December 24, 2006
Congressional Morons IV Posted by Alexander Burns at 03:30 PM EST Without belaboring this point too much, I want to both agree and disagree with John Steele Gordon. Of course he’s right that there’s always the temptation to idealize the past—to think, as Robert Penn Warren wrote, that “there was a long time back when everything was run by high-minded, handsome men wearing knee breeches and silver buckles.” Of course he’s also right that we tend to remember great men before we remember imbeciles. Yet at the same time I don’t think it’s such a stretch to argue that the overall quality of American public servants has deteriorated in the last century. Part of that may have to do with the disappearance of classical education. If the best educated among us entered Congress, we might still end up with a lot of representatives with fairly trivial knowledge of Shakespeare. But even with this being the case, it’s also pretty clear that the best educated Americans do not, in fact, enter public service in the numbers they once did. If they did, we’d probably have a lot more people in Congress who could understand math and science. I’m reminded of an incident I witnessed recently at an orientation for new members of the House in which a newly elected Democrat, presented with some demographic data, asked, “What proportion of the population is under the tenth percentile?” If Henry Clay were alive today, I bet he’d be a venture capitalist or a technology entrepreneur. Maybe, at some point, he’d hold an appointed job in the federal government, like Henry Paulson. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that, but it means there’s one less brilliant man to enter the House. I also agree with John Steele Gordon that our own age will probably be remembered in loftier terms than we might expect. I doubt, though, that Tom DeLay and Dennis Hastert, whom history cannot ignore, will ever be described in the same terms as Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams. As Mr. Gordon suggests, Spielberg and the Beatles will likely be remembered as components of a blossoming new culture. But I would expect this period to be remembered more like the last decades of the nineteenth century—in which plenty of interesting things took place, and few of them had anything to do with the government.
December 24, 2006
Congressional Morons III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:55 AM EST I agree with Alexander Burns that Henry Clay and Virgil Goode don’t have much in common other than both having been members of Congress. If Clay loused up a quote from Hamlet, it wouldn’t surprise me if Goode had never heard of Hamlet. However . . .
He writes, “Carson—a conservative Democrat and a graduate of Baylor, Oxford, and the University of Oklahoma Law School—has less positive things to say about the House of Representatives itself. Repeating an anecdote from The House, in which Henry Clay embarrasses himself by fumbling a Hamlet quotation, Carson asks, ‘The institution now headed by Dennis Hastert may share the same name as that led by Clay, but which member of Congress today reads Shakespeare? Is it possible to imagine a single twenty-first-century politician . . . who is so confidently educated as to recognize a minor quotation from the Bard, much less a misquotation?’”
I think this is a fallacy in two ways.
First, it is the fallacy of everything is going to hell, that the past was more glorious, more heroic, more cultured, more everything good than the present. This is nonsense. We remember Henry Clay because he was a giant, a man who played a major part in the history of this country for 40 years. But he, and a few other giants, served in Congress with many damn fools, ignoramuses, and jerks who are utterly forgotten today. So we tend to think of Henry Clay’s Congress as having been full of Henry Clays and Daniel Websters, when it was in fact much more richly endowed with Virgil Goodes and Sam Brownbacks. Similarly, a 150 years from now, Virgil Goode will be a footnote, while people will still know about, say, Sam Rayburn and Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Second, actually a sept of the first, it is the fallacy of yesterday’s culture that what the cultured man of the past knew and admired must be what is important and admirable today. While Shakespeare will be read and loved “as long as men can breathe and eyes can see,” other classics will be read mostly by scholars. I remember when I was a young man talking with my grandfather, who told me that my cousin was reading Xenophon in Ancient Greek class in college. “Imagine being able to read the Anabasis in the original,” he said. “I had to read it in translation.” I made some noncommittal noise, unwilling to say that the notion had never once entered my head to read it in any language. At least I’d heard of it.
Although my grandfather (born 1881) never went to college (never finished high school for that matter, although he later went to law school—you could do that in those days), he had read not only all of Shakespeare (he was unbeatable at identifying Shakespeare quotations) but all the great classic historians as well: Gibbon, Macaulay, Parkman, Bancroft, Prescott, etc. While I own most of his copies of these men’s books, I have only dabbled in them and don’t feel terribly guilty about it either.
Equally, what an earlier time might have dismissed as mere entertainment rather than art is sometimes regarded today as the highest culture. The British poet Alfred Noyes, most famous for “The Highwayman,” wrote a poem called “The Barrel Organ,” about that instrument being played in the City, London’s financial district, at the end of the business day: “There’s a barrel organ carolling across a golden street/ In the City as the sun sinks low;/ Though the music’s only Verdi there’s a world to make it sweet/ Just as yonder yellow sunset where the earth and heaven meet . . .”
It’s been a few generations since a piece of music has been referred to as “only Verdi.”
I think this fallacy arises because the present is always so messy, so full of ignorance and stupidity and discord, while the past has been carefully edited, its great men separated from its fools, its battles lost and won. A hundred and fifty years from now, I have no doubt that people will say that we lived in a golden age, when men were men and art was art. How glorious it must have been, they will say, to have lived at a time when Newt Gingrich was maneuvering so brilliantly to capture Congress for the Republicans after 40 years of Democratic rule, when Steven Spielberg was making movies, when the Beatles were pouring out their music to the world!
December 23, 2006
Congressional Morons II Posted by Alexander Burns at 08:00 PM EST Joshua Zeitz and John Steele Gordon’s exchange about Virgil Goode, et al., reminds me of an interesting article I read over the summer. In the inaugural issue of Democracy, a left-of-center quarterly, former Congressman Brad Carson reviewed The House: The History of the House of Representatives, by Robert Remini, of the University of Illinois at Chicago. The review has almost uniformly good things to say about Remini’s work, calling it an elegant and thorough treatment of congressional history. Carson—a conservative Democrat and a graduate of Baylor, Oxford, and the University of Oklahoma Law School—has less positive things to say about the House of Representatives itself. Repeating an anecdote from The House, in which Henry Clay embarrasses himself by fumbling a Hamlet quotation, Carson asks, “The institution now headed by Dennis Hastert may share the same name as that led by Clay, but which member of Congress today reads Shakespeare? Is it possible to imagine a single twenty-first-century politician . . . who is so confidently educated as to recognize a minor quotation from the Bard, much less a misquotation?” Highlighting stories like this, Carson argues that the last century and a half of congressional history “can only be measured along a steep descent,” and that Remini’s book “reads like a chronicle . . . of the decay of American politics, and, perhaps, of American character, too.” Congress has gone from a place where men like Clay felt at home to one in which Virgil Goode and Sam Brownback are less the exception than the norm. Congress will shortly be headed by someone other than the much (and rightly) maligned Dennis Hastert, but I hardly expect Nancy Pelosi to do much to elevate the level of congressional discourse. I agree with Messrs. Zeitz and Gordon about Goode and Brownback, but I can’t help worrying that a “Moron of the Month” award might give the inaccurate impression that there are only a dozen or so individuals in Washington deserving such a distinction. Carson’s review forces the reader to ask whether this kind of political degradation is avoidable, or whether it might just be the inescapable result of two centuries of democratic government. While Clay and his ilk are certainly more appealing public servants than Goode, I think it’s pretty clear that the latter, along with Brownback and Ellison, are actually much better approximations of the public will. I’d like to think that most Americans would find Goode’s words distasteful and Brownback’s conduct appalling. But would at least one in every 435 agree with the representative from Virginia? Would one in a hundred cheer on the senator from Kansas? Regrettably, I think the answer is yes. In fact, I think those proportions might be too small. In the 1970s, during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of G. Harold Carswell, Sen. Roman Hruska responded to those who maligned Carswell’s intellectual capabilities by asking, “Even if he is mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they?” Carswell’s nomination failed. Hruska’s point, though, remains: “We can’t have all Brandeises, Cardozos, and Frankfurters.” If we want only public servants of that caliber, then our system of government is bound to disappoint us again and again. It really is the worst—except, of course, for all the others.
December 23, 2006
On Blogs Posted by Fredric Smoler at 02:55 PM EST An interesting op-ed on blogging by Joseph Rago, an assistant editorial features editor at The Wall Street Journal, appeared on Wednesday, and you can read it here. Mr. Rago takes a very dim view of blogs, especially of political blogs. He quotes Joseph Conrad’s view of newspapers—“Written by fools to be read by imbeciles”—and points out that while bloggers happily take this view of the competition, it is equally applicable to their own effusions. By Mr. Rago’s account the relationship of bloggers to mainstream journalists resembles “remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps”: Bloggers do little or no reporting and write much too quickly; he dislikes their slapdash style, which he finds alternately too terse and too prolix, and he dislikes their tone, which he thinks runs to the mechanically adversarial. There is much to be said for these views, but they also apply to newspapers themselves, as Mr. Rago several times concedes. One of the most damaging charges Mr. Rago makes against political blogs—that they are usually preaching to the choir, and wind up reinforcing political convictions rather than challenging them—is by his own admission increasingly true of many other kinds of journalism. I do not expect to read a Murdoch paper, or listen to Fox cable, and encounter a sophisticated challenge to its owner’s views, nor do I not expect to see The New York Times run too many eloquent pieces challenging its own pieties on at least some subjects. Mr. Rago’s own paper has a pretty distinct ideological line on a number of questions, although it maintains a brighter line between news pages and opinion pages than do most papers. Some newspapers print a fair amount of powerful argument from the other side—the Israeli left-wing paper Ha’aretz is particularly admirable in this respect—but so do some blogs. The unusual mix of opinions on some of the busiest blogs can be striking—Instapundit is prowar and pro–gay rights, for example. It is dispiriting to hear readers of party-line blogs engage in pseudo-discussions, reciting only evidence that confirms preexisting views, but it is also dispiriting to listen to readers of some of our greatest newspapers paraphrase the day’s op-ed columns while suffering the delusion that they are engaging in thoughtful political analysis. I am not sure if Mr. Rago thinks newspapers are better than blogs at avoiding these sins; he seems cagey about committing himself on that question. One of the worst things about a blog—the qualities that derive from its having been written very quickly, with little time for reflection or editing—was long thought true of print and electronic journalism. Print journalism gets some editing, blogs in general none, but the difference is not always easy to spot; the very word “journalism” reflects the fact that the stuff was once produced daily, which meant hastily, and it is increasingly produced many times a day. Given the congruence of fault and flaw between the one form and the other, it is hard to escape the suspicion that journalists dislike bloggers because they are rate-busters, or to use an older and uglier word, scabs. The Internet allows anyone to publish, and erodes and dilutes the journalist’s sense of privileged exceptionalism. In the long run, maybe sooner, arguably already, this will also erode the journalist’s income as well. There is a poignancy about the timing of this erosive pressure, at least from the point of view of the journalists. Historically, most journalists were relatively low-status and badly paid employees. Rather recently, they became better paid and much higher status types, and some of them became celebrities, the sort of people journalists once merely wrote about, but this rise in status and income seems to have come right before a possibly vertiginous fall. In their defense, it is worth noting that blogs can do something print or electronic journalism cannot do, or at any rate have not done: They can very rapidly gather and publish informed comment from a wide variety of readers. When television journalists asserted that some memos incriminated George Bush, bloggers covering the story elicited a wealth of informed comment on what I would consider obscure topics (IBM Selectric typefaces at a particular moment, etc.). A lot of people know a lot of things, and almost none of those people are on the contact list of any journalist. I read an e-list nominally devoted to a particular author of alternate history, whose members regularly query what they call “the list mind.” On an amazing number of topics, the collective intellectual resources of that rather small list are staggering: how a dam fails, the history of technology, the physics of viscosity, historical demography, small arms, etc. I have been on journalists’ contact lists, and am myself a free-lance journalist, and in comparison with what I know as a contact, or what some of my sources have known, I find the breadth and depth of the “list mind” wholly remarkable. In this sense, the blogs do allow what bloggers piously call “citizen journalism” to exist, something that is new under the sun. In the old days, if you wrote to a newspaper about a gross error of fact, the letter was not necessarily published—in the case of some papers, it was never published—although it was handed on to the offending writer, who was free to sin again, and usually did. The bloggers have changed that. At least some cases of journalistic incompetence and arrogance are much more quickly, thoroughly, and widely exposed than they were only a few years ago. This makes journalists, who exult in widely exposing other forms of authority as incompetent and arrogant, more than a little irritable, which should surprise no one. Mr. Rago’s op-ed, which is pretty thoughtful about the causes and irreversibility of this trend, is a more impressive expression of irritability than one usually encounters.
December 22, 2006
1812 and Historical Imagination Posted by Fredric Smoler at 07:20 PM EST I was fascinated to learn, from reading this blog, that John Steele Gordon is a direct descendent of the sister of Capt. William Burrows, who commanded the sloop USS Enterprise in her victory over HMS Boxer. I also wonder whether I am of the last generation of Americans who will be fascinated by such a genealogy. When I was a kid a fair number of American boys still read and reread books about the famous engagements between American and British warships during the War of 1812. The most celebrated was a frigate duel, the USS Constitution, a ship boys in those days still knew as “Old Ironsides,” against HMS Guerriere, but I also vividly remember reading about USS Hornet engaging HMS Peacock, and USS United States engaging HMS Macedonia, and a fair number of other victories. I also remember reading about gallant defeats, and much less gallant disasters on land, along with the Battle of New Orleans. A song celebrating that last victory was actually a pop hit when I was a kid. It is tough to imagine such a thing today. I do not think I will be a member of the last American generation to know about Mr. Gordon’s relative, but if I am right, I regret that this may be despite rather than because of the labors of my own profession. In recent decades it has become the fashion to amend the history curriculum to put a lot less emphasis on events like frigate duels. The curriculum was amended for a number of reasons, but one influential theory held that wars bored kids and put them off the study of history. I think this was a large mistake. Boys, at least, are not quickly bored by stories of frigate duels. When they were taught about them, history was a popular subject, at least as popular as it is now. I do not think this was a quirk of 1950s culture. If you go into any chain bookstore, the military and naval history section is booming. It is not clear to me that the ’50s taste was a function of an apparently mono-cultural America. When I began teaching, at Columbia, an Asian-American student anxiously asked me if a volume in the college bookstore was likely to get marked down even more than its current discount of 40 percent; I asked which book and discovered that it was a volume titled Fighter Aircraft of the Second World War. Another theory justifying the transformation of the curriculum was the claim that history should be the study of what ordinary people did rather than what elites did, meaning (among other things) command warships. In the ’50s, of course, most people had relatives who had fought in wars, and this is still true of more people than you might think, although perhaps less true of people who teach in universities. But even if people cease to know people who fight in wars, it does not follow that people will cease to be interested in people who fight in wars. Wars are absorbing for many reasons, not least because they bring out the worst and the best in the species, and the most prominent class of people reliably bored by them seem to be the vast majority of modern academic historians. This goes for the history of elites generally. You do not have to be related to people who did something to be interested in people who did that thing. I remember a friend who taught British history to first-generation immigrant kids at Queens College in the 1980s and discovered that they were bored by analyses of the class and gender consciousness of coal miners and female munitions workers; they wanted to read about kings and queens. They were, I think, quite wrong to be bored by the subjects he was teaching but not wrong to want to know about those kings and queens. Those immigrant kids were Americans, which meant those kings and queens were now their history, in a more direct sense than that in which all history is everyone’s history. Some kings and queens are peculiarly interesting, especially the ones who say things like “I know I have but the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart of a king, and of a king of England, too; and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realms.” You probably have to be a certain sort of academic to find that dull. Did the memory of frigate duels lead to a needlessly adversarial sense of history? Maybe once upon a time—an American politician is said to have once threatened to bust George III in the snoot if the man ever showed up in Chicago—but by the 1950s Americans were more Anglophile than Anglophobic, and that didn’t make the frigate duels less interesting to us. When we went on to study the War of 1812 in high school, there was a lot on sectional tensions, imperialism and threats of secession by people whose children would crush secession, and this interested us, but my guess is that those earlier enthusiasms for frigate duels primed us to be interested in another part of the story. This shift in curricular fashion extends to other disciplines. Once upon a time boys learning Greek, and many did, read the Anabasis, a book about a war. When I was in grad school, it became the fashion to have students read loopy Hippocratic medical theory about the uterus when learning Greek. This was supposed to make Greek more interesting and broaden its appeal. It does not seem to have worked. In any case, I am delighted to learn that John Steele Gordon is related to William Burrows, whose command is part of the history I was raised to think was mine, although no ancestor of mine had ever served in a navy or been resident in America in 1813. When I was a teenager it seemed both fitting and thrilling that a fantasy starship, later a real space shuttle, should be named Enterprise, and that an aircraft carrier had been named Enterprise and fought at Midway. This interest connected me to the past in ways I did not fully appreciate and had consequences I could not have predicted. Decades later I wrote a dissertation on naval mutinies. To the best of my knowledge at the time, I was under the influence of Foucault and John Keegan. Looking back on it, I think William Burrows did his bit too. And probably that long-dead queen, whose fate, and in the long run mine, rested on whether men sailing ships not wholly unlike the one Burrows captained had the skill and resolve he would someday show.
December 22, 2006
Congressional Morons Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:15 AM EST Since we’re naming Congressional morons of the month, I am sure that Joshua Zeitz will concur with me that honorable mention must go to Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, for putting a hold on the nomination of a judge to federal district court.
The nominee’s offense? She had attended the same-sex commitment ceremony of the daughter of a long-time neighbor and friend. The ceremony had no legal significance and the nominee took no part other than to say something nice at the appropriate moment.
I have no doubt that 50 years from now, perhaps 25, civil unions for same-sex couples—by whatever name these unions are called—will be about as controversial as woman suffrage is today. Senator Brownback and his like will, if anything, accelerate that trend.
December 22, 2006
Ebonics III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:05 AM EST Josh Zeitz posts that “it’s worth dispelling the popular myth that today’s immigrants are especially resistant to learning English.” I agree, although I had not thought I had been propagating that myth. Josh also writes that “whatever we’re doing, it’s working.” The skeptics reply, compared with what? So the next question should be, how well is it working? By how well, the critics mean to query whether students would be doing better without the vast expansion of ESL programs, or with a stress on an immersion model. There is a substantial and acrimonious debate on those questions, and a very brief guide to some of it can be found here, in the May/June 1998 issue of the Harvard Education Letter. It is my impression that the decade of further debate since 1998 has not settled any of these questions to the satisfaction of most observers—here is another summary of the state of the debate in 2003.
Josh concludes that “(a) if classifying Ebonics as a language offered Oakland school administrators a back door to accessing more federal education dollars, then more power to them. It was a card worth playing. And (b) if teaching Standard English as a second language is a tried and tested method with immigrants, then why not employ this strategy with African-American children whose primary language (or dialect) is Ebonics?”
As for (b), the question remains “if.” As for (a), even if (b) is true, or more likely true in part, it does not necessarily follow that ESL would work as well for native speakers of black English. For example, there is some interesting evidence that possession of another language helps people learn Standard English. If this is true, it does not logically follow that possession of a given dialect helps in the same way, or to the same degree, or at all. There is also another possible problem, one of politics. The possession of a common language, including dialects of a common language, is one of the traditional markers of common nationality. Creating a common understanding that African-Americans are Americans, full stop, was a protracted and ugly battle; deciding that many African-Americans are native speakers of a different language will not necessarily help with continuing issues of race in our country. Having some fraction of the educational elite decide something that seemed ludicrous nonsense in the eyes of a vast majority of the citizenry, including much of the educated citizenry, might have had a lot of effects, some of them pretty nasty.
Oakland’s school officials may well have been aiming for flexibility, but there is some reason to think they hit a different target. Two years after Oakland tried to make Ebonics a language for the purposes of ESL, California’s voters passed Proposition 227, which drastically cut back ESL programs in the state (the portion of students being educated in Spanish dropped from almost two thirds to 11 percent). I do not think the Oakland Ebonics controversy is what produced this result—but I’d bet it contributed to that outcome.
December 21, 2006
Virgil Be Good(e) II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:55 PM EST I certainly agree with Joshua Zeitz that Rep. Virgil Goode is the hands-down winner of the Congressional Moron of the Month award, a title for which there is always much competition on both sides of the aisle. For starters, Rep. Goode might want to take a look at Article VI of the Constitution, which flatly forbids religious tests for holding office.
However I might add that I am not much of a fan of Keith Ellison. I couldn’t care less that he’s a convert to Islam, although that is not a step I am ever likely to take. But he has had in the not-too-distant past far too cozy relationships with the likes of Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam and other unsavory types. Ellison’s district covers Minneapolis, and the very left Minneapolis Star-Tribune resolutely avoided doing its journalistic duty to investigate these ties during the campaign. However Power Line (www.powerlineblog.com) has covered the story like a rug (just search on Keith Ellison).
One thing puzzles me in Mr. Zeitz’s post. In his interesting history on the removal of Jewish disabilities in Britain, he refers to the prime minister who finally got rid of the requirement that members of Parliament take an oath “on the true faith of a Christian,” as “Tory Prime Minister Edward Stanley.” That is technically correct, of course, but he is much better known to history as the earl of Derby, which title he had held since the death of his father, the thirteenth earl, in 1851, shortly before he became prime minister for the first time. He had had the courtesy title of Lord Stanley since the death of his grandfather the twelfth earl in 1834, and had sat in the Lords under that title since 1844, thanks to a wonderfully named legal device called a “writ of acceleration,” which allowed politically useful heirs to peerages to sit in the Lords during their fathers’ lifetimes.
December 21, 2006
Virgil Be Good(e) Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:15 PM EST I’m always on the lookout for the rare issue on which John Steele Gordon and I are likely to find agreement. I can’t say for sure, but I’m guessing that Mr. Gordon won’t object too strenuously if I nominate Virginia Congressman Virgil H. Goode, Jr., for Moron of the Month.
As readers are likely aware, Rep. Goode is offended by the stated intention of incoming Congressman Keith Ellison (Dem., Minn.), a Muslim, to use a Koran, rather than a Christian Bible, when he takes the oath of office in January. In a letter to constituents, Goode warned, “The Muslim Representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district and if American citizens don’t wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration, there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran. . . . We need to stop illegal immigration totally and reduce legal immigration and end the diversity visas policy . . . allowing many persons from the Middle East to come to this country.”
There are so many problems with Goode’s xenophobic rant that it’s difficult to know where to begin. For starters, Ellison isn’t an immigrant. He’s an African-American who converted many years ago to Islam. Moreover, having already served five terms in the House of Representatives, Goode should know that when members take the oath of office in January, they do not swear on a Bible or religious text of any sort. They simply raise their right hands—all 435 members in unison—and repeat the official oath. Ellison plans to use the Koran at a private, unofficial ceremony later in the day. All new members, Democrats and Republicans alike, will enjoy the same opportunity to pose with Nancy Pelosi at similar, unofficial swearing-in ceremonies. It’s just a photo op. It means absolutely nothing.
Of course, the real problem with Goode’s letter is that it betrays a shocking degree of ignorance and bigotry, something better suited to the nineteenth century than to the twenty-first.
As late as the 1840s, England’s small Jewish community found itself barred from government service. Unless a Jew was willing to swear “on the true faith of a Christian,” he could not sit in Parliament or on municipal councils and was ineligible for any Crown office. Though Parliament had granted Catholics and nonconformists the right to sit in the Commons, Jews were still denied this opportunity unless they were willing to take a Christian oath.
In 1847 the City of London elected Lionel Rothschild, a scion of the famous Jewish banking family, to the House of Commons on the Whig line. When he refused to swear a Christian oath, the Tory majority refused to seat him. In turn, Rothschild’s constituents reelected him to Parliament. In a ritual that lasted the better part of a decade, Rothschild was regularly elected to the Commons and was regularly denied his seat. An agitated Tory complained that “the rabble of London, partly out of love of mischief, partly from contempt of the House of Commons, and partly from a desire to give a slap in the face to Christianity, elected a Jew.” After 11 years of this routine, Tory Prime Minister Edward Stanley persuaded his party to loosen the rules a bit, thus allowing Rothschild to take his seat in 1858. In 1860 Parliament determined that Jewish members-elect could devise an oath of office that did not violate their faith. A short while later, in 1871, Parliament voted to allow Oxford and Cambridge to award degrees to Jews, effectively ending the long history of official religious discrimination that once governed gentile-Jewish relations in Great Britain.
The United States Congress never placed religious disabilities on its members. This fact seems lost on Virgil Goode, who would probably be hard-pressed to spell the word “Parliament,” let alone demonstrate even passing familiarity with the history of Anglo-American democracy.
Rep. Goode appears to empathize with those Tories of the mid-nineteenth century who feared that diversity in Parliament might undermine the organic nature of their Christian nation. If that’s indeed the case, I’ve got bad news for Congressman Goode. America isn’t a Christian nation. It’s not a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation either. It’s a secular democratic republic. If he doesn’t like that, then, if I might paraphrase an oft-repeated invitation levied by nativists of his ilk, he should go back where he came from.
December 21, 2006
War and Honor II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:00 PM EST Fredric Smoler’s thoughtful post on war and honor—with which I entirely agree—reminded me of an incident in the War of 1812. I have not seen Mr. Toll’s book so I don’t know if he refers to it.
Sailing from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on September 5, 1813, Lt. William Burrows, in command of the sloop Enterprise, fell in with HMS Boxer off Portland, Maine, the next day, and a fierce 45-minute engagement followed. The British captain was cut in two by chain shot and Burrows himself was mortally wounded but lived long enough to accept the British surrender.
The Enterprise and its captive put into Portland, and there the two captains were buried, with equal honors, side by side, where they remain to this day, a monument of sorts both to the concept of honor in wartime and to a strange war, the only one, so far as I can recall, between two nations that spoke the same language. Captain Burrows was 27 years old when he died on the deck of his ship.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a native of Portland, wrote of the battle in his famous poem “My Lost Youth”:
I remember the sea-fight far away,
How it thundered o’er the tide!
And the dead captains, as they lay
In their graves, o’erlooking the tranquil bay,
Where they in battle died.
And the sound of the mournful song
Goes through me with a thrill:
“A boy’s will is the wind’s will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”
Congress awarded a gold medal to Burrows’s nearest surviving male relative, and two ships in the U.S. Navy, DD-29 in the First World War and DE-105 in the Second, were named for him. The name of his ship, Enterprise, has been borne by a number of United States naval vessels since, most notably the aircraft carrier that fought throughout the Second World War in the Pacific. She was one of the three American carriers at the Battle of Midway, facing a vastly superior Japanese fleet. And it was from her deck that the dive-bomber strike that sank four Japanese carriers was launched, giving the United States Navy its greatest victory. The current USS Enterprise, the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, was built in the 1960s.
I am happy to say that Capt. Burrows’s sister was my great-great-great-grandmother. His father, Lt. Col. William Ward Burrows, was the first commandant of the Marine Corps and the founder of the famous Marine Corps Band.
December 21, 2006
Ebonics II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:00 AM EST In response to my article on Ebonics, Fred Smoler wrote the following about teaching standard English as a second language: “You may think you are fighting for people’s dignity, but you may be as likely to protract their poverty and powerlessness. If you cannot speak or write Standard English, your life chances diminish, and being taught English as a second language may lessen your chances of attaining proficiency in the victorious dialect, now the standard language. The evidence on teaching immigrants English as a second language is not wholly encouraging, and there is some evidence that one prime constituency for that project, in the face of its perceived failures, is teachers in the field, rather than immigrant parents and children.”
I’m not familiar with the academic literature on the effectiveness of TESOL, but it’s worth dispelling the popular myth that today’s immigrants are especially resistant to learning English. In “The Language Ability of U.S. Immigrants: Assimilation and Cohort Effects,” a scholarly article that drew extensively on secondary literature and census material, Geoffrey Carliner found that English-language proficiency among immigrant children and teenagers was extremely high. “Even among ethnic groups who have come to the U.S. in large numbers within the last generation,” he wrote, “lack of English fluency does not seem to be a significant problem for teenagers or adult natives. Concerns that the children of immigrants will fail to learn English are clearly ill-founded.” For those with access to a research library, the citation for Carliner’s article is International Migration Review, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Spring 2000), 158-82.
The Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study, a major, multiyear survey financed by the Russell Sage, Andrew W. Mellon, Spencer, and National Science Foundations, found that today’s immigrant children prefer English to their parents’ native tongues and, on average, have lower dropout rates and earn higher grades than the children of American natives. In San Diego, the total district-wide dropout rate was 16.2 percent; among immigrants it was 5.7 percent. Nationwide, the survey found that English was spoken in only 6 percent of immigrant households, but 88 percent of immigrant children preferred it to their parents’ native language.
All of which goes to show that whatever we’re doing, it’s working. I don’t know whether TESOL is responsible for the success that immigrant children have enjoyed in learning English. One could presumably credit television, or the natural linguistic adaptability of kids, with this achievement. But it’s clear that there is no great English-language crisis owing to immigration.
Getting back to the debate over Ebonics, I meant to argue, simply, that (a) if classifying Ebonics as a language offered Oakland school administrators a back door to accessing more federal education dollars, then more power to them. It was a card worth playing. And (b) if teaching Standard English as a second language is a tried and tested method with immigrants, then why not employ this strategy with African-American children whose primary language (or dialect) is Ebonics? It strikes me that what Oakland’s school officials were aiming for was flexibility.
December 20, 2006
War and Honor Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:30 PM EST This website regularly links on its homepage to interesting material on the Web, under the heading “Editor’s Picks”—and today I noticed a link to a review of Ian Toll’s new book, Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy. The review, more or less glowing, is by Evan Thomas, author of a life of John Paul Jones and an editor at Newsweek, and it contains a few passages that at first sound disturbingly insightful but upon reflection seem startlingly wrong. The thinking in these passages may also reveal something perturbing about our current cultural situation and our ability to understand the past. Here’s one of them: “Toll’s real life heroes were brave, sometimes too brave. With their dandyish manners and oversensitivity to any slight, they were obsessed with face and pride. The dueling young lieutenants in their gaudy gold braid weirdly resemble modern-day gangbangers, draped with bling and bristling at any “diss”; while the ship captains gallantly, almost gaily, sailing to their doom against more powerful warships seem, in some essential ways, no different from kamikaze pilots in World War II—or Islamic jihadists who value a glorious death above all earthly rewards.” Naval officers in the Age of Fighting Sail were indeed touchy about their honor, sometimes in ways that disturb or even appall us, but while they shared an ideal of physical courage with kamikaze pilots, gangbangers, and Islamic jihadists, they differed very sharply from them in almost all essential ways. Some of the differences should be obvious. Any successful mission by a kamikaze pilot required the death of the pilot, whereas almost no mission undertaken by an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century naval officer required his certain death. This is a crucial difference from some moral perspectives, where being a weapon is ethically distinct from wielding a weapon. Another difference flatters the kamikaze pilot: His mission seemed the only chance of defending his country against what was imagined to be savage conquest, one involving mass slavery, mass rape, and mass murder, by a foe who by 1944 could be defeated by no other means. This involved a double mistake, but the beliefs were sincere. An American naval officer of 1812-1814 fought for his country and personal honor, and for no other principle. His country would have survived his defeat. Other differences do not flatter the kamikaze pilot. For example, the American naval officer, like his British enemy, believed that an enemy fighting honorably was owed honorable treatment. He could surrender without fear of murder or torture. This was generally not true of the World War II Japanese military, and made for a difference of extraordinary importance. Similarly, those Western naval officers would not use violence on unarmed enemy civilians who shared their culture, other than as explicit reprisal, which was extremely rare. The Western naval officer did not, and in most cases probably would not, wage war with the same goals as those sought by the Japanese armed forces, which were unlimited domination of all outside his own nation. The Japanese navy was better about this than was the Japanese army, but it was still pretty ghastly. Western naval officers at the dawn of the nineteenth century would do some dreadful things—their disciplinary culture permitted flogging a seaman to death, and their treatment of soldiers and civilians from sufficiently different cultures could be atrocious—but their moral imagination extended to people outside their immediate national group and to some degree outside their own class, and they almost always tried to minimize their use of violence. They observed laws of war. These are enormous and urgent differences, and they all depended on the same conception of honor Thomas decries, for honor both authorized and limited violence. How about gangbangers? Western naval officers had both a heroic ethos and an honor culture—they share that with some gangbangers—but they also possessed military discipline. This is a difference of extraordinary importance, and it is why Western soldiers have almost invariably defeated members of warrior cultures. Western militaries have no monopoly on courage, but the honor culture they share with most of their enemies, while a necessary condition for their victories, is not a sufficient condition. When both sides had or have equivalent arms, Westerners are still overwhelmingly likely to win. This is one of the reasons for the rise of modern jihadists. So how about the modern jihadists? Little or no extension of honor to enemies, few if any laws of war, no immunity, however qualified or partial, for civilians, and the evidence on military discipline is at best mixed. Here’s another passage from Evan Thomas’s review, describing a frigate duel. The American frigate, the Chesapeake, was commanded by Capt. James Lawrence: “After less than 15 minutes, the American frigate was a floating wreck, her captain mortally wounded. Yet Lawrence cried out, ‘Don’t give up the ship!’ The words were heroic, but as Toll shows, they were also desperate and even foolish. Lawrence repeatedly cried out, ‘Don’t give up the ship! Fight her till she sinks!’ and finally, ‘Don’t give up the ship. Blow her up!’ He wanted a seaman to strike a match and throw it into the ship’s powder magazine. Toll writes, ‘It was strange that these dying words, comprising an order (not obeyed) to commit mass suicide, were subsequently adopted as the Navy’s unofficial motto.’” Sounds pretty jihadist, until you think about it. A dying man’s order, commanding mass suicide, was disobeyed, and no one has ever thought worse of the Chesapeake’s surviving crew for ignoring that order. Off the top of my head, I can think of no occasion on which any American or British naval commander did anything like what the dying Lawrence, presumably maddened by pain, had ordered, over the whole history of fighting sail, when at war with any antagonist observing the laws of war. Western naval officers could exhibit remarkable courage, but they could also honorably surrender to overwhelming force, and did. Mr. Thomas seems to think the eighteenth-century Western soldier’s honor culture was a half-mad love of death, and something we have transcended, but a recognizably similar sense of honor remains a good, maybe essential motive for men (and nowadays some women) who are expected to risk their own lives as part of their professional duty. This assumed risk of being killed, at least as much as the possibility of killing, makes the profession of arms different from most other trades. As Tennyson wrote, the soldier’s trade lies not so much in slaying, as in being slain. Other motives for enduring that risk are possible, but few of them have been as helpful in restraining the violence honor cultures simultaneously unleash, and none of them have yet proved as consistently militarily effective. No modern military has abandoned honor and shame. Honor can be perverted—the SS motto stressed mere loyalty as honor, and ignored the restraint of one’s own violence, but the SS was not a particularly typical Western military subculture, nor in the long run a particularly successful one. Naval officers must, on rare occasions, sail to their likely doom. If on those rare occasions they can do so “gaily,” or at least seem gay, others are likelier to follow them. The excessive love of honor may be the love of death—that is probably why Shakespeare has Hotspur cry “Die all, die merrily!” But Hotspur is not the whole of the story; on almost all readings he is at that point making a very bad mistake, and he is not at the core of the tradition still inspiring modern Western militaries. I think Thomas’s reading miscomprehends our past, making it more different from our present than is in fact the case. Few of us are nowadays soldiers or seamen, and the rest of us depend in large part on editors to explain to the rest of us the ones who are, so it is important to get this right. The officer’s honor was not only different from this depiction of it; it could also grow more expansive. It could extend to men of different colors, and finally to women. It cannot reliably restrain some extreme violence against enemies who glory in being wholly unrestrained, and soldiers possessed of it can still do dreadful things. But they do different and probably fewer dreadful things than do kamikazes, gangbangers, and jihadists. A useful British idiom describes things only superficially similar as “as like as chalk and cheese.” Which is just about how much those naval officers resembled jihadists.
December 19, 2006
Comparing Ahmadinejad to Hitler Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:00 PM EST A piece in last Sunday’s New York Times “Week in Review” section points out that “experts” reject comparisons between Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hitler as misleading. This rejection comes in the immediate aftermath of a Holocaust-denial conference in Tehran, and in the wake of repeated threats do either “wipe Israel off the map” or “erase Israel from the page of history”—the translation is disputed, although the obvious and urgent difference between these two phrases continues to elude me. Memories of appalling history are sometimes tenacious, which explains general disgust with Ahmadinejad, but the experts quoted in the Times had an obvious point: Hitler commanded the armed forces of the Third Reich, Ahmadinejad does not, and for that matter Ayatollah Khamenei rather than President Ahmadinejad also controls the judiciary and the mass media. Iran has multiple centers of power, more than early Nazi Germany ever had; Iran has periodic if semi-rigged and to a degree irrelevant elections, Hitler had none; Iran has neither an air force nor a navy, which limits its reach. So far so good: You are usually on safe ground rejecting comparisons between anyone and Hitler. Running an Ahmadinejad-not-Hitler story risks the old joke about “phone that in to the Times,” except that in this case someone did.
As I was pondering the New York Times piece’s bold belaboring of the obvious, it occurred to me that there actually are some interesting comparisons between Ahmadinejad and Hitler. At least through 1939, Hitler had a very keen grasp of the psychology of his adversaries, and Ahmadinejad, along with other Iranian hardliners, seems to have the same gift. Both statesmen have/had a flair for announcing that they intend to destroy their enemies, connive at acts of illegal violence against those enemies, and simultaneously persuade their enemies that the risk of military confrontation outweighs the risk of ignoring the threat. Everyone “knew” that war against Germany/against Iran is/was filled with appalling risks, and those risks consistently paralyzed adversaries. In addition to the risks of war, the asserted grievances are/were also persuasive. In both cases the immediate and middle-term demands—the overturning of treaties uniquely restricting the sovereignty of only one power, and hence presumed unjust; not implausible assertions about the oppression of co-nationals or co-religionists—Sudeten Germans, Austrians, Palestinians, Shiite Lebanese—can look like legitimate grievances, which if addressed would pave the way for a reconciliation, or at least a modus vivendi. In Hitler’s case, there was no possibility of a modus vivendi. There may be no such possibility with the Islamic Republic, either. The hard-liners seem to need confrontation to legitimize a joyless tyranny and mask economic failure, and there is no reason to doubt their sincere abomination of everything their enemies stand for. They lack the power to prevail over their enemies, but Hitler lacked that power too. In the long run, the Islamic Republic’s chances against Israel, or against any existing Sunni Arab state, look better than Hitler’s chances against France and Britain did in 1939. If victorious in the short run, Iran will probably suffer a fatal collision with a very large power from outside the neighborhood, just as Hitler did. A lot of possibly avoidable misery may come first. It did in the earlier case.
That parallel may point to another. Ahmadinejad is seen by other Iranian elites as pressing too hard, risking reprisals before Iran is sufficiently well-armed to deter either preemptive war or, likelier, punitive sanctions. Hitler was in something of the same situation. His immoderate language and his breaches of treaties, and of international law, seemed deadly dangerous to Germany, as Ahmadinejad’s provocations seem to threaten the Islamic Republic. In Hitler’s case, foreign policy successes redeemed the policy of provocation and risk and created more tolerance by nervous countrymen when he ran his next bluff, until, to his astonishment, a bluff was called, and a war began. Yesterday it was reported that voting returned Ahmadinejad’s enemies to power in one set of elections; the Iranians who dislike the risks their president runs seem to have decided he’d recently gone to far. But if Bush leaves office with the Iranian nuclear program intact, and with an Iranian client state as a likely prospect in Iraq, and another in Gaza and the West Back, and another in Lebanon, with thousands of American soldiers dead from IEDs constructed with Iranian expertise, and hundreds of Israelis dead because Iranian military expertise raised the game of first Hezbollah and then Hamas—I wonder whether Ahmadinejad’s internal opponents will still think he ran immoderate risks. And I wonder what lessons his successors will draw from his record.
None of the above means that Ahmadinejad is even a micro-Hitler. It means that analogies to the 1930s are natural for us, because the apparent lessons of that decade are the hardest-won lessons we know. If you draw an absurd parallel—the threat to amend the Senate rules on filibusters to the Enabling Act, for example—you discredit yourself. But if you resolutely ignore the more plausibly relevant lessons of history, you might as well not know any.
December 18, 2006
Ebonics Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:45 PM EST Josh Zeitz’s lead piece on AmericanHeritage.com today recounts, with considerable sympathy, the history of “Ebonics,” an attempt to reclassify “black English” as a distinct language. As Josh tells the story, when the city of Oakland, California, did this in 1996, it was, among other things, an attempt to secure money for the Oakland schools under the 1973 Equal Educational Opportunities Act. That legislation granted funds to school districts with large numbers of non-English speakers (53 percent of the kids in the Oakland schools were said to speak Ebonics). The response of the U.S. education secretary was not encouraging: “The administration’s policy is that ‘Ebonics’ is a nonstandard form of English and not a foreign language.” Josh writes that “Ebonics was a highly defensible intellectual concept” and quotes someone who was then directing the writing program at Syracuse University asserting that “No contemporary linguist would talk about [black English] as slang, substandard, incorrect, deficient, or jive talk.” Maybe not, but most non-academic commentators thought the idea was a bad joke. It was a political failure, one that brought additional discredit on what was taken to be the academic left. Josh may mean to imply that what was wrong with the Ebonics movement was that it failed, and that had it succeeded, teaching Standard English as a second language might have been a good thing, securing additional resources for schools that needed them. This moves me to make the case for the other side. First of all, while some professionally competent people thought black English was a language rather than a dialect, others disagreed. Some of the people who disagreed pointed to the lack of much separate vocabulary, or a geographically contiguous area of speech, and there were other reservations as well, all of them arguably questions for professors of linguistics rather than historians. Linguistics happens to be a sharply politicized and in some ways shrinking field (Columbia University abolished that department some time ago, and I have the impression that some of the work has been taken over by linguistic anthropology). The remaining professionals very sharply dispute the definitions of dialects versus languages, and their professional views, had they in fact been unified, would not necessarily have been a good guide to the wisdom and prudence of teaching Standard English as a second language to some inner city children. Does history have anything to say about it? There is certainly a case for the proposition that a language is only a dialect with an army behind it. What is now Standard French was once spoken only by the elites of the population that conquered the rest of what is now France, and Standard Italian is a related phenomenon. Standard English is the descendent of what was memorably described as a pidgin invented by Norman men-at-arms to seduce Saxon barmaids. Insofar as this is true, Standard American English is the not quite total conquest of immigrant dialects and other regional speech by New England schoolmarms, and their efforts would have had much less success, maybe none, without an earlier victory won by other New Englanders, notably Chamberlain’s Twentieth Maine Regiment. Many standardized languages are the fairly recent result of the establishment of modern nation states, which went on to marginalize or extinguish local dialects. Those states did not triumph without violence, nor did their languages. But if you detest mere force and seek to overturn its victories in a more enlightened age, you should be aware that once standardized languages triumph, there is a possible cost to trying to arrest their victory in an inner-city neighborhood. If you win, you run the risk of retarding the social mobility of the people you are trying to help. You may think you are fighting for people’s dignity, but you may be as likely to protract their poverty and powerlessness. If you cannot speak or write Standard English, your life chances diminish, and being taught English as a second language may lessen your chances of attaining proficiency in the victorious dialect, now the standard language. The evidence on teaching immigrants English as a second language is not wholly encouraging, and there is some evidence that one prime constituency for that project, in the face of its perceived failures, is teachers in the field, rather than immigrant parents and children. Even if you are only trying to be “culturally sensitive and culturally respectful,” rather than carve out some workplace turf, you can still harm people thereby. On a separate matter, dialects do not disappear without a trace, if they disappear at all. There is a two-way traffic between Standard American English and its dialects, and black English alters Standard American, just as other immigrant dialects have. An example: I grew up saying wintercoat, one word rather than two, because Yiddish-speaking immigrants run the words together as would be done in German, which is a large part of Yiddish. That verbal tic may die, but Yiddish speakers, along with German immigrants, also said “hopefully,” meaning “I hope so,” rather than the Standard English meaning “full of hope.” That immigrant usage, a translation of the German hoffentlich, does not seem to be dying; it rather seems to be spreading. I was taught that this was a solecism, and I still correct students who say or write “hopefully” in that once-nonstandard sense, but I often feel like a pedant when making the correction. After all, if students say “hopefully” in the once-nonstandard sense, they are unlikely to lose out on too many jobs. I have almost given up on “critique” used as a verb; I ban it from the classroom, but I make fun of myself when I do so. Students should speak better English than is spoken by some of the faculty, but there are limits, and I am not sure they have to speak like faculty of a particular generation and background. I try not to pick up idioms from students, not least because middle-aged faculty look foolish when using often-dated slang. But I’d bet black English has inflected my speech (if not my writing) at least as much as German or Yiddish has. Still, the mostly Standard English I speak and write was learned from my teachers, who treated traces of immigrant dialects with less generosity than is now the fashion. I think they did me a service thereby.
December 18, 2006
Dirty Dancing Posted by Ellen Feldman at 03:40 PM EST I was interested to read in this past Sunday’s New York Times that an increasing number of secondary schools across the country are banning “pornographic” dancing. The article quoted the principal of Fayetteville-Manlius High School, near Syracuse, New York, as saying, “If you watch this stuff, you end up seeing girls playing out, or being forced to play out, sexually submissive roles.”
While I do not consider myself a twenty-first-century Miss Grundy and rarely find myself on the same side of an issue as the religious right, which has also banned certain kinds of dancing in their schools, I could not help agreeing with the principal. Our sex-saturated society does not need grinding or freak dancing, as it is apparently called, on the gymnasium floor, or more peer pressure on young girls to behave in ways that make them uncomfortable. But the last line of the article forced me to question my own reaction. “I think it’s kind of ridiculous,” one 15-year-old boy at Fayetteville-Manlius said. “Our administration is refusing to change with the times.”
More than two hundred years ago, the waltz, from the old German walzen (to roll, turn, or glide), shocked European society. In place of polite lines of gentleman and ladies touching gloved hands gingerly while performing intricate steps, which required more memorization and concentration than passion, individual couples whirled around ballrooms in delicious intimacy. Bodies entwined, breath shortened, bosoms heaved, heads giddied. It is no accident that, at the count’s ball, Emma Bovary grows dizzy while waltzing.
According to eighteenth- and even nineteenth-century guardians of morality, the new dance threatened the very foundations of society. Religious leaders crusaded against it; most continental courts, with the exception of the Hapsburg, where it achieved some respectability, banned it; and the Times of London deplored it. In July 1816 the Prince Regent gave a ball at which guests danced the waltz. “The indecent foreign dance” scandalized the editors of that august paper. “So long as this obscene display was confined to prostitutes and adulteresses, we did not think it deserving of notice; but now that it is attempted to be forced on the respectable classes of society by the civil examples of their superiors, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion.” Eighteen years later, the waltz was danced for the first time in America, by, surprisingly, Bostonians, and pronounced “an indecorous exhibition.” See: www.centralhome.com/ballroomcountry/waltz.htm.
Perhaps every new craze shocks the generation that danced its precursor. The women who did the bunny-hug and turkey-trot outraged their waltzing parents, because while their feet took small steps, the rest of their bodies made the most of the music. The next generation raised their hems and kicked their rouged knees and gartered legs to the high heavens. By the time World War II convulsed society, jitterbuggers were performing acrobatic feats of wonder. In Kevin Baker’s brilliantly imagined novel Strivers Row, Malcolm Little, who will soon change his last name and history, goes to the Savoy Ballroom on his first night in Harlem to jump and spin and fly and throw his white dancing partner around in a scene that wows the crowd of onlookers, opens the protagonist’s eyes to a new world, and jumps off the page. I could go on through the twist and the frug and other fads that passed me by, but the story assumes a certain sameness.
Perhaps the 15-year-old high school student who complained about his elders refusing to change with the times was on to something. From primitive times, dancing has had a sexual connotation. I don’t want to get out on the floor and do these new dances. I don’t want young girls to be pressured into doing them. But neither history nor young people care what I think. They’re going to dance their seemingly salacious steps. And in 20 years, they’ll be trying to stop their children from doing the same, to a new beat.
December 18, 2006
The Good German Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:40 AM EST On Friday Alan Barra reviewed The Good German as the lead piece for this website; he dubbed the film a “war noi” and mentioned the influence of movies like Casablanca, The Third Man, and Foreign Correspondent, all of them set in the context or immediate aftermath of the Second World War. The Good German is set in occupied Berlin, on the eve of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. That makes it wartime (if barely), and The Good German is a noir in several other senses of the word: It is dark, morally and visually, although it does not have the pictorial beauty of the great noirs. Stephen Soderbergh, the director, is visually quoting a lot of Hollywood movies, and to my eye the shattered city, filmed in black and white, with newsreels and other footage spliced in, also quotes immediately postwar neo-realist films; the New Yorker reviewer Anthony Lane was reminded of Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero, and I was too. The Good German evokes some of the great Bogart movies, most explicitly Casablanca, which it in one crucial way inverts, but also Bogart as a private detective, in movies where the detective is always taking a physical beating. But insofar as The Good German is a war noir, it is a film in a problematic genre. Noirs generally diminish our sense of moral clarity, while the great World War II movies almost invariably sought to clarify and simplify moral questions; they may sometimes look like noirs, but they do not feel like them. My sense is that Foreign Correspondent and Casablanca, the latter quoted in one of the last scenes of The Good German, are in effect and possibly in intent mocked in it, if those movies have any meaning other than as a set of visual tropes. What follows is a spoiler; anyone intending to see this movie should stop reading now. Once its twisty plot is untangled, The Good German has a straightforward story: American intelligence agents are trying to recruit Nazi rocket scientists, who assembled the V2s in a concentration camp, in the course of which more than 10,000 slave laborers were worked to death or murdered. George Clooney’s reporter-detective is always one step behind, and changes nothing for the better. At the end of the move, a repentant German witness to those crimes is murdered, apparently to stop him from incriminating one of the rocket scientists who is on his way to the United States. According to the New York Times review, Cate Blanchett’s Lena, a Jew who has tracked down other German Jews for the Gestapo, was not a Jew in the novel on which the film is based. Manohla Dargis, the Times reviewer, described the film’s revised Lena as an “offensive, historically spurious character.”
Offensive maybe, but not historically spurious. The film’s version of Lena is probably based on a small number of German Jews who did precisely what the film has Lena doing. One, a woman named Stella Goldschlag, was the subject of a 1993 biography. Depending on their precise work, these people were known as catchers, retrievers, raiders, or stool pigeons. Few of the dispiriting details of The Good German are in fact pure invention: as for smuggling out Nazi rocket scientists, and otherwise racing the Russians for the spoils of German military R&D, we very famously did just that, and concealed the crimes of some of the scientists we recruited, although as far as I know we never murdered any of the witnesses to those crimes. That sort of thing happens a lot in neo-noirs and Cold War thrillers, less often, if ever, in real history. But the dispiriting, historically rooted details pile up, and in the mass they work to discredit any sense of virtue triumphant in the American victory over the Nazis. The Good German is more a certain sort of Cold War thriller than a war noir. It is the sort of spy film with (at best) grave reservations about American virtue; the Second World War isn’t quite over, but the Cold War has clearly begun. This, too, happened; the shape of the postwar world was on everyone’s mind during the Potsdam conference, which occurs during the film. I got the impression that Manohla Dargis found the film’s general vision of American political morality in 1945 offensive, which is interesting, and not necessarily what I expect to see in the Times.
To return to Dargis’s take on Lena, and the film generally: how is something that is not historically spurious offensive when included in a movie? Probably because the historical details are assembled into a poisonous misreading of the history. The Good German has a vision of history that might have been adapted from a Classic Comics version of an idiot-level paraphrase of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. The moral meaning of the Second World War is collapsed into a dystopian version of the postwar world, in which the Americans are indescribably vicious, cynical, and duplicitous, not merely little better than the Soviets, but apparently little better than the Nazis. In addition to being ridiculous, this is in jarring tension with the vision of many of the films Soderbergh is referencing, and disrupts the pleasure his visual quotations might otherwise have spurred, had they been better executed. Soderbergh’s “war noir” is in fact indebted far less to war movies, or to original noirs, than to neo-noirs. George Clooney’s journalist in uniform evokes less the detectives of the noirs, who usually possess some moral agency, than Jack Nicholson’s detective in Chinatown, whose investigations change nothing for the better, and who is wholly powerless in the face of vast and irreversible evil. In Casablanca, the reality of the hero’s moral and political agency is the point of the story; in The Third Man, evil is profound but individual, not politicized into near-universality, in Foreign Correspondent, there is a democratic citizenry—an American citizenry—to be awakened to a deadly military threat. The prospect of the V2 technology in Soviet hands is not in this movie such a threat, for no sympathetic character in the film seems moved by it; only the American villains care about this threat. Another problem is that the heroes of the original noirs—the detectives who take the beatings Clooney’s reporter takes here—are a bit like the soldier-heroes of war films. Both pay in pain and risk and are repaid with moral and/or historical significance. Clooney pays, but is not repaid. Soderbergh’s Lena, who will do anything to save her own life, also jars a bit. That attitude of save himself who can does not make her unreal—some people are like that, and no one should easily assume he or she is not such a one—but war movies tend to be about soldiers, most of whom will not do anything to save their own lives, for example, flee before the first shot is fired. Soldiers, and the heroes of noir, interest us because they are supposed to do precisely the opposite. So for my money The Good German is a bad (and deeply unoriginal) interpretation of postwar history, a worse if more original interpretation of the relative moral standing of Americans and their wartime antagonists, and an anti-tribute to the films its director claims he loves. One of its less-cliched characters, Tobey Maguire’s brutal and corrupt young GI, who savors the pleasures of the black market (and the sexual spoils) of occupied Germany, is recognizable and not implausible, if you know something about the period. In real history, however, the men—the boys—who looted and luxuriated in Berlin in July of 1945 had recently closed down Dachau and Belsen, and in the case of the Russians, Auschwitz. During and immediately after the war, when they filmed in black and white on a daily basis, the people who wrote and directed movies had jotted that fact down in the other column of the ledger. Maybe historical perspective is the amount of time it takes to get hopelessly wrong.
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