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This is cooler than the Bee. Non-lurker andrew reads the 1908 New-York Tribune. He reports, you decide.
Spoilers below the fold.
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People keep telling me they read this blog. And the stats support this notion. Or at least, they support the notion that some entities, which may or may not be people, regularly click on bits of this blog.
Yet only a small core of such people comment. So consider this lurker amnesty. Please, throw down a comment to let us know you’re here.
Scott McLemee’s post on May Day raises issues of history and memory.
[Editors Note: Karl Jacoby is our guest today. In addition to being a wonderful friend, Karl's an extraordinary environmental and Western historian. If you haven't already read his first book, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation, you really should. It's beautifully written and powerfully argued. Plus, it won a bunch of prizes. Prizes are shiny. Karl's post today is about the Camp Grant Massacre, which is also the subject of his new book, Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History, fortcoming from The Penguin Press in November 2008.]
Shortly before dawn on this day in 1871, a combined force of Tohono O’odham Indians, Mexican Americans, and Anglo Americans from Tucson descended upon a would-be Apache reservation located along the banks of Arizona’s Aravaipa Creek. While some in the party charged up the creek bed, pausing at each of the Apaches’ circular brush shelters to club to death all those found sleeping within, others stationed in the bluffs above shot down at those few terrified Apaches who, awakened by the chaos of the assault, attempted to flee to safety. In little more than half an hour, the raiders would claim the lives of almost 150 Apaches, the overwhelming majority of them women and children, with no casualties to themselves.
This event, known today as the Camp Grant Massacre after the military base near which it took place, is neither the largest nor best known of the brutal flurry of attacks on Native Americans that marred the latter half of the nineteenth century. (The dubious honor of leading these categories would probably go to the Bear River Massacre of 1863, in which an estimated 280 Northern Shoshoni died, and the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890, in which at least 250 Lakota Indians were killed by U.S. Army units armed with rapid-firing Hotchkiss cannons.) But coming at a time when the federal government had proudly, if paradoxically, announced a “peace policy” towards North America’s indigenous peoples, this civilian attack on sleeping women and children raised troubling questions for many Americans about the causes of the nation’s violence towards Indian peoples. Newspapers fanned a heated debate over the attackers’ ethics. While some considered the Camp Grant Massacre “just and right,” one “of those victories for civilization and progress, which have made Sand Creek, Washita, the Piegan fight, and other similar occurrences famous in western history,” President Ulysses S. Grant, an architect of the “peace policy,” decried the attack as “murder, purely.” Outraged federal officials sought to punish the attackers, an effort that culminated in December 1871 with the trial of 100 alleged participants in the massacre. A jury of twelve Anglos and Mexican Americans from Tucson, however, took just nineteen minutes to find the accused not guilty, quickly ending any attempt to bring the perpetrators of the Camp Grant Massacre to justice.
In the century and a quarter since the brutal events in Aravaipa Canyon, memories of the massacre have faded away, especially among non-Apaches. Today, the parade grounds of Camp Grant have been replaced by Central Arizona College and Aravaipa Villa RV Park. Most of Aravaipa Canyon itself is now part of a national wilderness area administered by the Bureau of Land Management. The canyon’s reincarnation as an oasis of untouched nature for weary urbanites from Tucson and Phoenix would seem to encapsulate many of the perils of the American approach towards nature that Bill Cronon warned about almost a decade ago in his now famous essay, “The Trouble with Wilderness.” Rather than publicly acknowledging its violent past—the existence of a U.S. Army fort, the massacre of women and children—the canyon’s new status as wilderness enables instead the failure to consider its human history at all.
From May 30 I-5 will be closed where it runs through downtown Sacramento, so don’t drive anywhere near here; Governor’s aides settle on $20.2bn figure for state deficit at least until governor’s budget is released, May 14.
Rex Babin’s editorial cartoon:
Hey, kids! Can you solve the problem of the mystery gaffe? On this day in 1912, Senator John Sharp Williams (Democrat of Mississippi), under pressure from ministers who thundered at him to “get on your knees and ask God to blot out the great sin of your lips,” ordered struck from the Congressional Record his parody of the Apostles’ Creed, in which he mocked Theodore Roosevelt. He “expressed astonishment at what he said he regarded as a misconstruction by many Christian people.” See, and folks think the non-apology apology is a thing of our fallen times.
Now, as far as I can tell the NYT did not deem the parody fit to print, and I couldn’t find it mentioned in the biographies of Williams or Roosevelt I could lay hands (or mouse-clicks) on. I’m sure someone knows this and can embarrass me with a ready citation in 3… 2… 1…
Alternatively, imagine your own parody Apostles’ Creed. You can post it, along with your blasphemous depictions of the prophet, somewhere else.
Flash: fast food makes you fat! really: “[i]n communities with an abundance of fast-food outlets and convenience stores, researchers have found, obesity and diabetes rates are much higher….”; SCotUS upholds IN voter ID law; bundle of small earthquakes West of Reno; objections to H-2A guest-worker program from unions and farmers. Lifestyle corner is Maria Shriver book with the message, “it’s never too late to become the person you want to be.”
[Editor's Note: Kathy Olmsted is back as our guest, and she's more cloak-and-daggerific than ever.]
On this day in 1994, Aldrich Ames pleaded guilty to giving secrets to the Soviet Union and later Russia. He was the highest paid spy in U.S. history, the first CIA agent ever proven recruited by the KGB, and the poster child for espionage for profit.
Historians of intelligence often use the acronym MICE to explain why people spy: Money, Ideology, Compromise (as in blackmail), or Ego. Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, the Soviet Union had recruited dozens of Americans who spied because of ideology. They didn’t get paid to spy; in fact, they paid for the privilege, in the form of Communist party dues.
But for Ames – and for others in his generation of spies — it was all about money. In 1985, as a CIA officer assigned to Soviet counterintelligence, Ames knew the names of all the Soviets who were secretly working for the CIA. He was in an ideal position to sell these names to the KGB. Angry, unstable, and in chronic need of money, Ames boldly entered the Soviet embassy in Washington in April 1985 and delivered a letter describing some Soviets who had offered to spy for CIA. The delighted KGB paid him $50,000. Two months later, he turned over the names of more than ten Soviets working for the CIA and FBI in return for $2 million. Some of these CIA sources were killed; others vanished.
As their assets disappeared, CIA officials knew that the agency had been penetrated and launched an investigation to uncover the mole. Nevertheless, Ames continued his espionage activities for nine years. When he was arrested in 1994, members of Congress and the media asked in astonishment how the agency could have missed all of the warning signs. Ames drank heavily, received poor job evaluations, parked his Jaguar in the CIA parking lot, and paid cash for a half-million dollar house. Yet agency officials resisted for years recognizing that one of their own had changed sides. Finally, in 1993 CIA officials turned the case over to the FBI, which succeeded in catching Ames a year later. In return for cooperating with CIA debriefers, Ames received a life sentence rather than facing certain execution.
The Ames case, with its revelations of treachery and incompetence, demoralized the agency. CIA chief James Woolsey ordered three different investigations into the causes of the fiasco, but still could not save his job. He resigned at the end of 1994. Both the Senate and House Intelligence Committees issued detailed reports that, in the words of the Senate report, criticized the CIA’s “gross negligence” in the case.
In a comment spurred by this post on MLK and popular memory, charlieford wrote:
Just thought I’d share with ya’all that I turned this into a paper assignment in an Intro class (ie, US History Survey–almost all non-majors, sophomores and freshmen). I had them read tha tail of the “Dream” speech, most of the 1967 “Breaking Silence” speech, and Kai Wright’s piece in the Prospect. I asked them to frame it in terms of “mythic King” vs. “real King,” and why the two are out there, why the one is more palatable, and to evaluate the whole thing in whatever terms appealed to them. For about half, that was slightly ambitious. BUT: I think this was one of the most engaging papers I’ve assigned in some 10 years of teaching–ie, about 80% of the students really got into it. They almost all admired King enormously already (thank the schools–some had had King family members visit in elementary school) but to a MAN/WOMAN, none knew of the radical King. Maybe 2, out of 70, were disappointed that he’d criticize his nation when it was at war, but almost all were deeply challenged by his more radical analysis of US distemper. If you’ve read enough papers, you can tell when people are passionate, and when they’re feigning interest. Lot of passion from this assignment. Fun to grade, too. I thank Ari, Eric, and the EAW community for the inspiration to do it.
That does sound like a good paper topic. (And not because the answers charlie got from his students support my contention in the original post. Actually, I think his students’ responses buttress charlie’s point in the comments. Come to think of it, it’s just like charlie to design an assignment in order to win an argument with me. Selfish, that’s what’s he is.) Regardless, reading charlie’s comment raised a question in my mind: what’s the best paper assignment you’ve ever given? And by “best,” I think I mean the prompt that elicited the most interesting responses and that helped your students learn what you hoped they would from your course. That said, I might mean something else by “best.” I’m not entirely sure. I am sure that I need a nap.
For my part, I think the best paper topic I’ve ever given was in a seminar on memory I taught a few years back. I assigned Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s Army Life in a Black Regiment, David Blight’s article, “For Something Beyond the Battlefield: Frederick Douglass and the Struggle for the Memory of the Civil War,” and Glory. I asked the class to consider the relationship between the primary source, the scholarly article, and the film, focusing on the production and transmission of memories of African-American troops in the Civil War. The assignment, it turned out, was too complicated for some of the students. But the majority of them dug in and produced papers that I enjoyed reading (which might be a more accurate measure of what I mean by “best”). So, what about you? What assignments have worked well for you?
Lawmaker pay cut may not be within purview of proposing panel; bankers resist Fed proposals to regulate mortgage lending; firefighters working near LA. Lifestyle corner is civilian boot camp.
Inside, the Field Poll for March, 2008, shows percentage of Californians “very concerned” about “not being able to pay for all the costs associated with a major illness or injury” rose to 59% from 48% in December 2006. Percentage who want “government” providing their health care up from 22% to 31% over same period (largest chunk still want “employer” but has shrunk from 42% to 38%; the other bit of growth in those wanting “government” appears to come from the reduction in those who want health care to be their “own responsibility”).
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People who don’t know about this, should know about this: you can come hear Michael Bérubé talk about what’s happened to the left since 9/11. At Historic City Hall in Davis, May 6, 5:30 PM. Free. Open to the public. One night only.
If you need this explained, Bérubé writes sharp witty prose, is funnier even than Kelman (sorry, Ari), makes a great case for academic freedom and the liberal arts, and has managed also to stake out new turf in disability studies. He is in addition a fearsome hockey player and a drummer to be reckoned with.
Also, Truckasaurus. Okay, no Truckasaurus. But everything else is true.
Write it down, make up a little song about it. Once more: Bérubé!
Cross-posted to Crooked Timber.
During this week’s guest stint I’ve managed to touch on Palestine-Israel, the New Deal, and Michel Foucault. Steering clear of the real killer tripwires—i.e., sex roles, the Democratic primaries, or emacs/vi—that leaves a final frontier of Internet mischief….
On this day in 1945, only three days after the occupation of their city by French troops, the remaining full professors of the University of Freiburg assembled to elect new officers and to restore the customs under which they had operated before 1933, when their faculty, racially purged by the Nazis, elected as rector the philosopher Martin Heidegger. (All details here come from Hugo Ott; see more at the footnote.)1
This is not a parable or an analogy. It is a story of one episode in which civil authorities and academic governing bodies reckoned with a disastrous crossover between scholarship and politics.
One of the first orders of business for the reassembled professors was the question of what to do about Nazis among their colleagues. They chartered an internal review committee for the purpose, and tried to keep jurisdiction over this process, without success. City authorities were conducting their own reviews, and they designated Heidegger’s house, among others, as a “Party residence” to be requisitioned for use. The university protested, based on the opinion of legal scholar Franz Böhm (an anti-Nazi dismissed from his post during Hitler’s regime) that for “establishing political guilt” one needed “a proper court of law.”
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State legislature considers creating retirement plan for private enterprises to be administered by CalPERS; Kevin Johnson’s lawyer investigated accusation of inappropriate touching at Sac High before police could; Officials to truck record numbers of salmon from hatchery to the sea to try to preserve a maximum number from river obstacles. Lifestyle corner is Wesley Snipes’s prison sentence for failure to file tax returns.
So read a New York Times (pdf) headline of April 25, 1877. The article explained that on this day, April 24, 1877, at noon, “United States troops were removed from the State-house of Louisiana.” Thus ended the era of Reconstruction.
And thus began an era of unfettered white supremacy in Louisiana. The Grant administration had stationed federal troops in New Orleans (Baton Rouge would not become the permanent state capital for two more years) to insure that Louisiana’s Republican governor, Stephen Packard, would not be usurped by Francis Nicholls, a Democratic Redeemer, planter aristocrat, and former Confederate general.
Packard and Nicholls had squared off in the previous year’s gubernatorial election. Nicholls had received more votes. But the state’s Returning Board had overturned the outcome, basing its decision on a law that allowed it to invalidate votes in the event of intimidation or fraud. Which, given Louisiana’s recent history, wasn’t a hard case to make. As recently as 1872, two separate governments had claimed power in the state. Republican Governor William Kellogg had only seized control after federal troops had arrived to maintain order. Terrorist organizations, including the White League, had then formed, poised to intimidate freedpeople and suppress Republican votes. In the spring of 1873, for example, more than 100 African-Americans had been killed in the notorious Colfax Massacre, followed by countless other episodes in which black people had been beaten or killed by the de facto military arm of the state’s Democratic Party, including during the run-up to the 1876 election.
Following the Returning Board’s decision to overturn the popular vote, Democrats and Republicans, as they had in 1872, began organizing state governments. Early in the new year, two legislatures, one Democratic and the other Republican, selected, respectively, Nicholls and Packard as the state’s governors. From that point on, as the Compromise of 1877 played out behind closed doors in Washington, federal troops in New Orleans held the White League in check, guaranteeing Governor Packard control of the state house. Until, on this day in 1877, those troops withdrew. The Times reported that the White League “celebrat[ed] the victory by cannon firing and bell ringing.” Packard retired the next day, ceding control to Nicholls. Two years later, Governor Nicholls chaired the state convention that promulgated the Louisiana Constitution of 1879, disfranchising freedmen and some poor whites by embedding literacy and education tests in the law. The Redeemers had carried the day.
Adam Nagourney from NYT notices white working-class people (in SOME STATES, Nagourney) unwilling to vote for Obama; California ninth-graders have to pass fitness tests or else re-take PE (nice photo). Lifestyle corner is expensive golf kit.
Inside, we find a short piece about the work of UC Davis communications professor Michael Motley:
Nearly every woman Motley questioned answered that when she tells a partner “it’s getting late” during intimate situations, she means she is putting up a stop sign. But most men interpreted “it’s getting late” to mean either that she wanted him to “skip the preliminaries” or that she wanted him to go forward and was politely informing him about the late hour.
The Bee headlines the story, “Hot talk or time to stop?”
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Facing a declining share of the market, the CocaCola Company introduced New Coke on this day in 1985. ‘Nuff said, right? Well, except for this: has there ever been a grander episode of corporate hubris in American history? The answer must be yes. But I can’t think of one. Of course, I’m not trying very hard. Beyond that, the Wikipedia article on this subject really is better than anything I can do. So if you’re interested, have at it.
Oh, I did just think of one more thing: I’m a Coke absolutist. I try not to drink too much of the stuff, favoring the lining of my stomach and the enamel on my teeth (your teeth are the best friends you have, readers; treat them well). But when I have a cola beverage, I will only drink Coke. Eric, though, a man of refined tastes and breeding, is willing to consume Pepsi. What’s up with that?
Over here I pointed out this list of the top 100 public intellectuals. Apart from its making your blood boil, etc., perhaps we could consider what it says about our particular field. The people who make the cut and are labeled “historians”:
Anne Applebaum
Drew Gilpin Faust
Tony Judt
Niall Ferguson
Enrique Krauze
Ramachandra Guha
Bernard Lewis
Jared Diamond
I was going to say something about this myself, but then I remembered that would be work. So why not throw it open? What do you think this says about history and public intellection?
Clinton wins PA by 10 (NYT story); feature on one of 5,278 Sac area home repos; California Citizens Compensation Commission may consider reducing salary of elected officials. Lifestyle corner is make your own limoncello.
Our Boston correspondent Sifu Tweety sends along the below, writing, “Sometimes in Boston it seems like we just have to deal with the same problems over and over again.”
Cross-posted to Crooked Timber.
On this day in 1933, British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald delivered an address from the National Press Club in Washington, DC, discussing the common problems of the US and UK: “In America at this moment and in Great Britain there are millions of men who want work and can’t get it…. Governments cannot be indifferent to a state of things like that.”
MacDonald looked forward to “wise international government action,” to be established at the upcoming international economic conference. He hoped it would revive “a freely flowing international exchange,” i.e., trade—“Self-sufficiency in the economic field on the part of nations ultimately ends in the poverty of their own people.”
He was mindful of the apparent irony in Britain’s having taken the nationalist, defensive action of going off the gold standard: “Can you imagine that in the early days of that crisis we said gayly and light-heartedly, ‘Let it rip. Let it rip. We will go off gold. There are benefits in being off gold, and we will reap them.’” Obviously he meant the answer to be “no.”—“And so on this currency question, agreement is the only protection.”1
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Cross-posted from Crooked Timber.
By request, a quick bibliography on academic freedom off the top of my… well, not the top of my head, but the top of my EndNote file. With some annotations. I tried to do hanging indents, but WordPress defeated me.
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Robbery/murder with arson to cover up in Placer County; generational split in Democratic Pennsylvania primary. Lifestyle corner is teen savings plans.
On this day in 1828, Noah Webster published An American Dictionary of the English Language. In preparing his opus, Webster apparently learned more than twenty languages, including Sanskrit and Anglo-Saxon. And with approximately 70,000 entries, his dictionary rivaled Samuel Johnson’s eighteenth-century British masterpiece, Dictionary of the English Language, as a reference work. More than that, Webster’s text provided the young United States with a definitive guide to its own language, American English.
In addition to its place in the history of American letters, I wonder if it makes sense to think of Webster’s dictionary as akin to the art of his contemporary, Thomas Cole, and the other painters of the Hudson River School: as works of cultural nationalism. Cole imbued the United States with a sense of its past and identity by looking to the landscape, depicting places like the Connecticut River Valley. Webster, by contrast, focused on the way that Americans had created their own vernacular, words like “skunk” and “chowder.” He also discarded many British spelling conventions. In Webster’s hands, “centre” transposed into “center,” “musick” turned into “music,” and a “plough” transformed into a “plow.”
Other than his work as a lexicographer, Webster, while attending Yale College during the Revolutionary War, served in the Connecticut Militia. He later pushed for the Constitutional Convention, became a staunch Federalist, edited newspapers, penned political essays, wrote popular textbooks, and served in the Connecticut legislature. But no matter how hard he tried, he never managed to convince his fellow Americans that “women” should more properly be spelled “wimmen,” leaving his life’s labours unfinished. Er, labors.
Malcolm X discusses race relations, seniority and the workings of the U.S. Senate, the limited power of the judiciary, and the classics of British literature.
Cross-posted from Crooked Timber, where I’m guest-blogging this week.
Greetings from the edge of the American West, in the neighborhood of which friendly folks have been urging academics to brush up on how to fire each other. In the midst of everyone scurrying around and reading rules and shouting, some of us noticed an article (not really online) in The New Yorker, which makes one wonder, is it maybe bad for academic freedom to have a free speech expert as university president?
Back by popular passive-aggressive nudging.
An article about “what most teenagers lust for”: a driving license, which some Assembly lawmakers want to make contingent on school attendance to the age of 18 absent a hardship waiver; CHP is suing a whistleblower, running the tab up to $619k; the Pope has kept his “focus on the problem” of Catholic clergy committing sex crimes. Lifestyle corner is about recreational use of American River Parkway trail.
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It was dumb luck that most of San Francisco was fast asleep when the city began shaking at 5:12 am on April 18, 1906. Had it been later in the morning, main arteries clogged with traffic, or midday, the city center humming, the carnage would have been worse. Instead, most people woke abruptly and took cover when the quake didn’t pass quickly enough to be mistaken for a bad dream. It lingered for nearly a minute, an eternity for terrified San Franciscans. In an instant, the ground in some parts of town liquefied; whole blocks of poorly constructed tenements slumped into piles of rubble, entombing those inside. Even monumental buildings, constructed to embody state power or Gilded Age prosperity — the US Post Office; the West’s most luxurious hotels and grandest office buildings; and the still-new City Hall, a Beaux-Arts monument that captured San Francisco’s ostentatious sense of itself at the dawn of a new century — all suffered significant structural damage. It was, without question, the worst disaster in a city whose short history had already been punctuated by earthquakes and fires. And the horror had just begun.
Then the shaking stopped. The city righted itself. The infamous San Andreas Fault, where two massive tectonic plates rub each other the wrong way for approximately 750 miles, along much of California’s length, had released some of its vast storehouse of energy. People crept from their hiding places, from beneath tables or beds, and began looking for loved ones, surveying the damage and considering how to rebuild shattered landscapes and lives. There were aftershocks, but nothing remotely as jarring as the initial event. As it turned out, people had felt the shaking throughout most of California and beyond: from Coos Bay in Oregon to Anaheim, just south of Los Angeles; from well into the Pacific Ocean all the way inland to Winnemucca, in northern Nevada’s arid interior. An area of roughly 400,000 miles had experienced some seismic activity. But San Francisco and its environs absorbed the brunt of the damage. The wounds were going to become far worse; the most severe would be self-inflicted. Blazes were just starting to burn around the city, born of urban life upended: cracked gas lines, scattered cooking fires, or candles and oil lamps toppled during the quake. The fires demonstrated that although the quake had been natural enough, the disaster would be a byproduct of poor planning, negligence, and the politics of catastrophe.
In 1912, President Adolfo Díaz of Nicaragua kicked Minister of War Luis Mena out of his cabinet, replacing him with Emiliano Chamorro. Díaz, Mena, and Chamorro were members of the Conservative party, but with Mena out, Liberals rallied around him and rebelled against the government. The Díaz government requested American intervention, and the U.S. complied, sending Major Smedley D. Butler and a few hundred Marines, who shortly afterward were reinforced by a couple thousand more. The Marines stayed while an election ratified Díaz in power, and they remained in reduced numbers for a dozen years.
The U.S. announced in 1923 its intent to withdraw the Marines. In 1924, peaceful Nicaraguan elections saw seventy-three percent turnout and a margin of 3:2 for a coalition ticket of the Conservative Carlos Solórzano for president and the Liberal Juan Sacasa for vice president. Solórzano, concerned about stability, asked the U.S. to leave the Marines, but the Coolidge administration declined and duly withdrew them on August 4, 1925.
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We’ve been asked to pass along the the following note to our readers. Be aware, the following is aimed at Community Organizations, not individual participants.
To Community Partners:
StoryCorps’ MobileBooth will be in Sacramento, CA from April 17-May 10. We really wanted to reach out to you for interviews at the MobileBooth. We have a limited number of slots in Sacramento, and we would like you to fill some.
StoryCorps is a national oral history project. Here is a little bit about how it works: 2-3 people who know each other well spend 40 minutes interviewing each other in our mobile recording booth. The interview format is up to the participants: one person can ask the other questions or the two can simply have a conversation. Participants will walk away with a CD copy of their interview, and the option of releasing their story to be archived at the Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center in Washington D.C.
Please visit our website to learn more. Some helpful hints for our site: click on “Listen” for samples of previous interviews from around the country. To learn more about the process, click on “Participate” and then “Record an Interview;” from there you can also click on “MobileBooths” to read more about the booth in which these interviews take place.
Thank you so much for your interest. I would love to start booking interviews as soon as possible. I’m excited to be in touch with you about your potential involvement in StoryCorps. You can reach me at this e-mail address (west@storycorps.net) or by phone at 646-723-7025 x201. If you cannot reach me, please try Katherine Brook, our MobileBooth Coordinator, at x41.
Thanks!
Jennie
This sounds like it could be fun. Perhaps we’ll see you there. Or, if you’re not in the area, you still might want to take a minute to check out the StoryCorps website.
[Update: For more information, see this story in our local paper, the Bee.]
The Supreme Court today rejected a challenge to the lethal injection protocol used by the majority of the states. The Court’s decision allows the states to resume executions that play out in three acts: first the condemned is sedated, then he or she is paralyzed, and finally he or she is killed. It bears mentioning that the use of the paralytic has been banned in animal euthenasia in forty-two states, including the five leaders in human lethal injection: Texas, Oklahoma, Virginia, Missouri, and North Carolina. I don’t have the training to do much more than paraphrase Brad DeLong and Atrios: in addition to a better press corps, we really need a better Supreme Court.
If you want to read more on the subject, including what seems to be a rather obvious and very decent policy prescription, I recommend this article (pdf), by Ty Alper, who has written for EotAW before. Ty is the associate director of the Death Penalty Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law which runs the website, www.lethalinjection.org, another excellent source for further reading.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go puke my guts up and then bang my head against a wall. Sometimes I love this country even less than Michelle Obama does.
On this day in 1889, a New York judge offered a fairly gratuitous attack on both corporations and their laboring opponents in his summing-up. Here’s the item from the NYT in its entirety:
CORPORATIONS ARE HARD TO FIGHT
Thomas Reardon was put on trial before Judge Cowing yesterday for assault in the second degree upon Policeman Patrick H. Lynch of the Thirteenth Precinct during the surface road strike. A number of witnesses, including ex-Senator George W. Plunkitt, testified that they saw the trouble, and that Reardon was not the policeman’s assailant. A verdict of not guilty was returned. In discharging the jury for the day Judge Cowing said in part:
“Corporations, in my judgment, are without consciences. I don’t think that they treat their employes as they should. They have no soul or body. If men peg away at them they don’t hurt the corporation, but rather hurt themselves. Men should remember that it is their first duty to maintain peace.”1
This kind of thinking—a pox on both their houses, these great combinations of capital and labor—crops up frequently in accounts of why middle-class Americans supported what came to be known as progressivism. The classic statement is probably Jane Addams’s account of the Pullman Strike, the disruptions of which prevented her visiting her dying sister. The great impersonal agglomerations of clashing interests crushed ordinary families between them without a thought. This concern developed into an argument for the growth of the state to regulate the interests on both sides of the capital/labor divide.
There are at least two worthwhile things a historian of what is still called “the age of reform” can say about this way of thinking. One is, however many middle-class people thought this way, there weren’t enough of them, nor were they spread sufficiently widely around the country, to carry reforms at the polls or in the Congress. So the sources of reform sprang from other impulses too.
Second, this way of thinking runs opposite to the New Deal emphasis on “countervailing power,” in which liberal, middle-class reformers supported unions specifically so they could avoid the growth of the state—if unions were powerful enough to fight their corner, we wouldn’t need a more powerful, and potentially oppressive, state. Senator Robert Wagner: “[W]e intend to rely upon democratic self-help by industry and labor instead of courting the pitfalls of an arbitrary or totalitarian state.”
Suppose this is a sufficiently strong interpretation of the shift in liberal reformers’ attitudes over a few decades: What changed their minds about the desirability of a stronger state? Several things, I should think: (1) the income tax; (2) the rise of fascism in Western Europe; (3) the experience of the NRA.
1“Corporations are Hard to Fight,” NYT 4/17/1889, p. 2.
At 7:22 am on this day in 1865, Abraham Lincoln died. The previous evening, during the third act of a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater, John Wilkes Booth, enraged by the speech discussed here, had shot Lincoln in the head. A single bullet had entered through the rear of Lincoln’s skull and lodged behind his right eye. The wound had bled very little. As word of the assassination attempt spread throughout Washington, Cabinet members, Congressmen, and other officials had descended upon Ford’s Theater, where surgeons struggled to keep Lincoln alive. They failed, and the nation mourned. It mourns still.
I’m agnostic about counterfactuals. Sometimes, they seem to offer a way to test theories. At others, they strike me as little more than a conceit or a sideshow, a diversion my students find endlessly fascinating, and therefore an annoyance in the context of my courses. But when it comes to Lincoln, I can’t help but consider the counterfactual: what if he had lived? How different would Reconstruction have been with Lincoln watching over its progress? Might there have been land reform in the South? Or would Lincoln have been more lenient even than Johnson in service of reconciliation? Beyond that, how different would the Republican Party’s history have been had Lincoln lived into his dotage, an elder statesmen protecting his own legacy? We have no answers for these and a host of other questions [insert yours below]. But each of these queries fascinates me. I fight my inner romantic when I consider the implications of Lincoln’s death and what the nation lost on this day in 1865.
Eric, whose pet counterfactual revolves around Lincoln living and Seward dying — with the martyred Seward looking over his shoulder, Lincoln would have had added moral authority and motivation to remake the South — turned me on to Niall Ferguson’s edited volume on counterfactuals. Ferguson’s introduction is wide-ranging: from Peggy Sue Got Married and Back to the Future to Michael Oakeshott and E.H. Carr to Augustine and John Calvin to Newton and Descartes to Hegel and Kant to Marx and Mill with stops along the way. As he skips across discursive time and space, Ferguson responds to E.P. Thompson’s contention that counterfactuals are “Geschichtswissenschlopff, unhistorical shit,” arguing that respect for contingency and chaos demand that we engage with counterfactuals. “Virtual history,” in this view, “is a necessary antidote for determinism.” That seems fair enough. But the book lacks a chapter on Lincoln, or the Civil War — a font of counterfactuals — more broadly. So it’s left to us to answer the simple question: what if?
No, not us. Well, yes us, but that’s not what I’m writing about. Thomas Haskell’s “must-read” essay on “Justifying Academic Freedom” is only partly online, but that part includes this excerpt from the Seligman and Lovejoy statement on academic freedom, from 1915.
The lay public is under no compulsion to accept or act upon the opinions of the scientific experts whom, through the universities, it employs. But it is highly needful, in the interest of society at large, that what purport to be the conclusions of men trained for, and dedicated to, the quest for truth, shall in fact be the conclusions of such men, and not echoes of the opinions of the lay public, or of the individuals who endow or manage universities. To the degree that professional scholars, in the formation and promulgation of their opinions, are, or by the character of their tenure, appear to be, subject to any motive other than their own scientific conscience and a desire for the respect of their fellow-experts, to that degree the university teaching profession is corrupted; its proper influence on public opinion is diminished and vitiated, and society at large fails to get from its scholars, in an unadulterated form, the peculiar and necessary service which it is the office of the professional scholar to furnish.
As Haskell goes on to say, you can see in this passage how all the pieces of academic inquiry and freedom fit together and rest on the core concept of the disciplinary community. Haskell—unlike Seligman and Lovejoy—knows the pitfalls and costs of a disciplinary communities, which he sees as
dangerous tools designed to fight fire with fire…. The community of the competent is … a special kind of voluntary association, one that offers its members (and through them, indirectly, the entire culture) a degree of protection against the tyrannous tendencies of unchecked public opinion…. [I]t achieves this laudable end only by exposing them to a rival source of majoritarian pressures, internal to the community.
Which is to say, academics can enforce an orthodoxy on each other. And, Haskell says, working conscientiously through Stanley Fish and Hayden White (“There is no satisfying a critic who prefers his history incomprehensible,” Haskell notes), such communities present difficult philosophical problems.
Still: “such communities do still exist, and their very existence gives some assurance that no one’s incompetence is likely to hold the floor for long”—so long as such communities operate properly, by policing their boundaries. Which, Haskell acknowledges, is hardly a cause people rally around. “In many parts of the world these truths will seem too frail to be valued, and even where valued, they may prove too lacking in charismatic authority to compete against other, more visceral sources of conviction.”
Time to bring it all together: YouTube Monday, This Day in History, celebrating the New Deal, and probably some other things I can’t think of right now. How, you ask, will Ari pull off this masterful feat of EotAW synergy? By embedding a short for The Plow That Broke the Plains (see above) coupled with a quick discussion of the Dust Bowl’s nadir, Black Sunday, which happened on this day in 1935. I’m just that good, people; you’d better get used to it. Okay, I know, it wasn’t exactly a masterstroke. So how about an “A” for effort?
Don Worster, whose Dust Bowl remains, more than a quarter century later, a great book, writes that on April 14, 1935, “dawn came clear and rosy all across the plains.” By midday, though, the temperature had dropped close to 50 degrees. Birds seemed nervous, “as though fleeing from some unseen enemy.” Then, on the northern horizon there appeared a dark cloud, advancing slowly. For hours, the dust swirled so thick that people couldn’t see their hands in front of their faces. Black Sunday marked the last of the year’s storms, but the damage already was done: an epidemic, as respiratory infections afflicted people who “spat up clods of dirt” throughout the region; an economic catastrophe, as cattle and other livestock died off; and a social crisis, as depression descended on the Dust Bowl states.
All of which is a longwinded (forgive me) way of saying that if you haven’t seen Pare Lorentz’s The Plow that Broke the Plains, you really should. I’m trying to think if it’s my favorite documentary ever. Hmmm. My gut says yes. But that could be hunger talking; I haven’t eaten anything yet today. Regardless, Lorentz’s film, the first half of which you can see here, is wonderful: a poetic script that turns on repeated phrasing; Virgil Thomson’s modern score, a masterpiece of Americana that nods to folk music and spirituals; and haunting cinematography, the work of Paul Strand, Leo Hurwitz, Paul Ivano, and Ralph Steiner. And just who was able to assemble that much talent in one place at one time, you ask? The federal government, that’s who, specifically Rexford Tugwell’s Resettlement Administration, which the Roosevelt administration later folded into the Farm Security Administration.
Because of this story at Politico (and others at places to which, as matter of personal preference, not to be confused with editorial policy, I will not link) Barack Obama is getting hammered today. If you clicked the previous link, you’ve learned the cruel truth: Senator Obama has attacked gun owners and people of faith. Worse still, he held a fundraiser in San Francisco. Grab your kids, people, teh gayz are coming.
Hillary Clinton seized on these comments, eager to distance herself from what must have seemed to her like the news cycle from hell. First, the story of Mark Penn’s double dipping: drawing a salary from Clinton (who, while in Pennsylvania and Ohio at least, has found blue-collar religion: hostility to free trade) while also on the payroll of trade-deal-seeking Colombia. And second, Bill Clinton’s latest episode of unforced fabulism, in which he doubled back to his wife’s exaggerated exploits in Tuzla while she served as first lady. Obama’s remarks, then, allowed Senator Clinton to paint him as, gasp, “elitist.” And, as ABC news reports, with John Mellencamp’s “Small Town” blaring in the background, Clinton talked to an audience in a Pennsylvania factory about her “Midwestern values,” “unshakeable faith in America” (Reverend Wright, anyone?), and respect for gun rights and religion. From all of the above we learn, yet again, that Hillary Clinton has really terrible taste in music.
On this day in 1865 Abraham Lincoln gave his last public speech, taking up the question of reconstruction, managing to sound a radical note or two:
By these recent successes, the reinauguration of the national authority—reconstruction—… is pressed much more closely upon our attention…. Unlike a case of war between independent nations, there is no authorized organ for us to treat with—no one man has authority to give up the rebellion for any other man. We simply must begin with and mould from disorganized and discordant elements….
Later, in laying out the case of Louisiana, he remarked
It is also unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the coloured man. I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.
Which is supposed to have inspired the listening John Wilkes Booth to say to his friend, “That means nigger citizenship. Now, by God, I will put him through. That will be the last speech he will ever make.”
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I feel obliged to note this. With respect to its opinions on the procedure that must still be followed, it doesn’t sound wholly unlike this. I would have avoided saying, “President Bush and his national security appointees were the deciders,” but that’s only because I find it funny, which is inappropriate given the circumstances.
SEK provides us with this Friday afternoon gem. Now that’s what I’m talking about people. This is a team effort. So try to pull your weight.
A lurker sent me this link to Independent Film Channel’s “50 Greatest Comedy Sketches of All Time.” I’ve only started looking through the offerings, but I seem to have acquired a taste for The State’s work in my old age. Anyway, thanks lurker.*
* Subtle subtext: You should all be doing more for the blog.
The ones that mother gives you
Improve focus and recall:
One in five respondents said they had used drugs for non-medical reasons to stimulate their focus, concentration or memory…. The most popular reason for taking the drugs was to improve concentration. Improving focus for a specific task (admittedly difficult to distinguish from concentration) ranked a close second and counteracting jet lag ranked fourth, behind ‘other’ which received a few interesting reasons, such as “party”, “house cleaning” and “to actually see if there was any validity to the afore-mentioned article”…. Our poll found that one-third of the drugs being used for non-medical purposes were purchased over the Internet….
Not so surprising, when you remember Brad DeLong coming out as a user.
On this day in 1866, Henry Bergh founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), in New York City. Before that time, Bergh seems to have been something of a dilettante, a child of privilege who spent much of his adult life gallivanting around Europe (lucky devil). While abroad, he found his calling and began crusading for “the mute servants of mankind.” Once back in the United States, he appealed to wealthy New Yorkers, a natural constituency for him, with a manifesto/petition titled, “Declaration of the Rights of Animals.” Certain that history would remember his declaration as fondly as it had Mr. Jefferson’s, Bergh secured signatures from luminaries including Horace Greeley, Peter Cooper, George Bancroft, and Hamilton Fish. (Yes, I just wanted to write, “Hamilton Fish.” Okay?)
Although detractors labeled Bergh an overzealous animal lover, his appeal instead emerged from a marriage of apparently conflicting worldviews relatively common to the era: Christian perfectionism, religious zeal that underlay many of the period’s reform movements, coupled with a new respect for the non-human world, likely rooted in Darwinism. Bergh, then, often framed the mistreatment of animals as a key part of the struggle for the collective soul of the body politic. In his words: “This a matter purely of conscience. It has no perplexing side issues. No, it is a moral question in all of its aspects…it is a solemn recognition of the greatest attribute of the Almighty Ruler of the Universe, mercy.” Some lawmakers in Albany resisted his call for a charter for the ASPCA; they balked at extended legal rights outside the human realm. But Bergh’s connections helped him carry the day, this one, in 1866.
Next, with the help of Ezra Cornell, Bergh successfully lobbied the legislature for a cruelty law that made it a misdemeanor to mistreat animals in New York, regardless of ownership. And then, along with the ASPCA’s original staff of three people, he patrolled the city’s streets, on the lookout for cases in which animals were being treated cruelly. As Bergh put it: “Day after day I am in slaughterhouses, or lying in wait at midnight with a squad of police near some dog pit. Lifting a fallen horse to his feet, penetrating buildings where I inspect collars and saddles for raw flesh, then lecturing in public schools to children, and again to adult societies. Thus my whole life is spent.” For his constant vigilance, he earned his nickname, The Great Meddler.
On this day in 1865, Abraham Lincoln returned to Washington from a trip to Virginia, where he had visited Grant’s headquarters, surveyed Richmond in captivity and sat in Jefferson Davis’s chair, contemplating the imminent end of war.
Arriving back in the capital, Lincoln stopped first by the house of William Seward, his Secretary of State, who was laid up owing to a carriage accident that left him with a broken arm and jaw. The president proposed a national day of thanksgiving, and held his face close to Seward’s to hear his colleague’s answer. Seward counseled, not yet. Sherman had still to secure the surrender of Joseph Johnston. Until then the Confederacy remained unconquered.
Lincoln would not live to see the end Seward advised him to await. But when that conclusion came, Lincoln’s trip to Virginia would hang heavy over it. Officers of the government and various journalists would claim that the terms Sherman gave Johnston were so lenient as to seem treasonous, and Sherman would say that he granted only what Lincoln had told him to grant when they met at City Point, Virginia.
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Yesterday we had an excellent guest lecture, despite the fact that the LCD projector failed and so did the video camera. I’d even tested the camera beforehand, though we couldn’t get into the room to test the projector. But to no avail.
To compose my introduction, I tried to find my review of the speaker’s book, and it had vanished off the website where once it was. Only the Internet Archive saved me.
That’s two-and-a-half failures out of three, technology. When we welcome our new robot overlords, we’re going to find out they’re just as incompetent as the human ones.
Henry cites me as being down on current Sesame Street. (What, you thought it was getting to be a serious blog?) And granted, I have my reservations; whenever I catch a groovy old one with, say, Bob singing “Good Morning Starshine” (oh, yes) I get a bit misty about my childhood. And much as anyone, I regret Cookie Monster being pressed into the service of nutrition with cookies being “a sometime food,” unlike fruits and vegetables.
Still, watching with my kids, I now believe Cookie one of the great redeeming features of Sesame Street. Why? Two examples, which I paraphrase from memory:
[on the word "cowabunga"]
Prairie: That’s not even a word!
Cookie: Sure, it word. Oh, it esoteric, but it word.
[on how he feels on an unfortunate occasion I can't remember]
Cookie: Me not too sad. Maybe a bit lachrymose.
Below, watch him saying he doesn’t like the word “pusillanimous,” and talking about his ambition to be an ophthalmologist.
Okay, so I think it’s funny when an embodied three-year-old id waxes sesquipedalian. What makes you laugh?
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Holy smokes, you have to take a minute to see what Teo is up to: 1692 in America. I’ll quote at length from the site’s “about” page:
This is a blog about synchronicity. It is an account of several notable events that took place in the Western Hemisphere during the year 1692, giving a day-by-day description of every little occurrence within each of these events that was recorded in a form that has survived to the present day. The idea behind it is to give a sense for what was happening at the same time in different places during a very tumultuous and eventful year for the European colonies in America.
The most important and best-documented events of 1692 in America were the Salem witch trials and the reconquest of New Mexico. Accordingly, a great deal of this blog is devoted to these two events. I have also included other less famous events that were going on at the same time in other parts of the New World. These include the witchcraft scare in southwestern Connecticut, the earthquake in Jamaica that destroyed the city of Port Royal, and the corn riots in Mexico City.
These events all involve either the English or the Spanish colonies in America. This is not by design, but rather because I was unable to find any events of comparable importance and documentation in the colonies of other European countries. The areas that were not under European control, of course, are even more sparsely documented, so nothing that happened in them at this time is documented in anything like the kind of detail necessary to be included here. This is unfortunate, but the records are what they are.
And there’s more. Seriously, you should see for yourself.
[Editor's Note: And while we're on the subject of what our commenters have been doing when they're not here (shame on you people for ever leaving), let me also recommend that you check out this post essay at charlieford's site.]
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On this day in 1935, the so-called “big bill,” the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act (at, sorry KRK, 49 Stat. 115) became law, appropriating around $5bn “to provide relief, work relief and to increase employment by providing for useful projects.” Under the terms of the law, Franklin Roosevelt created and defined the Works Progress Administration “to move from the relief rolls to work on such projects or in private employment the maximum number of persons in the shortest time possible.”
There’s a lot in this story, and I can only tell part of it here (much more is in this book, of course). Maybe the thing to start with is the year: 1935, two years after Roosevelt took office. The New Dealers took a long time to resign themselves to providing national relief.
At the start, in May of 1933, there had been the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, with half a billion dollars of money it could grant to the states for relief, thus respecting the tradition of federalism. It proved to be too little too slowly. By the autumn of that year, the administration felt moved to act more precipitously. Roosevelt created the Civil Works Administration, charged with hiring four million people. Which it did, by January 1934. And it’s credited with getting many Americans through the record cold winter of that year.
But it made Roosevelt nervous; he didn’t want federal relief “to become a habit with the country.” So before spring thaw had quite come, he’d decided to fire the four million. Which he did.
By the end of 1934, Roosevelt saw that the government had spent some, but achieved little and, he wrote, “I hope to be able to substitute work for relief.” Hence WPA, which hired Americans to do “useful projects.” They built public works; they plied their artistic trade if they had one; they collected a record of vanishing America as it existed.
In 1938 a WPA relief worker said,
The way I look at it is this. This is a rich country. I figger it ain’t going to hurt the government to feed and clothe them that needs it. Half of ’em can’t get work, or just ain’t fixed to handle work if they get it…. We’ve got the money. Plenty of it. No sense in the big fellows kicking about a little handout to the poor. Matter’s not if some ain’t deserving….
This little speech exists because the WPA recorded it, with programs like the Federal Writers’ Project, trying to “take down the exact words of the informant,” trying to hear America. They recorded the testimony of sharecroppers and the memories of slaves. And they published it.
And they got in trouble. The House Un-American Activities Committee brought Hallie Flanagan to book for staging radical theater (which sometimes they didn’t stage). Flanagan did the best she could; Congressman Joseph Starnes interrupted her discussion of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, saying “You are quoting from this Marlowe. Is he a Communist?”
Concerns about encouraging unlawful immigration led to increasing legal restrictions on the WPA’s ability to hire immigrants. Concerns about corruption gave rise to the Hatch Act, to prevent federal employees using public resources to conduct campaigns. In 1943, Congress eliminated WPA. To quote William Leuchtenburg, it
built or improved more than 2,500 hospitals, 5,900 school buildings, 1,000 airport landing fields, and nearly 13,000 playgrounds. It restored the Dock Street Theater in Charleston; erected a magnificent ski lodge atop Oregon’s Mount Hood; conducted art classes for the insane in a Cincinnati hospital; drew a Braille map for the blind at Watertown, Massachusetts; and ran a pack-horse library in the Kentucky hills…. employed actors, directors, and other craftsmen to produce plays, circuses, vaudeville shows and marionette performances… turned out about a thousand publications, including fifty-one state and territorial guides; some thirty city guides; twenty regional guides … a notable series of ethnic studies…. made use of the talents of … Conrad Aiken, … John Cheever and Richard Wright….
And by and large it was vastly more loved than hated. When in 1939 Congress killed the Federal Theater Project and other projects could continue only if they got other sponsors to bear 25% of their cost, the Writers’ Project got adequate contributions from every single one of the states.
WPA drew criticism for being a boondoggle and for providing opportunities for corruption. When a 1939 Gallup poll asked Americans to pick “the worst thing the Roosevelt Administration has done,” 23% picked WPA—more than picked any other agency.
But in the same poll, when asked to name “the greatest accomplishment of the Roosevelt administration,” more named WPA—28%—than named anything else.
While Yglesias is busy prospectively pimping George W. Bush’s merits, Ilya Somin, over Volokh Conspiracy, asks: who’s the most underrated American president? His answer? Warren Harding, about whom we’ve already talked. My answer? Let me get back to you. Wait, how about John Quincy Adams? Or maybe Bill Clinton? On fourth thought, I’ll get back to you after all. In the meantime, what do you think?
Yglesias writes today that…well, I’m just going to quote the whole post, okay?
In a History News Network poll, 61 percent of historians say that George W. Bush has been the worst president ever. It’s very hard to know what to make of these kind of questions. How can you possibly try to evaluate someone like, say, Andrew Jackson in contemporary terms?
At any rate, it will surprise no one to learn that I think Bush has been a very bad president. More interestingly, I also take the view that Bush is probably correct to think that history will remember him kindly. American presidents associated with big dramatic events tend to wind up with good reputations whether they deserve them or not. One possible Bush analogy would be to Woodrow Wilson, who did all kinds of things with regard to civil liberties that look indefensible today and whose foreign policy ended as a giant failure, but who was associated with both big events and with big ideas that were influential down the road. Someday, I bet there will be democracies in the Middle East and some future Republican president will figure out a way to put meat on the bones of “compassionate conservatism” and Bush will be looked upon as a far-sighted figure who made some mistakes in a difficult period of time. Will he deserve a good reputation? No. Will he get one? I’d say yes.
Sure, because of differences in context — the composition of the federal apparatus, the demographics of the electorate, the shifting nature of geopolitics, etc. — it’s difficult to compare Andrew Johnson and Lyndon Johnson. But it’s not impossible. You could say, for example, that AJ, in service of sectional and partisan goals, fought to uphold white supremacy, while LBJ, despite being a southerner and knowing that his actions would have dire consequences for his beloved Democratic Party, struggled to extend the franchise to black people. And, given that I think that not being servile to Slaveocrats or Dixiecrats is, on balance, a good thing in a president, LBJ takes this round. See what I did there? I compared two presidents, both named Johnson, despite the fact that they served in different eras. It’s the magic of historical analysis. Plus: I’m just that good.
On this day in 1862, the Battle of Pittsburg Landing, or Shiloh, ended. Shiloh is fascinating for a host of reasons: Grant’s and Sherman’s overconfidence, followed, in short order, by their redemption; the fatal hubris of Sidney Johnston, whose desire for victory overawed his better judgment; Lew Wallace’s lost division (found, for the Union, in the nick of time); and the horrifying number of killed and wounded, 20,000 men either dead or disfigured.
Ezra Klein’s friend asks, “What is tenure for … if not the protection of unpopular ideas?” Ezra replies,
But tenure doesn’t protect those with unpopular ideas, it just makes them harder to fire, and thus raises how unpopular an idea has to be before it merits termination. So on the one hand, firing someone with crackpot notions about tax cuts paying for themselves isn’t really worth the trouble. On the other hand, if, say, Greg Mankiw called for the extermination of the Jews tomorrow, Harvard and MIT would direct their physics departments to come together and create a time machine in order to help them fire Mankiw last week.
Because Ezra is a self-described wonk, I’m sure he will appreciate my taking some time to explain all the ways in which this is incorrect. And because he wants to sack John Yoo (author of the newly released “torture memo to top all torture memos,” as Marty Lederman writes) he will probably want to know that at the end of the post, there is still a route to do that, if he so wishes.
First, we’re talking about tenure as an instrument of academic freedom. And in that guise, tenure does not exist to protect unpopular ideas—or rather it does, but that description is imprecise. Tenure, considered as an instrument of academic freedom, exists to