June 16, 2006
More Democracy! II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 02:45 PM EST Just a few comments, as I, too, have no interest in getting into a war of words here.
1) The generally accepted notion as to what constitutes a democracy has, of course, changed over the years. The Athenians, who coined the term, after all, regarded Athens as a democracy. Yet one third of the population were slaves without any rights whatever, and women had no vote (but, perhaps, much political influence: She Who Must Be Obeyed was named, not invented, by John Mortimer). Today a democracy must have a far wider franchise in order to fit the modern definition. Whether ex-felons should vote is a political decision. Those who favor it think it would result in more votes for their side; those who oppose it think so too. As for the age people must attain to vote, that, too, is a political decision. No one would argue that newborn babes or ten-year-olds should vote, because they cannot make up their own minds. That is why Scholastic magazine’s poll has such a fantastic record of accuracy. The kids reliably vote in the poll the way their parents will on election day. When I was growing up in New York State you had to be 18 to drink and 21 to vote. Now you have to be 21 to drink and 18 to vote. Both numbers are, obviously, arbitrary.
2) Mr. Zeitz writes that “social democracy” is a term that is well understood in much of the world. Fine. No argument. But it seems to me that “social democracies” are a subset of “democracies,” those that choose to socialize many parts of their economies. I would argue that the only “right” in a democracy is the right of all adults to vote—or at least all adults who have not forfeited their right by being convicted of a serious crime—and to have the results of their votes determine the composition and policies of the government. The “right” to health care that is paid for by the government may have much to do with whether the country is a social democracy but has nothing to do with whether it is a democracy.
3) Liberty and democracy are not the same thing, although, to be sure, they tend to be found in the same places. The people of British India had liberty—to be secure in their persons and homes, to speak freely, to live under the rule of law, etc. They did not have democracy.
4) Proportional Representation. I wrote that “I certainly don’t see how proportional representation is an attribute of democracy. It is, in my view, a terrible idea.” Mr. Zeitz responded, “And Good for Mr. Gordon. And too bad for a large swath of the democratic world.” Too bad indeed.
Then he wrote, “Yet whether PR works or not is utterly beside the point. PR rests on an understanding of democracy that sees the polity as a unitary entity.” Exactly. It sees the millions of people as mere units—political atoms as it were—not as individuals. Intellectuals have always found actual human beings annoyingly idiosyncratic and resistant to being plugged into their beautiful theories. That’s why their theories so seldom work in the real world.
And the people are only allowed to vote for a set of ideas, not for individuals. This has little to do with representing localities. There is no requirement that MP’s live in their constituency in Britain, and the vast majority don’t. Some hardly ever visit their constituencies except at election time. But they are still individuals. There was a case in the 1960s or ’70s (the Wilson government, if I remember correctly) in which a Labor government was elected, but one of the pooh-bahs of the party was defeated in his supposedly safe seat because he was personally very unpopular (I’m afraid I forget why). So the party booted a member out of an even safer seat so the pooh-bah could run there in a by-election. He lost again. He ran in a third seat and lost there. At that point Wilson said, in effect, “Sorry, but you can’t lose us our majority seat by seat” and he was out of the government. Now THAT’S democracy!
Mr. Zeitz wrote further that “this idea hearkens back to the republican political discourse of the eighteenth century, with its emphasis on organic community and disinterested government.” I hereby nominate “disinterested government” as the oxymoron of the week. Only in the cloud-cuckoolands of political theory are governments ever disinterested. Hamilton and Madison had no such illusions. Brilliant as they were, and deeply versed in political theory as they were, they wanted a government that would work in the real world, the world of real human beings, not so many tabula rasas to be written on by intellectuals. In that sense they were engineers, not intellectuals at all.
This world could use more political engineers and fewer political intellectuals. Much of the troubles of the twentieth century can be laid at the feet of the latter.
June 16, 2006
Vanderbilt Celebrates Himself Posted by Richard F. Snow at 12:30 PM EST In his posting of June 12, John Steele Gordon speaks of the bronze freize that Commodore Vanderbilt commissioned to celebrate his life and works on the facade of his new freight depot in downtown Manhattan. It is perhaps not surprising that this project wasn’t unanimously embraced by the shareholders of the Hudson River Railroad, who, after all, had footed the bill; many would have agreed with George Templeton Strong’s condemnation of this “hideous group of molten images.” But I tend to agree with the New York Herald writer that John quotes: “This beautiful work is a monument of the genius and progress of the age.”
I say this on the evidence of a stereoscopic view I bought some years back. It seems to have been issued soon after the depot was finished in 1869, and it shows a slice of the center of the high-relief bronze. In the middle stands its only surviving detail, the statue of Vanderbilt, opening his left hand as if to say, “Look what I have summoned.” To his left, a big, oceangoing walking-beam side-wheeler trails brazen gouts of smoke; before it a pier is heavy with nautical fixtures—an anchor, a windlass—and bales of cargo (atop one of which mysteriously crouches either a big dog or a small bear). On the proprietor’s right is the mighty complement to his maritime enterprise, a passenger train passing what appears to be Grand Central Terminal. The Herald’s man is right, I think; whether or not Vanderbilt’s intention was solely to celebrate himself, he succeeded in making a tribute, both literal and allegorical, to the heroic creative industrial energies of the nineteenth century, and its destruction in the heedless 1920s seems an much an act of civic vandalism as the leveling of Penn Station a generation later.
June 16, 2006
More Democracy! Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:20 AM EST At the risk of initiating a war of words—and I hope it doesn’t come to that, since at the end of the day I’m sure he and I are both all for “democracy”—I think John Steele Gordon is missing the point. That’s probably my fault, as my last post might have been clearer. So let me try to elaborate by addressing some of his assertions:
1. “Democracy,” Mr. Gordon writes, “is any system of government in which the ultimate source of political power is the people as a whole rather than some small subset of the people, as in an oligarchy, or a single individual, as in a tyranny. The fact that the people in different democratic states make different choices regarding policy is neither here nor there.”
The problem, of course, is that “the people” has long been a contested term, in and outside of America. And it still is. How a country defines its polity—not its policy, but its polity—goes a long way in determining how it shapes and understands its particular brand of democracy.
Does “the people” include only male property holders (as was widely the case in America until the age of Jackson)? Does it encompass women (some states initially allowed women to vote but then stripped them of that right in the early nineteenth century; other states allowed women to vote in local but not state elections; today, some countries deny women the vote)? Does it include racial minorities (until 1870—and, arguably, 1965—racial minorities had only a tenuous grasp on the franchise in America)? Permanent residents, or only citizens? Ex-felons? How old must one be to be part of the polity? 21? 18?
2. A propos of my discussion of social democracy, Mr. Gordon writes: “Those are policy choices, not attributes of democracy. The fact that these countries have chosen to socialize medicine, pensions, and college education . . . does not make them more democratic; it makes them more socialist.”
But no. “Social democracy” is a widely understood term and concept; it may not be part of the American definition of democracy, and it may not be central to (or even part of) John Steele Gordon’s definition of democracy, but it is quite familiar to people in other parts of the world. In Western Europe, most people assume that health care and education are democratic rights, just as in America (and Western Europe), most people assume that free speech is a democratic right. One needn’t be a liberal or socialist to recognize that this is so. In her book on the creation of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, Mary Ann Glendon, a conservative constitutional scholar, locates two brands of democratic discourse—an Anglo-American democratic theory grounded in negative liberty (that is, liberty from the tyranny of the state), and a continental theory grounded in positive liberty (that is, entitlement from the state).
More to the point, I never suggested that Western European social welfare states make their countries “more democratic.” I just pointed out that these states, and their citizens, define democracy differently from us. Two very different ideas.
3. Along the same lines Mr. Gordon continues, “Nor does the use of different political mechanisms make one system more ‘democratic’ than another.” Quite right. I’m not sure why he felt compelled to assert this, however, as I never argued otherwise. Different does not mean better; different does not mean worse. Different just means different—as in, not the same. And my overall point is that democracy comes in different varieties.
4. Mr. Gordon writes, “And I certainly don’t see how proportional representation is an attribute of democracy. It is, in my view, a terrible idea.” Good for Mr. Gordon. And too bad for a large swath of the democratic world. Yet whether PR works or not is utterly beside the point. PR rests on an understanding of democracy that sees the polity as a unitary entity. This idea hearkens back to the republican political discourse of the eighteenth century, with its emphasis on organic community and disinterested government. Systems like the one by which the British parliament and U.S. Congress are elected assume that different localities have distinct interests that require representation. Both systems are democratic, but they rest on different assumptions about the nature of the polity, the state, and the relationship between the two.
June 15, 2006
American Democracy II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:30 PM EST Joshua Zeitz writes, regarding my previous post on democracy, that “I see his basic point, but the question is probably a little more complicated than that.” I’m afraid I don’t see how. Democracy is any system of government in which the ultimate source of political power is the people as a whole rather than some small subset of the people, as in an oligarchy, or a single individual, as in a tyranny. The fact that the people in different democratic states make different choices regarding policy is neither here nor there.
He writes, “In most of Western Europe, ‘democracy’ is generally understood to include social-democratic rights like health care, old-age pensions, and a free college education. Many of my European friends are stunned that Americans regard themselves as the world’s leading democracy, yet some 50 million or so Americans are without health care.”
Those are policy choices, not attributes of democracy. The fact that these countries have chosen to socialize medicine, pensions, and college education (which is no more “free” in Europe than it is in the United States, just paid for indirectly through taxes) do not make them more democratic; it makes them more socialist. These decisions have their costs (health care is rationed, for instance, with long waiting lists and denial of treatment), just as the decisions this country has made have costs (many people are without health insurance, which is not the same thing as being without health care, of course). Europe’s very high unemployment rate is an artifact of Europe’s decision to have very inflexible labor markets.
Nor does the use of different political mechanisms make one system more “democratic” than another. In Britain the people do not vote for either the head of state (the office is hereditary in one family) or the head of government (who is chosen by the majority party in the House of Commons). But Britain is most certainly a democracy. The Queen may reign by the grace of God in theory, but in fact of course she reigns by the grace of the people.
And I certainly don’t see how proportional representation is an attribute of democracy. It is, in my view, a terrible idea. With proportional representation the people do not vote for individuals, with all their individual quirkiness, but for a set of political ideas shaped, inevitably, by intellectuals, who are notoriously lousy politicians. This fosters political fragmentation, as often dozens of parties pursue ideological purity and often one single idea. As a result, political compromises are made after the election, as coalitions are assembled, and governments not infrequently are held hostage by a crackpot party whose handful of votes are needed to make a majority. This makes for political instability. Just look at the political history of postwar Italy.
In the English-speaking world, first-past-the-post elections foster big-tent parties (i.e. the political compromises are made before the election), which then win a majority and a mandate to govern on their own. This, in turn, fosters political stability, as the party in power wants to stay in power. The English-speaking countries, especially those whose populations are descended in substantial part from Britain, are the most politically stable countries in the world. Want an example? In 1789 the United States Constitution went into effect and the French Revolution began. 217 years later, we still have the same constitution, amended fewer than thirty times, while France has worked its way through three kingdoms, two empires, and five republics.
June 15, 2006
More on Flying the Hump Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 12:40 PM EST Readers of Julie Fenster’s very moving post right below about the airmen who flew over the Himalayas in World War II can learn more in a wonderful article that Richard Rhodes wrote for American Heritage in 1986: “The Toughest Flying in the World”.
Here is the link:
(http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/
ah/1986/5/1986_5_66.shtml).
June 15, 2006
The Flight of the Hump Pilots Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 09:00 AM EST The mail arrived at my uncle’s house on a Monday as June began, and he was reading through it, sitting at the table where breakfast had been served. I was a room away, and my father was in the kitchen, my aunt on the other side of the house. My uncle called all of us in to see a magazine that had just come, holding it out and saying nothing more than, “Will you look at this?” That was hardly unusual; my uncle, lively and sly at the same time, can be counted on to stir up just such a quiet morning as that Monday was, yet there was a note of surprise in his voice that wasn’t just kidding around.
I glanced across the cover of the magazine, fairly jostling it in my effort to be the first to spot something familiar, such as his name, or something conspicuous, such as a mistake embarrassing to the editors. The title of the magazine was “China-Burma-India Hump Pilots Association.” That was nothing noteworthy for anyone who knows my uncle.
During World War II, Sgt. Howard Francis Berk was in the Army Air Forces, part of the 1330th Base Unit, which was stationed mostly in Jorhat and Assam, India. The 1330th was part of a massive effort to support the Chinese resistance to the Japanese by keeping supplies flowing along the only plausible route. And the only plausible route, at that point in the war, really wasn’t very plausible at all. It ran to China from northern India over the Himalayas—the “Hump.” As many as 15,000 Americans at one time were assigned to operate it. Due to Japanese fighters, cruel weather and the danger of flying fully loaded cargo planes over the earth’s highest roadblocks, 3,605 airplanes crashed in the effort. “We used to navigate by the wrecks,” my uncle once told me.
I grew up knowing about the C-B-I theater of war, thanks to my uncle, and therefore I skimmed past the title of the magazine to keep searching in my haste to discern whatever it was that had struck him as so dramatic. The pictures on the cover consisted of a shoulder patch (captioned “1942-1945”), a photo of a memorial, a photo of an airplane, and another patch. I leapt to the wobbling conclusion that my Uncle Howard was thinking that I, of all people, didn’t realize that he was in the China-Burma-India Hump Pilots Association. With that, I flunked the moment.
He pointed to the bottom of the cover. “Membership Newsletter,” it said. He read the rest. “March 2006,” he said out loud, “Final Issue.”
I gasped. I admit it. The last two words carried the reality of an obituary reporting the death of a neglected friend. Of course I know perfectly well that World War Two veterans are going fast these days. But the ranks are supposed to dwindle against time, not surrender to it. “It has been a great run,” wrote the president of the Hump Pilots Association on the inside, “It is very sad that the Association must be dissolved. But time has caught up with us and we must give in.”
I have been tempted ever since to conclude that I don’t much like the idea of valiant Hump pilots and their crew members giving in. They never, by God, did that in the Himalayas. And so forth. But anyone who could fly fully loaded planes over the Himalayas is nothing if not coolly, if cruelly, realistic. The Hump pilots are disappearing of their own volition, in their own way, and according to their own time.
June 14, 2006
American Democracy Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:50 PM EST In his response to Ellen Feldman, John Steele Gordon writes: “I don’t know what the ‘American brand of democracy’ is, as opposed to other brands. There is nothing inherently American about democracy. Democracy is democracy, any system of government where the locus of power resides with the people, not the elite.”
I see his basic point, but the question is probably a little more complicated than that.
In Israel, as well as in much of Europe, elections are held on a proportional-representation (PR) basis, with voters casting ballots for parties, and parties dividing a fixed number of parliamentary seats according to the percentage of votes they received. This method allows smaller parties to elect members to the national legislature. In England, by contrast, elections are held on a “first-past-the-post” basis, in which different constituencies elect their own MPs to the House of Commons. This system favors the two large parties (Labour, Conservatives) at the expense of the Liberal Democrats, who tend to hold a smaller portion of seats in the Commons than the percentage of their national vote tally.
The difference between these systems isn’t merely tactical. It’s theoretical. The PR system implicitly assumes the existence of a national commonweal; the first-past-the-post system—which Americans use in elections for the U.S. House of Representatives—assumes that local communities have distinct interests that need representation in Congress. Both ideas borrow remnants of the classical republican discourse of the eighteenth century, but they take from this discourse different strands.
In most of Western Europe, “democracy” is generally understood to include social-democratic rights like health care, old-age pensions, and a free college education. Many of my European friends are stunned that Americans regard themselves as the world’s leading democracy, yet some 50 million or so Americans are without health care. To be clear, I’m not inviting a discussion of whether France and Germany should provide these benefits, or whether they do so well or efficiently, or whether health care should be factored into any measure of a country’s democratic standing. I’m merely pointing out that “democracy,” in the Western European understanding of the word, is quite different from “democracy” in the American context, where the state provision of most services is not understood as a right, or as in any way part of the American democratic tradition.
Then, there are variations even within the American democratic tradition. As Edward Larson points out in his book on the 1925 Scopes trial, Summer for the Gods, the debate between William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow wasn’t just about religion and science. It was about whose rights—the majority’s or the minority’s—a democracy should first protect. Bryan’s majoritarianism led him to believe that the citizens of Tennessee had a right to ban the teaching of evolution in the classroom, and that elite experts and judges shouldn’t interfere with that right. Darrow, on the other hand, believed that John Scopes had a right to teach evolution, and that a tyrannical majority shouldn’t be permitted to stop him from doing so. Two very different ideas about democracy. I empathize with both, but I also see where they are sometimes incompatible.
All of which is to say, democracy isn’t that simple a term. It comes in many shapes and forms. Some are peculiar to America; some are in competition with one another in America.
June 14, 2006
The Problem with American Exceptionalism II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:00 AM EST With regard to the three men who hanged themselves at Guantanamo, an act that many thought showed an indifference to human life, even their own, Ellen Feldman wrote in her thoughtful piece, “The Problem of American Exceptionalism,” that “I would argue that taking one’s own life, especially in protest rather than desperation, demonstrates an extremely high regard for human life. Look what I am willing to sacrifice to make my point, the suicide screams.”
One could argue, with at least equal validity, I think, that these suicides demonstrate not that the prisoners regarded life highly but that they had a very high regard for the PR value of their suicides in the western media. Ever since the Vietnam War, wars have been fought not just on the ground but on television and in the newspapers. The North Vietnamese did not win the war on the ground; they won it on CBS. Al Qaeda is every bit as media savvy as the Vietnamese and is fighting an even more asymmetric war. So it seems to me perfectly reasonable for the prisoners to have argued that “We know we will be welcomed into paradise after a momentary unpleasantness with a bed sheet around our necks, and our suicides will be a major media coup, setting off the usual knee-jerk, blame-America reaction that we can always count on from the likes of The New York Times and the major networks.”
As for American exceptionalism, it seems to me there are two varieties of it. One is the exceptionalism that everyone feels about his or her own tribe, a notion of exceptionalism that is built into our genes. Human self-interest is bound up in three things, ourselves, our families, and our group, whether it’s a band of two dozen hunter gatherers in the Kalahari or 300 million technically advanced people spread out over half a continent. One universally employed mechanism of building tribal solidarity, for instance, is to make fun of one’s neighbors. The English language is full of casual insults such as “Dutch courage” and “French leave.” The Dutch and French languages have equivalent insults regarding the British. I have no doubt that Polish has numerous expressions putting down the Germans and the Russians and vice versa. Even within a language these mechanisms exist. The bodies of mayflies that wash up on the shores of the Great Lakes every spring by the tens of billions are often known on the south shore of the lakes as “Canadian soldiers.” On the north shore they are commonly referred to as “American soldiers.”
This tendency to tribal solidarity might be especially true of polities that evolve on islands, such the English (“wogs start at Calais”) and the Japanese. Ours, too, is an island race, to borrow Noel Coward’s phrase, for we are a country that was born and grew up in profound isolation, two months’ sail from Europe.
And this form of exceptionalism, while perfectly normal and healthy, can be turned into a terrible, soul-destroying perversion, as the Third Reich demonstrated at the cost of 50 million lives.
The other sort of American exceptionalism is not, I think, a “belief that we are more moral and righteous than other peoples of other nations.” There are, to be sure, the usual flag-waving lunatics who believe exactly that, just as there are people who believe that the King James Bible is the literal word of God, who, they seem to think, speaks in Elizabethan English.
Most Americans, however, believe that we have been more successful, both politically and economically, than other countries, a belief that is hard to argue with. And that therefore adopting American ways is in the interest of other countries. For most of our history, however, most Americans could not have cared less if other countries did or didn’t. Even after Woodrow Wilson led the country into a European war in order “to make the world safe for democracy,” (translation: prevent a German victory), we skedaddled back to isolationism just as fast as we could, with disastrous consequences for the world as a whole. It was only after World War II that this country came to the conclusion that, like it or not, we had to lead because no one else could. We have been the most reluctant hegemon in world history.
Other countries, though they are far less likely to say so, of course, apparently agree with this idea of American exceptionalism. At least for the last 200 years the world has been becoming more and more democratic and capitalist, which is to say more and more American. We have led the way into the modern world because good ideas spread, despite all attempts to suppress them, and this country has been blessed with both remarkably good ideas and the circumstances that allowed their evolution.
Ellen Feldman also writes that “the Marshall plan required beneficiary nations to draw up their own programs rather than impose an American brand of democracy, as we are now determined to do.” I don’t know what the “American brand of democracy” is, as opposed to other brands. There is nothing inherently American about democracy. Democracy is democracy, any system of government where the locus of power resides with the people, not the elite. And while we imposed a constitution on Japan—it was written largely by General MacArthur and staff—we certainly didn’t impose one on Iraq. If we had, the whole messy business would have been done a lot more quickly. And the Iraqi constitution that is, finally, fully in place bears hardly any resemblance to ours, nor does the court system, as the trial-cum-circus of Saddam Hussein demonstrates. Whether the new constitution will work and democracy will take real and lasting root in Iraq only time will tell.
But I have no doubt whatever that if democracy fails in Iraq it will not be democracy’s fault. No country that has established a democratic form of government has ever relinquished democracy, except at the point of a gun. (To be sure, Hitler became chancellor of Germany by perfectly legal, democratic means. But that was the last decision left to the German people, for he almost immediately established a tyranny by extralegal means. In retrospect, of course, we know the German people made a ghastly mistake, but at the time they were more worried about anarchy and economic collapse than about Hitler’s real intentions. They thought he could be “controlled.” They were wrong.)
June 13, 2006
Ticker-Tape Parades Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:15 PM EST One of New York’s greatest ticker-tape parades took place 79 years ago today, when Charles Lindbergh returned (by ship) from his triumphant flight to Paris the previous month. Throwing things into the air in celebration is nothing new, of course, but New York, being New York, has long done it on a grand scale. Lindbergh’s was the twenty-first parade up Broadway to have tons of paper rained down upon it.
The first New York ticker-tape parade took place on October 29, 1886, when workers spontaneously threw ticker tape out brokers’ office windows onto to a parade honoring of the dedication of the Statue of Liberty. The first person to be so honored was Admiral Dewey, hero of the Battle of Manila Bay, on September 30, 1899. Theodore Roosevelt also got one in 1910, after he returned from his great African safari.
But it was after Grover Whalen became the city’s official greeter (technically his title was chairman of the Mayor’s Reception Committee) in 1919, an office he held for the next 34 years, that ticker-tape parades came into their own. There were three parades in the fall of 1919 alone, for General Pershing (September 8), King Albert of the Belgians (October 3), and the Prince of Wales, later the Duke of Windsor, (November 18). Among the most popular honorees were aviators (Amelia Earhart, Wiley Post, and “Wrong-Way” Corrigan among them) and sports heroes such as the great golfer Bobby Jones (twice) and the American Olympic team (in 1928).
The State Department soon got into the act, requesting ticker-tape parades for visiting VIP foreigners. This resulted in parades for some people of not the slightest importance to history, such as Prince Ludovico Spado Potenziani, governor of Rome, and some whom the world wishes it could forget, such as Pierre Laval, who was premier of France when he was honored in 1931 and was shot as a traitor to France in 1945.
In more recent years, sports heroes such as the 1986 World Series champion New York Mets have remained popular, and astronauts have replaced aviators. John Glenn’s parade in 1962 set the record for ticker tape, 3,474 tons to be exact, although how that was measured is a mystery to me. Meanwhile, the foreign VIPs have moved up a notch or two in average quality, with such honorees as Pope John Paul II and Nelson Mandela.
Doubtless this great New York tradition will go on (ticker-tape parades, after all, are a lot of fun) but it has long had to do so without ticker tape. The old stock tickers that spewed out endless miles of a thin newsprint tape disappeared in 1969, when they were replaced with electronic boards.
June 13, 2006
The Problem With American Exceptionalism Posted by Ellen Feldman at 09:00 AM EST In the wake of the three suicides at Guantanamo reported this past weekend, Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris, Jr., the commander of the detention camp, was quoted as saying of the prisoners, “They have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own.” He went on to add, “I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” I would argue that taking one’s own life, especially in protest rather than desperation, demonstrates an extremely high regard for human life. Look what I am willing to sacrifice to make my point, the suicide screams.
There is, however, a greater problem with Harris’s argument. His words took me back to Hearts and Minds, the film about the conflict that we call the Vietnam War and the Vietnamese term the American War. Point of view is exactly the point here. In the film Gen. William Westmoreland is heard saying that the Vietnamese do not share our regard for human life and family relationships. Meanwhile, on the screen, a Vietnamese mother is seen sobbing hysterically and trying to crawl into the grave with her son at his burial. I may be wrong about the exact words and scene. Perhaps General Westmoreland referred to only life or only family relationships. Perhaps it is a wife rather than a mother. But the fact that the scene has stayed with me all these years and sprang immediately to mind attests to its power. Even at the time there were complaints of the inflammatory juxtaposition of words and scene, as there always are with polemic documentaries, but the fact remains that Westmoreland did make the comment.
Certainly we cannot teach fighting men and women to love thy neighbor or turn the other cheek, though studies have shown that most men and women in combat fight not for principles or nation but for their comrades. But the need to demonize the enemy presents problems. In a soon-to-be-published biography of Franklin Roosevelt, Jean Smith writes that one reason many Americans were skeptical of the early reports of the horrors of the concentration camps was the debunking of some of the worst World War I stories about the atrocities of the “Hun.” (My colleague Fred Smoler says that many of the these debunked atrocities turned out to be true. I have no firsthand knowledge of the debunking of the debunking. I defer to Fred Smoler’s expertise in the matter.) But I think Harris’s statement, like Westmoreland’s before him, reveals a larger and more serious problem, that of American exceptionalism, the belief that we are more moral and righteous than other peoples of other nations.
In a recent New York Times Book Review essay on The Good Fight, by Peter Beinart, Joe Klein takes on this problem of America’s conviction of its own goodness. It was not always so, both the author and the reviewer argue, and they return to the glory years of Truman and a host of dedicated public servants who carried the liberal banner, when the L-word, as it is now called, was not a dirty one. “In the liberal vision,” Beinart maintains, “it is precisely our recognition that we are not angels that makes us exceptional.” That is why the Marshall plan required beneficiary nations to draw up their own programs rather than impose an American brand of democracy, as we are now determined to do. Other countries’ ways of doing things, liberal thinking went, may be different from, but is not necessarily inferior to, ours.
I am not suggesting that the world is a warm and fuzzy place; that terrorists do not want to destroy us; that there is not something warped about young men, and the occasional woman, who think they will achieve happiness in heaven, not to mention all those virgins we Westerners laugh at, by blowing up themselves and as many others as possible. But we will never solve the problem by dismissing those who create it as less good, less loving, less essentially human than we are. The only hope is to try to understand, and remedy, the conditions—some of them created by American policy, some by their own repressive societies and governments—that make them behave that way.
June 12, 2006
The Firefighters Memorial Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:30 AM EST A bronze memorial to the 343 New York City firefighters who lost their lives on September 11 has been unveiled on Liberty Street, across from the site of the World Trade Center. It already shows signs of becoming a place of quiet pilgrimage for Americans, similar to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. They will come to remember what former mayor Rudy Giuliani called the worst day in the history of the city, for the tragedy we suffered, but also its greatest day, for the response of New Yorkers to that tragedy.
I have not yet had a chance to see it in person, but thanks to the miracle of the Internet, one can get a pretty good look at it from the comfort of home. The memorial is vast, 6 feet high, 56 feet long, and weighing 7,000 pounds. It was modeled, in a way, after Trajan’s column in Rome, a bas relief that tells the story of two of the emperor’s campaigns. But emotionally it reminds me more of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s immortal Shaw memorial in Boston.
It also reminds me, because of its size and location, of another bronze memorial that, like Trajan’s column, was meant to record triumph, not tragedy. Also like Trajan’s column, it was ordered by the man it celebrated. Unlike Trajan’s column, it no longer exists.
This was the bronze high relief that Cornelius Vanderbilt erected to his own glory in 1869. Vanderbilt had bought once ultra-fashionable but by then much decayed St. John’s Park, at Hudson Street, south of Canal, to build a freight depot for his Hudson River Railroad. He decided to fill the pediment of the building, 31 feet high at its peak and 150 feet long at its base, with what amounted to a high relief autobiography in bronze, 100,000 pounds of it in all. In the center was a statue of the Commodore, twelve feet high and weighing four tons. On the right side were representations of his career in ships, on the left his career in railroads.
Opinions were sharply divided. The great diarist George Templeton Strong was appalled. Vanderbilt, he wrote, “is a millionaire of millionaires. And therefore we bow down before him, and worship him, with a hideous group of molten images, with himself for a central figure, at a cost of $800,000. These be thy Gods, O Israel!”
The New York Herald, the great newspaper of its day, begged to differ. “The objection that this bronze is only a monument to the achievements of a private citizen is of no force,” it noted; “for in truth the bronze is a monument of the greatest material inventions and enterprises of the nineteenth century. In other words, this beautiful work is a monument of the genius and progress of the age . . .” The Herald, fearing for the work’s long-term survival recommended moving it to Central Park, where, the paper thought, it would be safe.
The Herald was entirely correct. As residential St. John’s Park had given way to a railroad depot, so the depot gave way to the automobile and was torn down in the 1920s to make way for the Manhattan approaches to the Holland Tunnel. In the flood tide of reaction to all things Victorian, no one tried to preserve the Vanderbilt bronze, and it was melted down. Only the central statue survives, now located before the south facade of Grand Central Terminal.
June 9, 2006
Those Were the Days Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 11:20 AM EST Josh Zeitz is right that New York State has tumbled quite far from the unquestioned preeminence it once held in presidential politics. Consider this: From 1800, the first contested presidential election, through 1948, a total of 38 presidential elections were held. In all but nine of these, the presidential candidate or his running mate on at least one of the two major-party tickets was from New York. (See notes 1 and 2 below.)
As Josh notes, candidates have gone to great lengths to win New York. In the spring of 1800 Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson’s main lieutenant in New York City, put together a dream team of assembly candidates in that year’s local elections (the state legislature chose presidential electors in those days). George Clinton, a 60-year-old once and future governor and later Vice-President, who had retired to a farm upstate and whose wife had recently died, had his arm repeatedly twisted by Burr until he reluctantly agreed to run. Clinton stipulated that he would not be required to do any campaigning or express support for Jefferson, and that he would be free to state that his name had been put on the list without his permission.
Another celebrity candidate on Burr’s all-star slate was 71-year-old Horatio Gates, the Revolutionary War general, making his only foray into politics. Others included a former member of George Washington’s cabinet, a prominent lawyer who six years later would be appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the city’s largest landowner—all of whom Burr got to pretend that they wanted nothing more out of life than to spend a winter in Albany. After assembling the slate, Burr tirelessly raised funds and organized campaign activities. The result: Burr’s slate won the city election, thus giving control of the state legislature to Jefferson’s supporters, and thus essentially deciding the presidential election (New York was one of the few states where the outcome was in doubt). In return for these exertions, Jefferson made Burr his running mate (and look what happened—but that’s another story, or several stories).
Another example came in 1888. The presidential race between Benjamin Harrison and the incumbent Democrat, Grover Cleveland, was looking very tight, with New York and Indiana the main battlegrounds. Massive vote-buying and fraud won New York for Harrison by a margin of about 15,000 and swung the electoral vote his way, though Cleveland took the nationwide popular vote by nearly 100,000.
But that’s all in the past. In the 14 elections since 1948, no New Yorker has won a major-party nomination for President (see note 3; this streak will probably be broken soon), and only three for Vice-President, all losers: William Miller in 1964, Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, and Jack Kemp in 1996. The explanation? In the mid-1960s California passed New York as the nation’s largest state; now Texas has passed it too, and soon Florida will as well. Moreover, as a result of various demographic and political trends, New York is hardly ever “in play” in any close election. So the days when the Empire State stood like a colossus over presidential elections are gone for good.
As a lifelong New Yorker, I heartily deplore this trend and wish the Sunbelt had stuck to growing oranges and continued to let us run things. Unfortunately, however, the Sunbelt does not seem inclined to listen to me. It’s a sad state of affairs, but as John Steele Gordon points out, there is a silver lining: We can watch television in a leap-year autumn in peace, free from fear that our pleasure will be interrupted with a cacophonous barrage of presidential campaign ads.
NOTES
(1) This enumeration does not include Gen. George B. McClellan, Lincoln’s opponent in 1864, who lived in New York City for a year or so around the time of the election but was basically a nomad. You can change it to “all but eight” if you’re a stickler.
(2) The idea of a “major party” has broken down from time to time, but never in a way that would affect the statistics in this article.
(3) This enumeration does not include Dwight Eisenhower, who in 1952 was officially a New York resident (and president of Columbia University, though he had been on leave since 1950), or Richard Nixon, who in 1968 lived in New York City, where he was a partner in a law firm. You could make a case for Nixon as a New Yorker, since he had lived in New York for nearly six years at the time of the election, but he is so strongly associated with California that it would seem strange.
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