This is a guest post by our friend andrew, over by the wayside. Many thanks!

(Image from W.H. Michael, The Declaration of Independence, Washington, 1904)

On this day in 1941, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were taken out of their exhibit cases at the Library of Congress, carefully wrapped in acid-free and neutral packing materials, and placed inside a bronze container designed especially to carry them. When the packing was complete, the “top of the container was screwed tight over a cork gasket and locked with padlocks on each side.”*

The documents remained in this state for the next few days, until the Attorney General ruled on December 26th that the Librarian of Congress could “without further authority from the Congress or the President take such action as he deems necessary for the proper protection and preservation of these documents.” At which point the library went back to work:

Under the constant surveillance of armed guards, the bronze container was removed to the Library’s carpenter shop, where it was sealed with wire and a lead seal, the seal bearing the block letters L C, and packed in rock wool in a heavy metal-bound box measuring forty by thirty-six inches, which, when loaded, weighed approximately one hundred and fifty pounds.

Along with other important documents like the Magna Carta and the Articles of Confederation, the Declaration and the Constitution were then taken to Union Station in an “armed and escorted truck,” where they were loaded into a compartment in a Pullman car on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.  Accompanying the documents were Chief Assistant Librarian Verner W. Clapp and some number of armed Secret Service agents.

The documents left D.C. in the evening and arrived in Louisville the next morning, where they were “met by four more Secret Service agents and a troop of the Thirteenth Armored Division, who preceded by a scout car and followed by a car carrying the agents and Mr. Clapp, convoyed the Army truck containing the materials” to the depository at Fort Knox. The documents were to be kept there until it was determined that they could once again be considered safe in Washington, D.C.

It was not the first time the Declaration and the Constitution had been moved because of war.

During the Revolutionary War, the Declaration was packed up repeatedly and taken along with the Continental Congress as it changed locations. During the War of 1812, both documents, then in the care of the State Department, were hastily packed up and taken to Virginia when the British attacked Washington. (In contrast, they do not seem to have budged during the Civil War or the first World War.)

And yet perhaps the greatest threats the documents have faced as documents have come not from their enemies but from their friends. The Declaration of Independence, especially, shows the toll that frequent handling and long exhibition in less than ideal conditions can take on parchment and ink. Already by the 1820s observers had begun to note that the documents were showing signs of age, and some expressed the hope that the production of special, certified copies would relieve the stress on and demand for the original.

Ironically, perhaps the most famous of these copies, the William J. Stone engraving completed in 1823, has been blamed for damaging the original through the copying process. It seems to have been widely believed during the later nineteenth and early twentieth century that Stone used a so-called “wet copy” procedure: this would have involved physically transferring some of the ink from the original to a facsimile, which would have then been used to produce the engraving. But this appears to be one of those maddeningly unverifiable “facts” of history: later researchers have concluded that there is not enough surviving evidence to make it possible to determine just what process Stone used. Other possible methods would not have caused such damage.

Less controversial, but unquestionably harmful, has been the effect of natural light. From 1841 to 1876 the Declaration was exhibited in the United States Patent Office Building in Washington, D.C. along with George Washington’s commission as Commander-in-Chief. (The Constitution does not seem to have been exhibited much until the twentieth century.) The documents were hung together in a single frame on a wall where they would have received sunlight from a window. Despite growing concerns about its heavily faded text, the Declaration was then brought to Philadelphia in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition.

It was not until 1894 that its custodians finally heeded the advice of the experts brought in to consult on its condition and took the Declaration off permanent exhibition. But even then the State Department found it could not keep the document completely out of the light. It appears that those with the right connections in Washington could still obtain their own viewings of the document in the State Department’s library — even when it was not officially being displayed.

In 1921, the Declaration and the Constitution (along with other documents of the early Republic) were transferred from the State Department to the Library of Congress, which would be able to provide better resources for their exhibition and preservation. It had been determined that while the text of the Declaration could not and should not be restored, it would be safe to exhibit the document again as long as extra steps were taken to protect it. And so in February 1924, the Declaration and Constitution went on display together at the Library of Congress in a special case designed to filter or block out harmful light. Plans were also made to give the documents more extensive conservation treatment but by the time they were ready, the war had intervened. As a result, the treatment took place at Fort Knox.

It was there that in the middle of May 1942, with Chief Assistant Librarian Clapp looking on, the conservators took the Declaration out of its container and went to work. It seems to have taken “about an hour” just to open the outer box. The document was carefully photographed, examined and cleaned. Various adhesives had been attached to the Declaration over the years, including tape and glue; these and their residues were carefully removed. There were also a few small holes and minor tears in the parchment; these were patched up.

The Constitution was not entirely neglected, but upon examination it was found to be in good condition, and it was re-packaged with newer materials. When the work was complete just a few days later, the documents were returned to their container and the container returned to the vault.

The Declaration was taken out at least once more, in 1943 for the dedication of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, but the documents spent the bulk of the war years in Fort Knox. In the fall of 1944, the military determined that they would be safe again in Washington, and on October 1st they went back on display at the Library of Congress.

___

*All quotations and most of the factual information in this post are taken from the Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1949, which contains an extensive section on the history of the Declaration of Independence. Additional background from Verner Clapp, “The Declaration of Independence: A Case Study in Preservation” here; Jane Aikin, “Preparing for a National Emergency: The Committee on Conservation of Cultural Resources, 1939–1944″ here; and of course in the sources linked in the text of the post.

1.
Seventy years ago this winter, in one corner of the American West, explosions shattered the peace. But they were not, as elsewhere in the world, symptoms of war. Rather the five dozen men spending winter in a large wooden shack at a Dakota mountain were finishing the giant likeness of Theodore Roosevelt, which would stand alongside those of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln on Mount Rushmore.

In his speech marking the beginning of work on the monument, President Calvin Coolidge mentioned Washington the creator, Jefferson the extender, and Lincoln the preserver of the nation’s life. As for Roosevelt, “To political freedom he strove to add economic freedom.” Yes, Calvin “business of America is business” Coolidge said that; and Gutzon Borglum, the monument’s sculptor, explained that Coolidge really meant it:

President Coolidge once asked me, in discussing these men, what was my estimate of Roosevelt. “Well,” I answered, “I happen to know that Mr. Roosevelt said the cutting of the Panama Canal was the greatest and most important service he rendered to the nation.” Mr. Coolidge jumped to his feet and, with his index finger pointing upward, he said, “Have you forgotten that he was the only President who dared to tell big business, “Thus far you can go, and no farther, for the safety of our country”?

I was stunned. Not at the reminder, but that it came from Coolidge and in that phrase: “the only President.” Then he added, “Those words must be cut on that mountain.”¹

They weren’t—they abandoned the plan to carve a brief history of the nation into the mountain—but still: Roosevelt’s progressivism inspired even Calvin Coolidge. The other men on the mountain are gods of War and Revolution and enterprises of great moment. Roosevelt is there because of what he did for Americans in their ordinary lives.

2.
Meeting Roosevelt you could never be sure what he might discourse upon; he was a genius with innumerable enthusiasms ranging from natural history to simplified spelling. But you could bet he would reveal little of himself in any of his endless commentary. Rudyard Kipling described him as “Theodore the spinner”; a vaudevillian parodied the president as “Theater” Roosevelt. Henry Adams described Roosevelt as “pure act,” by which he surely meant at least “pure deed,” but Adams probably meant to put some ambiguity there: “pure act” can also mean “pure performance.” More so than with most Presidents, there was an element of put-on in any tete-a-tete with Theodore Roosevelt.

He was a self-made man, not in the middle-class striver’s sense of the term, but in a real sense: he was not who he had been born or brought up to be. For this reason a life of Roosevelt can be more worth your while than most biographies; normally the first hundred or so pages of a biography wastes the reader’s time with family trivia while telling nothing about the development of character because most of us remain who we were at an early age. Not Roosevelt. The asthmatic and privileged little myopic kid reinvented himself as an athlete and a cowboy, spurring himself onward to escape his sorrow and guilt. “Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough,” he wrote. Thus he fled the death of his wife from a disease concealed by her pregnancy on the same day his mother died, keeping a determinedly cheerful face to the world; thus he proved he was not his father, who had hired a substitute rather than fight in the Civil War. Roosevelt was going to be what he made himself become.

And he had that rarest quality among presidents: he was not taken in by himself. He was giving you a bit of an act, and if you called him on it, he would often laugh. Which is how he became friends with one of his needling critics, Finley Peter Dunne (creator of Mr. Dooley) and how, like John Kennedy, who shared this quality, he won over the press.

So Roosevelt presents historians with a problem: not only smarter and cannier than most presidents, he was also smarter and cannier than most historians. It doesn’t do to take him too much at face value. He might not have meant what it sounded like he said, and what he did probably had more than one purpose. That business of playing a cowboy wasn’t just about breast-beating machismo; it was about finding out the nature of work, and working people.

3.
The man who murdered William McKinley and made Theodore Roosevelt president was sadly ordinary in all but deed. The child of immigrants, one of a large family who struggled together to save up and buy a piece of land, who worked from a young age and learned about the promise of America in the public schools, he was put out of work in the depression of the 1890s and never fully recovered. If these were sufficient reasons to turn radical and murderer then millions of Americans had the same motives. You could look at the headlines and see revolution brewing.

Roosevelt knew this and used his presidency to stave off this revolution by curbing the power of business barons. His accomplishments in this arena seem so small: a Bureau of Corporations, to compel the opening of business’s books; laws for pure food and drugs and truth in advertising; a stronger Interstate Commerce Commission; a workmen’s compensation law covering railroads; a few prosecutions—notably one against a Morgan combination, one against Standard Oil—that, while successful in law, left the owners of trusts in substantial control of their property.

There are two things worth noting about these minor steps forward. First, businesses and their allies fought Roosevelt so fiercely over these measures they did not seem minor at the time. Second, Roosevelt made it clear from the beginning these were but steps forward and not the entirety of his agenda.

Roosevelt changed the national debate. As Charles Beard wrote, Roosevelt used “the whole range of the terminology of ‘social uplift’” from his first message to Congress onward, and he repeated it tirelessly. Talking is not action, but it can make action possible. By speaking the language of reformers, by uttering it from his bully pulpit, Roosevelt made it seem normal, even necessary, to demand social justice for the country’s working people. By 1912, all the presidential contenders—Woodrow Wilson, William H. Taft, Eugene Debs, and even the Prohibitionist Eugene Chafin—were trying to explain that they were, in their way, progressives just like Roosevelt.

That way of speaking, as if social justice mattered, remained prominent in American politics into the 1970s, and I believe historians came to think of it as so normal they failed to credit Roosevelt for what he had done to set the terms of discussion. Now that those terms have shifted so far from progressivism, maybe we can again appreciate the extent of Roosevelt’s rhetorical achievement.

4.
He was a godawful racist, sexist, and warmonger. His unthinking allegiance to the bigots of Brownsville, Texas, should alone discredit any claim he had to decency on the subject of civil rights, dinner with Booker T. Washington notwithstanding. If it occurs to Rudyard Kipling to tease you about your enthusiasm for colonial conquest, you’re probably somewhat beyond the pale. Roosevelt was.

Not that it should matter, but if I could have lived in that era with my current political attitudes intact, I do not think I would have liked him much. (Though I have a feeling I would have enjoyed the dinner conversation of his daughter, Alice “If you can’t think of anything nice to say, sit over here by me” Roosevelt Longworth.)

Yet I’m all but positive I would have voted for him and lent him my political support, even as the non-racist, non-sexist, non-warmongering Jane Addams did, on the ground that he had the right enemies and in the belief that he and his policies represented progress toward a country where such things as civil rights were possible.

5.
And for all his love of killing beasts he saved a lot of them and their habitats for Americans to enjoy. The Petrified Forest, the Grand Canyon, Lassen Peak, Devil’s Tower—he set aside so much of the nation’s land for preservation, including Mount Olympus, where the elk that bear his surname flourish.

It is always easier to explain why Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln belong on Mount Rushmore. Lincoln is America’s Christ. And Washington plays God the Father to Lincoln’s martyred savior. Which leaves to Jefferson the role of Holy Spirit: just so, as the author of the Declaration of Independence, the deeply flawed Jefferson nevertheless carried enough divine fire to channel into words the nation’s enlivening ideal of equality and natural right.

With such an established trinity, what need for a fourth figure? If we can see elements of the godly in each of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, what can we do with the rather thoroughly earthly Roosevelt? But perhaps that is the point. Alongside gods humanity also has a place, and a man who did so much to make daily life in America a little better, and to create the expectation that daily life in America must be better, belongs there.

Phil Nugent, my favorite cultural critic, has a great post up about Oral Roberts.

Here’s a taste:

It was Oral the raving bull goose loony whose image was preserved for all time by Lenny Bruce in his epic “Religions, Inc.” routine (“Thank you very much! Thank you, boy, here, have a snake!”). A milestone in Bruce’s career and the history of stand-up comedy itself, it depicted Oral as a cynical religious con man with contempt for the “thick rednecks” who were his natural audience, which stands to reason, since Bruce’s most fertile approach as a satirist was always to describe the powerful and respected as if they were just another bunch of nightclub performers who’d come up from working in strip clubs and toilets and hustled aluminum siding between gigs. It’s most prescient when it caricatures the rage that the self-made man (and woman, Sarah) feels at the brainy types who would dare to patronize him for his lack of book learnin’. “Go ahead, laugh at him,” Bruce’s Oral says to the straw men he’s sure must think the worst of him. “There’s a dummy! Ha ha ha ha! I’m a dummmy. Yes, I’m dumb, I got two Lincoln Continentals, that’s how goddamn dumb I am. I’m dumber’n hell, I don’t know how much a whole lot of nines are!” The supreme skeptic Martin Gardner once wrote of Oral, “Insecure feelings about his early poverty and lack of education mix with an awesome ego. Oral will never consider that when he hears the voice of God he is listening to himself, that when he builds a bigger monument it is a monument to himself. His visions are too childish to be fabrications.”

Really, you should read the whole thing. But be warned: before you start, block out a few days to make your way through the entire Phil Nugent back catalog.

Thesis:  A successful children’s cartoon in the 80’s required three elements: an occupation, a natural kind, and the ability to fight crime, broadly construed.

Case in point, from a late-night conversation:

“…the Mighty Ducks.”

“?”

“They were hockey players.  Who were ducks.”

“…”

“And they fought crime.”

Discussion point:  I admit one has to construe “crime” broadly to include the Decepticons and whoever it was that were the foes of the Care Bears.  I submit, however, that this is a legitimate construal.

[In what passes for a holiday tradition here at The Edge of the American West, I'm re-posting my thoughts about how to handle AHA interviews. If you want to see the previous iterations of this post, including some really useful comments, you can go here and here. Consider this my opening salvo in the war on Christmas.]

It’s the most wonderful time of year. No, not Christmas silly, the AHA. Or, as I’m fond of calling it, the world’s largest and least flattering mirror. The mere thought of thousands of historians gathered in one place warms the cockles of my heart. Particularly cockle-warming, of course, are AHA interviews, the preliminary candidate screening done by most history departments at the annual conference.

For the past few years, I’ve offered our graduate students a talk in which I’ve shared a few tips about how to handle the AHA interviews they receive. And, given the nature of this blog, I thought I’d pass along some of these ideas here. If you’re not a historian, I don’t know how useful this material will be, though I expect some of what I say is exportable to the AAG, the MLA, or most other three-letter waking nightmares. That said, much of what follows is targeted at graduate students in history. Also, although this should go without saying, I can’t promise that any of this will work for you. So let me know what you think. Or, if you’ve got an idea that’s missing from my list, by all means post a comment.

Preparation

1: Bear in mind that for all of your interactions with Prospective Employer (PE) your tone should be respectful but not cowed, enthusiastic but not crazed, and humble but not obsequious. Your goal is to convey several things with this tone. First, that you’re genuinely excited about the job at PE’s institution. Even if this isn’t entirely true, you’ll have plenty of time to relay that hard fact after you’ve received an offer. For the moment, though, remember that you’re eager to get the job. Second, that you’re not scared by professional obligations, including the job market. Third, that you’re exactly the kind of person PE will want to have working down the hall from her or him for the next three decades. And finally, that you’re prepared. Eric wrote a wonderful post about this issue last week. Read what he said and take him seriously. Even when he’s kidding.

2: Given all of that, the best piece of advice that I got when I was having my fifteen minutes of infamy following Katrina was this: don’t ever answer the phone unless you know exactly what you want to say. Hiding until you’re ready to talk isn’t an option when dealing with PE. But I do recommend, if you receive a phone call inviting you to interview at the AHA, allowing PE to say her or his piece, conveying your gratitude, and then making plans to talk again in the coming days after you’ve had time to think. In other words, let PE tell you what s/he has to say, and then reply with something like: “I’m excited about this opportunity. And I’m really looking forward to meeting with you in person. Is there a time in the next few days that we can talk, or correspond via e-mail, about questions that I might have?” Again, this will allow you to collect your thoughts, do research, and figure out which questions you do and don’t want to ask.

3: Before talking or e-mailing again, do your preliminary research. Learn a bit about PE’s department. Given that most of us apply to every job that makes even the tiniest bit of sense for us, including any job that we’d even consider taking (and likely several that we wouldn’t), we often know very little about the institutions to which we’ve applied. There’s no shame in that; there is shame, though, in not knowing about places that will interview you at the AHA. Shame typically followed by unemployment. So figure out, based on what you can learn from friends, friends of friends, or the internet, anything you can about the department: the curriculum; whether there are graduate students; what the undergraduates are like; the teaching load; where the position fits in their program; other holes in their department; whether, within reason, it’s a happy place; what their priorities are (teaching, research, a wintry mix); where the school is located; etc. The etcetera refers to anything at all you can learn using reasonable methods. No, reasonable does not include picking through the department chair’s trash.

4: After you’ve done that work, talk again with PE. You should be prepared to ask a variety of questions, including seeking clarification for what you might already know. For example, in which hotel will the interview take place? Will the interview be conducted in a suite? If so, does PE already know the suite number? And if PE doesn’t know that information, how will s/he let you know before your interview? If the interview won’t take place in a suite, where will it be? In the open-air stock pavilion that’s usually found somewhere in the bowels of the main conference hotel? That’s okay. (Not really, but what can you do?) But you’ll want to hear that news as soon as possible. Also, what day and time will the interview happen? Would PE like your cell phone number in case there are any last-minute changes? Is there a way of contacting PE at the conference should the need arise? And finally, who, other than you, will be present for the interview?

Just to reiterate, your tone should always be respectful, enthusiastic, and humble. So, here’s an an example of an appropriate way to ask the final question of those listed above: “I hope I’m not overstepping, but would you be willing to let me know who else will be interviewing me. That information would really help me prepare more effectively.” The worst PE can say is: “Sorry, we’re not yet sure.” Or: “Sorry, but I haven’t told the other candidates. And telling you who’ll be there might give you an unfair advantage.” But chances are PE will tell you. Which will allow you to:

5: Figure out as much as you can about the composition of the interview committee. No, this does not mean reading everything they’ve ever written. But you might want to know the arguments of their major works. And, at the very least, you should know what they’ve written about. As Eric said, scholars like to be flattered. At the same time, the AHA interview, in a perfect world, turns into a conversation between peers. That’s much more likely to happen if you know what PE and company have to say about the past.

6: Almost every AHA interview follows the same basic form. “Tell us about your research,” says a member of the hiring committee. Then other people on the committee follow up with specific questions about your work. After a set amount of time, another member of the committee asks some iteration of: “What about your teaching?” So be ready to answer those questions. Know what your work is about, focusing on the so-what question. You should have good, and relatively short, answers ready that explain what you’re writing about, the significance of your dissertation, your main argument, where it fits in the literature, when you plan to finish, and what you’ll be writing about next. Understand that even the most professional hiring committees will typically have at best one person, usually the chair, who knows your work. It’s your responsibility, then, to tell the rest of the committee why your scholarship is important. You want them to remember you and your project when they go to the bar that evening to talk over how the day’s interviews went. And you want them to remember the key points when they return to their department and report on the status of the search to their colleagues after the winter break.

7: You should also have a polished response explaining what you’d like to teach (recognizing that their needs not your desires should inform your answer), how you teach (methods and the difference between your introductory, intermediate, and advanced undergraduate courses, as well as, if relevant, your graduate courses), and what courses you’ve taught in the past. You should prepare an answer in which you detail how both your research and your teaching will complement what PE’s department already has on the books.

8: Practice your answers. Which is to say, find a friend, have them ask you a series of questions that are likely to come up at the AHA interview, and make sure that you have replies that are both true and plausible. And finally, please, please remember not to give answers that drone on for too long. How long is too long? More than a couple of minutes, I think, but this varies from person to person. So experiment.

9: Decide what you’re going to wear. Then pack carefully, making sure that you have all the materials you’ll want or need. About attire I have little to say beyond: be comfortable and appear professional. For me, that means wearing a suit. But that’s because suits are easy for me; they’re grown-up Garanimals. Maybe you want to wear pants and a sport coat. Or a dress. Or a kilt. Fine. Whatever. Just make sure that you feel good about what you’re wearing and that your clothes aren’t going to distract the committee from your brilliance. So maybe skip the kilt.

Performance:

1: You’ve made it through the hardest, though not the scariest, part. Now all you have to do is to figure out a way to do your best on the day of the interview. You’ll want to start by continuing to prepare, as tragic as that may sound, once you reach the conference. Make sure that you know where the interview is located. The AHA is usually spread out over many hotels that sometimes occupy several linear miles of the host city. Find the hotel and exactly where your interview is taking place. Recently, in Atlanta, there was more than one hotel owned by the same company. Several job candidates, apparently, missed interviews because they went to the wrong place. Eeek! Don’t allow such a thing to happen to you. And while we’re in full-on control freak mode, find out if the floor on which you’ll be interviewing is accessible by elevator. If you’re interviewing in the communal interrogation chamber, take a look at it in advance. Familiarize yourself with the smell of fear that permeates the place. Also, figure out how long it will take you to walk or cab or bus or teleport from where you’ll be before the interview to the interview hotel. In sum, cover all of your bases, so that on the day of the interview you don’t have to worry about any of this nonsense and can focus on substance. Speaking of which…

2: On the big day, make sure that you maximize the chances that you’ll feel good. Need a big breakfast in order to have energy? Then eat. Coffee makes you irritable? Don’t drink it. Exercise is a must for you to feel human? Go running. Need your meds in order to keep from howling at the moon? Me too. Make sure you take ‘em. In sum, take care of yourself.

3: Make sure that you’re a bit early to the hotel where you’ll be interviewed. Then, relax in the lobby until it’s time to head upstairs. (Or, perish the thought, downstairs if you’re to be grilled at the cattle call.) Might you run into another candidate for the job while you’re waiting? And if so, will the interaction be strained? Sure and sure. But be nice anyway. Bear in mind that s/he may be on a prize committee reviewing your book some day.

4: When you arrive at the interview itself, shake hands. Make eye contact with every member of the interview committee. Convey to them before you do anything else that you’re very pleased to meet them, very excited about the chance to talk about your work, and really thrilled about the opportunity the job represents. If they aren’t polite enough to tell you where to sit – not impossible in the anti-social world of the academy – ask where they’d like you to locate yourself. Then sit down. Open the bottle of water that you’ve brought for yourself. Did I fail to mention that you should bring your own water? Sorry. You should. Take out the pad of paper on which you’ll make notes, as needed, throughout the interview. I forgot to mention the pad also? Can’t you think of anything on your own? So, now it’s time to sit back, subtly take a deep breath or two, and try as hard as you possibly can to relax. The questions will begin shortly.

5: You should have practiced quite a bit for this next part. So the answers should come readily enough to you. That said, remember that you don’t want your responses to sound canned. And should PE pose a question that stumps you, there are several options at your disposal. You can ask PE to repeat a question. And if you’re still uncertain about what PE is after, or you don’t know what to say in response, you can paraphrase the question and ask if that’s what PE means. This will buy you time. Or, you can say, “Hmm, that’s an excellent question. Would you mind if I think about that for a minute?” Or, if you really have no idea what to say, admit that you have no answer. Never, under any circumstances, pretend that you know something that you actually don’t. I was once asked which five ecologists I would use as case studies in a class on the history of that discipline. I could only think of three, tried to bluff my way through the rest, and made a complete fool of myself. Don’t put yourself in a similar position.

6: Here are some strategies that, if possible, you might want to employ during the interview. Make connections between answers. “That’s a wonderful question Professor X, and it reminds me of something that Professor Y asked earlier.” It’s also nice if your answers demonstrate that you know something about the hiring committee’s work or the curriculum at their institution. “Given that you have three people teaching courses about the post-war period, it seems likely that you’d want me to teach a class on the Progressive Era. Which I’ve done before.” “I know that you, Professor Z, have written about Truman’s dentures. And I’d love to talk to you some time about the next project I’m planning, which focuses on the history of dentistry.” Or whatever.

7: Remember to convey, with body language and eye contact, to all of the members of the committee that you respect them. I’ve seen candidates crash and burn because they never looked at one member of a committee or they turned their back on another.

8: When it’s time for you to ask questions, make sure that your inquiries are innocuous but demonstrate that you’ve done your homework. “I’ve noticed that you have a senior thesis requirement. Will you tell me a bit about that?” “I’m curious to hear more about the methods class that you offer your graduate students.” That sort of thing. You don’t want to ask any questions that will put PE or other members of the committee on the defensive: about sabbatical policies (there might not be any), teaching load (it might be high), pay (it could be low), and many others. Again, you want to leave them with the impression that you’ll be a good colleague – not a high-maintenance jerk – and that you really want the job. If it turns out that you don’t, the best time to decide that is after it has been offered to you. Keep in mind that hiring committees, no matter how good their home institution, are terrified that their favorite candidate is going to take a job at Harvard. Or Yale. So while you shouldn’t lie about your level of interest, you should make sure that you stress the positives. “Oh, XU is located in a pestilential swamp. Well, I had yellow fever as a child and really love alligator meat.” You don’t want to take this too far. But it’s a killer if they leave saying: “She’ll never take the job. There’s no point in bringing her to campus.” One more thing: it’s appropriate for you to ask about the committee’s timetable, when, in other words, they’re likely to be in touch about their decision.

Post-game:

1: Don’t beat yourself up about your mistakes. There will be mistakes. You’ll feel lousy about forgetting the title of Richard Hofstadter’s second book. Oh well. Move on. But don’t forget your errors. Consider how to do better next time. Make notes.

2: Share information with friends or acquaintances. This sounds counter-intuitive, I’m sure, but it’s the right thing to do. Even if you’re competing with classmates for the job of your dreams, behave like a good person. You’ll feel better about yourself. And what goes around comes around. Again, remember that your competition today may be your colleague tomorrow, the person sitting next to you on a hiring committee at a national conference.

3: Send a brief and heartfelt note of thanks to all of the committee members.

Good luck.

This post is in response to Sir Charles’s request, though I can’t find it.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a liberal president, allowed by crisis to go further in turning the purpose of the United States to the aid of the least among Americans than any president before or since. He spoke frankly of his commitment to the poor and downtrodden.

Tonight I call the roll—the roll of honor of those who stood with us in 1932 and still stand with us today.

Written on it are the names of millions who never had a chance—men at starvation wages, women in sweatshops, children at looms.

Written on it are the names of those who despaired, young men and young women for whom opportunity had become a will-o’-the-wisp.

Written on it are the names of farmers whose acres yielded only bitterness, business men whose books were portents of disaster, home owners who were faced with eviction, frugal citizens whose savings were insecure.

Written there in large letters are the names of countless other Americans of all parties and all faiths, Americans who had eyes to see and hearts to understand, whose consciences were burdened because too many of their fellows were burdened, who looked on these things four years ago and said, “This can be changed. We will change it.”

We still lead that army in 1936. They stood with us then because in 1932 they believed. They stand with us today because in 1936 they know. And with them stand millions of new recruits who have come to know.

Their hopes have become our record.

Before he had campaigned on hope and now he campaigned on achievement. And he won, thumpingly. He promised to go further and do more.

I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.

It is not in despair that I paint you that picture. I paint it for you in hope—because the Nation, seeing and understanding the injustice in it, proposes to paint it out. We are determined to make every American citizen the subject of his country’s interest and concern; and we will never regard any faithful, law-abiding group within our borders as superfluous. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.

And yet within less than two years his program stood dead in the water. Indeed if it weren’t for the obviously impending war, Roosevelt probably would have lost his campaign in 1940, if he had even run for a third term, and it would now be harder than it already is to point out the success of his New Deal.¹

What stalled the New Deal and nearly killed FDR’s presidency? Why, a campaign for true democracy and ideological purity within the Democratic Party.

For starters, Roosevelt came into his second term determined to skirt the obstreperous Supreme Court by, as you almost certainly know, enlarging its membership. Roosevelt lost this fight, which consumed almost the entirety of a Congressional session. He called Congress into special session, asking for more New Deal legislation—a renewed AAA, labor laws, and an expansion of the TVA model of regional planning. None passed, and instead the session produced the “Conservative Manifesto,” a document in which Southern Democrats joined other conservatives to ask for lower taxes and protection for private enterprise as well as, of course, respect for “states’ rights.”

Conservative white supremacist southerners, bulwark of the Democratic Party, had as the Depression lessened become enemies of the New Deal. Roosevelt wanted the Democratic Party to become the party of the New Deal.

So in 1938 he campaigned against conservative southern Democratic senators “Cotton Ed” Smith and Walter George. In opposing them, he proposed an agenda of his own: in that summer’s “Report on Economic Conditions of the South,” the President’s men identified problems specific to the region that New Deal policies could fix.

But Roosevelt did not prevail. Instead of debating Roosevelt’s policies, southern Democrats turned the elections instead into a referendum on outside agitation in their affairs, depicting Roosevelt’s intervention as “a second March through Georgia” or part of an effort to secure a federal anti-lynching bill. And so Roosevelt lost.

What defeated Roosevelt in 1938? In part the peculiar southern fear of federal interference, which flourished in the night soil of white memories that preferred night riders to black voters.

But in part, too, the general conditions of American politics that favor the overrepresentation of rural voters and the local over the national. Because such a variety of diverse local interests must be represented at the national level, no competitive national political party in the United States has ever been ideologically pure, and the Democrats have generally been even less pure than the Republicans (see under Rogers, Will).

Neither Roosevelt’s eloquence, nor his personal popularity, nor the success of the New Deal could overcome such opponents. Instead, by ineffectually attacking them, he made them stronger and ensured that the roots of modern conservatism struck deep into the earth of the South. Returned to his position, Cotton Ed Smith faced reporters who wanted to know if Roosevelt was his own worst enemy. “Not while I’m alive,” Smith answered.

For this post I relied mainly on memory of Brinkley’s “New Deal and Southern Politics” here, Patterson’s Congressional Conservatism, Schulman’s Cotton Belt to Sunbelt, and Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear.

A woman starts a freelance writing service from home.  Her business struggles along.  On a whim, and to distance herself from her struggling business, she chooses a male pen name, James Chartrand.

Her business takes off, earning two to three times the income she earns under her own name.  She wins recognition, and now she’s outing herself as a pseud.

The phenomenon here is reasonably well attested.  J. K. Rowling published under her initial upon the advice of her publisher, if I recall correctly, because of the belief that a book by a male writer would be more appealing to the kids’ market.  Identical resumes with female names have been found to be presumed to be less qualified than their male counterparts.   What’s striking about this particular anedote is both that it’s removed from most of the external forces that would amplify or diminish prejudice and that the outcomes are so stark.  Two to three times as much money!

No doubt that part of the difference in success is simply that success follows success; once James Chartrand had a few nibbles and early successes, he became not merely James Chartrand, freelancer, but James Chartrand, successful freelancer with a proven track record, and she had the confidence that goes along with success.   Even if that were the whole story, however, it’s still interesting how a small difference in her client’s perceptions (it’s tantalizing to speculate what their thought processes were, but I suspect it was mostly nothing more than “this guy looks qualified enough” vs. “I’m just not convinced that her work is good, who else can we look at? ” rather than anything overt) is quite literally the difference between wondering whether she can feed her kids on her income and having enough money to purchase a house.

Ever since he made his debut as a giant floating head, we knew Michael Bérubé has what it takes to be a world leader. We congratulate the MLA on choosing Michael to become their president, thus enabling his further ascent.

Bérubé to Putin: Step off my airspace, pal.

And of course we congratulate Michael, too. The original official Edge of the American West interview with Michael Bérubé is available in three parts: 1, 2, 3.

Can someone explain to me why this isn’t an obviously bad idea?  During pregnancy, quite a lot of the weight gain is blood volume, water retention, and the fetus plus the architecture that supports it; it’s not comparable to a non-pregnant 15 pound weight gain.

So if someone’s goal is to gain no weight during pregnancy, that’s going to amount to losing things like fat and bone density and muscle tissue quickly because there is no way to make a weightless placenta or a weightless baby, and doing this while expending all of the energy required to put together a little human being.  Fat doesn’t turn into a baby any more than fat turns into muscle while you exercise.

I feel like I visited most of the abandoned malls in this photo-essay when they were still operating. Or maybe not. It’s hard to say. I suppose that’s the point.

Via.

A holiday message from President Mark Yudof, of the University of California, including a conditional: “If our proposed budget is adopted, I expect that we can end the furlough program, which has placed such burdens on staff and faculty, by the summer of 2010.”

UPDATE: The message to the faculty emailed this morning reads, “As you probably know, we are asking Sacramento for an additional $913 million next year, an amount that will restore the steep cuts made over the last two years to the University’s budget. The furloughs will end in the summer of 2010.”

UC COMMUNITY

Dear Colleagues:

As the holiday season approaches, I wanted to share my deep and sincere appreciation for the contributions each one of you has made to the University this past year. Your professionalism and dedication to the University and to serving the public under such challenging circumstances is impressive.

I recognize that this has been a difficult year for all members of the UC community. We have all made sacrifices. When I was forced to make hard choices about closing an unprecedented budget deficit, many of you provided thoughtful, insightful ideas about the fairest and best way to go about it.

Even when we have disagreed about how to protect the University, it’s clear that we share a fundamental goal: UC must retain its standing as a first-class research institution and as a public university accessible to all qualified California students.

You should take great pride in your accomplishments, and in what you and your colleagues have done this year to support the pre-eminent public university system in the world. You are part of an important enterprise that matters to people’s lives.

In the coming year, I will continue to stress the importance of maintaining UC’s pillars of excellence, affordability and access. I will also work hard to stabilize our financial situation. If our proposed budget is adopted, I expect that we can end the furlough program, which has placed such burdens on staff and faculty, by the summer of 2010.

But there is much more to do, and the coming year will be challenging. We know we can’t continue to rely on the sacrifices of students, faculty and staff to weather these tough times. That’s why I am bringing UC’s community members together under one banner – UC for California – to fight for greater and more stable appropriations from the State. Speaking with one voice in Sacramento, we will let our legislators know how vital the University is to California and why it demands their support.

We need every member of the UC community to get involved in this effort. It is critical that Californians understand that UC is their university – that we are growing the ideas, solutions and leaders that will move the state forward.

In closing, let me say once again how grateful I am for the dedication and commitment you bring to UC. Together, we can succeed in maintaining the University as the pride of California, and as a model for the world.

I extend to you my very best wishes for a happy holiday season with family, friends and loved ones.

With best wishes, I am,

Sincerely yours,

Mark G. Yudof
President

This video of the Muppets doing Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” seems to have been chased off YouTube by Warners, and I can’t embed it because, according to WordPress, the site hosts NSFW video (unlike YouTube? anyway). But you can see it if you click on that link. It’s a fine example of what made the Muppets great—there’s lots of serious weird in there with the sweet. This is especially true of the Muppet Show pilot (1, 2, 3), sometimes called “Sex and Violence.”

If only the Beatles had accepted Lorne Michaels’s offer.

So, we’re coming up on “mid December” again. The announcement on the “What’s New” page for the Research Doctorate Programs rankings is still the July announcement. The fifteenth anniversary of the previous rankings approaches. Possibly I’ve been looking at the wrong web-page for a year, and the rankings have in fact already been released.

This chart/slide/tangled web of spaghetti does not fill me with confidence about Afghanistan:

It is all too reminiscent of this one:

The magical realism of the latter Powerpoint was going to make the occupation run smoothly, with the aggressive arrows on each side funneling the Iraqis into modernity: peace, democracy, and Starbucks. The former seems similar in its optimism that depicting the complexity of the situation will somehow make it better. But it does not explain or clarify that complexity, it simply duplicates it; Afghanistan’s dynamics as the smudged rendering of a slightly askew copy machine.

A friend passed on some survey results about philosophers’ opinions on Big Issues. Some surprises: a full 66% accept or lean toward accepting a priori knowledge! Only 30% accept or lean toward moral anti-realism! These are sublime and funky results indeed.

This week James Bradley, author of Flags of our Fathers, wrote in the New York Times that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was Theodore [yes, you read that right: Theodore] Roosevelt’s fault. TR probably would have hugged to his flabby bullet-scarred chest the notion that he could start wars twenty-three years after his death. But let us attempt to take this case seriously.

In 1905 Roosevelt recognized Japan’s annexation of Korea in return for Japanese recognition of U.S. possession of the Philippines. He did so through an executive agreement, negotiated by his envoy William Howard Taft with Prime Minister Katsura Taro. Walter LaFeber writes in The Clash,

This executive agreement, one of the first important such agreements made by a president on his own, avoided possible embarrassing ratification debates in the U.S. Senate. The agreement was also sealed in secrecy. The Taft-Katsura deal was not known publicly until the historian Tyler Dennett discovered Taft’s memorandum in the Roosevelt Papers nearly twenty years later. The United States, the first Western nation to recognize Korea in 1882, became—at Japan’s request, which Roosevelt immediately met—the first nation to withdraw its diplomats from Korea in 1905. (86)

Bradley writes that in permitting Japan to have Korea, Roosevelt “emboldened them to increase their military might — and their imperial ambitions. In December 1941, the consequence of Theodore Roosevelt’s recklessness would become clear to those few who knew of the secret dealings.”

Sadao Asada points out what should have been obvious to Bradley and the editors of the New York Times: “Bradley entirely ignores and skips the course of real Japanese aggression from the Manchurian Incident of 1931 to Japan’s advance to southern Indochina in 1941.” Of course: there was plenty of policy and policy change in both the US and Japan between 1905 and 1941. But more, “In my view (shared by many of my Japanese colleagues and most of American specialists in TR’s diplomacy), the Taft-Katsura Agreement was a part of TR’s ‘realistic’ policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’ with Japan based on his sphere-of-influence policy and balance-of-power considerations.”

Right. Bradley thinks that Roosevelt did Japan’s bidding because he was reckless, or foolish, or acting as “an agent” of Japan. He quotes Roosevelt saying in 1900, apparently naïvely, “I should like to see Japan have Korea.” Bradley does not quote Roosevelt saying why: “She will be a check upon Russia.”¹ As Asada says, Roosevelt was thinking in balance-of-power terms.

He was also thinking, as Asada says, in realistic terms. Roosevelt told John Hay in 1903, “We can not possibly interfere for the Koreans against Japan … [because] they could not strike one blow in their own defense.” More, he said, “It was out of the question to suppose … that any other nation, with no interest of its own at stake, would do for the Koreans what they were utterly unable to do for themselves.”²

Which suggests another problem with Bradley’s interpretation: what should Roosevelt have done? In 1905, the US had 108,000 men in uniform, as against Japan’s 250,000. The most recent experience of U.S. mobilization for war, in 1898, had not inspired confidence—rather, it inspired a resolve to reform the military that in 1905 had only just begun.

Indeed much of Roosevelt’s thinking about Japan took place amid an awareness of American military weakness in Asia. War Plan Orange, drafted in 1906, ceded the indefensibility of the Philippines. LaFeber again:

Roosevelt now found himself back with Lincoln and Seward: the nation’s [i.e., the USA's] open-door interests in China and Manchuria had to be protected by cooperative diplomatic and military efforts with allies, not by the world’s second-greatest fleet, which lacked the power to act unilaterally in Asia. (90)

The sail of the “White Fleet” in 1908, depending as it did on the assistance of allies, further demonstrated America’s limited ability to project military power overseas.

Bradley is certain Roosevelt “was acting as an agent [of Japan] — it’s in his own handwriting.” He’s relying on a letter from Roosevelt to his son saying, “I acted in the first place on Japan’s suggestion … . Remember that you are to let no one know that in this matter of the peace negotiations I have acted at the request of Japan and that each step has been taken with Japan’s foreknowledge, and not merely with her approval but with her expressed desire.” Even if we read this as an admission that he acted as an agent of Japan, we should also note that Roosevelt said lots of other things about why he did what he did, so there’s no necessary reason to seize on this one. After all, as Kipling famously said of Roosevelt, he was a persuasive and compulsive “spinner.” He liked to tell stories, especially amusing and provocative ones. Which means one shouldn’t take any one of his pronouncements too seriously—as Kate Beaton knows:

Sometimes you should pretend not to hear Mr. President, especially if you’re trying to craft a serious interpretation of American history.

Thanks to Elliott Harwell for forwarding the Kate Beaton comic.
Sadao Asada discussed previously.

Scott McLemee responds to some of his sublime and funky demonstrably insane critics. It’s well worth the read, for this paragraph among many other reasons:

In any case, I want to make clear that there is no way I would ever send Cornel West a box of fried chicken. If we’re going to indulge in identity politics, let me just mention that I come from a Southern working-class family. If I had a box of fried chicken, I would eat it myself. Cornel West earns more in a weekend of public speaking than I do from a year of writing. Let him buy his own food.

A fantastic depiction of spreading unemployment. A better version is here.

In this era of bottom lines, Simon Sadler asks if we might not consider the other end of things.

Many faculty and students are stepping up to the plate this year to explain the bottom line on why public education is vital for our economy and for social justice. Is there also a way we can talk unabashedly about the top line, the improbable ambition of the institution, its libraries and labs and gardens and concerts, its saved lives in its hospitals and classrooms, unafraid of sounding elitist because the top line too is testament to UC’s splendid publicness?

Let there be light: not a bad pitch. Abstract. Benign, but grand. Secular, yet still echoing with religious thunder. It doesn’t short-sell the purpose of the UC. We are, however, feeling pressured to invent more positivist missions with greater customer orientation and more directly measurable outcomes—more bottom lines, in short, and fewer top lines.

Just as at the UC, senior administrators for the New York Public Library are working with consultants toward “reinventing” their institutional role. None of that, though, seemed to have got to our docent. He unhurriedly recounted the lessons the New York Public Library learned from the other great libraries since Alexandria, and stories of readers who’d come in off the street, read economics books, and gone from rags to riches, and he recalled tales of immigrants who’d been allowed to read books in their own languages denied them in the countries they had left, and he meditated on the depositing of materials for research not yet imagined. And through it all he was cannily reminding us that a choice had been made, and was still being made, between wonder and disenchantment.

There’s a beautiful little metaphor in that post, well worth the moment it will take you to read the small rest of it.

Aaron Bady, aka zunguzungu, has a long post up about the crisis facing the UC.

He argues that:

One of the myths about the UC system crisis is the idea that “Sacramento” is the real villain, and that protesting the UC administration is a waste of time. The legislature is the actual problem, people say, because they‘re the ones who have allocated less money to the University system. Instead of occupying the Office of the President of the UC system, such people argue, students should really be protesting politicians in Sacramento.

This seems to me to be both wrongheaded and misinformed. The president (and the regents who appoint him) are Sacramento, while the university community itself has not only had very little role in the massive top-down restructuring of the university that got under way in July, but they have been quite actively shut out of it, by the Regents and by President Mark Yudof, who are doing the job Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed them to do. Which is to say, when students from the university protest against the regents and the President, they are protesting Sacramento. The legislature in Sacramento may have created the problem by cutting funding for higher education, but it’s the representatives and appointees of our Sacramento-based governor who have turned the problem into an opportunity to privatize higher education in California.

This is an important point, because — and this needs to be emphasized — the scandal of the administration’s conduct is not the fact that they’re cutting services while raising fees, at least not in and of itself. In bad economic times, some kind of response is necessary. The scandal is that Mark Yudof and the regents are using the crisis of the moment to push forward a plan to privatize the UC system that has long been in the works and is geared to be permanent. And they are doing it by assuming “emergency powers” which allow them to arbitrarily overturn the precedents and policy that would otherwise explicitly prevent them from doing so, everything from caps on the amount that student fees can be raised to the contracts they’ve signed with university employees to the “Master Plan” for higher education that the state of California established fifty years ago. So if we want to talk about “Sacramento,” then let’s do so. But we need, then, to talk about two things: first, how the Republicans that run California through the governor’s mansion have been trying to privatize the state’s public education for a very long time, and, second, how the regents and Mark Yudof have been using the rhetoric of “crisis” to push that agenda through, bit by bit and step by step, replacing the UC’s traditional system of shared governance with a system of top-down corporate management.

The whole post is worth your time. So click on over and have a look.