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.
August 21, 2007
Pete Stemkowski’s Revenge Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 06:00 PM EST In their excellent interview on this blog about baseball-related songs, Allen Barra and Jerry Silverman scoff at the idea that there might be songs about hockey. In fact, there’s a band called the Zambonis that plays nothing but hockey songs, and they’ve been around for at least 10 years and put out half a dozen albums. (Here’s their MySpace page, if you’re interested in such things; I can’t make head or tail of it.)
Some of band’s most memorable songs include “Lost My Teeth,” a furious minute-and-a-half punk assault; the elegiac “Bob Marley and the Hartford Whalers,” a sensitive lament about losing the people and things we love; “Hockey Monkey,” which seems to be the theme song to something called “The Loop,” on Fox (here again I’m clueless); and my favorite, “Johnny Got Suspended,” about a boy who suffers the consequences for wearing an “Islanders Sucks” [sic] T-shirt to school. I once suggested through their website that they should do a song called “Kick Save and a Beauty” about Manon Rheaume, a woman who has played goal in various men’s professional leagues, but they showed a strange lack of interest. On the classical side, John Zorn, the avant-garde musician and composer, has released an entire album called Hockey, a description of which can be found here. (According to the blurb, Zorn has also made albums called Lacrosse and Pool.) So you see? I’ve come up with two sources of hockey music, and we’re still in the Z’s. There must be plenty more.
August 14, 2007
That Which We Call a Fred/ By Any Other Name Would Be Less Sweet Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 10:00 AM EST When I was growing up in the 1970s, my father, Harold, used to complain that any man named Harold in an advertisement was invariably a drip. He was right, and the sentiment was not confined to Madison Avenue. In The Sweet Science, a book about boxing, A. J. Liebling writes of a 1952 bout between Archie Moore and Harold Johnson (won by Moore): “On the margin of my card I find a note, ‘imp. of H. fierce,’ which I take to mean the impossibility of Harold’s getting that way, or maybe the impossibility of any Harold’s getting that way; if the leaders had switched names, the Saxons might have won the Battle of Hastings.” (Not that “Archie” sounds all that macho either.) These days the name Harold is so uncommon that it’s never used in advertisements. Instead, the role of an all-purpose loser has been taken over by Fred: He’s the chump with a bowtie that a woman had a boring date with before she met the exciting guy, who has tousled hair and a manly pullover sweater and brings a six-pack of Heineken (or whatever is being advertised) to her apartment. Every Fred in an advertisement is that exact same guy. And, as Mr. Smoler points out, the same is true in books: Freds in literature tend to be dopey and “sweet,” which is girl talk for pleasant but dull. One example that Mr. Smoler left out is Freddie Eynsford-Hill in Pygmalion/My Fair Lady, literature’s most famous stalker (though this case is not clear-cut—the original play ends with him apparently marrying Eliza Doolittle, but the 1938 movie (with screenplay by Shaw) and My Fair Lady end with Eliza seeming to favor Professor Higgins). I’ve never seen The Pirates of Penzance, but I get the impression that Frederic in that operetta is kind of a dufus. When I was a child, my parents used to get their way by threatening to sing “I’m in Love With a Girl Named Fred,” from Once Upon a Mattress; it made a much more effective threat than spanking. And the pinnacle of mid-1960s British Invasion nerdiness was Freddie Garrity of Freddie and the Dreamers, whose hit “Do the Freddie” required him to jump in the air, spread his arms and legs, and nod his head from side to side. It’s amazing what you could get away with in 1965 if you had an English accent. That’s why my favorite Jane Austen novel is Persuasion. It contains many subtle and perceptive observations*, but so do the others; the reason I like Persuasion best is that the character named Frederick gets the girl. In pop music, meanwhile, counterbalancing Freddie and the Dreamers is the uncharacteristically tender Patti Smith song “Frederick,” written in 1979 for her husband (now deceased), Fred “Sonic” Smith, formerly of the MC5. (Smith is her maiden name, by the way; that’s the answer to the frequently asked question, “What do Patti Smith and Eleanor Roosevelt have in common?”) But if you really want an example of an alpha Fred, first look at Fred Thompson and then look at his wife. It just goes to show: There’s nothing more irresistible to women than a Fred with lots of money. And finally, on the subject of John vs. Fred, I recall a pertinent footnote in H. L. Mencken’s The American Language. I would give it to you exactly if our books weren’t in storage, but the gist is that after discussing the use of “john” as a euphemism for a bathroom, Mencken reports someone’s recollection that in the 1920s, at a women’s college in the Northeast (Vassar, I think), the bathroom was referred to as “the Fred.” Agreed, that’s hardly a compliment, but I like to think this usage came about because some poor Vassar girl had her heart broken by a man named Fred. We do tend to have that effect. _______________ * Persuasion is the book where Jane does her best job of portraying the exaggerated ups and downs of a love affair—how we amplify every little thing, turning good or neutral developments into bad ones when we’re feeling pessimistic, and doing just the opposite when our mood swings the other way. After Captain (Frederick) Wentworth sees Anne, his old flame, for the first time in eight years, a friend tells Anne that Wentworth said she was “so altered that he should not have known her again.” As you’d imagine, Anne is rather put out about this. Then at the end of the book, when they’re reunited and it feels so good, Wentworth tells her—just a bit too honestly, like a true Fred—that his brother “enquired after you very particularly; asked even if you were personally altered, little suspecting that to my eye you could never alter.” And of course Anne, flush with love, turns this clumsy remark into a compliment: “Anne smiled, and let it pass. It was too pleasing a blunder for a reproach . . . the value of such homage was inexpressibly increased to Anne, by comparing it with former words, and feeling it to be the result, not the cause of a revival in his warm attachment.” In other words: I know he really thinks I’m hideous, but isn’t it sweet that he loves me anyway, and cares enough to lie about it? (By the way, at the time all this takes place, Anne is 27 years old.)
August 2, 2007
When She Was Bad She Was Horrid Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 03:20 PM EST An Associated Press story tells of efforts in Edinburgh, Scotland, to honor William McGonagall, a native of the city who is widely acclaimed as “the world’s worst poet.” As an example, the article cites this excerpt from what may be McGonagall’s most famous work, “The Tay Bridge Disaster”: Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879
Which will be remember’d for a very long time. Okay, I’ll admit, that is pretty bad. And plenty more along similar lines can be found here. But for capturing the narrative sweep of an epic tragedy, does it really compare with this: Have you heard of the dreadful fate
Of Mr. P. P. Bliss and wife?
Of their death I will relate,
And also others lost their life;
Ashtabula Bridge disaster,
Where so many people died
Without a thought that destruction
Would plunge them ‘neath the wheel of tide. Those lines were not written by any whiskey-sipping habitué of cosmopolitan Edinburgh; they sprang from the fertile soil of America’s heartland, courtesy of a Michigan farmer named Julia A. Moore. McGonagall the world’s worst? Ha! It’s the old, old story: A woman has to be twice as bad as a man to get half the recognition. This all stems from the “separate spheres” mentality, in which women were allowed to be bad at cooking, driving, and other humble pursuits, while leaving incompetence at lofty subjects like poetry, politics, and warfare to the “stronger” sex. These days Julia Moore is forgotten; no plaques, monuments, or memorials perpetuate her memory. Yet in the years following the 1876 publication of her debut collection, The Sentimental Song Book, Moore was celebrated nationwide as the Sweet Singer of Michigan. Today, when the Internet makes a cornucopia of awful writing available with a few clicks, it can be hard to appreciate the impact made by Moore’s not-slim-enough volume. Reviews ranged from mock raves (“a coal of fire on the altar of poesy,” “a collection the like of which has never tested the strength of type before”) to blunt ridicule (“Shakespeare, if he could read it, would be glad he was dead”). The acclaim was surely deserved for an author capable of writing lines like the following: “His father and mother being dead,/ It left him an orphan boy./ When he was with his brother/ His health failed him, poor boy./ Kind friends they thought ‘twould do him good/ To travel for his health;/ To California he did go/ With his Uncle Zera French.” In common with Lord Byron (of whom she wrote, “‘Lord Byron’ was an Englishman/ A poet I believe,/ His first works in old England/ Was poorly received”), she did not hesitate to strike back at her critics in verse: “Perhaps they talk for meanness/ And perhaps it is in jest,/ If they leave out their freeness/ It would suit me now the best.” Yet that was as much hostility as Moore, who clearly merited the “Sweet” half of her sobriquet, was capable of. In the end, she threw herself on the mercy of her readers: “And now, kind friends, what I have wrote/ I hope you will pass o’er/ And not criticise as some have done/ Hitherto herebefore.” Satirists from Bill Nye to Mark Twain imitated the Sweet Singer, often with quite amusing results, but none could match Moore’s guileless blend of banality and self-assurance. Like Walt Whitman, Moore was at her best when celebrating the richness and exuberance of American life: “On a moonlight evening, in the month of May/ A number of young people were playing at croquet.” Elsewhere, not unlike a later poet with the same last name—Marianne Moore, who penned odes to the Brooklyn Dodgers—the Sweet Singer immortalized the Grand Rapids Cricket Club: “In Grand Rapids is a handsome club/ Of men that cricket play/ As fine a set of skillful men/ That can their skill display.” Julia Moore ended her career at her husband’s insistence after being jeered at a public reading in December 1878, but discerning readers and critics have never forgotten the Sweet Singer of Michigan. Readers who wish to experience Moore’s work for themselves can purchase Mortal Refrains, a reprint of her complete works, edited and with an introduction by Thomas J. Riedlinger, or visit this website. Julia A. Moore exemplified a newly confident America, one that no longer deferred to the Old World even in pursuits requiring previously unimagined levels of ineptitude. Moreover, in an era of rampant sexism, she struck a resounding blow for equality, demonstrating that badness knows no gender. Most of all, in the nation’s centennial year, her debut volume served as a second Declaration of Independence, heralding a world where an unschooled woman in a land recently reclaimed from wilderness, strengthened by years of farm toil and nourished by the prairie sun, could be more than a match for the worst Europe had to offer.
July 23, 2007
Verdict: Not Proven Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 04:05 PM EST A recent article (registration may be needed) by William Kristol was headlined: “Bush the Winner: Why History Will Judge the Prez a Clear Success.” Regardless of how you feel about our current Prez, this headline is nonsense, because history doesn’t judge. The recent “founders boom” revealed this clearly: For every Beavis saying “John Adams was cool,” there was a Butt-Head saying “No way, dude, John Adams sucked.” The same goes for Thomas Jefferson (oracular sage or racist voluptuary), Benjamin Franklin (master of practical wisdom or hedonistic faker), and all the rest. A book just published argues that Aaron Burr, despite trying to steal the 1800 presidential election, killing Alexander Hamilton, and then attempting to start his own country in the Southwest, all within a period of half a dozen years, was actually a noble patriot. If history can’t get its story straight on these old-timers, how long will it take to make up its mind about President Bush? Not to mention the books we receive almost every day purporting to “debunk” the “conventional wisdom” on this or that historical event or person. Just about everyone thinks Washington and Lincoln were pretty good eggs (though even there you’ll get an argument), but outside of them and a handful of others, there is nothing close to unanimity about who the good guys and bad guys are in American history. The need to say something new about any well-worn subject leads to a sort of oscillation in which the academic reputation of a person or thing oscillates up and down with a period of roughly 30 years. When combined with the endless supply of graduate students in search of doctorates, this turns the old Hegelian dialectic into an eternal cycle: Instead of thesis, antithesis, synthesis, it’s thesis, thesis, thesis, thesis . . . The above discussion, of course, leaves aside the question of what is meant by “history”: University historians? Informed readers? The general public, most of whom probably could not name more than two or three Presidents? Personally, I would prefer leaving the verdict up to an impartial body, like the staff of American Heritage—except we have trouble even agreeing on a place to eat lunch. And any community of historically informed persons that you decide to empanel as a jury will be more numerous and further from agreement than that, even if it were somehow possible to predict how people will think in the future. Whether you like President Bush or hate him, the Kristol piece shows that whenever somebody appeals to “the verdict of history,” all it means is that he’s losing the present-day argument.
July 20, 2007
What We Told Our Readers to Tell Their Children About Vietnam Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 02:30 PM EST The first major article I worked on after joining the American Heritage copy department in 1988 was called “What Should We Tell Our Children About Vietnam?” An Oklahoma schoolteacher who had served in Vietnam wrote to many public figures, asking for advice on what to tell his students, and we published their responses. Many of these were fascinating, but—typically for a publishing employee—what I remember most about this piece was what a monumental pain it was to fit the copy. As the article appeared in our pages, each individual response had its own heading, which was usually four lines deep and needed a couple of lines of text beneath it. Since these heads could not be split by a column break, just about every response had to have lines cut or added. I gave Richard Snow, then our managing editor, a monumentally complicated set of galleys filled with instructions like, “Cut 7 lines total from next 3 items OR add 2 lines to first item.” Richard, in what I would soon come to realize was typical fashion for him, described my efforts as “lapidary.” I had to look it up. Oh, and did I mention that this was the last issue we put together by sending out for type, instead of using our own computers? We would tell the typesetter, “First 6 lines 10.5 picas wide, right justified, followed by 24 lines 21 picas wide,” and if they messed it up or left out a word, we’d have to wait another day for them to do it all over again. Then we would make our cuts and have the typesetters reset the entire thing and fix all their new errors, after which we would make more adds and cuts and send it out again. This was my introduction to publishing. With all these busy memories, you will understand why my recollection of the article itself was rather sketchy. My main impression was of a bunch of blowhards spouting their usual boilerplate. But the other day I came across this article while looking for links to accompany Allen Barra’s review of Rescue Dawn, and as I skimmed through it, the words that in 1988 I had seen essentially as marbles to be fit into a box now sounded a lot more interesting, especially in view of events that have occurred since. The entire article is worth a look, but below are some widely varying viewpoints that struck me as especially telling, in both positive and negative ways. They have been chosen with a mild bias towards respondents who remain prominent today.
Richard Armitage
Naval Operations Coordinator, Defense Attaché Office, Saigon, Vietnam, 1973-75; now Assistant Secretary of Defense
First, the U.S. government was unwilling or, perhaps, unable to articulate effectively goals and objectives for our involvement in Vietnam, thus failing to mobilize public support for this sacrifice. Second, the government failed to realize that Dau Tranh (Vietnamese for “struggle”) had both military and political applications and that the Vietnamese Communists gave equal weight to both sides of this equation. Third, once committed to sacrifice, we did not fight to win because of political constraints. . . . . Patience is not a well-known attribute of democracy; thus a consistent and credible rationale for our actions must be presented to enable the government to continue its course. —————————— Malcolm Browne
Chief Indochina Correspondent, Associated Press, 1961-65; Saigon Correspondent, ABC, 1965-66 Maybe the lesson of Vietnam was this: If you really want to win a war, you’re best off fighting it on your own, with as little help from outside as possible. I watched South Vietnamese fighting spirit evaporate in direct proportion to increases in the level of U.S. aid, combat assistance, and advice that was poured in. It’s just possible that Saigon would have waged a better war if we had simply stayed out. . . . —————————— George Bush
Director, CIA, 1974–75; now Vice-President of the United States —We must ensure that any major foreign policy commitment has the full support and understanding of the American people, for it is through their sons and daughters and their tax dollars that our power and influence are projected. Without such support a protracted U.S. involvement cannot succeed. —The United States must have a clear understanding of the historical processes at work. The United States viewed the Vietnam War as the first step in China’s drive to expand its influence throughout Southeast Asia, forgetting the long history of fighting between China and Vietnam. In fact, Chinese-Vietnamese hostility reemerged soon after our withdrawal. —The United States entered the Vietnam War viewing it as another Korea. In fact, the causes for the war, the topography, and the methods used by the enemy were very different. —The United States essentially fought the war for the South Vietnamese. In future conflicts of this type, every effort must be made to encourage the beleaguered people of a country to fight for their own survival, as is being done in Afghanistan and Nicaragua. —————————— Arthur J. Goldberg
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, 1965–68 The most important lessons for students to learn from the disastrous Vietnam War: One, America should never be involved in a war where its vital national interests are not at stake. Two, our country should never engage in a war which is not declared by Congress in a formal declaration, as required by our Constitution. —————————— Barry Goldwater
U.S. Senator from Arizona, 1953–65,1969–87 The best thing I could tell your students is that when you decide to go to war, you must at the same instant decide to win it. It’s just like having a fight with another fellow: If you go into it halfheartedly, you’re going to get the daylights beat out of you. That’s about what happened in Vietnam. We had some brilliant victories over there, but we also had some dreadful decisions made in Washington, relative to our efforts. —————————— Timothy Leary
Producer of Psychedelic Celebrations, 1965–66; wrote and acted in the film Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out It was a disastrous, insane, imperial invasion of a weirdo Third World country. It will leave a deep scar in the American soul for one generation. Trust the CIA, not the military, for estimates about military events. —————————— John S. McCain III
Prisoner of War, Vietnam, 1967–73; now U.S. Senator from Arizona Following the end to U.S. involvement in Indochina, Gen. Maxwell Taylor stated the conditions under which he thought it was appropriate to commit U.S. troops overseas. I subscribe to General Taylor’s criteria and believe these maxims must be adhered to in the wake of our misfortunes in Vietnam. First, the objectives of the commitment must be explainable to the man in the street in one or two sentences. Second, there must be clear support of the President by Congress. Third, there must be reasonable expectation of success. Finally, there must be a clear American interest at stake. —————————— John D. Negroponte
Second Secretary for the Department of State in Saigon, 1964—68; U.S. Delegate to the Paris Peace Talks, 1968–69 I think the most important thing for your students to know about the Vietnam War is that the United States lost. For countries, just like individuals, I think that learning the true meaning of the maxim “You can’t win them all” is an inevitable part of the maturation process. . . . But most important of all, I think we picked a difficult fight in a very faraway place. I am sure the results will help ensure that we pick our fights more carefully in the future. —————————— George S. Patton
Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, 1962–63; Commanding Officer, llth Armored Cavalry Regiment, Vietnam, 1968–69 The most important point your students must understand, is that because of our defeat in so-called limited warfare by an eighth-rate power (if that high), our enemies have discovered an Achilles’ heel and are putting it to us in Central America today. We have demonstrated a weakness in this type of conflict, and they are capitalizing on that weakness. Because of that, some blood may be spilled in that area in the future, if we have to invade. Cuba is the problem—not Nicaragua. —————————— Nicholas Proffitt
Newsweek Bureau Chief, Saigon, 1972 There were no “good guys” or “bad guys” in Vietnam. There were good people and evil people on both sides. You know the story of the American Revolution. To most of the Vietcong, we Americans were the British. They were the Americans. —————————— Ronald Reagan
Governor of California, 1967–74; now President of the United States Vietnam was not so much a war as it was one long battle in an ongoing war—the war in defense of freedom, which is still under assault. This battle was lost not by those brave American and South Vietnamese troops who were waging it but by political misjudgments and strategic failure at the highest levels of government. The tragedy—indeed, the immorality—of those years was that for the first time in our history our country and its government failed to match the heroic sacrifice of our men in the field. This must never happen again. —————————— Elliot L. Richardson
Secretary of Defense, 1973; U.S. Attorney General, 1973 First, today’s junior high students should understand that the United States should never undertake a military action that cannot, whether for military or political reasons, be successfully carried out. Second, because there are many situations like Vietnam and Nicaragua where decisive U.S. military action is not appropriate or feasible, the United States needs to exert effective leadership in pursuing alternative means of protecting its security interests. —————————— Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Author and historian; Special Assistant to the President, 1961–64 It is a great mistake for the United States to get involved in any war beyond its zone of direct and vital interests. We are not world saviors—either in Vietnam in the 1960s or in the Persian Gulf in the 1980s. —————————— William C. Westmoreland
Commander, U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, 1964–68; Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, 1968–72 The Vietnam War was a limited war, with limited objectives, prosecuted by limited means, with limited public support. Therefore, it was destined to be (and was) a long war, a war so long that public support waned and political decisions by the Congress terminated our involvement, resulting in a victory by the North Vietnamese Communists. The military did not lose a battle of consequence and did not lose the war. The war was lost by congressional actions withdrawing support to the South Vietnamese government despite commitments by President Nixon.
July 18, 2007
The Roberts Book Is Actually Kind of Lame Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 04:45 PM EST A few months ago the contributors to this blog weighed in with their opinions on A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, by Andrew Roberts. While the discussion was vigorous, it was handicapped somewhat by the fact that none of us had actually read the book. With the superhuman perseverance for which I am so justly famed, I have finally managed to finish it, and I can report that while it does have its virtues, the book ultimately amounts to more of an argument than a history, and not always an effective one. Roberts’s main points are that (1) the English-speaking peoples—the U.S.A., Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the West Indies, to which the author grudgingly adds Ireland and South Africa—had a better twentieth century than any other major linguistic group, and (2) the “special relationship” between the United States and Britain has been, and continues to be, of immense value to both nations and to the world as a whole. Domestically, he says, the Anglophones’ commitment to personal liberty and free markets has made them world leaders in culture and technology, while globally, their commitment to supporting and spreading democracy has been and remains the world’s greatest force for good. At first glance, neither proposition sounds all that controversial. Regarding (1), who had a better century? Surely not the German-, Japanese-, Russian-, Chinese-, or Arabic-speaking peoples. Not the Spanish, French, or Italians either. Looking down the list of world languages in the almanac, even if you could somehow turn “Indian-speaking” into a qualifying group, the subcontinent has had only a so-so record since the 1940s; the Portuguese-speaking peoples can claim few major achievements outside the soccer field; and while the Korean-speaking peoples have accomplished much in the face of great adversity, there’s no overlooking Kim Jong Il. As for (2), while Roberts’s chapter about the War on Terror is open to debate, the Anglos were unquestionably on the right side in both world wars and the many Cold War proxy conflicts, even if their methods and allies were not always impeccable. From this standpoint, Roberts is making an argument that only a crazy person or a college professor would disagree with. To be sure, the book has its flaws. Factual errors are quite common; I noticed a dozen or so in areas I happened to be familiar with, and a comprehensive list would probably number in the hundreds. Some of these are minor, some less so, and while none are big enough to invalidate the author’s argument, they do combine to undercut his authority. (Roberts’s comment on a recent article by William Boyd, with which Roberts disagrees strongly, is applicable here: “Boyd’s article was replete with factual errors, but that did not detract from the passion of [his] thesis.”) In the later chapters especially, the writing becomes scattershot, as Roberts free-associates like a modern-day blogger on whatever topic springs to mind: Three paragraphs on America’s oversupply of lawyers followed by two paragraphs on the Channel tunnel; a page on aboriginal rights in Australia, then a page defending American-style fast food, then a single paragraph summing up the 1968 Presidential election. There’s also a peculiar digression on how the Watergate affair would not have been a problem if the United States were a constitutional monarchy. And he makes bizarrely frequent mention of bets on various world events that are recorded in the archives of a London gentlemen’s club, apparently expecting us to be interested. But the biggest problem is that the book is so proudly, massively, aggressively one-sided. Roberts makes some good big-picture points that tend to get overlooked—reminding us, for example, of what a long and destructive struggle of attrition the Cold War was (in which context the Vietnam War was not a total defeat, because it prevented Communism from spreading across all of Southeast Asia); how consistent, if sometimes unrealistic, the Anglophones’ global commitment to freedom has been; how benign American and British colonial practices were in comparison with those of other nations; and how noble and brave the citizens, armed forces, and military and civilian leaders of the Anglosphere were during both World Wars. Points like these can easily get lost in the tight focus of much historical writing, and Roberts deserves praise for reminding us of them. Unfortunately, though, the book reads like a lawyer’s closing argument, with every scrap of positive evidence overemphasized and anything that’s negative either belittled or ignored. In this book, virtually every action taken by British Conservatives and American Republicans is good, the only exceptions coming when they fail to be interventionist enough abroad or laissez-faire enough at home. Labourites and Democrats are cut less slack but still given credit, in most cases, for good intentions, as well as for upholding the rule of law and fighting totalitarianism. But when it comes to certain unquestionably ugly features of history, instead of confronting them squarely, Roberts spares no effort to come up with creative excuses for why they really weren’t all that bad. In his discussion of America’s civil-rights movement, he asserts that “the English-speaking peoples’ tradition of protest,” as exemplified by Gandhi and his followers, “goes some way towards counterbalancing” America’s centuries of slavery and racism, since Martin Luther King and his allies were big Gandhi fans. Oh, and non-English-speaking countries treated their minority groups worse than we did—even worse than South Africa (where, by the way, “it was the English-speaking community that tended to oppose apartheid”). Moreover, “In the so-called McCarthyite ‘terror’, no-one was sent to any gulags or forced to till the permafrosted soil of Alaska, and there were no deportations, tortures, internments or attempts to revoke the US citizenship . . . even of the pro-Stalinist [Bertolt] Brecht.” So that’s all right then. You get the idea. All of what Roberts says is important and much of it is accurate, but the book is written to persuade, not to inform. This makes it no different from much modern historical writing, whether it’s “A People’s History of Such-and-such” or “A Politically Incorrect Guide to So-and-so,” whether a compendium of France’s historical sins against America or the latest fulmination from a tenured Marxist (and these days there are very few non-tenured ones). Roberts’s evident purpose is to counteract the constant stream of anti-Western books and articles that, in his view, tend to dominate public discussions of history. There’s certainly something in that. In the end, though, a book of history must be more than a collection of mostly reliable facts. To buy an author’s argument, you have to trust him to give both sides, and in this book Roberts brings up opposing views only for the purpose of dismissing them. That won’t do. Roberts is a man of impressively broad knowledge who writes clearly and with vigor, but readers will put down his book wondering how much he left out. If he would apply his many talents to writing an even-handed history, one that acknowledged the English-speaking peoples’ flaws and missteps while balancing them against their strengths and accomplishments, he could make most of the same points much more convincingly. As it stands, though, wherever you dip into the book, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that Roberts is trying to pull a fast one.
July 6, 2007
The Questionably Quotable Quaker Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 02:00 PM EST I guess we can all be thankful that Daniel Webster did not inspire Fred Smoler strongly enough to make him become a lawyer. As it happens, I also used this Fourth of July to check out a corny work of patriotism: The movie version of 1776, a musical about the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. My first reaction was to agree with Wilfrid Sheed that Broadway lyricists are the spawn of Satan. As released to cinemas in 1972, after a long Broadway run, 1776 was a shade over two hours long, but the “director’s version” I saw contained lots of material that was cut from the original, and it clocked in at a hefty 2:40. My parents got a bit drowsy as midnight came and went, but I managed to stay awake by counting the historical solecisms (which were numerous but mostly minor and, I’ll concede, excusable in the interests of dramatic necessity). As the movie wore on (and on), I found myself wishing that the musical interludes could have been replaced by anything else, even commercials. While the scenes with dialogue are quite brisk, every 10 minutes or so the characters break into a profoundly unmemorable song*, and the movie stops dead until it’s over. 1776 is an example of why the old-fashioned musical has gone the way of the Volkswagen van: It must be done well to work at all, and first-rate composers and lyricists now have better (or at least more lucrative) things to do than write for the theater. But initiates into the Broadway-musical cult think that setting any story to music somehow sanctifies it, like a priest blessing a suburban community’s motorboat fleet. The Turner Classic Movies host said that Jack L. Warner, the producer of 1776, screened the film before its release for President Richard M. Nixon, who suggested numerous cuts. Warner followed the President’s directions, and the slimmed-down result moved along much better than the uncut version. As would be true with the Watergate transcripts a year later, Nixon showed a deft editorial touch. (Now there’s an alternative-history premise for you: Smoler becomes a lawyer and Nixon becomes an editor.) Anyway, the musical opened on Broadway in 1969 and ran for several years. Given the political climate of those times, as Fred Smoler describes in his recent entry, I had to wonder how such a pro-war, flag-waving musical could have been so popular. Were audiences supposed to see the plucky, underdog, guerrilla-fighting American colonists in the role of the North Vietnamese? Perhaps. It’s easy to romanticize revolutionaries indiscriminately, like the guy in the bottom picture on this page, a pro-democracy demonstrator in Hong Kong who is burning a Communist flag while wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt. What struck me most in watching 1776, though, was one specific line that probably made little impression on 1960s audiences but would create quite a stir today. During the debate over whether to risk a ruinous war with Great Britain, Benjamin Franklin quotes a line of his that we’ve all been hearing a lot lately: “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” Now, after reading Allen Barra’s latest entry, I am extremely wary of attributing quotations to Early American figures. This is especially true for Franklin, who is the Yogi Berra of the Revolutionary Era, except more so: Not only did he never say half the things he said, but as I brilliantly pointed out a few years back, many of the things he did say were stolen. Sure enough, according to the infallible Wikipedia, which links to this rambling but informative piece, the attribution of this quote to Franklin is dubious—though, ironically, the actual author of record may have lifted it from Franklin to begin with. Authenticity aside, Franklin speaks this line in 1776, and if the show were being performed on Broadway today, one can imagine the handful of New Yorkers in the audience giving it a tumultuous ovation. But what was Franklin really saying? The opposite of what that quotation is interpreted to mean today: He was saying that sometimes you have to go to war instead of appeasing the enemy.** It’s essentially the same slogan as “Give me liberty or give me death.” Shifting connotations attached to the words “liberty” and “security” (which is the usual modern paraphrase for “safety” in this quote) have had the result of reversing the original meaning. Indeed, as a diligent but plodding American Heritage staff member once wrote, Franklin showed little respect for our modern notion of privacy when he purchased stolen personal letters and published their contents to advance the Revolutionary cause. Not that it matters. The debate over civil liberties and national security will not hinge on whether Franklin did or did not say something fallaciously apposite-sounding in an entirely different context 230-odd years ago. One could cite the same quote, or many similar ones from equally impressive sources that were spoken during the debate over independence, to support today’s War on Terror, and it would mean just as little. History has many functions besides its main one, which is simply to be interesting. It provides perspective, makes us re-examine our beliefs, suggests contingencies we may have overlooked and possibilities we should consider, reminds us of fundamental truths about human nature, and in many cases shows us how lucky we are to live in the present day. But all these things apply only in a broad sense. Once you start making direct substitutions between past and present, like “King X equals President Y” or “poor people in 1789 equal poor people today,” the result is as weak as when a freshman literature major writes “shooting victim = Jesus” or “banker represents capitalism” in the margins of the books on his Introduction to the Novel reading list. Franklin was a very smart man, but he was not clairvoyant. There’s no telling what he (or Lincoln or Emerson or any other frequently misquoted American) would have thought or said about anything in our modern world. And in cases like this where the attribution is uncertain at best, the wording is deceptive, and the circumstances to which it applies are vastly different—reducing a historic quotation to a bumper-sticker slogan sets back the cause of reasoned debate instead of advancing it. -------------------- * The songs are occasionally amusing for the wrong reason, as in one number where John Adams and the spirit of his wife (who is at home in Massachusetts) sing about how much they yearn for each other, mentally and physically. Mrs. Adams sings that she feels like “a nun in a cloister,” whereupon John replies that he feels like “a monk in an abbey.” Considering that his wife’s first name is Abigail, I consider this a poor choice of words. ** Nor has history borne out the suggestion that lost national security is temporary but lost civil rights are permanent. Every one of this country’s major wars has been accompanied by large-scale civil-rights violations, which have always been reversed when the crisis ended.
June 26, 2007
Sucker MC’s Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 02:10 PM EST In today’s feature article, Fredric Smoler introduces his review of Michael Chabon’s new novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, with some general remarks on alternative history. Along the way he says: “Almost no writer of the first rank has ever worked this vein. Kingsley Amis is one partial exception, back in 1976, with The Alteration, but the only other example is Philip Roth, in 2004, with The Plot Against America.” Shortly after reading this, I flipped through the latest catalogue from the Library of America, which describes its mission as “preserv[ing] our nation’s cultural heritage by publishing authoritative editions of America’s best and most significant writing . . . from Thomas Jefferson and Henry James to Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin, and Robert Frost . . .” Among the recent additions to this exclusive company, as listed in the catalogue, are collections of Edmund Wilson, John Steinbeck, Thornton Wilder, Saul Bellow—all staples of freshman English—along with Jack Kerouac, who doesn’t have to be good because he’s influential, and the Smoler-certified Philip Roth. And when you turn the page from Roth, you see Philip K. Dick. Remember that weird kid with the glasses in high school who was so geeky that even you could make fun of him? Odds are he was always carrying a Philip K. Dick novel. Now that kid is grown up and has a beautiful wife and his own software firm, and the Library of America has just reprinted four of Dick’s 1960s novels. Among them is The Man in the High Castle (1962), which, according to the catalogue copy, “describes an alternate world in which Japan and Germany have won World War II and America is divided into separate occupation zones.” Now, I’ve never read any Philip K. Dick, and I don’t want to, so I won’t try to make a case for whether he is or is not a “writer of the first rank.” It is clear, though, that a lot of people think he was very good—including Fred Smoler, who in this round-up called The Man in the High Castle “first a cult classic, now simply a classic, a novel about America after Germany and Japan won World War II.” Which brings us to the conclusion of Smoler’s review today: “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, however, confirms that Chabon is a major American writer. That he has recently been slyly working in low genres may keep a few snobbish readers from realizing how good he is for a little while longer, but probably not for much longer.” Is Chabon demonstrably “major”? Are there any absolute standards besides taste by which contemporary writers can be judged? I think not. Consider the case of Ian McEwan, for example. A few years back a friend picked up one of his novels in a bookstore, read the first chapter, and was so enthralled that he bought the book and gave it to me. I read the same first chapter and hated it so much that I stopped right there. Now McEwan has another novel out, and reviewers are going into hysterics. They quote sentences like, “She found it an ordeal to be in the street, walking toward a friend from a distance” or “He trod on the backs of his shoes to wrench them from his feet, and snatched his socks off with quick jabs of his thumbs,” citing them as examples of the author’s “genius for the poignantly observed psychological detail” and “supreme attentiveness that goes into crafting a sentence.” To me, these sentences are no more impressive than saying, “I bought a hot dog and ate it.” Does this make me a snob? No, I just don’t like Ian McEwan. And people who don’t like Michael Chabon just don’t like Michael Chabon. In the long run, the only way to say for sure that a writer is major (which is not the same as being good) is if his or her works are still available decades later. This uses what is effectively a popular vote, the only objective method, to decide, but restricts the franchise to literature lovers, the only people who buy books that are more than a few years old. Will Chabon make the cut 40 years from now? At this point it’s a matter of guesswork. And—a different question—is Dick not only major but “of the first rank”? Here, as with Chabon and McEwan and every other writer, past and present, it’s simply a matter of opinion.
June 14, 2007
The Frost of Yesteryear Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 10:40 AM EST Publishers send me a lot of books. Usually I spend a minute or two flipping through the pages before deciding whether to keep or discard them. A few months back I got uncorrected proofs of a forthcoming book called The Conviction of Richard Nixon. Hmm, I thought, the title is certainly intriguing. Is it an imaginary trial, written by a lawyer perhaps? An account of the congressional investigations of 1973-74? An episode from his earlier career? Some sort of alternative history? On closer inspection, I was disappointed; it seemed to be just another rehash of Watergate. And when I looked closer, it was even less promising: A rehash not of the scandal itself but of David Frost’s 1977 interviews with Nixon. The idea, evidently, was that Frost had “convicted” Nixon in some unspecified fashion. An entire book about some interviews? I dropped it in my wastebasket. Imagine my surprise, then, when a play based on that book opened on Broadway this spring. In fact, Frank Langella, who plays Nixon, has just won a Tony Award.* And now there’s an interview on this site in which the author and our own Allen Barra discuss the Frost/Nixon encounter as if it were the most important event in the history of the Republic. Now, I was around in 1977—not yet old enough to vote, but not much younger than at least one of my fellow bloggers today—and I distinctly remember how disappointing everyone found the interviews. Nixon admitted things he had to admit because they were on tape, said he couldn’t remember other stuff, came up with some bogus rationalizations, confessed to errors in judgment, and made the obligatory show of contrition. In other words, Tricky Dick had been his usual Nixonian self, evasive and unrevealing. Despite his histrionics, the interviews added up to a big nothingburger, with plenty of cheese. To be sure, memory can be deceptive, especially after so many years. For example, Mr. Reston says in his interview that “no one ever accused Richard Nixon of being an idiot,” which I know for a fact is not true; in my youth, people did it all the time. So I looked at newspapers from when the interviews were broadcast. (I used the New York Times, which in those long-gone days was liberal but not left-wing, because that’s what the Forbes library has on microfilm.) Sure enough, the reaction was one of disappointment. According to an unsigned item in the Week in Review section, “the spectacle was a familiar one . . . Mr. Nixon moved closer than ever before to admitting culpability in the Watergate cover-up, but he insisted, as before, that he was guilty of no crime and portrayed himself, in typically Nixonian terms and gestures, as a victim of circumstance whose errors sprang from good intentions. . . . No important factual information about Watergate emerged from the interview.” If Nixon was “convicted,” it was the tapes that did it. In the Frost interviews he accepted responsibility without blame, admitted mistakes but not criminal acts, and said he had resigned voluntarily to spare the nation further turmoil. Nothing new, nothing unexpected. Viewers were unimpressed; ratings declined sharply for later installments in the series, and a poll taken afterwards showed a small decline in Nixon’s “highly unfavorable” rating, from 47 to 42 percent. How did this damp squib become a watershed, a momentous turning point, a landmark in the history of the Presidency? At first glance, the case resembles that of another play currently running on Broadway, Inherit the Wind. As is well documented (here and here, for example), most contemporary observers, including H. L. Mencken, saw the Scopes Trial as a victory for creationism; no one thought Clarence Darrow had shown up William Jennings Bryan. But later historians ignored all this and portrayed the trial the way they wished it had been. There are some similarities between that and the Nixon interviews, though the Scopes Trial got enormously more publicity when it happened, and I’m sure that Frost/Nixon does a better job of sticking to the truth (it could hardly do worse). Yet I think a closer Broadway parallel lies in the recent rash of “jukebox musicals,” in which the works of ABBA or Billy Joel are woven in a story and performed on stage every night. We all know that nothing is as good as it was when you were young; the girls were prettier back then, the music was better, and the politics were more exciting and clear-cut. So now that the 1970s are in the ascendant with Broadway’s graying audiences, why not generate another batch of retro kicks with a show based on the decade’s greatest political hit, Watergate? As Mr. Reston points out, Watergate “put the nation through a terrible agony”—so terrible and agonizing that Democrats have been gleefully reliving it ever since. Cherry-pick the best moments, embed them in a backstory, hire some impersonators, and you’ve got a Broadway hit. In politics as in music, the worn-out schtick of the late 1970s seems fresh and new when it’s been out of circulation for a while. And, truth be told, we all find ourselves humming “Dancing Queen” and “Only the Good Die Young” once in a while. So there’s no harm in reliving your youth by wallowing in Richard Nixon’s reptilian charm one more time. Like Billy Joel and ABBA, it’s a guilty pleasure—though if Nixon were around today, he would be sure to dispute the “guilty” part. --------------------- * I’m sure Langella does a great job, though in my childhood, Nixon was the easiest person in the world to imitate. All you had to do was puff out your cheeks and say, “Let me make one thing perfectly clear” in a gruff voice, and you had him dead on. If you were going all out, you made V signs with your fingers--in fact, if you did that and glowered, you could imitate Nixon silently. I’m also just barely old enough to remember when people used to imitate LBJ. That might have been even easier: Just put on any sort of Southern accent, however fake, and people in our far-from-cosmopolitan little Northeastern town, where the very idea of a Southern accent was inherently hilarious, would laugh uproariously. It still worked a decade later when Jimmy Carter was President. There was a commercial for frozen waffles in which a Southern-accented mother told her husband that she’d just made waffles in the toaster, whereupon her twin little girls chimed in with: “An’ weeee he’ped!” This always put me and my siblings out of commission for the next five minutes. For the whole time I was in middle school, all you had to do was say, “An’ weeee he’ped!,” even if it made no sense in the context, and people would think you were the next Richard Pryor.
June 8, 2007
The Partly Cloudy Crystal Ball Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 02:15 PM EST Dean Martin’s favorite hangover cure was simple: “Stay drunk.” In similar fashion, the best way to reduce the stress of moving is never to unpack. I should know that by now, because office changes have been lamentably frequent at American Heritage in recent years. Still, there are benefits to opening up your archives every now and then. Recently, in the course of moving to a new office two doors down the hall, I found myself sorting through boxes and bags and piles of assorted stuff that I had saved for one reason or another. Amid the dusty Pez dispensers, cryptic smudged notes about long-forgotten projects, and spare floppy disks saved against a possible shortage, I found scores of photocopied pages from newspapers, magazines, and books that had struck me as worth saving. Many of these pages contain predictions, which automatically become interesting once they reach a certain age, whether they’re right or wrong. Some are amusing, like this, from the Washington Post shortly after the 1946 elections: “One of Massachusetts’ most eligible bachelors--handsome, 6-foot John F. (Jack) Kennedy--will be one of the youngest members of the new Congress. But the social lions of the Washington ‘Cocktail Circuit’ may be in for a disappointment, for the serious-minded 29-year-old son of the former Ambassador has little time for anything but work.” All work and no play would have made Jack a dull boy, so he seems to have found time to do a bit of dating. Others are more grim, like this, from Harper’s Weekly in 1899, during the anti-Semitic Dreyfus affair in France: “It is immensely to the credit of our present civilization that such an atrocity cannot be committed by any people with impunity. The world did not care, a few centuries ago, what any particular country did with its Jews. Now no nation can deny to one Jew even, the means of justice, and escape the condemnation of her sisters, so sensitive is the world-mind, and so closely knit have humanity become.” Some prophecies are harder to evaluate. Consider this editorial from the New York Times on December 31, 1899, looking back over the previous century and making predictions for the one ahead: “Through agitation and conflict European nations are working toward an ultimate harmony of interests and purposes, and bringing awakened Asia into the sweeping current of progress. Light has been let into the ‘Dark Continent’ beyond the ancient borders and is rapidly spreading. America is facing westward and beginning to take its part in carrying the regenerating forces of popular government to the uttermost parts of the earth. Notwithstanding the bloody conflicts through which some of the steps of progress must still be made, the ‘vision of the world’ grows clearer toward the time when ‘The war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle-flags were furled / In the parliament of man, the federation of the world / There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe / And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.’” (The quote is from Tennyson, “Locksley Hall,” 1842.) Whoever wrote that editorial should make up horoscopes, because it’s ambiguous enough to fit just about any outcome. The world will experience more fighting, it says, but eventually war will become obsolete. That’s pretty much what happened in Western Europe in the 20th century, though I suspect that they spilled more blood getting there, and that the rest of the world has been much slower to get with the program, than the editorialist would have thought. A quarter-century later, following the industrial-scale slaughter of World War I and the false hope of its aftermath, Aldous Huxley wrote in Along the Road (1925): “A drive from the Belgian frontier to the Mediterranean puts life and meaning into those statistics from which we learn, academically and in theory, that France is under-populated. Long stretches of open road extend between town and town . . . even the villages are few and far between . . . Driving through the fertile plains of Central France, one can turn one’s eyes over the fields and scarcely see a house. And then, what forests still grow on French soil!” Meanwhile, Huxley continues, “every three years a million brand new Teutons peer across the Rhine, a million Italians are wondering where they are going to find room, in their narrow country, to live. And there are no more Frenchmen. Twenty years hence, what will happen? The French Government offers prizes to those who produce large families. In vain; everybody knows all about birth control and even in the least educated classes there are no prejudices and a great deal of thrift. Hordes of blackamoors are drilled and armed; but blackamoors can be but a poor defence, in the long run, against European philoprogenitiveness. Sooner or later, this half-empty land will be colonized. It may be done peacefully, it may be done with violence; let us hope peacefully, with the consent and at the invitation of the French themselves. Already the French import, temporarily, I forget how many foreign labourers every year. In time, no doubt, the foreigners will begin to settle: the Italians in the south, the Germans in the east, the Belgians in the north, perhaps even a few English in the west. Frenchmen may not like the plan; but until all nations agree to practise birth control to exactly the same extent, it is the best that can be devised.” Like the Times editorialist, Huxley got enough right to avoid looking foolish, but not enough to qualify as a prophet. Within Huxley’s twenty-year time frame, France was indeed “colonized” by its friends from across the Rhine, and today, as predicted, citizens from all over Europe live and work in France (and vice versa). But birth control has overcome philoprogenitiveness all across the continent, and in France the population shortage has been made up by admitting large numbers of the “blackamoors” Huxley derided, along with their Muslim cousins from North Africa, leading to social strains he never envisioned. Moreover, the great majority of these immigrants have settled not in la France profonde but in the cities. All this ties in with what Fred Smoler wrote about in his review of Max Boot’s latest book. In the late 19th and early 20th century, all the world’s problems seemed to be caused by nations acting badly, and the only hope for a solution was to make them behave better and then spread their good habits to the heathen. Even the Harper’s Weekly writer saw anti-Semitism as something that was committed by nations and would be eradicated by them. There is much truth in this. The pacification of large parts of the world has, indeed, come about largely through international agreements and global bodies. Yet trends that the Times writer and Huxley could not foresee--terrorism, widespread birth control in Europe, mass migration--have occurred through the individual choices of millions of people, usually against the wishes of governments, and often through allegiances based not on geography or nationhood but on religion, ancestry, ideology, and shared hatreds. Even when you know a change is coming, though, it’s hard to tell how it will affect the world in the long run. Will the Internet turn us into a single worldwide community, with everybody giggling at the same cheesy videos? Or will it splinter us further, creating transnational enthusiast groups whose members never have to talk to anyone else? It’s hard to say. I could conclude with a long-range prediction, secure in the knowledge that I will be dead by its effective date, except there’s no telling how long we’ll all live with modern medicine. So instead I will take the advice of George Eliot, who wrote in Middlemarch: “Among all forms of error, prophecy is the most gratuitous.”
June 5, 2007
Smoking Is the New Smoking Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 12:45 PM EST Has anyone mentioned that Josh Zeitz has a new book out? Oh, they have? Well, I’ll do it again. The book is called White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics, and the Shaping of Postwar Politics, and it shows an exquisite understanding of the intertwining currents of religion, national origin, culture, and global affairs. The passage that caught my attention, though, has nothing to do with any of those things. It occurs during a discussion of the restrictive rules that governed college students’ personal lives in the 1960s: “At Barnard—Columbia University’s all-women’s affiliate—a man could visit a woman’s dormitory room at set hours, but three of the couple’s four legs had to be touching the floor at all times as a preventative against premarital sex.” Three legs on the floor? I’m not sure I can even picture that. And the rule seems pointless in any case, since you can get the job done with four legs on the floor if you use a little imagination. I asked our editor, Richard Snow, a 1970 Columbia graduate, whether he has any recollection of this rule. He says he doesn’t, though he also admits that he spent distressingly little time in Barnard dormitory rooms. The days of in loco parentis are long gone, of course. Today colleges give away condoms (to students paying $50,000 tuition) and hire speakers to demonstrate sex toys. You can bring anyone you want to your room and put all four legs on or off the floor, or even six, and the only thing that will get you in trouble is the cigarette afterwards. That’s because smoking is now completely prohibited in all Barnard campus buildings—and outdoors too, except in a couple of small, marked areas (though students usually just step onto the sidewalk outside the college’s gates). Back in the 1920s things were different. As explained a while ago in our “Time Machine” column (scroll down), in 1922 most colleges prohibited smoking by women. Even liberated Wellesley, Vassar, Bryn Mawr, and Smith expelled students who smoked, with the punishment in all cases assessed by a tribunal of fellow students. (Josh Zeitz probably has a section on smoking in his book about flappers, but I don’t have a copy of that handy.) New York City actually enacted a law banning public smoking by women, though it was quickly abandoned. At Barnard, however, smoking was permitted without restriction. As late as the 1970s, the ideal of empowerment through tobacco formed the entire marketing approach of one pseudo-feminist cigarette brand, and a dangling cigarette was part of the Barnard uniform, along with the leather jacket, black velvet dress, and mesh stockings with a hole in one knee. But today on Barnard’s campus, you might just as well wear a Rush Limbaugh T-shirt as light up a smoke. Across the street at Columbia, things are more relaxed: You can smoke in most outdoor locations and even in your dormitory room. With etchings out of style, this freedom could provide a new pick-up approach for Columbia men, who, if Richard’s and my experience is any guide, need all the help they can get.
May 31, 2007
Don’t Bogart That Point Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 04:00 PM EST The Motion Picture Association of America recently decided to be more aggressive about giving R ratings to films that include smoking. In the June 11 issue of National Review, Rob Long comments on this policy. (The article is available online only to subscribers.) Long scoffs at the idea that characters who smoke on-screen cause viewers to do the same: “Smoking isn’t cool because people do it in movies. People do it in movies because it’s cool.” The reason so many characters light up in films, he says, is that smoking injects some movement—”business,” in actors' lingo—into what otherwise would be a static scene of talking heads: “It draws attention inexorably to the smoker and away from whatever mediocre dialogue he or she is forced to say . . .” This is a good point—so good, in fact, that Fred Andersen made it in an article called “Smoking and ‘Business’” in the pages of American Heritage nine years ago, back when American Heritage actually had pages. Unsurprisingly, both articles invoke Humphrey Bogart, who lit up so often on screen that his characteristic smoking style has become a verb.
With this new ratings policy, as usually happens, social reformers have chosen a heavy-handed command-and-control scheme to attack a problem that was well on the way to solving itself. The main use of smoking in film is to break up long, dialogue-heavy scenes, and when’s the last time you saw one of those in a movie aimed at teenagers? Moreover, when’s the last time you saw a movie that wasn’t aimed at teenagers? These days you’re lucky (or unlucky, considering the quality of most movie dialogue) if a character speaks two consecutive sentences without something blowing up or somebody demonstrating a bodily function. Still, the decision has been made, and filmmakers will just have to cope. What can replace smoking? Andersen suggests drinking, even if it’s fruit juice, but that would quickly become conspicuous, and it doesn’t always fit the action. Cat’s-cradle would work nicely, and tying a bow tie would be my first choice, but I have to admit that these things work in an even narrower range of circumstances. How about rock/paper/scissors? It’s getting more popular every day, with championship tournaments and frequent pop-culture references. The trouble with r/p/s is that it takes two people, so it wouldn’t work for the type of scene where an anguished character pours out his or her soul. A bold conceptual filmmaker might have his characters use 1960s-Motown-style hand motions, like the Supremes backing up Diana Ross on “Love Child.” For most films, though, this would be a distraction; rhythmically imitating a football referee only works if you have music to do it along with. My nominee for Hollywood’s “business” activity of the future is knitting. It’s trendy, especially in the film industry, so the characters wouldn’t have to worry about looking like dorks. As with smoking, it can be done anywhere at any time for no particular reason. And it’s innocuous enough that no self-appointed censor of right or left can possibly object to it. In fact, knitting has already been used in many films, as these fans can attest. So knitting is the perfect choice as the favorite shortcut for future filmmakers who need to get around a boring screenplay—unless some future researcher discovers that it causes carpal tunnel syndrome.
May 23, 2007
That’s So Last Year Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 10:45 AM EST That barely perceptible laughter you hear is the staff of American Heritage expressing very restrained amusement over that fact that after spending decades covering history, we are about to become history ourselves. You’ll understand, I’m sure, if the irony is lost on us, though I have to admit it is a hell of a gag. In fact, you know who would think it’s really funny? Javier Solana. Solana’s job title is European Union High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, and if you think he’s stealing money because the EU doesn’t have a common foreign and security policy, don’t worry; he has half a dozen other titles, all equally Ruritanian. Anyway, last October, in a bilingual speech dealing mainly with the Middle East and Africa, Solana couldn’t resist throwing in the obligatory anti-American cheap shot (this is the one area where Europe really does have a common policy): “When Americans say ‘That is history,’ they often mean it is no longer relevant. When Europeans say ‘That is history,’ they usually mean the opposite.” Charlemagne, the Economist’s Europe columnist, called Solano’s remark a “neat turn of phrase,” which suggests that Charlemagne does not get out much. Ever since “____ is history” became a catch phrase—in the early 1980s, as I recall—history teachers, academics, convention orators, and editorial writers have been lamenting that its use signals Americans’ contempt for the past, a regrettable trait to which just about any supposed ill, as viewed from the left or the right, can be attributed. There was a time not so long ago when half the articles we got in the mail began with that phrase (the other half began with William Faulkner’s quote “The past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past”). In real life, however, calling something history does not signify disdain, nor does it imply that the object of the epithet is irrelevant. All it means is that it’s finished. (Peter Morance, our old art director, once suggested that we run an obituary column called “You’re History.”) It’s a pointless word substitution that’s meant to sound snappy, the way sportswriters will say the Brewers “own” a 28-18 record instead of “have.” It can also be used in a menacing way, as in yesterday’s paper, when Amy Fisher said of her lover Joey Buttafuoco’s wife, from whom Joey was supposed to be estranged but isn’t: “She’s messing up my life. She’s history.” This is probably just a rhetorical threat, though with Amy you never know. Most often, when somebody says that something is history, they simply mean that it’s over and done with and can’t be changed. Consider, for example, this quote from Javier Solana himself, in a speech at Belgrade in December 2004: “Nine years ago, almost to the day, IFOR deployed its first contingency to Bosnia-Herzegovina in order to implement the Dayton Agreement. A day very difficult to forget for the citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina. A day very difficult to forget for me. But all that is history. Today we gather here to look to the future.” Or this one, again from Javier Solana, in an interview conducted in late 2005: “Those leaders are obliged to convince their people that history is history, and, if they want a future, that they have to take decisions that are sometimes difficult, but, no doubt, far better for generations to come.” So let’s get something straight. When anybody, American or not, says that something is history, it isn’t necessarily meant to be derogatory or dismissive. All it means is that the speaker has a weakness for phrases gleaned from talk radio. Despite their unaccountable failure to embrace our magazine, Americans are not any less appreciative of history than Europeans; if they were, why would every home-run record for switch-hitting catchers and every election of the first Croatian-American highway superintendent be described as “historic”? But don’t expect the Europeans to pay any attention; they never do. In fact, I’m sure that at this very moment, somewhere in Europe, some scholar with a doctorate from the Sorbonne is writing a treatise analyzing the hermeneutical implications of “Gag me with a spoon” and “Where’s the beef?”
May 9, 2007
Branch Rickey, Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman: An Interview with Lee Lowenfish Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 10:55 PM EST Baseball, and all of America, recently celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s major-league debut. When he ran onto the field with the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947, he became the first African-American to play in the majors since the 1880s. The executive who signed him was Branch Rickey, and just as there is much more to Jackie Robinson than his time with the Dodgers—from his multi-sport stardom at UCLA and his defiance of segregation in the Army to his later career as a businessman and civil rights activist—there is also much more to Branch Rickey than the personnel move for which he remains so justly famous. Lee Lowenfish has spent a decade researching Rickey’s life and times, and the result of his labors has just been published by the University of Nebraska Press as Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman. A reading last month at Labyrinth Books, a Columbia University–area store whose stock in trade generally runs more towards Marxism and transgender studies, attracted better than a hundred baseball fans, visibly shocking the occasional granola eater who ventured upstairs in search of Chomsky’s latest treatise on post-colonial semiotics. I recently interviewed the author by e-mail to find out what made Rickey such a towering figure. Leaving aside his signing of Jackie Robinson, what would you say was Branch Rickey’s greatest contribution to baseball? Rickey's greatest contribution, I believe, was in streamlining player development. It was he who first talked about “five tools”: hitting with power, fielding, hitting for average, throwing, and running, perhaps in ascending order of importance. If you had a major-league-capable arm and could run with major-league potential, Rickey felt he and his staff of coaches could teach the rest (except for power). And he always looked for mechanical devices to improve technique, from sliding pits and batting cages to pitching machines and safety batting helmets. Rickey’s phrase “ferocious gentleman,” which appears in your subtitle, sums up his ideal of what an athlete should be. These days it sounds more old-fashioned every day, but was it ever realistic? Did baseball players in the first half of the twentieth century live up to the slogan any more than they do now? Rickey himself was very much a ferocious gentleman. He came out of the nineteenth-century school of “muscular Christianity,” which was not bellicosity for its own sake or in the service of a crusading religion. Rather, it was a “moral equivalent to war,” a term William James coined shortly before his death in 1910. Rickey cited this phrase a lot, and he quoted from a biography of Jesus Christ by Giovanni Papini, a onetime student of James, during his famous first meeting with Jackie Robinson in 1945. Was breeding “ferocious gentlemen” ever realistic in baseball? Not really. Rickey tried to lecture his players from that perch on the dangers of too much drink and carousing, but ballplayers being ballplayers, he had to let certain things slide. As a major-league catcher, Rickey’s greatest strength was his intelligence, and his greatest weakness was that he couldn’t hit (and, later, that his throwing arm was injured). What would you say his greatest strengths and weaknesses were as a field manager, and later as a general manager? As a field manager, Rickey was able to inspire players intermittently with his knowledge of the game and his fierce desire to win, but after a while his intensity made many players too nervous and afraid to make a mistake on the field. During games, Rickey was always pacing up and down in the dugout, showing nervousness himself, and when defeat did come, he was such a picture of dejection that the cumulation of losses began to have an adverse effect on his teams. He didn’t like the way St. Louis Cardinals owner Sam Breadon abruptly fired him as manager in May 1925, but he came to realize grudgingly that the front office was the ideal place for his talents. He had his strengths too, of course. Burt Shotton, a fleet outfielder who played for Rickey on the St. Louis Browns in 1913 and became a lifelong supporter, managed under him in Brooklyn for most of 1947–1950. Shotton said that Rickey was the first leader he ever had in baseball who encouraged players to think on their own. Rickey emphasized speed, speed, and more speed—knowing how to run the bases and cutting down on extra bases in the outfield by playing the angles well. The teams that Rickey managed often led the league in errors, but he preached tolerance of “the errors of enthusiasm.” His great strength, once he began working full-time in the front office, was his ability to predict accurately the future success or failure of raw talent. By the late 1930s he had more than 700 farmhands under the St. Louis Cardinals’ control, even after Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis had freed nearly a hundred of them in 1938 for being “hidden” in defiance of baseball regulations. It was a measure of their faith in Rickey's methods of training (and the lack of an alternative under the ironclad reserve system of the time) that the vast majority of those freed by Landis returned to the Cardinals’ chain. More often than not, Rickey's adage—“better trade a player a year too early than a year too late”—proved correct. Not always, of course, and I think long-suffering Cubs fans will enjoy learning in my book that ex-Cardinals played a major role in the Cubs’ 1935 pennant and, with Dizzy Dean, the 1938 pennant too. When Rickey came to Brooklyn after the 1942 season, he duplicated his St. Louis success by the same methods—tryout camps for thousands all over the country, even during World War II, and then honing the best in the rapidly growing Dodger farm system. He earned a commission virtually every time he sold a player to another team, but he felt, and I feel, that given the system of the time he was entitled to his riches. Sam Breadon thought otherwise after 1942, ditto Walter O’Malley after 1950, and ditto John Galbreath in Pittsburgh after 1955. What in Rickey’s background led him to become the first major-league GM to sign a black player? How did his fervently held religious views determine his racial attitudes? He was born in 1881 and grew up in southern Ohio near Portsmouth, which is virtually on the Kentucky line. His Wesleyan faith—his very religious parents named him Wesley Branch Rickey—made him sensitive to the issues of slavery and its legacy. John Wesley had condemned slavery in no uncertain terms in 1774. As a great devotee of the Protestant work ethic, Rickey was upset that the aftermath of slavery had led to the creation of a black underclass that wouldn't take a good white Protestant attitude toward work and, if it did want to, had no chance to rise in the world because of racism. These principles were bedrock to Rickey, but he also was a canny baseball businessman who saw great profits and perennial pennant contention from signing Robinson and other black players. He truly admired the dignity and class of Jackie and Rachel Robinson and later Archibald Carey, his colleague on President Eisenhower’s Committee on Government Employment Policy. He remained wary of less educated and less polite black (and white) activists. The only team Rickey did not succeed with was the Pittsburgh Pirates, where he was general manager from the 1951 through 1955 seasons. To what do you attribute his failure—or was he really a success, as can be seen in the Pirates’ 1960 World Championship? In the short run he did indeed fail in Pittsburgh. He inherited a very young team that was even further decimated when the Korean War military draft left him with fewer than two dozen prospects (compared with the several hundred potential players he left in Brooklyn). His one asset was the slugger Ralph Kiner, who was the team’s highest-paid player, its biggest fan attraction, and the kind of one-dimensional player—power was his main asset—that Rickey had never liked. That Kiner was getting involved in the nascent players union at the time didn’t help matters from Rickey’s standpoint. As the team fell and fell in the standings, fans stayed away by the hundreds of thousands, and many of those who did come left after Kiner’s last at-bat regardless of the score (usually the Pirates were trailing). When Kiner was finally traded, in June 1953, his value had sunk because, as with many power hitters, once injuries began to happen, the downslide was quick. Kiner retired after 1955. Rickey himself was kicked upstairs after that season, but in the long view of history (which is the hat as a historian I am proud to wear), his work in Pittsburgh established the nucleus of the 1960 World Series champion. He and his scouts plucked relief ace Roy Face from the Dodger farm system in 1952, the same year he signed shortstop Dick Groat out of Duke. His scouts signed Bill Mazeroski and Bob Skinner, and of course, most famously, they plucked Roberto Clemente out of the Dodger system after 1954. One final word on Rickey. His years as president of the projected Continental League in 1959 and 1960 threw enough of a scare into the established leagues, along with the threat of their antitrust exemption being lifted by Congress, that expansion was approved. Though Rickey was against 10-team leagues because it only increased the number of bad teams in the second division, there is little doubt that his leadership and the big bucks of the planned Continental League owners forced expansion. Rickey even had a chance to run the Mets, but he turned it down because he didn’t want it thought that he had supported a third league only to get a job in the existing leagues.
May 8, 2007
Where Are the Italian Girls? Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 03:15 PM EST A few weeks back, when the outside world was distracted by the Yankees’ pitching problems, this blog held a very interesting symposium on Andrew Roberts’s latest book, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900. What made the discussion so noteworthy was not the comments themselves; most of the debate consisted of quoting other critics and then saying, in effect, “What he said.” It wasn’t the level of invective, which was rather mild by American Heritage Blog standards, nor even the unexpected absence of Josh Zeitz, who usually has an opinion on everything but was probably busy promoting his forthcoming book, White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics, and the Shaping of Postwar Politics. The most fascinating thing about our debate over Roberts’s book can be seen in these excerpts: Fred Smoler: “I looked over a very few pages of a draft of a portion of his book, but I have not read the book . . .” Alexander Burns: “Not having read Roberts’s book, I won’t say that it’s worthless.” John Steele Gordon: “I haven’t read Roberts’s book either, so I’m in very good company.” I haven’t seen so many people discussing a book they haven't read since my Contemporary Civilization class in college. Yet that hasn’t stopped this blog’s contributors from taking sides pro and con, and while everyone paid lip service to the notion that it might be a good idea to actually read the book before deciding whether they like it, somehow, if they did all read it cover to cover, I doubt anyone would change his mind. As it happens, I haven’t read the book either. I do have a copy at home, but it has been sitting on my table for weeks, shunted aside in favor of a succession of novels (most recently Lucia in London, by E. F. Benson, since you asked). I was struck, however, in reading the odd mix of vehemence and hesitancy that characterized my fellow bloggers’ discussion, to see how great a role was accorded to trivia. The whole thing started after a captious New Republic reviewer made a detailed examination of the book’s 700-odd pages and found a number of mistakes, which he listed and then made the usual noises about how, while some may be minor, collectively they call into question the author’s trustworthiness, etc. That’s what proofreader/critics always say, and it may even be true, but by those standards, Ken Jennings would be the world’s greatest historian. As John Steele Gordon points out, much of the supposed decline in standards of accuracy is really a decline in the quality of proofreading and copyediting. I blame feminism for this. Decades ago, thousands of overqualified women spent their entire careers in low-ranking jobs in publishing because it was one of the few fields open to them. Now their daughters are off being genetic engineers and corporate executives and members of Congress, and the publishing industry—much more important, in my view—is greatly the poorer for it. I was reminded of all this last week, when I bestowed my coveted Dumb-Ass Right-Wing Commentator of the Week award on Tony Blankley of the Washington Times. (Mind you, I don’t have anything in particular against right-wing commentators; you might even say I’m one myself. I would willingly institute a similar award for left-wing commentators, except I don’t read them.) Anyway, my man Tony earned last week’s glittering prize, which entitles him to ride on the New York City subway for just $2, with the following passage: “But we all know that ‘hate speech’ is in the ear of the listener. In Europe, citizens can be—and have been—criminally prosecuted for calling elements of Islam violence-prone. The great crusading journalist Camille Paglia was forced to live out her last cancer-ridden days in exile to avoid paying the penal price for her honest (and accurate) expressions on that topic.” Camille Paglia is still alive, though you would hardly notice, since she has virtually disappeared from view after being overtaken in the outrageousness derby by today’s crop of Ann Coulter types. Mr. Blankley means Oriana Fallaci, of course, and this is another example of the poverty of the “gotcha” school of criticism. If Mr. Blankley had made the same statement in conversation, he would have noticed the puzzled looks on his listeners’ faces and said, “Oh, wait, not Camille Paglia—who do I mean?” Then someone would have corrected him, and he would have said thank you and gone ahead with his point. Mistakes of this type are like having your fly open—embarrassing, but they have nothing to do with whether you’re right or wrong. Maybe the reason I’m so peevish about this is that I just got a letter about my April “Time Machine” column on the Black Hawk War, declaring with exasperation that “Black Hawk was not chief of the Sauk people, pure and simple.” In fact, I called him “a chief,” and according to my sources, he was indeed a war chief, though not a hereditary chief. So there! This is the sort of mistake that letter writers always describe as a “glaring error.” Readers love to pounce on these, as if they invalidated everything the writer had ever spoken or thought. In fact, there are self-appointed fact checkers who specialize in certain specific corrections, firing off sarcastic letters whenever they see their favorite mistake. The more active members of this bunch are known in the publishing industry with nicknames like Big Apple Guy (who explains that the term “Big Apple” did not originate among Harlem jazz musicians in the 1930s but with a racing writer in the 1920s) or Hot Dog Guy (who shows that the story about hot dogs being named by the cartoonist Tad Dorgan after a 1901 baseball game is as bogus as it sounds). These people like to save all their clippings and show them off to journalists, or anyone else who will sit still for it. I suppose there are worse hobbies to have. Then of course there are those who spend their lives correcting fake errors, like the supposedly “wrong” period in Harry S. Truman’s middle name, on which see this. The other day I found a similarly “glaring” and trivial mistake in an excellent book whose author I will soon interview for this blog: Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman, by Lee Lowenfish. Early in the book, Lowenfish says that in 1908 William Howard Taft defeated Alton Parker for the Presidency. In fact, as everyone knows, he defeated William Jennings Bryan, making the Middle-Aged Boy Orator of the Platte a three-time loser. Parker ran against Teddy Roosevelt in 1904, when TR was so popular that Bryan realized he didn’t have a chance. I knew this without having to look it up (no, really, I did), and I would very much like to become known as Alton Parker Guy, but it’s hard to make a living that way. The last word on the subject, I think, can be found in this trenchant analysis of academic vs. popular history, which makes some worthwhile remarks despite the author’s unfortunate attempt to imitate my writing style. Academic historians are meticulous about accuracy on even the slightest points, as they should be. Popular historians, like the writers and editors of American Heritage, also strive to be as accurate as possible, which is why every one of our articles is fact-checked. Still, given the constraints under which we operate, a few errors inevitably slip past us from time to time, and as you can see by reading the magazine’s letters column, our readers are quite generous about pointing them out. Yet the main argument of a book or article is not invalidated by a few misspellings or inaccurate dates; after all, the contributors to this blog correct each other all the time. That’s why I think A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900 is a hell of a book despite its inaccuracies—and if I ever get around to reading it, I’ll be sure to tell you why.
April 24, 2007
Cowgirl Hall of Fame, Political Division Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 01:55 PM EST An article by Alexandra Starr in The New Republic (reprinted here in the New York Post) contains a disconcerting revelation about New Jersey’s former governor, Jim McGreevey. Governor McGreevey is best remembered for his fondness, as recalled in his recently published memoirs, for pressing the flesh of his constituents New Jersey–style by trolling for company at turnpike rest stops. But it turns out that when he wasn’t busy making friends at the Vince Lombardi Service Area, Gov. McGreevey liked to ogle female strippers with his fellow politicians. Anything for diversity in the Garden State. Ms. Starr blames the pervasive sleaze of New Jersey politics (which certainly did not begin or end with McGreevey) for the state’s low percentage of women in elected office. I’m not sure I buy that, but I was struck by one sentence in the article. After reeling off figures on the low numbers of female officeholders in several Northeastern states, she writes: “Yet many conservative Western states proved surprisingly hospitable to female politicians.” There is nothing surprising about female politicians in the West. Wyoming let women vote in 1869, as soon as it was organized as a territory, and Utah did the same in 1870, with both reaffirming the policy when they became states. And here are the other states that enacted female suffrage before World War I: Colorado (1893), Idaho (1896), Washington (1910), California (1911), Arizona, Kansas, and Oregon (all 1912), Illinois (1912, along with Alaska Territory), and Nevada and Montana (both 1914). As for women officeholders, Utah elected a woman state senator in its very first election (among the candidates she defeated was her husband; details can be found here if you don’t mind all the stifled giggling). Rep. Jeannette Rankin, who voted against U.S. entry into both World War I and World War II, represented Montana. As Ms. Starr acknowledges, the nation’s first two female governors, elected in 1924, were in Texas and Wyoming (see this for my scintillating account). After that, there was a long drought, but of the two dozen women elected as state governors beginning in the 1970s, more than half have been from Western states (i.e., those not east of or touching the Mississippi River). As I say, there’s nothing surprising about all this. It’s hard to maintain the notion of hearth and home as woman’s separate sphere when she’s out doing farm chores all day long, and in any case Westerners have long been skeptical about Eastern customs. Ms. Starr concedes much of this, and in general she seems enthusiastic about how government works in the West. But her gratuitous introduction of “conservative” and “surprising” gives the game away: She can’t believe what’s she’s seeing, because if these folks are so smart and enlightened, why aren’t they liberals? It’s like saying that Alexandra Starr is pretty smart for a woman. What I think is at work here is the common tendency, evoked with great perception and sensitivity here, of political activists to be sensitive to the finest distinctions within their own camp, since that’s where they spend all their time, while lumping together everyone on the other side as an undifferentiated mass. I have heard conservatives express wonder that liberals can be shrewd businessmen, since they’re all a bunch of socialist hippies, aren’t they? In similar fashion, Ms. Starr seems to assume that anyone who votes for a Republican or opposes partial-birth abortion must hate women; you know those “family values” types, right? All this leaves aside the question of whether the percentage of female officeholders is a reliable indicator of the status of women, or whether going to strip clubs is a reliable indicator of sexism. But whether or not these are true, Ms. Starr’s use of “conservative” is telling. A conservative is an admirer of tradition, and the Western states have a much deeper tradition of women in politics and government than the Eastern ones.
March 9, 2007
That Persistent Buzz Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 11:40 AM EST The world’s laziest blogging technique is to post whatever idle thoughts pop into your head in reaction to whatever you happen to be reading or watching at the time. These days I’m the world’s laziest blogger, so that suits me fine. Anyway, the other day I was reading an S. J. Perelman piece from the early 1940s called “Button, Button, Who’s Got the Blend?,” in which a bakery magnate confronts his wastrel of a nephew. Perelman liked to salt his writing with slang terms, as can be seen in the magnate’s bitter complaint: “It’s a stench in the nostrils of the cup-cake trade—throwing away your guilders on fly chorus girls and driving your Stutz Bearcat in excess of sixty M.P.H.” That quote reminded me of a passage in my favorite O. Henry story, “The Moment of Victory,” which was first published in 1908. In it, a young man tries to impress a young woman and gets the age-old response: “‘Hello, Willie!’ says Myra. ‘What are you doing to yourself in the glass?’ “‘I’m trying to look fly,’ says Willie. “‘Well, you never could be fly,’ says Myra with her special laugh, which was the provokingest sound I ever heard except the rattle of an empty canteen against my saddle-horn.” So here we have a slang term that goes back to the days of Theodore Roosevelt, was still alive at mid-century, continued to flourish in the 1970s (with Superfly, for example), and, according to my extensive contacts in the hip-hop world, is still a favorite of rappers today (as in “Cause I’m so fly / Ya eyes don’t lie,” from “U Know What It Is,” by Young Jeezy, and I’ll bet that’s the first time Young Jeezy has ever been cited on the American Heritage Blog). I thought the earlier uses might have had some connection with aviation, which was just getting started in O. Henry’s day and still carried an image of glamour in Perelman’s. (The O. Henry story takes place on the eve of the Spanish-American War, in 1898, but it could have been a mild anachronism.) Perhaps they did, but according to Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, “fly,” in the somewhat similar sense of “artful, knowing, shrewdly aware,” goes back to around 1810, with “U.S. fly dame, a harlot” dating at least to 1888. Of its derivation, Partridge writes: “Perhaps ex the difficulty of catching a fly [this would not explain the harlot — FS], more prob. cognate with fledge, fledged, as Sewel, 1766, indicates (W.); though Bee’s assertion that it is a corruption of fla, abbr. flash, is, considering the devices of c. [cant], not to be sneered at.” Wiping the nascent sneer off my face, I tried to think of another slang term that had accomplished the knife’s-edge feat of maintaining its rakish tone for a century without either falling into disuse or becoming mainstream. I couldn’t come up with anything, nor could I think of another example of white-to-black slang migration. It moves in the opposite direction all the time, of course, but how often does a term start out in the pages of Munsey’s and The New Yorker and end up being used as a mocking signifier of wannabe homeyness, as in the Offspring’s “Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)”? (Actually, that would make perfect sense for today’s New Yorker, but not for 60-odd years ago.) Leafing through a book of obsolete slang like Partridge’s can be as depressing as walking through a graveyard: page after page of words and phrases that once were young and fresh and lively and important to lots of people, and now are buried deep in the cold, cold ground. Yet somehow “fly” has managed to escape this fate. Although there are too many birds and bees and insects swarming around this entry already, I will venture to say that this virtually unprecedented achievement qualifies “fly” to be known as the cockroach of linguistics.
February 16, 2007
The Bunk of Tomorrow Debunked Today Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 03:55 PM EST The recent discussion of power struggles in New York’s state government reminded me of an item I clipped a few weeks back from my favorite source of political news, the Page Six gossip column in the New York Post. This was published before the Assembly chose a new comptroller. The item read: “Albany pols are concerned because one of the possible candidates to succeed state Comptroller Alan Hevesi is said to be a closeted homosexual. The Democratic majority in the Assembly will pick Hevesi’s replacement, probably from their own ranks. ‘Though they would appoint an openly gay candidate, they worry about someone in the closet,’ one Dem told Page Six. ‘After the Hevesi fiasco, they want honesty, and worry about the pressures involved for a statewide official to remain in the closet.’” There is much food for commentary here, but what interested me most was the final sentence in the Page Six item: “They point to what happened to New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey, who was forced to resign when his secret came out.” This is demonstrably false, as McGreevey’s homosexuality did not become public knowledge until he brought it up himself during his resignation speech. For the record, McGreevey’s departure from office had nothing to do with his sexual preference; he was forced to resign for repeated acts of corruption that were unacceptable even by New Jersey standards. Surely I was not the only person whose reaction on hearing about McGreevey’s “I am a gay American” speech was: “That devious son of a gun is trying to turn himself into a martyr!” And if Page Six is any indication, it seems to be working. We’ve all seen situations like this, where a misunderstanding takes hold and you know it’s wrong but are powerless to stop it. It’s common today to hear that Bill Clinton was impeached for having an affair; I’m sure that schoolchildren are already being taught exactly that. In fact he was impeached for committing perjury, but that makes a much less exciting story. Then there’s the following item, which I read in a newspaper this week: “Scooter Libby, former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, is on trial for identifying CIA agent Valerie Plame to the press.” (The newspaper was The Onion, and yes, I know that it’s satirical, but this appeared in the serious introduction to a string of gags and was clearly meant to be accurate.) In the unlikely event that anyone still recognizes the name Scooter Libby a year from now, those of us who were paying attention will patiently point out that Libby was put on trial for lying to investigators, not for “outing” Valerie Plame, which has been admitted by someone else and, in any event, was not a crime. Admittedly, a gossip column and a parody newspaper are slender reeds on which to rest a theory of mass deception. To be fair, most regular news stories do get these points right, however reluctantly. But fine distinctions tend to get lost when incidents are recalled weeks later, let alone years, especially if the resulting approximation is more lurid. We can all think of historical events that turn out to be much more nuanced than they seem, when you examine them closely. Now we have a chance to witness it happening right before our eyes.
January 22, 2007
More on Runnymede Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 03:45 PM EST John Steele Gordon points out that Great Britain gave a small piece of Runnymede to the United States in 1965. Whether this makes it the “farthest east” American territory depends on where you choose to place the endpoint. Greenwich is as good a point as any, I suppose, though since it is defined as 0 degrees, it might make even more sense to say that it is the least far east one can go. Alaskans like to point out that the last couple of islands in the Aleutian chain are just west of the 180-degree line, so their state contains the farthest west, farthest east, and farthest north points of American territory. As for criminals and babies, you’d have to consult a lawyer to make sure, but according to this item (scroll down to “Land ceded to a foreign country”), the United States owns the land but does not exercise jurisdiction over it. The same is true of the American military cemetery at Normandy.
January 10, 2007
Skeeter Eaters of San Antone Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 04:50 PM EST I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted, but as my many dedicated fans will recall from this classic, I just can’t resist an item about bat guano. In this case, I was prompted by an article in the January 6 issue of The Economist (the issue date is listed as January 4 on the website, for some reason) about a professor who is studying the bat population in Texas. Bats are a great help to Texas farmers, eating large numbers of moths whose larvae infest cotton bolls. The article gives other examples of helpful bats eating agricultural pests in a wide-ranging group of states. Some farmers put up specially designed bat houses to attract more of the creatures (as do bridge builders, the article says, though it doesn’t say why).
The only thing that’s new here is that the attempts to lure bats may finally be working. A century ago, a Texas physician tried to do the same thing—not to protect agriculture, but to reduce malaria in humans. As explained in a 1982 article in our magazine, in 1902 Dr. Charles A. R. Campbell came up with the idea of luring insect-eating bats to places with large numbers of mosquitoes. The role of mosquitoes as vectors of malaria had recently been established, and Campbell hoped his scheme would reduce the disease’s prevalence. As a sideline, he planned to harvest the bats’ droppings for use as fertilizer.
When simple boxes scented with bat guano failed to attract any business, Campbell began building ever larger and more elaborate towers designed to accommodate hundreds of thousands of bats. He tramped through filthy, vermin-infested caves to see what sorts of architectural features bats liked most. Finally, in 1911, he opened “Dr. Campbell’s Malaria-Eradicating Guano-Producing Bat Roost” near a San Antonio sewage dump. Sure enough, malaria cases in the area dropped steeply.
Inquries streamed in from mosquito fighters around the world—“Russia, Greece, Japan, Australia, India, South Africa, and British Guyana,” according to the article. In 1914 Campbell received U.S. patent 1,083,318 on his bat-house design; by the early 1920s bat houses had been built across the South and in Mexico and Europe; and in 1925 Campbell published a book called Bats, Mosquitoes, and Dollars. (Contemporary photographs of Campbell’s bat houses can be seen here and here along with 1920s towers in Italy; a tower from the Florida Keys can be seen here, and a present-day restored bat tower can be viewed here, in case your copy of Bats magazine for Summer 1989 is not in a convenient place.)
The only problem was that Campbell’s bat towers didn’t actually work. Whether they succeeded in attracting bats is unclear, but even if they did, it didn’t help, because the ones that live in the San Antonio area are free-tailed bats. They eat moths, which makes them valuable to cotton farmers today, but they turn up their noses at mosquitoes. The decline in malaria cases was just a coincidence, caused by public-health education and the increased availability of cheap screening. By the time Campbell published his book, the value of the towers was coming into serious question, and at his death in 1931 he was close to forgotten, though his gravestone does have a copper plaque depicting a bat on it.
What does all this mean? Nothing, really. I just like to use the phrase “bat guano.”
October 18, 2006
One Man’s Editor Is Another Man’s Censor Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 04:30 PM EST I really think we should stick to history on this blog, and I’m very busy with other things. So I’ll try (unsuccessfully, I see on rereading) to be brief as, at risk of having to dodge vitriol for the next week, I address a few recent threads on this blog:
1. It is beyond my power to comprehend why Alexander Burns thinks it’s racist for a black man to use the word “homeboy.” Admittedly, these days that term is most often used by whites, but in a multicultural era, such distinctions have lost their importance. Beyond that, I think he’s missing the point. When the Republicans run a black candidate, they aren’t hoping to attract black votes; that’s a lost cause. Instead, they’re hoping to attract votes from white moderates. It’s the same idea as when the Democrats nominate a decorated war veteran. The candidates that Alexander names will probably lose, as John Kerry did and James Webb will. But it still makes sense, because the strategy can pay off in the long term by making the party seem more centrist than it is.
2. It is beyond my power to comprehend why Joshua Zeitz (who is a very nice man, by the way, with a lovely wife) thinks there’s a conflict between supporting free speech and preferring not to analyze art. That’s like saying you can’t like Thai food if you’re a Phillies fan. In any case, I make a distinction between addressing a voluntary audience and addressing a captive audience.
At Columbia, my alma mater, which seems to have a lot of these incidents, there was a controversy a few years after I graduated involving the annual dinner of the alumni athletic club. As usual, an athlete who had distinguished himself during the preceding year was asked to speak. In this case, I think it was the captain of the soccer team. He began with some general remarks on Columbia’s lack of support for athletics (a perennial concern) and then explained that he attributed this dearth of school spirit to the college’s high percentage of Jewish students.
From the accounts I read, it wasn’t so much anti-Semitism as the sort of pop sociology you might hear at a late-night dormitory bull session. Jews, he said, were more interested in scholarship and preparing for their careers, so they didn’t have time to come out and root the Lions to victory. He rambled on in this vein for a couple of minutes as the assembled dignitaries shifted nervously in their seats, and finally the master of ceremonies went up to the podium and said it was time to move on to the next speaker.
Was this a case of suppressing free speech? No, it was just the organizers of an event declining to listen to an oration that was inappropriate for the circumstances. The same principle applies to the much more common situation of speakers who deliver political harangues at college commencements. My experience has been that most people hold their political beliefs much more fervently than their religious beliefs (“These days people are religious about everything but religion,” as Oscar Wilde said, or should have—this is too good for me to have made up myself). Yet if somebody went before a group of graduates at a secular college and gave an impassioned come-to-Jesus sermon, I would expect him to get a rude reception.* The same principle applies to insulting people’s cherished political beliefs.
When you are asked to speak at a graduation (and, often, get paid for it), they expect you to tell a few jokes, reminisce a bit about your own college days, mouth a few platitudes, and then get the hell out of the way. If you start saying things that will offend large numbers of students—mocking their religion, their politics, or, worst of all, their football team—you are abusing their hospitality and being rude and self-indulgent, and you deserve to get shouted down.** In any case, the organizers of an event have an absolute right to stop an invited speaker, just as the editors of a magazine have a right to print or reject what they wish. There’s no comparison between that and an outside group doing the same thing by force.
3. Most important, there’s a huge difference between booing a speech, or protesting outside the auditorium, and rushing the stage, physically preventing the speaker from continuing, and threatening his safety. From an audience member’s perspective, there’s also a difference between (a) attending an event where you have a right to expect the usual anodyne address and getting ambushed by a hostile speaker and (b) going to a speech you don’t want to hear for the specific purpose of shutting it down (with tactics and equipment prepared in advance). Hecklers and claques are something that every controversial speaker and every politician—not to mention musicians and stand-up comics—must learn to deal with. Going out of one’s way to prevent willing listeners from hearing a speaker they’re interested in is an entirely different, and much greater, offense.
It’s a common rhetorical technique to say, “Everyone crosses the street against the light or steals Post-Its from work, so therefore we’re all criminals, and there’s really no difference between you or me and Kenneth Lay/Richard Nixon/Osama Bin Laden.” (They then invariably go on to quote the joke where Winston Churchill, or whoever it was, says, “We’re merely discussing the price.”) As Fred Smoler wrote here recently, it’s slipshod thinking to say that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, and the same is true of opposing or suppressing speech. Just as there are degrees of criminality, there are also lines that must not be crossed, and the anti-Minutemen demonstrators at Columbia crossed those lines.
If the university expels all the students involved in that incident, or at least suspends them for a year, I may abandon my long-term policy and make a donation to Columbia. But my munificent publishing salary is safe, because I know exactly what the university is going to do: put four or five of the ringleaders on some sort of toothless probation, hand out warnings to the rest, issue a mealy-mouthed statement applauding them for caring so passionately but questioning their choice of tactics, and wrap it all up by convening a symposium on free-speech issues. Cop-outs like that vie with lousy football for the title of Columbia’s most cherished tradition.
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* In fact, something like this did happen when my older brother was at Princeton. As Passover approached, posters appeared around campus advertising a lecture on the historical and theological basis of the holiday. When Jewish students showed up, the speaker turned out to be an evangelist who told them that they were all going to hell if they didn’t convert.
** At my own class day at Columbia, the salutatorian gave an impassioned argument in favor of a nuclear freeze, a suicidally naive cause that was enjoying a brief vogue at the time. I wish I’d had the courage to boo him, but society kept me silent. And here’s the rest of the story: That little boy grew up to be . . . George Stephanopoulos! Seriously. (And no, I didn’t know him in college. This was Columbia—none of us knew any of our classmates.) The other thing I remember about his speech is that a couple of months before we graduated, Columbia College had announced that it would begin accepting women. So Stephanopoulos started out by saying, “I support this decision, though with mixed feelings, because if the policy had been in effect while we were students, I would never have become salutatorian.” His appearance was pretty much the same then as it is now—a typical Columbia geek—and, like most of the guys in the class, I looked at him and thought, “Yeah, right.” But look who he married! (Here she is [warning: explicit content] though this might be an even better picture.) It goes to show that Henry Kissinger was right: Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
October 11, 2006
“The Age of McCarthy” Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 04:45 PM EST Those who make the mistake of reading rock criticism know that any discussion of a British recording released between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s is sure to mention Margaret Thatcher. If it came out in the 1980s, it’s a relic of the Age of Thatcher, either a direct product of that era’s spirit of conformity/materialism/greed (if it’s at all conventional) or else a reaction to it (if it’s not). If the recording came out before Thatcher took office, it’s an ominous precursor of impending Thatcherism, and if it came out afterwards, it’s either a Thatcher hangover or an exemplar of the post-Thatcher era. The principle applies equally well to any social or cultural trend, from music to politics to literature to journalism to art to fashion. As a peg to hang random events on, Margaret Thatcher is the twentieth-century equivalent of Queen Victoria.
In America, the same is true with “Reagan” substituted. And if you’re looking back to the 1950s, you can just plug in “Joseph McCarthy” and blame everything on him. That’s why I think it’s important, in reading Josh Zeitz’s thoughts on High Noon and political thrillers, to remember that Carl Foreman was blacklisted for his testimony before a House committee, and Joseph McCarthy was a member of the Senate.
McCarthy was actually a Joseph-come-lately to anti-Communism. He began his career as a rabble-rouser in that field—accidentally, by some accounts—with a speech he made in February 1950. By that time the House Un-American Activities Committee had been in business for a dozen years, making its first headlines in 1938 with a probe of Communism in the WPA’s Federal Theater Project. It began investigating Hollywood in 1947, when McCarthy had just been elected senator. I’m sure that Foreman was not very fond of Senator McCarthy, but it was HUAC, not McCarthy, that got him blacklisted.
Like Josh, I have no sympathy for Senator McCarthy. By tossing around increasingly wild and ridiculous charges, he made a noble cause look silly, to the point where most people today make no distinction between anti-Communism and “McCarthyism.” Not all anti-Communist members of Congress were buffoons, like McCarthy; some, like Richard Nixon, took care to investigate thoroughly and prepare their evidence with care. Similarly, not all of America’s overreaction to the Communist threat can be placed at the feet of McCarthy. In particular, virtually everyone who was blacklisted from the film industry had been called to testify before HUAC, not a Senate committee. But HUAC was an amorphous body, with many members and numerous chairmen from both parties, instead of a single, glowering figure. And as McCarthy—who was cleverer than his detractors give him credit for—and other successful politicians have known for centuries, it always helps to have a handy villain to focus on.
September 28, 2006
Kids Say the Darnedest Things Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 03:00 PM EST A little girl that I know is at the age where she’s started asking awkward questions. Recently she said to me, “Why did World War II start?”
I replied, “Well, there was a very bad man named Hitler who was the ruler of Germany, and he wanted to take over all of Europe, so he sent soldiers into Poland. Some other countries didn’t like that, and they tried to stop him, and that’s how the war began.”
She frowned. “Was that before or after Pearl Harbor?”
“Oh, Pearl Harbor came later,” I replied. “The Japanese wanted to rule all of East Asia, so they dropped a bunch of bombs on our ships at Pearl Harbor. That’s how the United States got involved in the war.”
She nodded, thought for a moment, and said, “Well then, how did World War I start?”
“Well . . . ,” I said, “a man shot a nobleman from . . . um, someplace in Europe, and, er, the other countries . . . uh . . .” She stared at me with the no-nonsense look that seven-year-olds seem to specialize in. And after a few more moments of fumbling, I fell back on the ever-useful last resort for kids with inconvenient questions: “Go ask your parents.”
September 19, 2006
Gag Me With a Silver Spoon Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 09:15 AM EST Amy Weaver Dorning quotes the late Gov. Ann Richards of Texas as saying her biggest fear was that her tombstone would read, “She kept a really clean house.” With an excess of honesty like that, it’s no surprise that Governor Richards served only one term. Texas’s first female governor, Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, may have felt the same way about housework, but she kept her mouth shut.
Ferguson grew up in a prosperous ranching family and attended Baylor. Her husband served as governor before her. So the Fergusons were quite well off and had plenty of household help. Yet during the 1924 Democratic primary campaign, her daughter and a campaign advisor took pictures of “Ma” putting up peaches, tending animals, and doing other farmyard chores. Her daughter recalled Mrs. Ferguson saying in later years: “Mules, chickens, cows, pigs, and a sunbonnet! You and Harry Fisher certainly made a fool of me that day!” Even her nickname was faux-folksy, formed from her initials (Miriam Amanda Ferguson—and her maiden name was Wallace, so it could even have been “Maw”). No one had ever called her “Ma” before she ran for office. This poor-mouthing helped Mrs. Ferguson win the Democratic primary and the ensuing general election, which was contested more seriously than usual in one-party Texas—though, like Richards, she did not succeed in getting reelected. As Mrs. Dorning points out, every obituary of Ann Richards repeated her 1988 convention crack about the elder George Bush having been “born with a silver foot in his mouth,” usually in the first paragraph. I don’t know what her actual tombstone will say, but that line is what most people outside of Texas will know her for. Is it better to be remembered throughout eternity for making a lame joke than for keeping a clean house? From Governor Richards’s standpoint, I guess it is.
This brings up a larger question: Has anyone who made a memorable speech at a convention ever been on the winning side? Off the top of my head, I can think of William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech in 1896, Barry Goldwater’s “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” in 1964, and Mario Cuomo’s supposedly eloquent address at the 1984 Democratic convention (which I read in the paper and shrugged off as the usual boilerplate, then was shocked to hear praised as a masterpiece of oratory—though I’m told that if you saw it live, Governor Cuomo did a great job of selling it). All were on the losing side, along with Governor Richards, and you can add John Kerry’s “Reporting for duty” to the list if you want.
I may be forgetting something obvious, but it seems to me that wisecracks are rarely an effective way of winning votes from the American public. Adlai Stevenson, a two-time loser, was a famous wit, and in 1988 millions of people repeated or rang changes on Lloyd Bentsen’s putdown of Dan Quayle (“You’re no Jack Kennedy”—another gag that has posthumously eaten a Texas politician’s entire career) and then voted for his opponents. Could this be another case of the Regular Guy Theory of Presidential Elections, under which quipsters are seen as too clever by half? Or could it be that the voters actually make their choices based on the issues? Either way, I’m sure that Senator Bentsen and Governor Richards are having a great time yucking it up in heaven, which must look a lot like Texas (though as Phil Sheridan famously pointed out, there are other parts of Texas that could serve just as well for hell, and of course Dallas-Fort Worth Airport makes a fine stand-in for purgatory).
September 15, 2006
That’s Rich Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 09:35 AM EST On September 10, Frank Rich wrote a column in The New York Times about a photograph he said was “shocking” and “taboo.” “It shows five young friends on the waterfront in Brooklyn,” he wrote, “taking what seems to be a lunch or bike-riding break, enjoying the radiant late-summer sun and chatting away as cascades of smoke engulf Lower Manhattan in the background.”
The photograph was not published with Rich’s column, and if that was all you read, you might have expected to see people laughing uproariously and pouring champagne. In fact, as you can see here in Slate, the picture does show a group of people on the Brooklyn waterfront with the World Trade Center burning in the background, but there is nothing lighthearted or insouciant about it—certainly nothing surprising. Rich knows a grand total of zero about the people in the picture, so he builds a fantasy around them and then bases a column on that fantasy (or half a column, I should say, since the second half is just his usual auto-rant).
Rich’s remarks were based on the assumption that the people in the photograph were somehow ignoring or shrugging off the disaster across the water. But as is pointed out here the photograph shows nothing of the kind; it’s all supposition on Rich’s part. In fact, a couple of the people in the picture have gotten in touch with Slate to say that they “were in a profound state of shock and disbelief, like everyone else we encountered that day,” and were “in the middle of an animated discussion about what had just happened.” Far from being friends, two of them had never met the other three before. (For the photographer’s inconclusive account of the picture and its aftermath, see this).
Yet even if the people in the picture had been reading magazines or talking about tennis, it wouldn’t have meant they were insensible to the importance of the event in front of them. Rich is mistaken in his interpretation of the photo, but much more so in his assumption that it’s “shocking” to hear that people went about their business on September 11 instead of gnashing their teeth and rending their garments. Just about everyone who was in the New York area at the time can recall instances of this. On my walk home through Manhattan on that warm evening, I saw people shopping, eating in sidewalk cafés, playing games in the park, and doing dozens of other routine activities. Why am I supposed to be shocked? Here, as usual, Rich makes the mistake of assuming that his readers are as naive as he is.
There’s a lesson to be learned from this, besides the obvious one that Frank Rich is as sharp as a pair of nursery-school scissors. Photographs can be an enormous help in the study of history; that’s the idea on which American Heritage was founded. But they can also be deceptive, especially when you approach them with preconceptions.
When our staff was compiling our December 1999 issue, which contained a picture for every year from 1900 to 1999, the photograph we chose for 1952 showed a crowd in Platteville, Wisconsin, listening to a speech by Sen. Joseph McCarthy. I can’t find a copy of the picture online, but I do recall that when we were considering that photo for inclusion, half of our editors thought it conveyed everything about McCarthy and his supporters and the spirit of the times in a single image—the perfect historical photo. And the other half of us thought it looked like any other crowd of white people in the 1950s looking at something.
Then there’s Edward Steichen’s famous photograph of J. P. Morgan. It seems to sum up everything we know about the man: bold, ruthless, determined, impulsive, with an insatiable thirst for domination. In fact, as our fellow blogger John Steele Gordon explained in our pages in 1989 (scroll down to near the end), the reason for Morgan’s angry expression is that Steichen had asked him to pose in an uncomfortable position. Moreover, writes Gordon:
“Over the eighty-six years since the portrait was taken, many people have wondered how Steichen got Morgan to pose for him with a dagger in his hand, given all the weighty overtones of cut-throat capitalism that conveyed. In fact, the ‘dagger’ is only the reflection of light off the arm of the chair Morgan was sitting in.
“As Steichen explained, ‘It is not only photographers who read meanings into their photographs.’”
Indeed it is not. We all project our preconceptions into pictures and find things that aren’t there; that’s a natural human tendency. We all look at pictures and make up stories about them. And there’s nothing wrong with that—just as long as you don’t base an entire newspaper column on your mistaken analysis.
August 31, 2006
John Brown’s Reputation Lies A-Mould’ring in the Grave Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 05:00 PM EST If I shouted “I love freedom” and then hit my dog over the head with a rock, would that make me a hero? Maybe not to you, and certainly not to my family’s poor little dachshund. But for those true Americans who are devoted to the cause of liberty, I would be a brave pioneer in a noble quest, willing to adopt unorthodox methods to protect the precious values our society holds most sacred.
At least, that’s the impression I get from reading today’s lead article on this site. I have not read the book under review and so cannot comment directly on its merits, but if our article is an accurate summary, the book’s author seems to be saying that everyone thinks John Brown was a crazy man, when in fact he was fighting for a noble cause. Now, the impression I have held since grade school is that John Brown was both: a crazy man fighting for a noble cause. And from my hasty survey of the resources available in the American Heritage library, this seems to be the view of most historians past and present—setting aside the large and vocal contingent who from 1859 to the present have portrayed him as a martyr of unalloyed nobility.
The first paragraph of our review says: “The picture of John Brown that has come down through time is largely that of a madman, a fanatic . . . deranged, a violent psychotic.” Whether or not this actually is the picture that has come down to us, there’s no question that Brown was a fanatic by any reasonable definition of that word, nor that he was violent. “Madman” and “deranged” are imprecise terms, as is “psychotic” once you get past its scientific sheen. Indeed, the same might be said for the whole concept of mental illness—and yet, like love or truth or beauty, it does exist and can be discussed.
John Brown is one of many subjects in American history on which it’s hard to find an impartial source (particularly if, like me, you have lots of other work to do at the time). It’s clear that his family had a history of mental illness and that some people who knew him thought he acted strangely. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who could plan and carry out the Pottawotamie Massacre, in which he and his followers killed proslavery settlers in cold blood, chopped off their limbs, and split open their heads, must be considered at least something of an oddball. You can say that the violent times made him crazy, but that’s just another way of saying that he was crazy. In any case, there were thousands of settlers in Kansas who did not go around hacking up their neighbors.
That Brown was kind and loving in many ways, that not everything he did was deranged, that he was capable of making plans and organizing operations, that he could speak eloquently, and that he had a noble cause in his heart do not disprove the assertion that he was insane. Charles Manson had devoted fans too. Yet, as I’ve said, defining insanity is problematic, and since we cannot talk to Brown today, it’s even harder to make a definitive judgment. So I would set aside the question of his sanity, let alone whether “psychotic” is the correct technical term to describe him (or, for that matter, “doughty stoic,” which would seem to be just the opposite). That debate is so heavily dependent on what one thinks of Brown overall that it can never be resolved. A more interesting, if no more clear-cut, question is this: Were his actions at Harpers Ferry right, and did they help the slaves?
The Harpers Ferry raid got 17 people killed, 10 of them raiders (including two of Brown’s sons, but not counting Brown himself and five co-conspirators, who were hanged after the ensuing trial). It freed no slaves and, thankfully, inspired no similar acts by others. It’s hard to imagine that it attracted anyone to the abolitionist cause who wasn’t already a sympathizer; if anything, it did more to alienate neutrals and stoke up hostility in the South, especially after so many Northerners praised Brown’s actions. The raid does seem to have heightened the already severe sectional conflict, and it may have brought civil war five or ten years sooner than it otherwise would have occurred, but if so, it’s unclear whether this was good or bad. At the risk of incurring a smackdown from Fred Smoler, I’ll suggest very tentatively that the North was industrializing much faster than the South and developing new weapons as well, so a war that began in 1865 or 1869 would probably have ended much quicker.
But, of course, John Brown was against slavery, so even if his raid accomplished no more than bashing a dog’s head would have, he will find sympathizers—just as today’s terrorists and guerrillas find apologists among those who agree with the causes they say they are supporting. Personally, I think Brown could have done much more to eliminate slavery by letting his sons live long enough to fight for the Union.
The antislavery movement has many genuine heroes. William Lloyd Garrison was one for tirelessly criticizing slavery and attracting adherents to the cause. The same goes for Harriet Beecher Stowe, whatever the flaws of her Uncle Tom’s Cabin; for the antislavery legislators in Congress; and of course for Harriet Tubman and the rest of the Underground Railroad’s supporters. These people used persuasion, law, and direct action to restrict, expose, and nullify slavery as far as it was possible. John Brown, by contrast, achieved nothing at Harpers Ferry, and he did it at the cost of many lives and much increased bitterness. He was not a hero. He was just a crazy fool.
August 25, 2006
I Wouldn’t Let My Parakeet Poop on That Rag Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 06:15 PM EST If Fred Smoler knows media bias as well as he knows military history, I’m cooked, but I’ll take that chance and disagree with his post of Wednesday evening. By pointing to instances where liberal publications have pursued anti-Clinton investigations, or where their coverage has been governed by considerations other than politics, he does not disprove the assertion that these publications are biased; he merely shows that liberal bias is not their sole motivation. (This leaves aside the question of whether “liberal” and “anti-Clinton” are necessarily in conflict.)
You can’t disprove the existence of bias by listing some unbiased acts; you might just as well say that Fox News is unbiased because they report President Bush’s low poll numbers. Similarly, saying that New York Times reporters lack an “explicit sense of ideological mission” merely restates the old “everyone I know likes McGovern” line from 1972. They are so secure and unchallenged in their opinions that they don’t realize that they are opinions at all.
Fred points out that “before the 1950s, the American press was unabashedly partisan,” generally opposing FDR. That’s true, and the same went for Harry Truman. During the 1948 presidential campaign, Truman angrily told a reporter: “The Chicago Tribune and this paper [the Spokane Spokesman-Review] are the worst in the United States. . . . You’ve got the worst Congress in the United States you have ever had and the papers—this paper—are responsible for it.”
Most observers agreed with Truman that the papers he cited were strongly Republican. So, in varying degrees, were most other newspapers outside the South. Yet during that campaign, the press had great fun pouncing on the ill-advised statements of Gov. Thomas Dewey of New York, Truman’s Republican opponent, and his supporters. When Truman went on a campaign trip by train, Sen. Robert Taft, an Ohio Republican, mocked him for visiting “every whistle station in the West.” (A whistle station was a town so small that passengers had to signal the conductor if they wanted to stop there.) For days afterwards, newspapers gleefully reported statements from the mayors of cities along the route denying that they were “whistle stops.”
Later, when Dewey (whose hometown was Owosso, Michigan, for what it’s worth) was making a train trip of his own, a member of the crew bungled a braking maneuver, giving the train a sharp jolt. Dewey muttered that the crew member deserved to be “shot at sunrise.” This is the sort of statement that any of us might make in a moment of frustration, but unfortunately for Dewey, reporters were present when he made it. Regardless of their political views, newspapers did not hesitate to print Dewey’s statement, or to continue kicking it around for days afterwards.
Does this disprove the contention that newspapers favored the Republicans? No, it merely shows that one very strong motivation of American journalists has always been the desire to make authority figures look like jerks. If the ever-popular combination of fellatio and perjury is not available, then accusing powerful people of making fun of hicks will have to do. And that’s what makes America great.
To me, if you want to prove that The New York Times is biased, all you have to do is look at it. I recently heard someone defending the paper by saying, “It’s not that bad. The editorial page and the style section are really the only parts that make me want to throw up.” To which another person replied, “Yes, but these days half the paper is the editorial page and the other half is the style section.”
As Fred Smoler points out, this doesn’t mean that every single thing the Times does is calculated to advance a leftist agenda, though it does sometimes seem that way. Many other factors are involved. The White House security logs that proved Bill Clinton was a perjurer, for example, were leaked to the Times precisely because, being a liberal paper, it would have the most credibility. But over the course of time, a newspaper’s choice of what to report and how to report it will usually be governed by the political biases, conscious or unconscious, of its writers and editors. The fact that counterexamples can be cited does not make the principle untrue; it merely shows that other considerations are also at work.
I agree with Fred Smoler that newspapers used to be much more open about their biases. In the 1870s, when The New York Times was exposing the Tweed Ring, it advertised itself as “New York’s only Republican paper.” When I used to write the long version of “Time Machine,” I looked at a lot of newspapers from the late 1940s on microfilm. The Denver Post was particularly atrocious, essentially consisting of half wire copy and half vicious attacks on whatever local politicians they felt like taking down.
Back then the Washington Post was still a small-town operation. Whenever there was an important story about Congress or the Supreme Court, I learned to look in The New York Times for coverage, since the Washington Post rarely had anything more than wire-service articles, even though they were right in town. (By the way, I was amused to see that in the 1940s the Post sponsored a softball league called the Post Industrial League. I envisioned it being restricted to service-industry office drones, and when someone tried to bring in a ringer, the opposing team would say, “Hey, no fair—he works in manufacturing!”)
But the worst thing I saw in my “Time Machine” research was a story that ran in the Atlanta Constitution in October 1922. It was titled “Possum Season Opening Brings Joy to Negroes,” and it began as follows: “Make haste dere niggers and zoon around here. Dey’s sumpin’ a’doin’ aroun’ dis place tonight. De ‘possum time is come.” That’s right, the whole thing was written in dialect. That’s one tradition in American journalism that we are well rid of.
August 23, 2006
When Elephants and Donkeys Fight, the Gnats Get Strained Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 11:45 AM EST I hesitate to get in between John Steele Gordon and Joshua Zeitz for fear of being hit with all the spitballs and water balloons they’re lobbing back and forth. But I think this whole question of media bias is really one of definition. As we can see from the way Gordon shuns the label “conservative” and Zeitz admits only to being “somewhat liberal,” everybody locates the center close to his or her own opinions and evaluates the media using that frame of reference.* This reminds me of a manuscript we once received from a professor at a Canadian university. The subject was Harry Truman, and the author’s thesis was that everybody thinks Truman grew up poor, when in fact he was middle-class. The reason for this misapprehension, the author said, is that in America, you’re considered either rich or poor; there is no middle ground. We didn’t buy the article for a number of reasons, chief among them being that the basic premise is false. It’s true that Truman came from a modest background, but I don’t know anyone who thinks his family had to beg for crusts of bread on the street. But if the premise was a straw man, the professor’s explanation of it was even more wrong. In America, the popular myth is not that everyone is either rich or poor; it’s that everyone is middle-class. I’m reminded of a New Yorker cartoon, probably from the 1930s, that takes place at the graduation exercises of a wealthy boarding school. I don’t know if Helen Hokinson drew it, but it’s the type she would have drawn. Amid all the trappings of money and power, a young man standing at the podium gazes out over the well-dressed crowd and says, “. . . whilst we, the great middle class, are slowly being ground between the upper and nether millstones.” I had a friend in college whose father was a doctor. His family owned several homes and took frequent and expensive vacations, and I once ventured to suggest that they were rich. My friend looked at me like I was crazy. He explained that you can’t call yourself rich unless you have enough money to affect the movements of financial markets (or some such thing; this discussion took place late at night). Coming from the wealthy end of things, he was aware of degrees and distinctions of richness that I had never imagined; and similarly, people whose families had to scrape to get by will say, “No, we weren’t poor—we always had food on the table and a roof over our heads . . .” I think the same sort of thing is at work in the media-bias debate: Economically, everyone thinks of himself or herself as middle-class, and politically, everyone thinks of himself or herself as centrist. One reason may be that if you feel strongly about politics, you spend much more time reading commentators on your own side than those on the other. So you will be deeply familiar with fine distinctions within your tribe while tending to lump together everyone in the other tribe. People who are quite far to the left or right will say, “Who, me? I’m no liberal/conservative—not like those nuts who want to ban private schools/throw gays in jail” (or whatever wacky cause is being argued on the more feverish websites at the time). A similar phenomenon explains why it’s easier to visually tell apart members of your own race than those of a different one. That’s why Josh Zeitz can seriously assert that The New Republic is even-handed and The Weekly Standard is “an ideological rag.” In fact, if you read The Weekly Standard (or National Review, for that matter), you will see vigorous debate over immigration, religion, abortion, drug legalization, and many other topics, including the advisability of various past, present, and future wars. Now, I’m not saying that TWS is without flaw. While it hasn’t had a Stephen Glass episode, it does publish many articles just as lame as Michael Lewis’s paean to his wife’s rear end (which TNR published in 1994), and its spotty fact-checking lets through plenty of errors just as embarrassing as “In George Orwell’s 1984, the pigs took over” (as TNR asserted in 1984). But the two publications are equally open-minded and equally rigorous intellectually. For better or worse, TWS is to the right exactly what TNR (which has published a few articles by Josh over the years) is to the left. Josh doesn’t see this because his vantage point on left makes him acutely aware of all the internecine disputes in his own backyard while distancing him from the variety of opinion among conservatives, to the point where he can dismiss them all as what his fellow academics would call “the Other.” I think the same is true of John Steele Gordon and most other people who care enough about politics to assess the level of media bias. As Gordon admitted in a recent post, we strain at gnats that come from the opposing team while swallowing camels that come from our own. And that’s why the question of whether the media is biased can’t be answered definitively—one person’s bias is another person’s truth-telling. * yes, this is a popularized technicality from physics, but I couldn’t think of a better way of putting it.
August 22, 2006
Hillary Goes Electric Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 05:00 PM EST In a blog entry earlier today, John Steele Gordon wrote: “If newsrooms were populated almost entirely with people who had had posters of Barry Goldwater on their walls while they were growing up, they would suffer from exactly the same problem,” i.e., ideological bias. This has very little to do with his main point, but it’s interesting to note that in 1964, 17-year-old Hillary Rodham, who of course later married Bill Clinton, was a fervent Goldwater supporter, even knocking on doors in her Chicago suburb to campaign for him. Something seems to have happened over the next four years to make her reevaluate her views—though the folks at Daily Kos would say that she hasn’t changed much at all. To be sure, 1964 was a year of transition for many people—in fact, that year is the subject of the forthcoming October issue of American Heritage. Fans of this blog will be excited to learn that Joshua Zeitz has written an overview of 1964 for that issue, while John Steele Gordon contributes a piece on the 1964 World’s Fair. On a similar subject, and since it wouldn’t be an official Fred Schwarz post without mentions of punk rock and baseball, I’ll tell you that one of the most jarring moments in the recent Ramones documentary, End of the Century, came when Johnny Ramone, the band’s lead guitarist (who had an extensive baseball-card collection, by the way), said that he had been a Nixon supporter as far back as the 1960 election. What’s strange here is not that the man responsible for the distinctive sound of “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue” and “Teenage Lobotomy” was a conservative; this was already fairly well known. That he’d been that way as early as 1960, though, when he was 10 years old and I was not yet born—that took a while for me to comprehend. And he stuck with it, proving that Hillary Rodham Clinton has been much more changeable over the years than Johnny Ramone in both politics and hairstyle. With Hillary, it’s mostly been a case of her adjusting to the times, whereas with Johnny, the times have come to him. I knew punk rock had irrevocably gone mainstream in the late 1980s, when I started hearing “Blitzkrieg Bop” on the P.A. system at Yankee Stadium. I’ll admit that I was guilty of some Hillary-style apostasy myself as a youngster. My first experience with baseball came in the fall of 1969, shortly after my family returned from a year abroad. At the time, everyone in my Long Island elementary school was crazy about the Mets, so I went along with the crowd and cheered them to a World Series victory. But late that season I had also seen a couple of Yankee games on television, and they seemed so pathetic (this was at the nadir of what Yankee fans call the Horace Clarke Era) that I couldn’t help feeling sorry for them. Over the winter I thought it over and decided that I sympathized more with the losers, so I switched to the Yankees, and I’ve been rooting for them ever since. Strange but true—I cast my lot with the Yankees because they were underdogs. After all, they hadn’t won the pennant since the ubiquitous year of 1964, and as far as I (born 1961) was concerned, that might as well have been the year Columbus landed. To conclude this ramble, I will throw in a couple more notes related to 1964. First, on the subject of people shying away from political labels, I recall what Bob Dylan sang that year: Now, I’m liberal, to a degree
And I want everybody to be free
But if you think I’ll let Barry Goldwater
Move in next door and marry my daughter
You must think I’m crazy. In recent years Dylan has expressed admiration for Barry Goldwater, but back then he was still working to build a career, and he certainly knew what his audience would like. As you will read in our October issue, 1964 was the last year when it was easy to divide the world neatly into good (liberal/folkie/peacenik/northeastern/intellectual/bohemian) vs. bad (Eisenhower/businessman/southern/pop/conservative/square). The next year Dylan went electric and LBJ invaded Vietnam and riots broke out, and the whole thing started to collapse. Things must have seemed much clearer back in 1964. In fact, if you buy the CD of Bob Dylan’s 1964 concert at Philharmonic Hall and read Sean Wilentz’s self-loving liner notes, in which he worshipfully praises not only Dylan himself but also all of the elect who were brilliant and perceptive enough to be fans of his back then (including the teenaged Sean Wilentz), you’ll see that some people think it’s still 1964. Oh, and the other thing about 1964? Just that, to make this an even more typical Fred Schwarz post, I’ll bring in the book I’ve been reading lately. In this case it’s Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon. Recently I was staring at the cover and noticed that the title contains the first names of both major presidential candidates in the 1964 election. I know I’m not the first person to point this out, but it’s an example of something we were discussing a few weeks back: coincidences and what we tend to read into them. Surely no one would suggest that William Makepeace Thackeray was clairvoyant enough in 1844 to predict the candidates in an election 120 years later. Yet many coincidences that seem equally unlikely and have equally innocent explanations are taken to mean much more. There, I think that clears out my notebook. If I think of anything else, I’ll let you know.
August 18, 2006
For All You John Steele Gordon Fans Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 05:45 PM EST Our friend John is such a bloggin’ fool that one website isn’t enough for him. Over the last couple of days, he has been corresponding with Scott Johnson of Powerline about Britain’s policy toward Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. I don’t know what this says about John—probably that his greatest passion is for the truth—but even though Powerline is a conservative blog, he has managed to disagree with them. At the end of this post, John defends Neville Chamberlain, taking issue with Johnson’s assertion that the Munich Agreement of 1938 “assured that war, when it came, would be on terms more favorable to the fascists than they otherwise would have been.” John makes the case that if Britain had gone to war with Germany in 1938, it might well have been defeated. In a follow-up here, John expands on his discussion, addressing some points made by William Manchester in his biography of Winston Churchill. The back-and-forth between Gordon and Johnson is well worth reading, particularly today, when comparisons are being made between Europe in 1938 and the present world situation.
August 18, 2006
Bat Guano Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 03:00 PM EST The era of American imperialism began 150 years ago today, on August 18, 1856. That’s when Congress passed a law enabling the United States to seize territory overseas to secure its supply of a commodity that was vital to America’s industry and military. The commodity in question was the excrement of birds and bats.
Guano, as this substance is called, is rich in nitrates and phosphates, making it an excellent fertilizer as well as a fine source of saltpeter for gunpowder. In the early 1850s, reports began to arrive of uninhabited islands in the Pacific that were rich in guano. To a nation that was expanding rapidly onto increasingly marginal farmland, they were an irresistible target for acquisition.
Over the next several decades American companies found, claimed, and sometimes mined guano on more than 50 islands. Some were simply abandoned when the guano played out; others were settled and remain U.S. territory to this day. In the latter group is Midway Atoll, which played an important role in trans-Pacific transportation for decades and was the scene of an immensely important, momentum-shifting battle with Japan in 1942.
In fact, as an article in our sister publication Invention & Technology recently noted, guano has been responsible for many major events in world history, including Civil War naval clashes and an 1879 war between Chile and Bolivia that the Bolivians are still sore about. In the 1950s, long after the guano boom was over, one company built a tramway a mile and a half long across the Grand Canyon to extract centuries’ worth of bat droppings from a cave. Even in the space age, bat guano was important enough as a propellant that NASA made a special requisition for it during the Mercury and Gemini programs.
To be sure, America’s first venture into empire building was fairly benign, being restricted to uninhabited islands that were not under any nation’s jurisdiction. Later, when people and disputed territorial claims entered the mix, things got stickier. Yet even today, nations contest possession of barren rock outcroppings in order to establish ownership of underwater oil fields, occasionally firing shots in the process. Whether it’s wood, fish, crude oil, beaver skins, or any other indispensable commodity, people have always been willing to travel long distances and use all the machinery of national sovereignty to secure it. The droppings of flying creatures are just one of the more unlikely examples of this rule.
August 18, 2006
Lost at Sea Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 09:40 AM EST Yesterday’s paper had a story about some Mexican shark fishermen who got blown off course and drifted across the Pacific for nine months before being rescued. According to the article, they were confined to a 25-foot fiberglass boat the whole time and had to drink rainwater and eat the raw flesh of birds and fish to survive. Imagine spending a day like that, then multiply by 270, and you’ll have some idea of what they went through.
Yet however incomprehensibly agonizing their ordeal may have been, if there are degrees of awfulness, it must be conceded that the Essex whaling disaster of 1819-20 was even more horrific. As Walter Karp wrote in American Heritage in 1983, after a crazed sperm whale rammed the Essex and damaged it beyond repair, its crew of 20 set out in three fragile whaleboats for a tiny group of islands off the coast of Chile, more than 4,500 miles away. During the journey they suffered unimaginable privations, to the point where several men lost the will to live and voluntarily starved to death—whereupon their flesh was eaten by those they had left behind. There is no indication that the Mexican fishermen resorted to such an extremity, though, oddly, according to the Reuters report, five men set out in the ship and only three returned, but the survivors made no mention of the other two.
In these days of instantaneous worldwide communication, it may seem unthinkable that the men had no way to summon help, yet millions of fishermen worldwide go to work every day equally ill-equipped. And when you’re in a tiny boat all alone in the middle of a vast ocean, the gap between 2006 and 1820 must start to seem a whole lot smaller.
August 17, 2006
Something Chemical Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 04:45 PM EST In Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, published in 1944, one of the characters accounts for a drunkard’s addiction by saying, “It’s something chemical in him.” The narrator goes on to explain: “This was the cant phrase of the time [the 1920s], derived from heaven knows what misconception of popular science. ‘There’s something chemical between them’ was used to explain the overmastering hate or love of any two people. It was the old concept of determinism in a new form. I do not believe there was anything chemical in my friend.” Since Waugh wrote those lines, we have learned that many aspects of behavior can, in fact, be traced to “something chemical.” But he was correct in suggesting that the phrase, like most of what H. W. Fowler called “popularized technicalities,” gained currency from its ability to lend a quasi-scientific veneer to vague and ill-formed ideas.
Waugh’s remarks bring to mind a notion that was making the rounds a few years ago, to the effect that the nineteenth century was a chemical century, the twentieth was a physical century, and the twenty-first will be a biological century. This scheme may or may not be accurate in locating the shifting frontiers of science, but for what it’s worth, the same sequence, with something of a time lag, can be observed in an equally important area: scientific clichés. At the same time as Waugh remembered “chemical” being a ubiquitous catch-all, Americans and Britons were referring to a particularly severe obstacle or trial as an “acid test.” (One of the earliest nonscientific uses of that term in the Oxford English Dictionary is attributed to Woodrow Wilson, discussing the fate of Russia; the same example is cited in Fowler’s monumental Modern English Usage.) “Litmus test” for an inflexible yes-or-no criterion, “catalyst” for an agent of change, and “chain reaction” for a self-perpetuating process all seem to have come into vogue after World War II, with the era’s greatly increased emphasis on science in general.
Yet even as chemistry and its terminology flourished in the received idiom of postwar America and Britain, physics was getting ready to take its place. By the 1960s and 1970s it was common to hear people who had failed high school science using “quantum leap” to mean “increase,” or “critical mass” to mean “enough.” “Light year” became the standard term for any large distance (or, inaccurately, any long period of time), and when two people had a mysterious affinity, instead of there being “something chemical,” they were said to be “on the same wavelength.”
In the twenty-first century, however, such expressions are starting to take on the faintly comic air that attaches to anything once considered futuristic. Today the clichés of choice all have to do with molecular biology. A CEO or basketball coach is said to have “established the DNA of the organization,” and the secret or governing principle behind something is called its “genome.” Idiosyncratic tastes are described with phrases like, “I don’t have the gene for enjoying horror films,” and what once was metaphorically called a “carbon copy” is now metaphorically called a “clone.”
Fowler’s book was first published in 1926. I have the 1965 second edition, edited by Sir Ernest Gowers, which contains considerable new material. Using the blogger’s prerogative I’m too lazy to hunt down a copy of the first edition, so I’ll just say that it was either Fowler or Gowers who wrote of popularized technicalities: “First, that the popular use more often than not misrepresents, and sometimes very badly, the original meaning; and secondly, the free indulgence in this sort of term results in a tawdry style.” The book lists a few chemical phrases that were common at the time, but none from physics except for a couple of astronomical terms that have since fallen into disuse. It does, however, devote an extended rant to the then-current tendency to sprinkle a conversation with psychological jargon. That’s because when the entry was written Freud was in vogue.
This all goes to show that whenever a scientific advance (or pseudo-scientific, in the case of Freud) becomes familiar enough, it will inevitably be oversimplified and adopted in casual speech by a novelty-seeking public. In this way, a society’s most overused clichés in any given era are a useful guide to what sort of science was hot at the time (or a few decades before). And from that standpoint, a scan of the journalese on display in any newspaper or website will reveal that the twenty-first century is shaping up as a very biological one.
August 15, 2006
V-J Day Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 04:00 PM EST Today is the anniversary of V-J Day, the date in 1945 when Japan’s surrender was celebrated (though a formal agreement was not signed until September 2). Remembering V-J Day naturally brings up the question of America’s atomic bombing of Japan and its role in bringing the war to a close. That topic has been discussed extensively, in American Heritage (here and here for example) and elsewhere. I do not mean to renew here the arguments over the morality and necessity of the bombings, or the endless parsing of memos and reports that were circulated beforehand. But I do think it’s worth considering what would have happened if no atomic bombs had been dropped.
The British historian Michael Hickey, whom I quote simply because we have one of his books in our library, summarizes a common anti-atomic-bomb view by saying that “it is questionable whether the bombs actually accelerated the end, as secret overtures had been going on between Moscow and Tokyo for some time.” At the beginning of August 1945, the Soviet Union was not yet at war with Japan, so it was well placed to act as an intermediary for peace negotiations with the United States. By that time Japan was shattered and virtually defenseless (though not entirely impotent; kamikazes were still flying their one-way missions, and on July 30 a Japanese submarine sank the USS Indianapolis, killing 883 American sailors). Japan could not have held out for much longer, the antibomb school says, so the use of atomic weapons was cruel and unnecessary.
But even if it’s true that the Japanese were on the verge of surrender, you have to concede that the atomic bombs concentrated their minds. On August 6, Hiroshima was bombed, and two days later Japan made an urgent peace proposal to the Soviets, which was rebuffed. On August 9, Nagasaki was bombed, and the next day the Japanese government announced its willingness to surrender if the emperor’s role could be preserved. Finally, on August 14, the emperor himself threw in the towel in a dramatic radio address, and the war was over. (The surrender was formally accepted and announced on the evening of August 14, Washington time, and commemorated the following day.) So the first atomic bomb prompted a desperate peace proposal within two days, and the second one prompted an actual surrender offer within one day. That clearly shows that the atomic bombs decided the issue and put an end to the stalling.
Still, do a few days or weeks make that much of a difference? If Japan would have surrendered soon anyway, was it really necessary to drop not just one atomic bomb but two? I say yes. In the previous paragraph, we saw that two days after the Hiroshima bombing, the Soviet Union rebuffed Japan’s request to transmit a request for peace talks to the United States. In fact, Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, didn’t just tell the Japanese to take a hike; he told them that as of the following morning, Japan and the Soviet Union would be at war. The Soviet entry into the war with Japan had been planned for months, and Stalin had told the United States and Britain of his plans at the Potsdam Conference in late July, though he lied and said it would happen in mid-August.
So here’s the chronology:
August 6: U.S. drops atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
August 8: Soviets rebuff Japanese peace overtures and declare war.
August 9: Soviet troops invade Korea. U.S. drops atomic bomb on Nagasaki. (The dates for these two events had been independently set in advance and are coincidental.)
August 10: Japan agrees to accept the terms of surrender set forth at Potsdam but insists on preserving the emperor’s role. U.S. says no dice but stops bombing of Japan pending final surrender. Soviet troops continue advance into Korea.
August 14: Emperor Hirohito accepts terms, and Japan formally surrenders. Soviet troops halt at Pyongyang.
Now, there was no way for the United States to invade Korea from the south on such short notice; it would have taken months to prepare. So the only way we could stop the Soviet march through Korea, which was meeting little or no resistance, was for Japan to surrender. In just a few days, the Soviets had gotten halfway down the peninsula; another week, and they could easily have occupied the whole thing.
After Japan’s surrender, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. agreed that American troops would occupy Korea south of the 38th parallel and Soviet troops would do so north of the parallel. (That agreement was negotiated by Col. Dean Rusk, who would later serve as secretary of state under John F. Kennedy.) The usual vague plans were made for deciding Korea’s future by negotiation, and we all know how those turned out. But if Japan had dragged its feet for just a few more days before surrendering, most or all of Korea would have ended up under Soviet control. And when you look at how close the communists came to driving the U.S. out of Korea in 1950, it’s virtually certain that all of Korea would be controlled by Kim Jong Il today.
That’s why we had to drop both atomic bombs on Japan. Even if you don’t think the Japanese would have defended the home islands as fiercely as they defended Okinawa; even if a negotiated peace would have yielded the same surrender terms the Japanese agreed to after Hiroshima and Nagasaki; even if you ignore the terribly destructive conventional bombing of Japanese cities that was continuing undiminished; and even if you set aside the damage that Japan was still inflicting on our sailors in the Pacific and the horrific suffering of our prisoners of war—even with all these heroic assumptions, dropping the atomic bombs still made sense. If those bombs hastened Japan’s surrender by a week—even, perhaps, a single day—they saved what is now South Korea from 60-plus years (and counting) of slavery and hastened the end of the Cold War, possibly by decades.
I’m not saying that these considerations were foremost in Harry Truman’s mind when he gave the order to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Like most Americans, he just wanted the war to be over, and the quickest way to make that happen was to keep hitting Japan as hard as we could. As he wrote in his memoirs: “All previous discussions on the subject of Korea had shown the Russians agreed with us that Korea should pass through a trusteeship phase before attaining independence.” The A-bomb drop dates of August 6 and 9 had been set well in advance, before we knew when the Soviets would invade. Yet Truman knew that letting the war drag on would have been a grievous miscalculation, because any number of bad things could have happened. With the atomic bombs, we had a way to end the war immediately, and we used it. That’s something that lovers of freedom everywhere should be thankful for.
August 6, 2006
Retrosexual Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 09:30 AM EST One strange feature of the debate over same-sex marriage is that today’s homosexuals appear desperate to adopt an institution that so many other Americans (and even more Europeans) have abandoned over the last 40 years. Trend setters indeed! Unless it’s another case of retro camp irony, which seems unlikely, since getting married is, or should be, a much more serious business than buying a 1950s cocktail shaker. I’ve always meant to write a blog entry about how every sentence I speak or write now seems to start with the words “I’m old enough to remember . . .” In this case, I’m old enough—just barely—to remember when pop songs used to talk about getting married. There was the Dixie Cups’ “Chapel of Love” (“Today’s the day when we’ll say ‘I do’ and we’ll never be lonely any more”) and Manfred Mann’s “Do Wah Diddy” (“I’m hers, she’s mine, wedding bells are gonna chime”) and the Hollies’ “Bus Stop” (“One day my name and hers are going to be the same,” which would be doubly confusing to today’s youth), and hundreds of others. The Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” whose lyrics can be paraphrased as “Wouldn’t it be nice if we were old enough to get married, so we could have sex,” recently made No. 5 on National Review’s list of the Top 50 Conservative Rock Songs. All the songs I’ve just mentioned came out before my time, but they were still somewhat current during my 1970s boyhood. By then, pro-marriage sentiment in pop music had dwindled greatly, though it lingered on in songs like the Fifth Dimension’s “Wedding Bell Blues” and Carly Simon’s “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be,” in both of which a woman wistfully asks a man why he won’t marry her. In the pop music of the last 30 years, however, the question of marriage barely even arises. Love and marriage used to go together like a horse and carriage. Now some commentators and lawmakers, on the left and the right, want to get the government out of the marriage business entirely. After all, who needs it? Any non-traditional couple can find a church with sufficiently liberal principles and have a wedding ceremony and throw a great reception afterwards. All the main legal features of marriage could be duplicated under another title, with such complications as joint income-tax filing and inheritance rights included or omitted according to whether they seem necessary. Ideally, each couple could work out a contract tailored to its individual needs instead of accepting a pre-packaged deal. For example, New York State Assemblywoman Barbara Lifton, whose district is mostly in Ithaca (a college town—no surprise), wants to remove the word “marriage” from the state’s legal code and make “civil commitment” the single standard for everyone. “Why should state government become a religious institution?” she asks. Ms. Lifton’s question, suggesting that marriage is no more than a sectarian tradition, shows that we have come full circle since colonial days, or rather half circle, because the Pilgrims and Puritans felt just the opposite, considering marriage to be strictly a state function, not a religious one. Marriage was very important to the New England colonists, and they enacted severe penalties for fornication and adultery (and even worse for homosexual acts, though it’s no surprise the disputatious Puritans quarreled over defining exactly what was prohibited; in one legal case from the 1640s involving two young men, ministers were consulted on the question of whether the biblical condemnation of homosexual acts applied when there was no bodily penetration). But Pilgrim and Puritan alike took the Bible as their guide, and since the Bible says nothing about clergymen solemnizing marriages, they resisted the practice. Edward Winslow, a Pilgrim who was an important figure in the early days of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Colonies, said in the 1630s that marriage was “a civille thinge, and he found nowhere in ye word of God that it was tyed to the ministrie.” Not until 1708 did Hannah Sturtevant marry Josiah Cotton in Massachusetts’s first church wedding. Just as had happened with the early settlers’ shunning of Christmas as a Papist fiction, the universal human liking for a party eventually overcame religious scruples. Anyway, it’s true that the distinction between marriage and “civil commitment,” or whatever one wishes to call it, is largely artificial. Ms. Lifton’s proposal, like most libertarian schemes, makes sense if you assume that (a) sweeping changes can be introduced and accepted with little or no disruption and (b) most people are as fascinated as the typical libertarian is with making choices and weighing options. But by the same token, if everything in marriage can be duplicated with domestic partnerships, or simply shacking up, why do same-sex couples need it? Why are they flocking to an institution that opposite-sex couples, with all the weight of tradition behind them and a much higher rate of parenthood, are increasingly shrugging off? The answer is, of course, that, like so many issues that we spend our time debating, this one is symbolic. As Jeanette Baik, a former American Heritage editor, wrote a few years ago, “Homosexual activists consider marriage mainly a vehicle for mainstreaming homosexuality, with the law on their side.” I don’t agree with everything Jeanette says in the article, and there’s no point in arguing about it, since she no longer works here. But she is absolutely right that the reason behind the push for same-sex marriage is not that gays are being denied any rights. Rather, it is meant to be a statement—to give gays a new triumph and give their opponents a thumb in the eye. In this sense, gay marriage is the tribute that radicalism pays to tradition. The very existence of a pro-gay-marriage movement points up how important and powerful that tradition is, and that explains why gay marriage—which, as I say, will make little practical difference either way—is encountering such great opposition among Americans.
August 5, 2006
Thank You, Senator Javits Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 09:30 AM EST Sen. Jacob Javits’s third-party run for reelection in 1980 was not sad for anyone but left-wing Democrats. If Josh Zeitz’s analysis of the electoral dynamics is correct, Javits, a Republican, helped keep his seat in Republican hands and kept Elizabeth Holtzman, a wild-eyed fanatic, out of the Senate. Sounds like a good deal to me. Javits had known for years what a nut Holtzman was, and anyone who didn’t know could have told from the way she tried to get Richard Nixon impeached for war crimes. So instead of bowing out gracefully, Javits dragged his weary bones around the state one last time to save the country from having a 1960s-style radical in the Senate. Rather than being a case of giving in to pride, it was the last and perhaps most noble and selfless act of a distinguished career in public service.
August 4, 2006
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 05:15 PM EST I was familiar with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, who died in Austria yesterday at the age of 90, only as a soloist on a recording of the Messiah that gets played several times every Christmas in our family’s house. It’s a three-LP mono album from the late 1950s, I think, and by now it’s getting mighty scratchy (I gave my father a stereo version about 20 years ago, and he listened to it once and decided he liked the mono better). I’m not a connoisseur of vocal music by any means, but even I could tell from a young age what a prodigious talent Schwarzkopf was. The obituaries all discuss her membership in the Nazi Party, which she denied for a long time, then admitted but shrugged off as a necessity for artists who wanted to work, “like a union card.” During the 1990s, research showed that she was at least somewhat active as a party member, and a particular favorite of Joseph Goebbels. I don’t feel qualified to offer an opinion on that controversy, but I do know that the whole period of World War II was something she wanted to blot out. In the booklet that came with our recording of the Messiah, Schwarzkopf’s biography goes into great detail about her early training and her advancing career during the 1930s, listing which roles she played with which conductors and costars in which opera houses on which dates. As I recall, the last entry in this section is from 1938. The next paragraph begins, “After World War II, she . . .”
August 1, 2006
Disinherit the Wind Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 06:15 PM EST Oh well, I knew it couldn’t last between me and Ellen. As you know, every post of mine has to include at least one punk-rock reference, so we might as well get this one out of the way at the start. The New York Dolls, glam-punk heroes of my mildly rebellious youth, have just put out a new album, three decades after their last one. Its distinctly non-punky title is One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This, and while there’s nothing on it to match “Personality Crisis” or “Puss ‘n’ Boots,” I think it’s well worth buying—mostly because I’m a fan from way back. Listening to this record is like seeing a beautiful woman 30 years later: She’s still beautiful, sort of, but it helps to know what she looked like before. The reason I bring this up is that one of the better songs on the album is “Dance Like a Monkey,” which makes gentle fun of the evolution-creation debate while counseling everyone to forget their differences and dance. The lyricist and lead singer, David Johansen, throws around terms like “intelligent design” and “anthropomorphize,” and it’s significant that among the references he crams into the song is Inherit the Wind. This suggests how widely that play is still seen today as a basically accurate dramatization of the Scopes trial. In fact, it is nothing of the kind, not even close—and its use every year in thousands of classrooms across America does much more harm to our nation’s youth than any discussion of intelligent-design theory could possibly cause. Fred Smoler writes, “I don’t think the play’s version of history is anything like fanciful enough to call it alternate history.” To be fair, he admits that he has not read it in a long time, so he can be forgiven for that view. I hadn’t read it since high school either, so I bought a copy to see if it was as bad as I remembered it. In fact, it wasn’t that bad; it was 10 times worse. The cardboard-cutout characters might as well wear signs saying GOOD or EVIL or SMART or STUPID. Every supporter of the Scopes character is a saint, and every opponent is a nasty buffoon. For no apparent reason, the Mencken character declaims in a bizarre sort of free verse. Other characters speak in comic-book dialogue: “Drummond [i.e. Darrow] was perverting the evidence to cast the guilt away from the accused and onto you and me and all of society!” And: “When they started this fire here, they never figured it would light up the whole sky!” Above all else, the play is preachy, preachy, preachy. Inherit the Wind should be banned from every classroom in America, if only to ensure that innocent children will not start writing like Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. But the play’s problems go beyond mere incompetence and hackery. As I say above, millions of people across America remember reading or seeing this play, or the movie based on it, and most of them think it has something to do with the actual Scopes trial. In fact, the play and reality have nothing in common. Let’s look at all the ways Inherit the Wind differs from the Scopes trial: —In the play, the Scopes character is in jail at the start and faces a prison term if convicted. He and his girlfriend share a couple of touching scenes in which they imagine the dismal life he will lead behind bars. In reality, Scopes was never jailed. The worst penalty he faced was a fine, which he and everybody in town knew would be paid by someone else. (As I recall, the ACLU and H. L. Mencken’s newspaper both offered to pay the fine, though as things turned out it was never actually collected.) The climax of the play comes when the judge chooses not to send the Scopes character to jail and instead imposes just a token $100 fine. This is meant to be seen as a great victory for Scopes, truth, and justice. In fact, the $100 fine was a defeat for Scopes. —In the play, the Scopes character’s girlfriend is forced, amid great emotional distress, to reveal his personal religious views, which he had shared with her in private conversations. In real life, no such examination took place, nor could it have, since it had no relation to the question of whether Scopes had taught evolution. In any case, Scopes’s guilt was admitted at the start of the trial by the defense, which concentrated on challenging the validity of the law—and in fact, Scopes himself was unsure if he had ever mentioned evolution to his students on the few days he had taught biology. —In the play, the judge excludes testimony on evolution from scientific experts—and then, illogically, reverses himself and allows it from the Bryan character. In real life, several days were tediously spent on endless scientific testimony from a wide variety of experts. —In the play, the Bryan character believes in the literal truth of the Bible. In real life, Bryan had disclaimed any such belief for years in speeches and pamphlets (he was a creationist but not a fundamentalist), and he repeated the distinction at the trial. —In the play, the Bryan character, overcome with his public humiliation and the collapse of his cherished beliefs, makes a final address to the court during which he lapses into incoherence and then drops dead. This is a sick and ghoulish exploitation of the real Bryan’s coincidental death from a heart attack shortly following the trial, a few days after he made a rousing speech before thousands of fervently supportive creationists. —Most important, in the play, the Darrow character’s ruthless examination reduces the Bryan character to stammering and sputtering on the witness stand, to the point where the audience laughs at him and he breaks down in tears. In real life, none of this happened. The audience cheered Bryan loudly and repeatedly, and afterwards virtually every observer, including Mencken, thought Bryan had won the debate. Lawrence and Lee try to shrug all this off by saying in their preface that “Inherit the Wind does not pretend to be journalism. It is theatre. It is not 1925. The stage directions set the time as ‘Not too long ago.’ It might have been yesterday. It could be tomorrow.” Sure, guys. That’s why one man in the play says of the Bryan character, “I voted for him for President. Twice. In nineteen hundred, and again in oh-eight. Wasn’t old enough to vote for him the first time he ran.” And later the Bryan character says about the Darrow character, “He gave me active support in my campaign of 1908.” Yet Lawrence and Lee disingenuously pretend that they aren’t writing about William Jennings Bryan, and they expect us to buy it. What a pair of cowards! In the preface they also write: “The collision of Bryan and Darrow at Dayton was dramatic, but it was not a drama.” That’s true. In real life, the local citizens were not stupid or clownish enough for the authors, nor were they easily led enough to suddenly abandon the convictions of a lifetime when confronted with a few familiar arguments to the contrary. In real life, Bryan did not oblige the authors by taking the stand unprepared, or by humiliating himself; the law in question was not draconian enough; Darrow was not quick-witted enough; and the conduct of the trial was not one-sided enough to suit Lawrence and Lee’s wishes. So they invented a fantasy world. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I could write a play about Bill Clinton’s impeachment in which the President rapes and kills a seven-year-old blind girl and drinks her blood, but it would have nothing to do with the real Clinton impeachment. Similarly, Inherit the Wind has as much connection with the real Scopes trial as does Valley of the Dolls or The Maltese Falcon. This is not to say that the play has no value at all. It is a fine example of mid-1950s liberal paranoia and condescension, explaining as well as anything else why Adlai Stevenson lost twice. In that sense, it has considerable relevance to the current political scene. But it has zero overlap with the actual Scopes trial. Inherit the Wind is to history as creationism is to science, and it is to literature as Spam is to food. Lawrence and Lee did get one thing right. In the first act, the Darrow character says, “You murder a wife, it isn’t nearly as bad as murdering an old wives’ tale.” People don’t like having their cherished beliefs disproved, and when it happens, they are likely to shut their eyes and cover their ears and start singing “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” at the top of their lungs. In this case, when Lawrence and Lee realized that their beloved old wives’ tale about Darrow using truth and reason to humiliate Bryan and win over the yokels was the exact opposite of what really happened, they cooked up a make-believe version and wrote about it as if it were the truth. Was Darrow correct and Bryan wrong on the facts? Of course. But that doesn’t mean that Darrow outdebated Bryan, let alone made him look like a fool to his supporters. And it certainly doesn’t excuse distorting history to suit 1950s notions of right and wrong. That’s why I find it hard to get worked up about “intelligent design” being discussed side by side with evolution in our schools, when many, many more children are exposed every year to Lawrence and Lee’s noxious propaganda.
August 1, 2006
The Oatmeal Eaters Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 11:15 AM EST At risk of making myself sound as pretentious as I actually am, I’ll tell you that I spent part of the weekend rereading Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia. One of the essays is called “Imperfect Sympathies”; you can read it here. It’s basically a list of groups of people that the author dislikes, and why he dislikes them. He dislikes Africans “because they are black,” Jews for historical reasons, and Scots because they are quarrelsome. This sort of thing would not go over well in today’s multicultural Britain, but I’m sure that in the 1820s, when he wrote the essay, his fellow Englishmen ate it up. After all, it wasn’t so long since Samuel Johnson had made a whole career of ranking out on the Scots. (Well, he did some other stuff too.)
Lamb says nothing about the trait that, in my experience, Scots most often attribute to themselves—being excessively thrifty. I’ve always seen this as an example of the odd convention under which it’s okay to stereotype your own group but not someone else’s. The Forbes family is Scottish, and at our company’s annual meeting, Steve Forbes, the CEO, usually makes some joke about saving a tiny bit of money here or there, saying it’s important because he’s a Scotsman. I can also remember, when I was growing up, how Jackie Stewart, a Scottish auto racer, did a commercial for some sort of gasoline additive. He said it would improve your car’s performance, and “as a racer, that appeals to me.” Then he said it would also save money, and “as a Scotsman, that really appeals to me.”
At the time, I had no idea that Scots were supposed to be stingy, so this made no sense to me. I wonder how many Americans today are aware enough of this stereotype to appreciate a joke about it. As a matter of fact, the reputation for thrift explains how Scotch Tape got its name. It was originally intended to be used as masking tape, and the manufacturer decided that for this application, you didn’t need to cover the entire back with adhesive, so they made half the tape’s width sticky and left the other half blank. Someone kidded that this was being “too Scotch,” and they changed it to all-adhesive backing, but the name stuck. I’m not making this up.
Anyway, the final group discussed in the essay was the Quakers, whom the whimsical Lamb found excessively serious. He tells a story about how he and a couple of Quakers were traveling in a stagecoach together, and when they all stopped at an inn and had a meal, the landlady tried to overcharge them, so he and the Quakers refused to pay. An argument ensued, and after the Quakers got back into the coach, he expected them to continue expostulating with each other. Instead they sat in silence for several miles, until one of them said to the other, “Hast thee heard how indigos go at the India House?”
This reminded me of a story I once read about antislavery Quakers in Virginia, a decade or so before the Revolution. Some Quaker meetings had adopted resolutions against “traffic of menbody,” but not every member of the denomination agreed. So one day a couple of antislavery Quakers went to the farm of a neighboring Quaker who still kept slaves and said, “Does thee mind if we sit with thee a spell, Brother _______?” They went inside, and for the next half-hour everyone sat in silence. Then one of the antislavery Quakers said, “Well, I reckon we had better ride.” And they left. Eventually, it is said, this treatment convinced the slave owner of the error of his ways.
P.S. Auto racers are still making Scottish jokes. In a 1999 interview with ABC News, Dave Coulthard, a Formula One driver, explained his fitness routine by saying, “In terms of the muscular strength you need, it tends to be neck, forearms, grip, things like that. As a Scotsman I don’t like money coming out of my hand anyway, so I have a good grip!”
P.P.S. As long as we’re talking about Richard Nixon, the Quaker-style “plain speech” (as used above) played a role in convincing him that Whittaker Chambers was telling the truth about Alger Hiss. The Trickster himself explains here (search for “plain speech” or scroll down to 26:56).
July 31, 2006
More on Fred Smoler Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 04:00 PM EST Taking up a number of points raised by Fred Smoler in his recent posts:
1. “Is it damning to note that ‘the whole trial [was] basically a publicity stunt?” No, of course not. That’s why I never said it was damning. Nor did I suggest that Darrow was wrong, or say anything about Winston Churchill or Dred Scott, or express an opinion on Scopes’s heroism, or make any attempt to defend Tennessee’s legislature.
2. “Does the fact that Bryan didn’t consider himself humiliated mean that he was not humiliated in the eyes of history?” Yes, it does. Eleanor Roosevelt said it best: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” Lawrence and Lee, those champion liars, depicted their Bryan character stammering and crying on the witness stand, so greatly surprised by the Darrow character’s elementary questions that the audience turns on him. Many other historians, scholarly and popular, describe or allude to something similar. But it never happened. The real Bryan never cried, never sputtered, and fielded all Darrow’s questions, which he had been studying and writing about for years, with ease. The audience cheered him loudly and repeatedly and never expressed the slightest disapproval. That doesn’t mean Bryan was right, but it does mean that he was not humiliated by any stretch of the imagination. This is a fact, not an opinion, and since history is concerned with facts, “in the eyes of history,” as in the eyes of everything else, Bryan was not humiliated.
3. “Does the play unduly distort history when it compresses the sprawling chaos of real cross-examination into an ahistorically-dramatic form?” No, the simple act of compressing the cross-examination is not what makes the play a ludicrous piece of propaganda. What makes it a ludicrous piece of propaganda is that it falsifies virtually every fact from the real Scopes trial because the true facts of the case did not suit Lawrence and Lee’s political views.
4. In his post about technology, Mr. Smoler says in the second paragraph that technologies take a long time to develop. That’s exactly what I said was happening in the 1970s and 1980s. So do we disagree? If so, he doesn’t say how.
5. Cable and VCRs were important, to be sure, but I don’t think they had anywhere near the impact that television itself did. A few successful TV series still dominate the entertainment landscape, just as they did in the 1970s. In fact, VCRs and DVDs have contributed to this by making it easier to tape episodes you missed and watch boxed sets of previous seasons.
6. Precision-guided missiles are also important, but the item I wrote was concerned with consumer technologies. My point was that a description of an average person’s daily life in the mid-1970s could fairly easily pass for the early to mid-1990s. The two eras were not exactly identical, to be sure, but they were fairly close, whereas when you go from the early 1990s to today, the differences in the average person’s daily life are enormous. VCRs and cable have given consumers much greater choice about what to watch and when to watch it, but with or without them, you still spend four or five hours a day sitting on the sofa watching bubbleheaded actresses try to resuscitate stale jokes. But mobile phones, the Internet, e-mail, and high-level computer games were things that, for the great mass of people, did not exist 15 years ago and are now ubiquitous. That’s all I was saying.
July 24, 2006
Time, Life, Books Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 01:25 PM EST A while back I read a novel called Life and Love, Such as They Are, by Anna Shapiro. It’s a comic story with serious aspects, and though the author has a weakness for shoehorning one too many gags into a paragraph, overall it is very well done. But there’s something strange about it.
Ms. Shapiro’s novel was published in 1994, and when I read it, I assumed that that was when the action was taking place. So did the New York Times reviewer, who called it “a novel of New York in the ’90s.” But a few weeks later, the Times published a letter from Ms. Shapiro in which she pointed out that “‘Life & Love’ is a novel of New York in the late ’70s and early ’80s” (in fact it’s almost all ’70s, with only a brief epilogue in the latter decade). She pointed to an ambiguous mention of the 1970s in the next-to-last chapter and to a church fire that readers were supposed to know had occurred then. Yet if, like me and the Times reviewer, you didn’t catch these references, late 1970s could pass quite easily for mid-1990s.
I experienced the same sort of confusion recently when I read Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. It never says when the action is taking place, and I was guessing 1880s until I saw a mention of somebody being taken to the train station in a “motor.” When coupled with the publication date of 1905, this narrowed down the possible range considerably, but for the first third of the book, I was off by 20 years. By the time she got around to writing The Age of Innocence, her Pulitzer Prize winner from 1920, Wharton had become wise enough to begin the very first sentence with, “On a January evening of the late seventies . . .”
Don’t you wish more authors would do that? Or at least put “Fall 1973,” or whatever the date is, in italics at the start? Maybe it’s just me, and perhaps it’s because I work at American Heritage, but it always bothers me to go through a book not knowing when it’s taking place. Consider a recently published novel, King Dork, by Frank Portman. The author, under his stage name of Dr. Frank, leads the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band, the Mr. T Experience (also known as MTX), and the title of his novel is also the title of one of the band’s songs. (The song can be found on their best album, . . . And the Women Who Love Them (Special Addition), and if you’re still reading this, for goodness sakes stop immediately, click on the link above, and buy the record.)
Anyway, King Dork is narrated by a high-school student, and it’s being sold as a “young adult” book. A few imprecise time references early on suggest that it’s set in the present or the recent past; near the end, the author gives enough information that we can place it in 2000, give or take a year. Yet any high school student who reads it will smell a rat immediately, because it was quite clearly written to take place during the author’s own late ’70s/early ’80s high-school days.
It’s not just that all the narrator’s favorite rock bands and other cultural references are from that period; that might simply suggest that he has retro taste. And while I seriously doubt that any high school in America still has a “mod” subculture like the one in the book, I could be wrong about that, too, since I don’t spend as much time hanging around schoolyards as I used to. No, what gives it away in an instant is the absence of current technology.
No one in King Dork ever sends an e-mail or a text message; in fact, the author mentions dating couples who use third parties to carry handwritten notes back and forth. Students fulfill dopey “research” assignments by copying from books with pencil and paper instead of downloading from the Internet. When the narrator wants to research a girl he’s met, he searches for her number in a printed phone book, and when he wants to find a verse in the Bible, he goes to the library and looks it up in a concordance. Computers are mentioned only a couple of times, and then only in passing. That most ubiquitous prop of today’s high-schoolers, the mobile phone, is entirely missing, as are portable music players, laptops, and video games.
I suspect that Mr. Portman originally intended his book for an adult audience and set it in his own high school days. Then, I’m guessing, the publishers decided to recast it as a young-adult title, and he did a hasty rewrite to make the dates work out but left most of the text intact. Or maybe he just decided that there was no way he could portray today’s high school scene accurately, so he wouldn’t bother trying. Not that it makes much difference. Whatever the story behind it, King Dork is a funny and telling book as long as you don’t mind the shaky chronology.
All this made me think about how technology can be used as a measure of that nebulous quantity, “how much life has changed.” As Ms. Shapiro’s novel shows, it was possible to write about daily life during the mid-1970s and have it still ring true in the mid-1990s. Technology changed a lot during that time, but very little of it became so ubiquitous that it would necessarily come up in a novel. Some people in the 1980s had home computers, for example, but most did not, and those who did generally used them for things like alphabetizing their record collections, not for interacting with others. Ms. Shapiro’s novel came out right when the Internet boom was about to start. Between the early 1990s and today, the differences in communication and information technology have been enormous, and they’re so deeply embedded in our daily lives that any description of a person’s routine activities today would be unrecognizable to someone from a dozen years ago—and vice versa, as we see from Mr. Portman’s book.
So are we living in an era of unusually rapid technological change? Not really. It would be more accurate to say that the 1970s and 1980s were an era of unusually slow technological change—or, more accurate still, that they were characterized by great advances that did not reach the saturation point until the end of the century. Consider the big transformative consumer technologies since the start of the Industrial Revolution: railroads, telegraph, telephone, electric lighting, automobiles, aviation, movies, radio, television . . . and what? After television, there wasn’t any great leap of this sort for about four decades. Socially, to be sure, there were enormous shifts, and there were lots of incremental technological improvements and major steps that remained hidden. But there was no single, dramatic new technology used directly by the average American that had a transformative impact.
Yet behind the scenes, the stage was being set for the revolution that the general public is experiencing today. These changes tend to happen in spurts, which is why life can seem stable for a couple of decades and then become completely unrecognizable in the space of a few years. All of which suggests that it’s important for novelists to get their details right—and that they’ll do their readers a big favor by telling them at the start when the story is taking place.
July 21, 2006
Dummies for Darwin Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 03:20 PM EST Well, I think the world is in a hell of a state when John Steele Gordon agrees with Joshua Zeitz and Ellen Feldman agrees with me.
I don’t have much to add to Ms. Feldman’s excellent discussion of the Scopes trial and its image in the popular imagination. I’ve never seen the movie of Inherit the Wind, but we did read the play in my high school English class, and you can’t truly appreciate a text of that richness and depth until you’ve heard it read haltingly out loud by a bunch of bored teenagers.
The only comment I have on creationism is that as a private belief system—not something you impose on others, but something you believe yourself—creationism is no more irrational than evolutionism. It is non-rational—that is, it is founded not on reason but on revelation. But it is not irrational, because once you accept that revelation, what follows it is not contrary to logic.
Here’s what I mean. William Jennings Bryan’s version of creationism might be quickly summed up as follows: I know that God created the world and all its creatures, because the Bible tells me so. That’s an unquestionable fact. Everything else is just a detail, and anything that seems to conflict with the basic premise is not my concern. God is a lot smarter than me, and just because I don’t understand something doesn’t mean that it’s wrong.
This requires a considerable measure of faith, but to be honest, so does most people’s belief in evolution, including my own. I, Fred Schwarz, accept the theory of evolution completely and without reservation. That said, I’ll admit that my understanding of what is meant by “the theory of evolution” is quite hazy. It’s easy to imagine quadrupeds in prehistoric Africa competing for high-hanging fruit, and the ones with the longest necks survive the best, and that’s how we got giraffes. Neanderthals who could talk made better warriors than ones who could only grunt, and that’s why we have so many lawyers. That sort of evolution is easy to understand.
But how, for example, did sexual reproduction come about? Did all the organs and the plumbing and the internal chemical balance required for it spring into existence overnight, and species that had been reproducing asexually suddenly started shaving and buying breath mints? Sexual reproduction does seem to not fit the step-by-step model of evolution, and it’s hard for a layman like me to see how any sort of haphazard process could result in it.
And that’s the whole point. I don’t go from there to saying, “Sexual reproduction does not fit my understanding of evolution, so therefore it must be the result of intelligent design” (intelligent perhaps, but far from perfect, as any woman will tell you). Instead I think, “I’m sure the evolutionists have an explanation for this, or at least they have some theories, and even if they don’t, there must be a scientific answer that has yet to be discovered.” I have no idea what such an explanation might be like, and I don’t have the time or inclination to investigate the question myself. But I’m sure that an explanation exists—because I have faith in evolution.
To me, this is no different from a creationist saying, “I believe in creation, and when something doesn’t seem to fit that model, it doesn’t shake my faith; it’s merely one of many things in this world that I don’t understand.” True, either of us could try to resolve the whole mess by making a detailed study of paleontology, evolutionary genetics, archaeometry, and a host of other subjects. But the creationist has to feed his family, and I have half a dozen blog entries to catch up on, so neither of us has the time. Instead, we choose what to believe in based on what we know and have experienced, and we leave the details to the experts.
I’m sure any well-read creationist could rip me to shreds in a debate, if I were so foolish as to try to defend evolution. He would bring up a bunch of anomalies and unexplained events and challenge me to defend them, and I would keep clearing my throat and nervously taking sips of water, and finally I would have to admit that I didn’t know what I was talking about. This doesn’t mean that creationism is right and evolutionism is wrong—just that I personally don’t know enough about evolution to explain or defend it in any detail.
So, to repeat: As a private belief system, creationism is not irrational. I don’t think creationists are crazy or stupid or ignorant, just that their beliefs are different from mine. Now, if someone wants to start teaching creationism in public schools, they’ll have to prove that it can be deduced from something other than religious doctrine. That’s a much higher standard, one that I don’t think can be met. But creationists are not ignoring reality or shutting their eyes to the truth; all they’re doing is choosing a set of basic beliefs, sticking to them, and leaving the fine points to those with the leisure to consider them. And that’s something all of us do all the time.
July 9, 2006
Does This Dress Make Me Look Transgressive? Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 08:30 AM EST It’s official: The word transgressive has now completely, finally, and irrevocably lost every last shred of its meaning. The ritual execution was performed by the University of Pittsburgh Press, which, in a blurb for its forthcoming book Who Says: Working-Class Rhetoric, Class Consciousness, and Community, edited by William DeGenaro, writes: “The contributors examine the language of workers at a concrete pour, depictions of long-haul truckers, a comic book series published by the CIO, the transgressive ‘fat’ bodies of Roseanne and Anna Nicole Smith . . .”
June 9, 2006
Those Were the Days Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 11:20 AM EST Josh Zeitz is right that New York State has tumbled quite far from the unquestioned preeminence it once held in presidential politics. Consider this: From 1800, the first contested presidential election, through 1948, a total of 38 presidential elections were held. In all but nine of these, the presidential candidate or his running mate on at least one of the two major-party tickets was from New York. (See notes 1 and 2 below.)
As Josh notes, candidates have gone to great lengths to win New York. In the spring of 1800 Aaron Burr, Thomas Jefferson’s main lieutenant in New York City, put together a dream team of assembly candidates in that year’s local elections (the state legislature chose presidential electors in those days). George Clinton, a 60-year-old once and future governor and later Vice-President, who had retired to a farm upstate and whose wife had recently died, had his arm repeatedly twisted by Burr until he reluctantly agreed to run. Clinton stipulated that he would not be required to do any campaigning or express support for Jefferson, and that he would be free to state that his name had been put on the list without his permission.
Another celebrity candidate on Burr’s all-star slate was 71-year-old Horatio Gates, the Revolutionary War general, making his only foray into politics. Others included a former member of George Washington’s cabinet, a prominent lawyer who six years later would be appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the city’s largest landowner—all of whom Burr got to pretend that they wanted nothing more out of life than to spend a winter in Albany. After assembling the slate, Burr tirelessly raised funds and organized campaign activities. The result: Burr’s slate won the city election, thus giving control of the state legislature to Jefferson’s supporters, and thus essentially deciding the presidential election (New York was one of the few states where the outcome was in doubt). In return for these exertions, Jefferson made Burr his running mate (and look what happened—but that’s another story, or several stories).
Another example came in 1888. The presidential race between Benjamin Harrison and the incumbent Democrat, Grover Cleveland, was looking very tight, with New York and Indiana the main battlegrounds. Massive vote-buying and fraud won New York for Harrison by a margin of about 15,000 and swung the electoral vote his way, though Cleveland took the nationwide popular vote by nearly 100,000.
But that’s all in the past. In the 14 elections since 1948, no New Yorker has won a major-party nomination for President (see note 3; this streak will probably be broken soon), and only three for Vice-President, all losers: William Miller in 1964, Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, and Jack Kemp in 1996. The explanation? In the mid-1960s California passed New York as the nation’s largest state; now Texas has passed it too, and soon Florida will as well. Moreover, as a result of various demographic and political trends, New York is hardly ever “in play” in any close election. So the days when the Empire State stood like a colossus over presidential elections are gone for good.
As a lifelong New Yorker, I heartily deplore this trend and wish the Sunbelt had stuck to growing oranges and continued to let us run things. Unfortunately, however, the Sunbelt does not seem inclined to listen to me. It’s a sad state of affairs, but as John Steele Gordon points out, there is a silver lining: We can watch television in a leap-year autumn in peace, free from fear that our pleasure will be interrupted with a cacophonous barrage of presidential campaign ads.
NOTES
(1) This enumeration does not include Gen. George B. McClellan, Lincoln’s opponent in 1864, who lived in New York City for a year or so around the time of the election but was basically a nomad. You can change it to “all but eight” if you’re a stickler.
(2) The idea of a “major party” has broken down from time to time, but never in a way that would affect the statistics in this article.
(3) This enumeration does not include Dwight Eisenhower, who in 1952 was officially a New York resident (and president of Columbia University, though he had been on leave since 1950), or Richard Nixon, who in 1968 lived in New York City, where he was a partner in a law firm. You could make a case for Nixon as a New Yorker, since he had lived in New York for nearly six years at the time of the election, but he is so strongly associated with California that it would seem strange.
June 8, 2006
The Old Electoral College Try Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 03:15 PM EST Regarding the Electoral College, I agree with John Steele Gordon that it’s not going anywhere. As is true of a related and far greater injustice, the assignment of two Senate seats to each state regardless of population, changing the rules would require federal and state lawmakers to vote against their own interest for the sake of nothing more than fairness. That isn’t going to happen. To read my 2001 discussion of this issue, which still remains largely valid, click here.
One point that could use clarification is that while abolishing or modifying the Electoral College would require a constitutional amendment, the states remain free to appoint electors as their legislatures see fit. One scheme that has been making the rounds lately is for the dozen or so largest states to agree to allot all their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the nationwide popular vote. [Note: I wrote this before reading Josh’s entry of 10:10 a.m. today on this subject.] Supposedly this would have the effect of always giving the election to the popular-vote winner.
It’s a clever idea, but there are a number of objections: (1) Losers could always claim that votes were suppressed or counted improperly, which would presumably release them from the agreement (some people still claim that the 2004 election was stolen, for example); (2) there would be no way to enforce the deal, and thus nothing to prevent a state from changing its mind on the eve of a close election or even afterwards, or for a subsequent legislature to simply decide that it was a bad idea; (3) it’s unclear what to do when there is a non-trivial third-party candidate; and, perhaps most important, (4) would New York’s legislature really have given the state’s electoral votes to George Bush in 2004 because a bunch of rednecks voted for him? Or in 2000, would Texas’s legislature have given its votes to Al Gore, thus swinging the election, to satisfy a bunch of bluenecks? In either case, how could they face the voters afterwards? In elections won by a comfortable margin, the compact would be unnecessary, and in close elections, it would just be one more thing for people to go to court about. (I suspect it would also exacerbate the “faithless elector” problem, since an elector voting contrary to instructions could say, “But I was just obeying the people of my state!”)
Another problem: You can’t have a meaningful nationwide popular vote without imposing nationwide standards. Otherwise there’s nothing to prevent a state from being lenient towards repeat voters, fake ballots, biased officials, and the like. Under the present system, in most states there’s no need to steal a presidential election because it’s clear in advance which candidate will win, and piling up extra popular votes doesn’t gain you any extra electoral votes. But suppose there’s a de facto national popular vote, and it’s a squeaker, and reports start circulating of illegal aliens voting by the thousand in big cities, or of dead folks flocking to the polls in rural outposts. What then? Or by the same token, what if there were lines around the block that discouraged people from voting, or excessive and picayune challenges or red tape that created delays and scared voters off? What political true believer would feel compelled to respect the results of a vote with so many irregularities? Not to mention the differing standards for things like postal voting, suffrage for convicts, and regulations governing ballots and computer software. The Electoral College does not eliminate these problems, but at least it confines them to one state at a time and erases their effect in most places. With a nationwide popular vote, every local irregularity would become a national problem.
A better idea would be to have a separate electoral race in each congressional district, as Maine and Nebraska now do, with the statewide winner receiving a bonus of two electors. This solves all the objections mentioned above except (2), which applies to any system including the current one. It eliminates the winner-take-all feature, though it could still result in a popular-vote winner losing the election, if you consider that a problem. The difficulty, of course, as with all such schemes, would lie in getting states to agree to it.
May 30, 2006
Beat Me, Congress, With a Title IX Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 01:20 PM EST Go to any .edu website, or look at an official publication from any American university, and tucked away in a corner you will find a statement saying something like: “The University complies with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, related Executive Orders 11246 and 11375, Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1973 . . .” And on and on through dozens of federal, state, and local regulations, to the point where it almost sounds like a law-school reading list.
It’s nice to know that our colleges are so law-abiding. Yet as one surveys the ever-growing list of legislative enactments, court decisions, and bureaucratic guidelines that have been imposed on our institutions of higher education—as recipients of federal funds, as employers, and in many cases as government bodies themselves—to keep them from discriminating against disadvantaged groups, the question inevitably arises: Why? These laws may have been necessary when they were enacted, but why do they still exist? Leaving aside the question of whether affirmative-action regulations are ever justified, why apply them to colleges, by far the most left-wing, diversity-craving, less-racist-and-sexist-than-thou of any major group of institutions in American life? Why make a legal requirement of something they’re desperate to do anyway? It’s like forcing your kids to eat candy.
Liberated from the shackles of government rules, colleges would be free to thumb their noses at the Supreme Court, impose racial quotas and ethnic point systems at will, and practice any kind of affirmative action they want, with no need to dissemble. After all, academics have always been fiercely defensive of their freedoms and prerogatives. Here, for example, Roger Bowen, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, objects vociferously to the extension of federal regulations to universities: “Faculty members should stand their ground: appeal to the libertarian streak in American culture, which says the government that governs least governs best, especially in [the] intellectual realm, where the quality of our ideas legitimizes our pursuit of truth, unmediated by ideology, positive law, or cultural bias.” (The regulations that Bowen is objecting to in this case are the Sarbanes-Oxley rules on financial transparency.)
So why do academics meekly accept, even welcome, the hundreds of externally imposed rules that mandate nondiscrimination in admissions, hiring, promotion, and many other facets of university life? Is it to preserve the jobs of affirmative-action and government-compliance officers, with whom faculty members tend to be in political sympathy? Do they want to make sure that everyone plays by the same rules, so that nonpractitioners of affirmative action won’t gain an advantage? Might it be the intellectual persistence of Progressive and New Deal policies, with their command-and-control approach? Or even a sneaking admiration for totalitarianism, as long as it comes from the left?
All these reasons are possible. But another explanation may be found in Shelby Steele’s recently published White Guilt: How Blacks & Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era. Tracing the roots of the titular phenomenon back half a century and more, Steele’s thesis is this: With the passage of the civil-rights laws of the 1960s, and their swift acceptance by most Americans, the hostile phase of the civil-rights revolution was over, and the battle for black advancement should have shifted to different arenas. Instead the fighting continued, even gained strength, and grew heated, often violent; and with no more discriminatory laws to topple, civil-rights firebrands had to find new dragons to slay. Soon it was no longer enough for white Americans to simply not be racist; they had to prove that they weren’t, by both word and deed, and keep proving it over and over. This need for perpetual revolution and endless self-criticism, says Steele, has distorted American politics and life over the last several decades. And although Steele concentrates on race, the same principle applies to sexism, “able-ism,” and various other purported forms of prejudice.
An example of this sort of thinking can be found in, of all places, a recent article in Chemical & Engineering News by Prof. Richard Zare, chairman of the chemistry department at Stanford University (where Steele also works).
Zare notes that Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits sex discrimination in education, is starting to be used to enforce “gender equity” in university science departments, including such areas as faculty recruitment, retention of students, and professional advancement. He makes clear that he thinks this is a good idea. Now, I’ve met a few chemists in my day, and most of them would welcome yet another round of compliance reviews and requests for data about as much as they welcome teaching premeds. Yet Professor Zare is enthusiastic, almost giddy, about this extension of Title IX enforcement.
Here’s why: “I paraphrase what Rep. Vernon J. Ehlers (R-Mich.) is reported to have said at a congressional breakfast: ‘I am Richard Zare, and I appear before you as a recovering racist and a recovering sexist.’ We are all embedded in a culture that broadcasts signals about the innate superiority of men, and it is very easy to suffer a relapse. Although I have a wife who works full-time at Stanford University and three professional daughters who make me very proud, I still can catch myself downplaying the worth of women scientists, even though I know better.”
Sentiments like these exemplify the notion that white guilt, or in this case white-male guilt, is like original sin: You’re born with it, everyone has it, and you can only get rid of it through an elaborate series of rituals. Like self-flagellating medieval monks, even enlightened souls who have impeccable nonsexist credentials (and will tell you about them) bemoan their inherently evil nature and cry out for correction. This explains many of the follies of current academia, both large (the diversity obsession) and small (linguistic tics like opposing the use of “American” to refer to the United States). A previous scholarly generation may have expiated its own racist-sexist-classist-colonialist-orientalist original sin, but any expiation quickly becomes standard practice, and each new generation must search ever harder to find new isms that can be added to the list of evils and ever more minute sins that can be magnified, bewailed, and subjected to ceremonial death by committee.
In the end, that may be the greatest perversion caused by white guilt. The fearless intellectuals of our college faculties, impenetrably protected by tenure from retaliation or discipline, have always boldly explored the frontiers of society, science, thought, and life itself, free from constraints and roving wherever their restless minds take them in search of truth. Bravely and tirelessly they fight off all attempts at restriction or punishment—yet when it comes to affirmative action, their response is: “Tie me up! Beat me! Tighter! Harder!” Regardless of how you feel about academics, it’s sad to see these doughty battlers and rugged individualists timidly submitting to the iron hand of oppression—or it would be, that is, if you didn’t get the sneaking feeling that they’re actually enjoying it.
May 22, 2006
Men Are From Mountain View, Women Are From Seattle; or, Why John McCain Will Defeat Hillary Clinton Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 02:30 PM EST (Note: I picked Brother Derek in the Preakness, so there’s no reason to pay any attention to my predictions, but here goes anyway, for what it’s worth.)
According to the Regular Guy Theory of Elections, American presidential races tend to be won by the candidate who does a better job of impersonating
somebody you’d want to watch a football game with. You can trace this pattern all the way back to Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams in 1828 (and in fact, I did just that here five years ago (scroll all the way to the end)), but let’s look at the elections since World War II—and remember, this has nothing to do with the merits of the candidates, only with their images.
In 1948 Thomas Dewey was a prohibitive favorite, but he was a notorious stiff, while Harry Truman was informal as all get-out. In retrospect, it’s no surprise that Truman pulled off a last-moment upset. In 1952 and again in 1956, ever-genial Dwight Eisenhower had it all over Adlai Stevenson, for whom the word “egghead” seemed to have been invented (though in fact Eisenhower was a former college president, and you can’t get much more
eggheaded than that).
In 1960 there was no clear favorite in the affability department. JFK was more easygoing than Richard Nixon, but he also had a hard time hiding his aristocratic background, so that was a very close election. In 1964 LBJ had the advantage in folksiness and everything else; Barry Goldwater was actually quite down-to-earth, but his ideas were not right for the times (some were ahead of the times and some behind them, but very few were sound for 1964). The 1968 and 1972 elections were like 1960 in that neither Nixon nor his opponent (Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern respectively) had the down-home touch, so other factors predominated.
In 1976 Jimmy Carter seemed fresh and easygoing, giving him the edge on Gerald Ford, who was also unpretentious but somewhat on the dull side. But
after a rough four years, Carter had turned into an old scold, whereas Ronald Reagan was the master of well-gosh humility. Walter Mondale, in 1984,
was basically the same guy as Humphrey and McGovern—an intelligent, well-meaning, somewhat uptight, slightly too earnest upper Midwesterner—so
it’s no surprise that Reagan cleaned his clock.
The 1988 election may have pitted the least charismatic pair of candidates since FDR, as nerdy Michael Dukakis lost to preppy George H. W. Bush. Bush was easy prey for good ol’ boy Bill Clinton in 1992, and four years later Clinton managed to deflect a challenge from Bob Dole, who was much more like Ike than like Humphrey/McGovern/Mondale but had passed his sell-by date. And of course, George W. Bush did a much better job of positioning himself as a regular guy than Al Gore or John Kerry, not that those two offered much
competition.
So that’s why McCain will win in 2008. People appreciate how hard Sen. Clinton works and the fact that she’s less of a loose cannon than McCain, and while they know she takes most of her political positions for strategic reasons, they also understand that this indicates a welcome lack of ideological rigidity. Still, in the end she’s efficient but distant—not someone you can love. Hillary is Microsoft and McCain is Google, and Hillary’s attempts at being warm and friendly, however sincere they may actually be, ring about as true as the little smiling computer at the bottom of your screen. As weird and annoying as Google and McCain can sometimes get, in the end they’re just more fun.
May 19, 2006
Tar Baby Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 09:40 AM EST At a White House press conference on Tuesday, the President’s press secretary, Tony Snow, declined to answer a reporter’s question, saying it was a “tar baby” that would get him mixed up in unwanted complications. The next day, reporters for The New York Times and the Washington Post took Snow to task for “using a term—“tar baby”—that many consider racist” (the Post) or at least one that has “vague racist connotations” (the Times).
Even considering the sources, this tut-tutting sounded strange to me, since I had never heard “tar baby” used in any way except to describe a sticky situation that’s hard to get out of. And if it is a racist term, there are a lot of racists around: Fifteen minutes on the Internet yielded examples of the use of “tar baby,” with no hint of irony or disapproval, by Robert Dreyfuss and Laura Rozen in The Nation, Matthew Rothschild in The Progressive, Jack Shafer in Slate, Richard T. Cooper in the Los Angeles Times, Lance Morrow in Time, and numerous writers at The Daily Kos and the Democratic Underground (both left-wing websites), as well as such eminent liberals as James Wolcott (on his website) and Sen. John Kerry (in a New York Times article).
The term originates, of course, in an old African-American folk tale that Joel Chandler Harris adapted for one of his Uncle Remus stories. The story was first published in the Atlanta Constitution in 1879 (though a Texas lexicographer named John Williams has recently found the phrase “tar baby” used in a magazine from 1870). A copy of Harris’s story can be found here. The story is hard to read today because of all the gwine’s and sho’s, but the gist is that Brer Fox traps Brer Rabbit by putting a baby made of tar by the side of the road. Brer Rabbit strolls by and tries to talk to the tar baby, and when it doesn’t reply, Brer Rabbit gets angry and starts punching and kicking it. Before long he is stuck to it and can’t escape. The metaphorical use of “tar baby” is well established, though with varying meanings. In Mark Twain’s autobiography, dictated to his assistant in 1906 but not published until 18 years later, he recalled the 1884 presidential campaign thus: “For two years the [Hartford] Courant had been making a ‘tar baby’ of Mr. [James] Blaine, and adding tar every day—and now it was called upon to praise him, hurrah for him, and urge its well-instructed clientele to elevate the ‘tar baby’ to the Chief Magistracy of the nation.” Some other uses of the phrase through the years can be found here. Most reference works, including The American Heritage Dictionary (with which our magazine no longer has any real connection), simply define “tar baby” as a problem or situation that’s hard to get out of, rarely with any mention of a racist connotation. Yet some authoritative sources have ruled that the term does has racist overtones. In 1998 a Massachusetts appeals court decided a case in which a woman named Zhang was suing MIT for employment discrimination. Among other alleged offenses, she claimed that an MIT official had used the term “tar baby” in connection with her, though a previous judge had ruled that “the term ‘tar baby’ had been made in reference to her situation and not her race.” The appeals court declared that: “For purposes of this decision, we acknowledge that the term ‘tar baby’ is extremely offensive to Black Americans. Nonetheless, in view of the undisputed facts that Zhang is not a member of the minority who rightfully take offense to that term . . . and that MIT has a history of employing minorities, including Asians, we agree with the Superior Court judge’s conclusion that Zhang’s proffer was insufficient to show a prima facie case of race discrimination.” A similar wrong-race case, involving a Philadelphia library official who used the phrase in an e-mail, led to this explanation in a newspaper article: “Although the e-mail recipient . . . is white, the term ‘tar baby’ is commonly known to be a racial slur.” Even when the term is not applied directly to a person, its use may inspire objections. In 2004 a newly hired director of the New Orleans City Planning Commission looked forward to starting his new job by saying, “I’ve got to grab the tar baby by the ears and jump right in.” Mayor Ray Nagin, who probably wishes that questionable colloquialisms were still his biggest problem, demanded and got the man’s resignation. The same thing happened later that year when a utility board official in Fort Pierce, Florida, said in an e-mail that a “reporter is calling a PCA increase a ‘rate increase.’ This is a tar baby.” See here for a brief account of the controversy; also see here for the minutes of a city commission meeting with an extended discussion of the phrase’s use, starting on page 43; at one point a man says that he “has learned about a story of a rabbit, it is a Walt Disney story.” (This and other Joel Chandler Harris stories formed the basis for Disney’s 1946 film Song of the South.) Anyway, the official resolved the matter by apologizing. Then last fall the acting mayor of a Houston suburb described “a piece of property that would be difficult to develop” as a “tar baby,” and he too encountered calls for his resignation, though in the end an apology sufficed. And just this spring, in St. Cloud, Minnesota, a commissioner was sharply criticized by the local NAACP after he described the proposed expansion of a city bureau’s responsibilities as a “tar baby”. The commissioner apologized. In this case the story is complicated further because the bureau in question was the St. Cloud Human Rights Office. So the phrase is widely thought to be racist, yet many people who you’d think would know better are evidently unaware of it. What’s going on here? My guess is that until recently, most people encountered the term “tar baby” only occasionally and seldom gave it a second thought. Then, during the last few years, it became one of those phrases that everyone suddenly starts using, like “beg the question” (which originally meant that you were evading a question, not raising one, but that’s another issue) or “the mother of all _____”. In particular, people have been applying “tar baby” to the Iraq war when they’re looking for a cliché to use instead of “quagmire.” Then other people read the phrase, find it apt, and use it themselves, and pretty soon it’s all over the place. And as this process happens, the volume of objections also increases. There are two ways this situation could resolve itself. Either the people who have been using the phrase will avoid it for fear that it might be misunderstood, and a colorful metaphor and a classic bit of folklore will be lost from American speech, or else the people who have been objecting to the phrase will come to understand its origin and lighten up. For anyone who has lived in the United States over the last few decades, it’s not hard to guess which outcome is more likely.
May 17, 2006
Secession Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 05:30 PM EST John Steele Gordon is correct that the idea of New York City seceding from New York State is both old and crazy. However, the constitutional clause that he cites would not prevent the city from becoming a separate state—-if the existing state and federal governments agreed, which is not likely. A number of states have been formed from territory of other states since the passage of the Constitution. Leaving aside the disputed status of Vermont, if you look at a map of the United States in 1789, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia all extended far to the west of their current borders. Present-day Kentucky was carved from Virginia’s western portion (as was West Virginia later on), Tennessee from North Carolina, and most of Alabama and Mississippi from Georgia. Then, of course, Maine was separated from Massachusetts in 1820 as part of the Missouri Compromise, and when Texas became a state in 1845, it included parts of present-day Oklahoma, Kansas, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming. So it can be done, though it would require New York State to voluntarily surrender its jurisdiction over the city. And as we say in Manhattan, that seems a remote contingency.
May 11, 2006
Then There’s This Guy Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 12:15 PM EST I’m in a nitpicky mood today (as usual). At National Review Online, David Frum writes: “Nearly half the nation’s five year olds (45% to be precise) are now ethnic minorities, with most of the surge in minority population driven by Hispanic immigration. About half that immigration is illegal. In other words, the decision today not to enforce the immigration laws is guaranteeing that the US of the second half of the 21st century will cease to be a country predominantly populated by people of European descent.” Uh, dude? Do you know what “Hispanic” means? (Not to mention that some of the immigrants will go back, and there will be further immigration, and what’s wrong with non-Europeans anyway, but that’s a whole different topic.) I suspect that Mr. Frum wanted to say “nonwhite” but realized how that would sound, so he tried to come up with a euphemism. And he is not the first person to see the Spanish as being not really European. As I wrote in 1998 in “Time Machine,” at the time of the Spanish-American War, some Americans went to great lengths to explain why we were fighting against a white European power and for the mostly African and indigenous population of Cuba. “Harper’s Weekly [I wrote] was so fond of Europe and its people that when war broke out, it could barely admit that Spain was part of the continent: ‘The Spaniards are the last remnants of white barbarians, and, like their prototypes of the Middle Ages, whom they closely resemble, they have the savage instincts and methods that are found nowhere else in civilized Europe in this nineteenth century except in Turkey, and, with the exception of Spain and Turkey, are found only among the uncivilized red men of the remote regions of our own continent, and the brown and black and yellow men of Africa and Asia.’”
May 10, 2006
Of Thee I Sing Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 05:30 PM EST In yesterday’s New York Sun (not available online), Will Friedwald writes: “Gershwin’s 1931 show ‘Of Thee I Sing,’ which will be revived by City Center Encores this week, is surprisingly prescient.” (He means “the Gershwins’ 1931 show” rather than “Gershwin’s 1931 show,” but let that pass; and for the record, the book is by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, who go unmentioned in Mr. Friedwald’s piece.) In support of this supposed prescience, he mentions the show’s “silly senators” and “a goofy, spoonerism-spouting president.” This is the sort of thing that critics say when inspiration fails them, which is most of the time. Portraying authority figures as buffoons is hardly unusual in drama, and since it’s a situation that often accords with real life (Warren Harding was in office less than a decade before the show was written, for example), it can hardly be called prescient. I could write a play about a senator who takes bribes, for example, or gets involved in a sex scandal, and the next time either of those very common things occurred, someone could revive it and say, “That Schwarz was a regular Nostradamus.” Mr. Friedwald probably reads the horoscopes in the paper and thinks, “Wow, it’s like this guy knows me.” I’m reminded of the time a couple of years ago when I was reading my college’s alumni magazine (yes, I know—my fault) and one student remarked on the timeliness of an ancient Greek play they were studying: “It’s about a king whose father was king and who is fighting a controversial war.” And I thought: Let’s see, many ancient plays were about kings, war was a popular topic, wars tend to be controversial since people die in them, and due to the hereditary principle, most kings’ fathers were also kings. The notion that this not exactly striking set of coincidences might somehow make the play more illuminating than reading the newspaper is the sort of ludicrous idea that only a college student could propound with a straight face. (Okay, or a college professor—or a critic.) But that’s not what I came here to talk about. In the same paragraph as the sentence quoted at the start of this item, Mr. Friedwald goes on to say that the dim-bulb President in the show “mangles familiar expressions, as when Roosevelt’s slogan, ‘prosperity is just around the corner,’ becomes ‘posterity is just around the corner.’” He then states in parentheses, “I wouldn’t be surprised if Encores throws in a reference to duck hunting or the ‘Decider.’” This illustrates the time-honored journalistic principle that if you are criticizing someone else for being stupid, you should check your own facts, grammar, and spelling extremely carefully. If he is referring to Vice-President Cheney’s shooting accident, the intended target there was quail, not ducks. That makes three mistakes in a single paragraph. (And by the way, the prescience of the show’s writers failed them when it came to their Vice President. The word “Throttlebottom,” named after the VP in “Of Thee I Sing,” has become shorthand for, as one dictionary puts it, “a harmless incompetent in public office.” Neither his friends nor most of his foes would describe the current Vice President that way.) Mr. Friedwald’s attribution of “prosperity is just around the corner” to Roosevelt is worse than simple sloppiness, because twice in the article he mentions that Of Thee I Sing opened in 1931. I’ll admit that I skipped over the mistake the first time I read it, but when I saw 1931 again, I thought: Wait a minute—FDR in 1931? In fact, the statement is usually attributed to Herbert Hoover, although, as Hugh Rawson and Margaret Minor write in the American Heritage Dictionary of American Quotations, there is no record of his saying it: “This was the popular distillation of various statements of assurance made by Hoover and others following the 1929 stock market crash. . . . Eventually the phrase became an ironic joke, used mockingly as a political attack phrase by the Democrats.” My point, which I seem to be approaching rather circuitously, is that if I were teaching American history, I would make my students memorize all the Presidents along with the dates they entered and left office. I know that memorization is out of fashion these days (I’ve written on this subject before; see this), and concentrating on Presidents can distort one’s understanding of American history. But to me, learning the presidential chronology is like learning the names of the elements when you’re studying chemistry, or learning conjugations and declensions when studying a language—it’s the basis on which you build everything else. When you’re familiar with American history and you hear that something happened on a certain date, the first thing you usually think of is who was President at the time. (This can be carried too far, like the other day, when I bought some items in a store and the register showed a total of $18.81, so I thought, “Ah, James Garfield!”) When you know who was in power, you have an idea of what the background for the event was, and you can make much better sense of the chronology. Without this framework, events and trends swim about in a haze. Then it’s much harder to place things in context, and the pursuit of pedantry becomes much more treacherous. P.S. Here’s the link if you want to see the show, by the way:
May 2, 2006
Invasion of the Hedge Clippers Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 05:05 PM EST What the debate on immigration needs, and will not get, is honesty. The biggest problem with the current situation is that it requires us all to shrug off massive violations of the law. Everyone knows that large numbers of workers in restaurants, landscaping, the building trades, and many other industries are illegal aliens, usually paid off the books, yet we pretend that nothing is wrong. Not only does this breed disrespect for laws in general and force legitimate business operators to become criminals, but it makes the problem hard to address by the usual means: Why bother replacing a law that doesn’t work with another law that doesn’t work? Cases like this, where a law with important consequences is unenforced or unenforceable, have occurred in the past in American history, and they have usually led to trouble. The Boston Tea Party took place not because the British government had imposed a new tax but because it was trying, through devious means, to collect an old tax that had been almost universally evaded. Some unenforced or underenforced laws have been bad (fugitive slave laws, prohibition) and others good (the Fifteenth Amendment, which supposedly guaranteed equal voting rights regardless of race), but either way, the remedy is the same: You must either (1) do what it takes to enforce the law and deal with the consequences, (2) repeal the law, or (3) alter it to reflect what can actually be achieved. Otherwise you’re just encouraging both sides to resort to extralegal measures. In our current immigration situation, option (1) not only would present a massive enforcement problem but would play havoc with the economies of the U.S., Mexico, and Central America. No one can say that illegal immigrants are being exploited; if they were, they wouldn’t hike hundreds of miles across the desert to come here. Keeping illegal immigrants out, let alone sending home the ones who are already here, would amount to a way of artificially elevating wages above market levels. Schemes like that never work; in this case, it would increase unemployment here and create a crisis for our southern neighbors, who depend on remittances from abroad to keep their economies afloat. Option (2) would be even worse, depriving us of any control over immigration. Option (3), on the other hand, in the form of true border enforcement coupled with a guest worker program having no restrictions on wages and benefits, would work quite well. America’s and the guest workers’ home economies would both benefit; immigration could be monitored and controlled; and the rule of law would be reinforced instead of being brought into contempt. Unfortunately, as I said at the start, it would require some honesty, which is in eternal short supply in American politics. Both sides would have to admit that illegal immigrants aren’t going away, that they make an important contribution to our economy—and that what makes these things true is the crummy wages they’re paid. In the examples I mentioned above, it took war, depression, and a decades-long protest movement to make this nation face reality. Will something similar be needed to bring us a set of immigration laws that aren’t a joke? Anything is possible, but the historical record is certainly not encouraging.
April 24, 2006
What Would Earle Combs Do? Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 05:15 PM EST Last week I was reading The Divided Family in Civil War America, by Amy Murrell Taylor, which has recently been published by the University of North Carolina Press. On the subject of mail service between the two sections, she writes: “Union and Confederate postal authorities carefully monitored the mail that came through their offices and employed postal clerks for the sole purpose of reading every letter to look for anything suspicious.” This made me think of our recent discussion regarding President Lincoln’s wartime policies and their applicability to the present day, a subject that Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., one of American Heritage’s contributing editors, takes up in today’s Washington Post. Let’s see, if Lincoln were in charge of the United States during a war, what would he do? If history is any guide, he would suspend habeas corpus, arrest anyone who opposed him, and intercept all communications with the other side. Or maybe he wouldn’t. Times change, and if history teaches us anything, it should be the perils of translating thoughts and acts from one era to another (as I have discussed in a previous post). My own guess is that if Abraham Lincoln were somehow brought back to life in the twenty-first century, his first order of business would be to find out why everyone was walking around talking to themselves with a hand clamped to their face. The same situation occurs in sports when people try to make comparisons between eras. Last week I read yet another baseball writer dragging out the cliché about how “today’s Royals [who were 2-12 at the time], if put in a time machine, would probably thump the 1927 Yankees.” Sportswriters love to make statements like that because they know they can’t be denied, for the simple reason that they don’t mean anything. What would happen if you could actually try this experiment? Playing on the road is tough enough as it is—how would the poor Royals deal with a world without GameBoys or ESPN, in which they had to travel by train and wear flannel uniforms? How long would it take them to adjust to the different strike zone and the lack of lights and 460-foot outfields and smaller roster sizes? Would they be restricted to 1920s training methods? Would the teams have time to watch each other beforehand and gauge their styles of play? In real life you can’t send Babe Ruth to the plate against Zack Greinke, any more than you can put Abraham Lincoln (after a quick course in air power, perhaps) in charge of American military policy. For any such hypothetical exercise to have meaning, in baseball or politics, you need to make all sorts of assumptions about which things would stay the same and which things would change in the transition between eras—and the people who make these arguments always choose assumptions that yield the conclusion they want. If Lincoln were around today, would he adopt modern attitudes about privacy, press relations, dissent, international law, and so forth? Or would he retain the mentality of an age when public executions were common, reporters could casually stroll into Army field headquarters, and the biggest military threat the United States faced was from Indians? Similarly, would today’s baseball players, transported back to 1927, have the benefit of videotape analysis of the opponents they were facing—a staple of modern baseball? And which factors would weigh more heavily—the dilution of talent caused by expansion and baseball’s decreasing importance in American life, or the increase in talent caused by population growth and the greater use of African-American and foreign players? In all these cases, you can rig the conditions in such a way as to support whatever point you’re trying to make. I’m reminded of James Bryce’s remark that “the chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies.” It makes sense to ask how Lincoln would have handled, say, a defeat in the 1864 election, or how the 1927 Yankees would have fared against a team of Negro League stars. Those are things that could actually have happened. But once you start moving people from one era to another, you might just as well imagine that Grover Cleveland is a teenaged girl living in Ohio today and ask what color dress he would wear to the prom. Cross-era comparisons can be fun, and mildly instructive in a general sort of way, but the terms and conditions that govern them are so amorphous that it makes no sense to base a serious argument on them.
April 17, 2006
I Smell a Gimmick Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 04:00 PM EST According to the Associated Press, Japanese film exhibitors plan to accompany showings of The New World, last year’s Colin Farrell turkey about colonization in Virginia, with scents that will be released into the theater from specially designed machines. These scents will not try to reproduce what the people and places in the movie actually smelled like, and if you know anything about the seventeenth century, you’ll understand why that’s a good thing. Instead, they are supposed to fit the mood: “A floral scent accompanies a love scene, while a mix of peppermint and rosemary is emitted during a tear-jerking scene. Joy is a citrus mix of orange and grapefruit, while anger is enhanced by a herb-like concoction with a hint of eucalyptus and tea tree.” It all sounds very Japanese, and who knows? In time the technique could become as popular around the world as sushi, though it would help to find a better movie than The New World to use it with. Yet the idea of marrying scents and film goes back almost a century, as one of our sturdy hacks wrote in a sidebar to Tom Huntington’s excellent article on 3-D films in our sister publication Invention & Technology (scroll all the way to the end). As the sidebar explains, when Theodore Roosevelt was President, “S. L. ‘Roxy’) Rothafel, the famous theater owner who later founded Radio City Music Hall, spread rose perfume with a fan while showing film of the Tournament of Roses at a theater in Forest City, Pennsylvania.” The idea was revived occasionally in later decades, most notably in 1959 and 1960, when two competing systems with major-studio backing made brief appearances. (In 1981 John Waters tried a different approach by handing out scratch-and-sniff cards with his film Polyester.) Any scheme for adding scents to film runs into two main problems: (a) it’s hard to do it effectively and (b) there’s no point. From a technical perspective, synchronizing the scent with the action on screen is tricky because the scent takes time to diffuse throughout the theater, and then once it does, it tends to linger. One of the 1959-60 systems, Mike Todd, Jr.’s Smell-O-Vision, tried to solve the first problem by putting a nozzle on the back of every seat, while the other one, Walter Reade, Jr.’s AromaRama, used ordinary ventilation equipment but released a neutralizing agent between scents. Neither method worked very well, but even if they had (and even if realistic-smelling scents could have been produced cheaply enough), they would still have been solutions to a non-existent problem, because no one needs to be reminded during a movie what an orange or a bonfire smells like. Scented-film systems were simply a distraction, and once the novelty wore off (which happened quite fast), they disappeared, to be revived every now and then when some filmmaker needs a gimmick. Will the Japanese approach, which amounts to olfactory mood music rather than a literal rendering of smells from the movie, be more effective? Perhaps. But even so, if the long history of movie-theater innovations is any guide, the costs of installing and maintaining the system will be a strong deterrent to its spread beyond a handful of theaters.
April 7, 2006
The Hegemonic Twinkies of Oppression Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 11:30 AM EST By describing Twinkies, a time-honored working-class nourishment, as “junk food” and proclaiming them “a classic example of capitalism at work,” John Steele Gordon reveals yet again the right-wing proclivities that inform his commentary. Sensitive writers prefer the more empathic term “non-traditional cuisine,” and Mr. Gordon seems completely oblivious of the millions of socially aware individuals who have empowered themselves by shaking off the fetters of so-called market capitalism and constructing homemade Twinkies: http://www.cooks.com/rec/
doc/0,166,139189-241198,00.html http://www.cdkitchen.com/recipes/recs/
36/Homemade_Twinkies58571.shtml often using organic Crisco, artisanal cake mix, and heirloom marshmallow creme. By parroting the Twinkie’s corporate-approved creation myth, Gordon ignores the grim irony of referring to cake pans as “underperforming assets” in the 1930s, a time of mass unemployment. In Gordon’s Eurocentric narrative, a French peasant food based on Genoese folk confectionery is adapted by heroic Anglo-American imperialists in the so-called “New World.” Yet revisionists of the burgeoning Alternative Gastronomic History school have shown that the “banana shortage” story, blatantly designed to put a positive spin on World War II-era militarism, is actually an invention meant to disguise a racially driven agenda in which reified imagery of “whiteness,” as embodied in Twinkies’ intentionally bland filling, reinforces American hemispheric dominance and suppresses Latino aspirations of equality. Moreover, in discussing fried Twinkies, Gordon uses his position of privilege as a white male to exclude from the narrative all non-Western forms of culinary innovation, such as Twinkie sushi: http://www.twinkies.com/recipe_view.asp?rID=86 Gordon’s reactionary approach to this grass-roots movement of multicultural snack subversion, like his unabashed reverence for butterscotch pudding, displays the true agenda that underlies his remarks: an undisguised hostility to any and all attempts at upsetting the carbohydrate-based power structure of corporate America.
April 6, 2006
Post-Shooting Presidential Wisecracks Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 10:30 AM EST A few days ago, this Web site marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attempted assassination of President Reagan with an article on our main page. Since the President survived that attack, it’s easy to remember the incident as almost a lark. It helps that Reagan was alert enough to get off a few of the one-liners for which he was famous. Most of us will recall “Honey, I forgot to duck,” spoken to his wife (a line borrowed from the boxer Jack Dempsey), and “I hope you guys are Republicans,” to his surgeons. But he made quite a few other jokes of varying degrees of hilarity, some of which are listed here. Going back another century, this summer will mark the 125th anniversary of President James A. Garfield’s assassination, which I am researching for the “Time Machine” column in our print magazine. That event has a much darker tinge, since Garfield died of his wounds after two and a half agonizing months. He suffered much more severely than Reagan and was often unable to write or speak, and in any case, Garfield was considerably less ready with a quip than his namesake cartoon cat (or Reagan). But as he lay dying, he did manage to get off a decent one every now and then. In an 1888 diary entry, which can be read here, Rutherford B. Hayes, who had preceded Garfield as President, recounts a visit from William T. Crump, a White House attendant who had nursed Garfield after the shooting: “He [Crump] tells many things showing that Garfield during his illness was in full possession of his faculties; would joke but never smiled even when everyone else laughed. ‘Once Mrs. Garfield was reading items from the morning paper to the President. The death [of] Dean Stanley was read. The President said: “A letter to Mrs. Dean Stanley should be written.” Then an item that Sitting Bull was starving in the North. Mrs. Garfield said: “They better let him starve.” The President hated the oatmeal the doctors required him to eat every morning. He said: “Oh no, send him my oatmeal.”’”
March 27, 2006
Camels of Mass Destruction Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 07:55 PM EST The latest revelation to come out of the declassified papers captured in Iraq is that Saddam Hussein, in his fight against the invaders, planned to use camels to deliver explosives. These suicide bombers would presumably have been given no inkling of their mission, since camels are notorious for doing whatever they please and would not likely have been motivated by religious fervor. While this particular application would have been a novelty, camels have often been employed by military forces in their traditional capacities as a means of transportation and as beasts of burden. Even the United States Army experimented with camels in the deserts of the Southwest during the 1850s. For more on the less-than-encouraging results, see the following two articles in our archives from 1961 and 2005.
March 22, 2006
American Chromatic Exceptionalism Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 09:55 AM EST For all the virtues of using "red" and "blue" as political terms (as set forth here), it must be admitted that they are yet another example of America doing things differently from the rest of the world. Everywhere else, red means left because of its historic association with communism, and blue means Tory or Christian Democrat or what have you (though there are no true conservative parties worth mentioning in Europe). But here, for some reason, red has been assigned to the Republican party, and thus, with the present state of our politics, to conservatism. Many other practices exist in which we Americans stubbornly insist on going our own path (sometimes joined by the hybrid nation of Canada): putting the month first when writing dates with numbers; printing calendars Sunday-to-Saturday instead of Monday-to-Sunday; driving on the right side of the road; capital punishment; and, of course, refusing to adopt the metric system. I lived through the metric-system debate in the 1970s, and in retrospect, I realize that it was an important event in our nation's transition from 1960s liberalism to 1980s conservatism (a transition that Nicholas Lemann has analyzed in our pages) Beginning in the early 1970s, Americans were told that the switchover to metric units was inevitable, and that it would be beneficial and painless--even fun! Every newspaper and magazine in the country ran some sort of "humorous" piece in which maxims like "a miss is as good as a mile" or "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" were "translated" into metric. Distances in kilometers began to appear on highway signs, and with dubious precision, product labels rendered "1 pound" as "453.59 grams." Then, after a few years, Americans started to ask: Why are we doing this? Two main reasons were given: It's much easier to perform calculations with metric units, and in any event, the rest of the world uses them. But as Americans examined the issue more closely, these supposed advantages came to seem less important. Few people, it turned out, ever needed to know how many inches were in a mile, and if they did, they could either look it up or use a calculator. Moreover, when it was necessary to make a mental calculation, too many Americans proved just as incapable of multiplying or dividing by 100 as they were of doing so by 12 or 5,280. At the same time, the widespread adoption of duplicate measurements, as on the signs and labels mentioned above, was intended to pave the way for metrification, but it succeeded mainly in proving that it was, indeed, possible to use two systems of measurement at once. The idea of putting a quart of milk in a shopping cart next to a liter of soda turned out to be far less jarring for consumers than it had seemed to bureaucrats. And as the costs and inconveniences of a switchover became clearer, metrification came to look less and less attractive. By the end of the 1970s it was effectively dead--as a government fiat, that is, though many private industries adopted metric units on their own. What made the anti-metrification campaign such a milestone was that it helped put an end to the dominant pattern of American life since the 1930s, in which problems were attacked with broad, sweeping measures emanating from Washington: court decisions, legislation, executive orders, and so forth. The New Deal brought many successful examples of this approach from Congress and the President, while the Supreme Court kicked its reshaping of society into high gear with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Soon civil-rights legislation was reversing centuries of slavery and discrimination, even as constitutional amendments abolished the poll tax and reduced the voting age to 18. Perhaps the last big federal diktat of this sort was the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, which barred states from making abortion illegal. As often happens with social movements, however, repeated successes made the number and zeal of the supporters grow ever bigger even as the list of easy targets grew ever smaller. At some point these trajectories always cross, and a point arrives when the momentum behind the movement becomes disproportionate to the size of the problems it's addressing. What happens next is that the leaders take a step too far, or many steps; the degeneration of anti-communism into McCarthyism is a classic example of this phenomenon. With the top-down approach to social reform, that point arrived in the 1970s, when crusading bureaucrats who had grown up on the New Deal and the civil-rights revolution were reduced to aiming their lances at speed limits, artificial sweeteners, and, as we have seen, even ounces and inches. The biggest shock to this system was the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment, which seemed unstoppable and unexceptionable until opponents, most prominently Phyllis Schlafly, made the case against it. But the 1970s revolt against Washington-imposed reforms embraced a wide range of causes, large and small. Since then, the nation has continued to change in many ways, but it's hard to name a court decision, executive order, or congressional act that has been responsible for any major shift in American life (except unintentionally, as with the military communications network that became the Internet). For good or ill, the age when Washington decided where the nation should go and then led or pushed it there is over. Part of this is because all the problems with solutions amenable to this approach have been solved, but another part is because in the 1970s Americans finally decided that they'd had enough and told their government so.
March 11, 2006
Look at the Colors Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 07:00 AM EST The best thing that came out of the 2000 and 2004 elections was the establishment of “red” and “blue” as approximate synonyms for “conservative” and “liberal.” A color system for politics is something our nation has always lacked, and its acceptance is a sign of a mature political system. The English, for example, have used colors to indicate political allegiance at least since the War of the Roses; Dickens satirized this tendency with his chapter on the Blues and the Buffs in The Pickwick Papers. The advantage of color terms is that they are completely, unmistakably arbitrary. To be sure, most of us understand that “liberal” and “conservative” are mere labels, not meant to be taken literally any more than we would expect a person named Smith to be handy with tools. But not everyone grasps this rudimentary point, so at some point in any political debate, a conservative is sure to say, “I’m the true liberal because I’m in favor of freedom,” or a liberal will say, “I’m the conservative because I’m sticking with what’s tried and true.” (Adding to the confusion, in some countries, particularly the former Communist bloc, “liberals” are those who favor free markets while “conservatives” want to retain state control.) “Left” and “right” are just as arbitrary as “red” and “blue,” but in American parlance they have taken on a strong connotation of extremism. When someone says “left” or “right” in a political context, the listener tends to mentally supply “-wing” rather than “-of-center.” The same thing may happen with “red” and “blue” in time, though the lack of a convenient linear scale for in-between cases may work against this. In America most people are happy to think of themselves as centrists, but who wants to be purple? Terms like “center-right” or “to the left of Bill Clinton” are much more easily grasped than “gentian violet with a hint of rose pink” or “PMS 2582” (unless you happen to be an art director). Widespread adoption of “red” and “blue” will not, by itself, suddenly cause America’s political commentators to start making sense. But at least it will deprive them of one easy way to degenerate into linguistic quibbles instead of framing their arguments on the merits.
March 6, 2006
Trouser Press Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 11:15 AM EST It’s not clear whether this was coincidence or a bit of Old Testament-style retribution, but on the day in September 1922 when Harvard’s new application form, designed to filter out Jews, was announced, the Cambridge area suffered a strange visitation. As the incident was described in a New York newspaper: “Boston and its suburbs were captured by millions of tiny flies which swept through the city in such large numbers that many thought the snow had begun to fly. . . . Public health officials were unable to determine what caused the sudden invasion, nor could they say why the flies left the city before nightfall.” Other amazing stories in the news that month bore the headlines TROUSERED WOMAN WALKS BROADWAY and BRIDE REGISTERS UNDER MAIDEN NAME. For more on these, see this page.
March 4, 2006
The Goldilocks Theory of Social Engineering Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 07:00 AM EST In reviewing the furor over Harvard’s “Jewish problem” of the 1920s (here and here), what I find most striking is that it was yet another example of college administrators’ eternal fondness for social engineering. Like everyone else, academics overrate the importance of their own jobs. At Columbia, where I went to college, for example, there is a long-standing “core curriculum” that is supposed to mold the students’ tender young minds by acquainting them with the classic works of Western civilization. The faculty takes it very seriously, and if you listen to the deans and read the alumni magazine, you’d think that everything we will accomplish for the rest of our lives is the result of having been made to read a few books by dead Greeks and Romans and then discuss them with a bunch of pretentious 18-year-olds. In the social sphere no less than the academic one, college administrators seem to think their own efforts are all that separates students from disaster. In the 1920s President Lowell worried that if Harvard admitted too many Jews, they would not mix with the other students. More recently, President Lee Bollinger of Michigan (who has since moved to Columbia) defended his undisguised use of numerical racial preferences in admissions on the grounds that if the school had too few black students, they would feel “isolated.” So times have changed, or at least excuses have. But it seems clear to the academic mind that if you have too many students from a particular group, they won’t mix with the others, and if you have too few, they won’t mix either. Finding the correct ratio is evidently critical to the students’ future lives, so college presidents are placed in the position of Goldilocks, ever searching for the bowl of oatmeal whose temperature is just right. Speaking of lukewarm gruel, the Lawrence Summers imbroglio, which inspired this series of posts, makes me wonder: When was the last time a college president said anything interesting? Besides Summers, I mean—and his case shows why it doesn’t happen more often, because for the sin of doing so, he had to flagellate himself endlessly and give the feminists on his faculty a $50 million shopping spree, like a husband caught with his mistress. Back in the day, though, college presidents like Nicholas Murray Butler (who is the subject of a new biography by Michael Rosenthal), Andrew Dickson White, David Starr Jordan, Robert Hutchins, James Bryant Conant, Clark Kerr, and Theodore Hesburgh were widely known beyond their campuses—taking an active part in politics (Woodrow Wilson was the most notable example of this), giving weighty opinions on the issues of the day, and chairing panels and committees of the great and good. These days the only time you read or hear a college president’s name is when the college is hitting you up for a donation—or when, like Summers, one of them is unwise enough to speak a truth that would be obvious to anyone who had not spent his or her entire adult life on a college campus. Be honest: Would you want a job that requires all the butt-kissing skills of a politician but commands none of the power in return? The whole situation reminds me of the man who succeeded Butler as president of my alma mater: Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ike accepted the Columbia job in 1948 after flirting with a run for President of the United States, and if things had worked out the way he had envisioned them, he might well have stayed there. Unfortunately, despite assurances to the contrary from the trustees, he was asked to do much more fundraising than he was comfortable with, and he had much less influence over academic matters than he had expected. (By the way, the old story about Ike’s being offered the job by mistake when Columbia really wanted his brother Milton is not true. Minutes of meetings and correspondence in the university’s archives show quite clearly that Dwight was the Eisenhower they were after from the start.) Another problem Eisenhower had was his unfamiliarity with the academic process of consensus building. To get anything done, he had to go through all sorts of channels and procedures, and to a man who a few years before had moved tens of thousands of troops with a single command, this was quite a comedown. In particular, he was frustrated at having to deal with the city government. When Ike arrived at Columbia, the campus was split in two by 116th Street, an ordinary thoroughfare complete with automobile traffic. One of his first projects as president was to get that block of 116th Street converted to a pedestrian walkway. The goal was finally accomplished six years later, on the university’s bicentennial in 1954—by which time Eisenhower was dealing with somewhat more important concerns as President of the United States. There’s an anecdote about all this that I first heard from Prof. Henry Graff of Columbia’s history department. I wouldn’t swear to its accuracy; like the one about Dwight and Milton, it may have started as a joke and mistakenly been taken seriously. But the story goes that one day a pair of Columbia students saw Eisenhower standing at the corner of 116th and Amsterdam Avenue, waiting to cross the street. The light was against him, and even though there was no traffic in either direction, Ike stood motionless until it changed. Supposedly the students watched this scene in silence, and then one of them asked, “How did he ever invade France?” To which the other replied, “He must have waited for the green light.”
March 3, 2006
How Many Times in the Past Month Have You Eaten Kreplach? Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 01:00 PM EST Harvard’s response to its “Jewish problem,” which caused some embarrassment for the university’s president in 1923, had already drawn attention the previous fall, when, for the first time ever, applicants for admission were asked to specify their race, color, and religious preference. They also had to say where their fathers had been born and to answer the following question: “What change, if any, has been made since birth in your own name or that of your father?” Any such change had to be “explained fully.” Since name changing was common among Jews, the suspicion naturally arose that Harvard was seeking to limit its Jewish enrollment. Prof. Henry Pennypacker, chairman of the admissions board, scoffed at such charges. He said that the government had requested the information and that the new questions were meant to provide information on an applicant’s “family and background,” which could be useful for “making allowances in disciplinary cases.” Besides, Pennypacker said, an applicant could always decline to answer, though he added ominously that “if a boy doesn’t know whether his family changed its name or not . . . it may be then that there are many other things about his family that he doesn’t know.” Harvard had long enrolled moderate numbers of Jewish students, but with the great recent wave of immigration, their presence was reaching levels that made traditionalists uncomfortable—about 21 percent of the student body in 1922, triple the figure for 1900. The university’s president, A. Lawrence Lowell, worried that Jewish students in such large numbers would form cliques instead of assimilating and that their presence might scare away gentiles. The revised application form led some Jews to talk of boycotts, with one calling Harvard an “intellectual Ku Klux Klan.” The controversy had first flared up in June 1922, when the university announced a plan to limit class sizes; critics said it was a subterfuge aimed at excluding Jews. Some also saw sinister motives in the school’s decision to hire black dining-hall waiters instead of using students, since most student waiters had been poor Jews working their way through college. Harvard responded to the furor with the traditional academic tactic of appointing a committee, chaired by a professor with the fitting Harvard name of Grandgent. In April 1923 the Grandgent committee issued a report strongly opposing racial or religious discrimination in admissions. The committee also reversed another Lowell policy that banned black students from freshman dormitories. That situation had arisen when Roscoe Conklin Bruce, Jr.—the son of a Harvard man and the grandson of Senator Blanche Bruce, a Reconstruction-era senator from Mississippi—was accepted at Harvard but barred from living alongside his classmates. (Ironically, the freshman dormitory system had been instituted by Lowell himself as a means of forcing students from different backgrounds to mix socially.) The new policy put an end to such discrimination. Still, there was a limit to what Harvard students of the 1920s could be expected to put up with, so the committee’s report included a proviso that “men of the white and colored races shall not be compelled to live and eat together.” In practice, the few black students who got into Harvard were lodged in out-of-the-way places within the dormitories. Regarding Jews, the committee’s decision merely meant that Harvard, like most elitist colleges, would continue to discriminate in admissions, but more subtly. As for the student body, it adopted the official policy of non-discrimination and egalitarianism in typically Harvardian fashion. According to the historian Samuel Eliot Morison (class of 1908), in the period between the wars, “an Irish-American, Jew, Italian, or Cuban was not regarded as such if he went to the right school and adopted the mores of his fellows; conversely, a lad of Mayflower and Porcellian [a Harvard club] ancestry who entered from a [public] high school was as much ‘out of it’ as a ghetto Jew.”
March 3, 2006
Loose-Lipped Lawrence Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 10:45 AM EST Lawrence Summers is not the first president of Harvard to get in trouble for making unguarded remarks. On Christmas night in 1922, President A. Lawrence Lowell was stuck in a Pullman car between Boston and New York. The train was delayed, so Lowell struck up a conversation with Victor Kramer, a 1918 Harvard graduate. Kramer, a Jew, asked Lowell about Harvard’s recent moves to restrict Jewish enrollment (see my blog entry that will shortly follow this one). This was a favorite subject for Lowell, a fervent assimilationist, and according to The New York Times, “So interested were the pair in the discussion that neither thought of dinner.” Several weeks later Kramer, the manager of a Bronx laundry, recounted the conversation at a meeting of a Jewish men’s club, saying (as the Times recorded his remarks): “President Lowell takes full credit for the plan to limit the number of Jews in Harvard. It was his view that so long as the Jewish people desire to remain apart as a distinct entity in American life and not merge in a social way by intermarriage with the Gentiles, just so long will prejudice continue and grow even worse. “President Lowell predicted that within twenty years we will see in the United States the same conditions that now exist in Central Europe, where blood is spilled as a result of anti-Semitism. “The time will come, Dr. Lowell said--and he believed it would not take longer than a generation--when the Jew must be treated in the same way as the negro in the South and in many of the universities. Dr. Lowell’s advice was that the Jews drop their faith. “The fact that the Jews no longer try to proselytize the Christians indicated, Dr. Lowell said, that they have outworn their religion and that it is no longer a necessary religion. We Jews must give up our peculiar practices, which have marked our religion these many centuries, and must leave aside our individuality if we want to be treated with equality in this country in the future, Dr. Lowell said. “He also asserted that a Jew cannot be an American, for to be an American, in Dr. Lowell’s opinion, one must be that and nothing else. He said that Harvard is not the only university that is barring men of the Jewish faith, but that right here in New York, Columbia and New York University are gradually reducing their Jewish enrolment. He seemed to be delighted that, as he said, the Jewish enrolment at New York University has been reduced from 60 to 30 percent.” After the above story was published, Lowell said it had grossly misrepresented his views. Kramer stood by his account of the conversation. The president took some criticism, but since many of Harvard’s professors and alumni agreed with him, the controversy died down quickly. In April 1923 the university’s overseers banned racial or religious discrimination in admissions, and from then on, the college dealt with its “Jewish problem” by finding less obvious ways to enforce quotas.
March 2, 2006
More Vice-Presidential Trivia Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 10:00 AM EST 1) Nobody we know was able to come up with a Vice President other than Aaron Burr and Dick Cheney who shot someone while in office, but Stephen Eschenbach, the author of an article for Invention & Technology about the first pitching machine writes us to say that Adlai Stevenson, the grandfather of the 1950s Democratic presidential candidate, who was Vice President during Grover Cleveland’s second term, “accidentally shot and killed Ruth Merwin, a friend of his sister's, when he was twelve years old.” [Note: Stephen Eschenbach has written to say that the Adlai Stevenson who shot his sister's friend as a child was the 1950s presidential candidate, not the Vice-President.] And of course a number of Vice Presidents may have shot people before they were in office, while serving in the military—most prominently Theodore Roosevelt. 2) If Cheney remains in office until the end of his term, it will be the first time in our nation’s history that two consecutive Vice Presidents have served two complete terms. And if George W. Bush stays in office until the end of his term, the same will be true for Presidents for the first time since Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe served two terms apiece. 3) At least half a dozen Vice-Presidential historic sites can be found within a 20-minute walk of American Heritage’s offices: the site of a mansion formerly occupied by John Adams, and later by Aaron Burr; the site of a farm owned by George Clinton (Vice President under Jefferson and Madison), which by the way was later sold to John Jacob Astor; the grave of Daniel D. Tompkins (Vice President under Monroe); the former home of Levi P. Morton (Vice President under Benjamin Harrison); a statue and the former home of Chester Alan Arthur; and the birthplace of Theodore Roosevelt. Now don’t you wish you worked here?
March 1, 2006
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 04:00 PM EST In 1911 an Illinois businessman and self-taught musician named Charles Dawes wrote an instrumental composition called “Melody in A Major.” A friend heard him play it, and the song was quickly published, supposedly without Dawes’s knowledge. It achieved moderate success as a recording and in sheet-music form. A few years later Dawes became a major himself (and eventually a general), overseeing the Army’s purchasing and supply operations during World War I and selling off its surplus property afterwards. In 1921 President Warren G. Harding appointed him director of the Bureau of the Budget, and in 1923 he chaired a committee looking for ways to bring order to the postwar chaos of the German economy. The resulting Dawes Plan was enough to win him the Nobel Prize in 1925. By that time he had been elected Vice President under Harding’s successor, Calvin Coolidge—following a campaign in which he was greeted at almost every stop by brass bands playing his song. After his term was over, Dawes continued his activities in business, banking, and international philanthropy, struggling mightily to help America and the world pull out of the Depression. He died in 1951 at age 85. At the time of his death, Dawes may have been unaware that his “Melody in A Major” had recently acquired lyrics by Carl Sigman, who had previously written the words to such hits as “Pennsylvania 6-5000” and would go on to collaborate on “Arrivederci Roma” and “Theme From Love Story (Where Do I Begin),” among many others. The resulting song, called “It’s All in the Game,” was recorded by a crooner named Tommy Edwards. It made the Billboard charts in 1951, and on its re-release seven years later, it reached number one. In the years since, “It’s All in the Game” has been covered by Dinah Shore, the Four Tops, Van Morrison, and many others—including, most recently, Barry Manilow. Manilow’s version appears on his new CD The Greatest Songs of the Fifties, which was the best-selling album in the country the week of its release. So, to recapitulate: A song that was written when William Howard Taft was President by a man who became Vice President under Calvin Coolidge, and which was then released under Harry Truman and topped the charts under Dwight Eisenhower, has been rerecorded by a man whose career peaked under Gerald Ford—and it’s part of another chart-topping record under George W. Bush. What better way to demonstrate the endless tapestry that is our great nation’s history? In a way, you have to feel sorry for Dawes that a throwaway tune, supposedly written in a few minutes’ noodling at the piano one afternoon, is what he’s best remembered for. True, most Vice Presidents do not achieve even that degree of eminence: Coolidge’s predecessor in the office, Thomas Marshall, is known only for his pronouncement that “What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar” (supposedly spoken to a fellow sufferer while some windbag was pontificating on the Senate floor), while Dawes’s successor, Charles Curtis, is distinguished only as the last Vice President to have facial hair. Surely Dawes deserves better. Yet when you look closely at his biography, it’s not so clear. The Dawes Plan did help end Germany’s hyperinflation, but in view of later events it can hardly be called a long-term success. As Vice President, according to the Dictionary of American Biography, “Dawes shocked the Senate by demanding, although unsuccessfully, effective limitations on filibustering.” After leaving office he tried to rectify the Dominican Republic’s finances, head off war by means of limitations on naval forces, settle the disputes between Japan and China, and kick-start America’s economy with President Herbert Hoover’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation. In 1941 he urged America to stay out of the war in Europe. Considering the forces Dawes was up against—Japanese and German imperialism, global economic collapse, worldwide political tensions, and, most intractable of all, the United States Senate—he cannot be blamed for failing to accomplish any of these goals. Meanwhile, his genuine and numerous achievements in banking and industry have gone unnoticed, as such things generally do. And perhaps it’s not so bad after all to be remembered for a catchy and strikingly protean melody. This way, 10 or 20 years from now, when the song reappears as a hip-hop sample, or in some other musical form as yet uninvented, the memory of this otherwise obscure Vice President will be dusted off once more for yet another generation of Americans.
February 28, 2006
Eponymous II Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 12:15 PM EST I always used to wonder what the term “Dickensian” meant. The Dickens novels I had read were distinguished by their sweeping grandeur, covering many different social classes, geographical areas, literary and conversational styles, and moods and humors. I assumed that “Dickensian” was meant to describe something similarly broad-ranging or ambitious, and it took me years to figure out that in fact it refers specifically to grinding poverty. I’ve never figured out why that is. Similarly, after reading George Orwell’s Animal Farm and then encountering the term “Orwellian,” I wondered what it was supposed to mean. Allegorical? Making use of animals? Anti-Communist? But just recently I read Homage to Catalonia, Orwell’s account of his military service with an anti-Fascist unit in the Spanish Civil War. It was published in 1937, while that war was still going on. Most of the book is devoted to describing the dangers and the physical and mental discomforts that went along with being in a war zone. That part is detailed, pungent, and extremely vivid, and well worth reading. Amid all the grimness, amusing notes often pop up, sometimes unintentionally, as when the author repeatedly and without irony discusses tobacco as a necessity on par with food and water. A few of the chapters, however, are devoted to describing the snake pit of leftist parties, factions, and organizations that struggled for power on the anti-Fascist side. (To his credit, Orwell does his best to keep this political material separate from the rest of the book.) Orwell had come to Spain with no strong allegiance, motivated by simple anti-Fascist zeal. He hooked on with a militia aligned with what was called, in the parlance of the times, the Anarchist faction. As the book goes on, he describes his growing disillusionment with the more powerful, Soviet-backed Communist faction, which came to dominate the left and sometimes seemed to be as much of an enemy as the Fascists. Far be it from me to defend the Communists, or any group fighting on any side in that uniformly awful war. But it’s interesting to note the points of doctrine on which Orwell faults the Communists. The Anarchists, who had seized control in Catalonia, ostensibly on behalf of the workers, were dedicated to revolution. They scorned Soviet-style communism as “state capitalism.” The Communists’ biggest problem, says Orwell, was that they weren’t interested in a working-class revolution in Spain; they just wanted to win the war against Franco. So to gain wider support at home and abroad, they made concessions to the status quo, accepting “bourgeois democracy” (i.e., democracy); letting peasants retain their landholdings; and leaving some businesses in the hands of their owners. In other words, the Communists allowed the people of Spain to choose their own leaders, instead of having labor-union officials run their lives; let them work their own plots, instead of assigning them to collective farms; and permitted shopkeepers to keep running their shops. By so doing, Orwell says, they stabbed Spain in the back and betrayed the workers. So now I understand what “Orwellian” means.
February 28, 2006
Eponymous Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 07:15 AM EST Another point Joshua Zeitz raises in his review of Taylor Branch’s book is the ever-vexing question of naming buildings (and monuments and institutions and such) after imperfect people. After mentioning J. Edgar Hoover’s long years of harassing and spying on his enemies, Josh wonders why Congress has not rechristened the FBI’s headquarters building, which is currently named after Hoover. There’s a lot of that going around. In recent years, numerous localities across the country have prohibited naming schools after people who owned slaves, including most of our early Presidents. Some Southerners object to naming parks, roads, or anything else after Confederates. Woodrow Wilson’s name has been removed from schools because of his racist views (he repeatedly praised the Ku Klux Klan, for example). I once read the autobiography of Thomas Hunter, the nineteenth-century founder of New York City’s Hunter College. As I recall, it ends with a bizarre disquisition on phrenology that purports to prove the inferiority of non-white races based on the shapes of their heads. Will Hunter College be next? It’s easy to make fun of this tendency?but then I remember something that I noticed at a recent college basketball game. The program listed the players’ high schools, and I saw that one of them had gone to Nathan Bedford Forrest H.S. The player in question was a black woman, and I wondered how she felt about attending a school named after the perpetrator of the Fort Pillow massacre and the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Perhaps she didn’t care. Teenagers tend to be ironic about such things, and I can even imagine someone viewing her attendance as a way to posthumously stick it to General Forrest. But I can also readily understand someone objecting. This is a case where if a significant fraction of the area’s residents object, it’s probably best to change the name. In general, though, I wonder if we pay too much attention to such things. Sure, Hoover was a sneaky creep, but he also built a very effective law-enforcement operation that caught thousands of criminals. And what about Abraham Lincoln, who suspended habeas corpus, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who imprisoned hundreds of thousands of American on no charge except having the wrong ancestry? Should their names be stripped from our government buildings and public works? As I said, in the grand scheme of things, the name of a building is not very important. If people care enough to want to change it, we should be glad to see them taking an interest in history. But to avoid too sweeping a purge, it might be best to evaluate the people for whom we have named things in light of the time and place in which they lived. Owning slaves was not unusual in the days of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, or even those of Ulysses S. Grant, who owned some slaves for a few years. In the states where those men lived, it was not even looked down upon. So from that standpoint, barring their names would seem a bit excessive. The views of Woodrow Wilson and Thomas Hunter, strange as they sound today, were also quite widely accepted in their time. Forrest is a little harder to defend. There’s no question that he was brave and resourceful, and excuses can be made for his conduct, but my sense of the situation is that there are other soldiers with fewer blemishes on their records that we could honor just as well. Controversies of this sort make me think of Malcolm X. While I’m not a fan of his, I know that many people are, and most of them manage to draw inspiration from him without adopting his wilder ideas. So when I see Malcolm’s image on U.S. stamps and his name attached to schools and highways, I don’t protest the use of my tax dollars to glorify someone with whom I have severe differences; I accept it as part of living in a pluralistic society. I think a sizable dose of toleration, along with a healthy measure of teenage-style irony and whateverism, would leave everyone better off. Above all, however, I think that disputes of this kind show how strong America already is. Happy indeed is the country that has the leisure to spend its time worrying about building names and state flags.
February 27, 2006
Secrecy Is a Historian’s Best Friend Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 10:30 AM EST I have not read At Canaan’s Edge, Taylor Branch’s new book about Martin Luther King and the civil-rights movement, but I have read several reviews of it, including one by our own Joshua Zeitz. As often happens, each reviewer brings his own perspective to the material. A conservative critic bemoans the movement’s degeneration from egalitarianism and peacefulness into separatism and violence; a liberal critic laments that King’s death kept him from leading the country in a new and radical direction; and Josh, a pro historian, while generally praising the book, points out some lapses in Branch’s scholarship and aspects of the story that he might have pursued more thoroughly. One point that all the reviews mention is that much of Branch’s information comes from records of bugs and other illegal surveillance conducted by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. It must have been a little creepy for Branch to listen to the tapes and jot down important revelations while thinking the whole time what a gross violation of civil liberties they were. Yet, as I wrote in the early days of President Clinton’s perjury scandal, since Revolutionary times, Americans have never shied away from using evidence obtained in questionable ways. And while nobody would defend illegal surveillance on the grounds that it helps historians, neither would anything be gained by ignoring the wealth of information that is contained in the FBI’s files. The larger question here has to do with secrecy and the historical profession. A few years ago our magazine ran a column by Richard Reeves criticizing President George W. Bush’s decision not to declassify some documents from the Reagan administration. While there may have been many possible reasons to oppose the decision, the focus of Reeves’s article was summed up in its headline: “A recent presidential edict will make it harder for historians to practice their trade.” And if you’re writing a book about the Reagan administration, as Reeves was at the time (see his article about the experience), that assessment is certainly true. In the long term, however, greater secrecy leads to greater openness. Reeves’s column points out that much of what we know about the Nixon administration comes from minutely detailed records obsessively collected by Nixon’s aides, which were later made available to historians. Those records had been compiled with the expectation that they would remain under Nixon’s control, as had been the case with Presidents since George Washington. The same is true of Hoover’s FBI archives; he never suspected that they would one day be made public. Only in the mid-1970s, prompted by the Watergate scandal, did laws and court decisions begin to seriously restrict the power of government officials to keep documents under wraps. The result? No more Oval Office taping, of course (a practice that began in Eisenhower’s day and has yielded important information about the civil-rights movement and the Vietnam War). Nor would any President today be crazy enough to let his aides assemble a Nixon-style collection of revealing documents. In fact, when our current President took office, he announced that he would send no e-mails for the duration of his term in office, since if he did, they would be subject to subpoena. Around the Vatican it’s said that officers of the Catholic Church are trained to “think in centuries.” Historians need not be so farsighted, but they should at least think in decades. The sooner documents and records can be released to the public, the more effort will be made to destroy them, keep them secret forever, or avoid their creation in the first place. But if the secrecy of documents is assured for a couple of generations, they will eventually become available to scholars in much greater volume. This creates an awkward interval, after an event is over but before all the pertinent records are available, in which historians must rely on partial documentation—though, to be fair, it’s also the interval in which the participants are still around to be interviewed. And to be sure, there are far weightier arguments for and against government secrecy, ones that have nothing to do with the writing of history. To the extent, however, that history enters the discussion, it should weigh in on the side of greater privacy and confidentiality for longer periods. From a historian’s standpoint, more secrecy today means more openness tomorrow.
February 14, 2006
In Other News Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 11:00 AM EST 1. I can’t come up with another example of an incumbent Vice President shooting someone, though if Hannibal Hamlin had done so he would have been justified. Hamlin was Vice President during Abraham Lincoln’s first term, and he spent part of the summer of 1864 serving with a Coast Guard regiment in Maine. During most of his hitch he was a cook, but for his first few days on active duty he was a guard. So if any Rebels had decided to invade Maine (and the prospect is not completely far-fetched, since there was a Confederate raid on Vermont that same year), Hamlin could have shot them and been called a hero. 2. During the 12 hours or so Sunday when the snow was a moderate inconvenience, most sidewalks were reduced to a narrow path on which pedestrians trod, with high walls of snow on either side. I was reminded of the situation that prevailed into the nineteenth century in most cities, and probably still exists in some places, where most streets amounted to unpaved alleys. Muck and mud and refuse accumulated in the middle, so people stuck close to the wall as they walked, but when two people approached from opposite directions, one had to descend into the yucky part while the other slid by along the wall. Yesterday it was just the opposite, because the center of the path was the more desirable part, and when you took the “wall” (which in this case was really a pile of snow a couple of feet high), you risked getting wet shoes or a bootful of snow. The situation reminded me of a quotation from Samuel Johnson (via Boswell), which I’ll confess I had to look up: “In the last age, when my mother lived in London, there were two sets of people, those who gave the wall, and those who took it; the peaceable and the quarrelsome. When I returned to Lichfield, after having been in London, my mother asked me, whether I was one of those who gave the wall, or those who took it. Now it is fixed that every man keeps to the right; or, if one is taking the wall, another yields it; and it is never a dispute.” While looking that up, I came across this anecdote about Lord Chesterfield, which my source attributes to the British journalist A. G. Gardiner: “In his time, the London streets were without the pavements of today, and the man who ‘took the wall’ had driest footing. ‘I never give the wall to a scoundrel,’ said a man who met Chesterfield, one day in the street. ‘I always do,’ said Chesterfield, stepping with a bow into the road.” For what it’s worth, my experience yesterday was that both people tended to step aside. 3. Who would have thought a month ago that the greatest controversy on the world stage would be started by a bunch of cartoonists? Danish ones, yet. The only situation I can recall (after 30 seconds thought, admittedly) where cartoons caused so much commotion was when Thomas Nast was making fun of Boss Tweed in New York City in the 1860s and 1870s. Tweed supposedly complained that newspaper attacks were no problem, since his constituents couldn’t read, but Nast’s cartoons were killing him. His response was to offer Nast large sums of money to take up a different profession, or perhaps spend several years in Europe studying art at Tweed’s expense. Nast turned him down, and Tweed was eventually brought to justice. There’s no question that Tweed was a crook, but you have to admit that he was a mild-mannered one; a lesser man would have threatened or killed the cartoonist. If only all disputes could be settled according to our robust American traditions—open discourse, unfettered debate, and the judicious use of bribery—the world would be a much more peaceful place.
February 13, 2006
Don’t Believe the Hype Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 12:30 PM EST For the record, I live and work in Manhattan, and I have no idea where the supposed “record” figure of 26.9 inches in yesterday’s snowfall came from. There may possibly be 26.9 centimeters of snow out there, but inches? No way. Everywhere I’ve gone there is no more than a foot. The storm tied up some forms of transportation for a few hours, but by yesterday evening almost everything was back to normal. I would characterize this snowstorm as moderate, and I can remember three or four over the last 10 years that were much worse in both the amount of snow and the disruption they caused. I am completely mystified about why everyone is making such a fuss.
February 9, 2006
The View From 1911 Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 02:35 PM EST The 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, of which the ever-shrinking American Heritage library has tenaciously retained a set, is often, and justly, praised for the high quality of its scholarship. (A rather spartan but still useful online version, with no illustrations and frequent typos due to imperfect optical character recognition, can be found at www.1911encyclopedia.org.) The comprehensive entries are authoritative and well researched, and they often contain information that most other sources omit, making them invaluable for researchers. Equally praiseworthy is the writing style, which came near the end of an era when grandiloquence was considered a virtue. One of my favorite examples is a brief entry on backscratchers (the mere existence of such an item is part of the encyclopedia’s charm), which notes that they were often crafted in the shape of a human hand, and “the hand was indifferently dexter or sinister.” Still, the 1911 Britannica does reflect the prejudices of its age. In the entry on New York City, in the wake of statistics showing the city’s great increases in population, we are told: “This rapid growth, the large part which immigration plays in the growth, the marked falling-off in the character of the immigrants, and the fact that it is usually the weaker and less enterprising immigrant who stays in New York while the more capable go West—all these circumstances combine to make a serious social problem.” When those words were written, the turn-of-the-century flood of immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe was at its peak. One can imagine a writer with nativist inclinations walking down Orchard or Mulberry Street, recoiling in shock at the unfamiliar languages and outfits, and thinking, “It can’t be like this everywhere.” In fact, enterprise had nothing to do with it; newcomers went where they had a relative or friend from the old country. And overwhelming as the influx may have seemed, it wouldn’t be long before the immigrants of New York City, like those everywhere else, would show the world what they could accomplish when given a chance and an education.
February 6, 2006
In a Previous Life I Was William Jennings Bryan Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 06:30 PM EST In a recent interview, the actor and director George Clooney said: “Yes, I’m a liberal, and I’m sick of it being a bad word. I don’t know at what time in history liberals have stood on the wrong side of social issues.” Interesting question. But here’s David Pryce-Jones, reviewing Paul Berman’s new book, Power and the Idealists, in the latest issue of National Review: “In modern times, the Left has been wrong about everything important—with the one exception of Nazism. Wrong about Stalin, wrong about Mao and Castro, wrong to support North Vietnam and the Sandinistas and Milosevic, wrong, wrong, wrong. And now the Left comes out to say that Saddam Hussein should have been allowed to stay in power . . .” Hmmm. Leaving aside a few quibbles about the differences between “Left” and “liberal,” or what constitutes a “social issue,” I think you could safely say that these two fellows seem to disagree. And yet both men’s statements can be defended—if you let them retroactively assign whatever position they like to the Left/liberal side. By the same method, I could make myself clairvoyant about the Super Bowl by looking up the winner of every previous game and saying, “Yup, I would have picked them.” Without this ability to make one’s own rules, however, the analysis gets a lot tougher. What was the “liberal” position on the Civil War—peace or equality? Would today’s liberals, transported back in time, have been gung-ho abolitionists, even at the cost of half a million or so dead? Or would they have marched on Washington with banners reading NO WAR FOR COTTON? Depending on your bias, you can call it either way. In fact, however, the question cannot be answered, because it assumes that today’s political categories would still have some meaning when applied to the United States of 1861—a time when the country was divided to the point of war over an issue that ceased to exist when the war ended. Trying to decide which side today’s liberals would have been on is like trying to decide whether, if you grandmother had wheels, she would have won the Indianapolis 500. Similarly, what would today’s liberals have thought about the Populist movement of the 1890s? To be sure, many of the social reforms the Populists called for were enacted in the succeeding decades. But the glue that held the movement together was a crazy plan to debase the currency, which fortunately for us all was quickly forgotten. Would today’s liberals have embraced a movement of the downtrodden asking for government assistance to protect them against the wealthy and powerful? Or would they have shunned them as a mob of uneducated red-staters with a pronounced anti-urban, anti-immigrant, white-supremacist bias? I’m reminded of the episode of Bewitched in which George Washington pops up in early-1970s America. In a nice touch, the thing that surprises him the most is that his birthday is being celebrated on a Monday instead of the actual date. But then—the entertainment industry having been Clooneyesque even several decades ago—Washington goes on to decry poverty, pollution, and various other 1970s ills, including racial prejudice. Watching this, I thought: “Right, George, you owned slaves—tell me about it.” Putting today’s political categories into a time machine is like putting them into a blender--there’s no way they’ll emerge intact. Yet even if it did make sense, that sort of argument still wouldn’t prove anything. Suppose you grant Mr. Pryce-Jones’s point that a long line of dictators have deserved to be removed from office, and that the Left has supported them all. Does that mean the Left must be wrong about Saddam Hussein? Of course not. Or if a conservative praises the accomplishments of the civil rights revolution, which liberals supported, is he or she required to support racial quotas because liberals support them now? Of course not. Each new issue must be considered on its own merits. Slavishly following the past—even the real past, let alone a slanted version cooked up to fit one’s requirements—is just as likely to yield the wrong answer as the right one. History gives us a wealth of examples, guideposts, food for thought, analogies, parallels, and aids to understanding. But it provides very few unambiguous lessons, and those tend to be general ones about human nature, philosophy, statecraft, and so on. Anyone who crudely projects today’s political divisions into the past in an attempt to bootstrap some historical support for a present-day dispute only shows the weakness of his or her own case.
January 27, 2006
Sam the Man Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 03:45 PM EST The other day I was looking for a quote by Samuel Eliot Morison. In it he was discussing the Salem witchcraft frenzy of 1692, and as I recalled he said something like, “There are few sections of the historical literature more tedious than those that show how every responsible citizen of the seventeenth century believed wholeheartedly in witchcraft.” I wanted it for an item about the Supreme Court, believe it or not. I was going to introduce the topic by saying that in similar fashion, I’m sure we are all bored to tears at being told over and over that Supreme Court selections have always been political, so I won’t bore you with that. Then I would go on to say that we might as well be open about it instead of pretending, and the more political the confirmation process the less political the court, and so on. But you’ve heard all that too, so I’ll spare you. Anyway, I couldn’t find the quote. In fact, in the witchcraft section of the book I was looking for (The Intellectual Life of Colonial New England, 1964), Morison includes just such a passage himself, so I must have been thinking of some other historian. But Morison is always interesting to read, and I was amused to encounter, after he tells how the Salem episode began with a small group of girls who started twitching and shrieking, the following: “At this point a good spanking administered to the younger girls, and lovers provided for the older ones, might have stopped the whole thing.” True, perhaps, though depending on the quality of the lovers, it might simply have stimulated more such outbursts. But it made me reflect that you don’t see many serious historians writing sentences like that today. Whether that’s good or bad, I leave to others to decide. On the other hand, you do see serious historians writing passages like this: “Hence [here Morison is paraphrasing the historian J. G. Palfrey], many people who knew perfectly well that the court was condemning innocent people held their tongues, lest they bring the judges and the government into contempt. How true that analysis is, and how it recalls the actions of wise and good people in the same commonwealth, in the Sacco and Vanzetti case!” The only trouble with Morison’s remark is that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. Even a hack propagandist like Upton Sinclair knew that, or at least had very serious doubts—though, in a mirror image of what Palfrey wrote, Sinclair held his tongue because he did want to bring the judges and the government into contempt (see this which is mildly corrected by this). Indeed, from Sacco and Vanzetti to the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss and on to today’s celebrity Death Row murderers, “wise and good people” have been glorifying, excusing, and covering up for politically sympathetic criminals for generations. That’s a mass delusion that has lasted much longer than the Salem tragedy—and will take a lot more than spanking and lovers to correct.
January 26, 2006
A Nice Pair of Heels Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 01:00 PM EST Going through boxes of books from your past is like copying over an old address book: You happily rediscover some old friends and just as happily delete others. I have recently had this experience at home and at work. In both places, the acquisition of bookshelves has permitted me to take hundreds of books out of “storage” (a polite term, in most cases, for “unruly heaps”) and sort through them. The result was two large stacks of books that I want to read again but probably won’t, and two somewhat smaller stacks that either went to a local used-book store or were left on the sidewalk in front of my building (and ended up, within a few days, being sold from card tables on Broadway). One book I was pleased to revisit was Only in America (1958), by Harry Golden. The author was a Jew from New York City who settled in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1941 and began publishing a newspaper called the North Carolina Israelite. It was that era’s equivalent of a blog, filled with Golden’s miscellaneous thoughts on a wide range of matters, from segregation and racism to the oddities of human behavior to reminiscences of his Lower East Side childhood. One item in the book that has particular relevance for us at American Heritage is titled “How to hire a stenographer.” The item tells how Golden advertised for a stenographer and spotted, among the résumés he received, one from a woman named Carrie Ferrara. “Ferrara? In Charlotte there’s a Ferrara?” he writes. “I immediately put all the other letters to one side and decided to hire Miss Ferrara sight unseen.” Her very last name inspires Golden to thoughts of the Duke of Naxos, Princess Leonora, and “that great city of culture, art, good wine, and beautiful women.” And of course she turns out be a first-rate stenographer. Golden goes on to explain how such a fish-out-of-water situation happened: The stenographer’s brother had been stationed at an Army camp in North Carolina during the war. He married a Charlotte girl and stayed in the area, and Carrie followed him down from the North a few years later. Golden proclaims this unusual move as “a good thing for Charlotte and for the State of North Carolina . . . a few more ‘Ferraras’ and eventually Charlotte, too, will be enriched with a substantial community of these people who have given so much to the world . . . If there is any truth to what the philosophers say, that the Jews represent ‘the salt in the stew of civilization,’ it certainly follows that the Italians supply the bits of ‘red pepper’ and the dash of ‘paprika’ which help make the whole concoction more delightful.” The time is long past, of course, when anyone would raise an eyebrow at finding an Italian surname in North Carolina, or anywhere else in the United States. In fact, not long ago American Heritage hired a young Italian-American woman from North Carolina as an editorial assistant. Ms. Armaleo did an excellent job in the too-brief time she worked for us before moving on to better things. Shortly after she left, we hired another editorial assistant from North Carolina, also highly capable. This one would have surprised Harry Golden even more: Her last name is Cheng. Meanwhile, as I sorted through my office books, I came across a copy of Inside U.S.A. (1947), by John Gunther. This book created quite a stir when it came out and was even somehow made into a Broadway musical; my copy is from a 1997 reissue. Gunther, a Chicagoan by birth, was a world-traveling journalist who had spent several years, starting during the war, visiting all 48 states and noting what he heard and saw. He is also remembered for writing Death Be Not Proud (1949), about his young son’s unsuccessful struggle with cancer. When his tour of America reaches the South, Gunther writes: “The foreign-born and sons of foreign-born . . . now leave our story to all practical intent . . . in every [Southern] state except Florida and Louisiana 90 percent or more of the white citizens come of parents who were both American born. The figure reaches 98.7 percent in Arkansas, if Arkansas statistics are to be believed. That Arkansas should also be one of the most unquestionably backward of American states naturally gives the observer slight pause, and makes one wonder what peculiar characteristics the Celts and Gaels, when transported, contribute to a civilization.” Gunther’s sniffiness and Golden’s giddiness aside, it’s clear that the South has benefited enormously from the changes that have taken place in America since these two men published their books. As late as the 1960s, if you weren’t from the South there really wasn’t much reason to go there. Now there is; a good slogan might be “The New South—All the Weather, None of the Faulkner!” In fact, as my fellow blogger Joshua Zeitz wrote in our pages recently, the South not only has flourished at home but has come to dominate large sectors of the entire country’s culture, politics, and religion. You might say it took Martin Luther King to give Jefferson Davis his revenge. There are many reasons behind this change. The civil rights revolution was a big one, of course, and then there’s air conditioning, the mechanization of agriculture, advances in communications and transportation, the relaxation of immigration controls, the establishment of a working two-party system, and many others. Bluenecks may grumble about the red states’ disproportionate influence, but on the whole, there can be no doubt that the entire country is better off since the South made its great change. It’s the same old story of free trade, this time in culture. When the South was insular and hostile to outsiders, its potential was stunted. But when it opened itself up, willingly or not, the region’s natural charms and advantages attracted a whole new crowd of people, including many descendants of those who had fled the South in the old days. Cultural protectionism not only shuts off those on the inside from beneficial influences; it keeps those on the outside from finding out what they’re missing. And in the end, that means everyone loses out.
January 18, 2006
Paranoia Strikes Deep Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 09:00 AM EST The January 7 issue of The Economist contains a column titled “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” with a subhead reading, “It’s back, updated for a new generation.” The reference, of course, is to Richard Hofstadter’s penetrating analysis of American political discourse through the ages, which he delivered in lecture form in 1963 and then published as a magazine article in 1964 and a book the following year. A copy of Hofstadter’s article can be found here. Hofstadter makes his political views clear at the start: “In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority.” Yet while his lumping together of Alger Hiss with such innocent targets of McCarthyism as FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower sounds quaint today, other remarks in Hofstadter’s article have remained timely: “Any historian of warfare knows it is in good part a comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence; but if for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination.” Using the broad sweep that distinguishes all his writing, Hofstadter finds examples of the paranoid style in many eras: “In the anti-Masonic movement, the nativist and anti-Catholic movement, in certain spokesmen of abolitionism who regarded the United States as being in the grip of a slaveholders’ conspiracy, in many alarmists about the Mormons, in some Greenback and Populist writers who constructed a great conspiracy of international bankers, in the exposure of a munitions makers’ conspiracy of World War I, in the popular left-wing press, in the contemporary American right wing, and on both sides of the race controversy today, among White Citizens’ Councils and Black Muslims.” The Economist column suggests that nowadays the paranoid style is chiefly exhibited by the left, and to be sure, elements of it can be found there. Anyone who saw Samuel Alito raked over the coals last week for his membership in a college alumni group must have been reminded of the worse excesses of anti-Communism, though in this case the episode was much closer to farce than tragedy. Yet it’s not just the left; today’s American right also has plenty of members peddling tales of cabals and shadowy manipulation and nefarious foreign influence. Which raises the question: Is The Economist subhead correct to say that the paranoid style is “back”? Has it ever been absent from American politics? In his article Hofstadter makes tentative efforts to link the paranoid style to a sense of feeling “dispossessed.” That’s probably true, but it approaches being too vague to be useful. At any given time, just about everyone can generate some sort of grievance and can look back to some sort of golden age that has been destroyed. The wealthy and powerful are no less resistant to the paranoid style than anyone else. The paranoid style has been a constant presence in American politics because it works. It’s easier to label your opponents as dupes or traitors than to engage them on the merits, and when you assume the existence of a fiendish plot, any contrary evidence can be written off as disinformation—it’s all part of the conspiracy. Paranoid-style tactics may assume greater or lesser prominence according to how well they fit the issues of the day, but if the current level is, say, 8 on a 10-point scale, I’d reckon the index has rarely dropped below 5. Like it or not, the paranoid style is an unavoidable feature of democracy—though we can take a grim sort of comfort in observing that totalitarian regimes seem even more fond of it.
January 6, 2006
Presidential Suicide Shocker! Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 01:30 PM EST At National Review Online (a conservative website), Bradford William Short discusses a new book on assisted suicide in which the author, Margaret Pabst Battin, suggests that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson may have killed themselves. The reasoning behind this speculation seems to be that they died on the same day—July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of independence*—and both men had made vague semi-endorsements of the idea of suicide years earlier. I haven’t read the book and don’t intend to, but Short does not make it sound very convincing (though as a pro-life advocate, he is hardly impartial; by the end he strays far enough from the Founding Fathers to deride the entire field of “bioethics” as a “cult of death”). In the course of his discussion, he mentions Battin’s use of a quotation from Rep. John Randolph of Roanoke, who, upon hearing of Jefferson’s death, wrote, “they have killed Mr. Jefferson.” This inspired a rejoinder from Richard Brookhiser, a friend of American Heritage as well as of National Review, who points out that Randolph “was, to put no finer point on it, nuts.” And indeed he was. His entry in the Dictionary of American Biography is a long chronicle of alternating madness and brilliance, sometimes both at once, punctuated by speeches filled with eloquently contemptuous ridicule that on at least one occasion led to a duel (with Henry Clay, in 1826). Randolph was beardless and diminutive and spoke in a high-pitched voice. He seems to have been unable to function sexually as an adult, which could certainly make a person crabby. The DAB says, “The universal contemporary opinion that he was impotent was verified after his death,” though it doesn’t say how. Characteristically, Randolph made this deficiency the basis for one of his most devastating ripostes. When teased about his lack of virility, he replied: “You pride yourself on a faculty in which your slave is your equal, and your ass is your superior.” * In 1776 Adams predicted that the 2nd of July, when the Continental Congress first decided to declare independence (though without a specific text), would be celebrated by Americans, but custom quickly established the 4th, when the actual Declaration was adopted, as the date for commemoration.
January 4, 2006
These Kids Today, They Don’t Know Nothing Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 09:45 AM EST In a pair of recent entries in this blog, Ellen Feldman and John Steele Gordon have decried the sorry state of knowledge on the part of the American public, particularly its younger portion, about history and economics. I heartily agree with their observations, and I would add mathematics to the list. A few years ago I was staying at the oldest and best hotel in Pittsburgh and needed some postcard stamps. They cost 20 cents at the time, and I asked the desk clerk for ten. She had to use a calculator before she could tell me that the price was $2.00. In the movie Drugstore Cowboy, one character who wants to sell ten units of some narcotic item at $9 apiece is so perpetually wasted that he can’t figure out what the total cost should be. He asks, “What’s nine times ten?” and Matt Dillon tries to pull a fast one by saying, “Um, let’s see . . . 75.” The guy just nods. When I saw this movie in 1989, the audience laughed loudly at this scene, but now it’s all too common in real life, and not just among junkies. Everybody has their pet theory for why people are so uninformed. One factor is probably the politicization of school curricula. There are many ways of teaching history or economics, depending on your politics, and sometimes the desire to inculcate certain beliefs or attitudes takes precedence over basic learning. The same is true of science teaching, as we have seen recently as well as in past eras. Even in mathematics, the “fuzzy math” of today, like the “new math” of my childhood, can make finding the actual answer to a problem (or the “solution set” to an “open statement,” in 1970s-speak) seem like a minor detail. In general, I think there has been a trend since the 1950s to teach students about a subject rather than teaching the subject itself. This is usually justified on the grounds that “we’re teaching our kids how to think, not just filling them up with facts.” The trouble is that you need a basic set of facts, often quite a large one, to be able to think analytically about a subject. And by learning facts you develop an analytical framework, not vice versa. I could go on about this at great length, but I won’t. Equally important, however, is the fact that there’s so much more to know today than there was half a century ago. Not only do we have 50 years more history, but we expect our students to learn about topics that were ignored or glossed over in the past. When I was growing up, even in college, Rosa Parks was the answer to a trivia question, about on a level with the pitcher who gave up Roger Maris’s 61st home run (Tracy Stallard of the Red Sox, in case you’re interested). Nowadays every schoolchild knows her name, and when she died recently she was treated as a national hero. With the scope of history teaching having expanded so much, it’s no surprise that some of the old favorites get lost in the shuffle. I’m not saying that knowing about Rosa Parks is more important than knowing about Joe McCarthy or Anne Frank, just that there’s a limited amount of information that can be crammed into students’ heads, and as we broaden the scope of the history they’re taught, some readjustment is inevitable. In the end, all this may work out for the best, because ignorance can be better than simplistic or imperfect knowledge. Knowing nothing about economics is not a good thing, especially for a political journalist, but it’s better than being educated on the subject by Karl Marx or William Jennings Bryan. Similarly, it’s better to have never heard of Joe McCarthy than to make the common mistake of equating McCarthyism with anti-Communism. Today the phrase “Renaissance man” is applied to anyone who enjoys both Desperate Housewives and classical music, but its original meaning was a man who knew everything about a wide range of subjects—because of the limited range of knowledge at the time. Today we know, and are expected to know, so much about so many things that it’s no surprise to see important subjects get pushed aside. Until somebody comes up with a Moore’s Law for humans, in which brain cells double in capacity every so often, the ever-accelerating expansion of knowledge will continue to outpace our ability to absorb it all.
December 22, 2005
Gap Kids Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 10:00 AM EST The 1996 presidential election, in which Bill Clinton defeated Bob Dole, was widely portrayed as the final triumph of the baby boomers over the World War II generation (now generally known as the Greatest Generation). It seems safe to say that no World War II vet will make another serious run for President, and while a Ronald Reagan-type comeback is always possible, the odds are good that all our future Presidents will have been born after World War II. Which raises a question: What happened to the generation in between? There’s a 21-year gap between Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush (born 1924) and Bill Clinton and George W. Bush (born 1946) in which no Presidents were born. How come? All sorts of theories suggest themselves. A childhood spent in depression and war may have left a generation preoccupied with the basics of survival and security. People born in the 1930s reached adulthood in the 1950s and early 1960s, when conformism ruled, whereas baby boomers were encouraged to take charge, get involved, and change the world. Or maybe World War II and the social convulsions of the 1960s and 1970s created cohesion in the Greatest and baby boomer generations, whose concerns therefore dominated the media and the political agenda in later years. This left the amorphous bunch born in between too callow at first and then too square. Perhaps, but my guess is that it’s just a statistical quirk. If you arrange all the presidential birth dates in order, there have been three other gaps of more than 10 years (1809 to 1822, 1843 to 1856, and 1890 to 1908), so 21 years is not out of line. Moreover, assuming that nothing happens to the current incumbent, three of the last four Presidents will have served two terms. This reduces the sample size compared with periods like the 1830s to 1860s or the 1960s to 1970s, when there was a new President every few years. So I’m guessing it’s just a random fluctuation—though if the Generation Without a Name had been farsighted enough to hire a press agent and come up with a snappy moniker, there’s no telling what they could have accomplished. PRESIDENTIAL BIRTH DATES ARRANGED IN ORDER 1732
1735
1743
1751
1758
1767 (2)
1773
1782
1784
1790
1791
1795
1800
1804
1808
1809
1822 (2)
1829
1831
1833
1837
1843
1856
1857
1858
1865
1872
1874
1882
1884
1890
1908
1911
1913 (2)
1917
1924 (2)
1946 (2)
PRESIDENTIAL BIRTH DATES GROUPED BY DECADE
1730s -- 2
1740s -- 1
1750s -- 2
1760s -- 2
1770s -- 1
1780s -- 2
1790s -- 3
1800s -- 4
1810s -- 0
1820s -- 3
1830s -- 3
1840s -- 1
1850s -- 3
1860s -- 1
1870s -- 2
1880s -- 2
1890s -- 1
1900s -- 1
1910s -- 4
1920s -- 2
1930s -- 0
1940s -- 2
December 19, 2005
Work for the Unemployed Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 01:30 PM EST When my father was a boy, his mother worked in the state capitol in Lincoln, Nebraska. One day he went into the building to look for her, wandered around a bit, and ended up in someone’s office. The man he found there, who did not seem overburdened with work, chatted pleasantly with the preteen visitor for a few minutes and then told him where his mother might be found. My father walked out wondering what state official had so little to do that he could take the time to chat with every stranger who strolled in off the street. The man turned out to be the lieutenant governor. Not long before this scene took place, Nebraska had instituted a unicameral (one-chamber) legislature. This was eminently sensible, something I think every state should do. But why did those practical-minded Nebraskans retain such a useless thing as a lieutenant governor? The office can certainly be dispensed with. Georgia, for example, never had a lieutenant governor until the voters chose one in the 1946 election—just in time, as it turned out, since the elected governor, Eugene Talmadge, died before he could be inaugurated. In most cases, though, a lieutenant governor is picked mainly to balance the ticket, as if anyone cared. A man and a woman is one common formula, or else a candidate from each of a state’s two main regions or ethnic groups (in the Huey Long era, for example, the candidate for lieutenant governor of Louisiana was usually a French speaker). Every now and then some lieutenant governor has a “Rudy” moment and makes a brief appearance in the big job. For example, when Nelson Rockefeller resigned as governor of New York in 1973, ostensibly to head a public-policy group, his longtime Deputy Droopalong, the nondescript Malcolm Wilson, took over for a year or so. But except for a few states like Texas, where the lieutenant governor exercises some statutory power in the legislature, most lieutenant governors are afterthoughts to afterthoughts—like what Vice Presidents used to be, except that in recent times, for better or worse, most VPs have actually had a job to do. It wasn’t always this way. Before the Revolution in many colonies the lieutenant governor was the guy who did the real work, while the governor spent most of his time in London dining with wealthy merchants. As we would say in publishing, the lieutenant governor was like a managing editor. And in 1812 DeWitt Clinton ran a strong though unsuccessful campaign for President against James Madison while serving as lieutenant governor of New York. Today, though, in most states, the lieutenant governor is basically someone the governor sends out for coffee when his secretary is doing something important. That’s why I was surprised recently to see an advertisement in one of our magazines that read, “Lt. Governor Steele says: A well-earned day off deserves a trip to Maryland”—and then, later that same day, to receive a press release that began: “Today Lt. Governor Skillman encouraged Hoosiers to explore the many attractions within Indiana’s borders.” (Another e-mail proclaimed: “Lt. Governor Skillman Announces ‘Free Gallons Getaway’ Tourism Promotion.”) Michael Steele is running for the U.S. Senate, so that may explain why his name was mentioned so prominently. I’m not sure what Becky Skillman’s plans are, but if she does have aspirations of higher office, she’s certainly getting her name out there. And the same thing seems to be happening in Wisconsin. In a recent speech Michael Zimmerman, a dean at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, implored his audience to be more assertive in demanding additional money for education. “Am I being too extreme in asserting that we need to be more aggressive?” he asked. “I don’t think so—and it turns out that Lt. Governor Barbara Lawton agrees with me.” He then went on to describe the active role Ms. Lawton had taken in lobbying for funding reform. If this is a trend, it’s a welcome one. In recent decades, the role of state governments has expanded tremendously, and if the labor of running them can be divided in pre-Revolutionary fashion, with the governor concentrating on politics and the lieutenant governor on administration, everyone will benefit (and some people might say it’s no coincidence that the blowhard role is usually filled by a man and the practical role by a woman). Best of all is the boost it will give to the self-esteem of lieutenant governors, who will spend much less time delivering boilerplate speeches to tepid applause before the local Pulaski Society—knowing in the back of their minds that they were probably the third choice for speaker, after the pitching coach of the local minor-league team and the third runner-up from the second season of Survivor.
December 8, 2005
Gray Area Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 03:40 PM EST The FX cable channel says that next March it will present a six-part series called Black, White in which a black family and a white family will “trade places,” with the blacks made to appear white and the whites to appear black using makeup. During filming of the series, the two families lived together and were followed by cameras as they tried, as nearly as such artificial conditions would permit, to find out what it’s like to be a member of the other group. The obvious antecedent, of course, is the book Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin, in which the author darkens his skin and records how he is treated in the Deep South in the late 1950s. As an article on our site shows Griffin was a fascinating man in many other ways: “He served in the French Resistance and soldiered in the South Pacific, where he lived for a year as an aborigine islander. He converted to Catholicism, and he thirsted for a life of prayer and chastity even while he wrote a novel banned in Detroit for its sexual explicitness. He lost his sight, lived for ten years as a blind man, and then miraculously recovered his vision. He was a musical scholar, a religious intellectual, a working journalist, a livestock breeder, a professional photographer, a social activist, and a controversial novelist.” Cases of whites pretending to be black, and vice versa, are quite common, in fiction and in real life. One of my favorites came in a column Langston Hughes wrote for the Chicago Defender during World War II. (I could look it up, but since this is a blog I don’t have to, so I’ll just work from memory.) Hughes was sitting in a bar in Harlem when a man he knew walked in wearing an Army uniform. The man, who was light-skinned, explained that not only was he in the Army, but he was serving in a supposedly all-white unit. He had been living in a town upstate, and when he registered for the draft, the clerk glanced at him and checked “White” on the form. At the time, blood banking was just getting started, impelled in large part by military needs. Soldiers were among the most frequent donors. To avoid upsetting racists, blood from black and white donors was kept separate. So Hughes wrote: What if my friend gave blood? It would be marked as white, of course. Now, imagine that someone sets off a small bomb on the floor of the U.S. Senate and some of the senators are injured. And imagine that Senator Bilbo of Mississippi is rushed to the hospital and given a transfusion of my friend’s “white” blood. (Bilbo was a notorious race-baiter and foe of miscegenation.) Remember, Hughes continued, Bilbo himself says that one drop of black blood is enough to make you black. Hughes goes on to have a great time imagining Bilbo rising on the Senate floor and demanding a fair-housing act, an anti-lynching law, and so forth. I doubt we’ll see anything that dramatic in the FX series. More significant, perhaps, will be the ratings. Griffin’s book was a sensation when it came out in 1960; he made the rounds of talk shows, sold the rights to Hollywood, and received thousands of letters. Will Black, White elicit similar levels of interest? I suspect not—and if I’m correct, it will be a sign that, for better or worse, race-related issues are no longer in the forefront of Americans’ minds the way they were half a century ago.
December 6, 2005
Whatever Floats Your Boat Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 10:55 AM EST The other day, while looking through the 1842 edition of John F. Watson’s Annals of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, I came upon the following: “About sixty-five years ago [i.e. around 1777, when you’d think Philadelphians would have had other things to worry about], many hundred persons went out to the Schuylkill to see a man cross that river in a boat carried in his pocket! He went over safe, near High street. B. Chew, Esq., saw it, and told me of it, and my father saw the same at Amboy. It was made of leather—was like parchment—was about five feet long—was upheld by air-vessels, which were inflated, and seemed to occupy the usual place of gunwales. For want of a patent office, the art is probably lost. The fact gives a hint for light portable boats for arctic explorers, and suggests a means of making more buoyant vessels on canals.” I was amazed to read this. Way back in Revolutionary days, long before rubber became a common industrial material, someone had built a working inflatable boat! But in fact the technology is much, much older. According to this article: http://www.allinflatables.com/support/articles/inflatable-kayaks-01.html “the history of the inflatable boat goes back as far as 880 B.C, when the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II ordered troops to cross a river using greased animal skins, which they inflated continuously to keep the vessels afloat. In ancient China, during the Sung and Ming dynasties, inflated, airtight skins were used for crossing rivers.” I’ll bet that even the “airtight” Chinese skins were at least a little leaky, as well as the ones used to cross the Schuylkill. Still, Watson’s suggestions about possible uses for this technology proved quite prescient, as both were patented by other inventors before the end of the decade. On his 1845 Arctic expedition, Sir John Franklin brought along an inflatable boat made of rubberized cloth that had been designed by Lt. Peter Alexander Halkett: http://www.nmm.ac.uk/server/show/conWebDoc.9470 And Watson’s idea about canal boats was turned into an invention by none other than Abraham Lincoln, who received U.S. patent No. 6,469 for a scheme to use inflatable chambers to lift boats over sandbars (which, fortunately for posterity, did not turn out to be practical enough for Lincoln to make a business of it): Click here to see the patent office record.
December 5, 2005
Music and Politics Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 04:45 PM EST Another piece of music recently premiered at Lincoln Center was Colin Matthews’s Berceuse for Dresden, which was performed over Thanksgiving weekend by the New York Philharmonic. I did not hear the piece, and in fact was unaware of its existence until I saw it mentioned by the music critic and conservative commentator Jay Nordlinger: http://www.nationalreview.com/impromptus/
impromptus200512050824.asp Nordlinger says the title of the composition made him worry that it would be an Allies-bashing piece, but he notes with satisfaction that it is dedicated to Victor Klemperer, a Jew who had recently received a deportation notice but managed to escape Dresden in the aftermath of the bombing. (Nordlinger does worry, though, about the invocation of “They will beat their swords into plowshares” in the program notes, detecting a possible endorsement of pacifism over self-defense.) This search for a meaning in music reminded me of the first time I heard Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. It’s an extremely experimental piece from the late 1950s, filled with unconventional sounds made on string instruments. As I listened, I quite clearly made out, amidst all the aural clutter, the sounds of a massive explosion, followed by screams and cries, sirens, chaos (lots of this), and finally a fade to silence. The cumulative effect was overwhelming; I can’t remember another time when I’ve been so affected by a piece of instrumental music. Imagine my surprise, then, when I read the program notes and learned that Penderecki wrote the piece without any thought of an atomic explosion. It was originally titled 8’37”, for its length, and then Threnody for 52 String Instruments, the title under which it is usually performed today. He meant it as nothing but an exploration of sonic possibilities, but shortly before its first performance, the Polish government ordered him to insert the anti-American reference in its title. It reminds me of one of Leo Rosten’s Hyman Kaplan stories, in which Kaplan gives a moving analysis of a passage from Shakespeare, imagining in great detail Julius Caesar’s thoughts on the eve of battle, only to be told at the end that the passage is actually from Macbeth. I don’t know what all this means, except that it’s easy to see and hear things that aren’t there—and that orchestral music is not a very effective tool for analyzing history.
November 29, 2005
Long-Winded Lincoln Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 03:15 PM EST On Thanksgiving Day the New York Post published an editorial that quoted from Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation establishing the modern holiday of Thanksgiving. The newspaper characterized Lincoln as “notably a man of few words,” which prompted a reply in this morning’s paper from Harold Holzer, a longtime Lincoln scholar and friend of American Heritage. Holzer is certainly right to point out that Lincoln could wind stems with the best of them. But as our recent discussion of the Gettysburg Address shows, he at least was capable of being concise, something that is absent in many of our modern politicians. My favorite example came on April 8, 1861. With Fort Sumter in grave peril and a civil war seeming unavoidable, Lincoln sent a message to Gov. Andrew G. Curtin of Pennsylvania that read, in its entirety, as follows: “I think the necessity of being ready increases. Look to it.”
November 25, 2005
The Writer’s Voice Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 07:00 AM EST Part of my problem with the Gettysburg Address may be that I can’t imagine it vividly enough, since I don’t know what Lincoln sounded like—what sort of voice he had, whether he shouted or whispered, how often he paused, and so on. This can make a huge difference. The first time I attempted Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, I couldn’t finish it; it seemed like the most god-awful drivel I had ever read. Then I heard a recording of Kerouac reading some of his poetry, and suddenly it clicked. The author’s literal voice—a soft, earnest murmur with a slight lisp and a stop-start approach—showed me the way to interpret his literary voice, and suddenly I knew how to read him. (Though if Kerouac had lived longer, I suspect he would eventually have sounded much different. When you listen to a 1950s recording of his Beat colleague Allen Ginsberg reading “Howl,” he is quiet but intense, seeming to feel every single word as it spills out. By the 1980s, Ginsberg was reciting his sturdy masterpiece way you would read to a three-year-old, with lots of swoops and shouts and bells and whistles, as if the words themselves were not enough. That’s what happens when you’ve performed the same thing hundreds of times—like Bob Dylan rearranging his songs when he gets bored with them.) Anyway, without hearing a speaker’s voice, the words alone can give a misleading impression of how they were delivered. When I first read Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, having no experience with religious sermons of any kind, I imagined him reading it as the grown-ups I knew would have done: Serious, even-toned, yet impassioned, with the voice occasionally swelling to a near-shout for the most important phrases. I envisioned the entire audience of 250,000 hushed and straining to catch every word. Imagine my surprise when I heard a recording of excerpts from that speech, which King delivered with all the cadences and flourishes of the traditional Southern preacher. The only place I had encountered that sort of oratory before was on The Flip Wilson Show, and it was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud. I didn’t mean any disrespect to Dr. King, but the speech just sounded so completely different from what I had imagined. After I got used to his speaking style, I went back and reread the speech with a new understanding of what hearing it must have been like. I forget whether current literary theory says that the text is paramount and what we know about the author is a distraction, or vice versa. But I do know that hearing how somebody talks can be either an aid or an obstacle in grasping the essence of his or her work. On the other hand, sometimes it’s neither. I can remember when Mario Cuomo addressed the 1984 Democratic convention, and the next morning everyone was praising his speech to the hills. This made me curious to see what he had said, so I read the speech in the paper. It left me baffled, coming across as a boilerplate recital of the standard Democratic campaign themes. Then I watched several minutes of a tape of Cuomo speaking, and I still didn’t get it. So maybe I’m just a sourpuss.
November 24, 2005
Brief and Bromidic Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 07:00 AM EST What I wrote yesterday about memorization applies to anything that’s short and well written, even if the sentiments it expresses are as trite as those of the Gettysburg Address. Am I the only one who was disappointed, on first reading the address all the way through, at its utter conventionality? Ground hallowed by the selfless sacrifice of these noble men; gave their lives to carry on the sacred work of our nation’s founders; their deaths not in vain; etc., etc. All true, to be sure, and affecting to anyone who has a heart, and expressed with admirable concision—though it basically amounts to a “What he said!” after Edward Everett’s speech, which can be read here: http://douglassarchives.org/ever_b21.htm However common it may be to denigrate Everett’s oration—and he certainly does go on quite a bit—you have to admit that he gave the people what they wanted. It’s amazing what people used to do for fun before there was television. Lincoln could get away with his short-and-sweet cameo only because Everett had already satisfied the era’s appetite for grandiloquence. As we all know, Lincoln dashed off the address in his spare moments during the weeks before the battlefield’s dedication. It’s certainly a tribute to his powers of composition that with the cares of a nation pressing down on his shoulders and all the enormous demands on his time, he was able to come up with something so memorably phrased. But behind the simple eloquence, it’s still basically a cliché—though no less powerful for that, and like most clichés, it does express an important truth
November 23, 2005
In Defense of Memorization Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 01:30 PM EST In another part of this Web site, our colleague Josh Zeitz has written about the Gettysburg Address. On his way to revealing the deeper significance of Lincoln’s words, he mentions that schoolteachers used to make their students memorize the speech. Josh doesn’t think this was a good idea, and I agree that the rote approach can be taken too far. But I believe there is a place for memorization in learning, and I regret that modern educational practice seems to have gotten away from it. The advantage of being made to memorize things is that they stick with you for decades to come, whether you like it or not. My parents can still recite poetry that they learned by heart in the 1930s, and it’s a common observation among doctors that they remember the jingles they memorized to help them identify the cranial nerves (“On old Olympus’ towering top . . .”) long after they’ve forgotten the names of the nerves themselves. I had to learn the state capitals in the fifth grade, and while a few have slipped my mind in the intervening years, I can still reel off capitals like Salem and Pierre and Jefferson City, none of which I would otherwise even have heard of. So while rote is no substitute for real learning, it has its place as a means of wedging something into a student’s brain so tightly that it will never get out, no matter how unpleasant the process of learning it was. Drag a kid to a museum, and he’ll end up hating museums for the rest of his life; force a kid to write something, and he’ll consider writing a chore forever. But make a kid memorize something, and he’ll always be able to trot it out when he needs it. Admittedly, state capitals are of little use outside the crossword page, but if you can squeeze a piece of good writing, one that positively sings, into someone’s head, a world of benefits may result. And despite its infelicities, the Gettysburg Address does sing—though it’s so familiar to most of us that we notice its music about as much as we notice “California Dreaming” when we hear it on the radio for the 700th time. Yet that’s exactly why today’s kids should be made to memorize the Gettysburg Address. While a song that’s stuck in your head is merely an annoyance, a well-crafted text that’s stuck in your head will improve your writing for life, coming out of nowhere to resonate encouragingly whenever you manage to achieve something similar. That’s why old-fashioned teachers resorted to memorization, and it’s something that today’s teachers should consider as well.
November 15, 2005
The Golden Age of Jurisprudence Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 10:25 AM EST Being a judge wasn’t always a glamorous job. Denis Tilden Lynch, in his 1929 biography of Martin Van Buren (An Epoch and a Man), describes the conditions in rural New York in the early nineteenth century, when Van Buren was starting out as a lawyer: “Minor actions were tried before justices of the peace, who generally held court in a tavern; and here the blindfolded goddess functioned in most primitive fashion. . . . A bottle of whiskey was usually on the table of counsel ‘to be used as the trial progressed, whenever it should be necessary to solve an intricate question.’ Levi Beardsley, a distinguished counsel of the day, and the one-time President of the New York State Senate . . . recalls a sitting where ‘a crowd assembled, and as usual, took sides with the parties; but in this instance, were nearly unanimous for one of the parties, and in opposition to the justice, who, they thought, favored the wrong party.’ During |
