October 8, 2006
Political Thrillers Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 04:15 PM EST Last evening I watched the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate and was reminded of how superior John Frankenheimer’s original production was to the 2004 remake. In light of the recent chatter on American Heritage.com regarding the new remake of All The King’s Men, I’m drawn to the sad conclusion that American filmmakers have lost their knack for political intrigue. From a cinema standpoint, the original Manchurian Candidate has much to offer: a haunting score, brilliant camera work, superior acting (Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury give striking performances). But it also contains an important twist that is lacking in the 2004 remake. In the original film, Angela Lansbury’s character, the wife of a demagogic United States senator clearly patterned after Joseph McCarthy, is an ardent anticommunist activist. At a critical juncture we learn that she is really a Soviet agent and is using hard-line anticommunism to bore at America from within. In the 2004 remake, Lansbury’s character, played by Meryl Streep, is a conservative and staunchly anti-civil libertarian U.S. senator with deep, sinister ties to a Halliburtonesque defense contractor. Unlike the original film, which acknowledged both the treachery of Soviet totalitarianism and the perils (and moral bankruptcy) of McCarthyism, the remake is entirely linear. There is no credible terrorist threat against America in Jonathan Demme’s interpretation of The Manchurian Candidate. There is only a right-wing corporate cabal to subvert the Constitution. Whereas the original film is shockingly cynical, the remake is strikingly naive. Where the original film is as complex as real life, the remake is as simple as a Michael Moore script. The Cold War era was in many ways a golden era for the political thriller, from All the King’s Men and The Manchurian Candidate to Seven Days in May and High Noon. It’s little wonder that American filmmakers lost their interest in or talent for this genre as the Cold War ended. But in today’s sustained war on terror, with so many contradictory motives and truths lurking beneath the surface, surely there is fertile ground for a resurgence of good political intrigue on the silver screen. With The Manchurian Candidate (2004) and All the King’s Men (2006), Hollywood has missed the mark.
October 7, 2006
The Achille Lauro Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:25 PM EST Jon Grinspan’s excellent AmericanHeritage.com piece on the twentieth anniversary of the Achiile Lauro affair makes for interesting reading. Some may find it somber reading, although I think either enraging or grimly instructive would be better modifiers for the most appropriate response. One American ally refused to detain a terrorist who had committed piracy and the heinous murder of an American citizen—killing a stroke victim in a wheelchair, then ordering the body heaved overboard—and a NATO ally subsequently released the captured terrorist responsible for the murder and piracy, after which the courts of that NATO ally sentenced with admitted leniency the direct murderers and pirates, because they were “soldiers fighting for ideals”. Mr. Grinspan writes, with judicious neutrality, that “the event perfectly portrays an earlier era of terrorism”. It does indeed. It is nowadays fashionable, and to some degree reasonable, to criticize what the administration calls the war on terror as a policy suffering from an ill-chosen metaphor, because war, a measure taken against states, only occurs between states, whereas terrorist groups are not states. The Achille Lauro incident is a maddening reminder that while terrorists are not states, and so the use of the word war can be grossly misleading for actions taken against them, most groups of terrorists have pretty cozy relationships with one or more states. The particular group of terrorists who committed murder and piracy aboard the Achille Lauro lived under the protection of one state, Tunisia, and enjoyed the protection of another in the immediate aftermath of this particular crime, Egypt, which annually received truly vast sums in U.S. military aid. The leader of this terrorist group enjoyed the protection of a third state, Italy, for which the U.S. was pledged to sacrifice its own cities in the event of any attack on this NATO ally by a member of the Warsaw Pact. This same leader subsequently lived in peace and quiet on the soil of a fourth state, Iraq, which the United States was at that time covertly aiding in its war with Iran, and which desperately needed that covert assistance if it was to survive. While the case against going to war with Italy, Tunisia, Iraq, and Egypt in 1985 was pretty strong, the case for very painful American sanctions against some or all of those states was also pretty strong. As far as I know, none of those states suffered any sanctions of any kind for their despicable behavior during the Achille Lauro incident, yet all of them were, to one degree or another, vulnerable to U.S. sanctions. That very vulnerability may have created a paradox, one which the post-2003 collapse of the Iraqi state makes visible. The U.S. had to worry about the survival of some of these states. American security was seen to depend on the survival of the Egyptian and Iraqi regimes, and American security would not have obviously increased if we had significantly weakened the government of Tunisia. Weak or failed states are the environment in which terrorists groups generally thrive most freely, and so there is a painful dilemma: Sanctions or wars that risk collapsing a state can be a perverse response to states that are insufficiently aggressive against terrorists. But the Achille Lauro incident reminds us that allowing one’s allies to abet terrorists who murder wheelchair-bound fellow citizens is utterly contemptible, grossly offends something deep within us, and is not a policy likely to deter future derelictions, or further murders. The “war on terror” may be a dangerous metaphor, but the policy the war on terror replaced was a disgraceful policy that had itself failed for decades, and out of which emerged the forces that murdered 3,000 people on September, 11, 2001.
October 7, 2006
The Queen Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:00 AM EST I’ve just seen The Queen, which Ellen Feldman posted about on last Monday, and which I thought every bit as brilliant as she did. The movie explores a moment when the British public, whipped up into a frenzy by the press, and engaging in what seemed like an orgiastic mixture of grief over the death of Diana, princess of Wales, and voyeurism, demanded a more and more public display of emotion from the members of the Royal Family. Briefly balked of this, the public became angry enough to apparently threaten the continuity of the monarchy. Tony Blair, who at other moments seemed to incarnate the spirit of contempt for the past, a past of which the monarchy is generally considered the supreme and hence most despicable symbol, is widely thought to have saved the monarchy from itself, by advising a display of public emotion, crossed with implied contrition, which suited the exigencies of the moment. Any monarchy is by traditional American standards logically indefensible. As Tom Paine remarked, hereditary government makes as much sense as hereditary authorship. The British monarchy is similarly indefensible to some of the characters in the film, most conspicuously Cherie Blair, and Tony Blair’s director of communications, Alistair Campbell, in a sense a New Labor version of Karl Rove. The film has remarkably little sympathy for their perspective, but it also seems less than enraptured by either Prince Philip or Prince Charles. The former is represented as perdurably contemptuous of political modernity and political necessity, the latter, I think, as much more aware of those things, but the film hints that this awareness is a matter of self-interest: The failure to keep abreast of these matters threatens his inheritance. While they all have their foibles, none of these people are seen as in any way indifferent to the death of the princess of Wales, which was the ugly charge leveled at the time. They are rather seen as committed to protecting the most vulnerable among them, two children, and to behaving with the dignity and restraint that they think characterizes both their caste and their country, and for which they believe both have long been admired. What seems clear is that they are, at least for this moment, very dangerously mistaken in this belief. The Queen sees the role of monarch as a prison, but one within which the queen was quite willing to live, for the shape of the prison was determined by a bargain made between crown and people. At the death of the princess of Wales, the people briefly considered redefining that bargain. The film, however, implies that what the people at that moment wanted was something louder but smaller than a queen of England, for a queen of England has on occasion been something more than a cheaply emoting celebrity, and would have become something less than what she had been, had she too thoroughly complied with the new fashion. Why does the film think this? The Queen’s title character is consistently identified with the Second World War, during which she came of age, and also, as the film at one moment wonderfully reminds us, served as a driver and mechanic. I think the audience is meant to remember that in the 1940s British grief over the dead was wisely restrained, in part because there was an awful lot of it around, and also because it was thought that there were more pressing things to do than drink in displays of unrestrained emotion. This may provoke the reflection that while rational human beings do not give billions of dollars to one of their number, purely on account of an accident of birth, and then make everyone else curtsey to that person, it may also be the case that rational human beings do not always, when beleaguered, absolutely alone, at war with Adolf Hitler, under savage bombardment and blockade, and offered a chance to bow out of it while keeping a very large empire, refuse that offer with incredulous contempt. Ellen Feldman called The Queen filmed historical fiction, and that seems right, but I think it is also a film about the fictions that make up history, some of which, possibly to our sorrow, we may soon become unable to credit. Nations may well be merely imagined communities, and rational beings do not mistake imaginary things for real ones. Post-nationalists are very proud of seeing through the fiction of the nation, and are generally also proud of seeing through queens. The Queen, however, reminds us that committed membership in some imagined communities has had some useful consequences. Within living memory a monarch usefully incarnated a nation and helped rally it to an urgent end. It is a remarkable fact that The Queen may make Americans think not of Paine but of Burke, Paine’s great antagonist, who memorably observed that seen with sufficient clarity, a queen is but a woman, and that seen with similar clarity a woman is but an animal. It is not obviously to our advantage to see everything, at every moment, with quite that degree of clarity.
October 6, 2006
Universities and Free Speech Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:00 PM EST Two things stand out about the recent incident at Columbia: first, free and open debate is supposed to be the core value of a university, and protecting it the university’s distinctive and specific duty. Silencing a speaker with grossly disruptive heckling and, in this case, some violence, is not only vicious and contemptible, it betrays the university’s highest and most urgent ideals. The second thing that stands out is the startling mildness with which Columbia is reacting to this incident. Columbia security officers were present yet arrested no one, and the Columbia spokesman quoted in the Spectator, the college newspaper, did not express any great outrage about the event, but rather made this stirring defense of free speech: “The specific facts surrounding the incident are under active investigation by the University, so it is premature to make any official statement regarding facts that are yet to be determined . . ." In this case, cameras were present, there is footage available on the Web, which appears to show some of the violence, and the Spectator has printed what looks like admissions of guilt by some of the people who disrupted the event. So while all the facts are not yet available, enough facts are available to justify rather stronger language by Columbia. Columbia officials were more passionate when, on the eve of the war in Iraq, a member of the faculty called for “one million Mogadishus now,” which meant calling for the death of 18 million American soldiers and perhaps 2 billion Somali equivalents. (Given the relevant demography, it was not clear which population this particular anthropologist had in mind.) On that occasion, Columbia proudly defended the right to call for this horrific outcome, but on this occasion has been charier of speaking up for the right of Mr. Gilchrist to opine on immigration policy. Then again, a foolish consistency is proverbially the hobgoblin of small minds.
October 6, 2006
Sex Scandals, Past and Present Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:30 PM EST Mr. Smoler brings up a long list of instances when Republicans have sought partisan advantage in the past over matters touching on sex and sexual orientation, the GOP exhibiting a fine lack of intellectual consistency in the process. I don’t quibble with a single example he gives.
But if you love truth and elemental fairness, becoming a politician of whatever place on the political spectrum is contraindicated, to use a medical term. Democrats are quite as capable of selective outrage and seeking advantage—or refuge, depending on circumstances—in hypocrisy.
Take, for instance, Bill Clinton, a moderate Democrat, who had a sexual relationship—in the Oval Office itself—with a White House employee who was half his age.
Do a simple thought experiment. Assume everything was exactly the same, with one exception: Bill Clinton was a moderate Republican, not a moderate Democrat. How many readers of this blog think that the National Organization for Women (NOW) would have had the same reaction—essentially, she’s a grown-up, it’s none of our business, let’s change the subject—under those circumstances? How many think they would have been calling for him to be hanged from a lamppost in Lafayette Square for using his power to extract sexual favors from a staff member?
There’s a reason a common definition of “statesman” is “a successful dead politician.” It’s a very ugly business, and the ugliness is evenly spread around.
Mr. Zeitz quotes me as follows: “The people who are now howling for the head of the speaker for not acting swiftly to prevent a ‘predator’ from ‘stalking’ ‘children’ are the very same people who voted to revoke the charter of the Boy Scouts because that organization bans gay scoutmasters. Of course, if hypocrisy were worth a dollar a ton, Washington politicians (of both parties) could pay off the national debt in a week.”
He then writes, “I’m somewhat confused. Does Mr. Gordon mean to suggest that gay men are a threat to young children, because they are gay? I can’t really believe that this is the point he is trying to drive home, as it is a patently offensive and ugly point to make. But his language would seem to imply just that.”
I can see how one might interpret what I wrote that way, but it is not, of course, what I meant. I don’t think gay men are any more of a threat to young children than straight men. Pedophilia, as far as I know—and I don’t know much; it’s a topic that makes me turn the page as quickly as possible—is not related to sexual orientation.
What I meant was that Democrats are acting as politicians do in such cases. When they are going after the gay vote, the mere hint that gay men might be more inclined to abuse children is deeply offensive. But when they sense Republican blood in the water, suddenly Rep. Foley is tantamount to a child molester and the leadership should have known it, based on e-mails so innocuous that newspapers that had the e-mails didn’t bother to write a story based on them.
To bring up the idea of “child molestation” in these circumstances is, ineluctably, to pander to the idea that homosexuals are child molesters. If Mark Foley is guilty of molesting children, a terrible crime, harshly punished in every civilized jurisdiction in the world, then Gerry Studds and Dan Crane (to keep this bipartisan and bi-orientational) are also. They, after all, were both guilty of actually having sex with Congressional pages, not just talking about it with former (and therefore older) pages. Crane was defeated for reelection, but Studds was reelected six times.
October 6, 2006
Walking in Billy Sunday’s Footsteps Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:00 PM EST Today’s New York Times includes a lengthy front-page article on the efforts of Christian evangelical leaders to stoke the fires of faith among young people, whom they fear are leaving the evangelical fold in large numbers. So disconcerting are the reports of diminished Christian commitment that some 6,000 ministers are discussing the problem this fall in 44 different cities.
The Times notes that one of the devices that evangelical leaders are employing to win back or firm up the allegiance of young people is multi-day Christian rock concerts, where thousands of Christian teens gather to listen to Christian music , to dance, to pray, and—in some cases—to write down on tiny pieces of paper the various temptations they encounter from day to day, and to deposit these scraps of paper in conveniently positioned trash cans.
The Times presents these events as unusually innovative, but in fact they claim deep roots in American religious history.
In 1830 and 1831 Charles Finney, the great evangelical revivalist, staged enormous, three- and four-day revivals in Rochester, New York, where he called on penitent sinners to walk down a sawdust aisle, sit on the “anxious bench,” confess their earthly transgressions before their friends and neighbors, and recommit their lives to Christ. The events were carefully staged and fused the elements of religion and popular spectacle. The anxious bench was, in many ways, a predecessor to the scrap paper and trash cans that await today’s teenage penitents.
Fast-forward to the 1870s, when Dwight Moody electrified the nation with his dramatic evening revivals, or the early 1900s, when Billy Sunday fused modern media and evangelical fervor to convert tens of thousands of souls for Christ.
Born into wrenching poverty on the Iowa prairie, Sunday wandered from one dead-end job to another until friends encouraged him to channel his natural athleticism into baseball, a game that was quickly assuming its place in the 1870s and 1880s as America’s national pastime.
In 1883 Sunday came to the attention of Cap Anson, the legendary club manager whose Chicago White Stockings dominated professional baseball throughout the 1880s. Anson carefully tutored the Iowa farm boy on the finer points of the game, and though he never excelled as a hitter (his batting average fluctuated between .222 and .256), Sunday’s speed and agility made him a sensational outfielder. He played several winning seasons for Chicago until 1888, when Anson traded him (and several other star players) to Pittsburgh.
Sunday could have continued raking in handsome earnings as a professional athlete, but even before his move to Pennsylvania he gradually found that his attentions were being drawn in another direction: religion. He came to it almost by accident. June 1886, on the eve of an important series with the New York Giants, Sunday was out gallivanting with the other players when he happened across a troupe of roving evangelists who were singing the old religious hymns he had grown up with on the prairie. His eyes misted over as he recalled that much simpler childhood. His memories contrasted sharply with the filth and degeneracy of Chicago’s red-light district. By his own account he spent hours that night at Pacific Garden, singing hymns, listening to the testimony of wayward men and women, and breathing in the pure air of evangelical Christianity. “Boys,” he told some those present, “I bid the old life goodbye.” Billy Sunday had been saved.
Increasingly committed to his religious activities, Sunday retired five years later from professional baseball—even turning down a $5,000-per-season offer from the Cincinnati Reds—and took a job at $83.33 a month as a paid organizer for the YMCA. After three years, missing the open road and itinerant life of his baseball days, he signed on as an assistant to John Wilbur Chapman, one of the nation’s leading camp revivalists. Scarcely 12 months later, Chapman retired from the circuit, and Billy Sunday struck out on his own. By the eve of World War I, just as the fundamentalist-modernist debate was reaching a fever pitch, he was America’s most revered religious leader.
The Sunday machine was a complicated operation. His advance team would roll into town weeks ahead of a scheduled revival and immediately begin recruiting upwards of 20,000 volunteer staff members. His famous 1905 Boston revival drew on the labor of 700 secretaries, 200 doorkeepers, 5,000 prayer leaders, 8,000 choir members, and 2,000 ushers. The campaign succeeded beyond Sunday’s wildest expectations. Over 60,000 people were so moved as to make the ultimate gesture: They walked down the aisle and signed special preprinted pledge cards, offering their lives anew to Christ.
At every destination the advance men spread word of the upcoming event—at Protestant churches and fraternal orders, in hospitals and hotels, outside factories and offices. In each city they also raised a giant wooden tabernacle, strictly according to an architectural design that provided for maximum acoustics and seating. Inside the tabernacle, rows of pine benches circled a five-foot-high dais, specially equipped with a podium at its center. The floors were covered over in sawdust and wood shavings, to form an easy path for the throng of penitent sinners who would soon march in step to the podium and sign themselves over to the Lord.
In addition to the advance and construction teams, Sunday’s organization included a director of Bible study, a women’s outreach director, a pianist, a choir director, a chief-of-staff, and even a postmaster, who was responsible for processing thousands of pledge cards each week, in order to match up new converts with prospective churches.
Thinking back on Finney, Moody, and Sunday, it’s hard not to think of the current wave of Christian revivalism—and the events staged for the benefit of evangelical teenagers—as the latest chapter in a long and rich story. The fusion of mass culture and religion is almost as old as the nation itself.
October 6, 2006
The Yom Kippur War Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 01:30 PM EST Today marks the thirty-third anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, which saw Egypt and Syria launch a surprise attack on Israel just as the country had its guard down, with most of its citizens observing the Jewish Day of Atonement. While the war had tremendous long-term implications for the geopolitical and diplomatic future of the Middle East, it also had a profound effect on American Jews, whose ideas about particularism and universalism underwent considerable change in the wake of Israel’s near defeat at the hands of two foreign armies.
Popular convention holds that the turning point in American Jewish self-perception came not in 1973 but in 1967, when Israel defeated Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in the Six-Day War, capturing vast amounts of new territory and defying conventional wisdom (now widely discredited) that the small start-up country stood no chance against its well-armed, more populous enemies. “Has the Six-Day War changed my Weltanschauung?” Elie Wiesel famously asked. “I would go even further and say that the change was total, for it involved my very being as both a person and a Jew.” Historians tend to agree. Before 1967, they claim, American Jews sought to keep their Jewish identity subdued, even beneath the radar screen. After 1967 they were free to express tremendous pride and to emphasize their hyphenated identity.
I wrote an academic article on this question several years ago and found that, far from jettisoning their liberal cosmopolitanism, most Jews in the wake of the Six-Day War remained firmly committed on a concrete level to the same causes that the community had championed for several decades: civil rights, the fight against poverty, religious pluralism, and the expansion of the New Deal/Great Society state. Though relations with the black community were strained in the wake of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s embrace of the Arab cause, most Jews continued their strong support of integration and remained far to the left of their white Christian neighbors on questions concerning race and economics.
1973, however, may very well have signaled a breaking point for many American Jews. Whereas 1967 saw the Jewish state triumph unexpectedly over seemingly superior forces, the Yom Kippur War saw the Jewish state draw frighteningly near to defeat. But for a last-minute infusion of war supplies from the United States, Israel might very well have suffered a crushing blow. In the wake of the 1973 war, many American Jews, and certainly many American Jewish institutions, became less interested in universalism and cosmopolitanism and far more interested in emphasizing the themes of Jewish continuity (whether in Israel or the Diaspora—particularly in the Soviet Union) and self-defense. That Jewish groups soon broke with their longstanding civil rights partners over the question of affirmative action in higher education admissions only further exacerbated the new tendency toward group cohesion and particularism.
I don’t mean to suggest an absolute shift in perception and priorities. Many Jews remain estranged from their religious or cultural heritage and far more inclined to view themselves exclusively as Americans, and many American Jews who remain connected to their heritage are deeply committed to the spirit of universalism and cosmopolitanism that has been a hallmark of American Jewry for well over 200 years. But 1973 did change the world in which American Jews lived, and since then Jews in the United States have grappled with new difficulties related to their existence as hyphenated Americans.
October 6, 2006
Free Speech for Me but Not for Thee Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:00 PM EST When Jim Gilchrist, the founder of the Minuteman Project, tried to speak at Columbia University the other day, he was shouted down by a bunch of intellectual thugs and had to be escorted out a back door for his own safety. He was a guest of the Columbia University Young Republicans, who had hired Columbia University police to keep order. They didn’t. (Take a look at the video at the above link).
One of the thugs is quoted as saying, “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.” Translation: My rights under the First Amendment are absolute; yours are what I agree to let you have.”
You would think that a university would have a strong reaction to the violent suppression of peacefully stated opinion by a mob on its own campus. But so far the reaction has been little more than a few platitudes and tut-tuts from the Columbia University administration. No one believes that anything more forceful will be forthcoming.
There has been a disturbing pattern of leftist threats and violence against campus speakers they do not approve of, followed by an anemic reaction from college authorities, in recent decades. 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.
In the 1970s, if I remember the time period correctly, the Nobel Prize winner William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor, was frequently prevented from speaking about his very unpopular racial ideas, under the rubric of “no free speech for racists.”
In 1983, when Jeane Kirkpatrick, then the United States ambassador to the United Nations, was invited to give the commencement address at Smith College, she was forced to withdraw after violence was threatened and the college president, Jill K. Conway, said that she could not guarantee her security. The New York Times (which hasn’t bothered to cover the fracas at Columbia this week, although the New York Sun has had extensive coverage, here, here, and here) headlined the story of Mrs. Kirkpatrick’s withdrawal MRS. KIRKPATRICK BREAKS A DATE. Isn’t that neat? Threatened with violence, told by the college president that she’s on her own if she comes, Mrs. Kirkpatrick is described by the Times headline as the one who cancelled the appearance.
Ms. Conway, of course, could easily have secured the safety of Mrs. Kirkpatrick (not to mention the reputation of Smith College) by issuing the following:
1) Smith College is dedicated to the principle of free speech and will not tolerate violence to prevent it.
2) I have asked the governor of Massachusetts to provide sufficient state police to assure that Mrs. Kirkpatrick can both speak and be heard by all. The National Guard will be called if it is deemed necessary.
3) Any person not associated with Smith College who tries to prevent our guest from speaking will be arrested.
4) Any student who does so will be expelled forthwith.
5) Any faculty member who does so will be fired.
6) Peaceful demonstrations that do not disrupt the speaker or the audience’s ability to hear her will be allowed. People wishing to do so must announce their intention ahead of time and follow the directions of the campus police.
Instead, she caved to the mere threat of disruption.
October 6, 2006
Foley and Clinton Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:45 AM EST John Steele Gordon writes that he feels sorry for “this evidently unhappy and lonely man”—for Representative Foley—and I share his feelings. He goes on to write that Foley’s “sins here, while certainly sins, are rather small potatoes as such sins go,” and that also seems right. He then goes on to write about Gary Studds, whose active sexual involvement with a minor occurred some 23 years ago, and opines that while Rep. Foley has behaved “inexcusably,” Reps. Hastert, Reynolds, and Boehner are probably in the clear, and certainly deserve the presumption of innocence. People do indeed deserve the presumption of innocence, although the phrase may be slightly out of place, since I am not aware that anyone has accused Hastert, Reynolds, and Boehner of crimes.
Of course, there has been a more recent sex scandal than the one involving Representative Studds, the one that occurred when President Clinton had consensual sexual relations with an adult, and the comparison to that scandal may suggest why one portion of the electorate seems irritable about the Republican leadership, rather than only with Representative Foley. It is certainly possible to argue that the Clinton scandal was about perjury, rather than sex, although since the perjury occurred entirely the context of a perjury trap designed to exploit the common reluctance to publicly admit sexual infidelity, the majority of the electorate concluded that the scandal was in fact about sex. If you think that the Clinton scandal was indeed about sex, the comparison suggests that the Republican party is only erratically hyper-vigilant about sexual irregularity. Still, it seems too soon to conclude that the party observes a double standard. On the available evidence, the Republicans will use the impeachment power in a manner that threatens Constitutional stability, for partisan advantage, and propose amending the Constitution to ward off the possibility of same-sex marriage, again for partisan advantage, but will also, yet again for partisan advantage, more or less ignore the apparent sexual solicitation of a same-sex minor. So perhaps there is no double standard.
My guess is that the electorate has noticed that the Republicans are willing to rouse the persecuting spirit about homosexuality when they sniff a chance to, say, carry Ohio, but seem more genial and tolerant when it is a matter of losing a Congressional seat in Florida. The Republican leadership seems to suspect that the electorate is disquieted by this curiously elastic morality and this very selective indignation. I hope the leadership is correct.
October 6, 2006
Pages Again Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 08:00 AM EST Though I’m glad that he and I agree on the enduring importance of the page program, I have just a couple of responses to John Steele Gordon: 1) Mr. Gordon writes, “I feel especially sorry [for Mark Foley] because, as far as I can see, his sins here, while certainly sins, are rather small potatoes as such sins go. Consider what Rep. Gerry Studds, a Democrat, did. Studds actually had sex with a Congressional page. He was reprimanded—a slap on the wrist-by the House, then firmly in Democratic hands, not censured—a serious punishment—or expelled. He went on to win reelection several more times before he retired in 1996. So his constituents, obviously, were not horrified by the revelation.” Mr. Gordon neglects to mention that when the House reprimanded Gerry Studds in 1983, it simultaneously reprimanded Rep. Daniel Crane, a Republican from Illinois, who also slept with a 17-year-old page. In other words, the Democratic-controlled House handed out the same penalty to both Republican and Democratic offenders. Comparing 1983 and 2006 does not prove that Democrats apply a partisan double standard. It only shows that opinion has evolved over the past 23 years, and that Americans now look less kindly upon sexual (or sexually suggestive) relationships between adults and persons 17 years of age and under. I think much of this shift owes to two causes: first, a reaction against some of the excesses of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, which saw a decriminalization or downscaling of many offenses, including those against children; and second, the extension of childhood and adolescence. With so many kids now remaining in their parents’ homes into their late teens and even into their twenties, and with so many young people remaining in college and graduate school at ages when their grandparents and parents would already have been in the work force, Americans have come to view childhood as a much more elongated category. 2) Mr. Gordon writes: “The people who are now howling for the head of the speaker for not acting swiftly to prevent a ‘predator’ from ‘stalking’ ‘children’ are the very same people who voted to revoke the charter of the Boy Scouts because that organization bans gay scoutmasters. Of course, if hypocrisy were worth a dollar a ton, Washington politicians (of both parties) could pay off the national debt in a week.” I’m somewhat confused. Does Mr. Gordon mean to suggest that gay men are a threat to young children, because they are gay? I can’t really believe that this is the point he is trying to drive home, as it is a patently offensive and ugly point to make. But his language would seem to imply just that.
October 5, 2006
Congressional Scandals, Then and Now Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 05:30 PM EST Dennis Hastert’s bob-and-weave routine today—that is, his call for an investigation of the page program, generally, rather than an investigation of the leadership’s complicity in covering up Mark Foley’s misdeeds—is about all one expects these days of a fundamentally corrupt congressional regime. But the current page scandal (which should really be termed a House GOP leadership scandal, since the pages had nothing whatsoever to do with this sordid affair) got me to thinking about past congressional scandals. This has been a banner year for Congress, of course. Duke Cunningham accepted millions of dollars in cash and in-kind bribes in return for fixing government contracts. He then stashed thousands of dollars in a duffel bag shortly before reporting to prison, purportedly for his wife’s benefit, though Cunningham’s attorney claims he intended to forfeit the cash to prosecutors. Classier still was Rep. William Jefferson, who stashed thousands of dollars in cash in aluminum foil and then placed the money in his refrigerator, because, as we all know, money tastes better when chilled. In recent history, perhaps the most entertaining congressional scandal involved James Traficant, the former sheriff of Mahoning County, Ohio, who was indicted in 1983 on federal racketeering and bribery charges under the RICO statutes, represented himself in court (though he was not a lawyer), was acquitted of all charges, won election to the U.S. House in 1984, and was expelled in 2002 upon his conviction on charges of converting campaign funds to personal use. Known as much for his unique fashion sensibilities (conspicuous wig, wide-lapeled and bell-bottomed denim suits, cowboy boots) as for his fierce representation of down-and-out workers in postindustrial Youngstown, Ohio, Traficant stopped thousands of House office workers in their tracks each morning with his famous one-minute speeches that ended with the trademark (stolen) line, “Beam me up, Scotty!” When Traficant took to the well to speak, everyone tuned into C-Span and listened. Moving back a little further in time, to the early 1990s, Americans saw the powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee imprisoned for selling $55,000 of government stamps and pocketing the money. We saw over 350 current and former House members implicated in a check-kiting scandal. We learned that employees of the House post office were sidelining as cocaine traffickers. And, in perhaps the most bizarre spectacle of the decade, the House sergeant of arms shot himself in the mouth and then falsely claimed to have been mugged at gunpoint on Capitol Hill, in a last-ditch effort to fend off an investigation of his office’s mismanagement of the House bank. Then, of course, there was 1983, when Daniel Crane (R.-Ill.) and Gerry Studds (D.-Mass.) were censored for sleeping with underage congressional pages. But if I had to pick my favorite decade for congressional scandals, it would be the 1970s. And not just because I’m writing a book on the ’70s. If we consider 1980 as the tail end of the decade, then surely we can enjoy watching grainy footage of congressmen stuffing wads of cash into their jacket pockets, the source of which were FBI agents posing as Arab businessmen in the now-famous sting operation Abscam. In a bizarre footnote to the story, Rita Jenrette, the wife of Rep. John Jenrette, who went to prison for his role in Abscam (the feds raided his home and found cash totaling $25,000 stuffed in one of his shoes), gave a tell-all interview on the Donahue show and then posed nude for Playboy magazine. For good measure she also told readers that she and the congressman shared some intimate moments on the Capitol steps, during an all-night House session. If you ever wondered where the Capitol Steps, a popular political comedy troupe, got their name, now you know. Then there was Wilbur Mills, the all-powerful chair of Ways and Means, who stumbled onto the stage at a Boston strip club and joined Annabel Battistella—aka Fanne Foxe—for a few numbers. This incident alone might not have sealed Mills’s fate, had he not been involved in an earlier incident in Washington, D.C., which saw him and Foxe stopped by a police officer for failing to turn on their car lights. Mills was clearly intoxicated, and, for good measure, Foxe fled the car and jumped into the Tidal Basin. Only slightly more scandalous was Mills’s colleague, Wayne Hays, the chairman of the House Administration Committee. Hays kept his longtime mistress on the government payroll as a secretary, though she later admitted, “I can’t type. I can’t file. I can’t even answer the phone.”
We could go back even further in time. But I think the 1970s still take the cake. Bad as the current Congress is, the passing of the age of disco and the new transparency that followed in the wake of Watergate have surely made congressional corruption a far less entertaining subject. It’s no longer outrageous and amusing. It’s just pathetic.
October 5, 2006
Congressional Pages III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:00 PM EST I certainly join with Ellen Feldman and Joshua Zeitz in hoping that this scandal does not cause the termination of the congressional page program. As Mr. Zeitz’s personal recollections testify, it must constitute one of the great highlights in the lives of those lucky enough to be chosen for it.
Mr. Zeitz writes that “Mark Foley is a sad anomaly.” He is indeed, and I feel far more sadness than anger regarding him. This is not to say I excuse him. He behaved inexcusably and is now paying—and will be paying for the rest of his life—a fearful price for his behavior. He has no one to blame but himself, but I still feel very sorry for this evidently lonely and unhappy man.
I feel especially sorry because, as far as I can see, his sins here, while certainly sins, are rather small potatoes as such sins go.
Consider what Rep. Gerry Studds, a Democrat, did. Studds actually had sex with a Congressional page. He was reprimanded—a slap on the wrist—by the House, then firmly in Democratic hands, not censured—a serious punishment—or expelled. He went on to win reelection several more times before he retired in 1996. So his constituents, obviously, were not horrified by the revelation.
Rep. Foley, on the other hand, exchanged “overfriendly” but nonsexual e-mails with one former page who didn’t like the vibes he got from them, complained, and the e-mails stopped. And he had at least one sexually explicit instant-message conversation with another former page who, judging from his half of the conversation, didn’t seem exactly bent out of shape over it. It might be noted that IM conversations are not automatically saved as e-mails are. As far as I know—I am not a nerd—the only way to save an instant messaging conversation requires highlighting it, clicking on copy, then going to a word-processing program and pasting it into a blank document. Not exactly the actions of someone severely traumatized.
So sleeping with a congressional page gets you a reprimand but having a sexually explicit IM conversation with an ex-page who is a thousand miles away gets you called a monster and worse. Does something seem a little out of balance here?
Frankly, I doubt that any real harm was done to the boys he interacted improperly with from afar. They were, after all, 17, above the age of consent in some jurisdictions, not 7, which the term “children,” often being used in the media and by hay-making politicians like Nancy Pelosi to describe them, brings to mind. How many people, when they were in their late teens or adults, never had to deal with something equivalent? Not many, I imagine, and “No thanks,” or “I gotta go,” is almost always the end of it.
Mr. Zeitz writes, “It would be a great shame to see such an important program scrapped because of one bad apple and his protectors. Blame Foley, Hastert, Reynolds, and Boehner. But not the pages.”
Well, certainly not the pages. Isn’t it just a little early to blame Hastert, Reynolds, and Boehner? I have seen no evidence whatsoever that they were aware of anything but the e-mails until late last week. And the e-mails were so innocuous that neither the Miami Herald nor the St. Petersburg Times, in possession of them, thought them sufficiently newsworthy to print. Foley was told to stop being a jerk, he said that he would, and what more was to be expected?
I might note that the people who are now howling for the head of the speaker for not acting swiftly to prevent a “predator” from “stalking” “children” are the very same people who voted to revoke the charter of the Boy Scouts because that organization bans gay scoutmasters. Of course, if hypocrisy were worth a dollar a ton, Washington politicians (of both parties) could pay off the national debt in a week.
The House Ethics Committee, made up of equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans, has this morning issued a blizzard of subpoenas in order to get to the bottom of this. I hope they do so and let the chips fall where they may. But with Mr. Foley already gone, I think that a few good ideas, such as the presumption of innocence, should be followed in the meantime. That is too much to expect from politicians, to be sure, but the rest of us might give it a try.
October 5, 2006
Earl Warren Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:15 AM EST Fifty-three years ago today, Earl Warren, who as wartime attorney general and governor of California had supported the forced detention of his state’s Japanese-American citizens, was sworn in as chief justice of the United States. Just months after assuming office, Warren brokered a unanimous decision among his mutually antagonistic and divided associate justices banning segregation in public schools, thus delivering the first in a long series of rulings that broadened civil liberties for all Americans—particularly for minorities who had heretofore fallen outside the full protection of the law.
Scholars have long speculated about the motives behind Warren’s constitutional liberalism. It was Warren, after all, a man who had been complicit in one of the most egregious violations of civil rights in American history, who presided over court decisions mandating equal apportionment of legislative districts; establishing defendants’ right to competent legal representation and to learning their “Miranda” rights upon booking; affirming citizens’ rights to birth control; and striking down state segregation and “miscegenation” statutes.
Some writers have argued that Warren devoted his 16 years on the Court to making amends for his contribution to the detention of California’s Japanese-American citizens. This may well have been the case, though he studiously avoided any public mention of the episode in his later years. Another plausible explanation for Warren’s judicial liberalism was that it suited his political temperament. A leader of the moderate wing of the GOP, Gov. Warren had presided over the construction of California’s extensive systems of state schools, highways, colleges and universities, and hospitals; he had also fought unsuccessfully to establish a state health-insurance system. In this sense, he was comfortable with the expansion of state power (though as governor he also favored lower sales taxes) and favored using that state power to enhance the lives of individual citizens. That said, the brand of liberalism that Warren’s court championed focused on protecting minorities against the tyranny of majorities, and on broadening the scope of individual liberties; it’s not at all clear that this judicial liberalism flowed naturally from a belief in statist approaches to promoting the health, safety, and education of the citizenry.
Whatever Warren’s motivations, there’s no doubting that his court left a permanent imprint on American life. No chief justice since Warren has had as strong an impact. Warren Burger and William Rehnquist were strong chiefs, to be sure, but they presided over an ongoing argument about how to adjust either downward or upward the judicial legacy of Earl Warren. Recently The New York Times speculated that the defining characteristics of the Roberts court will make themselves evident in the coming year. Roberts may yet prove to be a deft chief justice. But he too will be living in the long shadow of Earl Warren.
October 5, 2006
More on Pages Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:00 AM EST I’m very happy to second Ellen Feldman’s cautionary tale against the age-old tendency to blame the victim. Already, news organizations have taken to labeling the current controversy surrounding Rep. Mark Foley the “page scandal,” and at least one major publication, The New York Times, has run a column calling for an outright end to the page program. In the same newspaper, legal scholar Jonathan Turley penned an op-ed recounting some sordid stories of booze and pedophilia from his days as a page in 1977 and 1978, and while Turley supports the continuation of the page program, he has subtly contributed to the false but easy to believe notion that there is somehow an inherent problem in allowing 16- and 17-year-old kids to wander the halls of Congress.
I served as a page in 1990 and 1991—some 12 years after Turley served, and roughly 7 years after the House censored Rep. Gerry Studds (D.-Mass.) and Rep. Daniel Crane (R.-Ill.) for initiating sexual relationships with two pages. Importantly, the charges against Studds dated from 1973, and those against Crane from 1980. In the wake of their censure, and well after Turley graduated from high school, the page program was radically restructured. Since then pages have been housed in a high-security dormitory and live under the (very) watchful eye of resident monitors, most of whom are graduate students. Having spent my entire junior year of high school under said surveillance, I can vouch for its stringency. Ironically, I got away with far fewer shenanigans in Washington, living ostensibly free of parental control, than I did in my parents’ house (sorry, Dad . . . the truth must out).
Having e-mailed with dozens of my “dead page” friends, as we took to calling ourselves after leaving the program, and having reunited with over 50 of them at a recent reunion, I can assure readers that nobody in my class can recall even the slightest impropriety. To drive home the point, my two most meaningful interactions with congressmen were an impromptu seminar on nonviolence that former Rep. Ron Dellums (now mayor of Oakland, California) staged for pages in the Democratic cloakroom, amid the debate over the Gulf War, and a similarly informal talk with Rep. John Lewis, about the enduring importance of federal civil rights legislation.
Which is to say, Mark Foley is a sad anomaly. It would be a great shame to see such an important program scrapped because of one bad apple and his protectors. Blame Foley, Hastert, Reynolds, and Boehner. But not the pages.
October 4, 2006
The French Fifth Republic Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:00 PM EST Tomorrow is an anniversary: The French Fifth Republic was legally established on October 5, 1958. The conditions of its founding are worth remembering, for they cast an interesting light on current politics. In 1958 France was waging a very bitter war in Algeria, and her army’s leadership thought that democratic politics at home were undermining the war effort. Early in 1958 the governor general of Algeria began to organize a coup, and in May an army junta seized power in Algeria and formed a Committee of Public Safety. The junta demanded that de Gaulle be made head of the government of France and given extraordinary powers to win the war. On May 24, French paratroopers seized Corsica. The junta made plans to invade mainland France, and threatened to do so unless de Gaulle was made head of the government. On May 29, 15 hours before the invaders were scheduled to land, and very much on account of that threat, de Gaulle was made leader of France. The Fifth Republic’s constitution was ratified by referendum in late September and formally took effect on October 5.
I think this history has some lessons, and they are not necessarily unhappy ones. Less than 50 years ago, what is now seen as one of the bedrock democracies of the West was acting like a banana republic, and it would act like one for a while longer: In January 1960 there was another attempted coup in Algiers, and in April 1961 a successful coup occurred, led by a number of French generals. De Gaulle beat down that coup, but a year later Rightist terrorists were still attempting to disrupt the Evian Accords, which created modern Algeria. From our current perspective, the savagery of terrorists, and of colonial warfare—the war in Algeria was horrifically cruel—is sadly unsurprising, but in 1961 the French police were murdering hundreds of peaceful demonstrators in Paris itself.
You can, of course, interpret this history to suggest the fragility of decency and the rule of law, but the history may also suggest a more cheering possibility, which is that building stable democracies may not be quite as quixotic a project as is nowadays asserted by newly-fashionable “realists.” France, to be sure, had been a democracy 1870 and 1940, but it had been an unstable and at times remarkably brutal polity before and after. In 2003 some of the architects of the Iraq War seem to have assumed that moderate and democratic political arrangements are very easily achieved. In the wake of the very violent disappointment of those hopes, some people seem eager to assume that the most crucial features of liberal modernity are culturally specific, and probably irreproducible. Maybe so, but if you had looked at France in July of 1940, after briefly surveying the world outside the Anglophone periphery, you would probably have concluded that post-democratic authoritarianism was the terminus ad quem—the goal and final end—of political development. Even 20 years later the idea that Latin Europe could sustain democracies might have seemed quixotic. In light of that very recent history, it seems perverse to bet that the war of each against all, or tyranny, are the only two “natural” political arrangements in the Middle East.
October 4, 2006
Congressional Pages II Posted by Ellen Feldman at 12:30 PM EST Two days ago Josh Zeitz posted an entry on this site recounting his rewarding experience as a congressional page and saying that he hoped representatives wouldn’t use the occasion of the Foley scandal to do away with congressional pages entirely. On the same day, Representative Ray LaHood called for an end to the practice of having young people serve as congressional pages. The country does not want to put boys and girls in harm’s way. Or to put it another way, the men and women who govern the country cannot trust themselves to resist temptation.
The practice of blaming the victim has a long and dispiriting history. As a girl, reading some novel in which religion played a role—it might have been To Kill a Mockingbird or Strange Fruit—I was shocked to come across a sermon warning of the evils into which women will lead good men. I had never thought of myself as an occasion for sin. Most religions buy into this stereotype of women as distracting, dangerous, and therefore responsible for men’s delinquency. The law has followed suit. Though occasionally the men who frequent prostitutes are swept up in raids, it is the women and girls who made the men do it who serve time. And the tradition of the she-was-asking-for-it defense in rape cases has become less common but not extinct. In fact a few years ago I was surprised to learn that as a middle-class woman of a certain age, I would not be welcomed on a jury by a prosecuting attorney in a date rape case, because my assumptions would be that the girl, if not asking for it, should not have put herself in a situation that permitted the rape. I guess those early books got to me after all.
The cry to abolish the congressional page system seems to be building. Since the foxes who were guarding the chicken coup failed to prevent one of their own from making a raid, their solution now is to burn down the chicken coup.
October 3, 2006
More on Ford Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:20 AM EST John Steele Gordon never misses an opportunity to take a cheap shot, though he is tremendously thin-skinned at even the slightest criticism of his own writing.
According to Mr. Gordon: “Joshua Zeitz is a good deal more certain of the future than I am (perhaps he’s seen a study, so he knows what it will be). While the American legacy automobile industry must surely change fundamentally, that will require a new business model on the part of the UAW as well as GM, Ford, and Chrysler. As for what cars should be manufactured, I’d prefer to let the American people decide what cars they want.”
Let’s leave aside for the moment Mr. Gordon’s habitual flair for over-dramatization and biting sarcasm. Instead, let’s focus on substance.
In August the Ford Motor Company announced plans to cut new production by 21 percent in its fourth quarter; this decision followed the announcement of a plan earlier in the year to close seven plants, eliminate between 25,000 and 30,000 workers, and reduce its annual production capacity by 1.2 million vehicles. Why the cuts? According to the Los Angeles Times, “Soaring fuel prices have hit hard at Ford and its Big Three rivals General Motors Corp. and Chrysler Group, all heavily dependent on trucks, as buyers have begun shifting to smaller, lighter and more fuel-efficient cars and car-based crossover vehicles.” Accordingly, Ford has decided to cut the production of pick-up trucks—not passenger cars.
A few points are worth highlighting.
First, Mr. Gordon, in his continuing love affair with those two great abstractions the free market and its invisible hand, writes, “I’d prefer to let the American people decide what cars they want.” Well, they have. They want smaller, lighter, more fuel-efficient models, and the American government can do Ford, GM and Chrysler a favor by mandating tougher fuel-efficiency standards and by generously funding R&D for hybrid models and alternative energy sources. Some challenges are sufficiently difficult and integral to national security that they demand public-sector and private-sector cooperation.
Second, Mr. Gordon snidely writes, “Joshua Zeitz is a good deal more certain of the future than I am (perhaps he’s seen a study, so he knows what it will be).” But it doesn’t take a study or a crystal ball to make informed prognostications about the future.
The International Energy Agency predicts that the global demand for energy will increase between 37 percent and 50 percent by 2030. Even in the past five years, the global price of oil, adjusted for inflation, has jumped fourfold. With the Chinese and Indian economies experiencing rapid acceleration, the United States will find itself competing for a finite reserve. In 2004 China accounted for 30 percent of the world’s oil consumption, and experts believe it will soon overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest energy consumer. Equally if not more problematic, oil and gas production are increasingly concentrated in autocratic countries with little or no love for America—for example Venezuela, Russia, and Iran. Gone are the days when Americans could count on an infinite supply of affordable crude oil from friendly dictatorships, like Saudi Arabia, whose reserves are currently under much strain, or Western democracies like Norway, where oil output has been on the decline for 20 years.
I know that it’s unfashionable these days to live in the reality-based world. One sleeps better at night if he entrusts our collective fate to religious gods (like, well, God) or secular gods (like Adam Smith). But one day the oil will run out. Before that day arrives, we’re likely to be faced with soaring prices and resource wars. Ford needs to adjust itself to this new age, because change is good for business, and it’s good for our long-term national security.
October 2, 2006
Henry Ford Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:30 PM EST Joshua Zeitz writes, “One wonders what Henry Ford would do. Innovator that he was, I’d like to imagine he’d see the future for what it is, and insist on retooling the American auto market for the production of lighter, more fuel-efficient models.” Henry Ford was surely an innovator—and we still live with the monumental consequences of his innovations. But he was quite as stubbornly unyielding as he was innovative. Having made one of the world’s great fortunes with the Model T, he flatly refused to change it in any way, shape, or form, insisting it was perfect. He confined innovation to manufacturing and to personnel policies after 1908. His crystal ball was more than a little clouded by the 1920s. When the Model T was getting more and more technologically obsolete, Edsel Ford had a new model car made up without his father’s knowledge. When Henry saw it, he took a sledgehammer to it and destroyed it. It was only when he was confronted with acres of unsold Model T’s and plummeting profits that he finally, much too late, conceded that the company’s business model no longer worked. Ford shut down for 18 months as it retooled to produce the Model A, lost its lead to General Motors, and never really recovered until Henry died in 1947 and Henry Ford II took over. That does not, I think, make a resurrected Henry Ford a likely candidate to lead the American automobile industry out of the wilderness. Joshua Zeitz is a good deal more certain of the future than I am (perhaps he’s seen a study, so he knows what it will be). While the American legacy automobile industry must surely change fundamentally, that will require a new business model on the part of the UAW as well as GM, Ford, and Chrysler. As for what cars should be manufactured, I’d prefer to let the American people decide what cars they want.
October 2, 2006
All the King’s Men Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:30 PM EST On Saturday Josh Zeitz posted on All the King’s Men, which has just been refilmed. He remarks that “Warren’s book, which was published in 1946, and its first film adaptation, which was released in 1949, dwelt on the dangers of populist upheaval.” I do not recall the first version of the film, which I have seen only once and not recently, and I have not yet seen the current version, but I have read the novel a few times over the last ten years, because I occasionally teach it.
My sense of the novel may differ somewhat from Josh’s: I think that All The King’s Men has as harsh a sense of the moral imitations of elite rule as it does of the dangers of populist demagogy. In the novel, Robert Penn Warren’s Louisiana elites justify their former rule on the traditional grounds for such claims, their asserted ethical superiority to hoi polloi. They lament their loss of absolute political authority in the same terms—on their account, they have been replaced first by thieving plebeians, and now by a demagogue. But as the novel’s plot unfolds, their boasts ring hollow, for we learn that the elite’s moral authority is doubly compromised: by the degree to which its own wealth has been gained via political corruption, and by the underlying and staggering evil that created most of the elite’s original wealth, slavery. The individual corruption of one aristocratic gentleman, a crucial element of the plot, is explained by Willie Stark in Calvinist terms, as a particular instance of something common to us all, a portion of original sin. I get the sense that in this respect, at least, Robert Penn Warren rather agrees with Willie Stark.
By my reading, this is a pessimistic account of our situation, one indicting not only populism but all politics, an account stressing the defects of our nature that circumscribe political possibilities. It is thus a conservative vision, but I do not think it is a conservatism greatly energized by fears of populism. I think the novel argues that populism must fail in any attempt to build the New Jerusalem, but its failure will not result in a totalitarian regime, it will result in tragedy. All The King’s Men’s tragic hero is Willy Stark. Willie seemed, in one brilliant moment, the voice and fist of ordinary folk, who desperately needed both. His enterprise is undone by his limits and ours, so ordinary people are left in the lamentable condition that generally attends them.
I grew up in a New Deal household, one where my father described Huey Long as a fascist. I think this was a legend that originated with New Deal politicos, who saw Long as a threat to FDR, and the legend survived Long, who perished at the hands of an assassin in 1935. If people were wondering in 1935 whether Huey Long was a fascist, that may have been because in 1935 fascism had not yet showed all of its nature. By 1946, most people should have had a pretty good idea of how much fascism differed from Huey Long’s populism, and I do not think Robert Penn Warren’s novel was articulating a vision of Long as a probable American equivalent of Hitler, or even of Mussolini. For one thing, Huey Long avoided the racial politicking of many populists, and in 1946 that ought to have sufficiently distinguished him from the men who ran the fascist polities we had very recently annihilated in Western Europe.
October 2, 2006
The Queen Posted by Ellen Feldman at 12:00 AM EST The superb new movie The Queen, elevated to the level of brilliance by the subtle, multifaceted performance of Helen Mirren, has got me thinking about historical fiction on the screen. (I am always thinking about historical fiction on the page.) While the movie is not about American history—the only moments of Americana in it are a television clip of President Clinton making a statement after the death of Princess Diana and of various American celebrities attending her funeral—the film’s use of fiction to explore recent British events stands in stark contrast to ABC’s miniseries The Path to 9/11.
In The Queen, Stephen Frears views the enormous and, to the British royal family, shocking and unanticipated explosion of public grief after the death of Diana through the prism of Queen Elizabeth’s feelings and interaction with the then-just-elected prime minister, Tony Blair. The conversations between the queen and Blair, and between the queen and members of her family, are, of course, imagined. I am not a royal-follower and have no idea how closely they adhere to fact, nor, I imagine, do even royal-followers. I would be delighted to discover that the queen has such a sharp wit, and that her husband calls her “Cabbage” as he kisses her good night. But the important point is that the characterizations and dialogue are credible as far as what is on record. The portraits of the queen and Blair are sympathetic, but they do not seem wildly off the mark.
Contrast this with The Path to 9/11. Before ABC aired the series, the network made much of the fact that former New Jersey Governor Thomas Keane, the chairman of the 9/11 Commission, had vetted it. Only when members of the Clinton administration began to protest that the movie, in the words of former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, “depicts scenes that never happened, events that never took place, decisions that were never made and conversations that never occurred,” did ABC begin to emphasize the fictional aspect of the program. One fabrication Ms. Albright objected to was a scene that shows her refusing to support a cruise missile strike against bin Laden without first alerting the Pakistani government. But perhaps the most egregious misrepresentation is a scene that shows former national security adviser Samuel R. Berger slamming down the phone on a CIA officer in a fit of pique and thus forfeiting a chance to get bin Laden. The writer and one of the producers of the miniseries admitted the moment had been improvised by an actor and kept in because it seemed to work so well dramatically.
The Queen illustrates and illuminates the place and problem of the monarchy in contemporary Great Britain without grossly misrepresenting the facts as we know them. The Path to 9/11 plays fast and loose with what we do know to sex up a horrific moment in our recent past, or perhaps only to score political points.
October 1, 2006
What Would Henry Ford Do? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:25 PM EST A few days ago I inadvertently inspired a debate over the federal minimum wage when I made note of Henry Ford’s dual policies of paying his workers $5 a day (later raised to account for inflation) and granting them 40-hour work weeks. My intention was simply to point out that Ford understood that in a consumer-driven economy, a reasonable distribution of income and wealth was needed to secure long-term economic growth. As it so happens, 98 years ago today Henry Ford launched an earlier and equally important innovation. He rolled out the first Model T car and inaugurated America’s love affair with the automobile. At the dawn of the twentieth century cars were still viewed as impractical and unsafe. Their tires fell off; they buckled and spun out at the slightest provocation; when it rained, their wheels got mired in mud and muck. At best they were playthings of oil tycoons and bankers’ sons. San Francisco, Cincinnati, and Savannah slapped drivers with a maximum speed limit of eight miles per hour. Vermont required all motorists to hire “persons of mature age” to walk one-eighth of a mile ahead of their cars, waving red warning flags for the benefit of innocent pedestrians. The technology revolution hit America almost overnight. In the years before World War I, Ransom Olds inaugurated the mass production of automobiles, Henry Leland experimented with interchangeable car parts, and Henry Ford took advantage of both advances to usher in a radical phase in the ongoing transportation revolution. By the late 1920s the automobile industry was turning out nearly five million cars each year and Americans collectively owned 26 million automobiles, which translated to one car for every five persons. To support this new car culture, state and local governments saddled themselves with over $10 billion of debt to construct modern highways, roads, tunnels, and bridges. Florida cut through the Everglades swampland to raise the Tamiami Trail; Arizona bisected its vast desert; Utah paved a road over Lake Bonneville; and New York erected the Bronx River Parkway. It’s ironic that today, 98 years after Ford introduced the Model T (which, he famously said, customers could purchase in any color, as long as it was black), Detroit is struggling to keep its head above water. Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors—the Big Three—are slashing production, buying out and laying off workers, closing plants, and cutting costs in order to compensate for record losses in market share to Asian firms that build smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. One wonders what Henry Ford would do. Innovator that he was, I’d like to imagine he’d see the future for what it is, and insist on retooling the American auto market for the production of lighter, more fuel-efficient models. One would also like to think that he’d concede the necessity of a national health insurance program—not necessarily single payer—to relieve Detroit firms of the need to pay costly health care premiums for their unionized workers. I very much doubt this, however. Ford would likely have opposed unions, not private health insurance. And, of course, it’s all counterfactual speculation anyway.
October 1, 2006
Minimum Wage Wars Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:00 PM EST I should be loath to position myself between Fred Smoler, who has made an informed and nuanced argument in favor of the minimum wage, and John Steele Gordon, who has flailed his arms (rhetorically speaking) and who, with his normal thin skin and penchant for drama, has taken extreme umbrage at the mere suggestion that his argument doesn’t add up, but who still feels pretty comfortable calling names and taking pot shots. But, why not? I’m a sucker for a good argument. Mr. Gordon writes: “To prove his point [Fred Smoler] produces modern studies that purport to show that minimum-wage hikes do not cause a net loss of jobs under current American conditions and, for all I know, they prove exactly that. I reply, there’s a guy down the street who just lost his job because his boss can’t afford to pay the new minimum wage, and a million like him elsewhere.” To which, I reply: which guy? Show me a study. Give me a name. Stop writing in vast generalities. Where’s your evidence? I have no doubt that someone, somewhere, has produced a study showing that the federal minimum wage has cost certain workers their jobs. But Mr. Gordon prefers invective to reasoned argument. If he has some counter-evidence to challenge or contradict Fred Smoler’s argument, he should produce it. If he doesn’t, it’s time to move on. I happen to agree with Fred Smoler, insofar as I understand his argument that the government should concern itself with net job gains and losses. Where environmental or wage policies cost specific people their jobs, the government can and should introduce any variety of compensatory measures to provide job training, education, and relocation funds to displaced workers. This is what the Kennedy administration did when it pushed through legislation to help displaced workers in Appalachia find new jobs and develop new skills. It’s a tradition rooted firmly in economic opportunity theory, which presupposes that an economy as vibrant as America’s requires growth and adjustments, rather than a wholesale redistribution of income and assets. But it’s worth reiterating: The minimum wage has lost 20 percent of its real value since it was last raised in 1997. How many businesses have really been shut down because they can’t afford to pay their workers $5.15 an hour? I’d genuinely like to know, and I’m waiting for Mr. Gordon to tell me.
October 1, 2006
Congressional Pages Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 07:30 PM EST The current scandal surrounding former Rep. Mark Foley’s (R.-Fla.) illicit e-mail and instant-message exchanges with a 16-year-old congressional page interests me on a number of levels. For one, I’m more than a little outraged by the seeming hypocrisy of GOP leaders who purport to be protectors of public morality, and who are first in the room to claim God on their side in the struggle against reproductive rights and gay marriage, but who covered up evidence that one of their caucus members was making inappropriate advances toward an underage employee. But I’m also intrigued by the scandal because I was once a congressional page. I spent my junior year of high school living in a dorm just two blocks from the Capitol Building (the dorm was housed on two floors of House Annex No. 1, which was later rechristened the Tip O’Neill building, before being torn down to make way for a parking lot; pages now live in a new dorm, several blocks down the street). Each morning, along with my fellow pages, I attended school on the top floor of the Library of Congress, from about 6:30 a.m. until roughly 10 a.m. (sometimes earlier, if the House went into session at 9 a.m.), and then spent a full day working as a runner, based on the House floor. There have been congressional pages virtually as long as there has been a U.S. Congress. Today, House and Senate pages are appointed for either one-year or one-semester terms, during their junior years of high school. They work either for the minority or majority side of each chamber, and perform any number of menial jobs. I spent most of my year running messages and packages between congressional offices, which are spaced out between several buildings, most of which are connected by an intricate underground tunnel system, with the Capitol Building at its hub. But I was also responsible for some of the niftier tasks, like raising the flag on the roof above the House chamber each day that the House was in session (fun to have the key to the roof; not fun to raise the flag during a thunder and lightning storm), and ringing the bells that go off throughout the Capitol, and in all of the House office buildings, to inform members of Congress that a vote, quorum call, or other procedural event is taking place. I once called a five-minute vote when I was supposed to ring the adjournment bells. But that’s a story for another day. Suffice it to say, I still have nightmares about it. In the early 1980s Congress was rocked by a page scandal that saw two members admit to having sexual relationships with pages. At the time, some congressmen called for doing away entirely with pages. Luckily, cooler heads prevailed. In the wake of that scandal, the page program became much more regimented, and pages came under much greater surveillance. I recall 10 p.m. curfews on weeknights, 12 a.m. curfews on weekends, and a staff of resident graduate students who kept a hawk’s eye on our comings, goings, and doings. It’s my hope that the current scandal doesn’t have an adverse effect on the program. This spring I went to my 15-year page reunion, and I was reminded what an absolutely remarkable group of people I worked with and am fortunate to call friends. They represented virtually every state, every race, every religion, every economic background, and every ethnicity; they were smart, and talented, and ambitious. They’ve gone on to do varied things, but every one of them continues to excel in whatever path he or she has chosen. Together we bore witness to debates over the weightiest of matters (the budget crisis of 1990, the Gulf War of 1991) and, in the process, did a lot of growing up. The program continues to afford about 200 high school students each year a tremendous education. I hope the press will keep the focus on Mark Foley, and on what the House leadership knew (and when it knew it), rather than on the pages themselves. Congress may be a troubled institution, but the pages bear no responsibility for the current mess.
October 1, 2006
The Minimum Wage, for the Last Time Posted by John Steele Gordon at 06:00 PM EST Mr. Smoler writes, “In 1,154 more words, Mr. Gordon again wholly fails to address, with even a single word, the empirical scholarship suggesting that under current American conditions, a rise in the minimum wage does not appear to increase unemployment.” Wow, he counted the words. Mr. Smoler wants me to act like a scholar here, refuting this study, accepting that, having learned discussions about which theory more fully explains the real world, and finally coming to a consensus, a meeting of the minds, a scholarly synthesis that puts us all one step closer to absolute truth. To prove his point he produces modern studies that purport to show that minimum-wage hikes do not cause a net loss of jobs under current American conditions and, for all I know, they prove exactly that.
He awaits my answer.
I reply, there’s a guy down the street who just lost his job because his boss can’t afford to pay the new minimum wage, and a million like him elsewhere.
He says, but there’s no net loss of jobs, everything is okay, this is a great way to help the poor.
I reply, there’s a guy down the street who just lost his job because his boss can’t afford to pay the new minimum wage.
He says, but you’re not refuting the study! Another job was created somewhere else in the American economy. We know that to be true, he says, waving his study in the breeze like Neville Chamberlain returning from Munich with peace in our time.
I reply, there’s a guy down the street who just lost his job because his boss can’t afford to pay the new minimum wage. I’d give you his phone number, but he had to have it turned off until he can find another job.
And on and on it goes. Mr. Smoler cares about numbers on a spreadsheet. I care more about the guy down the street—a real, living, breathing person, with hopes and dreams and family—who just lost his job. Sure, somebody else, somewhere else, got a job that hadn’t existed before. But that doesn’t help this guy, does it?
Mr. Smoler seems to think that if a million people lose their jobs because of a minimum-wage hike, that’s just fine as long as a million other people get new jobs.
In the view from the Ivory Tower, nothing has changed except the take-home pay of minimum-wage workers, and everyone is better off. They have studies that prove it.
Mr. Smoler writes, “Mr. Gordon writes that he ‘intended to imply that liberals are out of touch and love their theories to the point of refusing to even consider any alternatives.’ He succeeded in making this implication, but he made it without evidence . . .”
Well, if I failed to produce evidence of my assertion, Mr. Smoler came to the rescue and provided it for me.
October 1, 2006
Persiflage, Continued Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:35 PM EST In 1,154 more words, Mr. Gordon again wholly fails to address, with even a single word, the empirical scholarship suggesting that under current American conditions, a rise in the minimum wage does not appear to increase unemployment. He again resorts to argument by assertion. Once more, I hope for the last time: I do not claim this scholarship is beyond attack. It was indeed vociferously attacked, but it was then defended by some extremely eminent economists, and subsequent evidence, also quoted, suggests that it is eroding the consensus on the evils of the minimum wage. I suspect that Mr. Gordon is not evading the new scholarship out of timidity or indolence, but because theory tells him it cannot be right. I shall now quote the wisest remark I heard at graduate school: A good theory tells you the right questions, and a bad theory tells you the right answers. Neoclassical economics is not bad theory per se, far from it. But like any good theory, it can become bad theory in the minds and mouths of its exponents. Mr. Gordon makes a series of additional claims about his relationships to Brie and the common man. He insists that he loves Brie, indeed all cheese, that his neighborhood is very up-market indeed, that no one would accuse him of being one with the common man, etc. I have no reason to doubt any of these assertions. I have met Mr. Gordon at least once, he may even have been eating cheese at the time—it was a Christmas party for American Heritage—and on the strength of a minute of conversation, and on the more extensive evidence of his posts on this blog, my guess is that our tastes are in a number of respects pretty similar. But I do not think that Mr. Gordon’s tastes are any guide to the plausibility of his economics or the wisdom of his politics. His original effusion of Brie and white wine rhetoric suggests that he is not averse to implying the contrary, as does some of the more recent post. Mr. Gordon writes that he “intended to imply that liberals are out of touch and love their theories to the point of refusing to even consider any alternatives.” He succeeded in making this implication, but he made it without evidence, indeed in defiance of the evidence, and by means of some labored and dated joking about consumption patterns and zip codes. This is populism in one of its worse senses. So let us agree that a man may love Brie and be no villain for it, and while he may live in a splendid old house or a Manhattan apartment, we will agree that this is not going to generate a priori knowledge of his wisdom, his prudence, his knowledge, or his good faith.
October 1, 2006
I Confess! I Eat Brie Posted by John Steele Gordon at 08:30 AM EST My, my. Judging from the reaction, it seems my last rhetorical 16-inch shell must have slammed into the enemy battleship big time.
Mr. Smoler writes, “Why this labored sneering at Brie and white wine?”
I wasn’t sneering at Brie and white wine, I was sneering at the lamentably common tendency of liberal intellectuals to cling to outmoded theories, like Linus to his blanket, while they engage in an orgy of mutual back patting about how much they care for the common man, even when their theories are hurting some of them.
He writes, “But note what is being attempted by this labored faux-populism. A man who insists that he is looking out for the common man, from a perch somewhere north of the city (apparently a more plebeian precinct than the Upper West Side) . . .”
Pardon me. I didn’t realize that looking out for the common man was an activity restricted to liberals, although liberals seem to think that only they can or will do so. I thought anyone could try his best to find ways to make the world a better place for everyone. And sorry to disappoint Mr. Smoler, but my neighborhood is not very plebeian these days. I could never have afforded to buy the place. Happily I didn’t have to. I inherited it.
He writes, “Lest this solicitude be misunderstood, Mr. Gordon claims a solidarity of taste with Joe Six-Pack: no Brie and Pinot Grigio for real Americans.” I love Brie (never met a cheese I didn’t like, in fact, much to my cholesterol-checking doctor’s displeasure). I love pigs in blankets too. Not pretzels, however. I hate, loathe, and abominate pretzels of whatever shape and size. Clams and oysters on the half shell too, just to be socioeconomically evenhanded about my dislikes.
He writes, “What about that breeding and presumption business? It is surely intended to imply that liberals are snobs, people who think they are better than the common man, and are destructively playing Lady Bountiful.”
No, it was intended to imply that liberals are out of touch and love their theories to the point of refusing to even consider any alternatives.
He writes, “That part of the joke, alas, is not wholly original. It dates from 1944, when ‘Only a native domestic Burgundy, but I think you’ll admire its presumption’ was the caption to a Thurber cartoon.
First, I resent the implication of plagiarism (boy, liberals sure get nasty when someone disagrees with them). Second, the correct quote is “It’s a naive domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.” Here’s what I wrote: “washing it down with a naive little Pinot Grigio of no breeding but much presumption . . .” I think the readers of this blog are quite sophisticated enough to recognize an obvious allusion to one of the most famous cartoon captions ever to appear in The New Yorker when they read one. Mr. Smoler, I guess, is not or is too baited for bear to do so.
He writes, “The 1940s were not a time when people who wanted to abolish the minimum wage were readily mistaken for friends of the common man.” Probably not. But—are you seated, Mr. Smoler? this will be a shock—it’s not the 1940s anymore. We’ve had 60 years to come up with better ideas to help those with inadequate incomes. But Rip Van Liberal will have none of it.
He writes, “This whole business is a now-familiar tactic by the American right, the substitution of culturalist pseudoargument for rational economic argument: I am one of you, he is one of them, I must have your economic interests at heart, and he cannot, how could he even understand you? He eats Brie!”
Just for the record, not many people would accuse me of being one with Joe Six-Pack, and I have never pretended to be. I have spent my entire life nestled comfortably—perhaps too comfortably—in the bosom of Upper East Side privilege. Private schools, private clubs, doormen buildings, you name it. I’m tempted to joke that my family used to regularly go to the Trans-Lux to hiss Roosevelt, but Mr. Smoler would probably accuse me of swiping the line from Peter Arno.
He writes, “Mr. Gordon engages in a long burst of petitio principii, a fallacy also known as begging the question. He simply asserts that the minimum wage ‘hurts those people who lose their jobs as a result of a minimum-wage increase.’ But we do not know whether people nowadays lose their jobs as a result of a minimum-wage increase; that is what we are attempting to discover.”
Petitio principii? Now there’s a phrase dear to the heart of the common man. Frankly, I had to look it up myself. Pass the pigs in blankets, please.
I don’t know how many workers earn the minimum wage, or how many heads of households do, but let’s assume it is in the low millions somewhere. Is Mr. Smoler saying that if the nation’s employers were commanded to pay these workers two dollars more an hour, not a single solitary one of them would lose his job as a result? No restaurant owner, squeezed by tight margins, would decide to get along with eight busboys instead of ten? No gardening service owner would decide to invest in better and faster equipment so he could fire half his crew?
Mr. Smoler is talking abstractions—no net loss of jobs. I am talking real world—the José Garcia of the South Bronx who is told he’s fired because his boss can’t afford the new wage mandate. The one who has to go home to his wife and say, “I’ve got bad news, honey.”
He writes, “As for Mr. Gordon’s assertion—his mere assertion—that ‘anyone capable of holding a job is capable of filing a form’—he might want to look at the evidence on the effects of functional illiteracy, which is a real factor in the lives of the poorest of the working poor.”
I have no doubt that somebody, somewhere would have trouble filling out the requisite form. Just as somebody, somewhere has trouble applying for food stamps, signing up for Medicaid, getting a senior-citizen pass for the subway, passing a driver’s test. And yet 99.9 percent of them manage it somehow, with the help of a cousin or friendly bureaucrat or a social worker or the guy who cashes his paycheck for him. That is not an argument for the minimum wage. That is an argument for the status quo: Unless the new idea is perfect, with no trouble for anyone, anywhere, anytime, anyhow, the idea is no good, and we must stick with the old idea.
In this case, it’s an argument for getting José Garcia fired just when he thought maybe things were beginning to look up a bit. Thanks, Mr. Smoler. Have some more Brie.
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