September 30, 2006
Islamic Fascism Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:15 PM EST An interesting burst of historical argument surfaced earlier this month. In August the President made his first reference to “Islamic fascism.” In September a Democrat in the Senate called on the President to stop using the phrase “Islamic fascists,” calling the locution “a label that doesn't make any sense,” and soon a reporter at a White House briefing read a dictionary definition of fascism, claiming that this definition did not fit the current facts. This hostility to the phrase “Islamic fascism” is suddenly fairly common, and is often exhibited, with great confidence, by people who do not know anything much about fascism, classical or otherwise. But hostility to the phrase is not restricted to the ignorant—far from it. In late August Robert Paxton, an extremely celebrated historian of Vichy France, also my splendid teacher at Columbia, who taught a brilliant course on fascism, gave an interview on NPR. He questioned the value of applying the term fascist to most states in the Middle East, or to Islamist terrorists. He made a similar argument in his 2005 book, The Anatomy of Fascism. Robert Paxton’s argument against “Islamic Fascism” includes, among others, the following elements: Fascists adored states; Islamist terrorists tend to deprecate states. Fascists are extreme nationalists; Islamists are generally opposed to nationalism. Fascists were generally hostile to religion; Islamists are anything but. And, perhaps most powerfully, European fascists took power in formerly democratic regimes; most Middle Eastern states have never had democratic governments. The essence of fascism is arguably that it is a response to the capture of a democratic regime by the left, or to the paralysis of a democratic regime. I have been thinking about this, and while there is much to be said against the use of “Islamic fascism,” there is also something to be said for that usage. For one thing, extreme Islamists, while hostile to current states, are often seeking to construct a superstate, one including all Muslims. They seem in this sense comparable to fascists in, say, 1930s Austria, who deprecated the existence of the Austrian state and sought to dissolve it and merge it into a Germanic superstate. Must fascists be hostile to religion? The authoritarian antiliberal Austrians who held power between 1934 and 1938, who opposed assimilation into Germany, and who had a strong Catholic political identity, are known to posterity as “clerical fascists”—perhaps a misnomer, but not an oxymoron. Franco’s self-understanding included a strong Catholic political identity and was widely understood, perhaps misunderstood, but not, I think, madly so, as having significant links to classical fascism. What about the replacement of the nation by the community of religious believers? I am not sure that the distinction between nation and a community of religious belief is at all times absolute. There have been many periods where shared religious belief did (and does) duty as the equivalent of national identity, or where religious identity has overlapped national identity—Protestantism in England, Catholicism in Ireland or Poland or Croatia, Orthodox Christianity in Russia, Serbia, or Greece. The assertion that Middle Eastern regimes cannot be fascist because they have not displaced democratic orders should weigh the fact that some Middle Eastern regimes—the former Ba’ath regime in Iraq and the surviving Ba’ath regime in Syria—were/are based on theories developed by ideologues who were very visibly affected by, and imitative of, European fascism. And what about other attributes of classical European fascism? Classical European fascism was militarist and bellicist—it liked armies, and it worshipped war. The language of many Islamists passionately expresses the same tastes. Classical fascism was a response to a perceived although often receding threat from the secular left—and this is true, to some degree, of some Islamist movements and regimes (at certain moments, the Communist party in both Iran and Iraq). Classical fascism detested secular modernity, and it detested liberalism, it detested feminism, it detested parliamentary rule and democracy, it detested feminism, etc. Many Islamists share these loathings. Classical European fascism celebrated violence and charismatic leadership, and many Islamists do the same. On balance, I can see the case for, and the case against, sharply distinguishing violent, antirationalist, bellicist, misogynist, and authoritarian Islamists from fascists. I do not think the case for making the distinction a very sharp one is so strong that anyone pointing to affinities, rather than differences, is necessarily an idiot. Then again, Robert Paxton is an extremely capable historian, so it is worth wondering why he is now making this case. For one thing, fascists are dangerous when they capture states; Islamists are very dangerous even when—perhaps especially when—they do not control states, and Paxton suspects that the analogy of fascism with Islamism predisposes Americans to go after states, which may not be the most important target. This is very much worth thinking about, and the war in Iraq may have in significant part sprung from such a mistake. The American armed forces are very good at smashing states, and people possessing hammers have a notorious tendency to mistake many things for nails. Also Paxton knows that fascism is a ubiquitous term of generally unthinking abuse, and he is inclined to be fastidious about avoiding this tendency. This is surely commendable. Still, I am struck that other people who allege that they are too fastidious to use the word fascist about Islamists are oddly free with it when describing the American government, the Israeli government, etc. I am very far from being an admirer of President Bush, but I rather doubt that the application of the term to a Ba’athist regime is more outrageous than its application to the current inhabitant of the White House.
September 30, 2006
Another America Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 07:45 PM EST Forty-four years ago today, two important developments helped shape the future of civil rights activism: James Meredith was admitted to Ole Miss, under court order, and Cesar Chavez founded the United Farm Workers, a union then comprising mainly Mexican and Mexican-American farm workers in California. Since 1954, when the Supreme Court ruled that segregated schools were unconstitutional, the main battle lines in America’s civil rights struggle were drawn around educational institutions. While it is true that African-Americans were also boldly asserting their right to enjoy free and equal access to consumer venues—from buses, restaurants and lunch counters to department stores and railway-station rest rooms—school desegregation provoked the most intense grassroots activism and white resistance. A year after Meredith’s admission to Ole Miss, George Wallace made his famous stand at the schoolhouse door. But that was mostly theatrics. Meredith broke the color line in higher education, and by the decade’s end, the federal courts would, for better or worse, use affirmative policies like busing and district consolidation to give full force to the Brown decision. September 30, 1962, signaled the end of one era in civil rights history and the dawn of a new one. When Chavez organized the California farm workers, he introduced two important variables into the civil rights equation: economics and ethnicity. Throughout the 1950s most Americans assumed that their prosperous postwar country had eradicated the systematic material want that plagued the country in the 1920s and 1930s. With the publication (also in 1962) of The Other America: Poverty in the United States, by Michael Harrington, a socialist writer and theorist, liberals rediscovered the problem of poverty and began grafting it to civil rights activism. Martin Luther King, Jr., for one, became increasingly interested in the economics of race and race relations, as did a range of activists from Bob Moses to Jesse Jackson. In identifying labor exploitation as a race as well as economic problem, Chavez at once strengthened ties between the civil rights and labor communities (ties that existed, but under some strain) and reminded Americans that civil rights was far more than a white-black problem. By the decade’s end, other ethnic groups—as well as gay and lesbian Americans, American Indians, and women—asserted their rightful place in the era’s civil rights struggles. Meaning Chavez didn’t just introduce ethnicity into the civil rights dialogue. He broadened the dialogue to include a full range of politically, economically, or socially disenfranchised groups. The shift that occurred 44 years ago today was a subtle one but an important one as well.
September 30, 2006
Antisubmarine Warfare Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:10 PM EST The lead article on this website today, Blimps At War, by Nicholas Nirgiotis, describes the intriguing and almost-unknown role of blimps in the Battle of the Atlantic, the fight against German submarines during the Second World War. The Battle of the Atlantic was absolutely vital. Churchill later wrote that “the only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril”. Using only 30 words out of 3,300, Mr. Nirgiotis passes very tactfully over the degree to which remarkably bad American strategy vastly magnified that peril: “Poor planning by the Allies helped them. Merchant ships were permitted to sail singly and unescorted and to transmit their positions in uncoded radio messages.” In fact the US Navy actively resisted using convoys, as the Royal Navy had earlier in the war, as both navies had initially done in the First World War, and as the Japanese did in the Second World War. The history of antisubmarine warfare makes for depressing reading. Navies strenuously resisted convoying, an immensely effective tactic against a deadly threat. At critical moments air forces strenuously resisted deploying long-range aircraft to cover areas where land-based aircraft couldn’t reach: at the height of the Battle of the Atlantic, Air Marshal Harris, the head of the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command, refused allow to four-engine bombers to patrol the midocean gap. A handful of B-24D Liberators eventually did that, to immediate and great effect. Why did this happen? Both Robert O’Connell’s Of Arms and Men, the most fascinating single book on war I have ever read, and Richard Overy’s Why the Allies Won, a superb book on the Second World War, persuasively argue that very strong and very old instincts worked against effective antisubmarine tactics. The most effective way to protect merchant shipping was widely deprecated as a passive tactic: Convoy escorts can only engage the enemy when he chooses to attack, and naval officers vastly preferred offensive tactics, searching out the enemy, and initiating combat themselves. Unfortunately, this preference played to the submarine’s strength, since for most of the war hunter-killer groups could not effectively locate submarines and bring them to battle. But the submarines had to engage the escorts, if they chose to attack the convoys, which was the submarine’s reason for being. Convoys had other advantages: escorts forced submarines to stay submerged by day, and this made it harder for submarines to attack at all, since the submerged speed of a submarine was less than that of many merchantmen, whereas a submarine on the surface was faster than a merchantman. But a real fighting sailor is not supposed to wait and let the enemy come to him, and he is not supposed to employ tactics designed to minimize combat with the enemy. That rigid notion of what a real fighting sailor is supposed to do almost cost us two world wars. That rigidity has an unpleasant ring. When truly judicious and dispassionate post-mortems on Iraq are done—we may wait a long time for them to appear—the lessons of our current war may look nothing like the lessons we are drawing now, while that war still rages. But one lesson drawn now looks plausible: A lot of observers are insisting that some large portion of our difficulties in Iraq sprang from the fact that some sections of the American Army, and its political masters, had a strong and durable disinclination to understand themselves as necessarily engaging in counterinsurgency warfare and state-building. Those activities, apparently, are not what American soldiers are supposed to do.
September 30, 2006
One Man’s Sacred Cow Is Another Man’s Meal Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 04:45 PM EST Apropos of our three-way exchange on the minimum wage, John Steele Gordon wrote: “Both Mr. Smoler and Mr. Zeitz do not seem to grasp that the minimum wage is not a sacred, unquestionable concept to be defended at all costs.” Let’s leave aside for the moment Mr. Gordon’s habitually dismissive and snide tone. (If Fred Smoler and I disagree with John Steele Gordon, it only goes to follow that we “do not seem to grasp” some very elementary but vital fact of life.) I suppose I’m happy to seize this opportunity to defend sacred-cow status for the minimum wage. Before its introduction on the federal level in 1938, American workers in many industries suffered tremendously low wages and punishing work days. The 12-hour shift and seven-day work week at U.S. Steel stands out as a prime example of pre-New Deal labor exploitation. In the prosperous postwar years—say, 1945 to 1970—America did just fine by the minimum wage. Ours was something approximating a full-employment economy, and by keeping corporate taxes low (they got lower in the early 1960s, when the Kennedy-Johnson tax cuts were enacted) we provided business with a perfectly reasonable tradeoff: generous public subsidies in the form of federal highways, resource grants, and tax incentives, in exchange for a basic, humane agreement to treat workers with a bare minimum standard of decency. This was an arrangement that worked. In the absence of evidence that the minimum wage—currently at its lowest real value in several decades—has truly created meaningful unemployment over the past decade, why scrap it? Mr. Gordon makes much of my (and Fred Smoler’s) blind attachment to the minimum wage. But his stubborn insistence on Adam Smith and the invisible hand should be subject to the same scrutiny. There are plenty of sacred cows to go around.
September 30, 2006
Willie Stark and the Crowd Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:00 PM EST Last evening I saw All The King’s Men, the new film adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s classic novel by the same title, roughly modeled on the life of Huey P. Long, the Louisiana governor and U.S. Senator who was gunned down in the State House 71 years ago this month. Allen Barra wrote a fine review of the film for American Heritage.com, and I find myself largely in agreement with him. While some of the individual performances are brilliant—particularly Sean Penn’s chilling portrayal of Willie Stark, the demagogue-populist governor who, like Huey Long, is cut down in the prime of his electoral career—I thought the film didn’t quite cohere. But I’m no film critic. Warren’s book, which was published in 1946, and its first film adaptation, which was released in 1949, dwelt on the dangers of populist upheaval. Importantly, this was an age when many leading public intellectuals came to manifest a deep distrust of mass politics. Writers and scholars like Daniel Bell, David Riesman, William White, and Richard Hofstadter came out of a liberal intellectual tradition of the 1930s that celebrated the common man and the triumph of popular democracy. These were the days of industrial unions, The Grapes of Wrath, demonstrations for the Scottsboro Boys, rent strikes, and the like. By the late 1940s, however, many of these same public intellectuals moved into the Cold War camp. Alarmed by the rise of fascism and Soviet totalitarianism, when they saw large crowds of people demonstrating in the streets, they no longer saw working-class heroes. They saw Nuremberg, and it frightened them. This helps explain why Hofstadter’s famous 1955 book, The Age of Reform, portrayed 1890s populists and early-twentieth-century progressives as narrow-minded bigots with a tremendous capacity for hate and conspiratorial fantasy. Though much of this interpretation no longer holds up, the book remains an important artifact of mid-century intellectual distrust of mass political action. All the King’s Men was written and produced in this same tradition. Though the original film focused more intently on Willie Stark’s demagogic talents than on the credulity of his constituents, every good demagogue surely needs a believing crowd. In the wake of the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, a new generation of intellectuals rediscovered an affinity for mass politics. These same intellectuals dominate the academy, and the editorial room, today. I wonder, then, how much resonance All the King’s Men continues to have. We have learned not to be as skeptical of crowds as Robert Penn Warren was, even if we remain deeply distrustful of rabble-rousing politicians who make great promises that we know, in our heart of hearts, can’t be delivered.
September 30, 2006
Clinton/Bush Equals Charles II/William III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:50 AM EST A short while ago Joshua Zeitz and I discussed whether George Bush would be remembered as a latter-day Harry Truman or a latter-day James Buchanan. Obviously the jury will be out on that question for quite some time.
The inestimable Michael Barone, of U.S. News and World Report, yesterday chimed in (go here and scroll down) with a striking analogy of George Bush as King William III and Bill Clinton as King Charles II. I recommend it to all as a first-rate example of the power of history to explain the present. As Barone notes, historical analogies must not be taken too far and always break down at some point but can illuminate nonetheless. I found it fascinating.
In the same column, Barone analyzes poll results regarding the Iraq War. Barone is the co-author of The Almanac of American Politics, which, I promise you, is on the desk of every American politician, regardless of party, above the level of deputy assistant dog-catcher. He has a wide reputation for being an unusually acute analyzer of polls. His analysis is well worth reading here, even if you disagree with his conclusions.
September 30, 2006
Gordon’s Persiflage Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:15 AM EST John Steele Gordon assumes the point at issue, about the minimum wage, and engages in some intriguingly dated mockery. On the style of mockery and its history (this is a history blog, after all): After simply repeating his assertion that the minimum wage can only hurt the poor, Mr. Gordon then notes, “But liberals, munching a nice ripe Brie in their Upper West Side apartments, and washing it down with a naive little Pinot Grigio of no breeding but much presumption, will feel all warm and fuzzy anyway.” Aficionados of rightist polemical cliché may recall the polemical phrase “the brie and Chablis set,” which has been dragged wearily along by faux-populist would-be demagogues since at least the 1970s. Mr. Gordon has ingeniously updated the despised French white to an Italian made from a mutant clone of Pinot Noir (a Chablis is made from Chardonnay grapes), although the despised Brie remains, if in several senses riper than was originally the case. Why this labored sneering at Brie and white wine? Probably because white wine and runny cheese seemed the cynosure of bicoastal middle-class pseudosophistication back during the Ford Administration, when better Americans were apparently imagined to be still knocking back boilermakers while snacking on pigs in a blanket, and when cheese passed their lips it was presumably cheddar. I am mildly amused by this depiction of Pinot Grigio as the tipple of effete snobs, because the first person I knew who drank the stuff was my father, an extremely unpretentious man who was introduced to it by an allegedly mob-connected restaurant owner in the garment center, where it was otherwise consumed by ominous-looking older gentlemen at whom everyone was careful not to stare. But note what is being attempted by this labored faux-populism. A man who insists that he is looking out for the common man, from a perch somewhere north of the city (apparently a more plebeian precinct than the Upper West Side), is affecting to protect Joe six-pack, or the kid who wants a job in a bodega, from furrin-swilling snotties, by demanding that no cheese-eating, wine-sipping Europhile try to raise the common man’s minimum wage. Lest this solicitude be misunderstood, Mr. Gordon claims a solidarity of taste with Joe six-pack: no Brie and Pinot Grigio for real Americans. What about that breeding and presumption business? It is surely intended to imply that liberals are snobs, people who think they are better than the common man, and are destructively playing Lady Bountiful. That part of the joke, alas, is not wholly original. It dates from 1944, when “Only a native domestic Burgundy, but I think you'll admire its presumption” was the caption to a Thurber cartoon. But Thurber, had he for some reason disliked the minimum wage, would not have over-politicized his joke, and for good reason: The 1940s were not a time when people who wanted to abolish the minimum wage were readily mistaken for friends of the common man. This whole business is a now-familiar tactic by the American right, the substitution of culturalist pseudoargument for rational economic argument: I am one of you, he is one of them, I must have your economic interests at heart, and he cannot, how could he even understand you? He eats Brie! When there is a trace of economic argument, it is argument by assertion, which is to say, assuming the point at issue. Mr. Gordon engages in a long burst of petitio principii, a fallacy also known as begging the question. He simply asserts that the minimum wage “hurts those people who lose their jobs as a result of a minimum-wage increase.” But we do not know whether people nowadays lose their jobs as a result of a minimum-wage increase; that is what we are attempting to discover. I provided links to a study by some very reputable economists suggesting that this does not occur. I provided a link to a study by some less well-known economists suggesting the same thing. I provided a link to a study showing that economists are less persuaded of what Mr. Gordon insists on than was once the case. I do not claim that these studies must be right, but they are worth thinking about. But in this case, thinking is not what Mr. Gordon is doing. He is engaging in rhetoric, and not particularly edifying or original rhetoric. Remember, this is a contested question. There is no indisputable evidence that Americans are losing their jobs because of increases in the minimum wage. The assumption that the minimum wage has perverse effects is what the empirical work, done by rather celebrated economists, has called into question. As for my suggestion that raising the minimum wage is now a much likelier prospect than an attempt to institute politically less-probable earned income tax credits, Mr. Gordon replies that “this is simply an argument to maintain the status quo.” No, it is an attempt to raise the minimum wage, the value of which has eroded quite remarkably since my boyhood, and which has not been raised in a decade. As for Mr. Gordon’s assertion—his mere assertion—that “anyone capable of holding a job is capable of filing a form”—he might want to look at the evidence on the effects of functional illiteracy, which is a real factor in the lives of the poorest of the working poor.
September 29, 2006
Free Markets II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:45 PM EST A free market, at least in my definition, is one where buyers and sellers can freely enter and leave and can charge or offer what they think the market will bear.
But a free market does not mean a market without rules. No one wants sellers of medical services to be unlicensed or sellers of unskilled labor to be six years old or buyers of goods and services to be excluded because of race. But the rules must be uniformly applied and fair. All too often they are not. Rent-seekers, as they are called in economics, are always after the government to put a thumb on the scale for their benefit.
Organizations frequently seek to maintain monopolies or cartels by getting governments to enforce unfair or unnecessary rules. Optometrists in New York State, for instance, fought tooth and nail against allowing drugstores to sell reading glasses in standard strengths, as they could in most other states. They claimed that all sorts of horrors would follow if presbyopics were not examined first before having these glasses prescribed for them. Since they lost that fight several years ago, the only result of allowing people to buy reading glasses unassisted in New York State has been a considerable decline in the cost of the glasses.
Further, there must be cops on the beat. Markets are inherently unstable, as individuals will always pursue their own interests and some of them will always be willing to cheat. The more that is at stake, the more people who will be willing to cheat. (Imagine what the Super Bowl would turn into if those guys in striped shirts weren’t on the field.) Some mechanism must safeguard the interests of the market as a whole. The best example of what happens when there are no referees on the playing field of the free market—regardless of how level it is—is Wall Street in the 1860s, a topic I mentioned today in an earlier post.
Wall Street had been a small and parochial affair before the Civil War, and the rules, such as they were, were enforced mostly by peer pressure. If individuals cheated too much or too frequently, they found no one willing to trade with them. But by the time the war ended, Wall Street was the second largest securities market in the world, second only to London. With trading taking place not only at the New York Stock Exchange but also at the Open Board of Brokers, out on Broad Street itself (the so-called curb market), and even uptown at the Fifth Avenue Hotel long into the night, no Wall Street institution was able to enforce the rules.
Neither was government, because the federal government did not then have any role in regulating markets, and the city and state governments were mired in corruption of breath-taking extent. In 1868 the New York State Legislature actually passed a law the effect of which was to legalize bribery. The English Fraser’s Magazine reported that year that “in New York there is a custom among litigants, as peculiar to that city, it is to be hoped, as it is supreme within it, of retaining a judge as well as a lawyer.”
The result was Wall Street’s Wild West days. It was capitalism red in tooth and claw. It was very entertaining for those who could merely watch, but brokers knew it was no way to run a railroad. When the New York Stock Exchange merged with its largest (indeed, larger) rival, the Open Board of Brokers, in 1869, the new organization became powerful enough to enforce the rules needed to make Wall Street a safe place for honest men to do business.
September 29, 2006
The Serendipitous Pleasures of Historical Research Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:45 PM EST When I was writing The Scarlet Woman of Wall Street, a history of Wall Street in the 1860s, I decided to go through the New York Herald—then the greatest newspaper in New York and perhaps the world—for the period. It was unindexed, so I went over to the New York Public Library Annex on far West 43rd Street and looked through it in hard copy.
It took forever, not because there was so much material—individual issues were seldom more than eight pages long—but because I kept getting distracted by articles that had nothing to do with Wall Street. Civil War battle reports, juicy murders in Wisconsin, baseball games, deaths of European royalty such as the prince consort, Atlantic cable layings, draft riots, French invasions of Mexico, etc., etc. It was a window into the world of the 1860s such as no historian can recreate, for it was the very same window the people who lived in New York in the 1860s had used in order to see the world beyond their ken.
Yesterday, while looking for something else entirely, I came upon an article in The New York Times of April 26, 1934, with the headline, “Rowland Stebbinses Hosts at a Musicale.” Naturally I read it, not because I have much interest in musical soirées of the early 1930s but because Rowland Stebbins was my great uncle (his wife, Aunt Marie—short for Marion and pronounced like “marry”—was my grandmother Steele’s sister). I don’t remember Uncle Rowland, who died when I was four, but I loved Aunt Marie dearly until her death in 1972 at the age of 88. I still remember her surprisingly bright blue eyes twinkling with glee as some witty remark bubbled up from within.
It was quite an evening. The singers were Edward Johnson, a very popular tenor at the Metropolitan Opera, who became the general manager of the Met the following year, and Florence Page Kimball, best known as a vocal coach, whose most famous pupil was Leontyne Price.
As was usual in these sorts of articles, the guest list was given. Many were my assorted Stebbins relations, and friends of the family whose names are familiar to me even now, decades after they died. But what I found most interesting of the guests was my grandfather Gordon. He and uncle Rowland had been partners on Wall Street before Uncle Rowland had left the Street in August of 1929 (good timing, Uncle Rowland!), but they were not particularly close friends. My mother, then 12, and my father, then 15, would not meet for another six years.
September 29, 2006
Torture, Then and Now Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 12:15 PM EST Gen. George Washington on torture during wartime, courtesy of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton: video here.
September 29, 2006
The Minimum Wage: Still More Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:45 AM EST Fred Smoler writes, “If minimum wages help very needy people at all, that is already a blow to the empire of theory, because theory maintains that minimum wages increase unemployment, especially among the unskilled.” There is no doubt that the minimum wage helps those who still have a job—it increases their take-home pay. But it hurts those people who lose their jobs as a result of a minimum-wage increase. Even if, net, there is no loss of jobs or considerably more people are helped than hurt, that doesn’t change the fact that some people—real people, with families, with dreamswill be hurt by an increase in the minimum wage.
It is all too easy for us who, by the grace of God, can earn a decent living, to regard low-wage workers as an abstraction, a data set, not flesh and blood. But all the beautifully designed and carefully executed economic studies in the world do not put supper on the table of the family whose breadwinner lost his job because of an increase in the minimum wage.
He writes, “I think this claim [that minimum wage increases cause a rise in unemployment] is the source of any moral authority that the argument against the minimum wage can command . . .” Does no “moral authority”—whatever the hell that is—derive from the fact that there is a better way to help those who need help? A way that would involve no one losing his or her job?
I wrote yesterday that God did not include among the instructions for a well-run society that Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai a commandment to institute a minimum wage. Both Mr. Smoler and Mr. Zeitz do not seem to grasp that the minimum wage is not a sacred, unquestionable concept to be defended at all costs.
Mr. Smoler writes, “Academic economists tend to agree that earned income tax credits are preferable to minimum wages, and Mr. Gordon seems to share this view. My sense is that while there are some problems with earned income tax credits—very poor people are bad at filing the requisite forms, and the credit arrives only once a year, which is a significant practical difficulty—EITCs would in an ideal world be better public policy.”
This is a classic example of a liberalism-in-its-dotage argument for maintaining the status quo. There might be a problem somewhere, somehow, so let’s do nothing. Exactly the same argument is used to prevent any reform of voter registration laws. Anyone capable of holding a job is capable of filing a form. And the credit could easily arrive weekly. Simply set up an account for the individual, an account replenished weekly, and give him a debit card. People who now deal with food stamps can surely deal with this system. Indeed, they already do.
He writes, “But this is not an ideal world. There is significant political momentum behind the drive to raise the minimum wage, and politics is the art of the possible.” Again, this is simply an argument to maintain the status quo, no matter how lousy the status quo is. Liberalism has become the conservative force in American politics, fiercely resisting any and all ideas that weren’t part of the progressive agenda of a century ago (the first minimum wage law was enacted in Massachusetts in 1911).
He writes, “If you want to help the poorest working Americans, raising the minimum wage by a dollar or two may well be the likeliest way to do that any time soon.” Except, of course, for the poorest working Americans who actually lose their jobs because of it. They will be hurt. But liberals, munching a nice ripe Brie in their Upper West Side apartments, and washing it down with a naive little Pinot Grigio of no breeding but much presumption, will feel all warm and fuzzy anyway.
September 29, 2006
Free Markets Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:15 AM EST John Steele Gordon wrote that “in the real world, markets can never be totally free. But they should be as free as possible.” To my mild surprise, Josh Zeitz seems to agree with him, writing that “Mr. Gordon’s point—that ‘in the real world, markets can never be totally free. But they should be as free as possible’—may be correct.” I suppose this depends on what “as free as possible” means.
So without knowing what my fellow bloggers mean by that phrase, I shall merely point out that some very good economists do not think that markets should be as free as possible, if that means a return to the least-regulated economic regimes with which we have ever experimented. One of my favorite economists, Jagdish Baghwati, is a pretty militant free-trader. He believes that trade in manufactured goods and agricultural products should be very free indeed, and he is remarkably hostile to what he thinks excessive protection of intellectual property, but he does not believe in unregulated financial flows, that American policy goal of the 1990s, which he thinks can lead to destructive capital flight. Bagwhati was the favorite choice of economists to head the World Trade Organization, which should be some testament to his professional competence.
So what does “as free as possible” mean? For most of history, there were no child-labor laws. I’ve seen some good arguments against very strong child-labor laws in very poor countries, but who believes in the total repeal of child-labor laws in rich countries? There are also some interesting arguments against very strong environmental regulations in very poor countries. Bagwhati has made them, but he does not suggest an equally minimal environmental regulatory environment in rich countries. It would be possible to allow people to work without health and safety regulations. We did that, for most of recorded history, so we know it is possible, but who is for it? There is an old joke alleging that health and safety legislation prevents the market from getting rid of inefficient consumers, but I don’t know too many people who seriously propose that goal. Who is in favor of completely scrapping controls over the free movement of labor, meaning unrestricted immigration? We did that before the 1920s, and did rather well by it, but I cannot think of anyone who claims that we should return to that policy. One still hears the argument for allowing racial discrimination in hiring, but very few people are persuaded by it. So I am genuinely curious: What does “as free as possible” mean to my fellow bloggers?
September 28, 2006
Two Albums Worth Buying Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:30 PM EST It’s been an exciting year for American folk music. Since the waning days of the postwar urban folk revival, which gave rise to such groups as the Weavers, Peter, Paul and Mary, and the New Lost City Ramblers, and to such
influential solo performers as Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and Bob Dylan, folk’s definition has been blurred, and its following somewhat dispersed. The singer-songwriter movement of the mid-1960s and after helped stretch the definitional limits of folk music such that the term no longer really means anything terribly specific. If it’s acoustic, the local record store is likely to shelve it in the folk section. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess what folk music is or isn’t. Earlier this year, Bruce Springsteen released We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, an album of songs popularized over the past six decades by Pete Seeger. Ironically, though he intended the album as a tribute to Seeger, who is an accomplished songwriter as well as a performer of traditional material, most of the songs on the album claim roots as slave spirituals, minstrel numbers, trans-Atlantic transplants, or otherwise organic inventions that took shape over many centuries. Technically, Seeger didn’t write any of the album’s songs. I know that American Heritage Magazine will have more to say about Springsteen’s album in an upcoming issue, so I’ll withhold comment other than to give the album two thumbs up. It’s truly exciting to hear a performer of Springsteen’s stature reclaim traditional material and give it a modern twist. Today I discovered another such album: Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs, & Chanteys. This priceless collection of old sea songs boasts performers as diverse as Lucinda Williams, Lou Reed, Bono, and Sting, and it brings to seafaring music the same blend of innovation and respect for tradition that Springsteen lent to Seeger’s catalog. I’ve just started listening to the album on my iPod and would already recommend it to American Heritage readers.
September 28, 2006
What Caused the Great Depression? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 08:00 PM EST John Steele Gordon writes: “I think it’s a stretch, to put it mildly, to say that the uneven distribution of wealth in the early twentieth century led to underconsumption, which led to the Great Depression. It was a bit more complicated than that.” It’s always nice to be condescended to by Mr. Gordon, but in this case it’s only fair to remind him that I only suggested that “the distribution of wealth and income [in the 1920s] was alarmingly uneven, contributing ultimately to the crisis of underconsumption that helped fuel the Great Depression.” I never claimed it was the only or the sole cause of the Depression. That said, Mr. Gordon, who is reflexively dismissive of any idea that doesn’t flow from his pen or that challenges the sanctity of Adam Smith and the invisible hand, might want to consider that historians of far greater accomplishment than he or I have identified uneven income and wealth distribution as a cause of the Depression. In his general text America in the Twentieth Century, James T. Patterson, a Bancroft Prize winner and Ford Foundation professor of history emeritus at Brown University, devotes several pages to explaining the Depression. After reviewing some key ingredients—“the jerry-built nature of America’s corporate structure by 1929,” the instability of the banking system, “rampant speculation,” and the downward spiral in the agricultural sector—he explains that the American economy stagnated by 1929. “At the root of this stagnation was the maldistribution of income in America. . . . This distribution of income was no worse than it had been in earlier decades. The middle classes, in fact, formed a higher percentage of the population. But therein lay a key problem: ‘new era’ prosperity depended as never before on mass purchasing power. Until 1925 or so this consumer power, fueled by gains during the war years, was sufficient to promote growth. . . . By 1927, however, many people who could afford to buy such goods [as houses, cars, and furnishings] had already done so. As this ‘saturation point’ was approached, demand slackened, production leveled off, and payrolls stabilized. . . . These impediments to increased purchasing power helped make the depression of the 1930s deeper and more severe than any in the American past.” David M. Kennedy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 and a professor at Stanford University, agrees. Kennedy writes, “Mass production made mass consumption a reality. But as [Herbert] Hoover’s investigators discovered, the increasing wealth of the 1920s flowed disproportionately to the owners of capital. Workers’ incomes were rising, but not at a rate that kept pace with the nation’s growing industrial output. Without broadly distributed purchasing power, the engines of mass production would have no outlet and would eventually fall idle. The automobile industry, where Fordism had begun, was among the first to sense the force of this logic.” Of course, with a large portion of the country—namely, farmers—already living in dire economic circumstances, under-consumption was bound to pose a problem. And indeed it did. The Great Depression owed to a great many factors, but at its core was the uneven distribution of wealth and income that ground America’s mass consumption economy to a halt.
September 28, 2006
The Minimum Wage, Continued Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:30 PM EST John Steele Gordon writes that “Even in this all-too-imperfect world, a minimum wage is a lousy way to help those who really need the help, mainly because it doesn’t help them very much if at all.” But if minimum wages help very needy people at all, that is already a blow to the empire of theory, because theory maintains that minimum wages increase unemployment, especially among the unskilled. I think this claim is the source of any moral authority that the argument against the minimum wage can command, and there is some recent evidence that under some conditions, minimum wages do help very needy people, at least in rich countries like the United States. For example one 1999 study found that federal minimum-wage increases in the 1990s did reduce U.S. poverty rates (John Addison and McKinley Blackburn, “Minimum Wages and Poverty,” in Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Vol. 53, No. 3). There are other studies, on both side of the question, but the case against a minimum wage in, say, Sri Lanka, is generally thought a lot stronger than the case against a modest increase here and now. In a poor country, minimum wages reduce the ability to make the most of what may be the sole competitive advantage, cheap labor. But Josh Zeitz was writing about our economy. I grant Mr. Gordon’s argument that isolating the weight of one factor is very hard to do in something as complicated as the U.S. economy—but that does not mean that people shouldn’t try. Mr. Gordon states that he cannot speak to the quality of the study I cited. If it is any help, the last time I checked, David Card, who in 1995 won the John Bates Clark medal (the second most prestigious award in economics, the most prestigious being the Nobel Prize), was tenured at Berkeley, Alan Kreuger at Princeton. Neither university’s economics department is a hotbed of Bolshevism, and at least one Nobel laureate in economics has praised this work. That does not mean that the study is beyond challenge, but these are not charlatans. As it happens, while most American economists continue to have theoretical objections to the minimum wage, fewer are convinced of its inevitable evils than was once the case. A 2003 survey of academic economists (“Consensus Among Economists: Revisited,” in Journal of Economic Review, Vol. 34, No. 4) showed that 46 percent of them then agreed that a minimum wage increased unemployment among young and unskilled workers, and that an additional 28 percent were in partial agreement with that dictum of theory. But in 1990 it seems that 63 percent of academic economists thought this, while another 19.5 percent partially agreed with it. The number of academic economists who think this proposition false has increased rather dramatically (from 17.5 percent to 27 percent). Academic economists tend to agree that earned income tax credits are preferable to minimum wages, and Mr. Gordon seems to share this view. My sense is that while there are some problems with earned income tax credits—very poor people are bad at filing the requisite forms, and the credit arrives only once a year, which is a significant practical difficulty—EITCs would in an ideal world be better public policy. But this is not an ideal world. There is significant political momentum behind the drive to raise the minimum wage, and politics is the art of the possible. If you want to help the poorest working Americans, raising the minimum wage by a dollar or two may well be the likeliest way to do that any time soon.
September 28, 2006
Impoundment Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:00 PM EST Joshua Zeitz writes, “When President Richard Nixon impounded federal funds that Congress had authorized and appropriated for environmental protection, his actions were correctly understood as activist. Yes, he was choosing not to spend money. But willfully ignoring appropriations that had been legally mandated was an affirmative action.”
Mr. Zeitz makes it sound as though Richard Nixon invented the concept of impoundment. He didn’t. It was, in fact, that Democratic icon Thomas Jefferson who was the first president to decline to spend a Congressional appropriation. In 1803 he informed Congress that he had not spent $50,000 appropriated for gunboats because of “the peaceful turn of events.”
Most later Presidents also impounded funds, some because the reason to spend them had, in the President’s judgment, been obviated, or because they didn’t approve of the reason, or because of budgetary considerations. In 1950 Congress even acknowledged the impoundment power of the President by explicitly authorizing the executive to take advantage of savings that were made possible by developments that occurred after an appropriation had been made.
In 1966 Lyndon Johnson impounded a whopping $5.6 billion out of a total budget of $134 billion. The funds he declined to spend included $1.1 billion in highway funds and $760 million in such congressionally beloved spending programs as agriculture, housing, and education. Congress, needless to say, was not happy, but acquiesced.
So Nixon was merely following in a long-established tradition of his predecessors, except that, characteristically perhaps, he went too far. When Congress passed the Federal Water Pollution Act in 1972, Nixon thought it too expensive and vetoed it. (He wasn’t against “environmental protection”; he opposed spending $6 billion on it as directed by the bill.) Congress, however, overrode his veto, and Nixon then impounded the $6 billion.
Nixon perhaps would have been much better advised to have signed the act and then declined to spend the money, or some of it. By vetoing the bill and then impounding the money when he was overridden, he was making a direct attack on the power of Congress to make the laws. Hearings were convened in both houses on impoundment but no law came out of them. The Supreme Court has never ruled on the constitutionality of impoundment (although lower courts have ruled against it).
In 1974, with Nixon’s Presidency in its death throes, Congress passed the Budget Control Act of 1974, which stripped the President of the power of impoundment. As I have written before, the Budget Control Act is probably the most misnamed act in Congressional history, for it totally marginalized the President as a major player in the game of budgetary politics, and the budget went out of control.
What’s needed is what almost all governors have, a line-item veto. It would make the President once more a major player. This is important because the President is the only elected official in Washington—other than the constitutionally powerless Vice President—elected by the entire country, and thus the only one in Washington without parochial interests. I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for it, however. Just witness how hard the members of Congress tried this summer and fall to prevent the public from finding out what earmarks they were behind.
September 28, 2006
Kids Say the Darnedest Things Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 03:00 PM EST A little girl that I know is at the age where she’s started asking awkward questions. Recently she said to me, “Why did World War II start?”
I replied, “Well, there was a very bad man named Hitler who was the ruler of Germany, and he wanted to take over all of Europe, so he sent soldiers into Poland. Some other countries didn’t like that, and they tried to stop him, and that’s how the war began.”
She frowned. “Was that before or after Pearl Harbor?”
“Oh, Pearl Harbor came later,” I replied. “The Japanese wanted to rule all of East Asia, so they dropped a bunch of bombs on our ships at Pearl Harbor. That’s how the United States got involved in the war.”
She nodded, thought for a moment, and said, “Well then, how did World War I start?”
“Well . . . ,” I said, “a man shot a nobleman from . . . um, someplace in Europe, and, er, the other countries . . . uh . . .” She stared at me with the no-nonsense look that seven-year-olds seem to specialize in. And after a few more moments of fumbling, I fell back on the ever-useful last resort for kids with inconvenient questions: “Go ask your parents.”
September 28, 2006
Taxes, Wage Controls, and Underconsumption II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:30 PM EST Several points:
1) The studies that Fred Smoler mentions hardly demonstrate that minimum-wage increases “have been shown to have little or no effect on economic growth.” They demonstrated (I assume, I can’t say as to the quality of the studies) that a particular minimum-wage increase in a particular place, at a particular time, under particular conditions did not have much discernible affect on the unemployment rate at that time and place. That does not exactly make them a worthy successor to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations or Lord Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.
As I pointed out earlier, economics is not a laboratory science, and we must take our data where we find it—from the real world—and that means the data is always going to be full of noise, making interpretation difficult at best. When you add in the fact that politicians seldom if ever have the slightest reluctance to use economic data tendentiously and that political reporters are usually stone-dumb ignorant regarding both economics and basic statistics (not to mention the basic techniques of tendentious statistical manipulation), the noise is deafening.
2) Mr. Zeitz writes, “I’m sure Mr. Gordon would agree that the construction of even a modestly enhanced welfare state would require steep increases in taxes or, at least, a repeal of the Bush tax cuts.” Yes, it would, but I don’t advocate a modestly enhanced welfare state. I advocate helping those who need help by means other than a minimum wage, which helps few who need it (full-time, low-skilled workers supporting families) and many who don’t (high-skilled and high-paid union workers). In a perfect world (which, in case someone hasn’t noticed, isn’t the one we live in) a negative income tax could be easily financed out of other federal welfare programs it would replace and out of corporate welfare programs that should never have been implemented in the first place. Even in this all-too-imperfect world, a minimum wage is a lousy way to help those who really need the help, mainly because it doesn’t help them very much if at all.
I don’t mean to be flippant (well, okay, yes I do), but Moses did not bring down from Sinai the concept of a minimum wage. It is not sacred. If there is a better way to accomplish its ostensible goals, we should use it.
3) He writes, “We began this discussion by remembering Henry Ford, who blazed new trails in paying his workers $5 a day and granting them a 40-hour work week. He did these things in the 1910s and 1920s, when the distribution of wealth and income was alarmingly uneven, contributing ultimately to the crisis of underconsumption that helped fuel the Great Depression.”
I think it’s a stretch, to put it mildly, to say that the uneven distribution of wealth in the early twentieth century led to underconsumption, which led to the Great Depression. It was a bit more complicated than that. As for what caused an ordinary recession to spiral into an economic calamity, I would, with characteristic modesty, recommend Chapter 16, “Fear Itself,” of my book An Empire of Wealth.
But here let me suggest one cause. The real villain in causing the Great Depression was . . . Henry Ford!
In 1900 30 percent of the cropland in the United States was devoted to fodder crops—hay, oats, etc.—to feed the tens of millions of horses and mules that powered local transportation and agricultural equipment. As Ford’s revolution in both local transportation and agricultural equipment (the Fordson tractor took over from horses during the First World War, as the horses were shipped to Europe to be slaughtered alongside the soldiers), the demand for fodder crops relentlessly declined. More and more land was given over to producing food for humans. The extraordinary demands for American produce during World War I masked what was happening. But as Europe, and European agriculture, began to recover, farm prices here began declining as supply increased more rapidly than demand. Rural America went into depression (and rural banks began to fail in large numbers) long before urban America did.
September 28, 2006
Who’s a Judicial Activist? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:45 AM EST In our exchange on judicial activism, John Steele Gordon agreed with me that liberals and conservatives alike tend to write off as “judicial activism” perfectly reasonable legal theories and applications of legal theory with which they disagree. He also seems to concur that there are, in fact, plenty of liberal and conservative judicial activists to go around.
But Mr. Gordon disagrees with my argument that the federal courts from the 1870s through the 1930s (and quite possibly, the 1950s) practiced conservative judicial activism when they narrowly construed the Fourteenth Amendment. “I’m not sure that the narrow interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment by the Supreme Court until recent times is an example of conservative judicial activism,” he writes. “It is more a case of judicial inactivism. ‘Judicial activism,’ it seems to me, must be about expanding power, either of the court vis-à-vis the other two branches, or of the government in ways that no one previously thought the government possessed.”
This argument strikes me as a little too semantic. When President Richard Nixon impounded federal funds that Congress had authorized and appropriated for environmental protection, his actions were correctly understood as activist. Yes, he was choosing not to spend money. But willfully ignoring appropriations that had been legally mandated was an affirmative action. When President Andrew Johnson doggedly refused to enforce or abide by laws that were passed over his veto—notably, the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill and the Civil Rights Act of 1866—he was affirmatively interfering with the proper functioning of the federal government.
Likewise when the federal courts willfully ignored the constitutional mandate to hold states to the provisions of the Bill of Rights, and when those courts developed a novel interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s phrase “persons” to include corporations (which the courts protected against labor organizers by creatively construing a right to free contract for these same corporations), the Courts were acting affirmatively and in an activist fashion.
If I refused to pay my federal income taxes because I claimed to believe that graduated income taxes are unconstitutional, the government would not consider me negligent; it would consider me a tax dodger, and justly so. Inaction can be an activist tool, especially when Presidents, courts, or citizens take it upon themselves to circumvent the long-established procedures by which we govern ourselves.
September 28, 2006
Taxes, Wage Controls, and Underconsumption Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:45 AM EST I’m somewhat confused by John Steele Gordon’s apparently doctrinaire opposition to the minimum wage. On one hand, Mr. Gordon acknowledges that “free markets” are never, in fact, 100 percent free, though he argues that governments should attempt to keep markets unfettered to the maximum extent possible. Thus, price and wage controls, under which rubric the minimum wage falls, are anathema to a free-market economy. Mr. Gordon suggests instead that the government supplement the incomes of low-skill wage earners with either a negative income tax (as Richard Nixon proposed during his first term as President) or enhanced cash and service programs like food stamps, Medicaid, and the like.
Yet in earlier exchanges on tax policy and history, Mr. Gordon vigorously defended the logic behind the Laffer Curve, the supply-side model that (in Mr. Gordon’s words) “says that when tax rates on income (not any old tax) are above an optimum point, revenue will be increased by lowering the rates because people will be more willing to earn the taxable income. . . . The tricky bit, of course, is to figure out where on the curve the point that will maximize revenues is.”
A few days ago, Fred Smoler pointed to studies that suggest that the minimum wage has not been an impediment to economic growth or job growth. I’m sure Mr. Gordon would agree that the construction of even a modestly enhanced welfare state would require steep increases in taxes or, at least, a repeal of the Bush tax cuts. By his own logic, these tax hikes would have a debilitating effect on the economy. So why not address the problems facing the working poor by continuing to ask businesses to pay a living wage?
We began this discussion by remembering Henry Ford, who blazed new trails in paying his workers $5 a day and granting them a 40-hour work week. He did these things in the 1910s and 1920s, when the distribution of wealth and income was alarmingly uneven, contributing ultimately to the crisis of underconsumption that helped fuel the Great Depression.
In light of this historical example, how are wage controls, which have been shown to have little or no effect on economic growth, worse than tax hikes, which Mr. Gordon believes dampen economic growth?
September 27, 2006
Still More on the Minimum Wage Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:30 PM EST Joshua Zeitz writes, “But until the government stops manipulating free markets on behalf of employers, I don’t see why it can’t even the playing field for low-skill workers.”
To put that another way: As long as the federal government is doing economically disruptive things for the benefit of particular corporations, it should do this particular economically disruptive thing as well for the benefit of labor unions, disguising it in a cloud of intellectually dishonest verbiage about helping the working poor. I think the federal government should stop, in so far as possible (taxes are economically disruptive too), doing economically disruptive things. Corporate welfare is wrong. A minimum wage is wrong. Corporate welfare and a minimum wage is twice as wrong, not right.
There are simply better ways to do what the minimum wage is ostensibly designed to do (but doesn’t), economically assist the lowest-skilled workers. He writes, “I wonder if Mr. Gordon would prefer something along the lines of Richard Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan (FAP), which would have replaced the web of welfare programs for low-income workers with a negative income tax guaranteeing a minimum national income.”
The FAP came out of the ever-fertile brain of one of my political heroes, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. I supported it wholeheartedly in 1969, when Nixon first proposed it, and I support such a scheme today. I usually support anything that would collapse dozens of often conflicting government programs into one program, even if it has no other virtues. And the FAP had many. Unfortunately, it gored so many oxen (labor unions, anti-welfare let-’em-eat-cake types, bureaucrats, agricultural interests, and so on) that it got nowhere.
September 27, 2006
The Wreck of the Old 97 Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:00 PM EST One hundred and three years ago today, 11 passengers and crew members were killed when a train traveling between Monroe, Virginia, and Spencer, North Carolina, derailed and fell down a steep hill near Danville. The train, known as the “Old 97,” had a solid record for punctuality; in his determination to get to Spencer on time, the engineer accelerated the engine too quickly. The rest, as they say, was history.
The Old 97 certainly wasn’t America’s worst train-related accident. Between 1890 and 1917 roughly 72,000 railroad employees died in work-related accidents, while another two million were seriously injured on the job. Those figures don’t account for the 158,000 men who died in railroad repair shops and roundhouses.
Yet the Old 97 stuck in the popular mind. Vernon Dalhart’s recording of the country ballad song “The Wreck of the Old 97” was probably the first record to sell a million copies, as early as the 1920s. Folk balladeers from Woody Guthrie (who was, as far as authenticity goes, a pretty legitimate wandering troubadour) to Ramblin’ Jack Elliott (who was not: a Jewish kid from New York, Ramblin’ Jack was born Elliott Charles Adnopoz and reinvented himself as a traveling cowboy singer) made the song famous.
Like “The Ballad of John Henry,” “The Wreck of the Old 97” resonated with an industrializing nation. In an age when men used machines to harness the natural world, occasionally those machines fought back.
September 27, 2006
More on the Minimum Wage Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 01:15 PM EST In drawing on historical examples of government-sponsored, artificially manipulated wage systems (like slavery) and government-sponsored, artificially manipulated price systems (like agricultural subsidies or land grants), my intention was simply to keep my dialogue with John Steele Gordon rooted in history. This, it seemed to me, was in keeping with the mission of AmericanHeritage.com.
In response, Mr. Gordon writes: “So what? The horrors of slavery have no relevance today, 140 years after slavery ended. The fact that the government artificially suppressed wages in the past doesn’t justify artificially boosting them today.” Fair enough. But the government continues to artificially manipulate prices through its generous system of subsidies to agribusiness, energy companies, telecommunications firms, and, yes, Iraq War defense contractors, who until recently enjoyed access to no-bid reconstruction contracts, and who still enjoy the benefits of cost-plus contracts that are grossly at variance with market principles.
Mr. Gordon’s point—that “in the real world, markets can never be totally free. But they should be as free as possible”—may be correct. But until the government stops manipulating free markets on behalf of employers, I don’t see why it can’t even the playing field for low-skill workers.
Mr. Gordon also suggests that a better way of addressing the problem is to “supplement [the earnings of low-skill workers] through refundable tax credits, food stamps, Medicaid, etc., as indeed the government already does.” I wonder if Mr. Gordon would prefer something along the lines of Richard Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan (FAP), which would have replaced the web of welfare programs for low-income workers with a negative income tax guaranteeing a minimum national income. The FAP never gained congressional approval, but it reinvigorated the debate about poverty in the 1970s, long after the Great Society took its last gasp of air. I’m writing about that issue for my book on 1970s America and would be curious to know what he and others think.
September 27, 2006
George Allen and “the N-Word” II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:15 AM EST Joshua Zeitz seems to take a hit piece on the far-left website Salon as self-evident truth and convict George Allen on the basis of it of the charge of being a racist. I do not.
In the piece, three people—two of them hiding in anonymity—remember Senator George Allen using hateful words and having obnoxious attitudes more than 30 years ago. (1) Memories three decades old are nearly worthless as historical evidence. (2) Memories of people who will not allow their names to be used are evidence of nothing but cowardice on the part of the people who claim the memory. (3) These sorts of accusations in the middle of a political campaign appearing on a highly partisan website should be given no credence whatsoever. They are not historical evidence, they are propaganda, and this is a history blog.
It might be noted that George Allen disputes these charges and quotes—by name—numerous people who knew him at the time, who remember no such behavior. See here.
It might also be noted that George Allen has been involved in Virginia politics for 30 years, since he became chairman of Young Virginians for Reagan in 1976. From 1983 to 1991 he was a member of the Virginia House of Delegates. From 1991 to 1993 he was a congressman from Virginia. From 1993 to 1997 he was governor of Virginia. Since 2001 he has been a United States Senator from Virginia. In none of his many previous campaigns has any accusation of racism surfaced. Now, suddenly, a few people have distant “memories.” How very convenient for his opponent’s campaign.
As for the reluctance of the media to use the word nigger, there seems to be a very simple explanation. And that is the same explanation of why the Deutsche Oper cancelled performances of Mozart’s Idomeneo: Because people claiming the infinite right to be offended would raise holy hell and the media would supinely go along instead of telling them to grow up. When a few years ago an aide to Washington’s Mayor Williams used the word niggardly, a word that has nothing to do with racism and has been in regular use in English since 1571 and is of Scandinavian origin—not a part of Europe famous for its people of color—he was immediately fired when someone objected. Only after someone took the time to use a dictionary was he reinstated. If someone can get fired for using a word that shares a syllable with the word nigger, it is not surprising that people don’t want to use it.
This notion that anyone claiming “minority” status has an absolute right to set all the rules regarding the public discourse and other people’s behavior and vocabulary regarding any issue dealing with that minority is perhaps the most absurd and counterproductive aspect of political correctness.
September 27, 2006
The Minimum Wage III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:45 AM EST Just two comments on the posts of Joshua Zeitz and Frederic Smoler.
1) Mr. Smoler writes that theory is clear that minimum wage laws cause unemployment, but that data from the real world is much less so. That, it seems to me, is exactly what one would expect. Economics is not a laboratory science; we cannot control all variables to see precisely which ones are responsible for observed phenomena. So the fact that in a particular time and place, changes in minimum-wage laws did not result in precisely what theory predicts is actually neither here nor there. Just for one thing, there might have been a sharply rising demand for labor in that market anyway, which would swamp any negative effects of the rise in the minimum wage.
2) Mr. Zeitz first states, quite correctly, that the federal government, through such devices as the Fugitive Slave Law, helped keep wages down. So what? The horrors of slavery have no relevance today, 140 years after slavery ended. The fact that the government artificially suppressed wages in the past doesn’t justify artificially boosting them today.
Then he gives an overview of the long, rich, and largely disgraceful history of corporate welfare in this country (it’s not exactly unknown in others too, of course). He notes in particular the transcontinental railroad, which would not have been built without massive government subsidies (subsidies that were ransacked by the management of the railroad in cahoots with half the members of Congress in the Credit Mobilier scandal). The only alternative that I can see would have been building the railroad as a government owned entity. That would have been worse, as political considerations, not economic ones, would have dominated its management from day one. At least the Union Pacific could eventually come into the hands of E. H. Harriman, who turned it into a cash cow and one of the best-run railroads in the world.
And all the unjustified corporate welfare in the world and antilabor actions by the federal government in years past don’t justify labor welfare in the guise of a minimum wage. Even in macroeconomics, three wrongs do not make a right. Mr. Zeitz does not address my suggestion that the problem of inadequate earning power would be better addressed by carefully targeted and calibrated government subsidies to those who lack the marketable skills needed to earn a living wage, not by the blunderbuss of a rise in the legal minimum wage.
In the real world, markets can never be totally free. But they should be as free as possible.
September 27, 2006
George Allen and “the N-Word” Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:00 AM EST I share Josh Zeitz’s irritation with adult journalists writing of Senator Allen allegedly having used “the N- word.” This practice seems grossly infantilizing on a number of levels, and also cowardly, since one motive for this startling coyness is almost certainly fear of unjust accusations of racism, when one is in fact publishing a story exposing someone else’s (alleged) racism, also an implication of magical thinking, since the word is thereby implied to possess almost magical powers. Finally, I think this astonishing coyness sustains the epithet’s admitted power to cause pain. That said, refraining from printing the word is an understandable impulse; what is so annoying is the particularly childish euphemism. Writing “a particularly detested racist epithet” would probably do the trick, without suggesting the manner of a comically smarmy schoolteacher discussing menstruation in front of pubescent pupils. I disagree with Josh’s decision to even ironically welcome Sen. Allen to the fold. He presumably knows the Yiddish expression “a shonde fur de goyim.” For readers don’t know this phrase, it denotes a Jew who is an embarrassment in front of the gentiles. To employ the syntax of Yiddishized English, Sen. Allen we need like a hole in the head. But in addition, in most cases I find it unpleasant to hear people asserting that Sen. Allen is a Jew, when Sen. Allen himself disclaims the identity. He is widely reported to be a practicing Christian. If he wanted to emigrate to Israel, his maternal ancestry would be relevant to the local authorities, but he doesn’t, so it shouldn’t be relevant to anyone. If Sen. Allen is embarrassed by his ancestry, that is his business, not that of the press. If he has made the calculation that his ancestry would be off-putting to some of the voters who might otherwise pull the level for the jerk wearing the C.S.A. battle-flag pin, that is also his business—unattractive, but perhaps not as unattractive as some of the journalists unwittingly playing Gotcha! under the rules that obtained during the Third Reich. The pursuit of this story seems to me to be an invasion of Sen. Allen’s privacy, and it has a strangely bad smell. I do not have anything against Josh’s joking about it, but Josh is (to employ a phrase my people use) self-identified as a member of the tribe. Pointing out someone’s Jewish ancestry, like the use of that notorious racist epithet, can have a different meaning when it is done from without.
September 26, 2006
The Musical About Mrs. Lincoln Posted by Claire Lui at 05:00 PM EST I am a sucker for all shows entitled “[____]: The Musical!” I have attended Medea: The Musical!, a campy drag-queen version of the Greek tragedy, and Bat Boy: The Musical, a cheerful version of a Weekly World News tabloid story about a half-bat half-boy rendered in song.
It was not until last week, though, when my colleague Andrea and I went to see Asylum! The Musical, that I fully realized the possibilities of the genre. In our July 2006 issue we published an article by Jason Emerson, “The Madness of Mary Lincoln,” about the former First Lady’s years in an insane asylum. I fact-checked the piece, and I was drawn into the world of Lincoln obsession, becoming totally engrossed with the family trials of Mary Todd Lincoln, Robert Todd Lincoln, and the rest of the Todd and Lincoln clans. Jason Emerson had discovered a cache of long-lost letters from Mary Todd Lincoln, and reading the copies of those old documents really drew me into the story.
I am not, however, convinced that a topic that makes for exciting fact-checking makes for exciting musical theater. I never imagined that dry and dusty facts (the early flirtation of Mary Todd and Stephen Douglas or the scheming of Mary Todd Lincoln’s savior, Myra Bradwell) could be set to song, and watching these facts be sung by a cast of five was a probably the strangest history experience I’ve ever had. I was sufficiently mesmerized by the play that when I turned to Andrea to comment that the actor playing Abe Lincoln looked more like the actor John Lithgow than Abe, she started laughing and pointed out he was the same actor who was playing Dr. Richard Patterson, something that had completely escaped my notice.
The musical, which portrays Mary as a loving mother forsaken by her cold and money-hungry son (an image, I think, that hit home with many of the audience members), is only one take on the incident. But no matter how you cut it, the tale of Mary Lincoln in the asylum is essentially a domestic one, and thus a footnote. The story is closer to an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond than anything else. I think this kind of history appeals to women—and I say this as a woman—because it represents a kind of forgotten history, a reflection of daily life that is ignored in the stories of battles and politics that make up most history textbooks. Both the composer-lyricist, Carmel Owen, and the book writer of the play, June Bingham, are women, as is the author of a new novel about Mary Lincoln, Janis Cooke Newman.
Newman’s book, Mary: A Novel, seems in my brief skimming to have taken the novels of Judith Krantz, rather than a family television show, as a model. There are many steamy passages between Mary and Abraham Lincoln in this book, and I realized that there are places where my historical imagination is limited. Despite my fascination with the Lincoln family, I do not know if I am ready to read a bodice-ripping (and let me tell you, there is bodice-ripping) description of Mary and Abraham’s love life.
Both the musical and the book have an admirable goal: to make history relevant, and to point out that the Lincolns are not so different from you and me. I think, though, that sometimes we like our heroes to be heroes, and not quite so much like us.
If you are fascinated with the domestic life of First Ladies, you may be interested in Asylum! which ends October 1 and is playing at the York Theatre here in Manhattan. Mary: A Novel, by Janis Cooke Newman, is published by MacAdam/Cage, and the publicist tells me that the book is going to be reviewed by People magazine. At last, a trashy history book.
September 26, 2006
Shana Tova, Senator Allen Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:20 PM EST A few weeks ago, I wrote a review of Jonathan Sokol’s new book, There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975. In that review I cited Virginia’s junior senator, George Allen, as an extreme example of the South’s lingering problem with race. Allen, who until earlier this year harbored presidential ambitions, is unexpectedly locked in a very tight reelection race in the wake of revelations that he has been an ardent Confederate sympathizer, and in the aftermath of two bizarre, racially charged incidents: first, his use of a derogatory term to describe an opposition campaign worker of Indian descent, and second, his tortured denial and then subsequent admission of his mother’s Jewish ancestry, which seemed to cause him considerable embarrassment.
As though Allen’s problems couldn’t get any worse, articles in The New Republic, Salon and The New York Times are now claiming that some of Allen’s former college associates remember his frequent use of the term nigger and an incident where Allen stuffed the head of a deer in an African-American man’s mailbox.
Setting aside the obvious—George Allen is an unreconstructed racist, and also a very strange man—I’m interested in the way the press has chosen to cover the latest allegations of racial insensitivity. Most of the media outlets invoke the term “N-word” to describe Allen’s use of the word nigger. On one level, I understand the desire to be sensitive to the word’s historic usage. It’s a word packed with violence and intimidation. Its utterance causes distress. On the other hand, using the term “N-word” strikes me as both puerile—the sort of thing you’d say to a child—and evasive. The word still circulates in our vocabulary. It still has meaning, though as scholars like Randall Kennedy, the author of Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, have pointed out, the word has variable meanings and contexts.
Historians writing for academic and popular audiences generally do not avoid the use of uncomfortable language in discussing race, religion, class, gender, or sexuality. Seminal works by Leon Litwack and Grace Hale on the culture of Jim Crow, for instance, are full of direct quotations that should make readers squirm. But in being faithful to historical texts, these writers are filling out the larger American narrative forthrightly. How will future generations of students and historians be able to appreciate fully the strange career of George Allen, if his words and actions are concealed behind timid euphemisms?
Americans can handle an adult conversation about race. Any such conversation has to begin with an open acknowledgment of our nation’s racial vocabulary.
On a slightly unrelated note, I’d like to welcome Senator Allen to the fold and wish him a Happy New Year. Yom Kippur is just around the corner. Just an observation. |
