November 23, 2006
Thanksgiving Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:05 PM EST In my circles—call them educated liberal middle-class, for want of any greater precision—I have noticed, for as long as I have been an adult, a tendency to be a bit derisive about Thanksgiving. The holiday tends to be depicted as gluttony in preparation for consumerism, surrounded by a lot of family one might not want to see, on a day faintly yet irritatingly suffused by a religiosity one probably does not feel. Today’s New York Times editorial captures this tone nicely, when it opens with a question: “Is this the year Thanksgiving becomes nothing more than the prelude to tomorrow’s shopping?” and then suggests “an enlarged sense of the day, as a last defense against Christmas.” But the editorial manages to end with some mawkishness noteworthy for its lack of specificity: “Just when it feels as though we might be overlooking the meaning of this holiday—the peculiar value of Thanksgiving—it becomes clear that we have drawn together once again not to exchange the gifts our entire culture seems to be driving us to shop for but to share, simply, each other.” Why does Thanksgiving bring out this combination of irritability and vacuity? I remember primary school lessons in our civic religion talking not about “sharing, simply, each other,” but about gratitude for the land’s bounty, and for being safe from foreign kings. My guess is that Thanksgiving logically implies giving thanks to, giving thanks for, and simply giving thanks, and that all of these impulses make my sort uneasy. The thanks are supposed to be given to God, and my circles tend to be pretty secular. Thanks are supposed to be given for the blessings of the American founding, but the bounty of the land is now widely imagined to have been stolen, or otherwise tainted, and there is a sense there are no more foreign kings. Wicked old Europe is seen to be populated by Social Democratic and pacific welfare states, which my sort often admires more than we admire our own political arrangements. Giving thanks at all may run afoul of a quiet but deeply-rooted meritocratic certainty that our happy circumstances are the result of having gotten into a decent college and a good professional school on the strength of our own industry. In general terms, of course, we dutifully insist we have received undeserved privileges, but alongside that we are pretty confident that we’ve earned it, and why give thanks to anyone for hard-won and deserved success? At the risk of churching it up, take a look at the other side of the question. Wicked kings are still doing pretty well over much of the globe, and they can always stage a comeback in the lands where they seem to have vanished. Most people who have perceived the possibility of fascism in the Bush administration have rather oddly failed to see even a trace of it in, say, France, where the National Front beat out the Socialist Party for second place in the first round of the 2002 presidential election. The land’s bounty may well be a result of the way the American founding worked out. Some interesting Latin American developmental economists seem to think so. The Social Democratic welfare states are recent arrivals, and most of them owe something to, well, Americans. A few years ago I got a look at St. Vith, in Belgium. It looked like the set of Leave It To Beaver or My Three Sons, which surprised me until I remembered that American aircraft had leveled the town after a couple of Panzer armies finally pushed their way into it. Some decent political arrangements are very literally built on the ruins of some very indecent political arrangements. Outside of Atlanta and the swath Sherman cut to, through, and past that city, our society is rarely built on such literal ruins. Something to give thanks for. Back in those primary school civic lessons, I got the sense that Thanksgiving was also thanks for a second chance. I later read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s assertion that “There are no second acts in American lives,” and I thought I knew what it meant, but it still baffled me. The civic religion held the contrary: America above all meant that there could be a second act, or at least a chance at one. To get that second chance you needed pluck, and you needed luck, even if only the luck to get here. Luck remains something you should be thankful for.
November 23, 2006
The 100 Most Influential Americans IX Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:40 AM EST Mr. Zeitz—his intellectual X-ray vision ever at the ready—now finds “tension” in my latest post, much as he found “strain” in my list. I hadn’t realized that he listed expertise in psychoanalysis among his accomplishments. I haven’t the faintest idea what “tension” might mean in this context, unless it means “bullfeathers,” to use a euphemism. He writes, “On the one hand, Mr. Gordon agrees that it ‘would have been nice [for he and his fellow panelists] to get together . . . and have each explain why X deserved a spot,’ a statement that seems to acknowledge that no person’s list is infallible. On the other hand, with characteristic scorn Mr. Gordon accuses me of endorsing tokenism and writes, ‘American history up to this point has been very white and very male. I’m not about to sprinkle my list with women and nonwhites just to achieve the phony “diversity” that so obsesses academia.’” I am happy to acknowledge that no person’s list is infallible and certainly not mine. I have already admitted that I should have put Martin Luther King, Jr., far higher on the list than I did, and I am sure I could be persuaded (but not instructed) to make many other changes. But I would like Mr. Zeitz to quote the passage of my post wherein I accused him of endorsing tokenism. I merely said that I would not indulge in it myself. What I quoted from him seems, at the least, a bit self-absorbed. “Academia” and “Joshua Zeitz” are not the same thing. He writes, “Like the term ‘liberal,’ Mr. Gordon seems to think that ‘academia’ and ‘diversity’ are dirty words. Why, I don’t know.” Simple. Because liberals and academics have so often made them so in recent decades, with an insufferable elitism and scorn for anyone who holds, however honestly, however well thought out, however buttressed with evidence, a contrary opinion. For proof of that, just read Mr. Zeitz’s many posts regarding what I have written on this blog. They usually drip disdain. As for diversity, I’m all for it. What I’m not for is the faux-diversity the academic establishment so often pursues. They want diversity of color, religious background (but not religious expression, of course; it might “offend” an atheist), gender, sexual orientation, handedness, eye color, favorite football teams, and what have you. What they don’t want is diversity of thought. They will tell the peasants what to think, thank you. A good example of that has been on view in Michigan. There was a proposition on the ballot in the recent election to amend the Michigan Constitution to “ban public institutions from using affirmative-action programs that give preferential treatment to groups or individuals based on their race, gender, color, ethnicity or national origin for public employment, education or contracting purposes.”
This, it seems to me, is a big step forward toward judging people “by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.” Yet the entire Michigan establishment opposed it—most major politicians, the big newspapers, labor unions, organizations like AARP, all major academic institutions, and so forth. The opponents outspent proponents five-to-one on ads, many of them wildly hyperbolic. (One feminist group’s radio ads said the amendment would be like 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina with regard to women’s rights and women’s health.) Regardless, the amendment carried by 58 percent—a landslide. Only three counties failed to vote in favor. The reaction of the president of the University of Michigan? Essentially, it was, “Just who the hell do the people of this state think they are?” Addressing a rally a few days after the vote, she said, “Diversity matters at Michigan. It matters today, and it will matter tomorrow.” Sounds a bit like George Wallace on the steps of the Alabama capitol in 1963: “I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” The mayor of Detroit, Kwame Kilpatrick, sounded a similar theme: “We will affirm to the world that affirmative action will be here today, it will be here tomorrow, and there will be affirmative action in the state forever.” Mr. Zeitz writes, “But anyone who states with impunity that ‘American history up to this point has been very white and very male’ is either living in a dream world or has a reflexive and intellectually debilitating aversion to new ideas.” See what I mean? Disagree with me, Mr. Zeitz says, and you are either Walter Mitty or brain dead. So gracious and courtly, these liberal academics. Always so willing to see the other side of the argument. (I might note in passing the use of the word “impunity” here. I believe the First Amendment guarantees that I can write what I please with impunity. I have no idea what word or phrase he meant—”easy assurance,” perhaps?—but since Mr. Zeitz commands the language as well as anyone, a psychoanalyst might sense the hint of a threat, doubtless wishful rather than actual, in his use of the word.) The list I prepared was my best effort to come up with the 100 most influential Americans. That was the assignment. Not the 100 greatest, not the 100 most notable, not the 100 most famous, not the 100 most morally superior. But the 100 most influential in shaping the country that we 300 million now have the enormous good luck and privilege to live in and be a part of. But to have influence in this vale of tears called life, one must have power: political, economic, moral, intellectual, or otherwise. And for much of American history, nonwhites and non-males were systematically excluded from power. That is why, in my opinion, a list of the 100 most influential Americans is going to be short on nonwhites and women. He writes, “To note the influence of Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Duke Ellington, Martha Graham, Betty Friedan, Ralph Ellison, or Langston Hughes is hardly to promote tokenism.” I note their greatness with gratitude. I just didn’t think they ranked in the top 100 in influence, as shapers of modern America (although I could probably be talked into Frederick Douglass and maybe Duke Ellington). Unlike Mr. Zeitz, apparently, I’m only human, which is perhaps why I’m more tolerant of others with different opinions and more willing to be persuaded by them if they try to persuade me with arguments, not with disdain for violating the tenets of what amounts to their intellectual religion. Let me give an example: George Perkins Marsh. Never heard of him, right? Well, you’re in good company. My copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1966) doesn’t mention him. Yet in 1864 he published a book called Man and Nature, ten years later republished as The Earth as Modified by Human Action. He was the first to note that human action was having a profound and growing impact on the planet as a whole and that we had better do something about it, the sooner the better. You can read more about Marsh here. He was right, of course. The world would be a better place today had people listened to him when he wrote his great book. But they didn’t. The world was just not ready for the great truth he spoke. It was ready when Rachel Carson said the same thing a hundred years later. That is why George Perkins Marsh is not on the list and Rachel Carson is. Was Marsh great? Yes. Was he right? Yes. Was he a voice crying in the wilderness? Alas, yes. But being the last, while it will get you into heaven, won’t get you onto a list of the 100 most influential people.
November 22, 2006
The 100 Most Influential Americans VIII Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:30 PM EST There is a tension in Mr. Gordon’s response to my post about his list of “influential Americans.” On the one hand, Mr. Gordon agrees that it “would have been nice [for he and his fellow panelists] to get together . . . and have each explain why X deserved a spot,” a statement that seems to acknowledge that no person’s list is infallible. On the other hand, with characteristic scorn Mr. Gordon accuses me of endorsing tokenism and writes, “American history up to this point has been very white and very male. I’m not about to sprinkle my list with women and nonwhites just to achieve the phony ‘diversity’ that so obsesses academia.”
About business history and high political history (and, one might add, Broadway musicals), Mr. Gordon knows a great deal. But depth is no substitute for breadth. I’d suggest that Mr. Gordon stop denigrating academic historians and start reading more of their work. Like the term “liberal,” Mr. Gordon seems to think that “academia” and “diversity” are dirty words. Why, I don’t know. But anyone who states with impunity that “American history up to this point has been very white and very male” is either living in a dream world or has a reflexive and intellectually debilitating aversion to new ideas.
To note the influence of Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Duke Ellington, Martha Graham, Betty Friedan, Ralph Ellison, or Langston Hughes is hardly to promote tokenism.
Arguably, to include the name of Sam Walton (as Mr. Gordon does) is a case of tokenism. Wal-Mart is a tremendously important company. But is the business model it employs really all that innovative? From a historical perspective, it is but the next generation of the department store or the five-and-dime store, and Mr. Gordon’s list already includes A. T. Stewart, who was one of the first Americans to discover the value of high-volume retail sales. The nineteenth-century department store and twenty-first century Wal-Mart are different, to be sure, but conceptually they are very similar. I wonder if Mr. Gordon isn’t just a little obsessed with the phony achievements of white men.
Likewise, why include Daniel Webster or Henry Clay on the list? Both were tremendously important political figures in their own time, but no more so than James G. Blaine in the 1880s, Henry Cabot Lodge in the 1910s, Edith Green in the 1960s, or Ted Kennedy in the 1990s. Webster and Clay gave considerable backing to the Whig economic program, and Clay helped broker the Missouri Compromise. But Rep. Emmanuel Cellar authored the 1965 immigration reform act, which has arguably had as large an impact on the country as Clay’s and Webster’s signature achievements. He’s not on Mr. Gordon’s list, and he shouldn’t be. Like Clay and Webster, his achievements were great but not transcendent.
That said, perhaps Mr. Gordon would consider bumping Harriet Beecher Stowe for Wilbur Mills. Mills was the powerful chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in the 1960s and 1970s. Most people don’t remember him for much more than his drunken escapades with the stripper Fanne Foxe. On the other hand, Mills was white and male, and as John Steele Gordon reminds us, so was American history.
In crafting throwaway lines like, “Mr. Zeitz is very concerned with issues regarding race and gender. I am not,” and, “I am, obviously, very interested in and knowledgeable about business history and couldn’t care less about religion,” Mr. Gordon wears his ignorance like a badge of honor. Worse, he suggests that his limited range of interests and knowledge excuses the omission of entire categories of Americans from the Most Influential list.
This is a strange proposition. Personally, I don’t have the slightest interest in business history, but I wouldn’t have excluded many of the names Mr. Gordon included, because they were important figures in their own right. I don’t presume to confuse my personal interests with historical authenticity. In writing off the contributions of minorities and women in the construction of American history, and in discounting the central role that religion has played in American life, Mr. Gordon does.
My problem isn’t with Mr. Gordon’s list; as I said, these lists are fun but not particularly serious exercises. My problem is with Mr. Gordon’s characterization of American history as “very white and very male,” and his blissful infatuation with his own ignorance.
November 22, 2006
The 100 Most Influential Americans VII Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:00 PM EST Joshua Zeitz writes, “I don’t want to quibble with Mr. Gordon’s selections [says he, proceeding to do exactly that], but he does seem to have strained to find a few women and people of color to include in his list.” I’m glad Mr. Zeitz has so much insight into my thought processes that he can detect “strain.” In fact, I didn’t strain at all to include them. They deserved it, in my opinion. Mr. Zeitz is very concerned with issues regarding race and gender. I am not. These lists are always going to be greatly affected by the individual’s predilections. He writes, “In fact, he names only four women: Harriet Beecher Stowe, the great abolitionist novelist; Rachel Carson, the environmentalist who wrote Silent Spring; Julia Child, one of the first, and arguably the greatest, of the television chefs; and Oprah Winfrey, who needs no introduction.”
Julia Child’s importance lies with her magnum opus, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Published over 40 years ago, it still sells many, many thousands of copies a year. It introduced millions to serious cooking for the first time, by convincing them that such cooking was within their grasp, and sparked the extraordinary revolution in American food of the last few decades. Her television shows made her world famous—they were watched by many who couldn’t scramble an egg and didn’t want to—thanks to her cheerful, no-nonsense, forthright personality, which was quite unaffected by the presence of a television camera. But her influence flowed from what might well be the best—and most influential—cookbook ever written. He writes, “One of the dangers of compiling these lists is that they will invariably be very white and very male.” Yes. I’m afraid I don’t see what is dangerous here. American history up to this point has been very white and very male. I’m not about to sprinkle my list with women and nonwhites just to achieve the phony “diversity” that so obsesses academia. I have no doubt that the historians engaging in an exercise such as this one in 2106 will produce lists that are much less white and male, because the ranks of the most influential Americans by then will be much less white and male. I don’t think Thurgood Marshall or Cesar Chavez come anywhere close to deserving a place on the list, which is not to denigrate either man. If the list is limited to 100, then to include one person is to necessarily exclude someone else. Both Betty Friedan and Margaret Sanger made the merged list, if not mine. So did Frederick Douglass. Martin Luther King, Jr., ranks in the top ten in the merged list, and I think in retrospect that he should have been much higher on mine. But the idea that he was more influential than Hamilton or Jackson is, in my opinion, going way too far. He writes, “I would also argue that Mr. Gordon’s list includes too many business innovators, and too few religious figures.” That may well be, as I am, obviously, very interested in and knowledgeable about business history and couldn’t care less about religion. The latter has bored me since the first time I was dragged—figuratively kicking and screaming—into church. Likewise, my list has Broadway music well represented and jazz not at all. I love Broadway and am indifferent to jazz. It is interesting that Stephen Foster is the only composer to make the list. I wonder if that is because one panelist, loving Broadway, included his favorite composers, while another, loving jazz, included his, and so on, so no composer got enough votes to make the list. That is why it would have been nice to get together with the other panelists and have each explain why X deserved a spot. Perhaps that is why DeWitt Clinton didn’t make the cut: Only one panelist (myself) is a New Yorker. (Doris Kearns Goodwin grew up in Brooklyn, but has lived in Boston—wherever that is—for many years.)
November 22, 2006
Death in Vietnam II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:30 AM EST My thanks to Fred Smoler for pointing out an error in my previous post. I was working off of Christian Appy’s definitive work on the Vietnam War era military, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers in Vietnam. In an uncharacteristically tortured paragraph (Appy is a fine writer, but here is where I was thrown), the author wrote: “From 1966 to 1969 the percentage of draftees who died in the war doubled from 21 to 40. Almost half of the Army troops were draftees, and in combat units the proportion was commonly as high as two-thirds; late in the war it was even higher. The overall number of draftees was lower because the Marine Corps—the other service branch that did the bulk of fighting in Vietnam—was ordinarily limited to volunteers (though it did draft about 20,000 men in the Vietnam War.)”
Appy’s prose is a little confusing, but he appears to be suggesting that draftees accounted for a disproportionate share of war-related deaths. For the Army, the numbers break down as follows:
1965 28%
1966 34%
1967 57%
1968 58%
1969 62%
1970 57%
Appy explains that the “soldiers sent to Vietnam can be divided into three categories of roughly equal size: one-third draftees, one-third draft-motivated volunteers, and one-third true volunteers.” Which means that working-class men suffered a double burden: They were more likely to be drafted, and more likely to die once inducted into the service.
November 22, 2006
Deaths in Vietnam Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:00 AM EST Joshua Zeitz writes that “roughly 40 percent of all Vietnam War draftees were killed in combat; in the Army, this figure reached as high as 62 percent in 1969.” I don’t see how this can be true, so I am assuming Josh mistyped and meant something else. It can’t be true because according to the statistics I can quickly find on the Internet, 8,744,000 GIs were on active duty during the war era (dating our participation as occurring between August 5, 1964, and May 7, 1975). There were 1,728,344 draftees between 1965 and 1973. 38 percent of the draftees actually served in Vietnam, and draftees accounted for 30.4 percent (17,725) of combat deaths in Vietnam, all combat deaths totaling 47,359 (there were also 10,797 non-combat deaths, and 2,338 missing in action). These statistics may be off by a little, but from what I remember of the scale of the relevant numbers, they are not off by much.
Now, if 40 percent of all draftees were killed in action, that would mean around 692,000 draftee deaths, which clearly didn’t happen. If I am doing my sums correctly, the draftees who served in Vietnam numbered something like 656,771, and if what Josh means is that 40 percent of those men were killed in action, that still means something like 260,000 draftees killed in action. So something is wrong here. If Josh meant to write that draftees were 40 percent of those who served, that is close to the figure of 38 percent. It is true that the draftees suffered a disproportionate number of combat deaths, since they were only 25 percent of those who served in Vietnam.
November 21, 2006
The 100 Most Influential Americans VI Posted by Fredric Smoler at 07:45 PM EST I think lists of the most influential people are tough, especially when they are as expansive as this one, in part because influence is not the same thing as just celebrity. Hitler was surely the most influential Austrian who ever lived—he made the greatest change in the world—and while it is distressing to put him ahead of Mozart and Wittgenstein and Freud, his preeminence seems indisputable. A few random thoughts on this process: When you are an American, you do not always know how foreigners rate your countrymen, and it can be fascinating to find out. Sometime in the early or mid-1980s, an English friend, now professor of physics at Queens University in Belfast, was stupefied that I had never heard of Gibbs, in his view clearly the greatest American. Gibbs? I replied, faintly, and was told, with mounting incredulity, “Gibbs! Josiah Willard Gibbs!” My friend claimed that everyone knew about Gibbs. It turns out that between 1876 and 1878 this character had written On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances, and that this was perhaps the greatest scientific achievement of the nineteenth century. I at first assumed this was a brilliant deadpan joke, but when I eventually looked it up, I learned, to my astonishment, that this was a respectable claim. Max Planck, for example, had heard of Gibbs, “whose name not only in America but in the whole world will ever be reckoned among the most renowned theoretical physicists of all times . . .“ Go figure. Okay, who would I put on this list, who has not yet been proposed? William Tecumseh Sherman. Had Sherman not taken Atlanta before the 1864 Presidential election, it seems at least possible that McClellan would have won the Presidency, offered his promised truce, and eventually recognized the Confederate States of America. Lincoln deserves the No. 2 slot because Sherman let him finish the job. By the way, No. 43 seems ungenerous for Grant. If Lincoln is No. 2, let Grant and Sherman tie for No. 3. And how about John Walter Christie? In the late 1920s Christie invented a coil-spring suspension for tanks, which allowed considerably greater cross-country speed and a lower profile. The system was first introduced in Christie’s M1928 design, but the U.S. Army wasn’t interested. The Russians, however, got hold of the design in 1930 and later bought two of the M1931 model, which they imported without turrets, claiming that they were buying tractors. As it happens, John Walter Christie is at least the grandfather of the T34, and the T34 has as good a claim as any machine does to having won the Second World War.
November 21, 2006
Revisiting the Draft Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 06:40 PM EST Rep. Charles Rangel (D.-N.Y.), the incoming chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, raised a few eyebrows this week by repeating his call for a military draft. Rangel, a veteran of the Korean War, has argued in the past that a uniform draft will ensure that the burden of protecting America falls equally on all its citizens. “There’s no question in my mind that this President and this administration would never have invaded Iraq,” he said this week, “especially on the flimsy evidence that was presented to the Congress, if indeed we had a draft and members of Congress and the administration thought that their kids from their communities would be placed in harm’s way.” The military’s top brass is generally not supportive of Rangel’s idea, arguing that a volunteer military is superior to a conscripted military. Though the Armed Forces have had to lower some of their criteria in recent years to meet recruitment goals, a new draft would likely expand the number of active-duty servicemen and servicewomen to unreal proportions. That said, there’s something to Rangel’s argument. While I don’t have current data on the socioeconomic background of American service members, a recent report by the Kaiser Foundation found that 20 percent of military families have had to rely on food stamps and the WIC Program to feed their children. This is first and foremost a reflection of the shameful state of military pay, though by deduction it would seem that if these same service members came from families with economic means, they would not need to turn to public assistance. Which is to say, the military’s reputation as a working-class and working-poor institution may not be too off-base. In the Vietnam War era, America had a draft. But that draft had escape clauses that favored young men from middle-class and wealthy backgrounds. Exemptions were widely available for those who had the social and economic capital to procure a medical note from a doctor, and deferments were available to all full-time college and graduate students. Notably, part-time students were not eligible for deferments, which meant that any student who needed to work his way through college was likely to be drafted. For those who finished college or graduate school, additional deferments were available if one chose to work in a defense-related industry, or in other exempted professions, like teaching. In total, 80 percent of Vietnam War–era draftees had a high school education or less, while only 13.2 percent had some college, and only 7.2 percent had graduated from college. Until 1970 the draft burden fell on men 21 years of age and older, so these numbers do not suggest that people were simply being drafted before they had a chance to enroll in universities. Rather, these figures suggest that the draft had a serious class bias. A 1964 survey of enlisted servicemen found that 17 percent came from white-collar families, while 52.8 percent came from blue-collar families and 14.8 percent from farm families. This class bias had serious consequences. Roughly 40 percent of all Vietnam War draftees were killed in combat; in the Army, this figure reached as high as 62 percent in 1969. The implications of the Vietnam War example are complicated. On one hand, history suggests that a draft does not ensure uniformity or fairness. On the other hand, knowing where we went wrong 40 years ago could help today’s policy makers design a draft that eliminates class bias. Taken on balance, I’m sympathetic to Rangel’s proposal, and I think it deserves a hearing. If America is to continue sending young men and women to war, it needs to find a way to replicate the model of World War II, when virtually all draft-age men served in uniform. The burdens of our security should be borne by all.
November 21, 2006
The 100 Most Influential Americans V Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 05:35 PM EST When I was a graduate student at Brown University, it was my good fortune to take three courses with Gordon Wood, the Pulitzer Prize winning historian of early America, who served with John Steele Gordon on The Atlantic Monthly’s “100 Most Influential Americans” panel. My primary graduate adviser was James T. Patterson, a Bancroft Prize winner whose work on the modern American experience is second to none. While Patterson and Wood have been close friends for over 30 years, interestingly, Wood has traditionally agreed to serve on panels like this, while Patterson (who has written some book reviews for The Atlantic Monthly) generally turns down the invitations. As I remember it, his argument is that compiling lists of the “greatest Presidents” or the most “influential Americans” is folly, and that it degrades the more subtle forces at work in forging the American experience. I agree with Patterson’s rationale, but I can’t help wonder why anyone would turn down such a fun invitation. I don’t want to quibble with Mr. Gordon’s selections, but he does seem to have strained to find a few women and people of color to include in his list. In fact, he names only four women: Harriet Beecher Stowe, the great abolitionist novelist; Rachel Carson, the environmentalist who wrote Silent Spring; Julia Child, one of the first, and arguably the greatest, of the television chefs; and Oprah Winfrey, who needs no introduction. One of the dangers of compiling these lists is that they will invariably be very white and very male. If we start from the assumption that people drive history, and that elite actors make a greater impact than non-elite actors by virtue of their power and prestige, then these lists must skew away from women and people of color. But what about Margaret Sanger, the great birth-control pioneer, or Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, who brought feminism to millions of ordinary American women in the 1960s and 1970s? How, for that matter, does Martin Luther King, Jr., not rank in the top ten? His impact on American society was arguably much greater than Alexander Hamilton’s or Andrew Jackson’s (both of whom should certainly rank high on the list, as they do in Mr. Gordon’s version). Mr. Gordon includes Earl Warren, the chief justice whose court greatly broadened American civil liberties, but not Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP lawyer (and later Supreme Court justice) who developed the logic behind the Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Mr. Gordon includes Harriet Beecher Stowe, but what about Frederick Douglass, the great African-American political leader? His list includes Walter Reuther, but not Cesar Chavez. I would also argue that Mr. Gordon’s list includes too many business innovators, and too few religious figures. Surely in a country that has long been host to a fervent evangelical movement, and in which politics and Christianity have long existed in creative tension, the names Charles Grandison Finney, Lyman Beecher, Jonathan Edwards, Billy Sunday, and Billy Graham deserve mention. For that matter, how about John Hughes, the Catholic bishop who forged the modern American church in the nineteenth century, or Francis Cardinal Spellman, the “archbishop of the Cold War,” who helped bring American Catholics into the political mainstream in the 1950s? From an arts and literature standpoint, how about Hawthorne and Melville? Why Lorenz Hart but not Aaron Copland or Leonard Bernstein? Stephen Foster, yes, but Woody Guthrie, no? How about Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong? As Mr. Gordon said, “there can be, probably will be, and certainly should be endless debate over who does and does not deserve a spot on the list.” Maybe the problem is that 100 slots is 100 too few.
November 21, 2006
The 100 Most Influential Americans IV Posted by Alexander Burns at 04:00 PM EST I’m very grateful to John Steele Gordon, both for linking to The Atlantic’s list of the “most influential figures in American history” and for posting his own list. As I think is probably true of a lot of history students and obsessive personalities, I am an absolute nut for list-making. The Atlantic’s article is the kind of thing that can keep my attention for hours. That being the case, I have to say I’m a bit disappointed in the magazine’s choices. Many of them are either painfully obvious or painfully contrived. It’s awfully easy to make a list of Presidents—and a good number of the people on this list are Presidents. Half of the top 20 occupied the Oval Office. I think these lists tend to be a good deal more interesting when they exclude political officeholders in general, thus forcing the list-maker to think a little more creatively about what it means to be influential. The Atlantic list also seems flawed in its preference for well-remembered historical figures. It seems to privilege those who remain influential in American memory, rather than those who were most influential in their own day. For example, placing William Randolph Hearst at No. 80 is a bit of a stretch if you’re not going to include Charles Coughlin at all. The former occupies a more prominent place in the twenty-first century imagination, remaining the very model of a modern media baron, but the latter may have been just as influential in his own time as one of the first activists to use the radio effectively. There’s a similar problem with including William Lloyd Garrison in the top 50, while leaving other abolitionists, like Wendell Phillips, off the list entirely. Obviously it’s much easier to poke holes in someone else’s list than to make one of your own. But John Steele Gordon presents a pretty compelling alternative. I’m not sure I’d agree with every one of his choices, but the criteria he seems to be using represent a much more interesting conception of influence than those of The Atlantic’s list. Mr. Gordon’s list also corrects a number of major oversights in the other list, which includes few musical and theatrical figures and seems to overlook most of the Cold War. The omission of George Kennan, or someone like him, is particularly surprising.
November 21, 2006
The 100 Most Influential Americans III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:00 PM EST First, Steven Jobs. I think Bill Gates created a fabulously successful business model that has made him the richest man in the world. But the DOS operating system, on which Windows, the heart of Microsoft’s empire, still sits, was and is a lousy operating system. It is more a monument to the power of what economists call the “installed base” than anything else. Last week, as I was attempting what should be a simple task of copying about 100 JPEG files to a CD for a talk I was giving, my Windows computer seized up I don’t know how many times and I had to reboot . . . and reboot . . . and reboot . . . and . . . If I owned a handgun, I have no doubt I would have used it. Not a jury in the land would have convicted me of computercide. It was Steven Jobs who, more than anyone else, introduced the personal computer to the world, with consequences that have already proved revolutionary and that will continue to roll on for the foreseeable future in virtually every field of human endeavor. He is the James Watt of our time. Second, Franklin Roosevelt. I yield to no one in my admiration for FDR. He should be on Mt. Rushmore. But those ahead of him, it seems to me, were creators, bringing something that hadn’t existed before into existence. FDR saved the country and created its modern political environment. But that’s not out of whole cloth. Third, Milton Friedman. Perhaps he should be on the list. If I had had my druthers, we ten would have spent a weekend together (preferably at some lovely resort—on The Atlantic’s nickel, needless to say) and discussed our ideas before each separately making up a list. I think the final results would have been very different, both each individual list and the merged list.
November 21, 2006
The 100 Most Influential Americans II Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 11:45 AM EST I am fascinated by John Steele Gordon’s list of the hundred most influential Americans, below. It raises many interesting questions, but to start with I’ll just ask two related ones. How does Franklin Roosevelt come to be way down at No. 14, below the likes of Steve Jobs? It seems to me that Roosevelt gave the American political landscape its basic shape for a good half a century, at least until Reagan was President, not to mention transforming the role of the federal government and leading the country out of a Depression and to victory in a world war. And how does Jobs get to be so high on the list? I’d have thought Bill Gates had done much more to foster the spread of personal and networked computing, unless you maintain that Gates’s biggest contribution is Windows and he lifted that from Jobs’s company. I have no doubt John has very good answers to these questions, and I look forward to being enlightened. (I’m tempted to add that I’m a little surprised to see Milton Friedman nowhere on the list. But I said I’d ask just two questions.)
November 21, 2006
The 100 Most Influential Americans Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:45 AM EST The Atlantic this month is running a story on the hundred most influential people in American history. You can find the list here (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200612/influentials) . It was compiled by asking a panel of ten historians to each produce a list, and the lists were then merged. The panel consisted of Joyce Appleby, H. W. Brands, Robert Dallek, Ellen Fitzpatrick, Doris Kearns Goodwin, David M. Kennedy, Walter McDougall, Mark Noll, Gordon S. Wood, and myself. I might point out that of the 10, only Doris Kearns Goodwin and I are not professors (or a professor emerita) of history at major academic institutions, most holding endowed chairs, and Mss Goodwin has won the Pulitzer Prize in history. This makes me feel a bit as though I had unaccountably been invited to play in a charity golf tournament with the top nine money-winners on the PGA Tour. Needless to say, there can be, probably will be, and certainly should be endless debate over who does and does not deserve a spot on the list. I think James Gordon Bennett (No. 69 on the list) ranks way too low. Elvis Presley, for God’s sake, ranks No. 66. Bennett was the most important journalist in history—the maker of the modern media—and I had him at No. 10. On the other hand I think Jackie Robinson (No. 35) is way too high. J. P. Morgan, probably the most powerful banker who ever lived, after all, ranks only No. 37 on the list. The absence from the list of DeWitt Clinton is inexplicable to me. Without Clinton, the Erie Canal would probably never have happened, and without the Erie Canal, New York City would have been a much smaller, much less influential place. Ralph Nader ranks No. 97. I suspect a hundred years from now he’ll be Ralph Who? For what it’s worth, here is my list: 1) George Washington
2) Abraham Lincoln
3) Alexander Hamilton
4) Thomas Jefferson
5) James Madison
6) Henry Ford
7) DeWitt Clinton
8) Albert Einstein
9) Steve Jobs
10) James Gordon Bennett
11) Eli Whitney
12) Cyrus McCormick
13) Andrew Jackson
14) Franklin D. Roosevelt
15) Ronald Reagan
16) J. P. Morgan
17) The Wright Brothers
18) Martin Luther King, Jr.
19) Thomas Edison
20) John Marshall
21) James Watson
22) James K. Polk
23) Benjamin Franklin
24) Edwin Drake
25) Thomas Paine
26) Robert Fulton
27) Woodrow Wilson
28) Theodore Roosevelt
29) John Von Neumann
30) William Shockley
31) Mark Twain
32) Walt Disney
33) Stephen Foster
34) Harriet Beecher Stowe
35) A. T. Stewart
36) Sam Walton
37) Louis Sullivan
38) D. W. Griffiths
39) Cecil B. DeMille
40) Richard Sears
41) John Adams
42) John Jay
43) Ulysses S. Grant
44) P. T. Barnum
45) William Jennings Bryan
46) A. P. Giannini
47) Lewis and Clark
48) Julia Child
49) Earl Warren
50) David Dudley Field
51) George Gallup
52) Steven Spielberg
53) Rodgers and Hammerstein
54) Joseph Smith
55) Brigham Young
56) Cornelius Vanderbilt
57) William F. Buckley, Jr.
58) Peter Cooper
59) George Peabody
60) Nicola Tesla
61) Oliver Evans
62) John D. Rockefeller
63) William Johnson
64) William Boyle
65) Walt Whitman
66) George Kennan
67) Samuel Slater
68) Samuel F. B. Morse
69) Thomas Cole
70) Jerome Kern
71) Walter Reuther
72) Henry Clay
73) Daniel Webster
74) Noah Webster
75) William Maxwell Evarts
76) Louis D. Brandeis
77) Cyrus Field
78) James Fenimore Cooper
79) Frederick Jackson Turner
80) Rachel Carson
81) Alfred Thayer Mahan
82) Andrew Carnegie
83) John Brown
84) B. F. Skinner
85) William Lloyd Garrison
86) Henry James
87) Alfred Kinsey
88) Eugene O’Neill
89) John James Audubon
90) Henry Flagler
91) William Faulkner
92) Edward R. Murrow
93) Francis Cabot Lowell
94) Frederick Law Olmsted
95) Benjamin Spock
96) Edward Hubble
97) Martha Stewart
98) Oprah Winfrey
99) Elvis Presley
100) Lorenz Hart
November 17, 2006
The Border Fence Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:30 AM EST A headline in the Tuesday New York Times caught my eye: “Vatican Decries Fence Planned for U.S. Border.” Cardinal Renato Martino, head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, declared the proposed fence inhumane, and said that “speaking of borders, I must unfortunately say that in a world that greeted the fall of the Berlin Wall with joy, new walls are being built between neighborhood and neighborhood, city and city, nation and nation . . .”
I think of myself as near the pro-immigrant end of the political spectrum, but this pronouncement strikes me as dubious, and the reference to the Berlin Wall as bizarre. The Berlin Wall was built to stop illegal emigration, which in the case of East Germany meant almost all emigration; the proposed border fence is intended to inhibit illegal immigration. The first barrier demonstrated that the country walling itself off was repellant to a significant number of its inhabitants, the proposed second barrier demonstrates that the country walling itself off is magnetically attractive to people from all over the world. The first barrier revealed East Germany to be a prison, the second suggested that a fair number of foreigners take the U.S. to be a paradise. They might well be wrong about that, but they are willing to risk a lot to sneak into it, just as many East Germans were willing to risk everything to sneak out of the place.
You can say a lot against the proposed border fence—for one thing, the inspector general of estimates of the Department of Homeland Security has just raised the estimate of its proposed cost from $2 billion to $30 billion—but it is hard to argue that building the wall is necessarily a wickedness rather than possibly a great stupidity. For it to be a wickedness like the Berlin Wall, it would logically follow that the United States has no moral right to control entrance to this country, which is to say, doesn’t possess a right claimed by every sovereign state on the planet. The Church is a transnational organization, with no great instinct of deference toward the rights of states, but people live in states, and many of us are chary about giving up the right to legislate within a state. The United States was indeed open to almost all immigrants for some of our history, and to many immigrants for other parts of it, and those policies may be better—more rational, more ethical—than the ones we have now. But as it happens, I am not sure I know anyone who openly declares that the United States should admit all comers, and almost all people who decry the proposed fence seem to be shy about making so broad a claim.
He who wills the end, wills the means; if we have the right to control our borders, but the fence is wrong, why is it wrong? If it forces some to die in a desert, abandoned by their guides and defeated by the fence, that is horrible, but that is already the fate of some people without that proposed fence. If the U.S. built the fence, then patrolled it, succoring those stranded in the desert, one possible moral objection to the fence would vanish, but as far as I know, no critic of the fence suggests anything like this, as a measure for making the fence an ethical measure. This matters because the Republicans have just lost an election, in some part by appealing to ugly nativism. If the left now takes a conspicuous position abandoning any claim to control access to this country—if it becomes, in this respect, among others, an exponent of a post-national political morality—it risks losing the next election, or the one after that. Politics mostly happens within nations, and people who indicate precisely as broad a concern with the rights and needs of strangers as they do with the rights and needs of friends—of fellow citizens—tend to fill their fellow citizens with mistrust. People with so broad a moral imagination may be saintly, but I think they lack political imagination, and I think electorates punish them for it. There are times when risking that punishment is morally commendable, even ethically compulsory: Refugees fleeing hideous persecution come to mind. Building a wall on our Southwestern border does not yet seem to fall into such a case. Meanwhile, Cardinal Martino is attempting to erase the moral difference between the late and unlamented East Germany and the current United States. This is sophistry, and inept sophistry to boot. Building this wall may be wrong, it may even be wrong in principle—but if it is, that principle is incompatible with the existence of sovereign states. Espousing it openly will be a political disaster. Espousing it tacitly is not going to do a lot of good either.
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