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 o |
