October 16, 2006
Election Season Predictions, Round 1 Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 08:00 PM EST It’s probably a little premature to go on record with Election Day predictions, but I’ll take a stab at this anyway and invite my fellow AmericanHeritage.com contributors to do the same. Based on current polling data, I’d wager that the Democrats will pick up a net gain of between 25 and 30 House seats (they need only 15 to regain control), and a net gain of about five Senate seats. On the Senate side, Democrats will win GOP-held seats Ohio, Rhode Island, Montana, and Pennsylvania, and either Missouri or Virginia (but not both). This will leave them just short of a majority in the upper chamber. While 2006 will be an important year in American politics, it won’t be a watershed year like 1974, 1980, or 1994. The sharp polarization of the electorate and the sophisticated computer models that have allowed House incumbents to redraw their districts in a way that reduces or eliminates competition on a district-by-district basis have made it unlikely (indeed, almost impossible) that turnover will achieve historic records. In 1974 voters punished the GOP for the crimes of Watergate; the party lost 48 seats in the House and four in the Senate. In 1980 the Democrats, reeling from Abscam and from Jimmy Carter’s malaise (stagflation, hostage crisis, oil crisis), lost 12 Senate seats and 35 House seats. In 1994, in the wake of Bill Clinton’s disastrous first two years in office, Democrats lost 54 House seats. No such grand realignment is likely to occur this year, because the districts are too tightly drawn. Moreover, while the GOP is taking a real drubbing in the polls, no one should discount the party’s get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operation. There was a time when Democrats and their allies in organized labor were better at GOTV than the Republican party and its business backers. No more. Look for state and national party organizations to close much of the gap on Election Day, with critical help from evangelical Christian churches, which are currently somewhat disengaged—but not entirely aloof—from the upcoming electoral cycle. There are my predictions. They’re subject to change. Three weeks is a lifetime in politics.
October 16, 2006
When Culture Imitates Life, and Life Imitates Culture Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 06:30 PM EST My lead piece for today’s edition of AmericanHeritage.com concerns Margaret Sanger, the famous birth control advocate who opened America’s first birth control clinic in 1916.
Sanger’s actions preceded by just a few years the “roaring twenties,” the decade when America’s popular and leisure culture caught up with subtle social trends, especially the rise of extramarital sex and the transition from courtship to dating, that had been on the build for several decades.
Magazine aficionados in the 1920s consumed real-life glossies like True Confessions, Telling Tales, True Story, and Flapper Experiences, which ran stories with such lurid headlines as “Indolent Kisses” and “The Primitive Lover” (“She wanted a caveman husband”). Dish detergent advertisements featuring scantily dressed Egyptian women guaranteed the “beauty secret of Cleopatra hidden in every cake” of Palmolive. Popular songs of the era included “Hot Lips,” “I Need Lovin’” and “Nursing Kisses.” Movie posters for films like The Cowboy and the Flapper—”See What Happens When the Cowboy and the Flapper Meet. William Fairbanks and Dorothy Revier do their stuff in a way that raises this picture into the ranks of really dramatic production”—testified to the new level of sexual candor that permeated mass culture.
Importantly, while popular culture initially lagged behind behavioral patterns (as my piece explains, the sexual habits of American women—and, by extension, American men—had been changing over the course of several decades), by the mid-1920s it caught up and began to act as an agent of change.
Jazz Age youth who spent their adolescence in up in pre-code movie theaters learned to imitate what they witnessed on-screen. An undergraduate at the University of Chicago admitted that by watching romance films, he was able to give considerable “attention” to the “technique of making love to a girl. . . . I learned to kiss a girl on her ears, neck and cheeks, as well as on the mouth, in a close huddle.”
It wasn’t just the young men who found their passions roused and techniques improved by the motion-picture shows. Young women claimed to learn from their favorite on-screen starlets when to close their eyes during a kiss. “After I see a love picture,” a 16-year-old high school junior confessed, “it just leaves me rather dopey. I always try to imagine myself in a like situation. Instead of making me feel like going out on a party with some men, I generally feel more ready to be loved. . . . The only benefit I ever got from the movies was in learning to love and the knowledge of sex.” And a study of delinquent girls in the late 1920s revealed that three-quarters of them tried to boost their sex appeal by mimicking the way on-screen stars dressed, applied makeup, and fixed their hair.
“No wonder the girls of older days before the movies were so modest and bashful,” concluded a young co-ed. “They never saw Clara Bow or William Haines. They didn’t know anything else but being modest and sweet. I think the movies have a great deal to do with the present day so-called ‘wildness.’ If we didn’t see such examples in the movies where would we get the idea of being ‘hot?’ We wouldn’t.”
In many ways, the 1920s were the decade when America truly entered the media age. Magazine and newspaper circulations hit new highs; radio and film came into maturity; and a new cult of celebrity assumed primacy. In this sense, it was only fitting that the twenties gave rise to that curious, nonstop cycle by which culture imitates life and life imitates culture.
October 16, 2006
Free Speech, and the Paranoid Style in American Politics Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 05:00 PM EST It’s a curious thing that John Steele Gordon professes so much concern over the state of free speech on America’s college campuses. This, from a man who just recently denigrated the critical analysis of works of art, be they paintings, novels, other texts, films or dramatic performances. It’s been a long time since Mr. Gordon was a student, but surely he knows that critical analysis is the core principle of a liberal arts education. Without it, we could just shutter up all of our humanities and social sciences departments, as well as many physical and natural science departments, and call it a day.
Despite his seeming disinterest in the core idea behind the liberal arts education, Mr. Gordon seems genuinely vexed about the campus free-speech issue. In his fantasy world, American conservatives are a beleaguered force, subject to the constant repression that left-wingers and liberals inflict on any person who dares utter a center-right opinion. Sure, conservatives currently control the federal judiciary, both houses of Congress, and the Presidency (and, with it, tens of thousands of powerful Executive Branch positions); of course, Fox News leads the other cable news networks by a mile in both ratings and advertising; yes, right-wing talk radio attracts tens of millions of listeners, while its liberal counterpart, Air America, has just filed for bankruptcy protection. But it’s conservatives who are really marginalized in the United States.
Mr. Gordon has changed the terms of this debate so many times that I can no longer count them on one hand. But now he insists that I muster up some evidence that left-wing speakers are also subject to thuggish abuse on college campuses. In his Fox News fantasy world, where the faith-based approach to life always trumps the reality-based approach, no such incidents exist. In the real world, they do.
The following tidbit is clipped from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 25, 2003: “Chris Hedges, the veteran New York Times war correspondent, was just warming to his subject in a commencement address at Rockford College in Illinois last Saturday when the catcalls and booing began. The ruckus got so loud that Rockford College President Paul Pribbenow took the microphone to remind the audience that ‘one of the wonders of a liberal arts college is its deeply held commitment to academic freedom and the decision to listen to each other’s opinions.’ But the moment Hedges resumed speaking, a woman shouted, ‘You’ve already ruined our graduation. Please don’t ruin it any more.’ Hedges continued gamely, only to have his microphone cut twice. He sped through the rest of the speech, finishing amid a chorus of boos, cheers, shouts and foghorn blasts.”
Hedge’s speech was deeply critical of George Bush and the war in Iraq.
Then there is Rep. Lacy Clay (D., Mo.), whom conservative students shouted down and threatened when he delivered a staunchly antiwar speech at a St. Louis-area college this spring. According to some reports, Clay had to be escorted off the stage for his own safety.
Or the episode at Hofstra University in 2004, when conservative students jeered and booed the novelist E. L. Doctorow, who incorporated antiwar themes in his commencement speech. The heckling prevented Doctorow from delivering his remarks, prompting the university’s president, Stuart Rabinowitz, to call on the crowd to cease and desist, and to allow Doctorow to complete his talk.
One might add that the nation’s most conservative institutions of higher learning don’t even allow liberal or left-wing figures to speak on their campuses, thus saving their students the trouble of heckling.
In the end analysis, there is no army of left-wing thugs trampling over the rights of conservative Americans, on college campuses or elsewhere. There is only a loud minority of college students, left, right, and center, behaving idiotically and out-shouting the vast majority who are truly fair-minded and curious. Such has been my experience as a college instructor, in any event.
Mr. Gordon’s fantasy world is eerily similar to that which Richard Hofstadter described in his famous collection of essays, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. It’s filled with a sense of permanent victimization and a fierce anti-intellectual strain (e.g., “I like my frogs live”). One can somewhat empathize with a John Bircher in 1962 who felt marginalized by the larger culture. But today’s conservatives are so remarkably well-entrenched that their cries of social disenfranchisement don’t ring as hollow as they ring hilarious.
(Moreover, to bring this all back to our AmericanHeritage.com family, Mr. Gordon is way too smart, too well-read, and too deft a writer to pull off the anti-intellectual game convincingly. I just don’t believe him.)
I eagerly await Mr. Gordon’s response, in which he’ll probably explain why it was perfectly acceptable and even patriotic to shout down Doctorow, Hedges, and Clay, and why, as a white male, a Christian, and a conservative, he feels marginalized.
October 16, 2006
Free Speech, Intents, and Effects Posted by Alexander Burns at 03:50 PM EST John Steele Gordon demands evidence that right-leaning college students share the occasional intolerance of their left-leaning peers toward politically opposed campus speakers. The trouble with Mr. Gordon’s demand is that he seems to be looking for examples of events that have been cancelled due to the intolerant protest of conservative students. Based on my own experience, conservative students certainly do share in the hysteria of their left-wing counterparts. But because college students are largely—and in the case of my college, overwhelmingly—liberal, most conservative protests fail simply because they cannot muster the adequate force to silence the speakers they find objectionable.
Allow me to give an example. On the day after I moved into my dormitory this year, Harvard hosted an unusual guest on campus, the former Iranian president Mohammed Khatami. Khatami was on a short visit to the United States and during his time in the country he agreed to give a speech at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, housed in the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Khatami is a controversial figure, with significant blots on his record as president. But he is also widely recognized as a reformer—not a Western-style liberal, but probably the closest thing we can hope for from Iran.
Harvard is, of course, an easy target for right-wing pundits. Khatami’s visit made it only more so. In the august pages of the New York Sun and on what Al Franken has called “the prestigious ‘Internet,’” the oldest university in America was lambasted for hosting a man whom Michael Ledeen compared to Joseph Goebbels. Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, grandstanding in anticipation of a presidential campaign, publicly announced that he was withholding state security resources that normally might have been deployed to protect a foreign dignitary of Khatami’s stature.
Less noticed, however, was the reaction on the part of a number of Harvard students. To their credit, the Harvard Republican Club showed uncharacteristic restraint by blasting Khatami but simultaneously urging students to attend the event and challenge him with their questions. Harvard Students for Israel, an organization of which I count myself a member, acquitted itself less creditably. HSI condemned Khatami’s visit, and its president was quoted in the Boston Globe saying that Khatami had not “earned the right” to speak at Harvard. Members of HSI, together with members of the Republican Club and other campus groups, took part in a protest before the event alongside members of the Boston community. Some of these protesters carried signs bearing bizarre, doctored images of Khatami, depicting him as some kind of vampire-terrorist in league with the 9/11 hijackers. So vehement was the outcry in advance of Khatami’s visit that the State Department’s security service, along with Cambridge riot police and snipers, locked down the Kennedy School on the morning of the speech.
In the end, Khatami’s speech went off without a hitch. During his address, he spoke largely in unsurprising generalities. In the question and answer session that followed, he leveled some unexpectedly pointed criticism in the direction of Iran’s current president, Ahmadinejad.
The relevance of all this to Mr. Gordon’s inquiry is obvious: In the first weeks of September, right-leaning members of the Harvard community, as well as influential conservative leaders in the state of Massachusetts and the country at large, attempted to silence a speech before it was given. Operating on the assumption that someone must “earn the right” to speak, they worked to intimidate Khatami and bully Harvard into rescinding his invitation.
This is not a perfect example of conservative intolerance to liberal speech. Khatami can hardly be called, in American terms, a liberal, and pro-Israel students should never be dismissed as right-wing nuts. But Mohammed Khatami’s visit represented a clear challenge to the Harvard community’s tolerance. Liberals, by and large, acquitted themselves well; some conservatives behaved admirably; but some students succumbed to the temptation of reactionary intolerance. The students in the last group were, if not hardcore Republicans, almost uniformly right-leaning on issues of Middle Eastern politics. Fortunately, this group did not constitute a large enough or threatening enough presence to pressure the Institute of Politics into cancelling the event. But, to invert the wise words of Larry Summers, the actions of these students were intolerant in intent, if not in effect.
One final note: While I am happy to provide this as an example of the kind of behavior in which John Steele Gordon is interested, I am puzzled by his fixation on the alleged intolerance of liberal college students. It seems to me that a sitting congressman using his office to disrupt an election is a far more serious offense than the aggressive protest of agitated, left-leaning youths against a speech by Jeane Kirkpatrick. Indeed it also seems to me that Governor Romney’s refusal to protect a foreign dignitary and Michael Ledeen’s hysterical warnings about Khatami’s visit are far more embarrassing examples of intolerance than are the ridiculous signs of a few Cambridge residents.
October 16, 2006
Dissecting Frogs II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:00 PM EST I have nothing against analyzing works of art if that’s your wont, let alone your profession. I don’t disdain it (to disdain: “to look with scorn on”); it is merely something for which “I have no appetite.” I find that when taken apart too thoroughly, the whole is usually diminished.
I was thinking specifically of modern works, such as High Noon. With Shakespeare’s plays, written 400 years ago when the English language was quite different from modern English, it is often necessary to analyze to some extent simply to understand what he was talking about.
But not always. My personal favorite among the history plays is Henry IV, Part I, most especially Prince Hal’s soliloquy in Act I, Scene 2. It seems to me as clear as its language is glorious:
I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humour of your idleness:
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wonder’d at,
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.
If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work;
But when they seldom come, they wish’d for come,
And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.
So, when this loose behaviour I throw off
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes;
And like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glittering o’er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I’ll so offend, to make offence a skill;
Redeeming time when men think least I will.
October 16, 2006
Thugs and Free Speech IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:15 AM EST I will accept Mr. Smoler’s version of the incident in Florida in 2000, and I deplore it as well. I will take up the subject of the Supreme Court’s “notorious” decision at a later date, and I agree that voting is, in a metaphorical sense, a form of “speech.”
But right now, I continue to await a list of incidents in which right-wing students have prevented left-wing speakers from actually speaking. As I wrote numerous posts ago: “I would be genuinely interested in learning instances in which right-leaning students have sought to prevent leftist speakers from having their say.”
Can Messrs. Smoler and Zeitz give me any examples, or is the mob silencing of speakers on college campuses a left-wing phenomenon in recent decades?
October 16, 2006
Dissecting Frogs Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:45 AM EST Mr. Gordon writes that he prefers his frogs alive, meaning that he does not enjoy analyzing literature, and he especially deplores analyzing jokes. He quotes E. B. White: “Humor is like a frog, you can dissect it, but it dies in the process.” Mr. Gordon adds that “once you start teasing apart the characters and motivations and the author’s intent and whathaveyou, the magic fizzes away just as surely as the life of the frog.”
As it happens, I make part of my living taking apart frogs: I teach a course in the theories and forms of comedy. I think Mr. Gordon is making a very bad mistake, and I’ll try to show why, very quickly looking at one gag by one of the funniest characters in literature, Falstaff. In Henry IV, Part I, Act II, Scene 4, Falstaff makes a joke. Addressing Hal, he says, “Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.”
If you do the thing Mr. Gordon disdains to do, which is analyze that joke, you may work out that there is first the visual joke—about Falstaff’s world-size gut—and then a deeper joke. One thinks of the worldliness symbolized by plump Jack's vast gut (“Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace;/ Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape/ For thee thrice wider than for other men,” Henry IV, Part II, Act V, Scene 5). And if you look back on the joke when contemplating the Henriad as a whole, there is finally a much darker joke, about the looming prospect of Hal banishing all the human world, i.e., his own humanity, which will vanish when he becomes a Machiavellian king, and, inter alia, demands that Harfleur surrender lest “the blind and bloody soldier with foul hand/ Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;/ Your fathers taken by the silver beards,/ And their most reverend heads dash’d to the walls,/ Your naked infants spitted upon pikes..." (Henry V, Act III, Scene 3). Someone who threatens mass rape and mass murder may have indeed banished all the world. While Mr. Gordon prefers live frogs, the Henriad includes an awful lot of dead frogs, which is one reason that joke—that quick little joke about fat Jack—is worth analyzing. Its complexities do not all spring to view the first time we hear it in a theater, or even the first time we read it on the page.
October 16, 2006
Thugs and Free Speech III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:00 AM EST John Steele Gordon writes, “I asked for an instance where a right-wing mob prevented someone from speaking, and he [Josh Zeitz] gives an instance where GOP Hill staffers interrupted, but did not prevent, vote counting. (I hasten to add that I do not remember the details of the incident and I am not about to concede that Mr. Zeitz has correctly described what happened. But the details are not relevant as, by Mr. Zeitz’s own admission, no speech was prevented.)” I was going to blog on this same incident, but Josh beat me to the punch. Unlike Mr. Gordon, I do remember the details of this incident, and Mr. Gordon is mistaken, because the GOP staffers did interrupt the count. Shutting it down was indeed the plan: The count was about to be moved to another room, at which point Representative John Sweeney (R., N.Y) told his mob, “Shut it down.” Those words were reported by Paul Gigot, who was in the room with GOP operatives, in his Wall Street Journal column, and this affray was also reported in the Journal’s news pages, as well as all around the country. I quote the Wall Street Journal to preempt any impulse of Mr. Gordon’s to invoke liberal press bias as an explanation for the reporting. This was an ugly incident, at least as ugly as any threat of political violence on college campus, which quite correctly offends Mr. Gordon. As Mr. Gordon may recall, those votes were never officially counted. A notorious 5-4 decision by the US Supreme Court prevented the votes from being counted, with every Republican appointee voting to overrule the Florida court that had ordered the count to proceed. So a right-wing mob did prevent speech, if you think voting is political speech. Perhaps Mr. Gordon will argue that it is not. Maybe he’ll claim that whereas “Vote for Jones” is speech, and it is monstrous to prevent it, merely voting for Jones is something smaller, against which the threat of violence can be made with no great harm done.
October 15, 2006
Thugs and Free Speech II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 02:30 PM EST Let’s go back to the beginning here. My original request was: “There has been a disturbing pattern of leftist threats and violence against campus speakers they [the leftists] 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.” That seems a reasonable question to me: Are there any instances where right-leaning students have silenced speakers, or is this behavior characteristic of left-leaning students only? Mr. Zeitz didn’t respond to that question, however. Instead he wrote about the difference between 1983 and 2006, dismissing the events at Smith College in 1983 as “a dated story” (whatever that might mean on a history blog). So I then wrote, “I again invite Mr. Zeitz to provide a list of instances over the last 25 years when thugs of the right have prevented free speech, such as thugs of the left have frequently done over the last quarter century.” Here was my mistake. I should have just quoted my original inquiry or made it totally clear that I was, still, referring to events such as the ones that took place at Columbia recently and Smith College in 1983. By my not doing so and my using the perfectly apposite word “thug,” Mr. Zeitz was able—in the best college-debate-team style—to evade my question for a second time. Instead of answering my question, he “provided Mr. Gordon with several cases of state-sponsored, anti-free-speech thuggery . . .” He writes, “John Steele Gordon has a funny way of changing the terms of debate when the debate doesn’t quite go his way.” Then he writes, “I made the case—conditionally seconded by Fred Smoler—that state authorities who trample on the First Amendment rights of their citizens are no less “thuggish” than mobs of left-wing college sophomores who shout down visiting conservative speakers. What could have ensued was a nuanced discussion about state power and political repression, but Mr. Gordon doesn’t do nuance.” Just who is changing the subject here? That state authorities are quite capable of acting thuggishly is perfectly true. It is equally true that the sun rises in the east. Just what have those two facts to do with my original question? Not much. No, let me rephrase that. Nothing at all. I asked, originally, for instances of right-wing threats and violence against liberal campus speakers, and Mr. Zeitz would rather have a nuanced discussion about state power and political repression. I bet I know why: Mr. Zeitz can’t find any instances of right-wing threats and violence against campus speakers. Does any reader of this blog think that were he able to find any he would not have produced them instead of changing the subject? He writes, “In November 2000 a mob comprising GOP Hill staffers and political operatives, but posing as grass-roots Floridians, interrupted the proceedings of the Miami-Dade County Canvassing Board, causing such disruption and civil disorder that the board was forced to halt its manual recount of presidential ballots. Mr. Gordon will no doubt issue a lame retort—something along the lines of, “counting ballots is not the same as giving a speech”—or again change the terms of debate.” Translation: Mr. Gordon will point out that an apple is not an orange but pay no attention, that’s lame.” Who’s being lame here? I asked for an instance where a right-wing mob prevented someone from speaking, and he gives an instance where GOP Hill staffers interrupted, but did not prevent, vote counting. (I hasten to add that I do not remember the details of the incident and I am not about to concede that Mr. Zeitz has correctly described what happened. But the details are not relevant as, by Mr. Zeitz’s own admission, no speech was prevented.) Again, had Mr. Zeitz been able to produce a genuine instance of right-wingers suppressing the free speech of left-wingers, forcing a speaker to stop speaking (or not even start, as at Smith College), he would have done so and not have needed to resort to preemptive denigration of my inevitable reply. He writes, “So I’ll preemptively challenge him to do a little better than that.” Fine, how about this: Answer my original request for information: “I would be genuinely interested in learning instances in which right-leaning students have sought to prevent leftist speakers from having their say.” If Mr. Zeitz can’t find any such instances, how about him saying so and—dare I hope?—beginning a nuanced discussion about why student (and other) mobs that silence speakers always seem to be left-wing mobs. That still strikes me as an interesting, perhaps important question. The fact that Mr. Zeitz has been trying so very, very hard to avoid answering it makes it seem only more so. Could it be because he doesn’t like what the answer is?
October 15, 2006
Analyzing Art II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:15 AM EST The only thing I can say to Mr. Zeitz’s idea that not liking to analyze art is “an unusually extreme position to take” is chacun à son goût.
I prefer my frogs alive.
October 15, 2006
Analyzing Art Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 08:30 AM EST Regarding my dialogue with Fred Smoler about the film High Noon, John Steele Gordon wrote: “I confess I have no appetite for analyzing works of art, be they novels or movies or paintings or whatever. And make that double for analyzing the politics of such creations, explicitly political works excepted, of course. But the number of those that live beyond the age of their creation is notably few. I haven’t heard of any Clifford Odets revivals lately.” Actually, Odets wrote the screenplay for Sweet Smell of Success (1957), which Marvin Hamlisch and other adapted in 2002 for stage. Sweet Smell of Success: The Musical garnered seven Tony nominations; John Lithgow earned the Tony for Best Performance. In addition in 1991 Joel and Ethan Coen scored a critical success with their film Barton Fink, which was loosely based on Odets’s professional travails in Hollywood. I’m less interested in Clifford Odets than in Mr. Gordon’s resistance to “analyzing works of art, be they novels or movies or paintings or whatever.” This is surely a curious confession. Of course one should enjoy art for enjoyment’s sake, but is Mr. Gordon truly averse to analyzing it? What else should one do with a book, a film, a play or a painting? One meets very few historians these days who disavow cultural history. Cultural productions are, after all, just as much a part of the public discourse as political speeches and census data, and when used judiciously and critically, they help unlock the mysteries of particular peoples in particular contexts. One needn’t be a historian to appreciate the importance of critical analysis. My colleague Fred Smoler is much better qualified to discuss the different modes of literary criticism available to readers. But I’m reminded of the once furious debate among literary critics about the relative merits of New Criticism, a school of analysis pioneered in the 1950s, which sought to identify certain timeless and universal structural themes in literature, and New Historicism, a competing school that came into vogue in the 1970s and sought to anchor works of literature to their specific historical milieus. Shakespeare proved fertile ground for both schools of analysis. One could read Northrop Frye on the themes of comedy, tragedy, and romance in Shakespearean drama, or Stephen Greenblatt on the Elizabethan politics and social context behind Shakespeare’s works. In either case I always found that the criticism enhanced my appreciation of the literature. One needn’t even bring theorists into play at all. Even a five-year-old can critically assess a painting on some level. But to resist analyzing works of art? This seems an unusually extreme position to hold.
October 14, 2006
Gerry Studds Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:55 PM EST There’s been a fair amount of chatter lately on AmericanHeritage.com about Gerry Studds, the former 12-term congressman from Massachusetts who was implicated in an earlier page scandal. Gerry Studds passed away early on Saturday morning at the age of 69. In the course of researching my book on the 1970s, I learned something about Studds that seems thus far to have eluded obituary writers. In 1968 Studds, then a schoolmaster at the prestigious St. Paul’s Academy, and David Hoeh, an instructor at Dartmouth College, served as co-coordinators of Senator Eugene McCarthy’s New Hampshire presidential primary campaign. Though he later moved to Cape Cod and represented the Bay State in Congress for almost a quarter century, Studds got his start in national politics as one of the masterminds of McCarthy’s upset performance over Lyndon Johnson in New Hampshire. In this sense, Studds was an early leader of the so-called New Politics movement of the mid-1970s, a reformist brand of liberalism that appealed to upwardly mobile, college-educated, middle-class voters, rather than the Democratic party’s traditionally working-class, ethnic base. This was certainly Gene McCarthy’s core constituency, and it would prove to be Studds’s key electoral base, as well as that of other New Politics types like Barney Frank (a protege of Allard Lowenstein, who helped persuade McCarthy to run for president in ’68); Michael Dukakis; Ed Markey; and much of the famous Class of 1974—young reform Democrats who were elected to Congress in the wake of Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal. It’s a sad coincidence that Studds passed away amid the Mark Foley scandal. The timing almost dictates that he will be remembered solely for his involvement with a 17-year-old male page, and his subsequent censure by the House. There’s a much more interesting angle to Studds’s career that the newspapers would do well to investigate.
October 14, 2006
Nice Try, Mr. Gordon Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 07:10 PM EST John Steele Gordon has a funny way of changing the terms of debate when the debate doesn’t quite go his way. In his original challenge to me, Mr. Gordon wrote, “I again invite Mr. Zeitz to provide a list of instances over the last 25 years when thugs of the right have prevented free speech, such as thugs of the left have frequently done over the last quarter century.” I provided Mr. Gordon with several cases of state-sponsored, anti-free-speech thuggery, including the false arrests of over 1,500 protesters at the 2004 GOP convention in New York City; the Secret Service’s controversial arrest of a man who approached Dick Cheney at a public, outdoor mall where the Vice President was shaking hands, and who said simply to Cheney, “I think your policies in Iraq are reprehensible”; the ejection of two people—Cindy Sheehan and Beverly Young—from the House gallery, for the high crime of wearing political messages on their T-shirts; and the Secret Service’s arrest of a West Virginia couple for wearing political T-shirts at a presidential rally in Charleston. I made the case—conditionally seconded by Fred Smoler—that state authorities who trample on the First Amendment rights of their citizens are no less “thuggish” than mobs of left-wing college sophomores who shout down visiting conservative speakers. What could have ensued was a nuanced discussion about state power and political repression, but Mr. Gordon doesn’t do nuance. Instead, Mr. Gordon modified his initial challenge. “I am looking for incidents that have three elements,” he writes. “(1) a mob (“a large or disorderly crowd; esp.: one bent on riotous or destructive action”) that answers to no authority other than itself; (2) a speaker who is trying to have his say peacefully and under the auspices of an organization such as a college, governmental agency, or political party; (3) the mob—or the threat of mob action—forcing the speaker to cancel his speech or be unable to finish it.” Ahhh. I met his original challenge—e.g., to present cases of right-wing “thugs” infringing on the free speech of other citizens—so he has shifted ground and changed the terms of debate. I’ll take the bait. How about this, Mr. Gordon: In November 2000 a mob comprising GOP Hill staffers and political operatives, but posing as grass-roots Floridians, interrupted the proceedings of the Miami-Dade County Canvassing Board, causing such disruption and civil disorder that the board was forced to halt its manual recount of presidential ballots. Mr. Gordon will no doubt issue a lame retort—something along the lines of, “counting ballots is not the same as giving a speech”—or again change the terms of debate. So I’ll preemptively challenge him to do a little better than that.
October 14, 2006
Thugs and Free Speech Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:50 PM EST It seems to me that Messrs. Zeitz and Smoler are dodging and weaving to avoid directly answering a simple challenge: “Provide a list of instances over the last 25 years when thugs of the right have prevented free speech . . .” I have now provided four examples of thugs of the left doing so: 1) The incident at Columbia University two weeks ago. 2) The intimidation of the college president at Smith College in 1983. 3) The various incidents in which William Shockley was prevented from speaking. 4) The disruption of the WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999. Let me see if I can be so clear that they will have to answer my challenge or say that they can’t: I am looking for incidents that have three elements: (1) a mob (“a large or disorderly crowd; esp.: one bent on riotous or destructive action”) that answers to no authority other than itself; (2) a speaker who is trying to have his say peacefully and under the auspices of an organization such as a college, governmental agency, or political party; (3) the mob—or the threat of mob action—forcing the speaker to cancel his speech or be unable to finish it. Can Messrs. Zeitz and Smoler provide a list of instances in which the mob was of the right and the speaker of the left? I have now provided four in which the mob was of the left and the speaker of the right (or wished to express an opinion unpopular with the left). I know of no examples of the opposite. Are there any? Or is the intimidation of peaceful free speech by mob action exclusively a phenomenon of the left in modern America? And if so, why? Can Messrs. Zeitz and Smoler answer my question, not some other question of their own devising that they prefer to answer or delivering some semantic quibble about the meaning of a word so as to avoid answering?
Mr. Zeitz writes, “As for the argument that Cindy Sheehan and Beverly Young violated House rules by wearing shirts that bore political messages: How is the relevant House rule not in flagrant violation of the First Amendment? The House of Representatives is not a private eating club. It’s the people’s House. If one can’t don a political button or shirt with a political slogan in the House chamber, then where?” The answer to that is, almost anywhere else. If the restrictions on free speech in the House gallery are a “flagrant violation of the First Amendment,” why has no court ever so ruled? If people have an absolute right to express their opinions in the House chamber, do they not have an equal right to do so in the Oval Office? What’s the difference? Should the White House install a visitor’s gallery and invite Cindy Sheehan to come? People are not free to express their opinions in the House of Representatives unless they are elected to that body, and even then only if they conform to parliamentary procedure and the House rules. That seems perfectly reasonable to me. If one can wear a shirt with a slogan, then why not be allowed to carry a sign? If one can carry a sign, then why not be allowed to wave it about? If one can wave signs about in a distracting manner, then why not be allowed to demonstrate in an organized way? If one can demonstrate, then why not be allowed to voice one’s opinion? And so on, until you get all the way to what happened in 1954 when Puerto Rican nationalists expressed their opinions from the House gallery by wounding five congressmen with gunfire. Where does the House of Representatives have Mr. Zeitz’s gracious permission to draw the line so that the people’s House can do the people’s business? It seems to me that the proper place for that line is at the very beginning: People are invited to watch the House conduct its business but not to express their own opinions in any way, shape, or form. That rule has the virtue of utter simplicity and total clarity. No lawyers are needed to interpret it. Further, the best way to keep the tent up is to forbid the camel from putting even his nose under it. Mr. Zeitz writes, “Finally, readers will note that I haven’t used Mr. Gordon’s advanced age against him. I certainly wouldn’t suggest that senility or hypertension are clouding his judgment, because they aren’t. He might, then, cease and desist the nasty and gratuitous comments about my age.” I was not making nasty comments about Mr. Zeitz’s age. If he had as much of a sense of humor as a crocodile he would know that. I have nothing against people being young and would cheerfully go to any surgeon who could remove three decades (but not the memories thereof) from my not yet senile but oh so very hypertensive body (nicely controlled by the miracles of modern pharmacology). I was merely pointing out that he has been fortunate enough never to have experienced the awful, sickening, helpless feeling of hearing the news of an assassination such as I experienced four times in my life before I was 40. May he be spared that experience if he lives to be 100.
October 14, 2006
Microloans Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:05 AM EST The Nobel Peace Prize this year was awarded to someone who richly deserves it, Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. Grameen, of course, is no ordinary bank. It was founded to make “microloans” to the poor, often the poorest of the poor. The bank makes loans as small as $12 to people no ordinary bank would touch, enabling them to buy a cow that gives milk they can sell, or a sewing machine with which to make clothes, or stock for a small store. The bank was founded 30 years ago and now has over six million customers that it has helped lift out of the depths of poverty by giving them access to the magic elixir of wealth creation: capital. The idea has spread far and wide. To quote from this morning’s New York Times, “‘Yunus was one of the early visionaries who believed in the idea of poor people as viable, worthy, attractive clients for loans,’ said Elizabeth Littlefield, who heads the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor, a research institution supported by microfinance donors. ‘That simple notion has put in motion a huge range of imitators and innovators who have taken that idea and run with it, improved on it, expanded it.’” The problem of third-world poverty has bedeviled the world since the era of European imperialism began to end after World War II. Government-to-government foreign aid and loans from such organizations as the World Bank have often been disastrous, the money going into ill-conceived megaprojects such as a 1960s steel mill in Ghana, a country that lacks both iron ore and coal, or into the Swiss bank accounts of tyrants. The few rich in many of these countries have fought tenaciously to maintain the status quo (i.e., their own monopoly of economic power) with legal impediments to going into business and to obtaining clear title to land that could serve as collateral. Corruption, which economically speaking is a tax on the many for the benefit of the few, is usually a tremendous drag on the economic development of a middle class, a sine qua non of a prosperous country. But microloans go directly to the people who have, overwhelmingly, made good use of them to move up a notch or two, and some who have real entrepreneurial talent have gone further. Many of the beneficiaries of these loans are, by the standards of the developed countries, still wretchedly poor, but they are on their way. If that doesn’t deserve a Nobel Prize I don’t know what does. The idea of an organization to serve the little guy’s need for liquid capital has its precedents in American economic history, such as the Provident Loan Society of New York and, disastrously, the Freedman’s Bank. A. P. Giannini built what was for years the largest bank in the world, the Bank of Americaon the idea.
October 14, 2006
Running from Congress Posted by John Steele Gordon at 08:30 AM EST Joshua Zeitz recalls Richard Nixon’s campaigns against Jerry Voorhis (for the House in 1946) and Helen Gahagan Douglas (for the Senate in 1950), saying how dishonest—and politically effective—his descriptions of their voting records were. I don’t doubt for a second that they were exactly that.
But I think these tactics are a major part of the reason that so very few men have been able to move directly from Congress to the White House. Only two senators have succeeded (Warren Harding and John F. Kennedy) and one Congressman (James Garfield), despite all the advantages of national exposure and power that a seat in Congress can provide.
Unfortunately being in Congress requires that hundreds of votes a year be on the record. Many of them are technical and purely parliamentary in nature and are not indicative at all of the person’s true opinion or political intentions on a subject. This makes for easy demagogy that few politicians of any stripe can resist:
Charge: My opponent voted against Mom and apple pie 76 times!
Defense: A gobbledygook of inside baseball that no one bothers to sort out. The candidate comes across as saying “I voted for it before I voted against it,” not a phrase that served Senator Kerry well.
After the 1996 election, Bill Clinton invited Bob Dole to the Oval Office. There, Dole berated Clinton for some campaign tactic that he regarded as unfair and underhanded. Clinton didn’t deny the allegation. His response was, “Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.”
That, alas, is the motto of most professional politicians and always will be, as long as they are human, which seems likely to be the case for the foreseeable future.
But if you want to be President, be Vice President (six have made it to the White House since 1900—though only one by election), or a governor (five since 1900). But don’t run from Congress.
October 13, 2006
On Thugs Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:30 PM EST John Steele Gordon writes that a thug is “‘a brutal ruffian or assassin: gangster, killer.’ That is not a description of Michael Bloomberg, even metaphorically.” I’d thought a thug was literally a murderous disciple of Kali, and metaphorically can be a number of other things, one of those things being police or secret service agents who use force in contempt of law, to, for example, improperly and illegally arrest or intimidate people lawfully and peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights. I’m not kidding: All my life, I have heard people, including prosecutors, use the word thug to mean, among several other things, law enforcement officers using physical force in contempt of law. With respect to the case of Steven Howards, Mr. Gordon writes that “I have no knowledge of the incident. . . . If protecting the lives of our elected officials requires the Secret Service to prevent some jerk from exercising ‘free speech’ in a possibly threatening manner in the immediate vicinity of the Vice President, I imagine that is just fine with 99.9 percent of the American population.” Since Mr. Gordon concedes that he knows nothing of the incident, why does he assume that Steven Howards was “some jerk”? Why put “free speech” in quotes? I can imagine that Mr. Howards acted in what might have seemed to a reasonable person a threatening manner, and I can also imagine that he didn’t. If he didn’t, and the Secret Service thought they could arrest someone with impunity, when that person was merely peacefully exercising free speech, they were indeed acting like thugs. Is Mr. Gordon absolutely certain that the Secret Service detail couldn’t possibly have acted that way? If so, why? As for the demonstrators locked up during the 2004 convention, the courts did look into that one, and found that the city had acted unlawfully. I know honest and intelligent people who were there, and they reported that some of the police acted with admirable restraint, and that some acted—this really is the word they used—thuggishly. I know an assistant district attorney who looked over some of the evidence and thought the same thing. People who assume that the police invariably act with deceit and brutality are fools. People who assume that they never do are at least as foolish. I would want to ponder a while before hazarding a guess as to which sort of fool is more dangerous, if you care about the preservation of liberty under law.
October 13, 2006
On Red and Reds Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:10 PM EST I’ve been mulling over Fred Schwarz’s post “The Age of McCarthy,” and one thing that occurs to me—the least serious thing, as it happens—is how much our political symbols and idioms have changed. A couple of years ago, a colleague somewhat smugly asserted that senior colleagues didn’t like her because she was “a red.” The idiom had a decidedly dated sound, but I certainly knew what she meant. Because her tone was also mildly ironical, I decided that she might have deliberately employed dated slang to imply the paleolithic character of her adversaries and their clueless marginality. But her remark was faintly irritating, because she somehow simultaneously implied that her politics put her job at risk, a risk to which she was courageously indifferent. In the modern academic world, the implication that being on the Marxian left always requires reckless courage is not wholly persuasive. I remembered this incident last weekend, when a friend came to town. He had recently taken a job teaching history at the University of Georgia, and a couple of weeks ago he was baffled when some of his students patronized the southeastern counties of that state. “They’re really red down there,” one of his students observed, in a very heavy Georgia accent and a clearly derisive tone of voice. My friend’s first thought was that the contention that the area between Athens and Savannah was crawling with Bolsheviks seemed improbable. He then decided that “red” had clearly changed meaning, and tentatively concluded that “red” might now mean “red state,” but neither of us knew if southeast Georgia votes more heavily Republican than any other quadrant of the state. I suggested that it might mean “redneck,” which he thought was more likely, but we agreed that we really had no idea. Red once pretty reliably meant something else, of course. An anti-Communist socialist, dead and buried many years ago, once advised me to wear a red necktie whenever I debated, so that the meanest intelligence in the room would know which side I was on, and for a while I took that advice. The advice is clearly out of date: I was at an auction at Sotheby’s last night, purely for the sake of seeing a friend in town from the U.K.; it was a charity affair for Great Britain’s Countryside Alliance, which is generally if somewhat inaccurately thought to be a decidedly High Tory cause. A longish time ago, Tories wore blue ties, at least around election time, and a couple of decades ago I formed the impression that investment bankers wore yellow ties. I am not a Tory, but I did not want to look too out of place, so, still stuck in the ’80s, I wore a yellow tie and a charcoal suit, thinking I’d blend in. I had a certain intuition about what sort of person would be doing the heavy bidding. In the event, almost every man there was wearing a red tie, which may well be what you wear nowadays to suggest that you’ve had a McNab, which I discovered means the experience of catching a salmon and shooting a stag and a brace of grouse all in the same day. A red tie has come to be, at best, a floating signifier. In The Sorrow and the Pity, the great Ophuls documentary about Vichy France, a very, very brave peasant who had been in the Resistance offered his interlocutor some wine he had made himself, observing that it was “red—like me!” I wonder what they’d make of that in Athens, Georgia. When I was a boy, a logo for a once-famous paint company showed brilliant red paint spilling over a globe and was allegedly attacked as covert Communist propaganda. That seems goofy, but not quite incomprehensible, in an age when some my countrymen have detected the ominous numbers 666 in a modern corporate logo. Still, I do not think this is a case of plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose. In the age of McCarthy, the inquisitorial use of state power and industrywide boycotts punished political heresy on a significant scale. One oddity of the current scene is the conviction, at least in some quarters, that comparable political heresy nowadays puts comparable numbers of Americans at comparable risk from the same quarters. For as far as I can tell, that is very simply not true.
October 13, 2006
John Steele Gordon and State Power Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 06:00 PM EST In my earlier post, I wrote that “Mr. Gordon is a black-and-white kind of guy, so he’ll almost certainly muster up a lame retort” to my list of right-wing infringements on free speech. I was right. His response was lame. For someone with such strong libertarian convictions when it comes to taxes, wage controls, and business regulations, Mr. Gordon is surprisingly comfortable with the use of state power to suppress free speech. The crux of his argument seems to be that when a state actor violates the First Amendment—and make no mistake: this is precisely what happened in New York City, where over 1,500 people were found to have been falsely or illegally arrested; and it’s looking quite likely that civil juries are going to come down hard on the Secret Service for its actions in Colorado and West Virginia—there must be a good reason for it, and good citizens should nod their heads in approval and accept the wisdom of their leaders. By this logic, the city of Albany, Georgia, was only doing its job when it preserved the peace by peaceably arresting hundreds of civil rights demonstrators in 1962. As for the argument that Cindy Sheehan and Beverly Young violated House rules by wearing shirts that bore political messages: How is the relevant House rule not in flagrant violation of the First Amendment? The House of Representatives is not a private eating club. It’s the people’s House. If one can’t don a political button or shirt with a political slogan in the House chamber, then where? That the offenders in question wore jackets and ties and purported to have the state’s interest in mind does not make their violation of free speech any less offensive than the incident at Columbia University. That Mr. Gordon can’t see this comes as no surprise to me. His interest in free speech seems to begin and end with protecting the First Amendment rights of those who agree with him. Finally, readers will note that I haven’t used Mr. Gordon’s advanced age against him. I certainly wouldn’t suggest that senility or hypertension are clouding his judgment, because they aren’t. He might, then, cease and desist the nasty and gratuitous comments about my age.
October 13, 2006
Capitol Real Estate Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 04:45 PM EST An article in today’s New York Times reports that the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, known popularly as the Ethics Committee, has begun hearing sworn testimony in its investigation of the Mark Foley case. The article noted in passing that pages, clad in their signature uniforms (gray pants or skirts, white shirts, striped ties, blue blazers, black shoes), continued throughout the day to zip past the committee’s offices in HT-2, and that the room next door to the Ethics Committee is a page locker room. It’s been 15 years since I was a page, but I now remember that the aforementioned locker room, which we jokingly dubbed the “page cloakroom”—a place to hang our coats and deposit our backpacks before reporting to work on the House floor—was indeed situated next door to the House Ethics Committee. Both rooms are in the basement level of the Capitol Building. While I don’t remember what the Ethics Committee’s offices look like (I must at one point have delivered a letter there), I can only assume they look like the rest of the basement: dark, dingy, and unceremonial. Other feature attractions in the Capitol basement are the document room, where the day’s legislative documents are deposited for pickup; the flag office, which is basically a large storage room that holds thousands of boxes of American flags that have each been flown for a few seconds over the Capitol Building; and a cafeteria that was, in my day, the worst cafeteria in the entire Capitol complex (I have good memories of it nonetheless; it was where we took all of our dinners). All these years later, it occurs to me: What does it say about congressional priorities that the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct occupies some of the worst real estate in the entire Capitol complex? Compared with the august chambers of the Ways and Means or Budget Committees, the Ethics Committee’s offices are a joke. Given the recent history of congressional scandals and misdoings, maybe it’s time to make the Ethics Committee more visually imposing. Just a thought.
October 13, 2006
Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:45 PM EST Fred Schwarz is absolutely right in labeling Joe McCarthy a “Joe-come-lately” to the anti-Communist cause, and he is also quite right that the term “Age of McCarthy” lacks a certain specificity, given the wide range of citizens’ organizations (e.g., the American Legion), religious institutions (e.g., the Catholic Church), government institutions (e.g., the FBI, HUAC, the Senate Committee on Government Operations), and private actors who often cooperated under the very loose ideological umbrella of anti-Communism. As Fred points out, it was HUAC that worked in overdrive to ferret out alleged Communists in the film industry. Joe McCarthy’s focus was primarily on alleged Communist moles in various departments of the federal government. I differ somewhat with Fred when he argues: “Not all anti-Communist members of Congress were buffoons, like McCarthy; some, like Richard Nixon, took care to investigate thoroughly and prepare their evidence with care.” It’s true that Nixon was a far more disciplined congressman than McCarthy. In his committee work for HUAC, Nixon was especially careful to get his facts straight and to confine his remarks and questions to what could be proven, rather than what might boost his personal or party fortunes. But Nixon as consummate campaigner was a different character altogether, and sometimes just as reckless as Joe McCarthy. In 1946, during his first congressional campaign, Nixon accused his opponent, Rep. Jerry Voorhis, of accepting the endorsement and assistance of the left-leaning CIO-PAC. In fact, the organization backing Voorhis was the decidedly liberal but anti-Communist National Citizens Political Action Committee (NCPAC). In his debate with Voorhis, Nixon famously repeated the accusation and presented his flustered opponent with a copy of NCPAC’s endorsement, which he passed off as a CIO-PAC endorsement letter. Prior to election day, Nixon’s campaign went even further, distributing 25,000 thimbles that were inscribed, “Elect Nixon: Put a Needle in the PAC,” and using anonymous phone bankers to call registered Democrats and ask, “Did you know that Jerry Voorhis is a Communist?” In his famous 1950 Senate campaign against Rep. Helen Gahagan Douglas, Nixon distributed a so-called “Pink Sheet” purporting to show that Douglas voted down the line with Rep. Vito Marcantonio, a Communist sympathizer who represented East Harlem in Congress. The Pink Sheet claimed that “during her five years in Congress, Helen Douglas has voted 353 times exactly as has Vito Marcantonio, the notorious Communist party-line Congressman from New York,” and that Nixon had voted “exactly the opposite to the Douglas-Marcantonio axis.” In fact, most of these votes concerned routine procedural matters. Only 76 of the votes referenced in the Pink Sheet concerned substantive legislative matters; Douglas voted with Marcantonio only 66 of those roll calls (of the 66 roll calls, Marcantonio and Douglas voted with a majority of Democratic House members 53 times). Nixon himself had voted with Marcantonio on 112 roll calls, despite the Pink Sheet’s claim that he voted “exactly the opposite to the Douglas-Marcantonio axis.” All of which is to say that Richard Nixon was sometimes a hard-working and conscientious anti-Communist congressman. But on the campaign trail he lied with reckless abandon, thus blurring the line that separated him from Joe McCarthy.
October 13, 2006
Free Speech Imperiled II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 02:05 PM EST In my original post on this subject, I gave three instances of leftist thugs—storm troopers without the uniforms—preventing people whose ideas they disapproved of from speaking. (1) The recent event at Columbia University. (2) The intimidation at Smith College until the United States ambassador to the United Nations was forced to withdraw as a speaker. (3) The numerous instances when William Shockley was prevented from speaking by those who claimed “no free speech for racists.” I invited Mr. Zeitz to give examples of rightist thugs preventing, by act or threat of violence, people whose views they disapproved of from speaking. He gives several instances, not a single one of which is apposite. In each of Mr. Zeitz’s examples, agents of the state, acting under orders from duly constituted authority, carried out those orders in ways consistent with the Constitution. They bear not the slightest resemblance to the suppression of free speech by thugs. Of the demonstrators at the 2004 Republican Convention, Mr. Zeitz writes, “In this case, the thug was Michael Bloomberg, who trampled over the First Amendment to please the visiting Republican dignitaries.” Mayor Bloomberg may have erred on the side of caution in giving his orders (I don’t know), but perhaps he was influenced by fear of a repeat of the fiasco at the WTO meeting in Seattle, when leftist demonstrators made a shambles of the city and the meeting, and was determined, quite properly, to prevent a repeat of that in New York. A “thug” is “a brutal ruffian or assassin: gangster, killer.” That is not a description of Michael Bloomberg, even metaphorically. Mr. Zeitz describes Steven Howards as “a Denver man who was arrested by the Secret Service for having the temerity to approach Dick Cheney and criticize the Iraq War.” I have no knowledge of the incident. But the Secret Service has the job of protecting the President and Vice President from harm, not protecting free speech. For obvious reasons, they are going to prevent a stranger from getting in the face of the Vice President, and quite properly so. What should they have done instead? Stood by until he pulled a gun? Mr. Zeitz was not alive when President Kennedy was murdered and was reading comic books (other than Batman) when President Reagan nearly lost his life to an assassin. If protecting the lives of our elected officials requires the Secret Service to prevent some jerk from exercising “free speech” in a possibly threatening manner in the immediate vicinity of the Vice President, I imagine that is just fine with 99.9 percent of the American population. Again, not a thug or thuggish behavior in sight. As for Cindy Sheehan and Beverly Young at the 2006 State of the Union address, they violated the rules under which they were admitted to the gallery of the House (no demonstrations, no signs, no disruption of any sort) and were removed, entirely without violence, as a result. No thugs, no thuggery.
Again, I invite Mr. Zeitz to “provide a list of instances over the last 25 years when thugs of the right have prevented free speech . . .”
He has not yet done so. If he can’t give any, he might at least say so and consider why that is.
Peggy Noonan, in this morning’s Opinionjournal.com has thoughts on this that I think are well worth reading.
October 13, 2006
Moral Eras Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:30 AM EST Josh Zeitz responds to John Steele Gordon, saying that by Mr. Gordon’s calculus “the years 1983 and 2006 can be considered fairly contiguous.” Mr. Gordon had indeed written that “I really don’t think that in 1983 we had a different civilization . . . with different moral standards, different notions as to what constitutes right and wrong, and different ideas of what ideals colleges should defend.” I’ve been mulling this over, and have decided to respond with a bold “Well, yes and no” To start with one of the issues our bloggers were originally discussing, at various points between 1983 and 2006 people running American colleges and universities have had very labile ideas about the virtues of free speech. In 1983, as it happens, I remember being not that faintly patronized as a free-speech absolutist, an atavistic, unreconstructed dime-store version of John Stuart Mill, when I failed to see certain allegedly fatal flaws in Mill’s On Liberty. This was at a staff meeting at Columbia, composed of people who were teaching that text. Having lived through various debates about university speech codes, I can assure Mr. Gordon that the ideal of free speech remains contested in universities. My impression is that in the mid-1960s the ideal was less confused and contested, at least among academics, than it has been since, or was before, and I do not know how this is going to come out. Until recently, my guess had been that people whose speech is itself vulnerable to repression would become more militant about defending free speech, so that the sense on the left that the War on Terror has made some unpopular speech more vulnerable would make people on the left more solicitous about other people’s speech rights. Last week’s events at Columbia suggest that I may have been overly sanguine about this, and I have since heard academics murmuring approvingly when one of their number distinguished “speech that makes students feel uncomfortable and unsafe” from the speech we permit in classrooms. So we have not had a single ideal about academic free speech since 1983, stretching through 2006. We have rather had a series of controversies. What about John Steele Gordon’s notion that in 1983 and in 2006 we have the same civilization, with the same moral standards? I was in my thirties in 1983, and possibly like Mr. Gordon, I still tend to think of it as contiguous with the present. On the other hand, Bowers v. Harwick, which affirmed the right of a state to criminalize consensual homosexual relations, was decided in 1986. Seventeen years later, the Supreme Court overturned Bowers in Lawrence v. Texas. The courts have moved to the right in many respects, but not in this one. Within my lifetime, homosexuals in Great Britain were subject to court-ordered pseudo-scientific medical torment—the genius Alan Turing was driven to suicide by such treatment—and consensual homosexual relations were a frequently punished crime in both this country and in Great Britain. That now seems barbarous to a significant majority of Americans and British subjects, and my guess is that within 50 years Bowers v. Hardwick will look like medieval barbarism, and 1983 will look like a very different moral era from 2006. Similarly, in 1983 abortion rights seemed very secure. They are certainly less secure now, and whichever way debates about the use of fetal stem cells comes out, my guess is that the losing side is going to be seen as barbarous by posterity. My guess is that in 1983, no one would have predicted the current controversy being decided against medical research, or imagined that morning-after pills, had they existed, would soon enough be held up by the FDA for years, simply because they ran afoul of the moral convictions of a smallish portion of the electorate. In 1983 I do not think that American newspapers and magazines would have generally failed to reprint profoundly newsworthy Danish cartoons which had provoked death threats from Islamists, and congratulated themselves on their prudence for so failing, nor do I think that The New York Review of Books would have published an article suggesting that the Israelis had no right to a state, nor do I think that taxes on the estates of multimillionaires (indeed, on billionaires) would have been widely excoriated as indefensible “taxes on death itself.” So in some ways, 2003 was indeed a different moral universe.
October 13, 2006
Free Speech Imperiled Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:00 AM EST Regarding the recent events at Columbia University, where left-wing student protesters interrupted and “shut down” an appearance by Jim Gilchrist, the head of the Minutemen Project, John Steele Gordon wrote: “I again invite Mr. Zeitz to provide a list of instances over the last 25 years when thugs of the right have prevented free speech, such as thugs of the left have frequently done over the last quarter century. If he can’t, perhaps he could at least spare us another exercise in arrogance mixed with condescension.” First, it’s worth noting that in today’s New York Times, Norman Siegel, the former director of the New York Civil Liberties Union and a leading New York liberal, wrote, “Free speech is premised on the neutral principle that everyone has the fundamental right to say what he or she wants on any subject, regardless of the content of one’s views or the stridency of one’s language. Any deviation from this long-honored principle, especially at American colleges and universities, must be rejected as undermining a cornerstone of our basic freedoms.” Siegel was referring specifically to the events at Columbia. Like most liberals, but unlike the crude caricature of liberals that Mr. Gordon routinely promulgates, Siegel takes free speech very seriously. Why the New York Times didn’t cover the story, I don’t know. I certainly agree it was a story that demanded coverag—and especially from the hometown newspapers—but in equating The New York Times’s
editorial decisions with liberalism, Mr. Gordon applies some rather strained logic. Mr. Gordon invites me to “provide a list of instances over the last 25 years when thugs of the right have prevented free speech . . .” Where shall we start? Perhaps in 2004, right here in New York, during the GOP national convention, when 1,800 protesters were arrested by city policemen—who, I should stress, were only following the directives of the mayor. In this cas, the thug was Michael Bloomberg, who trampled over the First Amendment to please the visiting Republican dignitaries. Of 1,700 cases that were reviewed, at least 91 percent ended in an acquittal or dropped charges. Small compensation for the 1500-plus people who spent a night in lockup. Or we could talk about Steven Howards, a Denver man who was arrested by the Secret Service for having the temerity to approach Dick Cheney and criticize the Iraq War. Or the two other Coloradoans who are suing the Secret Service for having ejected them from a public presidential forum, on grounds that they had an antiwar bumper sticker on their car. Or Jeff and Nicole Rank, a couple from West Virginia who were arrested at a Bush rally in Charleston for the insidious crime of sporting anti-Bush T-shirts. Or Cindy Sheehan, the controversial antiwar protester who was ejected from the House gallery on the night of the President’s 2006 State of the Union speech, for wearing an antiwar T-shirt. Or, to be perfectly fair, Beverly Young, the wife of a Republican congressman who was also ejected from the gallery, for wearing a “Support the Troops” T-shirt. Both Sheehan and Young were booted at the behest of the Republican leadership. Mr. Gordon is a black-and-white kind of guy, so he’ll almost certainly muster up a lame retort. Or, he’ll just repeat the worn cry, “LIBERAL LIBERAL LIBERAL,” which he often substitutes for logic. I suspect his interest isn’t so much in defending free speech as in taking liberals out to the woodshed. Perhaps he’ll prove me wrong. I am reminded of two occasions at Swarthmore College, the very liberal Quaker institution in Pennsylvania where I spent four happy years as an undergraduate. Swarthmore is so notoriously liberal that Vice President Spiro Agnew purportedly dubbed it the “Kremlin on the Crum”—a typically Agnewesque, alliterative reference to the college’s physical location by a lovely, winding stream called Crum Creek. During my sophomore year, a small group of student conservatives managed to win grant money to bring high-profile conservative luminaries to campus for a semester-long lecture series. William F. Buckley, Phyllis Schlafly and Dinesh D’Souza were the headliners. They each drew a packed house, and while some campus lefties jeered and booed, on the whole, the very left-wing student body at Swarthmore thoroughly enjoyed the series. We asked lots of questions—some challenging, others sophomoric (because, hey, we were college sophomores; what else were we to do?)—and gladly applauded every sharp rejoinder that these talented wordsmiths hurled our way. We were liberal, but we were also impressed by Buckley’s wit and presence, Schlafly’s moral certainty, and D’Souza’s brash intellectual appeal. The state of affairs just isn’t as bad as John Steele Gordon would have us believe. Unless you get your news primarily from Fox and the New York Sun, in which case I’m sorry to inform you that the sky is falling.
October 12, 2006
Like a Frog Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:30 PM EST There has been much talk on this blog of late about the movie High Noon and exactly what sort of movie it is. I haven’t seen it in quite some time, although that was more recently than when it first opened, when I saw it as a young boy. By all accounts it is one of the masterpieces of American cinema. But I confess I have no appetite for analyzing works of art, be they novels or movies or paintings or whatever. And make that double for analyzing the politics of such creations, explicitly political works excepted, of course. But the number of those that live beyond the age of their creation is notably few. I haven’t heard of any Clifford Odets revivals lately. Analyzing always reminds me of the remark by the inimitable E. B. White: “Humor is like a frog, you can dissect it, but it dies in the process.” Once you start teasing apart the characters and motivations and the author’s intent and whathaveyou, the magic fizzes away just as surely as the life of the frog. I will order it from Netflix and renew my acquaintance, but don’t expect me to analyze its parts, although I might have a good word to say for one of God’s finest creations, the face of the young Grace Kelly.
October 12, 2006
On Carl Foreman Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:00 PM EST Some brief notes on Josh Zeitz’s remarks on Carl Foreman and High Noon: Josh writes that “labeled an uncooperative witness, Foreman was informally banned from working in Hollywood and was forced to relocate to England, where he enjoyed success as a television and film producer until his return to the United States in the mid-1970s.” This is all true, but it is worth realizing that Foreman was not only forced to relocate to England, he was lucky to get there. Foreman left because he had been warned that the State Department was about to lift his passport, so he hastened to get out while the going was good. After he arrived, the State Department did lift his passport, apparently thinking that the British would expel him and force him back to the U.S., where he would again be blacklisted and possibly be prosecuted. At any rate, this is what I have heard from Carl Foreman’s family, who happen to be my friends. In the event, the British did not expel the passportless Foreman, possibly because, as Winston Churchill later said to him, “In this country, we do not care what a man did while he was a boy.” Churchill and Foreman admired each other, and Churchill was interested in having Foreman make the film of his early life, which he eventually did, the splendid Young Winston.
Josh ponders whether High Noon “is either a Western allegory that seeks to apply the lessons of Munich to the Cold War era [or] a Western allegory that scolds otherwise good, churchgoing people for abandoning and turning on their neighbors—otherwise put, the townspeople who sell out Will Kane are stand-ins for the thousands of Americans who blacklisted or identified their neighbors as communists during the age of McCarthy.” He writes that he originally thought the first, and now thinks the second. Foreman’s family, and a 20-page letter Foreman wrote early in his exile, suggest that High Noon changed its meaning as he worked on it. He began playing with the idea in the later 1940s, at which time he apparently thought he was writing something about the United Nations; his son is not sure quite what Carl Foreman meant by this but thinks it is extremely unlikely that his father was at that moment intending to make a hardcore anti-Soviet point. But as the Red Scare mounted in intensity, Foreman’s own purposes changed, and by the time he made the movie, he was indeed making an allegory of the McCarthy period.
October 12, 2006
Historical Contingency Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:00 AM EST John Steele Gordon suggested in an earlier post that contingencies drive history. That is, in the absence of an important event like a war, change occurs at a very slow pace, if in fact anything changes at all. Thus, by his rendering, the years 1983 and 2006 can be considered fairly contiguous. In the absence of an important contingency—a war, a tsunami, a major technological shift, a plague—20-odd years is too short a period to allow for major shifts in popular mentality or worldview. Or, as Mr. Gordon put it: “The temporal space between 1983 and 2006 fits comfortably within the middle portion of a single lifetime. Nor has there been some titanic historical event, such as World War I, that remade the world in those 23 years. So I really don’t think that in 1983 we had a different civilization . . . with different moral standards, different notions as to what constitutes right and wrong, and different ideas of what ideals colleges should defend.”
Ignoring for the moment the possibility that the period between 1983 and 2006 has, in fact, borne witness to some fairly significant contingencies (the end of the Cold War; the AIDS crisis; 9/11), still, the questions of what drives history and at what pace history moves are worthy of our attention.
I sometimes assign students an article on counterfactual history that appeared a few years back in The Journal of American History. Gary J. Kornblith, the author, poses the following question: Had Henry Clay won the 1844 presidential election, would there have been a Civil War? It’s a fascinating proposition, and easy to imagine. The 1844 results were extremely close. Had the antislavery Liberty Party not fielded a candidate that year, and had that candidate not siphoned off a few thousand Whig votes in New York State, Clay almost certainly would have carried the Empire State and with it the electoral college. Counterfactually, no President James Polk means no Mexican-American War. No Mexican-American War means no new Western territory. No new Western territory means no political crisis of 1850 and, quite possibly, no dissolution of the bisectional second party system that gave Whigs and Democrats equally strong representation in both the North and South. No political crisis, no Republican party. No Republican party, no Abe Lincoln. No Abe Lincoln, no Civil War.
Counterfactual history is an interesting topic in and of itself. But for present purposes, let’s focus on the question of historical causality. To imagine that a Henry Clay victory in 1844 would have changed the course of history and allowed America to avoid the Civil War is to assume that contingencies, like elections or wars, drive the pace and direction of history.
But there are other ways to think about historical causality and change. Michael Holt, a leading historian of antebellum politics, famously argued that the political crisis of the 1850s—namely, the dissolution of the bisectional second party system and its replacement by a sectional party system—was partly a natural result of subtle political changes. For 25 years Whigs and Democrats defined themselves around major questions concerning political economy: banking, currency, internal improvements, and the like. As these issues were slowly but surely resolved, with Democrats winning most but not all of the battles, they lost their saliency. By 1850 many Americans were no longer engaged by the parties, because the parties came increasingly to sound identical to each other. In the absence of meaningful ideological differences between Whigs and Democrats, a political realignment was almost certain. That it happened to be a sectional realignment was certainly not foreordained. But events (contingencies) helped drive the process in a particular direction, and at a particular pace.
If we accept Holt’s argument, then contingencies are still important. (Not only did the Mexican-American War introduce the contentious question of whether to allow slavery in the new Western territories; even less directly, the California Gold Rush of 1849 provided America with a new influx of specie and rendered obsolete the heated debate between Whigs and Democrats over paper currency.) Yet equally important are subtle changes that can and do occur in the absence of major events. Holt’s argument clearly implies that a political realignment would have occurred in the absence of President James Polk and the Mexican-American War, and that realignment might very well have been sectional.
Taking an even longer view, historians like Eric Foner and Eugene Genovese have demonstrated that by the mid-1850s many Northerners and Southerners came to embrace competing and mutually incompatible ideas about political economy. At the center of their disagreement was slavery. Many Northerners believed that slavery destroyed the economic, social, and cultural strength of the region in which it existed; many Southerners, in turn, believed that slavery was a necessary feature of a democratic and equal society (for white Americans). Could two sections of the country continue to move so far apart ideologically, largely as a result of subtle economic and social trends, without confronting the question of disunion? Probably not. In the counterfactual event of an 1844 Henry Clay victory, perhaps the war might have started in 1880, or in 1900, rather than 1860. But the conflict over slavery was, to paraphrase William Henry Seward, an irrepressible conflict.
Bringing it all back home, I don’t buy Mr. Gordon’s argument that something big needs to happen to create a shift in political course, mentality or outlook. Contingency is important, but alone it cannot explain historical change. |
