November 24, 2005
Brief and Bromidic Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 07:00 AM EST What I wrote yesterday about memorization applies to anything that’s short and well written, even if the sentiments it expresses are as trite as those of the Gettysburg Address. Am I the only one who was disappointed, on first reading the address all the way through, at its utter conventionality? Ground hallowed by the selfless sacrifice of these noble men; gave their lives to carry on the sacred work of our nation’s founders; their deaths not in vain; etc., etc. All true, to be sure, and affecting to anyone who has a heart, and expressed with admirable concision—though it basically amounts to a “What he said!” after Edward Everett’s speech, which can be read here: http://douglassarchives.org/ever_b21.htm However common it may be to denigrate Everett’s oration—and he certainly does go on quite a bit—you have to admit that he gave the people what they wanted. It’s amazing what people used to do for fun before there was television. Lincoln could get away with his short-and-sweet cameo only because Everett had already satisfied the era’s appetite for grandiloquence. As we all know, Lincoln dashed off the address in his spare moments during the weeks before the battlefield’s dedication. It’s certainly a tribute to his powers of composition that with the cares of a nation pressing down on his shoulders and all the enormous demands on his time, he was able to come up with something so memorably phrased. But behind the simple eloquence, it’s still basically a cliché—though no less powerful for that, and like most clichés, it does express an important truth
November 23, 2005
Martin Luther King and Affirmative Action Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:45 PM EST John Steele Gordon and I disagree about whether, from a historical perspective, the Fourteenth Amendment allows for race-based quotas, targets, or set-asides. I think he makes a strong case that it does not; I think I also make a strong case that it does. Here is where divining “original intent” becomes an almost futile exercise. Alas, it’s the method in vogue, and it lends itself to a lively debate. On matters of public policy, I think John Steele Gordon and I are more in agreement. He supports class-based affirmative action, because it holds out the prospect of creating a more just society in which more citizens enjoy equal opportunity, and because it offers the promise of an America in which racial divisions cease to be salient. I support it, as well, because I think it’s more politically pragmatic and because I’m concerned about the growing socio-economic divide in America. That said, it’s still worth noting that though Martin Luther King, Jr., called for a color-blind society, he was not, as many pundits have suggested, opposed to affirmative action. As he grew more interested in questions relating to class inequities, he also came to a sophisticated understanding of the intimate relationship between race, public policy and poverty. Thus, in his book Why We Can’t Wait, King wrote that “no amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America through the centuries. Not all the wealth of this affluent society could meet the bill. Yet a price can be placed on unpaid wages. The ancient common law has always provided a remedy for the appropriation of the labor of one human being by another. The payment should be in the form of a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law. . . . I am proposing, therefore, that just as we granted a GI Bill of Rights to war veterans, America launch a broad-based and gigantic Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, our veterans of the long siege of denial.” Critically, King envisioned these broad-based, public-sector compensatory programs as targeting African Americans and poor whites, whom he labeled the “derivative victims” of slavery and Jim Crow. His reasoning was complex, but essentially he agreed with W. E. B. DuBois, who once argued that the Jim Crow bargain offered nothing to poor and working-class whites but the social and psychological “wages of whiteness.” In return for the social privileges and psychological boost that “whiteness” gave them, these whites—millions of them, from slavery times through the modern age—surrendered political and economic power to elite actors. Jim Crow divided white and black labor against each other, stunting the growth of unions, labor parties, and liberal political coalitions. Jim Crow thus drove down wages across the board and secured a political system (chiefly in the American South) where taxes were regressive, public services were minimal, and political participation was sharply limited. Remember that on the eve of World War II, poll taxes in eight Southern states disenfranchised as many as 64 percent of white citizens and virtually all eligible black voters. It’s hard to say what most working-class whites got from Jim Crow other than the smug satisfaction that they weren’t black. In other words, King embraced affirmative action—if we define affirmative action broadly, as compensatory government programs that benefit only certain categories of citizens—for African Americans and poor whites. He looked toward a future in which America was color blind, but he realized that public policy and politics had long bound the questions of race and class together, and that it was impossible to address one problem without also addressing the other.
November 23, 2005
In Defense of Memorization Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 01:30 PM EST In another part of this Web site, our colleague Josh Zeitz has written about the Gettysburg Address. On his way to revealing the deeper significance of Lincoln’s words, he mentions that schoolteachers used to make their students memorize the speech. Josh doesn’t think this was a good idea, and I agree that the rote approach can be taken too far. But I believe there is a place for memorization in learning, and I regret that modern educational practice seems to have gotten away from it. The advantage of being made to memorize things is that they stick with you for decades to come, whether you like it or not. My parents can still recite poetry that they learned by heart in the 1930s, and it’s a common observation among doctors that they remember the jingles they memorized to help them identify the cranial nerves (“On old Olympus’ towering top . . .”) long after they’ve forgotten the names of the nerves themselves. I had to learn the state capitals in the fifth grade, and while a few have slipped my mind in the intervening years, I can still reel off capitals like Salem and Pierre and Jefferson City, none of which I would otherwise even have heard of. So while rote is no substitute for real learning, it has its place as a means of wedging something into a student’s brain so tightly that it will never get out, no matter how unpleasant the process of learning it was. Drag a kid to a museum, and he’ll end up hating museums for the rest of his life; force a kid to write something, and he’ll consider writing a chore forever. But make a kid memorize something, and he’ll always be able to trot it out when he needs it. Admittedly, state capitals are of little use outside the crossword page, but if you can squeeze a piece of good writing, one that positively sings, into someone’s head, a world of benefits may result. And despite its infelicities, the Gettysburg Address does sing—though it’s so familiar to most of us that we notice its music about as much as we notice “California Dreaming” when we hear it on the radio for the 700th time. Yet that’s exactly why today’s kids should be made to memorize the Gettysburg Address. While a song that’s stuck in your head is merely an annoyance, a well-crafted text that’s stuck in your head will improve your writing for life, coming out of nowhere to resonate encouragingly whenever you manage to achieve something similar. That’s why old-fashioned teachers resorted to memorization, and it’s something that today’s teachers should consider as well.
November 23, 2005
Original Intent, Continued Posted by John Steele Gordon at 07:00 AM EST Joshua Zeitz writes, “I disagree, however, with Mr. Gordon’s next assertion, that the Freedmen’s Bureau bill was thus ‘much more analogous to modern-day legislation making victims of natural disasters eligible for federal help than modern-day affirmative action, which is aimed at a vague group of people for a vague amount of time for vague reasons.’ Slavery was not, of course, a natural disaster, and black Americans did not owe their postwar impoverishment to ‘vague reasons.’ Slavery was an institution legalized, protected, and subsidized by the federal government, and it held only Africans and their descendents in bondage.” Of course slavery was not a natural disaster; it was a man-made one, but no less a disaster for its victims for that. Therefore the Freedmen’s Bureau bill offered help to anyone who had been held in bondage, much as disaster relief offers help to anyone whose house or business was in the path of a hurricane and was damaged by it. Disaster relief does not offer help to everyone named Smith because a lot of people named Smith suffered losses in a hurricane. Affirmative action benefits people of the requisite skin color, even if they are on the Forbes 400 list. And I never said that the freed slaves were impoverished for “vague reasons.” I said that modern-day affirmative action offers help for vague reasons—race and ethnicity—rather than specific reasons, such as poverty. Mr. Zeitz further writes, “Let’s bring this back to Mr. Gordon’s argument. I quite agree with him that there is a strong appeal to class-based affirmative action. But there is a historical argument to be made that the Fourteenth Amendment’s framers were comfortable with class and race-based affirmative action. And there’s a case to be made that while some white Americans have been left behind by the federal welfare state, all black Americans were targeted victims of that same welfare state in very recent times. Black taxpayers subsidized my family’s climb into the middle class. In this sense, I can’t disentangle race and public policy.” I’m afraid I don’t see the evidence that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment were comfortable with race-based affirmative action, at least in the evidence he presents. And, yes, all blacks were the targeted victims of government action that, today, seems almost surreal. But those laws, thank God, are now on the ash heap of history, just like slavery. Terrible wrongs were done to black people in this country over the centuries by the government of this country, but those wrongs have, after a heroic but remarkably bloodless struggle, been righted. Today if you need a leg up, the government will help you get one, regardless of race. That’s how it should be. The poison of race should not be a factor in the equation. Why? Because it violates Martin Luther King’s dictum that people should be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. As long as people are eligible for benefits simply because of the color of their skin, we are not judging them by the content of their character. That is inescapable. Affirmative action perpetuates discrimination on the basis of race because it discriminates on the basis of race. It is a medicine that, far from curing the disease, makes it worse.
November 21, 2005
How History Argues for Affirmative Action Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:30 AM EST Last week, I argued against a “strict constructionist” reading of the Fourteenth Amendment, an interpretation that holds that the framers of that amendment meant to enforce a race-neutral world in which no citizen could be the victim or beneficiary of race-based policies. As I explained in my post, the Republican majority that authored the amendment did so almost concurrently with another measure, the Freedmen’s Bureau bill, which provided for land grants to freed slaves. Thus, it is far from clear that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment would have viewed affirmative action as a violation of constitutional principles. They were, in fact, enthusiastic practitioners of it. John Steele Gordon weighed in with some important comments. Mr. Gordon is exactly right that “the provisions of the Freedman’s Bureau Act favored a particular group of people in a particular time and place. That is to say former slaves in the defeated South. Blacks who had been born free . . . were not eligible.” I’d go a step further. The Freedmen’s Bureau Act also provided assistance to some destitute white farmers. I disagree, however, with Mr. Gordon’s next assertion, that the Freedmen’s Bureau bill was thus “much more analogous to modern-day legislation making victims of natural disasters eligible for federal help than modern-day affirmative action, which is aimed at a vague group of people for a vague amount of time for vague reasons.” Slavery was not, of course, a natural disaster, and black Americans did not owe their postwar impoverishment to “vague reasons.” Slavery was an institution legalized, protected, and subsidized by the federal government, and it held only Africans and their descendents in bondage. Had they followed their own logic to its right conclusion, congressional Republicans might have extended the provisions of the Freedmen’s Bureau Act to former slaves and free black citizens alike, for both groups faced legal disabilities of some sort and could rightfully assert a claim to restitution. Apply this logic to current-day questions. Just as slavery was not a “natural disaster” owing to “vague reasons,” until very recently the federal government wrote race into its laws. Consider housing policy, for instance. The great postwar housing boom was largely subsidized by the federal government, through agencies like the FHA and the VA, which insured the vast portion of home mortgages, thus making them affordable to middle-income and working-class families. African-Americans were excluded. The government’s own regulations explicitly prohibited the FHA and VA from insuring mortgages for African-Americans or in areas where African-Americans lived. The reasons behind this exclusionary measure were circular: the government maintained that by virtue of their presence in a given neighborhood, black Americans forced a drop in property values, and that this drop in property values rendered mortgages a poor risk. (Of course, by choking off mortgage subsidies in racially integrated areas, the government ensured its own argument.) By 1960 the portion of owner-occupied homes in America rose to 60 percent, but black Americans were largely excluded from the ranks of new homeowners. Until the government passed an open-housing law in 1968, black Americans also faced rampant discrimination in the rental market. Home ownership carried more implications than one might think. A family that bought a house with a government-subsidized, government-insured mortgage in 1950 accrued tremendous social and economic capital. It accrued equity in that house and received generous tax deductions on its mortgage payments, thus allowing that family to amass wealth that was portable from generation to generation. It enjoyed access to better schools for its children and to better infrastructure (consider, for instance, the massive amount of federal money devoted to highway construction in the 1950s and 1960s). And it enjoyed access to cheaper credit in the form of home equity loans. Let’s personalize this: My grandparents, who bought a home in suburban Long Island in the 1950s, were able to accrue equity in their home and send their kids (my father and my aunt) to private colleges. They also got income tax breaks for the interest payments on their mortgage, which enabled them to squirrel away money to secure their retirement and help their kids get a start in life. When my grandparents passed away, they left money to my father and my aunt, money that helped them send their own kids to college (and to summer camp, enrichment programs, etc.), make improvements to their own homes, and invest for their own retirements. And so the cycle goes. The typical postwar black family, denied these same opportunities for a quarter century, enjoyed no opportunity to accrue equity in a home, to benefit from mortgage tax credits, to enjoy the social benefits of new schools and new civil infrastructure. Moreover, federal mortgage policies flowed over into the rental market, making it financially beneficial for landlords to restrict black renters to specific neighborhoods. The government’s own policies therefore manipulated the supply end of the rental market for African-Americans, driving up rents and choking off resources for capital improvements. Let’s bring this back to Mr. Gordon’s argument. I quite agree with him that there is a strong appeal to class-based affirmative action. But there is a historical argument to be made that the Fourteenth Amendment’s framers were comfortable with class and race-based affirmative action. And there’s a case to be made that while some white Americans have been left behind by the federal welfare state, all black Americans were targeted victims of that same welfare state in very recent times. Black taxpayers subsidized my family’s climb into the middle class. In this sense, I can’t disentangle race and public policy.
November 18, 2005
Re: Original Intent Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:10 PM EST Joshua Zeitz writes a good brief in support of the constitutionality of affirmative action in “Whose ‘Original Intent’ Is It Anyway?” below. I would like to make a few points, however. It should be noted who, after the Civil War, passed the Fourteenth Amendment and the legislation Mr. Zeitz refers to. It was the Republican Party. There’s a reason blacks voted Republican until FDR came along, and this is it. It was also Republicans in Congress who made the Civil Rights victories of the 1950s and ’60s possible. Most of the Congressional opposition to civil rights legislation, in both the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, came from Democrats. The modern-day liberal establishment would like that to go down the memory hole, and it shouldn’t. Mr. Zeitz writes that “latter-day conservatives who argue for a strict, race-neutral reading of the Fourteenth Amendment ignore a critical point. Its framers were originators of affirmative action. They believed that certain classes of people—in this case, former slaves—deserved preferential government entitlement and special government protections to redress past grievances and to promote a more equal and harmonious society.” True enough. But the provisions of the Freedman’s Bureau Act favored a particular group of people in a particular time and place. That is to say former slaves in the defeated South. Blacks who had been born free, I believe, were not eligible. In other words, the affirmative action was not race-based but former-status-based, and thus limited in duration. Who was eligible was precisely defined (whereas race is a notoriously slippery concept—ask Sally Hemings’s children), and time made sure that the favored group would pass from the scene. These provisions, therefore, strike me as much more analogous to modern-day legislation making victims of natural disasters eligible for federal help than modern-day affirmative action, which is aimed at a vague group of people for a vague amount of time for vague reasons. The fact that the Republicans wrote specific benefits for former slaves into ordinary legislation is not, ipso facto, evidence that they intended all and any remedies of a somewhat similar nature be sanctioned by fundamental law that happened to pass in the same period. Had they intended that, they needed only to say so in the language of the amendment. I am by no means sufficiently familiar with the debates regarding the Fourteenth Amendment in the House and Senate. They might well make it clear what the framers of the Amendment intended.
As for whether affirmative action is good public policy, let me just say that the ostensible goal of almost everybody in this country (or at least everybody I’d care to find myself in the same room with) is to see the end of discrimination on the basis of race, to reach a point where being black or white is of no more moment than being left-handed or right-handed, blue-eyed or brown-eyed. We are not quite there yet, but we have made enormous strides just in my lifetime. (When I was born, in 1944, the highest ranking black in the U.S. Navy waited on tables. Today we have had two black secretaries of state in a row—appointed by a Republican president, please note.) Given the history of this country, that is a very, very remarkable fact. I think today affirmative action helps perpetuates discrimination on the basis of race, not end it. It keeps the issue of race alive in American politics. It seems to me self-evident that you cannot end discrimination on the basis of race by . . . discriminating on the basis of race, anymore than you can cure alcoholism with a martini. I would favor affirmative action programs that are based on economic status, not race. Family income can be precisely quantified; race is often a state of mind. And such programs, because blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately represented among lower-income families, would automatically disproportionately favor them. But most important, such programs would help get the poison of race out of American politics, and thus out of the body politic.
November 17, 2005
Whose “Original Intent” Is It Anyway? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:10 PM EST Earlier this week the release of a 1985 memorandum drafted by Judge Samuel Alito caused a good measure of partisan uproar. Predictably, Alito’s opposition to abortion rights has drawn the most partisan fire he’s gotten, on both the left and the right. Equally interesting, however, and equally illuminating, is Alito’s assertion that “racial and ethnic quotas should not be allowed” under the Constitution. Assuming for a moment that, like other conservative jurists, Alito based his claim on the “original intent” of the Constitution’s framers, his argument is certainly open to constructive debate. Whether one believes that racial quotas and set-asides constitute good public policy, there is a credible case to be made that the Constitution allows for them. When Republicans in the Reconstruction-era Congress drafted the Fourteenth Amendment, in 1866, they did so to make permanent the protections they had extended to former slaves in the Freedmen’s Bureau bill and the Civil Rights Bill of 1866, twin measures that Congress had passed earlier in the year over the veto of President Andrew Johnson. Those measures were meant to abrogate so-called Black Codes that Southern states had passed, one after the other, in late 1865, measures that denied freedmen property rights; the right to contract; the right to bear arms; the right to move about freely; the right to assemble, to hold political meetings, and to participate in public debates; the right to jury trials and due process. In short, the South was attempting to restore slavery in all but name, and the Republican Congress was determined to see that this didn’t happen. The Freedmen’s Bureau and Civil Rights bills endeavored to extend to freedmen most of the protections that citizens of the United States enjoyed under the Bill of Rights. The Fourteenth Amendment federalized these rights—that is, it applied the Bill of Rights to the states (it had heretofore applied only to the federal government)—and safeguarded them against future tampering by conservative legislators and Presidents. Despite initial legal setbacks in the late nineteenth century, a host of Court decisions from the 1920s onward confirmed this legal history of the Fourteenth Amendment by “incorporating” piece by piece most parts of the Bill of Rights and applying them to the states. Return to 1866. The same Republican Congress that passed the Fourteenth Amendment—which stipulates that “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”—also passed the Freedmen’s Bureau bill. Among its other provisions, that initiative distributed to former slaves small parcels of federal land, mostly land that had been abandoned by former slaveowners or land that was already held in the public trust. It also provided for schools that catered specifically to former slaves, and for special courts to resolve labor and criminal disputes between former slaves and their former masters. In other words, latter-day conservatives who argue for a strict, race-neutral reading of the Fourteenth Amendment ignore a critical point. Its framers were originators of affirmative action. They believed that certain classes of people—in this case, former slaves—deserved preferential government entitlement and special government protections to redress past grievances and to promote a more equal and harmonious society. If we embrace the idea of “original intent,” a doctrine that binds the law to history, we must acknowledge that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment were comfortable with what later generations would alternatively label “set-asides” and “quotas.”
November 17, 2005
AmericanHeritage.com Launches the Guide to the Best of the Web Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 09:50 AM EST We've had AmericanHeritage.com up since September as a vital Web site with rich content updated daily and archives of 50 years of articles from American Heritage magazine—and with this blog as an integral part of it too—and now we've just rolled out a major addition to our offerings. We've put up our guide to the best history-related sites on the Web, at www.americanheritage.com/bow. It's a selective, critical listing of roughly a thousand sites, organized by period of history, by state, by President, and by subject matter, such as Geneaology or African-American History. It's a big part of our effort to become the definitive site about American history. Like everything else at AmericanHeritage.com, it's just in its infancy, but already I think it's a huge resource. Check it out, use it, enjoy it—and let us know how we can improve it, by writing to comments@americanheritage.com.
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