April 7, 2006
The Hegemonic Twinkies of Oppression Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 11:30 AM EST By describing Twinkies, a time-honored working-class nourishment, as “junk food” and proclaiming them “a classic example of capitalism at work,” John Steele Gordon reveals yet again the right-wing proclivities that inform his commentary. Sensitive writers prefer the more empathic term “non-traditional cuisine,” and Mr. Gordon seems completely oblivious of the millions of socially aware individuals who have empowered themselves by shaking off the fetters of so-called market capitalism and constructing homemade Twinkies: http://www.cooks.com/rec/
doc/0,166,139189-241198,00.html http://www.cdkitchen.com/recipes/recs/
36/Homemade_Twinkies58571.shtml often using organic Crisco, artisanal cake mix, and heirloom marshmallow creme. By parroting the Twinkie’s corporate-approved creation myth, Gordon ignores the grim irony of referring to cake pans as “underperforming assets” in the 1930s, a time of mass unemployment. In Gordon’s Eurocentric narrative, a French peasant food based on Genoese folk confectionery is adapted by heroic Anglo-American imperialists in the so-called “New World.” Yet revisionists of the burgeoning Alternative Gastronomic History school have shown that the “banana shortage” story, blatantly designed to put a positive spin on World War II-era militarism, is actually an invention meant to disguise a racially driven agenda in which reified imagery of “whiteness,” as embodied in Twinkies’ intentionally bland filling, reinforces American hemispheric dominance and suppresses Latino aspirations of equality. Moreover, in discussing fried Twinkies, Gordon uses his position of privilege as a white male to exclude from the narrative all non-Western forms of culinary innovation, such as Twinkie sushi: http://www.twinkies.com/recipe_view.asp?rID=86 Gordon’s reactionary approach to this grass-roots movement of multicultural snack subversion, like his unabashed reverence for butterscotch pudding, displays the true agenda that underlies his remarks: an undisguised hostility to any and all attempts at upsetting the carbohydrate-based power structure of corporate America.
April 6, 2006
Twinkies Posted by John Steele Gordon at 02:50 PM EST Speaking of beloved brand-name junk foods (although I regard butterscotch pudding as spiritual health food), today is the 76th anniversary of the Twinkie.
The Twinkie is a classic example of capitalism at work. It was the invention of James A. Dewar, who started as a delivery boy for the Continental Baking Company in 1920 and by 1930 had worked his way up to manager at the company’s River Forest, Illinois, plant.
The plant produced small strawberry shortcakes as a snack food, but only during the strawberry season. The rest of the year, the shortcake pans sat on the shelf, an underperforming asset. Dewar filled the shortcakes (which are really sponge cake, of course—something like what the French call pâte à génoise—not shortcake at all, which, if you care, is pâte sablée in French) with a banana cream filling. He named the result after a sign he had seen in St. Louis for the Twinkle Toe Shoe Company and sent them forth into the marketplace. There they proved an instant hit with the public. When the outbreak of World War II caused a temporary banana shortage (German U-boats apparently sank a lot of banana boats in the Caribbean in early 1942), a vanilla cream was substituted and the modern Twinkie was born. In more recent years, a Brooklyn restaurateur named Christopher Sell is credited with gastronomic lily-gilding by having invented the fried Twinkie, which is a Twinkie plunged into hot fat to produce a crisp outside and a liquefied interior. The Twinkie is now so deeply embedded in our culture (about 500 million are consumed every year) that it has received the ultimate cultural compliment, the use of the term as a metaphor. “Twink” is gay slang for a very young and handsome man, and the “Twinkie defense” is a derogatory term for a legal argument for diminished responsibility due to some outside factor—such as sugar overload. While the Twinkie is perhaps the quintessential junk food, it might be pointed out that James Dewar claimed to have drunk a glass of milk and eaten at least three Twinkies (at 145 calories a pop) before bedtime every night. He lived to be 88.
April 6, 2006
Re: Of Sickles, McKinney, and Gordon Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:15 PM EST Well at least Mr. Zeitz and I agree on a few things: Dan Sickles and Cynthia McKinney are (or were, in the case of Gen. Sickles) loathsome human beings.
I have always meant to go visit Sickles’s leg in its pickle jar in the museum. He was, at least, a fascinating character no novelist would try to create (except, perhaps George McDonald Fraser, whose Harry Flashman -- http://www.briansiano.com/flashman/ -- comes pretty close at times). Not many people commit murder in broad daylight and get away with it, lose a leg in battle through disobeying orders and win the Medal of Honor for it, get kicked out of a government job for peculation, and work mightily to have the Gettysburg battlefield made a national monument. But Sickles did all that and much more besides. I would recommend Thomas Keneally’s American Scoundrel.
As for Cynthia McKinney, she’s an embarrassment to Georgia and just about everything else. But she has a serious opponent in the Democratic primary this August, so hopefully the voters will throw her out again, as they did in 2002. As for Neal Boortz, I’m afraid I’ve never heard of him. I would rather go to the dentist during a Novocain strike than listen to political talk radio of whatever stripe. The passage quoted by Mr. Zeitz is exactly why.
April 6, 2006
Post-Shooting Presidential Wisecracks Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 10:30 AM EST A few days ago, this Web site marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attempted assassination of President Reagan with an article on our main page. Since the President survived that attack, it’s easy to remember the incident as almost a lark. It helps that Reagan was alert enough to get off a few of the one-liners for which he was famous. Most of us will recall “Honey, I forgot to duck,” spoken to his wife (a line borrowed from the boxer Jack Dempsey), and “I hope you guys are Republicans,” to his surgeons. But he made quite a few other jokes of varying degrees of hilarity, some of which are listed here. Going back another century, this summer will mark the 125th anniversary of President James A. Garfield’s assassination, which I am researching for the “Time Machine” column in our print magazine. That event has a much darker tinge, since Garfield died of his wounds after two and a half agonizing months. He suffered much more severely than Reagan and was often unable to write or speak, and in any case, Garfield was considerably less ready with a quip than his namesake cartoon cat (or Reagan). But as he lay dying, he did manage to get off a decent one every now and then. In an 1888 diary entry, which can be read here, Rutherford B. Hayes, who had preceded Garfield as President, recounts a visit from William T. Crump, a White House attendant who had nursed Garfield after the shooting: “He [Crump] tells many things showing that Garfield during his illness was in full possession of his faculties; would joke but never smiled even when everyone else laughed. ‘Once Mrs. Garfield was reading items from the morning paper to the President. The death [of] Dean Stanley was read. The President said: “A letter to Mrs. Dean Stanley should be written.” Then an item that Sitting Bull was starving in the North. Mrs. Garfield said: “They better let him starve.” The President hated the oatmeal the doctors required him to eat every morning. He said: “Oh no, send him my oatmeal.”’”
April 6, 2006
About Food Posted by Claire Lui at 09:15 AM EST American Heritage bloggers have been writing about politics and about food, but what about political food? Food lore gives political power to a number of everyday snacks, including the croissant and the pretzel. I first heard the croissant story in a high school history class, though I fear it may be only a myth. Legend holds that a Viennese baker (or perhaps a Turkish one; the details are muddy) overheard the Turkish army tunneling under the city. His sharp hearing led to the tunnel being blown up, and this patriotic baker asked only that he be given the exclusive right to bake crescent-shaped pastries in honor of the occasion (crescents being the symbol of Islam). Alan Davison, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food, credits this story to the first edition of Larousse Gastronomique, but finds it unbelievable. (I’ve also heard that in French bakeries the curved croissants mean that they are made with real butter, while straight croissants are made with margarine. This too, may be only rumor.) Pretzels, as I learned while watching Final Jeopardy! the other day, are in the shape of crossed arms in prayer. A site called www.catholicculture.org gives more of an explanation: Pretzels, made only of flour, water, and salt, to satisfy the requirements of Lent, were shaped into the crossed arms of prayer (the preferred position of praying back in the early pretzel-making days) to remind snackers that Lent was a time of prayer. (This pretzel history is remarkably like the symbolism of matzoh, another timely holiday food.) And finally, in our own modern times, I was amused to see that in Iran bakeries were renaming Danish pastries “Roses of the Prophet Mohammed” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4724656.stm), in response to the uproar over the political cartoons in Denmark. We, of course, have our freedom fries (a name that my local pizzeria continues to use). Considering that the Danes don’t call breakfast goodies Danishes and the French don’t call their pommes frites French fries, it seems like a bit of a fuss over nothing. The best quote in the BBC article is from a sweet-toothed shopper in Tehran: “I just want the sweet pastries. I have nothing to do with the name," shopper Zohreh Masoumi said.
April 5, 2006
Of Sickles, McKinney, and Gordon Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 04:15 PM EST You can say one thing for Cynthia McKinney, the Georgia congresswoman who can’t seem to go 10 minutes without doing something vicious, malicious, or altogether stupid. At least she’s no Dan Sickles. Last week, Rep. McKinney struck a Capitol police officer who stopped her from circumventing a metal detector inside the Capitol complex. Members of Congress are permitted to walk around security stops, but the officer in question didn’t recognize McKinney. According to police accounts of the incident, the officer asked McKinney—who was not wearing her congressional lapel pin, which identifies members to Capitol staff—to stop a total of three times. When she refused, he tried to block her way physically, and she hit him. That’s pretty deplorable behavior, but mild stuff when compared with the actions of Dan Sickles, a Democratic congressman who, in 1859, right in front of Lafayette Square, shot and killed Philip Barton Key, the U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., and son of Francis Scott Key. Philip Key, it seemed, had been carrying on a tryst with Sickles’s wife, Teresa Bagioli, and none too inconspicuously. Little matter that the congressman was a notorious womanizer himself. In the spirit of the old double-standard, he seemed to many of his friends and constituents a completely sympathetic character. In a brilliant maneuver, Sickles’s legal team even managed to earn their client an acquittal, based on a plea of temporary insanity—the first time such a defense was ever invoked successfully in the United States. Ironically, it wasn’t the shooting that derailed Sickles’s political career; it was his public decision to forgive his wife, a decision that polite New York society regarded as unforgivable. But back to Cynthia McKinney and, by indirect association, my ongoing exchange with John Steele Gordon. I know, I know—I said that I regarded our exchange as closed. But that was before Mr. Gordon called me (or my writing) “nasty, humorless, morally self-congratulatory, and intellectually dishonest.” I actually do have a sense of humor (ask anyone who knows me!) and can only assume that Mr. Gordon was playfully goading me into further discussion. Mr. Gordon is a funny guy, in fact, with a keen sense of irony. He called me intellectually dishonest, but he also dismissed Sesame Street as “politically correct,” even though he admits to never having watched one episode of the show, and he dismissed historians Tom Sugrue, Matt Lassiter, Stephen Meyer, Matthew Dallek, Thomas Edsall, Mary Edsall, and Dan Carter as “liberals,” even though I’m pretty sure—correct me if I’m wrong—he’s never read their work. If that’s not irony, what is? So what of Mr. Gordon’s contention that “the people who prefer a society that brands and jeers make up, at most, a tiny fraction of the American population today. They are the white supremacists, neo-Nazis, religious zealots, and assorted other fanatics . . .”? In his March 31 broadcast, the prominent conservative radio impresario Neal Boortz, whose show is syndicated on Cox Radio, and who claims several million loyal listeners, had the following to say about Rep. McKinney, who is black (other than Boortz, participants in the dialogue were the show’s producer, Belinda Skelton, and the talk-radio host Royal Marshall): BOORTZ: For instance, or for goodness sakes, jump in and I’m gonna say—I’m gonna start out with something controversial. I saw Cynthia McKinney’s new hair-do. Have you seen it, Belinda? SKELTON: No. BOORTZ: She looks like a ghetto slut. SKELTON: Well, how is it? BOORTZ: It’s just—it’s hideous. SKELTON: Is it braided? Or— BOORTZ: No, it’s not braided. It just flies away from her head in every conceivable direction. It looks like an explosion in a Brillo pad factory. It’s just hideous. To me, that hairstyle just shows contempt for—no, it’s not an Afro. I mean, no, it just shows contempt for the position that she holds and the body that she serves in. And, I’m sorry, there’s just no other way to—it’s just a hideous and horrible looking— MARSHALL: Her hairstyle? BOORTZ: Yeah, the hairstyle. It just, it looks like an explosion. Have you seen it? MARSHALL: Yeah, I like it. BOORTZ: Oh, jeez. MARSHALL: It looks better than the braids she was wearing. BOORTZ: No, the braids had some dignity. They had some class. MARSHALL: The braids had dignity? BOORTZ: They had more class than this thing. MARSHALL: This says, you know, kinda 2000s, you know, stepping up to the plate. Contemporary look, you know? BOORTZ: She looks like Tina Turner peeing on an electric fence. MARSHALL: OK, so you don’t like her hair. BOORTZ: Yeah, OK, I don’t like her hair. I’m sorry. MARSHALL: That being said, I think a lot of people would say it looks a lot better than those cornrows she was wearing. You can’t tell me that’s dignified. BOORTZ: Well, I’m not a big cornrow fan but I got used to her with that. OK? MARSHALL: So she’s staying the same for you? BOORTZ: She looks like a shih tzu! Now, I’m sure that John Steele Gordon will accuse me, as he has before, of being typically humorless, or, he’ll accuse me, as he has before, of reading race into a story that simply has nothing to do with race, or he’ll accuse me of cherry-picking an extreme and unrepresentative example from the lunatic fringes of the right. But Boortz is a popular conservative commentator, and I think it’s fair to say that when he refers to a black woman as resembling a “ghetto slut” and a “shih tzu,” race is very much on his mind. (Did I mention that Neal Boortz got his start in life as a speechwriter for Georgia’s segregationist governor Lester Maddox?) What’s particularly pathetic—yet typical—about Boortz’s incendiary comments is that Cynthia McKinney is a loathsome character who should probably be expelled from the House of Representatives. Is it not enough for conservative commentators to say, ”Cynthia McKinney is out of control?” No. Typical of the burning hatred that infects much—but certainly not all—of American conservatism, Boortz feels obliged to call her a “ghetto slut.” How this all turns out is anyone’s guess. Maybe Cynthia McKinney will weather this storm. Dan Sickles certainly weathered his. He went on to serve in the Union army, in whose service he lost a leg at the battle of Gettysburg. After the war, he served in numerous high government posts and even returned briefly to Congress. At his request, his leg was preserved and put on display at a medical museum. Sickles, the ever-aging Lothario, liked to impress his lady friends by taking them to the museum to see the tattered limb. If that’s not funny, I don’t know what is. I sure hope John Steele Gordon agrees.
April 5, 2006
Re: On Branding Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:00 AM EST Mr. Zeitz writes that as my “only response to my observation about John McCain’s embrace of Jerry Falwell is to say that it is justified by Stalin’s embrace of Hitler (or vice versa?), I now have to consider our exchange successfully concluded.” I said no such thing, of course. What I said was that “Politics is a sleazy business that notoriously makes strange bedfellows. Why? Because Paris is worth a mass. Power trumps sincere belief every time. If Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler could climb into bed together, as they did between August 1939 and June 1941, then John McCain can certainly make nice with Jerry Falwell.” That is an observation that if two murderous dictators who were polar opposites in philosophy could make common cause for their mutual political benefit, then we should not be surprised that two American politicians with some overlap in philosophy can do so. It is not a justification of anything. I suppose I should have added that John Kerry, in pursuit of the presidency, pandered every bit as much to Al Sharpton—who has blood on his hands—as John McCain, in pursuit of the presidency, has pandered to Jerry Falwell, who merely has a philosophy most people of good will do not share. Politicians, of whatever stripe, pander to repulsive people in order to attract the votes of their followers. I, too, consider this exchange successfully concluded. I have argued my side, and Mr. Zeitz has argued his, amply demonstrating in the process one of my points: that liberals, in their years of decline, have all too often become nasty, humorless, morally self-congratulatory, and intellectually dishonest. As for my personal brand-name madeleine—although it has evoked no masterpieces from my subconscious that I’m aware of—it is butterscotch pudding, the kind that must be cooked, not the instant. Royal and Jell-O brands are indistinguishable as far as I’m concerned. Happily they are still available in most supermarkets, and I have every confidence that I will be calling for a last helping on my deathbed.
April 4, 2006
On Branding Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:05 PM EST Since John Steele Gordon’s only response to my citation of a number of highly respected historians is simply to reject them all by presuming (I stress, presuming) they are “liberal,” and his only response to my observation about John McCain’s embrace of Jerry Falwell is to say that it is justified by Stalin’s embrace of Hitler (or vice versa?), I now have to consider our exchange successfully concluded. And just on time, too. Frederick E. Allen’s musings on Junket Rennet Custard give me entrée to leave behind a charged exchange over “political correctness” and modern conservatism for a more light-hearted, but hardly inconsequential, topic. Branding. Fred’s longing for a lost (but now rediscovered) product of the 1950s raises a question. When did Americans develop a fascination with brand names? The historical literature on consumer culture suggests that the process began somewhere in the closing decades of the nineteenth century and accelerated in the years leading up to the 1920s. In that critical era, new methods of mass production allowed manufacturers to produce miles upon miles of standardized pre-fabricated, pre-canned, and pre-packaged goods. Moreover, because the United States boasted enormous natural resources, Americans spent a much smaller portion of their wages on food than did their European counterparts. This meant that they had more money left over at the end of the week for spending on non-essentials like phonographs, factory-made furniture, radios, electric appliances, automobiles, and the like. The trick was to initiate citizens into an emerging national market in which brand names—a completely new invention—meant something. People who were used to buying soap and sugar out of large vats at the local dry-goods store needed to be taught to prefer prepackaged cakes of Ivory soap and prewrapped packets of Domino sugar. Housewives accustomed to baking their own desserts and growing their own produce required instruction on the virtues of Uneeda Biscuits (manufactured by the National Biscuit Company) and White Diamond Corn. In the first years of the twentieth century, brand names sprung by the thousands from the wild imaginations of enterprising businessmen and, with
the help of Madison Avenue, the new home of national advertising, were seared into the minds of ordinary Americans. Crisco, Gillette, Coca-Cola, Colgate, Kodak, Sherwin-Williams, Waterman’s, Jell-o, Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes, Wrigley’s Doublemint Chewing Gum, Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit Chewing Gum, Wrigley’s Spearmint Chewing Gum. . . . The competition for mind share was fierce. Thanks to the highly successful efforts of advertising executives, by the eve of World War I Americans were well on their way to becoming trained consumers, and consumer branding—a new form of intellectual property—was widely recognized as intrinsically valuable. When the U.S. Supreme Court broke up the American Tobacco Company, in 1911, it appraised the total worth of its trademarks at $45 million—a sum equal to 20 percent of its total assets. By 1920 grocers in Chicago reported that more than three-quarters of their customers asked for baked beans by the brand name, while a national survey of 300 men revealed that every last respondent could identify at least one brand name of a watch, soap, and fountain pen. Together they pinpointed 36 different brand names of soft drinks. So, Fred, congratulations on your rekindled romance with Junket Rennet Custard. Just remember, though, that someone, somewhere—probably on the twentieth floor of a Madison Avenue office building—wanted you to remember that brand name. And that someone did a great job.
April 4, 2006
That Horrible Food You Loved as a Child Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 01:35 PM EST When I was a little boy in the 1950s my favorite dessert was Junket Rennet Custard. I liked it so much I would sometimes sneak into the kitchen at dawn on a Saturday to pour a box of the mix down my throat. I had a children’s book from my parents’ day called Junket Is Nice, about a strange man with a red beard who sat eating Junket as everyone for miles around wondered what he was thinking. He was thinking, it turned out at the end, that Junket was nice. I fully agreed. I have long presumed that Junket went the way of the Packard and the Automat. But to my surprise you can buy it today, at Hometown Favorites, a Web site devoted to the many humble American equivalents of that madeleine that’s so important to literature. Another one that Hometown Favorites resurrects is Moxie, the old New England cola-like beverage, which I now consider the ivory-billed woodpecker of soft drinks. But should I actually order Junket and Moxie, and learn what they taste like to an adult palate? Or shall I preserve memory undefiled? Visit Hometown Favorites and confront that crisis for yourself.
April 3, 2006
Re: Modern Conservatism Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:20 PM EST I’d just like to make a few points. 1) Mr. Zeitz trots forth a bunch of liberal historians who find racism permeating modern conservative thought and political action. What a surprise. 2) He then trots out Jerry Falwell, a media darling (the mainstream media is to liberalism what Max von Mayerling was to Norma Desmond—the principal enabler of her dearest fantasies), to represent the religious right. Please. For every Jerry Falwell there’s an Al Sharpton, every bit as odious (although, in Mr. Sharpton’s case, a great deal more amusing). The left has plenty of people no decent person should be proud of: Jesse Jackson, Julian Bond, Kweisi Mfume, racists one and all; Ramsay Clark, Noam Chomsky, viscerally, pathologically anti-American. The list is endless. When a country has big-tent political parties, as most English-speaking countries do, then there will be plenty of jerks in both parties. Using them to represent the other side is the oldest rhetorical trick in the book. 3) Politics is a sleazy business that notoriously makes strange bedfellows. Why? Because Paris is worth a mass. Power trumps sincere belief every time. If Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler could climb into bed together, as they did between August 1939 and June 1941, then John McCain can certainly make nice with Jerry Falwell. 4) When I talk about conservatives, I am referring to ordinary people, the sort you encounter getting into the subway, not the kind you encounter getting out of a limo in front of a townhouse in Louisburg Square. Whether Mr. Zeitz likes it or not (and he obviously doesn’t), these people have over the last 40 years been putting conservatives into more and more offices until now they dominate American government the way liberals did under Franklin Roosevelt.
There are only two possibilities to explain this if Mr. Zeitz is correct here. Either a considerable majority of the American electorate are racists in their hearts or they’re too stupid to know they are being hoodwinked by the race-baiters who dominate the right.
I’m a democrat. That’s why I would rather be ruled, in William F. Buckley’s famous remark, by the first 2,000 people in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. The former are a lot smarter about running a country than the latter.
There was a time when Democrats believed that too. Those days are long gone, which is why Democratic political power is long gone as well.
April 3, 2006
Modern Conservatism Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 12:45 PM EST However hard he labors at wishing away the serious legacy of conservative racism, homophobia, and nativism, John Steele Gordon—for all his powers of the pen—can’t make it so. Let’s begin by grounding this argument in good historiography. We are, after all, a history Web site, first and foremost. Over the past 20 years, a host of scholars have written extensively on the central role that race-baiting played in the rise of the conservative right. Dan Carter’s work on George Wallace (The Politics of Rage), that unrivaled merchant of hate, demonstrates that Wallace was, in fact, an important gateway politician who helped many opponents of racial integration , both North and South, make the move from the Democratic party to the Republican party. Matthew Dallek’s fine book on the 1966 California gubernatorial election, The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan’s First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics, is very persuasive in its argument that Reagan played heavily on popular opposition to residential integration in order to defeat the incumbent, Pat Brown. Similarly Thomas Sugrue’s absolutely indispensable work on Detroit, Origins of the Urban Crisis, goes a long way in demonstrating that popular, white working-class opposition to neighborhood integration helped bring down the labor-Democratic party coalition in Michigan, a point that Stephen Meyer makes in a national context in his important book, As Long As They Don’t Move Next Door: Segregation and Racial Conflict in American Neighborhoods. Thomas Edsall and Mary Edsall, in their seminal study of 1970s and 1980s politics, Chain Reaction, reveal the clever, but not always subtle, way in which GOP operatives have used issues like taxes, crime, and welfare to appeal to raw race prejudices. More recently, my friends Kevin Kruse, a Princeton University historian and author of White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism, and Matt Lassiter, a history professor at the University of Michigan, and author of The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South, have shown how deeply bound up were race antagonism and the rise of post-1960s conservatism. Both of these books are essential reads for anyone wishing to know more about how the Republican party achieved its monumental rise to power after 1968. So I’m sorry, Mr. Gordon. But unless all of America’s leading experts on the rise of the conservative right are wrong, race-baiting has been a central part of the conservative project for at least 30 years, and probably longer. It’s not the only component of conservatism, but it’s a central one. We needn’t necessarily take a crash course in the recent historiography of race relations to prove the case. The newspapers make the same point about conservative intolerance—and here the intolerance isn’t always directed toward African-Americans. It reflects a general conservative problem with pluralism. Gordon writes, “the notion that conservatives, either in general or the ones Mr. Zeitz quotes, exhibit a tendency ‘to lament (or ridicule) a world where women, African-Americans, immigrants, and gays and lesbians have full citizenship rights’ is, to be charitable, a liberal fantasy.” Let’s examine my liberal fantasy. Exhibit 1: Yesterday, on Meet the Press, Senator John McCain—a widely respected conservative figure and erstwhile critic of the religious right—explained that he thought “the Christian right has a major role to play in the Republican Party” and further acknowledged his own plans to speak next month at Liberty University, a fundamentalist institution founded by Rev. Jerry Falwell. Falwell, I needn’t remind Mr. Gordon (who claims not to need a history lesson on . . . anything), has identified the Antichrist as a male Jew, has claimed that Jews are to be consigned to hell, and said of the tragedy that was 9/11: “...feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’” So, does this make John McCain an “agent of intolerance?” (McCain’s words, not mine—directed at Falwell during the 2000 campaign.) Nope. It just means that a prominent conservative is comfortable getting into bed with an agent of intolerance, and it further means that Falwell continues to enjoy a prominent place in the conservative coalition. Mr. Gordon may wish it weren’t so. But it’s so. He may wish that Jerry Falwell weren’t an important American conservative. But he is. Exhibit 2: Until March 2000, Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist institution in South Carolina, banned interracial dating on campus. (In the interest of full disclosure, I am currently doing academic research on the roots of the conservative right and have had extensive—and very satisfactory, professional—dealings with the BJU library archivists, whom I’ve found to be generous, exceedingly good at their jobs, very well-versed in the history of evangelical Christianity, and altogether very pleasant to interact with.) This didn’t stop George Bush and a host of other Republican candidates from speaking at the university. Does this mean that George Bush winks at intolerance? By Gordon’s rules, no. By mine, yes. Does this mean that a prominent conservative institution until very recently opposed, in the most literal way possible, racial pluralism? Yes. Sorry, Mr. Gordon, but you can’t argue your way around it. Exhibit 3: Let’s review the utterances of prominent conservatives on the question of civil equality. Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma had this to say in 2004: “The gay community has infiltrated the very centers of power in every area across this country, and they wield extreme power. . . . That agenda is the greatest threat to our freedom that we face today. Why do you think we see the rationalization for abortion and multiple sexual partners? That’s a gay agenda.” South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint has argued that gays and lesbians should be banned from the teaching profession. The list goes on and on. In effect, gays and lesbians are to conservatives what African-Americans were 20 years ago: foils. Get working-class citizens to identify as heterosexual first, and working-class second, and you can peel off their votes. Conservatives like Mr. Gordon—or defenders of conservatism like Mr. Gordon—should to spend less time denying the self-evident truth and more time purging their ranks of professional haters. I’ve never said there wasn’t a principled conservative argument to be made on just about any issue. My contention is simply that modern conservatism has been laced with hatred, and it has stubbornly refused to accommodate itself to religious, sexual, gender, and racial pluralism. When Mr. Gordon and those like him turn a blind eye to this legacy, they do so at their own risk. Yes, hate plays well in politics, and sadly, history has shown that it’s too often a winning strategy. But with hundreds of thousands of Latinos (an increasingly important electoral demographic group George Bush has intelligently tried to court, despite opposition within his own party) currently taking to the streets to decry the GOP immigration-restriction bill, and with super-majorities of young Americans indicating support for gay marriage, the future of conservatism looks bleak if the movement doesn’t get right with pluralism. John Steele Gordon can cover his eyes, but it doesn’t make the rest of us blind.
April 3, 2006
A F[i]eldman[ual] to the Zeit[z]geist of Political Correctness Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:30 AM EST First of all, I do not need Mr. Zeitz or anyone else to give me a refresher course in American history. The last paragraph of his most recent post is uncivil. I will cheerfully concede that conservatives often drop the term “political correctness” vaguely and indiscriminately into political discourse. About as often, in fact, as liberals vaguely and indiscriminately drop the term “racist.” Those who engage upon the battlefield of politics tend to use what weapons are at hand, as do fighters on any battlefield, actual or metaphoric. Politics is not conducted by means of Socratic dialogues. But neither I nor Mr. Zeitz, so far as I know, are politicians. Our jobs are to seek the truth, not rhetorical advantage. And the truth here is that the notion that conservatives, either in general or the ones Mr. Zeitz quotes, exhibit a tendency “to lament (or ridicule) a world where women, African-Americans, immigrants, and gays and lesbians have full citizenship rights” is, to be charitable, a liberal fantasy. I could hardly agree more with Ellen Feldman about the Scottsboro case. The Deep South was often a dark and ugly place before the Civil Rights movement triumphed in the 1960s and utterly transformed it over the next decade or so. And casual racism pervaded ordinary discourse and appeared in respectable newspapers and magazines without a second thought. As Ms Feldman points out, The New York Times—then as now, hardly a promoter of racism—implicitly made fun of the speech of black Southerners (not a term in use in 1937, of course). In the 1930s The New Yorker had several covers that would make anyone today wince. Rodgers and Hart wrote at least one song that today the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization will not permit to be performed. But I think that in two sentences of her thoughtful post, Ms. Feldman inadvertently reveals much of what is wrong with modern-day liberalism and why this once great political movement has become so irrelevant to American politics, so intellectually pathetic, and often so nasty and humorless. First, liberalism has become the Miss Havisham of American politics. For Dickens’s famous abandoned bride, time stopped on her aborted wedding day and she always wore her now tattered wedding dress while the uneaten feast mouldered on the table, nibbled only by mice. For liberals it is always 1937 (at least domestically; in foreign policy, it seems, it is always 1968). Ms. Feldman, for instance, refers to the Scottsboro case as “a shameful chapter in our recent past.” Shameful to be sure—unutterably horrifying to modern sensibilities. But recent? The Scottsboro case began in 1931, 75 years ago. That is very nearly one-third of the way back to our nation’s founding. My mother was 9 years old when the case started and I, her younger son, am now nearly 62. The world of the Scottsboro “boys” is as dead and gone as the world of slavery. The case took place when the Amos ’n’ Andy show was among the most popular programs on radio. We live in a world where The Cosby Show was the most popular program on television 20 years ago. Blacks occupy the highest offices in the land, are represented on the Forbes 400 list, are the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, belong to the snootiest clubs, eat at the chicest restaurants without anyone giving them a second glance, command awesome salaries on television and in Hollywood, walk with ease through the corridors of power. When will liberals notice that the glass of racial equality is no longer four-fifths empty but instead four-fifths full and getting fuller all the time? Why can they not acknowledge their own triumph? Second, Ms. Feldman writes, “the term [‘political correctness’] has become a cudgel with which to beat soft-hearted liberals who think an inclusive society is preferable to one that brands and jeers at all but certain established and powerful groups.” But nowadays it is not only soft-hearted liberals who think that “an inclusive society is preferable to one that brands and jeers.” In 2006, as opposed to 1937, those who prefer an inclusive society include liberals, moderates, moderate conservatives, conservatives, libertarians, people who couldn’t care less about politics, and even hard-hearted conservatives. The people who prefer a society that brands and jeers make up, at most, a tiny fraction of the American population today. They are the white supremacists, neo-Nazis, religious zealots, and assorted other fanatics in the sense of Mark Twain’s famous definition of someone “who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” Let’s say, for the purposes of argument, that these people possessed by such soul-destroying hatreds total three million in the country today. That sounds like a lot, but it is one percent of the population. The other 99 percent of the American people—fewer than a third of whom describe themselves as liberals in polls—believe in a society in which all people of good will are welcome to participate as equals. The idea that only liberals want an inclusive society is a perfect example of the insufferable—and self-defeating—moral smugness of latter-day liberalism. To liberals today, it seems, either one is a liberal or one is some grotesque combination of Ebenezer Scrooge and Bull Connor, for any disagreement with liberal means is, to liberals, tantamount to disagreement with liberal ends. With their self-conceived monopoly on virtue, liberals do not argue for their beliefs anymore. Instead they anathematize anyone with the chutzpah to disagree with them because they think anyone who disagrees is, ipso facto, a moral eunuch. Any disagreement with liberal orthodoxy is greeted not with objective facts and logic, but with sneers, as Mr. Zeitz sneered at me. This is not how those taking the tide of human affairs at the flood behave. It is how those who can’t understand why no one listens to them anymore behave. In this sense, liberalism is not only the Miss Havisham of American politics, it is the Norma Desmond as well. How very sad.
April 1, 2006
Political Correctness: Stepping Things Up Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 07:00 PM EST I’m afraid John Steele Gordon has missed my point entirely. In each of the examples I presented—and these were diverse examples, drawn from three mainstream publications and outlets—conservatives dropped the term “politically correct” vaguely and indiscriminately, but in contexts that clearly associated “political correctness” with general gripes about racial, sexual, gender, and religious pluralism. In attempting to analyze the main arguments behind the articles and on-air commentaries I cited, Mr. Gordon has cleverly sidestepped the common strain they share—a tendency to lament (or ridicule) a world where women, African-Americans, immigrants, and gays and lesbians have full citizenship rights, and a twin tendency to invoke the term “politically correct” in the same breath. But I give Mr. Gordon credit. He can match me polemic for polemic. Nothing—neither facts, nor taste—deters him from his defense of conservatism, warts and all. Mr. Gordon admits to having never watched an episode of Sesame Street but “suppose[s]” it is “politically correct.” (Thank you, John, for proving by direct example my point about the inanity of conservative rhetoric. I’ll send you some back episodes on DVD next Chanukah. Happy holidays.) Mr. Gordon also characterizes a crude, racially charged editorial as “transparently satire” and claims I’ve proved, above all, that liberals have no sense of humor. (Point taken, John. Who doesn’t like a good slavery joke now and then?) He also suggests at several points along the way that because he has never heard of the conservative pundits I quoted, they must be obscure. (Can’t argue with that logic.) All of which brings me back to an earlier point. Several posts ago, Mr. Gordon threw one of his barbed javelins at me (it missed by a few yards, as per usual). He mocked my use of the term “popular democracy,” asking, “what other kind is there, come to think of it?” I wouldn’t know a thing about the topic, of course. But it seems to me that the antithesis of popular democracy would be a system in which a majority of adults were not permitted to vote (as was the case in America prior to 1920); a system in which women and African-Americans were denied full protection of the laws; a system in which all citizens paid taxes but only some benefited from government housing, education, and agricultural subsidies. Ours has not always been a popular democracy. I wish I didn’t have to explain that to John Steele Gordon.
April 1, 2006
Political Correctness: The Way It Was Posted by Ellen Feldman at 11:20 AM EST In the current discussion here of political correctness, I agree with Joshua Zeitz on two points. The issue in question is often nothing more than simple good manners. And the term has become a cudgel with which to beat soft-hearted liberals who think an inclusive society is preferable to one that brands and jeers at all but certain established and powerful groups. But perhaps another way to look at the matter is to examine what the world and the language were like before the concept of political correctness took root. (And I admit the term is less attractive than the practice.) The Scottsboro case, recently recounted on AmericanHeritage.com, and a subject I am currently researching for a book, provides an excellent example not only of racial injustice and legal chicanery, but of pre-political-correctness loutishness and cruelty. On July 27, 1937, the New York Times ran an article about the arrival in New York of four of the Scottsboro boys who had been freed. According to the paper, when a reporter inquired of Roy Wright what he intended to do in New York, “He drawled, ’Ah haven’t made up mah mind yet.’” Asked if he was afraid when he saw the mob that had gathered to welcome him at the station, he was quoted as saying, “’Ah ain’t nevah been afraid. Ah wasn’ afraid in 1931.’” When the same paper quoted various white Southerners associated with the case, no attempt was made to convey the rich flavor of their accents. The Times was not alone. When Time magazine, given to its own brand of vivid writing, carried an article about foreign demonstrations to protest the railroading of the defendants, it referred to them as “blackamoors.” There were other objects of official scorn. Ruby Bates, one of the white girls involved in the case, made an appearance to help raise money for the defendants. The New York World Telegram ran the headline “Ruby Bates, ‘Poor White Trash,’ to Speak Here in Effort to Help Scottsboro Boys.” Nor were the slurs limited to press coverage. In one of the many trials in the case, the prosecution charged that Ruby Bates “couldn’t tell you all the things that happened in New York because part of it was in the Jew language.” Attempting to discredit another witness for the defense, the prosecuting attorney cautioned the jury to “watch his hands . . . if he had been with Brodsky [one of the lawyers for the defense] another two weeks he would have been down here with a pack on his back trying to sell you goods.” Needless to say, the word “nigger,” appears frequently in the transcripts. The Scottsboro case was a shameful chapter in our recent past. The words used to describe it were not just a reflection of the mindset that permitted it. They were a contributing cause to a terrible miscarriage of justice that dragged on for almost half a century. Neither our society nor our language is less rich for the loss of ugly epithets and facile stereotypes.
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