November 14, 2007
New York Times Columnists and History II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:30 AM EST Just a few observations about the debate concerning Ronald Reagan’s campaign visit to Neshoba County, Mississippi, in 1980. First, the columnists who have been assessing the meaning and importance of Reagan’s remarks have tended to repeat the common claim that the future President kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign with this visit. (For what it’s worth, I made the same claim here. In fact, the speech in question, delivered before an audience of 10,000 white residents, was delivered in August 1980, after the Republican National Convention but many months into the campaign season. Technically, it might be correct to claim that the speech launched Reagan’s general election campaign. But he had been an active candidate for the Presidency long before he visited Mississippi. John Steele Gordon weighs in with the following: “Personally, I have not studied this in any depth, but I certainly don’t think Ronald Reagan was a racist. . . . But did he use racist code language in pursuit of Southern votes . . . ? 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.” For what it’s worth, newspaper coverage of the event suggests that the crowd cheered wildly throughout Reagan’s address, though whether they cheered at the offending line is not clear. I agree that it’s folly to ask whether Reagan was a “racist,” per se, though it’s fair to note that his longstanding opposition to civil rights legislation, from the 1965 Voting Rights Act to California’s 1964 Open Housing law, doesn’t speak well to his sense of moral purpose. The man who would defend freedom around the world, often bending domestic and international law to do so, would not support it at home. More fundamentally, I’m not sure that Reagan “buried code language” all that deeply, as Mr. Gordon contends. In 1978 the Carter administration’s IRS Commissioner declared his intention to suspend the tax-exempt status of private Christian academies that failed to integrate their student bodies. Founded in the 1960s and 1970s as a response to the creeping secularization in public education, these institutions also permitted many white Southerners to evade the federal courts’ efforts to enforce Brown through busing and pupil placement schemes. Jerry Falwell’s Lynchburg Christian School was typical in this regard. Out of 1,147 students, only 5 were black. The government had already set the bar low. For a school to qualify as integrated, the portion of minorities in its student body needed only be equal to 20 percent of the portion of minorities in the larger community. Thus, if a town were 10 percent black, a school would only need to achieve 2 percent minority enrollment to retain its tax exemption. But for many white Southerners, that standard was intolerably high. When Reagan uttered the terms “states’ rights,” “education,” and “taxes” in the same breath, he was cleverly—but not too cleverly—pushing buttons. Over the past several years, historians, including many liberal historians, have examined Ronald Reagan’s private and public papers and conceded that the former President was a smart man—hardly the empty suit he was long thought to be. Those who insist that we take Reagan seriously can’t have it both ways. He either was or wasn’t a clever man. He either was or wasn’t a master communicator. If he was both, then let’s assume he knew exactly what he was doing.
November 13, 2007
Norman Mailer II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:50 AM EST In his classic film Sleeper, Woody Allen has his character awake from a frozen slumber to learn that he is the sole survivor of a nuclear disaster that annihilated American civilization. Among the material artifacts that his futuristic hosts ask him to interpret is a picture of Norman Mailer. “He was a very great writer,” Allen explains. “He donated his ego to the Harvard Medical School for study.” After reading Mailer’s obituary in The New York Times, I half-suspect he didn’t mind Allen’s quip. Simply put, the man seemed to crave attention. No matter one’s position on his literary achievements, he clearly demanded his due in column space. I’m not sure whether Mailer’s entire career was a study in egomania, but certainly his ill-fated 1969 candidacy for mayor of New York City was. Running in a crowded primary field that included such liberal heavyweights as former Mayor Robert Wagner, Bronx Borough President Herman Badillo, and Rep. James Scheuer, Mailer stole just enough votes from the second-place finisher (Badillo) to hand a victory to City Comptroller Mario Procaccino. Though nowhere near as conservative as his opponents liked to portray him, Procaccino was ill-equipped to take on the incumbent mayor, John Lindsay, and became an unfortunate and unwitting agent of white backlash in the November election. Some time ago, in one of our rare moments of agreement, John Steele Gordon and I wondered whether New York might not have been better off under Herman Badillo’s stewardship than John Lindsay’s. We’ll never know, and for that we can thank Norman Mailer.
October 15, 2007
U.S. Attorneys, Then and Now Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:20 AM EST From the annals of U.S. attorney scandals, an interesting precedent: In 1977 Griffin Bell, President Jimmy Carter’s Attorney General, requested the resignation of David Marston, a former staff assistant to Republican Sen. Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania, whom Carter’s predecessor, Gerald Ford, had appointed U.S. attorney for Philadelphia. Though he claimed no trial experience prior to his appointment, Marston had quickly emerged as a highly successful prosecutor, securing the convictions of several corrupt state legislators. In firing Marston, Bell was attempting to mollify Rep. Joshua Eilberg, a powerful Philadelphia congressman whose law firm was under investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office and who had urged the President to place a Democrat in the position. It later emerged that neither Carter nor Bell knew of the pending investigation of Eilberg’s law firm at the moment they decided to fire Marston. The President and his attorney general assumed that Eilberg was simply interested in replacing a Republican appointee with a Democratic appointee. Nevertheless, the appearance of a partisan cover-up haunted Carter throughout the rest of his term and eerily foreshadowed the current controversy over the Bush administration’s firing of several U.S. attorneys.
October 14, 2007
Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Nobel Peace Prize Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 05:00 PM EST John Steele Gordon suggests dividing Nobel Peace Prize laureates into groups—“those, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Ralph Bunche, and Henry Kissinger, who accomplished something in the cause of peace by ending a war. . . . those such as Woodrow Wilson, Charles Dawes, Frank Kellogg, Cordell Hull, George Marshall, and Norman Borlaug, who made . . . future wars less likely . . . [and] 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, Mr. Gordon writes, there are the “political peace prizes.” The problem with this scheme is that Martin Luther King said virtually nothing about the related topics of war and peace at the time he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. He did not deliver his first public address against the Vietnam War until 1965, when he told a group at Howard University that the conflict was “accomplishing nothing.” Several weeks later he called on the U.S. government to negotiate with the National Liberation Front and endorsed a halt to the bombing campaign against North Vietnamese targets. Under intense pressure from allies in the civil rights movement who feared the consequences of antagonizing Lyndon Johnson’s presidential administration, King said little else about Vietnam until two years later, when he delivered a strong and controversial antiwar speech at New York City’s Riverside Church. The decision to award him the Nobel Prize in 1964 thus had little to do with his opposition to war or his espousal of peace, per se, but instead indicated approval of his embrace of nonviolent means to right injustice at home. Mr. Gordon’s categorization hints at this possibility, but some clarification seems helpful.
September 21, 2007
Washington, D.C. VIII Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:50 AM EST A reply to John Steele Gordon, who writes: “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.” 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.) Mr. Gordon’s suggestion that we allow District residents to vote in Maryland House and Senate races is flawed. Most problematic are the abstract questions of sovereignty, representation and consent. Under Mr. Gordon’s plan (which is, by the way, a political non-starter: It will never, ever happen), the residents of Washington, D.C., would be lumped with Marylanders in federal elections, even though they do not share the same tax structure, local political institutions, school system, or interests vis-à-vis the federal government. Who would decide how D.C. residents were apportioned among new or existing U.S. House seats? The Maryland State Legislature, of course. Would D.C. residents have representation in the Maryland State House? Not under Mr. Gordon’s proposal. Would they enjoy input into the laws governing congressional elections? No, they would not. 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. Moreover, his proposal dilutes the representation of Maryland residents and thereby conflicts with their constitutional rights as well. As for the question of race, in his recurring screed against Democrats, whom he accuses of being obsessed with “race, gender, and class,” Mr. Gordon ironically demonstrates the opposite point: It is he who seems obsessed with “race, gender, and class.” Anyone who claims that D.C. statehood has faltered only on the issue of race is hopelessly oversimplifying the issue and has a one-track mind. Anyone, like Mr. Gordon, who claims that “race and racism [have not] played any part at all, at least in the modern era,” is also hopelessly oversimplifying the issue and has a one-track mind. (What on Earth does Jesse Jackson have to do with this issue? Who’s obsessed with race? How did gender enter this discussion? Until Mr. Gordon invoked it, I believe it was off the table.) Historically, Washington, D.C., was a Southern-leaning town with a great deal of race tension between its black residents and the federal government, and between its black residents and surrounding areas in Maryland and Virginia. D.C. retained slavery until halfway through the Civil War and was slow to desegregate its public accommodations in the twentieth century. Throughout the 1910s and 1920s the federal government’s buildings and facilities were segregated. When the famed opera singer Marian Anderson attempted to give a concert at Constitution Hall in 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution, who owned the building, refused her access. The hall manager even boasted that “no Negro will ever appear in this hall while I am manager.” (She 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.”) In recent years, the city’s relationship with its suburban neighbors has been similarly strained. Rep. Stan Parris, who represented Fairfax County, Virginia, in the mid-1970s and again through the 1980s, famously called a bridge connecting Virginia and D.C. “the longest bridge in the world because it connects Virginia to Africa.” Some of his constituents thought this was a terrible thing to say, and others did not. In 1993, State Senator Warren Barry fondly recalled this quip at a Republican party tribute dinner to Parris and suggested that the bridge be renamed the “Soul Brothers Causeway.” All of this goes to demonstrate that Washington, D.C., has had an uneasy rapport with its suburban neighbors, and much of that tension owed to race. To deny that too many people continue to regard majority-black cities as less deserving or civilized than white suburbs is just as facile as denying that many people in this country have moved beyond that way of thinking.
September 19, 2007
Washington, D.C. V Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 05:25 PM EST I’m not sure I want to engage John Steele Gordon 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. Some 58 percent of Washington residents are African-Americans, and 8 percent are Latinos. I have a difficult time imagining that the country would be so sanguine about the disenfranchisement of a federal district where two thirds of the citizens were white. At the end of the day, however, I think it’s politics, and pure politics, that drives the process. Many Republicans are unwilling to create a new Democratic seat in the House; they are certainly unwilling to create two new Democratic seats in the Senate. Where I’m willing to venture some disagreement with Mr. Gordon is over his suggestion that allowing Washington, D.C. two members of the Senate would constitute “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 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. I’d also respectfully take issue with Mr. Gordon’s argument that Washington, D.C., is unusually vested in “an ever-expanding federal government and an ever increasing concentration of power there.” 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? Moreover, including suburban Virginia and Maryland in metropolitan Washington’s political equation hardly dilutes the electorate’s interest in an expansive federal state. I would venture a guess that most people in the greater D.C. area who rely directly or indirectly on the federal government for their livelihoods actually live outside of the District.
September 19, 2007
Washington, D.C. III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:15 AM EST John Steele Gordon’s post inspired me to dig lightly into the historical and legal debate over the status of Washington, D.C. Mr. Gordon believes that the proposed compromise to offer both the District and the State of Utah a new, voting member of the House of Representatives violates Article I, Section 2 and Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. “The members of the House are to be chosen by ‘the People of the several States,’” Mr. Gordon explains, “and the District of Columbia is not a state, and this bill does not make it one.” If we were to apply a strictly literal interpretation of the Constitution, as some legal scholars and politicians argue we should do, then Mr. Gordon’s reading of Sections 2 and 8 might well preclude the possibility of granting Washington, D.C., a vote in Congress by statute, rather than by Constitutional amendment. But two centuries of American jurisprudence have established plenty of definitional wiggle room. At various times, our courts have located “penumbras” and “emanations” in the Bill of Rights that create “zones of privacy” where none explicitly exists. We’ve equated “persons” with corporations. We’ve broadened the concept of free “speech” to include actions and expressions that would never qualify as the spoken word in any respectable English-language dictionary. As Charles Evans Hughes once put the matter, “The Constitution is what the Supreme Court says it is.” There are long and complicated traditions that seek to locate meaning in the Constitution’s historical and evolutionary contexts. This is precisely why the proposed legislation that was blocked yesterday in the Senate included a provision to fast-track the process of judicial review and thereby ascertain the constitutionality of the law. In 1910 George Hodgkin wrote an article for the Political Science Quarterly entitled “The Constitutional Status of the District of Columbia.” It was, I think, one of the first modern scholarly attempts to analyze this complicated issue. At the time Hodgkin wrote his article, the pressing question was whether the District should enjoy home rule, which is a somewhat different question from whether it should be granted a vote in Congress. But the issues do overlap. Hodgkin examined the records of the Constitutional Convention and concluded that the framers “did not seek to deprive the people of the District of Columbia of their political privileges. The sole aim of that body was to secure the national government from state interference.” Given the novelty of the new federal system, Congress was concerned that if the capital were located in a particular state or divided between a group of states, the new national government would have difficulty exercising sovereignty. Hodgkin surmised that “in view of certain alleviating circumstances, more potent then than now, the Convention felt itself justified in sacrificing some of the political privileges of the people to the security of the national government; but certainly this sacrifice was anything but an end sought. It was found necessary to sacrifice participation in national affairs, since the machinery for it apparently could not be placed in operation under the peculiar plan whereby the capital was separated from the states; but the Convention certainly did not contemplate the irrevocable perpetuation of this sacrifice if some means of placing that machinery in operation should appear in later years under changed conditions.” Since 1787 the machinery of government has undergone sweeping change. In the eighteenth century few Americans were enfranchised; today most are. In 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment established the concept of dual citizenship, and in the twentieth century, the Court used this amendment to incorporate most of the Bill of Rights. Voting rights are now far more sacrosanct than they were 200 or even 100 years ago. What’s more, Congress has long granted the District a non-voting delegate, and her status (the incumbent is Eleanor Holmes Norton) is more complicated than the term “non-voting delegate” would suggest. House rules allow Norton to vote in and chair committees and subcommittees; she is allowed to serve on and vote in conference committees; she is also able to vote on legislation when the House meets in the Committee of the Whole. Since bills are often amended in the Committee of the Whole before moving onto a final vote (in which Norton is not permitted to participate), this allowance has more than symbolic power. Are these measures unconstitutional? According to the logic of Mr. Gordon’s argument, quite possibly so. If the District is not a state, then it should no more be permitted to seat a voting delegate on congressional committees than the editorial board of American Heritage magazine (also not a state). This is probably a more complicated question than it first appears, and since Congress has been unwilling to remedy—or incapable of remedying—the disenfranchisement of several hundred thousand citizens (most of whom are black), it may be high time for the Court to sort out the mess once and for all.
September 15, 2007
Forbes Turns 90 Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 06:55 PM EST Readers may enjoy knowing that the first issue of Forbes magazine was published 90 years ago today. Forbes Inc. is the parent company of American Heritage and AmericanHeritage.com, so this is a family event of sorts. While Forbes was certainly not the first American publication to devote itself principally to business coverage, that it premiered on the eve of the Jazz Age and soon inspired competitors like Fortune (which Henry Luce launched in 1930) and Business Week (McGraw Hill, 1929) is probably not without significance. The 1920s were, after all, a period of dynamic economic growth and innovation. Between 1921 and 1924 America’s gross national product skyrocketed, aggregate wages rose steadily, and the United States, which entered World War I a debtor nation, emerged as Europe’s largest creditor. Wealth seemed to breed innovation. It took more than a hundred years for the U.S. Patent Office to issue its millionth patent in 1911; within 15 years it had issued its two-millionth. There was, in short, a lot of business to be covered. Forbes also managed to tap a growing market for celebrity coverage in an age when businessmen were regarded as celebrities. In the decade following World War I, the average number of profiles that The Saturday Evening Post and Colliers published nearly doubled, and while leaders of industry now had to share column space with key figures in entertainment and sports, the growth of celebrity journalism only made a product like Forbes all the more viable. In publishing, timing is everything. Ninety years ago, B. C. Forbes was right on time.
September 14, 2007
Time for a New Deal Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:25 PM EST Readers might be interested in an article by Andrew Jakobovics in the online edition of The New Republic. The associate director of the Economic Mobility Program at the Center for American Progress, Jakobovics finds striking parallels between the current mortgage market crisis and the crisis faced by millions of Americans in the early 1930s. Before the New Deal, most mortgages were short-term and non-amortizing and included a large, backloaded balloon payment. Most homebuyers thus acquired very little if any equity in their houses, unless those houses rose in value, and they relied on refinancing and new debt to pay off the end-of-term balloon payments. When credit dried up in the early years of the Depression, homeowners were unable to refinance and faced foreclosure. Sound familiar? Jakobovics urges a new program similar to Franklin Roosevelt’s Home Owner’s Loan Corporation, which used government funds to issue long-term amortizing loans to replace existing mortgages. In order to qualify for refinancing, applicants had to demonstrate a history of responsible debt payment and an ability to afford the new loan. Ultimately, the HOLC bailed out about one million property owners. The banks were happy to go along, for as Jakobovics explains, “in order for the HOLC to issue a loan, it needed to pay off the existing liens. This potentially posed a serious problem, as HOLC loans were never to exceed 80 percent of the appraised value of a property, which was often below the outstanding loan balance. The HOLC had to convince the existing lenders to accept those losses. The HOLC was able to succeed because it made lenders an offer they couldn’t refuse: A government guarantee of four percent interest in the amount of the new loan, which was worth far more (even at a reduced valuation) than the zero percent they were effectively getting from delinquent loans. Add to that the cost of servicing, foreclosure, and disposition, the decision was a no-brainer.” Ultimately the HOLC reduced its operations as another New Deal agency, the Federal Housing Authority (FHA), used mortgage insurance to cajole lenders into offering customers long-term, amortizing mortgages with little money down. Jakobovics makes a case for a similar program today. Economists estimate that a house loses 0.9 percent of its value for every foreclosed property within an eighth of a mile. As in the 1930s, the government has a clear interest in seeing that billions of dollars in wealth do not vanish in a general foreclosure epidemic. Jakobovics’s article is a fine example of applied history, and I’d strongly recommend it to our readers.
September 13, 2007
Our Changing Cities III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:45 PM EST Fred Allen quotes Kenneth Jackson, a leading historian of American cities, who observed of his trip to Croatia, “There they all look alike and they’re killing each other. Here, we’re all different and we live in peace.” As Jackson would be quick to point out, there is a difference between peace and integration, and it’s worth remembering that today’s ethnic communities—be they Dominican, West African, Chinese, or Mexican—are no more self-segregated and self-contained than Irish, Italian, and Jewish neighborhoods in mid-twentieth-century New York. In my book White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics and the Shaping of Postwar Politics, I explain that in 1930 roughly three-quarters of all Jews in New York City lived in neighborhoods with populations that were at least 40 percent Jewish. Availing themselves of a massive boom in the construction of apartment buildings and two-family houses, particularly in the outer boroughs (Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens), Jews followed the new subway lines to neighborhoods that were actually more ethnically segregated than the places of first settlement commonly portrayed in immigrant literature and film. This trend toward residential segregation along ethnic lines yielded a sharp rise in the general Jewish index of dissimilarity—measuring Jews against the residual population—from 0.38 in 1920 to 0.58 in 1930. Residential patterns held relatively steady in the Depression years, with the Jewish dissimilarity index dropping to 0.56 in 1940, a relative decline of only 3 percent. Twenty years later, in 1960, the index stood at 0.48, representing a larger (14 percent) though not drastic decrease in Jewish residential concentration. In other words, Jewish residential concentration showed remarkable staying power, even as popular and scholarly writers were announcing the end of ethnicity. Like their Jewish neighbors, New York’s Italians and Irish continued to segregate themselves residentially throughout the first decades of the postwar period. Data from the 1960 census indicate that the general citywide dissimilarity index for the Irish was 0.37, and for Italians it was 0.39. Within these insular communities, patterns of work and education worked to further segregate different immigrants from one another, with most Jewish children attending public schools and many Catholic kids attending parish or diocesan schools, and with Jews gravitating to the retail and wholesale sectors, and Irish and Italian Catholics entering blue-collar fields. Just as European immigrant communities in from the 1840s through the 1960s coexisted peacefully but separately, today’s newcomers have carved out entire sections of American cities as distinct ethnic enclaves. Paradoxically, America’s success at accommodating diversity might owe to the willingness of successive generations of urbanites to embrace the “salad bowl” model of pluralism, in which the constituent parts of the recipe retain their distinctive characteristics, rather than the “melting pot” model, which enforces a homogeneous (albeit collaborative) scheme on newcomers. Impressionistically, it seems that countries like France, which expect immigrants to embrace a single national identity, have the hardest time forging national unity. For what it’s worth, the melting-pot and pluralism models were developed by two Jewish immigrants—Israel Zangwill and Horace Kallen—in the early twentieth century. One hundred years later, we’re still having the same discussion.
September 13, 2007
Our Changing Cities Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:10 AM EST Yesterday I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Sewell Chan, a reporter for The New York Times who contributes regularly to the paper’s City Room blog, which is devoted to metropolitan issues. Chan was interested in a recent report that showed New York City’s non-Hispanic white population growing after several decades of sharp decline; at the same time, the number of immigrants in New York City, both the foreign-born and their children, is approaching levels last seen at the start of the twentieth century. A byproduct of these demographic developments has been a slight relative drop in the black population. New York is not the only city undergoing such change. In Washington, D.C., African-Americans composed 71 percent of the city’s total population in 1970; today, they account for 57 percent. Whites, whose share of the capital’s population fell from 65 percent in 1950 to just 27 percent in 1980, now compose 38 percent of its residents. As in New York, much of the difference can be accounted for by the growth of Asian-American communities. Likewise, in Newark, a classic study in postwar white flight, the arrival of Portuguese and Hispanic immigrants has brought the black population down to about 53 percent. On the local level, the reentry of non-Hispanic whites and the arrival of new immigrants into existing black urban neighborhoods is no doubt highly disruptive, though in many ways the same can be said of the arrival 50 years ago of large numbers of black immigrants into previously white-ethnic neighborhoods like Brownsville, Flatbush, and Canarsie. On a macro level, we may be witnessing the end of what the funk artist George Clinton famously termed “Chocolate City” in his 1975 hit song of that title. “We didn’t get our forty acres and a mule, but we did get you, C.C. . . . God bless C.C. and its vanilla suburbs.” As in the early and mid-twentieth century, some of America’s largest urban centers are once again host to a tremendous amount of ethnic and racial diversity. Even sweeping categories like “Hispanic” mean less than they once did, as today only one-third of Hispanic New Yorkers are Puerto Rican. Where this all leads is anyone’s guess, though as one who has written on ethnicity and urban life, I tend to see more good than bad in this story.
September 12, 2007
Eisenhower and Civil Rights Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:00 AM EST Apropos of the feature piece that I wrote week before last on Strom Thurmond’s historic filibuster of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, there is an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times by David Nichols arguing that President Dwight Eisenhower, whose administration gave strong backing to the bill, was a firm supporter of black civil rights. Nichols, a former dean and vice president of academic affairs at Southwestern College, and author of the recently released volume A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Revolution, views Ike in a more sympathetic light than other scholars, who have described his performance on civil rights issues as laggard at best and harmfully negligent at worst. Certainly Nichols’s book is well-timed. This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of Eisenhower’s decision to deploy federal troops to enforce the Brown decision in Little Rock, Arkansas. There is still something to be said for the standard argument. Having grown up in a primarily white community and attended an all-white university (the United States Military Academy), Eisenhower was naturally sympathetic to the concerns of white Southerners. He opposed Harry Truman’s desegregation of the military, fearing it would disrupt morale, and he once told Earl Warren that Southern whites were not “bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negro.” In his private diary, Eisenhower wrote that “the improvement of race relations is one of those things that will be healthy and sound only if it starts locally. I don’t believe that prejudices . . . will succumb to compulsion. Consequently, I believe that Federal law imposed on our States . . . would set back the cause of race relations a long, long time.” When the Supreme Court issued its famous decision in Brown v. Board, the President told one of his speechwriters, “I am convinced that the Supreme Court decision sets back progress in the South at least fifteen years. . . . It’s all very well to talk about school integration—if you remember that you may also be talking about social disintegration. Feelings are deep on this, especially where children are involved. We can’t demand perfection in these moral things. All we can do is keep working toward a goal and keep it high. And the fellow who tries to tell me that you can do these things by force is just plain nuts.” It was this sentiment that led Eisenhower to remain ominously silent on the subject of school desegregation in the weeks and months following the court’s ruling—silence that many historians believe encouraged many Southern whites to embrace “massive resistance” and defiance of federal law. I haven’t read Nichols’s new book but am looking forward to doing so. He’ll have a tough case to make in recasting Ike as a great civil rights proponent, though I doubt that’s exactly what the book attempts to do. More likely, he seeks to temper some of the popular but unwarranted enthusiasm for the Kennedy administration’s civil rights policies, which were far more equivocal and cautious than public memory would have us believe, and to locate the roots of a quiet revolution in law and politics in the 1950s, rather than the 1960s.
September 11, 2007
Looking Back Six Years Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:45 PM EST As Fred Schwarz notes in today’s lead article, six years ago American Heritage produced a special issue devoted to considering the September 11 attacks in historical perspective. I wrote a piece for the magazine arguing that just as wars have sometimes given American policymakers license to restrict and violate constitutional liberties—prominent examples of this tendency include the draconian repression of German immigrants and left-wing unionists during and immediately after World War I, and the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II—they have also produced what the historian Bernard Bailyn termed a “contagion of liberty.” Bailyn was writing specifically about the American War of Independence, when Americans who used slavery as a metaphor to describe their relationship with Britain came to oppose chattel slavery as inconsistent with revolutionary ideals. I also pointed to the Civil War, which evolved from a fight for the sanctity of the Union to a liberation struggle. Writing in the days after 9/11, I suggested that “as in the 1770s, the 1860s, and the 1940s, today the exigencies of war—in whatever shape it ultimately assumes—afford Americans an opportunity in the form of a challenge. To keep the nation unified and to convince the world that its cause carries merit, the United States will have to articulate its purpose. As indeed the President began to do very soon after the attack, when, before a group of American Muslim leaders, he said, ‘America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens. . . . And they need to be treated with respect. . . . Those who feel . . . they can intimidate our fellow citizens to take out their anger don’t represent the best of America. . . .’ We will have to make very clear exactly why American democracy is superior to dictatorship and theocracy, and this in turn will force us to examine our most deeply cherished institutions and beliefs. In the past, this exercise, although brought on by painful and urgent circumstances, has ended by giving us a more honest application of our founding ideals.” In my defense, I wrote that the war against terrorism presented an opportunity to strengthen the application of democracy in America. I didn’t say it would have this effect, though at the time, I was hopeful. Looking back after six years, this has sadly not been the case. The Patriot Act, which, among other things, allowed the government to investigate citizens’ library borrowing habits, and the administration’s decision to monitor citizens’ phone calls without first securing court warrants, are not shining examples of the “contagion of liberty.” Neither is the military prison at Guantanamo Bay likely to give us a “new birth of freedom,” let alone added security. As for Abu Ghraib, what is there to say, other than to note that we did not live up to our stated ideals? Of course, one shouldn’t overstate the case. The administration’s bizarre claims of executive privilege and its effective abrogation of international treaties are bad, but nowhere near as egregious as the internment of tens of thousands of citizens. Still, looking back on my article, I’m saddened by the opportunities that we, as a country, have lost over the past several years.
September 6, 2007
George Romney’s Interview II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:00 PM EST Thanks to Alexander Burns for pulling up a link to the video clip of George Romney’s famous “brainwashing” remark. I agree entirely with Mr. Burns, who writes that “it seems pretty obvious that [Romney] wasn’t using the word ‘brainwashing’ in any literal sense [but] that didn’t stop the press and the public from pulling the man’s campaign apart at the seams.” I’m sure Romney had a miserable time watching Richard Nixon, his onetime rival for the GOP presidential nomination, obfuscate his way around the Vietnam issue altogether throughout the better part of 1968. Though he had told a New Hampshire audience, “Yes, I have a plan to end the war,” and though he promised that he would “end the war and win the peace in the Pacific,” Nixon stubbornly refused to reveal even the scantest details of his “plan,” which, to his chagrin, reporters took to calling a “secret plan.” “I don’t want to pull the rug out from under our negotiations in Paris” by giving away too much detail, he explained. Unlike the Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Nixon could afford to be vague. He was not a member of the current government, and he stood for change ipso facto. Perhaps George Romney might have done well to follow Nixon’s lead and take no position at all. Or, like a certain actor-turned-politician (no, not the one you’re probably thinking of), he could simply have delayed his entry into the race for several months, ducked debates, and confined his appearances to late-night variety shows. Then, he wouldn’t have had to talk about Iraq—sorry, I meant to say, Vietnam—at all.
September 5, 2007
“Let Your Motto Be Resistance” Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:40 PM EST Since its inception, American Heritage has been headquartered in New York City, but since the magazine and website are dedicated first and foremost to all things American, we try not to overemphasize the local roots of the outfit. With this caveat in mind, I hope that readers outside the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut metropolitan region will indulge the following recommendation: Last weekend I went into Manhattan to visit the International Center of Photography’s temporary exhibit “Let Your Motto Be Resistance”—a collection of still photographs of African-American leaders from the political, cultural, and athletic arenas. It’s a remarkable exhibit, but it closes on September 9. I highly recommend a visit—soon. The exhibit includes familiar portraits of familiar faces, like Paul Robeson and W. E. B. DuBois, as well as unfamiliar portraits of familiar faces, like some rare shots of Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr. Though the cast of characters includes many predictables—from Harry Belafonte and Louis Armstrong to Malcolm X and Jack Johnson—the portraits are tremendously effective when seen together. What’s more, even scholars of African-American history will find more than a few photos of once-famous black artists and cultural figures who have slipped from the canon. By far the most difficult feature of the exhibit is a photograph of three of Martin Luther King’s children—Yolanda (age 12), Martin III (age 11), and Bernice (age 5). (Missing in the frame is King’s son Dexter, who was 7 at the time.) The three Kings are standing next to their father’s open coffin, where the slain civil rights leader rests before his final burial. Yolanda’s and Martin’s eyes betray absolute grief; their sister, Bernice, who, according to the placard accompanying the photo, had just viewed her father’s body for the first time, is in shock: Her mouth is hung open, her eyes are wide, she seems more in a state of disbelief than anything else, for she is only five, and the totality of the week’s events must have been difficult for her to comprehend. It’s a moving photo—difficult to view, and equally difficult to leave behind. The International Center of Photography is located on Sixth Avenue at 43rd Street in New York City.
August 22, 2007
Carolyn Goodman Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 01:15 PM EST Carolyn Goodman, the mother of the slain civil rights activist Andrew Goodman, died last week in New York at the age of 91. A trained psychologist and emeritus professor of clinical psychiatry at Yeshiva University’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Goodman was best known to the world as the grieving parent of one of the three young men whom a lynch mob brutally murdered at the start of Freedom Summer in 1964. In June of that year, Cecil Price, the deputy sheriff of Neshoba County, Mississippi, delivered Andrew Goodman, age 20, James Chaney, age 21, and Michael Schwerner, age 24, into the hands of a lynch mob. Schwerner and Goodman, both Jewish and both from New York City, were each killed at point-blank range by a single bullet to the chest. Chaney was beaten, then shot in the head and chest. The execution party placed the bodies in the trunk of a nondescript sedan and buried them at a remote site where contractors were in the process of erecting an earthen dam out of several tons of muddy, thick red clay. The FBI uncovered their remains on August 4. A few years ago I interviewed Carolyn Goodman at her Upper West Side apartment in New York. At the time, I was considering a book project on the legacy of the Chaney/Schwerner/Goodman murders, and while that project did not ultimately come to fruition, I was able to fold the interview into a long cover article I wrote for the October 2006 edition of American Heritage magazine. Then in her late eighties, Goodman was graceful and resolute. A longtime advocate of improving black-Jewish relations, she also remained a passionate advocate of civil rights. When New York City police officers shot an unarmed Guinean immigrant to death in 1999, Goodman was one of many demonstrators arrested while protesting outside City Hall and Police Headquarters. In later years, Carolyn Goodman would relive the moment when her son announced his decision to participate in Freedom Summer. Neither she nor her husband, Robert Goodman, wanted to see Andy walk into certain danger. “Suddenly,” Carolyn said, “here was Andy ready to commit himself in a most real and perhaps terrifying way to a belief which all our lives we had cultivated in our children. Was I to say, ‘Andy, this is none of your business?’ If my son now felt that a fight for human dignity in Mississippi was his business—was the business of his generation—was I to say, ‘No, no, I lied when I said a person must act on his beliefs. I didn’t mean it.’” Both Carolyn Goodman and Fannie Lee Chaney—James Chaney’s mother—lived to see the mastermind of the murders, Edgar Ray Killen, convicted of state murder charges in 2005. Fannie Lee Chaney died earlier this year.
August 22, 2007
The New Ireland Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:00 AM EST There was a fascinating article in last week’s Sunday New York Times about Ireland, which finds itself in an unfamiliar position as a magnet for immigrants from Eastern Europe and Africa. From the potato famine of the 1840s until recent times, the chief export of Ireland has been its people. Unable to sustain themselves at home, over half of the country’s prefamine population of eight million either died or picked up stakes, with most migrants choosing between the United States, Australia, and Canada. Like other newcomers to America, most Irish émigrés left Eire in search of economic stability, for want of political freedom, or to join family and friends. But in its songs, literature, folklore, and politics, the Irish-American disapora envisioned itself as an exilic culture. According to this rendering of history, the Irish were victims of criminal acts on the part of English and American Protestants, designed to drive them from their homeland. The potato famine itself became the central theme of this narrative. Though many historians agree that the blight owed in large part to a lethal combination of outmoded agriculture, overpopulation, and natural disaster, as well as to the stubbornly laissez-faire economic policies of the British government, for generations of Irish-Americans it would be remembered as a deliberate would-be genocide perpetrated by willful English neglect. The Irish-American disapora was thus a special sorrow to be borne with equanimity. It bore great possibility, but its causes were tragic. Today, Ireland’s booming economy has attracted workers from Poland, Lithuania, Nigeria, and other countries, turning an exilic nation into a polyglot society, much like our own. Some demographers believe that if growth continues at a steady pace, Ireland’s population will reach prefamine levels in 25 years or so. From an economic standpoint, this could be good news for the Irish. Whereas other Western European countries are aging because of sluggish population growth, Ireland’s median age is holding steady at 33. A higher ratio of workers to retirees translates to a more secure social welfare state and reduces the need for higher taxes to support retirees’ benefits. How Ireland deals with its new immigrants culturally, socially, and politically is another matter. From the days of Jean de Crevecoeur, whose 1782 tract, Letters from an American Farmer, celebrated the new nation’s heterogeneous roots, Americans have liked to think of themselves as a nation of immigrants. It hasn’t always worked smoothly, as the crude caricatures of the antebellum Irish that once filled the pages of Harper’s Weekly well demonstrate. But writers like Israel Zangwill, who coined the term “melting pot,” and Horace Kallen, who developed competing ideas about cultural pluralism, helped perpetuate a national self-image that largely embraced the concept of immigration, if not always immigrants themselves. Ireland is a different case in point. Its history and self-image are rooted in exile and emigration. Acculturating large numbers of people from elsewhere will require a great deal of national reinvention. What will it mean, half a century from now, to be Irish? Will the famine years become part of the collective self-consciousness of the newcomers and their families, or will immigrants to Ireland seek to weave their own narratives into Irish history, much as Irish immigrants did in their adoptive home of America? One can only hope that the Irish, whose ties to the United States run deep and strong, will look to our example both to see what we’ve done right and what we’ve done wrong.
August 14, 2007
Bruce Springsteen Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 06:50 PM EST Ross Warner’s excellent feature story on Bruce Springsteen, which led the AmericanHeritage.com lineup yesterday, hearkens back to a time when rock music was badly in need of creative rejuvenation. Revolting against the soft-pop sensibilities of acts like Donny Osmond, the Bee Gees, Chicago, America, Elton John, and the Carpenters, all of whom dominated the charts in the early 1970s, Springsteen injected a much needed sense of working-class vitality into popular music. “In 1974,” remembered the rock journalist Bill Flanagan, “everything was either folky or everything was jazzy but everything was tasteful.” Combining elements of jazz, funk, Motown, and rhythm-and-blues, the various incarnations of Springsteen’s Band—Child; Steel Mill; Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom; the Bruce Springsteen Band; and finally the E Street Band—enjoyed increasingly wide appeal among working-class men and women who frequented the Jersey Shore music scene and who found the prevailing sound an inadequate soundtrack to their youth. In conceiving Born to Run, Springsteen set out to create an album that would “explode in people’s homes and minds and change people’s lives.” Set against the E Street Band’s energetic blend of horns, keyboards, guitars, and percussion, the album’s title song it was a rollicking ballad of escape, packed full of cultural references that any young person from a working-class town like Freehold or Asbury Park would immediately have appreciated. Its first lines introduced what became Springsteen’s favorite metaphor—the automobile as an engine of liberation. In the weeks following his debut performance of “Born to Run,” Springsteen recorded a rough, four-and-a-half minute track of the song. Sensing the need for build-up, his manager, Mike Appel, distributed it to select disc jockeys, and within weeks it became an underground hit. Young people flooded record stores seeking copies of the new single, which did not yet exist, and radio stations that had not been on Appel’s small distribution list deluged CBS with requests for the new album, which also did not exist. In working-class Cleveland, disc jockey Kid Leo played the song religiously at 5:55 p.m. each Friday afternoon on WMMS, to “officially launch the weekend.” Clearly, Bruce’s growing fan base not only liked the song; they understood it. In his analysis of “Thunder Road,” the opening track on Born to Run, Robert Hilburn, the music critic at the Los Angeles Times noted that the song was a “classic rock ’n’ roll tale of a rebel-underdog kid, pinned down by the restrictions of his environment, inviting his girl, who has her own doubts and fears, to escape to a better life.” Missing from Hilburn’s assessment was class; the young heroes in “Thunder Road” and “Born to Run” are in flight from a very specific condition. As Springsteen told a reporter several years later, “I know what it’s like not to be able to do what you want to do, because when I go home, that’s what I see. It’s not fun, it’s no joke. I see my sister and her husband. They’re living the lives of my parents in a certain kind of way. They got kids; they’re working hard. These are people, you can see something in their eyes. . . . I asked my sister, ‘What do you do for fun?’ ‘I don’t have any fun,’ she says. She wasn’t kidding.” When Kid Leo played “Born to Run” at 5:55 each Friday afternoon to “kick off the weekend,” he was offering musical flight to people like Bruce’s sister. “It’s like, you gotta watch out—that’s the way it’s gotta be to get control,” Springsteen observed. “All of a sudden you get kids, get them jobs and houses and mortgages and bills, all of a sudden. Jesus Christ, if they don’t work they’re gonna loose their house, they’re gonna lose their kid, they’re gonna lose their money, they’re gonna lose their self-respect, they’re gonna lose everything. That’s how America imprisons everybody.” In “Thunder Road,” the narrator begs Mary to “roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair/ Well the night’s busting open/ These two lanes will take us anywhere/ We got one last chance to make it real/ To trade in these wings on some wheels/ Climb in back/ Heaven’s waiting on down the tracks.” With 16 percent of non-college-educated youth either unemployed or underemployed, and many of their more fortunate peers awaiting the next round of layoffs or cutbacks, the promise in Springsteen’s music had special resonance. Musicians cannot reverse economic recessions or redress inequality. Springsteen understood this and focused on those matters he could tangibly address as an artist. “Things like Watergate,” Springsteen said, “—people have lost their ability to dream. It’s been knocked out of people.” For at least some Americans in mid-1975 the street poet from Asbury Park offered people a little bit more.
August 11, 2007
Goodbye to Richard Nixon Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 01:40 PM EST Last week, the American Heritage blog let slip by without mention the anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation as President on August 9, 1974. Here’s a modest attempt at correcting the oversight. By far the more lurid account of Nixon’s decision to step down came from Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, the award-winning journalists who cracked the Watergate story for the Washington Post. In their second collaborative book, The Final Days, they recounted a late-night summit between the President and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, that took place in the Lincoln Sitting Room, a small alcove on the second floor of the southeast side of the White House, then furnished with Victorian period pieces and appointed with a gray marble fireplace. Portraits of Abraham Lincoln lined the walls. Nixon sat off to the corner in his leather armchair—the only comfortable seat in the room—in close proximity to a stereo and two five-foot shelves that stored his classical records. It was clear to Kissinger that Nixon had been drinking. Other sources noted that the President enjoyed cranking up the air conditioning and lighting the fireplace, even in the dog days of summer, but Bernstein and Woodward didn’t mention that detail in their contested version of events. “Will history treat me more kindly than my contemporaries?” the President asked his Secretary of State. Kissinger nodded yes and joined Nixon in a long recitation of the administration’s foreign policy achievements: ending America’s military involvement in Vietnam, reaching détente with the Soviet Union, opening diplomatic relations with China, forging landmark agreements on arms proliferation and economic trade. Though the former Harvard professor assured his Commander-in-Chief that future generations would judge him by these accomplishments, and not for a third-rate burglary, Nixon was inconsolable. “It depends on who writes the history,” he observed. Since 1974, historians have changed their tunes considerably on Richard Nixon. Early accounts tended to emphasize self-destructive continuity throughout Nixon’s career, from his reckless partisanship in the 1940s and 1950s to the take-no-prisoners approach that led to such rampant criminality in his administration. In the 1990s, a new generation of policy historians revisited the Nixon Presidency and concluded that whatever his personal shortcomings may have been, he was, by and large, a political moderate who presided over effective foreign and domestic policies. The problem with this revisionism is that it confuses moderation for competency. Yes, Richard Nixon was no Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan; he signed or pressed into law several important environmental and civil rights measures and oversaw an expansion of social spending, even as he forged a détente with the Soviet Union and established diplomatic relations with China. But he also prolonged the Vietnam War at great human cost, ultimately accepting terms in 1973 that were largely identical to those he could have accepted in 1969, and he bore considerable responsibility for over-heating the economy in 1972 in order to aid his reelection campaign, thus igniting the hyper-inflation of 1973–1974. This isn’t to say that he was anywhere near as incompetent as a certain President who followed him, many years later. But if Nixon’s legacy is to be salvaged by focusing on his policies, it’s important not to conflate the term “good” with “moderate”/”liberal,” and equally important not to confuse “conservative” with “bad.” As many of us have recently come to appreciate, there’s just no substitution for competency, and 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.
August 5, 2007
The Birth of Modern Political Reporting Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:40 PM EST If you’ve been overwhelmed by the heavy traffic in presidential campaign coverage, as have I—with over a dozen candidates, at least six plausible contenders, and hundreds of print, electronic, and new-media outlets, it’s maddening—you might enjoy a tidbit I learned while reading Timothy Crouse’s classic volume The Boys on the Bus. Crouse was a writer for Rolling Stone who spent the 1971–1972 presidential cycle covering the people who covered the candidates—wire reporters, national political correspondents, magazine writers, network television correspondents, and the like. Among his most interesting observations was the shift in campaign coverage between 1968 and 1972. Prior to ’72, most journalists focused exclusively on the inside game—what the candidates were saying, which political bosses and interest groups were endorsing which contenders, and how internal party dynamics were shaping the field. But after a solid year of covering Eugene McCarthy’s unlikely triumph over Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, the surge in antiwar activity among grassroots Democrats, and the seeming inevitability of a realignment in national politics, many professional journalists were stunned when Richard Nixon, undoubtedly the most bland and evasive candidate in the 1968 field, managed to capture the Presidency. Crouse interviewed the veteran journalist Joseph Kraft, who (in Crouse’s words) “went on to argue that Presidential candidates like McCarthy, [Bobby] Kennedy and even Nelson Rockefeller, who campaigned among college kids and blacks, got all the coverage, while Richard Nixon, who made his pitch to ordinary Americans, ‘was almost entirely out of the news in the weeks before he walked off with the Republican nomination. . . . In these circumstances, it seems to me that those of us in the media need to make a special effort to understand Middle America. [Kraft’s words].’” Enter Haynes Johnson, a veteran journalist with the Washington Post who, virtually alone among the reporters covering the ’72 race, spent little time on the candidates’ campaign buses and planes and instead devoted the better part of 18 months to tracking the opinion of the “middle Americans” who were thought to determine the outcome of national elections. With help from the electoral analyst Richard Scammon, the Washington Post identified 443 registered voters spaced out across 50 key precincts, and together with his colleague David Broder, Johnson tracked their opinions on a range of social and economic issues by way of formal surveys and informal interviews. “We wanted to chart the mood of the country over a period of years,” he explained, “so that when we got into the campaign we would really have something to base conclusions on. We would really have a sense of the major issues and what was moving people.” This brand of reporting, which Crouse termed “mood of America coverage,” and which critics tend to dismiss as pop sociology, later became standard fare in media treatment of presidential and congressional elections. Today, even regional newspapers and local newscasts hire pollsters to conduct focus groups, visit diners and office parks to gage the “sense of the people,” and interest themselves in what the voters are saying almost as much as in what the candidates are saying. Arguably, this sort of coverage enriched the larger universe of news reporting, as it recognized elections as political ecosystems rather than inside parlor games. It’s fascinating that the major outlets only discovered this methodology about 25 years ago.
July 31, 2007
American Ceremony IV Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:40 AM EST A quick note on Alexander Burns’s post about pomp and ceremony. In describing Harvard University’s centuries-old tradition of having the governor of Massachusetts paraded into its spring commencement ceremonies by a mounted honor guard, Mr. Burns notes that it was Michael Dukakis, a “liberal Democratic governor [who] decided that he didn’t need the adornment of an honor guard. . . . I suspect Bill Weld, the scion of a venerable Harvard family, might have found the idea alluring. The trouble is, when a custom like this is disestablished in a populist, magnanimous-seeming gesture, it’s hard to revive it without looking like a prig.” Mr. Burns may be right that Dukakis’s liberal leveling instincts were operative in his decision to discontinue the tradition. (I think most political scientists would say that Dukakis, circa 1975, was not a traditional liberal, but rather a leader of the more centrist, “New Politics” movement within the Democratic party. But that is merely a quibble.) I suspect, however, that there may have been more to it. Dukakis was an alumnus of my alma mater, Swarthmore College, a Quaker institution that still retains a good deal of the temperament and political traditions historically central to the Society of Friends. Swatties, as they’re called (Spiro Agnew, ever a fan of alliteration, once dubbed the college the Kremlin on the Crum, after the creek that runs through its grounds), are long on reflection and short on ceremony. Certainly when Dukakis was enrolled there in the 1950s, students attended regular “collections” at the beautiful, but beautifully simple, meeting house. There they discussed politics, the arts, literature, what have you, with a strong dose of decorum and with an eye toward comity and understanding. If the college has traditions, as certainly it does, those traditions are quite plain. Coming from this perspective, I can imagine that the governor may have been mortified by the prospect of being paraded onto Harvard Yard by a mounted honor guard. Had there been an MTA line running through the yard, I’m sure a compromise might have been struck.
July 31, 2007
Department of Useless Presidential Trivia Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:05 AM EST From the Department of Useless Presidential Trivia, I realized this weekend that there’s an outside possibility that next year’s presidential election will come down to an all-Tennessee final. Should Fred Thompson win his party’s nomination (not implausible), and should Al Gore throw his hat into the ring and win the Democratic nomination (less likely, but also not implausible), both candidates will be resident Tennesseans. This is not a situation that occurs often. In the last century, Franklin Roosevelt, a resident New Yorker, squared off against Wendell Willkie in 1940 and Thomas Dewey in 1944, both resident New Yorkers. Though born in Indiana, Willkie had lived and worked in New York City since 1929; Dewey was a native of Michigan but served as governor of New York from 1943 to 1953. FDR, of course, was a native and lifetime resident of the Empire State. Looking back in time, the most famous example of this rare phenomenon was the presidential election of 1860, which saw longtime rivals Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas face each other for one last battle. Though Douglas was born in Vermont, and Lincoln in Kentucky, both men had lived out their adult lives in Illinois. The only significance of this possible but unlikely scenario is that Tennessee would be in play. In theory, candidates should easily carry their home states, which usually results in the home states of both nominees being overlooked in the larger campaign strategy. Al Gore took a drubbing in Tennessee in 2000, and then he took a second drubbing from the pundits for having lost his home state. In fact, it’s not that uncommon a phenomenon. Wikipedia has compiled a list of major party nominees who lost their resident or native states, and it’s fairly extensive. This list aside, there’s a prevailing assumption that candidates should be able to carry their home ground. Should Gore and Thomspon face each other next year, Tennessee might very well be up for grabs.
July 23, 2007
More on Detroit Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 06:10 PM EST Over the weekend, Fred Schwarz posed several questions about today’s lead feature (which I wrote) on the 1967 Detroit riots. Fred’s questions are excellent, and with his permission, I’ll copy and answer them here on the blog: 1) Fred wrote: “In consecutive paragraphs [Josh] talks about landlords who abandoned their properties in black neighborhoods. In one case he says this was true because ‘they housed far too many tenants.’ So landlords have a captive group of tenants who are paying above market rates since they can’t live anywhere else, and the landlords respond to this effective monopoly by shutting down their buildings? It may be true that they tore down the buildings to avoid property taxes, but in that case, the housing crisis was caused by high taxes as much as by racism.” Fred is absolutely right about motive. Landlords in many cities like Detroit often abandoned their properties to avoid paying property taxes and maintenance on them. Worse still, they sometimes hired arsonists to torch these properties, thus allowing them to default on their property taxes and (fraudulently) collect insurance money. Though it’s tempting to blame the housing crisis on high taxes, in fact the shortage owed to an artificially manipulated housing market. Since African-Americans had no choice but to rent in certain neighborhoods, a landlord with, say, two houses, each containing three apartments, could torch one property (thereby collecting the insurance money and avoiding future maintenance and tax costs), subdivide the second property into six units, and charge the exact same rent for these substantially smaller apartments. With nowhere else to go, black renters had little choice but to pay the same rents for ever-smaller and more deficient housing stock. If taxes were the key problem, landlords in other sections of the city would have attempted the same strategy. But they didn’t. This strategy made sense only in majority-minority neighborhoods. 2) Fred asked me to explain how the FHA “insured the vast portion of home mortgages.” This is also a very good question. Before the 1930s, most Americans were not homeowners. In a volatile employment market, the average worker and his family posed a default risk for mortgage providers. Thus, banks reduced their risk by demanding prohibitively high down payments, keeping the terms of their loans short (say, five or ten years), and requiring clients to pay the interest up front, thus ensuring that the bank would realize an early profit. The Federal Housing Authority, a New Deal innovation, sought to boost employment in the building trades by freeing up capital for new home construction. In simple terms, the FHA insured mortgages, thus eliminating much of the risk for banks and other mortgage providers. In turn, it demanded that participating lenders make mortgages more accessible by lengthening the terms of their loans, allowing for smaller down payments, and spreading interest payments over the course of the loan so that homeowners would accrue equity in their property with each monthly payment. Thanks largely to the FHA, by 1960 about 60 percent of homes in America were owner-occupied. 3) Fred’s final question followed on this last point. “As far back as 1948, covenants under which homeowners agreed not to sell their homes to blacks were declared unenforceable because enforcing them would require the government to participate in an unconstitutional act of discrimination. These were private agreements, and they were declared unconstitutional. How, then, was it possible for a government agency to have an explicit racial prohibition in its regulations?” Fred is exactly right that the Supreme Court invalidated restrictive covenants in 1948 (Shelley v. Kraemer). That case simply made restrictive covenants unenforceable; it wasn’t until 1968, when Congress passed (and Lyndon Johnson signed into law) an open-housing act that such practices also carried penalties. But the FHA was not technically invoking restrictive covenants. People were free to sell their homes to black buyers; the government simply refused to insure mortgages in such cases. Using maps that were drawn up by another government agency, the Home Owners Loan Corporation, the FHA assessed every census tract in America for the stability of its housing market. Assuming that houses lost value in neighborhoods that were racially mixed or primarily black or Latino, the FHA assigned such areas lower scores or “redlined” them altogether; in other words, it refused to insure mortgages in these neighborhoods or insured them on unfavorable terms. This meant that black Americans could not secure mortgages, as their mere presence in a neighborhood would choke off affordable credit. On one hand, the FHA could claim it was simply following the logic of the free market. When African-Americans moved into a neighborhood, white homeowners tended to flee en masse, thus glutting the local real estate market and collectively driving down the prices of their homes. In this sense, it was white racism, not government policy, that was to blame. On the other hand, the logic was circular. White homeowners understood on some level that when black families moved into their neighborhoods, home prices dropped. Prices dropped in part because the FHA stopped insuring mortgages for prospective buyers in these newly heterogeneous neighborhoods, thus making loans more expensive and driving down the amount of money that buyers could reasonably offer. It was a vicious circle, and one that kept the majority of black urbanites trapped in a rapidly depleting and deteriorating universe of old housing stock. It was a recipe for disaster.
July 18, 2007
Mysteries of Life After Woolworth II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:25 PM EST Fred Smoler raises an interesting question about yesterday’s lead feature (which I authored) on the rise and fall of Woolworth’s. Fred writes, “What puzzles me is why a decade ago modern Manhattan could not support a Woolworth’s, but now it can support an apparently infinite number of chains of what are nominally pharmacies—Duane Reade, Rite Aid—that seem to me to be not entirely unlike the Woolworth stores of my childhood, minus the lunch counter and the needles and thread.” One answer might be that prescription drugs have become a boom industry since the introduction of Medicare in 1965 and in light of steady postwar advances in the medical sciences. In late 2006 the International Business Times reported that Walgreen Company, America’s leading pharmaceutical chain, saw its revenues climb by 17 percent, largely on the strength of drug sales. Fully two thirds of Walgreen’s revenue comes from the sale of pharmaceuticals. Along similar lines, I found this industry analysis, which explains that while “front-store merchandise typically yields higher profit margins than prescription drugs,” prescription and over-the-counter drugs account for about 61 percent of the industry’s revenues. Perhaps Woolworth should have branched out into pharmaceutical sales. Less chewing gum, more antibiotics. Fred will be pleased to know, however, that one can buy needles and thread at CVS.
July 14, 2007
How Not to Debate Iraq III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:00 PM EST With due respect to Mr. Burns, that I was not engaging the question that particularly interests him does not mean that I am participating in a “contest for civic virtue between liberals and conservatives.” Iraq poses a complicated and tragic problem for American policymakers. There is no easy way out. But I wasn’t debating Mr. Gordon on the question of whether the troop surge is working, or whether our forces are closer to victory than they were four months ago. I was taking issue with his tendency to dismiss people as anti-American when he simply does not agree with them, and to suggest that such people wish defeat on America. These kinds of ad hominem attacks only coarsen the political dialogue. Since I was addressing the need for a more civil discussion of the Iraq war, and not the Iraq war itself, Mr. Burns’s well-intentioned effort to coach me on the proper way to discuss Iraq was somewhat gratuitous. In his latest post, Mr. Gordon writes, “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.” I’m pretty sure that I demonstrated, rather than alleged, that our military is being spread too thin by the Iraq war. Mr. Gordon should remember that Democrats assumed narrow control of the Congress in January. For six years preceding that, it was a Republican Congress and a Republican President who planned and funded the war. On almost straight party-line votes, the last (GOP) Congress voted down $1,500 bonuses for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan; $3.6 billion in quality of life enhancements for deployed servicemen, including water treatment facilities and prepaid phone cards; extending the child tax credit to 200,000 low-income military families; and extending bankruptcy protection to deployed servicemen. The same Congress also voted on a party-line vote to under-fund veterans’ healthcare by $13.5 billion less than the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected would be necessary to keep pace with inflation. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid were victorious last November in large part because a Republican President and Republican Congress have handled the war in a most irresponsible fashion, sending servicemen into combat without properly equipping them or caring for their families. The Democratic Congress will have to do much better. On that, Mr. Gordon and I are probably agreed. How about that political realignment question?
July 13, 2007
How Goes the War? V Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 04:20 PM EST A few replies to Mr. Gordon: 1) Mr. Gordon writes, “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.’” Yet a recent Kaiser Foundation study found that over 20 percent of military families have had to turn to WIC and Food Stamps to feed their children. Myriad reports also show that the low ratio of dwell time to deployment time is having a brutal effect on these same military families, and in order to sustain their numbers the service branches have had to relax their recruitment standards. The Army entered Afghanistan short $56 billion worth of equipment and has seen its kit deplete rapidly, without any commensurate buildup. Consequently, items like night goggles, Humvees, and body armor are in dangerously short supply in some areas, and the National Guard reports that it has only 50 percent of the equipment it needs. The Army’s own calculations conclude that for every brigade in the field there should be two at home; by these standards, of the Army’s and Marines’ (equivalent unit) 50 brigades, 17 can be safely committed to the field at any given time. At present, 25 brigades (or Marine equivalents) are in the field. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), if the present surge lasts into next spring, the military will have 11 brigades at best—and 3 brigades at worst—ready to address other foreign crisis. Military planners agree that an invasion of South Korea, were it necessary, would require 20 brigades. 2) Mr. Gordon writes: “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.” I’d suggest that before commenting on it, Mr. Gordon read Cooney’s op-ed, which is easily accessible online here. It is entirely apolitical and simply conveys the feelings of a mother whose son is about to deploy. She also invokes Abraham Lincoln in hoping that out country will “care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan” better than it has over the past five years. I suspect that when Mr. Gordon reads this very moving, introspective opinion piece, he will feel a little foolish for accusing Ms. Cooney of grinding a political axe, or of “whining.” Bringing this back to history (sort of), Mr. Gordon claims that Cindy Sheehan is “anti-American to the core.” As a historian, he must know that those who bandy about terms like anti-American (or un-American) seldom look good in the annals of history. Those who criticize American values and institutions—from Thaddeus Stevens and Henry Wallace to Paul Robeson and Martin Luther King, Jr.—tend to be passionately interested in bettering, rather than destroying, the country they live in. Mr. Gordon’s argument is a slippery one, for just as Cindy Sheehan could be accused of “anti-American” bias, so could one level the same charge against mainstream and radical conservatives who hate so much about contemporary America, from its secular influences and liberal sexual mores, to its focus on material acquisition and its sometimes coarse public culture. Criticism and damnation are very different things.
July 11, 2007
How Goes the War? II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:15 PM EST Just a few thoughts about John Steele Gordon’s latest post. Mr. Gordon is certainly entitled to believe that we are (to invoke some Vietnam War–era phraseology) turning the corner in Iraq, or that we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I disagree, as do a great many people with honest intentions and good information. But it’s highly problematic to argue that there “are a large number of people on the left who sincerely hope” that “American defeat [is] inevitable.” Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia, as antiwar a politician as they come, introduced an amendment today that would have required that servicemen and servicewomen enjoy equal “dwell” time (time spent at their home bases, resting, working, retraining, and reuniting with their families) and deployment time. Currently, many Army brigades are facing dwell time of roughly one year and deployments that last 15 months. This ratio, 0.8-to-1 dwell time to deployment time, falls well short of Webb’s proposed 1-to-1 ratio, and dangerously short of the Army’s preferred ratio of 2-to-1 dwell to deployment time. A former Marine, Jim Webb certainly does not wish defeat on America; his son served in the war, and I find it hard to imagine that Sen. Webb hopes for his son’s death or dismemberment. Neither do the 56 members of the U.S. Senate, including seven Republicans, who supported this measure today. (Despite enjoying majority support, the amendment failed, as it takes 60 votes to end a filibuster and move to a final vote.) 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. Ditto, The New York Times, whose Sunday editorial, which Mr. Gordon found “morally and politically shameful,” argued this: “Continuing to sacrifice the lives and limbs of American soldiers is wrong. The war is sapping the strength of the nation’s alliances and its military forces. It is a dangerous diversion from the life-and-death struggle against terrorists. It is an increasing burden on American taxpayers, and it is a betrayal of a world that needs the wise application of American power and principles.” The vast majority of war opponents care deeply about our servicemen and think they deserve to be treated better, resent the administration’s reliance on twisted logic and bad intelligence in initiating the war, are appalled by the administration’s mismanagement of the conflict, and believe 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. A second case in point is Cindy Sheehan, the antiwar activist who has threatened to run in next year’s Democratic primary against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Sheehan is as radical an antiwar figure as they come. But one needn’t agree with her to understand her motivation. Her son died in Iraq. She is grief-stricken. In World War II, Ms. Sheehan would have been called a Gold Star Mother. In George Bush’s America, conservatives have made her into a traitor. Are we to believe that Ms. Sheehan wants the terrorists to win? Or is it more plausible that, right or wrong on public policy, she doesn’t want other mothers to lose their sons? Conservative hardheadedness reached an incredible level this week when a columnist for National Review Online (NRO) lashed out against Mary-Jo Cooney, the mother of a deployed Marine who had the temerity to write an op-ed for the Washington Post in which she described the sorrow and anxiety of family members whose kids, parents, and spouses are serving in the war zone. In a scathing item entitled, “It’s All About Me,” Michael Ledeen, whose sole contribution to the war effort, as far as I know, was enjoying some Bush-era tax cuts, wrote: “In short, both she and her Marine are victims. Not. He chose freely, he was not compelled to join the Corps. Why did he make that choice? Surely not because his mom told him to. And surely not, as so many would have it, because he’s from the underclass and has no other way to earn a living. But he, the Marine, doesn’t get a word. We get her memories of his early childhood, but nothing about the current man. Narcissus running wild as he so often does in our world.” The ideas expressed in Ledeen’s vile column go a long way in explaining why George Bush’s approval rating is on a par with Richard Nixon’s, and why in generic match-ups voters now prefer Democratic congressional candidates by wide margins. Mr. Gordon writes, “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.” Would that this were so. Richard Nixon, no dove, committed enormous airpower to the task of breaking the NLF’s supply lines in Cambodia. Code named MENU, his secret (and potentially illegal) bombing campaign dropped 108,000 tons of explosives on the small Southeast Asian country and accomplished almost nothing. North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front forces required only 34 tons of supplies each day—an amount that one military historian likened to “a trickle too small for airpower to stop.” MENU did little to disrupt the flow of war materiel to enemy forces inside South Vietnam. That wasn’t the fault of the New York Times editorial board. It was the fault of an enemy force that found a frighteningly effective, but unconventional, way of prosecuting its war effort. Fast forward to 1975, when South Vietnam had one of the largest air forces and best-equipped armies in the world. None of that enabled ARVN to stave off the North Vietnamese offensive. Walter Cronkite didn’t lose the Vietnam War. South Vietnam did. By 1975 the United States polity decided that it could no longer sacrifice its young men to prop up a regime that could not or would not sustain itself. Whether Vietnam is the right analogy, I don’t know. But as I’ve argued elsewhere on this site, the antiwar left today has stood with American servicemen and asked tough questions about the relationship between Iraq and the war on terror. To say that antiwar activists want America to lose the war is to dodge their tough questions with a hollow chorus.
July 11, 2007
Executive Privilege (Again) Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:30 AM EST There’s a little irony in White House Counsel Fred Fielding’s letter to the chairmen of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, invoking the principle of executive privilege to deny their request to see certain presidential documents, and to hear testimony from two presidential aides, in the ongoing investigation of the firing of several U.S. attorneys. Readers might recall that Fielding served as deputy White House counsel in the Nixon administration. When the Senate Watergate committee learned in the summer of 1973 of the existence of secret Oval Office audiotapes that would presumably shed light on the President’s involvement in the execution and cover-up of the Watergate burglary, a struggle ensued between Nixon, who claimed executive privilege and refused to hand over the tapes, and the Senate, a federal grand jury, and the Office of the Special Prosecutor. On October 20, 1973 (henceforth known as the Saturday Night Massacre), with the noose tightening around his neck, Nixon fired Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and accepted the resignations of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, both of whom had refused to carry out the firing. It fell to Solicitor General Robert Bork, a hard-line conservative and onetime law professor at Harvard, to close down Cox’s operation. It is little wonder that Nixon was willing to risk a constitutional crisis over custody of the Oval Office tapes. The recordings were proof positive that he had been involved in the cover-up since its first days. When Dean reported that it might take as much as $1 million to buy the silence of the Watergate burglars, the President replied, “We could get that . . . if you need the money, I mean, you could get the money . . . [Y]ou could get a million dollars. And you could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten . . . I mean it’s not easy, but it could be done.” He also told his staff that he didn’t “give a shit what happens. I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover-up or anything else, if it’ll save the plan. That’s the whole point.” Of course, the tapes were eventually released, and the rest, as we say, is history. In fairness to the current White House counsel, Fred Fielding left his Nixon administration post in 1972, before the President invoked executive privilege. Moreover, Nixon’s was hardly the first administration to tangle with Congress over access to executive branch documents. As I explained in my review of Michael Beschloss’s new book, George Washington, a Federalist, more or less pioneered the concept in a fight with the Republican-led House of Representatives. It’s a concept that always seems good to the party in control of the White House, and pernicious to those in the loyal opposition. All of which brings me to an amusing contradiction out of Washington, D.C. Earlier this month, Vice President Dick Cheney invoked executive privilege to avoid turning over documents to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Yet several weeks ago he claimed that his office was not part of the executive branch in order to avoid turning over entirely different documents to the Information Security Oversight Office of the National Archives. Dick Cheney: of but not in the executive branch. Not even Richard Nixon could have pulled off that trick.
July 10, 2007
The Second Party System Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:00 PM EST In today’s feature article, John Steele Gordon reviews the tumult that arose from Andrew Jackson’s war against the Second Bank of the United States. Mr. Gordon writes, “It’s hard to imagine today, but for much of the nineteenth century, matters like the gold standard, the money supply, and central banking were red-hot political issues. They not only took up space on editorial pages but were the casus belli in many a bar fight . . .” One of the more interesting books I often assign students who are working on the rise and fall of the second party system–the prevailing arrangement from the early 1830s through the early 1850s that pitted Whigs against Democrats–is Michael Holt’s The Political Crisis of the 1850s. Holt begins from precisely the same place as Mr. Gordon, observing that the truly salient issues in antebellum politics revolved around matters of political economy: Should the federal government finance infrastructure projects, then known as “internal improvements”? Should states and (or) the federal government charter banks and facilitate the proliferation of paper money, or should money transactions be limited to specie (gold and silver)? Was the ideal economy a “mixed” one in which manufacturing and agriculture prospered side-by-side, or should America remain a nation of small, self-sufficient farmers? In the 1950s consensus historians noted that Whigs and Democrats often agreed on more than they disagreed on. Good Democrats like Jackson were suspicious of the Second Bank of the United States but more sanguine about state-chartered banks (which tended to be less adequately capitalized and thus extremely unstable), just as many Whigs like Abraham Lincoln supported Henry Clay’s “American System” to promote economic development, even as they held up the yeoman farmer as the archetype of good citizenship. But the parties did disagree about a great many things. Some historians claim that Whigs favored expansion across time, meaning that they favored an economically developed and unified nation, while Democrats favored expansion across space – most notably, through annexation and conquest. Others believe that Democrats were less enthusiastic than Whigs about the emerging market economy and the values shift that accompanied it. At the most core level, there is no denying that the two parties had substantive differences. Holt argues that by the early 1850s these differences ceased to be salient. The 1849 Gold Rush and other such phenomena undercut the argument for paper currency and credit; the annexation of much of Mexico slaked most Democrats’ thirst for more land; and many of the battles over banks and corporate charters had settled themselves at the state level by the late 1840s, with Democrats usually winning the day. In other words, the issues that once stirred popular passions were becoming increasingly irrelevant through gradual resolution. A political vacuum thus left the two parties in a struggle to maintain the allegiance of their supporters, who were no longer sure why they identified either with the Democrats or with the Whigs. In this vacuum, a realignment occurred. It might have occurred around any numbers of issues, like temperance or nativism. In the latter case, it almost did. Instead, it occurred around slavery, and the second, bisectional party system gave way to a third, sectional system that pitted Northern Republicans against Southern Democrats. Most historians and political scientists believe we are still living in the “fifth party system,” which emerged in the 1930s. Then, voters realigned and reoriented the two existing parties (Republicans and Democrats). It’s remarkable to see a party system cling to life after 65 years. Despite claims of those on the radical left and those on the extreme right that the two parties are carbon copies of each other, the Bush years have shown otherwise. Say what you will about partisanship; America’s two-party system, for all its foibles, has kept the public debate sharp. The question I’d ask of my fellow contributors is whether the Iraq War, the big-spending conservatism of the Bush administration, the utopian ideology of the neoconservatives (utopianism being more often associated with the left), and the debates over abortion, gay rights, and immigration, might bring about a realignment?
July 2, 2007
More on Imperial Presidencies Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:30 AM EST Last month this site hosted a brief exchange on the idea of the “imperial Presidency,” a term coined by the late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who viewed with considerable skepticism the expansion of the executive branch’s authority from the 1930s onward. I argued that Richard Nixon’s administration “was less an aberration and more an extreme culmination of trends that had been on the build for several decades.” My larger point was that “if history has shown us anything, it’s that unchecked presidential authority often leads to great abuses of the law and the public trust.” In response, Fred Smoler offered a conditional defense of the imperial Presidency, proffering that “if [George] Bush gets us into a war with Iran, imperial Presidents will get an even worse name, but if Bush fails to use force and Iran one day launches nuclear weapons at Israeli, European, or American cities, opponents of imperial Presidencies will be widely execrated. . . . History has shown us more than one thing.” On June 30 The New York Times published an op-ed by Egil Krogh, a former deputy assistant to President Richard Nixon who served as one of the chief “plumbers” of Watergate fame. Krogh’s op-ed related the story of the administration’s decision to conduct an illegal search of the offices of Dr. Lewis Fielding, a psychiatrist who had been treating Daniel Ellsberg, the source behind the Pentagon Papers leak. As Krogh explained, “At no time did I or anyone else there question whether the operation was necessary, legal or moral. Convinced that we were responding legitimately to a national security crisis, we focused instead on the operational details: who would do what, when and where.” In effect, Krogh and his colleagues anticipated by several years the line that Richard Nixon would famously deliver in his televised interview with David Frost: “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal.” Last week the Washington Post ran a remarkable investigative series on the role that Vice President Dick Cheney has played in the Bush administration. With his combination of ideological rigor and administrative background—Cheney has served as White House chief-of-staff, GOP House whip, and Secretary of Defense—the Vice Vresident has managed to short-circuit established operating procedures and thereby exert enormous influence on defense, environmental, and fiscal policies. Though he is now advancing the bizarre claim that he is not part of the executive branch, arguably Cheney stands as an example of the potential dangers of the “imperial Presidency.” By proxy, he has enjoyed unchecked executive authority that Congress and the Courts will spend the next decade reviewing. In a separate item, documents released last week reveal that President John Kennedy authorized the creation of an extralegal unit affiliated with the CIA to investigate Pentagon leaks to The New York Times’ defense correspondent. In effect, JFK created his own plumbers unit, almost a decade before Nixon did the same. While I appreciate Fred Smoler’s point, I think there’s a distinction to be drawn between an enhanced executive branch—one with the flexibility to respond to national security threats—and an imperial Presidency that knowingly flouts the law, administrative codes, and the Constitution. In the case of JFK and Nixon, neither President could (or should) have used the CIA to spy on domestic political adversaries. In the case of George Bush and Dick Cheney, there is something remarkably troubling in the insistence that the White House operates beyond the boundaries of congressional or administrative oversight. If history has shown us more than one thing, certainly, it has shown us that such abuses seldom contribute to anything but the political security of those currently occupying the West Wing.
June 27, 2007
Duke University and the Scottsboro Boys Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 08:30 AM EST The front page of AmericanHeritage.com contains a link to John Steele Gordon’s fine piece in The Wall Street Journal comparing the Duke University lacrosse team case to the Scottsboro Boys case. It’s an interesting comparison, and rather than try to repeat Mr. Gordon’s argument, I’ll simply recommend his original essay to readers. As Mr. Gordon argued in the Journal, the “two cases offer a remarkable insight into how very, very far this country has come in race relations, and alas, in some ways how little. For race is central to why both cases became notorious. In Scottsboro, Ala., of course, the accusers were white and the accused was black. In Durham, N.C., it was the other way around.” I have only one criticism of Mr. Gordon’s op-ed. After reviewing the history of the Scottsboro and Duke University cases, he writes, “Here is where the real difference between the Scottsboro boys and the Duke boys kicked in: not race but money. The Scottsboro boys were destitute and spent years in jail, while the Duke boys were all from families who could afford first-class legal talent. Their lawyers quickly began blowing hole after hole in the case and releasing the facts to the media until it was obvious that a miscarriage of justice had occurred. The three Duke boys were guilty only of being white and affluent.” On one level, this paragraph undercuts Mr. Gordon’s larger argument. If he means to argue that race drove both cases, then it only complicates matters to suggest that the operative difference between them was the financial resources of the respective defendants. That said, life is complicated, and race and class are often hopelessly intertwined in America. But on a more fundamental level, it’s worth remembering that the Scottsboro Boys had a very well-financed legal team, courtesy of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Communist Party’s International Labor Defense committee, both of which financed and coordinated the defendants’ various jury trials and appeals, and the American Civil Liberties Union, which conducted the initial outside review of the case. Because of the support they enjoyed from wealthy civil rights and left-wing activists, most of whom were based in Northern cities, the Scottsboro defendants enjoyed access to some of the nation’s finest attorneys; indeed, their legal defense team ultimately compelled the United States Supreme Court to issue landmark rulings on the constitutionality of all-white juries. In this sense, the key difference between the Scottsboro case and the Duke University case was not money. In both cases, the accused enjoyed full access to some of the best lawyers money could buy. In the Jim Crow South, not even the best attorneys could overcome the hardened racial sensibilities of an all-white jury; today, the best attorneys can see to it that facts overcome sentiment. Mr. Gordon is right to draw the comparison, and I agree with much of what he wrote in his piece. But I would draw a somewhat different conclusion. We are capable today of overcoming racial divisions in a way that was not possible in 1931. But money and resources still determine where the weight of justice falls, and when money correlates with race, as it so often does, it is not wealthy white college students who suffer the full weight of the law.
June 17, 2007
Imperial Presidencies IV Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:55 AM EST I’m glad Mr. Gordon mentioned the flap over Richard Nixon’s introduction of new uniforms for the White House police, as this was indeed one of the stranger but more entertaining moments in his already bizarre Presidency. The New York Times noted that the “head gear vividly resembles that worn by American drum majors and West German traffic policemen.” When he learned that various newspapers, including the Times and the Chicago Daily News, had mocked the pomposity of the new uniforms, Nixon scribbled out instructions to his chief-of-staff: “I want our staff to take RN’s position on this regardless of their own independent views. . . . Have [Communications Director Herbert] Klein take the offensive on the slovenly W.H. police we found.” These ruminations were not unusual for Nixon, who spent an inordinate amount of time attending to minutiae. He wrote memos to staff members about the “pretty uncomfortable” chairs in the Cabinet Room, rearranged seating charts for state dinners, and drafted job assessments of the butlers, gardeners, and sommeliers. He also issued a memorandum specifying the placement of a trash can in the Oval Office bathroom and took time out of his day to specify, “I don’t want salad served as a separate course at a state dinner of eighty people or less.” Tragically, in his last six months in office Nixon also spent hours upon hours reviewing the Watergate tapes and plotting his legal and political strategy to remain in office. No matter what one thinks of his politics, there is little arguing that he wasted away too many precious hours of his Presidency on matters that should never have concerned him.
June 14, 2007
Imperial Presidencies Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 05:15 PM EST In today’s lead feature, Allen Barra interviews James Reston, Jr., about his new book, The Conviction of Richard Nixon: The Untold Story of the Frost/Nixon Interviews. Reston argues that “Watergate was the most important political scandal in America in the twentieth century and possibly the biggest scandal of the entire American Presidency. It was so largely because a criminal conspiracy was run right out of the Oval Office in the White House. The scandal was not about the burglary at the Watergate complex in Washington but about the cover-up of the involvement of President Nixon’s reelection campaign in the burglary.” This is surely correct, though it’s worth remembering that Richard Nixon’s administration was less an aberration and more an extreme culmination of trends that had been on the build for several decades. In 1973 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., a prominent historian and onetime advisor to John F. Kennedy, wrote about the vast expansion of the federal state since the 1930s and the consequent emergence of an increasingly powerful and autonomous executive branch. Identifying the unchecked “imperial presidency” as a threat to democratic values, Schlesinger noted that Nixon was not the first President to wield these expanded powers injudiciously, even if he ultimately proved to be the worst offender in modern presidential history. Indeed, we now know that Robert Kennedy, who served as attorney general in his brother’s administration, not only approved wiretaps on Martin Luther King, Jr., but also directed the IRS to audit Richard Nixon in 1962. Under Lyndon Johnson’s watch, the FBI tried unsuccessfully to use illegal recordings of a hotel-room tryst to blackmail King into committing suicide and worked overtime at the Democratic National Convention in 1964 to infiltrate the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a political organization comprised of black and white civil rights activists. It was also under Johnson’s authority that the CIA conducted the extensive–and patently illegal–surveillance and disruption of domestic political organizations, and that the FBI deliberately tried to disrupt peace rallies by planting violent saboteurs in the ranks of peaceful demonstrators. Congress did its best to curb many of these abuses in the aftermath of Watergate. Sen. Frank Church chaired hearings that brought to light the CIA’s violation of its charter, leading to more stringent regulations barring the agency from conducting domestic intelligence against U.S. citizens, while a stronger War Powers Act and new campaign-finance regulations made it tougher for presidents to wage war without congressional oversight or to engage in the kind of money laundering and dirty-tricks tactics for which Nixon’s re-election committee became famous. The question today is whether in the past seven years we’ve seen a return to the imperial presidency. Certainly the concentration of administrative power in the West Wing–with political advisers meddling with the Justice Department and U.S. attorneys’ offices–would suggest this is the case. If history has shown us anything, it’s that unchecked presidential authority often leads to great abuses of the law and the public trust.
June 14, 2007
On Evil Empires II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 04:20 PM EST Alexander Burns related an interesting story yesterday. In 1982–fully a year before he famously termed the Soviet Union an “evil empire”–Ronald Reagan began honing this language when he asked, rhetorically, of the British Parliament, “Must civilization perish in a hail of fiery atoms? Must freedom wither in a quiet, deadening accommodation with totalitarian evil?” Had Reagan posed the same question during his “evil empire” speech before the National Association of Evangelicals, many in the audience might well have answered, “yes,” or “sort of.” Millions of conservative Christian fundamentalists in this period believed deeply in the doctrine of dispensational premillennialism. Based on prophetic writings in the Old and New Testaments, premillennialism holds that God deals with human beings in distinct epochs, or dispensations; that the current (sixth) dispensation–the church era, or the Gentile era–will come to a close upon the arrival of the Antichrist (known also as the Beast), who will visit terror upon unsaved human beings; that the Antichrist’s reign of seven years, called the Tribulations, will be directly preceded by the in-gathering of world Jewry back to Palestine and by a tremendous event called the Raptures, which will see saved souls (or saints)–both living and dead–lifted directly from Earth to heaven; that at the end of the Tribulations, Jesus Christ will lead an army of saints to do battle with the Beast; that Christ will defeat the Beast at the Battle of Armageddon and introduce a thousand-year reign of peace; and finally, that at the conclusion of that millennium, Christ and Satan will engage in a final battle, resulting in the Satan’s ultimate defeat. As early as the 1940s, increasing numbers of fundamentalists understood the Cold War as a clear indication that the Antichrist’s armies were fulfilling prophecy by, first, constructing a worldwide government and, second, using these global institutions to inaugurate a seven-year reign of terror. “There is no reason why Anti-Christ should not be both a principle of opposition to God and the incarnation of that in a single person,” argued Clarence Edward Macartney of the First Presbyterian Church of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Rather than look specifically for a single person who might be the Antichrist incarnate, Macartney argued that it was important to search out those deeds and events that bore the Antichrist’s imprimatur. This line of thinking led him straight to the Kremlin’s doorstep. “It is an interesting and significant fact,” he concluded, “that in that very country, Russia, where the scriptural portrayals of Anti-Christ have most impressed themselves upon the minds of Christian people in past generations—in that very country we have had one of the worst outbreaks of Anti-Christ in government.” Many believing Christians welcomed the terrible events of the Tribulation as they lifted the curtain on a new and magnificent age for Christ’s army of saints. Russia was widely regarded as a key player in this drama–as “Gog,” the ruthless, militaristic nation from the North that, according to popular prophecy, would invade the Holy Land some time in the middle of the Antichrist’s reign. Gog’s defeat was, in fact, a scriptural prerequisite of Christ’s imminent return. So to Reagan’s question–must the world end in nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union?–some of his evangelical supporters may have answered, yes.
June 14, 2007
Amnesty Now and Then Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 01:50 PM EST There is a striking though certainly not perfect parallel between today’s speculation about Scooter Libby–will the President pardon him or commute his sentence?–and the controversy surrounding Gerald Ford’s decision on September 8, 1974, to issue a full and unconditional pardon to his predecessor, Richard Nixon. At the time, Ford felt compelled to couple Nixon’s pardon with a declaration of conditional amnesty for civilians and servicemen who had either dodged the draft illegally or gone absent-without-leave to avoid deployment to Vietnam. Just shy of 115,000 young men were living underground in the United States or were in exile, most of them in Canada and Sweden. Ford, a decorated World War II veteran, told the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in late August that these men were “in a sense . . . casualties . . . I want them to come home if they want to work their way back . . . So I am throwing the weight of my presidency into the scales of justice on the side of leniency. I foresee their earned reentry–their earned reentry–into a new atmosphere of hope, hard work, and mutual trust.” Deeply influenced by his three sons, who ranged in age from their late teens to early twenties, Ford introduced a system that allowed offenders the opportunity to turn themselves over to authorities, present their case to civilian and military appeal boards, and receive either commutation of their sentences, a full pardon, or pardon or commutation in return for alternative forms of national service. Roughly 20,000 men ultimately participated in this system, and most received either pardons or clemency. On the subject of Richard Nixon, Ford was eager to get the monkey that was Watergate off his back. Worried that the press was fixated on the potential prosecution and imprisonment of the former President to the exclusion of the new President’s domestic and foreign policy agendas, and genuinely concerned about Nixon’s emotional well-being, Ford understood that he could not seem to be setting one standard for ordinary citizens and another for Presidents. Thus, linking conditional amnesty for draft dodgers and deserters to a pardon for Richard Nixon provided balance. Not everyone was placated. In the wake of the Nixon pardon, Ford’s press secretary, Jerald terHorst, resigned in protest, while Ford’s approval rating plummeted from 71 percent to 50 percent in a matter of days. But by any measure, it was a bold move. George W. Bush has remained quiet on the subject of a presidential pardon for Scooter Libby. At the same time, he has offered lukewarm but certainly not wholehearted support for a bill that would give more than ten million illegal immigrants the opportunity to earn legal status in the United States. Ford’s insistence that his program was not one of “amnesty” but rather “earned reentry” is echoed in the current debate over immigration reform; its supporters also insist that their program is not one of amnesty but rather leniency and fairness. Like the Vietnam-era draft dodgers and deserters, today’s illegal immigrants could enjoy a chance to earn the right to live in the United States. Like the young men of 1974, they would be expected to turn themselves over to the authorities and to undergo a long process before attaining legal status. Conservative Senate Republicans scuttled the immigration reform package last week. Now the question is whether the President will go to bat for that bill as aggressively as he did for tax cuts, the war in Iraq, and his controversial Medicare Part D program. If he does, he can make the case that a pardon for Scooter Libby is in keeping with his general sense of fairness and leniency. If he doesn’t, such a pardon would apply different burdens on ordinary people, many of whose children are American citizens, and vice-presidential aides.
June 4, 2007
Thank You for Smoking III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:40 AM EST 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. Gordon speculates that while movies may have encouraged past youth generations to take up smoking, today’s teens are savvier about media imagery. I think Mr. Gordon is a little hard on those young people with (his words, not mine) “rings in their noses and their hair dyed puce. One suspects a certain insufficiency of parental authority, not coolness.” In my limited experience as a college instructor, I’ve found that many such young people, in addition to being very bright and respectful, are non-smoking vegans. Why fault them for what Mr. Gordon and I probably agree is a tragic fashion error? (They surely wouldn’t think much of our apparel decisions either.) I’ve also found that many of my straight-laced, button-downed students are chain smokers. It’s hard to go on appearances alone. Whether today’s youth generation is driven by media imagery, I don’t know. Presumably there are many studies on precisely this question. Historically, the first generation of American filmgoers claimed to be very much under the influence of their favorite Hollywood stars. In the 1920s the Payne Fund conducted a survey of teenagers and college students in Chicago and found that most respondents freely admitted to imitating what they saw on the silver screen. “I believe that watching the actions of people in the movies (the actors I mean) have led me to take up drinking and smoking,” confessed a male undergraduate at the University of Chicago. “I sort of got the desire to smoke from watching some actor inhale a cigarette.” Another undergrad admitted that by watching romance films, he was able to give “considerable . . . attention” to the “technique of making love to a girl. . . . I learned to kiss a girl on her ears, neck and cheeks, as well as on the mouth, in a close huddle.” It wasn’t just the young men who found their passions roused and techniques improved by the motion picture shows. Young women claimed to learn from their favorite onscreen flappers when to close their eyes during a kiss. “After I see a love picture,” a 16-year-old high school junior confessed, “it just leaves me rather dopey. I always try to imagine myself in a like situation. Instead of making me feel like going out on a party with some men, I generally feel more ready to be loved. . . . The only benefit I ever got from the movies was in learning to love and the knowledge of sex.” Furthermore, a study of delinquent girls in the late 1920s revealed that three quarters of them tried to boost their sex appeal by mimicking the way onscreen stars dressed, applied makeup, and fixed their hair. What this says about today is anyone’s guess.
May 31, 2007
How Important Is Television News? VI Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 08:00 PM EST Mr. Gordon is absolutely correct that the study I cited, conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, includes only the leading cable news stations (Fox, MSNBC, and CNN), and not the network news; and while it differentiates between morning, afternoon, and evening coverage, it does not, I think, single out each outlet’s signature new program for analysis. Still, it is a useful study and does not make Fox look like a particularly serious outfit. On a nitpicky point, Mr. Gordon quotes me as saying that “Fox also stood out for its lack of coverage on the firings of the U.S. attorneys, compared with the other channels . . .” Actually, this is not my contention; I was quoting the PEJ study and made that clear in my post. On a more substantive note, Mr. Gordon cites this very fact as evidence of liberal bias in the mainstream press. “Despite the very best efforts of Democratic politicians and their water bearers in the media,” he writes, “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. . . . Had George Bush been a Democrat, does anyone think that The New York Times et al. would have given a damn about this story?” Where Mr. Gordon sees liberal bias, I see only an unhealthy media fixation on scandal. (For the record, I do think the U.S. Attorneys affair is important. If not illegal, what the Bush administration did—by putting party loyalty ahead of performance standards—had a chilling effect on morale in U.S. Attorneys’ offices. Consequently, the policy sorely undermined both the war on terror, in which U.S. attorneys play an important role, and the general cause of law enforcement. The media and Congress have a legitimate responsibility to bring such partisanship and incompetence to the public’s attention.) I’m reminded of the media’s extensive coverage in 2001 of the vandalism that outgoing Clinton administration officials allegedly committed in the White House and Old Executive Office Building; it later turned out that no such vandalism had ever occurred. Or the ridiculous attention directed at John Edwards’s and Bill Clinton’s mega-expensive haircuts. Or “Travelgate,” which, despite Kenneth Starr’s best efforts, revealed no misdoings on the part of either Bill or Hilary Clinton, or their top aides. So much of this obsession with scandal must in some way date back to Watergate and Vietnam. Since the Washington Post helped to crack the Nixon administration’s misdoings, and since The New York Times revealed the thick web of lies and intrigue behind successive administrations’ policies in Southeast Asia, every reporter has wanted to be the next Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, or Seymour Hersh. There is surely an important place for this kind of journalism in a vibrant democracy, but when it runs amok, it really runs amok.
May 31, 2007
FDR’s Electoral Margins III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 05:30 PM EST In pointing to Franklin Roosevelt’s dwindling reelection margins after 1936, John Steele Gordon "guess[es] that his drop in 1940 was largely due to people who disapproved of a third term and came out to vote for Wendell Willkie," and that the "1944 vote was surely affected by millions being overseas." Building on this observation, Alexander Burns writes that it "was a unique accomplishment for the President to move the country as far as he did without incurring a greater backlash from his base of urban ethnics and racial minorities, white Southerners, and union members." Though it’s surely bad form to use this space to plug one’s own work, I’m going to do so anyway. In my new book, White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics and the Shaping of Post-War Politics, I chart FDR’s declining popularity among New York City’s Irish and Italian Catholic citizens, who gave the President 73 percent and 78 percent of their votes, respectively, in 1936, 56 percent and 42 percent in 1940, and only 50 percent and 41 percent, respectively, in 1944. Given the central role that urban Catholic voters played in building the New Deal coalition, these figures are startling. Some of the drop-off surely owed to specific ethnic concerns. Roosevelt’s staunch opposition to the Italian government lost him a good measure of support in the city’s Italian neighborhoods, where he was actually warned not to campaign in 1940. By the same token, the open sympathy that leading New Dealers showed to anti-fascist Loyalists in Spain and to the anti-clerical, secular government in Mexico sat poorly with many staunchly anti-Communist Catholic voters, be they Irish, Italian or German in descent. In the late 1940s a leading city Democrat observed that in the early New Deal era "the Irish and the Jewish people stayed together politically.... That’s all gone. I think it’s largely ascribable to the Fascist growth in Europe. So there is a dangerous, disheartening, and rather tragic cleavage now between our Irish friends and our Jewish friends—and I am afraid that is going to deepen as time goes on." More fundamentally, many Catholic Democrats grew increasingly uneasy with what they viewed as a strong parallel between Communism and New Deal statism. Mr. Gordon’s observation that the "1944 vote was surely affected by millions being overseas" scratches the surface but could go a good deal further. The massive growth of the state during World War II saw an expansion of the federal income tax to cover most wage earners and the introduction of withholding taxes; the use of unpopular wage and price controls to keep inflation in check; and the imposition of rationing, which affected household use of such staples as sugar, coffee, meat, and fuel. On the home front, ordinary people accepted these privations with an unusual amount of stoicism, but popular grassroots resistance did exist, and toward the end of the war, civilians grew restive. FDR’s declining popularity surely owed in no small measure to the tensions created by the new, bureaucratic regulatory state, whose tentacles reached deep into people’s homes and workplaces during the war.
May 29, 2007
How Important Is Television News? III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:45 PM EST Mr. Gordon wrote that he “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.” Would that it were so. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the cable news channels’ evening coverage from December 31, 2006 to March 31, 2007 broke down as follows:
PEJ’s report reads: “If Fox was less focused on the Iraq War, what took its place? Mostly—according to the numbers—Anna Nicole Smith. Coverage of her death trailed just barely the airtime spent on the Iraq policy debate, accounting for 9.6% of all the Fox content studied (versus 10.1% for the Iraq policy debate). 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%).”
What’s particularly incredible is that Anna Nicole Smith died on February 8, almost halfway through the sample period. I shudder to think how even more absurd these figures might look had she died toward the beginning of the quarter.
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. Even if we accept his argument that CNN and MSNBC betray liberal bias—and that is a highly debatable charge; Lou Dobbs is about as anti-immigrant as they come on cable news—that’s a problematic statement. It’s worth remembering that CNN built much of its reputation during the 1991 Gulf War, when its coverage was both unrelenting and triumphant. Given the depth and consequences of our involvement in Iraq, 15 percent seems an inadequate level of coverage. It’s probably MSNBC and CNN that have it right.
May 28, 2007
How Important Is Television News? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 06:45 PM EST Having lived in England for the better part of the last four years, I’m consistently struck by Europeans’ widespread but erroneous assumption that the Fox News Channel (a) dominates the American news market; (b) attracts more viewers than any other outlet; and (c) reflects the opinions of most Americans. In fact, as of six months ago Fox News averaged 840,000 viewers each evening. The channel’s most popular on-air talent, Bill O’Reilly, attracted roughly two million nightly viewers. These are impressive numbers when measured against Fox’s cable competitors, CNN (448,000 viewers) and MSNBC (270,000 viewers). But when stacked up against network news, Rupert Murdoch’s behemoth looks considerably smaller. Recent figures peg ABC’s World News With Charlie Gibson at 8 million viewers, NBC’s Nightly News with Brian Williams at 7.3 million viewers, and The CBS News With Katie Couric at 6.1 million viewers. More striking, National Public Radio, often accused of liberal bias (though that charge is disputable), reaches 20 million listeners. Its signature news shows, All Things Considered and Morning Edition, enjoy larger audiences than any radio program except Rush Limbaugh’s. Liberal or not, NPR is arguably one of the most thorough broadcast news outlets in the world, and its audience dwarfs that of Fox News. More fundamentally, I wonder just how influential television news really is. In American history courses, including those that I teach, it is axiomatic that the advent of television played an unusually large role in shaping recent politics and culture. Without taped coverage of Birmingham and Selma, the civil rights movement would have had a tougher time selling its legislative agenda to sympathetic Northerners; without news feeds from Vietnam, antiwar sentiment would have been slower to emerge. But is this really the case? Until 1963 the three networks offered only 15 minutes of national news each evening. CBS and NBC switched to the 30-minute formula that year, and ABC followed suit in 1967. Yet in October 1969, at the high-water mark of 1960s social upheaval (this was just weeks before the Moratorium Day protests against the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon’s famous “Silent Majority” speech), a survey reported that more than half of the adult population had not watched a newscast in the preceding two weeks. In 1976 the Roper Organization found that more than two thirds of poll respondents claimed to get most of their news from television, but the ratings told a different story. Newspaper readership still eclipsed TV news viewership. A 1974 survey of 5,600 Americans over the age of 18 found that “on any single, average day, the television news audience includes only about half of the adult population while only one adult in five sees the showcase of the medium, the evening network news.” This meant that what little news Americans were watching by the 1970s tended to be local news, which became sillier and more frivolous as the decade wore on. Once reported by sober-looking, nondescript, middle-aged white men, local news in the ’70s became the preserve of attractive on-air talent with little or no background in journalism. Local stations eagerly adopted the advice of broadcast consultants who argued, as did one typical 1970s-era concern, for “simplifying and limiting treatment of complex news, and elimination of ‘upper-class English.’” Increasingly, the focus of local news moved from current events to sensational and salacious doings (“Masked vigilante arrested wearing no pants! Film at 11.”), and the sales pitch for news teams was their affability rather than their knowledge or journalistic talent. Hence an advertisement that promised viewers “good news or bad, laugh a little with your News-4 favorites. You’ll feel better.” Back to my original point, just how relevant is Fox News? A recent study conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that of the three cable networks, Fox devoted the least attention between December 2006 and April 2007 to the Iraq War. During its daytime programming, the channel devoted just 6 percent of its coverage to Iraq and 17 percent to the death of Anna Nicole Smith. By comparison, CNN allocated 20 percent of its coverage to Iraq and 5 percent to Anna Nicole Smith; MSNBC, 18 percent Iraq, 10 percent Smith. Overall, Fox spent 15 percent of its time on Iraq, compared with 25 percent and 31 percent for CNN and MSNBC respectively. If I were Fox News chief Roger Ailes, I wouldn’t want to talk about Iraq either. The war that his channel so ardently supported has lost its popular support, and so much of the news that comes out of Iraq each day is bad news. But again, Fox News draws a modest audience, probably no larger than the local news audience in many medium-size cities. Maybe it’s best to leave the hard news to NPR, so that Fox can concentrate on lighter fare. Like, “The emperor has no clothes! Film at 11.”
May 28, 2007
The Six-Day War, 40 Years Later Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:20 PM EST Next month will mark the fortieth anniversary of the Six-Day War between Israel and several of its Arab neighbors. That brief but decisive conflict, which saw the Jewish state capture east Jerusalem from Jordan, the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria, redrew the borders of the Middle East and established the framework for much of the region’s chronic instability over the four ensuing decades. Though subsequent arrangements resulted in the return of the Sinai Peninsula and a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from (and Palestinian autonomy in) Gaza, the war’s legacy continues to form the backdrop against which Arab and Israeli politics operate. It’s long been established lore that the Six-Day War encouraged American Jews to reconsider their liberalism on domestic and foreign policy. According to the standard narrative, American Jews were stunned to see many erstwhile allies in the black civil rights movement support the Arab cause in 1967; feeling resurgent ethnic pride in Israel, they not only repudiated the agenda favored by their onetime friends in the civil rights struggle—namely, an expanded welfare state and increased opportunities for African-Americans—but also rejected the liberal universalism that had been ingrained in modern Jewish culture in favor of a more “particularist” strain of Jewish pride and power. It didn’t help that many prominent Jews claimed that the war changed their fundamental outlook. “Has the Six-Day War changed my Weltanschauung,” Elie Wiesel asked rhetorically in 1968. “I would go even further and say that the change was total, for it involved my very being both as a person and as a Jew.” But the standard narrative on American Jews and the Six-Day War is wrong. Far from repudiating the politics of Great Society liberalism, the main Jewish “defense” agencies—the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council—as well as local Jewish federations and synagogues continued throughout the 1970s to apply standard liberal logic to the problems facing their communities. Despite breaking with their civil rights allies over the issue of affirmative action in high education, something that did not drive a wedge between some Jewish and black organizations until the late 1970s, most Jewish organizations remained steadfast in their support of more compensatory spending on antipoverty, educational, and infrastructural spending. Prominent Jewish neoconservatives may have been in the process of questioning the efficacy of state intervention in social and economic affairs, but most Jewish community leaders were not. Moreover, on a grassroots level Jews continued to identify as liberal Democrats. Exit polls in 1968 indicated that 87 percent of New York City’s Jews voted for the Democrat Hubert Humphrey, down only slightly from 1964 totals, when 92 percent supported Lyndon Johnson. Four years later, when Richard Nixon ran for a second term, The New York Times reported that the President “overwhelmed [George] McGovern in areas of predominantly Roman Catholic voters,” while Jews continued to vote Democratic but in somewhat diminished numbers. Exit polls suggested that McGovern won 66 percent of the Jewish vote nationally but a whopping 85 percent among New York City Jews. By the early 1970s half of all Jews still considered themselves “liberals” and another 27 percent “moderates,” compared with just 13 percent of Catholics who identified as “liberals.” The flawed 1967 narrative has present-day implications. Those on the extreme left and extreme right continue to blame neoconservative Jews for America’s problems in the Middle East, with the former tending to claim that America’s support for Israel has cost it its moral capital in the region, and the latter insisting that the Iraq War was initiated for, by, and at the behest of Jewish necons. What both sides share is a dangerous tendency to see a powerful neoconservative Jewish lobby pulling the strings and calling the tune. But this has never been the case. Neoconservative Jews are few in number and do not enjoy the backing of the larger American Jewish community, which continues to support liberal and even dovish Democrats in greater proportion than does any other ethno-religion or racial group except African-Americans. If Karl Rove can do anything right, it is surely counting votes. In this sense, the Six-Day War did more than redraw geopolitical boundaries in the Middle East. It laid the foundation of an inaccurate but still resonant charge that blames American Jews for so many of the world’s woes, even as it fundamentally misreads American Jewish political culture.
May 12, 2007
What Do Women Want? III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:30 PM EST Mr. Gordon has it backwards. He writes that if I think “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 [him]. 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.” These five propositions have been roundly discredited by scientific evidence (though certain parties—namely, a few of my nieces and nephews—are still clinging for dear life to the Santa Claus narrative). Mr. Gordon has accused feminists like Gloria Steinem of hypocrisy and class bias. In earlier posts I produced evidence that second-wave feminism has been extremely attentive to matters concerning working-class and middle-class women alike, and I asked Mr. Gordon to produce evidence to the contrary, and/or evidence that prominent feminists have been hypocritical in their treatment of male politicians. He has done neither. In effect, it is Mr. Gordon, not I, who retains old prejudices without any sustaining evidence, and sometimes, in the face of evidence to the contrary. But, as he says, it’s a free country, and if he wants to believe in flying pigs, I’m all for his right to do so. Mr. Gordon is correct that Gloria Steinem is a partisan Democrat, though the notion that she considers herself a Democrat first and a feminist second I very much doubt. Steinem played an active role in the presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern and also clocked considerable time as a volunteer organizer and publicist for liberal outfits like the United Farm Workers of America. (Which, I might add, would bolster rather than weaken the case that she has been extremely interested in the issues effecting working-class women. It’s worth noting also that Steinem grew up in a working-poor family, in a working-poor neighborhood of Toledo, Ohio, attended Smith College on scholarship, and spent the first 20 years of her professional career living in a very cramped one-bedroom apartment in New York, barely scratching out a living as a freelance writer. Her working-class credentials, like those of many second-wave feminists who came to prominence in the 1970s, are impeccable.) But Mr. Gordon’s original point was not that many leading feminists are partisan; indeed, many are. His point was that they are upper-middle-class snobs who look down their noses at working-class women and stay-at-home mothers, and that they are hypocrites. He has not attempted to prove either of these points and has ignored all evidence to the contrary.
May 12, 2007
What Do Women Want? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:35 PM EST John Steele Gordon’s last post was clever, but I’m not sure he answered two of my basic questions: (1) On what evidentiary basis does he accuse feminist leaders of hypocrisy in their reaction to the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal? And (2) on what evidentiary basis does he believe that the National Organization for Women—and, presumably, other feminist organizations—are class-biased? On the question of alleged feminist hypocrisy, Mr. Gordon proposes a “thought experiment”: Substitute a moderate Republican for Bill Clinton in 1998, and ask whether there is “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.” That’s not really an argument; it’s an ad hominem attack on Gloria Steinem et al. Mr. Gordon does not address the fundamental difference between what Bob Packwood did and what Bill Clinton did. Neither does he provide any past evidence that would suggest that Gloria Steinem or other prominent feminists have applied a double standard in their public reaction to sexual harassment cases. It’s possible that such hypocrisy exists, but until Mr. Gordon provides some example to this effect, his argument leans on either a vague hunch or personal ideological bias rather than the historical record. It’s worth remembering that many younger second-wave feminists of the 1970s came to politics through the civil rights and antiwar movements and proved outspoken critics of the misogyny that pervaded these liberal and New Left coalitions. Veterans of lunch-counter sit-ins, voter registration drives and campus shutdowns, these women came to feminism out of disillusionment with the left, not the right. When Stokely Carmichael, the chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, quipped that “the only position for women in SNCC is prone,” he unwittingly spurred an exodus of many prominent women activists from the movement; they openly denounced their former colleagues on the left and turned their attention to women’s liberation. When a prominent activist attempted to voice the concerns of women at an antiwar demonstration in January 1969, left-wing male protesters taunted her with cries of “Take her off the stage! Rape her in a back alley! Take it off!” In the aftermath of this episode, the activist Ellen Willis decided that a “genuine alliance with male radicals will not be possible until sexism sickens them as much as racism. This will not be accomplished through persuasion, conciliation, or love, but through independence and solidarity.” In other words, second-wave feminists have—historically, at least—turned their fire on the left as often and as assiduously as they’ve turned it on the right. On the question of NOW’s (and feminism’s) alleged class bias, Mr. Gordon “stand[s] by [his] 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.” Historically, this argument is dead wrong. Ms. magazine, the flagship feminist publication of the 1970s, has a long history dating to its birth some 35 years ago of asserting the rights and dignity of women who choose to be stay-at-home wives and mothers. When asked what “the Movement [has] to say to those women who insist—as so many do—that they like being wives and mothers and are perfectly happy in these roles,” Gloria Steinem responded that the “Movement says the point is choice. If women really like these positions, then that’s fine. But women also should be able to be engineers and jockeys and truck drivers and nuclear physicists. The whole point of the Movement is individual choice—for both men and women. The point is to become individuals.” To that effect, her magazine ran profiles of, and articles by, stay-at-home mothers and housewives and explored issues like credit and banking equality, marriage equality, education, daycare, and women’s health, all of which concerned such women. Feminists writing in the pages of Ms. also forwarded the controversial argument that stay-at-home mothers and housewives were entitled to a portion of their husbands’ salaries and to a 40-hour work week, as they were no less integral to the working of the industrial economy than were their wage-earning husbands. This argument signaled respect, not disdain, for the work that stay-at-home mothers undertook. As for Steinem, she suggested that policymakers look to Sweden, where “men and women . . . work shorter hours, then have time together at home to run the household and rear children. Children need both mother and father. The trouble now is that they often have too much mother and not enough father.” My point is this: Second-wave feminism is much more complex and nuanced than the caricature that Mr. Gordon has offered, and historically feminists have pitched a big tent that included women who chose to work outside of the home, and women who chose to work exclusively within the home. As for his quip about Leonard Woodcock, the former leader of the United Auto Workers, again, Mr. Gordon has offered up some clever and biting prose, but this is no substitute for evidence. From the 1960s through the 1980s, organizations like NOW and publications like Ms. placed bread-and-butter issues affecting working women at the center of their agenda. Credit and banking equity, wage equity, restrictions against sexual harassment in the workplace—all are vital to the interests of working-class women. So, too, are questions like welfare reform, another key concern of second-wave feminism, given the increasing numbers of single mothers in America. So what of “NOW now,” as Mr. Gordon put it? A brief glance at the organization’s website shows that some of the issues it identifies as central to its mission are: reproductive rights; violence against women; constitutional equality; lesbian rights; disability rights; family; health; immigration; marriage equality; Social Security; Title IX/education; welfare; women-friendly workplace; women in the military; and “fighting the right,” a catch-all category that appears to be focused on responding to the claims of anti-feminists. There’s no denying that NOW’s agenda places it firmly in the liberal camp. The issue Mr. Gordon raised is whether NOW is overly concerned with issues effecting upper-middle-class women. All of the issues listed above have clear applicability to working-class women, and the ones I’ve italicized arguably apply more to working women than to wealthy women. On balance, the evidence does not sustain Mr. Gordon’s argument.
May 11, 2007
Gary Hart V Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 06:30 PM EST Two observations about John Steele Gordon’s last post. First, regarding the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, Mr. Gordon writes that because they did not call for Bill Clinton’s head, ”prominent members of the feminist movement show[ed] 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.” At first, I thought Mr. Gordon was arguing that prominent second-wave feminists should have made the case that the President’s conduct constituted a form of sexual harassment and as such violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and subsequent amendments, and the 1963 Equal Pay Act. As early as 1975, when a group of women at Cornell University accused a male professor of “sexual harassment” (they are widely credited with having first invoked the term), and when feminist legal scholars like Nadine Taub and Catherine MacKinnon began arguing that sexual harassment diminished women’s economic independence and thus constituted a violation of employment law, feminists have argued for stricter regulations governing sexual overtures and conduct in the workplace. In 1980 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission responded to these calls and issued its first guidelines, instructing employers how to remain within the limits of the law. Generally speaking, the EEOC’s “Guidelines on Discrimination” defined unwelcome sexual and romantic overtures as a violation of a woman’s civil rights. At the time of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, some conservative pundits took aim at prominent feminists like Gloria Steinem and Catherine MacKinnon, who had been outspoken in their denunciation of Clarence Thomas and Bob Packwood but who did not view Clinton’s conduct as falling under the rubric of sexual harassment. I suppose there’s some argument to be made here, inasmuch as Clinton was a man of great authority, and however much she may have consented to the affair, Lewinsky could never be considered a free and equal partner. (This is partly why military personnel are not permitted to become romantically involved with persons under their command, broadly defined. A staff sergeant simply cannot enjoy a level of romantic autonomy equal to that of a major.) That said, the rules governing military and civilian establishments are different, and 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, were 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. Though I’m inclined to agree with Steinem and MacKinnon on this matter, I assumed that Mr. Gordon’s argument with second-wave feminists had something to do with their alleged non-concern for working women (in this case, Monica Lewinsky). Why else quip that NOW should be renamed the “National Organization for Upper-Middle-Class Liberal Women”? This strikes me as an unfair and historically inaccurate barb. NOW was a creature of the state and federal Commissions on the Status of Women. These investigative bodies, which John Kennedy created by executive order in 1961, studied lingering inequalities in employment, wages, and education and sparked consideration of 432 bills at the congressional level, and countless others at the state and local levels, to redress these problems. Many if not most of the women who staffed the commissions were labor feminists and thus, by definition, working-class. Frustrated by the refusal of the EEOC to enforce the gender provisions of Title VII, in 1966 prominent representatives of the state and federal commissions founded NOW, an organization that focused primarily on wage, income, education, and credit inequality well into the late 1970s. 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. At second glance, however, I’m not sure that this was Mr. Gordon’s beef with second-wave feminists. Later in his post, he argued that Clinton’s affair, unlike most instances of sexual misconduct on the part of public officials, was “legitimate news” because “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.” Maybe so, but earlier in his post Mr. Gordon wrote that the media and the public should stay out of the private lives of politicians “unless that private business is illegal or evidence of gross hypocrisy or other disqualification for office.” Nothing that Clinton did was illegal; and the term “disqualification for high office” is a loose one. It would seem to cut against the very argument that Mr. Gordon made earlier in his post. More to the point, exactly why does Mr. Gordon believe that prominent feminists were both hypocritical and class-biased in their response to the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal? He never says exactly why this was so, and I’m genuinely eager for some clarification. My second point refers to Mr. Gordon’s belief 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.” I can only assume that Mr. Gordon also disagrees with the requirement that congressmen release a yearly accounting of their financial holdings and transactions. The reason for these customs and regulations is that we can’t really know if something “nefarious” is going on unless we have access to some form of disclosure. Whether congressmen are accepting gifts from interested parties, buying houses at below-market rates and selling them at above-market rates (e.g., Randy Cunningham), investing in companies that their committees regulate and oversee, or improperly hiding income (which may have been improperly gained) is impossible to determine without some form of disclosure. I believe that’s the rationale for this level of scrutiny.
May 4, 2007
Reliving the Sixties Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:20 AM EST Last Friday the rock singer John Mellencamp performed for wounded servicemen at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. According to the Washington Post, it was a rousing concert. Though Mellencamp has been an outspoken opponent of the Iraq War, as he explained to MSNBC News, the appearance was purely apolitical; he was simply “going down there and showing support for these kids who really don’t make any policies and who basically are following orders.” Politics, however, has reared its ugly head. Several days before his visit to Walter Reed, Mellencamp invited his friend, the folk singer Joan Baez, to join him on one or two numbers. Baez agreed, but the Army flatly denied her entrance to the hospital, effectively squelching the plan. The official rationale behind this decision was the late timing of the request, though Mellencamp has claimed—not implausibly—that the Army simply doesn’t like Joan Baez, whose outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War placed her on the outer margins of respectable activism some forty years ago. In addition to the Yale University chaplain William Sloane Coffin, the linguist Noam Chomsky, the folksinger Pete Seeger, and—most famously—the actress Jane Fonda, Baez was one of several prominent Americans who paid visits to North Vietnam during the war. (See Richard Snow’s reflections on Jane Fonda in the pages of American Heritage Magazine.) She also refused to pay the portion of her income taxes—which, given her considerable earning power, must have amounted to a pretty penny that corresponded to the military’s portion of the federal budget, and she married a prominent draft resister, David Harris, who later served prison time for refusing induction. A few things stand out here. In an editorial criticizing the Army’s decision, the New York Times marvelled that “somebody apparently could not get past the image of willowy Joan singing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ nearly 40 years ago and thought troops so young they wouldn’t know Mimi Fariña from Cream of Wheat couldn’t or wouldn’t abide her presence.” Mimi Fariña, for those not in the know, was Joan Baez’s younger sister and a popular folksinger in her own right. She died almost six years ago. Insomuch as one can probably count on one hand the number of 20-something-year-old soldiers at Walter Reed who’ve heard of Fariña I’ll guess that maybe it would take two hands to count those who actually know who Baez is the NYT is absolutely right. Though I grew up on Baez’s music and am still very much a fan, I can’t believe that she remains relevant enough to merit an invitation let alone to be denied entry to the hospital. Yet as much as I admire Baez’s music, I’m not sure the NYT has it right. I’m reminded of an anti-war poster, popular in the day, that featured a picture of the Baez sisters—Joan, Mimi and Pauline—seated next to each other on a sofa, clad in miniskirts, all legs and jet-black long hair, above a caption that read: “Girls Say Yes to Boys Who Say No.” Consider that roughly 25 percent of all enlisted men who served in Vietnam were from poor families, and 55 percent from working-class families. In an era when half of all college-aged Americans claimed at least some post-secondary education, only 20 percent of Vietnam War servicemen had been to college, while a staggering 19 percent had not completed twelfth grade. To the grunt who either got drafted and sent to Vietnam, or enlisted in order to pre-empt the draft or send a paycheck back to his wife or parents, that poster must have inspired pure disgust. Its message, not terribly subtle, was that successful, attractive women like the Baez sisters only slept with middle-class men who had the social capital and economic wherewithal to resist the draft. To her credit, last week Baez told the Washington Post, “I have always been an advocate for nonviolence, and I have stood as firmly against the Iraq war as I did the Vietnam War 40 years ago. . . . I realize now that I might have contributed to a better welcome home for those soldiers fresh from Vietnam. Maybe that’s why I didn’t hesitate to accept the invitation to sing for those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.” She’s absolutely right that her conduct forty years ago was elitist and arguably counter-productive, and she’s a big person for admitting it. On the other hand, according to Baez, when Mellencamp called her after last week’s concert to make sure that she wasn’t angry with him for agreeing performing solo, she replied, “Of course not. It’s an honor to be turned down by the Army.” Despite her genuine attempt to do things differently this time around—to oppose the war without opposing the people who are fighting it—Baez fell back instinctively on the kind of rhetoric that still makes her persona non grata at Walter Reed. In fairness to her, Baez is undoubtedly a very sincere pacifist, and when it came time to put her body on the line in the 1960s, she did so willingly. She was not one of those performers who got airlifted into the occasional rally and airlifted safely out two hours later. In Grenada County, Mississippi, she spent several days with Andrew Young, Martin Luther King, Jr., and local residents, escorting black children past rows of menacing state policemen and angry white parents so that they could enjoy their court-mandated right to attend previously all-white schools. She also served two weeks in prison for leading nonviolent sit-ins against the draft. If one can be judged by the company she keeps, it’s worth noting that during Baez’s stay at the Santa Rita Rehabilitation Center in Oakland, King and Young (no strangers to political imprisonment) paid her a visit. Forty years ago the anti-war movement faltered on its own inability to transcend the petty prejudices of class, region and culture. This time around, the protesters seem to have it right, for the most part. They have been supportive of American servicemen while opposing the war—two aims that needn’t be mutually exclusive and which, in fact, are often complementary. But as last week’s hullabaloo over Joan Baez reminds us, we’re still living in the shadow of the Sixties.
May 2, 2007
Ralph Ellison Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:05 AM EST In today’s lead article for AmericanHeritage.com, Jack Kelly reviews a new biography of Ralph Ellison by the author Arnold Rampersad. According to Kelly, “Rampersad lets the air out of the notion that Ellison’s inability to finish his novel-in-progress was connected to a house fire that destroyed much of the manuscript. At the time of the 1967 fire, Ellison acknowledged that he had lost only a few months’ revisions and some notebooks. Later, increasingly embarrassed by his writer’s block, he inflated the loss to hundreds of crucial pages. His failure to finish the book before his death in 1994 had numerous causes, starting with the daunting challenge of matching the success of Invisible Man.” Though he never completed work on it, Ellison’s long-awaited novel, Juneteenth, was published posthumously and reveals the author’s tremendous range and creativity. The novel opens in mid-century Washington, D.C., where a group of black Southerners have converged on the Senate gallery to watch Sen. Adam Sunraider, a crude bigot patterned roughly after Mississippi Sen. Theodore Bilbo, deliver one of his typical racial screeds. “Daddy” Hickman, the group’s leader, urgently tries to deliver a message to the senator, explaining to an unsympathetic Capitol secretary that he and Sunraider are old acquaintances. “Knows you?" she replies incredulously. ". . . the only colored he knows is the boy who shines shoes at his golf club.” In a remarkable plot twist, we learn that Hickman and Sunraider do indeed share a long and complicated personal history. Some writers develop a style and stick to it. Ellison didn’t. Juneteenth reads more like William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! than like Invisible Man. Heavy on stream-of-consciousness devices, its narrative is sufficiently fragmented to lend it a foreboding, gothic air. As Jack Kelly reminds us, Ellison worried that he might never match the literary accomplishment of his first novel. Arguably, he did.
April 24, 2007
David Halberstam Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:05 AM EST I’m sure I join the other contributors and editors at American Heritage Magazine and AmericanHeritage.com in noting with sadness the passing of David Halberstam, who died yesterday at the age of 73. Halberstam, who wrote several fine features for American Heritage, was one of the most influential popular historians of his time. His works on the 1950s, baseball, the Vietnam War era, and the civil rights movement stand out for their crisp prose style, extensive research, and sheer ambition. A testament to his tireless work ethic, at the time of his death he was working on a new book about the 1958 championship football game between the Giants and the Colts. A native of New York City, Halberstam attended Harvard College, where he edited the student newspaper, and then built a distinguished career in journalism, covering the early civil rights movement for two Southern newspapers (the West Point Daily Times Leader, in Mississippi, and the Nashville Tennessean), and foreign affairs for The New York Times. It was his coverage of America’s involvement in Vietnam that ultimately won him a Pulitzer Prize. An early skeptic of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ policies in southeast Asia, Halberstam was the first to call the war a “quagmire.” He sounded an early warning that in the absence of real economic and governmental reform in South Vietnam, American military might would prove inadequate to the task. In 1972, as the ground war was winding down, he penned a widely influential book, The Best and the Brightest, which sought to explain how a group of presidential advisors who were arguably the most worldly and well-educated in American history could have led the country so tragically astray. By far my favorite of Halberstam’s books was The Fifties. Covering topics as far and wide as the Cold War, Playboy magazine, suburbanization, television, and Marilyn Monroe, Halberstam provided a great narrative sweep on what was, at the time, America’s most prosperous decade. He also advanced what was then a fresh argument. While most academic and popular historians widely regarded the fifties as a stale decade, Halberstam located tremendous innovation, social unrest, and political foment in the years between Harry Truman’s 1948 victory and John F. Kennedy’s ascent to power. He excerpted some of that work in American Heritage (unfortunately, it’s not available online). Six years ago I had the pleasure of meeting David Halberstam at a cocktail party in Providence, Rhode Island. He was gracious and engaging, mindful to ask me about my own research and writing, which was nowhere near as interesting as his own, and genuinely interested in how American history was being taught at Brown University. I stand about six-foot-one, so it’s rare that I find myself looking up at a conversation partner. But Halberstam was a tall man, easily six-four, and I had to stretch my neck to make eye contact. It’s a fitting metaphor. In life and in stature he was a giant, and while his writing will surely be missed, his influence will, I hope, endure.
April 23, 2007
Sex in Early America Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 04:45 PM EST Apropos of our ongoing discussion about Roe v. Wade, which has branched out in some interesting directions, John Steele Gordon is absolutely correct to note that “there were any number of laws, common and statute, regarding adultery, sodomy, fornication, etc., in colonial America,” and to venture that “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.” On the one hand, New England Puritans were anything but puritanical when it came to discussing or having sex. Samuel Willard, a Boston minister, spoke for many fellow residents of the Massachusetts Bay Colony when he derided the “Popist conceit of the excellency of virginity,” while John Cotton affirmed that “women are creatures without what there is no comfortable living for a man.” David Hackett Fischer, a leading historian of colonial America, has found that “Puritans commonly believed that an intimate sexual bond between husbands and wives was an important and even a necessary part of marriage.” That said, the Puritans punished extramarital sex harshly. For sleeping with an unmarried woman, a man could be whipped, imprisoned, fined, or forced to marry the woman in question. Adultery was technically a capital crime in colonial New England, and indeed three people were sent to the gallows for betraying their spouses. In colonial Virginia and Maryland, codes were much less strict, and consequently the high rates of out-of-wedlock births did not usually result in punitive action. The secret diary of William Byrd, a Virginia planter and compulsive Lothario, is replete with entertaining and crudely detailed evidence to this effect. The Puritans would not have been amused. The key distinction here was religious culture. Puritans believed that any unnatural sex act—be it masturbation (which was a capital crime in New Haven) or bestiality (also punishable by death)—violated biblical codes that defined sex as a strictly procreative act. Not surprisingly, the Puritans were not great fans of birth control. These observations aside, it’s worth noting two things: First, Puritans were a self-conscious reform sect and defined themselves by their exceptionalism in the Anglo-American world. To their dismay, their grandchildren made the smooth transition from Puritan to Yankee and joined the rest of the colonies in accepting a more lax sexual and religious code. Second, even the Puritans regarded quickening as the key point at which a fetus became a live person. But back to the question of extramarital sex. Mr. Gordon is surely correct that the rules governing privacy were different for married and unmarried people, both as early as the seventeenth century and 150 years later, at the time of the Constitution’s drafting. This remained the case even in 1965, when in Griswold v. Connecticut the Supreme Court invalidated a Connecticut law that barred married couples from attaining birth control. In his decision, Justice William Douglas argued that the institution of marriage, and the degree of privacy on which it was predicated, long predated the Constitution and, as such, were among the common-law rights that the Ninth Amendment meant to protect. The Court said nothing about the rights of unmarried people until seven years later when, in the case of Eisenstadt v. Baird, it struck down a Massachusetts law that barred unmarried persons from purchasing birth-control devices. It did so by invoking the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause, which bars states from extending certain protections to some citizens but not to others. Writing for the majority, William Brennan found that “whatever the right of the individual to access to contraceptives may be, the rights must be the same for the unmarried and the married alike.” I realize that Mr. Gordon probably remains unsold on my argument that abortion was a common-law right in 1787 and, by any originalist or strict-constructionist reading of the Constitution, is covered by the Ninth Amendment. But as for the distinction between married and unmarried women, the Fourteenth Amendment made it impossible for the state to make that distinction, as indeed it made it impossible for the state to provide good schools for white children and substandard schools for black children.
April 22, 2007
Who’s a Strict Constructionist? V Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 01:15 PM EST John Steele Gordon invites readers to “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.” This is a useful place to continue with our dialogue on Roe v. Wade. Ignore for a moment the principal shortcoming of this thought experiment: in John Adams’s day, the Ninth Amendment safeguarded Americans against the potential overreach of the federal government; it wasn’t until the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868 that the individual states were obliged to respect the Bill of Rights. So Adams would likely have responded that the federal government wasn’t in the business of regulating medical procedures, but that the states were free to do so. That nitpicky objection notwithstanding, Mr. Gordon’s thought experiment is a useful one. At first glance, it would seem to bolster his argument that the framers had no particular knowledge of or interest in abortion or birth control, let alone a sense that any of these subjects fell under common or statutory law. I would respectfully disagree. Historians of early America have long noted that live birth rates began to drop off precipitously in the nineteenth century, so that the average American woman bore just over seven children in 1800 but just over three children by 1920. In New England, which led the nation in this trend, live birth rates began to plummet in the late eighteenth century. Clearly, one of two things was happening. Either people had less sex (unlikely) or, in response to the demands of the emerging market economy, they practiced more family planning (likely). Birth control methods of the day were crude, but they included the rhythm method, coitus interruptus, herbal and chemical remedies, and abortion. Surely the Adams family was not unaware of these strategies. In her diary Abigail Adams explained that she had deliberately spaced out her children by two years. One can only assume that John Adams was an active or passive participant in whatever strategy he and his wife plied to achieve that effect. In their day it was perfectly normal to find ads for patent abortion medicines in newspapers and journals. In 1810 the Herald of Liberty, an Augusta newspaper (Maine was then part of Massachusetts, home state of the Adams family), 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. Mr. Gordon writes, “I imagine [early Americans] rarely thought of [abortion] 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’?” These are good questions. In fact, there was a surprising amount of abortion case law in colonial America and in seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century England. Normally, criminal prosecutions targeted doctors or male partners who stood accused of aborting live or “quick” fetuses against the wishes of their female patients or lovers. Such was the case in 1652, when one Susanna Warren of Maryland was impregnated by a “prominent citizen,” Captain Mitchell. According to court records, Mitchell prepared a “‘potion of Phisick,’ put it in an egg, and forced her to take it.” The potion didn’t have the desired effect, but Warren brought charges of attempted infanticide against Mitchell. One of the laws governing abortion in the American colonies was an English statute, adopted by parliament in 1624, that made it a crime to conceal the suspicious death of an infant “in life”—meaning, one who had achieved viability. This supports Blackmun’s observation that courts and lawmakers at the time of the Constitution’s ratification were interested in neonaticide, not abortion, and that they drew a fairly distinct line between fetal life and human life. In English and colonial courts, when a woman stood accused of aborting a quickened fetus, all she needed to do was testify that the fetus had not, in fact, been quick. When a doctor or lover stood accused of aborting a quick fetus against the wishes of an expectant mother, the courts similarly took the woman at her word as to whether the fetus was quick. As late as 1812 the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court threw out abortion charges against Isaiah Bangs, because the prosecution could not prove that the fetus he aborted had quickened. Presumably (I don’t know the details of the case), the woman whose pregnancy he terminated either died during the procedure or refused to testify that her fetus had been quick. Mr. Gordon and I disagree about three things. First, we differ somewhat (though not, I think, entirely) on a fundamental question to which there is no real answer. Does the Constitution protect only those liberties that it specifically lays out in detail, or does it raise a high bar for taking away rights that people in the eighteenth century commonly enjoyed either by statute or organic case law? Second, as a historian, I’m fairly convinced that early Americans thought about and discussed abortion and birth control a good deal. These topics certainly appear frequently in the diaries of colonial and early Republic women, and given the enormous drop-off in the birth rate—again, a phenomenon that probably reflected a new accommodation with the emerging market economy—it’s hard to imagine that early Americans didn’t discuss procreative and family planning strategies. I find it difficult to imagine that John Adams never discussed with his wife the method by which they deliberately spaced out their children; I also find it hard to believe that as active a member of the Massachusetts bar as John Adams wasn’t aware of the 1812 decision in the state’s Supreme Judicial Court. This leads to my final observation. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, abortion and birth control were private affairs. There were no public hospitals, no AMA, no established medical profession, no clinics or social workers to insinuate themselves into the family sphere. Sex and family planning fell safely under the domain of husbands, wives, midwives, and (sometimes) crudely trained country doctors. On those occasions when the state did try to prosecute citizens for aborting a fetus, women were given considerable leeway in affirming or denying that the aborted fetus was quick. In other words, the state stayed out of people’s sex lives except in extreme cases, and even in those cases it had to clear an enormous burden to prove that a crime had taken place. 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. I would thus reframe Mr. Gordon’s question: “Imagine asking John Adams—a highly skilled and deeply learned lawyer—if he thought the state was permitted to imprison his wife or daughter for using Dr. Rolfe’s Aromatic Female Pills to terminate a twelve-week pregnancy.” I don’t know the answer to this question any better than Mr. Gordon, but my guess is no.
April 20, 2007
Who’s a Strict Constructionist? III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:05 PM EST John Steele Gordon raises an important question, which I’ll try to answer. Yesterday I quoted from Justice Harry Blackmun’s decision in Roe v. Wade, which asserts that 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.” I cited this part of Roe to suggest that since women had a common-law right to abort a pregnancy in 1787, by the rules of originalism and strict constructionism, abortion is a constitutionally protected right by the terms of the Ninth Amendment. Mr. Gordon writes, ”Blackmun seems to be saying that it [common law] 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.” 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.” In other words, at the time the Constitution was drafted, common law affirmatively allowed women to abort pregnancies before the period of fetal viability, and it regarded the abortion of a “quick”—or viable—fetus as a misdemeanor crime. We know this because courts in England and the United States repeatedly declined to convict women, doctors, or midwives on statutory homicide charges in contested cases. Common law develops on a case-by-case basis. I hope this answer’s some of Mr. Gordon’s question.
April 19, 2007
Who’s a Strict Constructionist? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:15 AM EST Anyone who was surprised by yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling upholding a federal ban on intact dilation and extraction abortions probably wasn’t paying close enough attention to judicial politics. Seven years ago the Court struck down a similar state law by a 5 to 4 vote. The majority in that case comprised John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, David Souter, and Sandra Day O’Connor. O’Connor’s retirement, and her replacement by the conservative jurist Samuel Alito, all but guaranteed a reversal. This is not the first time that the Court has backtracked from its landmark decision in Roe v. Wade (1973), which barred states from interfering with abortion rights during the first trimester and placed sharp restrictions on their ability to impinge upon women’s reproductive rights before the point of fetal viability. (Roe placed fetal viability at somewhere between six and seven months, thus granting state legislatures some leeway to regulate abortion after the twelfth week.) What’s particularly interesting about yesterday’s decision—alarming to some, heartening to others—is that it places considerable emphasis on what Justice Anthony Kennedy called “ethical and moral concerns.” Namely, the decision readjusts the scales in a way that gives more weight to the state’s interest in protecting the unborn fetus, and less weight to an individual woman’s right to privacy. Roe v. Wade essentially found that a fetus had no constitutional rights until the point of viability. It allowed the states to regulate access to abortion after the first trimester, but until the point of viability, such regulations were permissible only if they were intended to protect the health of the prospective mother. By contrast, yesterday’s decision finds compelling cause for state interference with abortion rights as early as the fourth month of pregnancy, on the grounds of protecting the fetus. This is an altogether new precedent. The Court’s original ruling in Roe v. Wade has withstood considerable criticism over the years, from both the left (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in her pre-Court days) and the right (Robert Bork). Months after the decision was issued, John Hart Ely, a law professor who had clerked for former Chief Justice Earl Warren, blasted the decision as “bad constitutional law.” In an influential journal article entitled “The Wages of Crying Wolf: A Comment on Roe v. Wade,” Ely developed an argument he had advanced privately with Warren in 1965, when the Court was deciding the case of Griswold v. Connecticut. The Court’s decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, which formed much of the legal precedent for Roe, struck down parts of a Connecticut statute that prevented married people from purchasing birth control products on grounds that the statute violated citizens’ “right to privacy.” Writing for the majority, Justice William Douglas found that while the Constitution included no specific mention of privacy rights, per se, “specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance. . . . Various guarantees create zones of privacy. The right of association contained in the penumbra of the First Amendment is one, as we have seen. The Third Amendment, in its prohibition against the quartering of soldiers ‘in any house’ in time of peace without the consent of the owner, is another facet of that privacy. The Fourth Amendment explicitly affirms the ‘right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.’ The Fifth Amendment, in its Self-Incrimination Clause, enables the citizen to create a zone of privacy which government may not force him to surrender to his detriment.” Douglas ruled that the shadows cast by these provisions shielded citizens against unwarranted state intrusion. Though Griswold is popularly considered a prime example of the Warren Court’s propensity to play fast and loose with the Constitution, in fact the Chief Justice shared the concerns of his clerk, who believed that Douglas’s “penumbra” argument was weak. In fairness to Douglas, the privacy argument that he enshrined in law in 1965 was hardly a new one. As early as 1888, when Thomas Cooley famously argued for a Constitutional “right to be let alone,” legal scholars argued that the Constitution safeguarded certain zones of privacy, and this idea was included in several important decisions and dissents at both the state and federal levels. But Ely’s criticism of Roe proved trenchant. Generations of law students have absorbed its central argument that the “privacy rights” maintained in Griswold and Roe are somehow made-up. To believe that these decisions were poorly framed is not necessarily to disagree with their outcome. Ruth Bader Ginsburg has criticized Roe but is clearly a proponent of abortion rights, while Robert Bork, who has decried both decisions, considered Connecticut’s ban on birth control an “outrage.” Were he a state legislator in Hartford, Bork said, “I would vote against that statute instantly.” Writing of Griswold, Bork argued that the right to privacy “does not have any rooting in the Constitution” and “comes out of nowhere.” This argument has proved compelling to many self-styled strict constructionists, who claim that if the Constitution doesn’t specifically mention the right to privacy—and if it doesn’t explicitly identify abortion as falling under that right—then no such right exists. The problem with this argument is that it doesn’t square with the Ninth Amendment, which affirms that “the enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” In other words, the Bill of Rights lists some but not all of the rights retained by the people. Douglas’s majority decision in Griswold found that the institution of marriage long-preceded the Constitution, and as such, the right of married people to govern their own sex lives and procreative strategies was one of the ancient common-law rights guaranteed by the Ninth Amendment. Writing for the majority in Roe, Justice Harry Blackmun also located the right to privacy in the Ninth Amendment. Former counsel for the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, Blackmun became well-versed in the medical history of abortion. As he explained in his majority decision, “it perhaps is not generally appreciated that the restrictive criminal abortion laws in effect in a majority of States today are of relatively recent vintage. Those laws, generally proscribing abortion or its attempt at any time during pregnancy except when necessary to preserve the pregnant woman’s life, are not of ancient or even of common law origin. Instead, they derive from statutory changes effected, for the most part, in the latter half of the 19th century.” 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.” When states began restricting the right to abortion, in the mid-nineteenth century, they usually did so with the express purpose of safeguarding the health and safety of the mother. This made some sense, given the dangers associated with abortion in the era before modern medicine. But subsequent improvements in the medical sciences rendered abortion a safe procedure and thus undermined the rationale for these nineteenth-century restrictions. “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 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. 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. Pro-life activists might respond to this argument by noting that we know more about fetal development today than did the Founding Fathers in 1787. This is true, and undoubtedly many Americans sincerely agree with Justice Kennedy that abortion poses “ethical and moral concerns.” But as Robert Bork once argued, “We have to accept that there’s a difference between laws that embody bad policy and laws that a state legislature lacks the power to enact. A law can be bad—like the Connecticut law in Griswold—without being unconstitutional.” By the same logic, a law can be immoral without being unconstitutional. Since 1973, the pro-life movement has cloaked itself in the “strict-constructionist” argument. The pro-choice movement would do well to deconstruct this syllogism. Whether abortion is good or bad, it was a common-law right in 1787, and as such, it is protected by the Constitution.
April 4, 2007
Defining Free Speech III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:05 PM EST Defining Free Speech III In his original post on this subject, Mr. Gordon drew a distinction between “meaningless” words or “mischievous acts” on the one hand and substantive free speech on the other. He characterized the now-famous “Bong Hits for Jesus” banner as belonging in the first category and thus deemed it unworthy of court protection. My question was this: If we apply such a standard, who decides (and according to what criteria) what is and isn’t meaningful speech? In his latest post, Mr. Gordon largely sidestepped this question and instead focuses on the age of the person hoisting the banner. He writes, “Mr. Zeitz fails to note the fact that the plaintiff in this case was a child.” (Not quite. In my original post on this subject, I explained that the plaintiff was “a high school student in Alaska.”) Abandoning for the moment his prior reliance on the distinction between the meaningful and the mischievous, Mr. Gordon instead takes issue with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969), which affirmed the right of students to wear black armbands to school in protest of the Vietnam War. Mr. Gordon writes: “Children have a right to wear armbands, display signs, stand on soapboxes . . . and proclaim truth to the world. They should just have to do it outside of school.” On legal principle, I disagree with this notion (as did a majority of the Supreme Court), and I would remind Mr. Gordon that the Alaska plaintiff was operating outside school grounds, though on school time, which makes matters somewhat more complicated. In the context of 1969, I disagree doubly. During the Vietnam War, the average combat soldier was 19 years old. Of the 2.5 million men who served in the war, two thirds were either drafted or were draft-motivated enlistees. Representatives of the armed forces actively recruited on high school grounds in those days, and if my memory serves me right, they were still doing so when I was in high school in the late ’80s and early ’90s. They may still recruit in public schools today; I’m not sure. In any event, students who wore black armbands to school in 1969 were often mourning the loss of people with whom they had attended the same school. To deny them that right was to make a mockery of the very system that asked 17-year-olds and 18-year-olds to fight the war, and that drafted many of them the moment they were handed their high school diplomas. Returning to Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, The New York Times ran a short article last month on a 14-year-old middle-school honors student from northern California who was reprimanded for violating her public school’s dress code. Her crime: sporting Tigger (of Winnie the Pooh fame) knee socks. This was the twelfth time she had been sent home for violating the dress code. Amazingly, one of those times her offense was wearing a T-shirt with an antidrug slogan on it. Along with five other students, the girl in question is suing in federal court, arguing that the school district has violated her First and Fourteenth Amendment rights. John Glasser, the district superintendent, explained that the code was intended to clamp down on the use of gang iconography and argued that “there are other ways to express your individuality in an academic environment.” (Of course, as we learned earlier in this thread, writing and performing an original play about the Iraq War is not one of the acceptable ways to express individuality. No wonder kids hate high school. They’re told to think and punished when they do.) The Napa Valley Unified School District clearly needs a new dress code and, arguably, a new superintendent. But what of the law? If the operative point is age rather than content, should a school district be permitted to impose dress codes on students? If students can’t wear Winnie the Pooh logos on their socks, or black armbands on their sleeves (in fact, they can, but Mr. Gordon wishes they couldn’t), can they be barred from wearing Christian T-shirts, crosses, yarmulkes, and head scarves? After all, if we can limit one part of the First Amendment inside school grounds, why not the other parts, too? And 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?
April 3, 2007
Defining Free Speech Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:10 PM EST Mr. Gordon misses the point when he writes that I do not “deign to inform the rest of us why [he is] 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.” My argument is simple and falls along standard civil-libertarian lines. Any speech that does not immediately imperil other people (or, to paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., which is not akin to shouting fire in a crowded theater) falls under the rubric of free speech. For his part, Mr. Gordon argues that some speech is constitutionally protected, while other speech is too silly to enjoy protection. So it’s up to Mr. Gordon—not me—to explain exactly how he would differentiate protected speech from “mischievous” acts unworthy of court sanction. In 1907 the U.S. Supreme Court sustained the contempt conviction of an editor from Denver who had criticized the state judiciary. In his lone dissent, Justice John Marshall Harlan declared it folly “to conceive of liberty as secured by the Constitution against hostile action, whether by the nation or by the states, which does not embrace the right to enjoy free speech and the right to have a free press.” The Court took Harlan’s dissent to heart in 1925 when, in its first use of the Fourteenth Amendment to “incorporate” the Bill of Rights, it ruled in favor of Benjamin Gitelow, a socialist and former New York assemblyman, who had been sentenced to prison for claiming in a public address that social change was contingent on an overthrow of the “parliamentary state.” In Gitelow v. New York, the justices agreed that “for present purposes we may and do assume that freedom of speech and of the press—which are protected by the First Amendment from abridgment by Congress—are among the fundamental personal rights and liberties protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment from impairments by the states.” I agree that “Bong Hits for Jesus” does not match either of these cases in political rigor. But this fact mitigates against Mr. Gordon’s distinction between free speech and mischief. If the Constitution demands that we risk the consequences of revolutionary speech to uphold the letter and spirit of the First Amendment, how can we deny the same right to someone whose speech is unlikely to elicit anything more than a few chuckles? The Court famously ruled in Schenck v. United States (1919) that there can be reasonable limits against free speech, but that “the question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree. When a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.” (Italics added for emphasis.) “Bong Hits for Jesus” surely doesn’t threaten the war effort in Iraq. So how can it be banned? And do we want to entrust that decision to a local high school principal? Mr. Gordon’s distinction between the silly and the political also breaks down upon further analysis. In 1931 the Supreme Court struck down a Minnesota law that barred newspapers from making any statement of a “malicious, scandalous and defamatory” nature. In this case, the state had shut down an anti-Semitic newspaper that violated the spirit and letter of the statute. Finding in favor of the paper, the Court ruled simply: “It is no longer open to doubt that the liberty of the press and of speech is within the liberty safeguarded by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” Surely political and social satire falls under this ruling. Like Mr. Gordon, I don’t really “get” the “Bong Hits for Jesus” banner. I’m not even sure I find it as clever as he does. I also don’t find certain columnists, comedians, or cartoonists to be funny, clever, or prescient. But surely someone does. And that’s the point. Mr. Gordon wrote off as “cheap” and puerile my suggestion that he look for political work in Zimbabwe or Iran. I intended this aside in good fun, but the idea behind the quip still goes unanswered. Iran and Zimbabwe are run by despots who are all too comfortable with making summary rulings about what is, and what isn’t, protected speech. 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?
April 3, 2007
Guns and Speech V Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:30 PM EST 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. Yes, the institute that invited Churchill to campus is left-leaning. Yes, Ward Churchill has been accused of shoddy research. Yes, Jeane Kirkpatrick was a more respected scholar than Ward Churchill. To this list, one might add: Hamilton College is located in upstate New York, in a small town called Clinton. The average January snowfall in Clinton, New York, is 30 inches. I have no doubt that Mr. Gordon feels genuinely sorry for right-wing students, like those at the University of Michigan who staged “Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day” and a “Fun With Guns” event last year. The latter involved using BB guns to shoot targets representing John Kerry and Hillary Clinton. But on the issue of free speech, Mr. Gordon is inconsistent. He rends garments over quite deplorable instances of left-wing thuggery on college campuses, but he argues that the young man in Alaska who was suspended for hoisting a “bong hits for Jesus” banner deserved to be dressed down by his local school. According to Mr. Gordon, his speech was “essentially meaningless, intended solely to get a reaction. . . . There was no idea or opinion related to the real world being offered . . . 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.” On the other hand, Mr. Gordon does believe that the students in Connecticut who were not permitted to perform an original play about the Iraq War have been done a great wrong. This idea 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.) Again, I wonder whether groups and individuals who support an expansive reading of the Second Amendment will attempt to strengthen the individual-rights emphasis of the Bill of Rights by defending the broadest possible speech rights for students.
April 2, 2007
Guns and Speech III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:30 PM EST John Steele Gordon writes: “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.” In 2005 Hamilton College invited left-wing Professor Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado to speak on the subject of American Indian rights. The talk was to be sponsored by the college’s Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society and Culture, as part of a series entitled “Class in Context.” Though his scholarly work focuses on ethnicity—particularly, on Native Americans—Churchill is a bête noire of the political right for his comments linking the September 11 attacks to American global imperialism. Even in the face of widespread conservative dissent, at first the college staked out a firm position in favor of free speech. Joan Hinde Stewart, Hamilton’s president, said: “There have been calls for me to rescind the Kirkland Project’s invitation to Ward Churchill and cancel the event. But there is a principle at stake, for once the invitation was extended by the Kirkland Project and accepted by Ward Churchill, it became a matter of free speech.” But after several weeks of right-wing shock incitement by the likes of Bill O’Reilly and David Horowitz, Hamilton College canceled the talk. The official reason: Physical threats against Churchill made it impossible for the college to guarantee his safety. I hope this will satisfy Mr. Gordon, as during last year’s exchange, he offered the following example of violent left-wing interference with free speech: “In 1983, when Jeane Kirkpatrick, then the United States ambassador to the United Nations, was invited to give the commencement address at Smith College, she was forced to withdraw after violence was threatened and the college president, Jill K. Conway, said that she could not guarantee her security.” Jeane Kirkpatrick at Smith, Ward Churchill at Hamilton. Parallel examples.
March 30, 2007
Algeria, Vietnam, and Iraq II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 05:15 PM EST At John Steele Gordon’s advice, I took a look at Arthur Herman’s article “How to Win the War in Iraq.” Mr. Gordon is correct that it’s worth reading, even if you disagree with its gist (which I do). On the question of the French occupation of Algeria, I’ll defer to Fred Smoler, who knows a great deal about European military history. But I’ll try to take issue with Herman’s argument about Vietnam. On the subject of America’s war in Southeast Asia, Herman wrote: “By 1972, the American military there had broken the back of the Viet Cong insurgency, had fought the North Vietnamese army to a standstill, and had forced the government in Hanoi to the bargaining table. Here at home, meanwhile, the end of the military draft had removed the domestic antiwar movement’s most powerful wedge issue. Nevertheless, reorganizing itself, the movement began to lobby Congress vigorously to cut off support for the pro-American governments in South Vietnam and Cambodia. The refrain, exactly as in the Algerian case, was that this would both bring the killing and suffering to an end and allow the Vietnamese and Cambodians to ‘find their own solutions to their problems.’ Once Watergate destroyed the Nixon presidency, and ‘peace’ Democrats took control of Congress in the 1974 midterm elections, funding to keep South Vietnam free from communist control evaporated. Victory was turned into defeat; the ‘solution’ advanced by the antiwar Left turned out to be the crushing and disappearance of the country of South Vietnam.” A few problems stand out. First, Herman’s timeline is remarkably pat. War was won by 1972, lost by 1974. Really? The United States managed to break the back of the NLF and North Vietnamese Army, but enemy forces were able to rebound within one year (1974–75) of the cessation of American military aid to Saigon? I don’t think most historians would agree that the NLF/North Vietnamese insurgency was a dead letter by 1972. Under Nixon, American troop levels declined from over half a million in late 1968 to 24,200 in late 1972. At the same time, the administration helped build up the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN), increasing its troop levels from 850,000 to more than 1 million soldiers, providing it with over a million M-16 rifles, 12,000 M-60 machine guns, 40,000 M-79 grenade launchers, and an endless supply of planes, helicopters, and tanks. By the early 1970s South Vietnamese military academies were training 100,000 cadets each year. Taken in sum, these measures helped the government in Saigon double the portion of the South Vietnamese countryside that it controlled. But how effective was all of this? It certainly didn’t help South Vietnam withstand an invasion in 1975. In fact, Vietnamization was never as successful as its architects claimed. ARVN’s forces were larger on paper than in reality, due to the prevalence of “ghosting,” a process by which officers kept dead, wounded, and deserted soldiers on their rosters and pocketed their pay, while at the same time corruption continued to run rampant in the civilian government, thus undermining President Nguyen Van Thieu’s hold on the countryside. Le Duc Tho, North Vietnam’s chief negotiator, once asked Henry Kissinger how, if America could not drive the Communists out of South Vietnam with more than a half million well-trained combat troops, it would “succeed when you let your puppet troops do the fighting?” It was a pretty good question. Moreover, Herman is wrong to suggest that the prolonged engagement forced Hanoi to the negotiating table. After all, the U.S. had been negotiating with Hanoi since at least 1968. The terms that Nixon and Kissinger signed in early 1973 were nearly identical to what that North Vietnam had placed on the table over four years earlier. North Vietnam was in a war of attrition with the United States. While Herman’s article is provocative, one could just as easily draw the opposite conclusion: After four additional years of war, and over 20,000 more American servicemen killed, Richard Nixon got the same deal he could have accepted in early 1969.
March 30, 2007
Guns and Speech Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:35 PM EST A long while back, we American Heritage.com contributors debated whether violations of free speech were the special preserve of the left or something that activists on both the left and right were guilty of. 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 see little to gain in belaboring my original point—to wit, that very few extremists on either side of the political spectrum respect the free speech rights of their opponents. Instead, I’ll just agree with Mr. Gordon that people who disrupt a campus talk should be appropriately disciplined, and move on from there. This month saw two very interesting free-speech cases come to public light. In one instance, a high school student in Alaska was suspended for hoisting a banner that read “Bong Hits for Jesus” during an Olympic torch procession. Though the student was not standing on school property (he was on a public sidewalk), administrators claimed that his message undermined the school’s legitimate interest in promoting a drug-free environment. Moreover, he was still on school time. A federal appellate court disagreed, finding that the school violated the student’s constitutional rights, and the case is now before the U.S. Supreme Court. Many miles away, in Wilton, Connecticut, a public school principal barred students from performing an original play about the Iraq War. Written under the direction of the school’s drama teacher, and drawing on the diaries, oral histories, and letters of current soldiers and marines, the script, entitled Voices in Conflict, attempts to convey the challenges faced by young servicemen in Iraq. From the description in The New York Times, the play sounds neither prowar nor antiwar but just thoughtful, provocative, and challenging. Nevertheless, Timothy H. Canty, the school principal, explained that the show must not go on, because it might offend local families “who had lost loved ones or who had individuals serving as we speak.” Last week this blog hosted a brief discussion of the Second Amendment. We noted that many liberal legal scholars concede that while the amendment may originally have been intended to protect state militias from a tyrannical central state, the Fourteenth Amendment (ratified in 1868) changed the nature of the Second Amendment by effectively conferring on individuals the right to bear arms. Liberal scholars like Lawrence Tribe and Akhil Reed Amar are willing to concede this point, because they wish to be consistent. If the Reconstruction-era process of constitutional revision greatly expanded the individual liberties enjoyed by U.S. citizens, this expansion must apply to the entire Bill of Rights, and not just to the Second Amendment. When Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866, it did so largely to countermand “black codes” enacted by Southern states. These statutes sharply restricted the rights of freed slaves to own guns and to assemble and speak freely. If the Fourteenth Amendment rendered the Second Amendment more powerful, by the same logic, it gave new muscle to the First Amendment. The question is, will conservatives who insist on a constitutional right to carry a concealed semiautomatic weapon also stand up for students in Juneau, Alaska, and Walton, Connecticut? (Ignore for a moment the terrible irony here. The good people of Walton pay their school principal to discourage students from writing original work about the most pressing social and political question of their time. Bravo for public education.) Will Second Amendment absolutists defend the rights of teenagers to say what they want on public streets and in the school auditorium? Can we expect Wayne LaPierre to file a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of these young people? Will conservatives of the libertarian persuasion be consistent?
March 21, 2007
The Second Amendment II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:45 AM EST Further to Fred Smoler’s post, I’d highly recommend Akhil Reed Amar’s book The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction, which challenges conventional wisdom by arguing that the original Bill of Rights was intended more to protect the republican majority against the tyrannical central state than the individual against the tyrannical majority. Amar, a law professor at Yale, charts the process by which the Reconstruction-era Congress framed the Fourteenth Amendment, which ultimately allowed the federal courts to “incorporate” most of the Bill of Rights and thus apply their provisions to the states. (Remember that before 1868 the first 10 amendments placed limits on the federal government but not the states. Unless a state explicitly protected free speech in its constitution, it was essentially free to throw someone in prison for criticizing the legislature or governor.) In the context of the 1860s, it’s not difficult to understand why Republican legislators grew less enamored of state militias and more trusting of central power. It was the Virginia state militia, after all, that raised arms against the government in Washington; it was the government in Washington that fought a war to limit and then abolish slavery. The congressmen who passed the Fourteenth Amendment were no longer in the thrall of localism. They were also seeking to turn the Bill of Rights into a sweeping protection of individual rights. Much of the impetus for the amendment, and for the statutory measure that anticipated it, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, grew out of the “black codes” that Southern states passed in the summer and fall of 1865. These codes restricted the movement, economic independence, and speech and assembly rights of former slaves. The codes also sharply restricted the right of freedmen to bear arms. (This restriction was intended both to limit black firepower and to prevent freedmen from hunting, something that would have allowed them a modicum of self-sufficiency.) When Congress barred states from infringing on the “privileges and immunities” of American citizens, they almost certainly had gun ownership on their minds. Where this leaves us on the gun control question, I don’t know. Benjamin Wittes believes that “one can still muster strong arguments in favor of a collective-rights conception of the Second Amendment, the view that has prevailed in most other circuits; and the individual-rights view does not necessarily doom all gun control (though it probably does doom the most sweeping bans).” But let me post a historical rather than political question for my colleagues: Until recently the only two amendments that remained “unincorporated” were the Second and the Third. It’s unlikely that anyone will soon bring a test case to the Supreme Court on the right of states to quarter guardsmen in private homes. But if the D.C. gun-ban case winds its way to the Supreme Court, and if the Court upholds the appellate decision, will the process of incorporation be almost complete? Many years ago, Justice Hugo Black argued for a total “absorption” of the Bill of Rights rather than piecemeal incorporation. Does the Court stand on the verge of fulfilling Black’s fondest wish?
March 20, 2007
The Richest and Most Powerful Country of the Time II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:20 PM EST In response to my suggestion that the United States is not categorically the richest country in the world, John Steele Gordon writes: “Per capita GDP is utterly irrelevant here. If I own a single Rembrandt worth $50 million, do I have a richer and more powerful art collection than the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose 100,000 pieces of art are worth only an average of $1 million each? A more relevant chart is . . . GDP per country, not per capita. The United States had a GDP in 2005 of $12.5 trillion. . . . With 28.15 percent of world GDP, the United States is by far the richest and most powerful country of our time, perhaps any time.” I still maintain that GDP per capita is both relevant to Mr. Gordon’s original argument and the right indicator to examine. In his post yesterday, Mr. Gordon proffered that “the richer and more powerful the parent, the less excuse there is for things not being perfect. It would be an interesting exercise in historical psychology to see if the tendency to blame one’s own country for all the world’s troubles is most strongly found in the richest and most powerful country of the time.” Mr. Gordon was suggesting an alternative explanation of homegrown criticism of American institutions. Agreeing only in part with Michael Barone, who attributed the blame-America-first instinct to liberal professors, Mr. Gordon wondered whether such self-directed criticism was not the usual byproduct of an affluent society. Seems to me he may be onto something, though I still take issue with his characterization of America as the “richest” country of its time. I hope we can agree that there are different ways to determine wealth. Total GDP is one measure; GDP per capita is another. Mr. Gordon used the art collector’s analogy. Let me suggest another. Family A has an annual household income of $100,000 and net assets of $250,000. Family B has an annual household income of $150,000 and net assets of $400,000. Family A consists of two working parents and two children. Family B consists of two working parents and eight children. Which family is richer? By Mr. Gordon’s standard, family B is richer, because it has more total assets and income. By my standard, family A is richer, because the cost of feeding, clothing, educating, and providing health care for 10 people is a lot more than the total cost of providing for the same basic needs in a family of four. Family A has more income and more assets per capita than Family B. It stands a better chance of eating out and vacationing more, sending its kids to private colleges, and stashing away more money, long-term, in retirement investments. Which family is “richer?” There are other ways to measure wealth, as well. I imagine that Mr. Gordon would agree that corporate perquisites like housing and travel allowances, stock options, and company cars should in some way be considered when measuring an executive’s personal riches. The same is surely true of states and citizens. Ireland and Norway, which have greater GDP per capita than the United States, and Canada, which ranks below the U.S., provide their citizens with valuable social provisions like health care. Surely this contributes to the wealth of individuals in ways that elude simple indices like total GDP or GDP per capita. Standard of living is also a good measure of wealth. Scandinavian countries are renowned for their superb public infrastructure, their health care systems, their schools and their childcare arrangements. Their citizens work less, live longer, eat better, and have more relative purchasing power than citizens of other countries, including the United States. That is why Norway, Iceland, and Sweden ranked first, second, and fifth in the 2006 Human Development Index, while the U.S. ranked eighth (behind Ireland, Canada and Japan). The HDI is an interesting measure of how much wealth countries possess and how universally felt that wealth is. Mr. Gordon’s original point was that citizens of affluent countries may be especially prone to criticize their domestic institutions and traditions, and that this may be especially true in the United States, which he called the “richest” country of its time. In order for his idea to bear out, aggregate wealth would have to be widely distributed and widely felt. It wouldn’t matter if the U.S. had 80 percent of the world’s wealth sitting in a bank vault in Kansas. If citizens could not enjoy the benefits of that wealth, they would not be living in an affluent society, and they would not feel affluent. My point is that on a per-capita basis, the U.S. is not richest, and in terms of its quality of life or standard of living, it lags behind several other developed countries. Mr. Gordon enjoys the quick quip, and indeed, in his recent post he mocked Canada for not matching the United States in military might and wrote off Ireland as a tax haven. Lest we confuse wit for wisdom, it might be helpful to remember that Ireland now has one of the most robust economies in the developed world and is, for the first time since the nineteenth-century famine, attracting immigrants rather than exporting migrants. That loophole by which Americans can claim Irish citizenship if they had one Irish-born grandparent? Expect to see the Irish government close that soon. As for Canada, it may not be able to pacify New York, but then, the U.S. can’t seem to pacify Baghdad either. Also, Canada still licks the U.S. on the HDI, and they still play better hockey.
March 19, 2007
Who Blames America First? IV Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 07:20 PM EST Thanks to John Steele Gordon for reviewing the career and credentials of Michael Barone. (I didn’t say that I hadn’t heard of or read Barone. I only said that I didn’t know a great deal about him. But it’s always nice to learn something new.) That said, I don’t believe I denigrated Barone’s character or career. I only complained that he charged the liberal academy with something fairly serious (to wit, infecting undergraduates with a virulent strain of anti-Americanism) without providing any evidence to this effect. Mr. Gordon writes, “Joshua Zeitz must live a weblife of nearly unremitting disappointment. He keeps going to blogs and being devastated that they are not written like peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals, dense with subordinate clauses and abristle with footnotes and carefully gathered evidence.” Not really. I don’t need a peer-reviewed article. I suppose I’m just looking for substance–a study of academic bias (there are many, of varying degrees of reliability), an anecdote, a review of current course offerings at Kremlin on the Charles (Alexander Burns’s alma mater) or Kremlin on the Crum (mine). Something. Anything. Mr. Gordon accuses me of committing “the very sin for which he berates Michael Barone.” I don’t think I did anything of the sort. I offered a few memories of my own career as a student and college instructor and admitted that these examples were entirely anecdotal and by no means paradigmatic. I then invited readers and fellow contributors to share their own experiences, or any studies of which they might be aware. I also admitted that some liberal professors do have a problem with American institutions and leaders, though I stressed that some does not mean many, most, or all. Mr. Gordon continues: “Mr. Zeitz writes, ‘If we followed Barone’s advice to the letter, students would still read William Dunning on the Civil War and Reconstruction, rather than James McPherson and Eric Foner.’ That is a gross distortion. Mr. Zeitz says he doesn’t know much about Michael Barone. Obviously.” I fail to see how I’ve grossly distorted Barone, who wrote: “On campuses, students are bombarded with denunciations of dead white males and urged to engage in the deconstruction of all past learning and scholarship.” From my reading of this line, Barone disapproves of the process by which students deconstruct past scholarship and learning. But the historical profession relies on exactly this process of deconstruction. It’s why we assign Foner and McPherson rather than Dunning. Finally, I’ve got bad news for Mr. Gordon. America is not categorically the “richest and most powerful country of the time.” See this chart.
March 19, 2007
Who Blames America First? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:45 AM EST John Steele Gordon writes approvingly of Michael Barone’s condemnation of (in Barone’s words) “our schools and, especially . . . our colleges and universities. The first are staffed by liberals long accustomed to see America as full of problems needing solving; the latter have been packed full of the people cultural critic Roger Kimball calls ‘tenured radicals,’ people who see this country and its people as the source of all evil in the world.” Agreeing in part with Barone that anti-American professors have infected undergraduates with a reflexive hatred of all things American, Mr. Gordon believes that it is difficult “for even the most sensible college students to resist the daily drumbeat of anti-Americanism from so many professors who are, of course, supposed to be experts in their fields.” I followed the link that Mr. Gordon provided to the Barone article, expecting to find some sort of empirical study demonstrating rampant anti-American bias in college classrooms and curricula, but I found no such thing. The article that Mr. Gordon finds so interesting claims with impunity that “on campuses, students are bombarded with denunciations of dead white males and urged to engage in the deconstruction of all past learning and scholarship.” It’s an oft-repeated conservative lament, but like most critics of the treasonous academy, Barone doesn’t bother to provide an iota of evidence. So who blames America first? I’d like to know. Let’s get a thread going on this site—one that engages with evidence. I hope that readers will chime in with their own experiences. I would be the last to deny that many liberal academics teach and write American history in a way that casts a dim light on America’s institutions and leaders, from Founding Fathers to present. But Barone’s article goes wrong in several places: First, and I repeat, Barone’s article is without evidence. From a purely anecdotal standpoint, as one who has attended and taught at several American colleges (Swarthmore and Brown as a student; Harvard, Brown, University of Rhode Island, and Rutgers as a professor or instructor), I have found no such bias in the teaching of history or literature. “Dead white men” are still given more than a fair hearing, as is America. During my time at Brown in the 1990s, classes on American colonial and Revolutionary War–era history, nineteenth-century American intellectual history, and the Vietnam War were among the department’s most popular offerings. None of these classes betrayed any bias “for” or “against” America; they simply provided a balanced overview. At Harvard, the respected History and Literature Program retains its special affection for nineteenth-century American letters. (I would venture that the average Hist & Lit student at Harvard has read more dead white American male authors than Barone, but that’s just a guess. I don’t know much about Barone.) As an undergrad at Swarthmore (1992–1996), I took popular seminars on the politics and culture of the Progressive era and American political history, and wrote an undergraduate thesis on Thaddeus Stevens, a nineteenth-century congressman who was unquestionably white and, by the time I studied him, unquestionably dead. I’m not claiming that my own experience is paradigmatic, but in the absence of a good study that suggests otherwise, why should I take Barone at his word when he claims that our universities are programming students to hate America generally and dead white men more specifically? Second, Barone runs the risk of confusing critical history with treasonous criticism. Should we avoid topics like slavery and nativism because they make America look small? Political campaigns are for flag-waving; college classrooms are for critical thinking. Barone derides the “deconstruction of all past learning and scholarship,” but this is precisely what a liberal arts curriculum is supposed to do: teach people how to think and assess a body of work. If we followed Barone’s advice to the letter, students would still read William Dunning on the Civil War and Reconstruction, rather than James McPherson and Eric Foner. Third, are women, working-class people, African-Americans, and immigrants not Americans all? Studying their daily lives, political culture, and struggles is as much a celebration of America as it is a selective condemnation of its institutions and traditions. Ignoring these topics impoverishes our understanding of the nation’s history. Fourth, conservatives are no less critical of America than liberals and leftists. When right-wing intellectuals like Robert Bork accuse America of “slouching toward Gomorrah,” or condemn the sexual, social, and cultural decisions of millions of its citizens, they are no less elitist or anti-American than the most extreme New Left professor. They are simply coming at their criticism from a different angle. Barone’s article projects something of a love-it-or-leave-it attitude. By the same logic, if Robert Bork and Ann Coulter aren’t happy with America, they should be invited to love it or leave it too. Bork might feel more comfortable in Taliban-controlled regions of Afghanistan, where the sexual and cultural ethic is conservative and where community standards trump rampant individualism any day of the week. So, I pose the question, who blames America first?
March 15, 2007
Barack Obama and Peter Pace Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:15 PM EST As a follow-up to my last post, and in the interest of fairness: When asked whether he agreed with General Peter Pace that homosexuality is immoral, Sen. Barack Obama replied: “I think traditionally the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman has restricted his public comments to military matters. That’s probably a good tradition to follow. . . . I think the question here is whether somebody is willing to sacrifice for their country, should they be able to if they’re doing all the things that should be done.” Not quite worthy of Profiles in Courage.
March 14, 2007
Hillary Clinton and Peter Pace Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:55 PM EST It’s fashionable in many political and academic circles to take a dim view of John F. Kennedy, whose media-made image as a Camelot knight in shining armor almost demanded an over-correction. In the years since his assassination and apotheosis, JFK has undergone substantial historical revision. He now comes across as a man who was as glib as he was poignant, and as cynical as he was idealistic. Certainly in the realm of civil rights, he and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, earned low marks for their tepid response to the great moral problem of their day. In the first installment of his three-volume study of the postwar civil rights movement, Taylor Branch paints a picture of a young President who was more concerned with preserving the peace than promoting racial justice. Thus in 1961 the Kennedys brokered a deal with Mississippi state authorities by which Freedom Riders would be peaceably arrested upon crossing into the magnolia state, even though they were fully within their constitutional rights (as per a Supreme Court decision) to demand the integration of facilities servicing interstate bus passengers. But people have the capacity to grow. During the darkest days of the Birmingham campaign, John Kennedy admitted that newspaper images of black schoolchildren being attacked by police dogs made him “sick.” On June 11, after two and a half years of steady procrastination, Kennedy took to the airwaves to demand a comprehensive civil rights act barring segregation in places of public accommodation and in the workplace. Just minutes before his live broadcast, the President received the finished draft of his speech. He made extensive edits and ultimately ended up extemporizing—on live TV—what was arguably his finest public address. Referring to the events in Birmingham, Kennedy said, “I hope that every American, regardless of where he lives, will stop and examine his conscience about this and other related incidents. . . . It ought to be possible for American consumers of any color to receive equal service in places of public accommodation, such as hotels and restaurants and theaters and retail stores, without being forced to resort to demonstrations in the street, and it ought to be possible for citizens of any color to register and to vote in a free election without interference or fear of reprisal. . . . It ought to be possible, in short, for every American to enjoy the privileges of being American without regard to his race or his color. In short, every American ought to have the right to be treated as he would wish to be treated, as one would wish his children to be treated. But this is not the case. . . . We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. “The heart of the question,” he continued, “is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?” Forty-four years later, it is dispiriting, to say the least, that one of the front-runners for the Democratic presidential nomination seems to have absorbed not a single word of Kennedy’s historic and influential address. When asked whether she agreed with Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who recently declared that “homosexual acts between individuals are immoral, and that we should not condone immoral acts,” Sen. Hillary Clinton responded that it was a matter for “others to conclude.” I’m all for crediting John Kennedy with intellectual and moral growth. The same applies to his brother, Robert Kennedy, who failed miserably at promoting civil rights during his tenure as attorney general, but who emerged as an important and deeply compassionate champion of racial minorities and the poor in the short time he had left in this life. So how much leeway should we afford Hillary Clinton? She has been a United States senator for more than six years. She has been in public life for well over two decades. She is 59 years old. How much more time does she need to get right with history, and with the scripture she claims to hold dear? John Kennedy spoke of nothing less than the Golden Rule. Surely, Senator Clinton understands this. “The heart of the question,” John Kennedy affirmed, “is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.” Substitute “gay” for “black,” and we are grappling with the same question today. Hillary Clinton’s answer is unsatisfactory. It is unbecoming of the junior senator from New York State, and altogether inadequate for someone who wishes to carry the Democratic party’s standard in the next presidential election.
February 21, 2007
Oliver Cromwell's Head Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:00 AM EST Mr. Gordon poses the following question: “To be sure, Oliver Cromwell’s corpse was dug up so that he could be hanged, drawn, and quartered, but since he’d been dead more than two years, I doubt that he suffered much. (I believe his head is in the possession of one of the colleges at Cambridge; I wonder what on earth they do with it. Perhaps Mr. Zeitz can report.)” To the best of my knowledge, in 1960 the fellows of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, accepted the bequest of Oliver Cromwell’s head, which they buried on college grounds, somewhere in the vicinity of the chapel. They have very wisely declined to mark the spot where his head is interred, for fear that someone might attempt to exhume it.
February 20, 2007
A Modest Proposal II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:30 PM EST John Steele Gordon writes that the Confederate flag (as opposed to the Confederate battle flag) is “an honorable emblem of their ancestors’ ‘blood-bought immortality.’” While I certainly intend no disrespect to Mr. Gordon, who is hardly responsible for what his great-great-grandfather did in 1861, I couldn’t disagree more. It is, for one, the flag of treason, which is precisely what its followers committed when they raised arms against the United States. As a general rule, nations do not honor treason with public commemorations or iconography. That few people recognize the flag does not rob it of its meaning. It is also the flag of chattel slavery. To understand the meaning behind the emblem, one need only read the words of Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederate States of America, who famously said that the “corner-stone” of the new nation “rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” Several years ago I contributed articles to the Washington Post and Dissen on the issue of the Confederate battle flag. If readers will indulge a little recycling on my part, the following is an edited excerpt from my Washington Post piece and makes the counterargument to Mr. Gordon’s modest proposal: In the debate over the presence of the Southern Cross on various state flags, many impartial observers continue to repeat the worn platitude that the flag is an emotional issue for white and black Southerners alike. As Boston Herald columnist Don Feder argued, “Southerners have every right to be proud of their heritage. . . . If Lincoln were alive today, he would say let the South honor its heroes. Race relations aren’t advanced by denigrating a symbol good Americans died for. . . .” Surprisingly, such statements aren’t new. This value-neutral interpretation of the Civil War emerged within a few decades of the war’s conclusion. As the nineteenth century neared its end, the ex-slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass denounced the collective amnesia that he thought had taken hold of the nation. “What was bad before the war, and during the war, has not been made good since the war,” he admonished a crowd assembled in 1894 at Mt. Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York. “Whatever else I may forget, I shall never forget the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery . . . there was a right side and a wrong side in the late war which no sentiment ought to cause us to forget.” Douglass was outraged by the willingness of the victorious to forgive and forget the trespasses of the vanquished. In the years following Reconstruction, Northerners seemed oddly complicit in a vigorous cultural assault against common-sense memory. They joined Southerners in refashioning the war as an epic family feud in which Johnny Reb and Billy Yank each fought courageously and honorably, then buried the hatchet and became brothers again. A powerful combination—the passage of time, the disillusioning experience of Reconstruction, and hardening racial sensibilities in both regions—led many Northerners and Southerners to revel in shared military glory without dwelling too much on the causes of the conflict. This spirit of reconciliation, and its emphasis on combat over ideology, found its most popular expression in a vogue that swept America in the 1880s and 1890s: blue and gray reunions. Veterans and their families attended hundreds of these gatherings. Reflecting and nourishing the nation’s fascination with all things military, The Century—a popular, widely circulated magazine—ran an acclaimed series of articles between 1884 and 1887 on “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War.” The editors explained that “no time could be fitter for a publication of this kind than the present, when the passions and prejudices of the Civil War have nearly faded out of politics, and its heroic events are passing into our common history where motives will be weighed without malice, and valor praised without distinction of uniform.” Until recently, historical consensus held that soldiers in the 1860s were driven by a variety of impulses, most of them vague: courage, honor, local ties, manly valor. Conspicuously missing from that list were theoretical commitments to the preservation or abolition of slavery. Writing in this vein nearly 50 years ago, Bell Irvin Wiley, who at the time was considered the leading authority on Civil War military culture, claimed that “American soldiers of the 1860s appear to have been . . . little concerned with ideological issues.” But more recent scholarship suggests that many Confederate soldiers knew well the ends for which they fought. The historian James M. McPherson, of Princeton University, has argued that “ideological motifs almost leap from” the written record bequeathed by Civil War soldiers. After reading more than 25,000 personal letters and 249 journals penned by Union and Confederate troops, McPherson concluded that a “large number of those men in blue and gray were intensely aware of the issues at stake and passionately concerned about them.” McPherson found that Confederate soldiers often made explicit mention of the need to preserve slavery. Sometimes they couched their purpose in the South’s regional idiom—for instance, the need to protect Southern “liberties” and “institutions.” But even a casual student of American history understands what such expressions implied. As Abraham Lincoln famously complained in 1854, the “perfect liberty they sigh for is the liberty of making slaves of other people.” One especially popular Civil War myth, often used to guard ordinary Confederates against the judgment of history, is that the struggle was a “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.” It's true that only one third of Confederate soldiers were slaveholders or members of slaveholding families. But as McPherson reminds us, non-slaveholders also had a commanding property interest in the institution. “That property was their white skins,” he explained, “which put them on a plane of civil equality with slaveholders and far above those who did not possess that property.” Indeed, McPherson’s research painstakingly chronicles the racial obsessions of everyday soldiers who did not own slaves but who feared the social consequences of emancipation. “I never want to see the day when a negro is put on an equality with a white person,” wrote one such artilleryman in 1862. “There is too many free niggers . . . now to suit me, let alone having four millions.” Seventy-five years after the Civil War, the novelist William Faulkner captured revisionism’s powerful grip on the Southern mind. Colonel Sartoris, a character in several Faulkner novels and short stories, is asked in one of them why he fought for the Confederacy. Sartoris replies simply: “Damned if I ever did know.” In Mr. Gordon’s proposal, the ghost of Colonel Sartoris lives on.
February 18, 2007
John Steele Gordon and the Uses of Evidence Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 04:15 PM EST As per usual, John Steele Gordon has hurled about a good deal of invective, and he hopes that readers won’t notice that he hasn’t provided a substantive answer to a single one of the responses I issued to his post. He’s too busy insulting me to deal in pesky things like evidence. Take for example the following lines from Mr. Gordon’s latest temper tantrum: “Mr. Zogby’s personal animosity to President Bush should be taken into account here. There is plenty of evidence that troop morale in Iraq, despite the best efforts of liberals and their cheerleaders in the media, remains very high. The fact that many of them would like to come home strikes me as more than a bit obvious. The percentage of people who would like to leave a dentist’s office quickly is quite high too, I imagine, although I haven’t commissioned a Zogby poll on the subject in order to be sure.” Nowhere has Mr. Gordon actually demonstrated (a) James Zogby’s alleged animosity toward George W. Bush or (b) that there is “plenty of evidence that troop morale in Iraq, despite the best efforts of liberals and their cheerleaders in the media, remains very high.” If this is so, Mr. Gordon, please inform me, and the readers of this magazine, of which studies or surveys prove either point. Where is your proof of healthy troop morale? (Can you provide anything beyond anecdotal evidence?) Can you provide a scientific study of James Zogby’s methodology that reveals a flawed approach in his data collection or analysis? If you can’t, then please, for once, spare us this nonsensical exercise you pass off as good scholarship. If he actually bothered to read the data from the Zogby poll (the same poll for which he provided a link to top-line results), Mr. Gordon would learn that the troops Zogby surveyed didn’t support their own withdrawal from Iraq; they supported an American withdrawal from Iraq. Two very different things. One is self-interested, one isn’t. The dentist analogy, while sort of clever, is wholly irrelevant. But, then, so much of what Mr. Gordon writes usually is. Though John Steele Gordon forgets all too often that American Heritage is a magazine concerned with history, the rest of us haven’t. Indeed, the question of how to measure troop morale is a nettlesome one. Zogby touted his poll as the first-ever statistical survey of troops in a combat zone, and to the best of my knowledge, this claim is correct. For scholars of earlier wars, the diaries, letters, and folk cultures of soldiers are the best cumulative measure of morale. Two of the finest professional histories of wartime military culture that I’ve encountered are James McPherson’s slim but deeply-researched volume on Civil War era soldiers, For Cause and Comrades, and Christian Appy’s fine book, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers in Vietnam. In reading McPherson’s study, one is struck by the high rates of literacy among Union and Confederate soldiers and by their intense political engagement. In short, Civil War–era soldiers read, thought, and wrote about and debated the political issues of the 1860s. Appy’s book does not address the question of political engagement in such direct terms but finds that soldiers and marines were acutely aware of the class dynamics that influenced the draft. In 1864 over three-quarters of Union soldiers supported Abraham Lincoln’s reelection bid over their former commanding officer, George McClellan. This, despite Lincoln’s open embrace of his party’s emancipation platform. While certainly a statistically imperfect measure of troop morale, this figure has been widely interpreted as evidence that there was a critical shift between 1862 and 1864 in military attitudes toward slavery and emancipation. I’m sure that James Zogby’s poll of Iraq war servicemen and servicewomen suffers the same problems as every other political survey, but given the leeway with which we draw conclusions about the attitudes of soldiers in past wars from spotty sources, it seems reliable enough evidence of a critical disconnect between the current Commander in Chief and the men and women he has sent to war.
February 17, 2007
Dragging Lincoln Into Iraq V Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:55 PM EST Fred Smoler notes that Abraham Lincoln “did not exile Vallandigham in the normal sense of the word, because Lincoln did not recognize the sovereignty of the Confederacy, so Lincoln in effect had Vallandigham sent from one portion of U.S. territory to another. When Vallandigham later came back into Union-controlled territory from Canada, Lincoln left the man unmolested, and Vallandigham was allowed to engage in political activity with perfect impunity.” This is true, but it’s more complicated still. Lincoln consistently maintained that secession was illegal and that the Confederacy was not a separate country, and consistent with this interpretation, he almost always referred to the conflict as a ”rebellion,” not a war. (Though he did occasionally refer to the conflict as a civil war—most famously in the Gettysburg Address—he employed the term “rebellion” more than 400 times.) But early on in the conflict, Lincoln ordered a blockade of Southern ports, a measure that ultimately proved extremely effective in crippling the Southern economy. Navy Secretary Gideon Welles and Secretary of State William Henry Seward warned Lincoln that international law regarded a blockade as a declaration of war between two belligerent and sovereign powers and suggested, instead, that he “close” Southern ports. But Lincoln, fearing that European powers would defy a simple declaration of port closure and continue trading with and arming the South, pressed ahead with the blockade. Thaddeus Stevens, the radical Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, loudly protested. “We were blockading ourselves,” he observed, a “great blunder and absurdity” that compromised the Union’s legal definition of the conflict as a rebellion, not a war. “As a lawyer,” Stevens told Lincoln, “I should have supposed you would have seen the difficulty at once.” “Oh well,” the President replied. “I’m a good enough lawyer in a Western law court, I suppose, but we don’t practice the law of nations up there. I supposed Seward knew all about it, and I left him to it. . . . It’s done now and can’t be helped, so we must go along as well as we can.” It was one of Lincoln’s typical deployments of self-effacing humor to counter an opponent’s charges. In other words, in word Lincoln denied the sovereignty of the Confederacy; in deed he inadvertently acknowledged it. So, did he “exile” Vallandigham or relocate him within the United States? It’s hard to say. On a scarcely related note, a few clarifications for my good friend John Steele Gordon, who managed to avoid history altogether in his brief for the White House: 1. Mr. Gordon is incorrect. Jack Murtha is not the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. In fact, Murtha is not even a member of the Armed Services Committee. The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee is Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri. Murtha chairs an Appropriations Subcommittee that has authority over military spending. Perhaps this is what Mr. Gordon was thinking of. 2. Mr. Gordon is also incorrect in asserting that I mischaracterized Rep. Don Young’s remarks. His short speech (only 528 words) opened with the faux Lincoln quote (“Congressmen who willfully take action during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled or hanged”) and continued several lines down with the following: “This resolution will undermine and cause a morale disruption to our troops. Nowhere can you be in the field and understand the Congress of the United States now is not going to support them when they say they do, when they say they are going to cut their funding in the future.” While Mr. Young did not suggest arresting, exiling or hanging all critics of the war, he clearly suggested the arrest, exile or hanging of its congressional critics. By splitting hairs, Mr. Gordon artfully dodges this problem. 3. Mr. Gordon writes: Murtha’s “bill, if enacted, would force defeat on the United States. Sounds a bit like sabotage to me and would inescapably undermine troop morale. Defeat always does.” Interesting proposition, but not correct. A poll conducted in March 2006 by Zogby revealed that only 23 percent of troops serving in Iraq thought they should remain “as long as they are needed,” compared with 72 percent who thought they should pull out within 12 months, and 29 percent who felt they should be withdrawn immediately. This was a first-of-its-kind poll in that the target universe of troops serving in the combat zone. What it tells us is that the servicemen and servicewomen in Iraq aren’t going to suffer a loss of morale if the Democratic Congress takes steps to curtail their operations and bring them home. They reached the same conclusion almost a year ago. 4. Mr. Gordon writes: “And how what Representative Young—exercising his right of free speech—said is ‘obnoxious to the principle of free speech’ is a mystery to me.” Representative Young suggested that congressmen who oppose the Bush administration’s war policy are undermining the war effort and should thus be arrested, exiled, or hanged. I’ll explain this slowly, and in small words, so that Mr. Gordon understands: It is obnoxious to the principle of free speech to arrest, exile, or hang legislators for expressing their opposition to a President’s war policy. Moreover, Article I, Section 6, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution states that members of Congress “in all cases, except treason, felony and breach of the peace,” shall “be privileged from arrest during their attendance at the session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any speech or debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other place.” So not only is Don Young’s speech dishonest and obnoxious to the principles of free speech; it also proposes a gross violation of the constitutional privileges accorded to members of Congress. 5. Mr. Gordon concludes his post by posing the following problem: “I also fail to see how criticism of the left by those on the right is dangerous to the Democratic process. It seems like the essence of it to me, just as criticism of the right by those on the left is.” Again, very slowly, to help Mr. Gordon get past his confusion: Criticizing the left is all good; calling for the arrest, hanging, or exile of congressmen who oppose the war is not. The suggestion runs counter to democratic process. I never said that Don Young doesn’t have a right to call for the arrest, exile, or hanging of his congressional colleagues. Unlike Mr. Young, I don’t believe in hanging or arresting people who utter things I find obnoxious. Words have meaning, and I’m not stifling anyone’s speech when I make the simple observation that Young’s words were offensive to democratic values. Got it, Mr. Gordon?
February 16, 2007
Dragging Lincoln Into Iraq II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:50 PM EST In his post earlier today, Fred Allen notes that Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) erroneously quoted Abraham Lincoln as having said, “Congressmen who willfully take action during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs, and should be arrested, exiled or hanged.” As Fred explains, Lincoln said no such thing. Ignoring for a moment the patently offensive quality of Young’s gaffe—he is suggesting that critics of President George Bush’s Iraq policy are undermining troop morale and should be treated as “saboteurs,” a notion that is as obnoxious to the principle of free speech as it is dangerous to democratic process—it’s worth noting that Lincoln was himself a staunch antiwar congressman. As a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Lincoln introduced a resolution on December 22, 1847, demanding that President James Polk furnish Congress with “all the facts which go to establish whether the particular spot of soil on which the blood of our citizens was so shed, was, or was not, our own soil.” The resolution, which went nowhere, followed the standard Whig line that the Polk administration had lied to Congress and the nation about the location of the skirmish that justified America’s war with Mexico. Weeks later, on January 3, Lincoln voted with 84 other Whig congressmen for a resolution declaring that the war had been “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President of the United States.” (Of course, as President, Lincoln did order the banishment of antiwar Rep. Clement Vallandigham to Canada on charges that Vallandigham’s speeches against the war effort constituted “expressed or implied” treason. Lincoln seems by then to have forgotten his earlier wartime political record. It’s not generally remembered as his best or smartest move.) If it “damages morale” and “undermines the military” to ask, as Democrats (and a clear majority of Americans) are currently doing, why the Iraq war was necessary in the first place, and whether the administration’s strategy is fundamentally flawed, then surely Lincoln’s resolution and vote, which called into question the cause and legality of the Mexican-American war, did the same. By Don Young’s estimation, Lincoln should have been shot, exiled, or hanged. Good thing Don Young wasn’t around in 1848.
February 13, 2007
Primary Envy III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:45 PM EST I find myself largely in agreement with John Steele Gordon, Julie Fenster, and Alexander Burns on the pressing need for primary reform. As Ms. Fenster points out, a state’s suitability to retail politics certainly doesn’t correspond to its civic-mindedness. Out of 38 states that had contested primaries in 2006, New Hampshire ranked twenty-eighth in voter turnout. In fairness, the only competitive New Hampshire primary last year was in the first congressional district (a race that turned out to be very interesting indeed; an insurgent antiwar Democrat ultimately defeated her party’s preferred candidate and then went on to unseat an incumbent Republican congressman). But if New Hampshire wishes to lay claim to first-in-the-nation status, it’s going to have to do better than that. When I was growing up, my parents used to vote even in uncontested primaries. They likened it to going to synagogue; it was just something you were supposed to do, especially if you boasted special civic piety. (One of the arguments New Hampshire politicians often invoke to protect their first-in-the-nation status is that most other states have lower turnout in presidential primaries. But this is a loaded argument. Of course voter turnout is lower in, say, New Jersey. In past years, by the time the Garden State presidential primary came around in June, the presidential nominees were already chosen. As the 2006 off-year primaries demonstrated, New Hampshire voters are no different from anyone else. When the stakes are low, they stay home and watch television. The really interesting question is whether turnout in New Jersey will exceed turnout in New Hampshire in 2008, as the state legislature in Trenton has moved its primary date to February.)
If New Hampshire voters aren’t any more civic-minded than the rest of the country, neither have they been any better informed, despite the lavish attention heaped upon them by presidential contenders. This has been the case since the very birth of the New Hampshire myth. In the wake of his primary victory in 1968, exit polls showed that a large number of Eugene McCarthy’s supporters mistook him for Joseph McCarthy, the conservative Republican senator from Wisconsin who had been dead for 11 years. These same polls showed that 55 percent of McCarthy voters supported the bombing campaign against North Vietnam, even though McCarthy’s entire candidacy was predicated on a bombing halt. Then and now, New Hampshire voters are every bit as misinformed as the larger American electorate. I’m not arguing that New Hampshire is a bad place. Quite to the contrary. It’s a lovely place. It’s got clean lakes to swim in, tall mountains to hike, beautiful town greens, covered bridges, and tax-free outlet malls. Can’t go wrong on any of those counts. But why should it get to go first? Effectively, if I might invoke some grade-school logic, because it called first. In 1968, when Eugene McCarthy won an upset victory against Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, thus giving birth to the tremendous lore surrounding the Granite State primary, only 15 states chose their delegates by primary. At least 57 percent of national convention delegates were selected by county committeemen, state party apparatchiks, and elected officials. Though he didn’t compete in a single primary that year, as early as June 2, Vice President Hubert Humphrey had enough delegates to secure the nomination. Which is to say, neither the New Hampshire primary nor the national system of primaries and caucuses is an ancient or timeless political tradition. When the Democrats changed their rules in the early 1970s and made primaries the chief vehicle for selecting convention delegates, New Hampshire capitalized on the McCarthy myth and, in 1975, passed a state law mandating first-in-the-nation status. Incredibly, the state legislature in Concord continues to believe that its laws are binding on the nation. I like John Steele Gordon’s idea, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for seeing it enacted. Presidential candidates are obsequious in their courtship of Granite State voters. It’s why Bill Clinton didn’t even bother to compete in Delaware in 1992; he didn’t want to upset New Hampshire notables who were peeved at Delaware for moving its primary up. My guess is that more states will push their primaries forward, and in 2012 New Hampshire will hold its primary on the day preceding Thanksgiving 2011. After all, it’s only fair. They called first.
February 12, 2007
Bill Kristol and Stephen Douglas Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:00 AM EST I’m not particularly a fan of Bill Kristol, the outspoken neoconservative magazine editor who has been one of the most strident proponents of the Iraq War. But rather than criticize Kristol for his position on the war, I’d like to suggest that he is a bad historian. Appearing today on Fox News Sunday, Kristol said the following: “We’re electing a war President in 2008. If I can go back to [Sen. Barack] Obama and Lincoln for just one second, Lincoln’s ‘house divided’ speech in 1858 was a speech saying we cannot live as a house divided on slavery. And he implicitly says we’ll have to fight a civil war if necessary on this. Obama’s speech is a ‘can’t we get along’ speech—sort of the opposite of Lincoln. He would have been with Stephen Douglas in 1858. Let’s paper over these differences, rise above politics, and all get along. That’s not Giuliani’s mode. And I think in a war context, social conservatives want to win the war against Islamic jihadism.” Kristol is referring, of course, to Obama’s decision to launch his 2008 presidential bid from the steps of the Old State House in Springfield, Illinois, where Lincoln (like Obama), served eight years as a state legislator, and where he also lived with his family for the better part of his adult life. Regardless of what one may think of Obama’s decision to jump into the fray after just two years as a U.S. senator, surely the well-choreographed event makes sense. By evoking Lincoln’s memory, he is subtly framing his candidacy as a realization of a dream long-deferred—a dream of a truly egalitarian nation—and also reminding potential voters that he has logged about as much time in Washington and Springfield as his famous predecessor. Granted, Obama is taking some liberties with history. Lincoln did not profess the kind of racial egalitarianism as radical Republicans like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens, both of whom genuinely believed black and white Americans to be equals. Indeed, during his famous debates with Stephen Douglas he took pains to tell listeners that he did not consider black men his social or intellectual equals, though it’s not clear to what extent he tailored those statements to the racially conservative disposition of downstate voters. (Years later, Frederick Douglass wrote favorably of his wartime meetings with Lincoln and said that the President treated him as an equal.) Moreover, Lincoln rose to the Presidency in the days before the growth of the modern state, when that office demanded considerably less experience than it does today. Ironically, it was under Lincoln’s watch that the federal state (and with it, the Presidency) underwent its first major period of expansion. But if Obama is playing loose with Lincoln’s legacy, Kristol is woefully ignorant of it. Or, he has a tin ear. Equating Barack Obama, a black man, with Stephen Douglas, a slavery apologist, is nothing short of idiotic. More fundamentally, Lincoln was very much a conciliator. In 1858, when he debated Douglas, in 1860, when he was elected to the Presidency, and until September 22, 1862, when he issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, he opposed the extension of slavery in the territories, but not its existence in the slave states. He was nominated in 1860 over the party favorite, then-radical William Seward, because his moderation made him palatable to residents of Southern Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Even in his second inaugural address, in which he denounced slavery in bloody, biblical terms, he looked forward to a merciful period of reconstruction. Surely he would not have compromised an inch on black civil rights, as did his successor. But in temperament, Lincoln was very much a man of the center. Stephen Douglas, on the other hand, was no conciliator. True, he attempted to have his cake and eat it too, by sponsoring legislation (the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act) that repealed the Missouri Compromise while insisting all the while that popular sovereignty would effectively keep slavery out of the newly organized territories. But intellectual dishonesty is not the same as consensus-building. It was Douglas, after all, who violently disrupted an almost 35-year compromise that kept slavery out of all territories acquired in the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36’30” line. It was Douglas who turned a blind eye for two years to Southern-sponsored violence and electoral fraud in Kansas. (He broke with the Democratic administration in 1857 and opposed the Lecompton Constitution, mainly to save his political skin in Illinois.) It was Douglas who used racially incendiary language to appeal to the baser emotions of downstate voters. Indeed, throughout 1858 Douglas played the populist rabble-rouser to Lincoln’s statesman. I wonder if Bill Kristol appreciates the irony of his commentary. After all, it’s really he, not Obama, who should look smilingly on Stephen Douglas, a man who foolishly unleashed sectarian violence that he could not contain, for reasons that were later hard to fathom, and for which he stubbornly refused to accept even the slightest responsibility.
January 24, 2007
The State of the Union II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 06:15 PM EST On the subject of the State of the Union address, John Steele Gordon writes approvingly of George Bush’s most recent speech (which I did not watch, as I am in England) and adds, “Having watched more State of the Union speeches than I might wish (I remember watching President Eisenhower in 1958), there is one aspect of these speeches that has annoyed me for nearly 50 years, and I wonder if I’m the only one who is annoyed by it. When the President arrives, the sergeant at arms walks down the aisle, stops, and says, ‘Mr. [or last night, Madame] Speaker! The President of the United States!’ The President then enters the House Chamber, and everyone rises to their feet and greets him with tumultuous applause as he makes his way to the rostrum.” And so on, and so on. Like many viewers, Mr. Gordon is impatient with the constant standing and sitting, applauding and cheering, and endless string of redundant introductions. A slight and not particularly important correction: Until 1995, when the GOP took control of the Congress for the first time in 40 years, it was the doorkeeper who announced the President. The Republicans abolished this office and streamlined many of the functions of the other House officers, including the clerk, the chaplain, and the sergeant at arms. Officers of the House are elected by the representatives (which is to say, they are selected by the majority leadership), have lifetime floor privileges (just like members), and are paid a salary equal to that of congressmen. Some, like Edward McPherson, were former members themselves. McPherson served as a Republican representative from Pennsylvania from 1859 to 1863, lost his seat in the 1862 off-year elections (in part a backlash against the Lincoln administration’s failure to win a swift victory against the Confederacy), and went on to serve several stints as clerk. Generally, House officers fulfill a combination of administrative and ceremonial functions, but on occasion their work matters a great deal. At the opening of each new Congress, the clerk presides over the House until a speaker is elected. In December 1865, when the Thirty-ninth Congress convened, McPherson refused to call the names of several dozen congressmen-elect from the recently defeated Southern states. McPherson was acting at the behest of his political patron, Thaddeus Stevens, a congressman from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who was the de facto majority leader. Though President Andrew Johnson had unilaterally readmitted several former Confederate states to the Union, Stevens and his Republican colleagues were determined to wrest meaningful concessions from the vanquished rebels, including a commitment to the rule of law, agreement to basic civil rights for black freedmen, and the exclusion of former high-ranking Confederate military and civilian officials from the political process. Over the hoots and hollers of Democratic congressmen, McPherson held his ground and excluded the Southern pretenders from the swearing-in ceremony.
January 18, 2007
Etymology and History II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:20 AM EST In his post on etymology and history, John Steele Gordon wrote, “It wasn’t until after the Second World War that this ‘fashionable’ anti-Semitism [in the United States] began to wane. The novel by Laura Hobson, Gentleman’s Agreement, made into a movie directed by Elia Kazan that won the Oscar for best picture in 1947, marks, perhaps, the beginning of the end of this form of anti-Semitism.”
In many ways, Gentleman’s Agreement was of a piece with other staples of the new culture of pluralism that emerged from World War II. Throughout the 1940s, the American government’s Office of War Information actively worked with Hollywood studios to churn out “platoon films,” each of which featured an ethnically (and, much more rarely, racially) diverse group of soldiers or marines. Movies like Air Force (1943), Bataan (1943), Guadalcanal Diary (1943), The Purple Heart (1944), Objective Burma (1945), and A Walk in the Sun (1945) encouraged ordinary servicemen and civilians to think of the nation’s diversity as a source of strength, while paradoxically blunting the real differences between people of different races, religions, and national backgrounds. In Pride of the Marines, a wounded Jewish serviceman named Lee Diamond tells his comrades (over the background score of America the Beautiful), “One happy afternoon when God was feeling good, he sat down and thought up a beautiful country and named it the U.S.A. . . . Don’t tell me we can’t make it work in peace like we do in war. Don’t tell me we can’t pull together. . . . Maybe some guys won’t hire me because I celebrate Passover instead of Easter. . . . We need a country to live in where no one gets booted around for any reason.”
This was a radically inclusive message—certainly a break with the 1920s and 1930s, when raw prejudice was still very much a staple of the public culture. Though African-Americans fared less well by the new ethic of diversity (they were usually, though not always, excluded from platoon films, an omission that was at least an accurate reflection of military policy), they weren’t entirely absent from the litany of artistic and political endorsements of an open society. In the Oscar-winning 1945 short film The House I Live In, Frank Sinatra teaches a group of white ethnic street kids that religion and national origins are completely inconsequential. Importantly, though the group does not include a black kid, Sinatra sings, “. . . all races and religions, that’s America to me.” It’s unimaginable that he could have voiced a comparable sentiment five years earlier.
On the other hand, the new culture of diversity tended to emphasize what Americans shared in common in such a way as to blunt the very real (and usually benign) differences between Catholics and Jews, Irish and Italians, African-Americans and whites. In Gentleman’s Agreement, Gregory Peck, whose non-Jewish character poses as a Jew for several weeks in order to better understand the workings of anti-Semitism, explains to his son that Jews are just like all other Americans, except that they go to “church” on Saturday. Fair enough. But not exactly right.
Clearly there was a tension between celebrating diversity and emphasizing the importance of national unity. Most movie artists and politicians erred toward the latter in the 1940s.
There’s a great story, perhaps apocryphal, about Gentleman’s Agreement. After the film won its Best Picture Oscar, a reporter asked one of the members of the crew what lessons he had learned. He replied that it’s important not to treat someone badly because he’s Jewish, because he might actually turn out to be a Christian.
Progress is progress.
January 16, 2007
Racism and Wages II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:20 PM EST Regarding my feature article on Martin Luther King, Jr., Fred Smoler asks whether Jim Crow necessarily drove down the wages of white workers as well as black workers, and, if so, why. Certainly Martin Luther King, Jr., believed that was the case, as did W. E. B. Du Bois, and as did most members of the loose Popular Front–era coalition of civil rights activists allied with organizations like the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. Fred asks, “wouldn’t white workers’ wages rise as a consequence of racial discrimination in the labor market? If the potential pool of applicants for a set of jobs is limited by racist exclusion of black workers, the law of supply and demand ought to drive up white wages. Did white workers really receive only psychic income from their racial privilege, but no real income?” Of course, white workers benefited from Jim Crow inasmuch as their wages almost always exceeded those of black workers. Moreover, as I’ve argued on this website, the white working class also received a host of generous public sector subsidies—particularly federally backed mortgages—which were largely closed to African-Americans and which facilitated the rise of hundreds of thousands of families to the ranks of the middle class. That said, if Jim Crow placed whites at an advantage vis-à-vis African-Americans, it did not necessarily place them at an absolute advantage. Take the following famous example: During the 1934 gubernatorial election in Georgia, Eugene Talmadge visited Rome, Georgia, the state’s center of textile manufacturing, where he delivered incendiary speeches that appealed to raw race prejudice. He sharply criticized FDR’s National Recovery Administration for issuing wage scales that placed black and white workers on parity. Talmadge won the election and carried Rome’s white working-class districts. Three days later he declared martial law in order to protect the “right to work” and sent 4,000 troops to bust the textile union. No union equaled stagnant wages. By the same token, most Southern congressman ardently opposed New Deal measures like the National Labor Relations Act, which provided legal mechanisms for workers to unionize, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which introduced maximum hours and minimum wages; they also joined Republicans to block FDR’s proposed wartime expansion of the New Deal. At the insistence of Southern congressmen, the Social Security Act initially excluded farm workers and domestic workers, as did the FLSA. These exclusions hit African-Americans, who were concentrated in both sectors, particularly hard, but they also affected hundreds of thousands of white families. On the local level, most Southern states in the Jim Crow era were marked by a low-tax, low-service, low-wage mentality that benefited large landowners and owners of the region’s limited industrial base but did nothing for the larger population of farmers. One must consider public provisions like education, health care, and infrastructure (e.g., roads, bridges, levies) as part of the “wages” that white Southerners forfeited when they repeatedly elected allies of the Black Belt barons and Big Mules to state and federal office. One needn’t concentrate just on the Jim Crow South to appreciate these dynamics. Look, for instance, at the famous 1919 steel strikes in Chicago. They failed, in large part because employers were able to import black strikebreakers to bust the union, which had never seen fit to include black workers. The prevailing wages, hours, and working conditions in steel remained appallingly low, high, and dangerous, in that order, until the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, later renamed the United Steel Workers of America, organized black and white workers in the mid-1930s. Until the rise of the great CIO industrial unions, white workers in industries like steel enjoyed a comparative advantage over black workers, but they fared much better—in terms of wages, hours, working conditions, insurance, and state benefits—when they joined hands with African-Americans, formed strong labor unions, and flexed their muscle inside the Democratic party.
January 8, 2007
Watergate Revisited Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 06:15 PM EST Since everyone deserves a vigorous defense, someone should stand up for Charles Colson. Why not John Steele Gordon? Mr. Gordon accuses me of hypocrisy for arguing that states should restore the voting rights of ex-felons while also mocking Colson. On the contrary. Colson should absolutely be permitted to vote. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t recall the criminal operation he built and ran inside the Nixon White House—an operation that illegally sabotaged rival presidential campaigns (particularly, that of Sen. Ed Muskie), willfully violated the civil rights of numerous private citizens, and employed toughs to physically assault antiwar protesters. Colson served seven months in prison. It should have been seven years. In any event, I’m not suggesting that he shouldn’t be permitted to vote. I just don’t believe a word he says. Neither am I crying for Chuck Colson. He’s as powerful today as he was when he was coordinating criminal projects for Richard Nixon. His life turned out just fine. Conservatives should treat all ex-convicts with such open arms. (Note to Mr. Gordon: Have I defended Webster Hubbell in these pages, or in any other forum? I don’t recall having done so. Unless he can refresh my memory, he should not intimate what is not true.) On the topic of Charles Colson, it’s worth noting that Fred Fielding, the high-powered Beltway attorney who has just been named to replace Harriet Miers as White House chief counsel, was also a member of the Nixon White House. As an assistant to White House counsel John Dean, Fielding sat in on FBI interviews with White House personnel during the initial investigation into the Watergate burglary. He did so with the explicit permission of L. Patrick Gray, the acting FBI director. This is partly why Gray never got to serve as director in his own right. It was a completely inappropriate violation of Bureau procedure, just this side of obstruction of justice. Fred Fielding played only a bit role in the cover-up. But he was there. Interestingly, before it materialized that Mark Felt was Deep Throat, the confidential government source featured in Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s bestseller All the President’s Men, Fielding was rumored to be the mole. Then again, so were about 100 other people.
January 8, 2007
Mitt Romney, Again Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:00 PM EST Referring to my statement that politicians who make their faith a central theme of their candidacy should be prepared to answer specific questions about that faith, John Steele Gordon writes, “I’m sorry, but I smell a political rat here. Mr. Zeitz, after all, will not be heading up the Upper West Side Romney for President Club. This seems to me to be an invitation for people of faith to get tangled up in public theological discussions that will win them no votes but might well cost them votes, especially if they make some misstatement or fail to express clearly some obscure point, providing an opening for their political enemies to twist it into something else entirely.”
For starters, Mr. Gordon is absolutely correct. I will not be heading up the Upper West Side Romney for President Club. I live on the Upper East Side. And I spend much of my year in England.
As for Mr. Gordon’s point—“Mr. Zeitz didn’t reply to my question as to whether a Nexis search would turn up concerns among the ‘religious right’ regarding Romney’s Mormonism”—the answer is yes, and no. A quick Nexis search revealed that James Dobson, the powerful head of the Focus on the Family, said recently, “I don't believe that conservative Christians will vote for a Mormon, but that remains to be seen, I guess.” He should know. Tom Minnery, Dobson’s policy advisor, pointedly declined to say whether Dobson would refuse to endorse Romney on religious grounds. In an interview about the prospects of a Romney candidacy, Charles Colson, the Watergate felon who once was lost but now is found (Colson is a leading evangelical conservative), invoked the story of Martin Luther, who said he would rather be “ruled by a wise Turk than a foolish Christian.” Doesn’t sound like Colson will be heading up Former Watergate Felons for Romney. Strike two for the governor.
Recognizing the sectarian dilemma inherent in a Mormon candidacy, Romney’s campaign recently organized a sit-down between the candidate and leading evangelical Christians, including Gary Bauer, Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell, and the pastors of several important megachurches. Several of the attendees were impressed by Romney and told reporters that while they had serious theological qualms with the governor, they were willing to give him a serious look because they liked his stance on political questions.
Ironically, a recent Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll revealed that the two groups that are most resistant to installing a Mormon in the White House are people who attend church more than once a week, 50 percent of whom said they would not vote for a Mormon, and Democrats, 42 percent of whom made the same claim. The former group includes a disproportionate share of evangelical Christians. So, at least one can say that Mormon politicians help Democrats and devout Christians find common ground. Sort of.
Mr. Gordon writes, “Mr. Zeitz says that people of faith should be cross-examined by a bunch of intellectuals to find out exactly what faith and what tenets and what the pattern on their theological boxer shorts is. Mr. Zeitz’s offer for people of faith to sit down and discuss the details of that faith is one that can—and undoubtedly will—be refused. Can anyone imagine candidates without faith sitting down and discussing the reasons for their agnosticism at length, or even admitting that they are agnostic?”
I don’t recall having suggested that we subject candidates who profess a strong faith to trial by university professors. Unlike Mr. Gordon, who postures as a populist but clearly has trouble imagining that non-intellectuals are concerned about and engaged by the political debate, I think that most voters are genuinely interested in knowing what ideas drive and inspire political candidates. If a politician makes faith a central part of his message, as Romney has done, he should explain precisely what that faith entails. Voters have a right to know. If a religious candidate doesn’t tout his faith as a selling point, then his faith is, and should remain, a private affair.
Mr. Gordon ignores my larger point—to wit, that by making a fetish out of “faith,” we denigrate faith.
If history is any indicator, evangelical Christians and Mormons will likely find ground for political cooperation—if not this year, then eventually. Remember that in the mid-twentieth century, fundamentalists and Catholics were deeply distrustful of each other. This was particularly true of fundamentalists, who regarded Catholicism as an apostate creed and often speculated that the Roman church might very well be in league with Satan. Prominent fundamentalists like Otto Klink casually denounced Catholicism as a “monster of iniquity, ” while Bob Jones, Sr., founder of Bob Jones University, a leading Bible college, argued that the “Roman Catholic Church in its organization and its exaltation of saints and a priesthood, is veiling Christ as our Intercessor. You don’t need any Virgin Mary to intercede for you. You don’t need a pope or a priest. The humblest Christian who walks this earth has as much access to God the Father through Jesus Christ the risen Lord as a priest, a bishop, or a pope. We Christians in this church age are a ‘kingdom of priests.’”
Fifty years later, leading evangelical and Catholic conservatives collaborate comfortably in their political opposition to abortion rights and gay marriage, and in their push for stronger human rights laws and funding for faith-based initiatives. Sectarian boundaries have tended to crumble in America, if slowly and in fits and starts. But as I said in my initial post on this subject, history doesn’t always move in a linear fashion, and even when it does, its direction is not always forward-looking.
January 3, 2007
The Romneys of Michigan VI Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:30 AM EST John Steele Gordon draws an obvious but important parallel between Mitt Romney, the outgoing governor of Massachusetts and a devout Mormon who is currently planning to run for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination, and John F. Kennedy, the nation’s first (and, to date, only) Catholic President. As Mr. Gordon explains, in 1960 Kennedy delivered a speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in which he vigorously defended the separation of church and state and affirmed that America was a secular democracy “where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the pope, the National Council of Churches, or any other ecclesiastical source—where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials—and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.” Mr. Gordon concludes that any questions about Mitt Romney’s religious convictions are as crass as were questions about Kennedy’s Catholicism.
In temperament and spirit, I agree with Mr. Gordon, though as a matter of history, I don’t think the Kennedy-Romney analogy is operative, and as a voter, I would like to demand more of candidates who vaguely profess the importance of their faith without explaining what exactly their faith tells them.
John Kennedy did not wear his Catholicism on his sleeve, claim Catholicism as his primary intellectual influence, or advocate a more prominent place for religion in the public sphere. In private, Kennedy was a devout Catholic, but one who questioned many of the prevailing tenets of his faith. In a letter to his mother in the early 1940s, he wrote, “. . . don’t good works come under our obligations to the Catholic Church[?] We’re not a completely ritualistic, formalistic, hierarchial [sic] structure in which the Word, the truth, must only come down from the very top—a structure that allows for no individual interpretation—or are we?” The question was, of course, rhetorical. Twenty years before Vatican II, there was indeed little if any space for individual interpretation of the Word in Catholic culture. The ultramontane Catholic revival of the previous century asserted the predominance of formal worship and experiential religious rites over interior dialogue and inquiry. It also placed a high premium on ecclesiastical authority. Kennedy knew this and grappled with it. Whatever his beliefs, he did not feature them in his public life. Though he died before the effects of Vatican II were fully felt, it’s a reasonable speculation that JFK, ever the ironist and skeptic, would have been more comfortable in the post-1963 Church.
In the speech that Mr. Gordon cited, John Kennedy said, “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.”
By contrast, in a campaign swing last year, Mitt Romney said, “Most people in South Carolina want a person of faith as their leader. But they [South Carolina voters] don’t care what brand of faith that is. . . . I believe Jesus Christ is my savior. I believe in God. I’m a person of faith and I believe that’s the type of person Americans want.”
There is considerable ambiguity in this statement. Does Mitt Romney mean to suggest that Americans want a person of “faith” to govern their affairs, or someone who accepts Christ as his or her personal savior? If he means the latter, then I beg to differ. If he means the former, then is it not fair to ask, faith in what?
Secularists—liberal secularists especially—take a lot of heat for their alleged mockery of, or disregard for, people of faith. But there is a flip side to this argument. If people of faith demand to be taken seriously, they should be willing to discuss the tenets of their faith. In another forum, Mitt Romney said that Mormonism is like “every other faith” because its “fundamental values . . . are quintessentially American.” This is about as lame a statement as I’ve ever read. It is also decidedly disrespectful of faith in a way few liberal secularists would dare be. Faith is about belief. Theology is about moral revelation and understanding. Not all religions are the same, programmatically or in their core beliefs and values. To collapse “faith” into a process (believing) rather than a discrete set of beliefs (believing in something) is to mock the very substance of faith.
Moreover, there are, according to Wikipedia, 6.5 billion persons on Earth (and, if I might use a little circular logic, the number must be accurate, because 6.5 billion potential Wikipedia contributors can’t be wrong). 300 million of these people live in the United States. The various religions of 95.4 percent of the world do not “quintessentially” reflect the values and beliefs of 4.6 percent of the world. To suggest otherwise is to mock the very serious components of—and differences between—the world’s many faiths.
To be fair, Mitt Romney is not the only public official in recent U.S. history to speak in such lame terms about faith. Dwight Eisenhower famously said, “Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith—and I don't care what it is.” Which makes about as much sense as saying, our government is founded on a deeply felt political idea, and I don’t care what it is. Democracy? Republicanism? Autocracy? Anarchy? Radical collectivist socialist state? Take your pick—all are good, as long as you deeply believe in one of them.
It’s not just conservatives who have embraced this wishy-washy idea of faith (which, I’ll say it again, is inherently, if ironically, disrespectful of faith). In his influential book Protestant, Catholic, Jew (1955), the liberal theologian Will Herberg argued that America was a nation of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, with each group committed to a vague “American way of life” and divided only nominally on significant questions of faith.
If this is indeed true—if Dwight Eisenhower, Will Herberg, and Mitt Romney are right—if faith is just the process of believing in something, no matter what, then faith really matters very little, and we shouldn’t waste our time discussing it in the political arena. If, however, faith is something altogether more serious than process, and if people of faith believe that their religious convictions lend them special qualification to hold office, then the substance of their faith is fair game.
If this argument seems to conflict with my initial post, in which I lamented the speculation over Romney’s religion, I’d suggest it does not. What I lament is the possibility that certain religious voters will veto a candidate solely on the basis of his sectarian affiliation. This is something altogether different from asking a candidate who places his faith front and center to discuss that faith.
January 2, 2007
The Romneys of Michigan III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:00 PM EST As luck would have it, just hours after I submitted my post on Mitt Romney, in which I argued that “there has been rampant speculation that his religion might turn off a sufficient number of voters—especially evangelical Protestants, whose support is crucial for GOP primary candidates—to cost him the election,” I received my copy of this week’s New Republic. Its cover story is entitled, “A Mormon in the White House? Why Religion Matters.” Maybe John Steele Gordon is right to “wonder . . . exactly who is continually bringing up the subject of Mitt Romney’s religion today? Is it the religious right or commentators on the right? Or is it liberal commentators (atheists or at least agnostics to a man and many of them profoundly theologically ignorant) assuming, as usual, that the ‘religious right’ is a monolithic group of intolerant bigots, who will reject anyone who is not one of them?”
A quick Nexis search revealed a good deal more speculation in conservative journals (e.g., National Review, The Weekly Standard) about Romney’s fitness for office than in liberal journals (e.g., The New Republic, The Nation). Moreover, when they ponder the topic, conservative and liberal journals alike have focused almost singularly on, as National Review put it, “Evangelicals for Romney?—A major question of the coming period.” The prevailing assumption is that liberals will probably not vote for Romney because many of his positions—on abortion, on gay rights, on religion in the public sphere—are conservative. The wild card is evangelical Christians. As Mr. Gordon points out, they share many policy goals with Mormons. But will they shelve their sectarian misgivings and support Romney?
I’m dismayed but not surprised by Mr. Gordon’s characterization of “liberal commentators” as “atheists or at least agnostics to a man and many of them profoundly theologically ignorant.” I’d venture a guess that the editorial staff at The New Republic, a magazine that runs probing articles on the current and historical interplay between religion and politics, knows a lot more about theology than the average American and includes not a few religiously devout persons. Ditto the staff of other leading left-wing journals of opinion like Dissent, The Nation, and Commonweal. Indeed, Mr. Gordon sounds especially preposterous when he writes of “liberal commentators” as “atheists or at least agnostics to a man,” and ignorant of matters pertaining to religion and theology. One has nothing to do with the other (a person can be agnostic and know more than his fair share about theology), and both are incorrect in any event. As a historian, Mr. Gordon surely knows that Christian theologians have been critical players in the development of postwar liberalism, from Reinhold Niebuhr (neo-fundamentalist) and Martin Luther King, Jr. (black evangelical), to William Sloane Coffin (mainline Protestant) and Charles Curran (Catholic).
But back to The New Republic. Though I stand by my lament that Mitt Romney faces a problem his father didn’t have to confront in 1968—namely, his religion—I think TNR’s article raises a fair point. Damon Linker, the author of the cover story, provides an impressive historical overview of Mormon theology and suggests that two tenets of the faith—the central role it assigns to living prophesy, and its view of America as a key staging ground in millennial eschatology—pose theoretical conflicts with secular democracy. Linker’s point is not that Mormons or any other religious group are unqualified to serve as President, but rather that any candidate who makes his religious convictions a focal point of his candidacy, as Romney has done, should be prepared to discuss those convictions in full and address potential conflicts with public office-holding.
Linker writes, “In the case of Mitt Romney, citizens have every reason to seek clarification about the character of his Mormonism. Does he believe, for example, that we are living through the ‘latter days’ of human history, just prior to the second coming of Christ? And does he think that, when the Lord returns, he will rule over the world from the territory of the United States? Does Romney believe that the president of the Mormon Church is a genuine prophet of God? If so, how would he respond to a command from this prophet on matters of public policy? And, if his faith would require him to follow this hypothetical command, would it not be accurate to say that, under a President Romney, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would truly be in charge of the country—with its leadership having final say on matters of right and wrong?”
Are these questions fair game? Or do they violate the spirit of the Constitutional prohibition against religions means tests for office holders? A question for my fellow AmericanHeritage.com contributors.
December 29, 2006
The Romneys of Michigan Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 01:10 PM EST In the Department of Tenuous Segues: Speaking of Gerald Ford, who represented Michigan in the House of Representatives for 25 years, how about Mitt Romney, the outgoing governor of Massachusetts and current GOP presidential hopeful? His father, George Romney, served as governor of Michigan in the 1960s and launched an abortive campaign for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination. George Romney’s candidacy hit an insurmountable roadblock in 1967, when the governor told a Michigan television audience that “when I came back from Vietnam, I just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get.” What he meant to say was that his recent fact-finding tour had left him deeply skeptical of claims by administration officials and military leaders that America was turning the corner in southeast Asia. To most pundits, however, it sounded simply as though the would-be commander-in-chief had admitted to being brainwashed. In response, Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, widely known for his acerbic wit, quipped that “a light rinse would have been sufficient.” Jokes aside, the damage was done, and Romney withdrew from the race. I conducted a quick electronic search of major newspapers (The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal) and found that Romney’s religion (he was a Mormon, as is his son) provoked minimal discussion in 1967, when he was the front-runner for the GOP nomination. Insomuch as anyone suggested that a Mormon might be unqualified for high office, critics pointed to the church’s shoddy record on race relations and demanded of Romney an ironclad assurance that he would enforce America’s new civil rights laws. As a Washington Post article dated March 26, 1967, explained, “Romney is beginning to feel the heat of religious differences, perhaps not primarily directed at the Mormon Church of which he is a devout member, but bearing on the Mormon doctrine, which prevents Negroes from serving in the higher echelons of the priesthood.” More widely debated was Romney’s legal standing as a presidential aspirant. His parents were U.S. citizens who crossed the Mexican border to flee religious persecution in their native Arizona. George Romney was born in Mexico but returned to the United States as a young boy. Consequently, political commentators in 1967 wondered if he qualified as a “natural born citizen.” Fast-forward to 2006. No one has seriously suggested that Mitt Romney is unqualified to serve as President because he is a Mormon, but there has been rampant speculation that his religion might turn off a sufficient number of voters—especially evangelical Protestants, whose support is crucial for GOP primary candidates—to cost him the election. At first glance, it seems odd that religious difference is a matter of greater speculation today than it was 40 years ago. To take a Whiggish view of American history, we should be on a straight path to perfection. I suspect that the rise of the “religious right”—that loose confederation of orthodox religious groups that since the 1970s have stridently pressed their agenda in America’s courts, media, and political arena—has made religion more important in the twenty-first century than it was in the mid-twentieth. For all the public fawning that religious conservatives demand and receive, from Republicans and Democrats alike, it may just be that their influence is every bit as invidious as it is salutary. After all, what can one say of a country that didn’t bat an eyelash at the prospect of a Mormon President in 1967 but that hotly debates the prospect in 2007? Sometimes history moves in a backwards direction.
December 27, 2006
Gerald Ford and Eastern Europe Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:30 PM EST In watching PBS’s coverage on NewsHour of Gerald Ford’s death, it occurred to me that history has been unfair to the late President on at least one count. In 1976 Ford attracted considerable criticism for claiming in his debate with Jimmy Carter, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.” To millions of stunned television viewers, Ford’s assertion seemed unforgivably daft. Was the President really so stupid as to believe, more than 30 years after the Yalta Conference, that Eastern Europe was still up for grabs? Few sources quote the rest of Ford’s statement, in which he specifically pointed to Yugoslavia, Romania, and Poland as examples of Eastern European countries not under Moscow’s paw. Was Ford wrong? Not necessarily. In the mid-1970s all three states were certainly part of the Communist bloc, insomuch as there was a united Communist bloc. But Romania’s leader, Nicolae Ceausescu, maintained a stubborn independence of Moscow. Under Ceausescu, Romania was the only Warsaw Pact nation to maintain diplomatic relations with Israel after the Six Day War and to criticize the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Similarly, under the leadership of Marshal Tito, Yugoslavia effectively maintained a neutral stance during the Cold War, continuing to enjoy reasonably friendly diplomatic relations with the United States and its NATO allies. I know less about Poland in the 1970s and would defer to my colleague Fred Smoler, whose training in European history is far superior to mine. But I imagine Ford had something specific in mind when he singled out Warsaw for its independence of the Kremlin. To be sure, Ford didn’t convey his idea clearly, and ultimately politicians should be skilled communicators. On the other hand, journalists shouldn’t confuse themselves with stenographers. They should act as informed professionals who mediate between elected officials and the general public. Ford’s argument was valid, and in an ideal world, it would have inspired a nuanced debate about the realities of Cold War–era geopolitics. It’s a small point, all these years later. But as John Steele Gordon pointed out in today’s feature article, Ford was a supremely decent man and a devoted public servant. It’s worth remembering that he was also a good deal smarter than many people assumed, then and now.
December 21, 2006
Virgil Be Good(e) Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:15 PM EST I’m always on the lookout for the rare issue on which John Steele Gordon and I are likely to find agreement. I can’t say for sure, but I’m guessing that Mr. Gordon won’t object too strenuously if I nominate Virginia Congressman Virgil H. Goode, Jr., for Moron of the Month.
As readers are likely aware, Rep. Goode is offended by the stated intention of incoming Congressman Keith Ellison (Dem., Minn.), a Muslim, to use a Koran, rather than a Christian Bible, when he takes the oath of office in January. In a letter to constituents, Goode warned, “The Muslim Representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district and if American citizens don’t wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration, there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran. . . . We need to stop illegal immigration totally and reduce legal immigration and end the diversity visas policy . . . allowing many persons from the Middle East to come to this country.”
There are so many problems with Goode’s xenophobic rant that it’s difficult to know where to begin. For starters, Ellison isn’t an immigrant. He’s an African-American who converted many years ago to Islam. Moreover, having already served five terms in the House of Representatives, Goode should know that when members take the oath of office in January, they do not swear on a Bible or religious text of any sort. They simply raise their right hands—all 435 members in unison—and repeat the official oath. Ellison plans to use the Koran at a private, unofficial ceremony later in the day. All new members, Democrats and Republicans alike, will enjoy the same opportunity to pose with Nancy Pelosi at similar, unofficial swearing-in ceremonies. It’s just a photo op. It means absolutely nothing.
Of course, the real problem with Goode’s letter is that it betrays a shocking degree of ignorance and bigotry, something better suited to the nineteenth century than to the twenty-first.
As late as the 1840s, England’s small Jewish community found itself barred from government service. Unless a Jew was willing to swear “on the true faith of a Christian,” he could not sit in Parliament or on municipal councils and was ineligible for any Crown office. Though Parliament had granted Catholics and nonconformists the right to sit in the Commons, Jews were still denied this opportunity unless they were willing to take a Christian oath.
In 1847 the City of London elected Lionel Rothschild, a scion of the famous Jewish banking family, to the House of Commons on the Whig line. When he refused to swear a Christian oath, the Tory majority refused to seat him. In turn, Rothschild’s constituents reelected him to Parliament. In a ritual that lasted the better part of a decade, Rothschild was regularly elected to the Commons and was regularly denied his seat. An agitated Tory complained that “the rabble of London, partly out of love of mischief, partly from contempt of the House of Commons, and partly from a desire to give a slap in the face to Christianity, elected a Jew.” After 11 years of this routine, Tory Prime Minister Edward Stanley persuaded his party to loosen the rules a bit, thus allowing Rothschild to take his seat in 1858. In 1860 Parliament determined that Jewish members-elect could devise an oath of office that did not violate their faith. A short while later, in 1871, Parliament voted to allow Oxford and Cambridge to award degrees to Jews, effectively ending the long history of official religious discrimination that once governed gentile-Jewish relations in Great Britain.
The United States Congress never placed religious disabilities on its members. This fact seems lost on Virgil Goode, who would probably be hard-pressed to spell the word “Parliament,” let alone demonstrate even passing familiarity with the history of Anglo-American democracy.
Rep. Goode appears to empathize with those Tories of the mid-nineteenth century who feared that diversity in Parliament might undermine the organic nature of their Christian nation. If that’s indeed the case, I’ve got bad news for Congressman Goode. America isn’t a Christian nation. It’s not a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation either. It’s a secular democratic republic. If he doesn’t like that, then, if I might paraphrase an oft-repeated invitation levied by nativists of his ilk, he should go back where he came from.
December 21, 2006
Ebonics II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:00 AM EST In response to my article on Ebonics, Fred Smoler wrote the following about teaching standard English as a second language: “You may think you are fighting for people’s dignity, but you may be as likely to protract their poverty and powerlessness. If you cannot speak or write Standard English, your life chances diminish, and being taught English as a second language may lessen your chances of attaining proficiency in the victorious dialect, now the standard language. The evidence on teaching immigrants English as a second language is not wholly encouraging, and there is some evidence that one prime constituency for that project, in the face of its perceived failures, is teachers in the field, rather than immigrant parents and children.”
I’m not familiar with the academic literature on the effectiveness of TESOL, but it’s worth dispelling the popular myth that today’s immigrants are especially resistant to learning English. In “The Language Ability of U.S. Immigrants: Assimilation and Cohort Effects,” a scholarly article that drew extensively on secondary literature and census material, Geoffrey Carliner found that English-language proficiency among immigrant children and teenagers was extremely high. “Even among ethnic groups who have come to the U.S. in large numbers within the last generation,” he wrote, “lack of English fluency does not seem to be a significant problem for teenagers or adult natives. Concerns that the children of immigrants will fail to learn English are clearly ill-founded.” For those with access to a research library, the citation for Carliner’s article is International Migration Review, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Spring 2000), 158-82.
The Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study, a major, multiyear survey financed by the Russell Sage, Andrew W. Mellon, Spencer, and National Science Foundations, found that today’s immigrant children prefer English to their parents’ native tongues and, on average, have lower dropout rates and earn higher grades than the children of American natives. In San Diego, the total district-wide dropout rate was 16.2 percent; among immigrants it was 5.7 percent. Nationwide, the survey found that English was spoken in only 6 percent of immigrant households, but 88 percent of immigrant children preferred it to their parents’ native language.
All of which goes to show that whatever we’re doing, it’s working. I don’t know whether TESOL is responsible for the success that immigrant children have enjoyed in learning English. One could presumably credit television, or the natural linguistic adaptability of kids, with this achievement. But it’s clear that there is no great English-language crisis owing to immigration.
Getting back to the debate over Ebonics, I meant to argue, simply, that (a) if classifying Ebonics as a language offered Oakland school administrators a back door to accessing more federal education dollars, then more power to them. It was a card worth playing. And (b) if teaching Standard English as a second language is a tried and tested method with immigrants, then why not employ this strategy with African-American children whose primary language (or dialect) is Ebonics? It strikes me that what Oakland’s school officials were aiming for was flexibility.
December 15, 2006
Aaron Asher’s LBJ III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 04:30 PM EST John Steele Gordon’s heartfelt defense of George Bush is very much in keeping with the holiday spirit—charitable, forgiving, and full of tremendous goodwill. It also glosses over some important and (for Mr. Gordon) inconvenient points.
Bankruptcy: Prior to the passage of the Bush administration’s bankruptcy legislation, most individuals generally filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 7 or Chapter 13. Under Chapter 7, most of a filer’s assets and property were liquidated to pay off his debts; once this process was complete, the debtor was excused from paying most of his remaining debt. Under Chapter 13, a debtor was permitted to retain his property and agreed to enter into a repayment schedule to make good on most or all of his obligations. In effect, Chapter 7 allowed debtors to make a clean start, though at the cost of losing their worldly assets, while Chapter 13 bound them to a long repayment schedule.
The Bush administration’s Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, which the President signed into law in 2005, limited eligibility for Chapter 7 relief to persons earning less than their state’s median income. The bill also capped the amount of home equity a debtor could exempt from his assets at $125,000 if his home had been purchased within the previous 40 months. Effectively, the bill sharply restricts access to Chapter 7 relief and makes it all but impossible for debtors to make a clean start of things.
I’m sure we can all agree that people who recklessly accrue debt should be held accountable for their obligations. Mr. Gordon goes a step further, praising the bankruptcy bill for making “it harder for millions of middle-class deadbeats to escape paying their entirely scrupulous creditors what they owe them, which lowers (or should lower: interest rates on unsecured loans tend to be very sticky downward) the cost of credit for everyone else.” That’s terrific rhetoric, and as I type these words from a neighborhood Starbucks, where Christmas music is being relentlessly piped through the walls, I can’t help but think of a famous Dickensian character who might have made exactly the same observation. The problem, however, is that the rhetoric doesn’t hold up.
While Congressional Quarterly reported that the number of personal bankruptcy filings rose by over 400 percent over the past two decades, and while the Federal Reserve reported in March 2004 that consumer debt stood at a record $2.12 trillion, most people filing for debt relief are not “middle-class deadbeats.” According to a Harvard study cited by the journal Health Affairs in February 2005, over half of all personal bankruptcies resulted from excessive medical bills relating to an illness in the family. Fully 90 percent of all personal bankruptcies resulted either from illness or from another catastrophic blow to family income, like divorce or job loss. In other words, what the bankruptcy bill does is place in permanent economic dependency a large number of people who did nothing wrong but get sick or lose their jobs or health care coverage.
Mr. Gordon thinks that Fred Smoler’s comparison of George Bush and Lyndon Johnson was “unfair,” but at the heart of the matter, Lyndon Johnson sought to expand the New Deal state in ways that shielded working Americans from the vicissitudes of the economy, while George Bush has tried to erode many of those protections.
Stem-cell research: It’s amusing that Mr. Gordon writes, at the top of his post, “I remember my grandfather saying, ‘God save us from those who think they are doing God’s work,’” while at the bottom of his post he writes favorably of Bush’s ban on fetal stem-cell research. Bush “forbade the use of federal funds for research that would involve the killing of embryos,” he writes.”
Not exactly. The Democratic-sponsored bill that Bush and the GOP Congress opposed would allow research only on stem cells derived from the approximately 400,000 frozen, fertilized embryos at American in-vitro-fertilization clinics that would have been destroyed in any event, as a matter of course. The Democrats propose putting these stem cell lines to good use, but they do not propose destroying—or, as Mr. Gordon writes, “killing”—stem cells that would otherwise have remained viable.
More to the point, a Fox News survey (that’s a nod to Mr. Gordon, who instinctively mistrusts any news outlet whose editorial position he generally dislikes) conducted in September found that 63 percent of respondents supported “medical research using tissue from human embryos,” while only 24 percent opposed such research. To put the matter in sharp relief, the overwhelming majority of Americans, not to mention many main-line Protestant and Jewish religious bodies and leaders, and the vast majority of the scientific community, feel that embryonic stem cell research is ethical and useful. A small minority of religious extremists believe otherwise. These persons are certainly entitled to their beliefs, and many of them have made intellectually defensible arguments against stem cell research. But it is they who lie on the outskirts of general consensus, and it is they who presume to invert Abraham Lincoln’s famous formula for faith-based politics. I have never heard a medical researcher argue that he or she is doing God’s work. And I’ve met a lot of researchers in my time in academia.
December 5, 2006
In Defense of Eric Foner Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:45 PM EST John Steele Gordon claims that Eric Foner characterized the Mexican Cession “as egregious imperialism.” In fact, in his Washington Post op-ed, Foner claimed no such thing. Assessing the Presidency of James Polk, Foner wrote: “Polk should be remembered primarily for launching that unprovoked attack on Mexico and seizing one-third of its territory for the United States. Lincoln, then a member of Congress from Illinois, condemned Polk for misleading Congress and the public about the cause of the war—an alleged Mexican incursion into the United States.”
Foner’s argument is not that the Mexican Cession was an example of brutal imperialism, but rather that it was a land grab initiated on a lie. He’s comparing George W. Bush’s spurious claims that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and ties to Al Qaeda to Polk’s claim, likely inaccurate or false, that Mexican forces had initiated an attack on American soil.
In an earlier post, Mr. Gordon snidely accused Foner of “historical malpractice,” which is a little bit funny, as Foner, who is regarded as the leading scholar of Reconstruction, is a Bancroft Prize winner with a Ph.D. from Columbia University, where he studied with Richard Hofstadter and now holds a chair in history. When Mr. Gordon wins his first Bancroft, he should feel free to judge Foner’s fidelity to the historical profession. Until then, he might want to feign a little more modesty.
“History, after all, deals with the past,” Mr. Gordon chides, “not the present, let alone the future. And history can turn on a dime.” In fact, Foner was careful to note exactly this point, explaining that Andrew Johnson was once regarded as a highly successful President, whereas today he is regarded as an abject failure. “It is impossible to say with certainty how Bush will be ranked in, say, 2050,” Foner admits. “But somehow, in his first six years in office he has managed to combine the lapses of leadership, misguided policies and abuse of power of his failed predecessors. I think there is no alternative but to rank him as the worst president in U.S. history.”
I would remind Mr. Gordon that he recently participated in an exercise that required him to rank in order of overall influence 100 Americans, including many who are still alive and whose work is not yet complete. (Hypocrisy?) If one of the best American historians of our time isn’t qualified to rank George W. Bush after his first six years in office, who is? Surely John Steele Gordon isn’t peerless.
December 4, 2006
On Class Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:45 PM EST I hope I might be able to draw a connection between two topics that recently piqued the interest of my fellow AmericanHeritage.com bloggers. In late November John Steele Gordon and I exchanged some thoughts about affirmative action in college admissions. He is categorically against it, while I’m more accepting of the idea that universities should be permitted leeway in creating a diverse student population, insomuch as diversity enhances the learning process for all members of the college community. In a seemingly unrelated exchange, last week Mr. Gordon and I wrote about the artist Norman Rockwell. I suggested that Rockwell was attentive to issues of class and race. Mr. Gordon responded, “To me, class is almost entirely an intellectual construct with very limited utility for explaining the real world.”
As it happens, this week is admissions interview week at Cambridge University, where I teach. In the English system, faculty members conduct all of the admissions interviews and render the final admissions decisions. It’s not a process I particularly enjoy, as I’m a lot nicer a guy than Mr. Gordon gives me credit for, and I find it difficult to turn away so many bright and enthusiastic students. Too many fine candidates, too few spaces. But British academia places a high premium on this process, so I have interrupted an otherwise productive research sabbatical to meet with several dozen aspiring Cambridge historians.
In England, whatever affirmative action one finds in college admissions is mostly informed by class rather than race. I often tell my English students that the difference between our countries is that America has deep class divisions but pretends it does not, while the U.K. has less inequality but pretends that its Victorian-era class system is still rigidly in place. If race looms large in America, class looms large in Britain. This is an over-exaggeration, to be sure, but my basic point is that Mr. Gordon is both right and wrong about class.
Like gender or race, class is surely an intellectual construction. Such historians as Grace Hale (who writes about the invention of whiteness), Stuart Blumin (who writes about the creation of the American middle class), and Lawrence Levine (who wrote about the emergence of class stratification in American culture) have made precisely this point. They would also agree that, once constructed, class assumes tremendous importance as a social category. In England, it determines what kind of secondary school a university applicant attended, how much social capital, savvy, and networking assets he brings to the admissions process, and how well she presents herself in an admissions interview. The trick for the admissions officer is to see past the obvious differences between candidates from different backgrounds. The applicant from a prestigious private school (which the British call a public school) may submit more polished written work than the candidate from a state school, but does that mean he is a more promising student? Does it mean he will excel better in the classroom? Not necessarily.
In a more benign way, scholars and memoirists have written a rich body of literature chronicling the differences in mentality, taste, and outlook between people of different income levels or job categories. One of my favorites is Andrew Hurley’s book Diners, Bowling Alleys and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in the Postwar Consumer Culture. Hurley reminds us that the postwar economic boom may have benefited Americans across class lines, but the aesthetic values they brought to the new consumer culture remained sharply patterned along socioeconomic lines.
All of which is to say, class may very well be an invented category. But once it’s been invented, it assumes meaning and importance.
November 30, 2006
Norman Rockwell and the Explosion of Wealth II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:45 PM EST I share John Steele Gordon’s amazement at the story behind Norman Rockwell’s famous painting Breaking Home Ties. A year or so ago my wife and I took a trip to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, for a dose of autumnal leaf-peeping and small-town Americana nostalgia. Stockbridge is picture-perfect on both counts. Rockwell’s famous December 1967 cover for McCall’s magazine, entitled “Stockbridge at Christmas,” shows the town’s main street covered in a thin blanket of snow, set against the majestic backdrop of the Berkshire mountains. Rockwell lived in Stockbridge for many years, and a museum showcasing the largest collection of his art (as well as his old studio) still rests on the outskirts of town. We had a good laugh this morning when we realized that the painting we saw at the museum that we thought was Breaking Home Ties was an impostor.
As Mr. Gordon notes, Rockwell isn’t a favorite among art critics. Until recently he also offended the sensibilities of many cultural critics and scholars who resented his celebration of small-town America, which struck them as stodgy and conservative. Having grown up in a small town—Bordentown, New Jersey, founded in 1682, population 3,800, the sort of place where the old brick sidewalks buckle from the force of ancient tree roots—I viscerally understand what Rockwell was getting at. Such places are fewer in number than they once were, but they existed, and they were quite authentic. Just visit Stockbridge in December. It looks exactly as it did when Rockwell immortalized it. He wasn’t making it up, because he didn’t have to.
More to the point, critics have missed a subtle strain of social commentary in Rockwell’s art. It’s not just classic political works like The Problem We All Live With and New Kids in the Neighborhood, which tackled head-on (and with clear liberal sympathies) the issue of school and neighborhood desegregation, or the “Four Freedoms” series, which Rockwell designed for a war bonds drive, and which placed in visual perspective Franklin Roosevelt’s decidedly liberal vision of a postwar world free from material want and prejudice. This social commentary is also evident in works such as Breaking Home Ties, which shows the disconnect between a blue-collar man and his college-bound son. If the small-town world that Rockwell chronicled was overwhelmingly white, nevertheless it had undercurrents of class tension, and Rockwell captured these undercurrents with humor and sympathy.
Mr. Gordon is probably right about the causes of price inflation in the art market. More millionaires, fewer available works by the acknowledged masters. Normally I’m a little more critical of the invisible hand than Mr. Gordon, but in this case, I’d readily agree that the consumers of art have made a wise choice in their veneration of Norman Rockwell. Inherent in this choice is a wisdom that many critics have not yet caught onto.
November 27, 2006
Populism, New Jersey Style Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 05:15 PM EST A quick note about “populism” in New Jersey. I’ve been a New Yorker for several years now, but I spent the first 18 years of my life in the Garden State. I also worked on several statewide and congressional campaigns before abandoning politics for academia. So it’s a part of the world I know somewhat well. John Steele Gordon is correct in identifying New Jersey’s arcane system of local government as the prime contributor to the state’s astronomically high property taxes. To New Jersey’s nonsensically decentralized school system one might add its municipal fire and police departments, which eat up enormous sums of tax dollars in the form of salaries, pensions, and benefits, as well as the time-honored custom by which every municipality, however small, engages the services of a municipal engineer and solicitor. Where I differ with Mr. Gordon is where I assign the credit or blame for this excessively expensive operating procedure. Mr. Gordon cites New Jersey as an example of government inefficiency and explains that a true populist is one who “believe[s] that economic decisions should be made, in so far as possible, by the free market (the common people in their millions buying and selling).” The trouble with this statement is that New Jersey’s electorate is stubbornly—one might say adamantly—wedded to decentralization. Local school districts and police departments are sacred cows in Garden State politics, somewhat akin to social security on the federal level. Politicians are free to inveigh against the evils of high property taxes, but they cannot and will not question the efficacy of local control. If they do, the voters punish them. If the metaphor of the free market carries over to electoral politics, then it only goes to show that the invisible hand, no matter where it wields its influence, is not invariably the most rational actor available. Just as New Jersey voters would save a lot of money by turning the organization of municipal services over to an elite management consultant, the American economy stands to gain extra efficiency from the interference of third-party institutions like the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve Board. Populism is an attractive creed, but it isn’t necessarily the most rational. Just ask the “progressives.” Or do we not want to get bogged down in the definition of even more nettlesome historical terms?
November 27, 2006
In Defense of “Phony Diversity” Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:45 AM EST John Steele Gordon responded to my criticism of his statement that American history has been “very white and very male” by attacking the University of Michigan’s support of affirmative action in college and graduate school admissions. This is one of Mr. Gordon’s favorite rhetorical devices: When he’s on shaky ground discussing apples, he shifts quickly to a discussion of oranges. But he raises an important question.
Mr. Gordon supports a proposed amendment to the Michigan state constitution that would “ban public institutions from using affirmative-action programs that give preferential treatment to groups or individuals based on their race, gender, color, ethnicity or national origin for public employment, education or contracting purposes.” I’m curious as to whether Mr. Gordon thinks this list should be extended to include the children of alumni; the children of university donors and benefactors; the children of political and entertainment celebrities; students from select high schools; and persons from select geographic regions. College admissions officers routinely use these categories to favor candidates from wealthy and elite families, families with financial or legacy ties to their home institution, and candidates who hail from under-represented states and counties (the latter policy favors white rural applicants, among others).
Perhaps Mr. Gordon is consistent on this question. But I certainly don’t hear him crying out in righteous indignation that legacy applicants and the children of white farmers from Idaho enjoy extra privileges in the college admissions game. Neither do I hear conservative stalwarts like David Horowitz express much concern about these long-established forms of affirmative action.
There are two questions at play in this debate. First, is affirmative action legal? Second, does affirmative action enhance a university’s ability to educate its students? I’m not qualified to address the first question, and neither is Mr. Gordon. We’re not lawyers or constitutional scholars. My layman’s reading of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act leaves me with a lot of doubt about the constitutionality of affirmative action in college admissions, but to paraphrase an old adage, the law is what the courts say it is. In this instance, the courts have agreed that quotas, set-asides, and dual admissions standards are unconstitutional, but that race, gender, or ethnicity may be taken into extra account in the interest of securing diversity. This prevailing (if confusing) standard rests on the assumption that universities have a vested interest in, and right to pursue, diversity.
So does demographic diversity enhance a university’s ability to educate its students? Based on my six years as a university teacher, I believe so. In a 15-person seminar or discussion group, the makeup of the class largely determines the tenor and quality of the discussion. I suspect that most people who’ve taught in a university setting would agree. I can (and have) taught about the social construction of race to an all-white seminar, just as I can (and have) taught the history of gender to groups that were all-male or all-female. It works on some level. But the quality and depth of the discussion is generally much better when the seminar is diverse.
As an instructor I cannot choose my students. But given a choice, I’d much prefer to teach a group of students who bring diverse demographic and ideological perspectives to the table. I prefer it because my experience tells me that such groups achieve a higher level of discussion, which enables individual students to prosper more from the intellectual experience of the seminar. Just as it enhances the intellectual and cultural environment of a university to include musicians, artists, athletes, and activists, it enhances the intellectual and cultural environment of a seminar to include students from a wide variety of backgrounds.
The universities have presented the courts with precisely this argument, and to date the courts have allowed the universities some leeway in securing diverse student populations.
November 22, 2006
The 100 Most Influential Americans VIII Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:30 PM EST There is a tension in Mr. Gordon’s response to my post about his list of “influential Americans.” On the one hand, Mr. Gordon agrees that it “would have been nice [for he and his fellow panelists] to get together . . . and have each explain why X deserved a spot,” a statement that seems to acknowledge that no person’s list is infallible. On the other hand, with characteristic scorn Mr. Gordon accuses me of endorsing tokenism and writes, “American history up to this point has been very white and very male. I’m not about to sprinkle my list with women and nonwhites just to achieve the phony ‘diversity’ that so obsesses academia.”
About business history and high political history (and, one might add, Broadway musicals), Mr. Gordon knows a great deal. But depth is no substitute for breadth. I’d suggest that Mr. Gordon stop denigrating academic historians and start reading more of their work. Like the term “liberal,” Mr. Gordon seems to think that “academia” and “diversity” are dirty words. Why, I don’t know. But anyone who states with impunity that “American history up to this point has been very white and very male” is either living in a dream world or has a reflexive and intellectually debilitating aversion to new ideas.
To note the influence of Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Duke Ellington, Martha Graham, Betty Friedan, Ralph Ellison, or Langston Hughes is hardly to promote tokenism.
Arguably, to include the name of Sam Walton (as Mr. Gordon does) is a case of tokenism. Wal-Mart is a tremendously important company. But is the business model it employs really all that innovative? From a historical perspective, it is but the next generation of the department store or the five-and-dime store, and Mr. Gordon’s list already includes A. T. Stewart, who was one of the first Americans to discover the value of high-volume retail sales. The nineteenth-century department store and twenty-first century Wal-Mart are different, to be sure, but conceptually they are very similar. I wonder if Mr. Gordon isn’t just a little obsessed with the phony achievements of white men.
Likewise, why include Daniel Webster or Henry Clay on the list? Both were tremendously important political figures in their own time, but no more so than James G. Blaine in the 1880s, Henry Cabot Lodge in the 1910s, Edith Green in the 1960s, or Ted Kennedy in the 1990s. Webster and Clay gave considerable backing to the Whig economic program, and Clay helped broker the Missouri Compromise. But Rep. Emmanuel Cellar authored the 1965 immigration reform act, which has arguably had as large an impact on the country as Clay’s and Webster’s signature achievements. He’s not on Mr. Gordon’s list, and he shouldn’t be. Like Clay and Webster, his achievements were great but not transcendent.
That said, perhaps Mr. Gordon would consider bumping Harriet Beecher Stowe for Wilbur Mills. Mills was the powerful chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in the 1960s and 1970s. Most people don’t remember him for much more than his drunken escapades with the stripper Fanne Foxe. On the other hand, Mills was white and male, and as John Steele Gordon reminds us, so was American history.
In crafting throwaway lines like, “Mr. Zeitz is very concerned with issues regarding race and gender. I am not,” and, “I am, obviously, very interested in and knowledgeable about business history and couldn’t care less about religion,” Mr. Gordon wears his ignorance like a badge of honor. Worse, he suggests that his limited range of interests and knowledge excuses the omission of entire categories of Americans from the Most Influential list.
This is a strange proposition. Personally, I don’t have the slightest interest in business history, but I wouldn’t have excluded many of the names Mr. Gordon included, because they were important figures in their own right. I don’t presume to confuse my personal interests with historical authenticity. In writing off the contributions of minorities and women in the construction of American history, and in discounting the central role that religion has played in American life, Mr. Gordon does.
My problem isn’t with Mr. Gordon’s list; as I said, these lists are fun but not particularly serious exercises. My problem is with Mr. Gordon’s characterization of American history as “very white and very male,” and his blissful infatuation with his own ignorance.
November 22, 2006
Death in Vietnam II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:30 AM EST My thanks to Fred Smoler for pointing out an error in my previous post. I was working off of Christian Appy’s definitive work on the Vietnam War era military, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers in Vietnam. In an uncharacteristically tortured paragraph (Appy is a fine writer, but here is where I was thrown), the author wrote: “From 1966 to 1969 the percentage of draftees who died in the war doubled from 21 to 40. Almost half of the Army troops were draftees, and in combat units the proportion was commonly as high as two-thirds; late in the war it was even higher. The overall number of draftees was lower because the Marine Corps—the other service branch that did the bulk of fighting in Vietnam—was ordinarily limited to volunteers (though it did draft about 20,000 men in the Vietnam War.)”
Appy’s prose is a little confusing, but he appears to be suggesting that draftees accounted for a disproportionate share of war-related deaths. For the Army, the numbers break down as follows:
1965 28%
1966 34%
1967 57%
1968 58%
1969 62%
1970 57%
Appy explains that the “soldiers sent to Vietnam can be divided into three categories of roughly equal size: one-third draftees, one-third draft-motivated volunteers, and one-third true volunteers.” Which means that working-class men suffered a double burden: They were more likely to be drafted, and more likely to die once inducted into the service.
November 21, 2006
Revisiting the Draft Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 06:40 PM EST Rep. Charles Rangel (D.-N.Y.), the incoming chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, raised a few eyebrows this week by repeating his call for a military draft. Rangel, a veteran of the Korean War, has argued in the past that a uniform draft will ensure that the burden of protecting America falls equally on all its citizens. “There’s no question in my mind that this President and this administration would never have invaded Iraq,” he said this week, “especially on the flimsy evidence that was presented to the Congress, if indeed we had a draft and members of Congress and the administration thought that their kids from their communities would be placed in harm’s way.” The military’s top brass is generally not supportive of Rangel’s idea, arguing that a volunteer military is superior to a conscripted military. Though the Armed Forces have had to lower some of their criteria in recent years to meet recruitment goals, a new draft would likely expand the number of active-duty servicemen and servicewomen to unreal proportions. That said, there’s something to Rangel’s argument. While I don’t have current data on the socioeconomic background of American service members, a recent report by the Kaiser Foundation found that 20 percent of military families have had to rely on food stamps and the WIC Program to feed their children. This is first and foremost a reflection of the shameful state of military pay, though by deduction it would seem that if these same service members came from families with economic means, they would not need to turn to public assistance. Which is to say, the military’s reputation as a working-class and working-poor institution may not be too off-base. In the Vietnam War era, America had a draft. But that draft had escape clauses that favored young men from middle-class and wealthy backgrounds. Exemptions were widely available for those who had the social and economic capital to procure a medical note from a doctor, and deferments were available to all full-time college and graduate students. Notably, part-time students were not eligible for deferments, which meant that any student who needed to work his way through college was likely to be drafted. For those who finished college or graduate school, additional deferments were available if one chose to work in a defense-related industry, or in other exempted professions, like teaching. In total, 80 percent of Vietnam War–era draftees had a high school education or less, while only 13.2 percent had some college, and only 7.2 percent had graduated from college. Until 1970 the draft burden fell on men 21 years of age and older, so these numbers do not suggest that people were simply being drafted before they had a chance to enroll in universities. Rather, these figures suggest that the draft had a serious class bias. A 1964 survey of enlisted servicemen found that 17 percent came from white-collar families, while 52.8 percent came from blue-collar families and 14.8 percent from farm families. This class bias had serious consequences. Roughly 40 percent of all Vietnam War draftees were killed in combat; in the Army, this figure reached as high as 62 percent in 1969. The implications of the Vietnam War example are complicated. On one hand, history suggests that a draft does not ensure uniformity or fairness. On the other hand, knowing where we went wrong 40 years ago could help today’s policy makers design a draft that eliminates class bias. Taken on balance, I’m sympathetic to Rangel’s proposal, and I think it deserves a hearing. If America is to continue sending young men and women to war, it needs to find a way to replicate the model of World War II, when virtually all draft-age men served in uniform. The burdens of our security should be borne by all.
November 21, 2006
The 100 Most Influential Americans V Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 05:35 PM EST When I was a graduate student at Brown University, it was my good fortune to take three courses with Gordon Wood, the Pulitzer Prize winning historian of early America, who served with John Steele Gordon on The Atlantic Monthly’s “100 Most Influential Americans” panel. My primary graduate adviser was James T. Patterson, a Bancroft Prize winner whose work on the modern American experience is second to none. While Patterson and Wood have been close friends for over 30 years, interestingly, Wood has traditionally agreed to serve on panels like this, while Patterson (who has written some book reviews for The Atlantic Monthly) generally turns down the invitations. As I remember it, his argument is that compiling lists of the “greatest Presidents” or the most “influential Americans” is folly, and that it degrades the more subtle forces at work in forging the American experience. I agree with Patterson’s rationale, but I can’t help wonder why anyone would turn down such a fun invitation. I don’t want to quibble with Mr. Gordon’s selections, but he does seem to have strained to find a few women and people of color to include in his list. In fact, he names only four women: Harriet Beecher Stowe, the great abolitionist novelist; Rachel Carson, the environmentalist who wrote Silent Spring; Julia Child, one of the first, and arguably the greatest, of the television chefs; and Oprah Winfrey, who needs no introduction. One of the dangers of compiling these lists is that they will invariably be very white and very male. If we start from the assumption that people drive history, and that elite actors make a greater impact than non-elite actors by virtue of their power and prestige, then these lists must skew away from women and people of color. But what about Margaret Sanger, the great birth-control pioneer, or Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, who brought feminism to millions of ordinary American women in the 1960s and 1970s? How, for that matter, does Martin Luther King, Jr., not rank in the top ten? His impact on American society was arguably much greater than Alexander Hamilton’s or Andrew Jackson’s (both of whom should certainly rank high on the list, as they do in Mr. Gordon’s version). Mr. Gordon includes Earl Warren, the chief justice whose court greatly broadened American civil liberties, but not Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP lawyer (and later Supreme Court justice) who developed the logic behind the Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Mr. Gordon includes Harriet Beecher Stowe, but what about Frederick Douglass, the great African-American political leader? His list includes Walter Reuther, but not Cesar Chavez. I would also argue that Mr. Gordon’s list includes too many business innovators, and too few religious figures. Surely in a country that has long been host to a fervent evangelical movement, and in which politics and Christianity have long existed in creative tension, the names Charles Grandison Finney, Lyman Beecher, Jonathan Edwards, Billy Sunday, and Billy Graham deserve mention. For that matter, how about John Hughes, the Catholic bishop who forged the modern American church in the nineteenth century, or Francis Cardinal Spellman, the “archbishop of the Cold War,” who helped bring American Catholics into the political mainstream in the 1950s? From an arts and literature standpoint, how about Hawthorne and Melville? Why Lorenz Hart but not Aaron Copland or Leonard Bernstein? Stephen Foster, yes, but Woody Guthrie, no? How about Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong? As Mr. Gordon said, “there can be, probably will be, and certainly should be endless debate over who does and does not deserve a spot on the list.” Maybe the problem is that 100 slots is 100 too few.
November 14, 2006
The Girl in the Black Helmet Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 08:30 PM EST Today would have marked the hundredth birthday of Louise Brooks who, along with Clara Bow and Colleen Moore, was part of Hollywood’s great flapper triumvirate in the silent-film era. If Colleen Moore was Hollywood’s archetype of the safe flapper—unthreatening, endearing, hapless, more bark than bite (see, for instance, Flaming Youth)—and if Clara Bow represented the naughty flapper who flirted and smoked a lot but could always be counted on to see the error of her fast-living ways (as was the case in her best-known film, It), Louise Brooks was the real deal. In an age of sexually liberated women, she stood out for her extremes. “I like to drink and f--k,” she announced to friends and acquaintances. Years later, she privately estimated that “at a modest 10 a year from [ages] 17 to 60,” the number of men she had “been to bed with” numbered somewhere around 430. A former Martha Graham dancer and Ziegfeld Follies performer, Brooks was a reluctant film star, an autodidact who never felt at home in Hollywood. “My [New York] friends were all literary people,” she later remarked. “And in Hollywood there were no literary people. I went to Hollywood and no one read books. I went to the bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard—it’s still there—and these Hollywood people would go in and say, ‘I have a bookshelf, and I want to buy enough books to fill up the shelves.’ And that was all the reading they did. Don’t forget, most people in pictures, they were waitresses, they were very low-class people.” Unlike many silent-era screen stars, Brooks could have survived the transition to talkies. When Paramount transitioned to sound, in 1928, Louise was one of the lucky ones. Studio chief Ben Schulberg proposed to retain her at her current salary, $750 per week. Hardly top-scale at the time, but exponentially more money than the average American family earned in half a year. Brooks stunned Schulberg and the entire industry by walking away. She traveled to Berlin, where the German director G. W. Pabst recruited her to play the lead role in his pioneering work Pandora’s Box. It was arguably the last great film of the silent era, and it was her finest performance. But the critics panned it. Louise stayed in Europe to shoot another film with Pabst, and several more in England. Then she ran out of money. She crawled back to California on her knees. But by the time she returned to Hollywood in 1930, she was persona non grata. Friends helped her secure a few minor parts here and there. By 1938, however, it was obvious that her film career was over. She moved back to Wichita and operated a dance studio for a few years. Then she returned to New York and worked behind the sales counter at Saks Fifth Avenue, picking up occasional voiceover work for radio soap operas. Salvation came in the 1950s when film buffs rediscovered the silent era. In 1955 Cinémathèque Française featured Brooks in an exhibit entitled “Sixty Years of Cinema.” The following year, with few other prospects, she accepted an invitation to move to Rochester, where she began a new career as a film historian at Eastman House. By 1979, when Kenneth Tynan revisited her early career in pages of The New Yorker (his article was entitled, simply, “The Girl in the Black Helmet,” an homage to Brooks’s distinct 1920s bob), she had been canonized as one of the most brilliant figures of the silent-film era. Louise Brooks died alone at her home in Rochester in 1985. She was 78 years old.
November 14, 2006
Premillennialism: Good for the Jews? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 07:30 PM EST There’s a fascinating article in today’s New York Times about evangelical Christian support for Israel. As the article notes, “Many conservative Christians say they believe that the president’s support for Israel fulfills a biblical injunction to protect the Jewish state, which some of them think will play a pivotal role in the second coming.” The eschatology to which the Times refers is known as dispensational premillennialism. Based on prophetic writings in the Old and New Testaments, premillennialism holds that God deals with human beings in distinct epochs, or dispensations; that the current (sixth) dispensation—the church era, or the Gentile era—will come to a close upon the arrival of the Antichrist (known also as the Beast), who will visit incalculable terror upon unsaved human beings; that the Antichrist’s reign of seven years, called the Tribulations, will be directly preceded by the in-gathering of world Jewry back to Palestine and by a tremendous event called the Raptures, which will see saved souls, both living and dead, lifted directly from Earth to heaven; that at the end of the Tribulations Jesus Christ will lead an army of saints to do battle with the Beast; that Christ will defeat the Beast at the Battle of Armageddon and introduce a thousand-year rein of peace; and finally that at the conclusion of that millennium, Christ and Satan will engage in a final battle, resulting in Satan’s ultimate defeat The problem for Jews, of course, is that this end-of-days theology foretells a fiery and unpleasant end for the original sons of Abraham—even those who convert to Christ. Which leads to a new twist on a familiar question: Premillennialism, good for the Jews, or bad for the Jews? Should American Jews and Israelis forge a partnership with conservative evangelicals, even if their aims and expectations are so vitally different, even though the same conservative Christians subscribe to a theology that damns Jews no matter what? On this particular question, I’m inclined to throw my lot with those liberal American Jews who’d rather not make common cause, however cynically, with evangelical conservatives. But politics makes for strange bedfellows, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the ties between both communities grow a little stronger in the coming years.
November 14, 2006
Would RFK Have Won in 1968? III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 06:20 PM EST Fred Smoler proposes a fascinating exercise in counter-factual history: “If you want to imagine Kennedy winning the nomination, it is pretty easy to do: Simply assume that the Palestinian assassin Sirhan Sirhan murdered Humphrey rather than Kennedy. After all, Kennedy was not famous for being a sturdier supporter of Israel than Humphrey. So what might have changed? Sometimes we suspect that a failed assassination would have change a great deal: Churchill was almost killed by a taxi in 1931, and a number of assassination attempts missed Hitler. How about this one?” I think the answer is still no. Neither Robert Kennedy nor Eugene McCarthy would have garnered enough delegates to win anything approximating a majority. Together, their delegates might have constituted a large enough bloc to swing momentum in favor of an antiwar nominee, but as Dominic Sandbrook’s excellent biography of Eugene McCarthy makes clear, the two men despised each other. “Under no circumstances would I join with Kennedy to stop Hubert Humphrey,” McCarthy said. “I would have given my delegates to Hubert.” Had there been no Hubert, it seems likely that McCarthy would have brokered a deal with someone else. For his part, Kennedy thought of McCarthy as a dilettante or worse. As one of his aides explained, “We regarded Gene as a dangerous man. . . . He raised enthusiasms without following through.” A more likely scenario would have been an eleventh-hour reversal by Lyndon Johnson, whose relationships with both Kennedy and McCarthy were so strained as to make a deal with either man highly unlikely. As the incumbent President, LBJ enjoyed tight control over the unelected delegates and could have engineered renomination. How that would have played out in November is anyone’s guess. Which is the folly and fun of counterfactual history.
November 14, 2006
Schools and Historical Change II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 05:15 PM EST Fred Smoler’s post on James Madison High School raised some interesting issues. As Fred points out, when the new Congress is sworn in next January, James Madison will count among its alumni three sitting members of the U.S. Senate (Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Norm Coleman of Minnesota, and Charles Schumer of New York) and one associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (Ruth Bader Ginsburg). Fred also notes that James Madison has produced three Nobel laureates, as has its nearby competitor, Abraham Lincoln High School.
Fred explores several possible explanations for the tremendous success of these two public schools in churning out high achievers. One quite plausible explanation is that “public schools were better when they were staffed by extremely capable women denied the chance to work in many other places, and that nursing care in public hospitals was once better for the same reason. If so, good public schools—a crucial ingredient of one vision of a just political order—depended on a linked injustice.”
Another explanation is ethnicity. In her influential history of interwar American Jewry, At Home in America: Second-Generation New York Jews, Deborah Dash Moore, a professor at Vassar College, looks particularly at Abraham Lincoln High and nearby Thomas Jefferson High and finds that the schools’ student bodies, teaching staff, and administrators were overwhelmingly Jewish by the 1930s. This remained the case well into the 1960s, when most of the aforementioned notables were in high school. Indeed, it’s worth pointing out that all of these notables are, in fact, Jewish.
Scholars have long debated the roots of American Jews’ obsession with education. Some of their explanations have verged on the chauvinistic, while others are less offensive and more plausible—for instance, because Jewish immigrants arrived in America with a particular set of skills, pursuing a high school and college education was simply a rational economic strategy.
Whatever the causes of the American Jewish love affair with education, it’s hard to deny a pattern. In my forthcoming book on postwar ethnicity, I find that as early as the 1930s Jews composed between 80 and 90 percent of the student body at City College, Hunter College, and Brooklyn College, over 90 percent at New York University, and 22 percent at Columbia University. And many Jews understood this last figure to be the result of aggressive anti-Semitic restrictions (in 1920, the proportion of Jews at Columbia had been 40 percent). As late as 1963 almost half of all Jews in New York City had continued their education beyond high school, compared with 27.5 percent and 18.2 percent in the Irish and Italian communities, respectively. Over half of all Irish New Yorkers and 60 percent of Italians did not finish high school, compared with 35 percent of the city’s Jews and only 21 percent among the native-born.
Fred invoked an amusing anecdote about his time at Cambridge University, and as a faculty member there, I have a few of my own. When I interviewed for my lectureship, a member of the hiring committee asked me why New York’s public schools were once a national gem but are now a national nightmare. Of course, this isn’t exactly right; many of New York’s high schools remain exemplars of scholarship and achievement. I suspected that he wanted me to answer, “because the schools were predominately Jewish then, and aren’t now,” but I didn’t oblige. I’m still not sure that’s the right answer, but it’s not the wrong answer, either.
November 14, 2006
Louis Brandeis Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 04:05 PM EST In a signed column on the New York Times editorial page today, Adam Cohen notes that this is Louis Brandeis’s 150th birthday. It was Brandeis who revolutionized American jurisprudence when, in 1908, he presented the Supreme Court with a brief in favor of an Oregon state law mandating a maximum 10-hour work day for women. Most observers at the time expected the court to strike down the law on grounds that it violated workers’ “freedom of contract,” a principle located somewhere in the shadow of the Fourteenth Amendment. Instead of wrangling over constitutional law, Brandeis devoted 100 pages of his brief to social science literature that established the deleterious effects of physical labor on women and only 2 pages to the constitutional questions at hand. The court unanimously upheld the law. Eight years later, Woodrow Wilson appointed Brandeis an associate justice.
As Cohen points out, not everyone approved of the use of scientific evidence in court cases. Brandeis’s prickly colleague on the Court, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., complained that Brandeis “drove a harpoon into my midriff by saying that it would be for the good of my soul to devote my next leisure to the study of some domain of fact—suggesting the textile industry.”
“I hate facts,” Holmes concluded.
But Brandeis was on the side of history. In the matter of Brown v. Board of Education, the Court ruled in 1954 that segregated public schools were inherently unconstitutional. Relying on psychological studies conducted by Kenneth Clark, which purported to show that black children who were raised and educated in segregated environments developed a crippling sense of inferiority, the Court determined that there could be no “separate but equal” schools in America. Even if all-black schools and all-white schools were granted equal funds and resources, segregation would psychologically damage black children and make it impossible for them to avail themselves of equal education resources.
Critics then and since have faulted the court for basing a large part of the Brown ruling on social science. For one, the Court’s logic inadvertently assumes that black children cannot learn outside the presence of white children, a patronizing and suspect conclusion to say the least. Moreover, Clark’s doll tests weren’t particularly well-designed. Social science literature is always in flux. How can the Court maintain a precedent if the foundations of its rulings are subject to decay?
Despite all these problems, Brandeis’s contribution to American jurisprudence remains very much intact. Today liberals and conservatives selectively draw on and criticize the use of expository evidence, slamming activist judges for stepping outside the law—except when it suits their purpose.
November 13, 2006
Spiro Agnew’s Ghost Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:00 PM EST Today marks the anniversary of one of the worst vice-presidential speeches in history. On this date in 1969 Richard Nixon’s Vice President, Spiro T. Agnew, issued a stinging rebuke of television network news.
Only ten days earlier, the President had taken to the airwaves to deliver his now-famous “silent majority” speech, in which the he denounced antiwar protesters—several hundred thousand of whom had participated in “moratorium” events that fall—for undercutting the American negotiating position in peace talks with North Vietnam. When the television networks realized that they had been manipulated into giving Nixon free air time under the false promise that he was primed to make an important announcement about the war effort, they spent several days focusing on the administration’s inability to reach a settlement in Southeast Asia. In turn the White House unleashed Agnew, whom Eugene McCarthy once dubbed “Nixon’s Nixon” for his intense negativity and slash-and-burn campaign tactics.
Agnew denounced network news professionals as a “tiny, enclosed fraternity of privileged men elected by no one” and slammed them for their alleged liberal bias. A year later he followed up with an even more vicious address in which he said, “In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4-H club—the ‘hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.’” (Funny that it’s always the vice presidents who are left to alliterate. In 1952, Nixon, as Dwight Eisenhower’s running-mate, denounced the Democratic presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson, as “Adlai the appeaser . . . who got a Ph.D. degree from Acheson’s College of Cowardly Containment.)
Agnew’s speech was the opening shot of a conservative war of words against the so-called liberal media. The themes he sounded remain part of standard conservative lore to this day. Ironically, the year before, in early October 1968, Nixon had garnered 483 newspaper endorsements—five times as many as his Democratic opponent, Hubert Humphrey. But starting in the late 1960s conservatives wove a compelling story about liberal media bias that has stuck, for better or worse. In many ways, Spiro Agnew’s ghost continues to haunt us.
November 13, 2006
Lessons from the Class of ’74 Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:15 PM EST In an earlier post I suggested that Nancy Pelosi has been incorrectly typecast as a “San Francisco liberal,” a pejorative term that connotes all sorts of cultural extremes, when in fact she is a Baltimore white ethnic” at heart. I also wrote about the checkered past of Rep. Jack Murtha, a lead contender for Majority Leader in the next Congress. Murtha was an unindicted co-conspirator in the Abscam case some 26 years ago.
Now it seems that Pelosi has endorsed Murtha for Majority Leader, which strengthens my argument that she is more of an old-style party boss than a hippy-dippy reformer.
The last (and most famous) Democratic sweep of off-year elections occurred in 1974, when the party tapped into popular disgust over Watergate to capture 48 House seats and four Senate seats previously held by Republicans. The so-called “Watergate babies” who composed the famous Class of ’74 tended to represent affluent suburban districts in the West and Northeast and were more committed to ethics reform than to traditional liberal policies. “We are not a bunch of little Hubert Humphreys,” claimed Gary Hart, the incoming senator from Colorado and a leader of the “new politics” movement of the 1970s. In total, the Democratic freshmen numbered 75 members and became a powerful force within their caucus.
Some of the reforms pushed through by the Watergate babies augured well for a more democratic (small-d) House. For instance, by a vote of 144 to 122 the Democratic caucus wrested control of committee assignments, which had previously been doled out by the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. The caucus also made the chairmanships of Appropriations subcommittees subject to caucus approval, thus subjecting the “cardinals”—Appropriations subcommittee chairs, who enjoy tremendous control over government funds—to popular oversight. At the same time, these reforms actually strengthened the hand of the House speaker, Carl Albert, at the expense of individual committee chairs. So it was hard to say whether a cleaner House would also be a more democratic House.
It’s ironic, to say the least, that the incoming Democratic majority, which partly owes its election victory to the public’s disgust over congressional ethics, may tap an Abscam veteran to hold its second-ranking position. Perhaps it’s too punitive to hold Murtha accountable for actions he took a quarter-century ago. But in politics, appearance is everything, and should Murtha ascend to the post of majority leader, the party is going to lose its reform luster.
November 13, 2006
Would RFK Have Won in 1968? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:00 AM EST Later this month, Emilio Estevez’s new film chronicling the last day of Robert Kennedy’s life is set for general release. While I’ve not yet seen the film, the trailers would appear to suggest it follows the standard narrative line about Kennedy’s ill-fated 1968 presidential campaign, namely that had he lived, RFK would have emerged as the great white hope, forged a coalition of working-class ethnics and black urbanites, won the Democratic nomination, defeated Richard Nixon in the general election, and pulled America out of Vietnam.
There’s always been a lot wrong with this story. For one, neither Kennedy nor his chief opponent in the Democratic primaries, Senator Eugene McCarthy, called for a withdrawal from Vietnam. They were simply calling for a halt in the U.S. bombing campaign and for allowing the Vietcong/National Liberation Front a seat at the negotiating table. There is little reason to believe that the governments in Hanoi or Saigon would have agreed to a quick resolution of the conflict. For Saigon, any settlement involving a coalition government with the NLF was tantamount to defeat; for Hanoi, a protracted war increased the odds of a more favorable peace.
Diplomatic concerns aside, Kennedy could not and would not have been nominated by his party. It is true that by August 1968, when the Democratic National Convention opened in Chicago, 38.7 percent of Democratic primary voters had cast ballots for McCarthy and 30.6 percent had cast ballots for Kennedy, meaning that over two-thirds of primary voters had supported candidates who called for a negotiated settlement of the war in Southeast Asia. By contrast, only 2.2 percent of primary voters had supported Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who initially adhered to the administration’s hard line on Vietnam
But in 1968 only 15 states chose their delegates by primary. At least 57 percent of convention delegates were selected by county committeemen, state party apparatchiks, and elected officials. As early as June 2, even before Kennedy’s assassination, the vice president’s advisers had sewn up enough delegates to secure the nomination. Humphrey did not need grass-roots support to win; all he needed was the party bosses.
That said, I’m looking forward to the movie.
November 10, 2006
Abscam Revisited Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:00 AM EST In the wake of the 2006 congressional elections, both parties are gearing up for leadership elections. On the Democratic side, Nancy Pelosi seems likely to run unopposed for speaker, James Clyburn seems likely to run unopposed for majority whip (he may yet draw some opposition, but he remains the hands-down favorite), and Rahm Emanuel, the current chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and chief architect of the Democrats’ victory, is poised to run uncontested for Conference Chair.
The only real race among Democrats will be for the position of majority leader, the number-two spot in the House. One candidate is Stenny Hoyer, a Maryland congressman who is liberal on most issues but hawkish on the war; he is currently the Democratic whip. The other candidate is Jack Murtha, a congressman from Western Pennsylvania who is conservative on most cultural issues but a leading critic of the Bush administration’s war effort. Murtha is also a decorated combat veteran, which increases his appeal.
In an earlier post I suggested that Nancy Pelosi has been smart to make the Democratic party a safe place for Catholic voters, and including Jack Murtha in the leadership will surely only contribute to that strategy. But there’s a problem with Murtha, and I think it overrides whatever strengths he brings to the ethnic equation.
Over a quarter-century ago, Murtha was an unindicted co-conspirator in Abscam, the famous sting operation in which FBI agents posed as Arab businessmen and offered cash bribes to 31 elected officials. Ultimately, one senator (Harrison Williams of New Jersey) and five House members took the bait. Most of the other targets said no, flat-out. Murtha, however, told the undercover FBI agent that he was “not interested . . . at this point.” You can see the full surveillance tape by clicking here. (It’s about an hour long, gets really interesting after about 15 minutes, and the crucial moment comes about 32 minutes in.) It’s not a pretty sight.
To his credit, Murtha didn’t take the money. But he didn’t say no, either, and he didn’t report the offer to the authorities.
In the wake of the Ney, Delay, Cunningham, Foley, Weldon, and Harris scandals, scandals that have strained the trust between citizens and their elected officials, it would behoove the new Democratic majority to place the highest premium on ethics. I have nothing but the greatest respect for Jack Murtha’s stand on the war, but he’s no poster child for congressional ethics. And right now, that’s exactly what the country needs.
November 10, 2006
The 2006 Election II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:30 AM EST Fred Smoler raises and answers an interesting rhetorical question: “The Republicans are the party of the rich, right? Well, they used to be, although even in 2004 the Democrats did a hair better than the Republicans with people earning over $100,000. In 2006 the Democrats did better still.” Fred’s thesis boils down to this: Republicans are losing their grip on high-income and wealthier voters over three issues: (1) culture wars, which presumably drive many pro-choice, pro-stem-cell-research, pro-privacy voters to the Democratic fold; (2) the war on terror, on which Republicans may have temporarily lost their edge; and (3) Iraq, which concerns voters from all demographic backgrounds. I’m not sure that I buy Fred’s argument that “Republicans risk becoming the party of lower-income white voters, and that is a losing strategy.” CNN’s national exit poll for House races shows that Democrats fared best among low-income voters and worst among high-income voters. How these numbers change when one controls for race, I don’t know, and perhaps Fred is working off of more sophisticated tab data.
From a historical perspective, Democrats experienced their worst postwar slump when they lost lower-income voters, not when they got trounced among high-income voters. In his 1978 study, Transformations of the American Party System, Everett Carl Ladd, Jr., found that in congressional races the Democrats’ share of “high status” white votes jumped from 48 percent in 1964 to 57 percent in 1974; meanwhile, the Democrats lost ground among “low status” whites, from 74 percent in 1964 to 67 percent in 1974. In presidential races, their share of low-status whites fell from 61 percent in 1960 to 53 percent in 1976.It’s not clear how Ladd defined low-status and high-status, but clearly Democrats after 1972 were appealing to more educated, higher-income voters and less to low-income voters, who had traditionally been their core base. In their influential study of post-war politics, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights and Taxes on American Politics, Thomas and Mary Edsall cited Ladd’s study as an alarming indication that Democrats were becoming too elitist a party, and that Republicans had managed to capture the populist banner, even as their tax policies did little to benefit low-income voters. In effect, in the 1970s Democrats were at least temporarily the rich man’s party. Or, at least, the upper-middle-class party. It’s not clear that this strategy was either good or bad. They still controlled Congress by enormous margins, but they were losing their grip on the Presidency.
November 9, 2006
TR Goes to Panama Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 05:10 PM EST One hundred years ago today, Theodore Roosevelt became the first sitting President of the United States to pay an official visit to a foreign country, when he traveled southward to inspect construction progress on the Panama Canal. It’s remarkable to think that for over a century before TR’s trip, America seemed so inconsequential to the rest of the world—and/or the rest of the world seemed to inconsequential to America—that no sitting President bothered to leave the country for official purposes. As Alexander Burns explains in today’s AmericanHeritage.com feature on the trip, TR was one of the first Presidents to take an active interest in foreign relations. True, other presidents including Jefferson and Lincoln had been greatly concerned with doings in Europe. But as Alex explains, TR “was an avid interventionist who supported an expanded military role for the United States in the Western Hemisphere. In that very same year, 1906, the twenty-sixth President was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to conclude a peace between the warring nations of Russia and Japan.” Were I delivering a lecture on this topic a few years ago, I might well have attributed the shift toward globalism to the Civil War, which expedited the construction of the transcontinental railroad, spurred massive industrial development to fuel the Union war effort, and furthered the cause of paper money and centralized banking. All of these developments created an economically advanced nation that increasingly traded labor, capital, resources, and goods with the rest of the world. By the time TR became President, he couldn’t help but take a more international approach to governance than his predecessors. But Eric Rauchway’s recent book Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America, which I reviewed for AmericanHeritage.com, raises a reciprocal issue. Not only was America selling to and poaching labor from the rest of the world; the world was investing its resources in America. Britain, for instance, was a major investor in American railroads. This meant that by the time TR became President, what foreign leaders thought mattered a great deal. Of course, TR’s trip to Panama was for a specific purpose. But it’s hard to imagine it occurring 30 years before. By 1906 the world had already become a smaller place, and America, so geographically expansive and economically robust, was finding itself a larger place in that smaller world.
November 9, 2006
Speaker Nancy D’Alesandro, Baltimore Democrat Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:20 PM EST I conducted an experiment yesterday afternoon. If you plug the key terms “Nancy Pelosi” and “San Francisco liberal” into a Lexis-Nexis search, you will find no fewer than 50 hits over the past two years in national and regional newspapers and magazines. Surely this reflects the effectiveness of the generic Republican charge that Pelosi is a left-wing, left-coast, granola-crunching Democrat who wants to raise your taxes to subsidize gay marriages for immigrant welfare queens on parole. (It goes without saying that the marriage licenses will be issued in Spanish.) Pelosi, the presumptive House Speaker in the next Congress, doesn’t seem too bothered by the caricature. She’s a professional politician, and she deals in plenty of over-the-top rhetoric herself. All’s fair in love and war—and electioneering.
But if the charge is politically fair, it’s not accurate. What pundits seem to be forgetting is that Nancy Pelosi, nee Nancy D’Alesandro, grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, where her father, Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr., was elected to five terms in Congress and two terms as the city’s mayor. Those were the days when Baltimore (like most cities in Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwest states) was a loose confederation of white ethnic neighborhoods with names like Little Italy, Pigtown, and Fells Point. For most Catholics—first and second generation immigrants from Poland, Italy, Ireland, and Germany—smaller neighborhood units were linked strongly with the church, such that city residents referred to the name of their local parish when asked where they lived (e.g., St. Leo’s instead of “Little Italy”). In his book Behind the Backlash: White Working Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940-1980, the historian Kenneth Durr revisits those neighborhoods in considerable detail, bringing back to life an era not so long ago when the church, the Democratic party, and the local neighborhood held sway over millions of white ethnic citizens.
Nancy Pelosi has lived in San Francisco for many years, and there’s little doubt that she is very liberal, both culturally and economically. But what’s fascinating about her stewardship of the House Democratic Conference is her forceful insistence that the party recommit itself to making her father’s old constituents—or, more accurately, their kids and grandkids—comfortable voting the Democratic line again.
Until 1968 white Catholics were fairly reliable Democratic voters. (That said, my forthcoming book on ethnicity and politics in postwar New York will suggest that their allegiance to the New Deal coalition weakened as early as 1944.) By 1972, however, Richard Nixon was able to pry away 58 percent of the Italian vote and 53 percent of the Irish vote. For Democrats, it was all downhill from there.
Part of the divorce between Catholic voters and the Democratic party owed to the politics of race. As John McGreevy, a Notre Dame historian, has shown, urban Catholics were particularly sensitive to racial turnover in their neighborhoods. Having invested so much emotional and financial capital in these small urban spaces, they viewed city blocks in distinctly ethnic and religious terms. Moreover, urban Catholics were often asked to bear the brunt of liberal race policies, from affirmative action in public-sector and unionized hiring, to busing policies aimed at achieving racial balance in public schools.
Much of their political defection from the Democratic party also owed to liberalism’s new interest in cultural issues after 1968. Many Catholic voters who had been happy to support the party of Franklin Roosevelt took issue with the party of George McGovern. Over the years, as the Democrats became increasingly identified with pro-choice and (later) pro-gay-marriage policies, as they became more strident supporters of the separation between church and state, and as they embraced the individual-rights revolution of the 1960s, they became less palatable to socially conservative voters, including large blocs of observant Catholics who were raised on values that emphasized the community over the individual.
This week, however, something remarkable happened. Democrats won the Catholic vote, 52 percent to 47 percent—exactly the margin by which George Bush carried Catholics in 2004. Part of this owes to general dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq, which cuts across ethnic and religious lines. But part of this shift also owes to the Democrats’ strategy of running cultural conservatives in large parts of the South and Midwest. In Pennsylvania, a heavily Catholic state, Bob Casey, Jr., a pro-life Democrat, was able to neutralize Rick Santorum’s appeal to Catholic voters. At the end of the day, these voters were able to support a candidate pledged to raise the minimum wage without compromising deeply felt religious and ethical values. The same is true of candidates in Indiana, Ohio, Florida, and North Carolina who defeated their GOP opponents by establishing their credentials as observant Christians.
In the race for Majority Leader, Pelosi is likely to lend quiet support to Jack Murtha, the culturally conservative Pennsylvania Democrat who represents a heavily Catholic district in western Pennsylvania. (Ironically, Murtha’s opponent, Stenny Hoyer, is a Maryland congressman.)
Essentially, Pelosi is inverting the logic behind Thomas Frank’s bestseller, What’s the Matter With Kansas. Frank basically argues that Republicans have hoodwinked Midwestern and Southern voters into placing cultural concerns above economic concerns. There’s something a little patronizing about this argument, which assumes that an Irish Catholic earning the minimum wage should compromise her position on abortion to secure a $2-per-hour pay raise. Having grown up in a white ethnic world, Pelosi respects and viscerally understands the worldview of observant Catholics. Rather than suggest that they wake up and smell the coffee, she is asking them, and asking the Democratic party, to forge a new consensus around issues like health care, energy independence, the environment, and the economy. Many of these issues also resonate with Catholic social teachings.
This isn’t to say that liberals will be asked to abandon their core convictions on gay rights, choice, or civil liberties. Rather, Pelosi is asking liberals to pitch a big tent. When cultural questions come before Congress, Democrats in the Pelosi conference will vote their conscience. When the minimum-wage hike comes before Congress, Pelosi will no doubt insist on strict orthodoxy.
Whether one agrees with this strategy, there’s little doubting that Nancy Pelosi isn’t quite the “San Francisco liberal” that Republicans make her out to be. She’s a Baltimore white ethnic Democrat, and for better or worse, she’s refurbishing the house that Roosevelt built.
November 8, 2006
I. F. Stone vs. Rush Limbaugh Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:45 AM EST For the record, John Steele Gordon is wrong to equate Josh Marshall’s website, www.talkingpointsmemo.com, with Rush Limbaugh’s radio program. He would like readers to assume that both Marshall and Limbaugh are partisans whose first allegiance is to their political ideology, and who are thus equally sloppy in presenting news and analysis. Not really true. Interesting, Josh Marshall earned a Ph.D. in American history at Brown University (we overlapped as graduate students there and have some friends in common, but we don’t know each other well), where he worked with Gordon S. Wood, a Pulitzer Prize winning historian of early America. In fact, I recommend Josh’s site to our readers from time to time because he often tries to provide some historical perspective on current events. Marshall also writes regularly for Time magazine and The Hill, two respected nonpartisan news outlets, and has written for The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly. Finally, his website contains scrupulous documentation of the stories it posts. Mr. Gordon should check it out. He might learn a little something.
By contrast, Rush Limbaugh completed one year at Southeast Missouri State University before dropping out of college altogether. Nothing wrong with that. College isn’t for everyone, and it’s certainly no prerequisite for being a talk-radio show host. But let’s not fool ourselves into equating his intellectual and research credentials with Marshall’s. Moreover, Limbaugh has not, to the best of my knowledge, produced any serious studies of American politics and culture.
While Mr. Gordon chides me for bringing politics to a history website, I’d remind him that I almost always try to tie my current-day observations to the past, which is more than I can say for his frequent antiliberal screeds, which have little or no discernible connection to history. There’s a word for this. I believe it’s “hypocrisy.”
Let me try, then, to tie this conversation back to history by suggesting that Josh Marshall’s blog is a latter-day variation on the underground newspaper, a journalistic tradition that stretches back at least as far as William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist publication, The Liberator, and in a more recent incarnation, to I. F. Stone’s Weekly. Marshall has tapped the Internet to modernize the institution of independent journalism. Insofar as he’s managed to help shape the public debate on any number of matters (as did Garrison and Stone), he’s proven that this remains an important institution, particularly in these days of media consolidation and declining newspaper readership.
Rush Limbaugh, by contrast, strikes me as a latter-day equivalent of Father Coughlin, the radio priest who galvanized millions of unhappy listeners against FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s. (Coughlin began his radio career as a Roosevelt supporter but soon changed his stripes.) Right-wing shock-talk can’t claim roots as long as those of independent journalism or underground newspapers, because commercial radio has only been around since about 1920. Still, that’s a long time, and Limbaugh is working in a rich tradition.
Ultimately, just as there’s no comparison between I. F. Stone and Father Coughlin, there’s no comparison between Josh Marshall and Rush Limbaugh. They work in different media, they apply entirely different standards of intellectual rigor, documentation, and research (Marshall works like a scholar, Limbaugh like an entertainer), and they have entirely different agendas. |
