September 23, 2005
Season of the Bureaucrat Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 11:50 AM EST Four times a year we read in the newspapers that “today is the official start of fall,” or whatever season it may be. The notion of some government functionary dictating the seasons is an odd one to begin with, and in most cases, starting and ending them at solstices and equinoxes is contrary to common usage. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, autumn is “reckoned astronomically from the descending equinox to the winter solstice,” but “popularly, it comprises, in Great Britain, August, September, and October [Samuel Johnson]; in North America, September, October, and November (Webster); and in France ‘from the end of August to the first fortnight of November’ (Littré).” That’s why in Britain the summer solstice was considered “midsummer night,” not the start of summer. What all this means is that fall has indeed just started—if you want. And if you think fall started when the kids went back to school, or that it won’t start until the leaves start dropping, that’s equally correct. Officials have the authority to decide when Veterans’ Day or Thanksgiving is, but with something as ancient and fundamental as the seasons, their choice is no better than anyone else’s. That’s the American way, after all. P.S. For the distinction between fall and autumn, see: http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/
magazine/ah/2001/7/2001_7_22c.shtml
September 22, 2005
More on the Bonus Marchers Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 03:00 PM EST It’s also worth noting that the bonus marchers were not exactly Gandhi and his followers. According to a June 1963 article in American Heritage by John D. Weaver, their leader, Walter W. Waters, tried to organize the bonus marchers into what Waters called “a closely knit, semi-military organization” that would be “100 per cent American” and anti-communist. Weaver writes that Waters’s goons “had already attacked locally, pouncing on suspected Reds and hauling them before kangaroo courts to be sentenced to belt-lashings and forcible expulsion from Washington.” The morning before the U.S. Army moved in, a group of bonus marchers hurled bricks at police, and that afternoon came the more serious brawl to which Gordon refers, in which the two policemen and two marchers were killed (these were the only deaths in the whole episode; no one was killed during the Army attack). It seems to be a subject of lively controversy who was to blame for the Army’s overreaction. Our 1963 author wrote that “[Pelham] Glassford [the D.C. police chief] went to his grave denying that he had asked for military assistance or had needed it after having put down the first two disturbances in less than ten minutes, but once the District commissioners had submitted their written request to the White House, President Hoover had no choice to comply.” The assertion that a few local politicos could give orders to the President seems odd, but that’s what our author says. I don’t know enough about the situation to evaluate his opinion. After saying how unfortunate it was for Hoover, our author goes on: “It was no less unfortunate for General MacArthur, who was called upon to carry out what he has always regarded as the most distasteful order ever given him. Admonished to ‘use all humanity consistent with the execution of the order,’ he brought it off without gunfire and with remarkably few casualties. When it was all over the Secretary of War [Patrick J. Hurley] was quoted as saying, ‘It was a great victory. MacArthur is the man of the hour.’ Later Mr. Hurley denied the statement and ruefully delivered what may well be the historian’s final judgment on the Bonus March: ‘There is no glory in this terrible episode—no hero.’” And finally, a minor correction. The Bonus Marchers were not “still there” when FDR became President. They dispersed after MacArthur’s attack, and a group of them, one of several factions into which the loosely organized “army” had split, returned the next summer. And while Eleanor may have brought them doughnuts, they didn’t get their money. That didn’t happen until January 1936, when Congress passed a bill for immediate payment of the veterans’ bonus—over FDR’s veto.
September 22, 2005
Re: The Bonus Army Posted by John Steele Gordon at 07:00 AM EST Ellen Feldman, in her posting of September 19, wrote about the Bonus March in the early 1930s and Eleanor Roosevelt’s visit to demonstrators in early 1933. Leaving aside her highly dubious suggestion that a President of the United States should walk through the streets of a blacked-out city where law and order are still, at best, problematical, I must take issue with some of her presentation of the history of the matter. She wrote, “In June 1932, when the Bonus Expeditionary Force, more than 90 percent of whom were Army and Navy veterans, marched on Washington, D.C., wanting no more than the military ‘bonus’ they had been promised …” Yes, promised for the year 1945. The clear implication of what she wrote is that the Hoover government was reneging on a promise. It was doing no such thing. The House of Representatives, in fact, passed a bill authorizing the printing of $2.4 billion in order to pay the bonus anyway, thirteen years ahead of schedule. (The Treasury had no other means to pay it; the deficit in 1932 was $2.7 billion while gross revenues totaled only $1.9 billion—in other words the government spent $2.42 for every $1.00 in revenue that year.) But the bill was defeated in the Senate, with the majority of the votes against it cast by pay-as-you-go Democrats. Only when District of Columbia police tried to evict some of the bonus marchers from government buildings on Pennsylvania Avenue, and a nasty riot ensued, with two marchers and two policemen killed, did President Hoover call on the army to restore order and to evict the marchers from the buildings and other government property. He specifically ordered that the marchers be confined to their encampment on the Anacostia Flats but left undisturbed there. Instead, Chief of Staff General MacArthur, in flat defiance of the express orders of the commander in chief, attacked the encampment and burned it to the ground. Hoover should have fired him on the spot (as President Truman would do nineteen years later) for gross insubordination. Why Hoover decided to take responsibility for MacArthur’s deliberate failure to follow orders, I don’t know. He paid a frightful political price for doing so, although I doubt he could have won in November regardless. He was the deadest of political dead meat by then. She writes that “Major Patton led his 3rd Cavalry against the crowd of hungry, unarmed men, women, and children.” George Patton was, at least, obeying lawful orders—however inappropriate to the situation, indeed stupid, heartless, and ego-driven they were—given by his commanding officer. Military officers don’t have the luxury of deciding what orders to obey. It would be interesting to know what Patton thought of them at the time.
September 20, 2005
The Twenty-first Century Is Calling Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 05:20 PM EST In 1997 Gary Chapman of the University of Texas wrote that the unregulated development of technology was an enemy of social harmony: “There are many causes of income inequality, according to economists, and one cause is technological development itself….technological progress creates its own discontent…. “James K. Galbraith, an economist at the University of Texas, says that because corporate managers look to a small segment of the population as their target market—people with high disposable incomes—we get innovation characterized by over-engineering, ‘baroque’ product features and short product life cycles with built-in obsolescence. “‘What inequality tends to foster, in terms of innovation,’ says Galbraith, ‘are “toys” for the rich instead of investments in mass use.’ That, he says, is why we favor $30,000 cars over mass transit, cellular phones and expensive services over universal access …” The phrase “toys for the rich” seems to have been originated, or at least popularized, by the physicist and “futurist” Freeman Dyson. He used it in print as early as 1993, and when he was awarded the Templeton Prize, for progress in religion, in 2000, one British journalist wrote: “Professor Dyson has criticised science for concentrating too much technology on ‘making toys for the rich’ such as cellular phones and ever-smaller laptops.” Whether Dyson himself ever specifically described cell phones as toys is unclear. In 1999, in fact, he wrote: “Most of our socially important technologies, such as telephones, automobiles, television, and computers, began as expensive toys for the rich and afterwards became cheap enough for ordinary people to afford.” Still, he was clear and emphatic about the need for science to concentrate its efforts on technologies aimed at the poor, so that “every Egyptian village can be as wealthy as Princeton.” In light of these sentiments, it’s interesting to read in the July 9 issue of The Economist that “Mobile-phone firms have found a profitable way to help the poor help themselves.” Africa and rural India are among the biggest developing markets for mobile technology. People there use the phones—which are often shared by groups of users or rented out by the call—to check prices on the goods they produce, find out about jobs, transfer funds, monitor how projects are going, and do dozens of other things that Americans take for granted. They even love handsets with musical ringtones and video games. The Economist continues: “Mobile phones have become indispensable in the rich world. But they are even more useful in the developing world,” where fixed-line phone systems, with their ravenous need for wires and switches, are expensive and unreliable in cities and non-existent outside them. “In a typical developing country,” the article reports, “a rise of ten mobile phones per 100 people boosts GDP growth by 0.6 percentage points.” The same magazine’s September 17 issue tells how in Mexico, a country whose bureaucracy is normally “far from efficient,” a new anti-poverty program is able to give a poor woman a check in less than ten seconds: “As names are called, each woman appears before the window with an identity card and a difficult-to-forge holographic stamp….All this would have been impossible without computerization … [and] the ability to crunch numbers on a massive scale.” It’s unlikely that the inventors of mobile telephones, holograms, and megacomputers were motivated by the thought of helping poor countries escape poverty. The entrepreneurs who backed these inventions probably never envisioned selling them in Kenya and rural Mexico either, but they knew that they would be a lot more than “toys” and would find a market extending far beyond the rich. Inventors have a much better idea of what is possible than bureaucrats and academics do, and entrepreneurs have a much better understanding of what the public needs—as the comments at the beginning of this posting demonstrate. The reason is simple: Unlike bureaucrats and academics, their success depends on it.
September 19, 2005
Chief Justice Fashions Posted by John Steele Gordon at 02:15 PM EST The judicial fashion statement of the Chief Justice wearing four gold stripes on his sleeves, while the sleeves of associate justices are unadorned, is a lot more recent than his official title, which, as Frederic Schwarz points out, dates to late in the nineteenth century. In fact it only dates to the middle of the late Chief Justice Rehnquist’s term, after he saw a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe. One of the major characters in the operetta is the Lord Chancellor, a powerful position in the British government. He presides over the House of Lords, is the head of the judiciary, and sits in the cabinet. As Gilbert explains in the Lord Chancellor‘s opening song: The Law is the true embodiment
Of everything that’s excellent.
It has no kind of fault or flaw,
And I, my lords, embody the law. The Lord Chancellor’s elaborate official robes positively drip with gold, and Rehnquist—a Gilbert and Sullivan fan (as am I)—promptly had a scaled-down version, suitable to a republic, made up for himself.
I was hoping that one of the senators at the recent hearings in the Judiciary Committee would ask Judge Roberts if he intended to continue wearing gold stripes on his sleeves if confirmed for Chief Justice. It would have been a perfect opportunity for him to say that here, certainly, was a case where the doctrine of stare decisis should be faithfully followed. Since no senator asked the question, I guess we will have to wait for October 3 to see what Chief Justice Roberts is wearing when he steps from behind the curtain.
September 19, 2005
A Lesson from the Bonus March Posted by Ellen Feldman at 10:00 AM EST On September 15, still trying to get it right, President Bush made his fourth visit to the area devastated by Katrina. Each trip has been, it seems to me, more carefully scripted. Gone are the off-the-cuff jokes about youthful hell-raising and the accolades to incompetent officials. The most recent game plan left no room for gaffes. The President, dressed uncharacteristically for a prime-time speech in an open-necked shirt, presumably to show he too was getting his hands dirty in the cleanup effort, spoke in a fenced-off area of Jackson Square with the iconic cathedral, lit by trucked-in generators, looming behind him. (When the President failed to visit the worst-hit sections of the city on his first visit, the White House explained that he did not want to disrupt rescue efforts. Didn’t efforts to fence off, camouflage, light, and sound one of the city’s central squares interfere with essential rebuilding tasks?) Before the speech the President was driven through some of the blacked-out sections of the city, a far cry from Lincoln’s walk through Richmond, as described here by Frederick Allen on August 31, or New York Mayor Lindsay’s stroll through Harlem at the height of the riots, or another reckless foray among supposedly dangerous elements. In June 1932, when the Bonus Expeditionary Force, more than 90 percent of whom were Army and Navy veterans, marched on Washington, D.C., wanting no more than the military “bonus” they had been promised, President Hoover called out the troops; General Douglas MacArthur, caught out of uniform, sent his orderly for the necessary items and announced, “MacArthur has decided to go into active command in the field,” and Major Patton led his 3rd Cavalry against the crowd of hungry, unarmed men, women, and children. The marchers fled, the troops pursued, and the results were tragic. When New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt saw the newspaper accounts, he observed that he might feel sorry for the President if he were not so deeply moved by the plight of the men and their families. The Bonus Marchers were still there when FDR moved into the White House the following year. His adviser Louis Howe, no slouch in the tricks-of-political-publicity trade, took the First Lady on a surprise—to both her and the marchers—visit to their encampment. Eleanor Roosevelt rose to the occasion quickly and magnificently, as usual. She served coffee and sandwiches, sang campfire songs, and listened. Her gesture changed nothing, except perhaps the feelings of the marchers. Hoover sent the troops, they said; Roosevelt sent his wife. In Jackson Square, Bush spoke to a gathering of officials and to the television cameras. He remained as far from Americans desperately in need of morale as well as help as he had been on his first tone-deaf visit.
September 17, 2005
Well, It Depends Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 07:00 AM EST My colleague John Steele Gordon is correct to say that “Chief Justice of the United States” is the official title currently in use, but several points should be noted: (1) As a lowercase, descriptive title, “chief justice of the Supreme Court” is entirely unassailable. In journalistic usage we often see it contracted still further to “Supreme Court Chief Justice,” which isn’t wrong either, just informal. (2) Insisting on the use of official titles in all cases can lead to madness. I don’t think any harm is done by talking of “Princess Diana” instead of “Diana, Princess of Wales,” which was her official title, or by lopping off the last three words from “State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations,” or by speaking of the intersection of “Sixth Avenue and 14th Street” rather than “Avenue of the Americas and West 14th Street.” (3) The official designation has gone back and forth through the years. As Charles Warren wrote in The Supreme Court in United States History (1926): “The official title of the Chief Justice seems to have varied at different periods of the Court’s history. Jay was commissioned under the title of ‘Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States,’ as were Rutledge, Ellsworth, Marshall, Taney, Chase, and Waite. Fuller was commissioned as ‘Chief Justice of the United States.’“ This was in 1888, a century after the Constitution was adopted. After citing the same section of the Constitution that Mr. Gordon does, Warren continues: “The Judiciary Act of Sept. 24, 1789, provided that the Supreme Court ‘shall consist of a chief justice and five associate justices.’ The Act of July 13, 1866, c. 210, for the first time officially used the term ‘Chief Justice of the United States’ providing that ‘thereafter the Supreme Court shall consist of a Chief Justice of the United States and six associate justices.’” It’s interesting that this change took place just after the Civil War; that was also when Americans started saying “the United States is” instead of “the United States are.” Warren goes on to cite statutes from 1869 and 1911 that refer to “Chief Justice of the United States,” and ones from 1873, 1902, and 1911 that refer to “the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.” In fact, the two 1911 statutes with contrary wording were enacted on the same day (can you guess which day? that’s right, March 3). So while the title currently in use by the U.S. government is “Chief Justice of the United States,” the usage has been anything but consistent over the years.
September 17, 2005
O Cremora, O Mores Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 07:00 AM EST When I was growing up on Long Island several decades ago, Chock Full o’ Nuts seemed the height of sophistication. From their advertisements, I knew that in Chock Full o’ Nuts coffee shops it was always the 1940s, with women wearing white gloves and men in sharp fedoras stopping in for a quick cup and a smoke before an evening at the theater. The soundtrack to these fantasies, of course, was the unforgettable Chock Full o’ Nuts jingle, sung in a lilting alto by Page Morton Black, the wife of the company’s founder: “Chock Full o’ Nuts is that heavenly coffee
Better coffee a millionaire’s money can’t buy.” (Originally, I’ve read, it was “Rockefeller’s money,” until the family made them change it.) When I moved to New York to attend Columbia University, reality turned out to be a little different. There was a Chock Full o’ Nuts at 116th Street and Broadway, across from campus, and it was anything but elegant. The kind of people you find in most coffee shops at two in the morning hung out there around the clock. The one time I ate at Chock, after trying vainly for five minutes to make the slow-witted waiter understand that I wanted tea (I was not yet a coffee drinker), I remember looking around at my fellow customers and thinking, “Gosh, I hope these people aren’t students.” Now the Chock Full o’ Nuts is long gone, replaced by a trying-to-be-funky Chinese restaurant. In fact, almost all the scuzziness has been expunged from Morningside Heights, and in true New York fashion, we affect to miss it. (The college has changed too—they have girls now and everything.) Today the neighborhood is too hip to have just one Starbucks, so there are two within a few blocks of each other. But you can still buy Chock Full o’ Nuts coffee in the supermarket, and the company has started advertising again. They’re even using the same jingle. It’s been updated, of course, with a vaguely “world” beat and an Enrique Iglesias type doing the vocal. The lyrics have been altered a little bit too—after all, it is the twenty-first century. Now it says: “Chock Full o’ Nuts is that heavenly coffee
Better coffee a billionaire’s money can’t buy.”
September 17, 2005
A New Measuring Stick Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 07:00 AM EST The latest amazing trick to try on the Internet is to search for the word “failure” on Google. Wait until you see what comes up. Go ahead—and then come back… In the nineteenth century, people in the public eye were judged only by newspaper editors, curmudgeonly as they could be. In the twentieth century, polls held the fate of anyone with ambition in politics. Now, apparently, a man is only as good as his search terms.
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