November 30, 2007
L. Sprague de Camp Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:50 AM EST This last Tuesday was the centenary of the birth of L. Sprague de Camp, who provided a few generations of teenaged boys with a remarkable amount of pleasure as a writer of alternate history, fantasy, and science fiction, and produced some durable work in a lot of other genres, writing over a hundred books. De Camp had a degree in aeronautical engineering from Caltech, along with an M.S. in engineering, and he spent the Second World War working in the Philadelphia Naval Yard with two other writers, Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, who were even more famously associated with the golden age of American science fiction, and both of whom, like de Camp, actually knew some science. De Camp’s engineering background may have given him his determined rationalism and aggressive contempt for cant—he wrote a once-famous history of the Scopes trial and a number of books debunking pseudoscientific hooey of various kinds. This distaste for pseudoscience did not stop him from producing some delightful fantasy novels. One of those books, in which some Depression-era Americans entered the world of Spenser’s Faerie Queen, cost me an astonishing amount of money in fines and a fair amount of baffled disappointment, since at the age of 15, on the strength of what I took to be de Camp’s salacious wit, I borrowed a volume of Spenser from the public library, and found the poem so inaccessible that I abandoned it, forgotten, in an obscure corner of my parents’ house. De Camp’s most celebrated and beloved work of alternate history, Lest Darkness Fall, from 1941, in which a time-travelling American engineer arrests the fall of Rome, arguably kicked off that genre in America, and it is still in print. Lest Darkness Fall was a response to Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and it is still generating homages and sequels, the most recent a short story, “The Apotheosis of Martin Padway,” by S. M. Sterling, reprinted just this year in a collection of Stirling’s short fiction; Stirling is probably the closest thing de Camp has to an heir among current writers of alternate history. As a fantasist, de Camp was witty and a little bawdy, also learned, and a lot of fun. Other personae included what seemed a gentle but not too gentle version of another traditional American type, the village atheist, and de Camp was an older and admirable sort of American in other ways, too: He wrote some histories of invention, technology, and engineering, also a good monograph on the history of naval weapons, which are all subjects more kinds of people seemed to care about when I was a boy than appear to now. He was also a pioneer in writing the history of the profession he went into: He wrote biographies of other American writers of fantasy, including books on Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft, which made him some enemies among cultists, and he made other contributions to the history of genre fiction. It seems only fair to return the compliment, and note the centenary of his birth.
November 29, 2007
Nothing Left to Invent Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 11:20 AM EST Today’s feature article is an enthusiastic review by Josh Zeitz of Daniel Walker Howe’s new book, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. As most users of this site will recognize, the title of the book quotes the first message that Prof. Samuel F. B. Morse sent by telegraph at the introductory demonstration of his wondrous new invention on May 24, 1844. Here’s what Howe’s book has to say about the message, which comes from Numbers 23:23 (“It shall be said of Jacob and of Israel, What hath God wrought!”): “Credit for applying the verse to this occasion belongs to Nancy Goodrich Ellsworth, who suggested it to her daughter Annie, who in turn provided it to Morse. (The professor was in love with Annie.)” As Josh points out, Howe packs an amazing amount of material into his wide-ranging book, even considering its 904-page length, so it’s not surprising that he did not have room to explain who these two women were. But the answer is instructive in several ways. Nancy Ellsworth was the wife of Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, an 1810 Yale classmate of Morse who served as U.S. commissioner of patents from 1836 to 1845. And if you believe The Patent Office Pony: A History of the Early Patent Office (1994), by Kenneth W. Dobyns, a volume that has been invaluable to Invention & Technology researchers through the years, Howe’s book has the relationship backwards: “Annie Goodrich Ellsworth (1826–1900), the Commissioner’s seventeen-year-old daughter, according to family tradition had a teenage crush on Samuel Morse, who was a fifty-two-year-old widower. Professor Morse was polite to Annie, which seems to have been all she required to maintain her interest.” Isn’t that always the way? Two lovers break up, and then it’s all he-said, she-said. Personally, I think Howe’s version is more plausible. When you’re Morse’s age, just about any 17-year-old girl looks good, and judging from the admittedly crude drawing in the Dobyns, Annie was quite some punkins. Morse, by this point, was a broken-down, careworn painter-turned-inventor struggling to get by on meager support from his backers, so it’s not clear what Annie would have seen in him. (On the other hand, Annie’s life was not exactly cushy either. According to Dobyns, “Annie was incidentally a part-time employee of the Patent Office. It was the custom of the day for local women to be hired to copy papers out in longhand. . . . Annie copied some 13,000 words at 10 cents per 100 words in 1843.” So her father had a high-ranking government position, and the best job he could find for her was copying papers. Thanks, Dad.) But I didn’t come here to gossip. Instead of trying to sort out who was stuck on whom, I want to mention something that Ellsworth wrote in his 1843 annual report. This report was greatly expanded from earlier ones, with a description of every patent issued during the year and sections written by examiners who specialized in particular fields. Evidently moved by the richness of America’s inventive spirit, Ellsworth surveyed the great reductions in cost of common items over the past 30 years: Shirt cloth down from 62 cents to 11 cents a yard; hooks and eyes reduced from $1.50 a gross to 15 cents; horseshoes, formerly handmade by blacksmiths, now manufactured and sold at five cents a pound. Then Ellsworth made a statement that has been misquoted, misattributed, and misinterpreted ever since: “The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity, and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end.” If this sounds vaguely familiar, you’ve probably heard the garbled version in which a patent commissioner supposedly asked Congress to abolish his office on the grounds that “everything that can be invented has been invented.” That never happened, and the story is not even remotely plausible. It’s hard to say which is more unlikely: Someone who has spent his career in technology believing that no more invention was possible, or a government bureaucrat recommending the elimination of his job. But that hasn’t stopped people from repeating the story ever since, including Richard Nixon in his 1989 book Victory Without War. Nixon would have been a lot more skeptical if the story had come from Alger Hiss, and in fact, the misquote goes back at least to that era. In its May 1, 1951, issue, Forbes magazine said of the industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss: “The Patent Office, he likes to remind doubters, almost closed its door in 1844 as having registered all possible advances.” Now here’s the kicker. If you’d been paying attention a few paragraphs back, you would have noticed that the year in which Ellsworth marveled at the wonders of progress and invoked “the arrival of that period when human improvement must end” was 1843. The following year Morse demonstrated his telegraph, and as Howe explains, in less than a decade, you could barely recognize the United States as the same country. To be sure, Morse’s telegraph was hardly unknown to Ellsworth in 1843. Morse had received several patents on his invention and gotten government grants to develop it, and Annie must have given her father updates on its progress. Yet its success was far from assured; other inventors had been trying to send messages with electricity since the 1820s. Ellsworth’s rhetorical flourish, vague as it was, did convey a sense that technology might soon be expected to reach its limits. Instead, within a few months, it took a huge leap forward, which in turn led to many more huge leaps. That’s how technology works, and however many unforeseen directions it may take in years to come, it is sure to continue working the same way—and surprising people in the process.
November 28, 2007
A New Yorker’s Objection to the Electoral College V Posted by Alexander Burns at 08:45 PM EST I am hesitant to reply to Mr. Gordon’s latest post, as I don’t want to belabor this issue too much. I also don’t particularly want to respond to sarcasm. But there are a couple issues that I feel are worth clarifying. Mr. Gordon says that my last post was “taking advantage of [his] careless choice of states, which is good for scoring college debate team points but not so good for finding the truth. Idaho and Vermont are both solidly in one camp. . . . But there are plenty of small states that tend to move back and forth between parties: New Mexico, Nevada, Delaware etc.” Mr. Gordon might find this hard to believe, but my last post was not just intended to highlight his carelessness; I actually made a broader assertion than he suggests, and it’s one that happens to be backed up by data. I wrote: “Presidential elections are fought in big, politically divided states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Florida. The practical impact of the Electoral College isn’t to favor small states; it’s to favor certain kinds of big states.” Delaware, Nevada, and New Mexico clearly do benefit, to at least some small degree, from having the Electoral College in place, and I never said otherwise. But the big winners from the Electoral College are the large states that happen to be politically divided. Allow me to offer some factual evidence (this tends to be a good strategy for college debaters and courageous truth-seekers alike). Between April 1 and September 30, 2004, $333.4 million was spent on presidential campaign advertising. The top five states where that money was spent were Ohio (17.9 percent), Florida (17.1), Pennsylvania (12.3), Michigan (6.7), and Wisconsin (5.8). That totals 59.8 percent of presidential campaign advertising during the period, to a set of states that contain something like 20 percent of the country’s population. If television advertising is a reliable indicator of where a campaign is sending its resources, and I believe it is, then clearly large, competitive states benefit from our system of subdividing the national electorate far more than the great majority of small states. Now, it may be that Mr. Gordon and I have an irreconcilable difference of opinion (surprise!). He would rather have our current system, which somewhat favors small states, strongly advantages big, politically divided states, and disadvantages ideologically homogeneous states of all sizes. In contrast, I’d prefer a system that leaves some small states behind—Delaware, most likely, with its special Delaware issues—but puts places like Oklahoma, Georgia, and Massachusetts back on the table. I’m obviously quite convinced of my position, and Mr. Gordon of his, and unless he’s surprisingly convinced by the data above, I expect things will stay that way. I have two other, less lengthy clarifications to conclude with. First, Mr. Gordon says that the Electoral College results in 1876 and 2000 were “clear enough” that Al Gore and Samuel Tilden didn’t have any objective reason to complain. Actually, the 1876 election saw an enormous controversy about the Electoral College after three Southern states sent multiple slates of electors to Congress. The resulting imbroglio makes the resolution of the 2000 election look brief and civil by comparison, and the election fight only ended when a special commission decided, by an 8–7 vote, to give the contested electoral votes to Rutherford B. Hayes. Despite Tilden’s three-point margin in the popular vote, this Electoral College fiasco denied him the Presidency. As for the 2000 election, we all know that history. If you think the Electoral College provided useful clarity in these circumstances, I have a profession to suggest to you. Finally, Mr. Gordon asks how I can be so certain that the outcome of the 2000 election would have been a clear victory for Gore if we had just been going by the popular vote. “A mere 544,683 votes, a little over 10,000 per state, separated Al Gore and George Bush, out of 101,463,105 cast,” he writes. “I imagine the Republicans would have fought just as ferociously and screamed fraud just as loudly over the country as the Democrats did in Florida.” I find this an implausible scenario. Finding an extra 10,000 votes per state would have been a totally impossible feat—the typical difference after a recount is no more than a few dozen, or at most a few hundred votes. In 2000, the Democrats were fighting for some 500 votes in Florida. That’s a close margin by any standard. But imagine if we hadn’t had the Electoral College, and George Bush had gone on television in November 2000 to declare, “If authorities miscounted 10,000 votes per state it would have changed the outcome.” He might as well have told America that if his grandmother had wheels she’d be a bicycle. It would have been hugely embarrassing for Republicans. The congressional GOP would probably have made President Gore’s life miserable, but I very much doubt they would have tolerated a 50-state scavenger hunt for votes. I’m not a fan of counterfactuals, but this seems like a pretty open-and-shut case.
November 28, 2007
A New Yorker’s Objection to the Electoral College IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:10 PM EST A few points. 1) I didn’t say that “the United States is necessarily better off with an electoral system that theoretically favors small, rural states over big, urban centers.” I said it was better off with the present system than with a system based purely on the popular vote. The present system, devised 220 years ago in an utterly different world, is by no means without its flaws. No system is. One might have an electoral vote system, just for instance, where the votes were allocated not according to the state’s representation in Congress but according to its population: one electoral vote for each 100,000 citizens recorded in the last census. That would give California 359 electoral votes and South Dakota 8, a 44–1 ratio instead of 55 and 3, a 13–1 ratio. (To be sure, best of luck getting such an amendment ratified.) 2) Mr. Burns is taking rhetorical advantage of a careless choice of states, which is good for scoring college debate team points but not so good for finding the truth. Idaho and Vermont are both solidly in one camp and so would be largely ignored in either system. But there are plenty of small states that tend to move back and forth between parties: New Mexico, Nevada, Delaware, etc. I don’t think any candidate for President is going to say, “Oh, the hell with [fill in the name of a small toss-up state]” under the Electoral College. But who’s going to bother with the 371,000 voters in Delaware (which in the last 15 elections has gone Republican 8 times and Democratic 7) when they can concentrate on the rich vote mines of Florida, Texas, New York, and California instead? Delaware issues would be utterly unimportant. Candidates wouldn’t even have to know what they are. 3) Mr. Burns writes, “I’m not sure that Al Gore or Samuel Tilden would agree about the consistent clarity of the Electoral College . . .” Why wouldn’t they? They undoubtedly didn’t like the results in 1876 and 2000, but those results were clear enough. 4) I know of no evidence that either President Clinton in 1993 or George Bush in 2005 thought themselves the holders of overwhelming mandates. To be sure, Clinton won a fairly resounding Electoral College vote in 1992 (370–168), but that very savvy politician knew perfectly well that that was because of Ross Perot siphoning off votes in states that Bush might well have won in a two-man race. In 2004, Bush’s Electoral College victory was a mere 286–251. As Mr. Burns has pointed out, a shift of a mere 60,000 votes in Ohio would have made John Kerry President. Clinton’s health-care plan and Bush’s attempt to reform Social Security both failed, I think, for quite other reasons. 5) He writes, “If the 2000 election had been settled without the Electoral College, there would not have been a 50-state scavenger hunt for votes. In fact, there would not have been a ‘messy, divisive legal battle’ at all. The outcome would have been an indisputable victory for Al Gore.” I wonder how Mr. Burns can be as certain of this as he might be of the time the sun rose on the day after Election Day in 2000. A mere 544,683 votes, a little over 10,000 per state, separated Al Gore and George Bush, out of 101,463,105 votes cast. I imagine the Republicans would have fought just as ferociously and screamed fraud just as loudly all over the country as the Democrats did in Florida. Given the utterly disgraceful mess the voter registration rolls are in in most states, how easy it is to register without proof of being enfranchised, and how easy it is to vote without proof of identity, they would have found very rich pickings.
November 28, 2007
A New Yorker’s Objection to the Electoral College III Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:10 AM EST John Steele Gordon raises a reasonable objection to my argument in favor of ditching the Electoral College: “In a race determined only be the national popular vote, much of ‘fly-over country,’ as coastal elites call it, would be ignored, and the race would be fought in the great media centers . . . and the major cities. That would not be a good thing. The Electoral College forces candidates to consider each of the 50 states and to spend time and resources in those that seem possible to win, no matter how small. Without it, they would ignore the Vermonts and the Idahos.” There are a few problems with this statement. First of all, on the level of broad principles, I’m not sure why the United States is necessarily better off with an electoral system that theoretically favors small, rural states over big, urban centers. There are arguments for promoting such a system, but it doesn’t strike me as an absolute political good. Second, and more important, the system we currently have doesn’t actually favor small states very much in practice. Mr. Gordon’s statement that abolishing the Electoral College would lead to candidates’ ignoring “the Vermonts and the Idahos” would be a good point—except for the fact that candidates already ignore Vermont and Idaho. Presidential elections are fought in big, politically divided states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Florida. The practical impact of the Electoral College isn’t to favor small states; it’s to favor certain kinds of big states. I’ve never actually heard a “coastal elite” use the term “flyover country,” but if some do, the Electoral College isn’t doing much to discourage them. Mr. Gordon makes an additional point that the Electoral College tends to establish more decisive winners than the popular vote, and suggests that this is a good thing because “clear winners are always better than unclear ones, and the great virtue of the Electoral College is that it always produces clear winners.” I’m not sure that Al Gore or Samuel Tilden would agree about the consistent clarity of the Electoral College, but I actually think there’s an argument to be made that the apparent clarity of Electoral College results is a bad thing. In 1992 Bill Clinton won by a clear Electoral College vote but took office with less than 50 percent support from the public. He proceeded to try and ram health-care reform through Congress as though he’d won an overwhelming mandate. A similar thing happened with George Bush and Social Security reform after the 2004 election. Both Presidents overestimated the public’s support for their administration, and both suffered gravely as a result. I doubt this kind of hubris would occur so easily if we didn’t have an Electoral College to disguise and distort the results of close elections. Finally, Mr. Gordon suggests a counterfactual: “Imagine a squeaker election . . . without the Electoral College. In 2000, because of the college, the messy, divisive legal battle was fought only in Florida, and it still took over a month to sort out. But without the college it would have been fought in all 50 states, because each and every vote would have been precious.” On this last point, I’ll note that the idea that each and every vote is precious is sort of the point of a democracy. As for Mr. Gordon’s larger thought experiment, to paraphrase The Princess Bride, I do not think it means what he thinks it means. If the 2000 election had been settled without the Electoral College, there would not have been a 50-state scavenger hunt for votes. In fact, there would not have been a “messy, divisive legal battle” at all. The outcome would have been an indisputable victory for Al Gore.
November 27, 2007
What People Know or Don’t Posted by Julie M. Fenster at 02:45 PM EST For a long time, the most frightening comment I had ever heard was made by my cousin, who sidled up to me one day on a very important errand. She said that she and her husband—college graduates—had been talking a few days before, and her husband wanted to know when Winston Churchill was President. That, however, has now been bumped to second-place. Over Thanksgiving, a friend in New England told me about some friends, men in their eighties, who visited a local school on Veterans Day to describe their experiences to the students. They walked into the appointed classroom and then stood in a state of shock as the teacher introduced them as veterans of World War 11. Any self-respecting graduate student could probably prove that World War II was, as a matter of actual fact, the eleventh world war in the planet’s history—but no matter. With such a thorough respect for history abounding, the world will get to No. 11 soon enough.
November 27, 2007
A New Yorker’s Objection to the Electoral College II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:05 PM EST I am not sure that abolishing the Electoral College would change the way elections are conducted in modern times in the way that Alexander Burns envisions. The Electoral College is biased in favor of the small states (which is most of the states). California has 55 electoral votes and South Dakota only 3. But California has about 600,000 people per vote and South Dakota only 200,000. So while there’s not much point in a candidate for President showing up in hopes of winning a majority of the minuscule popular vote in South Dakota (it’s a third smaller than New York’s Westchester County), three electoral voters can make all the difference in a close race. Bush beat Gore by only 5 electoral votes in 2000. So I think that in a race determined only by the national popular vote, much of “fly-over country,” as coastal elites call it, would be ignored, and the race would be fought in the great media centers (i.e., New York, Washington, and Los Angeles) and the major cities. That would not be a good thing. The Electoral College forces candidates to consider each of the 50 states and to spend time and resources in those that seem possible to win, no matter how small. Without it, they would ignore the Vermonts and the Idahos. Those states that are solidly one party or the other would be largely ignored with or without the Electoral College, unless, like New York, they are full of media. As Mr. Burns points out, there have been only three times that the Electoral College went against the popular vote. But each of these times the popular vote was so close that it was well within the margin of error, and we will never know in any absolute sense who won the popular vote in those elections. Yet in each case the Electoral College produced a clear winner, who thus had a legitimacy he otherwise would have lacked. Cleveland beat Blaine in 1884 by a mere 26,361 votes, less than .2 percent of the total. But he won in the Electoral College 219 to 182. Four years later, Cleveland beat Harrison by 90,596 votes, but lost in the college 233 to 168. In both cases we will never know who actually won the popular vote. And of course there have been several times when the popular vote was effectively a tie, with the winner in the college just barely edging out his opponent. Kennedy beat Nixon in 1960 34,226,731 to 34,108,157, but carried the college handily 303 to 219. Had Cook County, Illinois, politics been a bit closer to the ideal of a Jeffersonian democracy, Kennedy would have lost the popular vote and still have been President. He won Illinois by less than 10,000 votes, and Richard Dailey’s Cook County was remarkably late in reporting its results. Then there were the four times when no one had a majority of the popular vote (1860, 1912, 1992, and 1996) but someone carried the Electoral College handily. Wilson won only 45 percent of the popular vote but almost 82 percent of the Electoral College vote in 1912. Despite being a minority President, he had a very effective first term. Finally, imagine a squeaker election in these over-lawyered days without the Electoral College. In 2000, because of the college, the messy, divisive legal battle was fought only in Florida, and it still took over a month to sort out. But without the college it would have been fought in all 50 states, because each and every vote would have been precious. An army of lawyers would have had new Mercedes in their driveways when it was finally over, but the Republic would have been very ill served. Clear winners are always better than unclear ones, and the great virtue of the Electoral College is that it always produces clear winners.
November 26, 2007
A New Yorker’s Objection to the Electoral College Posted by Alexander Burns at 04:05 PM EST I see that I’m a latecomer to the discussion about the Electoral College. Thanksgiving has a way of keeping one busy (or asleep). I enjoyed Julie Fenster’s post last week about Abraham Lincoln’s scheme to undermine the Electoral College. It does seem similar to the law Maryland has already passed, which would effectively form a coalition of states that pledge to give their electoral votes to the popular vote winner, although the Maryland effort strikes me as rather less partisan. There are other sly ways that states have tried to make the Electoral College more representative of the popular vote; both Maine and Nebraska currently award two of their electoral votes to the candidate who wins a majority of votes in the state, and then apportion the rest of their electoral votes by congressional district. If a Democratic presidential candidate wins Maine overall by running up huge margins downstate, but a Republican ekes out a win in the rural second congressional district, the state’s electoral vote gets split 3–1 in the Democrat’s favor. Fred Smoler and John Steele Gordon both ponder the consequences of eliminating the Electoral College. The basic argument against doing so, as Mr. Smoler relates it, is that “people who detest all barriers to immediate majoritarian politics should think hard about precisely what they are wishing for.” Perhaps. But the Electoral College is not much of a check on the majority; there have been only three instances when the electoral vote has overridden the popular vote. What the Electoral College practically accomplishes, in the present day, is to take the vast majority of states off the radar of presidential candidates. Our current system makes it insane for a Democratic presidential candidate to waste his time campaigning in Texas, or for a Republican to blow a weekend in California (except for fundraising). It just isn’t cost-effective to take your message to your adversary’s home turf. You’re never going to convince enough Mississippians to vote Democratic to get their electoral votes, so why try to convince any of them at all? When you can focus on snagging Ohio’s electoral votes, why would you spend money elsewhere? This isn’t fair—not to any party in particular, and especially to the great majority of American voters. Mr. Gordon doubts liberals “would be so up in arms about the Electoral College these days had George Bush won the popular vote and Al Gore the College in 2000.” My complaint with the College, though, isn’t the complaint of a Democrat (the 2004 campaign showed that Democrats can benefit from the Electoral College, too, as John Kerry came within 60,000 votes of winning Ohio and the Presidency but lost the popular vote by a much larger margin). Mine is the complaint of a New Yorker. If we elected the President directly, it would make sense for Democrats to visit Texas (or parts, anyway) and for Republicans to visit California (Orange County, anyone?). Democrats could actually benefit from visiting rural Oklahoma, and Republicans could pick up useful votes in Queens. I suspect the electoral majorities that would result from such a system would probably look a lot more like America, and less like Ohio. Given the political polarization of recent years, geographically broader, more inclusive presidential campaigns might be just what the doctor ordered.
|
