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So long as I’m debriefing myself about the OAH panel on this blog, let me put up my answer to the “nomenclature question”—i.e., “progressive” or “liberal.” I said (and I paraphrase myself from memory) that while as a citizen I understand the practical reason for avoiding the “l-word,” as a historian I’m not that keen on the use of the word “progressive.” Because as I understand it, I said, both wings of our modern political family descend from the progressives of the early twentieth century.
Basically, some progressive reforms addressed the ills of modernity by trying to make Americans into a better people—prohibition, immigration restriction, eugenics and so forth, and their descendants are modern conservative measures. Other progressive reforms addressed the ills of modernity by taking people more or less as they are, but by trying to dicker with the system that governed them—regulation of the financial rules, changes in workplace laws, and so forth, and their descendants are modern liberal measures.
So the term “progressive” seems a bit imprecise.
There is a school of historians and other scholars who maintain that we are, as a people, basically conservative. The story goes something like this: liberals are crazy social engineers who will make you tolerate all kinds of weird people—even gay ones!—and real America—which is, generally, construed as meaning white working class people—do not like you effete liberals doing that. As if shifts in sexual attitudes did not result from a massive cultural sea change, and instead happened because liberals starting sneaking condoms into school lunches.
I am willing to credit that conservative working-class people exist. But I do not believe they are the bedrock source of modern Republicanism nor, despite a kind of casual identification of white working-class people with “real America,” do I believe they represent America.
Why do I express doubt on these points?
(a) Poorer people vote Democrat, richer people vote Republican. No matter what cultural attitudes they may express, in the voting booth people seem to see “liberal” in economic, not cultural terms. As the linked artlcle, by McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal shows, over the past thirty-five years or so, there has been increasing real division between rich and poor, and it has gone along with increasing party polarization. And there’s lots more evidence of that nature on the way, as this preview of Larry Bartels’s new book seems to show.
(b) The American people are more liberal on both cultural and social issues than you’d think if you thought only about “the American people” in terms of Nixon’s “silent majority,” or Reagan Democrats. So say Pew.
This post born from a comment on this panel, which in q & a turned out to be a lot less historical and more political.
[Editor's Note: Neil Maher, author of this particularly awesome book, joins us today. Neil's the tallest historian I know. He's also an excellent surfer and a very handsome lad. And on top of all that, he's a really great guy. What a jerk.]
Seventy-five years ago today Franklin Roosevelt asked Congress to create the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of the New Deal’s most popular programs. In his address to Congress, Roosevelt was obviously concerned with the twenty-five percent unemployment rate then gripping the nation. Yet a second crisis also worried the President. Noting severe flooding occurring along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, due in large part to deforestation along their banks, Roosevelt warned Congress that the country faced an environmental emergency as well. To combat simultaneously both crises — one economic, the other environmental — FDR called for the creation of the CCC.
During its nine-year existence the Corps helped battle both of these national problems. On the economic front, from 1933 to 1942 the CCC provided jobs for more than three million young men between the ages of 18 and 25. The Corps was as successful environmentally. Enrollees in the New Deal program planted more than two billion trees, slowed soil erosion on forty million acres of Dust Bowl farmland, and developed more than 800 new state parks that provided outdoor recreation to millions of Americans. All told, CCC work projects altered more than 118 million acres across the United States, an area approximately three times the size of Connecticut.
Today we face a similar pair of predicaments. News of Bear Stearns’ possible collapse last week was all too reminiscent of the wave of bank runs that cascaded across America during the early 1930s, and suggested to many economists that the looming recession may intensify into a full-blown depression. Meanwhile, record rainfall across much of the Midwest during the past few weeks not only caused river flooding, similar to that which alarmed Franklin Roosevelt back in the spring of 1933, but also highlighted once again the serious environmental consequences of global warming. While in the United States these two contemporary crises — one economic, the other environmental — are not often linked in the minds of most citizens, they are very much connected in other parts of the world.
“What a writer is obliged at some point to realize, is that he is involved in a language which he has to change. For example, for a black writer, especially in this country, to be born into the English language is to realize that the assumptions of the language, the assumptions on which the language operates, are his enemy.”
Here’s what I wrote down to say at the OAH. I’m posting it to go up at around the time of the panel, so I don’t know right now whether it’s what I’ll actually say (oh the verb-tense issues). But if you’re interested and you somehow didn’t manage to make the panel, read on.
Ian Buruma is a pretty smart guy. Or so I’m told. But this is a great example of the hazards facing an author who’s writing about something in his own field, in this case human rights in Tibet, and analogizing to something he apparently knows nothing about, contemporary Native American culture. Judge for yourself:
Are the Tibetans doomed to go the way of the American Indians? Will they be reduced to being little more than a tourist attraction, peddling cheap mementos of what was once a great culture? In Tibet itself, that sad fate is looking more and more likely. And the Olympic year is already soured by the way the Chinese government is trying to suppress resistance…
I know what he was after there: a hook, a lede to draw in readers. Which is fine, admirable even. But it would be tough to craft a more insulting sentence than the second one in the graf above. Buruma simultaneously demeans the current status of Native people while reducing and romanticizing their past: “little more than a tourist attraction, peddling cheap mementos of what was once a great culture.” Stick to what you know, Professor Buruma. So says the blogger. Oh, the irony.
If you’ll remember back to where we left our story on Wednesday, John Milton Chivington had performed admirably, if somewhat controversially, at Glorieta Pass. And he had been promoted for his trouble. Still, he wasn’t satisfied with the rank of colonel; he had his eye on a “brigadiership.” It wasn’t going to happen. There wouldn’t be any more significant Civil War engagements in the Rocky Mountain region, leaving Chivington frustrated by inactivity. But not all was bleak. He had secured for himself an excellent reputation: as a man of God, a man of courage, a man of action. And his good name was a kind of currency, especially in Colorado territory, where, absent an established community, the social hierarchy remained relatively fluid. Chivington, though still a newcomer, could rub elbows with the territorial governor, setting himself up for a bright future. Or so Chivington hoped.
Jewcy (still a silly name) has posted the finale, “Electoral Dog Whistles Are Giving Me A Headache,” of Tedra Osell’s (aka Bitch, Phd) conversation with Courtney Martin and Wendy Shanker about the Democratic primary. Tedra’s post, which must have been written some time ago, reads as eerily prescient. See for yourself.
The distinguished economic historian Peter Lindert, who before his retirement had the office next to mine and who was a great good scholarly neighbor to me, tendered me the following after a session of explaining certain concepts to me. I thought I would share it with you all. If you don’t like it please blame Megan.
On this day in 1866, President Andrew Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Act, a piece of legislation that moderates in Congress had drafted to combat the notorious Black Codes. According to Eric Foner, the Civil Rights Act of 1866:
Ezra Klein points to this fascinating article by Gershom Gorenberg (who has an awesome blog). Gorenberg argues that the Clinton camp’s effort to slime Barack Obama by tarring one of his advisors, Robert Malley, as an anti-Semite is misguided on several levels, the most significant being that Malley isn’t actually an anti-Semite.
Perhaps. It’s probably too soon to tell for sure. Still, bear with me while I explain.
More on the library kickback case; US outsourced Afghan munitions supply to “a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur” (from NYT); California snowpack average but restrictions on water export mean “an estimated 25 million Californians” south of the Delta may be drier than they’d like (25m is about 2/3 of Californians, btw); governor says illegal immigration has nothing to do with state’s budget deficit (no, it wasn’t praeteritio; he was asked).
Lifestyle corner has correlation between midlife belly fat and old-age dementia.
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By Civil War standards, the Battle of Glorieta Pass, which began on this day in 1862 and took place in what today is the state of New Mexico, was of only middling significance. A Union victory, the battle ended a Confederate invasion of the Rocky Mountain region and put to rest Confederate plans to control a vast swath of the Southwest. For this reason, some historians call Glorieta Pass the Gettysburg of the West. These historians, no offence to them or their loved ones, are begging to be mocked. Roughly 250 soldiers were killed or wounded at Glorieta Pass — compared to the approximately 24,000 casualties at Shiloh, less than a month later, or 46,000 at the Gettysburg of the East, the following summer. And the invasion was always something of a long shot.
Fmr Sac Public Library officials arrested for grand theft and bribery—“A Bee Exclusive”—they’re alleged to have worked with a maintenance firm to overbill the library and kick back; Parkway Little League recovers after arsonist burns down its snack shack; state chiropractor board found to have broken open-meeting and conflict-of-interest laws.
Lifestyle corner is how to see the Kings for “cheap”—$42.25 for a couple.
I have nothing to add to the horror of the round numbers 5 and 4,000.* Nor do I have anything to say about the rogues’ gallery of losers and thugs that lied us into this terrible war. Or at least nothing that Tom Tomorrow hasn’t already said.
* Not to mention the who-knows-how-many Iraqis who have been killed.
Speaking of “a class of the lost,” on this day in 1894, Jacob S. Coxey started out with his army of the unemployed, also known as “the Commonweal of Christ,” from Massillon, Ohio, to march to Washington. You know the basic story: it’s a deep, desperate depression, the worst at least until the Great Depression; Coxey is a soft-money man, a People’s Party kind of guy—not poor himself, but believes in the cause, and wants the federal government to provide aid.
Here’s the thing: it’s awfully hard not to play Coxey for laughs. He named his child “Legal Tender.” He converted to a peculiar version of Christianity at the hands of an amateur theologian named Carl Browne, who held that each of us is reincarnated from a pool of mixed souls, so that a new soul contains an amalgam of old souls, which means that each of us contains a bit of Christ’s soul, too—and that Browne and Coxey had extra bits of Christ’s soul (he could just tell). The army marched under a banner with a portrait of Christ and a motto reading, “He is Risen, but Death to Interest on Bonds.” Coxey promised an army of a hundred thousand, but mustered only maybe a hundred; Massillon, in retrospect, probably wasn’t the best place to accumulate a pool of the unemployed. The army accrued a few hundred more people as it went along, but arrived still pretty small in Washington, DC, where its leaders were arrested and convicted for walking on the grass.
There were, immediately following, much more serious armies. But they were all tainted by this first outing’s faint air of ridiculousness.
So what do you do, teaching this story? Do you let the funny parts be funny? (Honestly, I’m not sure you can stop them.) How do you get your students, or readers, to refocus on the serious material at hand (double-digit unemployment, Pullman Strike, federal government going bust until/unless Morgan bails it out, that kind of thing). How can you play something that happens first as farce, then as tragedy?
Emails, journals of six of the 4,000; Sacramento FBI indicts 19 in mortgage fraud case.
Lifestyle corner is how to spend your stimulus check.
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If you’ve got a spare fifteen or twenty minutes, and you can stomach it, take the time to remind yourself that New Orleans’s fate still hangs in the balance. Look at these gut-wrenching videos documenting the rebuilding effort in six of the city’s neighborhoods: Broadmoor, Gentilly, Lakeview, the Lower 9th Ward, Mid City, and St. Bernard Parish. I’m not a huge fan of disaster voyeurism, but these films are, I think, very well done. A couple of them are even pretty upbeat.
This Saturday I’m appearing on a panel at the Organization of American Historians’ Annual Meeting in New York, with Dorothy Sue Cobble, Thomas Edsall, Michael Kazin, and Todd Gitlin, on “Does Liberalism Have a Useable Past?” First of all, if they’d asked me, I would have told them they should spell “usable” correctly. Second, I thought for my remarks I would draw on the below, which I originally wrote as a letter to the editor for Eric Alterman’s Altercation back in 2005:
Since we’re all writing about liberalism, here is a capsule history, written off the top of my head, that I hope might help.
1. Where did American liberalism come from? American liberalism, as we knew it in the twentieth century, developed from the wide acceptance of an observation that capitalism, while wonderfully creative, does not regulate itself satisfactorily. Neat theories notwithstanding, capitalist economies, left to themselves, quite often idle at equilibria that a substantial minority, if not a majority, of citizens find unpleasant or even unendurable. (People afflicted with scruples often find such equilibria unjust.) Let’s call this the Original Observation.
I re-read Another Country this weekend — what a great book, by the way — and then decided to see if Baldwin was alive and well and living in YouTube.
On this day in 1933, William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor, testified to a joint session of the Senate and House Labor Committees that he opposed Franklin Roosevelt’s proposed unemployment law as “smacking of fascism, Hitlerism and in some respects of sovietism”. This objection, from a prominent union leader, gives us a sense of how the New Deal was done: in ongoing negotiations among various groups, each looking out for its own.
The plan to which Green objected would become the Civilian Conservation Corps, the New Deal’s first real effort at relieving joblessness (more on it in a few days). It was not a broad-gauged relief measure; it aimed specifically to solve the problem of unemployed young men—young men who might otherwise go out on the road to relieve their families of the burden of supporting them, who might become freight-hopping transients, criminals, a class of the lost.
Instead, if they enrolled in CCC, the federal government would give them a job preserving the nation’s forests, housing and clothing them in work camps out near said forests, paying their wages to their families, keeping them tied to their parents—hence AFL president Green’s objection to “regimentation”. But also, of course, he disliked the plan because “Won’t these men, therefore, be in competition with free labor in many places?”
On the very same day, in another part of the country, the Republican politician William A. Prendergast praised his party for backing the administration’s bank, budget, and beer bills, but said now Republicans should stop supporting Roosevelt. “[N]ow … we approach another period, a period of legislation that is not really emergency legislation,” he warned.
The union leader and the Republican had much in common: they worried that the New Deal might, in the name of addressing the crisis, erode the foundations of the interests they represented. They didn’t know quite what the Democrats were up to and they didn’t trust the administration to limit itself.
Nor do we, in retrospect, know that they should have. Roosevelt might well have used broader discretionary powers if he had been able to get them. As it was, the New Deal was always just what its name implied: a constant re-negotiation of the relationship of government to economy, with Roosevelt, the Democratic Congress, the Republican opposition, the courts, and various interest groups fighting their own corners of a polygonal arena. The many-sided opposition shaped the New Deal as much or more than Roosevelt’s own intentions.
When the voters put Roosevelt back in office by such an overwhelming margin in 1936, they almost certainly thereby expressed not (or not just) confidence in Roosevelt personally, but a willingness that this process of negotiation, of push and push-back, should continue. It was giving American liberalism a robust and lasting set of institutions.
“Job Bill ‘Fascism’ Alleged by Green.” NYT 3/25/1933, p. 4.
“Would Curb Roosevelt.” NYT 3/25/1933, p. 5.
Statewide initiative (prop. 98) would bar rent control in trailer parks; culture clashes for South Asian immigrants (pull-out table shows Californians of South Asian ethnicities [East Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi] from 30-34% likely to have BA as against 17.1% for average Californian; would have been better to show as against average non-South Asian Californian, right?); rising health care costs have cut real wages even without a recession.
Lifestyle corner is “Doonesbury” vacation.
PZ Myers tells perhaps the best story of creationist lunacy since Inherit the Wind.
Via Blacktriangle.
Eric Foner reviews two new books on the understudied (not anymore, it seems) Colfax Massacre and the end of Reconstruction: Charles Lane’s The Day Freedom Died and LeAnna Keith’s The Colfax Massacre. And he likes both. Whereas I, having just started The Day Freedom Died (I didn’t even know The Colfax Massacre existed), can’t yet offer much insight into their quality. I can, though, say these books come hot enough on the heels of Nick Lemann’s Redemption (reviewed by me here, if you care) to suggest a trend: historians and journalists increasingly are blaming the failure of Reconstruction on white supremacists, as opposed to, say, the scandal-plagued Grant administration or the freed people themselves. This is, I think, very welcome news (more below). But I’m still not sure Foner’s right about this:
The work of historians, however, has largely failed to penetrate popular consciousness. Partly because of the persistence of old misconceptions, Reconstruction remains widely misunderstood. Popular views still owe more to such films as “Birth of a Nation” (which glorified the Klan as the savior of white civilization) and “Gone With the Wind” (which romanticized slavery and the Confederacy) than to modern scholarship.
I agree that “Reconstruction remains widely misunderstood.” But I think that, for people under the age of, um, let’s say, just for the sake of convenience, forty-five, Gone with the Wind and Birth of a Nation very likely aren’t the reason why. To be fair, though, it may be that Foner is suggesting that the odious view of history evinced by those films lingers, even though the movies themselves may no longer be popular. And if that’s the case, my response would be: sure, that’s likely true enough. But I’d probably follow up by suggesting that if you asked most people about Reconstruction, they’d have no idea where to find it on a map. Ignorance, in other words, is a more important reason that people misunderstand Reconstruction — have no idea what it was, in other words — than familiarity with films that are now three-quarters of a century old or more. Add to that, I suppose, popular distrust of government, fostered by The Club for Growth and its allies, and also the fact that Reconstruction gets overshadowed in most lesson plans by the war itself.
All of which is to say: the more books that detail the bad acts of white supremacists, complicating American notions of terrorism, the better. Still, I remain skeptical that the cultural artifacts that shape my understanding of the way the past used to be understood collectively, or Foner’s understanding of the same issue, now have much impact on popular perceptions of history. Put another way: does anybody, excluding PhD candidates in history or related disciplines, still watch Gone with the Wind or Birth of a Nation? And, more important, do those films still have cultural weight?
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On this day in 1788, a huge fire, fanned by wind coming off the Mississippi River, consumed most of the structures in New Orleans. Exactly how the fire started remains a mystery. (It would have been a long commute for Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.) We do, though, know that New Orleans, like most cities at the time, had almost no firefighting apparatus. So the results were predictable: the city’s French-era architecture, including the original Cabildo, was reduced to ashes. The Customs House and the Ursuline Convent were among the very few major buildings to survive the blaze.
New Orleans’s Spanish authorities would rebuild, replacing wooden structures with brick buildings, often constructed around airy courtyards, and ornamented with elaborate wrought-iron balconies: the misnamed French Quarter’s signature architectural style. In sum, as with previous disasters and many that would strike the city later in its history, New Orleans emerged from the catastrophe better than ever.
I’ve been doing a lot of navel-gazing* this week about blogging. In part, because I had jury duty, which kept me away from my computer and the blog. But also because I’ve been getting hate mail — about recent posts — for the first time. No, I don’t need sympathy. It’s just that the notes have made me think about what it means to have a blog. So I hope you’ll forgive (or ignore) a post that’s absurdly meta.
Has anybody else noticed the raft of stories and posts (most notably here and here, but also here and here, as well as, take my word for it, many other places) all saying pretty much the same thing: Clinton can’t win. Or, more accurately, she can’t win unless the superdelegates choose, come summer, to spurn Obama despite the fact that he’ll have the lead in pledged delegates and almost certainly also in the popular vote.
So what gives? That’s a serious question, by the way. Is it that re-running the Michigan and Florida primaries now seems like a long shot? Is it that Obama weathered L’affaire Wright? And he may even have transfigured that tedium into a triumph by giving a great speech on race? (Speaking of which, imagine that Kerry, in the summer of 2004, had delivered a thoughtful and direct speech about his Vietnam service. He’d just be coming to the end of his first term now, right?) Is it that the Clinton campaign increasingly seems to be composed of what, in a post I’ll try to put up later tonight, I’ll call D.W. Griffith Democrats? Is it that Bill Richardson endorsed Obama, effectively ending the Wright news cycle? Is it that the press finally grew tired of a horserace that wasn’t really much of a race? Or did everyone suddenly learn to add? Honestly, I don’t understand it. What do you think?
[Update: Here's Ygelsias again. And now Ezra Klein's offering his two cents. Also, I just noticed that Nick Beaudrot, one of my personal faves, is getting in on the act.]
Here’s a book reviewer I quite like, Scott McLemee, reviewing a writer I quite like, Lou Masur (who is also an editor I quite like). When a reviewer I like takes on a writer I like, it’s a bit like Batman v. Superman, or Stanford v. Cornell; I hate to see either side scoring too many points. Putting my sensitivities aside: both the reviewing and the reviewed texts meditate on this picture.
The history encapsulated in that photo may well be the reason Obama won’t win the primary in Pennsylvania. It’s probably also the reason for this:
Overall, 20% of white Democratic voters say they would vote for McCain if Obama is the Democratic nominee. That is twice the percentage of white Democrats who say they would support McCain in a Clinton-McCain matchup. Older Democrats (ages 65 and older), lower-income and less educated Democrats also would support McCain at higher levels if Obama rather than Clinton is the party’s nominee.
Which doesn’t, in that poll or others, mean Obama would lose—that poll shows him winning (and take all such polls with grains of salt; many things could happen between now and November). But it does suggest he would win with a different mix of votes than Clinton. In choosing a nominee, primary voters and convention delegates are choosing between different historical and future versions of the Democratic party, in which different mixes of people identify as Democrats, going forward.
And as with all Batman v. Superman matchups, the question is inevitably, which one is more powerful? Why?
Local Ford dealer to stop being one, AIDS vaccine trials halted: “‘This is on the same level of catastrophe as the Challenger disaster’”; floods in the Midwest.
Lifestyle corner is March Madness (Cardinal over Carnelian, 77-53).
Lower right of front page refers to Sacramento featuring in the Brookings study, Twenty-First Century Gateways, on the increase of immigrants to formerly white-bread American towns: “fewer McDonald’s and Wienerschnitzel eateries.”
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On this day in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe published her antislavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The book, which already had been serialized in an abolitionist newspaper, made an immediate splash, selling out its initial print run and capturing international attention. Just a year later, readers had purchased more than 300,000 copies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, vaulting it toward its destiny as the nineteenth century’s most widely read work of fiction.
I’m off to do my duty as a citizen of Yolo County. While I’m gone, have a good day. And remember to be nice to Eric. Or he’ll euthanize the blog.
This post by Robert Farley gets it exactly right. Boys don’t grow up knowing this stuff, they seek it out, or they get it in the classroom. Girls can too. Even after adulthood. There’s no shame in studying up on something you don’t know.
Farley’s further point that experience teaches pretty well too seems right also. If only there were a moral equivalent of war that would give people a low nonsense threshold for policy matters. Or at least a course. Why, perhaps economists could take it, maybe from economic historians.
Sources: UC hopes to hire Mark Yudof, UT chancellor, as system-wide president; Bush on Iraq war: “The world is better, and the United States of America is safer” (Photo is peace symbol made of luminarias at Sacramento’s Unitarian Universalist Society church).
Lifestyle corner is March Madness: “Stanford, USC, UCLA play today.” (Sports section hed on Stanford-Cornell game: “‘Battle of Nerds’ is waged today.” I’m hugely proud of my alma maters [or almae matres, if we want to continue the theme] for that description.)
And as long as I’m on the subject of granfalloons, there’s a Business section piece on UC Davis olive oil, now in its fourth vintage.
You might like Mitch Benn’s music; I certainly do. He performs satirical songs featuring catchy tunes and smart lyrics. One of my favorites is his reply to John Lennon’s “Imagine.” I couldn’t find my other big favorite, “Call Me during Doctor Who and I’ll Kill You.” I’m also quite fond, at the right time of year, of “The True Meaning of Christmas.” (It’s “to eat until it hurts, then to drink until it don’t hurt anymore.”)
Here is his MySpace page, with music. Here is his homepage and the updated video version of “Happy Birthday War,” (which WordPress, hating us all, won’t embed, even with VodPod) and as brought to our attention by, uh, Mitch Benn.
So I just last night saw Disturbia on cable. Wouldn’t it have been better if the first two sequences—the one showing Kale with his father, and the one showing Kale punching his teacher—had been eliminated?
That way, you would begin with house arrest—you would not leave the near neighborhood of the house for the entire movie, thus increasing the sense of claustrophobia, and creating unity of time, place, and action.
Also, that way you would introduce doubt in the viewer’s mind as to Kale’s stability and his reliability as a p.o.v. character. As it is, your sympathy is locked in from the “fathers and sons” fly-fishing moment at the start. And so what’s probably the movie’s absolute best moment—when Kale tells Ashley what he’s noticed about her as he’s been spying on her—would have been even better, because the balance between creepy and sweet would not have been so obviously tipping toward sweet.
Yeah, I know, if I’m so smart how come I’m not rich.
Because of the faculty lounge, I’m now hip-deep in this Constitutional thicket:
Could Hillary Clinton pick Bill Clinton as her VP running mate? The 22nd Amendment says only that “no person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice” and bars any person who has served “more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President” from being elected President “more than once.” But Bill would be elected Vice President, not President, and should Hillary die or resign from office Bill would become President but could not be elected to the office. So, is Bill constitutionally eligible to be VP? If not, why not? And if Bill is eligible to be VP, does this constitutional lacuna bother anybody?
Not only does this interest me as a hypothetical — because, who, I ask you, doesn’t like a good Constitutional hypothetical? — but also because I’ve been arguing for months that as the economy gets worse, the Clinton brand becomes more and more valuable. Add Bill to the ticket and you’ve got electoral gold. Or maybe not.
I.
Late in the evening of this day in 2003, President George W. Bush announced “the opening stages of what will be a broad and concerted campaign” whose purpose was “to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and defend the world from grave danger.” It might be hard slogging, he said: “A campaign on the harsh terrain of a nation as large as California could be longer and more difficult than some predict.”
II.
Not much after this day in 2007, Mitch Benn sang “Happy Birthday War.”
Of course, “war” rhymes with “four”; now he’ll have to rhyme something with “five.”
III.
The cost of the war has come to almost 4,000 dead American servicemen, 100,000 dead Iraqi civilians and maybe $527 bn in direct expenses. Or maybe more; Stiglitz and Bilmes put the cost in the trillions of dollars and there are other ways to measure civilian deaths which get that number much higher, too.
IV.
It is difficult to compare the current situation to any previous in our history. To recapitulate:
Man on street finds Fed emergency action scary, not reassuring; UC labs develop small supercomputer chips so “‘a cell phone in your shirt pocket, kind of peeking out…. can recognize the face of someone approaching and can kind of whisper in your ear who it is’”; (from NYT) Obama’s speech on race in America.
Lifestyle corner (in black rectangle) previews article on black accused double-murderer.
As noted earlier, today has been an odd day. I spent hours in a stuffy room, listening to the stories of my fellow citizens, as the attorneys in a criminal case that I can’t yet discuss tried to choose their ideal jury. As a result, I had no access to the internet or cable tv and missed seeing Obama’s speech live. I’ve since read it, and watched long sections of it here. But I haven’t yet seen what others have been saying on the subject. I might, later tonight, begin canvassing the interweb for reactions. For the moment, though, I thought I’d share a very few unfiltered thoughts of my own.
You can find this anywhere, of course. Still, given that we’ve talked at length about the issues that prompted this speech, it seems odd not to post the text here.
I’m just home from jury duty but will try to think of something to say about this later. For now, though, I haven’t seen it; I’ve only read it. But it seems like a very good speech. Check that, an uncommonly good speech, noteworthy for its candor and eloquence. I want to say that Obama could, almost singlehandedly, usher in a new era in which oratory and political rhetoric matter again. But I’m not ready to commit to that sentiment just yet. I will, however, say this: if the rumors are true, and Obama wrote this himself over the past few days, it’s hard not to be awed by his skillz.
And now I have to run to my older son’s t-ball game. I can’t be late. Priorities.
In case you were wondering, I didn’t push Ari in the river, or anything; he’s got a civic obligation today. Which gives me no very good, though no very bad, occasion to point you to this piece I wrote while doing similar civic duty a while ago, on Friend of This Blog Michael Bérubé’s What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts.
Which, I should point out, contains the only Wittgenstein joke I can remember making.
This day in 1933 marked the end of Franklin Roosevelt’s first two weeks in office. Here are some highlights from the New York Times summary.
March 4. Inauguration; “disclosed in his inaugural address that he would ask for a practical dictatorship, if needed”.
March 5. Bank holiday announced.
March 9. Congressional special session begins, “established a peace-time record for legislative action, adopting the President’s program, the House unanimously, and the Senate by a vote of 73 to 7.”
March 10. Roosevelt asks for a balanced budget bill and authorization to reduce veterans’ benefits.
March 12. First fireside chat (on banking).
March 13. Roosevelt asks legalization of beer. Banks begin reopening.
March 14. House passes 3.2 beer bill. Roosevelt begins to consider farm and employment relief programs.
March 15. Senate Finance Committee adds wine to beer bill (under pressure from California Senator William McAdoo).
March 16. Senate passes beer bill, reducing alcohol content from 3.2 to 3.05. Congress approves budget bill. Roosevelt asks action on farm relief.
March 17. House rejects Senate reduction of alcohol content. (In the end, the Cullen-Harrison Act, 48 Stat. 16, March 22, 1933, permitted wine and 3.2 beer.)
March 18 (Saturday). “Congress rested from its labors while the President proceeded to put into operation powers given him during the two weeks.”
“Roosevelt’s First Two Weeks,” NYT, March 19, 1933, p. 2.
Three weeks of closures for I-5 northbound, to be followed by three weeks of closures for I-5 southbound, beginning late May; Fed plans rate drop (which, analysts say, is supposed already to be priced into the market and won’t alleviate the credit crisis); Assembly to make office gambling a minor infraction, rather than jailable offense.
Lifestyle corner: how inflation affects the price of a pizza.
In reply to drip’s question, I commented on the specific legality of the Fed’s actions over the past few days. I thought it worth consolidating into a post. Keep in mind IANAL, but:
A 1932 provision of the Federal Reserve Act allows the Fed to lend to non-banks if at least five of its seven governors approve. That provision was last regularly used during the Great Depression. It is meant to underscore that the central bank should lend to nonbanks only in extreme circumstances.
The law in question is at 47 Stat. 715, which includes the following:
In unusual and exigent circumstances, the Federal Reserve Board, by the affirmative vote of not less than five members, may authorize any Federal reserve bank, during such periods as the said board may determine, at rates established in accordance with provisions of section 14, subdivision (d), of this Act, to discount for any individual, partnership, or corporation, notes, drafts, and bills of exchange of the kinds and maturities made eligible for discount for member banks under other provisions of this Act when such notes, drafts, and bills of exchange are indorsed and otherwise secured to the satisfaction of the Federal reserve bank: Provided, That before discounting any such note, draft, or bill of exchange for an individual or a partnership or corporation the Federal reserve bank shall obtain evidence that such individual, partnership, or corporation is unable to secure adequate credit accommodations from other banking institutions.
(See also.)
Now you might think a president would, if we were invoking a law that required “unusual and exigent circumstances,” go on the teevee and/or radio and tell the American people what was going on and what we were doing about it and why.
From the Pogues’ St. Patrick’s Day show in 1998. This appears to be the point in the set when Shane MacGowan* was already drunk enough that he couldn’t really speak English but not yet so drunk that he couldn’t stand**. Oh, one more thing: this video may not be safe for work because of offensive language***.
Sort of via lemmy caution and John Emerson at Unfogged. I say “sort of” because their comments prompted me to start tooling around YouTube looking for Pogues videos. And thus this post. Too much information? Yeah, I guess so.
* God rest his liver.
** More commonly known as “the beginning.”
*** And also because of MacGowan’s teeth. I kid, as The Pogues remain among my favorite bands ever. The others? I keep that information on my secret blog.
Ralph Luker, aka the Blogfather*, has a post up at Cliopatria about Rev. Wright’s sermons. Luker, a historian of American religion and civil rights (and also an Obama partisan), places Wright’s sermons in a particuar context: the jeremiad.
Here’s a sample:
But Wright’s and Obama’s critics are too far removed from biblical study to recognize that Jeremiah Wright is following in the footpath of the biblical prophet, Jeremiah, whose oracles read the sufferings of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah as punishment for their failure to live up to their covenant with God. To be in covenant with God, to be “under God,” is to be blessed by the divine when we are faithful. But woe betide us when we have failed “to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God.”
As someone who is — as I’ve admitted repeatedly — “far removed from biblical study,” I found Luker’s intervention into this ongoing debate very interesting.
[Update: David Carlton, in the comments, had this to say:
“The words are certainly condemnable.” Condemnable for what? Ralph [He’s an old friend] is right; this is classic prophetic language, and it definitely outrages those who refuse to accept the proposition that this nation is under judgment. That’s OK to a point; Wright’s speaking out of a tradition that not everybody shares in modern America. But the above statement declares that a long tradition of American discourse that hearkens back to the Puritans, and whose practitioners have included Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, Jr., is to be condemned. Prophets aren’t nice people; they come in from the wilderness [In this case, the black church, which might as well be Outer Space to the white guys who dominate the chattersphere] and say disquieting things, usually prefaced with obnoxious lines like “Thus saith the Lord.” But while Wright may be extreme, is he being unjust? Was Lincoln unjust when he declared the Civil War to be the just deserts of all Americans for having protected slavery? Was Douglass unjust when he compared the good people of Rochester, NY to the sneering conquerors of “By the rivers of Babylon”? Those who denounce the prophetic tradition would gut American culture of much that has made it worth celebrating.
Again, more historical context for Wright’s rhetoric.]
* It may be that only I know him by this name.
Tedra Osell, aka Bitch, PhD, is participating in a “trialogue on gender, race, age, and presidential politics” over at the embarrassingly named Jewcy. Here’s the lede graf:
Do women have any special obligation to support Clinton’s candidacy? The obvious answer is no — only the most reactionary kind of identity politics would assert that women must support women, men must support men, etc. (And what are black women to do? Vote twice?)
It gets more complicated from there. So you should read the rest for yourself, lazy.
A phrase used by John Humphrys on Radio 4’s Today Programme (mp3 link), to describe the Fed’s action to bail out the financial markets by backing JP Morgan’s purchase of Bear Stearns. Robert Peston, BBC’s business editor, added “the Federal Reserve … is taking the kind of action to restore confidence and pump money into the financial system that it hasn’t done since the nineteen-thirties.”
While there may be some truth in this, it is worth noting that the significant action in the nineteen-thirties was not taken by the Fed, but rather by Congress and the White House, first with the creation of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which Hoover signed into law in January 1932, to bail out banks because the Federal Reserve would not; second with the bank holiday just ended as of this time in 1933, which Roosevelt declared to stanch the bleeding in the system. On this day in 1933, Newton D. Baker, who had been Wilson’s Secretary of War, took to the National Broadcasting System’s airwaves to offer guarded support of this tendency toward executive action:
Everybody agrees to the wisdom of what has been done. At the same time, everybody recognizes that we were able to do this not because out institutions were geared up to make it easy to do but because of the entirely accidental circumstances that a new President had been swept into power by an overwhelming vote and had qualities which enabled him to dramatize his own courage to such an extent that traditional limitations and institutional obstacles were swept away.
We have come now to believe so thoroughly that today’s Federal Reserve has the tools and will do what is necessary that we have not thought much, perhaps, what difference it might make that it is Ben Bernanke, and not the White House, coordinating this emergency effort. Bernanke has had to step beyond the Fed’s traditional ambit, to back up financial institutions he cannot regulate.
Perhaps under the current circumstances, we would much rather the Fed Chairman than the President coordinate this effort. But ultimately addressing it may extend beyond the powers Bernanke wields. What will happen then? Will a lame-duck lassitude permit the kind of collapse that occurred in late 1932-early 1933? Will an energetic president address the disaster with the same vigor and intelligence he brought to Katrina and the war on terror? Stay tuned.
Ben Alpers has e-mailed to let us all know that historian Alan Dawley has died. I didn’t know Dawley well enough to write anything like an appropriate tribute to his life or work. So, I’ll simply note that he was, for me, the very model of the scholar-activist, a kind of moral compass for the profession.
Beyond that, it should be said that Dawley’s written work was outstanding. If you haven’t read Class and Community, and you have any interest at all in social history, get the book today. It’s a vivid depiction of a fascinating place, Lynn, Massachusetts, at a critical time, the early nineteenth century, as the industrial revolution remakes New England’s landscape, politics, economy, and culture. Then there’s this: scholarship was only one part of Dawley’s life. He also devoted himself to pursuing social justice, including the rights of working people. And, recently, he was among the most dedicated organizers of Historians against the War.
Dawley was, in sum, a great historian and, it seems, an even better person. In his e-mail, Ben says of Dawley: “His particular genius was bringing disparate personalities and points of view together by identifying and articulating real common ground. He’ll be sorely missed.” Again, I didn’t know him well enough to speak to the former point. As for the latter, I knew him just well enough to miss him already. To his friends and family, please accept our very deepest sympathies.
The connection between Stanford and Cornell Universities extends back to the founding of Stanford. Upon the death of their son Leland, Jr., the Stanfords asked Cornell’s first president, the historian Andrew Dickson White, if he would come out to California to start up their university. No, he said, but call up David Starr Jordan, one of my old students. Jordan said yes; Stanford not only got a Cornellian from a Cornellian for its first president, but also almost half of its first faculty from Cornell, too.
The only real attempt to memorialize this connection I know of was the ghastly Cornell-Stanford football game of 1991, scheduled on the occasion of Cornell’s 125th anniversary and Stanford’s 100th. Stanford won 56-6. I went to that game. At the half Stanford was already up 35-0 or something like that. The highlight of the contest came at around that time, when a group of Cornell fans unfurled a banner reading, “OK, let’s play hockey now.”
Ivy-undefeated 14th seed Cornell Big Red face 3rd seed Stanford Cardinal in the first round of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament Thursday at or slightly before 2PM Pacific in Anaheim. We wish the gentlemen cagers the best of luck.
A truck carrying 440 colonies, which is ~8m bees, flipped over on Highway 99. “The cause of the crash is under investigation,” says the (ahem) Bee. Yeah, who’s that hairy fellow with the pic-a-nic baskets sprinting from the scene?
And, Caltrans will close I-5 to “fix” it. Lifestyle corner is March Madness. You do not see it there, but my alma mater will be playing my alma mater.
The Bear Stearns bailout (ooh! that’s a silly word!) is bottom right of the front page.
As John Adams? Really? You’re serious about that? Whose idea was this? Mind you, I do like the guy. I think he’s a gifted and intelligent actor. And his dad, I’m told, was a pretty good university president (plus: the baseball thing).
But Paul Giamatti can’t play John Adams. Or at least he can’t based on what I saw on tv tonight. Adams was famously (infamously?) sardonic and pompous. Convinced that he was the smartest guy in the room, even when the other occupants included Franklin and Jefferson, Adams didn’t suffer fools — or even geniuses — gladly. Giamatti, whose range extends from neurotic to nerdy, with occasional detours into petulant, seemingly has no clue how to embody a man like Adams. He might, though, be a good choice to play me, should the biopic Eric’s been considering ever get off the ground. So, despite my plan to live-blog the whole HBO series, I won’t be tuning in again. Even though Laura Linney is still teh awesome.
On this day in 1904, the Supreme Court of the United States decided Northern Securities Co. v. United States (193 U.S. 197), which breathed a little—but only a little—life back into the Sherman Anti-trust Act, which had been left for mostly dead since the case of U.S. v. E. C. Knight.
The suit aimed at a railroad holding company organized in November, 1901, by J. P. Morgan, James J. Hill, E. H. Harriman, to end competition among their lines, which extended from Chicago westward to Seattle. Mark Hanna (whom historians, for reasons I cannot understand, sometimes allow to stand in for a “progressive”) thought it much “the best thing.”
This latest steel octopus, assembled at the morning of Roosevelt’s presidency, stretching its tentacles over the farmlands and ranches of the West, pushed him to action. He asked his Attorney General, Philander Knox, to prepare the case in secret from his corporation-lawyer war secretary Elihu Root, whom he figured would disapprove.
The Supreme Court ultimately sided with Roosevelt—though without the support of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., whom Roosevelt himself had put on the high bench. Holmes’s dissent included what became a maxim:
Great cases, like hard cases, make bad law. For great cases are called great not by reason of their real importance in shaping the law of the future, but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgment.
The case had come before the Court, Holmes suggested, with too much of the unbecoming alarums and skirmishes that by now clearly typified the Roosevelt presidency. And especially, it had not accomplished much. As Justice Edward White wrote in his dissent (with which Holmes largely concurred),
the decree, whilst forbidding the use of the stock by the Northern Securities Company, authorizes its return to the alleged conspirators, and does not restrain them from exercising the control resulting from the ownership. If the conspiracy and combination existed and was illegal, my mind fails to perceive why it should be left to produce its full force and effect in the hands of the individuals by whom it was charged the conspiracy was entered into.
James J. Hill was more succinct: “The three railroads are still there, earning good money.”
Roosevelt didn’t like the dissent, especially coming from a man he had made—he said, famously, he could make a better: “I could carve a better justice from a banana.” But he called it a victory anyway—“one of the greatest achievements of my administration.”
Great cases can make bad history, too—take Roosevelt too much at his word and you turn an inconclusive matchup into a great victory. Northern Securities tells you more if you let it matter less—rather than treat it like the titanic clash Roosevelt would wish, see it as the ambiguous pas de deux Holmes and White implied, a story letting you talk about the strange nuances of Roosevelt’s ambivalence toward the great business combinations of his day.
See for yourself. I find it a very powerful and compelling statement on many levels.
[Update: I think it's fair to say that Wright, who's at the very end of his extraordinary career, is, to some extent at least (so many clauses -- argh), exactly what Obama has been saying he is for some time: the kind of crazy uncle who says inappropriate things without any regard for the consequences. Add to that, much of what Wright said wasn't crazy and was actually true enough.
In the end, I'm both reassured and impressed by how Obama handled this situation. He obviously has known for awhile that this moment was coming. I say that because his current treatment of the L'affaire Wright isn't much different than his past treatments have been: he (Obama) disavows his (Wright's) craziest rhetoric, but he (Obama) won't sever ties with the man (Wright), who has been an important part of his (Obama's) life.* This is basically what Obama said in Cleveland a few weeks back. And it's what he's saying now. In other words, Obama knew something like this was going to happen, he had a plan in place, he put that plan into effect before the bad news cycle arrived, and then he stuck with his plan through the worst of the storm. Pretty good stuff, if you ask me. Not that anyone's asking.
* Why did I write this sentence in this convoluted and infuriating fashion? No idea.]
In another thread, Ben