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Beware: spoilers below the fold.
On this day in 1868, John Logan, Commander in Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, asked Americans to set aside May 30 “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land.” The holiday, initially known as Decoration Day, later evolved into Memorial Day.
[spoiler, of course]
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Via wryandstanley comes this useful tidbit:
A few weeks ago, I botched some minor thing at work. No big deal, and I was chided mildly via e-mail. I said the basic “thanks for the heads up” sort of thing, adding “must’ve been a brain fart”, only to wince at the expression “brain fart”.
Seemed a bit crude for this situation, yet I wanted something light-hearted and silly to note that I was indeed taking the suggestion in-stride. (Yes, sadly, sometimes in life, this sort of gesture is necessary.)
Hence was born: “brain burp”!
I’ve been using it ever since, and I invite you to use it as you see fit.
Thanks, I will. Especially because this very thing (well, not exactly, but close enough) happened to me last week. And I found myself totally at a loss for how to describe the origin of my screw-up. See, that’s just what I mean: when “screw-up” is too crass by half, “brain burp” may be just the ticket.
WASHINGTON, May 29.—With American flags flying before them, sixteen truckloads of war veterans came to the end of a transcontinental hitch-hike today with the avowed purpose of remaining in Washington until Congress pays their bonus in full. (NYT)
Thus, in 1932, began the encampment of the Bonus Army, which numbered some thousands of marchers, in Washington, DC.
Their story was simple: in the old days, Congress had to make special provision for the slew of veterans created each time the US had a war. In 1924 it voted those who served in the Great War a payment, or bonus, sized to the time they’d spent in uniform; a dollar a day for service in the US and $1.26 a day for service overseas, plus interest, minus discharge pay. The payments were payable at time of death, or in 1945.
With the depression deepening, a fair number of veterans thought it might be nice for Congress to pay a little early. After all, Washington had just created a special bailout fund for the banks and other major corporations like railroads (the Reconstruction Finance Corporation) and as Charles Coughlin, the radio priest and not-yet-clearly-anti-Semitic populist said,
If the government can pay $2 billion to the bankers and the railroads, why cannot it pay the $2 billion to the soldiers?
Because it would break the bank, Congress said. And the president, Herbert Hoover, thought the same. Maybe most interestingly, so did the president’s chief challenger, Franklin Roosevelt.
Hoover, as was his wont, made a bad situation worse. Rather than glad-hand the men encamped near the Mall and occasionally marching—to the cheers of a hundred thousand onlookers—Hoover spurned them, and eventually let General Douglas MacArthur run off the Bonus Army with tanks and tear gas, burning their shanties and tents. Leading a cavalry group, George Patton contemplated what a fine, “comforting” sound the sabers made hitting the marchers.
Hoping Americans might side with authority, Hoover and MacArthur explained that the fellows on the Mall weren’t really veterans at all, but a bunch of lousy Commie subversives. As MacArthur said, they were
insurrectionists … if there was one man in ten in that group today who was a veteran, it would surprise me…. They were animated by the spirit of revolution…. they were about to take over the government… had the President not acted today, had he permitted this thing to go on for twenty-four hours more, he would have been faced with a grave situation which would have caused a real battle.
Unfortunately for MacArthur and Hoover, government agencies sent to survey the encampment had already concluded otherwise, discovering that 94% of the marchers were simply out-of-luck veterans. Twenty percent were disabled. People watching the army in action on the newsreel identified with the former soldiers, not the current ones. As FDR said, reading the papers, he would feel sorry for Hoover if he didn’t feel sorry for the marchers; it didn’t look good for the president’s electoral prospects. Indeed, the picture of the out-of-work, run out of town by an unsympathetic government, “made a theme for the campaign,” Roosevelt thought.
The Bonus Army came back once Roosevelt was elected. He sent Eleanor out to have a chat with them—be sure to tell them Franklin sent you, Louis Howe instructed her—but he didn’t favor paying them their bonus. The difference in style between Hoover and Roosevelt was remarkable, and the substantive difference was non-negligible: the army under FDR didn’t kill or maim the veterans. But neither did the government under FDR pay them. Remember, FDR remained, throughout the New Deal, a fiscal conservative leery of deficits and of direct payments to citizens. In 1936—many deficits and work relief payments later—Congress passed a Veterans’ Bonus over FDR’s veto.
NPR has a story here, with a link to some newsreel footage. Here’s a Library of Congress webcast, featuring Paul Dickson and Thomas Allen, the authors of this recent book. Roger Daniels’s Bonus March is worth your time, as is Lucy Barber’s Marching on Washington. And of course, for all things Great Depression and New Deal, this is a fine starting point.
Via Mark Thoma, this latest installment in Americans’ decreasing height. Whenever I mention this to a certain kind of person, they wave a hand and say, oh, it’s because of Latin American and Asian immigration.
But it’s not, if you remember the feature on Komlos in The New Yorker:
The obvious answer would seem to be immigration. The more Mexicans and Chinese there are in the United States, the shorter the American population becomes. But the height statistics that Komlos cites include only native-born Americans who speak English at home, and he is careful to screen out people of Asian and Hispanic descent. In any case, according to Richard Steckel, who has also analyzed American heights, the United States takes in too few immigrants to account for the disparity with Northern Europe.
We have bad habits and bad institutions. These bad habits and bad institutions have consequences.
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On this day in 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, a vaguely written piece of legislation later used as a pretext by state and federal authorities to dispossess the few remaining tribes in the southeastern United States — “removing” them to lands west of the Mississippi.
Beginning in the summer of 1829, following the discovery of gold on Cherokee lands, the State of Georgia’s longstanding desire to rid itself of the tribe became more urgent than ever. In December of that year, the state legislature ruled that the Cherokee constitution and laws would be meaningless come the following June. Georgia’s lawmakers implied that it would be open season on the Cherokees and their landholdings at that time. The federal government, then, had just a few months to avert what surely would have been another horrifying chapter in the already-grim story of Native-white relations in the United States. Andrew Jackson, who had long favored removal, seized the chance to advance his pet policy.
It wouldn’t be easy. By that time, Protestant evangelicals had taken an interest in the Cherokees, holding them up as the most civilized of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes (along with the Creeks, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Seminoles). The Cherokees had “civilized” themselves by adopting sedentary agriculture, a tribal constitution modeled on the U.S.’s, a written alphabet (see above), and, in some cases, Christianity. Reformers — including Catherine Beecher, who rallied women to the cause — organized a huge petition drive to counter President Jackson’s lobbying.
Jackson responded by casting support for removal as humanitarian and paternalistic. Observing the mistreatment of Native people throughout the nation’s history, Jackson claimed to want “to preserve this much-injured race.” At the same time, he packed the House and Senate committees that would write the removal bill with his loyalists. On this day in 1830, Jackson had his law, sealing the fate of the eastern tribes.
Jackson had promised that removal would be voluntary, that those Indians who wished to remain in the east would be able to do so, and that those who moved would be compensated for their property. In fact, the pressure to leave was intense, often accompanied by the threat of violence, and Native people who got paid for their land typically only received a fraction of its value. At the same time, Jackson compounded his crimes by setting the precedent of trying to remove tribes on the cheap. Underfunding and federal neglect ultimately led, after Jackson left office, to tragedies like the Trail of Tears, when, in 1838, thousands of Cherokees died en route to Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma. In the end, Jackson only forestalled the bloodletting that he claimed to want to avoid in 1830, putting off the carnage and relocating it to the West, where relatively few whites had to confront the horror.
In the Congressional debates surrounding removal, Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, who opposed the measure, had asked: “Do the obligations of justice change with the color of the skin?” For Andrew Jackson the answer was yes.
Charlie asked a while back, “Can anyone explain–or point to an article where this is discussed–why Clinton was on the MI ballot, but not Obama?” Mr. Super has an answer, in “Florida & Michigan Timeline - How we got here.” From the Politico last fall,
“We will honor the pledge and not campaign or spend money in any state that is not in compliance with the DNC calendar, but it is not necessary to take the steps necessary to remove Senator Clinton’s name from the ballot,” said her communications director, Howard Wolfson.
Basically, Obama and Edwards appear to have interpreted their pledges not to campaign in states holding unsanctioned early primaries as meaning they should get off the Michigan ballot; they couldn’t get off the Florida ballot because it seems a candidate has to be on the primary ballot to be on the general ballot in Florida. Clinton (and Dodd) appear to have decided their pledge did not bind them to get off the Michigan ballot. When asked about this decision, Clinton said,
“It’s clear, this election they’re having is not going to count for anything…. But I just personally did not want to set up a situation where the Republicans are going to be campaigning between now and whenever, and then after the nomination, we have to go in and repair the damage to be ready to win Michigan in 2008.”
I am not sure exactly what this means; perhaps that Clinton assumed she would be the nominee, and wanted Michigan’s Democratic delegates in her corner, rather than left in some sort of purgatory, while the state’s Republican delegates endured no such snub.
Today’s “This Day in History” comes from Andrew W. Cohen, also known here as AWC, among whose many fine qualities we cannot discern the desire to agree with me. He is the author of the excellent Racketeer’s Progress and here he explains the Schechter case doesn’t mean what the New Deal’s modern Republican critics think it means. Many thanks for the contribution, Andrew.
On this day in 1935, the US Supreme Court handed down A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, the so-called “Sick Chicken case,” invalidating the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 (NIRA). The unanimous court held that the US Congress had unlawfully delegated its powers to the executive and exceeded its authority by regulating commerce that did not cross state lines. This setback for the Roosevelt administration marked the end of the “First New Deal.”
Few scholars lament this verdict, partly because the court later reversed its worst implications, and partly because the NIRA itself was an ugly law. In a year of legal experiments, it was the Frankenstein’s monster. The law created the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which encouraged businesses and workers to write industrial codes and gave them the legitimacy of laws. As a recovery policy, it was a bust. When un-enforced, the codes seemed a pointless exercise in rah-rah economics, the 1930s equivalent of Gerald Ford’s “Whip Inflation Now” buttons. When compulsory, the codes appeared a counterproductive and intrusive form of corporatism. In retrospect, the law’s best legacy was its support for collective bargaining, which was re-created more effectively by the Wagner Act of 1935.
Historical contempt for NIRA has faded our memory of the Schechter decision, allowing journalists like Amity Shlaes to misrepresent the story as a libertarian fable. In Shlaes’ portrayal, the Schechter brothers were small immigrant businessmen crushed by a tyrannical federal government exceeding its traditional jurisdiction.
The real story is much more interesting. Read the rest of this entry »
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With all this talk that Obama’s the antichrist, shouldn’t we be just a bit more vigilant and at least read up on the subject. Go here for further information.
Via Alterdestiny.
In the above speech, which is long but worth the time, Obama appeals to graduating seniors to embrace public service. He asks them directly, personally, to forego the fruits of our “money culture.” And he draws on a classic Second Great Awakening formulation: individual salvation hinges on good works; community salvation rests on individuals sacrificing for the greater good. Even after seven years of kleptocracy, this speech makes me think that civic virtue might not be dead after all. That’s the audacity of hope talking, I know. I’ll get over it soon enough.
A reader just sent me this clip of Liz Trotta — who’s apparently a contributor to Fox News — casually, and with a chuckle, suggesting that it would be a “good idea” for somebody to kill both Osama and Obama, people she apparently can’t tell apart. Is it possible that she’s trying to make Senator Clinton look good by comparison?
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On this day in 1865 the U.S. Army paraded through Washington, DC, to mark the end of the Civil War. The nation had a million men in uniform, enrolled in an army that the world’s military men envied and feared. To many students of the war, this army was the emblem of what the war had wrought—a modern state. The United States government had grown in size and capacity, had levied its first income tax, and had become a nation-state at last. And here was the great instrument of that state, a citizen-army.
Here’s a less picturesque picture: the number of men in U.S. uniform 1865-1900.
That fearsome army vanished almost instantly and didn’t return. The U.S. fought a quarter century of wars against the aboriginal inhabitants of the continent, and a few more wars against labor unions, with a tiny professional force. And just as the great modern army went away, so did the great modern state. What remained of the war-swollen federal apparatus? The Department of Agriculture, pretty much. Pretty much everything else—even, or especially, the machinery for enforcing civil rights—was similarly reduced. It wouldn’t be till after World War II that such establishments of state power became more or less permanent. So inasmuch as the Civil War ended slavery, it was a watershed—but the other trends it’s often credited with (or blamed for) establishing, it didn’t establish. The pattern of American development 1865-1914—a lot of growth with a little government—is thus an even odder story: it wasn’t the case that Americans had never seen or used modern state power, it was the case that they had, and preferred not to.
A short while ago I appalled some of my more genteel colleagues by quoting former Louisiana governor, convicted felon, and political genius Edwin Edwards. Clinton’s justification for staying in the race, I said, has come down to the possibility of a “live boy/dead girl” scenario. Tuts were tutted, and I blushed, feeling duly chastened.
But Senator Clinton has gone well beyond me and Edwards:
“My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. You know I just, I don’t understand it,” she said, dismissing the idea of dropping out.
Tut some tuts, will you, decent people? I’m about all out.
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On this day in 1856, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina approached Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts while the latter sat at his desk in the Senate chamber. As Sumner affixed postage to copies of “The Crime Against Kansas,” a speech he had given earlier that week, Brooks explained that the address had been a “libel on South Carolina, and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine.”
“Mr. Butler” referred to Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina, Brooks’s cousin and one of the figures Sumner, in his stem-winder, had excoriated for supporting the abominable Kansas-Nebraska Act. After explaining his business with the Senator, Brooks began caning Sumner, who tried to rise and flee but found himself trapped beneath his desk, which was bolted to the floor. Struggling wildly as Brooks continued raining blows down upon his head, Sumner finally wrenched the desk from its moorings. He then collapsed in a pool of his own blood.
Sumner, in his speech, had been rather hard on the superannuated Butler. The abolitionist had called the South Carolinian a “Don Quixote who had chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows…the harlot, Slavery.” Sumner also had said that Butler, who drooled and suffered from a tremor as a result of a stroke, “discharged the loose expectorations of his speech” when supporting slavery.
Steeped in the aristocratic South’s honor culture, Brooks found these insults intolerable. He also viewed Sumner as a social inferior and so chose not to challenge him to a duel. Instead, he beat Sumner as an overseer would beat a slave.
Many Southerners recognized that Brooks had defended not only his family’s reputation but also the region’s good name. Editors at the pro-slavery Richmond Examiner, for instance, opined that the violence represented an:
act good in conception, better in execution, and best of all in consequence. The vulgar Abolitionists in the Senate are getting above themselves…They have grown saucy, and dare to be impudent to gentlemen…The truth is, they have been suffered to run too long without collars. They must be lashed into submission.
Brooks thus became a hero in the South, where people apparently begged him for fragments of his shattered cane, “sacred relics.” He received from admirers dozens of new walking sticks, often inscribed with pithy phrases (”Hit Him Again”). And although some of his colleagues in the House tried to expel him, they failed to reach the required two-thirds majority because of the Southern delegation’s sectional loyalties. Brooks then quit to make a point, re-running for his seat and allowing the people of South Carolina to return him to Washington with their blessing.
For Northerners, many of whom had no love for radical abolitionists, the caning of Sumner nonetheless joined the Sack of Lawrence — an episode in which approximately 800 pro-slavery terrorists had burned parts of that town, the center of free-soil Kansas — which had taken place just a day earlier. Even for moderates, the two events, in concert, demonstrated that the Slaveocracy could not be placated, no matter how many times the North compromised to forestall secession.
John Brown was no moderate. He had been rushing to defend Lawrence when the town fell. The violence there, coupled with the caning of Sumner, next led him to embrace biblical justice gone mad. By his calculation, border ruffians had already killed at least five free-soilers in Kansas. And so, two days after Brooks pummeled Sumner, Brown kidnapped five pro-slavery settlers from their homes near Pottawatomie Creek. That night, he split their skulls open with broadswords. The nation slipped headlong toward war, the skids greased with martyrs’ blood.
One of Josh Marshall’s “shrewdest readers” offers a contrarian reading of Hillary Clinton’s record. Shrewdest Reader reminds us that
After the 2000 election, she called for the abolition of the electoral college. “I believe strongly,” she said, “that in a democracy, we should respect the will of the people.” She argued then that “the total votes cast for a person running for president in our country should determine the outcome.” Sound familiar?
Shrewdest Reader then says that when, contrariwise, the Clinton campaign agreed to cut Florida and Michigan out of the nominating process, she had at that time “lost her bearings” but now, SR argues, she has returned to true course, because “the dictates of her conscience and of political expedience have at last converged.” Clinton “is finally giving voice to the grievances that she’s long held back,” and on the belief that she “could not have lost a fair fight for the nomination,” this has changed from a mere campaign: “This really has become a moral crusade for her[.]” Clinton is a true majoritarian, momentarily distracted in the intraparty rules disputes of 2007 from her principles, now returned to her true and noble purpose.
<BREEET> Two fouls: (1) omitting relevant evidence and (2) bad counterfactualizing.
(1) Omitting relevant evidence. Yes, Clinton in the autumn of 2000 called for abolishing the electoral college. Far from seeming the unalloyed “dictates of her conscience,” this too looks like “political expedience.” Clinton made this call well before Bush v. Gore, early in November of 2000. At that time, crying up the illegitimacy of the electoral college served a clear political function, urging the Congress, the Court, and various mucks to award Gore the presidency based on his national popular vote majority, whatever the Florida count turned out to say.
Clinton may indeed believe we should amend the Constitution to satisfy her deep majoritarian principles, but she hasn’t said much about it since 2000; she must have had other priorities.
(2) Bad counterfactualizing: Clinton “could not have lost a fair fight for the nomination.” Not entirely clear whether it’s SR, or SR ventriloquizing Clinton, but either way, it’s a load of cobblers’. In “a fair fight,” both candidates would know the rules in advance, plan their campaigns accordingly, and abide by the rules as they went. Had the party determined that Florida and Michigan were to count, you can bet Obama would have campaigned there. Had the party held a snap one-day nationwide primary vote for the nomination, you can bet both candidates would have designed very different campaigns than they have. But it’s just foolish to say that because Obama and Clinton have campaigned as they have and achieved these results under these rules, that they would have done the same under different rules. This is counterfactualizing of the sort that merits the reply, “yes, and if a frog had wings it wouldn’t bump its ass a-hoppin’.”
Seriously, Marshall, I’m going to have to hope this isn’t your Shrewdest Reader’s shrewdest analysis.
I can say that if you liked the other Indiana Jones movies, you will like this one, and that if you did not, there is no talking to you.
[Editor's Note: Kathy Olmsted is back for another guest post. Hurrah!]
On this day in 1979, Dan White, former police officer, fire fighter, and San Francisco County Supervisor, was sentenced to seven years in prison for assassinating two public officials, one of them openly gay. The lenient sentence provoked riots in San Francisco, a movement for tough sentencing laws, and, eventually, a revolution in attitudes toward gays and lesbians.
In the 1970s, thousands of gays and lesbians moved to San Francisco, which was becoming the gay mecca of the west coast. White represented conservative, working-class residents who resented the ways that their city was changing. He clashed many times with Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, a national leader in the gay rights movement and the first openly gay elected local official of any large city in the United States. In November 1978, White resigned from the board of supervisors in a fit of pique, and then asked Moscone to reappoint him. Milk advised Moscone not to do so. On November 28, 1978, White entered San Francisco city hall through a window, apparently to avoid a metal detector. After a brief conversation with Moscone, White shot the mayor dead. Then he reloaded his gun and went to Milk’s office, where he executed his political opponent by shooting him in the head.
Milk’s friends were worried about the trial from the beginning. Although White’s “twinkie defense” seemed laughable (his lawyer argued that White had not known what he was doing because excessive junk food consumption had altered his brain chemistry), some jurors seemed compassionate to the killer. They wept openly in sympathy when his tape-recorded confession was played in court. If he had just killed Moscone, observers at the trial believed, he would have gotten the death penalty. But by killing Milk, he seemed to trigger the homophobia of the jury. The manslaughter verdict enraged thousands of San Franciscans, who gathered at city hall. “He got away with murder!” the crowd chanted, as people began to break windows and set police cars on fire.
California soon got rid of the “diminished capacity” or “twinkie” defense, and began passing draconian sentencing laws, culminating in 1994 with Three Strikes. White was released in 1984, and committed suicide less than two years later.
This week, Mark Leno, one of several openly gay members of the California State Legislature, succeeded in persuading the Assembly to pass a bill designating May 22, Milk’s birthday, as “Harvey Milk Day.” If it gets through the Senate, Gov. Schwarzenegger may well sign it. And last week, the California Supreme Court voted to legalize gay marriage. The four-member majority included three justices appointed by conservative Republican governors.
[Editor's Update: You can find an account of the White Night Riot here.]
It’s hard to figure quite how to interpret this passage, from Max Hastings’s Retribution. It’s a bit lengthy, but I didn’t want you to think I was fooling around with ellipses or paragraph breaks. This is just as printed:
Col. Derek Horsford observed that though his Gurkhas had little regard for the unfortunate Africans as fighting soldiers—”they would go out on patrol only if you held their hands”—they were impressed by other attributes. “During the advance into the Kabaw valley, I found some of our chaps crouching behind a bush, watching a party of West African soldiers bathing. The Gurkhas were gazing fascinated, uttering exclamations of unwilling awe, at what they perceived as the extravagant dimensions of their black comrades’ private parts.” There was much bitterness after the war that in [General Bill] Slim’s expressions of gratitude to his soldiers, he never mentioned the Africans.
From pp. 83-84.
[Editor's Note: Despite the firm advice of counsel, Louis Warren is back to talk to us about the Homstead Act. Louis is also the author of this book, which won every prize ever. Louis's a bit selfish, you see. One really big prize wasn't enough for him.]
On this day in history President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, thereby inaugurating one of the most popular government programs in American history. Under the terms of the act, settlers could get 160 free acres — sometimes more — in return for making them into a private farm. Hundreds of thousands of settlers — black, white, immigrant, women and men — took up claims on the frontier, launching one of the great sagas of American history.
For all that, like so much else in the American West, homesteads have recently fallen into that dark and dreary world of right-wing symbolism. Homesteaders have long been icons of individualism. In recent years, advocates for privatizing social security have hailed the Homestead Act as a model (or a fable) of resource privatization. George W. Bush lobbied to privatize Social Security with the Homestead Act as an example of how Americans have found “ the dignity and security of economic independence, instead of laboring on the edge of subsistence.” David Brooks is certain that private investment accounts can replace Social Security and turn people into capitalists because, after all, “the Homestead Act turned people into pioneers.” George Will points out that homesteaders privatized 270 million acres, about 11 percent of today’s America. “Rarely has a social program worked so well.”
But even a cursory glance at the Homestead Act’s real history belies these simplistic conclusions. Sure, the Homestead Act had its successes. Many American families have homesteader ancestors, and many of them were genuine heroes who endured privation and hardship to root their crops and kin in New World soil. The fact that my great-grandfather earned a homestead is a high-point in family lore.
But the law’s failures were profound. Homesteaders may have privatized more than one in ten of America’s acres, but in fact, most who tried homesteading never gained a square inch from the law. For every settler who staked a claim and built a cabin between 1862 and the day the frontier closed, in 1890, at least two packed up and left their claims without ever gaining title. That’s right: the failure rate among would-be homesteaders was sixty-six percent.
Why did those resilient, risk-taking frontier settlers pack it in? To resolve that very question, Congress investigated much, and legislated often. Efforts to stem the flow of failed farmers led to bigger parcels and extra acres for planting trees and digging irrigation ditches. But with high prices for barbed wire, livestock, plows, and other equipment, and with the unreliable rainfall of the Far West, and with the fact that railroads and other speculators acquired most of the best land, making the frontier into farms was still too expensive for the vast majority, even when the land was free. Even with added incentives, the failure rate of aspiring homesteaders never fell much below fifty percent, and may have been much higher. Passed in hopes that urban citizens would take to the country, farming proved so difficult that the flow of farm dwellers to the city actually increased in the years after 1862. In the end, most of the West’s successful farms were not earned under the law, but bought from railroads or other large owners, by customers with cash. For every 160 acres earned by homesteaders, 400 acres were bought on the open market. Think of it this way: homesteaders settled 11 percent of the current United States, but home buyers settled more than twice as much.
Even these were not the full extent of the law’s failures. For those who stuck it out and earned their acreage, the future was often worse, not better. The global increase in farm production drove the price of crops sharply downward for decades after the Civil War. A new round of crop deflation hit in the 1920s, making it increasingly difficult for farmers to pay their bills. In the 1930s, drought turned many a green homestead to dusty brown. Banks foreclosed on mortgages. Debt drove farmers to sell cheap and move to town. The exploding numbers of the rural poor (among them my grandfather, the homesteader’s son) inspired John Steinbeck to conjure the Joads, and at the national level helped mobilize the public to create programs like Social Security in the first place. Except for in Alaska and a few other places, homesteading ended in 1935, when Franklin Roosevelt withdrew all remaining public lands from settlement.
The history of the Homestead Act is astonishing and often inspirational. When it concerns successful settlers, it offers remarkable tales of risk and reward.
But it also provides a cautionary tale about forcing private citizens to shoulder too much risk, and the hard death and eye-popping failure rates of the frontier’s most famous land law should make us think twice about following anyone bent on re-creating its supposed “successes.” In fact, Social Security has provided far more Americans with more wealth than the 1862 law ever did. At least, it hasn’t inspired songs like this one:
Frank Baker’s the name and a bachelor I am,
I’m keeping old batch on an elegant plan.
You’ll find me out west in the county of Lane,
I’m starving to death on a government claim.
My house is built of the natural soil,
The walls are erected according to Hoyle.
The roof has no pitch but is level and plain,
And I always get wet when it rains.
Hurrah for Lane County, the land of the free,
The home of the grasshopper, bedbug and flea.
I’ll sing loud its praises and tell of its fame,
While starving to death on a government claim.
Nineteenth Century Folk Song - Author Unknown
Indeed, if giving young people the chance to build wealth for the future is our aim, there are other laws that might provide more useful lessons. Decades before the Homestead Act, Congress began endowing public universities with land grants. The same year the Homestead Act came into being, Congress also adopted a less famous but ultimately more successful measure, the Land Grant Act, which endowed state universities with tens of thousands of acres. Institutions of higher learning sprang up and expanded across the West. The public acquired new access to college education, and the investment continues to pay handsome returns. Today more than ever, university education provides tools to make careers and build wealth, in a far more reliable way than western farming ever did. The state of California, for a brief few decades, and not so long ago, even made university education as free as land in the frontier West. Recreating that opportunity would cost much less than privatizing Social Security, and it seems certain to provide more wealth, too.
For students of post-war US history, the GI Bill stands as one of the towering achievements of the New Deal coaltion. In the wake of WWII, the so-called Servicemen’s Readjustment Act offered veterans returning home tuition to go to college or vocational school, up to a year of unemployment insurance, and loans to purchase homes or businesses.
Now, VoteVets is hitting John McCain hard for not supporting the latter-day GI Bill, the Webb-Hagel Bill. The above ad highlights one of the most sickening disjunctures between the rhetoric and reality of today’s Republican Party: braying about supporting the troops while treating them like expendable labor. From the horrible conditions at Walter Reed, to the abuse that is stop-loss, to the appalling rates of suicide among soldiers, and now to McCain’s and Bush’s partisan intransigence, the mainstream of the Republican Party uses the women and men who fight this country’s wars to score cheap political points while refusing to treat their service with the respect it deserves.
Via Yglesias.
In the student union here, right now, in 2008, there’s a poster of Marilyn Monroe—it’s the one with five different poses, all obviously from the same shoot, each differently colorized—it’s familiar to me because we had the same poster in my freshman dorm room, in 1991. There is a Marilyn Monroe thing, even now. It amounts to more, I think, than “to a hottie dying young.” Here is how John Irving put it:
… what could Marilyn Monroe’s death ever have to do with me?
“IT HAS TO DO WITH ALL OF US,” said Owen Meany, when I called him that night. “SHE WAS JUST LIKE OUR WHOLE COUNTRY—NOT QUITE YOUNG ANYMORE, BUT NOT OLD EITHER; A LITTLE BREATHLESS, VERY BEAUTIFUL, MAYBE A LITTLE STUPID, MAYBE A LOT SMARTER THAN SHE SEEMED. AND SHE WAS LOOKING FOR SOMETHING—I THINK SHE WANTED TO BE GOOD. LOOK AT THE MEN IN HER LIFE—JOE DIMAGGIO, ARTHUR MILLER, MAYBE THE KENNEDYS. LOOK AT HOW GOOD THEY SEEM! LOOK AT HOW DESIRABLE SHE WAS! THAT’S WHAT SHE WAS: SHE WAS DESIRABLE. SHE WAS FUNNY AND SEXY—AND SHE WAS VULNERABLE, TOO. SHE WAS NEVER QUITE HAPPY, SHE WAS ALWAYS A LITTLE OVERWEIGHT. SHE WAS JUST LIKE OUR WHOLE COUNTRY,” he repeated; he was on a roll…. “AND THOSE MEN,” he said. “THOSE FAMOUS, POWERFUL MEN—DID THEY REALLY LOVE HER? DID THEY TAKE CARE OF HER? IF SHE WAS EVER WITH THE KENNEDYS, THEY COULDN’T HAVE LOVED HER—THEY WERE JUST USING HER, THEY WERE JUST BEING CARELESS AND TREATING THEMSELVES TO A THRILL….”
This passage probably goes on a bit further than it needs to, making even more explicit the parallel between Marilyn Monroe and America, the beautiful mistreated desirable objects of powerful men’s careless use deprived of the right to be ends in themselves … but that’s the right theme, the Fitzgeraldian vast carelessness with the fresh green breast of the new world.
Seemingly less sexy than very stoned, Marilyn Monroe wished President Kennedy a “Happy Birthday” on this day in 1962. The performance, in Madison Square Garden, was Monroe’s last major public event before she died on August 5, 1962. For that and many other reasons, this video has always creeped me out, though you’re welcome to tell me in the comments what a tin ear I have for pop culture.
Groucho v. Kermit.
You may have noticed that we don’t normally do historic birthdays or deaths. But I’m going to make an exception today, because on this day in 1990, Jim Henson died. And we seem to be angling to become the Internet’s go-to blog for all things Henson. Regardless, the above video is Part One of the Muppets’ tribute to Henson after his death. The first three minutes are almost unbearably sad. So, if that’s not your thing, below you’ll find another Henson tribute, from his funeral, featuring the hilarious Kevin Clash. Finally, here’s the Times’s Henson obit.
Chris Matthews remains an insufferable windbag. But this is funny — though I began to feel bad for the poor winger as the segment wore on and on and on.
Via TPM.
Or, as we call them now, DFH’s. Frank Rich on Norman Mailer on 1968, in the New York Review of Books (which is, as we know, the real outlet for public intellection; please please ask me to write an essay on the new historical revisionism, NYRoB!):
… he is left to contemplate the Yippies in Lincoln Park with their signs of “Vote Pig in 68″: “Were those unkempt children the sort of troops with whom one wished to enter battle?” He frets that Vietnam and “Black Power” are “pushing him to that point where he would have to throw his vote in with revolution,” and asks, “What price was he really willing to pay?”
This question is not resolved by the end of the book, which finds the author, manhandled but unbowed by Daley’s thugs, repairing to the revels at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy mansion. But Mailer knows the trajectory that lies ahead for the country. “We will be fighting for forty years,” he suggests. Perhaps he thought that was hyperbole at the time, but we now know it was portent.
If you’re reading this, you know the American West has an Edge, but you may not know it has a Center. From that Center, Patricia Nelson Limerick writes about how to be a public scholar.
On this day in 1893, the Supreme Court decided Fong Yue Ting v. United States, 149 U. S. 698, which as Sabrina Karim points out, is worth noting.
The case asked the Court to review the implementation of the Chinese Exclusion Act and its 1892 successor (remember, the original expired after ten years).
The Court located the federal government’s power to deal with immigrants outside the Constitution, and in the inherent rights deriving from sovereignty. “The right to exclude or to expel all aliens, or any class of aliens, absolutely or upon certain conditions, in war or in peace, being an inherent and inalienable right of every sovereign and independent nation, essential to its safety, its independence, and its welfare,” the justices said; all we need to do is check to see whether this inherent right has been constitutionally implemented.
And, the Court said, it had. Basically, Congress could do with immigrants as it pleased—could assign the power of deportation to the executive branch alone, or could admit the judicial branch’s involvement—but it was up to Congress to make this decision.
Though it was true that in their persons and property, immigrants enjoyed Fourteenth Amendment protections, those did not extend to a safeguard against deportation:
Chinese laborers, therefore, like all other aliens residing in the United States for a shorter or longer time, are entitled, so long as they are permitted by the Government of the United States to remain in the country, to the safeguards of the Constitution, and to the protection of the laws, in regard to their rights of person and of property, and to their civil and criminal responsibility. But they continue to be aliens, having taken no steps towards becoming citizens, and incapable of becoming such under the naturalization laws, and therefore remain subject to the power of Congress to expel them or to order them to be removed and deported from the country whenever, in its judgment, their removal is necessary or expedient for the public interest.
Now, the 1892 act required Chinese in the U.S. to register themselves and to carry papers with them. It thus created the presumption of illegality for anyone of Chinese extraction. The Court was fine with this, and noted that Congress has, so far as the justices could see, exercised forbearance.
Congress, under the power to exclude or expel aliens, might have directed any Chinese laborer found in the United States without a certificate of residence to be removed out of the country by executive officers, without judicial trial or examination, just as it might have authorized such officers absolutely to prevent his entrance into the country. But Congress has not undertaken to do this.
Justice Brewer dissented, and couldn’t resist a (weak) joke:
The Constitution has no extraterritorial effect, and those who have not come lawfully within our territory cannot claim any protection from its provisions; and it may be that the National Government, having full control of all matters relating to other nations, has the power to build, as it were, a Chinese wall around our borders, and absolutely forbid aliens to enter. But the Constitution has potency everywhere within the limits of our territory, and the powers which the National Government may exercise within such limits are those, and only those, given to it by that instrument. Now, the power to remove resident aliens is, confessedly, not expressed.
He also noted that the law was at odds with the 1868 Burlingame Treaty between the U.S. and China, which recognized “the inherent and inalienable right of man to change his home and allegiance, and also the mutual advantage of the free migration and emigration of their citizens and subjects, respectively for purposes of curiosity, of trade, or as permanent residents.”
But the majority of the Court anticipated this objection, saying treaties, while “supreme,” were also merely “promissory,” and subject to the whim of Congress.
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On this day in 1607, 104 British colonists founded Jamestown, the first continuous English settlement in North America. From the beginning, the colony was a disaster. Jamestown lay next to a malarial swamp; the colonists dumped their trash into a nearby river, causing an outbreak of dysentery and typhus; and they were, by all accounts, too lazy to put in crops for food during that first spring and summer they spent in America.
I would read their next books without hesitation. Who’s on that list for you?
For some reason, I never post about one of my main obsessions, bicycling. But this photoessay, about a group of cyclists who highlight LA’s insane transportation planning choices, caught my eye. These folks ride their bikes on the city’s freeways during rush hour — like Critical Mass on steroids. I’ve always assumed that such demonstrations do little beyond infuriating motorists, making it more likely that the guy in the F-150 will run me off the road when next I go for a long ride. But with gas inching toward $1 million/gallon, maybe it’s useful to expose people in cars to the freeom riding a bike offers. Also, here’s a video, if that’s your thing.
Via boing boing.
Josh Marshall wrote a thoughtful post tonight about Appalachia, the region’s Scots-Irish settlers, their historical antipathy for both slavery and slaves, and the implications of all the above for contemporary voting patterns. I guess this is Josh’s way of reminding the world that he’s a historian and not just a new-media mogul. Regardless, his post is worth a look. In the same vein, the proprietor of Enik Rising expands on Josh’s argument, bringing to bear a similar analysis on Colorado’s Democratic primary. The result? It looks like Josh may be onto something. I suppose this is where I should note that their conclusions are overly determined. Because I’m extremely smart for knowing that phrase. Seriously, though, I wasn’t the biggest fan of Albion’s Seed. So I probably shouldn’t find arguments like the ones above so interesting. But I do. Oh well, I’m nothing if not inconsistent.
If you picked up your objective, neutral, full of fit-to-print news New York Times on this day in 1933, you saw the headline, “PRESIDENT SIGNS FARM BILL, MAKING INFLATION THE LAW.” The day before, Roosevelt had signed the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which included all kinds of market-jiggering and subsidy-for-nonproduction mechanisms meant to restore “parity”—an equivalent standard of living in the countryside and the city. But so far as the New York Times was concerned, the important part of the bill was the Thomas Amendment, or Title III of the law, which permitted the President to determine the value of the dollar in gold or silver.
The Times headline notwithstanding, inflation wasn’t the law, it was a tool in Roosevelt’s kit—one that, many economic historians now believe, he used rather well. In Christina Romer’s 1992 article, “What Ended the Great Depression?”, the answer is, mainly, Roosevelt’s use of a managed currency under the Thomas Amendment and related powers.
Non-economic historians—like, of course, Richard Hofstadter, who noted axiomatically that “the rural masses look for statesmen of the cheap dollar”—have tended to think relatively little of the plaint constant from the settlement of the plains onward that the currency needed a little uplift. But sometimes the rural masses get it right. Senator Elmer Thomas (Democrat of Oklahoma, he of the amendment) said, “For over three years the people of the United States have been engaged in war with the forces of deflation. Through the curtailment of credits and restriction of currency [he's looking at you, the Federal Reserve], causing enforced liquidation, bank failures, bankruptcies and hoarding, we have lost from circulation some thirty billions of bank credit or deposit money.” He meant for the president to set it right.
Now, you know that if you buy one little book on the New Deal this year, it should be this one. But if you buy two, the second one should be Anthony Badger, FDR: The First Hundred Days. Badger’s especially good on rural policy, and writes with an eviable clarity and concision.
Part three of this conversation (part 1, part 2). About privilege, rhetoric, and when it’s okay to tell your students you’re gay (especially if you’re not).
Ari asks Michael about privilege, so you have three middle-aged, tenured, straight white guys in a room talking about privilege. Well, you’re getting the insiders’ perspective, anyway.
There is no wiggling. Giblets and I are going on the lam, to a land where wiggling is properly appreciated.
In case you’re curious, the deal is, the YouTubes don’t do just-audio (afaik). So there needs to be a picture of some kind. One could simply stick on a still and have done with it, but I thought our readers would want more. And maybe you do, but you want a flavor of more—a non-wiggly flavor—I don’t stock.
Sacramento Bee photographer Paul Kitagaki Jr. is looking for Japanese Americans who were interned and who appear in these photos. If anyone can help, his email is pkitagaki@sacbee.com.
I’d like to go on the pilgrimage to Manzanar one year. I was about set to go this year, but couldn’t, owing to circumstances. Maybe next year.
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[Editor's Note: Vance Maverick says that he's a "software developer and occasional blog commenter who lives in San Francisco." But I have other ideas. I prefer to think of him riding the range, hat pulled low to keep the setting sun out of his eyes. Regardless, he was kind enough to provide us with an entry for This Day in History. Thanks, Vance.]
On this day in 1978, Louis Zukofsky, one of the most important of the “second generation” of American modernist poets, died in Port Jefferson, Long Island. He was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan on January 23 or so, 1904 (the date is uncertain), and spent most of his career in New York.
After public schools, including Stuyvesant High, he entered Columbia in 1920, alongside the likes of Lionel Trilling and Mortimer Adler. The professor who influenced him most there was Mark Van Doren (who, writing later on “Jewish Students I Have Known,” called him “a subtle poet” with an “inarticulate soul”). His closest friendship was with Whittaker Chambers. It was supposedly Zukofsky who urged Chambers to read the Communist Manifesto, but he never joined the party himself. He earned an MA in 1924, with a thesis on Henry Adams.
Setting out as a poet, he lived by miscellaneous jobs (bookstores, substitute teaching), until finding work with the WPA in the 1930s. He married Celia Thaew, and they had one son, Paul, a violin prodigy (and later a prominent new-music performer). He did technical writing during the war, then finally found a stable position at Brooklyn Polytechnic, where he taught from 1947 to 1965.
Why celebrate him on an American history blog? It’s not just that he’s important in literary history (or that this happens to be my favorite blog). I think he belongs here because he was dealt a cultural “hand” like many others, but played it in an utterly distinctive way, using it to push the modernist project further than anyone.
Our natural condition, as Americans, is rootlessness — immigration, internal migration, the “melting pot”. Of course there are wide differences in circumstance — Zukofsky, child of immigrants, speaking Yiddish before English, attending a university where he could not teach, must have felt a wide distance from the elite American culture of a Henry Adams. But not far beneath the confidence of that elite, at least in the arts, was a painful insecurity with respect to the mother cultures of Europe. The immediate exemplars, for a poet of the day, were Pound and Eliot, who both tried to reckon with the “mind of Europe” by moving there, and becoming it. There’s a touch of overcompensation in their labors — “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, for example, is magnificent but protests too much. Zukofksy too wrote an intensely bookish poetry focused on the classics, but with a detachment, with no rhetoric to persuade you he is of the same club as the masters, and with an omnivorous eye and ear for the modern world, especially his own New York. (For a light example, take one of his renderings of Cavalcanti’s “Donna mi prega”, preserving all its intricate structure, into Brooklynese, as “A Foin Lass Bodders Me”.) Also unlike his forebears, he embraced polysemy of the word, even to the point of indeterminacy in the text — he once wrote a note on the word “bay” in a poem, enumerating every sense of the word attested in the language and accepting them all. The younger poet Robert Duncan put it most concisely, noting on reading Zukofsky in the ’30s “a kind of self-consciousness in which not the poet but the act of writing was this ’self’.”
Zukofsky’s first major poem was “Poem beginning ‘The’” (1927), which is among other things a takeoff on “The Waste Land”. He submitted it to Pound ’s magazine The Exile; Pound accepted it, and became a sort of mentor to Zukofsky in the 1930s. Pound’s antisemitism, sometimes open, complicated the relationship, but he endorsed Zukofsky in a dedication (with Basil Bunting) as a “struggler in the desert”, and persuaded Harriet Monroe to let him edit the February 1931 issue of Poetry.
As editor, Zukofsky marshalled a brigade of obscure poets (notably George Oppen), under the banner of an enigmatic manifesto proclaiming them “Objectivists”. Nothing to do with Ayn Rand: rather, in the most condensed formulation,
An objective–rays of the object brought to a focus,
An objective–nature as creator–desire for what is objectively perfect,
Inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars.
The movement vanished almost as soon as it was born. From here on, Zukofsky focused his own poetic objective on the composition of a long poem, “A”. He worked on it until the 1960s, when he finished “A”-23, and his wife Celia capped the book with “A”-24, a vast collage of extracts from earlier parts of “A” and other texts (set in parallel with Handel keyboard pieces as accompaniment). The material of “A”, historical, contemporary, and highly personal, is as various as its styles: from a Williamsesque free verse to extreme formalism (the tightly rhymed “canzoni” of “A”-9), occasionally minimalism (”A”-16 is four words long) and in the later parts, an increasingly condensed form based on a regular number of words per line.
In his Long Island retirement, he worked steadily on his last major work, 80 Flowers, in which each poem is five lines of five words on one flower each, ravishingly beautiful and practically opaque. Meanwhile, his reputation grew. He encouraged and corresponded with younger poets, such as Robert Creeley. The University of California Press brought out “A” complete, in 1979 (he was able to see the proofs before he died). His poetry is well-established now in academic study, and he has been an inspiration to new generations of poets, notably the “Language” tendency arising in the 1970s.
For a taste of his poetry, here’s the ending of “A”-11. It’s a dedication of his life’s work, his “song”, to his wife and son; at the end, the song itself begins to speak, telling them:
Honor
His voice in me, the river’s turn that finds the
Grace in you, four notes first too full for talk, leaf
Lighting stem, stems bound to the branch that binds the
Tree, and then as from the same root we talk, leaf
After leaf of your mind’s music, page, walk leaf
Over leaf of his thought, sounding
His happiness: soung sounding
The grace that comes from knowing
Things, her love our own showing
Her love in all her honor.
–
My main source is Mark Scroggins’s fine new biography The Poem of a Life. For criticism, a good starting point is the Zukofsky special in Jacket 30 (July 2006). (This is drawn from the proceedings of a centennial conference at Columbia.) See also Ron Silliman’s blog, passim. And most of all, see the books. I swear by “A” and the Complete Short Poetry, but the best place to start is probably the recent Selected Poems edited by Charles Bernstein.
there was X. Also, because I’m feeling a bit nostalgic. I’m not sure why.
This is part two of this interview, in which Michael talks about why he is an antifoundationalist in matters of social justice, and you should be too. Ari still isn’t talking in this part. I promise he was there, and he shows up in the next bit.
Also, as promised or threatened, the wiggling remains for now, though after reading all your complaints I tried to come with more creative uses of animation in the latter bit of the video.
Please, as before, comment on form and/or substance.
The below represents an experiment for us. This is the first portion of about a half-hour conversation Ari and I had with Michael Bérubé this week. In this portion Michael talks about the Sokal Hoax and why it’s still important. Later parts of the interview include why you should be an antifoundationalist, ruminations on blogging and books, and three middle-aged heterosexual white guys (with tenure, no less!) talking about “privilege.”
Please comment on form or substance, as the mood strikes you.
On this day in 1913, the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified, providing for the direct election of Senators. The amendment went into effect for the following year’s election. I suppose there’s more to say on the subject — about early advocacy for the measure in the Jacksonian era, about the Populists, about Progressive reform, blah, blah, blah — but the Seventeenth Amendment is hardly my favorite. I mean, it’s not bad or anything. But it’s no First, Thirteenth, Fourteenth, or Nineteenth. Sorry Seventeenth Amendment, you’ll have to do better next time.
On this day in 1973, the siege at Wounded Knee, SD ended. For seventy-one days, members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and tribal traditionalists had controlled the small town on the Pine Ridge Reservation, home of the Oglala Sioux. The occupation lasted until May 8, when U.S. Marhals, FBI agents, and National Guard troops took control of the area.
This is Harry. He is a seven-week old golden retriever.
People have said to me many times over the years, “goldens are dumb.” I’m not sure why people think this. About every other seeing-eye dog you see is a golden retriever. That’s not a job for a dumb dog. Is it that goldens are blond, and therefore must be dumb? Maybe. I suspect it’s more that they’re extraordinarily willing to please, and for some of us that translates as dumb. (This says more about us than about the golden, though.)
“Harry” is for Harry Hotspur, who is easily among the coolest characters in Shakespeare. (He is also basically the same character as Mercutio, but you try saying, “Here, Mercutio!”)
On this day, Wednesday, three weeks ago, we got Magpie (she’s pictured above), a Border Collie pup we call Maggie. Which raises an important question: what happened to Luna? Well, that’s a long and sad story. So here goes.
On this day in 1882, the US adopted a law including these provisions:
Whereas, in the opinion ofthe Government of the United States the coming of Chinese laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the territory thereof [we're looking at you, California]: Therefore … until the expiration of ten years next after the passage of this act, the coming of Chinese laborers to the United States be, and the same is hereby, suspended…. That hereafter no State court or court of the United States shall admit Chinese to citizenship[.]
Actually, it’s much longer, going on for almost three pages in the Statutes at Large, beginning at 22 Stat. 58, including all kinds of provisions for controlling immigration. It was America’s first legal definition of an entire nationality as unassimilable.
There are several ways to think about this law. One is, it was part of a global movement among white settler colonies to exclude Chinese: what did Canada, Australia, and the US have in common? Aside from British-inflected culture and government. No, aside from frontiers. No, aside from gold strikes and boom-and-bust frontiers. No, aside from frontier war against the aboriginal inhabitants. No, aside from relying on immigrant labor. YES, bigotry against immigrant laborers! If you want to find your trans-oceanic community of policy-making, look at the immigrant-haters. Victoria, in Australia, had a Chinese exclusion law in 1855; other Australian governments followed suit, so that by 1887 there were such laws all over Oz. The US passed its law in 1882; the Canadians did not outright exclude Chinese until 1923 but in the meantime had a variety of measures, including a head tax and a highly discretionary system of immigrant admission, that kept down Chinese immigration. The pattern of Japanese immigration restriction is similar; Queensland made a “gentleman’s agreement” with Japan to keep down immigration in 1897, while the US did its deal with Japan in 1907 and Canada did its in 1908. (Why were the Chinese excluded by law while the Japanese were excluded by bilateral negotiation? The Chinese were quasi-colonized, while the Japanese had a navy modeled on Britain’s.)
Another way of looking at the law is to see it functioning within the history of American immigration restriction. Chinese exclusion invented something like the concept and business of modern illegal immigration. As a journalist wrote in 1891,
There is no part [of the Canadian border] over which a Chinaman may not pass into our country without fear of hinderance; there are scarcely any parts of it where he may not boldly walk across it at high noon.
The law and its successor of 1892 also made necessary for the first time the modern machinery of immigration and residency control and documentation. And what was made for the Chinese eventually extended to other immigrants as well—not just the Japanese, but eventually all “Asiatics,” excluded by the 1917 law. And also Europeans: in the decades around 1900, Americans found lots of ways to define various nationalities of immigrants as undesirable owing to “health” problems. Somehow, the taxonomy of health problems mapped onto certain ethnicities and national origins, as Howard Markel and Alexandra Minna Stern find; Jews were “neurasthenic,” Italians “criminally minded.”2 Medical opinion underwrote racism, allowing the redefinition of people previously considered “white” and thus A-OK, as excludable along with the “Asiatics.” What starts as the “Yellow Peril” can become the merely sallow peril. Say, you’re looking a little peaky there, yourself….
1Cited in Erika Lee, “Enforcing the Borders: Chinese Exclusion along the U.S. Borders with Canada and Mexico, 1882-1924,” Journal of American History 89, no. 1 (June 2002): 54-86. The discussion here also relies on Mae Ngai, “The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the Immigration Act of 1924,” Journal of American History 86, no. 1 (June 1999): 67-92, and the various works of Roger Daniels, including his good survey of immigration law, Guarding the Golden Door.
2Howard Markel and Alexandra Minna Stern, “Which Face? Whose Nation? The Construction of Disease at America’s Ports and Borders, 1891-1928,” American Behavioral Scientist 42, no. 9 (June/July 1999): 1314-1331.
Ari’s Killer Angels post reminds me, oncet upon a time I used to teach historical novels a lot more. Lots of ’em are very well known and appear on syllabi everywhere, but some I think are relatively underrated. For example, I think E. L. Doctorow’s Book of Daniel works pretty well for teaching the mid-century Cold War. When