October 31, 2006
American Jews and the Question of Confidence Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:00 PM EST Thanks to Fred Smoler for sharing some of his family history, and for responding to my daily feature on the Yiddish theater. Much of what I had to say about the acculturation of second- and third-generation Jewish Americans is culled from my forthcoming book, White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics and the Shaping of Post-War Politics, which will be published next spring by the University of North Carolina Press. Self-promotion aside, it’s a topic that holds great interest for me, as the book is an adaptation of my graduate dissertation. I’ve been living with the subject matter for a very long time. When I wrote of the “world before the Holocaust, when there was still a thriving transnational Yiddish culture, and when Diaspora Jewry possessed more cultural self-confidence and didn’t yet feel the need to fetishize the real and imagined deeds of Palestinian Zionists,” I didn’t mean to suggest that American Jews lived free of fear, or that they were impervious to the very real effects of anti-Semitism. I was referring specifically to their confidence in Diaspora culture. These were years when Jews took tremendous pride in Yiddish literature, theater, and song, which were rooted deeply in the diasporatic experiences of Ashkenazic Jewry, and when Labor Zionism and Revisionist Zionism, with their muscular ideal of the new Jewish man, were popular competitors—but only competitors—to the other models of the modern Jew: the scholar, the labor radical, the educated professional. In 1958 Leon Uris, the popular American Jewish author, earned fame and fortune with his novel Exodus, which Otto Preminger later adapted into a stirring film starring Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint. Along with Theodore Bikel’s recordings of Hebrew folk songs and Golda Meir’s autobiography, Exodus quickly assumed its place as a mandatory accoutrement in virtually every middle-class American Jewish household. (I exaggerate, and yes, Bikel also recorded Yiddiah folk tunes; but this is all in good fun.) The novel celebrated the new Zionist man, the sabra, who spoke Hebrew, not Yiddish; lived in Israel, not America (or France, or Britain, or Germany); worked the earth with his own hands; and exuded physical strength in abundance. It was an idea very much in line with Theodor Herzl’s pioneering Zionist work, The Jewish State, which envisioned a radical moral and physical makeover for Diaspora Jews, whom it portrayed as weak, corrupted, and pliant. I’m not knocking Exodus. It’s one of my favorite movies, and as far as historical novels go, it’s a keeper. But its essentially uncritical praise of Zionism contrasts sharply with some of the great Yiddish Diaspora works, like Isaac Beshevis Singer’s The Family Moskat, and some of the great English-language Diaspora works, like Philip Roth’s Zuckerman books (The Ghost Writer; Zuckerman Unbound; The Anatomy Lesson). Both writers exposed and mocked the foibles of Diaspora Jewry. And yet, while both would stand accused of self-hatred—particularly Roth, who earned scathing criticism from Irving Howe with the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint—their novels pay respect to Diaspora culture and treat it with humor and candor. The very fact that Roth was popular, and that Singer earned a Nobel Prize and remains in print, cuts against my argument a bit. American Jews clearly retained a love of their own culture. But with self-confidence must come honesty, and it strikes me that in their uncritical appreciation of Israel, these same Jews were worshiping Zionism in a way that suggested doubts about their own Western acculturation.
October 31, 2006
Punitive Damages II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:00 PM EST John Steele Gordon writes against current law regarding punitive damages in civil litigation, asserting that while compensatory damages necessarily go to a victorious plaintiff, any punitive damages ought to go to the state, and be determined by a judge rather than a jury. Mr. Gordon complains that lawyers “take cases not to right wrongs but to profit.” I must confess that I rather admire this feature of our market economy: A lawyer is not required to love justice to help me achieve it. Knowing a fair number of lawyers, this seems to me to be a very sensible procedure. With respect to some of Mr. Gordon’s other anxieties, a lawyer already has an incentive to avoid frivolous litigation—the likelihood of losing, and the risk of sanctions. A lawyer also has a reliable incentive to attempt to achieve justice—the chance to make some money doing so. Adam Smith never trusted men who professed to trade for the public good, and I think he was a shrewd judge of character, and of probable humbug. The danger of excessive punitive damages is currently addressed by the power of a judge to reduce damages he or she finds excessive, and I cannot understand why a plaintiff should not receive punitive damages when grossly and egregiously harmed. Mr. Gordon also writes that “the level of punishment for a given degree of misconduct should not be determined solely by the histrionic talents of lawyers or whether members of a jury got out of bed on the wrong side that morning.” Well, that is the way we decide who gets to be President of the United States. If it is good enough for allocating control of nuclear weapons, it is probably good enough for deciding what is going to happen to Philip Morris.
October 31, 2006
October Surprise III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 06:55 PM EST John Steele Gordon’s observation that it’s not too late for an “October surprise” (albeit one that arrives in early November), and that “often the best time, from a tactical standpoint, to launch such a surprise is the Friday before the election,” may have been right twenty years ago, but I don’t think it holds true today. First, whereas citizens were once permitted to cast early votes only if they could establish a credible reason for needing absentee ballots—students away at college, senior citizens too infirm to travel to the polls, vacationers planning to be out of the country—today many states allow anyone to cast his or her vote weeks in advance of election day. An article in today’s Wall Street Journal explained that “early voting has grown in the past 15 years, from around 2% of the national electorate participating to about 20% in 2004. . . . Experts predict this year that 19% to 25% of the electorate will vote early at the polls or by mail-in absentee ballots. That compares with about 14% in 2002, the most recent midterm election.” In some states, the totals are even higher. I have it from a credible Democratic source working in Florida that upwards of 45 percent of voters in that state will cast early ballots this year. What this means is that October surprises really, truly, need to come in October. Friday, November 3, simply won’t cut it. Too many voters will already have cast their ballots. Granted, the undecideds are more likely to wait until next Tuesday, and the partisans are more likely to vote early. But given how close many of this year’s congressional races are likely to be, Friday is simply too late. Second, many journalists are unwilling to break last-minute scandals too close to an election, for fear that doing so might adversely effect the accused candidate without allowing him or her enough time to recover and clear the air. This past weekend, I was in Washington, D.C., for a wedding, and I took time out to visit a few friends who work as journalists and Hill staffers. They told me of some unbelievably wild but apparently verifiable rumors currently flying around the city, concerning GOP incumbents who have thus far managed to get through the election season unscathed. These stories are unlikely to break before next week. On a related note, I’m afraid that I’ll have to disagree with Mr. Gordon when he argues that “perhaps the most egregious case of an October surprise . . . was when the Iran-Contra special prosecutor, Lawrence Walsh, released indictments of former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger and others . . .” Unless I’m mistaken, Walsh was a Republican, which casts some doubt on his motives. It’s possible that he was quite simply doing his job and, like many lawyers, had a tin ear where politics was concerned. Regardless, Nixon’s October surprise was arguably far more egregious. Acting as a private citizen, Nixon asked a foreign leader to refuse to participate peace negotiations in order to effect the outcome of a presidential election. Nixon’s actions cost lives (both American and Vietnamese), may very well have violated laws barring citizens from negotiating with foreign powers, and sabotaged the efforts of a duly elected government to conduct the nation’s foreign policy. That’s pretty egregious.
October 31, 2006
The Yiddish Theater Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:45 PM EST Josh Zietz’s lead article for the website today reviews Stardust Lost, Stefan Kanfer’s new history of the Yiddish theater in America. The review is in part a celebration, and necessarily an elegy: The Yiddish theater, once vibrant and vital, is dead, a victim of assimilation in some countries and extermination in others. I know that theater only at one remove. My father, who grew up bilingual in Yiddish and English, very frequently attended it as a boy in New York and Chicago. As a result, he could quote Shakespeare in Yiddish at greater length than in English; I suppose the plays seen as a child often have the strongest grip on memory. My father was sometimes mocking about the plays he saw as a child; he summarized the plot of a large percentage of them as “First Act, the shtetl; Second Act, the Lower East Side; Third Act, Park Avenue.” But the mockery was always affectionate; theater was his favorite art, and he was grateful for the form in which he first saw it, sometimes on a weekly basis. The demise of the Yiddish theater was an inevitable result of the success of Jewish assimilation in America, and on the basis of my own family’s experience, its existence was always more precarious than it seemed. Three of my grandparents spoke Yiddish as a first language, but my mother’s father was from a small hill town in Appalachia and grew up on Poor Richard’s Almanac rather than Sholom Aleichem. As a result, my maternal grandfather could not understand his wife if she spoke Yiddish, which meant that my mother never learned it, which meant that my father could not speak it to my mother, which meant that none of his children can speak it; one weak link broke the chain. This loss was not without its compensations: my mother quoted Chaucer, Milton, and Browning to us, rather than Shylock’s Daughter, and that was not a bad tradeoff. One thing does puzzle me about Josh’s essay, which is his remark that Kanfer’s book “brings back to life a world before the Holocaust, when there was still a thriving transnational Yiddish culture, and when Diaspora Jewry possessed more cultural self-confidence and didn’t yet feel the need to fetishize the real and imagined deeds of Palestinian Zionists.” For one thing, I am not sure that Diaspora Jewry possessed in every respect more cultural self-confidence before the Holocaust than after. Before the Holocaust there were plenty of Jewish quotas in American universities. It was disproportionately difficult for a Jew to get into medical school, or law school, or most good colleges. A Jew could not stay in many hotels, buy real estate in many places, get a job in many firms, etc. He or she was not welcome as a guest in many clubs, let alone as a member. This did not necessarily make for “cultural self-confidence.” The price of social advancement often meant muting or masking your identity. Only one anecdote, from only one family: My mother was offered a promotion, a good one, if she agreed to change her name; she refused, and changed jobs, moving into a different sector of the economy (radio and TV, not publishing). This process did not always make for “cultural self-confidence.” The Holocaust didn’t immediately end this regime, but it almost certainly accelerated its demise. Before its demise, which I would date to the early 1960s, social promotion usually meant learning to dress differently, speak differently, hold oneself differently, not necessarily bad things, but again, not things that necessarily made for cultural self confidence. With respect to any postwar “fetishizing the real and imagined deeds of Palestinian Zionists,” after the Holocaust, there were only three years in which Disapora Jewry could fetishize the real and imagined deeds of Palestinian Zionists; after 1948, those Palestinian Zionists were Israelis. I am not entirely sure what it means to fetishize Zionist deeds, real or imagined; I do suspect that after the Holocaust, Jews who successfully managed to resist being killed by armed enemies may have been seen in a new and very flattering light by some of Diaspora Jewry. I do not think they made this mistake, if it was one, because they had not seen enough Yiddish theater. The Holocaust made some Diaspora Jews understandably uncertain about the wisdom of living on the sufferance of their more numerous neighbors and perhaps more prone to acknowledge the importance of skill at performing some kinds of deeds. By way of explanation, one more piece of family history: I am very distantly related to Marshal Ivan Danilovich Chernyakhovsky, who commanded one of the three Red Army Fronts that destroyed Hitler’s Army Group Center. I do not think this would interest me nearly as much in an alternate history with no Holocaust. In that alternate history, Cherynakhovsky would merely be a servant of an evil regime. In our history, he is a Jew who managed to kill a very large number of armed (and, alas, some unarmed) Germans, in a world where armed Germans killed an astonishing number of unarmed Jews. Do I fetishize his deeds? Maybe, but history has given me a pretty good reason.
October 31, 2006
Harold Ford, Jr., and the Future of Black Politics II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:15 PM EST In a post on Harold Ford, Josh Zeitz noted that African-American voters appear to be more religious than most other voters, and perhaps in consequence more hostile to gay marriage, and he wondered whether cultural conservatism will become more characteristic of African-American elected officials than has recently been the case. Josh noted that the Republicans are unlikely to profit from this cultural conservatism, since African-American voters are suspicious of the strength of Republican commitments to civil rights and hostile to Republican economic policies. I think all of this is shrewdly observed, and probably right.
Interestingly, this same cultural conservatism is apparently true of a large number of Hispanic voters, who have on this account recently been the linchpin of Republican electoral strategy. Despite this “values” strategy, nativist (or at least perceived anti-immigrant) tendencies among portions of the Republican electorate seem to have prevented any Republican breakthrough among Hispanic voters, to the distress of the White House. The worst electoral nightmare for the Republicans would be a consequent loss of any chance at a larger slice of the Hispanic vote, continuing loss of the African-American vote (which was largely Republican before the New Deal, and only wholly lost to the Democrats after the civil Rights revolution), continuing problems with women over foreign policy, and continuing loss of some middle-class white voters, of both sexes, on a variety of grounds (not only foreign policy, but a revulsion at hard-line cultural conservatism, the sort that backs creationism in the schools while pandering to homophobia, and also a perception that the Republicans are bad on the environment, on social services many middle-class voters need, etc.) If this happens, the Republican strategy of seizing and holding the Christian right and the white South, the apparent magic bullet of the post-1980 Republican Party, will turn out to be a long-run strategic disaster.
What are grounds for Republican hopes? In my opinion, real Republican hopes depend on the Democrats reinforcing doubts about their competence on national security, if that issue again comes to the fore. Cultural politics indeed make for wedge issues, but there are other wedge issues, as well, and most of them, although not all of them, cut the Republicans a smaller slice of the pie. National security, though, tends to trump other issues when there is a perception of a real threat. Osama bin Laden can’t win it for the Republicans all by himself. He’ll need help from the Democrats. Some of them—it is not yet clear how many—may be willing to oblige.
October 31, 2006
October Surprise II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:10 PM EST Joshua Zeitz points out that we are fast running out of October, limiting the ability of either side to launch an October surprise. This reminds me a bit of the old line from the Pogo comic strip about “Friday the 13th falls on a Tuesday this month!” Because of the calendar, the election is late this year, and there is still a week of November to go. November surprises are still more than possible.
Often the best time, from a tactical standpoint, to launch such a surprise is the Friday before the election, giving time for the story to circulate but not much time for the other side to respond effectively. It was on the Friday before the election in 2000 that news of George Bush’s long-ago driving-while-drinking incident was released by Democratic operatives who had been in possession of the information for months. To be sure, the Bush campaign, knowing that it was possible the incident could become public, should have made the matter public itself months earlier. That was a dumb mistake that came within a nanometer of costing Bush the election.
Perhaps the most egregious case of an October surprise—because it was launched by someone who had no business whatever being involved in the political campaign at all, indeed should have bent over backwards to avoid even the appearance of playing politics—was when the Iran-Contra special prosecutor, Lawrence Walsh released indictments of former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger and others and criticized President George H. W. Bush’s part in the scandal. This bombshell was dropped on the Friday before the 1992 election. Bush, by that point, was almost certainly toast anyway, but it clearly didn’t help.
My favorite whipping boy, The New York Times editorial page, could find nothing wrong with Mr. Walsh’s action, but it had a very different opinion when the special prosecutor in the Watergate scandal was about to make his final report in September 2000, two full months before Hillary Clinton would face the voters in her first run for the Senate. Of course, The New York Times opposed the reelection of George H. W. Bush and favored electing Mrs. Clinton. I wrote about it at the time.
October 31, 2006
Punitive Damages Posted by John Steele Gordon at 02:00 PM EST The Supreme Court today will take up the case of Philip Morris USA v. Mayola Williams.
Very briefly, the history of the case is as follows. Mrs. Williams’s husband, Jesse, was a three-pack-a-day smoker who died of lung cancer in 1997. Mrs. Williams sued Philip Morris, claiming that the company had engaged in a 40-year publicity campaign to allay concerns about the health risks of smoking cigarettes, all the while knowing of those risks, thus misleading her husband into thinking cigarettes were safe. The jury found for the plaintiff and awarded her $821,000 in compensatory damages and $79.5 million in punitive damages. Court records indicate that part of the punitive damages was to punish Philip Morris for harm done to other smokers who were not parties to the case.
Philip Morris appealed the verdict, claiming that the award was excessive under a Supreme Court decision in 2003 that ruled that any punitive damages that were more than 10 times the compensatory damages could be presumed to be excessive and therefore a denial of due process under the Fourteenth Amendment. Philip Morris also argued that the jury had no right to punish it for damages to individuals who were not parties to the case. The Oregon Supreme Court upheld the award, and the U.S. Supreme Court decided to take the case on a writ of certiorari.
I have no comment on the case itself. But the concept of punitive damages has an interesting history.
Anglo-American law is divided into civil and criminal. In the latter, punishment is the whole point if the defendant is found guilty, in order to deter him (or her, of course, although over 90 percent of the jail population is male) from committing a crime in the future and, equally important, to deter others from doing so. The law positively bristles with the rights of defendants in criminal cases to ensure that only the guilty are punished. Civil law deals with such matters as contract disputes and torts, where harm was unintentional. Defendants have far fewer rights in civil cases.
While punitive damages have an ancient history in the common law, they were always uncommon and mostly confined to cases involving assaults, false imprisonment, and such where harm had been the whole point of the misconduct. While allowed in tort cases where the interaction was unchosen (such as an automobile accident), they were hardly ever applied in contractual disputes. By the early twentieth century many legal scholars thought that punitive damages, already rare, would disappear. Never common in Britain or the Commonwealth and virtually unknown in the code-law world, several American states abolished them altogether. By the mid-twentieth century punitive damages were a bit like the appendix, still there but nonfunctional, little more than a vestige of an earlier time.
But, also like the appendix, punitive damages were a potential disaster. As the tort-law industry began to rev up in the last 40 years, punitive damages staged a spectacular renaissance. The reason is not hard to find: Like compensatory damages, punitive damages go to the plaintiff. As tort lawyers work on a contingency basis, they take a healthy slice of any punitive damages awarded. The number of cases involving punitive damages began to increase markedly, and the sorts of cases where judges allowed them to be considered expanded dramatically as well. The number of awards of punitive damages began to grow quickly, as did the amounts awarded.
I have no problem with the idea of punishing people or companies who, while committing no criminal act, behave so badly that they and others of a like frame of mind should be deterred from such conduct in the future.
But punitive damages are, of course, exactly that: punishment. And yet they are imposed under civil law, not criminal law, with far fewer protections against injustice for the defendants. Worse, they are arbitrary. If you have murder on your mind, you can easily look up what your downside risk is in terms of the potential punishment (although I suspect that very, very few murderers do). But punitive damages are awarded by juries, often with no guidelines. So one jury might find no punitive damages at all and another, considering identical circumstances, might decide to “send a message” and hit the defendant with an award of millions or even billions of dollars. The level of punishment for a given degree of misconduct should not be determined solely by the histrionic talents of lawyers or whether members of a jury got out of bed on the wrong side that morning.
Punitive damages should be awarded by judges (once the jury has made the appropriate findings), and under explicit guidelines written by legislatures. And there should be one other significant change in the law as it stands today: Punitive damages are fines and like fines imposed under the criminal law, they should go to the state, not the plaintiff and his lawyer. The compensatory damages are supposed to make the plaintiff whole, and it simply makes no sense to make him rich because someone else behaved badly. Under the current system, lawyers have a huge incentive to push for punitive damages, even where was no intentional misconduct, often resulting in what is called “jackpot justice.” It is simply common sense to make the law as unarbitrary as it is reasonably possible to make it.
Tort lawyers argue that punitive damages give them an incentive to police the marketplace and go after wrongdoers. In other words, it enables them to act like the privateers of old, when governments at war granted citizens licenses (called letters of marque) to attack enemy shipping and keep the ships and goods successfully attacked. The trouble with privateers, of course, was that they had a very bad habit of turning into pirates. The same can be said of all too many tort lawyers, thanks to punitive damages. They take cases not to right wrongs but to profit. The marketplace should be patrolled by society—i.e., a government answerable to the people—not by private individuals with private motives.
October 31, 2006
October Surprise Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:30 PM EST With less than 24 hours left before the current month draws to a close, it’s looking less and less likely that the Republicans—or, for that
matter, the Democrats—will pull an “October surprise” out of their hats. Professional politicians and pundits live in dread of such eleventh-hour whammies, and while good money is still on the day coming and going without any great fanfare, it’s hardly too late for a late development.
On October 31, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson announced on live television that the North Vietnamese government had agreed to continued peace talks in Paris, and to a cessation of attacks on South Vietnamese cities. In return, the U.S. would immediately stop bombing North Vietnam, and peace talks, this time including the Vietcong and the South Vietnamese government, would resume on November 6.
Almost overnight, LBJ’s “October Surprise” delivered a much-needed shot of adrenaline to the moribund campaign of his Vice President and would-be successor, Hubert Humphrey, who had been trailing Richard Nixon in the polls throughout October. The Washington Post concluded that Johnson’s announcement removed “an enormous burden” from Humphrey’s candidacy, and indeed, by November 2 Humphrey regained a slim lead over Nixon, 43 percent to 40 percent, with 13 percent going to George Wallace, the former governor of Alabama who was running as an independent.
But Nixon had an October surprise of his own. In the days leading up to LBJ’s announcement, the Nixon team met secretly with Anna Chan Chennault, a wealthy supporter of Chiang Kai-shek, co-chair of Republican Women for Nixon, and confidante of South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu. At Nixon’s behest, Chennault informed Thieu that Nixon would secure a better deal for his country, and that the Democrats were effectively prepared to sell out Saigon in order to secure peace at any price, as the phrase would later go. If Chennault could convince Thieu to stay away from the negotiating table, LBJ would look foolish, and the Democrats’ eleventh-hour gambit would fail.
Johnson and Humphrey were well aware of these machinations—the FBI was tapping Chennault’s phone—but opted not to make them public. By one plausible account, Humphrey was too honorable a man to reveal the GOP’s shenanigans, as he feared that it would make it all but impossible for Nixon to govern in the event of a victory. By another, equally plausible account, LBJ didn’t want to acknowledge the wiretaps on Anna Chennault, for fear they would reveal scores of other FBI taps and bugs, many of them illegal.
In the end, Nixon’s October surprise trumped LBJ’s. On November 2, Thieu announced that “the government of South Vietnam deeply regrets not being able to participate in the [peace] talks.” Saigon would simply not sit down with the Vietcong.
As quickly as it had emerged, the euphoria over LBJ’s October 31 announcement broke. Without South Vietnamese participation in the Paris talks, there was little chance of final resolution.
Days later, Nixon defeated Humphrey by the slimmest of margins.
October 31, 2006
Nixon and Vietnam Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:30 AM EST Josh Zeitz writes, of Nixon and Vietnam, that “if many military analysts now view his faith in air power as misplaced, nevertheless the shift from a ground war to an air war allowed him to reduce troop levels from 475,000 in late 1969 to 156,800 by 1971 and just 24,200 by 1972, and to thereby defuse the antiwar movement.” I am not sure many military analysts think this, because I am not entirely sure Nixon thought this, although I could be wrong. My memory, admittedly dodgy, is that Nixon thought that sufficiently trained and well-equipped Vietnamese infantry, backed by sufficient air power, could substitute for American infantry. There is some reason to think that he was at least partially correct. Vietnamese ground forces backed by American air power defeated the North Vietnamese at An Loc in 1973. That was a major battle, with something like 150,000 casualties, and it was a clear South Vietnamese victory.
We’ll never know if that success would have been repeated in subsequent North Vietnamese offensives, because after 1973 U.S. tactical air power did not again intervene in the fighting. Of course, if U.S. willingness to intervene against subsequent offensives had remained clear, there might not have been an infinite series of such offensives. In the event, South Vietnamese air power didn’t do the trick. Some analysts claim that was because South Vietnam was not sufficiently generously supplied by 1975, when the North Vietnamese launched their final offensive. Others argue that people who cannot defend themselves do not deserve too many efforts by others. In some cases, maybe so, but it seems a hard saying. If one thinks with hindsight of the neighboring case of Pol Pot and the regime he overthrew, which we failed to defend, it seems a monstrous saying. George McGovern is not least admirable because when the news of Pol Pot’s genocidal rule got out, he proposed that the U.S. intervene again in Southeast Asia. Noam Chomsky is not least contemptible because he denied that genocide, even after enough news got out to persuade almost all other observers, and he attacked McGovern for suggesting that we were obligated to do something about it.
October 31, 2006
Lawrence Levine and the Canon Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:05 AM EST Josh Zeitz writes, on Lawrence Levine, canon-formation, and canon revision, that he is “persuaded by Levine’s well-documented argument that canonical texts, as well as methodologies, have always been subject to revision,, and concludes that “the point, above all, is that blind worship of ‘the canon’ may lend therapeutic relief to those who, for whatever reason, fear that their world is slipping away. But this sort of jeremiad ignores the canon’s constant reinvention. No text or methodology is sacred. It needs to withstand the test of time and scrutiny.”
Defining a canon as the books every educated person ought to have read at least a century after they were written, canons do change, although rarely quickly, and the test of time is not usually a kind one to newer additions. In political and social theory, the core of the canon I taught at Columbia, Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Adam Smith, and Rousseau have been in the canon since they appeared on the scene. Machiavelli and Hobbes were not added when they first appeared, but they seem very unlikely to disappear. Marx and Freud, who were still represented as the culmination of our tradition when I started teaching that course, were probably losing a bit of their canonical status when I stopped. I taught the better part of a thousand pages by each of them, but I don’t think anyone would do that now, in a course for non-specialists, i.e., when teaching the canon in a compulsory two-semester course for undergraduates.
Some people were adding Foucault when I stopped teaching that course, and while I have since taught Foucault, I would not bet a nickel that he will ever be canonical, in the sense that every educated person will have to have read him a century after his death. More remarkably, some people were teaching Edward Said. I have taught Said, but I would not bet a wooden nickel on Said’s chances at canonical status. Unfortunately, reserving the greatest suspicion for the most recent additions to a canon is rarely what people who are proud of their skepticism about canons actually do.
I have never met or read anyone who admits to being in favor of blind worship of a canon of secular texts, although people who are proud of their skepticism about any canon invariably seem to assume that their intellectual antagonists are peculiarly prone to this vice. Among blind worshippers who do not admit their credulity and piety, I find that confident anticanonical types are often more prone to those vices than are people who confess to loving most or all of a canon. Someone who insists that any belief in Shakespeare’s genius is “socially constructed” is almost invariably less likely to say the same thing of Edward Said. People who value the canon, and assume that it has mostly been rightly constructed, are not necessarily seeking therapeutic relief from a fear that their world is slipping away. They may be seeking to defend their world from slipping away, and that is not always an unreasonable thing to do. For example, Schubert’s Winterreise is in the musical canon, few of my students listen to it, this makes me sad on their account, I do what little I can to reverse this trend, and I think I have good reasons.
In terms of the correct attitude toward a canonical text, I agree with Josh’s quotation from Levine: Books that are invaluable because they make us think hard about urgent questions should never be approached without lively intellectual curiosity. People who dislike (secular) canons often seem to assume that canons are far likelier to provoke reverence than thought. I have never been clear on why they are so certain of that.
October 30, 2006
More on Lawrence and Levine and Canons Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 04:15 PM EST Fred Smoler is right to ask for more specificity in discussing the idea of literary (or other academic) “canons.” Our exchange prompted me to revisit Lawrence Levine’s book The Opening of the American Mind. Critically, Levine argued that “canons do not reside in some protected galaxy of universal truths beyond the reach of temporal events. This is not to say that a canon is defenseless . . .” Levine further specified that “a canon . . . is composed not merely of subject matter but of attitudes toward and ways of approaching that subject matter.”
By way of illustration, he reminded readers that nineteenth-century American colleges tended to use literature as a means of teaching syntax, grammar, and methods of memorization, rather than critical analysis. “During my own student life at the University of Virginia,” wrote Henry Shepherd, president of the College of Charleston, in 1892, “I cannot recall, in my course of instruction in Latin, a single shadowy reminiscence of aesthetic hint, critical suggestion, culture flavor, or stylistics interpretation. It was a mournful and plaintive round of local relations of prepositions . . .”
I agree with Levine that not every new methodology lends equal support to the study of texts. Fred Smoler was right to seek some clarification on that point, as I oversimplified Levine’s original argument.
I’m also persuaded by Levine’s well-documented argument that canonical texts, as well as methodologies, have always been subject to revision. Levine pointed to two editions of an American literature anthology, the first published in 1916, the second in 1963. Of the eight writers featured in the first edition, only three—Poe, Hawthorne and Emerson—made the cut for the second edition. Those who got dropped included Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant; those who were added included Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. If anything, since 1916 (and even since 1963) the canon seems to have expanded, demonstrating a useful elasticity.
The point, above all, is that blind worship of “the canon” may lend therapeutic relief to those who, for whatever reason, fear that their world is slipping away. But this sort of jeremiad ignores the canon’s constant reinvention. No text or methodology is sacred. It needs to withstand the test of time and scrutiny.
October 30, 2006
The Robber Barons Posted by John Steele Gordon at 02:45 PM EST I wrote a review in today’s New York Times on the new biography of Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw. As the review makes clear, I enjoyed the book immensely and recommend it all. I mentioned in the review that it is the latest in a series of biographies by such writers as Jean Strouse, Ron Chernow, Maury Klein, and David Nasaw himself (The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst) that have appeared in the last 20 years on the “robber barons” of late-nineteenth-century America. These biographies differ from most earlier ones about these men, being both even-handed and scrupulous. At first, most biographies were either hagiographic and could find no faults, or agenda-driven hatchet jobs that could find no virtues. Three of the few exceptions to this rule were Frederick Lewis Allen’s The Great Pierpont Morgan (1949), Wheaton J. Lane’s Commodore Vanderbilt: an Epic of the Steam Age (1942), and Stewart Holbrook’s The Age of the Moguls (1953). All are still worth reading. Far more typical, however, was Matthew Josephson’s The Robber Barons (1934). It reminds me of Mary McCarthy’s famous description of Lillian Hellman: “Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.” Let just one quote from The Robber Barons suffice, about Vanderbilt’s tactic of competing with other steamboat lines with lower prices and forcing them to either buy him out or be bought out by him: “In seeking quickened activity, great volume and lower prices—instead of honest but limited services at high tariffs—he gave intimations of a new personal departure from the older bourgeois order.” To Josephson, apparently, there was something inherently dishonest about economies of scale and the lower prices that result from it.
Compare that with what appeared in Harper’s Weekly in 1859, when Vanderbilt was still very much in the steamboat business: “It is hardly fair for any man to undertake to decide what are the particular motives of his neighbor in undertaking a specific work, if the work itself be legitimate and fair. He must be judged by the results; and the results in every case of the establishment of opposition lines by Vanderbilt has been the permanent reduction of fares. Wherever he ‘laid on’ an opposition line, the fares were instantly reduced; and however the contest terminated, whether he bought out his opponents, as he often did, or they bought him out, the fares were never again raised to the old standard. This great boon—cheap travel—this community owes mainly to Cornelius Vanderbilt.”
The year before, The New York Times, beginning a long tradition of editorial cluelessness with regard to economics, had used the image, if not quite the words, of the medieval robber barons in decrying Vanderbilt’s tactics. In the next decade the phrase itself would come into use, but it would be Josephson’s immensely successful book that would make the phrase a permanent part of the American lexicon.
The medieval robber barons were, supposedly, nobles who lived along the Rhine and would charge merchants for the privilege of passing their castles unmolested. It was, in modern terms, a protection racket. This, of course, bears no relationship to what Vanderbilt did, as Harper’s Weekly makes clear. Vanderbilt offered low-cost transportation and forced others to do likewise or go broke. Wal-Mart is a modern example of this tactic of using high efficiency and economies of scale to lower prices and forcing competitors to do likewise. As with Vanderbilt, many find this a dreadful thing to do. Shoppers, of course, pay no attention and flock to Wal-Mart.
I have never been able to find any reference to the “robber barons,” medieval or nineteenth-century, before the Times’s reference in the 1850s. I once asked the distinguished historian H. W. Brands if he knew of any, and he did not. I suspect the Times made it up. After all, medieval nobles behaving like modern-day Mafiosi were hardly confined to the shores of the Rhine. For the most part they all, from Ireland to Russia, acted like thugs.
October 30, 2006
Nixon and Vietnam Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 01:15 PM EST In the course of researching my new book project on America’s encounter with the 1970s, I’ve had occasion to sift through two important oral-history collections at Columbia University. Both were transcribed in the 1970s, one recording the experiences of Vietnam War veterans, and the other recording the experiences of antiwar activists.
I originally intended to use these collections to contrast the experiences of young servicemen, who came disproportionately from working-class homes, and antiwar protesters, who were predominately middle-class and had enough social capital and institutional savvy to secure medical exemptions or student deferments from the draft. As it happened, the oral histories have proved a useful source for just that purpose.
But as I read through the Vietnam veterans’ interview transcripts, a new and darker theme presented itself. I encountered several instances where interviewees—all former enlisted men—admitted to “fragging” their officers, or to witnessing their officers being fragged. The term was popularly understood by Vietnam-era servicemen to connote the murder of officers whose combat inexperience, ineptitude, or arrogance led them to endanger their troops’ lives. Nobody will ever know for certain how many officers died in this fashion, but an Army investigation discovered 600 attempted fragging cases between 1969 and 1971 alone. It’s hard to imagine that frightened or disgruntled enlisted men, who often claimed more time in-country than their officers, did not on occasion succeed in eliminating what they viewed as the primary threat to their safety and well-being. Above all, the upsurge in reported fraggings suggests that by 1970 the U.S. military was under tremendous pressure from all sides and in deep distress.
In some of my earlier posts for AmericanHeritage.com, I’ve been hard on Richard Nixon, and my book will not treat his foreign policy favorably. But on a few subjects, Nixon was a shrewd political leader. If many military analysts now view his faith in air power as misplaced, nevertheless the shift from a ground war to an air war allowed him to reduce troop levels from 475,000 in late 1969 to 156,800 by 1971 and just 24,200 by 1972, and to thereby defuse the antiwar movement. If secret bombing raids against Cambodia briefly inflamed antiwar passions, the general troop withdrawal helped alleviate antidraft pressure on American campuses and eased tensions within the ranks of enlisted men who had been bearing the brunt of the war. In this sense, Nixon may have lost the war abroad but won it at home.
October 30, 2006
Harold Ford, Jr., and the Future of Black Politics Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:45 AM EST A few days ago I wrote about Harold Ford, Jr., the Tennessee congressman who is currently locked in a tight race for the U.S. Senate. If Ford defeats his Republican opponent, Bob Corker, he will become the first African-American from a former Confederate state to serve in the Senate since Reconstruction.
I noted in my earlier post that Ford is a culturally conservative Democrat. He frequently touts his deep religious convictions, is a staunch opponent of gay marriage, and supports new limits on women’s access to abortion services. Whether he actually believes in these principles or has made the calculation (probably correct) that moving to the right is the only way to win a statewide race in Tennessee, Ford is something of an anomaly in the black congressional caucus, whose members tend, with some notable exceptions, to be culturally liberal.
The question I wish to pose is, who’s the anomaly, Ford or liberal black congressmen like Charles Rangel and John Conyers, who have long dominated the black caucus? A recent poll conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and American Life found that while 31 percent of Americans of all races believe that politicians mention their faith too infrequently, 43 percent of black respondents feel this way. While only 26 percent of black respondents in that same poll rated gay marriage as an important subject, other surveys have shown that African-Americans are more hostile to gay marriage than non-evangelical whites. A Zogby poll found that while white New Jerseyans support gay marriage by a margin of 54 percent to 41 percent, African-Americans oppose gay marriage 54 percent to 41 percent. Zogby’s New Jersey poll mirrors national surveys.
Finally, while a recent Pew Poll found that 71 percent of white mainline Protestants want abortion to remain either legal or legal with more restrictions, only 36 percent of black voters want abortion to remain legal or legal with some extra restrictions. The survey reported that 59 percent of black voters believe that abortion should be illegal or illegal in all but a few extreme circumstances, whereas only 25 percent of white mainline voters hold this position.
None of this should come as a terrific surprise. As countless historians and social scientists have noted, religion plays a central role in black communities. It’s the glue that held together the civil rights movement, and as David Chappell explained in his book A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow, the black Baptist church has traditionally been evangelical and neo-fundamentalist in its outlook. It parts ways with mainline churches in its assumptions about human nature and evil, and it shares with many white evangelical churches an emphasis on sin. This doesn’t mean that evangelical churches, white or black, are inherently anti-progressive. On many issues, particularly poverty, they are at the forefront of struggles for social justice. But on key cultural questions like gay rights and the separation between religion and state, they part ways with secular and religious liberals.
Black voters make up a significant portion of the Democrats’ electoral base, and on key cultural issues they part ways with liberal Democrats. (Importantly, black voters remain extremely skeptical of the Republican party’s commitment to pluralism and civil rights, and wary of the GOP’s economic agenda. So predictions of an electoral swing strike me as naive.) Viewed in this context, the cultural liberalism of leading black congressmen is a curious thing, and I wonder if Harold Ford, Jr., doesn’t represent the future of black politics.
October 30, 2006
Conservatism’s Intellectual Godmother Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:15 AM EST Yesterday evening, as I was flipping television channels, I stumbled across the old television show Little House on the Prairie not once, not twice, but three times. Which got me to thinking about William F. Buckley.
Last year, Buckley, conservatism’s aging happy warrior, remembered the American right of his childhood as an intellectually barren place. Forty years of progressive reform, New Deal state-building, and wartime collectivism had taken the bite out of the country’s once-dominant libertarian strain in politics and letters.
Then, according to Buckley, in 1943, everything changed. Three American women—Ayn Rand, Isabel Paterson and Rose Lane Wilder—published important theoretical tracts denouncing the state’s incursions against individual autonomy and freedom. In effect, Buckley claimed, the modern conservative movement, often dated to 1955, with the inaugural appearance of his own publication, National Review, was born.
Most Americans with a passing interest in literature are familiar with Ayn Rand. Fewer know of Isabel Paterson, though she was recently the subject of a scholarly biography. But virtually every American woman born before the 1980s, and not a few men of the same age cohort, know Rose Lane Wilder. Author of several obscure tomes on libertarianism and an early critic of Social Security, Wilder is best remembered as the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the creator of Little House on the Prairie and a string of other children’s classics.
Rose, a successful magazine journalist by her own right, served as her mother’s trusted editor, coauthor and, according to some critics, ghostwriter. Today, more than ever, Rose Lane Wilder is relevant, not because ABC televised a new Little House miniseries last year, though certainly that fact alone speaks to the lasting popularity of the Ingalls family saga.
More to the point, whatever the extent of her literary collaboration with Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose, a fiercely doctrinaire conservative who denounced the New Deal as pure socialism and refused to her dying day to collect Social Security, left a strong libertarian imprint on her mother’s work.
The Little House books—and the popular 1970s television series, and its latest ABC incarnation—boldly celebrate the pioneer spirit and rugged individuality of the American West. Generations of schoolchildren have been raised on Rose Lane Wilder’s frontier saga, in which hard work and internal discipline form the bedrock of American success. There is no nanny state—no unemployment insurance, no withholding tax, no welfare system, no Social Security, no minimum wage or maximum hours law, no Wagner Act—on Rose Wilder’s prairie. Only God and man.
Critically, this historical drama, so central to the current conservative assault on the New Deal state, is all myth. Just as latter-day conservatives ignore the long legacy of state intervention on behalf of private industry, 30 years of scholarship by “New West” historians have revealed the federal government’s strong hand in subsidizing the private exploitation and development of America’s frontier.
From massive giveaways of federal land and mineral holdings to the publicly financed construction of the nation’s railroad and telegraph systems, to the state’s artificial deflation of labor costs through its enforcement of slavery, tenancy, and strikebreaking, the federal state was everywhere.
So vast was its shadow, that it’s a wonder Rose Wilder, an authentic child of the American West, was able to neatly write it out of her frontier myth. But, then, she had to. To write truthfully about American history would have been tantamount to rejecting the logic of her stringent libertarian faith.
October 30, 2006
War Boredom Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:25 AM EST Two articles in today’s “Week In Review” section of The New York Times make for an interesting juxtaposition. One, by David Halbfinger, is titled “Burying Private Ryan” and asserts that no one wants to hear about World War II anymore, taking for evidence the relatively small audience that has so far turned out for Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers. This seems a modest amount of evidence for so large a claim. This evidence is interpreted rather than amplified by an anecdote from a local professor of film studies, who took some students to a showing—the students were bored—and by Douglas Brinkley, who opines that “This movie doesn’t fit into the zeitgeist of our times.” A decade or two ago, “writers and filmmakers were honoring World War II veterans. Those mining that field in 2006 seem to be capitalizing on them.” Take that, you pandering jingoes. The article rather gives the impression that Mr. Halbfinger is cheered by this asserted trend, and thinks it politically progressive. He ends with an extended quote from a man described as a 45-year-old writer, who lives in North Adams, Massachusetts, and seems to think that the Iraq War has allowed us to see through, or at least past, Saving Private Ryan. On the other hand, an article headlined “‘Antiwar’ and Other Fighting Words,” by David D. Kirkpatrick, notes that many Democrats meditating their likely victory in next week’s national election are dreading a subsequent attempt by antiwar activists to model the 2008 presidential campaign on the 1972 one. That was the last time the Democrats ran on a strong antiwar platform, and they were defeated, quite disastrously. Some Democrats think that running against war in broad and total terms seven years after the country has been attacked, in a world teeming with people who announce that they hate us and live only to die killing us, is asking for another electoral disaster. I think they may be right. Then again, I do think that a strong and broad antiwar approach will carry North Adams. It certainly did in 1972. In fact, that year the antiwar candidate carried the whole of Massachusetts. “Burying Private Ryan” seems to see history, at least the history of World War II, as having little wisdom to impart, nor, it implies to my eye, are we are we going to sustain much if any pietas—any sense of duty and devotion—toward the men who helped bury the Third Reich and put an end to the regime that inflicted the Rape of Nanking. Mr. Halbfinger notes, with no particular expression of regret, that hundreds, perhaps thousands of those guys are dying every week, and he notes that the ones not yet in their graves aren’t buying too many movie tickets. Mr. Kirkpatrick doesn’t seem quite as sure about the irrelevance of history, or the impending disappearance of pietas. My money is on Mr. Kirkpatrick.
October 29, 2006
Berlin Noir Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:20 PM EST A British thriller that I started reading last night and finished this morning—Philip Kerr’s The One from the Other—made me think about the eerie historical range and persistence of one of American popular culture’s greatest creations, the hardboiled private eye, the two greatest of whom were Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. Dashiell Hammett invented Sam Spade in 1930, when he published The Maltese Falcon; Raymond Chandler invented Marlowe in 1939, when The Big Sleep was published; the last novel Chandler finished was Playback, published in 1958. Chandler died the following year, before completing Poodle Springs. Hammett died in 1961, but Spade appeared only in that one novel. Marlowe and Spade are two of most the imitated characters in popular fiction, which makes Chandler and Hammett two of the most influential American writers. The original Marlowe was based in a version of Los Angeles, and Chandler’s vision of L.A. became part of the mythos of that city, but it turns out that Chandler’s hero can be very readily detached from L.A. By the 1980s, novels starring Marlowe/Spade clones seemed to be set in every middling-sized town in America. I remember one series set in Indianapolis, and it wasn’t bad. On the other hand, other towns became regional variants of L.A. once they became the venues for the careers of Marlowe clones. I seem to remember the Indianapolis clone being sharply distinguishable from the L.A. original only when he ate a regional specialty—a pork tenderloin sandwich—or when he traveled a short distance to Kentucky, to locate someone in a town where brothels were openly tolerated by brutal, corrupt police; Marlowe had only to cross city lines to encounter more brutal, corrupt police; he didn’t have to leave the state. Marlowe/Spade could even be incarnated as an android, as he was in the 1982 sci-fi film Blade Runner, and suffered no loss of cultural potency. American imagination has rarely produced anything more flexible and durable. Why was the figure so widely imitated? Possibly because that sub-Marxian take on twentieth-century America was peculiarly appealing when fused with a reworking of the notion of the American hero as an isolate, a man untainted by implication in what are depicted as the invariably corrupt forms of collective life. In Chandler’s and Hammett’s vision, authority was invariably dishonest and frequently vicious, inevitably at the service of predatory elites, and the fix was always in. There was no alternative to this situation, no possibility of a collective political response to corruption and predation, but there was the possibility of anatomizing the situation, which is what the novelist did, and of small acts of justice being performed by a cynical but not compromised hero. At any rate, the private detective, refusing affiliation with the morally compromised authorities, living by his own moral code, never possessed of illusions, turned out to be an amazingly hardy creation. His longevity was probably protracted by the fact that he was immortalized in a number of masterpieces of film noir and twice incarnated with genius by Humphrey Bogart, who played both Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. After a while, the prospect of seeing yet another jerkwater town turned into a dime-store version of L.A. began to pall on me, but I am not sure it palled on too many other people, for Marlowe/Spade clones are still appearing, along with some odd hybrid types. A while ago, the British author Phillip Kerr adapted Marlowe/Spade to the world of the Third Reich, and produced three novels (March Violets, set in 1936, The Pale Criminal, set in 1938, and A German Requiem, set in 1947); the three were republished in 1994 in one volume titled Berlin Noir. Last month, after a fifteen year gap, Kerr produced The One from the Other, a fourth novel in the series, mostly set in Munich and Vienna, in 1949, which I started reading last night and finished this morning. Kerr’s protagonist is Bernhard Gunther, a veteran of World War I and a former detective for the Kripo, the German Criminal Police, also former house detective at the Adlon, the greatest of Berlin’s hotels. He begins the series as a private detective, a wisecracking tough guy who encounters his share of babes, booze, saps, gats, and corrupt and brutal authorities; he also brushes up against much more historically specific and ghastly things. In the most recent volume, he is again a private detective and a veteran of the SS, who saw combat, and other things, on the Eastern Front. Gunther differs from his American originals in the infinitely greater horror that surrounds him, and I have at times wondered whether Kerr risks trivializing that horrific history by using it as the background for a noir, but in the event I think such fears are excessive. The One from the Other is loosely based on some historical events, some of them better known than others. The series owes something to Gorky Park, Martin Cruz Smith’s splendid noir set in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, and possibly to Hans Hellmut Kirst’s The Night of the Generals, although both of those novels have protagonists who work directly for the forces of order, but the series remains rooted in Chandler’s vision of 1940s L.A. The fact that Kerr’s series works at all is, in a sense, odd; Nazi Germany, and a military occupation of the defeated Nazi Germany, are not obviously too much like even a dystopian vision of L.A. My guess is that Chandler and Hammett can work as inspiration for a series initially set in Nazi Berlin because we like to think that there is generally some margin for ethical choice in almost every social and historical context, and can work in occupied Germany because the modern reader, especially the modern British reader, may be likely to resist any Panglossian vision of the consequences of World War II. Stories that are less sour about the Hitler years—which overlapped the Stalin years—are certainly possible; the best reworker of the spy thriller writing today is Alan Furst, who owes little if anything to Chandler or Hammett, although he does owe something to the movie Casablanca (and to Joseph Roth, and to Eric Ambler, and for that matter to Tolstoy), and like Kerr, Furst sets some scenes in late 1930s Berlin. For my money, Furst is a great deal better in every respect, but in this series Kerr isn’t bad. It may afford Europeans some consolation for the ignominy of having being saved from Hitler and Stalin by the odious Americans to find an American vision that greatly weakens, indeed almost annihilates, the moral authority of their liberators. We are a more generous people than we may realize.
October 29, 2006
Noah Feldman and the “Second Nuclear Age” Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:55 PM EST There is a long and interesting article by Noah Feldman in today’s New York Times Magazine titled “Islam, Terror and the Second Nuclear Age.” Feldman points out that nuclear proliferation in the Muslim Middle East looks likely. Iran is close, and if Iran gets there, various other states (Saudi Arabia and Egypt chief among them) will be under significant pressure to follow. Feldman then wonders whether we should be peculiarly alarmed at the prospect of more Muslim regimes in possession of nuclear weapons. In other words, are weapons of mass destruction any more alarming when they are controlled by Muslim states than they are when controlled by anyone else? The standard anti-alarmist theory is that deterrence worked during the Cold War, so there is no reason to assume that it won’t work with Iran, etc. The anti-anti-alarmist theory is that Stalin and his successors were, in this respect at least, rational and relatively unadventurous, even cautious, but that there is no reason to assume that modern Islamist thinking is necessarily going to produce the same behavior. In other words, those current Islamists who claim exhilaration at the thought of martyrdom, by which they sometimes mean suicidal attacks on civilians, may mean what they say. Feldman performs the service of surveying the history of Muslim thought on the laws of war, and to a lesser degree surveys Muslim practice. A very short précis of Feldman’s argument: Islam has generally sought to restrain the violence of war by laws of war and has condemned violence against civilians; recently things have been different; the trends are not necessarily encouraging; and we cannot know how things will turn out. This seems uncontroversial. Feldman usefully points out that permitting violence against civilians, indeed celebrating violence against civilians, began as a response to Palestinian murders of Israeli civilians (Israeli women are asserted to be legitimate targets because they are conscripted as soldiers by an evil government), then spread to justifications of violence against American civilians (American civilians are asserted to be legitimate targets because they vote for evil governments), and is now used to justify violence against Muslim civilians. This is well-observed, and it suggests that various responses to Bush’s announcement of a war on terror, responses that sought to distinguish the acceptability of murdering Israeli civilians (“the right of resistance”) from murdering other civilians, may have been not only evil and cowardly but short-sighted, or, more baldly, remarkably stupid. Feldman ends rather equivocally: “An Islamic bomb would not be just the same as the nationalist bomb of a majority-Muslim state, nor would it be the same as a Christian bomb or a Jewish one. But its role in history will depend, ultimately, on the meaning Muslims give it, and the uses to which they put their faith and their capabilities.” Some readers may be puzzled by an omission: After canvassing the possibility that an Islamic bomb might mean the capacity for very long-distance genocide in the hands of murderous and suicidal lunatics, Feldman spends almost no time addressing the wisdom of using force to delay or destroy Iranian nuclear weapons facilities before they can produce a bomb. He may think that he doesn’t need to do so, and that he is rather demonstrating the need consider that possibility very seriously. But what is most useful about Feldman’s article is that it points out the limits of an analogy between a stable balance of terror during the Cold War—successful deterrence—and the prospect for deterrence in the future. Showing the limits of historical analogy is generally a sound procedure. It is interesting to reflect on one paradox: People who pride themselves on their lack of “Eurocentrism,” and on their awareness of the variety of perspectives in a multicultural world, seem the most certain that all cultures will handle nuclear weapons in the same relatively prudent fashion. People who rarely use the word multiculturalism without spitting seem to be the ones who are canvassing the possibility that different cultures may have ominously different views of nuclear weapons. Feldman may be an exception to this pattern. I haven’t noticed too many others.
October 28, 2006
Lawrence W.Levine II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:30 PM EST I read with interest Josh Zeitz’s remarks on the historian Lawrence Levine, who died this week. When Levine published Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, I reviewed the book in The Nation. On balance, I liked the book very much, but one thing about it bothered me. Josh reminds me of what was troubling about it when he writes that in a subsequent book Levine “argued convincingly that the so-called ‘canon’ is no canon at all, and that much of what today’s academic conservatives claim as indispensable reading material for college students—Shakespeare, for instance—was considered intellectual drivel by nineteenth-century scholars and university presidents.” In Highbrow/Lowbrow, Levine was oddly squeamish about acknowledging that Shakespeare was in fact better than most of the other books miners, slaves, and cowpokes spent their time with. What does it mean to say that “the so-called ‘canon’ is no canon at all”? It may mean acknowledging that the body of things we think everyone should know, and the body of books we think everyone should read, changes over time. That is simple truth (although it does not mean that we cannot make judgments about the wisdom of given changes). It may also mean that there are no books everyone should read, and that there are no compelling grounds for passionately admiring some books more than others. In my memory, Levine mostly argued for the first position and sometimes slid into the second. When he did, I think he became foolish and destructive. Josh concludes with the assertion that “by implication, he [Levine] argued that the inclusion of new texts, by authors from different racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds, and of new methodologies or analytical tools, does not water down the canon but rather contributes to its ongoing development.” The problem is, this is not necessarily true. When I taught contemporary civilization at Columbia, a required course in what would once have been called great books, which I did for five years, something became painfully clear: A lot of modern academics hated the very idea that any books, and especially books written by people then despised as “dead while males,” were genuinely great. It also became clear that to teach one book on a given syllabus sometimes means not to teach another. And some critical methodologies and analytical tools do water down the canon, or at least impoverish the use we can make of it, when those methods and tools make us look at irrelevant things, or think foolish things. To pick only a single example from, alas, an embarrassment of riches, a method that insists that “great books” are only judged great when they corroborate existing forms of unjust power can very easily make people stupid about books, and has.
October 28, 2006
An Aussie Loon Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:20 PM EST An interesting story in today’s New York Times, picked up from Reuters, reports that Sheik Taj El-Din Hamid Hilaly—according to the Times “Australia’s top Muslim cleric”—has annoyed a fair number of Australians, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, by a recent remark on rape. This remark was intended as a defense of the veil and an insistence on the advisability women remaining in the home: “If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it . . . whose fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem.” The sheik, who had previously glorified “martyrdom” rather generally and 9/11 in particular, usefully reminds us that multiculturalism can be a mixed blessing. The periodic reluctance to admit this fact and face it squarely is one of the peculiarities of our age, both in this country and in Europe, where drawing attention to this sort of thing is often pilloried as Islamophobia. Drawing attention to Islamist homophobia is even rarer than drawing attention to Islamist misogyny, possibly because the American right, although not always particularly keen on feminism, may find it peculiarly awkward to decry homophobia in one quadrant while simultaneously exploiting it, indeed whipping it up, in another (this latter propensity is visible this week in the much-expressed hope that after the news out of the New Jersey courts, anxieties about gay marriage may save the Republicans’ bacon). But an equally dispiriting fact is that events comparable to the description of conventionally-garbed women in the workplace as “uncovered meat” does not excite more fury from the left. Why is this? Probably because multiculturalism is a shibboleth on the left, and possibly because some on the left may have a subliminal instinct to assume that the enemy of an enemy is a friend. Sheik Hilaly, declining to resign his post, remarked that he might do so “after we clean the world of the White House first.” This may have briefly warmed some hearts among people who ought to know better. If you think that the White House is more of a threat to liberal values than are Sheik Hilaly and his ilk, you are a fool, but fools are a numerous tribe. The recent defenses of head-to-toe veiling in the left British press, or at least attacks on those who attack the practice, are a depressing example of this tendency. One fears that some think that if Tony Blair is against it, how bad can it be? In the long run, this reluctance to defend the values of sexual emancipation, one of Western liberalism’s great achievements, against Islamist attacks, because of a reluctance to appear Islamophobic, is probably going to be suicidal. In France, it is now swelling support for old-fashioned and very racist xenophobes, and it may wind up doing that in other places. It is always a very bad mistake to let the devil have all the good tunes.
October 28, 2006
The Statue of Liberty Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 08:15 PM EST The Statue of Liberty celebrates her 120th birthday today. I still fondly remember the centennial in 1986, when I was a student at a public grade school in New Jersey. Back then our teachers considered it a point of pride to explain that Lady Liberty was actually situated on the New Jersey side of the invisible line that runs through the Hudson River. Whether this is actually true, I don’t know. A few years ago, in the course of preparing lectures for a class I taught on American immigration history, I came across an interesting claim. Several oral histories by immigrants who had arrived in the United States by way of Ellis Island, which operated as the primary point of entry between 1892 and 1954, claimed that they took little note of the Statue of Liberty upon their arrival in New York’s harbor. Even after 1900, when passage from Europe became quicker and more comfortable with the development of sturdier steamships, and with the introduction of relatively roomy third-class compartments, which replaced the dreaded, sublevel steerage rooms, families spent most of their last hour or two on the ship gathering their belongings, organizing their children, jockeying for a good place in the debarkation line, and reviewing their paperwork. They didn’t have a lot of time to reflect on the local scenery, and many wouldn’t have known to look for the statue in the first place. I suspect that for most people the Statue of Liberty became an important symbol of American pluralism after the fact. In 1936 President Franklin Roosevelt visited Liberty Island to commemorate the statue’s fiftieth anniversary. “I am proud—America is proud—of what they have given us,” he said of the several million immigrants who had arrived in the U.S. between the 1840s and 1820s. They “appreciate our free institutions and our free opportunity as well as those who have been here for many [more] generations . . . in some cases,” he continued, and added that “newer citizens have discharged their obligations to us better than we have discharged our obligations to them.” According to a recent issue of Time magazine, if we factor in illegal immigrants, whom many in Congress believe we should provide a road to permanent residency and citizenship for, today’s foreign-born population is as large a portion of the general population as it was in the peek years of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century immigration. They don’t come through Ellis Island anymore, but the Statue of Liberty may yet prove no less a symbol of their journey than it did for earlier migrants.
October 28, 2006
On Bankruptcy Posted by Fredric Smoler at 07:10 PM EST John Steele Gordon writes that it “might be noted that the United States has also been a leader in socializing risk. It has just chosen to more fully socialize other risks than what Messrs. Zeitz and Smoler have referred to. For instance, the laws of both personal bankruptcy and limited liability (incorporation) have long been much more generous to the risk takers in this country than is the norm elsewhere. These laws have had the effect of transferring risk from entrepreneurs to creditors (who, presumably, know the risks they are taking—that’s their job, after all—and charge interest accordingly). Business failure has always been judged a mere misfortune in this country but is often regarded as a matter almost of moral turpitude elsewhere. This has surely been no small factor in making the United States the most entrepreneurial and innovative culture on earth, and also the richest.” This is wisely said, although partial, possibly in two senses of that word. It is true that American bankruptcy law was designed to give ordinary people a second chance, and was not as tender of the interests of capital as was the case in Europe. But it is interesting to note that the Republican Congress’s recent “reform” of bankruptcy law, a very high priority for the credit card companies, shifted a lot of risk back onto debtors, so that the great and exceptional protection Americans have traditionally given to debtors has significantly eroded. Another perspective on the intersection of the concerns expressed in American bankruptcy law and the protection we give to corporations: Recent developments in American law and regulation have allowed corporations to avoid some of their pension obligations to retired workers. This does work to shelter debtors, although not in a particularly egalitarian way: We now allow retired and sick steel workers, for example, to take it on the chin. This means that pensioners—in a sense, of course, creditors—are now taking on increased risk, which is being shed by capital and management. This seems a dubious achievement, and I do not think it is what the generous originators of American bankruptcy law had in mind.
October 28, 2006
“My Retainer Has Not Been Renewed or Refreshed” Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 06:00 PM EST There’s a famous story about Daniel Webster, the great nineteenth-century politician who served his native state of New Hampshire in the U.S. House of Representatives for two terms, and his adopted state of Massachusetts for three terms in the House and multiple terms in the U.S. Senate.
Together with Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun, Webster, known to his admirers as the Godlike Daniel, dominated American civic life for the first half of the nineteenth century and was widely regarded as the greatest political orator of his day. Webster was a dedicated public servant, but during his congressional tenure he also continued to draw fees as a lawyer and quasi-lobbyist. In a letter to Nicholas Biddle, president of the Second Bank of the United States, Webster, a Whig who supported central banking and vigorous government efforts to promote economic growth, wrote, “Since I have arrived here [in Washington], I have had an application to be concerned, professionally, against the bank, which I have declined, of course, although I believe my retainer has not been renewed or refreshed as usual. If it be wished that my relation to the Bank should be continued, it may be well to send me the usual retainers.” However appalling this shake-down may seem to the modern ear, and it was a shake-down, it was fairly standard practice in Webster’s day. There were few if any laws then governing congressional ethics, and congressmen were not particularly well compensated for their public work, which was more disruptive to their lives and livelihoods in the days before air travel and telephones. I was reminded of Webster’s letter to Biddle when I read today’s article in The New York Times about the corporate community’s current dilemma. With Democrats poised to take back the House, and less likely, but still in the game, to win back the Senate, should Main Street and Wall Street start shifting campaign contributions to Democratic candidates? In 2004 between 68 percent and 73 percent of corporate campaign contributions flowed to Republicans, who stood little risk of losing control of either chamber. This year, 67 percent of corporate contributions between January and September went to Republicans, while 57 percent of such contributions since October 1 have flowed to the GOP. A shift, but not a resounding one. On one level, I’m amused by the sheer stupidity of corporate America. I’m as much a believer as the next guy that it’s unwise to count unhatched chickens, but if I were trying to buy access to Congress, I’d be betting on Speaker Pelosi. If given the choice between talking with Rahm Emanuel on line one or Denny Hastert on line two, I’d pick up line one and switch Hastert to voice mail. On another level, I’m appalled to find Democrats like Vermont congressional candidate Peter Welch making proactive calls to business lobbyists and, in The New York Times’s words, “offering an opportunity to begin a good relationship if he wins election.” Welch might as well be asking for a refresher on that bank retainer. True, Welch and his colleagues, both Democrats and Republicans, don’t accept personal kickbacks to finance expensive dinners at swank Boston oyster houses, as did Daniel Webster. (Well, okay, some do. Duke Cunningham, Bob Ney, and William Jefferson come to mind.) But many congressmen use legal loopholes to put their campaign accounts to personal use. Ken Silverstein, the Washington editor at Harper’s magazine, recently showed that Rep. Curt Weldon (R.-Pa.) spent $80,000 of his campaign funds on expensive dinners and lunches over ten years. Such outlays are commonplace and can be explained away as “campaign meeting expenses” (though Weldon’s final tally is surely extreme), and they’re probably legal. But they shouldn’t be. They effectively allow congressmen to convert corporate campaign contributions into untaxed, unreported income. If congressmen want expense accounts for fancy dinners, they should go back to the private sector and become bankers or lawyers. The U.S. Congress is not Skadden, Arps. And Daniel Webster has been out of public life for a very long time.
October 28, 2006
Lawrence W. Levine Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 04:35 PM EST I was saddened to read today of Lawrence Levine’s passing. Levine, a professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley and a 1983 recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, was arguably one of the best U.S. historians of the past century. The range and scope of his work—from studies of slave folk culture and nineteenth-century theater, to his influential book The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History—prove how deeply creative and engaged a scholar he was. Levine’s originality rivaled Richard Hofstadter’s, his research rigor matched Gordon Wood’s and Eric Foner’s, and his influence on the historical profession exceeds that of almost every other scholar of his generation. Levine’s first major work, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, was one of the first books to take seriously the rich oral and folk tradition of African-American slaves. Examining sources as diverse as the Br’er Rabbit stories and slave spirituals, Levine located patterns of psychological and social resistance that earlier historians had simply missed. In Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, he argued that as late as the 1850s, musical performances, productions of Shakespeare’s plays, and other cultural events drew spectators from across class lines and provided a little something for everyone to enjoy. These were the days of the old walking city, when many businessmen still lived above their shops, and when bankers and sailors often brushed shoulders in their day-to-day interactions. It was only with the development of a self-conscious middle class and a rigid geographic and social stratification of urban dwellers that culture became separated out into high, low and middle-cult. Levine also wrote a devastating reply to Allan Bloom’s attack on modern university culture, The Closing of the American Mind. His book The Opening of the American Mind argued convincingly that the so-called “canon” is no canon at all, and that much of what today’s academic conservatives claim as indispensable reading material for college students—Shakespeare, for instance—was considered intellectual drivel by nineteenth-century scholars and university presidents. He also reminded readers that nineteenth-century college students were expected to memorize and translate the Greek and Latin classics, but not understand or think too much about their meaning and content. He showed that ideas about texts and how to read them have evolved steadily throughout the ages. By implication, he argued that the inclusion of new texts, by authors from different racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds, and of new methodologies or analytical tools, does not water down the canon but rather contributes to its ongoing development. Levine, who died at the age of 73, left the historical profession richer for his involvement, and made an indelible impact on our understanding of America’s past.
October 28, 2006
Ivy Lee and Consumer Culture Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:55 PM EST If John Steele Gordon wishes to continue panning books he hasn’t read, ridiculing authors he can’t name, dazzling readers with his faux-populism, and treating fellow AmericanHeritage.com contributors with vicious disrespect, who am I to stop him? But just as I would not indulge a petulant four-year-old, I won’t indulge Mr. Gordon. Today’s daily Web feature, John Hanc’s skillfully crafted profile of Ivy Lee, the father of the press release and one of the early pioneers of the P.R. business, intersects nicely with the topic of consumer culture. “We aim to supply news,” Lee once explained of his profession. “This is not an advertising agency. . . . Our plan is frankly and openly, on behalf of business concerns and public institutions, to supply to the press and public of the United States prompt and accurate information concerning subjects which it is of value and interest to the public to know about.” Interestingly, by the 1920s even Ivy Lee, a fervent believer in just-the-facts, came to embrace more subtle forms of persuasion that drew on the emerging field of psychology. This shift owed in large part to World War I. Walter Lippmann, who first suggested to Woodrow Wilson the idea of creating a wartime Committee on Public Information, to help sell the war to the American public, had been deeply influenced by the works of Gustave Le Bon, whose 1895 book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, characterized labor unions, mobs, crowds—pretty much any mass assembly of ordinary citizens—as easily subject to demagoguery and “little adapted to reasoning.” As individuals, the idea was, people were still given to rational argument and discourse. But gather them together and they became illogical, responding only to force or manipulation. Although the CPI’s original mandate was to provide the public with hard facts and information, allowing citizens to reach their own conclusions about t |
