August 8, 2006
Regarding Property Taxes II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:45 AM EST Blog in haste, repent at leisure. Yesterday I wrote in agreement with John Steele Gordon’s attack on property taxes, and succumbed to the Jacobin instinct to privilege abstract theories of justice over experience. In hindsight, financing local government via taxing property has worked well enough for hundreds of years, and for that same period of time most (possibly all) Anglophone societies have thought it sensible to tap stored wealth in addition to income. If the inequity of giving renters a free ride is too offensive to natural justice, we can probably figure out a way to tax people who use local services without owning real estate.
But my main reason for repenting is John Steele Gordon’s last post, where he declares one of his purposes for proposing this change: He wants to freeze public expenditure at the local level by making it as hard as possible to increase taxes. He proposes state laws prohibiting local governments from raising taxes other than in proportion to rising populations and inflation, unless such increases are approved by referenda. This would allegedly stop politicians from behaving irresponsibly. It seems to me that we already have a way of controlling irresponsible politicians: voting them out of office. John Steele Gordon’s mechanism would not so much provide a method of controlling irresponsible politicians as substitute referenda for a function hitherto, i.e., normally, performed by elected representatives.
In this country, the use of referenda was once a populist measure favored by the left but has recently become a measure favored by the right, because it has been successfully used to inhibit tax increases, most famously in California. In Europe, where Napoleon III and Mussolini are associated with politics by referendum, the method has long aroused hostility on the left. That does not mean that referenda have any intrinsic advantage for either left or right, and there is certainly a case for subjecting changes in fundamental law to referenda: the new European Union constitution, drafted at the behest of unelected officials, was defeated by referenda, and I cheered at the time. There are good and interesting arguments on both sides of the broader question of direct vs. representative democracy, and I shall not rehearse them here. Instead, I want to think about John Steele’s Gordon’s broader question.
Should governments always be on a short spending lease? That was what the British Treasury thought, in the 1930s, when it was arguing against increased military expenditure. The French took a comparable view in the 1930s, when it came to consider funding the fortification of the Belgian border and the purchase of a modern air force. Louis Napoleon’s legislature thought something similar late in the Second Empire, just about the time Bismarck was planning his next war. I would be astonished if someone didn’t take a similar view when Americans began taxing themselves to pay for universal secondary education, one of the better investments this country has ever made. Politicians sometimes waste money, sometimes embezzle it, sometimes spend money very wisely, sometimes shamefully fail to raise and spend money when it is necessary. Corporate managers exhibit all of these tendencies themselves. As far as I know, no one has ever done a systematic comparison of the wisdom of all public and all private expenditure. We think we “know” that public expenditure has to be more reckless, because of the structure of incentives, but it is worth remembering that Ford bought the Edsel and the American government bought the F-16. Someone decided to market New Coke, and someone decided to build the interstate highway system. There are strong theoretical arguments on both sides, so for now I am going to go with a minute amount of personal experience—oddly enough, that is what conservatives are supposed to do, but no matter.
My mother was an elected, unpaid official in local government and wound up her career as head of the school board. The schools in our town were then thought to be the best in the nation, and I have no reason to doubt that description. I was too lazy to profit fully from them, but most were not. School taxes were high, but people who didn’t want to pay them had the option of moving a few miles to any adjacent town, where taxes were lower and schools worse. People also had the recourse of voting down the annual budget, which they almost never did, so John Steele Gordon could argue that they had the power of referendum, and he might have a case. But what if they didn’t have that power? They could always have voted my mother and her colleagues out of office. So why did they not do that, and only rarely—maybe once in 40 years—vote down a school budget? Maybe because their property was valuable because of the excellence of their school system, and they knew it. They had good and honest police, and excellent roads. One road was a border with an adjacent city, one with lower taxes, and you could see the difference in the paving on either side of that street. They paid high wages to teachers, and still do. If I taught in that town, rather than at my college, I would probably double my salary. But in the aggregate, those teachers clearly did a splendid job, and few greatly begrudged them their salaries. If you did, again, you could vote in a new school board, one pledged to renegotiate labor contracts (teachers in our state do not have the right to strike).
Representative rather than direct democracy means, among other things, trusting elected officials who (ideally) have the time and responsibility to develop a kind of expertise on questions, and (again ideally) have demonstrated exemplary character. It is in local government, the kind Mr. Gordon wants to keep on so short a leash, that this latter part of the business can probably work best. Why did the citizens trust my mother’s judgment? Well, it was a smallish town, and she was known for her industry and her integrity. I only recently realized that she spent many hours each day keeping up on the questions she had been elected to decide, because my brother is now helping her clean out her basement, and he has found cartons and cartons of elaborate notes, many reams of legal pads and many scores of notebooks, all filled, which he has been looking through and is astonished by. It occurs to me that she devoted significantly more time to thinking over the merits of possible increases to the school budget than would people deciding such questions by referendum.
Is John Steele Gordon’s suspicion of politicians’ ways with tax money the true American genius (“If America has a native criminal class, it is Congress,” etc.), and my veneration for my mother’s public life blinding me to some great truth? Maybe, but there is another American tradition, in which skepticism about expertise, elites, and politicians is counterbalanced by trust in our ability to wisely delegate power to elected officials, then correct their mistakes at the ballot box. We have a lot of American traditions, and they do not all point in the same direction. We do not always keep governments on a short spending lease. The majorities who elected and reelected FDR and LBJ didn’t, just as the ones who voted in recent Republican majorities went the other way. Polling data suggests that emerging majorities are trending back the other way yet again. A lot of people are apparently happy to pay more taxes for better schools. I am not eager to develop an innovative method of political economy largely designed to stop them.
August 7, 2006
Property Taxes II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:40 PM EST Fred Smoler writes that, “Some of John Steele Gordon’s objections to the property tax are not objections in principle. Valuations could in theory be made less arbitrary . . .” Perhaps they could in theory, but not in fact. A raised ranch on half an acre is likely to be worth almost exactly what the identical house on half an acre across the street is worth, unless, say, a murder has taken place in it. The Times had a story the other day on how such things affect value in real estate, sometimes markedly. (Would you want to live in Jeffrey Dahmer’s house? I thought not.) But I bet such a factor is not taken into account in setting the taxable value. And such valuations are always going to be subjective, because they must be made by human beings. In New York, and I’m sure in other states, it is actually against the law to reassess a house at sale, as frequently sold houses would then pay much higher taxes.
Also, more unique properties are much harder to value, especially if they are only seldom on the market. My small 1750 house has been owned by only two families in its entire existence. Its antiquity would be a huge plus for some people and an equally huge minus for others, who would rather have central air conditioning than seven-foot ceilings and hand-hewn beams (and last week, so would I have).
I will get into the whole subject of taxation in general another time and confine myself now to the question of what to substitute for the property tax so that it can be sent to the Smithsonian, to be exhibited alongside other relics of our colonial past, such as chamber pots and clay pipes.
Since all taxes are, in the last analysis, paid out of income, why not tax income at the local level? By that I do not mean set up a whole new local version of the IRS. God forbid. Instead, in those states that have state income taxes, the state would simply tell each local jurisdiction what the total taxable income of its residents was that year (not the individual taxable incomes, which in a small town would be leaked in about a nanosecond). The local jurisdiction would then decide how much income it needed, do the simple math, and tell the state how many percentage points to tack on to the state income-tax bill. The state would send each jurisdiction the money and take over the often expensive task of dunning deadbeats.
This would be equitable, simple, and cheap, not violating any of Adam Smith’s principles of taxation. To be sure, property values would rise sharply as the tax burden was lifted, but that wouldn’t upset anyone except those looking to buy real estate. They would have to pay more in mortgage payments when they bought, but would have no fear of rising property taxes. Those with large incomes would be hit hard. But they’ve been avoiding paying their fair share of the costs of local government for years, so tough.
There are only two real problems that I can see. First, landlords would have to be required to rebate the property-tax portion of their rents to tenants (who would be now paying income taxes to the local jurisdiction).
Second, in times of prosperity, jurisdictions would get more and more money as the net taxable income of residents went up without their raising rates, and the politicians would, of course, find ample ways to spend it. But then, when recession hit, tax receipts would fall, perhaps sharply. The jurisdictions would then either have to do some very painful belt tightening or raise rates, which would be very unpopular during a recession.
What to do? Do what Colorado did a few years ago with state spending (and has now partially undone): require that town tax receipts not rise except to reflect increases in population and inflation (i.e., remain level in real dollars per person). To put that another way, the town would have to cut tax rates in prosperous times. This, of course, would put the towns, school districts, etc., on a short spending lease, which is exactly what government should always be on. It would force them to make choices, terminate outdated programs quickly, look for ways to increase efficiency, innovate, etc. (In other words politicians would have to do what corporate managers have to do every day of their working lives and which politicians try very hard never to have to do at all). If a jurisdiction wanted to institute a new program that required more tax revenue, it would have to get the people to agree to it in a referendum.
August 7, 2006
Regarding Property Taxes Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:05 PM EST To my mild surprise, I am in (partial) agreement with John Steele Gordon’s dislike of property taxes. Taxes on real estate target only one class of asset, so they are a discriminatory levy on capital. If the state has such a right, why shouldn’t it also take an annual percentage of financial assets, or of the value of jewelry in a vault, or of books in a library?
Property taxes can also be somewhat regressive. The poor are unlikely to own a lot of real estate, indeed any real estate, but a home tends to be a very large portion of an ordinary American’s wealth. I have the impression that in the world in which I grew up, the net worth of ordinary Americans was usually the sum of equity in a primary residence and the value of a defined-benefit pension; to the degree that that has changed, it is in significant part because fewer and fewer people have defined-benefit pensions. For most people, a mortgage is a mechanism for forced savings, and real estate taxes offset those savings and may well tax them regressively. The wealth tied up in a middle-class citizen’s home is presumably a larger percentage of her wealth than is the primary residence of a richer citizen.
As a renter, I think I am the picture of disinterestedness on this question, for in the words of the old Irish proverb, I own no more land than would fit in a window box. The renter escapes direct property taxes (although those taxes are normally passed on via the rent), whereas the owner receives not only positive discrimination via the mortgage-interest tax advantage, but invidious discrimination via property taxes. Do the two sorts of discrimination balance out? I do not know, but I rather doubt it; I would hesitate to estimate net effects, because of the tendency of tax preferences for mortgage interest payments to drive up purchase prices for property. In any case, most economists dislike tax preferences for mortgage interest payments and can make a good case for their prejudice, so we should consider getting rid of both practices.
Some of John Steele Gordon’s objections to the property tax are not objections in principle. Valuations could in theory be made less arbitrary, annual assessments could be rescheduled or levied monthly, etc. But the objection in principle is pretty strong, and I think his history is sound: Property taxes date from an era when most wealth was imagined to exist as income-generating real property. Although other forms of wealth existed, and were indeed more and more conspicuous, real property was imagined to be held in pretty reliable proportion to holdings of total wealth. We no longer live in such a world. Leaving aside hyperbolic comparisons to slavery, tar-and-feathering, and witch hunts, the injustice of disproportionately taxing one asset class seems pretty clear.
So what would be a good alternative? I rather doubt that John Steele Gordon would favor my ideas—somewhat higher and more sharply progressive income taxes, supplemented by higher gasoline taxes and other carbon taxes, which would to some degree be rebated to the poor by tax credits or other redistributive mechanisms, maybe a selective national value-added tax (omit VAT on food, medicine, etc.), also to be partially rebated to the poor. I am going to take a wild guess and assume that of those three he would find some sort of consumption tax least offensive. My stronger hunch is that a flat tax on income along with reduced public expenditures will be his prescription.
August 7, 2006
Property Taxes Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:30 PM EST If a front-page article in The New York Times is any indication, the issue of property taxes is, finally, heating up. As the Times reports, in this decade they have been rising far faster than income, and the political pressure to do something is mounting quickly. In New Jersey, which has the highest property taxes in the country, the legislature is in a rare August session trying to find a way to lower them, and many other state governments are also trying to reform the property tax and make it more equitable.
Good luck to them, but the property tax cannot be reformed, for it cannot be made equitable. It is inherently unfair, arbitrary, immoral, and economically damaging. It is to taxation what slavery was to labor markets.
Like slavery, the property tax is a relic of the colonial era. Today, in a completely different economic universe, it makes no sense whatever. In the eighteenth century, real property was the best means available by which to judge the ability to pay taxes. Nearly all property at that time was income producing, either farms or commercial structures, such as lumber mills, shipyards, and urban retail establishments. Only the very rich had houses on town lots where no business was done. Today, there are any number of ways to precisely judge income, starting with federal and state income taxes. And the suburbs, undreamed of in Benjamin Franklin’s day, are where the majority of the American population lives. In the suburbs, nearly all property is income absorbing.
In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith listed four principles of fair and equitable taxation. The property tax violates them all.
1) “The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government . . . in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state.” Property taxes today have nothing to do with income. Families are often forced to sell a much-loved home they can afford to maintain, only because the home has soared in value and property taxes are based on real value, not income. People of equal incomes can pay wildly unequal property taxes, because some choose to live in less valuable houses or on smaller lots than do others.
2) “The tax which each individual is bound to pay ought to be certain, and not arbitrary.” Property taxes are highly subjective, with a town assessor guessing what a property is worth. The opportunities for good-ole-boy corruption (not to mention the usual greased-palm variety) are endless. Grievance committees, just as subjectively, rule on whether assessments are correct. Property owners with good lawyers fare far better than others in these proceedings. There are actually companies that specialize in getting property-tax reductions, taking a percentage of the reduction they obtain as their fee.
3) “Every tax ought to be levied at the time, or in the manner, in which it is most likely to be convenient for the contributor to pay it.” In the eighteenth century, property taxes were usually due in the autumn, when farmers took their crops to market and had the cash to pay the taxes. Today, at least in New York State, town taxes are due in April (just when federal and state incomes taxes are due), and school taxes are due in September (when many families are meeting fall college tuition bills) and January (just as the Christmas bills and spring college tuition bills are coming in). I imagine those dates are an accident of history, but they could not be more inconveniently timed if they were deliberate.
4) “Every tax ought to be contrived as both to take out and to keep out of the pockets of the people as little as possible, over and above what it brings into the public treasury of the state.” In other words, taxes should be easy—and therefore cheap—to calculate and collect. Property taxes are difficult to calculate, and every town, no matter how small, has to maintain a considerable staff to determine what they should be.
In our modern, highly mobile cash economy, which Adam Smith never knew, we should add a fifth principle. Taxes should distort the underlying economy—which generates the wealth to pay for them—as little as possible. The property tax is a prime culprit behind suburban sprawl, by forcing the break-up of large holdings, as towns, ever seeking more income, raise the taxes on undeveloped land. New suburban lots then bring in more school kids, which sends school taxes soaring and adds to the costs of maintaining roads and other infrastructure, which sends town taxes up, and the spiral ends in a political crisis.
As I said, there is no fixing the property tax. It should be abolished, like slavery, tar-and-feathering, and witch hunts. As for how to fund local government and schools, I’ll give my suggestions in a second post.
August 7, 2006
More on Jacob Javits Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:15 AM EST In response to my post on Jacob Javits’s doomed 1980 reelection bid, Fred Schwarz wrote: “Javits had known for years what a nut [Elizabeth] Holtzman was. . . . So instead of bowing out gracefully, Javits dragged his weary bones around the state one last time to save the country from having a 1960s-style radical in the Senate. Rather than being a case of giving in to pride, it was the last and perhaps most noble and selfless act of a distinguished career in public service.”
Fred is right that Javits pointedly criticized Holtzman during the 1980 campaign, especially over her position on defense spending. But I don’t think he’s right about Javits’s motivation in running. The senator surely believed, for a time, that he could win re-election on the Liberal line. Eleven years earlier, in 1969, New York City’s incumbent Republican mayor, John Lindsay, had lost the GOP nomination to a conservative state senator, John Marchi. In a three-way race, Lindsay had gone on to win the general election solely as the candidate of the Liberal party. So there was some precedent for what Javits was attempting.
Moreover, it’s well-established that Javits viewed Holtzman as the lesser of two evils. On November 5, 1980, in the aftermath of the election, The New York Times reported that “in private, aides say, [Javits] was far more blunt. He feared that by staying in a race he apparently could not win he would merely draw votes from Miss Holtzman and help elect Mr. D’Amato. Despite his neutral comments last night, his opinion of Mr. D’Amato in private bordered on contempt. Mostly, he resented the way Mr. D’Amato had drummed away during the primary campaign about Mr. Javits’s age, 76, and his motor-neuron disease. He was afraid, friends say, that by remaining in the race he would tip the balance of victory from Miss Holtzman to the Republican candidate.”
It seems that Jacob Javits ran as a Liberal because he wanted very much to remain in the U.S. Senate, not because he wanted to sabotage Elizabeth Holtzman.
August 6, 2006
The Gay Marriage Question Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:15 PM EST Fred Schwarz writes that he agrees with the argument “that the reason behind the push for same-sex marriage is not that gays are being denied any rights. Rather, it is meant to be a statement—to give gays a new triumph and give their opponents a thumb in the eye. In this sense, gay marriage is the tribute that radicalism pays to tradition.” I am not sure the first half of this argument is true, and I think the second half of it—the part about the thumb in the eye—can be phrased differently, in a fashion that may alter people’s assessment of the merits (of extending the right to marry). First of all, I have the impression that the campaign for gay marriage preceded the creation of same-sex domestic-partner status in many and possibly any jurisdictions. So to some degree, inertia may be at work. The fight for the right to marry began as a demand for the extension of rights unjustly denied, and the motive for pressing the campaign may still be energized by its original moral impetus. It is worth remembering that strong domestic-partner laws do not yet exist all over the country. With neither strong domestic-partner laws nor gay marriage, people are denied real and valuable rights—rights to pensions, the right to take over a lease, to survivor benefits in medical insurance, etc. A good test of whether someone who claims to want to “protect marriage” without harming anyone’s legitimate rights is to find out whether that person is in favor of strong domestic-partner laws. Happily, my memory of the polling data is that a majority of Americans want gays to have the rights to heritable benefits of the sort described about. Okay, but what about pressing for the right to marry rather than pressing for the right to domestic-partner status? Is that a desire to put a thumb in someone’s eye? Another way to look at this is to imagine what it feels like to be denied the right to marry when heterosexuals who do not intend to have children, indeed who cannot have children, possess the indisputable and frequently exercised right to that legal status. In at least some cases, that apparently (and I think understandably) feels like a thumb in the eye of the person being denied the right. So the demand for equal rights is at least in part a demand for a thumb to be removed. In this light, the demand for the right to marry is a demand to enjoy a right enjoyed by the vast majority of citizens and denied on a basis that feels like simple and unjustifiable discrimination. The peculiar status created by denial of the right to marry is experienced as a stigma; whether or not there is an injury, there is an insult, and the insult is delivered by the American institution which is expected to refuse to create or defer to stigma, the law. Americans have a notoriously complicated history with respect to creating equal and unequal status under law. The bulk of the history of race sits very conspicuously on one side of the ledger, much of our happier and more honorable history squarely on the other side. My guess is that in the long run the weight of the American commitment to expanding equality under law will carry the day, and homosexuals will possess either the right to marry or the right to domestic-partner status, all across the nation. In the short run, ballot initiatives on the subject seem to be poison for the Democrats.
August 6, 2006
Freedom Fries III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:45 AM EST “To french” (properly uncapitalized, in my view, but often capitalized anyway) means to cut into long thin strips before cooking. So the term “french fries” merely refers to the shape of the potato pieces, not the country of origin. This, of course, makes changing the name to “freedom fries,” even sillier. But if it were against the law for Congressmen to be silly, we would still be waiting for enough of them to get out of jail to constitute a quorum? One inexplicably named food item is the English muffin, which is neither English nor a muffin. It is instead wholly American and a griddle cake. As for “Japping” someone, I have never heard that term, but in school in the late fifties and early sixties, an unannounced test was always, by masters and students alike, called a “Jap quiz,” an academic sneak attack. Whether that had any currency beyond the hallowed halls of Millbrook School, I know not. Speaking of the silly hysteria that led to such things as sauerkraut being rebranded “liberty cabbage,” I once saw a page from an encyclopedia of World War I vintage that had thumbnail illustrations of what it termed “The Great Composers.” There were maybe 50 pictures on the page and not a single one of those depicted was German. No Bach, no Mozart, no Beethoven, no Schubert, no Brahms, etc., etc. Of course, if you exclude Germans from the pantheon of great composers you are forced to elevate some very obscure Italians to it. I had never heard of at least half of the “great composers.”
August 6, 2006
Retrosexual Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 09:30 AM EST One strange feature of the debate over same-sex marriage is that today’s homosexuals appear desperate to adopt an institution that so many other Americans (and even more Europeans) have abandoned over the last 40 years. Trend setters indeed! Unless it’s another case of retro camp irony, which seems unlikely, since getting married is, or should be, a much more serious business than buying a 1950s cocktail shaker. I’ve always meant to write a blog entry about how every sentence I speak or write now seems to start with the words “I’m old enough to remember . . .” In this case, I’m old enough—just barely—to remember when pop songs used to talk about getting married. There was the Dixie Cups’ “Chapel of Love” (“Today’s the day when we’ll say ‘I do’ and we’ll never be lonely any more”) and Manfred Mann’s “Do Wah Diddy” (“I’m hers, she’s mine, wedding bells are gonna chime”) and the Hollies’ “Bus Stop” (“One day my name and hers are going to be the same,” which would be doubly confusing to today’s youth), and hundreds of others. The Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” whose lyrics can be paraphrased as “Wouldn’t it be nice if we were old enough to get married, so we could have sex,” recently made No. 5 on National Review’s list of the Top 50 Conservative Rock Songs. All the songs I’ve just mentioned came out before my time, but they were still somewhat current during my 1970s boyhood. By then, pro-marriage sentiment in pop music had dwindled greatly, though it lingered on in songs like the Fifth Dimension’s “Wedding Bell Blues” and Carly Simon’s “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be,” in both of which a woman wistfully asks a man why he won’t marry her. In the pop music of the last 30 years, however, the question of marriage barely even arises. Love and marriage used to go together like a horse and carriage. Now some commentators and lawmakers, on the left and the right, want to get the government out of the marriage business entirely. After all, who needs it? Any non-traditional couple can find a church with sufficiently liberal principles and have a wedding ceremony and throw a great reception afterwards. All the main legal features of marriage could be duplicated under another title, with such complications as joint income-tax filing and inheritance rights included or omitted according to whether they seem necessary. Ideally, each couple could work out a contract tailored to its individual needs instead of accepting a pre-packaged deal. For example, New York State Assemblywoman Barbara Lifton, whose district is mostly in Ithaca (a college town—no surprise), wants to remove the word “marriage” from the state’s legal code and make “civil commitment” the single standard for everyone. “Why should state government become a religious institution?” she asks. Ms. Lifton’s question, suggesting that marriage is no more than a sectarian tradition, shows that we have come full circle since colonial days, or rather half circle, because the Pilgrims and Puritans felt just the opposite, considering marriage to be strictly a state function, not a religious one. Marriage was very important to the New England colonists, and they enacted severe penalties for fornication and adultery (and even worse for homosexual acts, though it’s no surprise the disputatious Puritans quarreled over defining exactly what was prohibited; in one legal case from the 1640s involving two young men, ministers were consulted on the question of whether the biblical condemnation of homosexual acts applied when there was no bodily penetration). But Pilgrim and Puritan alike took the Bible as their guide, and since the Bible says nothing about clergymen solemnizing marriages, they resisted the practice. Edward Winslow, a Pilgrim who was an important figure in the early days of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Colonies, said in the 1630s that marriage was “a civille thinge, and he found nowhere in ye word of God that it was tyed to the ministrie.” Not until 1708 did Hannah Sturtevant marry Josiah Cotton in Massachusetts’s first church wedding. Just as had happened with the early settlers’ shunning of Christmas as a Papist fiction, the universal human liking for a party eventually overcame religious scruples. Anyway, it’s true that the distinction between marriage and “civil commitment,” or whatever one wishes to call it, is largely artificial. Ms. Lifton’s proposal, like most libertarian schemes, makes sense if you assume that (a) sweeping changes can be introduced and accepted with little or no disruption and (b) most people are as fascinated as the typical libertarian is with making choices and weighing options. But by the same token, if everything in marriage can be duplicated with domestic partnerships, or simply shacking up, why do same-sex couples need it? Why are they flocking to an institution that opposite-sex couples, with all the weight of tradition behind them and a much higher rate of parenthood, are increasingly shrugging off? The answer is, of course, that, like so many issues that we spend our time debating, this one is symbolic. As Jeanette Baik, a former American Heritage editor, wrote a few years ago, “Homosexual activists consider marriage mainly a vehicle for mainstreaming homosexuality, with the law on their side.” I don’t agree with everything Jeanette says in the article, and there’s no point in arguing about it, since she no longer works here. But she is absolutely right that the reason behind the push for same-sex marriage is not that gays are being denied any rights. Rather, it is meant to be a statement—to give gays a new triumph and give their opponents a thumb in the eye. In this sense, gay marriage is the tribute that radicalism pays to tradition. The very existence of a pro-gay-marriage movement points up how important and powerful that tradition is, and that explains why gay marriage—which, as I say, will make little practical difference either way—is encountering such great opposition among Americans.
August 5, 2006
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:20 PM EST Fred Schwarz blogged about Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, whose obituaries all discuss her membership in the Nazi Party. He remarks that he loved her recording of the Messiah; I owned and loved her recordings of the Marschallin in Rosenkavalier and a few other things, especially several of her Mozart roles. He remarks that he doesn’t feel qualified to offer an opinion on that controversy. Neither do I. I know that Schwarzkopf lied thrice on her Fragenbogen—her de-nazification questionnaire—in which she claimed never to have been a party member, and that she lied about her affiliation with the Nazi party thereafter. Failing to honestly answer a questionnaire distributed by conquerors feels different from lying later in a career, but neither seems like the crime of the century. An awful lot of people did both. But while it seems too easy to condemn people a priori for succumbing to temptations and pressures one has never faced, it also seems too easy to assume that almost everyone does the same thing under those same pressures and temptations. So without judging Schwarzkopf in the absence of all the facts, what might the relevant considerations for judgment actually be? In the case of membership in the Nazi party, one relevant consideration may be whether the member betrayed or ignored friends from groups persecuted by the regime, or instead sought to help such people. There are famous examples on both sides. Did one stop with simple membership, or participate in conspicuously nasty activities? Wilhelm Furtwängler did very well under the Nazis, but apparently never joined the party, tried to help Jewish friends, and apparently managed to avoid giving Hitler the Nazi salute on one very public occasion, by the simple expedient of tucking his conductor’s baton under his saluting arm when Hitler approached. I have never heard that Schwarzkopf engaged in such ideological sabotage, or went out of her way to help others. There is some evidence that Schwarzkopf engaged in ideological supervision of others. She was Führerin of the youth wing of the Nazi Student Association in 1935. She was a favorite of Goebbels and may have worked in the propaganda ministry. There has been a fair amount of recent scholarly work on musicians under the Third Reich. I have read about that work, but not actually read it; Fred Schwarz’s post made me resolve to do so. Judging people from perfect safety, and doing so more than 60 or 70 years on, feels unpleasant, even a bit nasty. Americans have generally been spared the sorts of choices Schwarzkopf faced and made, but if you keep your eyes open, and have taken up certain lines of work, you may not have been spared the unattractive sight of exhilarated heresy hunters. The problem with not doing judging in almost any case is that one may thereby risk the logical possibility of duly honoring people who behaved better than Schwarzkopf did. If almost everyone behaved timidly, with only a few villains or heroes, the past would be simpler. But there were small heroes, and small villains, along with others distributed all along the scale. And it feels condescending to say Schwarzkopf did all that could be expected of a ravishing soprano. That sounds like a dumb blonde joke on a very grand scale. The idea that artists are excused from the obligation to exercise ethical and political judgment on the strength of their genius makes good poetry (Auden’s elegy on the death of Yeats comes to mind) but is not necessarily wholly persuasive. When this came up a decade ago—some new books had appeared—Edward Rothstein made an interesting observation in the New York Times. When speaking about the Nazi years, Schwarzkopf famously quoted Tosca, “Vissi d'arte”: “I lived for art.” This has since been taken as a pretty good exculpatory statement, but Rothstein pointed out that when Tosca says that, she has just rethought her hitherto apolitical life and is off to assassinate a tyrant. Of course, Schwarzkopf had sung Tosca. Come to think of it, I also have a recording of Schwarzkopf singing Leonora, in Fidelio. One wonders how carefully she listened to herself.
August 5, 2006
On Freedom Fries II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:00 PM EST Josh Zeitz notes the demise of Freedom Fries in the House cafeteria on Capitol Hill, but suggests, I suspect tongue in cheek, that French Fries be rebranded as chips. Unfortunately, Americans who call fries chips, like Americans who call apartments flats, tend to arouse hostile merriment. But having (however briefly) renamed French fries, there is one reason to maintain the achievement. French fries are not indisputably French. They are at least as likely to be Belgian in origin, and the French themselves associate fries with Belgium. They may also be Spanish (Galician), and I have seen a theory that they were in fact invented by Belgians in Spain, from where they made their way to Belgium. There is even a theory that they were named after an eighteenth-century Albany tavern keeper surnamed French. Belgian Fries, Spanish Fries or Albany fries sound unpromising, but fries are often simply called fries, and maybe that would be simplest, rather than continue to credit France with a possibly undeserved achievement. We have already given them French toast, which relatively few Frenchman claim as indisputably French in origin. Alternately, we could keep calling them French fries but struggle to revive “French leave,” for desertion from the military, “French letter,” for condom, French pox, etc. Linguistically attributing undesirable properties to others has a very long history, a lot of which was still in use when I was young—Dutch courage for drunken bravado, talking like a Dutch Uncle for abusive remonstrance, Indian-giving and welshing for going back on a deal—but it does seem interesting that the most feared and hated enemies have been less subject to this than have less-alarming enemies, French fries being a case in point. I can only think of one exception—Japping someone, for treacherous attack—and I have rarely heard it used or seen it in print. Germany, which seriously menaced Anglophones twice in the last century, has not generated much pejorative usage of this kind. One apparent exception actually proves the rule: a divorce granted a woman in 1885 because her husband, the politician Sir Charles Dilke, had sexual tastes a judge subsequently described as involving “Hunnish practices.” In my experience, no one who delightedly quotes the decision has any idea of precisely what that jurist had in mind, and it is not clear that anyone knew exactly what was meant at the time. In 1885, of course, Germans were nothing like as feared as they would be in subsequent generations, but that is when Hunnish practices took a hit.
August 5, 2006
Pluralities vs. Majorities Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:30 PM EST Josh Zeitz writes about Joe Lieberman’s likely defeat on Tuesday, and the prospect of a three-sided race in November. He compares the upcoming contest to the 1980 New York Senate race, where in the wake of a primary defeat, Jacob Javits, a liberal Republican, split the Democratic vote and helped elect what was then considered a very conservative Republican, Al D’Amato, who won with 45 percent of the vote. Josh Zeitz does not expect that this split on the Left will again play out with a Republican victory in Connecticut this November, and I think he is right. What happened with Javits, which in my circles at the time seemed unnatural, was not in fact all that rare. Something very similar happened in New York State in 1970: Charles Goodell, a liberal Republican, split the liberal vote with Democrat Richard Ottinger, and thereby handed the Senate seat to Conservative Party nominee James L. Buckley, who won with 38.7 percent of the vote. Although some people think Buckley might even have won a second term, had Bella Abzug won the Democratic primary, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who narrowly beat Abzug in the primary, routed Buckley. So twice in recent times, a state that had elected Democrats or liberal Republicans who generally voted with Democrats, elected a Rightist Republican after a third-party nomination let the majority split its vote. At the time, if you were a Democrat—I was, and am—these results seemed outrageous and perverse, but not illegitimate. We did have the notion that the electoral system was supposed to deliver victory to candidates possessed of absolute majorities, not mere pluralities, thus yielding power to stable parties that possessed the strength and legitimacy to make decisive changes. In our cheerful American self-regard, we thought this was what made two party systems obviously preferable to proportional representation, which had produced immobility in the then ill-regarded French Third Republic, or vast number of Italian parliaments, or the Israeli Knesset. But when this didn’t happen in two consecutive New York Senate races, no one thought the legitimacy of the system was in doubt. In 1980 we blamed what we considered Javits’s self-destructive vanity for what we took to be a repellant outcome. In any case, one thing that may have taken legitimacy off the table was that neither Senate race changed the balance of political power in the country at large. In retrospect, this outcome—where pluralities created by splits in the opposition have achieved significant victories—has happened a fair amount in recent electoral history, and the comparisons are interesting. Margaret Thatcher won her first general election in 1979, when her Tories took 43.9 percent of the vote, her second with 42.4 percent in 1983, her last with 42.2 percent in 1987. She was a revolutionary figure in postwar British politics, and she never won a majority. I began living off and on in Britain in 1981, initially almost entirely among people who detested Thatcher, and in retrospect something interesting was happening: While many people thought Thatcher’s sweeping use of her power destructive and in some respects precedent-shattering, almost no one thought her almost revolutionary use of her political power fundamentally illegitimate, despite her lack of support by anything like a majority of the electorate. England had not two but three parties, with a winner-take-all system, and this sort of result was seen as within the rules. Even though Thatcher’s very sweeping use of mere pluralities was widely enraging and transformative, the legitimacy of British politics was in no way imperiled. So the parallel to 1970s American politics is not exact. We hadn’t yet run that experiment. In 1970 Salvador Allende was elected President of Chile with of 36.3 percent of the popular vote. The opposition had split. Allende was reelected in early 1973, significantly increasing his plurality to 43 percent of the vote, and lost power in a brutal military coup in September of that year. Allende’s use of plurality power was seen, by many of his enemies, as grotesquely illegitimate. I have heard this outcome used to attack electoral systems that allow great power to plurality holders, but it seems likely that some of Allende’s enemies might well have reacted the same way to comparable use of an electoral majority. It is tempting to speculate about linkages between electoral mechanics, fluke results, and the perceived legitimacy of outcomes, so the sources of perceived illegitimacy may not be so easily pinned down. Okay, back to the United States. Bush’s 2000 victory was seen, in some quarters, as illegitimate. Why? Not, I think, because Bush lost the popular vote—people understood that to be within the rules—nor because Ralph Nader’s third-party run reproduced the D’Amato and Buckley outcomes—but because a bare majority of the Supreme Court, a majority composed entirely of justices appointed by Republican Presidents, voted to stop the Florida Supreme Court from interpreting its own constitution. Still, this last perception has done relatively little harm to Bush’s perceived legitimacy. Sure, many people detest Bush, and our politics feel relatively bitter, but no one fears the Chilean outcome. And when you think about it, the bitterness of our politics does not seem to be the product of the judicial origins of Bush’s 2000 victory. Bill Clinton won in 1992 with 43.01 percent of the vote, was reelected with 49.2 percent in 1996, and was seen as a somehow illegitimate President by an audible number of Republicans, but not, I think, because of his plurality victories. Most Democrats saw Clinton’s impeachment as an abuse of Republican legislative power, and that perception probably contributed something to a sense that Bush’s 2000 victory was tainted. But on balance, the perceived legitimacy of American political outcomes, like the perceived legitimacy of British outcomes, remains impressive. And when legitimacy takes a knock, as it did from the Clinton-haters, it is not clear that electoral mechanics and flukey outcomes are responsible for our troubles.
August 5, 2006
Thank You, Senator Javits Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 09:30 AM EST Sen. Jacob Javits’s third-party run for reelection in 1980 was not sad for anyone but left-wing Democrats. If Josh Zeitz’s analysis of the electoral dynamics is correct, Javits, a Republican, helped keep his seat in Republican hands and kept Elizabeth Holtzman, a wild-eyed fanatic, out of the Senate. Sounds like a good deal to me. Javits had known for years what a nut Holtzman was, and anyone who didn’t know could have told from the way she tried to get Richard Nixon impeached for war crimes. So instead of bowing out gracefully, Javits dragged his weary bones around the state one last time to save the country from having a 1960s-style radical in the Senate. Rather than being a case of giving in to pride, it was the last and perhaps most noble and selfless act of a distinguished career in public service.
August 4, 2006
The Round Number Problem II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 07:00 PM EST Fredric Smoler made some very interesting points in his post on round numbers, especially the essential uselessness of centuries and decades as organizing principles in history. But while life is lived day by day, history is shaped, by both historians and the collective folk memory of the people, and we all tend to look at the accidents of our decimal number system as having significance. If evolution had given us six digits per hand instead of five, I imagine the whole history of the world would look very different. It is almost impossible not to look at these ready-made packets of time and pick out the most salient features of each as characterizing them. One can point out how illogical that is, but that won’t change things, I’m afraid. This brings to mind an interesting point, how historical eras get names. The first thing to notice is that they don’t get them until they are over or at least well on the way to being over. The era that’s in progress is always just “now” or “these days” or “modern times.” The first use of the term “Middle Ages” didn’t come about until 1722, more than 200 years after the conventional date for their end, 1500. The term “industrial revolution” was coined only in 1848, when its consequences brought down governments all over Europe, and didn’t become common until the 1880s, when the process was more than a hundred years old. The term “Victorian” was first used in 1875, when the eponymous queen had been on the throne for nearly 40 years. (The term was coined by an American, not a Briton, by the way, E. C. Stedman, a poet and editor who made a living as a Wall Street broker. Not even the French, who gave the word chauvinism to the world, object, however, habitually calling the period “l’époque victorienne.”) I suspect that what we call modern times will soon be relegated to the past and given a label. The microprocessor is changing things so rapidly and so profoundly—at least as profoundly as the Industrial Revolution and far more quickly—that our grandchildren will look on the world before 1969, the year of the first microprocessor, the way we look on the world that existed before World War I. I can’t wait for some wide-eyed six-year-old to say to me, “Do you really remember using a typewriter? Wow!”
August 4, 2006
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 05:15 PM EST I was familiar with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, who died in Austria yesterday at the age of 90, only as a soloist on a recording of the Messiah that gets played several times every Christmas in our family’s house. It’s a three-LP mono album from the late 1950s, I think, and by now it’s getting mighty scratchy (I gave my father a stereo version about 20 years ago, and he listened to it once and decided he liked the mono better). I’m not a connoisseur of vocal music by any means, but even I could tell from a young age what a prodigious talent Schwarzkopf was. The obituaries all discuss her membership in the Nazi Party, which she denied for a long time, then admitted but shrugged off as a necessity for artists who wanted to work, “like a union card.” During the 1990s, research showed that she was at least somewhat active as a party member, and a particular favorite of Joseph Goebbels. I don’t feel qualified to offer an opinion on that controversy, but I do know that the whole period of World War II was something she wanted to blot out. In the booklet that came with our recording of the Messiah, Schwarzkopf’s biography goes into great detail about her early training and her advancing career during the 1930s, listing which roles she played with which conductors and costars in which opera houses on which dates. As I recall, the last entry in this section is from 1938. The next paragraph begins, “After World War II, she . . .”
August 4, 2006
On Freedom Fries Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:55 PM EST In what surely ranks as one of the more puerile moves executed by the United States Congress, in the months preceding the Iraq War, House Republican leaders ordered all congressional cafeterias to change the term “French fries” to “freedom fries” on menus and price boards. Bob Ney, the embattled Ohio Republican who then chaired the House Administration Committee, which oversees the House cafeterias, explained that members were simply conveying “the strong displeasure of many on Capitol Hill with the actions of our so-called ally, France.” France had not joined the “Coalition of the Willing,” you see. According to the Washington Times, in recent days the House has nonchalantly allowed its cafeterias to revert to “French fries.” It seems that we are in need of a little help from the Palais Elysée in resolving the troubles in Lebanon. This reminds me of World War I, when familiar edibles like hamburgers and sauerkraut were renamed “liberty sandwiches” and “liberty cabbage.” This was part of a larger assault on all things German. The governor of Iowa, for instance, signed an order banning spoken German on public streetcars, while in Wyoming a man who publicly uttered “Hoch der Kaiser” was hanged, cut down just seconds short of death, and compelled by an angry crowd to kneel and kiss an American flag. In the long run, it didn’t work. Ninety years later, hamburgers are still hamburgers, and sauerkraut is still sauerkraut. But maybe we should meet the Republicans half way. Let’s just call French fries by their English designation, “chips.” The British are, after all, part of the Coalition of the Willing, though the vast majority of British voters, like the vast majority of American voters, clearly think the Iraq war was a ghastly mistake
August 4, 2006
Joe Lieberman and Jacob Javits Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:25 PM EST If the polls are to be believed, next Tuesday something extraordinary is going to happen. Joe Lieberman, the three-term United States senator from Connecticut and one-time Democratic vice-presidential nominee, will lose his primary bid for a fourth term. By a wide margin. According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, Lieberman now trails his opponent, the businessman Ned Lamont, by 54 to 41 percent. The senator has indicated that he is prepared to run as an independent in the November election should he lose next Tuesday, thus setting the scene for a three-way race between Lieberman, Lamont, and a little-know Republican nominee. Much has been written about this race. Lieberman’s trouble owes to a multitude of reasons, including his unflinching support for the unpopular war in Iraq and his rhetorical attacks on critics of the war, whom he accused of undermining the military effort; his vote for cloture on Samuel Alito’s Senate confirmation (notwithstanding his subsequent vote against Alito); his hemming-and-hawing on Social Security privatization; his cozy relationship with the financial-services and insurance industries; his vote for cloture on the Bush administration’s bankruptcy bill (though, again, he subsequently voted against the bill); and his holier-than-thou posturing on cultural and social questions, which might play well among exurban evangelicals who tend to vote Republican, but which doesn’t sit well with Connecticut’s Democratic loyalists. And it hasn’t helped his cause a bit that he announced his intention to run as an independent should he lose the party’s nomination, while Lamont has promised to remain loyal to whatever ticket the primary voters choose. There are several historical parallels here, the most recent of which is New York’s 1980 U.S. Senate election, in which Republican primary voters booted four-term Senator Jacob Javits for a little-known Long Island politician, Alfonse D’Amato. Javits, who was extremely liberal and generally voted with the Democratic majority on most important domestic and foreign policy questions, chose to run on the Liberal party line, thus setting up a three-way race that included the Democratic nominee, Elizabeth Holtzman. Ultimately, Javits ran an anemic, defeatist campaign and polled only 600,000 votes. D’Amato won the state by about a margin of about 130,000. The bulk of Javits’s voters would surely have backed Holtzman had the senator dropped out of the race. Instead, he gave into pride, stuck it out, and helped send a very conservative Republican to Washington. It was a sad ending to an otherwise distinguished career. Democrats are similarly concerned that Lieberman’s independent candidacy might split the Democratic vote and deliver a safe Democratic seat to the Republicans. In other words, New York all over again. This seems unlikely. Lieberman is, and Javits was, a career politician, that rare breed of human being that starts running for office at 25 and never stops. But there the comparison ends. Lieberman is still in the prime of his career and will surely mount a much more aggressive challenge than did Javits, who had lost much of the fire in his belly by 1980. The Republican candidate is an unknown and nowhere near as strong as Liz Holtzman was in 1980. So the race is more likely to come down to a squeaker between Lieberman and Lamont, come November. However things shake out, Tuesday is looking like a sad day for Joe Lieberman, just as it was for Jacob Javits in the fall of 1980, when he lost his primary. Stay tuned for the results.
August 3, 2006
The Round Number Problem Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:45 PM EST John Steele Gordon writes “Why there should be this human fascination with flukes and big round numbers, I have no idea. It’s a question for psychologists, not historians. But there’s no more point in decrying it than in decrying any other part of human nature.” I agree that a fascination with flukes as flukes is harmless; I have been trying to suggest that a tendency to interpret flukes so that they are not flukes but signs and portents, or revelations of causal mechanisms, is not so harmless. Maybe more on that in another post, but for now, what about big round numbers?
Historians can perhaps do one thing about the fascination with big round numbers: They can try not to sign on to it, and write too easily of centuries as if those numbering units had some historical essence. Take the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, to see how this can make trouble. Does the nineteenth century make sense as an explanatory category? Is it a useful shorthand, as it was when I was a student, for the industrial revolution, or for the rise of nation states? Is the eighteenth century the age of Enlightenment, or the twentieth of mass industrialized warfare, or of totalitarianism?
The onset of the industrial revolution can plausibly be dated to the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The completion of its first phase—the mechanization of certain portions of the textile industry—has been plausibly dated to 1830. So the industrial revolution, on this account, spans roughly one quarter of one century and one quarter of another, which means that it doesn’t happily correspond to either century. And even this scheme means restricting analysis to significant parts of Britain, the Low Countries, and a smallish bit of France.
Does the spread of industrialization to large parts of the rest of Europe over the nineteenth century mean that we can on that account rest easy about the old association of the industrial revolution with that century? I don’t think so. The industrialization of China and India is a current and world-transforming event, if you think about industrialization as including the movement of a very large portion of the labor force out of the agricultural sector and into manufacturing, and an impressive rise in per capita GDP.
How about the Enlightenment? Is that one safely eighteenth century, indeed the essence of the eighteenth century? By one modern account, Enlightenment disappears as anything like a unitary category the harder you think about it; by another, it is still going on and expanding into the Islamic world and the Indian subcontinent, and if it means, among other things, secularization, it has either not hit a lot of the world at all, or is going into reverse, or is hitting now, inspiring furious reactions, but will sooner or later triumph, etc. Is the eighteenth century an age of (political) revolution? If you mean in Europe and North America, in small parts only. You can make a good or better case for either the nineteenth or twentieth centuries.
Industrialized mass warfare arguably starts in 1861, and in the West ends in 1945—once again, it spans two centuries and includes better than half of neither. What some modern historians call “the long eighteenth century” can run from Dryden to Byron, call it 1660 to 1830, and there is a very common version of the nineteenth Century, if you judge these things from the way survey courses are constructed, that lasts from 1815 until 1914.
Is speaking about centuries as if they correspond to decisive shifts more or less harmless? I’m not sure. How about a smaller round number, the decade? Were the 1960s the decade of the civil rights movement? You can make a better case for 1954 to 1965, which splits two decades nicely. What about the sixties as sex, drugs, and revolutionary student politics? You can make a decent case that such a sixties lasted from 1968 through 1973, whereas I’d guess that changing sexual mores or mass drug use considered separately would produce different spans of time, with changes in sexual mores beginning earlier, and drugs hitting big later. Feminism? That sixties arguably started in 1969. Were the fifties a dull, depressing, reactionary era? Everyone “knew” this for much of my adult life, until books began appearing eloquently arguing that this was an almost insane slander.
My hunch is that large conceptual generalizations like “Enlightenment,” ”industrial revolution,” and “military revolution” can be endlessly complicated by closer scrutiny, and when too coarsely and easily employed, admittedly do harm, but they remain indispensable. Assuming that these conceptual generalizations can be usefully associated with the units of time produced by the big round number fetish is something we would ideally do without—whether or not we can.
August 3, 2006
Fidel Castro Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:30 AM EST Is Fidel Castro still alive? Only a very few know for sure. His sister, who lives in Miami, recently said that she had spoken with people in Havana and “He’s not dead. He’s very sick, but he’s not dead.” But his sister has been estranged from Castro for more than 40 years, so the quality of her sources is dubious. And it is hardly unprecedented for the death of tyrants to be kept secret while the underlings sort out the new pecking order and attempt to prevent a power vacuum.
But if he is not dead in fact, he is nearly so metaphorically.
The poet A. E. Housman extolled the advantages of an early death in “To an Athlete Dying Young”, where the hero would not be one of those “runners whom renown outran/And the name died before the man.” Fidel Castro, 80 years old next week, is a great example of what Housman was talking about.
Fidel Castro has been a head of government longer than anyone else now in power. But the world that brought him to power, the world of the Cold War and the great geopolitical contest between democracy and communism, is long dead. There are now just five nations in the world with governments run by a Communist Party: China, Laos, Vietnam, North Korea, and Cuba. Only the last two have communist systems that Lenin or Stalin or even Khrushchev would have recognized.
In his early days of power Castro was major player in world affairs and fairly obsessed the government of the United States. Cuba is a small country (a little smaller than New York State in area; its population is only 11 million, its economy primitive). But its location only 90 miles from American territory allowed Castro to play off the two superpowers and greatly enhance his own power thereby. His zest for doing so brought the world to the brink of nuclear catastrophe in 1962. As the Soviet Union backed away from the Cuban missile crisis, however, it never again allowed him as much freedom of maneuver. Cuba became little more than a client state of the Soviet empire, if a useful thorn in the side of America.
With the end of massive subsidies when the Soviet Union collapsed, the Cuban economy fell even further behind and today has only half the GDP per capita of the Dominican Republic on the neighboring island of Hispaniola, and that only if we believe official Cuban government figures. It is still heavily dependant on the export of a single crop, sugar, that is grown and harvested the same way it was a century ago. Integrated into the world market, it could not hope to compete with the highly mechanized Brazilian and Australian sugar industries. It can do so now only by maintaining a miserably underpaid peasantry, condemned to one of the most backbreaking jobs on earth. So much for communism being the vanguard of the proletariat.
Cuba is intrinsically a rich country, with a great climate, rich soil, mineral resources, an educated population, and immense tourist potential. But it has been miserably misgoverned through most of its long history, first by the Spanish colonial government, then by a series of thugs and crooks, and then by Castro, who has been living proof of Lord Acton’s dictum about the corrupting nature of power. For the last few decades the maintenance of his own power has been his only concern. Today Cuba is technologically a museum of the 1950s. Agriculturally it is a museum of the 1850s.
But Cuba has one other major economic resource, one that once the country is freed of the incubus of communism could be decisive in bringing it rapidly to prosperity and modernity: its large, prosperous, and deeply patriotic exile community in south Florida and elsewhere in the United States. The “Little Havana” area of Miami erupted in joyous celebration on Monday on learning of Castro’s very serious medical problems. With their financial and intellectual capital, and their now decades-long experience of democracy, returning exiles could transform Cuba both economically and politically in an amazingly short period of time.
Castro, a pathetic relic of the past, could do his country no greater favor than dying if he has not already done so, allowing the future to come to Cuba at last.
August 3, 2006
Another Great Hotelier Posted by Ellen Feldman at 09:20 AM EST Yesterday’s AmericanHeritage.com homepage article about Conrad Hilton reminded me of another American success story in the hotel business. In 1950 Kemmons Wilson, a Tennessee homebuilder who was doing well in the postwar boom, decided to take his wife and five children to the nation’s capital. They would drive from Memphis and enjoy the sights along the way. The trip turned out to be anything but enjoyable. Sleeping accommodations for the large family were hard to find. Rooms were often dirty. Food was frequently inedible. The family was dispirited by the trip. Kemmons Wilson was inspired.
He knew he was anything but unique in postwar America. Before the war, families that took to the road had not done it for pleasure. During they war, gas was rationed, and tires were out of the question. But now many men were making more money than they had ever dreamed of in their Depression-era youth. Families started during the wartime years were growing rapidly. These newly prosperous and confident Americans would want to see their country. And the thriving automobile industry would provide the best way to do it. Cars offered flexibility, intimacy, and fun for the whole family, or so it was thought. But when the shadows grew long on the road and the children got cranky and started fighting in the back seat, these families would need a reliable place to stop for the night.
The answer, Wilson sensed, was a chain of hotels that would not vary from town to town or even state to state. You could stay in a room in Missouri one night, check into another in Ohio a few days later, and know you were going to find the same clean and comfortable accommodations, as well as plenty of space to park the family car. The rooms would even look alike. Wilson’s brainstorm would take fear of the unknown out of adventure.
In 1952 he opened his first hotel in Memphis. By 1958, the chain had grown to 50, by 1964 500. In 1968, the 1,000th hotel opened, in San Antonio Texas.
As inventive as Wilson was, however, he could not seem to come up with a suitable name for his new-style hotel. Then one night he was going over blueprints drawn by his friend and architect Eddie Bluestein. Bluestein had been watching an old Bing Crosby movie on television while he worked, and as a joke, had scribbled the movie’s name on the plans. Holiday Inn.
I have a footnote to the story. A few years ago a friend’s seven-year-old caught Holiday Inn on cable and was enchanted. She had heard of Holiday Inns in her own world, but had never been to one. She pleaded with her parents to take her. When they drove up, she almost cried with disappointment. It looked nothing like the set Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire had sung and danced their way across. When I passed on the information that, yes, Virginia, there really was a connection, she was mollified, but only slightly.
August 2, 2006
Coincidences IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:25 PM EST Actually quite a big deal was made out of the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. It was, after all, the first “round number” anniversary. Both Adams and Jefferson (being two of the three signers still alive; Charles Carroll was the third) received numerous invitations to attend celebrations of the event. They were unable, of course, to accept any. Thomas Jefferson’s last public statement, in fact, was a letter to the mayor of Washington, written on June 24, regretting his inability to attend the festivities planned in the capital. He then predicted the political future of the world, with considerable accuracy.
“May it be to the world,” he wrote, “what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. . . . All eyes are opened or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few, booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God. These are the grounds of hope for others; for ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.”
Not bad for someone only 10 days from death. The letter was widely printed.
By the way, I misquoted John Adams the other day. He didn’t say, “Thomas Jefferson still lives.” He said “Thomas Jefferson survives.”
Fred Smoler is quite correct that flukes must happen now and then, even the flukiest of flukes if enough time and enough trials are available, and therefore shouldn’t be surprising. But they are, and people respond powerfully to them. Even he admits that a pat straight flush on the very first hand of a poker game was a WOW! event in his life.
Equally, people love round numbers. There is nothing more magical about the Dow Jones passing 10,000 than about its passing, say, 9,786. But the last time the Dow hit 10,000 I was invited on to The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer to discuss the event. In the days of mechanical odometers, children loved to watch them roll over to a big round number, not infrequently making driving the car difficult in the process.
Why there should be this human fascination with flukes and big round numbers, I have no idea. It’s a question for psychologists, not historians. But there’s no more point in decrying it than in decrying any other part of human nature.
He writes “Mr. Gordon, who seems to read a lot of nineteenth-century fiction, will probably recall a disturbing and brutally funny scene in War and Peace where Pierre Bezukhov massages numbers until he finds the meaning he is looking for.” Today, Pierre would probably be a politician, doing exactly the same thing. Why political reporters never, ever seem to notice when they are being statistically duped is another great mystery of human nature.
August 2, 2006
Coincidences, and Days vs. Dates Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:25 PM EST I do not think I confused day and date—I considered them sequentially—but Mr. Gordon is surely right about the vastly lesser probability of the day and date of death coinciding. In re CEOs named Charles E. Wilson, I wrote that when you consider other factors, “the odds drop a bit,” which I still think is true. I think Mr. Gordon perhaps overestimates the psychological import of a semicentennial, but if I understand him correctly, he does not assign any meaning to this sort of coincidence; he is simply pleased by what he takes to be a fluke.
This continues to puzzle me. Insofar as flukes happen and must happen, I simply do not understand why people are so diverted by them, and I suspect that most people who are greatly struck by this sort of thing at least tacitly assign some sort of meaning to the coincidences. I do think that people who want to find significance in striking coincidences have a sad and distressing tendency to find that meaning; Mr. Gordon, who seems to read a lot of nineteenth-century fiction, will probably recall a disturbing and brutally funny scene in War and Peace where Pierre Bezukhov massages numbers until he finds the meaning he is looking for. I do not mean to imply that Mr. Gordon does any such thing, but again, I do not quite understand why genuine coincidence, understood as such, greatly diverts anyone. The fault is probably my own.
Now that I think of it, a coincidence did at least once divert me. At college, the toughest-looking woman on campus asked on a single occasion if she could sit in on an otherwise invariably all-male nightly poker game. Her first hand, in five stud, was a straight flush to the queen of spades. But I think this diverted me because I was amused by the temptation to ascribe meaning to a meaningless event. I may come by this prejudice genetically. My father was once in a foxhole in the Ardennes, about to be overrun by tanks, when the other man in the fox hole began to pray his rosary. My father suggested that the fellow drop the rosary and pick up his rifle, and was rebuffed with the not unpersuasive reply that the rifle was no likelier to be of assistance than the rosary. To my father’s gratified astonishment, the tanks then veered off, probably attracted by a more inviting target, but I remember my father remarking that his joy in not being overrun was tempered by his irritation at the prospect of his never hearing the end of this coincidence. He was spared that, as the other fellow was either killed or wounded soon after. To the end of his life, my father was understandably struck by a few such coincidences, i.e., ones that had affected him personally, but he meticulously refused to assign them metaphysical significance of any kind. It was one of the many things I admired about him.
August 2, 2006
Scots and Parsimony Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:25 AM EST Fred Schwarz wrote, in re the comic stereotype of Scots and parsimony, “At the time, I had no idea that Scots were supposed to be stingy, so this made no sense to me. I wonder how many Americans today are aware enough of this stereotype to appreciate a joke about it.” Well, the stereotype was certainly around when I was a boy—I was born in 1951—and I heard jokes about it, some told by Americans of Scottish descent. One thing about this stereotype was that it existed in the context of another, non-comic stereotype, which was that Scots were disciplined, industrious, intelligent (“canny”), possessed of great probity, particularly good at war and civil engineering, but good at lots of things.
A note on this: having spent a lot of time in the U.K. since 1981, I was amazed to discover that modern British stereotypes of the Scots apparently included none of the above virtues, and the stereotype about thriftiness was barely remembered—and when it was, it was considered Victorian. On the basis of what is admittedly a small sample, Scots were instead depicted as scroungers living off the welfare state, feckless complainers (“whinging Scots”), and possessed of various other vices. Jokes about Scots involved sheep and, to a lesser extent, Calvinism. When I told people that in America the stereotype, to the extent that one about Scots survived, was that Scots were admirable—I stressed the business about industriousness and probity—my assurances were met with open incredulity. When I explained that to the best of my knowledge this American stereotype was shared by Canadians, people speculated that Scots with these qualities may all have emigrated.
I once had a similar experience when sailing in Long Island Sound with the high school’s Norwegian AFS student. Passing a Swedish yacht, he began to curse loudly, and I then discovered that Scandinavians, indistinguishable and admirable in the stereotypes I grew up with, could in fact detest one another. To that one Norwegian, anyway, Swedes were sanctimonious, overpaid, and arrogant, Finns were dangerous and bloodthirsty, and Danes were bibulous good time Charlies.
But Fred Schwarz’s remark made me think, and my guess is that he is correct: I rather doubt that a number of ethnic stereotypes very much alive in my youth are even known to my undergraduates, or to my younger colleagues (when an Iranian-descended colleague told several Scots-and-sheep jokes to a Scottish colleague, the jokes were immediately understood if not much appreciated by the Scot, but met with incomprehension by a number of other listeners.) Ethnic jokes were very much a feature of my childhood, and I heard them at home and, to a lesser degree, in school, but I hear almost none now. I would posit several reasons for this. The civil rights movement and subsequent changes in the culture may have made ethnic jokes unfashionable, but broader changes in the culture may be more important. I heard a lot of these jokes growing up because my father, who told jokes, grew up in Chicago and New York, which means he was raised in an environment where ethnic groups were residentially segregated and did not go in for much intermarriage. Ethnicity was the basis for local politics and seemed to explain a lot of electoral and other behavior. There has been a vast increase in exogamy (people marrying outside the group) in the United States over my lifetime, a collapse of at least some ethnic residential segregation, and a weakening of many once-distinct subcultures. America remains more melting pot than salad bowl, and consciousness of ethnicity (rather than race), while very high among some academics, seems lower in the workplace. Some ethnic jokes were funny in part because they represented apparently plausible generalizations, which seemed to explain some things. Some ethnic jokes simply ascribed undesired traits to rivals—stupidity, lubriciousness, etc.—but others pointed to observable differences. Those generalizations are now less plausible, indeed seem to explain nothing, so the jokes have almost disappeared.
August 1, 2006
Disinherit the Wind Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 06:15 PM EST Oh well, I knew it couldn’t last between me and Ellen. As you know, every post of mine has to include at least one punk-rock reference, so we might as well get this one out of the way at the start. The New York Dolls, glam-punk heroes of my mildly rebellious youth, have just put out a new album, three decades after their last one. Its distinctly non-punky title is One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This, and while there’s nothing on it to match “Personality Crisis” or “Puss ‘n’ Boots,” I think it’s well worth buying—mostly because I’m a fan from way back. Listening to this record is like seeing a beautiful woman 30 years later: She’s still beautiful, sort of, but it helps to know what she looked like before. The reason I bring this up is that one of the better songs on the album is “Dance Like a Monkey,” which makes gentle fun of the evolution-creation debate while counseling everyone to forget their differences and dance. The lyricist and lead singer, David Johansen, throws around terms like “intelligent design” and “anthropomorphize,” and it’s significant that among the references he crams into the song is Inherit the Wind. This suggests how widely that play is still seen today as a basically accurate dramatization of the Scopes trial. In fact, it is nothing of the kind, not even close—and its use every year in thousands of classrooms across America does much more harm to our nation’s youth than any discussion of intelligent-design theory could possibly cause. Fred Smoler writes, “I don’t think the play’s version of history is anything like fanciful enough to call it alternate history.” To be fair, he admits that he has not read it in a long time, so he can be forgiven for that view. I hadn’t read it since high school either, so I bought a copy to see if it was as bad as I remembered it. In fact, it wasn’t that bad; it was 10 times worse. The cardboard-cutout characters might as well wear signs saying GOOD or EVIL or SMART or STUPID. Every supporter of the Scopes character is a saint, and every opponent is a nasty buffoon. For no apparent reason, the Mencken character declaims in a bizarre sort of free verse. Other characters speak in comic-book dialogue: “Drummond [i.e. Darrow] was perverting the evidence to cast the guilt away from the accused and onto you and me and all of society!” And: “When they started this fire here, they never figured it would light up the whole sky!” Above all else, the play is preachy, preachy, preachy. Inherit the Wind should be banned from every classroom in America, if only to ensure that innocent children will not start writing like Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. But the play’s problems go beyond mere incompetence and hackery. As I say above, millions of people across America remember reading or seeing this play, or the movie based on it, and most of them think it has something to do with the actual Scopes trial. In fact, the play and reality have nothing in common. Let’s look at all the ways Inherit the Wind differs from the Scopes trial: —In the play, the Scopes character is in jail at the start and faces a prison term if convicted. He and his girlfriend share a couple of touching scenes in which they imagine the dismal life he will lead behind bars. In reality, Scopes was never jailed. The worst penalty he faced was a fine, which he and everybody in town knew would be paid by someone else. (As I recall, the ACLU and H. L. Mencken’s newspaper both offered to pay the fine, though as things turned out it was never actually collected.) The climax of the play comes when the judge chooses not to send the Scopes character to jail and instead imposes just a token $100 fine. This is meant to be seen as a great victory for Scopes, truth, and justice. In fact, the $100 fine was a defeat for Scopes. —In the play, the Scopes character’s girlfriend is forced, amid great emotional distress, to reveal his personal religious views, which he had shared with her in private conversations. In real life, no such examination took place, nor could it have, since it had no relation to the question of whether Scopes had taught evolution. In any case, Scopes’s guilt was admitted at the start of the trial by the defense, which concentrated on challenging the validity of the law—and in fact, Scopes himself was unsure if he had ever mentioned evolution to his students on the few days he had taught biology. —In the play, the judge excludes testimony on evolution from scientific experts—and then, illogically, reverses himself and allows it from the Bryan character. In real life, several days were tediously spent on endless scientific testimony from a wide variety of experts. —In the play, the Bryan character believes in the literal truth of the Bible. In real life, Bryan had disclaimed any such belief for years in speeches and pamphlets (he was a creationist but not a fundamentalist), and he repeated the distinction at the trial. —In the play, the Bryan character, overcome with his public humiliation and the collapse of his cherished beliefs, makes a final address to the court during which he lapses into incoherence and then drops dead. This is a sick and ghoulish exploitation of the real Bryan’s coincidental death from a heart attack shortly following the trial, a few days after he made a rousing speech before thousands of fervently supportive creationists. —Most important, in the play, the Darrow character’s ruthless examination reduces the Bryan character to stammering and sputtering on the witness stand, to the point where the audience laughs at him and he breaks down in tears. In real life, none of this happened. The audience cheered Bryan loudly and repeatedly, and afterwards virtually every observer, including Mencken, thought Bryan had won the debate. Lawrence and Lee try to shrug all this off by saying in their preface that “Inherit the Wind does not pretend to be journalism. It is theatre. It is not 1925. The stage directions set the time as ‘Not too long ago.’ It might have been yesterday. It could be tomorrow.” Sure, guys. That’s why one man in the play says of the Bryan character, “I voted for him for President. Twice. In nineteen hundred, and again in oh-eight. Wasn’t old enough to vote for him the first time he ran.” And later the Bryan character says about the Darrow character, “He gave me active support in my campaign of 1908.” Yet Lawrence and Lee disingenuously pretend that they aren’t writing about William Jennings Bryan, and they expect us to buy it. What a pair of cowards! In the preface they also write: “The collision of Bryan and Darrow at Dayton was dramatic, but it was not a drama.” That’s true. In real life, the local citizens were not stupid or clownish enough for the authors, nor were they easily led enough to suddenly abandon the convictions of a lifetime when confronted with a few familiar arguments to the contrary. In real life, Bryan did not oblige the authors by taking the stand unprepared, or by humiliating himself; the law in question was not draconian enough; Darrow was not quick-witted enough; and the conduct of the trial was not one-sided enough to suit Lawrence and Lee’s wishes. So they invented a fantasy world. |
