¡Huelga contra WPA!

Ferdie Pacheco, “The Lector Reads to Women Cigar Workers” (Detail)

Today brings another installment of “there is too interesting and nontrivial scholarship in today’s scholarly history journals,” this one drawn from the flagship journal of US history. The article touches on two of my favorite topics. One, I’ll grant, is a favorite for purely sentimental reasons: my native heath. The other, though, is of long-standing scholarly interest to this blog: the New Deal.

THE ARTICLE

Elna C. Green, “Relief from Relief: The Tampa Sewing-Room Strike of 1937 and the Right to Welfare,” Journal of American History 95, no. 4 (March 2009). Accessed July 7, 2009, here.

SOME NONTRIVIAL QUESTIONS RAISED

How did WPA workers think of themselves—as workers, or as recipients of welfare? How did their employer, the state, see them in return?

“He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals.”

Tomasky has the money quotation from the late, and undeniably complicated, Robert McNamara. (Much more complicated than Henry Kissinger, who supposedly said Bill Clinton “does not possess the strength of character to be a war criminal.”) McNamara was talking about his role in this and that sort of thing, but of course he’s better known for his role in inspiring this sort of thing.

The Miller Center has an online McNamara exhibit which includes his case for a withdrawal from Vietnam in October, 1963.

UPDATED to add, on McNamara’s memoir:

… there is something wrong with a culture in which a McNamara is feted for his “guts” while George McGovern and Gene McCarthy, who opposed McNamara’s mistakes, are regarded as nobodies. In one of the uglier passages of In Retrospect, McNamara sneers at the antiwar protesters who marched on the Pentagon in 1967. If they had been more “disciplined” and “Gandhi-like,” he says, “they could have achieved their objective of shutting us down.” Instead they were “troublemakers” who “threw mud balls” and “even unzipped [soldiers'] flies.” This is contrition? Shouldn’t McNamara be admitting that the mudball-throwers, after all, had been right?

Which, wow. Whatever happened to Mickey Kaus?

UPDATED again to add, Fog of War transcript.

Jefferson the writer.

Whatever one’s overall opinion of Jefferson the man and Jefferson the president, he could write. Here he is at work, with his strikeouts shown in parentheses:

they are permitting their (sovereign) chief magistrate to send over not only soldiers of our (own) common blood but Scotch & foreign mercenaries to (destroy us) invade and deluge us in blood. (this is too much to be borne even by relations. enough then be it to say, we are now done with them.) these facts have given the last stab to agonizing affection, & manly spirit bids us to renounce for ever these unfeeling brethren! we must endeavor to forget our former love for them and to hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends. we might have been a (great) free & a (happy) great people together, but a communicat(ed)ion of (happiness) [g]randeur & of (grandeur) freedom it seems is be(neath)low their dignity. (we will climb then the roads to glory & happiness apart) be it so, since they will have it: the road to (glory &) (to) happiness & to glory is open to us too, we will climb it (in a separate state) apart from them & acquiesce in the necessity which (pro) denounces our (everlasting Adieu) eternal separation. (these facts have given the last stab to agonizing affection, & manly spirit bids us to renounce for ever these unjust) (unfeeling) (brethren.)

Notice how happiness gets struck, and struck, and finally lands in its spot next to glory. I’m especially taken by the struck sentiment, “this is too much to be borne even by relations”. Nice thought for a holiday weekend.

More powerful than memory alone.

Ars Technica has a post summarizing Kodak’s decision to end sales of Kodachrome after 74 years because, basically, “not enough people are shooting KODACHROME for us to continue offering it.” In 1935 the film offered casual photographers the ability to take snapshots in color—to indulge that “twinge in your heart more powerful than memory alone,” as Don Draper says; it “takes us to a place where we ache to go again.”

That phrase….

Adam Serwer complains today of the administration’s approach to LGBT issues,

In 1955, the Supreme Court ordered school desegregation to commence with “all deliberate speed.” Lately, it seems like the Obama administration has been moving in slow motion.

But that’s kind of what “all deliberate speed” means. Warren had originally written “at the earliest practicable date”. But Frankfurter urged him, successfully, to change it.

‘with all deliberate speed’ conveys more effectively the process of time for the effectuation of our decision…. I think it is highly desirable to educate public opinion—the parties themselves and the general public—to an understanding that we are at the beginning of a process of enforcement and not concluding it…. as … the phrase ‘with all deliberate speed’ … [is] calculated to do.

So, disappointing though the administration’s policies may be, they’re actually quite consonant with the Court’s directive to move forward with “all deliberate speed.”

Buffy writes a journal article.

You’ll sometimes hear historians bemoaning the state of professional scholarship, saying there’s nothing interesting in the new issues of our journals and everyone’s fixated on trivia to the exclusion of important questions. And I like a good jeremiad as well as anyone. But I thought I’d begin a series of posts on journal articles that are interesting and nontrivial. (We’ll see how long it lasts.)

THE ARTICLE

Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” Journal of African American History 92, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 265-288.

Link here, for those who can access it.

It’s gone. It was so small. It might come back.

Sigh.

Look at your local paper; for bad reasons I’m looking at USA Today.

And, srsly? Bigger than Iran, Bernanke, and Farrah Fawcett? At least Fawcett did The Burning Bed.

Determined to prove a villain.

Every newly released Nixon tape reminds us afresh how special he was. But this one has extra bonus Reagan approval of Nixon’s attempt to evade justice!

“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white,” he told an aide, before adding: “Or a rape.”

Nine months later, after Nixon precipitated the resignations of two top Justice Department officials and forced the firing of the special prosecutor looking into the Watergate affair, Ronald Reagan, who was then the governor of California and would later be president, told the White House that he heartily approved.

Reagan told the White House that the action — which would become known as the “Saturday Night Massacre” — was “probably the best thing that ever happened — none of them belong where they were,” according to a Nixon aide’s notes of the private conversation.

Kermit plays the banjo and hawks bacon.

Well, what else do you need to know? Sent us by Ben Wolfson, whom we count (despite everything) as a friend of the blog.

Appears to be from Sam and Friends.

Yes, in the middle of a street.

Some more photos of Aarhus. From a café, of a street near the university, and two of the university.

Tied up with a Silver Bow.

Matthew Yglesias has discovered afresh the massively inequitable US Senate. As longtime readers of this blog know, it’s historically been even worse than Yglesias notes: the party in power has rigged the course of admissions to keep itself in power. In 1889-90, Republicans rolled Democrats and got six new territories admitted as new states—not the most populous territories, but the most Republican-leaning territories, at least in five cases: Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota, Washington, and Wyoming.

But, as Heather Cox Richardson points out in a recent email, five out of six wasn’t good enough for the enterprising Republicans of the fifty-first Congress.

Ari Fleischer U.

Okay, before I get started, let me make absolutely clear that I did not write this post in pursuit of my official duties. You’ll see why.

The other day, faculty members at the University of California, Davis, received a memorandum from the Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility concluding,

In light of the present deep economic recession and dramatic cuts under discussion at UC Davis, faculty participating in shared governance are in a position in which they may voice strong views and concerns that could lead to lawful but punitive reaction by the administration, including denial of merits and even dismissal. Given the legal and policy realities at hand, we highly recommend that you use caution, restraint, and judgment in your speech and actions in all job-related duties.

Where did that come from? you might ask. Well, it seems to have gone like this.

It’s the “and White” that seals the deal.

I guess Neil’s “Naming Fail” says it all.

Toward a classless society.

The snark about whether erstwhile torture advocates want to torture terrorist Scott Roeder is legitimate snark, of course, but it is sometimes worth drawing out into the open what lies underneath the apparent hypocrisy. Remember this famous passage from Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, in which James Wormold (who’s British) is chatting with Captain Segura (who’s Cuban)?

“Did you torture him?”
Captain Segura laughed. “No. He doesn’t belong to the torturable class.”…
“Who does?”
“The poor in my own country, in any Latin American country. The poor of Central Europe and the Orient. Of course in your welfare states you have no poor, so you are untorturable. In Cuba the police can deal as harshly as they like with émigrés from Latin America and the Baltic States, but not with visitors from your country or Scandinavia. It is an instinctive matter on both sides. Catholics are more torturable than Protestants, just as they are more criminal…. One reason why the West hates the great Communist states is that they don’t recognise class-distinctions. Sometimes they torture the wrong people. So too of course did Hitler and shocked the world. Nobody cares what goes on in our prisons, or the prisons of Lisbon or Caracas, but Hitler was too promiscuous. It was rather as though in your country a chauffeur had slept with a peeress.”
“We’re not shocked by that any longer.”
“It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.” (pp. 164-165 in the collected edition)

What Greene, and Segura, are wittily gliding over here is that the torturable class consists almost entirely of poor people, most of them with brown or yellow skins. Not the citizens of welfare states. Which raises the question, what about Americans? We don’t exactly have a welfare state, do we. And apparently some of us are torturable, to those who believe in torture. Just not ones who look like Scott Roeder or James von Brunn.

A closer reading than you want, I’m sure.

So, now that nobody cares anymore, about that Star Trek movie.

“It’s a bad sign.”

Which is to say, it’s a bad sign that “despite Obama’s campaign promises, his approach to secrecy on issues of national security will likely not depart significantly from that of George Bush”. But you don’t want to take my word for it—read further down and look whose expert opinion TPM Muckraker leans on:

Kathryn Olmsted, a professor of history at UC Davis who has written extensively about the CIA’s track record of secrecy, agreed with Aftergood about the significance of the administration’s position on the interrogation tapes material.

“It’s a bad sign that they’re not going to break as much with the Bush administration as they had said they were going to,” Olmsted told TPMmuckraker. “I really want to give them the benefit of the doubt, but they certainly seem to be going down that path.”

Olmsted described the CIA’s position on the issue as more egregious than Obama’s decision to oppose the release of the Abu Ghraib photos. “You can make the argument that the photographs are so inflammatory that it’s going to help recruiting of terrorists” to release them, she said. “But just having the text of the interrogation, I think that’s really pushing it to say that that also is going to hurt national security.”…

Obama’s approach to issues of secrecy on national security doesn’t mimic Bush’s alone, it appears. Rather, said Olmsted, it’s broadly in keeping with “every other presidential administration” of modern times. But, she added, “it’s disappointing, because President Obama promised a whole new era in government transparency, and here they go again concealing this information.”

What’s that? You say you were thinking about taking off your bumper sticker? Put that craft razor away. I mean, if Kathy says so.

One nation.

One of the big stories in US history is the creation of a nation out of a diverse group of sections—particularly by the convergence of the South on the rest of the country. We know this, at some rough level; the South was rich in the era of slavery¹ then poor after the Civil War and then in the middle twentieth century began to look more like the rest of the country.

It would be nice to show it, wouldn’t it?

Next, bee-hives.

Those are Fathers and Sons from the Brooks Brothers Father’s Day ad. But don’t you see? Don’t you?

I can only assume that the proposed return of the Eisenhower-era TV-fold is because of Mad Men. But what a strange way to shape fashion! Although it never would have occurred to Don Draper, it occurs to the ad-men for Brooks Brothers that maybe Americans want to look like the most alienated version of themselves.

For pseudonymity.

We’re a partially pseudonymous blog (it’s an open secret that I write all Ari’s posts, for example, and mine are written by a collective of political prisoners forced, a la Clockwork Orange, to consume Atlas Shrugged and Pat Boone around the clock). So we have a stake in the outing of publius by Ed Whelan.

But the case looks pretty clear: Whelan, cross that Eugene Volokh had shown him wrong and noticing publius agreed with Volokh, outed publius—after publius told him he had professional and personal reasons for wanting to remain pseudonymous.

There isn’t even the problematic case for outing as presented in Outrage to justify this; publius’s secrets had no bearing on the argument at hand. I can see no reason at all except the desire to strike at an antagonist.

You can make a case for pseudonymity from first principles, and maybe our philosophers here would like to do it, but you know, if it’s good enough for Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, I guess it’s good enough for us historians.