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 p |
