Ira Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action was White shows how government social programs of the New Deal and immediately afterward skewed heavily toward white people – and, as the title indicates, this early “affirmative action” occasioned no objection from the paler members of the citizenry. It was only later, when government programs aimed to help Americans with darker skins, that principled libertarian objections became so popular among white folks.
It’s a good book to assign, though it always elicits at least one student’s objection that it’s a little polemical, isn’t it? I mean that’s not entirely fair, is it, to say that white people can benefit from government programs and then object to such programs helping black people? The student is always licensed in saying this because Katznelson himself describes the book as “polemical,” which makes it a safe critique. So we then talk about how polemical a history can, or should, be.
Comes now Rick Santorum, son of Aldo:
Aldo Santorum called the GI Bill the greatest gift he received. He gave back by building a career and family around veterans hospitals.
“We always lived on the campus of the veterans hospitals. It was called the domiciliary,” said his son, former Sen. Rick Santorum of Penn Hills. “I always joked that I spent my childhood living in public housing.”…
After returning from the war, he earned a psychology degree from St. Francis College in Loretto, a graduate degree from Catholic University in Washington and a doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Ottawa.
“He then went to work for the Veterans Administration and that is where he met my mom,” Rick Santorum said.
Catherine Dughi worked for the VA as an administrative nurse, and both were assigned to the VA hospital in Martinsburg, W.Va. After having three children — Barbara, Rick and Dan — the family moved to the Butler VA Hospital in the early 1960s, where they stayed for more than a decade.
And yet Rick Santorum – son of a beneficiary of the GI Bill (the veterans’ New Deal, you know) and a man who wouldn’t exist were it not for the government program that employed his parents, brought them together and housed them to boot – now says (when he can’t stop himself saying it) that “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.”
Which is to say, when affirmative action was white, it was great, but now … I think we can at least consider the possibility that Santorum proves Katznelson is not too polemical.
Many thanks to the correspondent who sent along the Aldo Santorum obituary.
The Edge of the American West 
22 comments
January 8, 2012 at 11:35 am
ari
So gross. Your title, I mean, not Santorum’s predictable hypocrisy.
January 8, 2012 at 12:23 pm
TF Smith
Hypocrisy or cognitive dissonance?
I’m sure the senator thinks his parents were great, hardworking people AND they would have done just fine without the Bill and the VA….
Not sure what they would think of him, however.
January 8, 2012 at 12:31 pm
Odm
I thought that it’s not fair “to say that white people can benefit from government programs and then object to such programs helping black people” was the argument of the book, so I’m not sure what the students’ objection is. Is it that it’s not fair to claim that racism is what caused acceptance in one case and protest in the other?
January 8, 2012 at 3:38 pm
eric
It is the argument of the book, but students sometimes object that it’s insufficiently nuanced. That New Deal policies did benefit some black people. That later welfare-state policies were clothed in very different rhetoric and justifications, and came from different circumstances. And so that yes, the objector will sometimes say, it’s not necessarily the case that race is the differentiating factor between the two eras.
January 8, 2012 at 5:00 pm
Vance Maverick
Consider also Santorum’s story of how his grandfather fled the Old World (morphing in those years from the Old Bad of feudalism to the New Bad of fascism) for the Land of Opportunity — when the work he actually found was coal mining, paid in scrip redeemable only at the company store. I think it’s neither hypocrisy nor cognitive dissonance: rather, the familiar stories of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, whether by contrast to benighted Europe or lazy, ah, fellow citizens, are simply more important than verifiable fact.
January 8, 2012 at 6:07 pm
eric
It would be natural to wonder if Grandpa Santorum was a union man.
January 8, 2012 at 6:23 pm
TF Smith
“The Santorum Taint” sounds like yet another Ludlum novel title…
January 8, 2012 at 6:31 pm
kevin
Rick Perlstein had a nice piece on Santorum’s grandfather.
It’s amazing how Santorum can hold up the man’s life as an example and decide that the lesson is that government intervention in the economy is bad and companies should be allowed to dominate the lives of their workers with impunity.
January 8, 2012 at 6:34 pm
eric
But government intervention in the economy isn’t bad, it’s bad for black people. It has always been thus, hasn’t it?
January 8, 2012 at 6:36 pm
eric
Yeah, in that Perlstein piece he asks how Santorum grandpere could have come in 1925, with the 1924 law in place. Does this have something to do perhaps with the fact that the 1924 quotas weren’t immediately put into place? Or did he just get in under the bar, as some people had to do?
January 8, 2012 at 6:41 pm
kevin
Eh, some Italians still made it in under the new restrictions. It would’ve been difficult, but not impossible.
The real issue, as you note, is that grandpa was almost certainly a UMW member. If not when he first started working in the mines, then definitely a decade later after John L. Lewis turned the union into a powerhouse.
January 8, 2012 at 6:56 pm
eric
Also that the Santorums (Santora?) were almost certainly Roosevelt Democrats, right? At least until such time as Aldo and the missus were working phones for Rick.
January 8, 2012 at 7:00 pm
kevin
A Catholic immigrant coal miner in the 1930s? If he wasn’t a Roosevelt man, I’ll eat John L. Lewis’s eyebrows.
January 8, 2012 at 7:03 pm
kevin
There’s another angle in Santorum’s family history that deserves exploring. His grandfather was a heroic immigrant coal miner, his father was a WWII veteran who gave back by becoming a VA psychiatrist, and Rick got his start … as a lobbyist for pro wrestling.
January 8, 2012 at 7:06 pm
John Emerson
Congressman Ernest Lundeen of the Minnesota Farmer Labor Party introduced a superior bill (H.R. 2827):
The Lundeen bill (H.R. 2827) was a more comprehensive and progressive plan than Roosevelt¹s Economic Security Act since it (a) provided coverage for all workers; (b) offered a federal, rather than federal-state, system for unemployment insurance and aid to dependent children; (c) covered the workers who were then unemployed; (d) offered immediate compensation to workers at their average weekly wages, and guaranteed it until a job was found; (e) provided a sixteen-week paid maternity leave for women; (f) offered national criteria for unemployment and welfare; and (g) was funded by an inheritance tax on upper-middle-class and rich individuals and corporations.
For this he was called a Communist by Elizabeth Dilling (The Red Network), an anti-Semitic anti-Communist who in 1944 would be prosecuted under the Smith Act as a Nazi sympathizer. But she and Lundeen were both isolationists, and in 1940 Lundeen was also accused of being a Nazi sympathizer. If he hadn’t died in a mysterious plane crash (like Sens. Paul Wellstone and Bronson Cutting) Lundeen might also have been prosecuted. Sen. Lundeen was a Spanish American War veteran and a crack shot, and he played a role in getting the M1 Garand rifle approved for military use:
In July 1940, the Army demonstrated the revised M1 before Congressional officials, allowing them to fire the rifle for themselves. Senator Ernest Lundeen, a former infantry officer and the M1’s biggest critic, fired 27 consecutive bull’s-eyes at 300 yards, convincing all at the event that the M1 was the best design available.
January 8, 2012 at 10:19 pm
Main Street Muse
First of all, Santorum is lucky his old grandpa didn’t die in a mining accident caused by unregulated companies undercutting safety as a way to maximize profits.
[Could the grand-dad have worked until 72 without becoming a union man? Or is Rick Santorum the grandson of one of the most successful scabs in history?]
Second of all, let’s remember that Santorum feels that “liberalism” contributed to the pedophile scandal of the Catholic Church. Rick’s not one to let facts get in the way of his opinion. [Why hold those who committed such heinous crimes accountable for their actions when you can point the finger at liberals?] That he’s gotten this far in the GOP race is quite frightening.
WRT “it was only later, when government programs aimed to help Americans with darker skins, that principled libertarian objections became so popular among white folks…” Eric – do you think racism gave birth to the Libertarian Party? That’s not something I’ve given much thought to, but would be curious to know your thoughts.
Another interesting question for me: how does the grandson of a coal miner, son of a beneficiary of the GI Bill, transform into a man pledged to eliminate such benefits from today’s government? What happened to him to shrivel up his moral compass into a hard, cold bit of stone?
[Radical conservative Paul Ryan went to college using Social Security survivors’ benefits… [http://bit.ly/kfpNax]. Former SC governor Mark Sanford [GOP] was a far too big a fan of Ayn Rand for one who worked in government. I do not understand why those who hate government go to work for government, Alan Greenspan included.]
January 9, 2012 at 7:44 am
John Emerson
I think that some people born poor want to erase the shame, and suck up to rich people in order to do it. Their conservatism is based in part on gratitude toward whoever rescued them from the stupid mass. Reagan is a prime example.
The Horatio Alger story was about that, a rich man recognizing the worth of a poor man and making him rich. It’s almost like the Cinderella story of the beautiful but poor girl who becomes a rich man’s mistress and the toast of Paris, cleaned up for Victorian consumption. Opportunity egalitarianism can reinforce the class structure while moving individuals around in it. A lot of the equality-by-education ideas just involve rescuing the talented tenth from their horrible lower-class origins.
January 9, 2012 at 8:25 pm
Vance Maverick
So what’s your take, Eric? Not polemical enough? Just right?
January 10, 2012 at 4:06 am
Dave
“the Cinderella story of the beautiful but poor girl who becomes a rich man’s mistress and the toast of Paris”
Wow, your kids must have much different storybooks than mine…
Maybe you mean Nana, which is ‘Victorian’ in period, and not cleaned up at all?
January 10, 2012 at 4:36 am
chris y
It’s amazing how Santorum can hold up the man’s life as an example and decide that the lesson is that government intervention in the economy is bad and companies should be allowed to dominate the lives of their workers with impunity.
Not amazing at all. “I got mine so screw you Jack” is a depressingly common attitude IME.
January 10, 2012 at 6:49 am
rea
“the Cinderella story of the beautiful but poor girl who becomes a rich man’s mistress and the toast of Paris”
She dies of consumption, doesn’t she?
January 10, 2012 at 12:22 pm
John Emerson
La Boheme, La Traviata, and Camille, based on two different real people, did die of consumption.
I suppose that in the children’s books Cinderella married the Prince. I was just merging three different bodies of cliche in a critical, feminist way. The message being suck your way to the top.
Horatio Alger was about marrying heiresses, not about being frugal and hard-working and improving your skills and investing wisely. Marrying heiresses is a big factor in French literature and everyday life, and sons-in-law seem quite rightly to be regarded as predatory scoundrels.