December 8, 2006
Jeane Kirkpatrick, 1926-2006 Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:30 PM EST Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan’s first U.N. ambassador, has died, peacefully in her sleep according to reports, at the age of 80. Like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, she represented the United States in that body with intellectual force, wit, and honesty, and, as a result, she earned many enemies both abroad and at home. Why, can be seen clearly in the speech she made to the 1984 GOP Convention, in which she pointed out, over and over and over, how the “San Francisco Democrats” (the Democrats that year had held their convention in San Francisco, but the phrase has lived on, thanks to that city’s famously liberal politics) always blamed America first. Liberals never tire of using the phrase “speaking truth to power,” almost always in a context in which the phrase is utterly empty of real meaning, but Jeane Kirkpatrick was one of those people who spoke truth to jerks, such as those who threatened her safety at Smith College, as was recently discussed on this blog. Jerks are an unforgiving bunch. It is ironic that when she made the speech Jeane Kirkpatrick was still a Democrat, not switching her registration until the following year. In her student days she had been a Marxist. She will be missed. If a person can be measured by his or her enemies, Ms. Kirkpatrick stood tall.
December 8, 2006
Plagiarism and Historical Fiction Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:30 AM EST An interesting article in yesterday’s New York Times describes a pseudoscandal alleging plagiarism by Ian McEwan. The writer for the Mail on Sunday who relayed the charge has managed to provoke a remarkable level of indignation from writers, a class of men and women who seem generally more exhilarated by the humiliation of a better-paid member of their profession than moved to solidarity with a rival. The details of the allegation are printed in the article, but in brief, McEwan’s novel Atonement describes a scene in a hospital during the Second World War and uses material from a biography. The allegation of plagiarism seems truly absurd, and some of the writers who have written letters to that effect, many of them published in the Telegraph, include Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, John Updike, Zadie Smith, Martin Amis, and, most remarkably, Thomas Pynchon. A copy of Pynchon’s letter appears in the Times.
If you read the article on line you have to click on the document to increase its size. That is very much worth doing. The letter is quite beautifully written, and if you know the novels, is fascinatingly different from Pynchon’s other voices. It includes a few meditations on what it means to write historical fiction, which should interest any reader of this blog. I find it consoling to reflect that this intervention by Pynchon, who has long been famous for shunning publicity of any kind, is possibly the most effective balm for the pain of being accused of a shameful thing, however unjustly. I certainly hope McEwan takes it that way.
December 7, 2006
Been There, Done That Posted by Richard F. Snow at 05:00 PM EST In 1956 John Masters published a wonderful memoir called Bugles and a Tiger. By then he had been living in America for years pursuing a highly successful career as a novelist, but this book told of a very different life indeed, that of an officer in the old Indian Army commanding Gurkha troops on the Northwest Frontier. It followed him from his days in Sandhurst, the British West Point, in the mid-1930s up to 1939 and the outbreak of World War II. I just recently learned he had written a sequel, The Road Past Mandalay, that takes him through the war, and I found a copy. It’s every bit as good as its predecessor—which is to say, about as good as a memoir can be—but at the beginning it gave me a feeling of dislocation. That’s because Lieutenant Masters and his Gurkha battalion are sent to Iraq, and here are names—Basra, Fallujah, Baghdad—very familiar to twenty-first-century Americans, along with the narrow old streets, the parched landscapes, the unpredictability of allies, the logistical miscalculations and all the rest. To someone who doesn’t know a great deal about the opening phases of World War II in the Middle East, it’s surprising and slightly eerie. Here’s Masters: “We were going to Basra in fulfillment of a treaty pledge to protect Iraq should its recent independence be threatened by anyone; and it was certainly being threatened by Germany; or shortly would. It was strictly a standard trooping movement. Nothing had been loaded or packed for an assault landing . . .” Then, having steamed into the Persian Gulf, Masters is called by his colonel, Willy Weallens (who in the face of incessant calamity has a favorite, all-purpose phrase that I think could offer comfort to any of us: “Oh, well, worse things happen at sea”). “’We’re going to make an assault landing,” he said... “Jesus Christ. No assault landing craft, only the ship’s lifeboats. No covering fire. . . . Where in hell was the reserve ammunition packed? The mortar bombs? Who was responsible for this bloody mess anyway? . . . “The company commanders arrived and Willy explained what had happened. Some weeks earlier an Iraqi politician, Rashid Ali, had, with three others, formed a cabal and overthrown the government. The Golden Square, as the cabal called itself, was pro-Hitler. They had just informed England that Iraq did not need to be helped, since she was not threatened by anyone, except indeed the force now steaming from India to her assistance. She would resist the landing of that force, and would get help wherever she could . . .” In the event, they were able to land unopposed. But soon Masters finds himself lying in a sweltering marsh listening to another unit “fighting their way into the old city to give us all more elbow room. They had located a strong post held by a few Iraqi regulars, and the brigadier ordered us to support them in an attack. Willy and I drove into the narrow, stinking alleys to co-ordinate details with their colonel. We found him in a battered police station his battalion had captured during the night. He looked tired but cheerful and he had a peculiar gleam in his eye. “’Morning, Willy,’ he said as we arrived, and then at once, ‘Do you know where our two-inch and three-inch mortars are? The ones that were N.A. [army notation for “not available”] all over India? . . . The Iraqi Army has them.’ “This turned out to be true. The British government had been supplying Iraq and other ‘allies’ with modern arms, leaving none for the regular battalions of the Indian Army, a force which even Mr. Churchill came to learn was of more value to our cause than the Arab conscripts now busily supporting the Golden Square’s Nazi-inspired revolution. “We put in a brisk attack, alongside the 2/7th Gurkhas, more to get at our mortars than out of any pique at the enemy, who fired a few shots and fled. We settled down to hold Basra until more troops came, to release us for operations further upcountry.” In time they were upcountry: We “captured the Euphrates crossing at Falluja in a smart, fierce fight. The road to Baghdad lay open. . . . We got orders to fly to Mosul, three hundred miles farther north. The Golden Square had fled, and the Iraqi army . . . signed an instrument of surrender in Baghdad; but there was no knowing whether the garrison commanders in the rest of the country would adhere to it. Mosul we had to have at once, to prevent the German bombers using it; but the very presence of the bombers would stiffen any resolve the local commander might have to fight on . . .” Then British history diverges from ours (so far), for it’s on to Syria and, after that, Iran. “We were to continue our advance at 1400 hours. But we did not, for a signal came that the Persians had surrendered. The lunch turned into a party. We found some of our beer and whisky ration and, joined by anybody who happened to be traveling on the road, sang and ate and drank till late at night. “We settled down to make a camp near Karind, and train for whatever might befall us next. We had started the great war for democracy by invading three neutral countries against the wishes of their inhabitants or, at least, of their governments. The supply of opponents was now running out. Surely our next move must be to the big one—to the Western Desert, to fight Rommel.” Masters went on to become a brigadier and receive high decorations for gallantry. He did not return to Iraq, but he leaves us with an arresting observation made by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s far-sighted lieutenant Harry Hopkins, who visited there not long after Masters had moved out: “The Persian Gulf is the a--hole of the world, and Basra is eighty miles up it.”
December 6, 2006
In Defense of Eric Foner II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:00 PM EST Joshua Zeitz takes me to task for writing that Eric Foner characterized the Mexican Cession as “egregious imperialism.” Mr. Zeitz is right, he did not, he characterized it as a land grab, which is not necessarily the same thing as imperialism. He writes, “Foner’s argument is not that the Mexican Cession was an example of brutal imperialism, but rather that it was a land grab initiated on a lie. He’s comparing George W. Bush’s spurious claims that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and ties to Al Qaeda to Polk’s claim, likely inaccurate or false, that Mexican forces had initiated an attack on American soil.” The causus belli in the Mexican War was that “Mexico has . . . shed American blood upon the American soil.” But that rested on the very dubious claim that Texas extended to the Rio Grande, not just to the Nueces River, the traditional southern boundary of Texas. But it was good enough for both President Polk and Congress, which voted to declare war, 174-14 in the House and 40-2 in the Senate. Polk knew perfectly well the shaky ground on which his request for a declaration of war rested. George W. Bush, relying on the judgment of every Western intelligence service from the CIA (the head of the CIA called it a “slam dunk”) to the Mossad, was not in any way misleading the Congress or the nation. To call Bush’s statements that Iraq had WMD’s a “lie” is itself a lie. And yet the “Bush lied” meme has been endlessly repeated and accepted by the left as holy writ. The difference between Polk and Bush is obvious to anyone who is interested in truth more than political advantage. He writes, “In an earlier post, Mr. Gordon snidely accused Foner of ‘historical malpractice,’ which is a little bit funny, as Foner, who is regarded as the leading scholar of Reconstruction, is a Bancroft Prize winner with a Ph.D. from Columbia University, where he studied with Richard Hofstadter and now holds a chair in history.” First, I didn’t “snidely” accuse Mr. Foner of anything. I accused him of historical malpractice in a forthright, honest way and gave my reasons for doing so. Second, this is a pure ad hominem argument. Does a Ph.D. and winning a Bancroft make one immune to criticism from anyone who lacks such ornaments on their curriculum vitae? If that is the case, then Michael Belleisles would still have his Bancroft for Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, a book that turned out to be a tissue of lies and a case of deliberate historical malpractice of epic proportions.
He writes, “When Mr. Gordon wins his first Bancroft, he should feel free to judge Foner’s fidelity to the historical profession. Until then, he might want to feign a little more modesty.” I am not likely to win a Bancroft, usually given only to academic historians, but I will criticize anyone I think warrants criticism and give my reasons for doing so. If Mr. Zeitz doesn’t like that, I cheerfully invite him to lump it. To paraphrase Georges Clemenceau, history is too important to be left to a self-declared priesthood of academic historians. Mr. Foner made several historical references to buttress his argument that George Bush is the worst President in history. He argued that Bush, like President Polk, went to war for false reasons. But, see above, Polk knew his reasons were spurious and Bush had every reason to believe his were genuine. He decried the corruption of the Bush administration, comparing it to Warren Harding’s, when, in fact, it has been squeaky clean, and he ignored the far more corrupt Clinton administration, which corruption caused President Clinton himself to suffer severe legal sanctions. He decried Bush’s treatment of foreign terrorists, calling it a flagrant violation of rights the English-speaking people have held dear since Magna Carta, which is both false and nothing at all compared to Franklin Roosevelt’s treatment of native-born American citizens. As I wrote in my initial post, Eric Foner is a distinguished historian. I greatly admire his work on the Reconstruction era. But he is not one bit more equipped or entitled to discuss current-day politics than I or any other American citizen. I don’t care if he has Bancroft Awards lined up on his mantelpiece by the yard. The article I criticized was a work of politics, not history, and it misused history for political purposes.
December 5, 2006
In Defense of Eric Foner Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:45 PM EST John Steele Gordon claims that Eric Foner characterized the Mexican Cession “as egregious imperialism.” In fact, in his Washington Post op-ed, Foner claimed no such thing. Assessing the Presidency of James Polk, Foner wrote: “Polk should be remembered primarily for launching that unprovoked attack on Mexico and seizing one-third of its territory for the United States. Lincoln, then a member of Congress from Illinois, condemned Polk for misleading Congress and the public about the cause of the war—an alleged Mexican incursion into the United States.”
Foner’s argument is not that the Mexican Cession was an example of brutal imperialism, but rather that it was a land grab initiated on a lie. He’s comparing George W. Bush’s spurious claims that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and ties to Al Qaeda to Polk’s claim, likely inaccurate or false, that Mexican forces had initiated an attack on American soil.
In an earlier post, Mr. Gordon snidely accused Foner of “historical malpractice,” which is a little bit funny, as Foner, who is regarded as the leading scholar of Reconstruction, is a Bancroft Prize winner with a Ph.D. from Columbia University, where he studied with Richard Hofstadter and now holds a chair in history. When Mr. Gordon wins his first Bancroft, he should feel free to judge Foner’s fidelity to the historical profession. Until then, he might want to feign a little more modesty.
“History, after all, deals with the past,” Mr. Gordon chides, “not the present, let alone the future. And history can turn on a dime.” In fact, Foner was careful to note exactly this point, explaining that Andrew Johnson was once regarded as a highly successful President, whereas today he is regarded as an abject failure. “It is impossible to say with certainty how Bush will be ranked in, say, 2050,” Foner admits. “But somehow, in his first six years in office he has managed to combine the lapses of leadership, misguided policies and abuse of power of his failed predecessors. I think there is no alternative but to rank him as the worst president in U.S. history.”
I would remind Mr. Gordon that he recently participated in an exercise that required him to rank in order of overall influence 100 Americans, including many who are still alive and whose work is not yet complete. (Hypocrisy?) If one of the best American historians of our time isn’t qualified to rank George W. Bush after his first six years in office, who is? Surely John Steele Gordon isn’t peerless.
December 5, 2006
The Mexican Cession Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:15 AM EST I wrote in my previous post that I would discuss the Mexican Cession, which Professor Eric Foner regarded in a recent Washington Post op-ed piece as egregious imperialism. Under the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican War in 1848, Mexico ceded most of what is now the southwest quarter of the United States, including all of California, Nevada, and Utah, most of Arizona, and large areas of Colorado, Wyoming, and New Mexico. It also abandoned all claims to Texas east of the Rio Grande River. It amounted to a territorial acquisition of 529,017 square miles, about 14 percent of current U.S. territory. In exchange, the United States paid Mexico $15,000,000 and assumed the claims of U.S. citizens against the Mexican government amounting to $3,250,000. It was, to be sure, a fabulous bargain, some of the most beautiful, fertile, and resource-rich land on the planet for $34 a square mile. It is quite impossible to imagine the present United States without it: No Hollywood, no Grand Canyon, no Las Vegas, no Yosemite. But was it imperialism? To be sure, we were able to make the bargain because we had militarily defeated Mexico in a war that an expansionist United States had in large measure initiated. Mexico didn’t have much choice. But that, in itself, doesn’t make it imperialism if that term is defined as one nation assuming political hegemony over another. Had the United States followed the wishes of Secretary of State James Buchanan and many others, we would have taken all of Mexico. That would have been imperialism with a capital I. The territory that we did acquire was largely unpopulated by Mexicans. Except for the California missions and a few settlements in New Mexico, such as Taos and Santa Fe, it was empty. (Like the people of the 1840s, Mexicans and Americans alike, I am, of course, ignoring the Indian population. That, I think, is best treated as a separate issue.) The total Mexican population of the Mexican Cession was about 15,000 people. Few if any decided to leave after the United States acquired the territory, which would indicate that their ties to Mexico were as weak as the Mexican hold on the land. The area we acquired from Mexico was “Mexican” because that country had inherited Spain’s claim to the territory. But that was all it was, a claim. It is a settled principle of international law that claims to territory have little validity unless backed by occupation. No one thinks that England violated Spanish sovereignty in settling the east coast of North America, despite Spain’s claim to the whole of the New World except Brazil. In effect, we bought Mexico’s claim to this territory for a considerable sum (about what we had paid for Louisiana, a far larger area, four decades earlier, and twice what we would pay for Alaska, slightly larger, two decades hence). Over the next 60 years the United States proceeded to do what Spain and Mexico had not, occupy the territory and make it its own. Compare this with Britain’s acquisition of Quebec in 1763 after victory in the Seven Years’ War. It took it by right of conquest, and nearly two and half centuries later, the divide between English- and French-speaking Canadians is still the principle fault line in that country’s politics. Or consider the German acquisition of Alsace-Lorraine after the Franco-Prussian War. That, perhaps the stupidest single act of international politics in world history, caused deep, bitter resentment in France (the figurative statue of Strasbourg in the Place de la Concorde in Paris was draped in mourning until 1918) and was a prime cause of the First World War, because it made impossible the resumption of friendly relations between Germany and France. But there has never been a serious irredentist movement in Mexico regarding the Mexican Cession. Indeed, when in 1853, it seemed that a railroad to California from the Eastern United States would need to take a southern route, Mexico, no longer under the gun of military defeat and occupation, agreed to sell the United States an additional 29,640 square miles of what is now southern Arizona and New Mexico, the so-called Gadsden Purchase. That would have been a very strange action for a country that felt it had been territorially raped.
December 4, 2006
On Class Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:45 PM EST I hope I might be able to draw a connection between two topics that recently piqued the interest of my fellow AmericanHeritage.com bloggers. In late November John Steele Gordon and I exchanged some thoughts about affirmative action in college admissions. He is categorically against it, while I’m more accepting of the idea that universities should be permitted leeway in creating a diverse student population, insomuch as diversity enhances the learning process for all members of the college community. In a seemingly unrelated exchange, last week Mr. Gordon and I wrote about the artist Norman Rockwell. I suggested that Rockwell was attentive to issues of class and race. Mr. Gordon responded, “To me, class is almost entirely an intellectual construct with very limited utility for explaining the real world.”
As it happens, this week is admissions interview week at Cambridge University, where I teach. In the English system, faculty members conduct all of the admissions interviews and render the final admissions decisions. It’s not a process I particularly enjoy, as I’m a lot nicer a guy than Mr. Gordon gives me credit for, and I find it difficult to turn away so many bright and enthusiastic students. Too many fine candidates, too few spaces. But British academia places a high premium on this process, so I have interrupted an otherwise productive research sabbatical to meet with several dozen aspiring Cambridge historians.
In England, whatever affirmative action one finds in college admissions is mostly informed by class rather than race. I often tell my English students that the difference between our countries is that America has deep class divisions but pretends it does not, while the U.K. has less inequality but pretends that its Victorian-era class system is still rigidly in place. If race looms large in America, class looms large in Britain. This is an over-exaggeration, to be sure, but my basic point is that Mr. Gordon is both right and wrong about class.
Like gender or race, class is surely an intellectual construction. Such historians as Grace Hale (who writes about the invention of whiteness), Stuart Blumin (who writes about the creation of the American middle class), and Lawrence Levine (who wrote about the emergence of class stratification in American culture) have made precisely this point. They would also agree that, once constructed, class assumes tremendous importance as a social category. In England, it determines what kind of secondary school a university applicant attended, how much social capital, savvy, and networking assets he brings to the admissions process, and how well she presents herself in an admissions interview. The trick for the admissions officer is to see past the obvious differences between candidates from different backgrounds. The applicant from a prestigious private school (which the British call a public school) may submit more polished written work than the candidate from a state school, but does that mean he is a more promising student? Does it mean he will excel better in the classroom? Not necessarily.
In a more benign way, scholars and memoirists have written a rich body of literature chronicling the differences in mentality, taste, and outlook between people of different income levels or job categories. One of my favorites is Andrew Hurley’s book Diners, Bowling Alleys and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in the Postwar Consumer Culture. Hurley reminds us that the postwar economic boom may have benefited Americans across class lines, but the aesthetic values they brought to the new consumer culture remained sharply patterned along socioeconomic lines.
All of which is to say, class may very well be an invented category. But once it’s been invented, it assumes meaning and importance.
December 4, 2006
The Other Tree Lighting Ceremony Posted by Ellen Feldman at 02:10 PM EST As we move into the holiday season, citizens will sue local governments over crèches and nativity scenes on town squares; right-wing pundits, who coincidentally are flogging their recent books on the subject, will rail against the lack of Christ in Christmas; and everyone, except retailers, will bemoan the commercialization of the holiday. Some of my colleagues debated the issue here a few months ago. I will eschew argument for the moment in the interest of pure celebration. Last evening, as every first Sunday evening in December for the past 62 years, the annual Park Avenue tree lighting ceremony in New York City brought together just about everybody in a small corner of Manhattan for a moment of joy, hope, and tribute to America’s war dead. The Park Avenue tree-lighting ceremony is little known beyond the neighborhood where it takes place. It boasts none of the grandeur of the Rockefeller Center event, which manages to shut down midtown Manhattan for a good part of the afternoon and evening on which it occurs and features a headline-making, statistically-notable, telegenic tree. (I’m not complaining. I happen to be a sucker for Christmas trees and their lighting in any venue.) Nor does the Park Avenue ceremony have the artistic clout of the unveiling of the tree at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with its gorgeous baroque ornaments and endlessly intriguing nativity scene. The Park Avenue lighting is a homier and, because of its origins, more deeply affecting event. It begins shortly after dark, as small children ride on parents’ shoulders and gambol along sidewalks, and teenagers struggle to hide their excitement beneath a veneer of ennui, and families and couples and singles pour out of their apartment houses, and dogs, sensing that something’s up, strain at their leashes, as they all flow toward the Brick Church at Park Avenue and 91st Street. Only a few blocks are closed to traffic, and people mill in the street and swarm over the dividing islands. Amazingly, there are no traffic jams, honking horns, or incidents of road rage. Here and there someone wanders through the crowd in a Santa suit, others hold candles, and a few sip eggnog decorously. Finally, officials appear on the brightly lit portico of the Brick Church to lead the singing of the favorite carols you remember from grammar school. It’s all easy camaraderie and good cheer, until the closing moments. A bugler steps forward on the portico, and a hush falls over the crowd. As the mournful notes of “Taps” float out into the cold night, small children stop chasing one another and dogs prick up their ears. The adults feel a chill down their backs. The last note dies, and the minister utters a short inclusive prayer about hope and peace and light. Then, one after another, like a wave rushing down the broad avenue as far as the eye can see, the trees on the islands flare in the night. The first Park Avenue tree lighting ceremony was held in 1944 to honor the men and women who had died during World War II. This year the minister spoke of those who had fallen in Iraq and Afghanistan. There have been many, too many, between. Certainly, the trappings of the ritual are Christian, but the impetus behind it and the emotions evoked by it transcend denominational differences and go to the essence of suffering, hope, and the human condition. I wish I could invite all the litigious local citizens, and cantankerous right-wing pundits, and tireless shopping junkies to join the celebration next year, but I fear they would not only crowd the area but spoil the homey uncommercial ambiance and turn a peaceful coming together into one more noisy take-no-prisoners holiday battlefield.
December 4, 2006
Historical Malpractice Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:45 AM EST Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, has an op-ed in today’s Washington Post entitled “He’s the Worst Ever.” Readers will probably not be stunned to learn that the antecedent of the pronoun in the title is George W. Bush. It is not the work of a historian, however; it is a work of politics masquerading as the work of a historian (and a distinguished one, I might add, when he sticks to history). He writes, “He has sought to strip people accused of crimes of rights that date as far back as the Magna Carta in Anglo-American jurisprudence: trial by impartial jury, access to lawyers and knowledge of evidence against them.” But neither Magna Carta nor any subsequent foundational legal document gives these rights to foreign terrorists. He writes, “His administration has adopted policies regarding the treatment of prisoners of war that have disgraced the nation and alienated virtually the entire world.” This simply begs the question of the lawful status of those being held, when, in fact, that status is very much in legitimate question, as the issues raised are novel ones. They are not “prisoners of war” by any reasonable reading of the Geneva Conventions, whether or not they are legally entitled to be treated as such. Professor Foner doesn’t bother to mention the fact that Franklin Roosevelt threw an entire race of United States citizens into concentration camps on no evidence whatsoever and without so much as a hearing. He accuses the Bush administration of being as corrupt as that of Warren Harding. But in fact the Bush administration has been one of the cleanest in history (which is more than can be said for several Republican members of Congress, of course, but Bush heads the executive branch of government, not the legislative one). Professor Foner doesn’t mention the fact that Bush’s predecessor lost his law license for perjury and ran an administration in which several senior members got into serious trouble. The only senior member of the Bush administration to be in legal jeopardy is Scooter Libby, and his legal woes came about because of a “scandal” that, it has finally become clear, was no scandal at all. He writes, “One other president bears comparison to Bush: James K. Polk. . . . Polk should be remembered primarily for launching that unprovoked attack on Mexico and seizing one third of its territory for the United States.” I wonder if the citizens of California, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico rank Polk as low as Professor Foner does. Polk, at No. 50, is one of 17 presidents to make The Atlantic’s 100 Most Influential Americans list, and several of those made it for reasons other than their presidencies (such as the two Adamses, Madison, Grant, and Eisenhower). I will discuss the Mexican Cession in another post, but apparently in Professor Foner’s political cosmology, it is a terrible sin for an American President to vigorously advance American interests and to sometimes use convenient excuses to do so (in which case William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt must also be at the bottom of Professor Foner’s Presidents list). He calls Abraham Lincoln one of our great Presidents, but I can’t help wondering if, had Professor Foner been around then, he would have voted for George McClellan in 1864. After all, McClellan had merely been an abject failure as a general and wanted to sit down and talk rather than fight, while Lincoln had suspended habeas corpus on very dubious legal grounds. I have no problem with Professor Foner or anyone else expressing his or her political opinions in any venue willing to pay for them. But in this piece, Foner damns a President whose administration is not yet three-quarters over, using dubious, highly tendentious, and sometimes flat-out wrong historical analogies to do so while omitting positive achievements, such as a flourishing economy and rapidly decreasing deficit. That seems to me historical malpractice. History, after all, deals with the past, not the present, let alone the future. And history can turn on a dime. Warren Harding’s reputation was sky high when he died in office, and his tomb is the most elaborate of all presidential tombs except Lincoln’s. Harry Truman, on the other hand, was reviled at the end of his Presidency, in large measure for presiding over a difficult war that he had decided to wage. Today he ranks on everyone’s near-great list (he’s No. 21 on the Atlantic’s list of influential Americans). I hereby nominate Professor Foner for this week’s Diane McWhorter award.
December 1, 2006
Norman Rockwell and the Explosion of Wealth III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:15 AM EST Joshua Zeitz writes, “This social commentary is also evident in works such as Breaking Home Ties, which shows the disconnect between a blue-collar man and his college-bound son. If the small-town world that Rockwell chronicled was overwhelmingly white, nevertheless it had undercurrents of class tension, and Rockwell captured these undercurrents with humor and sympathy.” This, I think, is a classic example of how great art is a mirror and we, the audience, tend to see in it what concerns us individually. And thus two people can see two very different things in the same work. Mr. Zeitz is far more sensitive to issues of class than I am. To me, class is almost entirely an intellectual construct with very limited utility for explaining the real world. So I see no class tension in this work at all. It seems to me that one would very seldom find such tension within a family. Were the farmer watching his more prosperous neighbor’s son go off to college instead of his own, it would be a very different story. What I see is a painting full of emotion, not class. A hopeful, excited son about to have his world greatly enlarged, a tired and emotionally reticent father about to have an emptier house (notice how he is holding, almost clutching, his son’s hat along with his own); and a dog who is losing his best friend; all are captured at a highly significant moment in their individual but intertwined lives, each dealing in his own way with the turmoil going on inside himself. We have all been through moments like this, and it is his capturing of such a moment so perfectly, as he did so often, that makes Rockwell the very great artist he is. Using the word artist in its broadest sense, it is an artist’s job to allow us lesser mortals to see ourselves more clearly. Perhaps that’s why Rockwell so often reminds me of Thornton Wilder’s immortal play Our Town. It covers the same territory, small-town America of the first half of the twentieth century, with the same emotional insight.
By the way, I was looking last evening at a book of Rockwell’s paintings that I happen to own, and I noticed something I’ve never noticed before: Rockwell seems to pay extraordinary attention to his subjects’ shoes (or, occasionally, lack thereof). They are always meticulously rendered and add considerably to the painting’s overall impact. I haven’t the faintest idea what significance, Freudian or otherwise, this might have to understanding Rockwell, but I was quite struck by it.
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