December 15, 2007
Back Talk V Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:10 AM EST This discussion began with two examples of politicians being sandbagged by journalists and not putting up with it, to their credit. I agree with Alexander Burns that politicians have to be careful with this tactic, as it can backfire, especially if one lacks the talent for coming up with the right response in real time. Chris Dodd, I think, responded perfectly to the moderator’s unfair question in the debate the other day. It was far better than a justifiably angry response would have been. (By the way, I believe I speak for the entire political nation when I hope that Carolyn Washburn never, ever, again moderates a presidential debate. She may, for all I know, be an excellent journalist. But she was as good at leading these two debates as I would be at quarterbacking in the NFL.) Some people who have considerable political gifts just lack the talent for instant response. Dan Quayle certainly didn’t do a good job responding to Lloyd Bentsen’s nasty jab at the 1988 vice-presidential debate. And in the 2000 campaign, some radio journalist whose political sympathies were not hard to discern—radio’s answer to Dan Rather—asked George Bush who the prime minister of, I think, Tajikistan was. Bush, needless to say, didn’t have a clue, and he fumbled his response. In retrospect, what he should have said, I think, was, “I haven’t the faintest idea and neither did you until you looked it up this morning so you could blindside me with the question.” On the other hand, people with the talent for instant and witty response might not make good Presidents. I’m a great admirer of Groucho Marx and Johnny Carson, but I have my doubts about how they would have fared in the White House. It might be noted that British politics is much more accustomed to witty zingers. Anyone who survives the fiery furnace of House of Commons debate—much rowdier than in Congress, and where the repartee is often very witty and sometimes vicious—long enough to get to high office is going to be good at instant response. I remember Margaret Thatcher being referred to in Parliament as “La Pasionara of privilege” and “Attila the Hen,” both in the I-wish-I’d-said-that category, even though I’m a great admirer of Lady Thatcher. I am glad to see that Alexander Burns is no more of a Hillary Clinton enthusiast than I am. I have long suspected that her lead in the polls over the last few months was mostly because of name recognition. Now that we’re getting down to the wire and the people, not just the punditocracy, are thinking about choices, her lead is evaporating. But her biggest problem may not be her evasiveness and unlikability, but her baggage. The biggest Clinton steamer trunk of all, of course, is her spouse. Douglas Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine, has an article in today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required) about the possibility of Clinton’s being appointed to the Supreme Court. There is precedent for this. William Howard Taft, after all, served as Chief Justice from 1921 to 1930, an office he vastly preferred to the Presidency. I find a Bill Clinton justiceship highly unlikely for two reasons. One, Supreme Court justices are expected to shut up on questions that might come before the Court and about what goes on behind the scenes there, and Bill Clinton is not exactly famous for his reticence. Two, I can’t see the Senate—any Senate—confirming to the high court a man who had his law license suspended for five years for “serious misconduct.” So far as I know he has never asked for reinstatement to the bar. Anything can happen, of course, but my guess is that we have seen the high point of the Hillary Clinton campaign.
December 13, 2007
Back Talk Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:05 AM EST At the apparently rather bizarre Republican presidential candidate debate in Johnston, Iowa, yesterday, Fred Thompson scored points when he wouldn’t give a yes-or-no answer to a non-yes-or-no question. The moderator wanted a show of hands from those who “believe global climate change is a serious threat and caused by human activity.” Thompson asked for a minute to explain his position and when the moderator refused to give it to him, he flatly refused to answer the question. In focus groups where the participants had meters recording their positive and negative reactions, the meters went off-the-chart positive for Thompson. The American electorate obviously like displays of backbone from candidates. Ronald Reagan’s candidacy surged in 1980 after he made his famous “I am paying for this microphone!” remark when a moderator tried to cut him off. In 1988, George Bush took on Dan Rather (link—scroll down) in an interview where Rather kept trying to ask have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife-yet questions about Iran-Contra, and he also saw a surge in support. Since talking back to journalists seems to work so well, I wonder why candidates so seldom do it. Journalists, after all, have public approval ratings on a par with congressmen and people who talk on cell phones at the movies.
December 8, 2007
Mining Disasters II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:35 AM EST Just as an addendum to Fredric Smoler’s post on mining and its death toll, it might be noted that that toll has been decreasing steadily for the last century in this country. There are three principal reasons for this. One has been the effort to prevent another disaster such as occurred at Monagh, West Virginia, a hundred years ago, when 362 lives were snuffed out in an instant. In 1910 the U.S. Bureau of Mines was created to investigate accidents, advise on safety procedures, and teach courses in mine safety. Regulation of mines has been increasing steadily ever since and today is governed by the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act of 1977, which created the Mine Safety and Health Administration as part of the Labor Department. The second reason has been the growth of open-pit mining and the reduction of tunnel mining, which is intrinsically far more hazardous. Open-pit mining uses far fewer miners per ton mined, and the two principal causes of tunnel mining disasters, collapse and explosion, are negligible factors. The third reason is that management has come to realize that an unremitting emphasis on safety is simply good for the bottom line. The result in the United States mining industry has been spectacular.
Year: Average Annual Deaths / Average Annual Injuries
1936-1940: 1,546 / 81,342
1941-1945: 1,592 / 82,825
1946-1950: 1,054 / 63,367
1951-1955: 690 / 38,510
1956-1960: 550 / 28,805
1961-1965: 449 / 23,204
1966-1970: 426 / 22,435
1971-1975: 322 / 33,963
1976-1980: 254 / 41,220
1981-1985: 174 / 24,290
1986-1990: 122 / 27,524
1991-1999: 93 / 21,351
2000-2004: 67 / 13,601
Even if you factor in the reduction in the total number of mine workers, thanks to greatly increased productivity, the reduction in mining deaths has been impressive. In 1970 there was about one death per million man-hours in coal mining (the most hazardous type of mining). By 1977 the ratio was down almost to one death per three million man-hours. In 1995–99, there was less than one death per six million man-hours.
Indeed the number of work-related deaths in all occupations has been declining for the last century. In 2004 there were only 5,703 work-related deaths in the United States (and almost 14 percent of them were homicides and self-inflicted injuries). That is not many more than the number of miners being killed every year in the first decade of the twentieth century, and we have a vastly larger workforce today than we did a hundred years ago. That’s also equal to the number of miners killed every year today in China.
November 28, 2007
A New Yorker’s Objection to the Electoral College IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:10 PM EST A few points. 1) I didn’t say that “the United States is necessarily better off with an electoral system that theoretically favors small, rural states over big, urban centers.” I said it was better off with the present system than with a system based purely on the popular vote. The present system, devised 220 years ago in an utterly different world, is by no means without its flaws. No system is. One might have an electoral vote system, just for instance, where the votes were allocated not according to the state’s representation in Congress but according to its population: one electoral vote for each 100,000 citizens recorded in the last census. That would give California 359 electoral votes and South Dakota 8, a 44–1 ratio instead of 55 and 3, a 13–1 ratio. (To be sure, best of luck getting such an amendment ratified.) 2) Mr. Burns is taking rhetorical advantage of a careless choice of states, which is good for scoring college debate team points but not so good for finding the truth. Idaho and Vermont are both solidly in one camp and so would be largely ignored in either system. But there are plenty of small states that tend to move back and forth between parties: New Mexico, Nevada, Delaware, etc. I don’t think any candidate for President is going to say, “Oh, the hell with [fill in the name of a small toss-up state]” under the Electoral College. But who’s going to bother with the 371,000 voters in Delaware (which in the last 15 elections has gone Republican 8 times and Democratic 7) when they can concentrate on the rich vote mines of Florida, Texas, New York, and California instead? Delaware issues would be utterly unimportant. Candidates wouldn’t even have to know what they are. 3) Mr. Burns writes, “I’m not sure that Al Gore or Samuel Tilden would agree about the consistent clarity of the Electoral College . . .” Why wouldn’t they? They undoubtedly didn’t like the results in 1876 and 2000, but those results were clear enough. 4) I know of no evidence that either President Clinton in 1993 or George Bush in 2005 thought themselves the holders of overwhelming mandates. To be sure, Clinton won a fairly resounding Electoral College vote in 1992 (370–168), but that very savvy politician knew perfectly well that that was because of Ross Perot siphoning off votes in states that Bush might well have won in a two-man race. In 2004, Bush’s Electoral College victory was a mere 286–251. As Mr. Burns has pointed out, a shift of a mere 60,000 votes in Ohio would have made John Kerry President. Clinton’s health-care plan and Bush’s attempt to reform Social Security both failed, I think, for quite other reasons. 5) He writes, “If the 2000 election had been settled without the Electoral College, there would not have been a 50-state scavenger hunt for votes. In fact, there would not have been a ‘messy, divisive legal battle’ at all. The outcome would have been an indisputable victory for Al Gore.” I wonder how Mr. Burns can be as certain of this as he might be of the time the sun rose on the day after Election Day in 2000. A mere 544,683 votes, a little over 10,000 per state, separated Al Gore and George Bush, out of 101,463,105 votes cast. I imagine the Republicans would have fought just as ferociously and screamed fraud just as loudly all over the country as the Democrats did in Florida. Given the utterly disgraceful mess the voter registration rolls are in in most states, how easy it is to register without proof of being enfranchised, and how easy it is to vote without proof of identity, they would have found very rich pickings.
November 27, 2007
A New Yorker’s Objection to the Electoral College II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:05 PM EST I am not sure that abolishing the Electoral College would change the way elections are conducted in modern times in the way that Alexander Burns envisions. The Electoral College is biased in favor of the small states (which is most of the states). California has 55 electoral votes and South Dakota only 3. But California has about 600,000 people per vote and South Dakota only 200,000. So while there’s not much point in a candidate for President showing up in hopes of winning a majority of the minuscule popular vote in South Dakota (it’s a third smaller than New York’s Westchester County), three electoral voters can make all the difference in a close race. Bush beat Gore by only 5 electoral votes in 2000. So I think that in a race determined only by the national popular vote, much of “fly-over country,” as coastal elites call it, would be ignored, and the race would be fought in the great media centers (i.e., New York, Washington, and Los Angeles) and the major cities. That would not be a good thing. The Electoral College forces candidates to consider each of the 50 states and to spend time and resources in those that seem possible to win, no matter how small. Without it, they would ignore the Vermonts and the Idahos. Those states that are solidly one party or the other would be largely ignored with or without the Electoral College, unless, like New York, they are full of media. As Mr. Burns points out, there have been only three times that the Electoral College went against the popular vote. But each of these times the popular vote was so close that it was well within the margin of error, and we will never know in any absolute sense who won the popular vote in those elections. Yet in each case the Electoral College produced a clear winner, who thus had a legitimacy he otherwise would have lacked. Cleveland beat Blaine in 1884 by a mere 26,361 votes, less than .2 percent of the total. But he won in the Electoral College 219 to 182. Four years later, Cleveland beat Harrison by 90,596 votes, but lost in the college 233 to 168. In both cases we will never know who actually won the popular vote. And of course there have been several times when the popular vote was effectively a tie, with the winner in the college just barely edging out his opponent. Kennedy beat Nixon in 1960 34,226,731 to 34,108,157, but carried the college handily 303 to 219. Had Cook County, Illinois, politics been a bit closer to the ideal of a Jeffersonian democracy, Kennedy would have lost the popular vote and still have been President. He won Illinois by less than 10,000 votes, and Richard Dailey’s Cook County was remarkably late in reporting its results. Then there were the four times when no one had a majority of the popular vote (1860, 1912, 1992, and 1996) but someone carried the Electoral College handily. Wilson won only 45 percent of the popular vote but almost 82 percent of the Electoral College vote in 1912. Despite being a minority President, he had a very effective first term. Finally, imagine a squeaker election in these over-lawyered days without the Electoral College. In 2000, because of the college, the messy, divisive legal battle was fought only in Florida, and it still took over a month to sort out. But without the college it would have been fought in all 50 states, because each and every vote would have been precious. An army of lawyers would have had new Mercedes in their driveways when it was finally over, but the Republic would have been very ill served. Clear winners are always better than unclear ones, and the great virtue of the Electoral College is that it always produces clear winners.
November 22, 2007
Lincoln’s Plan to Battle the Electoral College IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:55 AM EST It would be interesting to contemplate what would have happened in 1860, had the scheme mentioned by Julie Fenster really happened, in which states agreed to award their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner, rather than the popular vote winner in that particular state. (By the way, I have my constitutional doubts about this idea. It seems to me it would be “an Agreement or Compact with another State,” therefore requiring the consent of Congress under Article I, Section 10, a consent that would be very difficult to get through the Senate at the least.). As I understand the idea, since Lincoln won the popular vote, the Southern states would, under this agreement, have had to cast their electoral votes for Lincoln. Of course, they would have done no such thing, and the agreement would have broken down instantly. One of the great strengths of the Electoral College is that it has usually produced a clear winner, even when no one had a majority of the popular vote, giving that winner much needed legitimacy. Besides Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson in 1912 and Bill Clinton in both 1992 and 1996 failed to win a majority of the popular vote. But in all cases their right to the office was unchallenged. Only when the election was extremely close and charges of irregularities abounded, such as in 1876 and in 2000, has the legitimizing function of the Electoral College to some extent failed. I favor keeping the Electoral College as it is for numerous other reasons. They are best expressed by Alexander Bickel in a magisterial essay in his book Reform and Continuity. It’s long out of print, but any library that doesn’t have a copy can get one through interlibrary loan. It is well worth the time of anyone whose mind is not beyond the reach of reason on the subject. In this most democratic of countries, it is always hard to argue against anything that can be portrayed as “undemocratic,” because, the logic goes, since democracy is good, anything that is undemocratic must be bad. But as with anything else that is good, from candy to exercise to alcohol to sleep to butterfat to aspirin, there can be too much of a good thing. Many states still suffer from the excesses of Jacksonian democracy (the election of judges, for instance). One can make a very strong case that the reforms in 1975 that got rid of the undemocratic seniority system in Congress produced not superior democracy but an out-of-control spending machine building bridges to nowhere and tea-cozy museums. Then of course, there is the filibuster in the Senate, which effectively requires an extra-constitutional supermajority of 60 votes to get anything done there. Personally I have no problem with it in legislative cases. The point of the Senate, as Thomas Jefferson put it, was to function as the saucer in which to cool the coffee, by curbing the majoritarian passions of the House. The filibuster is a means of forcing the majority to compromise with the minority. (In cases of confirming presidential nominations, however, no compromise is possible, so no filibuster should be allowed. The Senate, not a minority of it, should give or withhold advice and consent.) It might be noted, of course, that one’s opinion on such matters as the Electoral College, election of judges, the seniority system, and the filibuster often depends on whose ox is being gored at the moment. I doubt the left would be so up in arms about the Electoral College these days had George Bush won the popular vote and Al Gore the College in 2000. They would instead be defending the astonishing political wisdom of the Founding Fathers, not trying to outwit them. (Good luck in that enterprise, by the way. They’re not an easy bunch to outwit.) As a classic example of this, I offer my favorite whipping boy, the editorial board of The New York Times. If you oppose the filibuster in the Senate as an unconscionable affront to democracy and majority rule, you will like this editorial of May 11, 1993, when there was a Democratic President and a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. If, however, you favor the filibuster as one of the indispensable checks and balances that keeps tyranny at bay, you will like this editorial this editorial of November 28, 2004, when there was a Republican President and Republican majorities in both houses.
November 21, 2007
Lincoln’s Plan to Battle the Electoral College II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:05 PM EST Julie Fenster’s post is very interesting. I had no idea that Lincoln invented political junk mail. But I can’t help wondering if Lincoln, four years later, changed his opinion regarding the Electoral College. In 1860 he won only 39.89 percent of the popular vote but carried 18 states and won 180 electoral votes, 59.4 percent of the total, making him the undisputed President. Had the Founding Fathers been “outwitted,” and electoral votes allocated according to the popular vote, the election would have been thrown into the House of Representatives. There Lincoln would have had to battle it out with Senator Stephen Douglas, who had the second highest popular vote total (but, curiously, the lowest electoral vote total). With each state getting one vote in the House, I very much doubt that Lincoln would have emerged the victor. Instead, Douglas would have led us through the nation’s greatest crisis (unless, of course, he managed to prevent secession altogether). So would there be today a Douglas Memorial at the western end of the Mall in Washington? We’ll never know. But Douglas died in June 1861 (of typhoid fever, but he apparently was also suffering from throat cancer, which would have killed him soon enough), barely three months into the presidential term. So Herschel Johnson, former governor of, ummmm, Georgia, his vice-presidential running mate, would have probably inherited the White House, unless the Senate had chosen Lincoln’s running mate, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, which is highly unlikely. So would there now be a Johnson Memorial? My guess is no. He opposed Georgia’s secession but acquiesced in it and served in the Confederate senate. After the war he was disbarred from sitting in the U.S. Senate. So in at least one instance it is surely a good thing that the Founding Fathers weren’t “outwitted.” This seems to me a good example of why we should be careful what we wish for.
November 18, 2007
The Fair Tax Posted by John Steele Gordon at 06:15 PM EST Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and current Republican presidential candidate, was on Fox News Sunday this morning. According to two polls, he is suddenly a contender in Iowa, despite having spent only a tiny fraction of what Mitt Romney has spent there. He is now running an amusing ad. One of his signature issues is the “fair tax.” For a short run down on its provisions see here. Basically, it junks the federal income tax, social security tax, corporate income taxes, gift taxes, estate taxes, self-employment taxes, etc., and replaces them all with a retail sales tax of 23 percent on goods and services. Because sales taxes are inescapably regressive (i.e., they impact the poor more than the affluent, because the poor, by definition, spend most of their income on necessities while the rich bank most of their income), the fair tax would rebate monthly to everyone 23 percent of poverty-level income. I have not, by any manner of means, looked at the fair tax proposal in depth. But almost anything that would replace the current income tax would have to be an improvement. The federal income tax code, as originally passed in 1913, was only 14 pages long. Today, 94 years later, it is tens of thousands of pages long and quite literally nobody really knows all of what is in it. After the original tax was passed, the rich—the only people who had to pay it in 1913—naturally looked for ways around it, and their well-paid lawyers and accountants quickly found “loopholes” to allow them to do so. Ever since, the government and the lawyers and accountants have been engaged in an evolutionary arms race: Lawyers find loopholes, Congress either plugs them or, just as often, regulates them, leading the lawyers to find new loopholes, and so on ad infinitum. Worse, Congress regularly passes out goodies in the form of amendments to the tax code that benefit only a favored few and often only a single individual. In recent years the tax code has been amended at a rate of about 4,000 times a year. This allows members of Congress to sock it to the rich—-”these people must pay their fair share!”—in public, while quietly letting them off the hook in private. As a result, the so-called progressivity of the tax code is an utter sham. The poor don’t pay incomes taxes, and neither do the rich, who shelter their incomes in trusts, corporations, and a thousand fiddles. It is the middle class, those dependent on a regular salary, that get socked. Warren Buffett has said he pays a lower tax rate than most people who work in his office. Teresa Heinz Kerry, the very rich wife of Sen. John Kerry, reported during her husband’s 2004 presidential campaign that her income was over $5 million but her taxes were only about $600,000, or 12 percent. I don’t know about others, but my income, at least, was a lot lower and my tax rate a lot higher. The fair tax certainly has great advantages. The IRS would go out of business. The vast underground economy would no longer escape taxation, because the earners of that unreported and sometimes illegal income would get taxed when they spend it instead of when they earn it. The huge compliance costs of the current system, for both corporations and individuals, would disappear, going into their respective pockets to be spent (and taxed) or saved (and not taxed). Prices would decline as the passed-along costs of the corporate income tax and payroll taxes were taken out. It would encourage savings and discourage consumption. It would, to be sure, not be nearly as apparently progressive as the current income tax. But it would be even more progressive in fact, which is what should count, even for ideologues. Who would be hurt? Tax lawyers would be hurt badly, and tax accountants would be devastated. Tax bureaucrats would be out of a job. So would tens of thousands of Washington lobbyists. And members of Congress would be hurt in two ways. First, they would no longer be able to hand out dark-of-night tax fiddles to the well-heeled. Worse, they would no longer be able to play the game of “Don’t tax you and don’t tax me/ Tax the man behind the tree.” They could still raise or lower taxes, but only for everyone. Taxation for reasons other than raising revenue would be much more difficult. Social engineering via the tax code would be, effectively, impossible. Such idiocies as an estate tax that has been declining for years and will disappear entirely in 2010, only to arise, like the phoenix from the ashes of its own cremation, in 2011 at the original rate would vanish. If Mike Huckabee should win in Iowa in early January, or even come close, the major issue of the 2008 election might very well not be Iraq. It might be taxes. The Democrats wouldn’t like that one little bit.
November 16, 2007
Movies and History Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:35 PM EST I imagine that doctors tend to dislike movies about doctors, and lawyers movies about lawyers, because they see the inaccuracies that pass unnoticed by those who are not in those professional fields. There are few movies about historians—not a profession, perhaps, that lends itself to drama—but there are plenty about history. I confess to being a sucker for them most of the time. I don’t mind the often necessary time shortening and the introduction of fictional characters. But I wonder why so many of them have quite unnecessary historical solecisms. For instance, last night I watched Amazing Grace about William Wilberforce and his long struggle to get the slave trade abolished in England. I enjoyed it for the most part. But one minor character was named the Duke of Clarence. He spends much time in the House of Commons and at one point in a card game with Wilberforce and out of ready money, he throws his black coachman into the pot (Wilberforce throws down his cards in disgust and storms off). I understand the dramatic needs the character serves. But why call him the Duke of Clarence? There was a real Duke of Clarence at the time. George III gave his third son that title in 1789 (in 1830, much to his surprise and delight, the Duke of Clarence became King William IV). And dukes, of course, don’t sit in the Commons. They sit in the Lords (or they did then; most got the boot in 1999). And in a very famous case in England in 1772, Lord Mansfield declared slavery to be contrary to the common law, making all slaves in England free. So the coachman, however little he might have been in charge of his own destiny, was not property to be wagered at cards. It would have been the work of a moment to give the character a fictional title. Since heirs to higher titles use one of their father’s lesser titles as a courtesy and could sit in the Commons until their father’s death, any title but duke would have done. It would have taken hardly longer to devise a dramatic means of conveying the common attitude of most of the aristocracy toward blacks at the start of Wilberforce’s campaign. I think producers should hire historians to clean up their scripts before shooting starts. It wouldn’t cost much, by Hollywood standards. I, for one, would be willing to work for a whole lot less than your average second-tier movie star. And I mean a WHOLE lot less.
November 15, 2007
Historical Probabilities and Markets II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:15 AM EST I certainly agree with Fredric Smoler that the price of Confederate bonds in Amsterdam was a measure of the speculators’ perception of the probability of Confederate victory, not a measure of the actual probability. Speculators in Europe, at least ten days away from the North American battlefields, could not have had full knowledge of what was going on. And, as Mr. Smoler notes, they were not competent to evaluate the military situation in any event. Then, given the fact that wars can be lost “for want of a nail,” or because of highly improbable chance events that nonetheless occur, the speculation in Confederate bonds was sheer gambling, not reasoned investment. I can think of two other examples off the top of my head of military actions that rational people would not have predicted. I don’t think Macedonian bonds would have sold well in Amsterdam when Alexander the not-yet-Great set out to conquer the Persian Empire. And would speculators have bet on Nimitz instead of Yamamoto before the Battle of Midway, even if they were in on the secret that Nimitz was reading the Japanese naval code? Markets are notorious for over- and underestimating the probability of future events due to “the madness of crowds.” From tulipomania in the early seventeenth century to the dot-com bubble that burst in 2000, the history of markets is filled with what appears, at least in retrospect, to be remarkably irrational behavior. This irrationality is not always to the up side. It’s a commonplace that “the stock market has predicted ten of the last three recessions.” I believe that British government bonds held their value even in Britain’s darkest days in 1940. Of course, there’s a difference here. Everyone knew that Confederate bonds would be worthless in the event of a Confederate defeat, as indeed, they were. But would Britain, even defeated, have repudiated its debt? I doubt it, and, obviously, so did investors. Hitler, after all, wanted peace with Britain and would have cut a deal far short of unconditional surrender. Just by the way, British consols, which are government bonds that never mature, have been the best measure we have of the price of money over the last 250 years, as there is no yield to maturity to factor into the current price. The only other factor is the likelihood of Britain defaulting on the interest. Even in 1940, not many thought that a serious risk. While crowds are no better than individuals in predicting future events that are contingent on many factors, they are very good at one kind of prediction. If you fill a very large jar with, say, jellybeans, and invite people to guess how many beans are in the jar, the individual guesses will be all over the map. But the average of all the guesses will always be spot on. There are now markets on the Internet in which people can bet on the outcome of political races. I believe they do a better job of predicting outcomes than the polls. The reason, perhaps, is that people must put their money where their mouth is in a market, whereas they can tell a pollster anything they feel like. Also, of course, polls are supposed to be of a carefully selected sample of the total electorate, many of whom couldn’t care less. People in a political marketplace betting on outcomes are all interested in that outcome and trying to analyze what will happen. So the jellybean effect is in operation. One poll that has an excellent record of predicting outcomes in presidential races is the polls of the Weekly Reader, which polls school kids in very large numbers. It is not a “scientific poll” in any sense, but it has a very good track record of being right. The reason, perhaps, is that while grownups often tell pollsters what they think they ought to say, the kids just echo what they hear at home. From the mouths of babes . . .
November 13, 2007
New York Times Columnists and History Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:15 AM EST My friend James Taranto, of OpinionJournal.com, notes that the columnists of The New York Times have been having a historical discussion on what Ronald Reagan said in a speech at the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, at the start of the 1980 presidential campaign and, more important, what he meant by it. Philadelphia, of course, is famous for having betrayed its own name when three civil rights workers were murdered there in cold blood in 1964, one of the most terrible events in the long national struggle for civil rights. Here’s the “money quote” from the speech: “Programs like education and others should be turned back to the states and local communities with the tax sources to fund them. I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level.” Paul Krugman has, numerous times, called Reagan’s reference to “states’ rights” flat-out racist code language. Yesterday David Brooks called that a distortion. Today Bob Herbert chimes in with his own interpretation of that moment, reasserting that it was a blatant appeal to white racism. Taranto notes that that interpretation is somewhat ex post facto, as neither the speech nor the phrase “I believe in states’ rights” attracted much criticism at the time. Anthony Lewis, then a liberal Times columnist, whose civil rights credentials are 100 percent in order, wrote about the speech only six weeks later and gave Reagan a considerable benefit of the doubt if not complete exoneration. Personally, I have not studied this in any depth, but I certainly don’t think Ronald Reagan was a racist, and neither, obviously, do the vast majority of the American people who increasingly regard him as one of the giants of twentieth-century American history. But did he use racist code language in pursuit of Southern votes, which would have been certainly cynical but not necessarily racist? Like Anthony Lewis, I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. The phrase “states’ rights” is embedded in a paragraph supporting the traditional meaning of the phrase, and apparently it evoked no particular reaction from the mostly white crowd. It was certainly well buried code language if code language it was. So perhaps he meant nothing more than what he said he meant by it: “I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level.” As Sigmund Freud is famously supposed to have said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
November 11, 2007
The Politics of National Security III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:45 PM EST Alexander Burns’s response to Senator Lieberman’s speech is to quote the “centrist Democrat” Ed Kilgore. I haven’t the faintest idea how centrist Mr. Kilgore is, although even a centrist Democrat is pretty far left these days, especially with presidential primaries coming up and given the need to appeal to the Moveon.org tail that now so wags the Democratic dog. But the website on which he posted (The Democratic Strategist) is an explicitly partisan Democratic one. “The Democratic Strategist will be clearly focused on developing political strategies for promoting Democratic candidates and issues.” Therefore his job was to criticize Senator Lieberman, not to consider the worth of his argument. He proceeds to criticize in the usual fashion of partisan Democrats: We’re right, everyone else is wrong. Q.E.D. Mr. Burns quotes him as follows: “You’d never know from Lieberman’s speech that the Democratic tradition he’s pretending to uniquely defend had a lot to do with multilateralism, collective security, international institutions, diplomacy, non-military means, human rights, bipartisanship, and the rule of law—all parts of the tradition that Bush and contemporary Republicans have aggressively rejected, and that today’s Democrats explicitly support.” I must have been napping. When exactly did the Republicans aggressively reject the rule of law, human rights, and bipartisanship? Was it at the same time they were aggressively rejecting Mom and apple pie?
November 9, 2007
The Politics of National Security Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:30 AM EST Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Independent Democrat of Connecticut, gave a very interesting speech at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University yesterday called “The Politics of National Security” that seems to me to have been underreported (neither the Washington Post nor the New York Times covered it). It looks at the history of these politics since World War II, and I think it is well worth reading. It can be found here. I would be interested in the comments of my fellow bloggers.
November 5, 2007
Pork and the Line-Item Veto III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:00 PM EST Mr. Burns should have made clear when he quoted me as writing, “There’s only one problem: It is patently unconstitutional,” that I was talking about another matter entirely (congressional representation for Washington D.C.), not the line-item veto. To be sure, the Supreme Court threw out the 1996 act that gave President Clinton a line-item veto, by a vote of 6 to 3, for reasons Mr. Burns elucidated. The fact that three justices thought it constitutional makes the word “patently” inappropriate here. Justice Breyer’s dissent, which was joined in part by Justices O’Connor and Scalia, is worth reading. It is a classic Hamiltonian argument of implied powers, distinguishing between things that are explicitly forbidden by the Constitution (such as granting titles of nobility) and means on which the Constitution is silent (such as chartering a bank, in Hamilton’s case) to a legitimate end. Yesterday’s Supreme Court dissent has very often become tomorrow’s majority opinion, as Mr. Burns knows full well. Mr. Burns writes, “President Bush asked Congress to enact the line-item veto in his 2006 State of the Union Address, and Senators Bill Frist and Mitch McConnell moved to comply.” Unless President Bush and the Republican leadership in the Senate last year are in some alternative constitutional universe, this too would indicate that the line-item veto, in one form or another, cannot be “patently” unconstitutional. Further, he writes that Rudy Giuliani was the man who initiated the lawsuit that resulted in the Supreme Court’s decision. Indeed he was, but I think it was really the mayor of New York more than Rudy Giuliani who initiated the suit. If Mr. Giuliani gets elected to the Presidency next year, I’ll be very surprised indeed if he doesn’t have a constitutional epiphany regarding the line-item veto. That veto could take many forms and be limited in many ways, some of which might have passed muster with the Supreme Court majority of 10 years ago. One way would be simply to repeal the provision of the 1974 Budget Control Act (perhaps the mostly wildly misnamed act in the history of Congress) that forbids Presidents to impound funds rather than spend them. President Nixon—in his desperate last days as President—signed the bill but stated that he thought that provision unconstitutional. I agree, as I see no constitutional requirement that the President spend the money that Congress appropriates, while there is a flat prohibition against “money being drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law . . .” As far as I know it has never been tested in court. There is nothing to stop a President today from asserting the same idea and impounding funds, inviting a lawsuit. I bet he would win it. Of course impoundments are a greater power than a line-item veto. The latter could be overridden by Congress, the former cannot be. I did not label Congressional spending corrupt; I labeled pork corrupt. And it is. Forcing the Navy, say, to buy ships it doesn’t want and can’t use as a favor to some company located in a particular congressional district is corrupt, however legally the appropriation is enacted. It is corrupt because it is spending public money for private gain. When I referred to a new contract with America, I did not mean simply the line-item veto but a whole panoply of reforms, most of them congressional rules, not laws. Requiring that committees reconciling differing versions of a bill not add new spending, for instance. Requiring earmarks to be publicly posted on the Internet so that the people can see them in the light of day in time to form an opinion. Forbidding non-germane amendments. Requiring all political donations to be posted on the Internet the same day the money is deposited into the legislator’s campaign bank account, with full disclosure of who is actually giving the money. There are dozens more that are obvious to anyone whose first interest is not getting reelected to Congress. Mr. Burns writes, “If this is an issue that voters currently care about, I don’t think we’ve seen any evidence of it yet.” That is because it hasn’t been tried yet. But corruption was a major issue in the 2006 election (far more potent than Iraq, in my opinion). I would invite Mr. Burns to take a look at the ridicule heaped upon the first contract with America in 1994 by the mainstream media, on precisely the grounds that the voters didn’t care, before the election of that year. The ridicule stopped on Election Day when one of the great political tsunamis in American history swept the Democrats out of power in Congress (and practically everywhere else).
November 5, 2007
Pork and the Line-Item Veto Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:25 AM EST If ever there was a textbook example of why we need a line-item veto, the water projects bill that President Bush vetoed in its entirety on Friday is it. The bill funds the Army Corps of Engineers, which currently has a project backlog of $38 billion. The Corps requested $4.9 billion for what it identified as necessary projects for this year—dams that needed immediate attention, for instance. But construction projects are dear to the hearts of members of Congress. They get to boast of bringing home the bacon, to cut ribbons at groundbreaking ceremonies, and, all too often, to get the project named for themselves, a common practice I find obscene. So the water projects bill is always as full of pork as a bratwurst. The bill as passed by the House funded $14 billion in projects, almost three times what the Corps asked for. The Senate funded $15 billion. Once a bill passes both houses, it usually needs to go to a committee made up of members of both houses to reconcile the differences between the two versions. The final bill is then voted on by each house and sent to the White House if it passes, as it almost always does. When the water projects bill went to the committee this year, a funny thing happened. Since the House authorized $14 billion and the Senate $15 billion, one might think that the final bill would have authorized, say, $14.5 billion. But welcome to Washington: It authorized $23 billion. In other words, $8 billion of pure pork was added to the already pork-laden bill behind closed doors with no debate whatever. The President’s veto is almost certain to be overridden. Pork, if nothing else in Washington, is a splendidly bipartisan affair. Meanwhile, The New York Times yesterday reported that the military appropriations bill is also loaded with pork. The House version has 1,337 earmarks, not a single one requested by the Pentagon, which is not a branch of the federal government famous for self-restraint in the appropriations process. The cost would be $3 billion. The Senate has added $5 billion more. (The Times also points out, in great detail, how much of the money in these earmarks ends up being spent on lobbying for further earmarks and the fact that the companies favored by congressmen and senators to receive earmarks have a funny habit of seeing that the solons in Washington get handsome campaign contributions.) So the next time you hear a member of Congress decry the federal deficit, don’t believe a word of it. The Army Corps of Engineers requested $4.9 billion. Congress is cramming down its throat $23 billion. If the military appropriations bill pork is added in, that’s $26.1 billion over and above what was requested. That amounts to 15.6 percent of the federal deficit in fiscal 2007 just in those two bills. Much of this grotesque corruption (not necessarily illegal, of course, although ask Duke Cunningham and Bob Ney how they like their accommodations in the federal penal system) stems from the early 1970s. Members of Congress, to be sure, have always been willing to spend the public’s money to ensure their own reelections, but the ending of the presidential power to impound funds (i.e., refuse to spend them) and the breakdown of the seniority system in Congress caused a collapse of discipline. In the seniority system, the senior member of the majority party on each committee was automatically the committee chairman. Thus he didn’t have to cater to other members of the committee in order to be elected chairman. He could hand out pork judiciously, if that’s the word. Once the seniority system ended, however, Congressional logrolling (you vote for my project and I’ll vote for yours) became more and more rampant, until it spun completely out of control in the last few years. A line-item veto, in which particular appropriations could be struck from a bill before the President signs it, would end this at a stroke. As, I’ve said before, good ideas spread, and 43 states have given their governors the line-item veto. (The Confederate Constitution, by the way, also gave the executive the line-item veto.) The President is the only one in Washington elected by the whole country (along with the constitutionally powerless Vice President), so he is the only one without parochial interests, the only one who looks at the budget, and the national interest, as a whole. Making him a major player in budget negotiations, which he isn’t now, would go a long way toward establishing fiscal discipline. With the public’s disgust at corruption in the last Congress, which resulted in the Republicans losing their majorities after 12 years, and the ratings of the current Congress, which make President Bush wildly popular in comparison, I would guess that the party willing to seize the issue and make a “contract with America” that would offer specifics on how they would bring fundamental reform and transparency to Congress would do very well next November.
November 2, 2007
Paul Tibbets Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:30 AM EST Paul Tibbets died yesterday at the age of 92. He was a retired brigadier general in the Air Force, and his death would have been of interest chiefly to family and friends, except for one mission in a long military career. That one mission, however, earned him a reefer on the front page of the New York Times. On August 6, 1945, the 30-year-old Tibbets, then a colonel, commanded Enola Gay (named for his mother), the B-29 that carried an atomic bomb to Hiroshima and dropped it. When the bomb exploded 1,890 feet over the city, it killed instantly somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000 human beings. Thousands more died later of radiation poisoning and radiation-induced cancers.
Tibbets was a bomber pilot (one of the very best, by all accounts, which is why he was chosen for this mission) and he did what bomber pilots do in wartime, having received a lawful order. Therefore he is purely symbolic, no more responsible for the bomb or it use than any of the other eleven men on board Enola Gay. It is interesting that while I have known of Paul Tibbets all my life, I haven’t the faintest idea who was the pilot on the B-29 that dropped the second bomb, on Nagasaki, three days later.
And yet a powerful symbol he was. He requested that there be no funeral service or headstone placed on his grave, for he did not want to be a locus for antiwar demonstrations. History, like life, is not fair.
It will never be settled whether President Truman (who was responsible) was right to order the use of the atomic bomb, for if history is not fair, it is also not mathematics. Different people can have different opinions. As for me, I think he was right, especially given the knowledge he had at the time. The Battle of Okinawa had been horrendous. The island is only 454 square miles, yet capturing it had taken from April 1st to June 21st and had cost the lives of 11,260 American soldiers, sailors, and marines, along with 33,769 wounded. A total of 36 Allied ships were sunk and 368 damaged; 763 American aircraft were destroyed. About 110,000 Japanese were killed. Extrapolating from Okinawa, everyone thought the conquest of the main islands of Japan would be a bloodbath for both sides quite unprecedented in history. Further, both the country at large and the armed forces were very war-weary. The victorious American forces in Europe were, to put it mildly, unhappy at the prospect of being transferred to the Pacific.
Had Truman decided not to use the bomb, one wonders what would have been the public reaction afterwards when it was learned that he’d had a weapon that might have ended the war in a week (which, after all, it did) with no American casualties at all. Truman really had no political choice. I think he also had no moral choice. The roughly 110,000 deaths from the two atomic bombs is a ghastly number. But it is a tiny fraction of the deaths Truman had every reason to believe would result from the alternative. Many of those deaths would have been American servicemen, of whom President Truman was commander in chief.
When Paul Tibbets landed Enola Gay back on Tinian, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s highest decoration for valor after the Medal of Honor. As far as I’m concerned, he deserved it. And now he deserves to rest in peace.
November 1, 2007
The Melting Pot—2007 Version Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:00 AM EST Some enterprising genealogist recently unearthed the fact that Barack Obama is the ninth great-grandson of a Maryland immigrant named Mareen Duvall. Duvall, a French Huguenot, was a classic American success story. Arriving in Maryland in the 1650s as an indentured servant, by the time of his death in 1694 he was one of the largest landowners in Anne Arundel County. He had 12 children, so he has a vast descendancy. There is even something called the Society of Mareen Duvall Descendants. One of those descendants turns out to be . . . Vice President Dick Cheney, who is Senator Obama’s ninth cousin once removed. Also related to Senator Obama through Mareen Duvall are the Duchess of Windsor, Harry Truman (twice, thanks to a cousin-cousin marriage some generations back), and the actor Robert Duvall. Oh, and me too. Mareen Duvall is my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, making me a ninth cousin of the Vice President and a ninth cousin once removed of the senator. It is amazing how genealogically interconnected Americans are. Of the 42 men who have been President, only 15 have no known relationships to other Presidents. Franklin Roosevelt was related to no fewer than 16 other Presidents, the two Bushes to 15, Taft and Coolidge to 14. Part of the reason for that is that Roosevelt, the Bushes, Taft, and Coolidge have many New England ancestors and thus are descended from the mere 25,000 or so immigrants who came in the Great Migration from 1620, when the Mayflower arrived, and 1642, when the English Civil War broke out. Immigration to New England largely stopped after that and so the descendants of the 25,000 intermarried over and over until the nineteenth century, when the “New England diaspora” began and new immigrants, such as the Irish and Portuguese, began coming to New England.
October 26, 2007
Al Gore and the Nobel Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:10 PM EST After Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize there was considerable discussion here about whether he deserved it. I thought not, as it seems to me that his contribution to the problem (assuming it is a problem) of global warming has been highly propagandistic and intellectually dishonest. It seems I’m not alone in this attitude. John Christy, a member of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that was the co-winner of the prize, doesn’t think very much of Al Gore’s labors in the vineyards of climate change either. Here’s what he said on CNN the other day.
October 19, 2007
The Great Crash of 1987 Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:25 PM EST It was twenty years ago today Black Monday when the Dow Jones Industrial Average declined 508 points, or 22.6 percent, on a record volume of 600 million shares, three times the previous volume record. The equivalent numbers today would be more than 3000 points on the Dow and a volume of around fifteen billion.
The market had been very strong for months. It began 1987 at 1985 and on August 25 reached its peak at 2722, up 44 percent for the year. But the next two months were volatile, to put it mildly, with the market trending downwards, a pattern reminiscent of 1929. On Wednesday, October 16th, it fell 95.46, a record in point terms. The next day it fell 58 points and on Friday 108.35.
At the opening bell on Monday, October 19, all hell broke loose. The crash had actually begun in Far Eastern markets, especially Hong Kong, and rolled around the globe, hitting Europe before New York. By the start of trading, sell orders were piled high in brokerage offices and many stocks could not open on time because of the imbalance. When the futures markets opened in Chicago, they added to the sell pressure. At midday rumors hit the Street (Wall Street has long had the world’s most efficient rumor mills) that the chairman of the SEC had suggested the Exchange shut down temporarily. This exacerbated the panic as traders rushed to avoid having exposed positions with no way to close them.
No one knew what to expect the next day, but while volume was again extraordinarily high, the market stabilized by noon, and October 20 would prove the low for the year. The market began to recover in December. Within two years it had recovered its 1987 high, and it is now more than ten thousand points higher. The causes of the great crash of 1987 are still much in dispute. Why it didn’t presage a depression, as previous stock market crashes had always done, is less so. For one thing, the extraordinary technological possibilities of the microprocessor were just beginning to be exploited, and they would open a floodgate of profits as they were. We have not begun to see the end of that tide. The Internet did not even exist in its modern sense twenty years ago. For another, for the first time since 1792, the federal monetary authorities, in this case the Federal Reserve, did what such authorities need to do in such situations: they flooded the Street with liquidity. Will such a crash happen again? Undoubtedly. It is a commonplace that Wall Street knows only two emotions, fear and greed, and can switch between them in the blink of an eye. Roughly every twenty years, apparently the length of time it takes to forget the lessons of the past in 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893, 1907, and 1929 we had great crashes. Then it was almost sixty years until 1987. Human beings haven’t changed, but the financial world is very different than it was twenty years ago. Increasing globalization and decreasing national barriers are ever more tightly integrating world markets. The Internet makes it possible to trade stocks from anywhere in the world. Sharply reduced brokerage commissions have encouraged frequent trading. Fast-spreading wealth has greatly increased the number of traders. And new instruments and derivatives have still uncertain effects on the market. Most of all, the amount of information available in real time is now staggering. Michael Bloomberg became one of the richest men in the world by providing a means of accessing and manipulating that information in ways that were inconceivable twenty years ago. As Bette Davis said in All About Eve, “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”
October 15, 2007
The Duke Non-Rape Case—Sources Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:00 AM EST In a post last June, Alexander Burns wrote, regarding the Duke case, “I . . . find it believable that the Duke faculty, as well as members of the national media, joined in a ‘rush to judgment that was racist at its heart.’ . . . I’m curious where I might look for evidence of such racism. I’ll admit that I try my hardest to block out the hysterical yammering of Nancy Grace and journalists like her, so I’m probably not as tuned in to this case as the average American. This being the case, what would I say if I wanted to convince somebody that the media and faculty would have reacted differently if the exotic dancer in the case had been white?” I would highly recommend Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, by Stuart Taylor and K. C. Johnson. It reads like a John Grisham novel (in fact it’s blurbed by Mr. Grisham) but is written by a nationally respected legal reporter and a history professor at Brooklyn College who blogged exhaustively on the case as it was unfolding. The book has been very well reviewed, even in The New York Times Book Review, although the Times, deservedly, comes in for brutal criticism in the book for its shamelessly agenda-driven coverage of the case. On Amazon, it’s been reviewed by 32 readers, 30 of them giving it five-star reviews. (There is one four-star and one, inevitably, one-star review.)
October 14, 2007
Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Nobel Peace Prize II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:10 PM EST Joshua Zeitz helpfully clarifies that Martin Luther King, Jr., received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 for his embrace of nonviolent means to achieve the goals of the civil rights movement, not for his opposition to the Vietnam War. Mr. Zeitz is, of course, entirely correct, and I never meant to imply otherwise. Let me add that I think Dr. King deserved the prize as much as anyone who has ever received it. The civil rights movement produced a profound social revolution in this country. A historically oppressed minority demanded justice and, after a long, intense, often bitter struggle, received it. I wonder if people under, say, 50, realize just how intense, protracted, and bitter the struggle was, how much it consumed the political attention of the country in the late forties, the fifties, and the early sixties. But considering its size and the depths of feelings on both sides, it was, I think, a remarkably bloodless struggle. It was by no means completely bloodless. Like all such movements, the civil rights crusade has its honored martyrs, many of them, including, of course, Dr. King himself. Compared to comparable struggles in other countries and at other times, however, the death toll was very low. I think that was due in part to the strength of American constitutional institutions and respect for the rule of law, but much was certainly due to Dr. King and the other leaders of the movement, who argued that moral force would win the day and sooner than physical force could. But for them, this country might have been drenched in blood in the middle decades of the twentieth century, and we are forever in their debt that it was not.
October 13, 2007
The Nobel Peace Prize III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:30 AM EST Just a few responses to Alexander Burns’s post. The nature of peace and war has changed markedly since Alfred Nobel established the Peace Prize in his will, calling for it to be awarded to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” I think he would be astounded at how much standing armies have shrunk in size over the last few decades and how long it’s been since there was a “peace congress.” Great-power war was a constant threat in Nobel’s day—Abou Ben Adhem’s nightmare. It is much more remote today. So who receives what is perhaps the most prestigious prize in the world has—and should have—changed. Perhaps its name should be changed to the Nobel Humanitarian Prize to reflect the new reality. And certainly I have no objection to the prize, whatever it’s called, going to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have done good work in the cause of humanity. Mr. Burns mentions three people who have not contributed to peace in any direct sense but have won the Nobel Peace Prize: Norman Borlaug, Muhammad Yunus, and Al Gore, and puts them on the same plane. I do not. Both Borlaug and Yunus, when they were recognized, had accomplished a great good. Borlaug had developed strains of wheat that produced much higher yields. Thanks to these new strains, Mexico became a net wheat exporter by 1963 and Pakistan and India both saw wheat production double between 1965 and 1970, the year Borlaug won the Peace Prize. The “green revolution” he fostered has continued to spread to other areas and other crops, greatly reducing world hunger. He is one of the giants of the twentieth century and was known to be so when he won the Peace Prize. Yunus began his microloan program in 1976 and established the Grameen Bank (which shared the prize) in 1983. In the next two decades it helped tens of thousands of Bangladeshis lift themselves out of abject poverty by providing low-interest credit, and the idea has spread widely to other countries. Increasingly, private foundations are helping to reduce poverty in this way, rather than by means of grants to governments, which are often deeply corrupt in poor countries (by no means the least of the reasons they are poor). But Al Gore was awarded the prize merely for his prediction of the consequences of not following one possible way to combat global warming. His movie, An Inconvenient Truth, won an Oscar for best documentary but is, in fact, propagandistic, selecting facts and making unsubstantiated claims with gay abandon. A British judge recently ruled that there were at least nine serious errors of fact in the movie and ruled that it can only be shown in British classrooms if it is accompanied by balancing information. Al Gore has consistently refused to debate the subject, even though he is an excellent debater. (He mopped the floor with Ross Perot on the subject of NAFTA, for instance, early in the Clinton administration.) Even The New York Times, which gave the story the lead with a two-column head, (all other Nobel prizes this year got only a reefer on the front page), states that Gore’s co-winner, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is much more cautious in its predictions. Gore, for instance, predicts a 20-foot rise in sea levels over the next century; the panel thinks one foot (about equal to the rise in the last hundred years) is more like it. That’s a very big difference. Al Gore has unquestionably raised the public consciousness regarding global warming. But he has done his level best to shut down any discussion of both its causes (an open scientific question) and possible solutions other than the one he favors—capping and then reducing carbon emissions—an open political question. To use a financial metaphor, Borlaug and Yunus had their money in the bank when they were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Al Gore has, at best, a paper profit. If he ends up intellectually broke, the Nobel Peace Prize will have been diminished. Mr. Burns is correct that I erred in saying that the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded by the Norwegian Parliament. It awarded by the Nobel Prize Committee, which is appointed by the Norwegian Parliament. That strikes me as a distinction without a whole lot of difference. (By the way, if someone would like a short course in how microlending works and would like to read a wonderful novel in the process, let me recommend A Town Like Alice, by Nevil Shute. Shute was a wonderful storyteller perhaps best remembered today for his On the Beach, made into an unforgettable movie by Stanley Kramer.)
October 12, 2007
The Nobel Peace Prize Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:50 AM EST To no one’s surprise, the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Al Gore and the United Nations Committee on Climate Change for their work on global warming. Let’s take a look at previous American Peace Prize winners and what they received the prize for. 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt, for leading negotiations to end the Russo-Japanese War. 1912 Senator (and former Secretary of State) and president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Elihu Root, for his work in advancing arbitration as a means of settling international disputes. 1919 President Woodrow Wilson, for advocating the establishment of the League of Nations. 1925 Charles G. Dawes, member of the Allied Reparations Committee (and later Vice President of the United States), for developing the Dawes Plan to help Germany stabilize its economy and meet its reparations obligations. 1929 Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg, for his work on the Kellogg-Briand Treaty to end war. 1931 Jane Addams, international president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University, for his advocacy of the Kellogg-Briand Treaty. 1945 Secretary of State Cordell Hull, for his work establishing the United Nations. 1946 Emily Greene Balch, honorary international president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and John R. Mott, chairman of the International Missionary Council and President of the World Alliance of Young Men’s Christian Associations. 1947 American Friends Service Committee, on behalf of the Society of Friends (the Quakers). 1950 Ralph Bunche, principal secretary of the United Nations Palestine Commission and chief mediator to end the first Arab-Israeli war. 1953 Former Secretary of State George C. Marshall, for the Marshall Plan. 1962 Linus Pauling, for his crusade against nuclear testing above ground. 1964 Martin Luther King, Jr., for leading the American civil rights movement. 1970 Norman Borlaug, for leading the “green revolution” that greatly increased food yields. 1973, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, for the Vietnam peace accord. 1985 International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, for its campaign on the dangers of nuclear war. 1986 Author Eli Weisel, for his “practical work in the cause of peace” and for delivering a powerful message of “peace, atonement, and human dignity.” 1997 Jody Williams, jointly with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which she headed. 2003 Former President Jimmy Carter, “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.” 2007 Former Vice President Al Gore, for his work on global warming. It seems to me that this list can be divided into groups. There were those, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Ralph Bunche, and Henry Kissinger, who accomplished something in the cause of peace by ending a war. Then there were those such as Woodrow Wilson, Charles Dawes, Frank Kellogg, Cordell Hull, George Marshall, and Norman Borlaug, who made (or attempted to make—neither the League of Nations nor the Dawes Plan nor the Kellogg-Briand Treaty worked) future wars less likely by specific actions, policies, or scientific accomplishments. Then there are those, such as the Society of Friends, Linus Pauling, Martin Luther King, Jr., the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, and Eli Weisel, who opposed war (or violent means to obtain domestic political goals) or particular aspects of war and who were given the prize for their eloquence or symbolic value in the cause of peace. Finally there were the political peace prizes. Had Jimmy Carter shared the 1978 prize with Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin for achieving the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab nation, I doubt that anyone would have objected. It was a huge advance toward bringing peace to the world’s leading powder keg, and Carter contributed significantly to achieving it. But since leaving the presidency, Carter has been drifting ever further leftwards and has wallowed in the moral smugness that has always been his most prominent characteristic. (Just the other day he said that the only thing he regrets about his Presidency was not having sent one more helicopter to rescue the hostages in Iran. Really. Running for reelection, he carried only as many states as Herbert Hoover had carried in 1932 and won even fewer electoral votes. But he has no regrets having, I guess, made no mistakes other than failing to send enough helicopters.) Had he possessed the gift of eloquence he might have contributed something to the cause of peace since 1981. But no one has ever accused President Carter of that. The only speech of his that has lasted in the national memory is one of the most disastrous in recent presidential history, the “malaise speech.” Violating the longstanding and wise unwritten rule that ex-Presidents should give their opinions in private, he has publicly opposed American foreign policy at nearly every turn. And that was what he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for. As for Al Gore, his prize, too, seems more political than anything else. Has he brought about peace anywhere? No. Has he instituted a policy, treaty, or scientific revolution that makes war in the future less likely? No. Has he been unusually eloquent in the cause of peace? No. He has instead advocated, often by tendentious means, a scientific hypothesis that is by no means settled and a political program predicated on that hypothesis’s being fact. The political class (the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded by the Norwegian parliament) loves that particular program because it would greatly increase the power of politicians. Ergo the prize. Other programs might accomplish much more at far, far less cost and disruption to the world economy (see here for another approach). Indeed, Al Gore’s approach to solving global warming might well increase the chances of future war by bringing fast-rising world prosperity to an end. Prosperity is good for peace. Alfred Nobel wanted the peace prize he established awarded “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” How Al Gore and his crusade for one particular approach to combat global warming fits that bill is a mystery to me.
October 8, 2007
A Dying Language Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:00 PM EST Many of the world’s languages are in deep trouble. There are about 6,000 of them at the moment, but they are dying out at the rate of one every two weeks as those who use them as a native tongue die and their children prefer to speak one of the major languages instead. Indeed, the top 20 languages in the world—as measured by number of native speakers—are now spoken by 96 percent of the world’s population. One language, of course, English, is rapidly becoming everyone’s second language and is now widely spoken in no fewer than 107 countries. If the world ever settles on a single language, it is highly likely that it will be English, which has numerous advantages as a lingua franca over and above being the world’s most widely spread language. The Wall Street Journal today carries a front-page story on one man’s crusade to save another dying language, Morse Code. Morse Code, of course, is not, strictly speaking, a language at all. It is a code that works perfectly well in any language that can be expressed in the Roman alphabet and, I imagine, can be adapted for other languages as well. But it is unquestionably dying. The federal government no longer requires competency in Morse Code in order to get a ham radio operating license. The Internet, cheap phone rates, and other technological advances have mortally wounded it. Morse Code was invented in the United States, by Samuel F. B. Morse. It was the only part of the Morse telegraph system that was wholly his creation, and a brilliant one it was. By noting the frequency of letters in English, Morse assigned dashes and dots to each letter, the most frequently used getting the shortest code. So E, the most common letter, is simply dot, while Z is dash dash dot dot. To Morse’s surprise, Morse Code proved so easy to learn that it was not even necessary to write it down: a trained operator could just listen and understand it by ear without “translating” it. Ham radio operators used to do exactly that, but there aren’t many Morse users left anymore. So a retired astrophysicist named Chuck Adams, who loved using a ham radio as a child, cooked up a software program that can translate books into Morse. If you would like to listen to, say, H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds in Morse Code, Mr. Adams will be happy to sell you a CD for a modest $10.50. It won’t save the Morse Code from ending up in the Smithsonian as Mr. Adams’s generation passes from the scene. But at least, like the grammars and recordings being created by linguists desperate to save dying languages from being utterly lost, it will preserve the sounds and rhythms of Morse forever.
September 28, 2007
What Hath Google Wrought? Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:40 AM EST Last night I was watching a documentary on the life of Franklin Roosevelt by David Grubin. I got it from Netflix, and I recommend it. The film showed FDR delivering his Fourth Inaugural Address, on January 20, 1945, which he gave at the White House with little ceremony. I was struck by a sentence in it and made a mental note to look it up this morning. The speech is not one of FDR’s more famous ones and so it is not to be found in such compendia as Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations or William Safire’s Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History. Twenty years ago, I would have had to go to a library. The odds are no better than fifty-fifty that the local ones would have had it, so I probably would have had to send for a book, and it might have been three or four days before I was able to get my hands on the text. Even at the New York Public Library it would probably have taken me at least an hour to determine where I could find it, send in a slip, and get the needed volume. That was yesterday. This is now: I turned on my computer, typed “Roosevelt 4th inaugural” into Google, and had the text in less than 30 seconds. Just as the telegraph speeded up communication by orders of magnitude in the middle of the nineteenth century and changed the world profoundly thereby, so the Internet has accelerated research by a similar amount. Google has, in effect, created a single, integrated index to all the knowledge in the world. You don’t even have to flip the pages. Just type in a few keywords, and there is what you are looking for, ready to be highlighted, copied, and pasted into whatever you are working on. Is this a great world we live in, or what? By the way, the quotation I was looking for is an apposite one. It turns out that FDR was quoting his old Groton headmaster, Endicott Peabody: “Things in life will not always run smoothly. Sometimes we will be rising toward the heights—then all will seem to reverse itself and start downward. The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward; that a line drawn through the middle of the peaks and the valleys of the centuries always has an upward trend.”
September 27, 2007
Are There Any Great Powers? II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:55 PM EST I did indeed mean to invite a response, and I agree with most of Alexander Burns’s. So I have just a few comments. He asks, “is there any country other than the United States that must have its interests considered by every other one?” He doubts if Britain or France these days meets that high bar. Certainly they are lesser powers than the United States, which he agrees meets this definition of a Great Power. It seems to me, however, that where British and French interests are involved, any country would be very foolish indeed not to take them into account. India felt free in 1961 to snap up the Portuguese colony of Goa, on the west coast of the subcontinent (without bothering to ask the people of Goa whether they wished to be snapped up, although a U.N. Security Council resolution had called for self-determination) because India knew that there wasn’t a thing Portugal could do about it. However it negotiated over the course of 15 years with France to have French India merge with it. The merger was accomplished peacefully and legally, not with 40,000 Indian troops. The different Indian approaches to very similar circumstances, I think, must be due to the relative power of Portugal and France. While neither Britain nor France in the 1950s could have projected enough power in the Indian subcontinent to have prevented a military takeover of territory, they both were capable of exerting a lot of economic and diplomatic pressure. No country, I would think, would want a veto-holding member of the Security Council as a sworn enemy, and Britain, with the worldwide insurance and financial power of London markets, could impose painful economic sanctions unilaterally. The duc de Richelieu joked in 1818 that there really were six Great Powers: Britain, France, Prussia, Austria, Russia, and the banking house of Baring Brothers. Mr. Burns notes that India, Pakistan, Israel (almost certainly), and North Korea are also nuclear powers and therefore under one possible definition are Great Powers. I left them out because none of these countries has more than a regional ability to project nuclear power. North Korea not even that, as its one nuclear test was mostly a fizzle. The five permanent members of the Security Council, however, have the power to drop a nuke wherever they decide to drop one. Britain could have won the Falklands war in a few minutes, merely by moving one of its boomer submarines to the South Atlantic and lobbing the big one into Buenos Aires, thereby decapitating the Argentine state. I have every confidence that the British government never contemplated such a move and that the Argentine government was entirely confident that Britain would not. But I’m equally sure that even that gang of thuggish half-wits running Argentina in 1983 must have thought about it, along with other possible British responses. They gambled that Britain would swallow a military takeover rather than go to the trouble and expense of undoing a fait accompli. Margaret Thatcher turned out to be made of sterner stuff than they bargained for. Here, of course, is the trouble with nuclear weapons. While they are immensely powerful, they are also immensely expensive, in terms of public opinion, to use. which is a big reason they haven’t been since 1945. Britain, as a practical matter, could not have annihilated several million Argentinians to regain control of some rainy islands and a lot of sheep. But a nuclear deterrent with global reach makes one, ipso facto, one of the big boys, i.e., a Great Power. Charles de Gaulle said as much when he was building the “force de frappe” (with public American tut-tutting and private American help). But I agree that the term, very clear in 1900, is much less meaningful today and perhaps should indeed be buried. Maybe it’s a sign that we have moved (or at least are moving) beyond the day of the nation state as well.
September 26, 2007
The Great Powers Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:55 PM EST The Term “Great Powers” has been around since the end of the Napoleonic wars. It was first used by Lord Castlereigh, the British foreign minister, in 1814, and the term was used at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to describe Great Britain, France, Prussia, Austria, and Russia, who called the shots at that conference. But what defines a Great Power? The professor who taught me international politics in college defined the term to mean, “Any country whose interests must be taken into account by every other country.” He gave as an example of the difference between a Great Power and a lesser one an incident in 1940, after the fall of France. The Royal Navy, looking at a map of the Atlantic, realized that Iceland, without military forces and a tiny population, might be subject to a German coup de main. A German submarine base in Iceland, sitting athwart the vital Atlantic sea lanes, was a nightmare. Britain acted like a Great Power. A force of 1,500 Royal Marines landed at Reykjavik, and the Icelandic government was simply informed, after the landing, that Britain had assumed responsibility for the defense of Iceland. That, as it happened, was fine with the Icelanders, not that they had any say in the matter, and the next year the United States took over the defense of Iceland, a responsibility that it still has. By the turn of the twentieth century, the United States had joined the ranks of the Great Powers, and many people regarded Japan as one as well. Prussia by this point had been subsumed into Germany, and Austria lost its status after the Austrian Empire was broken up following World War I. That made six Great Powers, now operating on a global scale. As defeated powers, neither Germany nor Japan were given permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council, but China—at that point only potentially a Great Power—was given one. Today, the United States is often considered a Superpower, with by far the largest military establishment in the world as well as by far the largest economy with which to sustain that power. With China rising quickly, the other permanent members of the Security Council are major economic powers (Russia’s GDP being highly dependant on the price of oil, however) but much smaller military ones. Still, they are all nuclear powers, with the capacity to deliver nuclear weapons anywhere in the world. Following my old professor’s dictum, they are thus all Great Powers, as no one is going to ignore the interests of a country armed with nuclear weapons or feel free to land troops uninvited on its shores. The great historian A. J. P. Taylor, thought military capacity was the sine qua non of Great Power status, “The test of a Great Power,” he wrote, “is the test of strength for war.” But in a world where the possibility of Great Power wars, such as the conflicts that so dominated the first half of the twentieth century, is currently remote, and where the integration of the global economy is proceeding at a breakneck pace, I wonder if that is still true. Perhaps the test of a Great Power nowadays is the ability to compete in the marketplace, not on the battlefield. Germany and Japan are certainly Great Powers economically, but not militarily. India and Brazil are rising to that status. According to the World Bank in 2006, there were 10 countries whose GDP exceeds a trillion dollars (roughly 2 percent of world GDP): The United States ($13.2 trillion), Japan ($4.3), Germany ($2.9), China ($2.7), Great Britain ($2.3), France ($2.2), Italy ($1.8), Canada ($1.3), Spain ($1.2), and Brazil($1.1). Russia ($.98) and India ($.9) are nearly there. Do we have 5 Great Powers, based on nuclear weapons, or 12, based on GDP?
September 23, 2007
Protecting Homosexuals at Columbia from Discrimination Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:20 PM EST Alexander Burns quotes me as follows: “ROTC is banned from Columbia because that institution disagrees with the official policy of the United States government, a policy that discriminates against homosexuals in the military by requiring them to keep silent as to their orientation. But Columbia welcomes the president of Iran, although the official policy of the government of Iran that he heads—not just his personal opinion—is to execute homosexuals by hanging them.” He then writes that, “This is a nicely symmetrical but oversimplified description of Columbia’s moral dilemma.” He adds, “ROTC is singled out for special treatment because the process of military recruitment, as it would take place on campus, might violate the university’s nondiscrimination policies. If recruiters came to Columbia, they would be engaging in an activity that treats some students in a degrading and discriminatory way. Banning them from campus has a whiff of political protest to it, but at heart it is a pragmatic move designed to shield students from immediate and active discrimination. President Ahmadinejad’s visit is different. It is an absolute abomination that his government executes homosexuals. But he’s not going to be executing them at Columbia, and he’s not going to be recruiting for the Revolutionary Guard, either.” I’m sorry. I have the greatest, genuine respect for Alexander Burns, even—perhaps especially—when we disagree, but this is utter nonsense. If discriminating against homosexuals is bad, hanging them is far, far worse. If gay students at Columbia need be “shielded” from having to face the presence on their campus of an organization that requires homosexuals to keep quiet about their sexual orientation, they surely should not have to face the presence on their campus of someone who hangs people for being gay, even if that person will not be hanging any homosexuals on Morningside Heights. I might point out that Mr. Burns does not seem to understand what ROTC is. Columbia does not ban ROTC recruiters from the campus. It bans ROTC, which stands for Reserve Officers Training Corps. It is a program that students can join, should they so choose, before coming to Columbia. In return for considerable help in paying college tuition, students who join ROTC contract to spend a certain number of years in the military as military officers after graduation. Students going to Columbia can still participate in ROTC, but they must go to the campus of Fordham University in the Bronx in order to take the required classes and training. That is a considerable inconvenience at the least. The ban at Columbia, which dates to 1969 (the same year as the Stonewall riots, ironically), had nothing initially to do with discrimination against homosexuals. It was rather a protest against the Vietnam War. Discrimination against gays is simply the latest excuse for what is, at its heart, anti-military posturing. It has more than a whiff of political protest to it, it has a foul and pervasive odor of political protest to it.
September 22, 2007
President Summers and President Ahmadinejad III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:05 PM EST Just let me note that I entirely agree that the hiring, firing, and now rehiring of Erwin Chemerinsky to be dean of the new law school at the University of California–Irvine was a profound embarrassment. It at least has had a happy ending. But Chancellor Michael V. Drake has admitted “bungling” the whole business and taken the blame entirely upon himself. He did not act at the behest of an intolerant bunch of faculty members. So I think the Chemerinsky incident was a one-off. People being disinvited (not to mention fired) because of protests from the left-most members of university faculties are quite common, partly because college administrators (noting the fate of Lawrence Summers at Harvard, perhaps) are unable or unwilling to confront them. But Mr. Burns writes, “Focusing on Columbia alone, though, Mr. Gordon suggests that it is hypocrisy for the university to allow Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on campus while banning military recruiters. William Kristol recently made the same point. This seems a grotesque distortion—in the literal sense of grotesque as the yoking together of heterogeneous ideas. There is a difference between the beliefs of an individual, expressed publicly, and the policies of an organization, maintained by law.” Indeed there is, but that is not the case here. ROTC is banned from Columbia because that institution disagrees with the official policy of the United States government, a policy that discriminates against homosexuals in the military by requiring them to keep silent as to their orientation. But Columbia welcomes the president of Iran, although the official policy of the government of Iran that he heads—not just his personal opinion—is to execute homosexuals by publicly hanging them and many have been hanged. See here and here. (Warning: The pictures are very, very ugly.) If representatives of governments that discriminate against homosexuals are unwelcome on the campus of Columbia University, then why is President Ahmadinejad, the head of a government that hangs them, being welcomed there? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has the blood of homosexuals on the hand that Lee Bollinger will shake on Monday.
September 22, 2007
President Summers and President Ahmadinejad Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:55 AM EST The University of California Regents recently invited Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard, former Secretary of the Treasury, and distinguished economic scholar to speak to the Regents at a dinner in Sacramento. President Summers accepted. But then a petition signed by 130 or so feminist professors in the vast U.C. system protested having someone speak at an institution dedicated to the free expression of ideas who had once allowed himself to entertain the possibility of the existence of a feminist heresy and to allow that possibility to escape his lips. In a display of abject academic cowardice in the face of race- and gender-obsessed faculty such as is all too common these days, he was promptly disinvited. No diversity of ideas at the University of California, please, we’re scholars. Columbia University, meanwhile, has invited the president of Iran to speak on Monday, causing protests from a far larger number of people inside and outside the academy. President Bollinger of Columbia University has issued high-minded statements about the need to hear everyone speak at an institution dedicated to the free expression of ideas. Yeah, right. I might point out that President Bollinger recently refused to allow ROTC to return to the Columbia campus, because the American military, obeying an executive order issued by Bill Clinton, requires homosexuals in the military to hide their sexual orientation, a policy that is unacceptable to President Bollinger (and, incidentally, to me). Ahmadinejad, of course, doesn’t discriminate against homosexuals. He hangs them. Hypocrisy, if not diversity of ideas, is welcome in academia, apparently. More, the audience that will hear Ahmadinejad directly has been carefully chosen so good behavior can be assured. No such courtesy was extended to the head of the Minutemen last year when a group of liberal thugs ran him off the stage at Columbia University. The fate of the liberal thugs was to be told they had been very, very naughty and shouldn’t do it again. Personally, I think President Ahmadinejad should be as welcomed as President Summers should have been, and all those who try to prevent others from peacefully having their say should be told to drop dead in so many words. That, of course, would require having at least as much backbone as is possessed by a banana, and backbone, if not hypocrisy, is in short supply among university administrators when faced with their faculty. Of course, as speakers should be free to speak, so audiences should be free not to come hear them. I would be delighted if President Ahmadinejad faced nothing but empty seats on Monday. I am reminded of a classic New Yorker cartoon that ran after Houghton Mifflin published the English-language version of Mein Kampf. It was entitled, “Messrs. Houghton and Mifflin Tender a Tea for One of Their Authors.” It shows a hotel private dining room with an elaborate high tea laid out on a long table. In the room are two elderly gentlemen in frock coats and striped trousers and a Nazi-uniformed Adolf Hitler—holding a tea cup with pinky raised in the approved Emily Post manner. They are all elaborately ignoring the fact that there is no one else in the room. As the perpetrator of the Holocaust was treated in the cartoon, so should the advocate of another holocaust be treated at Columbia University. Alas, I’m sure the seats will be filled with people who think he should be heard but not Lawrence Summers. Lawrence Summers, if not the man who has called for Israel to be wiped off the map, raises possibilities simply too dreadful for academics to contemplate.
September 22, 2007
Washington, D.C. IX Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:40 AM EST Joshua Zeitz writes, “Wrong. I support granting full congressional representation to Washington, D.C., because its citizens pay federal taxes, serve in the armed forces, and shoulder the same responsibilities as the citizens of Wyoming, whose numbers are fewer. To date, three residents of the District have died in the Iraq War. Their parents deserve a voice and a vote in Congress. (We could just as easily reverse the equation: Mr. Gordon supports treating Wyoming’s population of 509,000 more equally than D.C.’s population of 581,000 because it provides two guaranteed very conservative seats in the Senate and one in the House in perpetuity.)” No. I support Wyoming having one representative and two senators because that is what the United States Constitution calls for, and I think we should follow what it mandates because, to quote Sir Thomas More (from memory and perhaps from A Man for All Seasons) “without the law, such a wind would blow as no man could stand.” For the same reason, I equally support Vermont having one representative and two senators, even though the state that once voted for Alf Landon over FDR is now jokingly referred to as “the people’s republic of Vermont.” Wyoming and Vermont are not at issue here. Their congressional representation is constitutionally set in stone. What to do about giving Washington, D.C., representation in Congress is a political question precisely because the Constitution is less than crystal clear as to what can be done and how. Reasonable people can—and do—disagree about what the best course of action might be. Mr. Zeitz writes that my suggestion to allow D.C. residents to vote in federal elections as though they were citizens of Maryland is “flawed.” Of course it is. If there were a perfect solution to this problem it would long since have been adopted. But mine is, I think, the best plan, as it would give D.C. residents the same voting power in Congress enjoyed by the residents of every other city in the country. All other plans I have heard of would give it grossly disproportionate representation by giving a city with a smaller population than Louisville, Kentucky, two senators of its very own. If it is “unfair” for Wyoming to have two senators, then surely it would be “unfair” to give Washington, D.C., two as well. Mr. Zeitz argues that D.C.’s political interests are different than those of, say, Annapolis and Baltimore, and therefore Maryland senators would not represent the residents of the District as they should. No doubt D.C.’s political interests diverge to some extent from those of Annapolis and Baltimore and even its own suburbs. But then those of Louisville differ from those of Frankfort and Paducah and its own suburbs, so the residents of D.C. would only be in the same boat as those of every other city, which is, of course, the boat they ought to be in. Mr. Zeitz, however, makes the very good point that in my plan the residents of D.C. would have no say over how the Congressional district lines would be drawn, as they could not vote for members of the Maryland legislature. Those lines would, undoubtedly, be drawn at their expense, as the disenfranchised will always get the short end of the political stick. This could be solved by giving D.C. as many congressmen as it would be entitled to as a state (currently one, and that’s unlikely to change) while having D.C. residents vote for Maryland senators and Maryland presidential electors. He also makes the good point that the amendment I proposed might arguably deprive Maryland of its “equal Suffrage in the Senate,” which is explicitly forbidden by Article V. But Article V allows a state to give its consent. Therefore let me revise my proposed Amendment.
AMENDMENT XXVIII
Section 1: The Twenty-third Article of Amendment is hereby repealed. Section 2: The District that is the seat of the government of the United States shall have as many representatives in Congress as it would be entitled to if it were a state. Section 3: Provided the state that ceded the land that comprises the District gives its consent by ratifying this amendment, residents of the said District shall be entitled to vote for the Senators and presidential electors of that state, the number of which shall be determined by adding the number of representatives of the district to the number of senators and representatives of the state.
Mr. Zeitz writes, “Mr. Gordon’s proposal ignores the fact that Washington, D.C., however narrow its economic base may be, is a discreet geographic and population entity that should enjoy full sovereignty over itself and full weight in Congress.”
That is not a fact; that is an opinion. To turn it into fact would unquestionably require a constitutional amendment, as Article I, Section 8 gives to Congress the power to “exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District . . .” And, frankly, I don’t see how it differs as a distinct geographic and population entity from every other city in the country, none of which have their own senators or full sovereignty. He writes, “Under Mr. Gordon’s plan (which is, by the way, a political non-starter: It will never, ever happen) . . .” I fail to see why it is so obviously a non-starter that Mr. Zeitz need not explain why it is. On the other hand, an amendment giving the District of Columbia two senators of its own is, indeed, obviously a non-starter. Such an outcome would require a vote of two-thirds of the House, two-thirds of the Senate, and the concurrence of 75 or 76 state legislative houses (if unicameral Nebraska were one of the ratifying states it would be 75). There is not a registered Republican in the country who would vote for an amendment giving the Democrats two permanent senate seats. Finally, he writes, “She [Marian Anderson] ultimately sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, courtesy of Harold Ickes and Eleanor Roosevelt, whom I suppose Mr. Gordon would consider “obsessed with race, class and gender.” Eleanor Roosevelt was deeply concerned with issues involving race, class, and gender, as well she should have been, because they were huge, largely unaddressed issues in her day and she was in the vanguard of getting the country to deal with them. She was successful in doing so, and we had an enormous—and enormously positive—social revolution in this country as a result. It was liberalism’s finest hour, and Mrs. Roosevelt is a national hero of the first order. But I have a news flash for Mr. Zeitz: Mrs. Roosevelt’s day was a long time ago. A person born the very day that Marian Anderson sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial would have been old enough to vote for John F. Kennedy; would have been fifty when the Berlin Wall fell; would have become eligible for Medicare three years ago. I had the enormous honor to meet Mrs. Roosevelt when I was a 16-year-old boy. She was very elderly—but still sharp as a tack—and she died the following year. I am now 63. The whole concept of class has for all intents and purposes vanished as a means of understanding the world in which we live. Blacks and women are the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, governors, secretaries of state, serious presidential contenders, wildly popular movie actors and singers, and world-class scientists. Mrs. Roosevelt would be very, very pleased with what she helped so mightily to achieve. But Rip Van Liberal, he just dozes on, listening to Marian Anderson (who died 14 years ago at the age of 96) on his Philco radio and seeing racism behind every bush.
September 20, 2007
Washington, D.C. VII Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:35 PM EST In response to the post of Joshua Zeitz let me make a few points. 1) Mr. Zeitz acknowledges a certain reluctance to engage me “on the question of whether D.C. statehood has faltered because of race politics, though I’ll admit to being extremely skeptical of his insistence that race and racism play no role in the matter.” I’m afraid I don’t know where I insisted on any such thing, although I cheerfully admit that I don’t see where race and racism has played any part at all, at least in the modern era. The obsession of the left with race, gender, and class explains, in my opinion, why it has been so politically ineffectual in recent decades. The country has long since moved on while the left continues to fight the battles it won 50 years ago, thus perpetuating the problem it claims to want to solve. If you want racism, however, try the left. It isn’t white racism against blacks, of course, but black racism against whites. Jesse Jackson, speaking at a historically black college in South Carolina, recently accused Barak Obama of “acting like he’s white.” If that isn’t racism, I can’t imagine what is. A significant segment of the Duke faculty formed the modern equivalent of a racist lynch mob last year when three white Duke students were falsely accused of raping a black woman. They looked at the skin colors of the accused and the accuser and made up their minds on that basis alone. They have still not apologized or even retracted their despicable words. 2) Mr. Zeitz writes, “The current population of Washington, D.C., is about 581,000. Last year, Wyoming’s population was about 509,000. Vermont’s, 603,000. North Dakota’s, 636,000. Alaska’s, 663,000. All four states have two U.S. senators. What’s good for Wyoming is surely good for Washington, D.C.” It would certainly be good for Washington, D.C. But would it be good for the country? I think not and, given the fate of the amendment to make D.C. the functional equivalent of a state, neither does a large majority of the country. Wyoming to be sure has a somewhat smaller population than the District of Columbia, and its small population is vastly overrepresented in the Senate and slightly overrepresented in the House (where the average district represents 689,000 people). But equal suffrage in the Senate was the great compromise that made the Constitution possible and it is the only part of the modern Constitution that cannot be amended. But Wyoming, while small in population, is large in area (it’s the tenth largest state at 97,000 square miles, 1,447 times the size of the District of Columbia) and diverse in both its geography and economic interests. Wyoming has farming, mining, tourism, logging, ranching, natural gas, and oil interests. Its manufacturing base includes oil refining, electronics, foodstuffs, clothing, and even aircraft. Its senators and representative, therefore, must balance the often conflicting interests of their constituents. Washington, D.C., has only two interests: the federal government and tourism. As I’ve said before, the District of Columbia is not a state, it is a company town, with only one industry and therefore only one political interest. If Kohler, Wisconsin, had two senators of its own, they would be obsessed with seeing that every house in America had an extra bathroom installed. The senators from Washington, D.C., would be obsessed with the care and feeding of the federal government. 3) Mr. Zeitz writes, “To be sure, the District’s bread and butter is the federal government. But was this not historically true of postwar Orange County, California, whose economic fortunes were so closely tied to federal defense spending and to federal irrigation and water projects, or vast swaths of the South, which relied on the federal government for subsidized electricity, dam projects, and agricultural subsidies?” Sure it’s true, but so what? Orange County does not have two seats in the Senate, and the South is much more than just a giant maw to take in federal subsidies. 4) I know why Mr. Zeitz would like D.C. to be treated as a state or even made one—it would provide two guaranteed very liberal seats in the Senate and one in the House in perpetuity. I would be interested in what objections, other than his personal political preferences, Mr. Zeitz has to my idea of counting the citizens of the District of Columbia—for purposes of voting for President and senators and representatives only—as being citizens of the state of Maryland. This would give them precisely the same representation in Congress and the same power to elect the President as every other American citizen has. Talk about fundamental fairness.
September 19, 2007
Washington, D.C. IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:40 PM EST Alexander Burns writes that “I don’t think this will be the last we hear of this subject.” I certainly hope not, as the people of Washington are not getting what they are entitled to, which is representation—and a vote—in the Congress. My objection was the manner in which the bill was trying to achieve it and The New York Times’s airy indifference to the constitutional problems the bill presented. He is, of course, perfectly right that to take every word of the Constitution in a strictly literal way—to follow “strict construction” out a window—would make it unworkable. It would need to be constantly amended, and the amending process is deliberately difficult, requiring supermajorities in both houses of Congress and among the states. He mentions the power to “coin money” and notes that the government these days prints, not coins, quite a lot of the stuff. No serious person would argue that the Bureau of Printing and Engraving is engaged in a massively unconstitutional enterprise. As far as I know, no one has sued over the matter, as paper money is the functional equivalent of coins and a lot handier. (Of course, in a few years, the government will be out of the money business altogether, other than adjusting bank reserve requirements, but that’s another post.) In the 1920s the Supreme Court ruled that the government, under the Fourth Amendment, needed a warrant to tap a telephone, despite the fact that the Founding Fathers had never heard of a telephone. Tapping a phone is the functional equivalent of entering someone’s home and hiding behind the curtains in order to listen in to private conversations, and therefore a warrant is required. The ruling, I think, is fully in accord with the reasoning behind the Fourth Amendment. But the District of Columbia is neither a state nor the functional equivalent of one. It is, rather, the world’s largest company town, existing of, by, and for, the federal government. If the capital were to move to, say, Omaha, the District of Columbia would be nothing more than Williamsburg, Virginia, writ large, within a week. Thirteen states ratified the Constitution to join the Union and the other 37 were admitted by act of Congress. And though the telephone was unknown to the Founding Fathers, they quite specifically mentioned a district to serve as the seat of the federal government. Had they meant it to be treated as a state they would have said so. They didn’t. While it is certainly possible to follow strict construction out a window, it is even easier to start changing the essence of the Constitution by ignoring what it clearly says in order to achieve more easily some noble goal. Before long, there simply would be no Constitution beyond what nine unelected judges across Capitol Hill from the Congress say it is this year. Again, I note that amending the Constitution to give the District of Columbia the representation it is morally entitled to should not be that difficult. The amendment that gave the citizens of D.C. the right to vote in presidential elections was ratified in record time because people recognized it as the right thing to do. It was, to coin a phrase, fundamentally fair. But an amendment passed by Congress in 1978 did not fare so well. It read: Section 1. For purposes of representation in the Congress, election of the President and Vice President, and article V of this Constitution, the District constituting the seat of government of the United States shall be treated as though it were a State. Section 2. The exercise of the rights and powers conferred under this article shall be by the people of the District constituting the seat of government, and as shall be provided by the Congress. Section 3. The twenty-third article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed. Section 4. This article shall be inoperative, unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years from the date of its submission. Note that the amendment calls for the District of Columbia to be treated “as though it were a state,” the use of the subjunctive mood being a clear admission that it is not one. This amendment died when only 16 of the required 38 states ratified it in the time period allowed by Section 4. Why did it fare so poorly, when the Twenty-third Amendment sailed through ratification in record time? Because it would have given D.C. grotesquely disproportionate representation in Congress. A middle-size city, with only 20 percent the area and less than 10 percent of New York City’s population would have had two senators of its very own, without even any suburbs to counterbalance the company town’s interest in an ever-expanding federal government and an ever increasing concentration of power there. The amendment I propose would avoid that problem and, I fearlessly predict, would easily win ratification. Joe Lieberman and Tom Davis should introduce it.
September 18, 2007
Washington, D.C. Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:05 PM EST The Senate will try today to invoke cloture in order to pass a bill that would give Washington, D.C., a vote in the House of Representatives. While I’m fully in favor of the people of Washington having a voice in Congress equal to that of other American citizens, I am not in favor of this means of giving it to them. The bill would increase the size of the House from 435 to 437 and give one seat to Washington and one seat to Utah, which missed by a hair getting an extra seat in the 2000 census. Washington would elect a Democrat and Utah, presumably, would elect a Republican, so the balance of power would not be shifted. It is a classic political compromise. There’s only one problem: It is patently unconstitutional. Article I, Section 2, states, “The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second year by the People of the several States . . . .” Article I, Section 8, gives to Congress the power “to exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States . . . become the Seat of the Government of the United States . . .” The members of the House are to be chosen by “the People of the several States,” and the District of Columbia is not a state, and this bill does not make it one. The law would certainly end up in the Supreme Court, which would, I hope, throw it out. This would put the whole business back to square one, only with increased hard feelings. Were the Supreme Court, unaccountably, to let it stand, would it end the matter? Not likely. As soon as the representative of the District of Columbia took his or her seat in the House, agitation would immediately start to give the District representation in the Senate. Artful political compromise would be harder to achieve there. The New York Times has an editorial today on the subject that is a classic example of all that is wrong with modern liberalism. Here’s what it has to say on the constitutional issue: “Opponents continue to raise constitutional issues about the district’s not being a full-fledged state; proponents offer counterarguments about Congress’s long history of dominating, even dictating, the city’s precise political freedoms.” First, the District is not a state in any way shape or form, still less a full-fledged one. Second, the Times has a very strange notion of what constitutes a counterargument. It simply ignores the inconvenient constitutional argument and changes the subject to point out, correctly, that the District has been unfairly under the thumb of Congress for 200 years. I guess the Times is arguing that the Constitution should just be ignored in the cause of “fundamental fairness,” which is liberalspeak for doing as liberals please. If there is a constitutional argument in favor of this bill, the Times does not deign to give it. I suspect if there were one, it would have. The Times writes, “This will likely end up in the courts, but what could be closer to the ideals of America’s democracy than giving D.C. taxpayers their long-denied representation?” How about obeying the fundamental law of the land? Most despicably, the Times writes, “A minimum of 60 votes is required, and it would be a grim echo of segregationist history if the Senate denied this opportunity to advance the district’s voting rights.” Isn’t that neat? Vote against this unconstitutional bill and you are a segregationist. The blithe liberal assumption that anyone who disagrees with a liberal position must, ipso facto, be a moral eunuch, is perhaps degenerate modern-day liberalism’s most pervasive and pathetic tendency. Why not fix the problem the old fashioned way, with a constitutional amendment? Here’s a proposed amendment that would give the people of Washington, D.C., exactly the same standing in federal elections as every other American citizen Amendment XXVIII Section 1 The twenty-third article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed. Section 2 For purposes of participating in elections for President, Senators, and Representatives, the citizens of the district constituting the seat of the government of the United States shall be regarded and counted as citizens of the states that ceded the territory constituting the district. One might argue that amending the Constitution is a long, drawn-out process. That is not always the case. The 23rd Amendment, which gave the people of the District of Columbia the right to vote for President, but with no more electoral votes than the least populous state, was proposed by Congress on June 16, 1960. It was declared ratified only nine months later on March 29, 1961. No amendment has ever been ratified more quickly. One of its unfortunate side effects is that it made the number of presidential electors an even number, making it more likely that a close presidential election would end up in the House. The above amendment would solve that problem.
September 15, 2007
Wodehousiana II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:40 PM EST Like every civilized, decent, God-fearing, English-speaking individual, I love Bertie and Jeeves (now nearly a generic term for “manservant”) and the other denizens of P. G. Wodehouse’s antic imagination. I especially remember for some reason a line—I haven’t the faintest idea which book it’s from—in which Bertie describes a local restaurant as being “owned by a branch of the Borgia family.” But it is as a Broadway lyricist that I especially appreciate him. Fredric Smoler writes, “A lot of American popular culture would not have existed without him. He collaborated with Cole Porter on Anything Goes, frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern (he wrote the lyrics to Show Boat’s “Bill”) and Guy Bolton.” Indeed, Wodehouse’s contribution to the history of the Broadway musical has never received its due. “Bill” is certainly his best-known song, probably because it was dropped from the now mostly forgotten Oh, Lady! Lady!! and later inserted in the immortal Show Boat (its lyric slightly tweaked by Hammerstein). But he wrote many others that became standards, such as “As the Clouds Roll By,” and “The Land Where the Good Songs Go.” One of my favorites is “Tulip Time in Sing Sing,” where Wodehouse treats a well known institution a few miles up the Hudson from Manhattan as a sort of college, much loved by its alumni: How I wish that there I’d waited,
Wished I’d never graduated,
For the memory of those days still stirs me so.
And the birdies every Spring sing,
Aren’t you coming back to Sing Sing
Where you used to be so happy long ago? We were just a band of brothers,
Each as good as all the others.
As the humblest sort of sneak thief you might rank,
But when you’d been there a week, well,
We were treated as an equal
By the high and mighty swells who’d robbed a bank. But he did more than write good lyrics. Wodehouse’s partnership with Guy Bolton (who wrote the librettos) and Jerome Kern in what are known as the Princess Theatre shows during the years of World War I changed muscial comedy profoundly. Musicals in the first years of the twentieth century were usually either operettas, set in Europe, with princes falling in love with milkmaids and such, or straight plays with songs inserted here and there that had nothing to do with the plot. Often major stars had a contractual right to do their particular shtick, such as play the ukulele, at a particular time. But the Princess Theatre, 104 West 39th Street, was tiny, only 299 seats. Therefore there was no room for elaborate costumes, scenery or theatrical effects and no money for major stars. For shows to make money there, they had to rely on the plays themselves. The Princess Theatre shows were set in contemporary America (period costumes are expensive) and, while the plots hardly plumbed the depths of the human soul, involved people who were neither milkmaids nor princes. And the songs had something to do with the plot. The result was something very new indeed. The critics liked what they saw. George Kaufmann, no mean playwright himself (he and Ira Gershwin would win the first Pulitzer for drama ever awarded to a musical) wrote: This is the trio of musical fame,
Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern:
Better than anyone else you can name,
Bolton and Wodehouse and Kern. Dorothy Parker wrote that “Wodehouse, Bolton, and Kern are my favorite indoor sport. . . . I like the way they go about a musical comedy. . . . I like the way the action slides casually into the songs. . . . I like the deft rhyming. . . . and, oh, how I do like Jerome Kern’s music.” Younger writers and musicians flocked to the Princess Theatre to see these brightly original shows and were greatly influenced by what they heard. Both Lorenz Hart and Ira Gershwin owe much to the witty, intricate rhymes of Wodehouse, who brought Gilbert and Sullivan wordplay to America. Oh, by the way. The rehearsal pianist at the Princess Theatre at one point was a teenager named George Gershwin. I wonder what ever happened to him.
September 9, 2007
The Blitz II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:55 AM EST The book that caused me to abandon the conventional wisdom on the effect of bombing in World War II was Richard Overy’s Why the Allies Won, which I found compelling. It goes into much more than just the effects of airpower, of course. I’d be very interested in Fredric Smoler’s opinion of it. Overy makes the point that the allied bombing of Germany had significant military effects over and above the destruction of German manufacturing and transportation facilities it achieved and its morale effect on the German population. For one, it forced the Nazis to divert enormous resources in artillery and aircraft away from the Eastern Front, where they might have proved crucial to victory. And, of course, had the Germans developed a strategic bomber, capable of heavy loads and long range, the ability of the Soviets to move their armaments factories eastward, out of range of the Luftwaffe, would have been greatly complicated.
September 8, 2007
The Old Order Passeth III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:55 AM EST Fredric Smoler wrote, “According to Mr. Gordon’s account . . . the decline of the share of world population engaged in agriculture means a chance at abundance (rather than subsistence) as the fate of most of the species. If this is true—and I think it is—it is of course not the only possible majority fate. Hordes of unemployable paupers living in urban slums is also a possible fate, but Mr. Gordon surely knows that.” Indeed I do. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England that is exactly what happened. The enclosure movement, where the landlords tossed out the peasants and brought in sheep—which were both more profitable and much less likely to get uppity—turned many of the displaced peasants into roaming hordes of paupers, often pushed from one parish to another. (Parishes were in charge of what today we would call welfare, so they each sought to make it the next parish’s problem.) One result of this, happily for this country, was the migration of the most ambitious and daring of these displaced workers to the new North American colonies, a fact that has enriched this country ever since. Toward the end of the seventeenth century and especially in the eighteenth century, the English trading and, increasingly, industrial economy began to expand quickly and was able to absorb more of these displaced workers. But many ended up in urban slums anyway, although I doubt the unspeakable urban slums of Dickens’s England were much if any worse than the unspeakable rural slums of Fielding’s England had been a century earlier, just vastly larger. The transition from a rural, agricultural economy to an urban, industrial one ended up making it possible for a much larger percentage of the English population to live above the poverty level, today essentially everyone. But it was a long process with many dislocations and individuals who were made worse off, sometimes far worse, in the short term. It was a good thing in the long term, but, as Lord Keynes explained, “In the long term we are all dead.” Mr. Smoler writes, “We are eerily sentimental about the rural past. We have a tendency to imagine rural life as virtuous and just, with the city as the zone of corruption and wretchedness. This is perverse sentimentality held with remarkable tenacity, and it affects people who ought to know better.” I entirely agree. If you would like to be disabused forever of this notion of an idyllic rural past, I would recommend Michael Lesy’s remarkable Wisconsin Death Trip. It consists mostly of often grim photographs taken in Black River Falls, Wisconsin, by Charles Van Schaik between 1890 and 1910, along with clippings from the local newspapers about barn burnings, madness, alcoholism, bank failure, murder, armed gangs, you name it. It is not the world depicted by Grandma Moses. This nostalgia for a picket-fence and vine-covered-cottage rural past that had never, in fact, existed, began in the middle third of the nineteenth century, as the pre-industrial age was beginning to vanish from human experience with the introduction of new technologies such as the railroad, steamboats, telegraph, mass media, and running water. People previously had lived in a world in which technological change had been glacial. Someone born in, say, 1800, grew up in a world that would have been familiar to his parents, grandparents, even great grandparents. To be sure, politics changed and fashions (for those who could afford to be fashionable) changed, but the way the world worked did not. The steam engine and the Industrial Revolution changed that, and the early Victorians found themselves living in a new age, one they thought of as “an age of chaos . . . [a] heaving tumbling age.” People began to long for “the good old days” (the phrase was coined in 1844), which they remembered nostalgically, not accurately. Today we are in the midst of a technological revolution, induced by the microprocessor, that is even more profound. But it has not, at least not yet, produced a similar nostalgia for the industrial era. I detect no longing for the good old days of air pollution, labor strife, and operator-assisted long distance. I suspect the reason for that lies with the fact that the Industrial Revolution not only changed the world profoundly in the course of a single lifetime but also greatly accelerated the rate of change. Every generation since that first, early Victorian one has lived to see the world made new. I can remember my grandmother telling me about the first time she ever used a telephone. My grandfather, born in 1881, grew up in a horse-and-buggy world lit by kerosene, and yet he and I watched television together as Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon.
September 7, 2007
The Old Order Passeth Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:15 AM EST The New York Times carried a Reuters dispatch the other day that is simply filled with astonishing statistics. For one thing, it reports global statistics, not just national ones. Global unemployment fell in 2006 to 6.3 percent from 6.4 percent, and productivity is rising nearly everywhere. The United States is the world’s most productive nation, measured in annual output per worker, but then American workers work more hours than those in most other countries. Ireland was second. When measured in output per hour, Norway was first. But Norway is a very large oil producer with a very small population, which distorts the statistics. The United States was second by that measure. East Asia shows the greatest increase in productivity, but from a much lower level than Europe or North America. Altogether, “In 2006, the productivity rise was 3.3 percent at the global level, 2.1 percent for the industrialized world and 8.5 percent in East Asia.” The number of working poor is falling sharply everywhere but in sub-Saharan Africa, down by 50 percent in East Asia between 1996 and 2006. But for me, the most astonishing statistic of all was buried in the very last paragraph of the story. For the first time in 10,000 years, agriculture is no longer the primary source of global employment. According to the report, in 2006 industry employed 21.9 percent of the world’s workers, services 42 percent, and agriculture 36.1 percent. Ten years ago, agriculture was at 42 percent and services at 37 percent. That is a very rapid change indeed. It also indicates that much of the developing world seems to be bypassing the industrial stage of development and moving directly to services, perhaps because the enormous growth of global trade in the last 50 years has made it both unprofitable and unnecessary to establish local industries. Agriculture made civilization possible, but it made prosperity possible for only the few. And for millennia civilized societies were islands surrounded by barbarians. For 200 years industrialized societies were islands of ever-increasing and ever-more-widespread prosperity surrounded by those who still lived at a subsistence level except for the few. That is now changing rapidly. Assuming politics or nature doesn’t produce a global disaster, the world might be a much better place in a few decades, with abundance, not subsistence, the fate of most of humankind. If that should come to pass, the old order will indeed have passed.
August 31, 2007
Larry Craig’s Antecedents IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:05 AM EST I’m grateful to Alexander Burns for linking to the Los Angeles Times op-ed. But I wonder if the author has it exactly right. I’m not a psychiatrist by the longest of shots, but I suspect the persistence of “tearoom trade,” as the op-ed calls it, has a lot more to do with the erotic potential of the danger involved—the thrill of getting away with something so fraught with potential consequences—than with people who engage in such behavior simply being in denial. Mr. Burns writes, “In 1964, Jenkins was called a security threat by members of the political establishment. Today, similar political actors are condemning Larry Craig as merely ‘disgusting’ (see here and here). I guess this is a kind of progress, but it’s certainly not as much progress as one might have hoped for in 43 years.” Speaking of the security-threat excuse for being homophobic, it is interesting to put it mildly that when Walter Jenkins was hospitalized after the news broke, who should send him flowers but J. Edgar Hoover. In fairness to the writers in the two links, however, what they found disgusting was not Larry Craig or homosexuality per se but his behavior in a public restroom.
August 30, 2007
Larry Craig’s Antecedents II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:45 PM EST One of the biggest scandals involving politics and men’s room indiscretions involved Walter Jenkins, perhaps Lyndon Johnson’s closest aide, who had been with Johnson since 1939. On the night of October 7, 1964, in the midst of the presidential election of that year, Jenkins attended a party at the new Washington headquarters of Newsweek, where he had several martinis, and then visited the men’s room at the nearby YMCA, where he was arrested for having sex with another man by policemen who had the place staked out (using peepholes). See here. Jenkins paid the $50 fine and went back to work at the White House, hoping—like Senator Craig—that the story would not come to light. However, when newspapers began calling about it a week later, he went to see Abe Fortas, Lyndon Johnson’s legal Mr. Fixit (and later Supreme Court appointment) and was nearly incoherent. Fortas put Jenkins in George Washington Hospital and tried mightily to get the story spiked, unsuccessfully. After it hit the front pages, on October 15, Jenkins, married and with six children, resigned immediately. Jenkins and President Johnson had a tremendous stroke of luck when, the very day the story broke, Nikita Khrushchev was ousted in a Kremlin coup d’état and the British government of Sir Alex Douglas Home fell on a no-confidence vote in Parliament. The day after that Mainland China exploded its first atomic bomb, and the Jenkins story was pushed far into the back pages. Although Barry Goldwater was way behind in every public opinion poll, he exhibited a decency not common in Washington when he refused to exploit the story in any way.
August 23, 2007
Eisenhower’s Reputation II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:20 PM EST Being a little older than Fredric Smoler, I can remember the Eisenhower era a little better. For some mysterious reason I remember quite clearly seeing a picture in the paper in January 1953 (when I was eight) showing a moving van outside the White House as the Trumans prepared to depart. Harry Truman as well, of course, left office with the cognoscenti sniggering and pronouncing him a national joke. He too has seen his reputation rise and rise. The most recent presidential poll (that I know of) of historians has Truman at No. 7 and Eisenhower at No. 9, both in the near-great category. This, I think, does not say much for the snap judgment of historians. Mr. Smoler writes, “Eisenhower’s verbal clumsiness was constantly mocked, and the mockery was tinged with a sense of bitter loss: They could have had someone they loved and passionately admired, and they got that dull clown instead.” Adlai Stevenson was certainly more witty than Eisenhower (I especially admire the opening of his 1952 concession statement: “A funny thing happened to me today on the way to the White House. . . .”). Wit and wisdom, however, are not synonyms, as Mr. Smoler points out. But regarding Eisenhower’s verbal clumsiness. One way this was mocked at the time was to publish uncleaned-up transcripts of his press conference remarks. They were, of course, a verbal and syntactical mess. But this was very unfair. Few of us speak spontaneously in Augustan prose, and transcripts do not convey the body language that is so important a part of verbal communication. So if Eisenhower was often unclear as to what he meant, I strongly suspect that that was because he wanted to be unclear, not because he was incapable of clarity. I remember my father, who did not have a political bone in his body (I don’t think he ever voted in his life), snorting with derision at the idea that Eisenhower couldn’t say what he meant. My father spent five years in the army during World War II, rising from private to lieutenant colonel, and he told me that at Officers Candidate School he spent a lot of time learning how to give orders. According to him, in class the students would, over and over and over, be given orders to carry out an operation and told to prepare the orders they would give in turn as a platoon leader. The officer candidates would then read out those orders, and if anyone in the class had a legitimate question as to what they meant, they flunked. Eisenhower went to the oldest and biggest officers candidate school of them all, and I’d be very surprised indeed—given how richly military history is endowed with stories of avoidable disaster because of faulty or ambiguous orders—if he didn’t have the same drill pounded into his head. So it seems to me that the idea that the man who organized and successfully executed the largest and most complex military operation in the history of warfare couldn’t be clear in expressing himself is an idea so stupid, to quote George Orwell’s ever apt phrase, that “only an intellectual could believe it.” Add in the fact that it was an operation involving the always mutually antagonistic air, sea, and land forces not just of one but two Great Powers and numerous smaller countries, each with its own notions about how to do things, and Eisenhower comes across as a very major-league politician indeed.
August 19, 2007
Warren G. Harding and Barack Obama II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 06:10 PM EST I certainly agree with Alexander Burns that if Warren Harding had a black ancestor, that does not make him “black” in any modern sense of the term. So it is ridiculous to say that he might displace Barack Obama as the first black President, assuming—and it’s a very big assumption at this point of course—that Senator Obama is elected. But the story goes back much further than the racist Professor Chancellor. Indeed, it goes back further than Warren Harding, who was born in 1865. As his most recent major biographer (Francis Russell, The Shadow of Blooming Grove: Warren Harding in His Times; Russell also wrote the article in American Heritage Mr. Burns referred to) wrote, “In church and meeting, in ownership of land and in the quality of their gravestones, the Hardings appeared the oldest and most prominent family in the village. Blooming Grove [Ohio] was even referred to as Harding Corners. Yet there was a flaw in this successful family, a shadow that the Hardings could not escape, a rumor that would not quite die down, that they and every family in Blooming Grove were aware of. For it was said, usually in whispers, and had been said almost from the arrival of the Hardings in Ohio, that the Harding veins had Negro blood in them.” President Harding’s great-great grandfather, Amos Harding, who was the first of the family to move to Blooming Grove and died there in 1839, told his descendants that the rumor had been started by a man whom he had caught stealing corn from him and who had soon thereafter left town. But whether or not the rumor was true doesn’t really matter. The rumor was always there. And that did matter in the nineteenth century. Warren Harding had it thrown in his face in every schoolboy quarrel. It never went away, and it profoundly affected Harding and many of his relatives. Indeed, the shadow in the title of Russell’s biography was the rumor of Negro blood. Harding hardly ever referred to it, but the one time he did, he told a reporter friend of his, “How do I know, Jim? One of my ancestors may have jumped the fence.” There is little if any evidence to support the rumor, but Harding’s ancestry, while as well studied as all presidential genealogies have been, has some large gaps in it. One great grandmother is only probably known, and another has “said to be” parents. So there is room for the rumor to fester in the absence of evidence to the contrary. What interests me here is that as far as this country has come in race relations in the last 60 years, the fact remains that 170-year-old utterly unsubstantiated rumors about the supposed black ancestry of an American President who died 84 years ago can still be regarded as newsworthy by a respectable newspaper.
August 12, 2007
Freds and History II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 06:00 PM EST I long ago noted that the people who blog for American Heritage were disproportionately named Fred—25 percent of the total and 37.5 percent of the male bloggers. But it might also be noted that each of them spells his full first name differently—Frederick, Frederic, and Fredric. I wonder if the diversity of ways to spell the name contributes to its sudden apparent scarcity. In other words is this a problem in methodology? For instance, this list of male first names shows the following rankings among American male names: Fred, 71; Frederick, 131; Freddie, 299; Fredrick, 303; Freddy, 533; Frederic, 720; Fredric, 992. Add those all together and you get a pretty common first name. There appears to be no danger of my first name falling out of favor. It’s No. 2 on the above list. Even among popular names for babies in 2005, John ranks No. 18. If you add in all the variant spellings (Jon being the most common) and all the foreign versions (Sean, Ian, Jean, Johan, etc.), I’m sure it is No. 1 by a country mile. Like many people, I have always disliked my first name, in my case precisely because it is so very common. Coupled with a very common last name (Gordon ranks 143 on this list of surnames), it results in a name of notable unmemorability, right up there with John Doe. That’s why I have always used my middle name, in hopes of distinguishing myself from the vast herd of John Gordons that roam the American landscape. I am not the only one to adopt this ploy. A friend once presented me with the following list of people with a first name of John who used their middle name:
John Quincy Adams
John Jacob Astor
John James Audubon
John Wilkes Booth
John Sherman Cooper
John Singleton Copley
John Foster Dulles
John Kenneth Galbraith
John Nance Garner
John Marshall Harlan
John Paul Jones
John Maynard Keynes
John Stuart Mill
John Ringling North
John Crowe Ransom
John Philip Sousa
John Singer Sargent
John Cameron Swayze
John Scott Trotter
Then there are also John Wellington Wells, the title character in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Sorcerer, and John Beresford Tipton, the mysterious moneybags who wrote the checks in the 1950s television series The Millionaire. I was nearly named otherwise. My father (fighting in Europe) wanted me named after my great-great grandfather, whose name was Powhatan Gordon (his mother claimed descent from Pocahontas—the direct surviving evidence is thin, to put it mildly, but the indirect evidence is very good, so who knows?). My mother was inclined to agree, but my grandmother Steele had a fit at the idea and that was that. I was stuck with John. I have always wondered if I would have disliked having the extraordinarily uncommon name of Powhatan as much as I have disliked the all-too-common John. Since one gets only a single trip through this vale of tears, that question will never be answered.
August 11, 2007
Goodbye to Richard Nixon II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 06:15 PM EST Just a couple of comments before I turn on the television to watch the greatest golfer who has ever lived ply his trade at the PGA. First, I am old enough to remember Watergate at first hand. It was certainly hog heaven for us news junkies. I doubt there have ever been so many banner headlines in The New York Times—a newspaper notoriously parsimonious with banner headlines—in so short a period, finally ending with only the second time in history that the Times had used war type in a headline: “NIXON RESIGNS.” The first time, for the record, was, “MEN WALK ON THE MOON” five years earlier. But equally, I hope the country never has to go through another series of events that require so many banner headlines. In many, many ways, the country has never recovered from Watergate. That’s why I’m puzzled when Joshua Zeitz writes, “. . . it’s still not clear that Nixon was especially competent or incompetent. He may well have been average. In which case, Watergate continues to matter.” It seems to me that Watergate would matter if Richard Nixon had been the very embodiment of competence (although, to be sure, had he been such, I doubt he would have made such an utter dog’s breakfast of it). Competent or not, moderate or not, accomplished or not, Richard Nixon is one of the most fascinating characters in American political history, indeed of almost Shakespearean dimensions. How many Presidents, after all, have had operas written about them? As more and more political actors of that era pass from the scene, more and more historical data will become available, and more and more books will be written and probably more operas. A hundred years from now, Nixon is going to take up a lot of shelf space—or whatever the digital equivalent may be in 2107. I think Mr. Zeitz failed to mention one of Nixon’s most egregious policy mistakes, price controls, imposed in the summer of 1971. Government price controls have a record going back all the way to the Emperor Diocletian and, except briefly in wartime, they have always been a disaster, as they were when Nixon tried them. Like so many people in the public sector, Nixon just never understood that market forces are a force of nature that cannot be turned off by political fiat. To quote a Vietnamese proverb, “Trying to stop a market is like trying to stop a river.” Finally, Mr. Zeitz writes, “. . . it’s important not to conflate the term ‘good’ with ‘moderate’/’liberal,’ and equally important not to confuse ‘conservative’ with ‘bad.’” I certainly agree with this, provided the slash mark is replaced with the word “or.” Moderates and liberals are not the same beasts in my book, by a long shot. Now, off to the television. Go, Tiger!
August 9, 2007
FDR’s Polio Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:35 PM EST Reading Ellen Feldman’s excellent article on FDR’s polio (or whatever it was in fact), I am stimulated to make a recommendation.
A couple of weeks ago I remembered watching, with great enjoyment, the television series “Eleanor and Franklin” based on the book of the same name by Joseph P. Lash, which won the Pulitzer Prize in biography in 1972. The TV program dates to the mid-70’s, so I last saw it thirty years ago. I turned to the estimable Netflix and ordered it. I have now watched the first half, “The Early Years,” which covers the Roosevelts up to his election as President.
I think it is excellent in every way, wonderfully capturing the characters of both Eleanor (beautifully played by Jane Alexander) and FDR (equally well played by Edward Hermann) and their complicated, all-too-human, and historically remarkable relationship. I found it deeply moving. Reading Ms. Feldman’s piece this morning, I am struck by how many of the details that she mentions about his early days with polio are mentioned or portrayed in the TV show. Joseph Lash was a consultant, so I imagine the show is equally historically fastidious throughout.
Indeed, about the only thing I could find to complain about was the house used to depict Theodore Roosevelt’s Sagamore Hill in one scene: it was too gilded-age fancy. Sagamore Hill, while large (23 rooms), is a much more homey, wicker-rockers-on-the-porch sort of place (the Roosevelts were old money and didn’t need to impress anyone). And, of course, there are TR’s hunting trophies all over the place, including, if I remember correctly, an elephant-foot wastebasket that fascinated me when I saw it fifty years ago.
So I would recommend people do what I did: get “Eleanor and Franklin” from Netflix or Blockbuster or wherever and spend a couple of evenings with one of the most extraordinary American couples of the twentieth century. As a bonus, “Going Home,” the greatest American folk song ever written by a classical Czech composer (Antonin Dvorák), is heard frequently as FDR’s funeral train makes its way slowly northward from Warm Springs.
August 4, 2007
The Guerre de Course II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:25 PM EST Just a few thoughts regarding Fredric Smoler’s thoughtful post on this subject. We will, of course, never know if the Germans could have won the Battle of the Atlantic by having concentrated on submarines before the outbreak of war instead of trying to build a surface fleet to take on the Royal Navy. But surely had the shipbuilding capacity and the design talent that went into building such ships as Bismarck and Tirpitz (quite possibly the finest battleships ever built) gone into submarines instead, the Battle of the Atlantic would have been an even nearer-run thing than it was. The Bismarck and Tirpitz proved useless. The former was sunk in a week (after a thrilling chase to be sure), and the latter was bottled up in a Norwegian fjord until sunk by bombs late in the war. Germany had only 57 U-boats at the outbreak of the war and most of them were small, short-range vessels intended to operate in British coastal waters. Even the long-range U-boats were essentially of World War I design. If Germany had had a large fleet of submarines of state-of-the-art design, it could have devastated British shipping before Britain could have acquired the escort vessels and long-range aircraft (properly armed to attack submarines) that finally proved the key to winning the battle. Speaking of poets, a very good if often very didactic one, Rudyard Kipling, understood the threat of the guerre de course. I don’t think the Confederate guerre de course was designed to win the war for the South. As always it was a faute de mieux strategy, and the question is whether the resources devoted to the guerre de course against the North could have been deployed elsewhere with more effect. It seems to me that the resources were small and the effect large, giving the strategy more bang for the buck than any other. The effect, especially if unexpected, can be huge. John Paul Jones managed to put the British maritime industry (a large part of the British economy) into fits and deeply embarrass the British Admiralty when he captured British warships in home waters. Jones didn’t come close to winning the American Revolution, but he sure helped, psychologically and thus politically. Mr. Smoler writes, “Come to think of it, when did the guerre de course ever produce a victory in war, rather than merely add to a war’s cost? Commerce raiding was the naval strategy of the Confederacy, the Wilhelmine empire of Germany, and also of the French monarchy, the French Republic, and the Napoleonic Empire. It failed every time.” Indeed it did, which just goes to show that Alfred Thayer Mahan was right in his remarkably influential book The Influence of Sea Power Upon History: the superior naval power wins the big wars. I wish someone would write a new book on Mahan and how his theories affected twentieth century warfare. I have the perfect title for it: The Influence of The Influence of Sea Power Upon History Upon History. Catchy, don’t you think?
August 4, 2007
Florence Foster Jenkins Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:10 PM EST While we are memorializing spectacularly untalented poets, we should not forget the most untalented singer ever to sell out Carnegie Hall, Florence Foster Jenkins. Madame Jenkins, born in 1868, was the daughter of a very successful Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, banker. Though she was given music lessons as a child, when she said that she wanted to travel to Europe to train as a singer, her father refused to foot the bill. She eloped with a young doctor, Frank Jenkins, but he, too, gave her no encouragement. With her divorce in 1902 and her father’s death in 1909 leaving her plenty of money, Florence Foster Jenkins was able to undertake the singing career of which she had always dreamed. Unfortunately she lacked any sense of pitch, rhythm, or tone, defects of which she appears to have been blissfully unaware. She gave her first concert in 1912 and, after her move to New York from Philadelphia, she gave an annual concert in the ball room of the Ritz Carlton Hotel. She determined who could get tickets, giving them out to her friends—-who all seemed to be as tone deaf as she was—but they were soon in great demand among New York’s musical cognoscenti, because she was so bad she was howlingly funny. As one writer put it, “Audiences laughed at her—laughed until the tears rolled down their cheeks, laughed until they stuffed handkerchiefs in their mouths to stifle the mirth—but she was never dismayed. Even when a song was punctured by rowdy applause (her listeners sometimes responded to a piercing clinker with whoops of “Bravo! Bravo!”), the diva simply smiled and bowed. After all, she modestly murmured, didn’t Frank Sinatra arouse the same sort of buoyant enthusiasm among his adoring bobby soxers?” It wasn’t just the singing. She filled the stage with potted palms and flowers and appeared in costumes suitable for the song. For one of her favorites, “Angel of Inspiration,” she would dress in acres of tulle, complete with angel wings adorning her dumpy, unlikely-to-get-airborne figure. She was always accompanied by a pianist with the unlikely name of Cosmé McMoon, who did his best to adjust to her sense of rhythm, or lack thereof. Finally, in October 1944, at the age of 76, she rented Carnegie Hall and allowed the tickets to go on public sale. The concert sold out weeks in advance. The people lucky enough to get tickets cheered her to the rafters, but the critics were, predictably, less enthused. One described her as “undaunted by the composer’s intent.” Another wrote, “Only Mrs. Jenkins has perfected the art of giving added zest by improvising quarter tones, either above or below the original notes.” Robert Bager of the New York World-Telegram was more gentle: “She was exceedingly happy in her work” he wrote. “It is a pity so few artists are. And her happiness was communicated as if by magic to her listeners . . . who were stimulated to the point of audible cheering, even joyous laughter and ecstasy by the inimitable singing.” Her life work now complete, Florence Foster Jenkins died a month later. Fortunately for us, she recorded several songs and these are still available on Amazon on such albums as Florence Foster Jenkins and Friends: Murder on the High C’s. Or you can catch her splendiferous awfulness on YouTube (earlier bad link now fixed).
August 2, 2007
Elizabeth I Returns II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:50 AM EST I thank Alexander Burns for telling me of the forthcoming Elizabeth: The Golden Age. It looks so terrific that I will probably bestir myself sufficiently to see it in a movie theater rather than wait a few months and get the DVD. He writes, “Mr. Gordon wrote yesterday about Elizabeth I, who is ‘forever enshrined as the apotheosis of English monarchs, clear-eyed assessments be damned.’ I’m not sure what Gilbert and Sullivan would think of this, not to mention Queen Victoria herself . . .” Well, here’s what Gilbert and Sullivan thought of Elizabeth I (while making fun of the House of Lords in Iolanthe): When Britain really ruled the waves—
(In good Queen Bess’s time)
The House of Peers made no pretence
To intellectual eminence,
Or scholarship sublime;
Yet Britain won her proudest bays
In good Queen Bess’s glorious days! As far as I know, G&S never referred directly to Queen Victoria. No fools they. They were both great queens, and they both have had the ultimate in historical compliments bestowed upon them: to have their names become adjectives to denote the times in which they lived. But as for which queen better deserves to have the title of “apotheosis of English monarchs” bestowed upon her by popular (as opposed to professional historical) acclaim, I would offer this bit of evidence: Compare Elizabeth I: The Golden Age with the most recent movie about Queen Victoria, Mrs. Brown. The former is the story of a monarch as the heroic leader of her people in a time of national crisis. The latter is a quite touching story of a woman—who happened to be the Queen of England—helped out of her inconsolable grief over the death of her husband by a bumptious, pushy, often drunken servant who was hated by everyone else, from the other servants to the Prince of Wales. While a superb movie, I don’t think Mrs. Brown is the stuff of which apotheoses are made.
July 31, 2007
Another Great Rightist IX Posted by John Steele Gordon at 06:45 PM EST Alexander Burns writes, “I disagree with his [i.e. my] statement that Churchill, de Gaulle, and Reagan were not really men of the right.” I don’t believe I made that statement. De Gaulle was certainly, at least by the standards of twentieth-century French politics, a man of the right. But both Churchill and Reagan began on the left. Reagan was a Roosevelt Democrat in his younger days and got his start in politics as a union president, not the usual job of a rightist, although to be sure it wasn’t the usual kind of union either. But Reagan was always a very practical (and gifted) politician first and an ideologue second, which is why he was so successful, making very significant deals with the likes of Tip O’Neill and Dan Rostenkowski. During his days of greatness, on a scale of 1 to 10 (1 being lunatic left, 10 lunatic right), I’d rate Reagan at about a 7 in rhetoric and a 6 in practice. To the Dan Rathers of the world, of course, everyone to the right of 5 is automatically a 10. Talk about lack of nuance. Before World War I, when liberalism was the mainstream left, Churchill was an advocate of increased government spending on such matters as unemployment insurance and old-age pensions and therefore definitely of the left. After the war, British politics moved sharply leftwards, and the old Liberal Party—the party of Gladstone, Palmerston, and Lloyd-George—ceased to be a major player in British politics; Labor, avowedly socialist, became the left, making Churchill a man of the right without his having taken a step. Also, of course, Churchill was both a romantic and impetuous. Frankly, he was not a very good politician, in the dog-eat-dog, back-stabbing, finger-to-the-wind sense, although he was an excellent administrator and strategist. He remained a supporter of the empire (“I did not become the King’s first minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire”) long after it had ceased to be fashionable in elite British circles. He opposed giving India dominion status, which was bad politics and, I at least think, plain wrong. The world had moved beyond Rudyard Kipling, and in some ways Churchill never did. And he defended Edward VIII and Mrs. Simpson out of a romantic sense of the divine right of kings, when almost everyone else in Britain, from dukes to dustmen, wanted them gone. Mr. Burns writes, “George H. W. Bush received a smaller percentage of the vote in 1992 than any incumbent President since Taft.” True, but not quite fair I think. He faced the first third-party candidate with major national appeal since Taft faced Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt was, of course, a far more formidable political force than Perot. My apologies to Roosevelt for even mentioning them in the same sentence. He writes, “It would be unsettling to think that the American people are incapable of a clear-eyed assessment of their Presidents.” Here’s where Mr. Burns and I seriously differ. I don’t think collectives can make “clear-eyed assessments.” Only individuals can do that. The people slowly (or not so slowly) zero in on a collective folk memory that soon becomes quite impervious to scholarly attempts to add a little clear-eyed assessment. Consider two examples: —James K. Polk was a remarkably successful President. Scholars rank him highly, the only president between Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln who isn’t totally in the rankings cellar. The panel here ranked him No. 10, ahead of Woodrow Wilson. (I wrote the article on Martin Van Buren but was not on the rating panel, made up entirely of academics.) But how many Americans have even heard of him? Maybe 2 in 10 could tell you he was a President. I bet not 2 in 100 could tell you what he did as President. —Queen Elizabeth I is not only known to everyone in the English-speaking world (and far beyond) but is universally regarded as one of England’s greatest monarchs. But was she? She was hell to work for and chronically unable to make up her mind or even keep it made up when she finally did make a decision. She was neurotically cheap, except when it came to spending (preferably other people’s money) on herself. She shamelessly played favorites, putting people like the earls of Leicester and Essex at the head of armies when far better qualified and talented men were available. (She finally wised up about Essex and had his head whacked off—she coined the phrase “I shall make you shorter by the head.”) She didn’t even defeat the Spanish Armada. It was an astonishingly badly conceived plan, and the weather did the rest. But she was a brilliant propagandist, tightly controlling her own image and never forgetting for a minute that the ultimate source of her power was the people, however much she believed in the divine right of kings, and she played to them always. (“Though God has raised me high, yet this I count the glory of my crown: that I have reigned with your loves.”) She was also, like Churchill, de Gaulle, and Reagan, a master of public speaking and an instinctive nationalist (“I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England too”—Could Shakespeare have written the Tilsbury speech better?). And so she is forever enshrined as the apotheosis of English monarchs, clear-eyed assessments be damned. —When Reagan ran against Jimmy Carter in 1980, he kept asking the question, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” It was a devastating ploy, for the answer was so clearly no, and Jimmy Carter became the first elected President since Hoover to be awarded what Churchill called, after his defeat in 1945, “the order of the boot.” Michael Dukakis did not ask the question, “Are you better off now than you were eight years ago?” when he ran in 1988, because the answer was so very clearly “yes, very much better off, thank you.” Reagan got the credit for that, and he will keep it, just as Carter got the blame for the dismal late 1970s, not all of which belonged to him. The English people in 1603 could equally answer the question if they were better off after Elizabeth than before her in the affirmative. That counts for a lot in the folk memory.
By the way, Rasmussen has a very interesting poll out: Survey of 1,000 Adults
July 24-25, 2007
Political Description of Candidate-Positive or Negative Pos Neg Net
Like Reagan 44% 25% +19
Progressive 35% 18% +17
Moderate 29% 12% +17
Conservative 32% 20% +12
Liberal 20% 30% -10 I sincerely hope we never add any more faces to Mt. Rushmore, but if we do, I’ll bet a very goodly sum that the two that are added will be FDR and Ronald Reagan and there won’t even be much of an argument.
July 30, 2007
American Ceremony III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 02:40 PM EST Alexander Burns’s description of the governor of Massachusetts proceeding in stately procession to the Harvard commencement in a carriage with armed guards in scarlet uniforms reminds me of a family story too good not to pass on. My aunt’s great-great grandfather was Edwin D. Morgan, who served as governor of New York from 1859 to 1862. Both he and his wife were, shall we say, amply proportioned in the best Victorian manner. “Between us,” he once proudly said, “my wife and I dispose of better than a quarter of a ton.” On some ceremonial occasion, they were in a parade, going up Broadway in an open carriage. As the bands played, the soldiers marched, and, presumably, the people cheered, the bottom of the carriage suddenly gave way, depositing the governor and his lady unceremoniously onto the pavement, fortunately on their feet. All dignity instantly dispensed with, the two of them ran along, surrounded by what was left of the carriage, until the coachman could bring the frightened horses under control and halt them. How they finally extricated Governor and Mrs. Morgan from the wreck is not recorded, but I imagine the spectators on the sidewalk enjoyed themselves immensely at their expense.
July 30, 2007
American Ceremony Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:45 AM EST This country often takes a very cavalier attitude toward ceremony and punctiliousness. I often get letters and e-mails from total strangers who address me as “Dear John,” or even “dear john,” capital letters having become optional in e-mails. That’s fine with me and quite in keeping with the character of this bumptious, informal, everyone’s-a-friend-until-proven-otherwise, howdy-pardner country of ours. Even on state occasions the informal often intrudes, sometimes for better and sometimes not. While Ronald Reagan’s immense funeral was stage managed to perfection, intensely moving and with nary a wrong note, presidential inaugurations usually seem, to me at least, lacking in ceremonial pizzazz, a high school graduation ceremony on a larger scale. The British are supposed to do these things much better, although that reputation is of relatively recent vintage. Queen Victoria’s coronation in 1838 was more or less a shambles, thanks to a lack of rehearsal. At one point the Queen had to ask one of the peers, “Pray tell me, what am I to do now?” I was reminded of all this yesterday evening when I happened to turn on the television just in time to see Britain’s new prime minister, Gordon Brown, arrive at Camp David for his first meeting with the President. While not a “state visit,” the arrival was handled with some ceremony . . . up to a point. When the Marine Corps helicopter that had ferried Brown from Andrews Air Force Base landed, two lines of sailors and Marines in dress uniforms marched out and lined either side of the path from the helicopter, standing at rigid attention. Then the President—dressed in a tie and sport coat—appeared, accompanied by a naval officer in dress summer uniform. When they reached the bottom of the stairs, the prime minister descended and warmly shook hands with President Bush, who introduced him to the naval officer and led him between the lines of sailors and Marines, who were all saluting smartly. So far so good. Then the President led Brown to a golf cart. Brown got in the passenger side, the President slipped behind the wheel, did a 360 in front of the press corps, and “the leader of the free world” and the head of government of our closest ally went tootling off together to Camp David. Welcome to America, Prime Minister.
July 27, 2007
Another Great Rightist VII Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:45 PM EST Just a few observations to add to this most interesting colloquy. 1) I think these sorts of polls are basically meaningless because they are asking an unanswerable question. It’s a bit like asking which is more inherently delicious, a cheese soufflé or a bowl of strawberries with heavy cream (“Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did.”). Which is a greater work of art, Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, or Picasso’s Guernica?The only possible answer, as far as I’m concerned, is all of them. 2) I don’t think that being a “rightist” (whatever that might be) is what Churchill, de Gaulle, and Reagan have in common. Churchill backed programs early in his career (and crossed the floor of Parliament in 1904 to further them) that were definitely of the left. Only when British politics drifted further leftward, did Churchill come to seem of the right. He was a liberal, not a socialist. Churchill felt that the aim of socialism was to tear down the rich, and the aim of liberalism to raise up the poor. Much the same can be said of Reagan, who always felt that he didn’t leave the Democratic Party; it left him. 3) Varied as they were, Churchill, de Gaulle, Reagan, and the so-far-strangely-absent-from-this-discussion Franklin Roosevelt had a few things in common. First, they were all optimists. They had no trouble seeing the “broad, sunlit uplands” of the future whatever the terrible travails of the present. Second, they were all eloquent and able to connect with the people through words at a very fundamental level. Third, they were all nationalists, intensely proud of the history of their respective countries and entirely confident that their countries’ days of glory were not over. Fourth, all four were capable of thinking with their hearts, not just their minds. They could think—and speak—emotionally. Intellectuals seem never to understand that it takes two of the body’s organs to really find the truth in the human universe. The ordinary guy in the street has no problem with that concept at all. 4) Alexander Burns writes, “Many Americans remember Reagan as the winner of the Cold War. There’s plenty of evidence to complicate that perception of history, but it may be that popular memory hasn’t yet absorbed it.” Nor, I’m confident, will it. Nuance is for historians, not the people. Previous Presidents wanted to manage the Cold War; Reagan wanted to win it, and he did. He was captain of the ship when the enemy vessel became a flaming wreck. To be sure, a fire in the enemy’s boiler room helped mightily, but it was Reagan who helped force the enemy to overstress its dilapidated machinery. And it was Reagan who took over a country in deep economic distress and left it in the midst of an economic roll that the world has never seen the equal of. Was he entirely responsible? Of course not. But it wouldn’t have happened had Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale been running the country between 1981 and 1989. I have a very close friend who is a card-carrying liberal of the old school: boycotted grapes, backed the nuclear freeze, opposed every tax cut he ever heard of, you name it. For reasons I can’t remember now, someone gave him a list of the “great Presidents” including Reagan. My friend smiled and said, “Yeah, I guess he was pretty good after all.” That’s when I knew that Reagan had made it into the presidential seraphim. Historians will quibble about this and that, but the man’s greatness will never be seriously in question.
July 24, 2007
Confidential Sources II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:25 PM EST I agree with Alexander Burns that Novak broke his word to Senator Eagleton never to reveal him as the source. A deal is a deal. Even politicians and journalists—neither profession exactly famous for gentlemanly behavior—can understand that. I also agree that it would be great if we could get it standardized that a promise of confidentiality made to get the story should have an expiration date, such as 50 years after the death of the journalist, so that historians can use the material. The historical record is imperfect enough. Speaking of the historical record, there have been far worse instances of destruction than a journalist taking a confidence to his or her grave. I can think of three infamous cases off the top of my head, all of them British. After Lord Byron’s death in 1824, his publisher, John Murray, burned his memoirs. While surely unpublishable at the time, they must have been fascinating. So fascinating, in fact, that that is why Murray destroyed them. How true they were, of course, is another matter. After the death of Sir Richard Burton in 1890, Lady Burton burned his journals. Burton had led one of the most adventurous of Victorian lives, which is saying something. Speaking numerous languages fluently, he traveled the world, went many places never seen before by Europeans (he discovered Lake Tanganyika in the heart of Africa, among other things). Fluent in Arabic (he translated The Arabian Nights into English) and Muslim customs, he dressed in Arab clothing and went to Mecca for the Hajj. Had he been discovered, his fate would undoubtedly have been very unpleasant indeed. Apparently he was as sexually adventurous as he was geographically, and his wife did not want the details to besmirch her husband’s memory. They might have, I suppose, at the time, but today his journals would make this extraordinary man only more extraordinary. Finally, Queen Victoria left her diary to her youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice. She had kept it faithfully from when she was still a child until a few days before her death at the age of 81, having reigned over Britain at the height of her glory for more than 63 years. The diary was massive, 111 volumes filled with the details and vignettes of the remarkable life of the person who gave her name to an age. A good, direct writer and sometimes very observant, the Queen knew all the great figures of her time and was present at innumerable events of historical significance. The diary was published and is a remarkable document to put it mildly, but it was only published after Princess Beatrice destroyed the parts that she and she alone deemed “unsuitable.” Only about one third survives. What a tragedy.
July 20, 2007
Disaster and Technology II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:45 AM EST I was not in New York when the steam pipe exploded. I was in the Denver airport, waiting for a plane that was two hours late, and saw it live on CNN. That’s about as close as I care to come to such an event, thank you very much. If that means living vicariously, so be it. Ellen Feldman mentions that news of the Titanic disaster spread around the world in hours thanks to the technological miracles of submarine cables and wireless, and that a few decades earlier it would have taken weeks for the news to spread. Indeed. In January, 1856, the Collins liner Pacific, sailing from Liverpool to New York, simply vanished. No trace of her or any of the 280 souls on board ever appeared. It is unlikely we will ever know what happened. Ms. Feldman mentions the heavy use of cell phones, both as communication devices and as cameras, and I agree with her that they are often obnoxious when used in the wrong place or too loudly. (In the Denver airport I watched in fascination as a man, oblivious to his surroundings, carried on an animated conversation—complete with emphatic hand gestures—with an unseen interlocutor, using a hands-free cell phone. Twenty-five years ago such a scene would have brought the security guards and probably men in white coats.) But the proliferation of cell phones and camcorders has produced a revolution in the amount of evidence regarding historical events that can be utilized. The first time a tornado was photographed was in 1884, and it was, I believe, the 1950s before one was caught on movie film. Today you can buy dozens of DVDs of tornado movies. I’ve seen some that are very impressive to put it mildly. One was shot from the entrance to a storm cellar, with the man’s wife screaming at him in the background to stop filming and close the door. The famous Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination is, so far as I know, the only one, and by far the most important piece of evidence regarding exactly what happened. But when 9/11 happened, 38 years later, things were different. There is only one piece of film footage of the first plane striking the north tower. It was shot by a French film crew who were doing a piece on New York City firemen and just happened to be filming them while facing south on Greenwich Street—the World Trade Center in the background—when history happened before their astonished eyes. But there are dozens if not hundreds of views of the second plane hitting the south tower, taken from every conceivable vantage point, and there’s an almost infinite amount of film of the immediate aftermath, the desperate rescue attempts, and the fall of the towers. Ms Feldman writes, “Outside on the street, they were stopping to capture the scene digitally. I assumed they were all fledgling photojournalists, dreaming of breaking into the big time with their pictures. A neighbor whom I ran into on the long trek home interpreted the picture-taking differently. She says we have turned into a nation of individuals who can experience events only vicariously. Perhaps that’s another result of technological innovation.” I don’t agree. Our species is the most communicative on the planet. We make a flock of parrots seem like Trappist monks. And when there is a big event, the urge—the deep need—to communicate with other humans becomes overwhelming. Technology just makes us more able to communicate, more able to be human. We can not only tell people when we got home what we saw (Hey, honey, guess what!), we can show them what we saw. That doesn’t mean we can only live vicariously; it simply means we can experience more fully at second hand what we didn’t (fortunately or unfortunately) experience firsthand.
July 14, 2007
Realignment Posted by John Steele Gordon at 07:50 PM EST Five years ago, I wrote a piece about future political realignment
for The Wall Street Journal, called “The Next Great
Divide.” (The interested reader can find it at the Wall Street
Journal website, but he will have to fork over $2.95 to see it,
even subscribers. In fact even the author, I am not happy to
report.)
I noted that countries that trace their political traditions to
England usually have two-party, big-tent political systems,
divided by a single overriding issue. In this country, that issue
was first the size and power of the federal government. Then
there was a muddled period (the 1824 election went into the
House) before a new divide opened up, sectional in nature, with
the tariff and then slavery as the crucial issue. After the Civil War
there was another muddled period (the 1876 election was only
settled at the very last minute, and many other elections in this
period were very close). The next great divide was between
capital and labor. The Republicans had the better of the
argument between 1896 and 1929, but the Great Depression put
the Democrats in charge and they were able to push through a
broad array of programs on behalf of the have-nots in this
country.
The liberal programs proved so successful that the have-nots
began to disappear from the body politic, which became
dramatically more skilled, more educated, and more affluent. A
country of haves and have-nots became a country of haves and
have-mores. The third great divide began to close up, and we
are now back in a muddled period, characterized by close and
divided elections and personal vituperation, just as we had in
the 1820s and in the post–Civil War era.
So what’s next? Good question. Three factors might be noted,
however.
First, the left half of American politics hasn’t had a new idea in 50
years. It is still committed to economic policies geared to a
country with widespread poverty. On foreign policy it is
increasingly isolationist. Its main sources of support are all
backward looking: labor unions, civil rights organizations,
bureaucrats, and tort lawyers. Meanwhile the right half,
intellectually moribund in the ‘
’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, has been a ferment of ideas, by no means
all of them good (in fact some of them terrible). But at least they
are ideas that would have been unfamiliar to Franklin Roosevelt
and Arthur Vandenberg.
Second, we live in the most technologically revolutionary times
at least since the steam engine, only now change is happening
much more quickly than it did 200 years ago. To demonstrate
this, here’s a quick thought experiment. Some latter day Rip Van
Winkle has just woken up from a half-century sleep. He says,
“What’s new?” In answer you hand him an iPhone, which kids
are acquiring by the millions. See what I mean? And, to coin a
phrase, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. The world of 2057 will be far
more different from today’s world than today’s is different from
the world of 1957.
Third, the new technology is rapidly reducing the control of old
political power centers (the mainstream media, political parties,
governments, labor unions, central banks) and raising that of
new centers, most prominently perhaps the blogosphere (just
ask Dan Rather). How it will all play out is anyone’s guess, but it
is not good news for the conservative party in American politics.
And that party today is the Democratic Party, deeply wedded to
old ideas and fighting hard to maintain the old ways of doing
things and sustaining the political power of fading forces, like
organized labor. That’s the very essence of conservatism.
My guess—or perhaps more accurately, my wish—is that
American politics will divide, at least in the near future, over how
fast and how far to allow market forces to dictate change, just as
in the middle third of the twentieth century it was over how far
and how fast to introduce the liberal programs. That change is
coming as surely as the sun will rise in the east tomorrow, and
market forces will drive it—all those kids mobilizing coalitions
over their iPhones. The argument will be over the hows and
whys and wheres and whens and whethers. Globalization and
the ever increasingly out-of-date monopoly nature of
government are two major areas where these battles will surely
be fought. I expect the Democratic party to be on the
conservative side of most of these battles and to lose most of
them as well, unless an American Tony Blair arises. I certainly
see no sign of him in the current bunch of Democratic
contenders.
It’s going to be very exciting, and I’d love to stick around and
watch it unfold over the next half a century. Unfortunately, I
expect I’ll find that I have an appointment in Samarra before
then.
July 14, 2007
How Not to Debate Iraq II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:05 AM EST Mr. Burns writes that I cited only one article in support of the idea that matters might be improving in Iraq at long last. I cited three, one from the New York Times front page, in fact. Here are six more, including one from a journalist embedded in Iraq and one from an Iraqi blogger whose blog www.iraqthemodel.com should be read frequently. http://michaelyon-online.com/wp/al-qaeda-on-the-run-feasting-
on-the-moveable-beast.htm http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=071107A http://britainandamerica.typepad.com/britain_and_america/2007/
07/bbc-reports-tha.html http://article.nationalreview.com/?
q=MDVlZDA4NjFlNmUzZGU1OTk3MDEyNWFiNWRjN2E2Mjg= http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118420029887664045-search.html?
KEYWORDS=iraq+the+model&COLLECTION=wsjie/6month http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118429030611165505-search.html?
KEYWORDS=iraqthemodel.com&COLLECTION=wsjie/6month As for Mr. Zeitz’s three points in his latest post, let me say the following: 1) If the military is underfunded, as Mr. Zeitz alleges, then that is easily remedied. The Democrats control Congress, which controls the purse strings, so Senator Reid and Speaker Pelosi can easily add the necessary funds to the defense appropriation bill. I am confident that the President will not veto the bill because of those additions. I am, shall we say, less confident that Reid and Pelosi will do any such thing. Of course, in the strange political calculus of the left, the underfunding will then be President Bush’s fault. 2) I have now read the articles by Mary-Jo Cooney and Michael Ledeen. I haven’t changed my mind. I just don’t buy the idea that people who choose to publish articles in major newspapers are immune to criticism because they have a child in the military. I, like Mr. Ledeen, found the article remarkably egocentric. 3) With regard to Cindy Sheehan and whether she is anti-American or merely criticizing a country she loves, let her speak for herself. “I was raised in a country by a public school system that taught us that America was good, that America was just. America has been killing people . . . since we first stepped on this continent; we have been responsible for death and destruction. I passed on that bulls**t to my son, and my son enlisted. I’m going all over the country telling moms this country is not worth dying for.” That is not criticism, that is a rant by a pathological (I use the word advisedly) anti-American. The undoubted fact that there are anti-American nut cases elsewhere in the body politic is neither here nor there.
July 12, 2007
How Goes the War? IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:20 AM EST A few responses to the points Joshua Zeitz made in his latest post. 1) He writes that “Webb and his colleagues—most of whom also support withdrawal in one fashion or another—simply believe that the Iraq War is breaking the back of the U.S. military and that we need to do better by our servicemen by bringing them home and helping them mend their families, their souls, and their bodies.” First, “withdrawal” is defeat. When an army moves in to a foreign country in order to achieve an objective, fails to achieve it, and withdraws from that country, it has been defeated. Therefore those who advocate immediate withdrawal are advocating immediate defeat. Defeat can be euphemized a thousand ways, but it is still defeat. And when an army has been defeated, someone has been victorious. In this case, the victors would be Al Qaeda, Iran, and the other enemies of civilization. Second, the Iraq war has required the deployment of roughly one percent of the soldiers and sailors deployed in World War II, 20 percent of those employed in Vietnam. It is absorbing something like 25 percent of the military budget, which, in turn, is a much smaller percentage of federal spending than in the 1960s, let alone the 1940s. It is, therefore, a very small war, however vicious and frustrating. To say that such a war “is breaking the back” of the United States military does not say much for one’s opinion of the United States military. The fact that reenlistment rates in Iraq are very high argues powerfully that it is anything but “broken.” Third, anyone who believes that Senator Webb, et al., “simply believe” that the soldiers need more R&R stateside, must also believe in the tooth fairy. The net effect of Senator Webb’s amendment would be to force an American defeat (oh, sorry, “withdrawal”) in Iraq by making it impossible to deploy sufficient troops there, not something of which Senator Webb could possibly be unaware. The reason that Congress’s approval ratings are even lower than the President’s, I think, is exactly the habitual use of such smoke-and-mirrors dishonesty. 2) He writes, “The vast majority of war opponents . . . think . . . that Iraq has sapped precious military, diplomatic, and financial resources that are needed in the real fight against Al Qaeda. Mr. Gordon is free to disagree with these ideas, as honest people can and should do, but it’s wrong to impugn the motives of those with whom he disagrees.” I am not impugning the motives of those who think the war on terror should have been fought differently than it has been or who think the war in Iraq should have been fought differently or not fought at all. In many ways I agree with them. Obviously our strategy in Iraq in the last few years has not worked. But we have a new strategy now, and it shows preliminary signs of working. I cheerfully admit that, as Mr. Zeitz points out, that has a certain light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel quality about it. But consider a small thought experiment. A patient has been suffering from a medical problem and the treatment regimen has not been working. He’s as sick as he was before. So the doctors decide to try another approach. They develop another treatment regimen, and start that regimen. An hour and a half later, Dr. Harry Reid declares the new approach a failure and says the only acceptable action is euthanasia. I think we should give the new regimen time to work before we kill the patient. I am, however, impugning the motives of those who ignore that fact that, for better or worse, we started a war in Iraq and now must deal with the consequences of that action. Many of these people can’t seem to fathom that what we should have done or not done in 2003 is one question and what we should do in 2007 is entirely another. In July 2007 the only alternative to war is not peace. It is catastrophic defeat. These people advocate, whether they know it or not—and those of them who sit in Congress or write for serious periodicals surely do—a catastrophic defeat for the United States in particular and civilization in general. Some of them even admit that one of the consequences of that defeat (oh, sorry, “withdrawal”) will be a genocide in Iraq and quite possibly a far worse conflict in the Middle East into which the world’s strongest power (and largest importer of oil) will inevitably be drawn. They just don’t seem to care. As far as I can see, the passion to be able to say “I told you so” trumps everything else with these people. To admit that genocide—another Darfur—will be the consequence of an action one advocates and be indifferent to that fact is as morally shameful as anything I can imagine, short of taking an AK-47 and personally shooting as many strangers as possible. 3) Regarding Cindy Sheehan, Mary-Jo Cooney, and Michael Ledeen, I regard Cindy Sheehan as a profoundly disturbed woman who has shamelessly exploited her son’s death for political purposes while she has been shamelessly exploited in turn by the liberal media to advance their political purposes. I do not trivialize the death of a child. It’s hard to imagine anything more painful. But the idea that someone like Cindy Sheehan has “absolute moral authority,” to use Maureen Dowd’s hyperbolic phrase, is frankly ridiculous. Does Ms. Sheehan get to say whatever she wants and everyone else must simply stand in awe of her sacrifice? Ms. Sheehan has chosen to enter the political arena and must take her lumps like everyone else. Her son’s death, if anything, has clouded her judgment, not clarified it. The death of a son would certainly cloud mine. Do I think her a traitor? No, for as far as I know she has not levied war against the United States or given aid or comfort (except spiritually) to the enemies of this country. But she is anti-American to the core. Her antiwar rants get wide coverage, her anti-American ones do not. I was not able to find the articles to which Mr. Zeitz refers, but judging from his description of what Ms. Cooney and Mr. Ledeen wrote, I agree with Mr. Ledeen. Her adult son chose to join the Marines. She should be proud of that fact, not whining about it. Like Cindy Sheehan, Ms. Cooney seems to me to be exploiting her son’s service for her own political agenda. Again, she has of her own free will entered the political arena by writing an op-ed article. She is therefore fair game for criticism.
July 11, 2007
How Goes the War? Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:10 PM EST Alexander Burns, in his post on political realignment (to which I hope to respond soon), writes, “As the war in Iraq continues to fail . . .” Is that the case as of today, July 11, 2007, or have things begun to change for the better in Iraq at long last? Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid certainly thinks it’s the case, and so does the New York Times editorial board, which last Sunday published one of the most morally and politically shameful editorials I have ever read. It called for immediate and total American withdrawal regardless of the political consequences for this country or the flesh-and-blood consequences for the Iraqi people. “There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide,” the Times admits without a trace of concern for the people who will die in that genocide. The Times columnist Tom Friedman agrees, writing today (behind a subscription wall) that “it will be one of the most morally ugly scenes you can imagine—no less than Darfur.” But is the war effort still failing, and is American defeat inevitable? There are a large number of people on the left who sincerely hope so, some of them running major newspapers and other media. But even The New York Times—perhaps through an editing error—has reported improvement in the situation on the ground, now that the “surge” has reached full strength and the new tactics devised by General David Petraeus are just now being fully implemented. Since I have zero respect for the New York Times editorial page, I actually wonder if the Times is trying to force defeat before the possibility of victory can be clearly demonstrated. Consider this: on Sunday, the Times editorial wrote, “It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit. . . . Milestones came and went without any progress toward a stable, democratic Iraq or a path for withdrawal. . . . Whatever [President’s Bush’s] cause was, it is lost. . . . Keeping troops in Iraq will only make things worse.” On the very same day, on the front page, the Times reported, “Now, a pact between local tribal sheiks and American commanders has sent thousands of young Iraqis from Anbar Province into the fight against extremists linked to Al Qaeda. . . . The deal has all but ended the fighting in Ramadi and recast the city as a symbol of hope that the tide of the war may yet be reversed to favor the Americans and their Iraqi allies.” The Wall Street Journal editorial page today reports considerable progress now that the surge is up to full strength. I am hardly in a position to evaluate it, of course, but I recommend reading it, if only as an antidote to the mainstream media’s relentless see-no-American-successes-speak-no-American-successes drumbeat. That drumbeat, it seems to me, is Al Qaeda’s greatest success in this war. It has failed in all its on-the-ground objectives, but it has had great success manipulating the American media in ways designed to produce American defeat. A very interesting article on this exact subject can be found here. It is worth your time, and I would hope Fredric Smoler, far more of an expert on such matters than I, would comment on it. The Vietnam War was lost not on the ground but in the American media. The Tet Offensive was a military debacle for the Viet Cong on the ground but a huge success for it on CBS and the pages of The New York Times. The American military and government, it seems, has yet to learn the real lesson of Vietnam, which is that it is not enough to win the battle on the ground; it must be won in the media as well, or the war will be lost regardless. Our enemies, perhaps because they are so much weaker in conventional measures of military power, understand that. When will we?
July 8, 2007
The Questionably Quotable Quaker V Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:05 PM EST Fredric Smoler writes, “. . . in cold print, the lyrics of many of the songs look appalling. Then again, the lyrics of ‘Mama Look Sharp’ aren’t much when read on screen, without the music, and neither, for that matter, are the lyrics to Mozart and Da Ponte’s ‘Porgi, amor, qualche ristoro’ or ‘Piú docile io sono, when compared with their power when sung. I have seen Beaumarchais, Voltaire, George Bernard Shaw, and Sir Kenneth Clark all credited with the remark that ‘what is too silly to be said can still be sung,’ and it is true.” Let me hasten to the defense of the art of lyric writing in general, without specifically referring to the work of either Sherman Edwards or Lorenzo Da Ponte. I never saw 1776, and my grasp of Italian is limited to ordering dinner in Italian restaurants. Lyrics when read, divorced from the music, often seem banal. But that is a bit like judging a painting from a black and white photograph of it. Lyrics, after all, are written to be sung, and that has consequences. While lyricists use all the literary devices employed by poets, they are far more constrained in their choice of words. Stephen Sondheim, a master of the art if there ever was one, thinks that lyrics are the most restrictive of all literary forms. First, the reader can go back and reread a poem until he understands it; a listener must catch the words of a lyric on one go and through the ear. Thus the words have to be easily understood. Consider the line from “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” “The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye.” Seeing as this line is sung by a cowboy in Oklahoma, Oscar Hammerstein originally wrote “The corn is as high as a cow pony’s eye.” But, meticulous researcher that he was, he walked over to his neighbor’s cornfield and found that the corn, in late August, is considerably higher than a cow pony’s eye. That wouldn’t have bothered him too much; Oklahoma! is a musical, after all, not an agronomy lesson. (Hammerstein didn’t let the fact that the mating season for sheep is in the autumn, not June, stop him from using the marvelous line “All the rams that chase the ewe sheep/ Are determined there’ll be new sheep/ And the ewe sheep aren’t even keeping score!” in “June is Bustin’ Out All Over.”) But the phrase “cow pony’s” did bother him. It reads fine but it doesn’t sing well. Try it, it sounds a bit like the name of some non-existent garden flower, the cowpenny. Another problem for lyricists is that the words have to sing well. Some vowel sounds open the throat—making them easy to sing loudly or at a high pitch—and some close it. The word “sweet,” for instance, no matter how apposite, just can’t be used at certain points in a song. Another problem is with notes that are to be held, such as, usually, the note at the end of a song: A lyricist can’t use words that end with a hard consonant, such as t or p. Hammerstein was convinced that the reason the song “What’s the use of Wond’rin’?” from Carousel did not enjoy the success outside the show that so wonderful a song deserves is solely because of the word on which the lyric ends: So, when he wants your kisses
You will give them to the lad,
And anywhere he leads you you will walk.
And any time he needs you,
You’ll go running there like mad.
You’re his girl and he’s your feller—
And all the rest is talk. Hammerstein knew that he was breaking a rule and that other endings were possible (You’re his girl and he’s your feller—/ That’s all you need to know). He believed, however, that rules should be tested now and then just to see if, in fact, they are breakable. As he wrote, “Sometimes you succeed and this is the way the most exciting things in the theater are done. Sometimes you fail. This time a good and sound rule slapped me down.” I have taken all my examples here from Oscar Hammerstein not because he was a great lyricist, although he certainly was. It’s because he wrote the best thing ever written on the art of writing song lyrics, “Notes on Lyrics,” that serves as an extended preface for his collected lyrics. Anyone who aspires to being a lyricist should memorize it.
July 6, 2007
The Questionably Quotable Quaker II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:00 PM EST I wholeheartedly agree with Frederic Schwarz that the practice of digging up the greats of the past to provide political backup in the present should be laughed out of existence. But, alas, I have every confidence that it will continue, with or without our approval, until approximately five minutes before the Battle of Armageddon begins. In 1923, the future conservative Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg wrote an entire book called If Hamilton Were Alive Today. In it he tells us what Alexander Hamilton’s opinion would have been on the great political issues of 1923, which was 119 years after Hamilton died. Strangely, they coincided exactly with Arthur Vandenberg’s opinions on those very same issues. Funny that. But Mr. Schwarz’s less-than-glowing reference to the movie of 1776 and the stage original provides me with an excellent excuse to discuss movie versions of Broadway musicals in general. They are, with a few glorious exceptions, awful, regardless of how good the stage original was. The stage is a highly artificial medium; no one confuses it with reality. So a cowboy walking onto a stage singing about what a beautiful morning it is, with a full orchestra coming in to back him up, doesn’t seem unreasonable at all. We are trained to more willingly suspend our disbelief in these circumstances. But the movies are a highly literal medium, easily confused with reality, so a cowboy riding past a cornfield singing “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” with a full orchestra apparently lurking unseen in the corn, seems, well, a bit silly. So does a bunch of cowboys and farmgirls at a train depot breaking into an elaborate dance that only highly trained professional dancers could possibly execute without making total fools of themselves. Oklahoma!, as a matter of fact, offers a beautiful means of comparing the stage version vs. the movie version. The 1955 film I find unendurable, despite one of the greatest of Broadway scores. In fact I’m not sure I’ve seen it since it first opened half a century ago. The reason, I think, is that Rodgers and Hammerstein, geniuses though they were with stage musicals, never really understood the nature of cinema, and so the film version is simply the stage version shot in front of real scenery. (Well, almost real; the movie was filmed in Arizona, not Oklahoma. There is even the occasional glimpse of a mountain range, not a geographical feature with which Oklahoma is richly endowed.) I would recommend getting the DVD of the 1997 London stage revival of Oklahoma!, which works wonderfully and really gives you the feeling of being in the theater. It starts off with a terrific device, shamelessly cribbed from the Laurence Olivier version of Henry V, which shows London from a helicopter flying up the Thames until it reaches the actual theater where the show was being performed. You then zoom down, join the crowd, and enter the theater. The signal is unmistakable: we’re going to the theater, not a movie. If your knowledge of Oklahoma! comes entirely from the 1955 film version, I promise you that you will find this version a revelation. It’s as close as we will ever be able to come to what it was like to sit in the St. James Theatre on the opening night of the most influential American musical ever written. Unless you just hate all musicals, you will love it. Almost all the other Rodgers and Hammerstein movie versions I think are equally awful for exactly the same reason. (I realize that The Sound of Music has been seen by everyone on the planet ten times and that trucks back up regularly to the Rodgers and Hammerstein office in order to dump vast piles of cash into their coffers because of it. I still don’t like it.) The one artistically successful movie of a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, in my opinion, is The King and I. I suspect the reason is that the setting is so exotic—the royal court of 19th century Siam—that we don’t mind an English schoolmarm and an oriental potentate dancing a polka together (and, of course, what a polka!). A great example of a great Broadway musical reconceived for the movies is Cabaret, which opened the same year as the movie of 1776 and won best actress (Liza Minnelli), best supporting actor (Joel Grey), and best director (Bob Fosse). The stage version is a brilliant conventional musical, where people break into song in living rooms and elsewhere. In the movie version, every song in the film is sung on the stage of the cabaret around which the show is built, with one exception. While the songs comment on the plot and characters, they stand apart from them as well and thus “work” for the audience. The exception is the utterly chilling scene in the biergarten, where the angelic looking boy begins to sing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” and is then revealed to be wearing a Nazi uniform, and nearly the whole crowd joins in by the end of the scene. It is something that could have happened in real life (even though the song was, of course, written by John Kander and Fred Ebb, Cabaret’s creators). The scene is reminiscent of another great scene from a non-musical movie, Casablanca, where the French in Rick’s Café break into the “Marseillaise.” Kander and Ebb’s Chicago, which won the Oscar for best picture in 2002, is another perfect example of a stage musical brilliantly reconceived for the movies in much the same way. So my advice is to never judge a Broadway musical by the film version, any more than you would judge a classic novel by a film version of the story. Some make the transition beautifully (Cabaret, Tom Jones) and some do not (Oklahoma!, Barry Lyndon).
July 1, 2007
In Memoriam Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:20 AM EST I rarely read the obituaries unless I’m looking for a notice that I’m sure will be there. But I sometimes look at the “In Memoriam” notices that come at the end of the New York Times obituaries. These are not notices regarding people who recently died. Rather they refer to people who died earlier but are remembered on this day, often the anniversary of their death or birth. Some are touching, some sad, some full of the memory of a life well lived. And some touch upon history. I remember particularly one I saw a few years ago. It gave the birth and death dates of a young man, say, 1965 and 1997. It was signed by another man’s name and simply quoted one of the lesser-known songs of Rodgers and Hammerstein: “You are never away from your home in my heart.” I’ll never know for sure, but it is hard not to imagine that here was one more promising life snuffed out by AIDS. Today’s Times obituary page has another entry in the “In Memoriam” section that refers to a far larger tragedy, one that began 91 years ago today. It reads:
The British Expeditionary Force
The Somme
1 July 1916
0730-2130 hours
54,000 KIA/WIA
June 25, 2007
Free Trade and Inequality IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:55 AM EST First, I think we have a bit of a semantic problem here. By globalization I do not mean simply free trade—trade without the taxes we call tariffs or artificial barriers such as quotas. It is perhaps true that the world had more free trade in 1914 than in 1990. But it had less globalization in 1914 than it had in 1990 and a lot less than it has now. In 1914 the developed world exported manufactured goods to the undeveloped world (much of which the developed world had sovereignty over) and imported mostly raw materials and agricultural products in exchange. The United States by that time had become a major exporter of manufactured goods while remaining a major exporter of raw materials (such as petroleum and copper) and agricultural products (such as cotton and wheat). As has so often been the case in recent economic history, the United States had the best of both worlds. For a history of American foreign trade see here. But it was much rarer for one developed country to export significant amounts of manufactured goods to another developed country. That’s why the word imported had commercial cachet well into my adulthood: English marmalade, Italian leather, Swiss watches, and so forth. Today, however, it has none, for the simple reason that every developed country (and many not so developed) exports massive amounts of manufactured goods to other developed countries. It’s hard to imagine a shopper at Wal-Mart saying to her friend, “Oh, look, Ethel. Bangladeshi T-shirts. How chic!” Even more, we import and export parts in huge amounts. I own a Subaru. That’s a Japanese car, right? Well the corporate headquarters are in Japan. But the car was assembled in Ohio, out of parts that were manufactured in heaven knows how many countries. Were a misguided American government to put a prohibitive tariff on importing auto parts in order to protect the American market in automobiles for American automobile manufacturers, the result would be the almost instant collapse of the American automobile industry itself, for lack of parts. Ford and General Motors as much as Toyota and Audi manufacture them in many countries. By globalization I mean integrated markets and globalized manufacturing. The gold standard that ruled the world’s currencies in 1914 is long gone, but the international currency market, which operates around the clock and around the globe, has replaced it, trading trillions of dollars worth of currencies in a single day. Any country that adopts what the gnomes of Zurich (and New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Bonn, Paris, London, Grand Cayman, Sydney, Mumbai, etc., etc.) perceive as bad economic policies will find its currency headed south and fast. That puts severe constraints on just how dumb the economic policies of governments can be. This new and irreversible world came about for three reasons. (1) Led by the United States, the world has been reducing trade barriers since the end of World War II to the point where they are a mere ghost of what they once were. (2) Ocean transportation costs have declined by orders of magnitude. Just as the collapse of overland freight transportation costs, thanks to the railroads, made national markets possible in the nineteenth century, containerization and much cheaper air freight have created global markets that were impossible before. Chilean fruit can now be profitably sold in American markets that are thousands of miles away in the middle of the American winter. Sweet cherries in January are sweet indeed. (3) International communications costs have virtually disappeared. A company located all over the world can be as tightly integrated as one located entirely in one city. So, while individual industries might resist globalization by getting their friends in government to tilt the playing field in their favor (such as subsidizing ethanol from Iowa but slapping a high tariff on ethanol from Brazil), whole economies can’t now reverse course by such means as a latter-day Smoot-Hawley tariff. Why? The price of nearly everything would go through the roof (T-shirts, six for 12 bucks at Costco? Try six for 25 bucks). This would set off an epic inflation and therefore a nosedive by the country’s currency. All political hell would break loose. Even the individual industrial policies that have adverse long-term consequences probably can’t last for long. People are beginning to notice that the reason chicken is no longer 89 cents a pound, even on special, is because chicken feed is being converted, at high cost and low efficiency, into fuel for automobiles when we could be importing cheap Brazilian ethanol made from sugarcane waste instead. As for democracies making bad political decisions, of course they do. But they make fewer of them and usually correct them sooner than other forms of government. There are several reasons for this. First, short-term national interests often conflict with long-term interests, just as they do for individuals. The short-term need to get the nicotine monkey off the smoker’s back right now trumps his long-term interest in avoiding health problems, no matter how severe, that are 10 or 20 years down the road. Equally, the short-term interest in getting reelected or elected to higher office trumps almost everything else in politics. Politicians are in the reelection business, not the good government business. Ethanol made from corn is a truly stupid idea economically. (The energy in a gallon of ethanol is only about 10 percent more than the energy required to produce it, for one thing; for others see here.) But the first battle of presidential campaigns is fought in Iowa, which is one vast cornfield. Result: mandated ethanol use with tariffs to prevent its importation. As things stand now, one third of the nation’s corn crop will be used to produce ethanol by 2012. That’s going to have very unpleasant consequences for food prices. Second, “what is” is always more powerful than “what might be.” The declining industry has lobbyists by the score in Washington seeking help. The emerging industry usually does not. So the political pressure to impede the “creative destruction” of capitalism can be intense. A third reason, I think, is that the media often does a truly terrible job of informing people about the entirely predictable economic consequences of political policies. And it does an even worse job of asking politicians tough economic questions about their proposed policies. Political reporters, like the people they cover, are interested in politics, not the long-term real-world consequences of political decisions. As with those they cover, the next election is what they are concerned with. Worse, many political reporters are entirely incapable of thinking in economic terms for they have no understanding of the subject at all. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were numerous stories about how sky-high interest rates were hurting people who couldn’t afford mortgages and car payments, etc., etc. In the late 1980s there were numerous stories about how very low interest rates were hurting people who depended on investment incomes to meet expenses. I never saw a story about how these two stories might be related. Also, the media, with its inevitable focus on bad news, does a terrible job of telling the people about the good news of globalization, which would increase support for it. The supposed horrors of “outsourcing” are endlessly retailed (while the near record-low unemployment rate in the United States that refutes the dangers of outsourcing is relegated to the business section). But the fall in prices that has resulted from globalization goes unreported. Nearly all the necessities of life, such as food, clothing, and household equipment, cost less as a percentage of income today than they did in the 1950s, often much less. We spend about 10 percent of household income on food today; it was 20 percent half a century ago. Telephone service costs only a small fraction of what it did when I was a kid. Globalization is no small part of the reasons for this.
June 22, 2007
Free Trade and Inequality II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:45 AM EST Fredric Smoler refers to an article regarding increasing opposition to globalization, despite globalization’s many and profound benefits to the economy, and a proposed solution to the problem, in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. I agree that it is a most interesting article, but I don’t agree with either the analysis of the situation or the proposed solution. A few points. 1) Globalization. The ongoing integration of the world economy is unstoppable, whether we like it or not. Trying to stop it would be like trying to stop the Industrial Revolution in, say, 1830. American participation in the process might, at enormous economic cost, be delayed, but, with 30 percent of the world’s GDP, not for long. The last serious attempt to wall off the American economy from global influences was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930. It was one of the major reasons an ordinary recession turned into the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression, as American exports in particular and world trade in general collapsed. 2) Redistributing payroll taxes. First, political quid pro quos don’t work, at least not for long, unless there is a very tight nexus between the two parts. The idea that a change in the domestic tax structure that would benefit many people who perceive their economic interests to have been adversely impacted by globalization would result in a change of heart on their part regarding globalization strikes me as highly unlikely to put it mildly. This seems to me to be an example of the sort of political naiveté that is all too common in ivory towers. Instead, they would take the increased income, say thank you very much, and go right on opposing globalization. Second, the payroll tax that the authors of the article would make progressive—i.e. higher rates for higher incomes—is not, in theory, a tax at all. It is instead a mandatory contribution to one’s Social Security account and to Medicare. The initials in the acronym FICA, after all, stand for Federal Insurance Contributions Act, and individuals get a statement every year showing how much they and their employers have contributed to their individual accounts. The authors would have the FICA of those earning below the median drop to zero while sharply increasing the FICA of those above it, either by eliminating the cap or increasing the rate on higher incomes. How would this be accounted for in the annual statement? Politicians are, of course, masters of euphemism, but this would be a challenge. 3) Wages. The authors refer to the stagnation and even decline in wages and “money income” for most American workers in recent years, especially in the period 2000–2005. I don’t doubt the truth of the statistics they rely on, but I question how accurately those statistics reflect the real-world experience of most employed Americans. First, 2000–2005, with the end of the stock market bubble and 9/11, is perhaps not a good period to use, and five years is too short a period in any event. Second, money income is not the same as compensation, and whenever I see “wages” (or “money income,” which, I presume, would be wages plus investment income) being used as the sole measure of economic wherewithal, I get wary. For while wages have been lagging, noncash perks have not. For instance, The Wall Street Journal reports that of employers with 20 or more workers, 85 percent provide tuition assistance to employees, 45 percent provide adoption assistance, 74 percent paid sick leave, 57 percent flex time and 77 percent paid vacations. Most pay for or help pay for health insurance, many offer in-house medical services, in-house food services, and even in-house day care. None of this shows up in statistics on “wages,” but it shows up nonetheless in workers’ wallets in terms of increased disposable income. If you aren’t paying to take a course at the local junior college or paying the babysitter you would otherwise have to hire, that money can be spent on other needs. The fact that these forms of noncash compensation are not taxed might, of course, account for why they are increasing much faster than wages.
June 15, 2007
Imperial Presidencies II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 02:15 PM EST As Joshua Zeitz notes, the late Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., coined the phrase “the imperial presidency” in 1973. It seems to me that people usually start to worry about an overreaching White House when the other party is in power there, and that the other two branches of the government—not exactly averse to wielding power themselves—can be counted on to keep executive imperialism under control. The Founding Fathers, after all, knew what they were about. But the phrase always reminds me of one of the sillier incidents of the Nixon presidency. On January 27th, 1970, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson was greeted at the White House by White House guards decked out in snappy new uniforms. Nixon, apparently, had been impressed with the uniforms worn by the presidential and royal guards who had greeted him on a European tour the previous year. He ordered the sprucing up of the White House police, who had until then been dressed more or less like ordinary American policemen. The uniforms featured double-breasted white tunics with lots of gold braid, a black gunbelt and holster, and black vinyl, gold trimmed hats that Time magazine thought looked like something that might be worn by a cross between a Belgian customs inspector and Prince Danilo in The Merry Widow. The New York Times described the get-ups as “dazzling new operetta-like uniforms” and thought the White House police looked distinctly sheepish wearing them. It also noted that they had been designed by a Washington tailor named Jimmie Muscatello, whose downtown store featured a sign in its window saying “Pants cuffed free while you wait.” When the pictures of the White House ceremony hit the TV news programs and the newspapers, the entire nation collapsed as one in helpless mirth. The new uniforms soon disappeared, beginning with the hats, which were never seen again. If the United States is to have an imperial presidency, it seems it will have to be clothed in workaday, republican garb.
June 15, 2007
Amnesty Now and Then II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:20 AM EST I think Joshua Zeitz’s linkage between a pardon for Richard Nixon and a pardon for Scooter Libby, and between some form of what I will call amnesty (even though the term is inaccurate—but life is short) for draft dodgers then and illegal aliens now, is a bit strained. First, I agree that the Ford proposal for ending the legal problems of draft evaders is an excellent historical analogy for the proposal to end the legal problems of currently illegal aliens. Ford’s proposal and the proposal in the immigration bill were the only real, practical solutions to the two problems. We couldn’t jail 100,000 otherwise law-abiding young men then or expel 12 million workers now. But I do not think it correct to say that Bush has given only lukewarm support to the immigration bill. He was up on Capitol Hill this week lobbying GOP senators, a very unusual thing for a president to do and a clear sign that he means business and is willing to spend his fast-dwindling store of political capital on it. His rhetoric on the bill has been unusually strong as well. I’m not sure what more he can do. If you want villains here, I nominate Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his political Svengali, Senator Chuck Schumer. Both are far more interested in political advantage than in solving the nation’s problems. If the country’s immigration problems have to continue to fester so that these two can deny an achievement to President Bush, so be it. Reid yanked the bill off the floor, despite the pleas of such not-exactly-Bush-allies as Senator Ted Kennedy, called it the President’s bill, which it is not (it was written by Senators McCain and Kennedy), and claimed that the President had failed again. There’s a reason Senator Reid’s approval ratings are even lower than the President’s: he’s widely perceived as being a partisan first and a senator second. He’s the sort of politician who gives politics a bad name. He doesn’t even seem to be very adept at it. But I don’t see any correspondence between Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon and Bush’s possible pardon of Scooter Libby. Ford pardoned Nixon for raisons d’état, to get Watergate over and done with so the country could face the many very serious problems of the dismal 1970s. And he did it despite the fact that it was bound to hurt him politically, which it did, badly. It was, therefore, a genuine profile in courage, one that has been vindicated by time, now that the passions of thirty years ago have died down. Any Bush pardon of Libby, however, would not be for the good of the country. One more Washington insider in the hoosegow would be only a personal tragedy for Scooter Libby. In this case a pardon would be to prevent what is, in my view and that of many others, a grotesque miscarriage of justice. Scooter Libby faces two and a half year in jail for the crime of practicing politics in Washington, D.C. Nor would it cost Bush much politically. People who wish him ill anyway would be up in arms, of course. I can just hear Senator Schumer on the Sunday talk shows calling it, in Schumer’s apparently one and only political metaphor, “a dagger to the heart of the American justice system.” But most people just don’t give a damn. It’s political inside baseball that only the chattering classes care about. If the President were to pardon Scooter Libby, it would be a three-day story at most.
June 10, 2007
Joy and Serendipity in Archival Research II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:30 AM EST Ellen Feldman’s most interesting post reminded me of my own two great moments in research, although only in one case archival. As with her, they were not Lincoln letters, alas, but peculiarly satisfying nonetheless, one bit of joy, one bit of serendipity. When I was writing about New York City in the 1840s I turned, as all who need to know about New York City in the 1840s must, to Philip Hone’s diary. Hone (1780–1851) had been mayor of New York in the 1820s and was one of its leading citizens until his death. His diary, along with that of his younger contemporary, the lawyer George Templeton Strong (1820–1875), are simply indispensable to the history of New York as it exploded in size from a modest seaport to the megalopolis of the western hemisphere. They are also very good reading, and Strong’s diary is often very, very funny. By the 1840s Hone was getting old and crotchety, bemused and often annoyed. In 1844, for instance, he wrote, “. . . this world is going too fast. Improvements, politics, reform, religion—all fly. Railroads, steamers, packets, race against time and beat it hollow. Flying is dangerous. By and by we shall have balloons and pass over to Europe between sun and sun. Oh, for the good old days of heavy post-coaches and speed at the rate of six miles an hour!” I was struck by the now-trite phrase “the good old days.” I suddenly realized, however, that before Hone’s generation there had been no such thing. Hone’s parents and grandparents and great-grandparents had been born into a world that had been relatively unchanging in terms of its technology and economics, and therefore its social and political relationships. Until the first decades of the nineteenth century, the old days had been pretty much the same as the new days, at least as to how life was lived day to day. I wondered when was the first use of the phrase, “the good old days,” and so I turned, as again one must, to the Oxford English Dictionary. To my utter delight, the first use of the phrase given in the OED was 1848. I had found one four years older and, so far as I know, the very first use of the phrase. I became interested in this first generation to experience what we now take for granted—ceaseless technological change and its affect on our quotidian existence—and I wrote about it for American Heritage here. My little bit of serendipity came when I was in the New York Public Library looking for letters by Jim Fisk, the Wall Street figure who was spectacularly murdered in 1872. (See my book The Scarlet Woman of Wall Street: Jay Gould, Jim Fisk, Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Erie Railway, and the Birth of Wall Street.) He didn’t write many, and the one I found that day was of no interest, having been written by a secretary on a trivial subject and only signed by Fisk. In the same folder, however, was a letter written by Henry Adams when he had been serving as secretary for his father Charles Francis Adams, who was minister to Great Britain during the Civil War. I forget what the letter concerned, for what fascinated me was Henry Adams’s handwriting. It was as regular and precise as though it had been written by a machine. Nineteenth-century handwriting was often very readable, as students were taught penmanship in school then and good handwriting was a sign of a good education. It was also, of course, the only way for a person to communicate by writing in those days, and so it simply had to be readable. Adams’s handwriting was something else entirely, very atypical of the handwriting of the day and completely devoid of even the slightest carelessness. It was the handwriting of a calligrapher, not a secretary, with a peculiar cramped style. I had always disliked Henry Adams, brilliant as he was, and now I knew exactly why: Anyone with handwriting like that had to be a most unpleasant human being.
June 5, 2007
Presidential Longevity Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:15 AM EST In my last post I noted that pipe-smoking Gerald Ford now holds the record as the longest-lived president, having lived to be 93 years, 4 months, and 12 days. That surpassed Ronald Reagan—who died at 93 years, 3 months, and 30 days—by less than two weeks. This brings up an interesting statistical anomaly among the Presidents, for the previous record holder in the presidential longevity sweepstakes was the second President, John Adams, who was 90 years, 9 months, and 4 days old when he famously died on July 4, 1826. He held the record for an astonishing 176 years. Presidents in recent decades have been doing pretty well in the longevity department. Since Lyndon Johnson left the White House nearly 40 years ago, every subsequent occupant has lived to see 80, and in two cases 90, or is still alive. Nixon lived to be 81, Ford 93, Carter is 82, Reagan was 93, and Bush senior is 82 (he’ll be 83 on June 12). Clinton and Bush junior are both 60 and, so far as I know, going strong. The miracles of modern medicine account for much of this, of course. Clinton would probably not have survived his recent heart troubles in earlier decades, and Ronald Reagan would certainly not have survived the assassination attempt in 1981 were it not for some very fancy doctoring. Better diet, better lifestyles, and a cleaner environment have also helped, I’m sure. But what accounts for the fact that four of the first six Presidents lived to be 80 or more? After the first six, things went downhill, and not a single one of the 23 Presidents between John Quincy Adams and Herbert Hoover lived to be 80. Andrew Jackson, who followed J. Q. Adams, was 78 at his death, and his successor, Martin Van Buren 79, but after that only James Buchanan lived to be 75 (he died at 77), until Herbert Hoover lived to be 90 and presidential longevity finally began to increase. With so small a sample, of course, it could be mere coincidence. But I suspect that late colonial and early republican America was simply a much healthier place than the country would be for the next century and more as industrialization and burgeoning population brought pollution and communicable diseases to much higher levels. Now if someone would only explain why four of the last six Presidents (Ford, Reagan, Bush senior, and Clinton) have been left-handed while only three of their 36 predecessors (Garfield, Hoover, and Truman) were.
June 4, 2007
Thank You for Smoking IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:50 PM EST Joshua Zeitz wrote, “A small quibble with John Steele Gordon’s post on smoking. Mr. Gordon writes that ‘Franklin Roosevelt (dead of a stroke at 63) was the last President to smoke in public.’ I’m not sure that’s correct. Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson smoked to one degree or another. All three men were more discreet than FDR about being photographed with tobacco products in hand, though at least in the case of LBJ, there is extant footage of the President with a lit cigarette. Gerald Ford, however, made little pretense about his habit. He was frequently caught on camera with a lit pipe. I’m not sure whether the MPAA’s new guidelines apply only to cigarettes or to cigars and pipes as well, but it’s probably more accurate to identify Gerald Ford as the last unabashed smoker to occupy the West Wing. Ironically, he lived longer than his predecessors. Maybe it had something to do with golf.” Mr. Zeitz is quite correct. I was imprecise in my language in that I meant cigarette smoking. I don’t believe Eisenhower smoked in public when he was President, and certainly not after his 1955 heart attack. Lyndon Johnson, likewise, stopped smoking after his 1955 heart attack. Obviously that was a bad cardiac year for high government officials. Johnson apparently started smoking again after he left the White House (I don’t think he much cared in his sad last years if he lived or not). Kennedy smoked an occasional cigar, and there are a few pictures of him doing so, but they were not really a part of his public persona as they were for, say, Al Smith (and I imagine that Kennedy smoked far higher quality cigars than Smith did). Gerald Ford did indeed smoke a pipe, but since he now holds the longevity record for Presidents, I guess the habit didn’t do him much harm. While cigars have had a renaissance in recent years—there’s even a high-end magazine called Cigar Aficionado—pipes seem to have virtually disappeared. It’s been years since I’ve seen someone smoking one. Personally, while I thought they were sort of dashing in a Gregory Peck kind of way, the paraphernalia a pipe smoker has to carry around would have driven me nuts. As for cigars, they have the most pleasant family memories for me. My grandfather would smoke one after dinner every night, and being designated the grandchild to go to the humidor and bring him back the type he wanted was a mark of the highest favor. Cigar smoking did him no more apparent harm than pipe smoking did Gerald Ford: He lived to be 96. But while I have always liked the smell of good cigar smoke, probably because of my grandfather, they were never an option. Smoking one has always made me sick as a dog. Since good cigars can now cost well north of $10 a pop, just think of how much money my recalcitrant stomach has saved me.
June 3, 2007
Thank You for Smoking II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:30 PM EST I doubt that smoking in movies induces a single teenager to smoke these days. That might have been true in the mid-twentieth century, when Humphrey Bogart (dead of lung cancer at 58) was a leading movie star, Edward R. Murrow (dead of lung cancer at 57) did his television interviews wreathed in smoke, Franklin Roosevelt (dead of a stroke at 63) was the last President to smoke in public—even using an iconic cigarette holder—and every party and restaurant was blue with the smoke of cigarettes. In those days, smoking cigarettes was a quintessentially adult thing and thus something that teenagers wanted to do. I can remember quite consciously, at age about 16, imitating the way my father (dead of a stroke at 58) held his cigarette. Today I suspect that about the only thing that induces teenagers to smoke is peer pressure, and that, I bet, is declining fast. As a totally unscientific bit of evidence, the local high school students I see smoking are invariably the ones with rings in their noses and their hair dyed puce. One suspects a certain insufficiency of parental authority, not coolness. Instead, I imagine the real motive behind the MPAA’s action is public relations, trying to make the movie industry look socially responsible (now, now, no sniggering please). There is also, I suppose, a touch of one of this country’s less attractive cultural traits, the urge to control other people’s behavior, strictly for their own good, of course. Prohibition is exhibit A, but New York’s Mayor Bloomberg succeeded in banning smoking, even in private clubs, and would dearly love to control the fat content of meals in restaurants. The drinking age, once a state responsibility, was made national, using the states’ dependence on federal highway funds as the lever (no age-21-drinking law, no funds). This made Congress look socially responsible (hey, I said no sniggering!), but it also makes the United States the only country in the world, at least where alcohol is legal, that does not set the drinking age at the age of majority. Instead adults are supposed to wait three years after they can vote, sign a contract, join the army, etc., before they can have a beer. Guess what. They don’t.
June 1, 2007
Kennedy at 90 II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:55 AM EST I agree with Alexander Burns that a major part of the Kennedy mystique, like that of Achilles, lies with his early death. We did not see him grow old, and so he is forever young, vital, and unblemished by the vicissitudes of life, which have a nasty habit of crowding into the later years. This idea, that early death is not without its compensations, has engaged the thoughts of some of the greatest poets. John Keats hints at it in “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” And A. E. Housman addresses it directly in perhaps his most famous poem, “To an Athlete Dying Young.” I imagine President Kennedy, who was a literate man, knew them both well. Regarding alternative histories had any of a thousand minor events thwarted Lee Harvey Oswald, I am reminded of a historical anecdote I have heard often but cannot vouch for. I hope it is true, but it seems a little too good to be so. Someone is supposed to have asked Mao Tse-tung, several years after Kennedy’s assassination, how the world would have been different had it been Nikita Khrushchev who had been killed rather than Kennedy. Mao puffed on his cigarette for a minute and then said, “I don’t know, but I don’t think Aristotle Onassis would have married Mrs. Khrushchev.”
May 30, 2007
FDR’s Electoral Margins Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:30 PM EST In his recent post on television news, Fredric Smoler wrote, “The newspapers were steadily more anti-FDR between 1932 and 1944. He won his elections by steadily larger margins.” Actually, FDR had his best election in 1936. In 1932 he won 59 percent of the vote; in 1936, 62.6 percent; in 1940, 55 percent; and in 1944, 53.6 percent. (I’m ignoring minor parties.) But I suspect the newspapers were of marginal influence, at least after 1932, as everyone “knew” Roosevelt and knew what they thought about him. I would guess that his drop in 1940 was largely due to people who disapproved of a third term and came out to vote for Wendell Willkie, whose popular vote total was much larger than Alf Landon’s had been (22.3 million to 16.7 million), while Roosevelt’s popular vote was down slightly from 1936 (27.8 in 1936, 27.3 in 1940). FDR’s vote was down again in 1944 (25.6 million), while Dewey’s was slightly down from Willkie’s (22.1 million). The 1944 vote was surely affected by millions being overseas.
May 30, 2007
How Important Is Television News? IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:15 AM EST I thank Mr. Zeitz for the information he provided, but it does not quite answer my question. What I was hoping for was “a comparison of the various news and broadcast channels’ signature evening news programs regarding Iraq coverage and fluff coverage.” (Italics added.) By signature evening news programs I meant such programs as NBC Nightly News and The Fox Report. I’m sure CNN and MSNBC have equivalent programs. In other words, straight news. Most of the evening on Fox is devoted to The O’Reilly Factor, Hannity and Colmes, and On the Record with Greta Van Susteren, which are basically opinion shows. And the last in particular seems devoted to whatever the Fox News Channel’s fluff obsession of the week happens to be rather than what Mr. Zeitz and I would consider news. Of course, Fox News Channel is in the TV business first, and their ratings via-à-vis the other news channels would seem to justify their programming, even if I have zero interest in watching it and therefore don’t. I would count Special Report with Britt Hume as a “signature evening news program,” as Hume is the Washington managing editor at Fox and the program is entirely devoted to news, albeit from a Washington perspective. In other words, if the story does not have national political implications, it will get fairly short shrift. The last 20 minutes of the program is a discussion, led by Hume, by the “Fox All Stars,” on the biggest news items of the day, news items of the Zeitz-Gordon variety. These all stars are people like Fred Barnes (The Weekly Standard), Mort Kondracke (Roll Call) and Mara Liasson (NPR), to name the most frequent ones. In other words, fair and balanced. Again, I guess that if these particular types of shows are compared, each of the various network and cable news channels will be seen to have devoted roughly equal percentages of time to Iraq and roughly equal percentages to Anna Nicole Smith. Mr. Zeitz writes, “Fox also stood out for its lack of coverage on the firings of the U.S. attorneys, compared with the other channels. The story, which gained real momentum in mid March, consumed a mere 2% of Fox’s total airtime. CNN devoted twice that percent (4%) and MSNBC four times (8%).” This would seem to prove my case of unconscious liberal bias at CNN and MSNBC, and I thank Mr. Zeitz for it. First, the story was fully covered on Special Report because it obsessed Washington and, I’m sure, The Fox Report. Perhaps the reason Fox did not cover it much outside of its straight news programs is that this is the Oakland, California, of political stories: There’s no there there. Despite the very best efforts of Democratic politicians and their water bearers in the media, no one has been able to come up with a scintilla of evidence that anything illegal took place, a hopelessly dysfunctional public relations operation at the Department of Justice not being against the law. The New York Times was even forced to posit a totally bogus distinction between firing every United States attorney for political reasons at the beginning of a Presidency, which Bill Clinton did, and firing 10 attorneys for political reasons in the middle of a Presidency, which George Bush did. Had George Bush been a Democrat, does anyone think that The New York Times et al. would have given a damn about this story?
Mr. Zeitz writes, “One last note. Mr. Gordon suggests that ‘maybe the reason CNN and MSNBC have so much Iraq news is that they are only too delighted to report the bad news,’ presumably because of their, as he put it, ‘unconscious liberal bias.’ There is a pernicious logic to this statement that I hope Mr. Gordon did not intend—to wit, that liberals delight in America’s military troubles in Iraq.” I think they delight in George Bush’s troubles in Iraq and often don’t think through the situation enough to comprehend the implications for the country.
May 29, 2007
How Important Is Television News? II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:50 AM EST I abandoned the news programs of the three major networks several years ago, having usually watched NBC Nightly News since the old Huntley-Brinkley days. I am not alone, as their ratings have been in steady and serious decline for more than 20 years. My objection was the ever-increasing emphasis on “soft news,” especially features aimed at the AARP demographic that is the heart and soul of the aging audience for network news. Being a member in good standing of that demographic doesn’t make me want to listen to reports on kidney dialysis and old people moving back from Florida to be with their children in their final years, thank you very much. I want to listen to the news. Now I watch Special Report with Britt Hume on Fox News Channel, which runs from six to seven, at least in the Eastern time zone. Its virtues are many besides its anchor, who, I think, is the best in the business. For one thing, it’s all hard news of the day, no soft, feel-good features of the locating-the-blind-boy’s-stolen-puppy variety. For another, it really seems to me to be, to coin a phrase, fair and balanced. Network news—along with CNN and MSNBC—remains permeated with an unconscious liberal bias. By that I don’t mean a tough-on-Republicans-soft-on-Democrats bias (although that happens, of course) but rather the unquestioning acceptance of the idea that the liberal world view is the only one decent people have, that the American political universe is divided into two classes: moderates and right-wing nuts. Hume, who does not share that notion, seems to me consciously to try hard to be fair and balanced, whereas his competitors unconsciously assume that, being “moderates,” they are, ipso facto, fair and balanced. So I would recommend Special Report. I don’t recommend Bill O’Reilly any more than Joshua Zeitz would. I find him obnoxious to put it mildly. But then, proving myself fair and balanced, I can’t stand CNN’s Lou Dobbs either. I have a limited tolerance for blowhards, even blowhards who earn several million dollars a year blowing hard. Mr. Zeitz notes a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism finding that Fox spent more daytime air on Anna Nicole Smith than on Iraq and less on Iraq than CNN and MSNBC did. Having sometimes tuned into The Big Story with John Gibson, which precedes Britt Hume, I can certainly verify that she got more than her fair share of attention (personally I would put her fair share at about 10 seconds; I also have a limited tolerance for bimbos). Having run that story into the ground, Gibson’s show is now obsessing about Rosie O’Donnell. Why a Fox News Channel show would give ABC’s The View a free 10-minute infomercial every afternoon is a mystery to me. But I wonder why just daytime news was measured. None of the “news channels” are pure news, especially in the daytime. They are all a mix of opinion, fluff, financial ticker, etc. I wonder what measuring the evening, or even the whole 24-hour day, would reveal. Mr. Zeitz mentions that he can understand why Fox shies away from reports on Iraq (Special Report certainly doesn’t), but then, maybe the reason CNN and MSNBC have so much Iraq news is that they are only too delighted to report the bad news. This tendency is nicely spoofed in the Day by Day cartoon series for Memorial Day. I would be interested to see a comparison of the various news and broadcast channels’ signature evening news programs regarding Iraq coverage and fluff coverage. I bet Fox does nicely (more Iraq, less fluff) compared with the others, but that’s only a guess. As for the question, how important is television news, about the only thing for sure is that the news business, like every other aspect of publishing and communications, is in a profound state of flux, thanks to the Internet. The news business that I grew up with (I can remember when New York City had at least seven daily newspapers) is long gone. The news business of the 1980s and 1990s (let’s call it the CNN era) is rapidly disappearing. What will replace it is anybody’s guess. But one thing is certain. The news business in, say, 2032 will be utterly different from what it is today, just as the overland transportation business in 1860 was utterly different from what it had been in 1835, thanks to the railroad.
May 24, 2007
The Return of the Otter Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:05 PM EST In 1993 I wrote an article for American Heritage on the history of the American environment, which you can find here. I pointed out, 14 years ago, that while the environment has had its ups and downs, it had been mostly—and strongly—up since the first Earth Day in 1970. This trend has continued, indeed accelerated, since then. Just today there is an article in The New York Times on four peregrine falcon chicks who are doing fine in a nest box high atop the Throgs Neck Bridge, where the East River gives way to Long Island Sound. Peregrine falcons nest elsewhere in the city these days as well, including on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, thriving on New York’s inexhaustible supply of pigeons, one of their favorite foods. Nearly exterminated by the 1950s because DDT caused their eggshells to thin, the species was removed from the endangered species list in 1999. Although the environmental news has been increasingly good for the last four decades, the average person might not know it because (a) the media prefers bad news and (b) the environmental organizations depend on bad news to raise money. That’s why global warming has been a godsend for the environmental Chicken Little crowd as the water, land, and air have gotten cleaner and cleaner, as many species that were doing poorly are now doing well and many that had been extirpated from areas have been successfully reintroduced (such as wolves to Yellowstone and the California Condor to the High Sierras). As a sidebar to the environmental story, I wrote a piece on the environmental history of North Salem, the small town in northern Westchester County where I live. (Just scroll down past the main article to see it.) I noted, in 1993, that a bald eagle had recently been sighted in town for the first time in decades. Today they are sighted often, and I even saw one land next to the Croton River as I was boarding the train at the nearby railroad station. Yesterday morning my tenant knocked on my office door and said, “Guess what!” An avid fisherman, she had been out in her rowboat the previous evening on Titicus Reservoir to enjoy the glorious late spring weather and, hopefully, to rustle up a little supper. Suddenly she noted, quite close, fish jumping out of the water, not in the way they occasionally do in pursuit of a bug (rustling up a little supper of their own), but in the way fish do to elude predators. As she watched, a furry head appeared and looked around for a few seconds before plunging back in pursuit of his own supper. Its short, rounded ears, large size, and long, tapering tail gave it away. It was an otter. These immensely beguiling creatures have fur that was especially valued by the early Dutch traders in Nieuw Amsterdam, and they paid the Indians handsomely to hunt them. They were soon very rare. With the increasing pollution of local streams in the first half of the nineteenth century, the otter was gone from this area long before the twentieth century dawned. Now they are back, another piece of the infinitely complex web of life returning to an area only 44 miles from Grand Central Terminal. I hope the Sierra Club, et al., will forgive me for spreading the good news.
May 20, 2007
Whatever Happened to the Aviators? Posted by John Steele Gordon at 06:00 PM EST It was on May 20, 1927, that Charles Lindbergh, invariably referred to as an “aviator” in the press of the day, took off from Roosevelt Field in Long Island in a single-engine plane, headed for Paris. He was so laden with fuel that he barely cleared the phone wires at the end of the runway. But 33 hours later he landed safely at Le Bourget airfield just outside Paris. To put it simply, the world went nuts. Overnight, the unassuming 25-year-old aviator became as famous as anyone on earth. Thousands greeted him at Le Bourget, even though it was 10:30 at night. The next day tens of thousands mobbed the U.S. Embassy in Paris in hopes of getting a glimpse of him. Awarded the Légion d’Honneur by the president of France, when he returned to the United States (like a conquering hero, aboard the cruiser USS Memphis, escorted by other warships), he received the Distinguished Flying Cross from President Coolidge. New York gave him one of the largest ticker-tape parades in its history, and Mayor James J. Walker gave him the city’s Medal of Valor. The following year he was given the country’s highest award, the Medal of Honor, by act of Congress, becoming one of the very few to receive it for actions not involving combat. (It is given only to members of the armed forces, and Lindbergh was eligible because he was a captain in the U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve.) Today, 80 years later, it is a little hard for us to understand what all the fuss was about. Writing this in the late afternoon, I’m confident that, should I take a mind to, I could easily be in Paris tomorrow in time for lunch. (And if anyone would care to finance the venture, I’d be happy to prove it.) Indeed, it was only 12 years to the day after Lindbergh’s flight, May 20, 1939, that Pan-American initiated trans-Atlantic air service, from Port Washington, N.Y., and anyone (with enough money—for it was very expensive) could do what Lindbergh had won world acclaim for, fly nonstop to Europe. The word aviator—a word of magical, romantic power in the 1920s—began to disappear from the everyday vocabulary. To paraphrase Richard Nixon, we are all aviators now. A family story, if I may. My great aunt Mabel Stebbins (she was actually my great aunt’s sister-in-law, but she was Aunt Mabel to me, and I was very fond of her) flew just twice in her life. Married to an army officer, in 1910 she was living in the Panama Canal Zone when someone in the army’s infant air corps (it was called the Aeronautical Division of the Signal Corps then) showed up in a Wright Flyer and offered to take people, including, apparently, wives, up for a spin in the wondrous new technology. Aunt Mabel decided to do exactly that. I see her taking the hat pins out of her vast picture hat and handing it to a friend, tying a stout piece of twine around the hem of her long white summer frock, and climbing aboard. Off she went, becoming, probably, one of the hundred first women ever to fly. The next time she flew was 48 years later, in the fall of 1958. Eighty-eight years old and in failing health by then, she was too frail to make her usual three-day drive to her winter home in Florida, or even to take the train. Instead, she flew down and died peacefully there a few months later. Having flown for the first time in a Wright Flyer, Aunt Mabel’s second and last flight was in a Boeing 707.
May 14, 2007
Gary Hart VIII Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:30 AM EST “Tomas” writes in the discussion section, “My point, exactly. Can any of you who are carrying on this discussion explain to me why, if Gary Hart’s error was in [not] knowing that media standards had changed, he was hounded out of his race for president even before it began by a media frenzy in 1987, and there is no such thing now about Giuliani, McCain and Gingrich? Even Clinton made it through the 1992 race relatively unscathed. By contrast, Gary Hart’s personal life has been relatively mild compared to the trio of leading GOP candidates now. Why the distinction? . . . I am curious as to what you think of the apparent contradiction. Have media standards changed back, or changed again, or just disappeared?” First, life isn’t fair, and the media most certainly isn’t. But I think the reason that Gary Hart found his private life politically fatal when it became public was in his explicit dare to the press, when the subject came up, to “follow me around. . . . They’ll be very bored.” Immediately after that less-than-wise challenge, given the reality, the Donna Rice story came out and the frenzy erupted. Had he evaded comment, I think he might have survived the Donna Rice episode, at least if his PR people had handled it well. But the combination of the chutzpah of the challenge and the immediate appearance of the story after the challenge was beyond what even the deftest public relations campaign could handle. Senator Hart was toast. In the case of the current crop of candidates, however, their peccadilloes are old news (unless, of course, some juicy new ones come to light). That doesn’t make their private behavior any less egregious than Hart’s, just less politically potent. Giuliani, for instance, has been asked about his marital track record, most recently on Fox News Sunday yesterday, and he has been forthright about it. He said that he, like everyone else, is a miserable sinner, that he has learned from his sins, and seeks forgiveness—which is a Christian duty. He asks to be judged on his positive achievements as a politician, not his acknowledged failures as a human being. Whether that will work we’ll have to wait and see, but people in my experience are pretty forgiving of bad behavior if they perceive honest contrition. They are a lot less forgiving of hypocrisy and arrogance, which is what they perceived in the case of Senator Hart.
May 12, 2007
What Do Women Want? II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:35 PM EST I’m afraid I will just have to leave my thought experiment as it is. If Joshua Zeitz thinks that feminist leaders would have had the same reaction to the Monica Lewinsky scandal had Bill Clinton been a Republican, then that’s fine with me. It’s a free country, and one can believe what one wants: in a flat earth, that the world was created in 4004 B.C., in Santa Claus, that the moon is made of green cheese, that pigs can fly, you name it. To use her as an example, it seems to me that Gloria Steinem is a partisan Democrat first, a feminist second. After all, she has referred to Kay Bailey Hutchinson as a “female impersonator.” Senator Hutchinson is another woman who, one would think, would be a feminist hero, having climbed the greasy pole of Texas politics all the way to the United States Senate on her own, with no pathbreaking from a husband or father. But, no, she’s not even a real woman in Ms Steinem’s view, let alone a hero. Why? She’s a Republican. I think the problem here is that Mr. Zeitz is taking a very lawyer-like attitude towards the scandal. It wasn’t sexual harassment under the law and therefore there’s no problem. Legally, as I said, he’s right. Politically, he and the leaders of the modern feminist movement who kept trying to change the subject are dead wrong. Bill Clinton’s desperate attempts to evade responsibility for his actions—including wagging his finger at the American people and telling them a bald-faced lie—is, I think, all the evidence one needs of that. Had Bill Clinton been, say, president of the Kiwanis Club in Frozen Sneakers, Iowa (a mythical town invented by William F. Buckley, Jr.), then perhaps his behavior would have been a matter for him, his wife, and his awestruck employee. But Bill Clinton was not president of the Frozen Sneakers Kiwanis Club, he was President of the United States. Only a lawyer with a hopeless case to win or a hopelessly partisan Democrat could fail to see how that makes a profound difference. He had no right whatever to do what he did, even if it was not technically illegal and Monica Lewinsky welcomed his advances with open arms, if that’s the relevant part of the human anatomy in this case. Mr. Zeitz attributes the crack about Leonard Woodcock in my post to me. I’m flattered, but it was coined by Garry Trudeau. I merely drafted it and sent it into rhetorical battle. I did, however, come up with “Real women don’t do housework; cleaning ladies do housework.” Since honesty forces me momentarily to set aside my characteristic modesty, I must say I rather like it.
May 12, 2007
Gary Hart VI Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:50 AM EST A few points in response to Joshua Zeitz’s post on this subject. First, I am not a lawyer, but as far as I understand it, President Clinton’s conduct with regard to Monica Lewinsky did not violate any law. (His conduct with regard to the investigation is another matter, but not germane to the subject at hand.) But it most certainly violated his “contract” with the American people, who have a right to expect self-control from a President. He behaved despicably, and decent people of whatever political opinions should have said so. Therefore it was a legitimate news story. Indeed the media itself would have been violating its contract with the American people had it not covered the story. Second, as for the reaction of Gloria Steinem, Catherine MacKinnon, et al., to the scandal, he writes, “there’s a glaring difference between what Bill Clinton did and what Bob Packwood and Clarence Thomas did (or, in the case of the latter, [was] accused of doing). It’s one thing to enter into an affair with a subordinate; it’s quite another thing to chase employees around desks, grope them, or place erotica on their desks.” I propose a thought experiment. Assume everything is exactly the same as what happened in the Lewinsky scandal except for one fact: Bill Clinton was a moderate Republican (like Bob Packwood) instead of a moderate Democrat. Is there a person on the planet not in custodial care for chronic political hallucination who thinks that Gloria Steinem and Co. would not have been howling for him to be hanged from a lamppost in Lafayette Square, but would instead have said, as in effect they did, “That’s none of our business”? Third, he writes, “Many if not most of the women who staffed the commissions [on the status of women] were labor feminists and thus, by definition, working-class.” This reminds me of the famous line from Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury comic strip about Leonard Woodcock, then head of the United Automobile Workers: “All labor leaders are sensitive to the needs of the working class. That’s how they avoid belonging to it.” Fourth, he writes, “As a historian, I am more interested in what NOW was doing in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, but I have no reason to believe its agenda is any less concerned today with issues faced by working women than it was 30 years ago.” I guess Mr. Zeitz is more concerned with NOW then than NOW now. Sorry, couldn’t resist. But I stand by my statement that the modern feminist movement is mostly concerned with liberal politics and has a narrow, class-based conception of the proper place of women in American society. Be a high-power lawyer whose kids are raised by nannies from the age of three days? Good. Be a full-time housewife or pursue a career that allows one to raise one’s own kids? Bad. Not liberated. Real women don’t do housework; cleaning ladies do housework. Consider Martha Stewart. She started with nothing and created a business empire that put her on the Forbes 400 list entirely by her own efforts. One would think she would be a feminist hero of the first order. No, sorry, wrong empire. Nothing domestic, please, we’re feminists. When Martha Stewart was railroaded into jail for an offense that would have gotten anyone else a slap on the wrist, the silence from the feminist movement was deafening. Fifth, Mr. Zeitz writes that my idea that a zone of privacy should extend around not only the sex lives of politicians but their financial lives as well, absent credible evidence of wrongdoing, must mean that I disagree “with the requirement that congressmen release a yearly accounting of their financial holdings and transactions.” Heaven knows Congress has its bad actors, from Republican Randy Cunningham, with his less-than-arms-length real estate deals, to Democrat William Jefferson’s $90,000 in cash stored in the freezer next to the four-cheese pizza and Ben and Jerry’s new Mint Chocolate Chunk ice cream (which is utterly delicious, by the way). I have no well-thought-out solution to the genuine problem of keeping government officials honest while keeping their private affairs private. Perhaps a nonpartisan commission could receive the necessary information and have broad powers to demand clarification as needed, but be under the same strictures as the IRS about releasing it. Only if the commission launched a formal investigation or referred the matter to the Justice Department for action would the fact be made public. But that’s an off-the-top-of-my-head suggestion.
May 11, 2007
Gary Hart IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:10 AM EST Count me in along with Fredric Smoler and Alexander Burns when it comes to wishing that the media would butt out of the private business of public men and women unless that private business is illegal or evidence of gross hypocrisy or other disqualification for office. But I think that the zone of privacy should extend not only to their sex lives, but to such things as their income taxes. I see no reason whatever why candidates and officeholders should make their private financial affairs public unless there is credible evidence of something nefarious going on. Unfortunately I doubt that that genie is going back in the bottle, although Mr. Smoler’s idea of a trust fund to out overly nosey journalists who themselves have feet of clay is an intriguing one. It would certainly be refreshing, however, if a candidate, asked an unnecessarily intrusive question, would simply say, “That’s none of your or anyone else’s damn business, and if you don’t like it I suggest you tell your readers to vote for my opponent.” I bet it would gain him votes. Members of the media, after all, are even less esteemed than politicians, if that’s possible. I am interested, however, that neither Mr. Burns nor Mr. Smoler mentioned the 800-pound gorilla of American sex scandals, the Monica Lewinsky uproar. People have argued that since both she and the President were of lawful age—and certainly Bill Clinton never campaigned on the strength of his moral rectitude—it was a private matter. Among those so arguing were prominent members of the feminist movement, showing no little hypocrisy themselves, or at least political selectivity. But then I’ve long argued that the National Organization for Women might a good deal more accurately be called the National Organization for Upper-Middle-Class Liberal Women. So should the press in a perfect world have ignored the evidence of the Lewinsky affair when it came to light? (We do not, of course, live in a perfect world, and I doubt if even some latter-day combination of William Allen White, Edward R. Murrow, and Walter Lippmann could have brought himself to suppress a story of such obviously gigantic news value.) My take is that the story was legitimate news. Bill Clinton was President of the United States, entrusted by the people with the country’s highest office, and as such had a profound obligation to behave himself in a manner that did credit to the country. Having a tawdry affair with a White House intern less than half his age in the White House itself was an outrageous violation of that duty and very much a matter of public concern. He disgraced himself and therefore, ex officio, disgraced the country. Since Presidents are judged in the court of history, I have no doubt that Clinton will pay a fearsome historical price for his dalliance. A hundred years from now, the average man in the street will know little more about him than the average man today knows about William McKinley. Except, of course, for one thing. Late-night comedians, circa 2107, will still be making jokes about it.
May 9, 2007
Near Misses Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:50 AM EST Reader Thomas Engel, in the Discussions section of this website, brings up the subject of near misses, people who just missed the train that crashed or the ship that sank and thus lived to become famous and important. He mentions Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., the poet (and father of the Supreme Court justice), who missed a train, and the future Duke of Wellington who was too sick to take a ship home from India, a ship that vanished. I have another candidate, the great Broadway composer Jerome Kern. Kern, a notorious night owl, failed to get out of bed on time on May 1, 1915, to catch the ship he was scheduled to go to Europe on. The ship, of course, was the Lusitania. Had Kern been less of a slugabed, there might have been no Princess Theater shows, no Show Boat, no “Smoke Get in Your Eyes,” or “Remind Me,” or “I’ve Told Every Little Star,” or “All the Things You Are,” or “The Last Time I Saw Paris.”
May 5, 2007
Someone Else’s Civil War IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 08:00 PM EST Let me hasten to assure Fredric Smoler that if Louis XVI’s head was the price of American independence, then, au revoir, Louis, et merci bien. While the counterfactual history of an undivided British Empire is toothsome to contemplate, I prefer what actually happened. Charles de Gaulle, to be sure, dismissed the lot of us as “les Anglo-Saxons,” so I’m not sure how much of a distinction the French make even today among the English-speaking peoples. And while the English do indeed produce that incomparable prince of cheeses, the Stilton, the French nonetheless have an often-justified saying that “hell is where the chefs are British.” Just for the record, Louis XVI was not the grandson of Louis XIV but rather his great-great-great-grandson, Louis XV being the great-grandson of his predecessor and the grandfather of his successor. It is remarkable that only three kings should occupy the French throne between 1643 and 1792. In that same time period the English throne had no fewer than eight occupants (not counting Mary II, who ruled jointly with her husband William III). Had there been no revolution and had Louis XVI lived to be seventy, then the three kings would have reigned for a total of 181 years, averaging more than 60 years each. I was idly thinking this morning that had a committee of wise men deliberately set out in 1774 to design a human being who was as utterly unsuited—intellectually, physically, and psychologically—as possible to be king of France at that point in time, they could not have done better than Louis XVI. He was a decent man, and no stupider than many kings, but the times called for someone who was farsighted, shrewd, attractive, brimming with self-confidence, at ease exerting his royal authority, and willing to be ruthless when crossed. Louis XVI was, alas, none of those things. What France needed right then was Elizabeth I. What it got was a cross between Don Knotts and Casper Milquetoast. And so France, not to mention Louis himself, paid a fearful price.
May 4, 2007
Someone Else’s Civil War II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:30 PM EST Fredric Smoler writes, “The French once intervened in what was in many senses a British civil war, the one known as the American Revolution. They backed the winner, and in the long run France did well out of its investment. There may have been blowback by way of encouraging their own revolutionaries, but after a while the investment paid off with a lot of young fellows shouting, ‘Lafayette, we are here!’” I’m not sure that Louis XVI, as he approached the scaffold, would have thought his decision to enter the American Revolution on the side of the Americans had proved to be a good idea. French finances were already in terrible shape before France entered the war and were in much worse shape afterwards. The French financial system was a century behind Britain’s, with no properly funded national debt, so the war was financed by short-term borrowed money at high interest rates. Tax farmers instead of bureaucrats collected taxes and it is estimated that less than half the revenue extracted from the French people ended up in the national treasury, making the citizenry overtaxed and the government underfunded. (That probably accounts for why so many of the tax farmers found themselves intimately, if briefly, acquainted with Dr. Guillotin’s bright idea a few years hence.) And the privileged classes were exempt from most taxation and fiercely resisted any reform of a system so advantageous to them if terrible for the country. In the event, I think it was the expense of supporting the American Revolution rather than any intellectual inspiration that proved to be the match that set off the French Revolution. Then the pent-up fury of the French people provided the explosion. The collapse of the French financial system forced the government to call the Estates General for the first time since 1614. Once assembled, the King’s government could not control it and matters quickly spiraled out of control. The result, in the memorable words of Margaret Thatcher, was “a pile of corpses and a tyrant.”
May 3, 2007
Presidents and Monarchs III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:30 PM EST Alexander Burns writes, “I’m not sure I agree with Mr. Gordon that there’s not much heart in my position. I have little patience for the monarchy, but I don’t think the alternative is necessarily so dry and unromantic. While Mr. Gordon disparages the office of prime minister as one for a ‘worn-out bureaucrat (the usual occupant of the office of head of state in a parliamentary government),’ I’d argue that there is more than a little glory in the succession of leaders from Walpole to the Pitts, to Wellington and Peel, running straight down to Thatcher and Blair. Maybe they haven’t ruled by the grace of God, but if they’ve done their jobs well, ruling by the grace of elections will do for me.” I did not, of course, disparage the office of British prime minister, nor any of the historical giants who have served in that office, but rather the putative office of a British president. Every country needs a head of state (or at least every country has one). In parliamentary systems, the offices of head of state and head of government are separate. The former gets the pomp, the latter the circumstance. In parliamentary republics, the office of president is usually filled by some has-been bureaucrat whose name no one can remember if they ever knew it. Quick! Who’s the president of Germany? See what I mean? But in parliamentary monarchies, the office of head of state is held by a king or queen, who holds it for life (although the Dutch monarchy has a tradition of abdicating in old age). In all cases the history of the royal family and the history of the country are deeply intertwined and so the sovereign is, quite literally, the embodiment of that nation’s history. And, as Walter Bagehot noted in the nineteenth century, royalty is magic. I wish a scholar would try to figure out why royalty has such a deep fascination for the rest of humanity instead of just dismissing it out of hand as a relic of a past time to be replaced by something “logical.” Since states, thank heavens, are not run by intellectuals, they have been much more sensible. I can think of no country, not led into political disaster by a monarch, that has chosen to abolish its monarchy. In one case, Japan, even though the monarch had indeed led the country into disaster, his retention on the throne was the one condition the country set before surrendering its sovereignty to a conquering foreign power. Instead, countries that have had monarchies have retained them, both because of their historic significance and in order to exploit the magic of royalty as a national asset. That exploitation can be seen, in spades, in this country beginning today with the state visit of Queen Elizabeth in honor of the four-hundredth anniversary of the founding of Jamestown. She later goes to Kentucky for the Derby and then to Washington for all the ruffles and flourishes of a state dinner, invitations for which are worth their weight in gold among Washington movers and shakers. The visit will—I fearlessly predict—receive wall-to-wall media coverage that no president of a middling power could dream of commanding. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to see the TV coverage of the horse race with a split screen, one half on the leading horse, one half on the Queen of England. I doubt the British people—who have survived and often triumphed for more than a thousand years as subjects of a monarch—would be so foolish as to throw away so priceless a national asset, just because their chattering classes can’t understand what is clear to everyone else.
May 2, 2007
Presidents and Monarchs Posted by John Steele Gordon at 06:05 PM EST I agree with Alexander Burns that we are not likely to agree on the British monarchy. On this subject, I think partially with my heart; he, it seems, only with his brain. Fortunately it is not up to us. It is up to the people of the U.K. and the queen’s other realms and territories. In theory she is Dei Gratia Regina. In fact, of course, she is Populesque Britannicus Gratia Regina. (My apologies if I have screwed up the Latin. Gaul wasn’t Caesar’s only conquest; he did a pretty good job on me 50 years ago.) The British monarchy is, paradoxically enough, a democratic institution. But a few points. Buckingham Palace is not maintained with public monies, but with the gate receipts of people who pay to see the various royal palaces. I wonder how much they would fall off if Windsor Castle were inhabited by the former minister for sewers and drains who had been kicked upstairs instead of by the queen of England with all the magic of that title. Bring in a Presidency and the British taxpayers might well find themselves worse off. Royalty, after all, is great for tourism. I did not say I agreed with the argument that royalty does not choose its status and therefore is under no obligation to behave well. They can always renounce their royal status, after all, and live ordinary lives. None do so, of course. No fools they. Mr. Burns writes, “It seems to me that the royal family can either be embodiments of their nation’s spirit or flawed, philandering elites—but not both.” I disagree. I think Mr. Burns might be a little more forgiving, as perfection is hard to come by. Both princes and Presidents are made of the same stuff, human clay, and therefore are equally miserable sinners. Presidents have often failed to embody the nation’s spirit. Is Jimmy Carter—that sanctimonious, humorless, anti-Semitic, Arab-money-grubbing hypocrite—the embodiment of America’s spirit? I certainly hope not. John F. Kennedy was a major-league philanderer, but he did a great job of embodying the nation’s spirit. Charles I so failed to do that job he ended up about eight inches shorter (and he was none too tall to start with). Edward VII philandered as much as JFK, and the British people loved him anyway. Way back when (in 1980, if you insist on knowing) I wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times proving—scientifically!—that a monarchical system is superior to a presidential one. I recommend it, here, to all who do not find the sheer meta-scientific magic of royalty sufficient.
May 2, 2007
Citizen Kane and Prince Charles III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:25 AM EST Alexander Burns writes, “By Bragg’s preferences, the producers of Gangs of New York should be liable to the estate of William Marcy Tweed. Except, I’d be quite flabbergasted if Tweed ever had an active estate.” I think the producers of Gangs of New York should be sued for making a terrible movie. But seriously . . . I doubt Tweed left an estate as well. He died in the Ludlow Street Jail. And while his little tin box had been very well stuffed at one time (Fifth Avenue mansion, Long Island estate, diamond stickpin the size of a robin’s egg, etc.), I don’t think there was much left by the end. Just for the record, however, Tweed’s middle name was almost certainly not Marcy, even though you can find that name in a million reference works. Tweed’s middle name, in fact, is unknown (unless it’s been found recently and I haven’t heard) but was probably Magear, which was his mother’s maiden name. He signed his name William M. Tweed. William Marcy, the New York governor in the 1830s and cabinet member under Polk and Pierce, is famous for having coined the phrase “to the victor belongs the spoils,” if not for much else. But he had nothing to do with Tweed. How his name got to be irrevocably concatenated with Tweed’s is one of the minor mysteries of American history. As for the British royal family. I agree that they should set an example, and the queen most certainly does. She has devoted her life to a hard, endless, and often thankless job. The other members of the family, I suppose, could argue that they, like everyone else, did not get to choose their parents and therefore shouldn’t have to behave any better than everyone else. Presidents, however, have no such excuse. They choose their fate and should behave as the country expects them to. I can think of one recent American President who behaved far worse in the improprieties and moral decay department than any member of the British royal family has in recent times. Mr. Burns writes, “Even then, though, public financial support of the monarchy still seems pretty wasteful. Mr. Gordon and I had a good exchange a while back about American politicians and their decorating expenditures. The wastefulness of the Clintons’ White House redecoration, which we both deplored, was insignificant compared to the millions of pounds poured down the drain each year keeping up Buckingham Palace and Balmoral Castle.” First, Balmoral is not maintained by the British government. It is the private property of the queen, who pays for its upkeep out of her own resources. Second, Buckingham Palace would be maintained in splendor whether a monarch or a President was living there. It is hard to believe that a historian would say that maintaining a building so drenched in history is pouring money down a drain. Third, the various palaces (all except Buckingham Palace open at least in part to the public, and many, such as the Tower of London and Hampton Court, now purely museums) are not maintained out of the civil list, which pays for the expenses of the royal family in carrying out their official duties. They are maintained out the income generated by entrance fees. Fourth, in exchange for the civil list (7.9 million pounds), the Queen surrenders the vastly greater income from the crown lands (190 million pounds last year). The civil list would be about the only savings that abolishing the monarchy would create, and that is less than the British government spends each year on finding lost cats. It amounts to about 11 pence per British subject per year. The British monarchy is the literal embodiment of British history, and the monarch has political power only as the last guardian of the constitution, not a situation likely to arise. Why anyone would prefer some worn-out bureaucrat (the usual occupant of the office of head of state in a parliamentary government) instead of someone with 1,200 years of the nation’s history in his or her veins and with all the very real if atavistic magnetism and charisma of a genuine monarch only in order to cut the budget of the British government by less than two one thousandths of one percent is an utter mystery to me.
April 30, 2007
Citizen Kane and Prince Charles Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:35 PM EST First, please let me correct what might be only a miswording in Alexander Burns’s post. Alexander Burns wrote, “I suppose, by Bragg’s preferences, the producers of Citizen Kane should be liable to the estate of William Randolph Hearst for possible distortions of the man’s character. Maybe Bragg meant, ‘a living historical figure,’ but, in any case, I can’t imagine how unbearably dry such a version of popular culture would be. I’m sure that I’m grateful to Michael Kitchen for offering an enjoyable alternative.” William Randolph Hearst was, of course, very much alive when Citizen Kane opened in 1941 and lived for more than a decade more. As far as I know, he didn’t sue, but I imagine his newspapers did their best to trash the movie, unavailingly to be sure, as it is, as fiction, an unalloyed masterpiece. Who was really wronged by the movie, of course, was his mistress, Marion Davies. She was intelligent and a gifted comedic actress, not at all like the pathetically untalented and dumb-as-a-post character Susan Alexander. And Davies stuck with Hearst through thick and thin. When he got into bad financial trouble she lent him $1 million, not the usual direction of the cash flow between mogul and mistress. (He paid her back.) He also writes, “While the impropriety and moral decay of the British royal family was already on full display in the early 1990s . . .” I cheerfully admit to being a cheerleader for the royal family, but have their improprieties and moral behavior been any worse than that of millions of other British families who do not have to live their lives in goldfish bowls? Or has the recent royal family been any worse behaved than it was in earlier times? Given my choice between the current Prince of Wales and his great uncle, Edward VIII, thanks, but I choose Charles. Edward VII was an often badly behaved Prince of Wales but was an excellent and very popular king. And don’t even mention the “wicked uncles” of Queen Victoria. They wrote the field manual on impropriety and moral decay. I think Foyle’s War is an altogether excellent series, and I highly recommend it. Michael Kitchen is perfect in the leading role.
April 27, 2007
Madame Restell Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:35 AM EST Ellen Feldman mentions “Madame Restell’s Female Pill,” one of the many supposedly abortifacient products on the market in the nineteenth century. Madame Restell was one of New York’s more colorful and, in some ways, remarkable characters in the Victorian era. Born in England in 1812 (her real name was Ann Trow Lohman), she came to New York in 1831 and was soon advertising herself in the city directory and newspapers as a “female physician and professor of midwifery.” Besides serving as a midwife, she was soon providing contraceptives, performing abortions, and arranging for the quiet adoption of unwanted babies.
 | | Mme Restell’s Fifth Avenue mansion. |
It was a brisk and lucrative business to say the least, and Mme Restell was obviously a highly competent businesswoman at a time when “businesswoman” was an oxymoron. By 1864 she was doing so well that she built a grand mansion on Fifth Avenue at 52nd Street (just across 52nd Street from where Cartier’s is today). This was north of the main area of development on Fifth Avenue at the time, but as development reached the lower fifties, no one would build next to her because she had become so notorious. One has to admire her so openly sticking it in the eye of the New York society that both scorned her, loudly, and utilized her services, very quietly.Vilified in sensationalist newspapers and by such people as the obnoxiously self-righteous Anthony Comstock, head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (it might have been called more accurately the New York Society for Butting into Other People’s Business), she was often arrested and spent time in the prison on Blackwell’s (now Roosevelt) Island. Facing yet another trial in 1878, she committed suicide, much to Comstock’s ill-concealed satisfaction. She left an estate valued at between $600,000 and $1,000,000. That might not have put her on the Forbes 400 List, had it existed then, but it made Mme Restell a very, very rich woman.
April 23, 2007
Who’s a Strict Constructionist? VI Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:25 PM EST Joshua Zeitz’s latest post is most interesting and informative, but I would still disagree with his statement that, “given how jealously the early Americans guarded the sanctity of their homes and their private sphere—this was, after all, the rationale behind constitutional limits on quartering soldiers in private homes, on compelling self-incriminating testimony, on conducting unlawful searches and seizures, and on abridging the freedom of speech and assembly—it is hard to imagine that the founders would not have considered laws regulating sex, childbirth, and women’s health as unconstitutional violations of common-law rights.” To me, that is a bridge way too far. First, I believe the Third Amendment against quartering soldiers was directed less at maintaining the privacy of families in the modern sense of the term and more at preventing the severe economic and other damage (to the virginity of daughters, for example) that soldiers were all too likely to inflict on a family. Eighteenth-century soldiers weren’t exactly famous for their good behavior off the battlefield. To be sure, Justice Douglas used the Third Amendment to add a little artistic verisimilitude to his “umbras and penumbras” argument in Griswold, but that was, I believe, a “kitchen sink” gambit on his part. Second, there were any number of laws, common and statute, regarding adultery, sodomy, fornication, etc., in colonial America. Perhaps sex inside of marriage was entirely a private matter. But outside of it, it most certainly was not. Colonial New England, especially, bore little resemblance to, say, modern-day Amsterdam, as to what was regarded as nobody else’s business. Third, if “it is hard to imagine that the founders would not have considered laws regulating sex, childbirth, and women’s health as unconstitutional violations of common-law rights,” would not one of the founders have explicitly written so? If one did, it is really hard to imagine that latter-day defenders of abortion rights would not have trumpeted the fact to the skies. The founders wrote volumes—quite literally—about a man’s home being his castle, self-incrimination, freedom of speech and assembly, etc., that are grounded in such sources as the English Bill of Rights. But so far as I know, they wrote not one word about “sex, childbirth, and women’s health” or abortion. Mr. Zeitz writes, “In 1810 the Herald of Liberty, an Augusta newspaper . . . announced the availability of ‘Dr. Rolfe’s Aromatic Female Pills,’ promising that ‘they are conducive to the health of married women, unless when pregnant, at which time they must not be taken as they would most certainly produce miscarriage.’ Rolfe’s cautionary note was not intended to protect him against legal charges, as it was not a criminal offense in Massachusetts, or anywhere else in the United States, to induce a miscarriage before quickening.” I find this fascinating and don’t know enough to flatly disagree with Mr. Zeitz’s interpretation. But—call me cynical—when I read the advertisement my first thought was that Dr. Rolfe was slyly writing one thing and meaning quite another. Abortion was not illegal, but was it socially acceptable? I doubt it. Dr. Rolfe’s ad struck me as a bit like a modern soft drink advertisement saying, “teenagers on no account should use this product, as its effects are much the same as alcohol.” And while abortion was not illegal in 1810, being pregnant and unmarried most certainly was a social calamity for a young woman in 1810. I would guess that Dr. Rolfe was not so much warning married women against the dangers of miscarriage as he was peddling his pills as being the answer to a maiden’s (and many a married woman’s) prayer.
April 21, 2007
Who's a Strict Constructionist? IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 07:00 PM EST Joshua Zeitz writes, “Part of the problem is that I quoted only selectively from Blackmun’s decision. He continued: ‘Most American courts [in the colonial era] ruled, in holding or dictum, that abortion of an unquickened fetus was not criminal under their received common law, others followed Coke in stating that abortion of a quick fetus was a “misprision,” a term they translated to mean “misdemeanor.” . . . In this country, the law in effect in all but a few States until mid-19th century was the preexisting English common law.’” I am not a lawyer (but then, unless I’m mistaken, neither is Mr. Zeitz), but I would think that the fact that a court here or there had held that X was not criminal under the common law did not, ipso facto, make X a “right.” To be the latter, it seems to me, would require that X have been regarded as an aspect of “liberty.” As Mr. Zeitz points out, common law develops on a case-by-case basis, and it takes a number of cases before the common law becomes settled and thus binding on future judges under the doctrine of stare decisis. And even then legislatures overturn the common law by statute all the time (such as the common law principle that 21 was the age of majority). And surely no one in the eighteenth century thought of abortion as an aspect of the “liberty” that became enshrined in the U.S. Constitution via the Ninth Amendment. (Do a thought experiment. Imagine asking John Adams—a highly skilled and deeply learned lawyer—if he thought the Ninth Amendment protected “the right to have an abortion.” My guess is he would have looked at you as if you had come from Mars.) In fact, I imagine they rarely thought of it at all. I would be very interested to learn what, exactly, was the jurisprudence Blackmun was referring to. I wonder, for instance, how many cases there could have been altogether. After all, who would have hauled the women into court? How could it have even been determined whether it was abortion or miscarriage that had ended the pregnancy? How, indeed, would the pregnancy have been known to exist before “quickening”? Given the fact that abortion is almost always a very private act and that the state of knowledge before the modern era regarding gestation was nearly nil, these must have been very unusual cases and, I suspect, very few in number. Far better established, both in the common law and as an aspect of liberty, was the doctrine of “liberty of contract,” that two parties are free to make whatever contract they wish provided it does not contravene some established principle of law (such as the common-law principle that one cannot contract against one’s own negligence or make a contract of marriage if one is already married). Under this doctrine, the Supreme Court ruled in Lochner v. New York (1905) that the New York State Legislature could not mandate a limit on the number of hours bakers could work, even for the sake of the bakers’ health. Lochner was later invoked to strike down laws limiting child labor, mandating minimum wages, and most New Deal legislation, until the court changed course in the late 1930s (the famous “switch in time that saved nine”). Today, of course, most people regard Lochner as a classic example of judicial activism, the court blithely substituting its judgment regarding what was necessary to protect the health of bakers for that of the legislature and elevating a common law right, liberty of contract, over all others, including the state’s right to protect the health of its citizens. Today it is the dissent in Lochner of Justices Holmes and Harlan that is regarded as having pointed the way to our modern understanding of “liberty of contract.” I certainly agree with Holmes and Harlan, and—just a guess!—I expect that Mr. Zeitz does too. Overturning Lochner did not require a constitutional amendment and shouldn’t have. In the eighteenth century nothing was known about the occupational hazards of bakers, and nothing was known about gestation until late in pregnancy (and very little then). So it was a medieval religious doctrine (the Catholic Church had decided that the soul entered the body of the fetus when it quickened) that determined when a fetus became entitled to legal protection. We now know a great deal about both occupational diseases and gestation, and legislatures are (or rather should be) entitled to make reasonable laws regarding both. I think Roe and Lochner are classic cases of judicial usurpation of legislative power masquerading as the protection of a “right.”
April 20, 2007
Who’s a Strict Constructionist? II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:45 AM EST I certainly agree with Joshua Zeitz that Wednesday’s Supreme Court decision on partial birth abortion was strictly a dog-bites-man news item, once Samuel Alito replaced Sandra Day O’Connor on the court. I also agree that strict construction tends to be a flag of convenience, to be invoked or ignored at will as suits someone’s agenda. Even the original strict constructionist, Thomas Jefferson, admitted after becoming President that it was a doctrine more congenial to those out of power. Certainly he had no hesitation—if some misgivings—in snapping up Louisiana, despite the fact that the Constitution nowhere mentions the acquisition of territory from a foreign power. Mr. Zeitz writes, quoting, I assume, Justice Blackmun, who wrote the Roe v. Wade opinion, “In 1787, when the Constitution was drafted, as a matter of ‘common law, abortion performed before “quickening”—the first recognizable movement of the fetus in utero, appearing usually from the 16th to the 18th week of pregnancy—was not an indictable offense.’” Mr. Zeitz continues, “‘Strict constructionists’ like to argue for a literal reading of the Constitution. If a certain right is not embedded in its text, it doesn’t exist. But as [Justice William O.] Douglas and Blackmun demonstrated, citizens enjoyed a host of common-law privacy rights prior to—and at the time of—the Constitution’s enactment, and these rights fall under the rubric of those ‘rights . . . retained by the people’ protected by the Ninth Amendment.” So far, I have no disagreement. But then he argues that “if ‘strict constructionists’ don’t like abortion, the onus is on them to amend the Constitution and remove a right that was guaranteed to women at the time of its original drafting.” Here Mr. Zeitz loses me. I am no expert on the common law (where is Oliver Wendell Holmes when you need him?). But as I understand it, the common law was not silent on the subject of various “privacy rights”; they had been established in many cases over the centuries. But Blackmun seems to be saying that it was silent regarding abortion early in pregnancy, as was statute law in 1787 (only violations of statute law can lead to criminal indictment, I believe). So it seems to me to be quite a stretch to argue that, since the common law was silent on something, that therefore that something “was a common-law right in 1787, and as such, it is protected by the Constitution” under the Ninth Amendment. If you accept that argument, then wouldn’t everything on which the common law was silent in 1787—from the speed one may travel on a highway to licenses needed to practice various professions to how and where property owners can dispose of garbage—require a constitutional amendment to empower a legislature to enact statutes regarding them? I’m reasonably confident that the common law was silent on the subject of growing marijuana in the privacy of one’s basement. But I’m equally confident that a Ninth Amendment argument that the law was therefore unconstitutional wouldn’t impress the judge.
April 17, 2007
Reacting to Tragedy II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:10 PM EST I certainly agree with Alexander Burns that there will be a time for investigating and finger-pointing and second-guessing, but it is not now. It is an inherent misfortune of television, I think, that even when there is nothing to say, TV journalists and commentators must still speak. And so they do, all too often making fools of themselves in the process. His reference to Robert Kennedy’s eloquent quote from Aeschylus reminded me of Kennedy’s speech at the 1964 Democratic Convention, when he gave a tribute to his brother the late President, not yet 10 months dead. Before an auditorium filled with tens of thousands of hushed people he ended with a quotation from Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, III:2:21–25). The words have haunted me ever since I heard him speak them, now 43 years, and two thirds of a lifetime, ago: . . . when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
April 15, 2007
Andrew Roberts IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 06:30 PM EST I haven’t read Roberts’s book either, so I’m in very good company. But I wonder if Andrew Roberts wasn’t somewhat constrained by the fact that his book is explicitly a sequel to Winston Churchill’s four-volume work of the same name that stopped in 1900. To be sure he must have found Churchill’s worldview congenial or he wouldn’t have taken on the task, but he is a tough act to follow, after all. I imagine that Johann Hari and Caroline Elkins have no use for Churchill any more than they do for Roberts, of course, his having saved the world and won a Nobel Prize for literature hardly compensating for his imperialist and capitalist views. Like campus hooligans, these sort of truly and unnecessarily personally nasty reviews always seems to come from the left. Maybe Ann Coulter has written some book reviews I haven’t read, however. I agree with Fredric Smoler that it is easy, especially with a book of this length and breadth, to compile a list of mistakes that should have been caught in manuscript. I just got an e-mail from a reader of one of my books pointing out, very politely, a stupid mistake on my part (I know, I really do, that radios don’t have electric motors in them). But—maybe I’m getting old—it seems to me that editors and copyeditors just don’t seem to try to catch them anymore. Spelling and punctuation gets fixed, but if the author writes that the sun rose in the west, well, that, it seems, is not their department anymore.
April 10, 2007
The Titanic and Bruce Ismay Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:45 PM EST I watched the movie Titanic over the weekend. I hadn’t seen it since it first opened 10 years ago, and I was every bit as impressed with it as I had been the first time I saw it. It is a wonderful romance movie, a thrilling adventure movie, and an epic disaster movie (quite as close as I ever care to get to being shipwrecked in the North Atlantic in mid-April, thank you very much). It fully and brilliantly conveyed the horror and pathos and terror of the moment. The ending—as the ship slowly transforms from the dead wreck of the late twentieth century into the living, breathing, glittering creature she had so briefly been in the early twentieth, and as the doomed lovers are reunited forever at the top of the grand staircase—is a please-pass-the-Kleenex moment for the hardest of hearts. And, in a limited way, Titanic is not a bad documentary of what is by far the most famous (if not the most death-ridden) maritime disaster in history. That is understandable, as why would a competent moviemaker fool around with what is already a nearly perfect story? To be sure, the characters so memorably played by Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio are pure fiction, but the world they inhabited is not. The ship was meticulously recreated, many of the minor characters are real and accurately portrayed, and the details of the sinking, as they were understood 10 years ago, are faithfully rendered. (There is new evidence that the ship broke in two from the bottom up, not the top down as shown in the movie.) There were, of course, minor slips. There is a scene involving smoking at lunch, but no one would have smoked in the first-class dining room in 1912. The astronomer Neil de Grasse Tyson pointed out that the stars in the sky as DiCaprio and Winslet floated in the dark, wreckage-flecked waters after the ship went down were randomly generated, not those of the real sky. (I confess I didn’t notice that the first time around; I was thinking about how cold that water must have been.) One of the minor characters, in this and in earlier movie versions, is Bruce Ismay. Like many first-class male passengers, he survived and, like them, he would be mostly forgotten today except for one fact: He was the managing director of the White Star Line, which owned the Titanic. He spent two hours helping the ship’s officers load women and children into lifeboats on the ship’s starboard side. As the last lifeboat was ready for launch and there were, according to his testimony, no other passengers in sight, he made a fateful decision. At the crossroads of his life, with a single flicker of his all-too-human heart, he sought to do what all living creatures seek, to stay alive. He stepped into the lifeboat. Thus he survived, but his reputation did not. Because he was popularly regarded as having had a duty to stay with the ship until all the passengers were safe, although he was not part of the ship’s crew, he was savaged by the press, especially in the newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst. He was the subject of derision by vaudeville comedians. The journalist Ben Hecht (who would later write the play The Front Page) published a doggeral verse about him: The captain stood where a captain should
When the captain’s boat goes down.
But the owner led when the women fled
For an owner must not drown. Ismay had had a long association with New York City. He had run the line’s New York operations for several years as a young man and had married Julia Florence Schieffelin, from one of the city’s most prominent families. He was a member of one of New York’s most exclusive clubs. But as soon as he finished testifying before the American board of inquiry, he sailed back to Britain. He soon retired from business, resigned from his New York club, and never crossed the Atlantic again, although he lived until 1937 and died a very rich man. One can only wonder how often he relived that one fateful moment, how often he second-guessed the action he took, how often he must have wondered if the cold, cold water would have been preferable to the life his action had made possible, knowing that he had been condemned in the court of history to be scorned forever. And which of us is sure what we would have done had we been in his shoes at that moment?
April 6, 2007
Ward Churchill and Hamilton College II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:00 PM EST I’d like to make one point regarding Fredric Smoler’s post, with which I largely agree, although I would have disinvited both Churchill and Paulin on the simple grounds that new information had shown them to be unworthy of being invited. Seems like a good reason to me. He writes, “Josh Zeitz quite correctly observes that allegations about Churchill’s mendacity, fraud, scholarly misconduct, and plagiarism have nothing to do with this question. For one thing, these allegations surfaced after the Hamilton controversy, not before it, so they cannot retrospectively justify Hamilton’s decision, even if they have all proved to be true.” In fact, members of the Hamilton faculty had evidence of Churchill’s scholarly malfeasance and used it to argue against having him speak. The evidence was later turned over to the University of Colorado at Boulder and formed the basis of the charges against him there, charges of which Churchill was later found guilty and dismissed from his professorship.
April 5, 2007
Defining Free Speech IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:30 AM EST When discussing the “Bong Hits for Jesus” case, I should have been more explicit in stating that we were dealing with children and school, which makes it a special, not a general, free-speech case. Children have their civil rights restricted frequently because they are, well, children. To not do so would be folly. And schools have an obligation to maintain an environment conducive to learning. If that requires restrictions on free speech (and it does), then so be it. Children are in school for only a fraction of their time and can express themselves fully the rest of the time, so what is lost is minimal and what is gained is considerable. That seems an entirely reasonable tradeoff to me. I think my analogy to the man serving on a jury is apposite here. While in the jury box his free-speech rights are severely restricted, and for good reason. The fact that the boy was, physically, not on school property is neither here nor there. The students had been let out of school solely for the purpose of watching the Olympic torch go by. They were thus subject to school discipline just as though they were on a class trip to, say, a museum. If the school had a right to tell the boy to take down his sign, had he been carrying it in a school corridor, then it had a right to tell him to take it down in this instance. Mr. Zeitz writes, “. . . if we allow students to wear crosses or stars of David on the grounds of religious freedom, why can’t a student in Alaska hoist a banner that invokes Jesus?” Because he wasn’t expressing a religious sentiment. By his own admission he was only trying to provoke a reaction from school authorities. It was just a stunt, a rather amusing and clever one, but a stunt. That’s why I think this case is a Hurricane Katrina in a nearly microscopic teapot. Just because someone yells “Free Speech!” doesn’t mean we have to send our brains to the dry cleaners and cower before the majesty of the expression. Part of the problem here, undoubtedly, is the concept of “zero tolerance” regarding drugs, etc., which is why the school principal ordered the boy to take down the sign. Schools, especially public schools, are necessarily run by bureaucracies, and bureaucracies love hard-and-fast rules, as they require no thinking or even common sense. But the idiocies that result from “zero tolerance” are legion (see
here). Mr. Zeitz points out a girl disciplined for wearing Winnie-the-Pooh socks. My favorite is the six-year-old boy who was suspended for sexual harassment, having touched another six-year-old “inappropriately.” (You would think that a school would be familiar with the way six-year-olds actually behave, but apparently not in this case.) The boy had to sign a statement on the matter (I guess he used block letters) before his parents were called. Does anyone think that a six-year-old is capable of understanding the meaning of “sexual harassment”? Best of luck explaining it to one. So, as I said in my first post on this subject, the first mistake was the school’s reaction to the sign. It had nothing to do with drugs and nothing to do with religion. It should have been ignored and the boy should have later on been given one of those now-you-see-here-young-man lectures we all remember so fondly. Had that been done, maybe a half million dollars in legal fees and court costs would have been saved. The money, instead, could have been used to fight malaria in Africa (probably behind a subscription wall, alas) and saved the lives of dozens of school kids. There’s a reason Jefferson listed life as the first of the unalienable rights with which we are all divinely endowed.
April 4, 2007
Defining Free Speech II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:05 PM EST Well, it is certainly nice for Joshua Zeitz to produce an argument to back up his position instead of just a sneer of contempt for anyone who could be so unenlightened as to not agree with him. It is an argument worth a serious reply. All of the famous cases cited by Mr. Zeitz, many of which are the basis of the modern jurisprudence regarding free speech, involve adults engaged in the serious expression of ideas: an editor criticizing a state judiciary, a person of antiwar views distributing pamphlets advocating resistance to the draft, a socialist expressing a basic tenet of socialist doctrine, even a newspaper spewing hate. The case of the schoolboy holding up a banner saying “Bong Hits for Jesus” involves neither adults nor ideas. Mr. Zeitz fails to note the fact that the plaintiff in this case was a child. While children most certainly have civil rights, no one has ever argued—at least that I know of—that they enjoy the full panoply of them. Do six-year-olds have the “right” to decide when to go to bed, whether or not to take a bath, what to eat for supper, where to live? Of course not. To be sure, the Supreme Court ruled in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969) that students had the right to wear black armbands in school to protest the Vietnam War, calling it a matter of free speech. I think it was a disastrously wrong-headed decision, and I am not alone. Justice Hugo Black—as firm a friend of the First Amendment as has ever sat on the Court—dissented vigorously, writing, “The Court’s holding in this case ushers in what I deem to be an entirely new era in which the power to control pupils by the elected ‘officials of state supported public schools . . .’ in the United States is in ultimate effect transferred to the Supreme Court.” Black was right. Children have a right to wear armbands, display signs, stand on soapboxes (not that soapboxes actually exist anymore, I suppose, but plastic milk crates will do nicely), and proclaim truth to the world. They should just have to do it outside of school. For six hours a day, five days a week, nine months a year, they should be learning, not teaching. Tinker made matters that are properly decided by educators and parents a matter of judicial process instead of common sense. That, 99.9 percent of the time, is a ridiculous waste of money and time. It is a measure, I suppose, of just how rich this country has become that we can afford to spend tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of dollars arguing in court a case this trivial. Mr. Zeitz writes, “The United States is governed by laws, and by a written constitution. Is there a place in such a system for the distinction that Mr. Gordon is making between protected free speech and unprotected mischievous speech? If so, who should be the arbiter of whether speech merits protection, and what are the standards that should govern this decision?” The jurisprudence of free speech requires distinctions between what is allowed and what is not allowed (yelling fire in crowded theaters, libel, false advertising, inciting to riot, etc.) all the time. It is judges who make those distinctions, by means of well-established legal standards. In the case of schoolboys in school, it should be educators using the standards of common sense. If the schoolboy in question genuinely thinks he has been seriously wronged, he should complain to his parents when he gets home and let them decide if he is right and, if necessary, speak to the school. Or he can just wait until two o’clock, when he will be entirely free to exercise his unalienable right to proclaim the sacred truth of “Bong Hits for Jesus” to the world.
April 3, 2007
Guns and Speech VI Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:20 PM EST Mr. Zeitz writes, “Mr. Gordon has changed the rules in mid-play. I provided evidence of a case in which a college was forced to cancel an appearance by a left-wing speaker because that speaker was threatened with violence, and he replied with a long list of interesting facts that have little bearing on the subject at hand.” I have not changed the rules by so much as a millimeter. Here’s what I wrote on the very first post on this subject, way back on October 6 of last year: “I would be genuinely interested in learning instances in which right-leaning students have sought to prevent leftist speakers from having their say. I know of no examples. Examples of the opposite abound.” There were no right-leaning students threatening violence to prevent Ward Churchill from speaking at Hamilton College. The faculty opposition to his speaking was because Ward Churchill is a scholastic fraud, unworthy of being heard by honest scholars. Those seem to me to be relevant facts. Certainly they are a lot more relevant than the fact that right-leaning students at the University of Michigan staged a sophomoric stunt (and exercised their rights of free speech in the process, by the way) involving BB guns and pictures of John Kerry and Hillary Clinton. Six months ago, I asked for an apple. Since then Mr. Zeitz has brought forth crates if not boatloads of oranges, bananas, grapes, pawpaws, mangoes, papayas, loganberries, and even the occasional carrot and rutabaga. He has produced not one single, solitary piece of fruit that any reasonably objective person could call an apple. I’m still waiting, but I seem to be waiting for Godot. Mr. Zeitz writes, “Yes, Ward Churchill has been accused of shoddy research.” No, Ward Churchill has been convicted—by his peers, unanimously—of far more than shoddy research. He was convicted of “four counts of falsifying information, two counts of fabricating information, two counts of plagiarizing the works of others, improperly reporting the results of studies, and failing to ‘comply with established standards regarding author names on publications.’” Surely Mr. Zeitz knows that fabricating information and using other people’s work without acknowledgment are not shoddy research. They are the scholarly equivalent of capital crimes. Mr. Zeitz writes, regarding the two free-speech cases he wrote about a few days ago, “This idea [my distinguishing between the two cases and coming to a conclusion regarding one that Mr. Zeitz does not approve of] works, but only if we appoint Mr. Gordon the final arbiter of what constitutes meaningful speech. Of course, we can’t do that. Our Constitution doesn’t allow for it. (It might be possible in Iran, or maybe Zimbabwe. I’ll look into this and get back to Mr. Gordon as soon as I learn something.)” I’ll ignore the cheap—indeed typical of a junior high school debate in a less-than-top-drawer school system—insult. But what have I done that causes this freshet of gratuitous insult from Mr. Zeitz? I looked at the facts in the two cases, reached conclusions regarding them, and explained my reasoning. Mr. Zeitz, in contrast, seems to have simply adopted the ACLU party line as revealed truth, thus saving unnecessary wear and tear on the little gray cells. Mr. Zeitz’s reaction is to say, in effect, “He disagrees with me, therefore he’s wrong.” He doesn’t deign to inform the rest of us why I’m wrong to think that “Bong Hits For Jesus” is not in any real sense an exercise of free speech but rather merely the mischievous act of an apparently clever schoolboy. (One has to admire how the schoolboy manages to hit two educational hot buttons—drugs and religion—in the space of only four words. Of course, had he written, “Black Gays Demand Bong Hits for Jesus,” he would have hit four buttons in only seven words. But I digress.) Mr. Zeitz, in fact, seems to think that his conclusion regarding this case is indeed the only acceptable one. “The question is,” he wrote, “will conservatives who insist on a constitutional right to carry a concealed semiautomatic weapon also stand up for students in Juneau, Alaska, and Wilton, Connecticut?” I can’t speak for “conservatives who insist on a constitutional right to carry a concealed semiautomatic weapon,” but I just don’t think the student in Juneau needed standing up for and said why I so thought. Mr. Zeitz, awash in the moral smugness so characteristic of American liberalism in its pathetic dotage, only sneers at me for disagreeing with him.
April 3, 2007
Guns and Speech IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:35 PM EST Joshua Zeitz writes, “Jeane Kirkpatrick at Smith, Ward Churchill at Hamilton. Parallel examples” and hopes that I am satisfied. No, sorry, I’m not, for the two cases in fact are not parallel at all. First, the opposition to having Jeane Kirkpatrick, a distinguished scholar as well as a high government official, speak at Smith in 1983 came entirely from Smith students and left-wing faculty who disliked her politics and the policies of the Reagan administration. It was they who threatened violence and presented a clear and present danger to her safety. They were out to suppress free speech, plain and simple. The opposition to having Ward Churchill speak at Hamilton in 2005 came, as Mr. Zeitz says, from such people as Bill O’Reilly and David Horowitz, neither of whom have anything whatever to do with Hamilton College. Some Hamilton faculty members objected to having Churchill speak there, not because of his obnoxious opinions regarding 9/11 but because they regarded Professor Churchill as a scholarly fraud. They were right. In 2006, according to Wikipedia, the Investigative Committee, a subcommittee of the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where Churchill was a tenured professor, “agreed unanimously that Churchill had engaged in ‘serious research misconduct,’ including four counts of falsifying information, two counts of fabricating information, two counts of plagiarizing the works of others, improperly reporting the results of studies, and failing to ‘comply with established standards regarding author names on publications.’” The university chancellor dismissed Churchill. The matter, as far as I know, is still under appeal. Second, it has never been established where the anonymous threats of violence against Churchill, should he appear at Hamilton, came from, but they certainly did not come from a campus mob or faculty members. They might well have come from people personally affected by 9/11 who had heard about Churchill on television. The inability of the college to guarantee his security might well be owing to the Kirkland Project having recently invited the 1960s radical Susan Rosenberg, of the Weather Underground, to come to Hamilton as an “artist/activist in residence.” (The term “activist in residence” speaks volumes.) Ms Rosenberg, before having her 58-year sentence commuted by President Clinton—one of his infamous I’m-out-of-here pardons and commutations—had spent 16 years in a federal prison for assorted crimes of violence and had taken part in the armed robbery of a Brinks truck in which a Brinks guard and two Nyack, New York, policemen had been killed. Hamilton, a liberal arts college, is located deep in the countryside, near the small town of Clinton, New York, and is dependent on local police to provide security over and above what the very modest campus force can provide. The local police at the time were understandably not inclined to help out an institution that had given a “scholarly” appointment to a cop killer. (Susan Rosenberg, facing near unanimous disgust, withdrew before taking up the appointment.) The Kirkland Project, which has an independent endowment, is thus largely independent of college control. Run by a very left-wing faculty member, it has been far more interested in “activism” (of the left only, of course; no diversity of ideas, please, we’re liberals) than in scholarship. To learn more about the Kirkland Project I would recommend reading this op-ed piece by Robert Paquette, who is Publius Virgilius Rogers Professor of American History at Hamilton College and whom I have known and admired for a number of years. So, we’re still waiting for an instance in which a college speaker was forced to withdraw because right-wingers on campus objected to his or her politics and used violence or the palpable threat of it to disrupt or prevent the free expression of ideas. I’d also like to learn about any left-wing campus publications that have been stolen and destroyed by right-wing students.
April 1, 2007
The Wit of Science Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:55 AM EST Scientists as a general rule are known for their brains, not their wit. But there are occasional delightful exceptions. A recent scientific paper (available here) ponders the question of why of all the great apes, only humans have two species of lice with which to contend, while gorillas and chimpanzees have one (and orangutans, luckily for them, are lice free). Of the two human lice, the head louse is related to the chimpanzee louse and, indeed, split off from it at the same time that humans diverged from chimps, about six million years ago. The human body louse, however, is closely related to the gorilla louse, having diverged only about three millions years ago. How it made the jump to humans is unknown and probably always will be. (Yes, I know what you’re thinking, but there are many innocent possibilities beyond interspecies hanky-panky.) What makes the story interesting to other than louseologists, however, is that it makes it possible to date with some precision when humans lost most of their body hair. As long as we were hirsute, there was room for only one louse, thanks to the general biological truth that only one species can occupy a single biological niche at the same time in the same place (because competition will always eliminate all but one species). But once we had hair only in certain parts of the body, with, in effect, a cordon sanitaire around our hairless necks, then two niches were created and early humans could scratch different critters in different places. So where’s the wit? The title of this in fact very serious paper is “Pair of Lice Lost or Parasites Regained: The Evolutionary History of Anthropoid Primate Lice.” This reminds me of one of the most elegant scientific jokes of all time, which first saw the light of day on April 1, 1948, 59 years ago today. On that day the premier British scientific journal, Nature, published a paper called “The Origin of Chemical Elements.” It proved to be a major, and very early, contribution to the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. Indeed, it was so early that the theory wouldn’t even acquire its popular name until 1955 (courtesy of one of its most formidable opponents, the cosmologist Fred Hoyle). The authors of “The Origin of Chemical Elements” were Ralph Alpher, then a graduate student at George Washington University and now a vastly senior and greatly honored physicist, and his advisor, the late George Gamow, a highly distinguished physicist in his own right as well as the author of many popular works of science (most famously One, Two, Three . . . Infinity, which is still in print after more than 60 years). Gamow, who was once described by a reporter as “the only scientist in America with a real sense of humor,” recognized an opportunity when he saw it, and added the name of a friend, the great physicist Hans Bethe—who in fact had little if anything to do with the paper’s creation—to the list of authors. Thus the paper would be written by Alpher, Bethe, Gamow and it’s been known as the a?? paper ever since.
March 31, 2007
Guns and Speech II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:05 PM EST Joshua Zeitz writes, “I scarcely remember the details of the exchange, except that a few of us agreed that campus disruptions were more likely to be instigated by left-wing activists than by right-wing activists.” I still await learning of a single instance where a campus speech, discussion, poster, or newspaper was disrupted, systematically defaced, or destroyed by right-wing students. These sorts of actions seem to be exclusively, not “more likely,” the province of left-wing students. I suspect part of the reason for that is that right-wing students know that the college administration would come down on them like a ton of bricks for such behavior while left-wing students equally know they will get a free pass, as they did at Columbia. Mr. Zeitz says such behavior should be “appropriately disciplined.” I wonder if he thinks that is what happened in this case and, if not, what discipline they should have received. Had it been up to me, I would have suspended the students involved for a year and announced that anyone—of the right, left, or center—who trampled in such a way in the future on the free-speech rights of others would be summarily expelled. Moving on to guns and speech, let me say that I am not an Second Amendment absolutist. But, then, neither am I a First Amendment absolutist. I try to be a common sense absolutist. I think individuals have a right “to keep and bear arms.” But I have no problem whatever with reasonable restrictions on that right. I think all firearms should be registered, that age limits can be imposed, that certain areas (such as schools, courthouses, and—pace, Senator Webb—the United States Capitol) can be properly required to be gun-free, and that individuals can forfeit their right to keep and bear arms if they misbehave seriously enough, just as they can lose their right to vote. Equally, I think a person has a right to peacefully speak his mind on any and all subjects. But I don’t think a person has a First Amendment right to incite to riot, to stand up in the middle of a play and start telling the rest of the audience his political opinions, or to libel or slander someone. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said (I’m quoting from memory), “the right of free speech is like the right to swing one’s arm: It is absolute only until it comes in contact with someone else’s nose.” In other words, the right of free speech, important as it is, does not trump all other rights. I find the two cases Mr. Zeitz mentioned very interesting but quite different. In the Alaska case, while the incident took place off school property, the boy (now an adult—I believe he’s teaching in China at the moment) was still subject to school discipline as the school was acting in loco parentis. So the question is, did the school exceed its powers to control student behavior? As far as I understand it, the boy was deliberately trying to provoke a reaction, although I doubt he foresaw in his wildest dreams that the reaction he provoked would end up in the United States Supreme Court. The “speech”—involving a sign saying “Bong Hits for Jesus,” unfurled as the Olympic torch went by in a parade—is essentially meaningless, intended solely to get a reaction, in much the same way that “your mother wears combat boots” is. There was no idea or opinion related to the real world being offered. In retrospect, the school should have ignored the sign and, later, called the boy into the principal’s office for a dressing down for being a jerk. And the court of first instance should have dismissed the case under the doctrine of de minimis non curat lex. There was no real-world First Amendment issue here. Claiming one, and the courts taking the claim seriously, just because “words” are involved is, at best, silly. But do students have First-Amendment rights in school? The answer, I think, is both, yes, of course they do, and no, they don’t. Students are in school to learn. They are, quite properly, expected to listen, not talk, except when called upon to do so and then to respond appropriately. “Joshua, what is the past tense of donner?” is not a license to give one’s opinions on the war in Iraq. It’s exactly the same as a member of a jury. He does not lose his First Amendment rights by entering the jury box, but he may not talk while he is in it and he may not discuss the case outside of it until it is over. Would any judge allow a jury member to unfurl a banner saying “Bong Hits for Jesus” in the middle of a trial? I would certainly hope not. On the other hand, if a teacher asks a student what he thinks about X, the student has every right to honestly state what that opinion is and why he thinks so, regardless of how unpopular that opinion may be. And that is why I think the principal in Wilton, Connecticut, was dead wrong in banning the student-written play about the Iraq War. Assuming the New York Times description was an accurate one, the students, under the guidance of a teacher, had produced a genuine and worthwhile play on a painful subject. To ban it because it might “offend” someone is, to me, deeply offensive. Free speech—real free speech, not faux free speech like “Bong Hits for Jesus”—has suffered grievously in this country, especially on college campuses, because of the notion that selected groups have an absolute right not to be offended and an absolute, unappealable right to decide what is offensive to them. The trivial Alaska case got as far as it did because self-proclaimed defenders of the First Amendment have pushed the idea, with far too much success, that every noise issuing from a human being, regardless of both circumstances and content, is sacred. In the substantive Wilton case, the right of any person not to be “offended”—and a principal’s understandable if unacceptable reluctance to face their displeasure—caused what sounds like a very worthwhile project to be cancelled after a good deal of hard work. The students have every right to feel wronged.
March 30, 2007
Columbia University and Free Speech (for Selected People Only, of Course—We’re a University) Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:35 PM EST Last fall a group of Columbia University student thugs violently prevented a speaker from the Minutemen, a group concerned with illegal immigration, from finishing a talk that he had been invited to give by a campus organization. They invaded the auditorium and forced him off the stage. You can see the video of the incident here. Quite a lively discussion followed on this blog when I brought the subject up. I wrote that as far as I knew this sort of behavior on the nation’s campuses was exclusively the province of the left. At least I could think of no incident where right-leaning students had prevented a speaker from peacefully having his say at a campus event. Neither could any other contributor to this blog. After a five-month investigation (it took five months to investigate an incident that lasted five minutes?), Columbia has finally punished the perpetrators of this outrage against free speech and academic inquiry. Their punishment? According to the student newspaper, “they were charged with simple violations of the University’s Rules of Conduct. The resulting warnings . . . will be notated on students’ transcripts and remain there until the end of 2008.” Boy, that’ll teach ’em not to commit the intellectual equivalent of armed robbery. One wonders what they would have gotten if they had simply shot the speaker in order to shut him up. A two-week suspension, perhaps? If you think the punishment does not exactly fit the crime, the students involved entirely agree: “It’s a light punishment, it’s a slap on the wrist,” said one of them, Monique Dols, a graduate student. “It’s a victory for free speech and anti-racism.” No punishment at all for the violent suppression of free speech at an institution supposedly dedicated to it is a victory for free speech? George Orwell, call your office. Perhaps the reason this sort of behavior is exclusively a province of the left is that the campus authorities encourage it by their reaction, or rather non-reaction, to it. Does anyone think that, had the Columbia Republicans (the group that had sponsored the Minutemen talk) violently disrupted a speech by, say, Cindy Sheehan, this would have been the only result?
March 29, 2007
Algeria, Vietnam, and Iraq Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:20 PM EST Arthur Herman, a well-known historian (his latest book is To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World, has written what I think is a most interesting and perceptive essay comparing the Algerian War of the late 1950s and early ’60s, the Vietnam War, and the current struggle in Iraq. He looks at the tactics that proved highly successful against insurgents (and that now, having been adopted very late in the game, seem to be showing good results in Iraq) and yet how the first two wars were nonetheless lost on the home front, thanks to an intelligentsia and media that were only too willing to put moral posturing above reality and forgive the enemy every atrocity while forgiving the Western power nothing. The results, in the cases of Algeria and Southeast Asia, were horrendous for the people of those areas and disastrous for the cause of freedom everywhere. It is well worth reading, even if you find yourself disagreeing with parts (or all) of it. Originally published in Commentary, it can be found here.
March 27, 2007
McCain-Feingold Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:55 AM EST McCain-Feingold, which was supposed to clean up American politics by taking away or at least greatly reducing the taint of money, is five years old today. Has it worked? Not that I can see. McCain-Feingold passed Congress because—whatever its allegedly high-minded purposes—it’s an incumbent’s protection act. In the nature of things, incumbents will always have an easier time raising money and getting media attention than challengers, so equally restrictive rules must always favor incumbents. And it hasn’t even reduced the amount of money campaigns cost. When the presidential candidates report first-quarter donations next month, no one expects them to be anything but new records (except, apparently, for John McCain himself, whose fund-raising is stumbling). Many of the major candidates have already opted out of voluntary restrictions under the pressure of necessity. Another purpose of McCain-Feingold was to reduce negative campaigning. As John Kerry found out with the Swift Boat Veterans ads, that purpose, as well, has been an abject failure. What McCain-Feingold has unequivocally done is to reduce free speech. One of its provisions forbids advertisements by citizens groups within 30 days of a primary and 60 days of an election. In other words, everyone except the candidates and the established media has to shut up before an election. Arthur Sulzberger’s opinions are fine, John Q. Public’s are not. The Supreme Court upheld this provision—to the astonishment of nearly everyone—in one of its more shameful recent decisions. One can only hope it will see the error of its ways soon. Fortunately technology is making McCain-Feingold increasingly irrelevant. Only in the 2004 election did the Internet begin to exert a powerful, and so-far unregulated, influence on politics. It will have a much more powerful effect next year. And it won’t be restricted to the well-heeled, as television is. The spoof of the classic Apple Computer 1984 ad, targeting Hillary Clinton, that was all over YouTube last week and then spilled over into television as a news story, was cooked up by an individual on his own time. Thanks to the Internet, one needs increasingly only to be clever to get wide public attention. Many argued five years ago, correctly it appears, that there is no way to fairly and successfully regulate the flow of money into politics in a democratic society. Instead, we should make the reporting requirements much more strict and immediate. A New York Times editorial yesterday reported how the Senate currently reports political contributions: “Instead of quickly downloading [actually it’s uploading] their campaign financing data directly to the Federal Election Commission, like everybody else, senators print out their records on paper and snail-mail them to the Senate secretary. These pages have to be scanned into digital images that are then e-mailed to the election commission, where—wait now—they have to be printed and collated. This paper treadmill—perhaps 10,000 pages—is next sent to a private contractor to be tediously typed at a cost of $250,000 back into a computer, of all things. From there, the information is e-mailed back to the election commission for, yes, posting on the Internet.” By the time the money is reported, of course, it has already been put to use and, after the election, the campaign can always do the oops-clerical-error routine and return the money when it no longer matters. If it were up to me, I would remove all limits on contributions by American citizens (to the candidates, parties, and citizen groups) and simply require that every candidate and officeholder report contributions, in whatever amount, on their websites the very same day the check is deposited in the bank, along with full disclosure of who gave it and, for amounts over, say, one thousand dollars, that person’s business affiliations. The media—not to mention the other candidates—can be relied upon to keep close tabs on who is giving what to whom and reporting on it. Then the American people can decide for themselves if a candidate or officeholder is being unduly influenced. Since I’m a democrat, I have every confidence that the people are more than capable of making intelligent judgments on the matter.
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 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 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
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? 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
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 ps |
