February 6, 2006
In a Previous Life I Was William Jennings Bryan Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 06:30 PM EST In a recent interview, the actor and director George Clooney said: “Yes, I’m a liberal, and I’m sick of it being a bad word. I don’t know at what time in history liberals have stood on the wrong side of social issues.” Interesting question. But here’s David Pryce-Jones, reviewing Paul Berman’s new book, Power and the Idealists, in the latest issue of National Review: “In modern times, the Left has been wrong about everything important—with the one exception of Nazism. Wrong about Stalin, wrong about Mao and Castro, wrong to support North Vietnam and the Sandinistas and Milosevic, wrong, wrong, wrong. And now the Left comes out to say that Saddam Hussein should have been allowed to stay in power . . .” Hmmm. Leaving aside a few quibbles about the differences between “Left” and “liberal,” or what constitutes a “social issue,” I think you could safely say that these two fellows seem to disagree. And yet both men’s statements can be defended—if you let them retroactively assign whatever position they like to the Left/liberal side. By the same method, I could make myself clairvoyant about the Super Bowl by looking up the winner of every previous game and saying, “Yup, I would have picked them.” Without this ability to make one’s own rules, however, the analysis gets a lot tougher. What was the “liberal” position on the Civil War—peace or equality? Would today’s liberals, transported back in time, have been gung-ho abolitionists, even at the cost of half a million or so dead? Or would they have marched on Washington with banners reading NO WAR FOR COTTON? Depending on your bias, you can call it either way. In fact, however, the question cannot be answered, because it assumes that today’s political categories would still have some meaning when applied to the United States of 1861—a time when the country was divided to the point of war over an issue that ceased to exist when the war ended. Trying to decide which side today’s liberals would have been on is like trying to decide whether, if you grandmother had wheels, she would have won the Indianapolis 500. Similarly, what would today’s liberals have thought about the Populist movement of the 1890s? To be sure, many of the social reforms the Populists called for were enacted in the succeeding decades. But the glue that held the movement together was a crazy plan to debase the currency, which fortunately for us all was quickly forgotten. Would today’s liberals have embraced a movement of the downtrodden asking for government assistance to protect them against the wealthy and powerful? Or would they have shunned them as a mob of uneducated red-staters with a pronounced anti-urban, anti-immigrant, white-supremacist bias? I’m reminded of the episode of Bewitched in which George Washington pops up in early-1970s America. In a nice touch, the thing that surprises him the most is that his birthday is being celebrated on a Monday instead of the actual date. But then—the entertainment industry having been Clooneyesque even several decades ago—Washington goes on to decry poverty, pollution, and various other 1970s ills, including racial prejudice. Watching this, I thought: “Right, George, you owned slaves—tell me about it.” Putting today’s political categories into a time machine is like putting them into a blender--there’s no way they’ll emerge intact. Yet even if it did make sense, that sort of argument still wouldn’t prove anything. Suppose you grant Mr. Pryce-Jones’s point that a long line of dictators have deserved to be removed from office, and that the Left has supported them all. Does that mean the Left must be wrong about Saddam Hussein? Of course not. Or if a conservative praises the accomplishments of the civil rights revolution, which liberals supported, is he or she required to support racial quotas because liberals support them now? Of course not. Each new issue must be considered on its own merits. Slavishly following the past—even the real past, let alone a slanted version cooked up to fit one’s requirements—is just as likely to yield the wrong answer as the right one. History gives us a wealth of examples, guideposts, food for thought, analogies, parallels, and aids to understanding. But it provides very few unambiguous lessons, and those tend to be general ones about human nature, philosophy, statecraft, and so on. Anyone who crudely projects today’s political divisions into the past in an attempt to bootstrap some historical support for a present-day dispute only shows the weakness of his or her own case.
February 6, 2006
History in the Making: How Old Was Al Lewis Anyway? Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 03:30 PM EST We learned this weekend the sad news that the actor Al Lewis, best known as Grandpa on The Munsters, had died at 95. Then we learned the sad news that Al Lewis had died at 83. Or maybe 82. Then we kept learning that he had died at both ages. As of this writing, no one seems to know to within a decade when Al Lewis was born. His son says he was born in 1923. He himself always claimed he’d been around since 1910. There’s one theory that he lied about his age to get the Grandpa job, feeling that someone in his fifties had a better shot at the part than someone barely forty. The search for Al Lewis’s true age has been feverish in the several days since his death, and it’s a fascinating close-up case study in the difficulty of doing history even about someone very well known in the very recent past. Moreover, was he really a circus performer when he was six? A Ph.D. from Columbia? A member of the Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committee? To check out some of the research that has gone on, and the back and forth in historical consensus it has produced so far, visit the “talk page” that accompanies Wikipedia’s fast-changing biography of the man, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Al_Lewis.
February 3, 2006
Planets and the Power of History Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:15 AM EST We live in a golden age of golden ages. In the last half of the twentieth century, field after field after field of human endeavor burgeoned beyond anyone’s imagination. But perhaps no field has seen its knowledge base increase as much as astronomy. Part of the reason for that, of course, is that the knowledge base was so very small in 1950. The mirror of the largest telescope in the world then was 200 inches across and only film was available to record images. Today giant new telescopes have been built or planned. The largest, the Keck telescope in Hawaii, consists of twin observatories each with a 390-inch mirror. Computer-adjusted mirrors and digital recording of images make unprecedented clarity and precision possible. Further, in 1950 humans were firmly attached to our home planet. I remember looking at a wall chart in a classroom when I was in the fourth grade that showed the earth’s atmosphere in cross section, with its layers such as the troposphere, ionosphere, and stratosphere delineated. Added were such benchmarks as Mt. Everest—not yet climbed—and the highest airplane and balloon flights then achieved. Also marked was “the highest point ever reached by man,” the altitude achieved by a V-2 rocket that had been aimed straight up. If I remember correctly it was 272 miles, only a little over 3 percent of the earth’s diameter. Because of these technological limitations, even the largest and nearest planets and their moons were little more than blurry dots floating in a black sea. We didn’t even know how fast some of the planets rotated on their axes. Boy, what a difference half a century makes. Today you can hit a few buttons on your computer and see the latest images from the rovers that are happily tootling about the Martian landscape or from the Cassini spacecraft now exploring the Saturnian system. And the highest point ever reached by man is now well over eight billion miles away from earth—a million percent of our planet’s diameter—as the Voyager space vehicles that were launched in the 1970s to explore the planets sail majestically off in the direction of the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri. Today every planet in the solar system that was known in 1950 has been explored close up, except Pluto. And a mission to that distant outpost of the solar system took off last week, scheduled to reach it in a decade. But poor Pluto, discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930 at the Lowell observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, is now struggling mightily to maintain its status as a planet. It is a measure of just how far astronomy has come in the last few decades that after several thousand years, it is suddenly not clear what a planet is. The word “planet” comes from the Greek for “wanderer.” The five that were known to the Greeks—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn—look like stars to the naked eye, but unlike stars they don’t stay in the same place in the sky. Instead they seem to wander around in complex ways as they, and the earth, orbit the sun. In 1781, Sir William Herschel discovered Uranus orbiting beyond Saturn. It was clearly a new planet, with a diameter of about 31,000 miles. On January 1, 1801, the first day of the nineteenth century, Giuseppe Piazzi discovered Ceres orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, where it had been suspected for mathematical reasons that a planet was to be found. But Ceres is only about 480 miles in diameter. Soon more of what came to be called asteroids were found in the same area. Today they are generally agreed to be what is left of a failed planet, one that owing to Jupiter’s immense and disruptive gravitational field could not coalesce into a single body. In 1846, after some very fancy mathematics indeed, Neptune was discovered beyond the orbit of Uranus. Again, it was clearly a planet, being nearly the same size as Uranus. The number of planets then remained at eight until Clyde Tombaugh, at the ripe old age of 24 and lacking even a bachelor’s degree, discovered a faint dot of light that had shifted it position between the time photographs were taken on January 23 and January 29, 1930. Its location in the solar system turned out to be well beyond Neptune, and the Lowell Observatory, which had been searching for “Planet X” since 1905, promptly announced on March 13 that Planet X had been found. The number of “planets” in the popular mind rose to nine. Pluto is so faint that little was known besides its orbit for decades, and its diameter was at first wildly overestimated. But it was the only thing known beyond Neptune, so what else could it be but a planet? Then in 1951 Gerard Kuiper (1905-1973), a Dutch-American who was perhaps the greatest planetary astronomer of the twentieth century, predicted the existence of what came to be known as the Kuiper Belt, an area of minor bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune, which he thought would prove to be the source of short-period comets. As the ability to detect faint and distant objects increased by orders of magnitude in the years after Kuiper’s death, he was proved correct. Since 1992 numerous Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) have been found, and at least ten of them are not far from Pluto’s size, which is now known to be about 1,400 miles in diameter, far smaller than Earth’s moon. A recently discovered KBO, called at the moment 2003 UB313, has been found to be considerably larger than Pluto, about 1,800 miles across, as reported in an article published yesterday in Nature. So are these KBOs planets, with many, many more of them undoubtedly to come? Some people, including, for fairly obvious reasons of self-interest, the discoverers of 2003 UB313, have argued exactly that, saying that anything in orbit around the sun and large enough to have been shaped into a sphere by its own gravity is a planet. That, of course, would make Ceres and a few other asteroids planets too. An alternative suggested by some is to continue to call Pluto a planet for historical reasons, but limit the number of planets to nine. Certainly the idea that the sun has nine planets has become deeply embedded in the popular culture, so booting Pluto out of the planetary club would be difficult. But it would essentially render the word planet scientifically meaningless. Personally, I think Pluto must be demoted to being a KBO. Consider this: The eight undoubted planets all share a number of characteristics. (1) They have nearly circular orbits; (2) they orbit in or near the ecliptic (the plane defined by the earth’s orbit); (3) they gravitationally dominate the area of the solar system where they reside, having long since swept up (or flung away) smaller objects; (4) they are all over 3,000 miles in diameter. Pluto has none of these characteristics. Its orbit is elliptical not circular (for 20 years of its 240-year orbit, it is actually closer to the sun than Neptune); its orbit lies at a 17-degree angle to the ecliptic; it orbits along with a cloud of other, similar objects; it is less than half the size of Mercury, the smallest of the planets. And Pluto has many characteristics in common with KBOs, including a specific gravity that is close to the specific gravity of comets and much less than that of the terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars). I’m a great believer in the power of history to shape our understanding of the world. (What historian isn’t?) But history should not dominate science or semantics. And demoting Pluto from planetary status does not, I think, diminish Clyde Tombaugh’s great achievement. Using far more primitive equipment than what is available today, he found a KBO fully 62 years before anyone else did and 21 years before Gerard Kuiper even predicted their existence.
February 2, 2006
Discovering the Real Jesse James: An Interview Posted by Allen Barra at 11:45 AM EST The writer T. J. Stiles’s 2002 book, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War (now a Vintage paperback, $16), took a truly fresh look at an American legend. It was the first book to place the outlaw’s life and legend in a modern context. Stiles was one of the consultants for the new PBS documentary American Experience: Jesse James, which airs nationwide this coming Monday, February 6. I spoke to him about what he’s learned about his extraordinary subject. Your book on Jesse James was a surprise success, and I say surprise because few would have thought there was any new approach to take, so much had been written over the years. What was particularly different about your perspective on him? There are two parts to my answer. First, I took Jesse James seriously as a historical figure. And in taking him seriously I found that he was actually more significant than most people, even well-informed outlaw buffs, ever realized. One of my favorite quotations is by the British historian E. P. Thompson, who wrote in The Making of the English Working Class that his mission was to rescue his subjects from “the enormous condescension of posterity.” For historians, condescension is very attractive, because it seems inherently the most sophisticated position. In Jesse James’s case, this has led some scholars to conclude that the popular-culture myth was more significant than the flesh-and-blood man. I tried to examine the evidence with a clear eye, and I found that the reverse was true. He had a strong sense of mission on top of his obvious greed and violence, and he had a noteworthy impact on his times. The second part of the answer is that I removed Jesse James from the frontier, where we usually think of him, and placed him in an unexpected context: the Civil War and Reconstruction. On the wide spectrum of late-nineteenth-century violence in America, I found him to be closer to the Ku Klux Klan than to Billy the Kid (closer, though not the same). His story opens a window on deep conflicts in American history that still affect us to this day, the struggle over secession and slavery and the fights over emancipation and civil rights that followed. After a career as a Confederate guerrilla, James became an outlaw who was definitely interested in money, first and foremost, but what separated him from virtually every other criminal of his time was his attempt to portray himself in a political light, as both a martyr of and scourge to Radical Republicans. That role, with its overtones of terrorism, obviously speaks to the world we find ourselves in today. So the short answer is, I painted an unexpected portrait of an American icon—and instead of debunking him, I found him to be more important than most of us realized, as well as more relevant to our own time. Would it be fair to say that James became a folk hero largely because of his appeal to the unreconstructed South? Not entirely. There were actually two legends of Jesse James. One existed during his lifetime and was cultivated by the newspaper editor John Newman Edwards and James himself. The other arose very, very late in his life and drew its greatest strength far from his birthplace, through dime novels and ballads. The two legends shared some common traits. Jesse James was depicted as a good man driven outside the law by unjust forces larger than himself, a man whose cunning and skill with a gun outwitted the authorities time and again, who never robbed the average working man or woman but only corporations or the government. The first legend, the one that surrounded him during his lifetime, rested on his status as a Confederate hero in the face of radical Reconstruction. It brought him national attention, and without it the second legend never would have arisen. But Jesse James outlived his political role. When he returned to crime, in 1879, Reconstruction was over, and the Confederates had won. The second act in his bandit career, being devoid of politics, laid the foundation for the dime-novel Robin-Hood myth that is still the predominant image of Jesse James in American culture. Interestingly, his appeal during his lifetime was fairly specific to the border states, especially Missouri and Kentucky. The post-Civil War period in the border states was different from in the Deep South; the white population there was deeply divided. It was in that context that the legend of Jesse James flourished, as he battled local Unionists as well as federal authorities. When he moved to Nashville, in 1875, he felt the need to write letters to the local newspapers to explain his Confederate-hero status back in Missouri. When you read histories of the period, it sometimes seems that Jesse’s brother Frank and their partner Cole Younger were as prominent as Jesse. And Frank James and Cole Younger outlived Jesse by many years, even lending their names to a Wild West show. Yet today they are mere appendages to the Jesse James story. Why did this happen? Jesse James had two things going for him that his brother Frank and Cole Younger lacked: a flare for the dramatic and a high-profile death. In other respects they seem to have been equals. From what little evidence we have of the James-Younger gang’s internal deliberations, we can conclude that they were a small band of comrades in arms, with no operational commander who ruled the others. In addition, Frank and Cole both made statements in later years that show that they shared Jesse’s strong Confederate identity and loathing of Radical Republicans (at least during their outlaw years). But time and time again, Jesse James pushed himself forward, demanding public attention. He made himself the public face of the bushwhacker-bandits. He was the one who wrote letters to the press, who seems to have made dramatic pronouncements during robberies, who forged a particular alliance with the editor John Newman Edwards. When Edwards wrote a newspaper supplement on five of the outlaws, he devoted more than half of the 20 pages to Jesse. Frank was quieter and retreated from the outlaw life (or tried to) after the Northfield debacle in 1876. Jesse kept going and even announced himself by name at his last train robbery. And there’s no denying the incredible drama of his assassination, carried out by his last two gang members in league with the governor of Missouri. There legend cannot improve on the facts. Frank, on the other hand, lived quietly for three decades after his surrender and acquittal, and Cole Younger spent the same period in prison. In the public eye they faded out. Does the American Experience episode on James focus more on his life or on his legend? Or is one inseparable from the other? The film focuses on the flesh-and-blood Jesse James. It shows how much more brutal the real outlaw was than the legendary one, but it also makes clear that he was a product of his time and place, perhaps the most violent time and place in our history. But even the living Jesse was wrapped up in legend, and the film does a good job of sketching out the myths that surrounded him and how they related to his real life. It illustrates, for example, how he became a prisoner of the legend he and John Newman Edwards were creating for him, and turned into a man so hungry for attention that he couldn’t stop his string of high-profile robberies until he was killed. And it suggests how the later myth arose in an America tired of the hatreds of the Civil War, when the battle between populists and corporations had come to dominate the scene. The upcoming Jesse James film, with Brad Pitt, is made from a superb novel, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, by Ron Hansen. With luck it will be the best movie on James. There have been a couple of dozen movies about him. Do you have anything good to say about any of them? I do think the new movie has a good chance of being the best Jesse James film, and for precisely that reason. The question of realism is usually the one I get when it comes to James movies, and I don’t think it should even be asked. The movies have perpetuated an entire mythical universe that is its own thing, created with no desire to check it against the real world. It would be kind of strange to see a film version of James that had him killing unarmed people left and right in the Civil War, or that positioned the first bank robberies in the political turmoil of Missouri in 1866, or that showed Jesse as a media-savvy public figure writing letters and press releases. But do I have anything good to say about them? I did enjoy The Long Riders a great deal; I liked the way the two sets of brothers played off each other, even if they didn’t spend that much time together in actuality. And I’m fond of The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, in part because I like Robert Duvall so much, even as a crazy, over-the-top Jesse. But in terms of realism, none of them measures up.
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