March 24, 2007
Stewardesses IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:15 AM EST Fredric Smoler writes, “But I do not think that regulation can account for the stewardesses being touted in the way they were. There were a lot of regulated industries before Alfred Kahn came along—telecommunications, for example, and trucking, but no eroticization of the labor force in those cases.” I don’t think regulation made the eroticization of stewardesses inevitable, simply possible. Without regulation, the airlines would have competed on price and convenience. With those off the table, they looked about for something else to compete on, and, as I wrote, there wasn’t much available except eye-candy stewardesses. Once it started (perhaps in the fertile brain of a Madison Avenue ad man), of course it took on a life of its own, as these things tend to do in both economic and biological ecosystems, and went about as far as it could go in those more restricted days. As for other regulated industries, telecommunications was a regulated monopoly, not a regulated cartel, so there was no competition at all. Further, the personnel in telecommunications are, the opposite of well-behaved children, largely heard but not seen. (The plot of a 1950s Broadway musical, Bells Are Ringing, turns on this very fact.) The exception is the telephone repairman, a job category that would have been hard—not to mention socially dicey—to eroticize. Nothing much can happen on an airplane, after all, but milkman stories have been around forever. Trucking, in turn, is almost exclusively a wholesale business, with businesses, not individuals, as customers. So sex appeal would not have been a very effective draw. Plus there is the problem of turning truck drivers into the kindling of sexual fantasy for the largely male hirers of trucking companies. Mr. Smoler writes, “Now that airlines can and do compete on the basis of price, there is no reason for them to have stopped competing on other fronts.” Indeed, but with the rise of modern feminism at about the same time as the rise of deregulation, the disappearance of stewardesses touted for their sex appeal rather than their competence was surely inevitable.
March 23, 2007
Stewardesses III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:00 PM EST John Steele Gordon suspects a connection between the eroticization of stewardesses and the regulatory environments in which airlines were born and came of age. On the face of it, this is not a foolish argument: When firms are forbidden to compete on the basis of price, they will generally compete by offering customers other incentives. In the case of the airlines, I remember a race to provide ever more luxurious food. Since airline food had previously been more or less disgusting, this was not necessarily a bad outcome, although much cheaper air travel seems preferable, since people were in effect paying vast sums for the modest pleasure of a bad steak on the way to Florida. But the eventual deregulation of air fares did drive down some prices on many routes, sometimes to an astonishing extent. I still regret my 1999 failure to fly from the United Kingdom to Stockholm for 37 pence, plus taxes and fees (which I think amounted to ten pounds or so). I also think there is something to the notion that some of the higher profit margins regulation produced were passed on to the work force; this was certainly true in broadcast television, and I think it was true with the airlines. But I do not think that regulation can account for the stewardesses being touted in the way they were. There were a lot of regulated industries before Alfred Kahn came along—telecommunications, for example, and trucking, but no eroticization of the labor force in those cases. Similarly, now that airlines can and do compete on the basis of price, there is no reason for them to have stopped competing on other fronts; when I fly Air India, I do it for the combination of the price and the food. I still think there was something peculiar about our culture’s transient stewardess fetish, and I think it has to be explained, at least in part, in non-economic terms.
March 23, 2007
Stewardesses II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:50 AM EST I suspect the eroticization of stewardesses in the early decades of the airline industry was not entirely unconnected with the economic environment in which the airline industry was born. Federal regulation of airlines began in 1926 with the passage of the Air Commerce Act, which charged the Department of Commerce with issuing rules, licensing pilots, and certifying aircraft. It was run by the new Aeronautics Branch of the Commerce Department. As the nascent airline industry grew in the 1930s (although it still transported only a tiny fraction of long-distance passengers at the end of that decade), regulation increased. In 1934 the Aeronautics Branch became the Bureau of Air Commerce (bureau, in bureaucratese, is more prestigious than branch). In 1938 the Civil Aeronautics Act took airline regulation out of the Department of Commerce and into a new independent agency, the Civil Aeronautics Authority. Crucially, it also gave the CAA the power both to regulate air fares and to determine which routes the various carriers could serve. (In 1940, the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) took over economic regulation, while the Civil Aeronautics Administration (later the Federal Aviation Administration, or FAA) took over the technical regulation.) In other words, the Civil Aeronautics Act created an aviation cartel run by the government. The purpose was to prevent “destructive competition,” exactly the same purpose of the old trusts that had stirred the politics of a generation earlier. The only difference was that these were government-run cartels, not privately run ones. But it is, of course, competition that drives capitalism, forcing companies to constantly look for ways to cut costs and to offer better products. The Civil Aeronautics Act stifled competition by means of price and flight schedules. Since airlines couldn’t compete by offering better aircraft—there being only a very few to choose from—and since in the 1940s and 1950s there was no real way to compete in terms of food and drink, about the only way left to compete was by offering sexier stewardesses to admire in flight. Cartels not only stifle innovation, however, they tend also to foster handsome labor contracts, since the labor costs can always be passed along to the consumers by means of higher prices. This is quite as true of government-run cartels, such as the airline industry, as it is of privately run cartels, such as the American automobile industry in the postwar era. Foreign competition ended the automobile cartel in the 1970s, and the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 mandated the phasing out of economic regulation of the aviation industry. The CAB ceased to exist in 1984. Both industries have never been the same, and the old “legacy” companies, Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler in the case of the automobile industry, United, Delta, American, Eastern, Braniff, TWA, Pan Am, etc., in the case of the airline industry, have been struggling to adapt to the new economic environment ever since, with very limited success. No small part of the problem in doing so has been the labor contracts and work rules from the cartel era that are simply not sustainable in the new competitive environment. The disappearance of the pulchritudinous stewardesses (and the now quite startling ads promising them that Joshua Zeitz quotes) is certainly connected to the modern feminist movement, among other trends. But the fact that the airlines could, after 1978, promise to get passengers where they were going more cheaply and more conveniently than the other guy—a much more powerful sales pitch than leggy stewardesses—probably had much to do with it as well.
March 22, 2007
Stewardesses Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:30 PM EST I read with interest Josh Zeitz’s new piece on this website, “Where Did All the Stewardesses Go?”. The astonishing commercial eroticization of stewardesses seems to me to raise the question of why this happened to stewardesses and not to other sectors of the female labor force, at least to a comparable degree. If marketers wanted to simply imply that women in a given place of employment were available to the customers, why didn’t it occur to anyone to hysterically eroticize, say, bank tellers? I have the impression that some other employers have paid (and pay) a premium for sexually appealing workers, who were sometimes encouraged to be flirtatious—restaurants and, I think, sales workers in some parts of some department stores, as well as, proverbially, auction houses, etc., but merchandizing a product via a fantasy of sexual gratification by the female staff seems to have been most conspicuous in the airlines. My guess is that stewardesses were the most promising portion of the labor force for such a strategy because they were so mobile, meaning that they were away from the imagined (and to some degree real) sexual supervision of their families. A bank teller may be imagined to live at home; a stewardess, by the nature of her job, spends time very far from home. In the old days, when the powers of a community to police the sexuality of its young women were at least imagined to be a lot greater than is now the case, stewardesses were in a genuinely different situation and could provoke more fantasies. The thought that women on their own were on the loose was not unique to stewardesses, for moral panics about unsupervised sexuality could attend any group of young women earning enough to support themselves and live away from home. Once upon a time this happened with mill workers, and later and more temporarily with munitions workers, but my guess is that the situation of stewardesses was almost unique. So I’ll guess that ad men saw their opportunity and they took it. My wild guess is that the process ran out of steam not only because of second-wave feminism but because the sexual revolution made the customers less pessimistic about their chances with other young women. Once stewardesses were no longer imagined to be peculiarly free of inhibition bred of observation by ones friends and family, it made less sense to advertise them as the courtesans of the skies.
March 21, 2007
The Second Amendment II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:45 AM EST Further to Fred Smoler’s post, I’d highly recommend Akhil Reed Amar’s book The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction, which challenges conventional wisdom by arguing that the original Bill of Rights was intended more to protect the republican majority against the tyrannical central state than the individual against the tyrannical majority. Amar, a law professor at Yale, charts the process by which the Reconstruction-era Congress framed the Fourteenth Amendment, which ultimately allowed the federal courts to “incorporate” most of the Bill of Rights and thus apply their provisions to the states. (Remember that before 1868 the first 10 amendments placed limits on the federal government but not the states. Unless a state explicitly protected free speech in its constitution, it was essentially free to throw someone in prison for criticizing the legislature or governor.) In the context of the 1860s, it’s not difficult to understand why Republican legislators grew less enamored of state militias and more trusting of central power. It was the Virginia state militia, after all, that raised arms against the government in Washington; it was the government in Washington that fought a war to limit and then abolish slavery. The congressmen who passed the Fourteenth Amendment were no longer in the thrall of localism. They were also seeking to turn the Bill of Rights into a sweeping protection of individual rights. Much of the impetus for the amendment, and for the statutory measure that anticipated it, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, grew out of the “black codes” that Southern states passed in the summer and fall of 1865. These codes restricted the movement, economic independence, and speech and assembly rights of former slaves. The codes also sharply restricted the right of freedmen to bear arms. (This restriction was intended both to limit black firepower and to prevent freedmen from hunting, something that would have allowed them a modicum of self-sufficiency.) When Congress barred states from infringing on the “privileges and immunities” of American citizens, they almost certainly had gun ownership on their minds. Where this leaves us on the gun control question, I don’t know. Benjamin Wittes believes that “one can still muster strong arguments in favor of a collective-rights conception of the Second Amendment, the view that has prevailed in most other circuits; and the individual-rights view does not necessarily doom all gun control (though it probably does doom the most sweeping bans).” But let me post a historical rather than political question for my colleagues: Until recently the only two amendments that remained “unincorporated” were the Second and the Third. It’s unlikely that anyone will soon bring a test case to the Supreme Court on the right of states to quarter guardsmen in private homes. But if the D.C. gun-ban case winds its way to the Supreme Court, and if the Court upholds the appellate decision, will the process of incorporation be almost complete? Many years ago, Justice Hugo Black argued for a total “absorption” of the Bill of Rights rather than piecemeal incorporation. Does the Court stand on the verge of fulfilling Black’s fondest wish?
March 20, 2007
The Second Amendment Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:50 PM EST Benjamin Wittes, who is now at the Brookings Institution, has an interesting piece in the on-line edition of The New Republic about the appeals court panel that recently struck down the gun control law in Washington D.C. Wittes points out that while the judge who wrote the decision, Laurence Silberman, is a noted conservative, some of the newer arguments on Silberman’s side (for example, that in the wake of the post–Civil War constitutional amendments, the Second Amendment creates an individual rather than a collective right) have been made by celebrated liberal professors of constitutional law—for example, by Laurence Tribe, Sanford Levinson, and Akhil Reed Amar. If the Second Amendment is a collective right, it means no more than that your state can maintain a National Guard outfit. If the right is individual, it means no less than that you probably have the right to keep a handgun in your home. Just how far such a right might extend is not clear, but it would clearly extend farther than pleases a gun control advocate. Wittes thinks the new scholarship is more likely to be right than wrong. What makes his piece unusual is that Wittes is in favor of gun control, and his response to the new ruling is to urge the repeal of the Second Amendment. Why does he urge a course of action he admits is almost certainly doomed to near-term failure? Because Wittes thinks it is in the long run destructive to pretend that a portion of the Bill of Rights means whatever he wants it to mean, rather than what competent professional opinion increasingly thinks it does mean. He is very clear that the virtues of an armed citizenry, which he notes are currently on display in Baghdad, and were recently on display in Bosnia, are not indisputable. But the advantages of good faith are not derisory. In his words, “to put the matter simply, the Founders were wrong about the importance of guns to a free society. But, critically, judges shouldn't be in charge of stripping disfavored rights from the Constitution. If the courts can simply make gun rights disappear, what happens when the First Amendment becomes embarrassing or inconvenient? It corrodes the very idea of a written Constitution when the document means, in practice, the opposite of what its text says. The great beauty of the Constitution is that, unlike, say, the treaties that form the European Union, you can actually read it. You can see how its language embodies principles that still animate the day-to-day operation of American political life. When that is no longer the case, American democracy suffers; it gets unmoored from its source of legitimacy.” I think this is a brave position, and a remarkably rare one. Of course, there may be good legal reasons to maintain the older view, which is that the Second Amendment now denotes only a collective right. But there is something impressive about evidence and argument triumphing over a desperate hope that the law means what someone very passionately wants it to mean.
March 20, 2007
The Richest and Most Powerful Country of the Time III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:05 PM EST A few points. First, telling a joke to Mr. Zeitz is like showing vacation pictures to a blind man. I mean, why bother? As I stated, it was a joke and, more, a joke told to me by a Canadian. He told it because he thought it was funny, not mocking. And so did I. One would think that even someone as humor-challenged as Mr. Zeitz would recognize that the joke is about “Trojan geese,” not relative military power. I in no way, shape, or form “mocked” Canada—a country in which I spent some of the happiest days of my childhood and adolescence, where I have many old friends, and which I love more than any but my own. Second, I did not “write off” Ireland, a country I have never visited, which gives me something to look forward to. I merely said it was a tax haven, which it is. The European Union bureaucrats in Brussels are furious with Ireland’s tax-cutting ways. Mr. Zeitz writes, “It might be helpful to remember that Ireland now has one of the most robust economies in the developed world and is, for the first time since the nineteenth-century famine, attracting immigrants rather than exporting migrants.” Exactly. What does Mr. Zeitz think brought that about, leprechauns? It came about because Ireland drastically cut taxes, becoming a magnet for development capital from all over Europe. Its new-found prosperity began virtually the day it embarked on its tax-cutting program. Since Mr. Zeitz seems never to have seen a tax cut he favored, regardless of how beneficial it might be to the economy as a whole, one would think he would avoid the example of Ireland at all costs. Ireland is a poster child for the benefits of low taxes. Third, I don’t deny that per capita GDP is an important measure of a country’s prosperity, but not necessarily its wealth and certainly not its power. Surely a scholar such as Mr. Zeitz must realize that statistics can be very misleading, which is why Disraeli numbered them among the three forms of mendacity. Number 8 on the list to which he refers, for instance, is the Cayman Islands, with a per capita income of $43,800 to $43,500 for the United States. I have never been to the Cayman Islands, but I would be very surprised indeed if they differ much from, say, the British Virgin Islands (number 12 on the list at $38,500), which I have visited often. Only a total fool, having taken an hour’s drive around, would say their prosperity comes close to that of the United States. So where’s all that handsome per capita income? A little maldistributed is where. The population of the Caymans is about 43,000, but if you add the incomes of half a dozen billionaires who establish legal residence there to avoid taxes elsewhere but rarely set foot on the islands, add a few banks that establish headquarters there (in a post office box sometimes), then suddenly—bingo!—the Caymans have a per capita income greater than that of the United States. For places like the Cayman Islands, average per capita income is a meaningless statistic. Median per capita income is what’s needed. Of the nine territories with per capita income greater than the United States on that list, four of them (Bermuda, Jersey, Guernsey, and Cayman Islands) are not even sovereign and don’t have a population over 100,000. Two more are oil puddles, and Norway, while a fully developed country, has a small population (only 4.6 million) and vast oil reserves in the North Sea. One of the oil puddles, Equatorial Guinea, has a population of only 529,000. By the way, the same website that gives Equatorial Guinea’s per capita income as $50,200 gives its life expectancy as 49.5 years. Does something not seem to compute here? If the people of Equatorial Guinea are so individually rich, why don’t they have proper health care? The other two countries are Luxembourg and Ireland, both very small countries with very small populations. Luxembourg is only two thirds the size of Rhode Island with one third of Rhode Island’s population. So let’s compare apples with apples, large population countries with sophisticated and diversified economies. The countries with the 10 largest GDP’s are United States, Japan, China, Germany, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Spain, Canada, and Brazil. They have per capita GDP’s, respectively, of $43,500, $33,100, $7,600, $31,400, $31,400, $30,100, $29,700, $27,000, $35,200, and $8,600. Thus the per capita GDP of the United States is more than 23 percent larger than the next highest on this list, Canada. With large-population countries, average per capita incomes can be meaningfully compared. So I’m quite content with the notion that the United States is the richest, as measured by income, of all the world’s major economies. Since power is a function of total GDP, not per capita GDP (Luxembourg is on no one’s short list for getting a U.N. veto), the United States is by orders of magnitude the most powerful country on earth.
March 20, 2007
The Richest and Most Powerful Country of the Time II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:20 PM EST In response to my suggestion that the United States is not categorically the richest country in the world, John Steele Gordon writes: “Per capita GDP is utterly irrelevant here. If I own a single Rembrandt worth $50 million, do I have a richer and more powerful art collection than the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose 100,000 pieces of art are worth only an average of $1 million each? A more relevant chart is . . . GDP per country, not per capita. The United States had a GDP in 2005 of $12.5 trillion. . . . With 28.15 percent of world GDP, the United States is by far the richest and most powerful country of our time, perhaps any time.” I still maintain that GDP per capita is both relevant to Mr. Gordon’s original argument and the right indicator to examine. In his post yesterday, Mr. Gordon proffered that “the richer and more powerful the parent, the less excuse there is for things not being perfect. It would be an interesting exercise in historical psychology to see if the tendency to blame one’s own country for all the world’s troubles is most strongly found in the richest and most powerful country of the time.” Mr. Gordon was suggesting an alternative explanation of homegrown criticism of American institutions. Agreeing only in part with Michael Barone, who attributed the blame-America-first instinct to liberal professors, Mr. Gordon wondered whether such self-directed criticism was not the usual byproduct of an affluent society. Seems to me he may be onto something, though I still take issue with his characterization of America as the “richest” country of its time. I hope we can agree that there are different ways to determine wealth. Total GDP is one measure; GDP per capita is another. Mr. Gordon used the art collector’s analogy. Let me suggest another. Family A has an annual household income of $100,000 and net assets of $250,000. Family B has an annual household income of $150,000 and net assets of $400,000. Family A consists of two working parents and two children. Family B consists of two working parents and eight children. Which family is richer? By Mr. Gordon’s standard, family B is richer, because it has more total assets and income. By my standard, family A is richer, because the cost of feeding, clothing, educating, and providing health care for 10 people is a lot more than the total cost of providing for the same basic needs in a family of four. Family A has more income and more assets per capita than Family B. It stands a better chance of eating out and vacationing more, sending its kids to private colleges, and stashing away more money, long-term, in retirement investments. Which family is “richer?” There are other ways to measure wealth, as well. I imagine that Mr. Gordon would agree that corporate perquisites like housing and travel allowances, stock options, and company cars should in some way be considered when measuring an executive’s personal riches. The same is surely true of states and citizens. Ireland and Norway, which have greater GDP per capita than the United States, and Canada, which ranks below the U.S., provide their citizens with valuable social provisions like health care. Surely this contributes to the wealth of individuals in ways that elude simple indices like total GDP or GDP per capita. Standard of living is also a good measure of wealth. Scandinavian countries are renowned for their superb public infrastructure, their health care systems, their schools and their childcare arrangements. Their citizens work less, live longer, eat better, and have more relative purchasing power than citizens of other countries, including the United States. That is why Norway, Iceland, and Sweden ranked first, second, and fifth in the 2006 Human Development Index, while the U.S. ranked eighth (behind Ireland, Canada and Japan). The HDI is an interesting measure of how much wealth countries possess and how universally felt that wealth is. Mr. Gordon’s original point was that citizens of affluent countries may be especially prone to criticize their domestic institutions and traditions, and that this may be especially true in the United States, which he called the “richest” country of its time. In order for his idea to bear out, aggregate wealth would have to be widely distributed and widely felt. It wouldn’t matter if the U.S. had 80 percent of the world’s wealth sitting in a bank vault in Kansas. If citizens could not enjoy the benefits of that wealth, they would not be living in an affluent society, and they would not feel affluent. My point is that on a per-capita basis, the U.S. is not richest, and in terms of its quality of life or standard of living, it lags behind several other developed countries. Mr. Gordon enjoys the quick quip, and indeed, in his recent post he mocked Canada for not matching the United States in military might and wrote off Ireland as a tax haven. Lest we confuse wit for wisdom, it might be helpful to remember that Ireland now has one of the most robust economies in the developed world and is, for the first time since the nineteenth-century famine, attracting immigrants rather than exporting migrants. That loophole by which Americans can claim Irish citizenship if they had one Irish-born grandparent? Expect to see the Irish government close that soon. As for Canada, it may not be able to pacify New York, but then, the U.S. can’t seem to pacify Baghdad either. Also, Canada still licks the U.S. on the HDI, and they still play better hockey.
March 20, 2007
Amazon Rankings and Noam Chomsky Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:15 AM EST Alexander Burns writes, “In the case of Mr. Buchanan, his latest book, State of Emergency, has an Amazon.com sales rank of 6,763. In comparison, Noam Chomsky’s latest, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy, is ranked at 12,783. The latter is probably a good example of the kind of academic disliked by Mr. Barone, but if Amazon is any guide, his following is rather less impressive than the supposedly marginal Buchanan’s.” I don’t think it is any reliable guide. This morning State of Emergency is at 6,655 and Failed States at 4,180. When the rankings are this low, selling two books can push the book’s rank way up for a day. Both books have been out for more than six months, which is the period within which most books sell 95 percent of all the copies they are going to sell. While I have not read his books (I’d rather read almost anything else), Noam Chomsky, it seems, is indeed the very apotheosis of the America-hating academic. While perhaps the world’s greatest living linguist, in the completely unrelated field of international politics, he seems to be the victim of an intellectual disorder, an idée fixe that America is this monstrous imperial state bent on world domination. If Chomsky is right, then America is certainly a remarkably incompetent monstrous imperial state. And, of course, if one assumes his premise, than the conclusion is inescapable that the American people are 300 million supine sheep, content with the shadow of democracy while being led by the evil shepherds of the military-industrial complex. That’s not the American people I know. And the American media must either be a vast conspiracy in cahoots with the evil shepherds or too stupid to know what is going on. As George Orwell famously wrote, “There are some ideas that are so stupid only an intellectual could believe them.” Were his deserved reputation in linguistics less formidable, Noam Chomsky would be regarded as a nut case when it came to politics.
March 20, 2007
The Richest and Most Powerful Country of the Time Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:45 AM EST Joshua Zeitz writes, “I’ve got bad news for Mr. Gordon. America is not categorically the ‘richest and most powerful country of the time.’ See this chart.” This reminds me of a joke a Canadian friend once told me about the forthcoming conquest of the United States by his country. I asked how Canada was planning on achieving this impressive military goal, and he said, “You know all those Canada geese that are all over the place? They’re not what you think they are.” Mr. Zeitz’s chart is a list of countries ranked by per capita GDP, with the United States ranking only tenth. That well-known global economic powerhouse, Bermuda, sits atop the list, followed by the equally formidable Luxembourg and the Isle of Jersey. Two of these three are not even sovereign states, but possessions of the Crown of Great Britain. With a collective population about equal to Chattanooga, Tennessee, Bermuda and Jersey may be rich, but they are not powerful. That is also true of the other eight territories ahead of the United States on the list. With the exception of Norway and Ireland all of them are either tax havens or oil puddles. And while both are “real countries,” even Norway is an oil puddle and Ireland a tax haven. Per capita GDP is utterly irrelevant here. If I own a single Rembrandt worth $50 million, do I have a richer and more powerful art collection than the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose 100,000 pieces of art are worth only an average of $1 million each? A more relevant chart is this one, which shows GDP per country, not per capita. The United States had a GDP in 2005 of $12.5 trillion. That is more than three times the GDP of the second-ranked country, Japan, and exceeds the GDP of the next four countries on the list—Japan, Germany, China, and the United Kingdom—combined. With 28.15 percent of world GDP, the United States is by far the richest and most powerful country of our time, perhaps any time. Bermuda is a statistical anomaly with a very pleasant climate and easy access to New York and Washington, where the power is.
March 19, 2007
Who Blames America First? VI Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:40 PM EST I have a few more comments in response to John Steele Gordon’s latest post, unrelated to those that Joshua Zeitz has already offered. First, in response to my entry this afternoon, Mr. Gordon writes: “Mr. Burns quotes several people of the Looney Tunes religious right blaming Hurricane Katrina on God’s wrath over New Orleans’s sinful ways. . . . I don’t think such nonsense is what I and Barone were talking about. The Jerry Falwell types, finding sin in everything and ascribing everything bad that happens to the wages thereof, have been around since God turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt.” Taken individually, I agree with each sentence of Mr. Gordon’s comments, as quoted above. He and Mr. Barone were not talking about cultural conservatives in their blog entries, and religious radicals have, indeed, been around forever. My point is that the nominally Christian right is hardly ever lumped in with the loosely defined “blame America first” crowd, even though they seem to blame Americans for some of the twenty-first century’s worst domestic catastrophes. In a way, Jerry Falwell and Ward Churchill (of “little Eichmann” fame), have rather similar views of where 9/11 came from. Both see it as a kind of punishment for America’s past sins; they just emphasize the importance of different sins. I was not criticizing Mr. Gordon’s post but rather Mr. Barone’s, which was carelessly reasoned and underinclusive in its focus. Furthermore, Mr. Gordon has dumped Jerry Falwell and co. into the same “Looney Tunes” dustbin where he deposited Pat Buchanan a few days ago. I certainly agree with him that these miscreants belong in such an undignified category. But it’s a mistake to dismiss these men as insignificant just because they’re so far from the political center. Falwell and Buchanan still exercise influence on certain segments of the population. Witness, in the former’s case, Senator McCain’s backtracking on his 2000 campaign criticism of Falwell, Robertson, et al. In the case of Mr. Buchanan, his latest book, State of Emergency, has an Amazon.com sales rank of 6,763. In comparison, Noam Chomsky’s latest, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy, is ranked at 12,783. The latter is probably a good example of the kind of academic disliked by Mr. Barone, but if Amazon is any guide, his following is rather less impressive than the supposedly marginal Buchanan’s. On a different subject, I’d add that at least one of Mr. Gordon’s examples of frivolous, America-blaming academic debates seems flawed. In the case of the “Who lost China?” discussion, I don’t think it’s entirely clear that the question is ridiculous. Mr. Gordon is right that the Communist takeover in China would have happened even with a historical all-star team in charge of the State Department. It’s not at all obvious, though, that the emerging Chinese state had to be as hostile to the United States and as close to the Soviet Union as it was. If “losing China” means losing it not just to Communism but to the Soviet sphere of influence, the debate over how that came to pass is still one worth having. With the international situation being what it is, we might end up learning something very useful.
March 19, 2007
Who Blames America First? V Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:25 PM EST I concede that Michael Barone’s column is bereft of statistical evidence, and I embrace what I take to be the call for some impressionistic evidence. My impressions are more sanguine than are Mr. Barone’s, but I do not think everything he says is wholly mad. For example Barone wrote, “The default assumption predisposes them (educated Americans) to believe that if there is slaughter in Darfur, it is our fault; if there are IEDs in Iraq, it is our fault; if peasants in Latin America are living in squalor, it is our fault; if there are climate changes that have any bad effect on anybody, it is our fault.” Thinking this over, I am pretty sure that many academics I know would reject the charge about Darfur but accept the other three allegations (the U.S. is a prominent cause of Iraqi IEDs, immiserated Latin American peasants, and global warming). I accept one of them myself—I think American carbon emissions are one plausible cause of global warming—but I do not think we are the chief cause of poverty in Latin America. Iraqi IEDs are trickier. Had we not toppled Saddam, who monopolized violence much more effectively than does the current Iraqi government, there might be no IEDs, but Iraqis and foreigners who use IEDs are surely a significant cause of IEDs, as are the Iranian and Syrian governments, and Saudis who help finance the practice, and you could spend a lot of time in faculty dining rooms—I do—and not hear too much about those latter causes, compared with the first one. I have seen studies claiming that Democrats outnumber Republicans among younger faculty as much as 30 to 1 in some academic disciplines, and that ratio may have some effect on how some subjects are taught. Do American academics keep their politics out of the classroom when they are teaching undergraduates? I strongly suspect that some do and some don’t, but the latter impression is based on student gossip and muckraking journalism, not direct observation. An odd thing about teaching is that academics only rarely see one another do it, and when they do, the fact of observation may affect what is being said on those occasions. I am cheered by Alex Burns’s remark that he “can’t recall the last time one of my professors denounced a historical figure or field of study.” In my experience, academics pretty regularly denounce historical figures and fields of study when talking to one another, but I take Mr. Burns’s word for it that they keep it out of the classroom at Harvard. I share part of Mr. Burns’ surprise at Barone’s celebration of Adam Hochschild. I have taught King Leopold’s Ghost, and my memory is that one of its weaknesses is a tendency to take as typical of Western imperialism one of its most ghastly and greed-maddened episodes. It also seems to be one of the more commonly taught books on imperialism in Africa, and it occurs to me that very few if any of my students seem to know that late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century European imperialism was often a money-losing proposition and had many quite powerful non-economic motives. My students must be getting their notions from somewhere, and it would not amaze me if they are picking up some of them at college. But that does not mean that academics on the left are effectively controlling the mental life of educated America. Barone is not alone in claiming that the sorts of history books on sale at a chain store do not look too much like the ones on sale in college book stores. Perhaps more to the point, an article in today’s New York Times suggests that when academics drift too far from the rest of the society, or from a profession practiced outside the academy as well as within it, the result may not be ever more effective propaganda but increasing irrelevance. The article notes that law reviews are apparently less and less influential on judicial decisions. The Times does not speculate that a reason for this is politicization of the law schools in one direction while the judiciary is politicized in the other, but that would be my guess about one cause of this phenomenon. Similarly, when the academy moves to the left, think tanks pop up on the right and produce more and more of the “expertise” consumed by the government; the universities were once monopoly producers of “expertise,” but no longer. Tenured academics can be pretty insulated from the rest of the society, with the perverse result that the rest of the society may wind up being pretty insulated from the academy.
March 19, 2007
Who Blames America First? IV Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 07:20 PM EST Thanks to John Steele Gordon for reviewing the career and credentials of Michael Barone. (I didn’t say that I hadn’t heard of or read Barone. I only said that I didn’t know a great deal about him. But it’s always nice to learn something new.) That said, I don’t believe I denigrated Barone’s character or career. I only complained that he charged the liberal academy with something fairly serious (to wit, infecting undergraduates with a virulent strain of anti-Americanism) without providing any evidence to this effect. Mr. Gordon writes, “Joshua Zeitz must live a weblife of nearly unremitting disappointment. He keeps going to blogs and being devastated that they are not written like peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals, dense with subordinate clauses and abristle with footnotes and carefully gathered evidence.” Not really. I don’t need a peer-reviewed article. I suppose I’m just looking for substance–a study of academic bias (there are many, of varying degrees of reliability), an anecdote, a review of current course offerings at Kremlin on the Charles (Alexander Burns’s alma mater) or Kremlin on the Crum (mine). Something. Anything. Mr. Gordon accuses me of committing “the very sin for which he berates Michael Barone.” I don’t think I did anything of the sort. I offered a few memories of my own career as a student and college instructor and admitted that these examples were entirely anecdotal and by no means paradigmatic. I then invited readers and fellow contributors to share their own experiences, or any studies of which they might be aware. I also admitted that some liberal professors do have a problem with American institutions and leaders, though I stressed that some does not mean many, most, or all. Mr. Gordon continues: “Mr. Zeitz writes, ‘If we followed Barone’s advice to the letter, students would still read William Dunning on the Civil War and Reconstruction, rather than James McPherson and Eric Foner.’ That is a gross distortion. Mr. Zeitz says he doesn’t know much about Michael Barone. Obviously.” I fail to see how I’ve grossly distorted Barone, who wrote: “On campuses, students are bombarded with denunciations of dead white males and urged to engage in the deconstruction of all past learning and scholarship.” From my reading of this line, Barone disapproves of the process by which students deconstruct past scholarship and learning. But the historical profession relies on exactly this process of deconstruction. It’s why we assign Foner and McPherson rather than Dunning. Finally, I’ve got bad news for Mr. Gordon. America is not categorically the “richest and most powerful country of the time.” See this chart.
March 19, 2007
Who Blames America First? III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:50 PM EST First let me say that I was paraphrasing Michael Barone, not stating my own opinion, on why the “tenured radicals” have created a generation of blame-America-firsters. I thought it might be part of the reason, but “hardly all of it.” Perhaps I should amend that to “hardly any of it.” As I wrote in the last paragraph of my post, I think the origins lie elsewhere and much further back than just one generation. I find my hypothesis an interesting one (of course, I usually do find my hypotheses interesting), but I guess Messrs. Burns and Zeitz do not, or perhaps they were too busy rushing to the defense of academia to notice it. However, Joshua Zeitz must live a weblife of nearly unremitting disappointment. He keeps going to blogs and being devastated that they are not written like peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals, dense with subordinate clauses and abristle with footnotes and carefully gathered evidence. But he then commits the very sin for which he berates Michael Barone, who is, I believe I can safely say, one of the most respected commentators in Washington. Mr. Zeitz writes, “I have found no such bias in the teaching of history or literature. ‘Dead white men’ are still given more than a fair hearing, as is America. During my time at Brown in the 1990s, classes on American colonial and Revolutionary War–era history, nineteenth-century American intellectual history, and the Vietnam War were among the department’s most popular offerings. None of these classes betrayed any bias ‘for’ or ‘against’ America; they simply provided a balanced overview.” I have, of course, no knowledge of the particular courses to which he refers. He admits the evidence he presents is mere anecdote, but I suspect Mr. Zeitz and I might differ sometimes on exactly what constitutes a “balanced overview.” Mr. Zeitz writes, “If we followed Barone’s advice to the letter, students would still read William Dunning on the Civil War and Reconstruction, rather than James McPherson and Eric Foner.” That is a gross distortion. Mr. Zeitz says he doesn’t know much about Michael Barone. Obviously. For the record, Michael Barone, besides editing the indispensable Almanac of American Politics, is the author of several works of history himself. His current project is a history of England’s Glorious Revolution and its effect on America. He is not a historical know-nothing. Here’s what Publishers Weekly had to say about his most recent book, Hard America, Soft America. “In his latest book, Barone, a writer for U.S. News and World Report and a well-known political commentator, describes America as comprising two diametrically opposed characteristics: hard and soft. ‘Hard America’ is characterized by competition and accountability, while ‘Soft America’ attempts to protect its citizens through government regulation and other social safety nets. While Barone’s book is not without its political overtones—he identifies Hard America with the political right and Soft America with the left—his book should not be seen as the latest installment in the conservative-liberal cultural wars. Rather, Barone provides a deeper look at the way in which ordinary people live and work and the meaning behind the decisions they make. His concrete historical examples highlight the advantages and disadvantages of Hard and Soft America, creating a compelling picture of two very different ways of looking at the world, without degenerating into mudslinging or name-calling. Although Barone, a conservative, clearly favors Hard America, he appreciates the necessary difficulty that comes with balancing the two Americas. He concedes that a society without some softness would be a cruel one, but warns that “we have the luxury of keeping parts of our society Soft only if we keep enough of it Hard.” Despite his conservatism, Barone (The New Americans) writes with moderation and insight. Even those who do not agree with his normative conclusions can enjoy his thought-provoking and perceptive analysis.” Mr. Burns quotes several people of the Looney Tunes religious right blaming Hurricane Katrina on God’s wrath over New Orleans’ sinful ways. I must say that God certainly took his sweet time about teaching New Orleans a lesson, sin not being exactly a new concept there. But I don’t think such nonsense is what I and Barone were talking about. The Jerry Falwell types, finding sin in everything and ascribing everything bad that happens to the wages thereof, have been around since God turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt. Sometimes the Jerry Falwells even get into power, such as the Puritans in mid-seventeenth-century England. (They made themselves so unpopular that they inoculated Britain against religious excess ever since.) Wahabi Islam today is another example. Let me give two examples of what Mr. Barone (I think) and I are talking about. First, after 1949, the American right kept asking “Who lost China?” as though what had happened in that vast and alien land must have been only because of something the United States had done or not done. I don’t doubt that we made mistakes, but the Communist takeover in China that year would have happened had the State Department been run by some combination of Talleyrand, Metternich, and Machiavelli. More recently, it has been a commonplace on the left that North Korea went nuclear (if just barely—I wonder how many scientists got shot for that fizzle) because somehow we screwed up the diplomacy (especially after George Bush took power, of course, the world having been created on January 20, 2001, at noon). Had we only handled the negotiations the right way, they would have behaved themselves. But if North Korea is now genuinely beginning to dismantle its nuclear facilities (a big if), I am pretty certain that the reason is that China, the one country with real leverage, quietly told them to do so or else.
March 19, 2007
Who Blames America First? II Posted by Alexander Burns at 01:05 PM EST I read the same Michael Barone column as John Steele Gordon did this morning, and I am only slightly disappointed that Joshua Zeitz managed to respond to it first. I thought Mr. Barone’s column was profoundly bizarre. As a college student, enrolled at the so-called Kremlin on the Charles, I expect I would remember being “bombarded with denunciations” of anything. I can’t recall the last time one of my professors denounced a historical figure or field of study. My experience is obviously only anecdotal evidence, but, as Mr. Zeitz has already pointed out, “Barone’s article is without evidence” altogether. The more disappointing thing about Mr. Barone’s column, in my mind, is his practice of what good statisticians call case exclusion. He has focused entirely on an elusive group of liberals who detest different subgroups of American society. Mr. Zeitz has named a few right-wingers who have condemned American social practices. I’d like to add a couple more instructive examples that conform to Mr. Barone’s description of people who “always blame America—or the parts of America they don’t like—first.” About a year and a half ago, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast of the United States. The devastating impact of the storm is now legendary. Within days of the disaster, accusing fingers were pointing at different responsible and irresponsible parties. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, FEMA Director Michael Brown, and President George Bush all found themselves taking harsh criticism, most of it deserved. A few right-wing Christian groups had other perpetrators in mind. A group called Columbia Christians for Life observed: “Louisiana has 10 child-murder-by-abortion centers, and five are in New Orleans.” The group also pointed out that the hurricane’s image supposedly resembled the shape of a fetus. This was taken as persuasive evidence that Katrina was intended to purge and purify Louisiana of abortionists. Another leader within the religious right exulted: “This act of God destroyed a wicked city. . . . New Orleans was a city that had its doors wide open to the public celebration of sin.” More famously, and in a similar vein, were comments by the Reverend Jerry Falwell just days after the 9/11 attacks. Appearing on The 700 Club, Fallwell declared: “The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’” Never mind Al Qaeda. Our real problem is the Human Rights Campaign! Talk about blaming America “or the parts of America [you] don’t like—first.” Barone may be right that there are well-educated people who are excessively critical of the United States and its British allies. But what about the conservatives who see America as not just wrong but actually deserving of God’s wrath? To me, they’re rather more deserving of scorn than a college professor who detests American military power. One final note. It is ironic that Mr. Barone chose Adam Hochschild’s Breaking the Chains as an example of a right-headed history of English-speaking peoples. Hochschild is a graduate of the same degree-granting program in which I am currently studying. He helped found Mother Jones magazine and he currently teaches at Berkeley. He is also the author of King Leopold’s Ghost, a celebrated and disturbing account of Belgium’s conquest of the Congo. As a writer, he’s hardly uncritical of the Western European and American tradition. I wonder if Barone has read Hochschild’s wider oeuvre, or just the parts that celebrate his heritage.
March 19, 2007
Who Blames America First? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:45 AM EST John Steele Gordon writes approvingly of Michael Barone’s condemnation of (in Barone’s words) “our schools and, especially . . . our colleges and universities. The first are staffed by liberals long accustomed to see America as full of problems needing solving; the latter have been packed full of the people cultural critic Roger Kimball calls ‘tenured radicals,’ people who see this country and its people as the source of all evil in the world.” Agreeing in part with Barone that anti-American professors have infected undergraduates with a reflexive hatred of all things American, Mr. Gordon believes that it is difficult “for even the most sensible college students to resist the daily drumbeat of anti-Americanism from so many professors who are, of course, supposed to be experts in their fields.” I followed the link that Mr. Gordon provided to the Barone article, expecting to find some sort of empirical study demonstrating rampant anti-American bias in college classrooms and curricula, but I found no such thing. The article that Mr. Gordon finds so interesting claims with impunity that “on campuses, students are bombarded with denunciations of dead white males and urged to engage in the deconstruction of all past learning and scholarship.” It’s an oft-repeated conservative lament, but like most critics of the treasonous academy, Barone doesn’t bother to provide an iota of evidence. So who blames America first? I’d like to know. Let’s get a thread going on this site—one that engages with evidence. I hope that readers will chime in with their own experiences. I would be the last to deny that many liberal academics teach and write American history in a way that casts a dim light on America’s institutions and leaders, from Founding Fathers to present. But Barone’s article goes wrong in several places: First, and I repeat, Barone’s article is without evidence. From a purely anecdotal standpoint, as one who has attended and taught at several American colleges (Swarthmore and Brown as a student; Harvard, Brown, University of Rhode Island, and Rutgers as a professor or instructor), I have found no such bias in the teaching of history or literature. “Dead white men” are still given more than a fair hearing, as is America. During my time at Brown in the 1990s, classes on American colonial and Revolutionary War–era history, nineteenth-century American intellectual history, and the Vietnam War were among the department’s most popular offerings. None of these classes betrayed any bias “for” or “against” America; they simply provided a balanced overview. At Harvard, the respected History and Literature Program retains its special affection for nineteenth-century American letters. (I would venture that the average Hist & Lit student at Harvard has read more dead white American male authors than Barone, but that’s just a guess. I don’t know much about Barone.) As an undergrad at Swarthmore (1992–1996), I took popular seminars on the politics and culture of the Progressive era and American political history, and wrote an undergraduate thesis on Thaddeus Stevens, a nineteenth-century congressman who was unquestionably white and, by the time I studied him, unquestionably dead. I’m not claiming that my own experience is paradigmatic, but in the absence of a good study that suggests otherwise, why should I take Barone at his word when he claims that our universities are programming students to hate America generally and dead white men more specifically? Second, Barone runs the risk of confusing critical history with treasonous criticism. Should we avoid topics like slavery and nativism because they make America look small? Political campaigns are for flag-waving; college classrooms are for critical thinking. Barone derides the “deconstruction of all past learning and scholarship,” but this is precisely what a liberal arts curriculum is supposed to do: teach people how to think and assess a body of work. If we followed Barone’s advice to the letter, students would still read William Dunning on the Civil War and Reconstruction, rather than James McPherson and Eric Foner. Third, are women, working-class people, African-Americans, and immigrants not Americans all? Studying their daily lives, political culture, and struggles is as much a celebration of America as it is a selective condemnation of its institutions and traditions. Ignoring these topics impoverishes our understanding of the nation’s history. Fourth, conservatives are no less critical of America than liberals and leftists. When right-wing intellectuals like Robert Bork accuse America of “slouching toward Gomorrah,” or condemn the sexual, social, and cultural decisions of millions of its citizens, they are no less elitist or anti-American than the most extreme New Left professor. They are simply coming at their criticism from a different angle. Barone’s article projects something of a love-it-or-leave-it attitude. By the same logic, if Robert Bork and Ann Coulter aren’t happy with America, they should be invited to love it or leave it too. Bork might feel more comfortable in Taliban-controlled regions of Afghanistan, where the sexual and cultural ethic is conservative and where community standards trump rampant individualism any day of the week. So, I pose the question, who blames America first?
March 19, 2007
Blame America First Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:45 AM EST Michael Barone has an interesting entry on his blog today called “The Blame-America-First Crowd.” “In their assessment of what is going on in the world,” he writes, “they seem to start off with a default assumption that we are in the wrong. The ‘we’ can take different forms: the United States government, the vast mass of middle-class Americans, white people, affluent people, churchgoing people or the advanced English-speaking countries. Such people are seen as privileged and selfish, greedy and bigoted, rash and violent. If something bad happens, the default assumption is that it’s their fault. They always blame America—or the parts of America they don’t like—first.” Barone wonders why so many of the educated, affluent parts of society in particular hold to this paradigm so firmly when the evidence for it is so weak and the evidence against it so strong. He notes that the very well reviewed new book by Andrew Roberts, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, makes an overwhelming case that these peoples did far, far more that was good in the twentieth century than that was bad. The same can be said for the eighteenth and the nineteenth. As Barone writes, “The default assumption portrays American slavery as uniquely evil (which it wasn’t) and ignores the fact the first campaign to abolish slavery was worded in English.” He blames it on the “tenured radicals” who have so infested, and infected, the academy in recent decades. It is hard, after all, for even the most sensible college students to resist the daily drumbeat of anti-Americanism from so many professors who are, of course, supposed to be experts in their fields. I don’t doubt that that is part of the answer, but hardly all of it. The paradigm, in fact, has a long history. As far back as 1884, Gilbert and Sullivan put on the Lord High Executioner’s list of people who “never would be missed” if executed, “The idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone,/All centuries but this one, every country but his own.” I’m not a psychologist by a long shot, but I suspect the answer lies in that field. All adolescents go through a phase of blaming their parents for everything, and one’s own society is, in a sense, a parent. The richer and more powerful the parent, the less excuse there is for things not being perfect. It would be an interesting exercise in historical psychology to see if the tendency to blame one’s own country for all the world’s troubles is most strongly found in the richest and most powerful country of the time.
March 18, 2007
Waterboarding Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:25 PM EST With respect to the slave trade and Elizabethan sea dogs, John Steele Gordon writes that Sir John Hawkins was England’s first slaver, but I think John Lok has priority, with a voyage in 1555, and William Towerson was apparently the second, in 1557. Adm. Sir John Hawkins, chief architect of Elizabeth’s navy, was admittedly a pioneer in the English slave trade. In 1560 he formed a syndicate of wealthy merchants to invest in the trade, and Queen Elizabeth invested in his second voyage, in 1564, which made a 60 percent profit. (Sir Francis Drake was also a slaver.) I agree that English profits from the trade become much greater in the next century. My point was that Elizabethan political morality is not ours. As for waterboarding, opinions differ. Among others, Senator John McCain thinks it is torture, Vice President Cheney does not. The current Army Field Manual (released in September 2006) on the topic, Human Intelligence Collector Operations, prohibits the practice. We were less tolerant of waterboarding in the past. In 1947 the United States convicted and imprisoned a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, for abuses of an American civilian that included a version of waterboarding, and included charges of what would now be called waterboarding in other cases against Japanese accused of torture. The United Kingdom executed Japanese who carried out versions of waterboarding during World War II, and Norway tried Germans for similar activities. The State Department has condemned variants of the practice when it has been carried out by foreign governments. Our government has in the past condemned its use against American POWs by the North Koreans and North Vietnamese. As for what Walsingham would have considered torture, I am not sure, but as I noted in the previous post, our political morality differs in various respects from his. I do know that many passionate supporters of the war in Iraq reject waterboarding. Whatever might or might not be countenanced in a ticking-bomb case, especially one involving significant numbers of civilian deaths, I think it is important to distinguish such cases from what has sometimes occurred since 9/11. Most people think the harm we have done our cause has significantly exceeded any intelligence gains we have made from techniques that look like torture to many reasonable observers. In the last few years, the Israeli high court, which exists in a society that does face ticking bombs, has moved against interrogation by means of what the Israelis called “moderate physical pressure,” including stress positions, one of the techniques American interrogators have used. My memory of the Israeli legal decision is that it still allow interrogators the theoretical defense of necessity, but the burden of proof is on the interrogator. The defense is not to be accepted automatically.
March 18, 2007
Torture, in the Sixteenth Century and Today II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:55 PM EST I was, of course, not endorsing all Tudor methods for guaranteeing the safety of the queen, as Mr. Smoler knows perfectly well. I merely stated that Walsingham found torture efficacious for obtaining good information. No one, I would hope, wants to go back to Tudor ideas of how to maintain domestic tranquility. But I’m not sure we need a ticking bomb and a proven murderer to justify methods of interrogation that would not pass muster in a civilian court. Whether they are torture, of course, is a good question. Apparently what induced Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to start talking was “waterboarding,” which, as I understand it, is utterly terrifying but not terribly painful. I think “torture,” by definition, must involve very considerable physical pain. Just as law and order has evolved in the last 400 years, so has our ability to make people talk without resorting to the rack. But I would hope that if the ticking bomb scenario ever came to pass, we would not hesitate to do what was necessary, including the rack or its modern equivalent. I think that nearly all of the people we have in Guantanamo right now, if not indeed all, are known to be the enemies of what we think of as civilization, and were known to be so very soon after capture if not immediately. So far as I know, none of them has been subjected to what Walsingham would have regarded as torture. While I don’t doubt Mr. Smoler’s statement that German spies were not tortured by the British, I would be surprised if they were not made very uncomfortable indeed when necessary. Again, where does forceful interrogation leave off and torture begin? By the way, I don’t believe that the English had any substantial part of the slave trade in the late sixteenth century, when there were as yet no colonies in the New World but Spanish ones (Portugal was part of Philip II’s dominions after 1580). Non-Spanish ships were not welcome in Spanish colonies, as Sir John Hawkins, England’s first slaver, found out for sure in 1568 at Veracruz. The British would, of course, come to dominate the slave trade a hundred years hence, and it would certainly help mightily to fund the country’s wars in the eighteenth century. But it put only trivial sums into Queen Elizabeth’s exchequer.
March 18, 2007
Torture, in the Sixteenth Century and Today Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:00 PM EST John Steele Gordon suspects that “everyone talks when tortured. . . . If it’s a confession to a heinous crime that’s wanted, regardless of the truth, then confession is what is produced. If it’s truth that’s wanted, however, then truth is what is forthcoming. So torture is worthless as an instrument of justice, but very efficacious when it comes to intelligence gathering. Certainly Sir Francis Walsingham found it useful in protecting Queen Elizabeth from Catholic conspirators. And the Elizabethan Jesuits, et al., were a bunch of boy scouts compared to our enemies today, as revealed in the blood-chilling statements made the other day by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. I hate to put in a good word for torture, but if the torture of someone who is proud to have held Daniel Pearl’s severed head in his hands can save a planeload or a city of innocents, then, alas, so be it.” I am not sure that Sir Francis Walsingham’s methods are necessarily the best ones for us. For example, the regime he successfully defended had priests drawn and quartered; the naval expansion that preserved Protestantism and liberty was in part financed through the slave trade; and the regime executed, generally under torture, some 300 Catholics. Scaling this up, the equivalent would be Bush and Cheney killing something like 25,000 American Muslim citizens, on the grounds that their religious convictions were sufficient proxy for a propensity to commit treason. In the case of torture, one of my difficulties with John Steele Gordon’s position is that while many people are willing to countenance the torture of a sadistic murderer to save a city, we very rarely if ever know in advance that the person about to be tortured is such a person, in possession of such knowledge. In the case of the people who have to date been tortured in the course of the War or Terror, it is not clear that any would have met this test. Some may have been sadistic murderers, but to the best of my knowledge none have met the ticking-bomb test, i.e., been in possession of knowledge of an imminent planned mass killing of innocents, one that could only be averted via the extraction of information through torture. In terms of what measures may be necessary to avert catastrophic outcomes, it is worth noting that the British did not torture German spies caught during the Second World War. The British were not, at that time, particularly squeamish—those were the days when the Royal Air Force launched area attacks on German civilians—but they did draw the line at torture.
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