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Oh, and about Wall-E: today’s comments on Frank Rich’s column remind me that I’ve been meaning to note, the most interesting creative choice in the movie is the decision to present Fred Willard in live-action as Shelby Forthright, the long-gone CEO of Buy n Large.
Why? I assume it’s to emphasize the notion that the people who trashed the planet are people. Like us. Which is probably also why the only after-the-credits gag you get is the Buy n Large logo appearing on the screen.
An earnest commenter is trawling the blogs trying to find out just what Barack Obama meant by “mental distress,” as in “I don’t think that ‘mental distress’ qualifies as the health of the mother. I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy….”
Well, earnest commenter, it is possible that Obama means “mental distress” to encompass some kind of qualm or concern short of mental illness. In which case Obama is only “restating existing law”; there is no legal late-term abortion on the grounds of “cold feet,” “the screaming heebie-geebies,” or whatever synonym for “hysterically irresponsible woman-feelings” you’d like to use.
But look again: that can’t be true, because the Obama quotation clearly says, “I think it has to be a serious physical issue….” Now, it is possible that Obama understands, say, paranoid schizophrenia, because it has a chemical basis, to be a “serious physical issue” rather than a mental illness.
But that would certainly be an unconventional use of the language.
So what can Obama mean? It seems he doesn’t mean anything, much, beyond saying, “I certainly don’t support abortions on frivolous grounds.”—i.e., “It is not just a matter of feeling blue.” (Wait, is that a slam on depressives?)
To be clear, I fully expect (for whatever my full expectations are worth) that Obama as president would appoint judges and justices who support a woman’s right to choose an abortion. I firmly believe this is dog-whistle language.
Of course, defenses of the form, “he doesn’t really mean it, he’s just signalling a constituency he’d like to court and later ignore,” when made on behalf of modern Republicans using terms like, say, “states’ rights,” don’t elicit my sympathy.
You know, I’ve been spending a portion of my time over the last few weeks mulling over the intriguing thesis that the rise of the Republican Party in the South happened because southerners got richer—i.e., that it’s rich people voting their self-interest that accounts for Republicanism in the South, and it’s nothing to do with (say) George Wallace splitting the Democratic Party and delivering the racist part to the GOP. And mulling this thesis requires careful examination of voting patterns, and scatterplots, and regressions, and concerns about ecological fallacies, and so forth.
And then Jesse Helms up and dies, unleashing from the depths of Nexis the long history of his views on race:
- “The nation has been hypnotized by the swaying and gesturing of the watusi and the frug.”
– WRAL Viewpoint, 1966 - “They should ask their parents if it would be all right for their son or daughter to marry a Negro.”
– In response to Duke University students holding a vigil after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, 1968 - “I’ve been portrayed as a caveman by some. That’s not true. I’m a conservative progressive, and that means I think all men are equal, be they slants, beaners or niggers.”
– February 6, 1985 - “All Latins are volatile people. Hence, I was not surprised at the volatile reaction.”
– After Mexicans protested his visit in 1986 - “I’m going to make her cry. I’m going to sing Dixie until she cries.”
–of his new colleague, Senator Carol Moseley-Braun
And there was this television ad, which helped him pull ahead of Harvey Gantt:
I know, I know: but if you look at the numbers, it’s class, not race. I mean, Helms’s own advisor said so: “Well there is nothing racial about the campaign.” What advisor, you ask? Why, Charlie Black. Yes, McCain top advisor Charlie Black. Well done, Senator McCain.
But wait, if you look at these regressions, you might understand that modern Republicanism truly owes nothing to the racist past of the segregationist South!….
via Tom S., among other places.
It’s not too late to get one; maybe it’ll look nice enough you’ll forget how mad you are.
Oh, you didn’t hear?
Now, I don’t think that ‘mental distress’ qualifies as the health of the mother. I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy, where there are real, significant problems to the mother carrying that child to term.
Via Ari, who is in the wilds, and everywhere but particularly here.
Yglesias quotes the Washington Post saying, “the fact remains that no one can claim with certainty that his or her communications were monitored.”
Are they calling Lawrence Wright a liar?
Lawrence Wright is a reporter for the New Yorker Magazine, and an author of the bestselling book on Al Qaeda, The Looming Tower. He’s also one of the few people in America who can say definitively that he was targeted by the U.S. Government’s warrantless wiretappping program, first exposed on the front page of The New York Times.
He tells the story of how he knew his phone calls were listened to…and how he then went on to question the head of US intelligence, Mike McConnell, about it.
Lawrence Wright first wrote about his experiences in an article in The New Yorker, called “The Spymaster.”
Beaudrot notes the inanity of continuing “terrorist fist jab” obsessions without remarking on what I believe is the hidden awesomeness of this moment:
Child: Can you sign my hand?
Obama: If I start that…
… what other body parts will I have to sign?
When I was a lad of about fourteen I saw a pickup truck with a bumper sticker that said “Union Pride” next to a picture of Old Glory, and I figured it represented a reaction against the many pickup trucks with Confederate flag bumper stickers. Because what other referent could “union” have?
Cookie Monster continues his epic streak of awesomeness with an appearance on Colbert.
“It run on … imagination.” <wiggly fingers>
The bumper sticker looks good in real life, too. If I had a bumper I would put it on, but I don’t normally drive a car, so you’ll have to settle for me spokesmodelling it. The white band around it is just excess backing-paper, not part of the sticker, which does a full bleed to the edge. The printing is sharp. I like it.
Whether you’re unhappy about the FISA reversal or other lameness, this is the bumper sticker for you. Remember, proceeds go to a worthy cause. Get one of your own here.
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Because Walt wants “This Day in Pony History” (even though nothing makes him laugh) and because Ari is a self-hating Canadian, it falls to me today to mark, for This Day in History, the 141st anniversary of Canadian Confederation. On this day in 1867, Canada became “one of the great facts of the world,” or as the Globe observed, deploying characteristic Torontonian caution, it became for citizens of Upper Canada a day that “may well be heartily rejoiced over as the brightest day in their calendar.” And it came not a minute too soon. For nefarious schemes were evidently afoot, such as those providing that “the States of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Canada East, and Canada West, and the Territories of Selkirk, Saskatchewan, and Columbia, with limits and rights as by the act defined, are constituted and admitted as States and Territories of the United States of America.” Why, apparently some Billy Yanks sang as off they went to war,
Secession first he would put down
Wholly and forever,
And afterwards from Britain’s crown
He Canada would sever.
When I think of Canadian patriotism, I think of principally of October 30, 1995, when the referendum for Quebec’s secession failed; I was in Toronto for that, and have an anecdote or two. But that’s not this day in history. But that thing reminds me of two other things, which are below the fold. Cheers and greetings to all our Canadian readers.
A map derived from War Plan Orange, the US war plan for defense of American possessions in the Pacific, as drawn up in the years before the first world war. Or rather, perhaps a plan for the inability to defend American possessions in the Pacific: Orange asked the US garrison in the Philippines to hold out for sixty days against a Japanese assault until relieved by a fleet sailing from the Atlantic. The theory was that the fleet sailing from the Atlantic would engage the Japanese near Guam.
Only, of course, the facts couldn’t hope to match the theory, as the planners themselves admitted. The fleet wasn’t up to the chore, for although it had plenty of battleships, it didn’t have enough support ships or staff. And the army wasn’t going to be able to hold out for two months.
From p. 15 of J. A. S. Grenville, “Diplomacy and War Plans in the United States, 1890-1917,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 11 (1961), 1-21.
On this day in 1971, the Supreme Court by a 6-3 majority ruled that the US government could not stop the publication of the Defense Department’s “History of U.S. Decision-Making Process on Viet Nam Policy,” better known as the Pentagon Papers.
The short per curiam opinion merely “held that the Government had not met that burden” required for such restraints on the press. Some of the concurrences went into greater detail on the inadequacy of the government’s claims, particularly its minatory generalities on the subject of “national security.”
The word “security” is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment. The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic.
The Government says that it has inherent powers to go into court and obtain an injunction to protect the national interest, which, in this case, is alleged to be national security….
A debate of large proportions goes on in the Nation over our posture in Vietnam. That debate antedated the disclosure of the contents of the present documents. The latter are highly relevant to the debate in progress.
Secrecy in government is fundamentally anti-democratic, perpetuating bureaucratic errors. Open debate and discussion of public issues are vital to our national health.
The entire thrust of the Government’s claim throughout these cases has been that publication of the material sought to be enjoined “could,” or “might,” or “may” prejudice the national interest in various ways…. Even if the present world situation were assumed to be tantamount to a time of war, or if the power of presently available armaments would justify even in peacetime the suppression of information that would set in motion a nuclear holocaust, in neither of these actions has the Government presented or even alleged that publication of items from or based upon the material at issue would cause the happening of an event of that nature.
… under the Constitution, the Executive must have the largely unshared duty to determine and preserve the degree of internal security necessary to exercise that power successfully. It is an awesome responsibility, requiring judgment and wisdom of a high order. I should suppose that moral, political, and practical considerations would dictate that a very first principle of that wisdom would be an insistence upon avoiding secrecy for its own sake. For when everything is classified, then nothing is classified, and the system becomes one to be disregarded by the cynical or the careless, and to be manipulated by those intent on self-protection or self-promotion. I should suppose, in short, that the hallmark of a truly effective internal security system would be the maximum possible disclosure, recognizing that secrecy can best be preserved only when credibility is truly maintained.
Taking these excerpts as statements as much of basic political philosophy as of law, it appears that to at least five of the Justices in 1971, the use of a general claim that national security requires secrecy posed a presumptive threat to American democracy, and ought to be viewed with the greatest suspicion.
“The central question,” Senator Howard Baker (Republican of Tennessee) said on this day in 1973, in an effort to focus the minds of a crowded room, “is what did the President know? And when did he know it?”
He was questioning John W. Dean III in pursuit of the elusive truth about the welter of misdeeds known as Watergate. If those misdeeds failed utterly to destroy the American republic, it’s because the Congress and the courts exposed them, with the help of members of both parties, and passed laws to prevent their recurrence.
And at the time–in the middle of a long, drawn-out, ideological war–the administration was not shy of shouting “national security” every time it seemed its secrets might get out.
But the courts weren’t having it; as Justice Black had written two years before, “The word ‘security’ is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law[.]”
Amid the general threat posed to the United States by the expansionist ambitions of the communist Soviets, a general threat sharpened by the specific need to support our troops mired in a war whose purpose was uncertain and end indefinite, the repeated claim that it would imperil national security to expose what the administration had done in the name of American citizens gained force.
Yet some politicians managed to do the right thing anyway, to ignore that specious claim, and seek the truth.
For the Baker quotation: Christopher Lydon, “Dean Navigates Watergate Shoals with Ease,” NYT 6/29/1973, p. 22.
The Bee had a nice article today on the new Civilian Conservation Corps memorial in Sacramento.
“I didn’t have a job. I didn’t have anything. There was no work at the time. I had finished the eighth grade and there was no high school to go to…. They put me on a train and we went all the way across the state to the Black Hills.”
The CCC was one of the earliest, most remarkable, and least controversial of the New Deal’s relief programs. It hired young unemployed men and put them to work saving the nation’s natural resources. You might could read Neil Maher’s book; also, Sarah Phillips’s book.
Or, you know, for the big picture, you know where to go.
See update here.
By popular demand, the bumper sticker has become reality.
Get it here.
Couple points: Look, this really is a pro-Obama bumper sticker. It’s just a realistic, not to say jaded, pro-Obama bumper sticker. And maybe it’s more than a little whiny. You really think you can win the presidency without courting or crafting constituencies that Good People don’t like? I don’t. Of course, I’m a notorious pain; to borrow from the great Michael Bérubé, the number of people whose politics I can wholly accept would fit comfortably in a phone booth.1
Inasmuch as it really is a pro-Obama bumper sticker, albeit one with attitude, The Edge of the American West is not going to profit from it. We clear a dollar on each sale, and those dollars will go to the Obama campaign. Somehow we3 feel this will send the right message.
Second point: I only just ordered one myself, and I haven’t seen the physical thing yet. If it turns out to look crummy, I’ll let you know. You can order one now, but consider yourself an early adopter, downloading beta software, if you do.
1Remember phone booths?2
2Ooh, that’s another demerit from Leslie.
3“We” is Cala, whose idea the slogan was, and me, who designed it, and Ari, who supplies advice.
An anonymous emailer offers this answer to andrew’s question, “why has labor history declined so much as a subfield? I’m not sure I’ve seen a satisfying explanation….”
- Labor history suffers because unions are currently moribund. No strikes=no labor history. You can try to write a history of work, but the absence of conflict drives away the audience.
- Historians are now thoroughly middle class. Many of them not only don’t care about working people, they secretly distrust labor unions and dislike the white working-class men who have historically run them.
- Labor history attracts ideologues who are attracted to struggle for its own sake. They have an embarassing crush on the tiny, widely hated, IWW because Big Bill Haywood was RADICAL, DUDE!!! This kind of silliness can tend to drive serious people away.
- Labor history is no worse off than any number of fields. Given the explosion in the number of books, genres, subjects, and methods, there is no center. You often hear political, diplomatic, business, and economic historians complain that “social historians” have blackballed them. But you know what? Women’s historians have the same bitterness. Their work is also largely ignored. Everybody feels unloved.
So, what attracts the recognition of a wide audience? Race, race, race. It’s the only issue that really resonates with the boomers who currently run the profession.
Whether andrew will find that satisfying, I don’t know. It’s certainly vigorous.
During the 80th Congress, from 1947-1949, for one two-year period in the postwar era, the Republicans enjoyed a majority in both the House (246 R to 188 D) and the Senate (51 R to 45 D). The GOP seized its moment, passing over President Truman’s veto on this day in 1947 the Labor-Management Relations Act, better known as the Taft-Hartley Act.
Taft-Hartley gave back to management and also to the government much of what the Wagner Act of 1935 had taken away.1 Where the Wagner Act sought to limit the size and power of government by giving unions the power to bargain legally for workers’ compensation—“[W]e intend to rely upon democratic self-help by industry and labor instead of courting the pitfalls of an arbitrary or totalitarian state,” Wagner explained—the Taft-Hartley Act increased the power of the state to regulate unions.
It was easy to find the reason for Taft-Hartley’s popularity. In 1946, hours of labor lost to strikes reached a record high. Two steel strikes, two coal strikes, and a railroad strike that year all threatened to shut down of the national economy.
The reason for the strikes was equally easy to find: the war had ended and with it the no-strike pledge. Pent-up demand for increased wages, of which a generation had been deprived by depression and war, suddenly sprang loose. Not all such demands met with understanding from management. And so the strikes came.
On January 6, 1947, in his State of the Union address, Truman asked Congress for “the early enactment of legislation to prevent certain unjustifiable practices.” Despite the submission of some dozens of bills to Congress, the lawmakers reached a decision relatively quickly, and once Truman vetoed their law on June 20, they re-passed it over his objections almost immediately.
Where the Wagner Act had left much basic state law in place, Taft-Hartley increased the scope of federal control. The new law created a provision for “national emergency,” which let the president shut down strikes. It banned the closed shop and permitted states to ban union shops. It offered a list of forbidden kinds of strikes. And it went on and on; as one analyst noted, “It is a long law, covering twenty-nine pages of eight-point type….”2 But the basic point was pretty clear: to give the federal government new powers to curb unions.
Now, it turned out the 80th Congress was not very popular. In 1948, despite a Dixiecrat challenge, the Democrats kept the presidency and won back both houses of Congress. The Democratic platform included a paragraph advocating repeal of Taft-Hartley. Despite the victories the repeal didn’t come. Perhaps it is because some of the equalization provisions of the law seem to provide a needed, equitable treatment, applying the same restrictions to unions as to management. Perhaps it is because lawmakers like the government’s increased power over labor-management relations, preferring a bigger government to Wagner’s vision of a nation in which the increased power of unions prevented an increase of power to the state. Perhaps it is because the Dixiecrat challenge revealed how beholden the Democrats still were to their southern wing which, among other things, was not particularly pro-union, and a shift in Democratic policy on unions would have to wait—even longer than the shift in Democratic policy on civil rights.
1More excellent material about the Wagner Act here.
2Sumner H. Schlichter, “The Taft-Hartley Act,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 63, no. 1 (February 1949): 1-31, quotation on 8.
The title is a paraphrase from Harry Millis and Emily Clark Brown, From the Wagner Act to Taft-Hartley.
As a youth I was fortunate that my parents put me in nerd camp—computer programming classes at the Science Center. They had a Honeywell mainframe, in a room full of tape drives and disk drives, the disks that looked like stacks of LPs in a covered cake dish made of clear plastic.1 All that was housed in a room with plate-glass windows, and on the other side was a room full of terminals. Many if not most of them were basically teletypes with keyboards—every time you hit a key, it would dot-matrix the character right onto a roll of perforated paper that just kept on scrolling as you typed. At first I preferred these to the LED screens, because they reminded me of typewriters and if you had to debug code you reached behind the machine and lifted up a yard of paper to scan down it, holding a pencil, making you look like someone reading the stock-ticker or telegraph tape in an old movie. We started in BASIC, and the first program they showed us produced an ASCII art picture of Snoopy.2 Oh, brave new world. I think the appeal of the thing was basically identical to that of playing with an insect or a lizard you found in the yard: you do something to it and it reacts, not always in a predictable way. Maybe you can train it, you think….
When did you first realize you could get along with a computer?
1Not unlike this, but I remember them being cylindrical.
2I think it was this one, but this page has annoying music so maybe you don’t want to open it.
Obama on the FISA bill:
It does, however, grant retroactive immunity, and I will work in the Senate to remove this provision so that we can seek full accountability for past offenses.
We will see it again and again.
Brad DeLong says,
A tariff is a revenue bill. And revenue bills must originate in the House of Representatives. (Although what “originate” means when procedure allows amendments in the nature of substitutes I do not know.) So it is Hawley-Smoot.
My linguist friends tell me usage is king.
- In JSTOR, I find 317 instances of “Hawley-Smoot” and 525 instances of “Smoot-Hawley.”
- In Google Books, I find 907 instances of “Hawley-Smoot” and 1063 of “Smoot-Hawley.” (Owing to a felicitous typo, I also find 96 instances of the much more awesome “Smooth-Hawley.”)
On the other hand, that’s lily-livered descriptivism. Also, DeLong says my book is “excellent.”
So I think DeLong, and my eighth-grade US History teacher, must be right.
Ah, Belle Waring reminds me of my childhood. No wait, that was someone else’s childhood, maybe with noodle salad. Still, it’s good:
Cucumber Sandwiches:
Use peeled hothouse cucumbers, those thin-skinned ones, or if they are normal cucumbers, peel, cut in half, and remove the seeds and gelatinous middle bit with a spoon. Slice cucumbers paper-thin. Use Pepperidge Farm Very Thin White Bread, spread with Hellman’s mayonnaise. Lay the slices of cucumber down, top with fresh mint leaves, and add salt and freshly cracked ground pepper. Top with another slice, cut the crusts off after completion, and cut each sandwich into four triangles (now it feeds four times as many people!). You may wash this down either with iced tea with a splash of orange juice and fresh mint, or with Nannie’s traditional libation, a triple bourbon on the rocks.UPDATE: if you want to take the sandwiches on a picnic you may substitute softened unsalted butter for the mayo, being careful to coat the bread thoroughly–that way they won’t get soggy.
On this day in 1930 the Smoot-Hawley Tariff became law. I swear when I was in eighth grade it was the Hawley-Smoot Tariff. Apparently the forces of Smoot have ensured that he takes pride of place. Or maybe it’s the forces of Hawley who have ensured that Smoot takes the brunt of blame. Because the law is virtually synonymous with a Bad Thing. Remember this Golden Television Moment?
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Since some folks asked, James Gregory on “variable 666” and white migration from the South:
Good for the edge of the West. One of the couples in the Bee’s pictorial includes a partner who is a friend of 2/3 of our bloggers; we don’t want to violate their privacy, but good for them!
UPDATED: Elizabeth says it’s okay to let people know she associates with us. So: Elizabeth Bacon and Sarah Asplin, many congratulations to you. You’re awesome.
Beginning in the late 1960s, the Democratic Party lost its once-solid southern bloc to the Republicans. In truth historians often overstate the solidity of the South. Democrats of the South split from their national brethren whenever the party took a step toward its more cosmopolitan wing. It happened in 1928, when the Democrats nominated a Catholic of mixed ancestry to the presidency; in 1948, when President Truman moved a short step or two toward “securing these rights,” as championed by Hubert Humphrey; in 1960, when the Democrats nominated another Catholic who was somewhat less indifferent to Civil Rights than the white South would have liked; in 1964, by which time the Johnson administration had committed itself to “enforcing the right to vote”; and in 1968, when the Democrats could no longer pretend they weren’t serious about this Civil Rights business and nominated Humphrey his own self.
We thus know that a significant number of white voters in the South would desert the national Democratic Party—even for a Republican, as they did in 1964—if it wavered in its commitment to white supremacy.
What’s more, ever since Kevin Phillips predicted, “The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are”—which is to say, ever since Nixon’s “southern strategy”—it’s been commonplace to assume that the Republicans picked up where the Democrats left off in courting bigoted whites, in the South and elsewhere. Hence Rick Perlstein’s observations; hence Reagan’s pilgrimage to Philadelphia, Mississippi; hence Lee Atwater explaining that “you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff”; and all, all, all that stuff down to “Harold, call me,” and “Obama’s Baby Mama.”
But wait, now. Along come some political scientists to tell us this Republican racism is a bit of a side show, that the real story of the GOP’s new southern eminence has to do with the emergence, at long last, of a New South, ushered (ironically) into being by Democratic programs of New Deal and wartime mobilization. As people in the South got richer, they got more Republican, for the same reasons that people get Republican anywhere else—they want to keep their taxes low and protect their own interests.1
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The Bee is a McClatchy paper, and as such has a source of excellent material. Today it ran the first installment of a four-part series, “Guantanamo: Beyond the Law.” (Hey, if SCotUS says so, it must be true!) Schedule of installments:
Today: We got the wrong guys
Coming Monday: ‘I guess you can call it torture’
Tuesday: A school for Jihad
Wednesday: ‘Due process is legal mumbo-jumbo’
Thursday: ‘You are the king of this prison’
I imagine that in broad outline there’s not a lot there our readers don’t know, but it’s often helpful to learn details. Although it’s not good for your digestion.
UPDATE: urbino quite rightly points out that looks like five parts. Yet, here is what the Bee says.
If you opened your New York Times on this day in 1963, you read that Alabama governor George C. Wallace “stepped aside today when confronted by federalized National Guard troops and permitted two Negroes to enroll in the University of Alabama. There was no violence.”1 And on this day, the two students to whom Wallace so objected, Vivian J. Malone and James A. Hood, attended class. “They strolled across the main quadrangle, talking and occasionally laughing. Three Federal marshals followed unobtrusively in an unmarked car.”2
It sounded very much like the end of something, but of course it was very much the beginning. The next year, Barry Goldwater—who voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, who said that a “Supreme Court decision is not necessarily the law of the land,” and who thought politics needed to take into account “the essential differences between men,” carried Alabama, along with Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina. For a Republican to carry this Deep South bloc was a post-Reconstruction novelty. And he did it in part because Wallace voters switched to him; Wallace had run as a Democrat in the primaries and considered a run as [fixed thanks to Ben Alpers] an independent candidate but withdrew in the summer, instantly spawning “Democrats for Goldwater” in much of the South. “Obviously we are thrilled that Governor Wallace is withdrawing,” the Alabama Republican party chairman said. “He … has practically the same views on everything that our presidential candidate has.”
In 1968, Wallace would carry Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia, in addition to Arkansas, on much the same platform—promoting segregation in the guise of protecting property rights, and opposing civil rights in favor of law and order.
If you asked Wallace voters in 1968 who their second choice was, they generally said Nixon. “Democrats voting for Wallace were repudiating the standard national ticket, as many as a third of them for the second time in a row. If Wallace had not run, we can have little confidence that they would have faithfully supported Humphrey and Muskie…. the majority of his votes were from Democrats who otherwise preferred Nixon rather than from Republicans who might have given their favors to Humphrey.”3
For all these reasons, historians often view Wallace as playing an important role in the rise of the Southern GOP. Many white Southern Democrats, fed up with the civil rights policies of Humphrey, Kennedy, and Johnson, defected when they could: first to Wallace and then to Goldwater in 1964, then to Wallace in 1968, and finally, sometime in the 1970s, becoming Republicans.
Recently there have been some studies that muddy this picture. I’ll have more to say about that in a while.
1“Governor Leaves,” NYT 6/12/1963, p. 1.
2“Alabama Campus Retains Its Calm,” NYT 6/13/1963, p. 14.
3Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller, Jerrold G. Rusk and Arthur C. Wolfe, “Continuity and Change in American Politics: Parties and Issues in the 1968 Election,” American Political Science Review 63, no. 4 (December 1969): 1083-1105, p. 1091.
I’m sure some apologist will find a way to claim it isn’t at all racist when Fox News calls Michelle Obama “Obama’s Baby-Mama.”
Predictions for future Fox slogans to tease stories about Obama.
- On his suits: “Is the Democratic nominee big pimpin’?”
- On his campaign schedule: “Is Obama hitting the chitlin circuit?”
- On his urban policy: “Watts up with our cities?”
- On his close relationship with Tom Daschle: “A profile of Obama’s political uncle, Tom!”
- On his monetary policy: “Obama is a Negro! A NEEEE-GRO!”
A university near us is celebrating its centennial this year. Someone thought it would be a good idea to ask a historian to write a short piece, principally for alumni, about America’s place in the world at 1908. So here’s a draft of that.
Let’s take for granted (1) it is insufficiently generous to the South; (2) it needs more details on the kinds of ships; (3) it is part of a left-wing echo chamber plot to destroy teh world!!!1!!!!1! (4) it needs more paralepsis and less anaphoresis.
Beyond that, I’d be interested to know what you think.
… is what I imagine David Carlton writing to Stephen Colbert right now.1
1If anyone comments that Colbert is not a Yankee, well.
Asking a question is not the same thing as giving a speech.
The set of things you find interesting is not necessarily coterminous with the set of things relevant to the topic under discussion.
The longer a meeting continues, the less value any question can add; as a corollary: past a certain point in a meeting the only thing of value anyone can say is, “Move to adjourn.”
If you want people who hold stupid ideas to agree with your nonstupid ideas, there are better ways to start than calling their stupid ideas stupid.
In his chapter on “The Last Act” of the Pacific War, Max Hastings uses the word “contemptible” twice within four pages, describing the suicides of Japanese commanders.1 Throughout his book he makes absolutely clear that once Japan had clearly lost the war—which was certainly before 1945—the invocation of bushido and the determination to choose death before dishonor is itself not only delusional but morally discreditable.
It differs slightly from the view of Japan in Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima, in which it’s clear that we should find Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi and Lieutenant Colonel Takeichi Nishi admirable characters. In Eastwood’s film, neither is at first aware that the defense of Iwo Jima is per se an act of mass suicide in a lost cause; both discover it over the course of the film as they learn the Empire is in a parlous state and has sent them to die without the intent or ability to support or evacuate them. Under the circumstances, they appear to believe they should fight to defend the island as best they can, short of obviously suicidal attacks, and they repeatedly try to thwart the more zealous of their officers who seek to kill themselves and their men in futile assaults. Yet both of them choose suicide for themselves.2
Hastings spends a fair bit of his book teasing out the parallel between the Japanese imposition of suicide on soldiers and American tactics—he at least airs out the idea that many American officers, particularly General Douglas MacArthur and Marine Lieutenant General Holland Smith, were too willing to sacrifice too many men to achieve too little, and that perhaps there is a certain uncomfortable similarity between the Japanese and American willingness to fling soldiers, sailors, and Marines knowingly to their deaths when other alternatives might have saved their lives. (Hastings specifically remarks that it was not necessary to take Iwo Jima as an airbase, though he concedes it was “implausible” that American leaders should have resisted it.) Eastwood achieved a similar parallelism with Flags of Our Fathers.
In Eastwood’s two films, (as in perhaps all his films over the past several decades), the possibility of honor seems to exist only at the personal level; institutions are inevitably corrupt and institutional violence always immoral. Individuals can make honorable decisions to die; they can also make honorable decisions to survive—Kuribayashi’s suicide is not depicted as dishonorable, but neither is Private Saigo’s survival. (Indeed, Kuribayashi tells him at one point, noticing how Saigo seems to survive a variety of desperate maneuvers, that he is a good soldier.)
Hastings’s book does seem to go a bit further: there is not personal honor, either. There is wisdom and folly, based principally on cost-benefit and risk analysis. You can die, or send men to their death, if it seems likely to gain worthy goals. Once such goals are no longer attainable, dying or sending men to their death becomes wicked and despicable. (The trick of course lies in making those cost-benefit and risk analyses correctly.)
Both Hastings and Eastwood are right-of-center political figures, yet their critique of war and especially their critique of honor, seems at odds with much right-of-center discourse. Compare their analyses with George Will’s angry dismissal of David Kennedy’s suggestion that Americans’ conduct of, specifically, the Pacific War (among other things) might have caused “some discomfort”:
Well, yes, they might have “reflected with some discomfort” on that coagulation of late-20th-century academic conventional wisdom. They preferred — silly them — simply to say: We won, and a good thing, too.
Do not read this book. And if any of your children wind up at Stanford, where Prof. Kennedy teaches, tell them to shun his classes.
I suppose it’s possible, here, to conclude that Eastwood and Hastings are simply more honorable conservatives than Will. But perhaps also the intervening eight years have made it possible to say different things about war.
1In one case—that of Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki—it’s possible that Hastings finds a method of suicide contemptible because it entails the near-certain death of others; in the other case—that of General Korechika Anami—the suicide is a traditional, personal act.
2According to Hastings, it remains unclear whether Nishi actually shot himself or not, though in the film he does.
This is the image on the Barack Obama campaign’s homepage just now.
Clicking “show your support” takes you here. The Obama campaign really knows how to show good grace and high-mindedness, in a way that truly astonishes me and almost gives me, er, hope—especially combined with today’s other show of class. It also seems overwhelmingly at odds with the prevailing political discourse in this country.
A good speech; a historic speech:
The way to continue our fight now, to accomplish the goals for which we stand is to take our energy, our passion, our strength, and do all we can to help elect Barack Obama, the next president of the United States.
(APPLAUSE)
Today, as I suspend my campaign, I congratulate him on the victory he has won and the extraordinary race he has run. I endorse him and throw my full support behind him.
(APPLAUSE)
And I ask all of you to join me in working as hard for Barack Obama as you have for me.
(APPLAUSE)
I have served in the Senate with him for four years. I have been in this campaign with him for 16 months. I have stood on the stage and gone toe-to-toe with him in 22 debates. I’ve had a front-row seat to his candidacy, and I have seen his strength and determination, his grace and his grit.
In his own life, Barack Obama has lived the American dream, as a community organizer, in the State Senate, as a United States senator. He has dedicated himself to ensuring the dream is realized. And in this campaign, he has inspired so many to become involved in the democratic process and invested in our common future.
Now, when I started this race, I intended to win back the White House and make sure we have a president who puts our country back on the path to peace, prosperity and progress. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do, by ensuring that Barack Obama walks through the doors of the Oval Office on January 20, 2009….
Let us resolve and work toward achieving very simple propositions: There are no acceptable limits, and there are no acceptable prejudices in the 21st century in our country.
(APPLAUSE)
You can be so proud that, from now on, it will be unremarkable for a woman to win primary state victories…
(APPLAUSE)
… unremarkable to have a woman in a close race to be our nominee, unremarkable to think that a woman can be the president of the United States. And that is truly remarkable, my friends.
(APPLAUSE)
To those who are disappointed that we couldn’t go all of the way, especially the young people who put so much into this campaign, it would break my heart if, in falling short of my goal, I in any way discouraged any of you from pursuing yours.
Always aim high, work hard, and care deeply about what you believe in. And, when you stumble, keep faith. And, when you’re knocked down, get right back up and never listen to anyone who says you can’t or shouldn’t go on.
(APPLAUSE)
As we gather here today in this historic, magnificent building, the 50th woman to leave this Earth is orbiting overhead. If we can blast 50 women into space, we will someday launch a woman into the White House.
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Y’see, you can’t trust these people, they’re not real, hard-working Americans like you and me, they have clubs where we can’t go and foods we don’t eat and they use words we don’t use! Maybe they’re “radicals”—or possibly “secret Muslims”. Or—wait—d’ja see that? Right there! Go back—what was that I saw? Hit the slow motion button…. there! That was a terrorist fist jab, I swear!
No? Not buyin’ that? Well, we’ll work on it. Gotta think of something other than “Negroes” or “colored” or, you know. To mean Negroes or colored or—you know. We got a few months yet. We’ll make somethin’ stick, you can bet on it.
The Jonathan Coulton lobster song featured in The Areas of My Expertise, as discussed below.
I will not be sad if Barack Obama is elected President in the fall; indeed, I will be delighted beyond measure. Of all the possible Presidents who could disappoint me, he’s the one I’d most like to do it.
And John McCain is shaping up just now to be a poor candidate, who seems mainly to favor more, longer wars for reasons even he cannot quite explain. I hope very much that Obama supporters will continue to make the case that he is ill informed, corrupt, and temperamentally, characterologically, and intellectually unsuited for the presidency.
But it diminishes liberals, progressives, and Democrats—the party, let us not forget, of Social Security—to mock McCain simply for being old or for acting as old people do or enjoying the things old people enjoy. I feel guilty, and I know my fellow progressives and liberals do, for doing and allowing this. Ageist attacks hurt not just the elderly at whom they’re directed, but all the superannuated among us.
Do you or any of your friends live next door to a negro–why should we have them pushed down our throats?As a citzen and a taxpayer I was very upset to hear about ‘TITLE IV’ of the so-called civil rights Bill S. 3296. This is not Civil Rights. This takes away a person’s rights. We too are people and need someone to protect us.
We designed and built our own home and I would hate too think of being forced to sell my lovely home to anyone just because they had the money.
This post by Rick Perlstein documenting how people became Republicans because of racism is an excellent post. Everyone else is linking to it, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t too.
Or, you know, the hosannaing cherubim. With great pleasure we announce that we’re gonna keep moving, for the usual sharklike reasons, and are therefore welcoming as a regular contributor Scott Eric Kaufman.
Scott’s an Americanist scholar of things historical who lives in the West, and more importantly shares with us a certain, hm, sensibility. (No, that isn’t code for Yiddishkeit.) On the other hand, he’s a deal more junior than we and must therefore let us know when we are indulging in the fatuities that come with academic seniority. (As opposed to those fatuities that come naturally.) Also, his expertise in H/ello K/itty shines with the brightness of a supernova.
Please treat him as you would us–no, on second thought, please be nice–at least till he’s earned your belittlement and derision.
A while ago, This American Life had an even more brilliant episode than usual, on the subprime mortgage crisis. No, really. From the subprime borrower, to the guy who finds him and certifies him for a mortgage despite his having no verifiable income or assets, to the guy who bundles those mortgages for sale to an investment banker and so on up the chain, they follow the money.
You can hear the episode here.
You can tell your iTunes automatically to download the free weekly podcast of This American Life here.
You can support the This American Life podcast directly here.
If this is all old news to you, blame Ari. He said I had to post it and you know I trust his judgment. If you do not already know about This American Life, it is another very good thing you might like, and you can find out more by clicking below.
It is Black Music Month. The iTunes tells me that they have a selection of Bay Area Funk. They also have a disquisition on the “harder—tighter” West Coast sound of the late 1960s.
Truly, I just wanted an excuse to quote Graham Central Station.
Sorry, let’s try that again: “Graham Central Station.”
There we go.
This is a map that appears on p. 74 of this book. It had to be made, and the publishers had it made the old-fashioned way: I gave them a table, showing the numbers of immigrants and internal migrants going to particular states over the course of a decade, I showed them an internal migration map from a standard work on the subject and said, I want something like this, with the arrows showing where people went, and the magnitude of the arrow corresponding more or less to the magnitude of the migration. They gave it to an artist, and the artist produced the map.
What I’d like (which I suppose makes this post a bleg) is an application that can generate people-mover maps automatically: feed it a table showing places people came from, places they went to, and how many people made that move, and have it generate maps with arrows of appropriate size. Ideally, it could do bigger or smaller scale—show within-state migrations, say, as well as national or international migrations—and would be able to deal with historical maps, when the boundaries were different.
Do any of you know if such a widget exists?
Thirty years ago today, the Los Angeles Times ran an op-ed by Neil H. Jacoby whose hed asked, “Would Prop. 13 really lighten the load?” and whose sub-hed answered, “Yes: bloated government will be the only loser.”1 In another story on the upcoming election, Times staffer Kevin Roderick wrote that “So overwhelming is the debate over [Howard] Jarvis’s Prop. 13 that candidates for local offices have become frustrated at their inability to interest voters in other issues.”2
Prop. 13 passed overwhelmingly, as you know. As the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association (HJTA) site tells you,
Under the tax cut measure, property tax valuation was set at the 1976 assessed value…. property tax increases on any given property were limited to no more than 2% a year as long as the property was not sold. Once sold, the property was reassessed….
Thus, the longer ago you bought your house, the more you benefit. It’s therefore hard for a new homebuyer to appreciate Prop. 13; HJTA advises you undertake this “welcome, stranger!” dialogue:
NEW NEIGHBOR…. how come I’m paying more in property taxes than some of my neighbors who have similar houses?
A. Under Proposition 13 you determine how much your property taxes will be. Your taxes are not based on your neighbors’ taxes, but are based on the price you voluntarily agreed to pay for your new home.
Awesome. Even in HJTA’s model dialogue, the last thing the “NEW NEIGHBOR” says is, “I still don’t see what good Proposition 13 is to me.”
For further assessment, let’s turn the mike over to the Bee’s Peter Schrag, author of Paradise Lost, who has this column today:
Proposition 13 did not cause every public service calamity of the last 30 years, much less the Northridge earthquake or the San Diego County wildfires.
But in the years since Proposition 13’s passage, it has compounded California’s governmental and fiscal mess something awful.
California’s per pupil school spending, which was among the top 10 states in the 1960s, is now among the bottom 10. Proposition 13 alone is not responsible, but along with two major court decisions that preceded it, it helped decouple school funding from the local tax base and thus undercut voter incentives to fund education generously, as it had been in the generation after World War II. Our roads, once a national model, are an embarrassment.
More certainly it entangled state and local accountability to the point where it became increasingly hard even for diligent voters to understand who was responsible for what. When streets didn’t get paved, was it City Hall that was wasting money or was it state government, which now controlled the local property tax and wasn’t providing enough of it?
Worse, Proposition 13 reinforced the distrust of representative government that helped bring it on and vastly increased reliance on the initiative process and the sway of what became known as the initiative-industrial complex, the network of lawyers, consultants, petition circulators, pollsters, direct-mail operatives and the various outsiders attached to them….
… we borrow and fudge and struggle with a policy-making process that’s little more than a string of ad-hoc votes driven by deep-pocket interest groups – public-sector unions, railroads, insurance companies, real-estate groups, Indian casinos, oil and tobacco corporations, among others – the very groups whose influence the initiative process was once designed to check.
California once had a communitarian ethic. That’s been turned into a market ethic. It once did serious planning for the future. For now, that’s a nearly forgotten hope.
Happy anniversary.
1Neil H. Jacoby, “Would Prop. 13 Really Lighten the Load? Yes: Bloated Government Will be the Only Loser,” Los Angeles Times 6/4/1978, p. I1.
2Kevin Roderick, “It All Comes Down to Prop. 13, Candidates Complain,” Los Angeles Times 6/4/1978, p. SF_A1.
Ezra Klein shows the chart below, then says, “Very, very scary.”
Now, one of the things liberals think is that government institutions should intervene to, among other things, moderate the operations of the business cycle and prevent economic crashes. And this is like minimal, not-even-very-liberal intervention—it’s what central banks do. As Walter Bagehot said, in a crisis a central bank should “lend freely, boldly, and so that the public may feel you mean to go on lending.”
That’s what the Fed’s doing here, or so Ben Bernanke says. (There is some debate over whether it’s lending at the right rate.)
So maybe it is “very scary” in the sense that some great emergency must have occurred for the Fed to do this—but it’s not necessarily scary that the Fed is doing it; after all, it might work to lessen the crisis.
Because Ezra Klein is a liberal, I assume that’s what he means. Otherwise I would think Ezra Klein is channeling Andrew Mellon.
(With thanks to Andrew for prompting.)
On this day in 1960, the New York Times ran a story headlined, “Air Cooling Alters Skyscraper Lines,” recording the comments of the architect Ely Jacques Kahn:
The period of individualistic, imaginatively decorated skyscraper towers has ended…. “All of this modern equipment, including the cooling towers for air-conditioning systems, takes space, and the logistical area was at the top of the structure, resulting in a bulky and not too handsome mass[.]”
The mass implementation of air conditioning in the decades around 1960 gave shape to the skylines of the (at last) New South, and to its culture.
As Raymond Arsenault noted, in 1902 the luxury item for which Arkansas governor Jeff Davis got criticized was a “whirligig fan” (electric ceiling fan); in 1922, Willis Carrier built an air conditioner with a centrifugal compressor, which made cooling quicker and cheaper and began the slow crawl of comfort into the indoor climate of the South. Cinema palaces went first; in St. Petersburg in 1926, the Florida Theatre opened to the boast that “the proud management had the temperature down so low that ladies in evening dresses almost froze!” Congress got AC in 1928; the Senate in 1929; the White House in 1930 and the Supreme Court in 1931.
By 1970 more than half the households in the South had air conditioning. The Weather Bureau had begun its Discomfort Index—documenting heat and humidity—in 1959; in 1962, the Federal Housing Authority claimed a house without AC was obsolete. The 1960s were also the first decade since the Civil War that more people moved to the South than left it—a trend that would only accelerate, creating the Sunbelt.
Air conditioning made for ugly skyscrapers, and ugly houses, too: for decades, southern architecture had featured porches, breezeways, cross-ventilation and elevated foundations—“You look at what the Crackers were doing 75 or 100 years ago … they had the right answers,” said one architect. No more: now you could build the same cookie-cutter pre-fabs they had everywhere else, with the slab foundations and the small windows—and the AC units, which you could crank up at whim. With porches went visiting, the “Florida room,” and a whole way of life.
“I hate air conditioning; it’s a damnfool invention of the Yankees,” said one of Arsenault’s interviewees. “If they don’t like it hot, they can move back up North where they belong.”
Suppose the AC did bring Yankees South, helping to create the modern, culturally conservative, southern GOP: did the in-migraters self-select, to be more conservative, or did they become conservative sometime after passing the Mason-Dixon line?
Raymond Arsenault, “The End of the Long Hot Summer: The Air Conditioner and Southern Culture,” The Journal of Southern History 50, no. 4 (November 1984): 597-628.
UPDATED TO SAY, EXCEPT: BECAUSE I AM IN LATE-ACADEMIC-TERM SLEEP-DEPRIVATION BURNOUT (OR WHATEVER YOU WANT TO CALL IT), THIS IS FOR MAY 2, 1901. YOU MAY OR MAY NOT CARE.
On this day in 1901, Congressman John Hollis Bankhead of Alabama gave a speech in which he claimed that if it weren’t for what the NYT called “the fear of negro domination” many southern whites would happily vote Republican.
There has been a wonderful industrial development in Alabama, and many of the wealthy and prominent men engaged in business enterprises are at heart Republicans, and if conditions were such as to admit of it, would vote with the Republican Party. As long as the negro is in politics, however, they cannot do so. They have to ignore every other consideration in politics when confronted with the danger of negro domination.
I feel no hesitation in saying that if the negro question is eliminated, some of the most prominent men in Alabama will associate themselves with the Republican Party, and as a Democrat I say that it would be better for the South and for the whole country if conditions were such as to admit of every man voting his sentiments on great questions of public policy without being held in bondage by a disturbing local condition.1
Bankhead thus claimed that disfranchising African Americans would lead to an increase of the white Republican vote in the South. Set aside whether he was being disingenuous; we know this is not what happened: disfranchisement merely went along with a different “disturbing local condition,” Jim Crow, whose preservation compelled continued fealty to the Democratic Party of the South.
But there is now a set of historians and political scientists who argue that Bankhead had the right general idea but the wrong specific remedy: it wasn’t more Jim Crow and disfranchisement that would enable the rise of the Republican Party in the South, but less. Once civil rights had begun to take its course, “the negro question” vanished from southern politics. Voters who would have voted Republican for economic reasons could now do so without fear of destroying a social order that was already going.
You can find this claim in, for example, Shafer and Johnston’s End of Southern Exceptionalism: that the rise of the postwar GOP in the South had more to do with class than with race, as richer whites became Republicans.
The rise of Republicanism among richer southern whites—call it the Bankhead effect—didn’t mean the end of race in Southern politics: Shafer and Johnston point out, “Racial attitudes … were strongly aligned with support…. Those who were supportive of aid targeted specifically to black Americans were more likely to stay with the Democrats, those opposed to move to the Republicans….” It just meant the end of support for formal white supremacy, which nobody could any longer deliver. Indeed, as Shafer and Johnston describe them, these Republicans are very much Bankhead Republicans—chiefly interested in protecting their economic interests, but also keen on preventing “negro domination,” which they now fear may come about through social policy.
Which may help explain why the southern GOP, while focusing on an electorate defined as much by class as by race have not shied from race-baiting tactics.
In short, the question of what enabled the rise of the Republican Party in the South is probably not going to yield to a simple answer that lets us easily say, “it’s all about class” or “it’s all about race.”
1“The Negro in Politics,” NYT 5/3/1901, p. 5.
I would someday like to read a story in which, in my hometown, a group conscious of history and heritage is raising a replica of this flag the size of a tractor semitrailer. This is of course the flag on which the secessionists fired. It is the flag of the United States of America, and for a citizen of this country to make war on it is treason.
(My brother sent the story to me; I then realized that of course Kevin blogged it.)
Wow, next time she’ll be talking about how the Bee covers the “Dickensian aspect”:
As I wrote earlier in this space, the paper will be an inch narrower beginning in late July.
Our company is making the change to reduce the amount of paper we use, and thus to save money.
Our newsroom is using the change as an incentive to improve news coverage.
This sounds contradictory, but I think it can be done…..
Instead of taking The Bee of the past and trying to squeeze it into a smaller frame, our journalists have developed ideas and plans for the 2008 model̷