November 8, 2006
I. F. Stone vs. Rush Limbaugh Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:45 AM EST For the record, John Steele Gordon is wrong to equate Josh Marshall’s website, www.talkingpointsmemo.com, with Rush Limbaugh’s radio program. He would like readers to assume that both Marshall and Limbaugh are partisans whose first allegiance is to their political ideology, and who are thus equally sloppy in presenting news and analysis. Not really true. Interesting, Josh Marshall earned a Ph.D. in American history at Brown University (we overlapped as graduate students there and have some friends in common, but we don’t know each other well), where he worked with Gordon S. Wood, a Pulitzer Prize winning historian of early America. In fact, I recommend Josh’s site to our readers from time to time because he often tries to provide some historical perspective on current events. Marshall also writes regularly for Time magazine and The Hill, two respected nonpartisan news outlets, and has written for The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly. Finally, his website contains scrupulous documentation of the stories it posts. Mr. Gordon should check it out. He might learn a little something.
By contrast, Rush Limbaugh completed one year at Southeast Missouri State University before dropping out of college altogether. Nothing wrong with that. College isn’t for everyone, and it’s certainly no prerequisite for being a talk-radio show host. But let’s not fool ourselves into equating his intellectual and research credentials with Marshall’s. Moreover, Limbaugh has not, to the best of my knowledge, produced any serious studies of American politics and culture.
While Mr. Gordon chides me for bringing politics to a history website, I’d remind him that I almost always try to tie my current-day observations to the past, which is more than I can say for his frequent antiliberal screeds, which have little or no discernible connection to history. There’s a word for this. I believe it’s “hypocrisy.”
Let me try, then, to tie this conversation back to history by suggesting that Josh Marshall’s blog is a latter-day variation on the underground newspaper, a journalistic tradition that stretches back at least as far as William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist publication, The Liberator, and in a more recent incarnation, to I. F. Stone’s Weekly. Marshall has tapped the Internet to modernize the institution of independent journalism. Insofar as he’s managed to help shape the public debate on any number of matters (as did Garrison and Stone), he’s proven that this remains an important institution, particularly in these days of media consolidation and declining newspaper readership.
Rush Limbaugh, by contrast, strikes me as a latter-day equivalent of Father Coughlin, the radio priest who galvanized millions of unhappy listeners against FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s. (Coughlin began his radio career as a Roosevelt supporter but soon changed his stripes.) Right-wing shock-talk can’t claim roots as long as those of independent journalism or underground newspapers, because commercial radio has only been around since about 1920. Still, that’s a long time, and Limbaugh is working in a rich tradition.
Ultimately, just as there’s no comparison between I. F. Stone and Father Coughlin, there’s no comparison between Josh Marshall and Rush Limbaugh. They work in different media, they apply entirely different standards of intellectual rigor, documentation, and research (Marshall works like a scholar, Limbaugh like an entertainer), and they have entirely different agendas.
November 7, 2006
Murray Chotiner and Karl Rove Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:00 PM EST Apologies for having assumed that most readers were familiar with the events that transpired in South Carolina during the 2000 presidential primary cycle. Since Mr. Gordon seems completely unaware of the back story, I’ll provide it for him, nice and slow. It is true that one cannot directly tie George W. Bush’s campaign to the push-polls that suggested inaccurately (and irrelevantly) that John McCain fathered a child with a black woman. That’s the marvelous thing about push-polls: It’s maddeningly difficult to trace them. By the same token, Richard Nixon’s 1950 Senate campaign did not directly fund the phone-bank calls that informed thousands of California voters that Rep. Helen Gahagan Douglas, his Democratic challenger, was married to a Jew—a damaging bit of information in 1950. But few historians doubt that the tactic was masterminded by Nixon’s political dirty tricks man, Murray Chotiner. With a wink and nod from Chotiner, the rabid anti-Semitic demagogue Gerald L. K. Smith enlisted his Christian Nationalist Crusade to disseminate the same information. Despite pleas from moderates that he distance himself from Smith, Nixon took weeks before he openly renounced anti-Semitism. (As transcripts of his Oval Office tapes later proved, the renunciation was disingenuous.) What’s widely known about the 2000 South Carolina primary is that independent groups like the National Right to Life Committee, the National Rifle Association, and Americans for Tax Reform financed a vicious mail and television campaign against John McCain, and that the themes of these mail and TV buys often overlapped with other push-polls and whisper campaigns that were unleashed against the Arizona senator. These groups did not, of course, openly accuse McCain of fathering a child with a black woman, though an influential professor at Bob Jones University—an evangelical college with strong ties to Ralph Reed, who was then a strategist for the Bush campaign—did. The general thematic overlap between third-party ads supporting Bush and the subterranean whisper campaign against McCain strongly suggests collusion. Furthermore, as The Atlantic Monthly disclosed in a lengthy article on Bush’s latter-day Murray Chotiner, Karl Rove has been using such tactics since his days running state judicial races in Texas. On balance, the evidence strongly suggests that the push polls originated with the Bush campaign.
November 7, 2006
Historians and the Use of Evidence Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 08:00 PM EST John Steele Gordon, who is lots of things, but never a particularly gracious colleague, asserts: “Mr. Zeitz and I do indeed live on different planets. I think evidence should be presented when making serious charges. He, apparently, believes that anything that favors his politics and disfavors the politics of anyone with the lese majesty to disagree with him is, ipso facto, the truth.” I’m not going to play who’s-the-more-responsible-historian with Mr. Gordon, other than to say that I really don’t need a lecture from him on proper historical methodology. Rather, I’ll use his cheap shot to open up a thread on how historians document their arguments. Academic historians are often justly accused of loving historiography more than history, an occupational hazard that leads us to weigh our books down with dense footnotes and endnotes that sometimes detract from the flow of the larger argument or narrative. While I’m sensitive to this aesthetic danger, having been trained as a professional historian I see the merit in documenting my analysis. At last count, my forthcoming book, White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics and the Shaping of Post-War Politics, has about 500 endnotes, most of which cite multiple sources. I have no idea how many book pages these endnotes will fill, as I have not yet seen the galleys. But to give some perspective, the total manuscript is about 115,000 words, of which 95,000 words are text and 25,000 words are notes. In effect, about 17 percent of the book is taken up by source citations. While I’m pretty certain that my friends and family will never give these endnotes a moment’s attention, my colleagues in the academy will, so I’ve taken great care in making sure they line up. When I write for the popular market, as was the case with my book on the 1920s flapper, I’m more sparing in my use of endnotes. General readers are less interested in analytical debates between historians and more interested in story and synthesis. That manuscript came in at about 96,000 words, of which 9,000 (or 9 percent) were in the endnotes. As a mass circulation magazine, American Heritage—and its companion website, AmericanHeritage.com—does not use endnotes or footnotes. But the magazine does subject all of its articles, including daily web features, to a rigorous fact-checking process. Authors are asked to provide source notes for their articles, and fact-checkers and editors then work through every last word of each article to make certain that the content checks out. I’ve been part of the process and can vouch for its integrity. Of course, implicit in this arrangement is trust. Readers have to trust American Heritage to get it right. On the other hand, when I cite a document in one of my books, readers have to trust that I’m citing it faithfully. A few years ago, Michael Bellesiles, a history professor at Emory University who won the prestigious Bancroft Prize for his book Arming America: The Origins of a National Culture, got into hot water when many of his citations proved inaccurate or false. He claimed to have looked at 11,000 probate records from the early Republic, but many of his footnotes led to cold trails. This was undoubtedly an extreme case of academic fraud, but it demonstrates the limited use of endnotes. It’s one thing to cite a document. But most readers are nowhere within proximity of the relevant archives and therefore cannot assess how accurately the author has cited and interpreted the document. All of this bedevils those of us who write and teach history for a living. I remember the first time I reflexively flipped to the back of a novel in search of the endnotes. It was a Philip Roth novel (American Pastoral, I think). That’s when I knew I was in trouble.
November 7, 2006
The World Is Watching II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 06:35 PM EST Just a few comments on Joshua Zeitz’s DNC press release—oh, sorry, blog post. 1) Are the Republicans in control of the election machinery in every jurisdiction in the country, and therefore any “shenanigans” must necessarily be laid at their doorstep? Is it possible that somewhere, some Democrat might just possibly be playing a dirty trick? 2) www.talkingpointsmemo.com is a purely partisan Democratic website. That’s fine by me, but it is no more to be taken as a simple repository of the truth, which Joshua Zeitz presents it as, than is Rush Limbaugh’s radio program. Once again, this is a history blog, not an annex of MoveOn.org. 3) He writes, “How will Mr. Gordon creatively turn the situation on its head and argue that Democrats, not Republicans, are the real tricksters?” Again, we live on different planets. Mr. Zeitz thinks that Democrats can do no wrong and Republicans can do no right. I think both parties are populated by human beings. Mr. Zeitz is so partisan when it comes to politics that he seems unable to even conceive of the notion that anyone can disagree with his politics and be a decent human being. Perhaps after this election—and its aftermath, which, I fear, may be protracted, as both sides are lawyered up to a fare-thee-well—Mr. Zeitz can relax a little and be less bigoted (for that is the only word for it) about those who do not pray in his church.
November 7, 2006
Campaign Tricks IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:25 PM EST Regarding illegitimate children, I agree with Joshua Zeitz that the term is obsolete in any meaningful sense. But in that case the quotes—forgive me for reverting to my long-ago status as a copyeditor—should have been around illegitimate not illegitimate child. The latter inescapably implies there was something doubtful about the particular child’s status. And there wasn’t. It is interesting that illegitimacy has seen an ebb and flow of opinion over the centuries. Before about 1600, the term bastard was not pejorative, merely explanatory, for illegitimacy carried no social stigma but merely disbarred individuals from inheriting their father’s status (and lands, etc.). A major figure in fifteenth-century French history was known, then and now, as the Bastard of Burgundy. Today bastard is purely an epithet, quite devoid of other meaning, except in a historical context. But illegitimate never meant an “illegitimate human being” merely one unlawfully begotten, as the word’s Latin root implies. And while, needless to say, no one should suffer simply because he or she is the child of a “single parent,” there is a mountain of evidence that children born of married parents are, on average, much better off. Society has a genuine interest in promoting the idea that parents should be married. That, inescapably, means discouraging illegitimacy. Mr. Zeitz writes, “Perhaps so, but the best Mr. Gordon can come up with is a juvenile act of tire slashing carried out by the son of a Democratic congresswoman.” First, they weren’t juveniles, they were adults, and it wasn’t one person, it was five. Second, Mr. Zeitz very conveniently ignores the ACORN scandal. Are they children too? The federal grand jury didn’t think so. He writes, “As for his suggestion that George W. Bush had nothing to do with the push-poll carried out against John McCain, I repeat: Mr. Gordon and I are living on different planets. John McCain certainly believes that the Bush campaign coordinated these calls with an outside group.” I made no such suggestion and wouldn’t be in the least surprised if the Bush campaign (which is not in any way the same thing as George W. Bush) was involved. What I wrote, quite clearly, was that Mr. Zeitz presented not a scintilla of evidence that the Bush campaign or even self-appointed Bush partisans had something to do with it. What John McCain believes is neither here nor there and is in no way evidence. If Mr. Zeitz has evidence, which is what historians—as opposed to political partisans—are supposed to deal in, then Mr. Zeitz should present it. If not, he should not present unsupported accusations as established truth on a history blog. Mr. Zeitz and I do indeed live on different planets. I think evidence should be presented when making serious charges. He, apparently, believes that anything that favors his politics and disfavors the politics of anyone with the lese majesty to disagree with him is, ipso facto, the truth.
November 7, 2006
The World Is Watching Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:00 PM EST John Steele Gordon writes: “Tighter voter registration and voting procedures are consistently popular with the general population and with all subsets of the population, regardless of race, location, and income. And yet the left has opposed each and every attempt to reform the system to
prevent voter fraud. The left is against both voter fraud and any attempt whatever to prevent voter fraud. That can’t be because they feel they can win honest elections.”
As usual, Mr. Gordon has it the wrong way around. Democrats don’t fear honest elections; they fear that Republicans will never let honest elections occur.
There are dozens of reports today, from all around the country, of voting machines that don’t work, voters who have been illegally purged from the rolls, and citizens whose phones have been jammed by the NRCC’s robocall campaign. These scenarios occur predominantly in low-income, heavy-Democratic-turnout wards. Visit www.talkingpointsmemo.com to sample from the chamber of election horrors.
The most egregious violation I’ve encountered thus far today—and it’s only 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time as I write this—is this recording in which a man who has been lawfully registered to vote in Virginia since 1998 is informed by a caller purporting to be from the state elections commission that he will be arrested if he attempts to cast a ballot today. See here.
This example raises two questions in my mind: First, how will Mr. Gordon creatively turn the situation on its head and argue that Democrats, not Republicans, are the real tricksters? And second, do such practices already violate the Voting Rights Act, about which a great deal has been written on this blog, or does the new Congress need to pass tough new restrictions against these anti-democratic shenanigans?
The world is watching us today. It grows increasingly difficult to export our brand of democracy to other regions when our election system is so fundamentally broken and rife with fraud.
November 7, 2006
More on the Courts II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:45 PM EST Mr. Smoler writes, “Contingency fees, in combination with punitive damages, give lawyers incentives to take on poor clients, and that keep the courts open to people who could not otherwise seek redress.”
Indeed it does, but only if the defendant has deep pockets worth going after. The little guy who happens to have been wronged by a little guy is still out of luck, while the little guy with a case against a big guy, even if it’s a very weak case, has a chance of being recompensed out of all proportion to his injuries. That is exactly the definition of jackpot justice. If you’re going to get run over, make sure the car that does it is a brand new Mercedes, not a 1987 Chevy.
He writes, “But I do not object to encouraging civil litigation—civil litigation is how people are supposed to achieve justice—if there are effective deterrents to frivolous litigation.”
In all countries but this one, litigation is regarded as a last resort, not a first one. There are other far less expensive ways to achieve justice, such as arbitration, and they, not litigation, should be encouraged. Litigation first suits the interests of lawyers and no one else.
He writes, “Mr. Gordon claims that this is because judges are in the pockets of trial lawyers.” I did not so claim. I merely said that the nexus between tort lawyers and judges was deep and abiding and this made them predisposed to see things from the lawyers’ point of view. Many state judges are former partners in law firms and many will be partners again when their term on the bench is up. The relationship is far too cozy to be healthy for society as a whole. I’m not much of an admirer of the French justice system, but in that system lawyers go to law school and judges go to judge school. They are separate professions. That might not be a bad idea.
He writes, “The lawyers I know concede that these punishments for frivolous litigation are too rarely employed . . .” Perhaps part of the problem is that the judges get to decide what is frivolous almost entirely on their own. If there were statutory definitions it would help. Of course, frivolous litigation might be like pornography in Potter Stewart’s famous line that he can’t define it, but he knows it when he sees it.
Part of the problem here is that the law is a self-governing profession that has done far too little governing of self in recent decades. I, too, know any number of lawyers who deplore the excesses of the tort bar, and yet the American Bar Association and state bar associations do absolutely nothing about it. In the 1950s it was discovered that tiny amounts of fluoride in drinking water had a dramatic affect in reducing tooth decay. The American Dental Association launched a major campaign to have drinking water fluoridated where it was not already by nature. This was, obviously, directly contrary to the economic interests of dentists, who make a living filling cavities. Can anyone imagine the ABA acting in a similar manner? I can’t. Instead the ABA issues cant about the sacred nature of the law blah blah blah, all translating into: Maintain the status quo. It reminds me of Richard Whitney, president of the New York Stock Exchange in the early 1930s (and a resident of Sing-Sing in the late 1930s) proclaiming the stock exchange a “perfect institution” in need of no reform whatever. Yeah, right.
Mr. Smoler writes, “In terms of Mr. Gordon’s belief that only trial lawyers make campaign contributions to judges, thus judges rule badly, and that as a result we should stop electing judges, I am doubtful. Industries annoyed by trial judges can fund their opponents at reelection time and have recently done so. Should we not elect judges because foreigners disdain that vulgar populist practice?”
Again, I only said there was a pressure, induced by self-interest, to rule badly, not that there is overt corruption. As for electing judges, first it, again, fails the good-ideas-spread test. No other country in the world elects judges. Second, candidates for bureaucratic and judicial positions have nothing to campaign on. “I will apply the law fairly” is the campaign platform of all judicial candidates. In New York State we elect town clerks and receivers of taxes. What on earth for? They should report to elected officials, who are responsible for their conduct, and be part of the civil service.
I don’t vote for judges for another reason: I don’t know who they are. When I voted this morning at 7:30, I did not recognize a single name among the assorted judges on the ballot. I received not one piece of literature from any of them. In New York City, where, I presume, Mr. Smoler votes, being nominated by the Democratic Party is tantamount to election, and the Democratic candidates are chosen by the remnants of the old Democratic machine in a process that is rife with corruption and that produces barely qualified judges who know exactly to whom they owe their position on the bench. Many of them have been spectacularly corrupt, especially in surrogate’s court, where the patronage to be handed out to lawyers is rich pickings indeed.
It would be far better to have the mayor nominate judges and the city council confirm them. That would bring the light of day to a process that now takes places entirely behind closed doors. The election of judges is not democracy, it is pseudo-democracy.
November 7, 2006
Campaign Tricks III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:45 AM EST John Steele Gordon writes: “About the scandal involving Grover Cleveland and the illegitimate child (‘Ma! Ma! where’s my pa?/ Gone to the White House, ha ha ha!’), I’m not sure why [Joshua Zeitz] puts ‘illegitimate child’ in quotes. There was no question the boy was both real and illegitimate, the question was whether or not Cleveland was the father.” I put the term in quotes because it’s an anachronism, and an offensive one at that. Just as we no longer call African-Americans “coloreds” and we don’t lump together Chinese, Japanese, Egyptian and Iranian citizens as “Orientals,” we’ve stopped calling the children of single parents “illegitimate.” Why? Because unlike in Grover Cleveland’s day, polite society no longer believes that a baby can be born an “illegitimate” human being. As to historical substance, Mr. Gordon writes: “Mr. Zeitz’s examples of recent dirty tricks are, ummm, conveniently one-sided. Indeed, they are Republican dirty tricks each and every one. I have no doubt whatever that the Republicans are quite as capable of dirty tricks and quite as guilty of putting them into effect as the Democrats.” Perhaps so, but the best Mr. Gordon can come up with is a juvenile act of tire slashing carried out by the son of a Democratic congresswoman. If Mr. Gordon actually believes that this episode is morally or constitutionally equivalent to coordinated efforts by a presidential administration or the National Republican Campaign Committee to violate federal laws, then he and I are living on different planets. As for his suggestion that George W. Bush had nothing to do with the push-poll carried out against John McCain, I repeat: Mr. Gordon and I are living on different planets. John McCain certainly believes that the Bush campaign coordinated these calls with an outside group. To bring this all back home, which is to say, to connect the discussion to American history, it’s worth noting that the current Republican robocall and push-poll tactics are but a technically sophisticated play on old tricks. In 1950 supporters of Richard Nixon’s Senate campaign hired phone bankers to call prospective voters and inform them that the Democratic candidate, Rep. Helen Gahagan Douglas, was married to a Jew. It was sort of like calling voters in South Carolina to inform them that John McCain fathered “an illegitimate black child.” Which is to say, it swayed voters who were stubbornly committed to old prejudices, and it had few if any visible connections to Nixon’s campaign committee.
November 7, 2006
Uncharted Waters Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 08:50 AM EST Further to my post on dirty campaign tricks, the New Mexico Democratic party has asked a state judge to issue an injunction against Republican operatives who appear to be calling Democratic voters and feeding them incorrect information on poll locations. See here. I wondered why Karl Rove appeared so confident this weekend, even in the face of surveys that show his party on the verge of losing control of the House of Representatives. Together with the robocall story, the situation in New Mexico suggests that we may be in store for a very dirty, very contentious election day. I can think of several occasions on which presidential elections proved uncomfortably close (1800, 1960, 1968) and on which their results were contested (1824, 1876, 2000). But I can’t recall a year in which control of both houses of Congress seemed so in doubt. In 1849 the incoming House of Representatives included 105 Whigs, 112 Democrats, and 13 Free-Soilers, and with the existing parties on the verge of realignment, it took 63 ballots to elect a speaker. But these were unusual circumstances, and not particularly relevant to today’s events. If, by the end of the night, we are still unsure who controls Congress, we are in uncharted waters.
November 6, 2006
More on the Courts Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:25 PM EST John Steele Gordon writes that the correct phrase is the English Rule, not the British Rule, and that under it costs are assigned to the loser. He is right on both counts. When I wrote “assigned,” I meant awarded to, but I did not write what I meant. He also writes that contingency fees have nothing to do with punitive damages, which is true in the abstract, but what I wrote was that “contingency-fee litigation plus the possibility of punitive damages tilts the board a bit,” toward the plaintiff lacking the means to go to court. Contingency fees, in combination with punitive damages, give lawyers incentives to take on poor clients, and that keep the courts open to people who could not otherwise seek redress. Mr. Gordon agrees (in part) about contingency fees, and proposes one apparently modest change in the law, forbidding contingency fees if a client is willing to go with fee for service. Off the top of my head, I don’t see a problem with that change, although I shall ask some lawyers, to see if there is any reasonable objection. Mr. Gordon also notes that the English rule discourages litigation, and that the American rule encourages it. Again, we agree. But I do not object to encouraging civil litigation—civil litigation is how people are supposed to achieve justice—if there are effective deterrents to frivolous litigation. Two deterrents exist under current law, sanctions against the lawyer and assigning costs to the loser (in egregious cases, this can be done in the United States). The problem is that these deterrents are ineffective, because both measures are rare. Mr. Gordon claims that this is because judges are in the pockets of trial lawyers. The lawyers I know concede that these punishments for frivolous litigation are too rarely employed, but they claim that this is because judges want to keep the courts open and fear that sanctions and costs awarded to the victor will discourage people from seeking justice. I think these lawyers are sincere in this claim, for they are themselves exasperated by frivolous litigation. In terms of Mr. Gordon’s implication that Congressmen receive comparable campaign contributions and comparably effective lobbying from credit-card companies and credit-card debtors, we differ. Credit-card debtors are generally unorganized and in many cases light on spare cash. Credit-card companies are well organized, and very rich. Mr. Gordon asks, “Does Mr. Smoler think that a well-funded congressman who got contributions from just one industry, the industry regulated by the committee upon which the congressman sits, would draw no attention?”. Actually, when the industry pushed through the most recent change in bankruptcy law, it was (in many of the papers I read) something of a scandal. It did get some attention, but shame is not always a perfect deterrent to Congress. In terms of Mr. Gordon’s belief that only trial lawyers make campaign contributions to judges, thus judges rule badly, and that as a result we should stop electing judges, I am doubtful. Industries annoyed by trial judges can fund their opponents at reelection time and have recently done so. Should we not elect judges because foreigners disdain that vulgar populist practice? By my lights, electing people is something of an American tradition, and one about which I am sentimental—bloody footprints in the snow and so forth. When it produces outcomes unwelcome to a particular group, enthusiasm for democracy tends to wane in that group. For example, some of my colleagues deprecate “bourgeois democracy,” but I suspect their sentiments would change if their candidates won some elections. As of now, a fair percentage of the Federal judiciary has been appointed by Republican Presidents, which might possibly account for some people’s relative enthusiasm for it. Liberals used to love the Federal bench and scorn state judges—this was back during the civil rights movement. Some liberals, despairing of the Federal bench, are now enthusiasts for the state courts. Call me crazy, but I somehow think comparable phenomena occur on the right.
November 6, 2006
Campaign Tricks II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 06:40 PM EST Just a couple of comments on the post by Joshua Zeitz regarding campaign dirty tricks. About the scandal involving Grover Cleveland and the illegitimate child (“Ma! Ma! where’s my pa?/ Gone to the White House, ha ha ha!”), I’m not sure why he puts “illegitimate child” in quotes. There was no question the boy was both real and illegitimate, the question was whether or not Cleveland was the father. Cleveland admitted that it was possible but doubted that he was in fact. Several other men, apparently, might also have been, including his close friend and law partner Oscar Folsom, who, unlike Cleveland, was married. (The mother had chosen to name the child Oscar Folsom Cleveland.) Folsom was killed the next year in a traffic accident, and many think that Cleveland accepted responsibility for the child in order to protect the widow from scandal and pain. Mr. Zeitz writes, “Such was the case in the 2000 South Carolina primary, when someone paid for a push poll that asked Republican voters, ‘Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?’ Conveniently, George W. Bush’s campaign left no fingerprints on the poll.” Excuse me? Is Mr. Zeitz accusing the Bush campaign of paying for this poll? If so, why use the term “someone”? If not, what is that word “conveniently” doing in the last sentence? It implicitly assumes guilt in the same sentence in which he states there is no evidence of that guilt. Mr. Zeitz’s examples of recent dirty tricks are, ummm, conveniently one-sided. Indeed, they are Republican dirty tricks each and every one. I have no doubt whatever that the Republicans are quite as capable of dirty tricks and quite as guilty of putting them into effect as the Democrats. But the reverse of that last sentence is equally true. We are all miserable sinners, especially when it comes to politics. So, in the interests of being fair and balanced, to coin a phrase, here are a few Democratic dirty tricks. In Milwaukee on November 2, 2004, vehicles rented by the Republicans to carry voters to the polls had their tires slashed, impeding the party’s get-out-the-vote effort. Found guilty of the crime and sentenced to jail were four men, one the son of a Democratic congresswoman, another the son of the former Democratic acting mayor of Milwaukee. Just last week a federal grand jury in Missouri handed up four indictments against workers for ACORN for voter fraud. The federal district attorney’s office in Kansas City said after the indictments that this was part of national investigation that is still very much ongoing. ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) is a liberal group funded by the AFL-CIO that has conducted voter registration drives in many states and been found guilty of numerous false registrations. In 2004 one ACORN worker in Ohio was found to have been given crack cocaine in exchange for fraudulent registrations of dead people, underage people, and people named Mary Poppins and Dick Tracy. ACORN makes it a regular practice to register people over long periods of time but to submit those registrations only at the very last minute before a filing deadline for voter registrations. If anyone can give me a reason for that other than trying to overwhelm the system and get phony registrations through, I’d appreciate hearing about it. Tighter voter registration and voting procedures are consistently popular with the general population and with all subsets of the population, regardless of race, location, and income. And yet the left has opposed each and every attempt to reform the system to prevent voter fraud. The left is against both voter fraud and any attempt whatever to prevent voter fraud. That can’t be because they feel they can win honest elections.
November 6, 2006
Samuel Burchard, John Kerry, and the Pre-election Blunder Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 05:15 PM EST A few days ago I posted on the (exciting if you're a Democrat, dispiriting,= if you're a Republican) shift in the gender gap. I spoke too soon. In its last poll before the election, the Pew Research Center for People and the Press revealed not only a much closer national race between Democrats and Republicans, but also a narrower 11-point Democratic lead among women and a very narrow 1-point Democratic lead among men. Critically, the Democrats are now losing white women by 2 points. A month ago, they led among white women by 15 points. Over at The New Republic there’s a good debate about how much of the Democrats’ reversal of fortune owes to John Kerry’s unbelievably stupid joke last week—a joke that intended to take a swipe at George Bush’s intellect but instead managed to insult American servicemen and servicewomen. I’m not sure to what extent the Kerry gaffe is responsible for the new poll numbers. But certainly if post-election surveys prove its significance, and if Democrats underperform, Kerry’s joke will go down as the most disastrous pre-campaign statement since 1884, when Rev. Samuel Burchard decried the dangers of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion” at an appearance with Sen. James G. Blaine of Maine. That little speech cost Blaine enough Catholic votes to lose a very narrow race against Grover Cleveland. Today, nervous Democrats probably feel about John Kerry much the same way Republicans felt about Samuel Burchard.
November 6, 2006
War Made New Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:50 PM EST I have just finished reading War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today, by Max Boot, and I recommend it to all American Heritage Blog readers. I would be especially interested in Fredric Smoler’s opinion of it. While of substantial length (624 pages), it is so well written and so full of information and insight that was new to me that it didn’t seem long enough.
The book covers the technological revolutions that have swept through military history in the last 500 years, beginning with the gunpowder revolution at the end of the Middle Ages that concentrated military power in the hands of kings, as the nobility largely could afford neither cannon nor the rebuilding that was necessary to keep medieval castles from being sitting ducks for those cannon.
The first industrial revolution, beginning in the nineteenth century, brought far larger armies, thanks to much more rapid economic growth; more rapid movement and better command and control, thanks to railroads and the telegraph; more potent arms such as the Maxim and Gatling guns, and far more powerful battleships.
The second industrial revolution brought tanks, aircraft carriers, and heavy bombers.
The information revolution of our own time brought smart bombs, stealth aircraft, and vastly improved communications.
Each of these revolutions altered the balance of power in favor of those countries that were the first to exploit them effectively, such as the English defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 or the blitzkrieg tactics that overwhelmed France in 1940.
American mastery of information technology allowed the 1991 Gulf War to be a cakewalk and yet 15 years later, what is militarily the only significant country in the world is struggling mightily against enemies in Iraq that are not even nation-states, for the new information technology and electronics can be exploited effectively and cheaply by them. And the United States military, especially the elephantine Pentagon bureaucracy, has been reluctant to develop the needed skills and expertise in counterinsurgency warfare. The military wants to fight tank battles when there are no more tanks left to fight.
One of the lessons that Boot draws in this book is that, over and over again, the losers in the last war and inferior powers are far quicker to exploit the possibilities of new technology than are the victors and dominant powers. The English mastery of the new cannon-dominated naval warfare helped doom the Armada. The Germans after 1918 developed the new offensive capabilities provided by closely integrated armor and air power, while France assumed that defense, as it had been in World War I, was still king. And the United States, after Vietnam, profoundly changed its military culture for the better (John Kerry, please note).
Boot uses several battles as examples. Some of these, such as the Spanish Armada, are known to every school child. Others, such as the Battle of Königgratz (1866), which established Prussian dominance of the German-speaking world at the expense of Austria, have been largely forgotten.
War Made New is one of those books that had me saying, “Ah hah, now I understand,” over and over again.
November 6, 2006
Making Congregation out of Segregation, Irish Catholic Style Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:35 PM EST In his informative feature on anti-immigrant nativism in the 1850s, Jon Grinspan notes that in the aftermath of the Civil War, “Irish and Catholic citizens began to gain wider acceptance in American society. Catholicism is now America’s largest religious denomination. A majority of the current Supreme Court justices are Catholic.”
Mr. Grinspan can certainly be forgiven for leaping 140 years in just one sentence. His AmericanHeritage.com feature was, after all, about the 1850s, not current-day ethnic politics, and he was just trying to wrap up an otherwise excellent piece. Still, it’s worth noting that nativism persisted well into the twentieth century. From the burning of Boston’s Charlestown Convent in 1834 and the Know Nothing upheavals of the 1850s to the ever-present “No Irish Need Apply Signs” of the 1890s and the Ku Klux Klan revival of the 1920s, immigrant Catholics faced the brunt of Protestant rage and anxiety, and they reacted accordingly.
One of the key ways American Catholics protected themselves against nativism was by creating an enormous network of parallel institutions. As late as the 1960s, in cities like New York the parochial school system still served about two-thirds of all Catholic children; its national network encompassed almost 11,000 schools and served one half of the Catholic elementary school population.
The Catholic school system was merely the most conspicuous component of a larger social and cultural network. By the early 1960s at least 350,000 children from metropolitan New York belonged to the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) and participated in its broad range of after-school and weekend activities: summer camps, boxing leagues, football teams, art classes, swimming lessons—virtually every imaginable activity. By 1960 the Archdiocese of New York estimated that 40,000 Catholic teens were attending parish and diocesan dances each week. Amazingly, that figure excluded Brooklyn and Queens.
The upside of nativism, then, was the creation of a distinct subculture that is increasingly lost to fifth- and sixth-generation Irish and German Catholics, who grew up not knowing the full effect of ethnic and religious intolerance. Just as African-Americans made “congregation” out of “segregation,” American Catholics forged a rich culture out of exclusion.
November 6, 2006
Kerry’s Joke Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:40 PM EST An interesting piece in The New York Times’ “Week in Review” section yesterday notes that what people took to be John Kerry’s joke—what Kerry said, rather than what he later insisted he meant—was in any case wrong. Kerry had ad libbed that if you don’t do well in high school, you’ll get stuck in Iraq; he claims he meant to say that if you don’t study hard, you’ll get us stuck in Iraq—like President Bush did. I would never rule out Kerry’s claim that he screwed up a joke. But as it happens, and as the Times points out, American soldiers on active duty are likelier to have a high school diploma than are Americans who are not serving (of Americans over 25, 85 percent have diplomas, compared with 97 percent of the people in the military). As for college, its trickier: 17 percent of soldiers on active service have B.A.s, compared to 28 percent of adults in the general population, but a lot of people are recruited out of high school and join up for the education benefits. It seems strange that it took the Times so long to check this out, since anyone familiar with the armed services and America knows that a daunting number of inner-city kids cannot pass the tests to get into the services. But people who work at the Times may not know too many people who join the Army.
I don’t think the Democrats are going to lose this election, but if they lose the next one, it will probably because the attitude suggested by this joke-as-actually-delivered will seem evocative of something a majority of the electorate detests and associates with the Democratic Party: ignorant elite contempt for ordinary people, and for people who possess an older notion of civic virtue. That older attitude is not restricted to good old boys from the red states: after 9/11, when someone in my sister’s office disclosed that her son had dropped out of Harvard, where he had just been admitted, to join the army, no one admitted to anything but somber admiration. That was an office in Manhattan, where employees need law degrees, generally good ones. At my workplace, however, the standard assumption seems to be the one gotten across by Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11, that military service is a blood tax on the poor and desperate. It does not seem to occur to many of my colleagues that to join the Army as a volunteer, during wartime, may be a product of motives other than economic desperation.
The assumption that people who enlist are idiots, misfits, and failures was a widespread assumption in Anglo-American society before 1939, when the United States and United Kingdom were the only societies to disdain peacetime conscription. The attitude is now out of date, although a revised version of it seems oddly common among educated people in my part of the world. The revised version comes out as (at best) pity for those who serve, and the assumption that such people are in the service because they are so desperate that they cannot do anything “better” and safer. This attitude is bred of pretty pure ignorance, and small wonder for the ignorance: The last member of my faculty to have served in wartime retired a number of years ago, and I am not sure that we have anyone on the teaching staff who served in peacetime. I do not think this attitude, and this ignorance, is restricted to academics. A friend who was twice embedded in Iraq tells me that alternately genial and hostile contempt for the brains and character of American soldiers, mixed with pity, was not wholly uncommon among reporters who were not embedded. Reporters are no longer themselves anything like a working-class profession, which they were for a good bit of the twentieth century. That social rise may be a mixed blessing.
My attitude toward people who nowadays enlist in the Army was shaped by a very little bit of experience. One part of that experience: I became friendly with retired Lt. Col. Ralph Peters after I did a Q&A with him in American Heritage. Ralph is a sixth generation coal miner who enlisted as a private in 1975, is genuinely trilingual in English, Russian, and German, gets around in a lot more languages, and has since published around 20 books. When we took him to lunch at a local club, my editor pointed out a painting by Kensett, and Ralph gave an extempore lecture on Kensett’s interest in Swedenborg and its probable influence on that painting. I find it odd that Ralph patronizes academics rather less than the academics I know patronize soldiers. I find it vastly depressing that a lot of people I know are similarly patronizing.
November 6, 2006
Campaign Tricks Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:45 AM EST Dirty tricks have been a staple of American political campaigns for as long as political campaigns have existed, and they come in several varieties.
There’s the “whisper campaign,” in which one party spreads damaging rumors about the opposition. This was the case in 1828, when President John Quincy Adams’s backers disseminated rumors (which were, in fact, accurate) that challenger Andrew Jackson had married his wife, Rachel, before she obtained a legal divorce from her first husband. Fast forward to 1884, when Republicans spread word that Democrat Grover Cleveland had fathered an “illegitimate child,” a rumor that may or may not have been true, but that worked to no greater effect than the smear campaign against Jackson. Both men were elected to the White House.
In its modern-day incarnation, the smear campaign is often conducted by “push poll,” a controversial practice in which paid phone bank operators conduct seemingly ordinary political surveys that feed prospective voters a menu of negative—and often inaccurate—information about their opponents. The purpose of the calls is primarily to disseminate negative information about a candidate, rather than collect statistical information about public opinion. Such was the case in the 2000 South Carolina primary, when someone paid for a push poll that asked Republican voters, “Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?” Conveniently, George W. Bush’s campaign left no fingerprints on the poll.
Then, there’s the garden-variety campaign prank, which Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign perfected to the level of high art in 1972. In the days when men could leave shoes outside their hotel rooms at night and collect them, polished, the next morning, Nixon’s staffers trailed Democrat Ed Muskie’s campaign, stealing the shoes of reporters who were covering the Democratic senator, thus interrupting press coverage of his campaign. The Nixon team also circulated false press releases under their opponents’ letterhead and ordered pizzas to rival campaign headquarters, cash on delivery. As sleazy as these tactics were, it’s hard not to laugh. They were, at least, funny. (Less amusing was a GOP operation against Muskie’s wife, making it appear, falsely, that she had used an ethnic slur against French Canadians. Defending his wife’s honor, Muskie teared up in front of television cameras and soon dropped out of the race.)
Then, of course, there are the truly egregious dirty tricks, like the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel complex.
Sure enough, the dirty tricks are in full evidence this year, and they seem to be of the third variety. As Josh Marshall has revealed on his popular news and blog site, www.talkingpointsmemo.com, The National Republican Campaign Committee has been sponsoring highly suspect “robo-calls” in several competitive districts. As Marshall explains: “Automated political campaign calls are a staple of modern politics. Both sides put in millions of them every election year. That’s because they’re very cheap, fairly effective and they get less scrutiny than ‘public’ ads on tv and radio. . . . What we’re talking about [here] is something a bit different. What we’re seeing is an apparent coordinated effort from the NRCC—the House GOP committee—to place calls that appear to be from the local Democratic candidate and then automatically call the same number back as many as seven or eight times each time the caller hang-ups. If the caller listens to the whole message it goes on to bash the Democratic candidate. But if the caller hangs up prematurely, the computer calls right back. Hang-ups are the achilles heal of robo-calls. So this seems to be an attempt to cover for that weakness by making those who hang up think the Democratic candidate is basically harassing them with phone calls. The GOP wins either way.”
The GOP is effectively harassing tens of thousands of swing voters, inundating them with five, six, or seven phone calls each, and leaving them under the impression that it’s the Democratic challengers who have placed these calls. In some states, this practice is explicitly banned, including New Hampshire, where the attorney general has ordered the NRCC to cease and desist.
Of course, the Republican congressman on whose behalf the NRCC is harassing New Hampshire voters, Charlie Bass, is shocked and appalled. “I’ve heard of them, but it has nothing to do with me or my campaign,” he told local reporters. “It’s an independent expenditure. I don’t like any independent expenditures, whether it be Democratic, Republican or anything else.”
If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.
November 6, 2006
Guy Fawkes Day Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:55 AM EST It occurs to me that yesterday was Guy Fawkes Day. I don’t recall how old I was when I first hear the rhyme “Remember, remember the fifth of November,/Gunpowder, Treason and Plot./ I see no reason why gunpowder and treason/ Should ever be forgot.” It was not part of the American tradition, but it was related to our tradition in a couple of ways, and since American children read British literature when I was a boy, and still do, I knew a very little bit about Guy Fawkes Day. I do remember that I was amused by that verse, obscurely pleased by reciting it. It seemed to chime with some old tradition I had imbibed. Much later, when I ran across the rest of that poem, the verses I didn’t know, which have dropped out of use in the United Kingdom, I was less amused; the second verse was still pleasing, but the last was much less so:
Remember, remember the fifth of November,
Gunpowder, Treason and Plot,
I see no reason why gunpowder and treason
Should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, 'twas his intent
To blow up the King and the Parliament.
Three score barrels of powder below,
Poor old England to overthrow:
By God’s providence he was catch’d
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, make the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!
Hip hip hoorah!
A penny loaf to feed the Pope.
A farthing o’ cheese to choke him.
A pint of beer to rinse it down.
A faggot of sticks to burn him.
Burn him in a tub of tar.
Burn him like a blazing star.
Burn his body from his head.
Then we’ll say ol’ Pope is dead.
Hip hip hoorah!
Hip hip hoorah!
That seemed a lot nastier, and if you thought about Northern Ireland, a whole lot nastier. I mentioned this to a British friend in an email today, and his reply was interesting:
“There’s been controversy here because one London council replaced the traditional celebrations with something based on Bengali folk tales. When challenged the council said it wasn’t being politically correct but that the traditional Guy Fawkes Day is anti-Catholic and offensive. . . . Surely the anti-Catholicism of Guy Fawkes Day is interlinked with resistance to absolutist tyranny as well as triumph over a sinister treasonous and terroristic plot. . . . Though anti-Catholicism has had some unpleasant manifestations in America as in the U.K., the defense of the tolerant Protestant tradition is a key element of Whiggery in the English sense. And that Anglican Protestant tradition includes important political content—is it not one of the reasons why America doesn’t feel like Argentina or Chile?”
I have the impression that modern historical taste does not vaunt the relative religious tolerance of the Protestant tradition over Catholic practice as much as used to be the case, but that aside, my friend’s remarks made me realize that I’m not sure what I think about the role of anti-Catholicism in the Whig and other Anglo-American political traditions. I do think that in the wake of the Church’s sixteenth-century decision to (briefly) define regicide as a political duty, Catholic loyalties were perceived to be a problem. Later on, in other political cultures, presumed Catholic ideological hostility to secular democracy was perceived to be another problem, once secular democracy got on the agenda. On the other hand, political exclusion of loyal Catholics in the U.K. long outlasted the reality of the first problem, outlasted it by centuries. A larger, more recent, and wholly American problem was KKK-style anti-Catholicism as late as the 1930s, and similar phenomena, which in some tenuous ways did descend from the Whig tradition. That anti-Catholicism was ugly, very ugly indeed in some times and places. It is now almost entirely dead: I remember reading that nowadays, the KKK accepts Catholics. Happily, the KKK is also almost entirely dead. Compared to fears of dual loyalty in almost any multi-national or multi-confessional political culture I know about, the U.S. has gotten off pretty cheap.
But that occasional ugliness made me think about something else, because the older issues can map onto newer ones, onto fears of dual loyalty by German-Americans during World War I, by Japanese-Americans during World War II, by Jews in the McCarthy era, by Jews today with respect to Israel, and currently to Muslims in a number of Western societies, to assumptions about various kinds of ideological hostility to democracy, and presumed theological commitments to the equivalent of that sixteenth-century duty to commit regicide. Is it reasonable to think about any of this on Guy Fawkes Day? I don’t know, but I did. As someone observed, history may not repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes.
November 5, 2006
Still More on Damages Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:20 PM EST Mr. Smoler is bringing in all sorts of new matters that have nothing to do with punitive damages. Contingency fees: I have no problem, per se, with contingency fees, where the lawyer finances the case and gets a percentage of what is recovered as his fee. But I don’t see why the practice of financing someone else’s litigation should be restricted to lawyers. If my impecunious neighbor were to be tortiously wronged and I offered to pay his legal bills in return for a percentage of what was recovered, I’d be guilty of champerty. If a lawyer does exactly the same thing, it’s called a contingency fee. In many cases the lawyer who is nominally handling the case is actually doing no such thing. Some associate being paid an hourly wage does the actual work. All the bargain-making lawyer is doing is assuming risk. That’s champerty in all but name. No other profession is allowed to charge on anything other than a fee-for-service basis. Contingency fees began as a means of allowing the little guy his day in court, and most cases were handled in the normal fee-for-service arrangement. But today, tort lawyers insist on contingency fees in all cases, making them partners in someone else’s case, whether the someone else wants it that way or not. That should not be allowed. Nor should contingency fees be allowed where there is no contingency, i.e., where there is no chance of losing. If a construction crane collapses and demolishes a million-dollar house across the street, for instance, the owner of the house is certain to recover (the house, after all, didn’t hit the crane). The party at fault will be more than happy to settle and there is nothing much to do but negotiate the precise agreement. But try to find a tort lawyer who will handle such case without becoming a partner in it. Often, a lawyer in such a case can make hundreds of thousands of dollars for a few hours work, despite the flat ban in legal ethics against excessive fees. Lester Brickman, a professor at Cardozo School of Law in New York, has written an excellent book on Rethinking Contingency Fees, now out of print. I recommend it to all. Basically, he would require that the plaintiff first demand compensation. If the defendant made an offer of settlement, the plaintiff could either accept it, and the lawyer would receive a suitable fee, or reject it and go to court. In that case, the lawyer would get a contingency fee only on whatever was collected over and above the original offer. That would go a long way to clearing up the clogged court system. The American Rule: Mr. Smoler writes, “More freely assigning costs to the victor—the British rule—is widely thought to discourage people from seeking justice.” First, it is usually called the “English rule,” not the British rule, and it assigns court costs to the loser, not the victor. Under the American rule, each side pays its own court costs, regardless of outcome. (Under certain statutes, the plaintiff is explicitly empowered to collect his legal expenses from the defendant if victorious. I know of not a single instance where the defendant can collect if victorious. Not exactly a level playing field.) If the English rule discourages plaintiffs from going into court, which it does in iffy cases but not strong ones, the American rule greatly encourages plaintiffs to go into court on weak cases. It also greatly encourages frivolous lawsuits and what might properly be called legal extortion (“Yeah, you’ll win the case eventually, but it will cost you $250,000 to successfully defend it. So pay my client $100,000 now and I’ll go away”). Good ideas always spread, even when the forces of the status quo fight tooth and nail to prevent them from doing so. Take the Field Code of Civil Procedure. Largely the work of the great New York lawyer David Dudley Field (brother of Cyrus Field, who laid the Atlantic cable, and Stephen Field, who sat of the U. S. Supreme Court for 30 years), in the 1840s it reformed the Byzantine rules of civil procedure that New York State had inherited with the common law. It made the rules simple, logical, and efficient (think Dickens’s Bleak House for what it replaced). It quickly spread to other states and to the federal court system. In 1873 it was used as the basis for reforming civil procedure in Britain and the Empire. Today, whether you are in Banff or Brisbane or Boston or Birmingham, civil procedure is basically what David Dudley Field devised 160 years ago.
Now, the American rule has been around longer than that. If it is a good idea, why has it not spread to one single legal system outside the United States? Not one. Nada, zilch. The reason, of course, is that it is a lousy idea, unless you happen to be a lawyer. The good idea of the English rule will come to this country eventually, but we might have to follow Shakespeare’s advice first. For the origins of the American rule and David Dudley Field, see here.
He writes, “John Steele Gordon writes that state judges cannot be trusted to judge justly, because ‘tort lawyers are, by far, the greatest contributors to the electoral campaigns of state judges.’ It would be interesting to generalize from this principle. If credit card companies are bigger contributors to congressmen who pass bankruptcy laws than are people with a lot of credit-card debt, should we strip Congress of the power to legislate in this and comparable cases? To ask this question is to answer it.” No, to ask that question is to be silly. Is that really the most impressive argument Mr. Smoler can muster on this subject? Congressmen receive contributions from lots of different interests. Elected judges receive contributions only from tort lawyers (and maybe their mothers). Does Mr. Smoler think that a well-funded Congressman who got contributions from just one industry, the industry regulated by the committee upon which the Congressman sits, would draw no attention? Congressmen are subject to intense media scrutiny and are elected every two years. Judges, unless they misbehave egregiously, are ignored and elected to long terms. They shouldn’t, of course, be elected at all. That’s another truly lousy American legal idea that has spread absolutely nowhere. There’s a reason the federal bench is so much more respected than most state benches. I would recommend the website www.overlawyered.com, created by my friend Walter Olson of the Manhattan Institute, along with his other website, www.pointoflaw.com. It is not a pretty picture sometimes, although sometimes it is hilarious.
I might also point out that tort lawyers as a group are the largest single contributors to Democratic and liberal candidates and interest groups. No wonder liberals have so much trouble discerning problems with the status quo. They are funded by it.
November 5, 2006
Kissinger and Iraq Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:15 PM EST Josh Zeitz wrote about Kissinger the other day, noting that “Kissinger’s Ph.D. dissertation, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh, and the Problems of Peace 1812-22, celebrated the Austrian diplomat Klemens Wenzel von Metternich’s role at the Congress of Vienna, which saw the major European monarchies reimpose stability on the continent at the cost of stifling national and liberal forces unleashed by the French revolution.” Josh added that if rumors are correct, “Kissinger is counseling the current President to bide his time before slicing Iraq into three national regions and declaring victory. Order restored, but hardly according to Metternich’s model.” You could make a case for the contrary, that if the rumor is correct, Kissinger is again urging the restoration of order on the Metternich model. The principle of majority rule, which would mean a Shiite-dominated Iraq, would be abandoned. Metternich didn’t have much regard for majority rule. The liberal forces that would be crushed—that are already being crushed—by Shiite and Sunni Islamists would be abandoned to their fates. Not un-Metternichean. Creating three states, one Kurdish, one Shiite Arab, and one Sunni Arab, may look like anti-Metternichean ethnic (or confessional) self-determination, but it would not be done out of any anti-Metternichean conviction about the right to self-determination. It would be done, as Josh suggests, so that Bush could declare victory and abandon the Iraqis to their fate. That is what Kissinger is accused of having done in Indochina. From imagining the perspective of the people left to their fate—the ones exterminated in Cambodia, or imprisoned in smaller prison camps or one country-sized prison camp in Vietnam—one obtains a darker view of Kissinger than the one taken by the newest celebrants of his “realism.” If this “realism” is Kissinger’s advice, and it carries the day, the ethnic cleansing that will follow in places like Kirkuk, let alone Baghdad, may not produce killing and torment on the Indochinese scale, but that outcome is not impossible, and it will likely produce killing and torment on a massive scale. That may come in any event, but if it is done as a result of a policy authored by Kissinger, one can trust it will be done with few tears from its instigator. Kissinger was always stoical in the face of other people’s tragedies. My memory of A World Restored—it may be shaky, as I haven’t taught that book since 1987—is that Kissinger praised Metternich for trying to rehabilitate France to balance the rising power of Russia, with the implication that the United States was wise to do the same with Germany after 1945. There is no precise parallel in Iraq. You could argue that a Metternichean strategy would be to rehabilitate the Iraqi Sunni Arabs to balance Iran, and that is in fact what the first Bush tried in 1991 and what the “realists” proposed in 2003: Give Iraq to another Sunni tyrant, one less unreliable than Saddam Hussein. This remains odd advice for a number of reasons, chief among them being that the U.S. can balance Iran on our own, if we have the will to do so, and if we do not have the will to do so, a restored Iraqi Sunni tyrant is not going to have the means. Josh quotes, without assessing the remark, a New Republic writer’s certainty that by August 1972 Kissinger knew that Vietnam was “a lost cause.” This implies both that South Vietnam was a lost cause and that Kissinger knew it, and I am not sure of either of those things, although Kissinger’s belief to that effect does seem likely; middle-period Kissinger occasionally gloried in Spenglerian gloom. One of the maddest things about the Iraq war is the attempted partial rehabilitation of Henry Kissinger, by both conservatives and liberals. Kissinger was a man who combined amazing cynicism with a record of pretty consistent failure, and whose crimes purchased no victories, or at least not ones he intended. He is a strange hero for the right, and a stranger one for the left.
November 5, 2006
More on Damages Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:30 PM EST John Steele Gordon writes that state judges cannot be trusted to judge justly, because “tort lawyers are, by far, the greatest contributors to the electoral campaigns of state judges.” It would be interesting to generalize from this principle. If credit card companies are bigger contributors to congressmen who pass bankruptcy laws than are people with a lot of credit-card debt, should we strip Congress of the power to legislate in this and comparable cases? To ask this question is to answer it. He also writes that plaintiffs should not receive punitive damages because “compensatory damages make the plaintiff whole. All the harm done him is, at least in theory, undone by them.” Perhaps in theory. In fact, the expense and trouble of going to court is a significant deterrent to ordinary people attempting to recover damages, and the chance of punitive damages encourages people to go to court, and makes attorneys chance their arm. Encouraging people to go to court is a mixed blessing, but discouraging them from going to court has costs of its own. If we remove part of our existing structure of incentives, we should probably replace it with another, and some of the obvious possibilities have their own problems. More freely assigning costs to the victor—the British rule—is widely thought to discourage people from seeking justice. Providing legal representation at taxpayer expense to impecunious litigants does not seem very likely. As it is, rich malefactors already have a decisive edge in litigation against most plaintiffs; contingency-fee litigation plus the possibility of punitive damages tilts the board a bit in the opposite direction. As for plaintiffs receiving punitive damages, I can see a case for a person who has been wronged receiving additional compensation when the injury is particularly wanton. I can also imagine going the other way. What seems most important is that punitive damages be inflicted when they are merited, and that they be painful enough to make sure that wrongdoers with economic motives can never correctly calculate that the risk of compensatory damages is only the cost of a given business strategy. Mr. Gordon closes with a question, and an answer: “Would the system, if that’s the word, we have now be the one we would design from the ground up? Of course not.” Maybe so, but we rarely get chances to design political systems from the ground up, and Mr. Gordon is not doing so now. He is rather seeking to tilt the board against plaintiffs, to achieve what he thinks a just and prudent end. I can imagine other changes instead, ones I think would check some evils of the current system while leaving what I take to be some of its strengths in place. One such change would be to increase the use of sanctions for frivolous litigation.
November 5, 2006
The Summer Isles Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:00 AM EST I write an occasional column for this website on alternate history, and I always read the Sidewise Award winners—one Sidewise Award is given for the best alternate history novel published each year, another for the best piece of short fiction. The 2005 the award for best novel went to Ian MacLeod’s The Summer Isles, which I read last night. I cannot imagine writing a column on The Summer Isles, because it is in a peculiar but striking respect astonishingly similar to Christopher Priest’s The Separation, one of the two books I discussed in a column that went up a week ago—and thereby hangs a tale. The Summer Isles is set in 1940, in a Britain that has lost World War I and gone fascist in the early 1930s, although this British fascism has another name, Modernism. All alternate histories require points of departure from our own history and trace alternate paths from that point of departure; part of the trick of writing a good one is to pick a point of departure that makes the alternate path plausible. Another part of the trick is to possess the literary gift for writing novels. MacLeod certainly has that gift, as does Christopher Priest. What about MacLeod’s point of departure? In The Summer Isles, Ludendorff’s 1918 Spring Offensive succeeded. In both this history and our own, Ludendorff attacked near Arras, and infiltration tactics devised by Oskar von Hutier, combined with new artillery tactics devised by Georg Bruchmuller, broke the trench lines of both the British and French armies. The Germans made territorial gains not seen since August of 1914, but in real history these attacks nonetheless failed to win the war. In MacLeod’s alternate world, the British and French armies retreat in opposite directions, Paris is abandoned, the French capitulate, and the British armies are surrounded and taken prisoner on the Channel Coast. Is this plausible? Nowadays, most specialist historians think the failure of Ludendorff’s offensive was over-determined. It succeeded by flowing around hard points and seeking out the soft spots, but the hard points were the most crucial ground, and the British Army’s morale did not disintegrate. It does not seem to do so in this world, either. It may be possible to plausibly describe a disaster overwhelming the Allies in March of 1918, although MacLeod hasn’t done it, but maybe that doesn’t matter; we can perhaps assume catastrophic bad luck, the kind that happened in the real 1940. What about the alternate path that follows from this point of departure? In MacLeod’s 1920s, an ungenerous peace—the British are forced to scuttle their fleet at Scapa Flow—is followed by the loss of most of Ireland to a revolution (this happened in real history, as well) and the loss of parts of Africa, most importantly Rhodesia and Egypt. Hyperinflation follows, and a series of general strikes is crushed by Churchill, using gangs of nationalist thugs, many of them from a paramilitary group called the Knights of St. George, led by a charismatic veteran of the Somme, one John Arthur. When the crash of 1929 hits, John Arthur goes from strength to strength, and after a few years of political deadlock, is asked to form a government. Arthur’s career parallels Hitler’s, with revision of the equivalent of the Versailles treaties, in this case the reconquest of Ireland and Rhodesia, and repression at home and in India. An economic boom follows, as does significant satisfaction with the end of a series of British humiliations, a vast military build-up, and, offstage, the deportation of Jews, homosexuals, dissidents, and other undesirables to islands off the coast of Scotland. Arthur seems to be planning war, apparently with the Kaiser’s Germany and an ultranationalist France led by De Gaulle, which are now in a European Union with the Low Countries. Arthur has signed a pact with Stalin, and in Australia, Britain is testing what seems to be a fission bomb. Most of this is satisfyingly revealed in small bits and pieces; the narrator’s main concerns are his own life and its imminent end. He has been diagnosed with metastasizing cancer. The narrator, a necessarily furtive homosexual, has a career he does not deserve at an Oxford college, the result of patronage by Arthur’s Modernist government, and much of The Summer Isles describes his life. These large portions of the novels are impressive. One of MacLeod’s points, asserted in a preface as well as in the novel itself, is that for a variety of reasons, most people will often go along with dreadful things, and that seems sadly indisputable. Another assertion is that fascism could have happened anywhere, and that countries that did not succumb to the disease were merely lucky and have no right to be proud of mere luck. Maybe so, although certainly debatable, but it will not be debated here. What is more pertinent to our moment—the eve of a national election, in which many Americans are apparently turning on the Republicans over their handling of the war—is the resolution of MacLeod’s fiction, an assassination and the swift unwinding of British fascism. The Jews are released from the camps in Scotland, after being fed via emergency relief flights by the RAF, India and Ireland will soon receive autonomy, and things are generally loosening up. The only result of Britain’s nuclear monopoly is a good seat at the conference table, where a European Union works to ward off the threats posed by Stalin and Roosevelt. Leaving aside the lesser implausibilities, the great implausibility is worth thinking about. An implication of this account is that war is always avoidable lunacy, even in cases that would most clearly justify it, for example, a mortal threat from a genocidal, racist, and imperialist regime. Evil turns out to be self-liquidating, and the Royal Air Force is good for feeding refugees but not necessary for any harsher purpose. This eerily echoes Christopher Priest’s thinking in The Separation: war is not, as Heraclitus claimed, the father of all things, which makes some free men and others slaves. No war is necessary to free MacLeod’s slaves, nor to keep any men free. As a stylist, MacLeod, like Priest, leaves Harry Turtledove in the dust. As thinkers about the tragedies of history, both make Harry Turtledove look like Thucydides. It is possible that this sort of political fantasy is restricted to pacific and gung ho enthusiasts for the European Union, who take an admirable, humane, and democratic political order, one historically made possible by a successful war, to be logically independent of the willingness to use force to defend that order. I certainly hope it is restricted to such people. The Democrats look set to do pretty well on Tuesday. If, in the wake of their victory, enough of them take something like MacLeod’s line, I am pessimistic about my party’s chances over the long haul. The great Republican strength is normally taken to be the electorate’s intermittent willingness to credit one claim: that Democrats cannot be trusted to acknowledge the real.
November 4, 2006
Scandal and Turnout Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 08:40 PM EST If the pundits are to be believed, 2006 is shaping up to be a watershed election year, potentially on level with the famous elections of 1974, 1980, and 1994, which saw scores of incumbents turned out of office in favor of new reform-oriented candidates. In past watershed years, as now, congressional elections substituted as popular referenda on political ethics. In 1974, voters turned their post-Watergate rage on the Republican party, which lost 48 House seats and four Senate seats. In 1980, amid revelations that several congressmen had accepted bribes from FBI agents posing as Arab businessmen, Democrats lost a net 12 seats in the Senate and 35 seats in the House. In 1994, in the wake of several House ethics scandals, including a check-kiting scheme involving over 350 sitting and former members, and a House Post Office scandal in which government employees trafficked in cocaine and helped a senior committee chairman convert his stamp allowance into personal funds, 54 Democratic seats swung to the Republicans, who gained control of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1954. Today, voters are outraged by the Cunningham, Foley, DeLay, and Ney scandals, and they seem likely to punish the majority Republican party. History shows us that political scandals may be good for the party out of power, but they’re bad for American democracy. Voter turnout numbers speak volumes about the cumulative effect of such scandals on people’s engagement with the political process. In 1966, 48.4 percent of eligible voters participated in the off-year congressional elections. Turnout fell to 46.6 percent in 1970, amounting to a total drop-off of just 3.7 percent. But in 1974, in the aftermath of Watergate, turnout plummeted to a dismal 38.2 percent—or a total drop-off of 21 percent in just eight years. In recent off-year elections, turnout has hovered between 36 and 37 percent. Polls currently show that independent voters are breaking two-to-one for Democratic House and Senate candidates. Traditionally, however, independents do not turn out in large numbers for off-year elections. The question is, then: Who will vote on Tuesday? If history is any guide, political scandal is a double-edged sword.
November 3, 2006
Party Systems Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 04:35 PM EST Political historians have long referred to five distinct party systems in the grand sweep of American history: the first party system (Jeffersonian Republicans v. Federalists), which spanned the time roughly between 1790 and 1815; the second—or Jacksonian—party system (Democrats v. Whigs), which lasted from about 1828 through 1852; the third party system (Republicans v. Democrats), from roughly 1854 through 1896; the fourth party system (Republicans v. Democrats), from 1896 through 1932; and the fifth party system (again, Republicans v. Democrats), from about 1932 through the present. The lag between 1815 and 1828, and between 1852 and 1854, reflect periods of transition, when no clear party system was in place. It was this sense of political consensus that led contemporary political activists to dub the years of James Monroe's presidency an "Era of Good Feelings," in which party divisions no longer mattered. In addition, while the names of America's two major political organizations have remained the same since 1854, the ideals that embodied the Democratic and Republican parties, and the core constituencies that formed each party's base, changed markedly in 1896 and 1932, which is why most political historians think of these dates as points of realignment. Today marks the anniversary of the 1896 and 1936 presidential elections. Believers in the “presidential synthesis” tend to argue that the 1896 McKinley-Bryan race fundamentally realigned the two parties, and that the 1936 Roosevelt-Landon election solidified the New Deal electoral base that FDR had been constructing since 1932. On the eve of the 2006 elections, which promise to be historic, and with the country so evenly polarized along partisan and ideological lines, we do not seem to be in a state of transition. If anything, we have seldom been so clear on how the two parties differ as we are today. Yet it’s not at all clear that we are still living in the fifth party system. The issues that define politics in the early twenty-first century—homeland security, financial security, economic restructuring, the environment, sexuality, and privacy—have little to do with the politics of the New Deal era, or of the 1960s. By the same token, as John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira suggest in their book The Emerging Democratic Majority, we may be in the midst of an electoral realignment. Whether one buys their argument that the Democratic party will soon emerge the dominant force in American politics, it’s hard to deny that many well-educated, suburban voters, previously a mainstay of the Republican party, are switching allegiances over questions involving choice, privacy, and culture. Next Tuesday’s elections may help us better understand just what party system defines the times, and understanding that will help us navigate the coming presidential election season, which is annoyingly close at hand.
November 3, 2006
Broadway Lyrics Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:30 PM EST Joshua Zeitz writes, “That said, Stephen Whitfield, a Brandeis historian and author of In Search of American Jewish Culture, proposed a different explanation of Broadway lyricism. Writing about just one of these Jewish figures, Whitfield suggested that ‘Perhaps [Lorenz] Hart’s absorption in the quiddity of words stemmed from his capacity to see English from the outside: he grew up in a German-speaking home and remained fluent in the language. Broadway lyricists reached heights of literacy that were unequaled before or after, making it permissible to speculate about a Jewish absorption in the mystique of language itself.’ I’m not sure which theory I buy. So I’ll open this back up for general discussion.”
There have, of course, been many influences on Broadway lyric writing. Hammerstein swiped the line “I’m tired of living and scared of dying,” in “Ol’ Man River,” from St. Augustine, and the whole idea of the song came from Tennyson’s “The Brook”: “Men may come and men may go, / But I go on forever.” But the main traditions were well established by the time Lorenz Hart had his first big hit (The Garrick Gaieties, 1925). Many of the standard song types were established by Gilbert and Sullivan. While not many lyric writers, wisely, have tried to outdo Gilbert with patter songs, such forms as contest songs (“Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” by Cole Porter, “Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better,” by Irving Berlin) are straight from G&S.
George M. Cohan (1878-1942), who was Irish Catholic, was a major influence from the beginning of the twentieth century. So was P. G. Wodehouse (1881-1975), who was, of course, English. Although now remembered for his incomparable Jeeves and Bertie Wooster novels, he wrote the lyrics for the Princess Theater shows (with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton) that are considered in many ways the foundation of the modern American musical, with the songs integrated with the plot, and modern and realistic American settings for the stories. As Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball explain in their book Reading Lyrics, “the relaxed vernacular of Wodehouse’s lyrics . . . influenced generations of American musicals.”
Consider one of Wodehouse’s most famous songs, “Till the Clouds Roll By”:
Oh, the rain
Comes a pitter-patter,
And I’d like to be safe in bed.
Skies are weeping
While the world is sleeping,
Trouble heaping
On our head.
It is vain to remain and chatter,
And to wait for a clearer sky;
Helter-skelter
I must fly to shelter
Till the clouds roll by.
That is a lyric that might have been written by Gilbert or by Hart. Wodehouse was one of the few who wrote something approaching patter songs, such as “Cleopatterer” from Leave It to Jane.
I think Hart’s great contribution to Broadway lyrics was his wit and sense of fun laced with an inner sadness that only got deeper as he grew older; a very New York sensibility (his first big hit was “Manhattan”); and a genius for rhyming equaled only by W. S. Gilbert and Stephen Sondheim:
Remember the youth ‘mid snow and ice
Who bore the banner with the strange device:
Excelsior!
This motto applies to those who dwell in
Richmond Hill or New Rochelle, in
Chelsea or
In Sutton Place.
You’ve got to reach the heights to win the race.
The second partner of Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, was probably the great Broadway lyricist least influenced by Gilbert and Sullivan and their successors. He was capable of verbal pyrotechnics when he needed to be:
Many a light lad may kiss and fly,
A kiss gone by is bygone;
Never have I asked an August sky,
“Where has last July gone?”
Never’ve I wandered through the rye,
Wonderin’ where has some guy gone—
Many a new day will dawn before I do!
But his greatest lyrics can seem almost like prose if read. Only when matched to the music (and no one could make words sit better on the music than Hammerstein) does their poetry come alive. Consider the verse from “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” written on the fall of that city—a city Hammerstein knew well and loved deeply—to the Nazis:
A lady known as Paris,
Romantic and charming,
Has left her old companions and faded from view.
Lonely men with lonely eyes are seeking her in vain,
Her streets are where they were,
But there’s no sign of her.
She has left the Seine.
Interestingly, this was one of the very, very few songs with music by Jerome Kern where the words were written first. It won an Academy Award for best original song, being interpolated into a movie version of Gershwin’s Lady Be Good. For total trivia buffs it might be noted that Oscar Hammerstein is the only man named Oscar ever to have won one.
November 3, 2006
The Jewish Roots of Broadway II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:00 AM EST I don’t think I glossed over “the large role played by Jews in the development of Broadway musicals”; I was writing about something else.
Jews played an enormous role in the development of this great American art form. Of the “big five” Broadway composers, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, and Richard Rodgers, only Cole Porter was not Jewish, and as Mr. Zeitz noted, Gershwin advised him to fake it. Jewish also were Sigmund Romberg, Leonard Bernstein, Jule Styne, Burton Lane, Harold Arlen, and (still very much alive) Stephen Sondheim. Herbert Stothart, Vincent Youmans (“gifted humans like Vincent Youmans”—Cole Porter), Frederick Loewe, Rudolf Friml, and Frank Loesser, however, were not.
Among the great Broadway lyricists (three of the greatest, of course, being Berlin, Porter, and Loesser), Ira Gershwin, Lorenz Hart, Alan Jay Lerner, E. Y. Harburg, and Dorothy Fields (the daughter of Lew Fields, of Webber and Fields fame) were all Jewish.
Oscar Hammerstein II was certainly partly Jewish by blood, but not by upbringing. Oscar Hammerstein I was raised Jewish, although his mother may have been of French Huguenot ancestry (most of the details of Oscar I’s early life come from him and he wasn’t, to put it gently, exactly obsessed with the notion of historical accuracy). He married a Jew, Rose Blau, and they had five sons (one died in infancy). But these sons were raised in a completely secular household. They were not even circumcised. Oscar II’s father, William, married Alice Nimmo, the daughter of Scottish immigrants, who was, as Mr. Zeitz says, Presbyterian, and sincerely so. Her two sons were baptized and went to Sunday school; the family celebrated Christmas and Easter. Oscar II’s first wife, Myra Finn, was Jewish, but his second wife, Dorothy Blanchard—the great love of his life, the woman he first saw, quite literally, across a crowded room, the woman to whom he dedicated his book of lyrics simply as “To Dorothy, the song is you”—was Australian. His children went to Sunday school so they could learn something of religion. Christmas and Easter were celebrated in the Hammerstein household. While he certainly had many close Jewish friends, he had many non-Jewish ones as well. None of this, by the way, concerned Hammerstein in the least. He considered himself simply American. There have been few men as enormously talented as he was who were as comfortable in their own skin as he was.
Hammerstein liked to tell the story of when he and Jerome Kern were beginning work (later abandoned) on a musical version of a novel about Marco Polo that had been written by an Irishman. What sort of music, Hammerstein asked Kern, was he thinking about for a show about an Italian traveling in China based on a book by an Irishman. Kern looked up at him and said, “Don’t worry. It will be good Jewish music.” That’s Broadway!
A personal note: At the end of the summer of 1958, the year I turned 14, I dropped by my mother’s office to pick up her department-store charge cards (they were made of metal in those days and looked like army dog tags) so I could go clothes shopping before going back to school. Dorothy Fields was there and my mother introduced me. One of the reasons I needed new clothes was that I had grown about three inches over the summer and was at the absolute height of adolescent gawkiness. Nevertheless, Dorothy Fields, who was only slightly over five feet tall, stood on tiptoe in order to stage-whisper into the ear of my mother (who was five feet eleven), “SO handsome!” Needless to say, I have been a Dorothy Fields fan ever since.
November 2, 2006
The Jewish Roots of Broadway Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:50 PM EST John Steele Gordon wonders whether British comedy (which has traditionally involved elaborate puns) differs from American comedy (which by and large does not lean on etymological gamesmanship), because the roots of modern American comedy are mainly Jewish, and not Anglo. This may be so. Certainly it strikes me as a good theory. But in singling out Broadway lyrics, which trace their roots “directly back to Gilbert and Sullivan,” as the exception to the rule, Mr. Gordon glosses over the large role played by Jews in the development of Broadway musicals. Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, Lorenz Hart, Yip Harburg, Leonard Bernstein, Oscar Hammerstein, Jerome Robbins, Stephen Sondheim . . . all Jews. (Hammerstein’s mother was a Presbyterian, but his circle of friends and collaborators was inescapably Jewish.) Even the libretto for Kiss Me Kate, which Mr. Gordon cited, was written by Samuel and Bella Spewack. According to one account, which may very well be apocryphal, Cole Porter once asked George Gershwin how to succeed on Broadway. “Write Jewish,” Gershwin is said to have responded. I’m not saying I don’t buy Mr. Gordon’s theory. Some of the prominent Jewish Broadway impresarios were highly assimilated types whose parents and grandparents immigrated from Central Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. I seem to remember that in the course of researching my graduate dissertation I looked at the transcript of an oral history given by Richard Rodgers’s granddaughter, who remembered going to Christmas parties at her grandparents’ apartment. That said, Stephen Whitfield, a Brandeis historian and author of In Search of American Jewish Culture, proposed a different explanation of Broadway lyricism. Writing about just one of these Jewish figures, Whitfield suggested that “Perhaps [Lorenz] Hart’s absorption in the quiddity of words stemmed from his capacity to see English from the outside: he grew up in a German-speaking home and remained fluent in the language. Broadway lyricists reached heights of literacy that were unequaled before or after, making it permissible to speculate about a Jewish absorption in the mystique of language itself.” I’m not sure which theory I buy. So I’ll open this back up for general discussion.
November 2, 2006
Dewey Defeats Truman! Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 06:05 PM EST On this date in 1948, Harry S. Truman defeated Thomas Dewey of New York to earn a second term as President of the United States. Of course, that’s not what readers of the Chicago Tribune learned when they picked up the morning edition to read, in banner headline print: DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. In the end, the race, which just about everyone expected Dewey to win, wasn’t even that close. Truman won the popular count by over two million votes, or five percentage points, and blew Dewey away in the electoral college, 303 votes to 189. “I could not have been more wrong,” the pollster George Gallup admitted. Life magazine, which also assumed Dewey would emerge victorious, told its readers, “In common with 90% of the U.S. press we were wrong in doping the presidential election. We make no apology for having supported Thomas E. Dewey. . . . But we do feel badly about falling victim to a mass illusion. . . . Instead of eating crow we insist on our own cliché: we are wearing sackcloth and ashes.” In 1948, political polling was a lot more sophisticated than it had been in 1936, when Literary Digest surveyed its readers by postcard and famously predicted that Kansas Gov. Alf Landon would defeat incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Even before those results proved as wrong as wrong could be, George Gallup, a young Ph.D. from Iowa who was then heading up the research department at Young & Rubicam, issued an influential critique of the poll, which he claimed (correctly) was unscientific in design and execution. Gallup later founded the American Institute of Public Opinion and, with his competitors Elmo Roper and Archibald Crossley, was recognized by the time of the Dewey-Truman contest as one of the leading practitioners of the scientific voter survey. When Gallup predicted a Dewey victory, news organizations had plenty of cause to assume he knew what he was talking about. He had come within four points of calling the past two presidential elections correctly. The problem in 1948 was that for the first time in well over 25 years, neither party dominated the field, and there were large numbers of undecided voters in the weeks and days leading up to the election. None of the leading pollsters had a tried and tested method of dealing with the undecideds. Crossley, for one, assumed they would ultimately adhere to the same pattern as the decideds. If 10 percent of voters were undecided, and Dewey led among decided voters by 10 points, Crossley assumed that Dewey would lead by 10 percent among undecided voters as well. This proved to be a completely inaccurate assumption, and in the fallout of the 1948 fiasco, the pollsters developed new models for weighing the undecided portion of the electorate. Today, pundits from both sides of the spectrum are predicting that Democrats will pick up between five and six Senate seats and between 20 and 30 House seats in next week’s off-year election. I’m not holding my breath, though I’d certainly like to see that happen, both because I am no fan of the Republican Congress and because I’m curious to see how my colleague John Steele Gordon will react when he finds out that Charlie Rangel is chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. But as I said, I’m not counting the chickens before they hatch. Today political polling is infinitely more sophisticated, less expensive, and more publicly accessible than it was in 1948. Anyone with an internet connection can visit Josh Marshall’s election site and read the latest numbers in Pennsylvania’s seventh district, or in Nebraska’s third district, or wherever. Yet two things are worth noting. First, many of the target races are well within the statistical margin of error. As in 1948, anything could happen. It could rain in Philadelphia, and it could snow in Nebraska. What effect the weather might have, I don’t know. But many of these races are close enough to be highly subject to contingencies. Second, however sophisticated the art of polling may be (relative to 1948, that is), the increased use of cell phones, the aversion of many young voters to installing land lines in their homes, and lower call-yield rates have made poll results less accurate in recent years. So on Wednesday, before the pundits announce the next House Speaker, they might want to wait until all the votes are counted. Unless they want to don sackcloth and ashes.
November 2, 2006
Is the Gender Gap Gone? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:45 PM EST Several pre-election surveys suggest that the Republican party could be in for a historic drubbing next week. Among its other findings, a New York Times/CBS News poll released today shows that 33 percent of voters intend to vote for Republican congressional candidates, compared with 52 percent who plan to vote for Democrats. More ominously, among independents, Democrats lead Republicans by a two-to-one margin.
Democrats also enjoy a 21-point lead among women and a 16-point lead among men.
The last statistic is critically important. When women were constitutionally enfranchised in 1920, many observers expected a distinct women’s bloc to emerge in national politics. This didn’t happen—at least, not for several decades. Over the last quarter century, however, a gender gap has opened up in voting patterns.
In 1980 women broke evenly between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter (46 percent to 45 percent), while men preferred Reagan by a 17-point difference. In 2000 women preferred Al Gore to George W. Bush by 11 points, whereas men preferred Bush by 11 points. In 2004 John Kerry led Bush by 3 points among women but trailed the incumbent President among men by 14 points. Indeed, a key cause of Bush’s re-election was his ability to use concerns about terrorism to win a large portion of what pundits termed the “security-mom” vote.
This year, if the NYT/CBS poll is an accurate reflection of popular opinion, the Republicans have not only lost the “security moms” but also a majority of men.
Take all of this with a grain of salt. A national rout by Democratic candidates does not necessarily translate into a Democratic-controlled Congress. I live in a safe Democratic district. My congressman, Charlie Rangel, will probably win 80 percent of the vote. Rob Simmons, an embattled GOP incumbent who represents eastern Connecticut in the House of Representatives, may very well squeak by with 51 percent of the vote. If you put our two districts together, far more voters will have cast ballots for the Democratic candidates. But little good that does Joe Courtney, Simmons’s Democratic challenger. In the end analysis, the tight drawing of House districts has provided GOP incumbents with an artificial buffer against voter anger. (I’m using Connecticut’s second district as a theoretical example. Courtney may very well win on Tuesday; his numbers are strong.)
That said, if I were a Republican, I’d be nervous. A poll commissioned in late October by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that in 40 competitive House districts, registered voters and likely voters prefer Democrats by an 11-point spread. In these same districts, women prefer Democrats by a 17-point margin (whereas in 2002, amid fears about terrorism, the Democrats carried women by only 4 points), and men prefer Democrats by 4 points (whereas in 2002, they preferred Republicans by 12 points).
It’s still anyone’s guess as to what happens next Tuesday, but if the gender gap is any indication, Republicans are in trouble.
November 2, 2006
The Yiddish Theater II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:00 PM EST Having a distinct shortage of Yiddish-speaking ancestors, I have no stories to tell of the days when the Yiddish theater thrived in New York, but I do have a question.
I have long been curious as to why American comedy is so very different from British comedy when so much of our literary and dramatic heritage is British. For instance, while the British love wordplay and have whole radio programs devoted to elaborate puns, it plays little part in American comedy, with the exception of Broadway lyrics:
Mr. Harris, plutocrat,
Wants to give my cheek a pat.
If a Harris pat
Means a Paris hat, OK.
But I'm always true to you, darlin’, in my fashion.
Yes, I'm always true to you, darlin’, in my way.
(Cole Porter—Kiss Me Kate, 1948)
Broadway lyric writing, however, traces directly back to Gilbert and Sullivan, and Gilbert was one of the great masters of wordplay.
I suspect the answer might be because American comedic traditions do not derive from British comedy but from Yiddish comedy. An astonishing percentage of the great and highly influential American comics of the twentieth century (Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, Weber and Fields, the Marx Brothers, Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice, Milton Berle, etc., etc.) were Jewish.
As I say, this is only a question, as my ignorance here approaches the total.
November 2, 2006
What Would Metternich Do? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:00 AM EST In a fascinating article in this week’s edition of The New Republic, Rick Perlstein, the author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, notes that Henry Kissinger, the Harvard professor who served as secretary of state under Presidents Nixon and Ford, has lately been a welcomed visitor at the Bush White House. The article is packed full of learned speculation, so it’s not entirely clear what to take from it. But as Perlstein notes, Kissinger might very well be tutoring George W. Bush on the same subject matter he so skillfully imparted to Nixon back in 1972: how to declare victory and withdraw from an unpopular, unsuccessful war.
On August 3, 1972, Kissinger, who even then was engaged in high-stakes diplomatic talks with representatives of the North Vietnamese government, told Nixon, “We’ve got to find some formula that holds the thing together a year or two, after which—after a year, Mr. President, Vietnam will be a backwater. If we settle it, say, this October, by January ’74, no one will give a damn.” Which is to say, long before the Democratic Congress cut off aid to the South Vietnamese government, Nixon’s foreign policy chief understood that Southeast Asia was a lost cause. Saigon would fall. The only question was, could American glue hold the situation together long enough to secure the President’s legacy?
Perlstein wonders whether “if Kissinger wasn’t truly a stay-the-course man in Vietnam but just sold himself to posterity as one,” he might be “teaching his new apprentice [Bush] the same trick—how to end a war with a retreat and blame it on anyone but himself? That’s not very hard to imagine. A growing body of data suggests that the Bush administration is edging ever closer to withdrawal. We have heard strong hints that the president will make one last desperate stand—pacifying militia-filled Baghdad, convening an international conference, dividing Iraq into three semi-autonomous regions—before finally departing. James Baker’s Iraq Study Group will likely be recommending some variation of this to the White House after the November elections.”
It’s well to remember that Kissinger’s Ph.D. dissertation, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh, and the Problems of Peace 1812-22, celebrated the Austrian diplomat Klemens Wenzel von Metternich’s role at the Congress of Vienna, which saw the major European monarchies reimpose stability on the continent at the cost of stifling national and liberal forces unleashed by the French revolution.
Ironically, if Perlstein is right, Kissinger is counseling the current President to bide his time before slicing Iraq into three national regions and declaring victory. Order restored, but hardly according to Metternich’s model.
November 2, 2006
William Styron Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:30 AM EST The novelist William Styron passed away on Wednesday at the age of 81. Among his many accomplishments, Styron won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for his fictional rendering of Nat Turner’s 1831 slave revolt, entitled The Confessions of Nat Turner.
Earlier this summer I contributed a daily feature for AmericanHeritage.com on Turner’s revolt. As I noted, Stryon, who was white, faced fierce criticism from leading black intellectuals for having the gumption to write in Turner’s voice, and for presuming to understand the experience of a nineteenth-century African-American slave. His literary opponents scored him for advancing a “whitened appropriation of our history.”
Ironically, in criticizing Styron for departing from Turner’s jailhouse interview, the critics missed an important point: Turner’s original “confessions” were transcribed and edited by Thomas R. Gray, a white lawyer who almost surely manipulated or, worse, fabricated parts of the condemned man’s autobiography. In imagining Turner’s life story, Styron was acknowledging that the only reliable source material available was a “whitened appropriation” of a black man’s history, and thus, no reliable source at all.
I sometimes recommend to students that they read, back-to-back, both Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner, and Russell Banks’s magnificent novel Cloudsplitter, a fictionalized account of John Brown’s life, as “narrated” in the late nineteenth century by Brown’s only surviving son, Owen Brown. Like Styron’s work, the novel imagines how things might have been and, along the way, makes countless observations about America’s tortured encounter with slavery.
Styron was one of the masters of the historical novel, and his voice will surely be missed.
November 1, 2006
Who Certifies a Congressman-Elect? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 04:40 PM EST Amid the excitement over next week’s congressional elections, a potential post-November blowout has gone largely unnoticed by the press. It’s possible—and even likely—that the House of Representatives will face a bruising debate in January 2007 over whether to seat one of its new members.
In Florida’s sixteenth congressional district, which was recently vacated by former Rep. Mark Foley, Republican Joe Negron is locked in a tight race with Democrat Tim Mahoney. A poll released on October 15 showed Mahoney with a seven-point lead, but as the shock over Foley’s misdeeds has subsided, many voters in this staunchly Republican district may be giving Negron a second look.
The catch is, Negron’s name does not appear on the ballot. Mark Foley’s name does.
Florida election law held that it was too late for the GOP to replace Foley on the ballot and further stipulated that all votes cast for Foley be credited to Negron, who has been officially designated the GOP nominee by party leaders.
Here’s the problem: Article I, Section 5, Clause 1 of the United States Constitution clearly states that “Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members,” which is to say, the House of Representatives is the only body empowered to approve or reject the credentials of its elected members. If Florida’s secretary of state certifies Joe Negron the winner of the sixteenth district election, the House can still refuse to seat him.
There would be good cause to deny Negron his seat. The fact that Florida election law allows for a transfer of votes between Foley and Negron does not make the law constitutional. There’s a strong argument to be made that when voters tick off a name on a ballot, they mean to vote for that candidate and only that candidate. If Floridians wish to send Joe Negron to Congress, they can vote for him as a write-in candidate. This is precisely the case in District 22 in Texas, where Tom DeLay’s name remains on the ballot, and where supporters of the new Republican nominee, Shelley Sekula-Gibbs, must exercise the write-in option to vote for their candidate.
If Mark Foley wins a majority of votes cast, and Florida’s secretary of state certifies Joe Negron a congressman-elect, two things are likely to happen:
First, Democrats will challenge the certification in court and argue—with good cause—that Mark Foley, not Joe Negron, is the duly elected congressman from the sixteenth district. If the state or federal judiciary subsequently ordered Florida’s secretary of state to certify Foley, the House would have to decide whether to seat and then expel him for his actions in the prior Congress. Alternatively, Foley could refuse to take his seat, and a special election could be called to fill the vacancy.
Second, while the case wound its way through the courts, the House would be faced with the decision of whether to seat Joe Negron. If anyone doubts the legal authority of the House to ignore a member-elect’s certification, she or he might look back to December 1865, when the Republican-controlled Congress refused to seat members-elect from the former Confederate states, despite President Andrew Johnson’s summary readmission of several of those states to the Union. While the Southerners stood waiting in vain, House Clerk Edward McPherson followed the strict instructions of Rep. Thaddeus Stevens (R.-Pa.), the de facto majority leader (there was no such official post in those days), and refused to read their names on the first roll call.
It’s also worth emphasizing that Mark Foley’s resignation from Congress should have no bearing on the 2006 elections. Each Congress is constituted from scratch. A member’s resignation from the 109th Congress is wholly irrelevant to his ability to serve in the 100th. It’s not even relevant to his ability to run in a special election to fill his own vacancy.
In fact, back in the day, it was standard practice for congressmen who did something incredibly bold or incredibly stupid to resign their seats and then run in special elections to fill their vacancies. When the House of Representatives censured Rep. Joshua Giddings in 1842 for his defiance of the congressional “gag rule” prohibiting members from advocating the abolition of slavery on the House floor, Giddings resigned his seat, went home to Ohio, and won election to succeed himself. Preston Brooks, a congressman from South Carolina, went the same route in 1856 when a majority of the House voted to expel him for caning antislavery Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts nearly to death. Expulsion requires a two-thirds vote, but Brooks felt sufficiently aggrieved to seek vindication from his constituents. Which was forthcoming.
The same thing happened as recently as 1983, when Texas Rep. Phil Gramm switched allegiances from the Democratic party to the Republican party. Gramm resigned his seat, ran as a Republican in the special election, and filled the vacancy that he had created.
All of this goes to show that Foley’s resignation should have no bearing on his ability to stand as a candidate in next Tuesday’s election. If his name is on the ballot, he’s running for Congress. Or so the Democrats will have
cause to argue.
It’s possible that Democrats will win a resounding victory next week and may opt not to make an issue of the sixteenth-district seat. It’s also quite possible that Mahoney will win the election outright. But in the event that more voters cast ballots for Mark Foley than for Tim Mahoney, in a closely divided House of Representatives every seat will count. In which case, the nastiest battle of this election season remains to be fought.
November 1, 2006
Punitive Damages III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:45 AM EST Fred Smoler writes, “The danger of excessive punitive damages is currently addressed by the power of a judge to reduce damages he or she finds excessive.”
Except for the fact that tort lawyers are, by far, the greatest contributors to the electoral campaigns of state judges. Indeed they are practically the only contributors in many cases. Thus the judges have an enormous built-in bias in favor of high punitive damage awards, because that is the side their bread is buttered on.
He writes, “and I cannot understand why a plaintiff should not receive punitive damages when grossly and egregiously harmed.”
Why should he? Compensatory damages make the plaintiff whole. All the harm done him is, at least in theory, undone by them. Having the plaintiff and his lawyer receive the punitive damages as well is like giving the fines assessed for running a stop light to the man whose property is adjacent to the stop light. Oregon, where this case originated, by the way, apparently has a system where most of the punitive damages awarded in civil cases go to a state fund to recompense the victims of crime. That makes a lot of sense to me, instead of paying for one more Mercedes in the lawyer’s garage.
Mr. Smoler writes, “Mr. Gordon also writes that ‘the level of punishment for a given degree of misconduct should not be determined solely by the histrionic talents of lawyers or whether members of a jury got out of bed on the wrong side that morning.’ Well, that is the way we decide who gets to be President of the United States. If it is good enough for allocating control of nuclear weapons, it is probably good enough for deciding what is going to happen to Philip Morris.”
This reminds me of one of the two jokes ever made involving mathematics: A topologist is someone who can’t tell the difference between a doughnut and a teacup. (For the non-mathematically inclined, topology is the study of surfaces and doughnuts and teacups, topologically speaking, are both tori. Hey, I didn’t say it was a good joke! The other mathematical joke isn’t very funny either.)
Do a thought experiment. Say there was no such thing as the concept of punitive damages in the common law and it was decided that those who commit egregious torts should be punished over and above having to make the plaintiff whole. Would the system, if that’s the word, we have now be the one we would design from the ground up? Of course not.
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