October 24, 2006
Clarifying Household Income II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 02:25 PM EST Mr. Zeitz accuses me of side-stepping the issue. But the issue, raised in Mr. Zeitz’s second post, was his claim that wages were falling. I gave evidence that, in fact, they are not. (He also raised some other points in his first post that he has chosen not to pursue, ignoring one and admitting the other was “over-zealous.”)
It was not until his third post on this thread, having admitted that compensation has been rising, that he mentioned household income. Compensation and household income are, while obviously related, two very different things. Apparently because his previous statistics weren’t working too well, he’s trying some new ones in order to shore up his argument. Mr. Zeitz is a fan of L. Frank Baum, and I think he is here trying to tell the readers to pay no attention to that man—the Wizard of Zeitz—behind the curtain who keeps changing the subject.
He writes, “The thrust of Mr. Gordon’s original argument was that since compensation has risen over the past 50 years, workers are doing fine without unions.”
I made no such argument. I merely argued that Mr. Zeitz’s statement, that wages were falling and therefore unions are needed, was not correct.
He writes, “But I don’t think his reply necessarily addressed the issues I raised, however clever and hip it is to be flip.” I think I did, but this is surely the first time I have ever been accused of being hip. I’ll take any compliments I can get, however, regardless of how far from the truth they might be.
October 24, 2006
The Transcontinental Telegraph Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:15 PM EST A few days ago, I noted the anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase and suggested that one of the unintended consequences of Jefferson’s attempt to secure an “elusive republic” (as the historian Drew McCoy once put it) of agrarians and small mechanics was the growth of a massive transportation system. More land created more population dispersal, which in turn required better means of linking people together, which in turn spurred economic modernization that doomed Jefferson’s entire project.
Today marks another milestone in this process. On this date 145 years ago, the first transcontinental telegraph cable was completed, rendering obsolete the famed Pony Express, an overland delivery service that had only been in existence for about a year and a half, and whose legend would soon outstrip its brief accomplishment. Together with America’s first transcontinental railroad, which was completed in 1869, the transcontinental telegraph allowed for the quick flow of information from one coast to the other, setting the stage for the massive wartime and postwar expansion that transformed the country. The territories west of the Mississippi, which Walt Whitman had once called “vast, trackless spaces,” quickly became integrated into the nation’s burgeoning economy. Their timber, mineral, and agricultural resources fueled the east’s massive industrial fires.
“In April 1861,” James Garfield later remarked, “there began in this country an industrial revolution . . . as far-reaching in its consequences as the political and military revolution through which we have passed.” Garfield wasn’t referring to the transcontinental telegraph, specifically. But he might as well have. After 1861 the world in which he had been born passed quickly into memory.
October 24, 2006
Clarifying Some Points About Household Income Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:45 AM EST I think that Mr. Gordon is side-stepping some important issues. For purposes of clarification, let me address his recent post.
First, Mr. Gordon admits that while he touted the rise in compensation for workers engaged in manufacturing, he did not tell readers that the portion of workers employed in that sector has fallen from 34 percent in 1950 to 16 percent in 1995. “No, I didn’t tell the readers that,” he concedes. “And, to be flip, I also didn’t tell them that the capital of Montana is Helena. The percentage of the workforce engaged in manufacturing has nothing to do with whether manufacturing workers are being paid more now than at a previous point in time.”
I appreciate Mr. Gordon’s admission that his statement is flip. But his statement also misses the point. Unions remain particularly strong in the manufacturing and public-service sectors. By Mr. Gordon’s own admission, wages and compensation in these sectors are high. This information presents a strong argument in favor of unionizing low-wage service workers, who are increasingly replacing well-paid manufacturers. The thrust of Mr. Gordon’s original argument was that since compensation has risen over the past 50 years, workers are doing fine without unions. I’m suggesting that the numbers tell another story. Unionized workers are doing well; non-unionized workers, especially those without technical training or higher degrees, are doing less well.
Second, Mr. Gordon has side-stepped my argument about two-earner households. My point is that a rise in household income since 1950 should not necessarily be interpreted as a measure of increasing wages and compensation. If the average household in 2005 earns 50 percent more than the average household in 1950, but if the average household now has twice as many wage earners, then wages and compensation are not, in fact, rising. Families are keeping pace with inflation, or making gains in household income, by sending more people into the workforce. What this means in a world of soaring housing, health care and education costs, is that it’s becoming increasingly difficult for two-parent nuclear families to maintain middle-class status without both parents joining the workforce. Given the rising number of single-parent households, and the low rates of income growth among workers in the bottom quintile, unions have an important role to play in boosting wages and compensation across the board, so that families of whatever composition or character are able to avoid the so-called “two-income trap.”
I don’t doubt for a second Mr. Gordon’s regard for unions. But I don’t think his reply necessarily addressed the issues I raised, however clever and hip it is to be flip.
October 24, 2006
More on the Wagner Act IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:45 AM EST Mr. Zeitz raises three points in his latest post.
First he writes, “The rise in median income for those involved in manufacturing may well have increased by 33.8 percent in real dollar terms between 1950 and 1999, but what Mr. Gordon doesn’t tell readers is that the portion of employed workers engaged in manufacturing has declined from 34 percent in 1950 to 16 percent in 1995.”
No, I didn’t tell the readers that. And, to be flip, I also didn’t tell them that the capital of Montana is Helena. The percentage of the workforce engaged in manufacturing has nothing to do with whether manufacturing workers are being paid more now than at a previous point in time.
Second he notes, quite correctly, that far more women are in the workforce today than in earlier decades and that this obscures the true income figures for households. It does indeed. But so does, and in the opposite way, the fact that households today have a much smaller number of people in them. In 1960 the average American household had 3.35 people living in it. Today the figure is 2.57, a nearly 25 percent drop. In other words, there are many more households to divide up total income, even correcting for population growth. This, of course, is an artifact of the country’s increasing prosperity: More people can afford to live on their own these days.
Third he writes, “Mr. Gordon has bemoaned the deficiencies of the CPI in past posts, but since the Census Bureau serves up its real numbers using the consumer price deflator, so have I.” We all do, because we have to work with the numbers available; we can’t have our own census and labor statistics bureaus. But it’s important to note that, because of an endless number of complications, such as the over-measure of inflation by the CPI, these numbers are not the bright-line, rock-solid facts we often treat them as. Statistics are no more than shadows on the cave wall, highly imperfect projections of a world we cannot see directly.
Mr. Zeitz writes that “wages and compensation in manufacturing have risen since 1950 because of unions . . . unions are being aggressively blocked from organizing workers in key private-sector service industries, which account for most jobs in the twenty-first-century economy, only strengthens the case for unions.”
I agree that many companies are making it as hard as possible for unions to organize (they always have, for obvious reasons) and are succeeding in many cases. Only about 50 percent of NLRB certification elections are won by unions, and many organizing drives don’t get as far as an election. But I think a major part of that is that the union movement is the one major sector of the American economy that has not evolved rapidly in the last half century. In far too many ways, it still views the American economy as being like the one confronted by John L. Lewis and Walter Reuther. Many American workers, far better educated, far more skilled, far more able to individually negotiate from strength, want no part of a movement they see as a relic of a long-ago past.
I have nothing against unions. It might surprise Mr. Zeitz to know that I once served as the president of an NLRB-recognized union and spent a couple of months negotiating a new contract with management. I learned a lot during that time.
October 23, 2006
More on the Wagner Act III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 06:15 PM EST Mr. Gordon raises some important points, which I’ll address one by one. 1) First, the rise in median income for those involved in manufacturing may well have increased by 33.8 percent in real dollar terms between 1950 and 1999, but what Mr. Gordon doesn’t tell readers is that the portion of employed workers engaged in manufacturing has declined from 34 percent in 1950 to 16 percent in 1995. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2005 about 27 percent of all workers engaged in manufacturing were members of, or represented by, labor unions, compared with just 16.3 percent of private-sector employees across the board. Which is to say, wages and compensation in manufacturing have risen since 1950 because of unions; that fewer Americans are now engaged in manufacturing, and that unions are being aggressively blocked from organizing workers in key private-sector service industries, which account for most jobs in the twenty-first-century economy, only strengthens the case for unions. 2) Mr. Gordon distinguishes between wages and income. This is a good point. Between 1967 and 2005 household income (in real, CPI-adjusted dollars) for the first, second, third, and fourth quintiles increased by 34 percent, 25 percent, 32 percent and 48 percent respectively. But these figures mask a major structural change in the economy. In 1950 only 20.4 percent of working-aged women were in the labor force; today, that figure is roughly 60.5 percent for married women and 65.9 percent for single women. Since 77.1 percent of married men are also employed today, we can state with some certainty that in most households with two married adults, both spouses work. This means that household income has risen, but only because more people in each household are participating in the workforce. It doesn’t mean that wages and compensation have continued to rise in the growing service sector. 3) Mr. Gordon has bemoaned the deficiencies of the CPI in past posts, but since the Census Bureau serves up its real numbers using the consumer price deflator, so have I.
October 23, 2006
Beirut 1983 Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:40 PM EST In today’s feature article at AmericanHeritage.com, Jack Kelly writes of the 1983 attacks on the Marine barracks in Beirut that “it has become axiomatic that the main lesson of the . . . debacle was about the danger of appeasing terrorists. This message was underscored by the Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who pointed to the hasty withdrawal as proof that the Americans were ‘paper tigers.’ ‘The Marines fled after two explosions,’ he boasted. . . . Bin Laden’s simple-minded and ahistorical statement was taken to heart by many Americans. In Beirut, said John Lehman, a member of the national 9/11 commission, ‘we told the world that terrorism succeeds.’”
As far as I can tell, Bin Laden’s statement may have been ahistorical, if this simply means that Americans have not been at all times and places paper tigers. And if ahistorical statements are necessarily simpleminded, I suppose he was also simpleminded. He was not, however, wrong. We did flee after two explosions, and we then invaded Grenada, rather like the man in the adage who achieves a contemptible satisfaction by kicking his cat, after being berated by either his boss or his wife. John Lehman, admittedly an exasperating gentleman in many other respects, clearly had it right that time: We did tell the world that terrorism succeeds, and we paid a stiff price for it in the following decades.
It seems overwhelmingly likely that Saddam Hussein took what he thought was our measure in Beirut, and a few years later invaded Kuwait on the strength of this assessment. Even being very easily ejected from Kuwait failed to erase the memory of the American flight from Beirut, and Saddam failed to observe the requirements of the armistice agreement, a course of action which was almost certainly the necessary prerequisite for our invasion of Iraq in 2003. Syria’s Assad also took our measure in Beirut—he indeed boasted of having done so—and continued to use terrorist proxies against our allies (and probably against us). The Iranians formed their assessment of our resolve during the hostage crisis of 1979, when they broke the bedrock principle of international law with perfect impunity, but it seems certain that 1984 bolstered their assessment. On the strength of this assessment, Iran also used terrorists against us, and against our allies. Had the rulers of Iran thought this was the path to certain annihilation, they seem very, very unlikely to have pursued it: In the immediate aftermath of our initial victories in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran apparently offered us far-reaching concessions and contemplated abandoning Syria (there is an interesting article on this in the current New York Review of Books). They did this, it seems, out of simple fear of American military power, fear they have now lost, with the result that they are developing nuclear weapons with no discernible fear of any consequence. Given how little we have been able to deter a non-nuclear Iran, it is interesting to speculate about how Iran’s ultras will behave with an even greater sense of impunity.
Mr. Kelly concludes that “It’s easy to read the tragedy in Beirut as a warning about the consequences of appeasement. But the incident has suggested to some a more nuanced lesson about the need for more careful strategic thinking before committing U.S. forces, about the limits of military intervention, and about the danger of ignoring excruciatingly complex realities in favor of ideology-tinted simplifications.” It is hard to fault this portion of Mr. Kelly’s analysis. Military intervention is not an easy and clearly not a certain route to turning tyrannies into modern democracies, and fragile multinational states like Lebanon and Iraq may be peculiarly unpromising places to try to build nations. But because American military power is not omni-competent, it does not follow that failing to use it in the face of extreme provocation is a path without significant risks of its own.
Contrariwise, if we had destroyed Syria’s armed forces and leadership in 1983, or annihilated Iran’s revolutionary leadership in 1979, or at any time since, we might have produced horrific chaos in those societies, but we would probably not have produced successor leaderships eager to provoke the government of the United States, or connive at the murder of our civilians, or of civilians anywhere. We might have produced anarchy, in which terrorist groups would have flourished, but since the states we made contemptuous of our power and resolve in Beirut in 1983 continued to themselves used terror against us, and against our allies, it is not obvious that we would have produced a much worse world by destroying the regimes that have tormented us than we have produced by allowing them to attack us at very low cost. In both cases, of course, the existence of the Soviet Union, adjacent to Iran and allied to Syria, served (in different ways) to complicate the problem and shelter those states. But the difficulty of the problem does not vindicate the policy we adopted. We have probably not yet paid the full price for allowing Syria and Iran the privilege of killing hundred of our soldiers without significant reprisals.
October 23, 2006
More on the Wagner Act II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:05 PM EST I don’t doubt for a second that there have been violations of the spirit and even the letter of federal labor law in recent years. But I am equally sure that there always have been. It’s just that recently these have tended to benefit management whereas in times past they often benefited labor. There were times during the era of Democratic dominance when the National Labor Relations Board was a wholly-owned subsidiary of the AFL-CIO and the motto for management there was “abandon hope all ye who enter here.”
I am not familiar with the particular instances cited by Mr. Zeitz, so I can’t comment, although I must wonder if they are quite as open-and-shut violations of the law as he reports them.
He writes, “But I hope he won’t deny the equally powerful truth that wages have fallen concurrently with union membership. In real terms (inflation-adjusted 1982 dollars), weekly earnings have fallen from $302.52 in 1964 to $277.57 in 2004. What good is a robust economy to workers, if wages are falling?”
It is important to distinguish between “wages” (cash income) and “compensation,” which includes fringe benefits such as health insurance, pensions, unemployment insurance, vacation time, FICA taxes, etc. Non-cash income almost quadrupled as a percentage of total compensation between 1950 and 1995, so comparing wages alone does not give a fair picture. The Historical Statistics of the United States reports that the median income (i.e. compensation) in manufacturing (in 1997 dollars) was $21,981 in 1950, and $29, 411 in 1995, a 33.8 percent increase.
There is also the problem of measuring inflation and taking it into account in comparing past and present wages. Most economists think the Consumer Price Index, the main means of measuring inflation, overstates true inflation by at least one percentage point per year. David Henderson, an economist at the Hoover Institution, writes, “Assuming this minimum 1 percentage point bias for every year since 1973, real hourly wages since 1973 have actually increased by about 9.5 percent and real employee compensation since 1980 has increased by about 25 percent.”
By almost every measure one can think of, the standard of living for average families has been increasing, not decreasing, as would have to be the case if income had fallen 8.2 percent, as the wage statistics Mr. Zeitz cites would indicate. The average new house in 1960 had 1,400 square feet. By 2000 the average square footage was 2,100. Such things as air conditioning and dishwashers were found in fewer than 20 percent of houses in 1960. Today air conditioning is in over 70 percent and dishwashers in over 50 pcrcent. The number of two-car families has grown enormously. Not to mention things that didn’t exist in 1960: modern TV’s, cell phones, microwave ovens, etc., etc.
But statistics don’t give the whole picture. As a meteorologist once said, it’s always a good idea to look out the window before making a forecast. The United States today is a vastly more prosperous country than it was 40 and 50 years ago, and that prosperity reaches ever further down the socioeconomic scale. One need only walk the streets of American cities and suburbs to see that.
October 23, 2006
Suffrage Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 01:20 PM EST On this date in 1915 one of the largest American woman suffrage protests took place, drawing upwards of 33,000 women to the streets of New York, where they paraded in dramatic fashion for the franchise. Decades before Martin Luther King, Jr., electrified 250,000 civil rights marchers in Washington, D.C., to flood Fifth Avenue with so many protesters was to shake the very foundations of the political culture.
Yet for all its tactical radicalism, the woman suffrage movement had in some ways grown conservative. Whereas the first generation of American women’s rights leaders that gathered in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 declared unequivocally that “all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights: that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” leading suffragettes in 1915 had changed their tune. Rather than invoke the gender-neutral, natural-rights language of the American Revolution, they conceded the importance of separate spheres for men and women and, by extension, the essentialism of gender difference.
“Women’s place is Home,” Rheta Childe Dorr affirmed in 1910. “But home is not contained within the four walls of an individual house. Home is community. The city full of people is the Family. The public school is the real Nursery. And badly do Home and Family need their mother.”
The modern world was too complex to sustain rigid divisions between public and domestic spheres, explained leading women’s rights advocates like Dorr and Jane Addams. People now lived in closer quarters, bought most of their food and household items from stores, and came into daily contact with urban blight and vice. In short, “if woman would keep on with her old business of caring for her house and rearing her children,” Addams explained, “she will have to have some conscience in regard to public affairs lying outside of her immediate household.”
In the wake of their victory in 1920, suffrage activists split not only over where to channel their political energies. They also split between so-called social feminists, who continued to embrace the separate-spheres view of the world and press for special labor and environmental protections for women, and adherents of the National Women’s Party, which re-embraced the natural-rights language of Seneca Falls. In many ways, winning the vote was the easy task. Defining feminism would prove harder.
October 23, 2006
L. Frank Baum and Consumer Plenty Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:45 AM EST This weekend I saw the Broadway production of Wicked, the much-acclaimed musical based on Gregory Maguire’s prequel to L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. I’m a sucker for theater, and so I thoroughly enjoyed the show. But I was also reminded that Baum was a character of some significance in the development of modern American consumer culture, and that the original Wizard of Oz was something of a commercial allegory, if read in the context of Baum’s life and career.
As William Leach explains in his fascinating book Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture, Baum was an early pioneer in the department-store window display profession. In the 1890s he edited a trade journal devoted to the topic and also consulted for numerous companies on the subtle art of using light, mirrors, and artistic enticements to help produce consumer desire. Seen in this context, Oz makes a great deal of sense. Juxtaposed against the grim, black-and-white reality of Dorothy’s Kansas, in all its scarcity and austerity, Oz is multicolored wonderland of abundance.
Consider that in the 1890s, when Baum moved to Chicago and first involved himself in the new window display profession, American industry was expanding in leaps and bounds, resulting in warehouses virtually overflowing with unsold consumer goods. Businessmen faced an unforeseen embarrassment of riches. They could produce the goods, but they couldn’t always unload them. “The goods must be moved,” cried a merchant in 1912. But how? People first had to be taught how to consume.
It became increasingly popular to view the problem as one of underconsumption rather than overproduction. “We are not concerned with the ability to pay,” wrote an early proponent of advertising, “but with the ability to want and choose.” Americans could and would empty the warehouses of their surplus goods if only they were given the “imagination and emotion to desire.” “Without imagination, no wants,” explained another advertising guru in 1899. “Without wants, no demand to have them supplied.”
Between 1890 and 1920 the nature of advertising changed markedly. Leading firms no longer acted as mere brokers but now designed arresting ad copy and artwork that championed new brands. They suggested with varying degrees of subtlety that consumer items were not just luxuries, but necessities. Whereas a typical advertising expert in the 1890s claimed that “pictures are merely adjuncts to the ad. . . . When they dominate the ad they weaken it,” within the space of just a few years industry professionals agreed that “the advertising of the future will be illustrated. There can hardly be a question about that.”
So it was with department stores, which turned to L. Frank Baum and his colleagues to design stunning new window displays that used lights, mirrors, and bright colors to widen the eyes of potential customers. Much like the Wizard of Oz, who proves something of a huckster in Baum’s book (and something a little more sinister in Maguire’s), Baum was a modern-day salesman, pedaling a dream of consumer plenty in a country that was just coming to grips with its own prosperity and industrial potential.
October 23, 2006
More on the Wagner Act Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:45 AM EST John Steele Gordon’s post on the Wagner Act reads a bit like an editorial in a business trade journal.
Mr. Gordon doesn’t acknowledge that over the past 25 years American workers have suffered wholesale violations of the spirit and letter of the Wagner Act. For instance, in recent decades increasing numbers of businesses have eliminated full-time employees from their payrolls and instead subcontracted with firms representing temporary workers, who are paid lower wages and denied health care and pension benefits. GOP majorities on the NLRB have consistently ruled that unions may not organize such workers, as was the case in the board’s ruling that denied organized labor the right to represent subcontracted employees at a long-term care facility in Oakdale, New York, or its ruling that artists’ models may not be organized, because they own their own robes and are thus “independent contractors.” Mr. Gordon is certainly right in pointing to structural changes in the postindustrial economy. But noting these changes does not inevitably lead to the conclusion that today’s workers are less in need of representation than their parents and grandparents.
It’s not only the NLRB that stands in the way of workers’ rights. In recent years, capital has become increasingly brazen in its violation of the letter—not just the spirit—of the Wagner Act. When Kate Bronfenbrenner, a Cornell University sociologist, examined 400 union campaigns between 1998 and 1999, she found that over half of the employers threatened to close down their plants in the event of a union victory, while 25 percent went a step further and fired workers who supported unions. Both forms of retaliation are illegal but, in the current climate, often go unpunished. Case in point: When a judge found that Smithfield Food violated workers’ legal rights a whopping 36 times in 2000, including its dismissal of 11 union activists, the Bush administration’s majority appointees on the National Labor Relations Board overturned the ruling.
Mr. Gordon is right to correct my over-zealous claim that the American economy was strongest when unions were strongest. But I hope he won’t deny the equally powerful truth that wages have fallen concurrently with union membership. In real terms (inflation-adjusted 1982 dollars), weekly earnings have fallen from $302.52 in 1964 to $277.57 in 2004. What good is a robust economy to workers, if wages are falling?
The balance between capital and labor that Mr. Gordon fairly credits the Wagner Act with having established is sorely lacking in the current climate. If businesses are to enjoy a new arsenal in their age-old struggle to prevent workers from unionizing, it’s time to empower workers to fight back and claim their legal rights under the NLRA.
October 21, 2006
The Wagner Act Revisited II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 02:00 PM EST Joshua Zeitz’s post on the Wagner Act reads a bit like an editorial in a union newspaper. I, too, celebrate the Wagner Act as one of the great achievements of the New Deal. It brought the power of labor and management much more into balance and brought about the unionization of much of American industry. Membership in the craft unions of the AFL increased considerably, but the greatest gains were among unskilled and semiskilled workers (exactly the workers that most needed unions to protect and advance their interests). In the six years after the passage of the Act, union membership more than doubled.
But as so often happens when a great reform comes about, the Wagner Act overcorrected in some ways. For instance, while it listed a number of “unfair labor practices” that companies were forbidden to engage in, it did not list a single one that unions were forbidden to utilize. In 1947 the famous “do-nothing” eightieth Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act over President Truman’s veto. Its most famous provision was to enable the government to interrupt a strike with an 80-day cooling-off period while government mediators sought a settlement. But it also outlawed secondary boycotts, which had been a powerful weapon in labor’s arsenal, and the closed shop (where a worker has to be a member of the union before he can be hired—not that different from a medieval guild). It also allowed companies to fully inform their workers regarding the company’s position on issues in an election to certify a union, as long as they used no threats. It also allowed management to call an election on its own if it chose to and forbade unions, just as the Wagner Act had forbidden management, to coerce workers or to refuse to bargain. The Taft-Hartley Act was passed in an era of intense labor unrest. In 1946 there had been a total of 125 million man-days lost to strikes, and in each of the next three years there was an average of 40 million. But labor and management learned to bargain more successfully in subsequent decades, and in 1992, in a vastly larger economy with a far larger workforce, there were only 4 million man-days lost to strikes. While the Taft-Hartley Act was invoked often to end strikes in the first two decades after it was passed, it has been invoked only once in the last 30 years. Part of the reason for that is that over the 70 years since the Wagner Act, the economy has changed at least as much as it did in the 70 years prior to the Wagner Act, when the American economy went from a basically agricultural one to an industrial one. Since World War II, the economy has evolved from one where manufacturing dominated to one where information and services dominate. The result has been devastating to union membership and thus to the political power of union leaders. The chart below shows this: YEAR | % OF WORKERS UNIONIZED | PER CAPITA GDP (IN 2000 DOLLARS)
1955 33 $13,467
1965 28.2 $16,489
1975 21.6 $20,009
1985 17.4 $25,444
1995 14.3 $30,163
2005 12.5 $37,232 The chart doesn’t tell the whole story, however, for in 1955 there were few government workers unionized and today about one third are. If one takes out the government workers, only 7.5 percent of American salaried and wage employees are unionized today, about the same as in 1930. That is why the labor movement today is so desirous of amending the law so as to allow the certification of labor unions by means of just the card-check. Mr. Zeitz writes that this method is, “essentially, a simplification of the union election process that allows a critical majority of workers in a particular unit to trigger certification by signing a form endorsing a particular labor union.” This description leaves out a few details, to put it mildly. As the law stands now, a company must not only allow union efforts to organize its workers, it must do nothing whatever to interfere with the process. If a majority of the workforce signs cards requesting certification of the union, a government-supervised election is then held by secret ballot. At this point the company is empowered to give the workers information on its position. In other words, it can inform workers of reasons why they should vote against certification. In practice in recent years they have done exactly that and about half of certification elections have failed. Under the change in labor law advocated by the unions, unions would be able to put tremendous pressure on workers to sign the cards while the company could do nothing. Once more than 50 percent of the workers have signed cards—often in the presence of other workers and union organizers—that would be it, the union would represent the workers. In other words, the secret ballot, Australia’s great contribution to democracy that allows people to vote without fear of personal consequences or peer pressure, would be eliminated from union certification elections in the United States. It would be a grotesque step backwards. Mr. Zeitz writes, “Throughout the twentieth century, America’s economy was strongest when its unions were strongest. It’s time to restore the balance.” The chart above would indicate otherwise in recent decades. As union membership, and the union movement’s strength with it, declined by almost two thirds as a percentage of total workers, GDP per capita in constant dollars has increased by 276 percent. I certainly wouldn’t argue that there is an inverse correlation between union strength and national economic strength, but a positive correlation seems very unlikely.
October 21, 2006
Brown University and the Slave Trade Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:25 AM EST Earlier this week, Brown University’s Committee on Slavery and Justice issued its final recommendations about how the university should address the role of slaves and the slave trade in its long history. It’s an issue that holds more than passing interest for me, as I spent several very happy years as a graduate student at Brown, and two equally enjoyable years as an assistant professor in the history department. When I think back on my time there, I fondly remember how beautiful University Hall, the college’s stately eighteenth-century flagship building, looks when blanketed with newly fallen snow, and how perfect Benefit Street is in the fall, when the trees are ablaze with red and yellow leaves and the sun casts a particular autumn light on the neo-federalist houses than dot the old brick sidewalks. If you like American history, there’s no better place to be. But there was always an underside to that history, as I pointed out several months ago in a review of Charles Rappleye’s fine book on the Brown family and the slave trade. Indeed, the Committee on Slavery and Justice explained in its report this week that John Brown, one of the university’s founders, was an active participant in the slave trade, as were several other early benefactors, and University Hall, where the current president, Ruth Simmons (the great-granddaughter of slaves and the first black American to head an Ivy League institution), has her office, was built in part with slave labor. Ultimately, the committee opted not to go the monetary-reparations route and instead suggested building a memorial to acknowledge the university’s historic relationship with slavery; creating a center for the study of slavery and injustice; and stepping up its recruitment of minority students. In the interest of full disclosure, I know and greatly admire several of the committee members. But as an alumnus, a former faculty member, and an American historian, these recommendations truly strike me as exactly the right move. The university is already home to the John Carter Brown Library, one of the nation’s premier research libraries for the study of early America and the trans-Atlantic world. It makes a great deal of sense to build on this strength by establishing a center for the study of slavery. More to the point, by continuing to acknowledge and act on the importance of diversity in the university’s faculty and student bodies, and by openly confronting the community’s historic relationship to the slave trade, Brown sets itself apart as an institution that’s strong enough to address its past and confident enough to assert its continued relevance. Knowing that so many of those fine homes on Benefit Street were built with money gained in the slave trade doesn’t diminish the city’s beauty for me. On the contrary, it deepens my appreciation of the Brown’s American past, and makes it a richer place to revisit.
October 21, 2006
There Was New York Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:00 AM EST A few weeks ago I confessed to being one of those New Yorkers who still haven’t completed what are surely mandatory rites of passage, like visiting Coney Island. In a moment of self-congratulation, I wrote about crossing the Brooklyn Bridge on foot. Since then I’ve plodded through my New York life without any special civic accomplishment, though this week I did manage finally to read E. B. White’s celebrated essay “Here is New York,” originally published in 1949. By 1949, when he penned this slim volume in a guest room at the Algonquin Hotel, White, a former staff editor at The New Yorker, had fled the city and was living happily in Maine with his wife, Katherine Angell, also an editor for the magazine. Though both husband and wife continued to work for The New Yorker, White wrote his essay as a visitor to the city he had once called home. Even after years of self-imposed absence, he instinctively understood New York. “I have an idea that people from villages and small towns, people accustomed to the conveniences and the friendliness of neighborhood over-the-fence living, are unaware that life in New York follows the neighborhood pattern,” he wrote. “The city is literally a composite of tens of thousands of tiny neighborhood units.” Though some of what White described, like the ice-coal-and-wood cellars that once dotted every city block, has vanished, his essential portrait of the city, as so many small villages, continues to hold currency. I’ve tried on many occasions, but without much success, to explain to friends from out of town that the city can often be a more localized milieu than the suburb, with its sprawling physical landscape and its inaccessibility to pedestrians and bicyclists. As E.B. White put it, “Each area [of New York] is a city within a city. Thus, no matter where you live in New York, you will find within a block or two a grocery store, a barbershop, a newsstand and shoeshine shack, an ice-coal-and-wood cellar (where you write your order on a pad outside as you walk by), a dry
cleaner, a laundry, a delicatessen (beer and sandwiches delivered at any hour to your door), a flower shop, an undertaker’s parlor, a movie house, a radio-repair shop, a stationer, a haberdasher, a tailor, a drugstore, a garage, a tearoom, a saloon, a hardware store, a liquor store, a shoe-repair shop . . .” So it is today, though for some of the obsolete venues, like the radio repair shop or the tearoom, one could substitute the nail salon or the pizza parlor. If the intense localism of cities like New York often renders them more tight-knit than their suburban cousins, still, there is tension in this neighborhood arrangement. During the high-water mark of New York’s Ocean-Hill Brownsville school strike in 1968, which pitted the mostly Jewish teachers’ union against black neighborhood groups that sought community control of local schools, Albert Shanker, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, claimed, “We don’t happen to believe that the little old hometown is a warm, nice place. We think that the smaller the area, the more provincial, the more bigoted, the more narrow; that the smaller the group, the more homogeneous, the more there’s an appeal to a primitive type of tribalism.” Shanker was attempting to assert the importance of New York’s cosmopolitan disposition—its volatile but creative blend of ethnicities, classes, religions, and races—over its inward-looking, homogeneous neighborhoods. He wasn’t exactly wrong. Even E. B. White, who was so drawn to the city’s neighborhood traditions, remarked that New York was “a permanent exhibit of the phenomenon of one world. The citizens of New York are tolerant not only from disposition but from necessity. The city has to be tolerant, otherwise it would explode in a radioactive cloud of hate and rancor and bigotry.” Yet to deny, as Shanker did, the central role of neighborhoods in New York’s past and present was to deny the creative tension between particularism and universalism that has always been at the heart of the city’s character. Since its founding, American Heritage has been headquartered in New York, and while the magazine’s contributors come from every region of the country, many of its staff are based in Gotham. We try not to dwell too much on our hometown, for fear of seeming too provincial, but at the risk of boring out-of-state readers, I’d be curious to know what some of our other bloggers think about this age-old New York question.
October 20, 2006
The Louisiana Purchase Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 06:00 PM EST Apropos of our mini-dialogue on slavery and speech, and touching ever so slightly on the earlier exchange about historical causality, today marks the 203rd anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase, which saw America’s territory increase by 828,000 square miles—and all for the modest price of $15 million. As Drew McCoy explains in his classic history of Jeffersonian republicanism, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America, many Americans living in the opening years of the nineteenth century believed strongly in the principles of republicanism, which held up the model of solid, self-employed small farmers, gathering together in local self-governance, as the bedrock of a healthy society. The corrupting influences of paper money, factories, cities, and stock-jobbers, so clearly on display in England, made for a sharp contrast with the virtuous agrarian republic that Americans were building. The question, of course, was how to secure America’s agrarian, republican future. Population growth was threatening to exhaust the young nation’s land resources. Jefferson, James Madison, and others in the Democrat-Republican camp saw the Louisiana Purchase as a safety valve. Acquiring vast amounts of land would allow the sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons of the founding generation to push farther west in the pursuit of self-ownership. But how to acquire than land? Here, the agrarian-republican model faltered. To buy the land from Louisiana, Jefferson had to incur a large public debt, which signaled his first major embrace of “Hamiltonian means” in the service of “Jeffersonian aims.” Together with the wartime embargo against Great Britain several years later, Jefferson’s administration secured westward expansion at the price of encouraging the growth of paper money, public debt, and domestic manufacturing. All of which could only have made former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton smile, had he not died in a tragic duel with Vice President Aaron Burr. In a more subtle way, the doubling of America’s land mass ultimately spurred the development of a transportation revolution in the 1820s and 1830s. Integrating so vast a collection of states and territories required railroads, telegraphs, roads, and canals. This new transportation infrastructure, in turn, subtly encouraged specialized commercial farming and manufacturing and led to a growth of trade and industry. In other words, more land didn’t necessarily encourage agrarianism and agrarianism alone. It led to the economic maturity of the growing nation and, in its own way, sounded a death knell for Jefferson’s “elusive republic.” In the short term, it also posed a new and troubling question: should there be slavery in the Louisiana Purchase territories? Congress settled the question after acrimonious debate in 1820, but in 1854 passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act introduced the question anew. The rest, as they say, is history.
October 20, 2006
The Wagner Act Revisited Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 04:30 PM EST It’s looking increasingly likely that the Democrats will recapture the House of Representatives next month, and possibly even the Senate. In the event they find themselves on November 8 with working majorities in both chambers, one of their first tasks will surely be amending the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) to reverse several damaging regulatory decisions recently handed down by the three-person GOP majority on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
Originally passed in 1935, the NLRA, known popularly as the Wagner Act, specifically empowered workers to organize and bargain collectively. The legislation also created the NLRB as a neutral body that would arbitrate between capital and labor, oversee representation elections, and intervene in the event that either a union or an employer violated provisions of the NLRA. The Wagner Act opened the door to a tremendous burst of union activity and led ultimately to the organization of millions of workers in key industries like steel, autos, rubber, electricity and coal.
During World War II the government established a tripartite labor commission, with representatives from labor, industry, and the public sector, to ensure the smooth progress of war production. This step led to an important wartime arrangement by which unions agreed to a wage freeze in return for the automatic enrollment of new war-industry employees in the union ranks, and industry agreed to work with unions and (effectively) to tolerate closed shops, in return for generous cost-plus contracts that guaranteed a profit.
In 1947 the Republican Congress passed amendments to the NLRA that prevented supervisors from joining unions. Drawing on the Senate’s original analysis of its own legislation, until recently the NLRB interpreted “supervisor” in such a way as to exclude “straw bosses, leadmen, set-up men and other supervisory employees” who played minor supervisory roles, but whose job descriptions did not lend them the “independent judgment” and “discretion and judgment” of real supervisors.
This year, however, the NLRB’s GOP majority determined that nurses who are responsible for designing the work schedules of other nurses are supervisors and thus fall outside the protections of the Wagner Act. Using this extremely broad definition of the term “supervisor,” which flagrantly violates the original intent of the 1947 amendments to the NLRA (and which will strike even the most casual devotee of the TV program ER as dishonest), the board has summarily denied upwards of eight million white-collar workers due protection under the NLRA. An assistant editor who occasionally assigns fact-checking jobs to editorial assistants; a pharmacist employed by a large chain but whose work includes overseeing a cash-register clerk; a cook at a chain diner who oversees dishwashers and busboys—these are latter-day equivalents of “straw bosses, leadmen, set-up men and other supervisory employees.” They should be allowed to join unions if they want to.
If the GOP majority on the NLRB is bent on violating the spirit and letter of the Wagner Act, a new Democratic Congress should amend the act to make the spirit and letter more explicit. While they’re at it, Democrats should pass other amendments to the law, including an explicit endorsement of card-check recognition—essentially, a simplification of the union election process that allows a critical majority of workers in a particular unit to trigger certification by signing a form endorsing a particular labor union. Throughout the twentieth century, America’s economy was strongest when its unions were strongest. It’s time to restore the balance.
October 20, 2006
War Games Posted by Fredric Smoler at 02:50 PM EST In the current issue of New York magazine, the historian Niall Ferguson, an industrious gentleman now simultaneously employed by Harvard, New York University, and Oxford, writes in praise of computerized war games, particularly ones dealing with World War II. Ferguson dislikes point-and-shoot games like Medal of Honor and Call of Duty, preferring strategy games like Axis and Allies, and he is very much taken with a new release called The Calm and the Storm. He praises the ability of multiplayer strategy games to assess the counterfactuals that interest historians of the Second World War, and laments historians’ supposed refusal to look at the results of such war games: “What if the Nazis had invaded Britain in 1940? What if Hitler had captured Moscow in 1941? What if the Japanese had won the Battle of Midway in 1942? These are questions that computer games ought, in theory, to be able to help answer. And yet no military historian, to my knowledge, has made use of them.”
I am pretty sure that last remark is false, or at least misleading. I have a vivid memory that longtime Harvard luminary Ernest May’s fascinating book on Hitler’s conquest of France, Strange Victory, points out that sophisticated computer simulations of the campaign always result in a German defeat. Military historians have certainly made use of non-computerized war games to assess counterfactuals, a case in point being a war game played by the British and German militaries modeling a 1940 German invasion of Britain (the invasion fails). But what about Mr. Ferguson’s main assertion, which is that World War II historical simulation multiplayer strategy games are a powerful way to think about the problems of the present, and are clearly better suited to that purpose than Cold War-era simulation games? Ferguson writes that “Cold War games are now obsolete. Then, there were just two players, each armed to the teeth with nukes. Today we live in a multipolar, multiplayer world. Some players are much better armed than others. In that sense, today’s strategic problems are more like those of the World War II era. Sure, the U.S. can invade Iraq. But what will the French do? The Russians? The Chinese? What if invading Iraq ends up benefiting Iran?”
Point of disclosure: I spent more than a decade and a half playing and (in a very small way) helping develop some rules for what I think was then the most sophisticated (while also playable) World War II simulation game, a boxed map-board game called World in Flames. Over the years, World in Flames won a lot of awards given by the industry: Game of the Year, State of the Art, Best Twentieth-Century Game and Game of the Decade. Its rules and components were repeatedly expanded, tweaked, and re-released, and if you insisted on all the bells and whistles—the crowd I knew did—WiF (as it was known) was playable if you had at least 50 spare hours, at least five fellow lunatics with that much time on their hands, the ability to master more than a hundred pages of rules, room to spread out maps and charts that covered an area significantly exceeding a Ping-Pong table, and enough real estate to leave the thing set up for the many weekends it took to play it.
There was supposed to be an even more sophisticated game everyone claimed was clearly unplayable and was no longer sold, but if you liked a sophisticated World War II game, WiF was your baby. Like the games Mr. Ferguson enjoys, WiF had economies, diplomatic rules for modeling the behavior of neutrals and minor powers, economic warfare, and very intricate combat charts. In the days when I knew it, WiF proved hard to computerize, although at least one computerized version has since been released. As recently as the late 1990s, the computer professionals who played WiF asserted that the capacities of any existing AI (artificial intelligence) were inadequate to competently play any single great power represented in WiF. At its full extent, WiF had separate players for the British Commonwealth, France, the United States, the USSR, China, Germany, Italy, and Japan, although you could play a satisfying version with five players.
Did WiF help explore strategic counterfactuals of the Second World War? While I was fascinated by the game, and remain deeply engaged by World War II counterfactuals, I’d have to admit not really, or at least not many of them in a satisfying way. For one thing, what actually happened in World War Two was in a sense improbable, and exploring some elementary counterfactuals is hard to do in a competitive strategy game. Hitler did as well as he did only because of fantastic luck and massive incompetence by his adversaries from 1933 through the Battle of Moscow. Hindsight is 20-20, and in a game, all the Allied players know that Hitler was, well, Hitler. He could not be appeased. Fighting in 1936, or 1938, was clearly the better choice, but if this happens, there is no World War II looking anything even remotely like the historical one. In a game world, Stalin cannot easily be given a really good reason to sign the pact with Hitler, or keep to its terms in the first half of 1940. If the Allies are made anything like as competent as they could have been in the Battle of France, Hitler never gets to Russia, or is so weakened that his forces are doomed at the outset of the Russian campaign. If Stalin is given a chance to deploy his forces rationally, the German armies do not get to do anything like the historical damage they did in 1941. If the Allies know that the Japanese are coming, the Japanese do not do very well. WiF made the Germans and Japanese ahistorically strong and the Russians ahistorically weak, so that game would be satisfying to the players taking the Axis powers. There were ways around this—a complicated bidding system for the powers, based on how they thought they would do in a game of uncertain duration, coupled with modifications of the rules to make the Allied powers more formidable—but the basic outline of the original game made it hard to modify the rules to the extent necessary.
WiF was still utterly absorbing, but it was a game, not an effective tool for exploring counterfactuals. Friends who still play strategy games modeling the same events on the same scale, including the computerized ones Professor Ferguson plays, tell me that all of them have versions of the problems that affected WiF, and that WiF remains the best of the lot. You can satisfyingly explore counterfactuals on a smaller scale than the whole of WWII, but that is a different thing. To return to the questions Professor Ferguson posed, “What if the Nazis had invaded Britain in 1940? What if Hitler had captured Moscow in 1941? What if the Japanese had won the Battle of Midway in 1942?” Because of war games, professional historians do think that a 1940 Nazi invasion of Britain would have almost certainly failed, but those are not strategy games modeling the whole of the Second World War. Games modeling smaller-scale events and events of shorter duration are much better at illuminating counterfactuals.
I do not see how a strategy game can help us determine what would have happened if Hitler had taken Moscow in 1941, because the effect of taking Moscow would have been in large part political. The effect on the Soviet rail net is easier to explore, but how does the game assess the effect of the loss on Moscow on Turkish, Swedish, Spanish, American, and British decision makers, or on the will to fight of the inhabitants of the Soviet Union? A strategy game can and should assume there will be such effects, and provide probabilities for various reactions by such actors, but it thereby assumes these things, rather than explores them. As for Midway, the American victory may have been improbable, but not nearly as improbable as a Japanese victory in the World War II, no matter what happened at Midway.
WiF taught me a lot—among other things, some trivia, like the name of every capital ship that took part in the war, and the approximate combat radius of almost every military aircraft—but it did not teach me much about assessing the war’s counterfactuals. To the extent that it is possible to learn anything about that, I learned to do it by spending decades in university libraries. Professor Ferguson claims to have learned more from strategy games. With respect to the virtues of The Calm and the Storm, he writes that “I made a fatal mistake. I decided to dispense with the Nazi-Soviet pact and defeat Poland single-handed. It didn’t work. And as soon as things began to go wrong, I found myself entirely alone. . . . I had discovered, in short, that unilateral action can lead to disastrous isolation.” I don’t think this is a lesson that can be learned only from computerized games.
October 20, 2006
Union and Slavery Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:20 PM EST John Steele Gordon writes, “I don’t know the answer here, I’m just asking the question, but I wonder if the [nineteenth-century] politicians in limiting freedom in ways Mr. Zeitz lists, were doing so just ‘in the service of protecting slavery,’ or did they also have another motive mind: protecting the Union.”
The answer, I think, is both. Writing in 1820, amid the national debate about allowing slavery in the new state of Missouri, former President Thomas Jefferson told a correspondent that “this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed indeed for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.”
Beginning with the 1820 debate, which threatened to snap the nation in two, and continuing through the Nullification Crisis of 1832, in which South Carolina claimed unprecedented powers to cancel out a federal tariff, many politicians joined Jefferson in fretting over the possibility of disunion. These lamentations and worries were sporadic, and were interspersed among more frequent assertions that slavery was just a red herring. Jefferson himself claimed that “the Missouri question is a mere party trick. The leaders of federalism, defeated in their schemes of obtaining power by rallying partisans to the principle of monarchism . . . are taking advantage of the virtuous feelings of the people to effect a division of parties by geographic line.”
Jefferson and his political heirs could genuinely believe that slavery was a red herring and a real threat to the Union. Moreover, politicians in the 1830s an 1840s were truly motivated by philosophical debates over political economy and were thus equally concerned with preserving the viability of their bisectional Whig and Democratic parties, and in settling questions like the tariff, internal improvements, state involvement in banking and currency, and the size of government, and preserving the intersectional harmony that sustained the Union.
Yet at the end of the day, the preservation of Union and party rested on the stifling of free speech. Because at the end of the day, the only people crying disunion were slaveholders and their non-slaveholding allies who predicated their support of Union and party on a total non-discussion of slavery.
October 19, 2006
October 19 Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:15 PM EST Speaking of historical happenings on October 19, there is one much more recent than the two mentioned by Joshua Zeitz. And it, unlike them, seems to have had almost no long-term consequences, despite universal agreement at the time that it would rank among the great historical events in American history.
But only nineteen years in the past, the great Wall Street crash of October 19, 1987, is nearly forgotten.
On that day the market was down from the opening and things just got worse and worse. By the time the closing bell mercifully rang, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down a staggering 22.6 percent, substantially more than the decline on Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929. Volume was an unprecedented 608 million shares, at a time when 200 million was regarded as a very busy day.
Why would the crash of 1929 be carved into the folk memory of the American people today, few of whom were even alive then, while an even bigger crash less than two decades ago is a distant and fading memory?
The answer to that, of course, is what followed in each case. The 1929 crash was followed by the greatest economic calamity ever to befall a major industrialized economy, although the crash did not cause the Great Depression but merely preceded it. It would be 25 years before the Dow Jones recovered to its 1929 high. It would be 39 years before volume on the NYSE exceeded the 16 million shares that traded on Black Tuesday.
But the market recovered from the 1987 crash in only two years and went on to heights and volume no one dreamed possible. How high and what volume? Well, today’s volume was about 2.6 billion shares, not a terribly busy day, and the Dow Jones closed up 19.13 points, to close above 12,000 for the first time ever.
October 19, 2006
Happy Birthday, Mrs. Teasdale Posted by Alexander Burns at 02:45 PM EST This blog has seen some heated exchanges over the last few weeks, so I thought it might be appropriate to take a moment to mark a historical anniversary of lighter import. On tomorrow’s date in 1882, 124 years ago, Margaret Dumont was born.
I am not sure how many people of my generation are fans of the Marx Brothers, but I would venture to guess not many. This is unfortunate, not least of all because the majority are depriving themselves of Margaret Dumont’s work. Dumont was the only major, recurring, and beloved female character in the films of the Marx Brothers, and anyone who is familiar with her performances will understand why.
In films like The Cocoanuts and A Night at the Opera, she plays a succession of very wealthy and cultivated socialites, forced, as one reviewer put it, to play hostess “to such devastating guests as never lived outside a penitentiary”—the Marx Brothers. Since the films are usually set in the social world of Dumont’s characters, it is always the Marx Brothers who seem out of place in the setting of a cruise ship or a presidential palace. In each film, however, it is Margaret Dumont who ends up uncomfortable.
A perfect straight man for Groucho and company, Dumont provided her audience with the opportunity to laugh at the stiff, snooty cultural elite without malice. Confronted with the ridiculous actions of the Marx Brothers, Dumont rarely seems genuinely upset. Most often, she simply appears confused or, at worst, exasperated. In film after film, Groucho courts her intensely in scenes that exaggerate and mock every convention of sentimental romance. In the 1933 movie Duck Soup, Groucho calls himself “a sentimental old fluff” and asks Dumont for a lock of her hair. Dumont is flattered and charmed. Then Groucho adds: “I’m letting you off easy. I was going to ask for the whole wig.” Reacting to such obvious insult, Dumont is restrained, ladylike, and clueless. She is hilarious in her obliviousness and she makes her fellow actors funnier as a result of her own good humor.
In Dumont’s New York Times obituary, the paper relates a scene from Animal Crackers in which the actress plays bridge. Harpo Marx ends up the winner, but, the Times writes, “Miss Dumont loses with dignity.” This talent, to lose with dignity, is what makes Margaret Dumont such an essential part of the Marx Brothers’ art. In the present day, when comedy and dignity often seem to be at odds, she provides an instructive example of their powerful combination.
October 19, 2006
Freedom, Slavery, and Speech II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:15 PM EST Joshua Zeitz writes, “From banning the use of the federal mail system to disseminate abolitionist tracts to the congressional ‘gag rule’ barring congressmen from reading their constituents’ antislavery petitions on the House floor, to the state and federal governments’ refusal to protect antislavery agitators from extreme mob violence—I’m thinking particularly of the 1837 lynching of Elijah Lovejoy—mainstream white politicians limited their own freedom, and the freedom of other white Americans, in the service of protecting slavery.”
I don’t know the answer here, I’m just asking the question, but I wonder if the politicians in limiting freedom in ways Mr. Zeitz lists, were doing so just “in the service of protecting slavery,” or did they also have another motive mind: protecting the Union.
Ever since the Civil War, the possibility of the breakup of the Union has been nonexistent. While we are the most diverse nation on earth, we also have the fewest centrifugal forces at work in our politics, which is a very nice paradox indeed.
But before the Civil War the possibility that the Union would dissolve over a number of issues, not just slavery, was a continuing clear and present danger. As a nation we were walking on eggshells to keep the Union together, and it seems to me likely that that motive must also have played a part, perhaps a dominant one, in their political calculations.
October 19, 2006
On This Date Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:30 AM EST I’m no colonial historian, but I noted with interest that today, October 19, marks two very important events in early American history. On this date in 1765 the Stamp Act Congress concluded its two-week session in New York City and issued the Declaration of Rights and Grievances, which asserted that only colonial legislatures, and not the British Parliament, could issue levies on citizens of the 13 colonies.
Arguing that Parliament could not represent the interests of colonial subjects, because the colonies had not been granted the opportunity to elect representatives to the House of Commons, the Stamp Act Congress broke with prevailing ideas about “representation,” which viewed the British nation as an organic whole and strongly denied that subjects living in London and Boston had different “interests.” Though the colonists’ revolutionary ideology was heavily steeped in republican rhetoric that similarly viewed the polity as a unitary entity with a single set of interests, the colonial experience—with its intense localism, its relatively extensive franchise (a product of wide-scale land ownership), and its truncated social structure (fewer gentry, fewer poor)—led many colonists to believe that civic virtue could only prevail where small communities of people governed their own affairs. They embraced a decentralized ideal of the British empire, one that didn’t necessarily sit well in Parliament.
To many MPs in London, the notion that Parliament was unrepresentative seemed ridiculous. The colonies enjoyed “virtual representation,” they insisted. But to many colonists, virtual representation was no representation at all. It didn’t recognize the fundamental differences between the Old World and the New. The problem was that both sides were deploying the same political rhetoric, even as their life experiences led them to read different meaning in key political terms like “representation.”
Fast forward 16 years to when, also on this date, Lord Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington’s forces at Yorktown. By then the revolution had developed a mind of its own. In the words of the historian Bernard Bailyn, a “contagion of liberty” had stretched the limits of republicanism and led many colonists to embrace bold new ideas about virtue, representation, and liberty.
October 19, 2006
Population Bombs and Birth Control Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:05 AM EST Fred Smoler wrote earlier this week about America’s new population milestone. We are now a nation of 300 million.
As Fred pointed out, in the 1970s most demographers and political scientists regarded population growth as a dangerous trend. In what one might term environmental Malthusianism, the best minds regarded the world’s resources as finite and imagined that more human beings walking its shores could only produce dangerous competition for fuel, food, and shelter.
I’ve encountered quite a few examples of this line of thinking in my research on the 1970s. Just the other day I came across a letter to the editor submitted to Ms. magazine in 1975. The writer in question was a pro-life feminist who explained, “I am not against contraceptives. They are a necessity in this age of overpopulation and in freeing women from the encompassing role of mother and homemaker. I do believe that any woman who really wishes to protect her freedom from childbearing will employ one of the many birth control methods available. . . . A liberated woman is concerned about her rights. She should also be concerned about the rights of others.”
Interestingly, this correspondent—and many others like her—fused two earlier arguments in favor of contraception. As I pointed out a few days ago in my daily feature on Margaret Sanger, some pioneer birth-control proponents, like Sanger and Emma Goldman, began as opponents of population growth. As committed socialists, they believed that more people meant more workers, and that more workers created a slack labor market and thereby depressed wages and working conditions. Strictly speaking, this was not an orthodox Marxist position; a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist would have welcomed the deterioration of working conditions, as it would only hasten capitalism’s judgment day.
By the 1920s activists like Sanger abandoned their interest in population control for a more personal argument about women’s sexual fulfillment and freedom. The “freedom from childbearing” that the Ms. magazine reader cited in 1975 implicitly recognized women’s right to dissociate sex from procreation, and to thereby give it new meaning.
Funny, then, that demographers and social scientists now agree that population growth might just be the life blood of nations. After decades of viewing contraception as a check against economic or environmental calamity, and simultaneously viewing birth control as a fundamental building block of women’s personal freedom, we now view population growth as an imperative. How we reconcile the knowledge that birth control enhances the personal freedom of American women, even as we acknowledge the need to increase our numbers, is anyone’s guess.
October 19, 2006
Freedom, Slavery, and Speech Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 08:45 AM EST Though the connection might seem tenuous at first glance, I hope I can relate the ongoing AmericanHeritage.com debate over free speech issues to a key historical epoch. The serious perils of campus hooliganism notwithstanding, recent events at Columbia University and Smith College pale in comparison to the clampdown on the public debate over slavery in the 1830s and 1840s. Before John Steele Gordon goes apoplectic and accuses me of comparing apples and oranges, let me explain that it’s exactly my intention to change the focus of this discussion, and to bring it back to American history. One of the great joys of being a working academic is that I get to preview a good deal of scholarship-in-progress. At Cambridge, where I spend half of each year teaching U.S. history, each Monday we invite a visiting scholar to deliver a paper derived from his or her current research. A year or two ago, William W. Freehling, a professor at the University of Kentucky and author of the critical volume The Road to Disunion: Volume I: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854, delivered a talk on his forthcoming sequel on Southern social and political history between 1854 and the Civil War. It’s been some time since Freehling’s talk, but one point that stuck in my mind is his controversial argument that the so-called Slave Power Conspiracy was not the work of an over-active Northern imagination, but a very real plot (if we apply the term “plot” loosely) by white planters to subvert the working of American democracy. Freehling might have been over-selling his argument a bit; it became clear during the Q&A that he meant simply to suggest that we shouldn’t dismiss the rhetoric of antislavery zealots as critically flawed and biased. But in the course of building this argument, he made an intriguing observation. If we look back at the 1830s and 1840s, what stands out is the process of self-censure that white politicians, both North and South, imposed on themselves. From banning the use of the federal mail system to disseminate abolitionist tracts to the congressional “gag rule” barring congressmen from reading their constituents’ antislavery petitions on the House floor, to the state and federal governments’ refusal to protect antislavery agitators from extreme mob violence—I’m thinking particularly of the 1837 lynching of Elijah Lovejoy—mainstream white politicians limited their own freedom, and the freedom of other white Americans, in the service of protecting slavery. The point is subtle but important, particularly in historiographical terms. The historian Edmund Morgan famously argued that American slavery and American freedom were integrally connected. In his book American Slavery, American Freedom, Morgan charted the halting process by which black servants in seventeenth-century Virginia became permanently indentured, and white servants became freeholders. Morgan’s thesis is complex, but essentially, he finds that the concept of race was highly fluid in seventeenth-century America. The uprising of so many downtrodden white and black servants during Bacon’s Rebellion forced colonial elites to rethink their management of Virginia’s social and political system. They began shifting black laborers to permanent servitude and sharply decreasing the influx of white indentured servants, allowing those whites already in the Chesapeake to transition to free status. In this way, white equality was built on the back of black slavery. A permanent underclass buttressed social equality for the white majority. Morgan’s argument is a compelling one, but Freehling’s thesis-in-progress complicates it. For if white freedom was indeed predicated on black slavery, still, whites diminished their own freedom by vigorously protecting the institution of slavery. The first freedom to go was free speech. Perhaps the point is too subtle to matter. But for good or bad, it’s the kind of thing that keeps academic historians up at night, and the sort of question that keeps the profession interesting.
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 18, 2006
Downfall Posted by John Steele Gordon at 02:45 PM EST I will confess to a deep aversion to subtitled movies. My loss, to be sure, but there we are. (For the record, I dislike dubbed movies even more.)
Regardless, I watched Downfall last night (on DVD), a German movie about the last days of Adolf Hitler, starring Bruno Ganz, a Swiss-born actor, as der Führer. It won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film, and I can most certainly see why.
It is, I think, an extraordinary feat of moviemaking. The bunker beneath the chancellery, in all its claustrophobic awfulness, is brought back to life as the inner circle of Nazidom carries on while the Red Army closes in. Ganz’s performance is extraordinary as he manages the feat of making a monster no less monstrous but still, somehow, recognizably human. The subsidiary characters, especially Magda Goebbels (played by Corinna Harfouch), are equally good. Frau Goebbels, unfailingly elegant even under the dreadful circumstances in which she finds herself, poisons her children rather than let them grow up in a world without National Socialism. Somehow it comes across as both a terrible crime and the final, twisted gift of a genuinely loving mother. Then she stands tall and proud in the chancellery garden, waiting for her husband to shoot her through the heart.
I am no expert on the Third Reich or the details of its final days, so I cannot speak to the precise historical accuracy of the movie, although I noticed no errors. And it gives the viewer, in spades, that extraordinary sense of you-are-there that is the sine qua non of a great historical movie.
The movie is two hours and 36 minutes long, and I was not bored for one single second of it. I didn’t even mind the subtitles. Somehow, this is a movie that needs to be in German.
October 18, 2006
Mobs and Speeches Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:30 PM EST I asked the following question, in relation to the incident at Columbia University a few weeks ago where a mob of left-wing students forced an invited speaker off the stage: “I would be genuinely interested in learning instances in which right-leaning students have sought to prevent leftist speakers from having their say. I know of no examples. Examples of the opposite abound.”
Mr. Zeitz, finally, answers: 1) New York Times reporter Chris Hedges was booed when he gave a commencement address at Rockford College in 2003. See the details here and an editorial in the local paper here. 2) Rep. William Lacy Clay was booed when he gave a commencement address at the University of Missouri at St. Louis in May of this year. See here for details. 3) The novelist E. L. Doctorow was booed when he gave a commencement address at Hofstra University in 2004. See here and here for Peggy Noonan’s take on the incident. In all three cases the speakers were invited to give a commencement address and in all three cases they gave a hyper-partisan, anti-Bush political speech instead. The audiences, whose members must have been of all political stripes, were assembled for a great day in their lives and the lives of their children and grandchildren and were the victims of an intellectual bait-and-switch. To use an analogy, they had bought tickets (very, very expensive tickets) to see a performance of Our Town, and the curtain went up on Waiting for Lefty instead.
Not surprisingly, they booed. Yes, yes, I know, they should have politely listened to what was being so impolitely said to them (and then greeted the end of the speech with stony silence), but, being human, they booed. Frankly, I don’t blame them. As one parent said about the Clay speech, “Needless to say, we were very upset that such a special occasion had to be marred by such classless behavior, but no sense in giving him more attention than he is worth. I don’t know that I could give you any details—I was fuming so I didn’t even try to listen—it was tough to have to sit there when we really wanted to walk out—but after all, we were there for the kids . . .” Whom was Congressman Clay there for? In none of these cases is there anything resembling a mob of students assembling for the purpose of preventing someone from having his say on an announced topic. So we are still left with the fact—at least it has not been contradicted by any evidence—that speech-suppressing campus mobs are always left-wing mobs. (There have also, by the way, been numerous instances of right-wing campus publications being stolen and destroyed before they could be distributed. I know of no instances of left-wing publications being so treated.) As Alexander Burns has pointed out, the left tends to overwhelmingly dominate on college campuses, so one wonders why they feel the need, let alone the entitlement, to act this way. If they are in a position of such strength, if their ideas are so strong and those of their opponents so weak, why do they feel the need to prevent even the airing of weak ideas? The truth will always triumph in the end. As Shakespeare wrote, “Time’s glory is to . . . unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light.” So is it just terminal intellectual arrogance (“I don’t feel like we need to apologize or anything. It was fundamentally a part of free speech. . . . The Minutemen are not a legitimate part of the debate on immigration”) that leads them to behave this way? Or do they sense the intellectual bankruptcy, the rot, that lies at the heart of today’s left and seek, desperately, to prevent its exposure? In my experience, bullies are always rotten at the core.
October 18, 2006
October 17, 1961 Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:30 PM EST October 17 is the anniversary of a massacre. On this day in 1961 the chief of the Parisian police, Maurice Papon, ordered his men to attack a peaceful demonstration by 30,000 Algerians resident in France. In 1998 the French government admitted to 40 murders, there is very good evidence that there were at least 70, and respectable estimates run up to 200. Algerian demonstrators were pushed into the Seine, many after being beaten unconscious, where many drowned. A number were tortured.
In 1961 the French were still at war in Algeria, a war in which the Algerian government claims a million people died; the French government estimated 350,000 at the time, and most modern scholars think the true number lies well above the latter figure, if below current official Algerian estimates. The 1960s, of course, remain famous as a decade of racial turmoil and racial violence in America, and of vastly destructive American warfare in Vietnam; among everyone I know, Bull Connor is more vividly remembered than Maurice Papon (and the few people who remember Papon remember him for shipping Vichy’s Jews off to concentration camps, not for ordering the mass murder of Arabs almost 20 years later).
By all accounts, these memories of the American 1960s continue to vividly color French (and other) perceptions of America. I know very few people who have heard of the massacre of October 17, and 1960s France remains celebrated as a culture of racial tolerance. The 1960s do remain fixed in memory as the era of American violence in Vietnam. Historical memory is a funny business.
October 18, 2006
Demography and the Future Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:30 AM EST The U.S. population officially hit 300 million yesterday. The New York Times didn’t make a big deal of it, pointing out that the 300 millionth American probably walked into the country over the Mexican border a while ago. The Times did quote someone at the Census Bureau opining that the increasing size of the population is good for the economy.
How times change, and how quietly the Times sometimes notes that fact. A couple of decades ago, the population bomb was very big news; the coming world population bust is news, although not nearly such big news. The really interesting news is what comes with comparative perspective: The United States, while growing, is also aging, but it’s not aging as fast as the Europeans or the Chinese. In a few decades there will be 400 million Americans, and if present trends continue, the country will be bigger in relationship to China and appreciably younger, which almost certainly means more dynamic and more productive.
Old Europe, as everyone I know likes to mock Rumsfeld for calling the place, will be a lot older, and its population appreciably smaller. Latin Europe is way below replacement rate, as are many other European states. The U.S. will be more multiracial than is now the case, but not necessarily more multicultural; by most indices, maybe all, Americans are still very good at assimilating immigrants. Europe looks like it will be a lot more multicultural; over the past decades, Europeans have not been particularly successful at assimilating immigrants, and few observers think this is going to change soon. Some varieties of multiculturalism are less cheering than others, and rather few Europeans seem greatly cheered by their current varieties. Of course, reproductive mobility may speed assimilation. Or not; the rise of xenophobic populist forces and the rise of Islamist groupings loudly opposed to assimilation look like a real problem in much of Europe.
China has not had immigrants in recent memory and seems unlikely to see many any time soon. A rapidly aging China is less likely to overtake the United States as either an economic or a military competitor than is almost invariably taken to be the case in the newspapers I read online. The financial stability of retirement systems in Europe is shaky, but the retirement system in China doesn’t bear thinking about. A rapidly aging China will also have remarkable sex imbalances, the result of aborting female fetuses, and certain political effects may flow from that, none of them pleasant. The Chinese future, normally painted in brilliant colors, may be rather darker than it is now the fashion to imagine. In terms of relative power, shrewd observers think India will probably overtake China, on the strength of population growth alone, especially if the Indian economy continues to liberalize. A country with the rule of law and political democracy will increase in relative power. That seems like good news. Of course, that makes two countries with the rule of law and political democracy, whose relative power is likely increase.
A remarkable number of people I meet and read nonetheless think that the United States is going to inevitably decline in relative wealth and power, and with it the influence of the political and social norms we embody. Perhaps, but there is a good chance that the reverse will happen, and demography helps explain why. Demography is not destiny. Human behavior can change, and can change demography with it, but the latter does not change very quickly. A friend informed me that one British paper, the Independent, mourned the arrival of the 300 millionth American. I do know that one British magazine, The Economist, celebrated it. Those numbers, which strongly predict wealth and power, bear thinking about. The Economist has been doing some thinking. Across the political spectrum, few Americans sound too much aware of a trend that seems likely to protract and increase our dominance. Rather remarkably, at least as far as I can tell, neither do most foreigners.
October 18, 2006
Free Speech Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:30 AM EST My friend James Taranto over at www.Opinionjournal.com had an interesting item in his Best of the Web column Monday:
A Discriminatory Lecture? “Two African American teachers have filed a racial complaint against Lakeside School”—a prep academy in Seattle—”claiming that the elite private institution created a hostile work environment and discriminated against them,” the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports:
Chance Sims, a part-time Lakeside history teacher who filed the claim along with former Lakeside teacher Novella Coleman, listed a series of incidents over the past three years that he said ran counter to the school’s stated diversity goals. . . .
Among the plaintiffs’ complaints was Lakeside’s invitation to conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza to speak as part of a distinguished lecture series.
After Sims and other faculty members and parents complained, the school in January rescinded the invitation to D’Souza, who has argued that the underachievement of African Americans has more to do with cultural attitudes and behaviors than with white racism.
Seattle Weekly described the D’Souza episode in February:
Though not invited to discuss race per se—Iraq and empire were the topics—his views opposing affirmative action and questioning distinctly racial views of slavery and segregation were apparently beyond the pale. One Lakesider likened him to a Holocaust denier.
Under pressure, the school’s head, Bernie Noe, rescinded the invitation. In a formal statement, Lakeside explained that “we realized Mr. D’Souza’s presence could cause emotional pain to many at our school, including our increasingly diverse student body.”
The clear implication was that students, faculty, and staff at one of the country’s premier college prep academies couldn’t handle the ideas of a mainstream conservative. That’s an odd signal coming from an institution known for academic rigor.
We doubt the plaintiffs will get very far with that part of their complaint, which seems way over the First Amendment line. But think about what they are saying here. Merely inviting someone who holds politically incorrect ideas about race to come and speak is “discrimination.” It doesn’t even matter that D’Souza was to have discussed a topic other than race, or that the invitation was rescinded.
In the plaintiffs’ view, equality requires that dissenters from the racial orthodoxy be treated as nonpersons. This attitude is totalitarian in its essence.
October 18, 2006
Ms. Magazine, 35 Years Later Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:20 AM EST I’m writing this dispatch from New Haven, Connecticut, where I’m conducting some research for my forthcoming book on America’s encounter with the 1970s. Tucked away in a lovely, quiet corner of the Sterling Memorial Library, I’ve spent the past two days sifting through back issues of Ms. magazine, the feminist monthly founded by Gloria Steinem and others some 35 years ago this December. I intended—and still intend—to use Ms. as a primary source to document the various strains of feminist thought in the 1970s, but I’ve found to my surprise and delight that the magazine was a good deal more interesting and intellectually complicated than popular stereotypes would hold, and that it will prove a useful source for chapters that are otherwise unrelated to the topics of women and feminism. While Ms. was fairly doctrinaire in its support of reproductive rights (early in its run, it took the controversial step of publishing the names of women who had abortions), abortion figured less prominently in its pages than one would think. Instead, Ms. addressed a wide variety of questions concerning women’s economic status (e.g., equity in credit and wages); sexuality (e.g., competing theories about the female orgasm); marriage; electoral politics; race; advertising; and, importantly, masculinity. Last week, I visited Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library, which houses a fascinating collection of letters to the editor—thousands of them, mostly unpublished—sent to Ms. magazine between 1972 and 1980. I was intrigued to find that the magazine’s readership was extremely diverse, at least insomuch as letters to the editor were representative of its subscriber base. Correspondence poured in from virtually every state and every region, and women living in places far removed from the magazine’s New York City headquarters were anything but shy about calling out the editors on their urban, Northeast bias. I came across hundreds of letters from pro-life women expressing support for the magazine’s mission but dismay over its pro-choice bias, and hundreds of letters from girls—some as young as eight or nine—who grappled in their own way with the decade’s changing gender mores. Having grown up on Free to Be You and Me—a children’s song album, sponsored by Ms. magazine, that challenged traditional, gendered stereotypes—I’ve thoroughly enjoyed taking a second look at the magazine behind the record. It strikes me that Gloria Steinem and her editorial staff were a good deal more sensitive to questions of race and class than their critics allowed, and that anyone who still buys into the old canard about second-wave feminists—to wit, that they hated men—never bothered to pick up an issue of Ms. The magazine ran many articles by and about men and celebrated a new gender politics predicated on equality and cooperation. Next week I’ll be tackling the Steinem archives at Smith College. I’ll let readers know what I find.
October 17, 2006
Maryland, Reconsidered Posted by Alexander Burns at 04:30 PM EST At Joshua Zeitz’s invitation, I would like to make some predictions about the elections next month. I want to start, though, by revisiting one particular race discussed here a little less than a month ago. In the Maryland Senate race, Democratic Congressman Ben Cardin is running against Republican Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele. A month ago, with the Democratic primary just complete, this race seemed to be in flux. Cardin had just emerged from a heated primary, and while Maryland is a deep blue state, Michael Steele retained an enormous war chest and statewide name recognition. Today, I’m pleased to say, it looks like this race is practically over, and Cardin is the winner. John Steele Gordon observed on September 22 that Michael Steele is something of an anomaly in the politics of his state and country. Steele is, as Mr. Gordon observed, the first black politician elected statewide in Maryland. Even more notably, he is a Republican. At the time of the last discussion of this topic, Mr. Gordon argued that Democrats were not giving Steele adequate respect: “The Baltimore Sun wrote that his only visible qualification for office (as lieutenant governor) was the color of his skin . . . The left, it seems, think that while whites . . . can have their own political opinions and still remain authentically white, blacks can’t be truly black unless they are liberal.” This is an interesting and relevant point, and I think it’s worth discussing further. I agree with Mr. Gordon that the Sun’s words are offensive. Michael Steele was a lawyer and local party operator before he was tapped to run as Bob Ehrlich’s lieutenant governor. His race certainly played a role in his selection, but he was no less fit to serve as lieutenant governor than any number of Democratic running mates across the country. The fact that he is black should not single him out for criticism of his light qualifications. What I find more objectionable than even the Sun’s characteristically blunt and aggressive language, however, is the way Steele has used his race as a political tool. After Governor Ehrlich caught fire for attending a fundraiser at the racially exclusive Elkridge Country Club, Steele defended him, calling the governor his “homeboy.” He used the same term to defend President Bush from Democratic criticism. More recently, as a widely read humor blog has already pointed out, Steele created a profile on facebook.com, a popular social networking site, in order to showcase his campaign. In this profile, under the section marked “About Me,” Steele writes: “I’m hip hoppin my way to the United States Senate!” Employing terms like “homeboy” and making ridiculous declarations like the one on his facebook profile, Steele is using popular stereotypes of African Americans to give himself and his white allies political cover. Rather than commenting on the propriety of Maryland’s chief executive visiting an exclusive social organization, Steele mustered some silly slang intended to showcase his race. Rather than offering any information about his beliefs, Steele declared that he is “hip hoppin” into the nation’s highest deliberative body. Even if the Sun is wrong, and Steele has qualifications other than his race, he is doing a remarkably poor job of showing it. This year, there are a number of black Republican candidates vying for high office. Ken Blackwell, Ohio’s Secretary of State, and Lynn Swann, a former Pittsburgh Steelers star, are running for governor in their respective states. Steele, of course, is running for Senate. For a while, it looked like Michigan Republicans would nominate the African American Rev. Keith Butler as their candidate against U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow. These candidates all have a number of things in common. They are all Republicans. They are all African American. And with the exception of Blackwell, they all have relatively little to say on issues of policy. There may come a time when Republicans give Democrats a serious run for their money with black voters. When they do, though, it’s going to be because they put up serious candidates, whatever their race, who speak to the concerns of African Americans better than their Democratic opponents. Right now, even black Republicans are failing to do this. That’s another characteristic that Steele, Swann, and Blackwell share. On November 7, they will suffer for it.
October 17, 2006
Free Speech, Last Time Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:00 PM EST Poor John Steele Gordon. Though he is positively vicious with anyone who dares disagree with him—he recently said of me, “Mr. Zeitz doesn’t seem to realize that his bodily wastes are quite as odiferous as those of everyone else,” and added for good measure that “had Mr. Zeitz been reading something more substantial than Batman comics in 1983, he might” be better qualified to comment on events of that year—he takes such precious umbrage at the slightest criticism. With all due consideration for Mr. Gordon’s fragile feelings, I’ll paraphrase the same advice he recently gave me: If he had as much of a sense of humor as a crocodile he would realize that there is, in fact, something funny about decrying violations of campus free speech on the one hand, and dismissing the importance of critical analysis on the other. But back to Mr. Gordon’s artful dodge: I’ve now provided several examples of conservative students heckling and shutting down speeches by left-wing or liberal visitors. Can we now reach some agreement that these cases, as well their political inverse, are isolated examples of college sophomores behaving sophomorically, rather than some vast, left-wing conspiracy to thwart free speech? As for my teaching skills, I invite Mr. Gordon to drop in on one of my lectures the next time he’s in town. He might learn a little something, and I always encourage questions and dialogue in the classroom.
October 17, 2006
Free Speech, Intents and Effects II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:45 AM EST I would invite the readers of this blog to compare the responses of Joshua Zeitz and Alexander Burns to my request for information and decide which man they would rather spend a rainy weekend at the beach with.
Mr. Burns’s response is on point, thoughtful, and illuminating.
He writes, “While I am happy to provide this as an example of the kind of behavior in which John Steele Gordon is interested, I am puzzled by his fixation on the alleged intolerance of liberal college students.”
I don’t think I’m fixated in the least. I asked for A, received B, asked for A, received C, asked for A, and received D. Finally, I asked for A and received A.
Who has the problem here?
October 17, 2006
Free Speech, etc. Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:45 AM EST If Joshua Zeitz’s latest post on this subject—a grudging response to a perfectly valid, politely phrased request for information that had to be repeated four times, all wrapped up in a cloud of personal insults—is an example of the critical analysis that is the core of a liberal arts education, then one can only pity his students. I wonder what they call him behind his back.
He writes, “I eagerly await Mr. Gordon’s response, in which he’ll probably explain why it was perfectly acceptable and even patriotic to shout down Doctorow, Hedges, and Clay, and why, as a white male, a Christian, and a conservative, he feels marginalized.”
Well, he’s right about one thing, I’m a white male.
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