May 16, 2006
Health Care II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:20 PM EST I am glad to see that Joshua Zeitz and I are not entirely on separate pages of the hymnal when it comes to health care. Just a few comments: 1) He writes, “In effect, the private sector promised to build and maintain the safety net. . . .” Since the “private sector” is, in reality, everything that is not government, I don’t see how it can promise anything. The deal cut between General Motors and the UAW bound GM and the UAW (and, in effect, the rest of the auto industry), not “the private sector.” The greatest attribute of the private sector is that it does not and cannot act monolithically. 2) Mr. Zeitz writes, “. . . by agreeing to let responsibility for health care rest with private industry, workers left themselves at the mercy and discretion of their employers.” Again “workers,” except in so far as they are represented by unions, cannot act collectively. As for the auto workers, they were hardly at the mercy of their employers. Indeed, General Motors employee health benefits became so extraordinarily generous over the years that they are bankrupting the company by making it uncompetitive.
3) He writes, “By the 1980s, a powerful combination of global competition and sheer greed emboldened many firms to cut or cancel out pension plans and health insurance, thus shifting risk back to working Americans.” I think that global competition may have forced firms to cut back benefits but hardly emboldened them except in so far as necessity can make one brave. The “defined benefit” pension model seemed like a good idea in the low-inflation, life-time-employment-model world of the postwar years. In the new globalized economy of recent decades it has proved an economic disaster for employers and employees alike.
As for “greed,” it is one of the seven deadly sins to which all flesh—not just that of corporate executives and their stockholders—is equally heir. Labor unions have often succumbed to greed, to the great long-term harm of their members. The GM health plan as it evolved is an example. And politicians are quite as likely to be greedy as any corporate executive. Sometimes they are greedy for money, such as Congressman Duke Cunningham, now in a federal pen. Far more often, they are greedy for power. Their urge to take control is hard to satiate. That is what makes me so wary of the “cooperatives” proposed by Hillary Clinton’s health care task force. 4) He writes, “the private sector made a solemn promise in the 1940s to provide for Americans’ health insurance. If it cannot or will not continue to honor that pledge, then we need to revisit the idea of state-financed or state-run health care.” Again, “the private sector” cannot promise anything. In this case, Mr. Zeitz seems to be using the term as a synonym for “corporations.” They, too, never acted in concert (which would have been illegal in any event). I only wish the accidents of war and politics that led to corporations being the main providers of health insurance could be undone. In a perfect world, employers would have nothing to do with providing health insurance other than providing the money for their employees to purchase it.
5) He writes, “. . . economists like Paul Krugman argue that America’s health care economy is inefficient.” There was a time, I suppose, when Paul Krugman could have been described as an economist. And perhaps in his classes at Princeton he still is. But in his column in The New York Times, Mr. Krugman is nothing but a propagandist for the left in American politics. His columns remind me of Mary McCarthy’s famous description of a book by Lillian Hellmann, “Every word she wrote was a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” Even the first public editor of the Times, Daniel Okrent, no right-winger by a long shot, felt obliged to publicly rebuke Krugman’s intellectual dishonesty and refusal to acknowledge even the most unquestionable errors.
Tomorrow I’ll try to outline my ideas for creating an efficient, affordable, reliable health-care system in this country. At least, I’ll outline what it should look like. The political hurdles getting there will be tremendous. I agree wholeheartedly with Joshua Zeitz that the plan offered by the federal government to its employees is an excellent model. I also agree that greed is a big problem, as it always is in human affairs. But corporate greed, union greed, political greed, and individual greed, in my view, are all part of the problem.
May 16, 2006
The Health Care Trap Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:15 AM EST Apropos of John Steele Gordon’s post several days ago on the tangled mess that is America’s health care economy, there is a fascinating body of recent historical literature that deals with the origins of our country’s strange, patchwork system of employer-based insurance for those in the workforce and public-sector health care for the elderly and indigent. Jennifer Klein’s book For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare State, is a particularly strong contribution. Klein, a Yale historian, traces the development of private health and life insurance from the early twentieth century through the 1960s and argues convincingly that private insurers and industry appropriated New Deal language emphasizing economic and personal security (think, for instance, of FDR’s Four Freedoms, which promised Freedom from Fear and Freedom From Want) while insisting that the private sector, and not the government, could best provide that security. In effect, the private sector promised to build and maintain the safety net—in stark opposition to Western Europe where, in the years after World War II, states constructed vast, publicly-financed safety nets—in an effort to stabilize industrial relations and prevent the expansion of the American welfare state. But there were big problems with the so-called Treaty of Detroit, the generic name for a sweeping arrangement between large industrial unions and big employers, first ironed out between General Motors and the United Auto Workers in the late 1940s. The prevailing postwar arrangement in America was essentially that industry supplemented Social Security with private pension plans and assumed responsibility for workers’ health care, while unions, in turn, curbed their earlier demands for a more expansive system of state welfare (which would have been funded, of course, by higher personal and corporate taxes, as was the case in Western Europe). For one, the new arrangement left non-unionized workers out in the cold, and that meant that certain sectors of the population—namely women, Latinos and African-Americans—who were under-represented in the ranks of organized labor enjoyed less security than white men. In addition, by agreeing to let responsibility for health care rest with private industry, workers left themselves at the mercy and discretion of their employers. By the 1980s, a powerful combination of global competition and sheer greed emboldened many firms to cut or cancel out pension plans and health insurance, thus shifting risk back to working Americans. Morally, it’s somewhat clear what the stakes are. In an effort to stop the expansion of the New Deal welfare state, the private sector made a solemn promise in the 1940s to provide for Americans’ health insurance. If it cannot or will not continue to honor that pledge, then we need to revisit the idea of state-financed or state-run health care. But the situation is probably more complicated than that. Though the percentage of employers offering subsidized health care to employees has dropped from 69 percent in 2000 to 66 percent in 2005, most of that drop has been in the small-business sector (98 percent of firms employing more than 200 people offer some health insurance to their workers). Arguably, small businesses often cannot afford to build high premiums into their benefits packages. On the other hand, whereas industry leaders like GM—which helped pioneer the system of private insurance—led the way in the 1950s, today’s industry leader is Wal-Mart, which has stubbornly shirked its part of the social contract. And this position has had ironic consequences. Wal-Mart may be anti-statist, and it may clamor for lower corporate taxes, but it leaves many of its workers to rely on Medicaid. If the moral dimension of the problem is complicated, as John Steele Gordon points out, the economics are even more mind-boggling. On one hand, economists like Paul Krugman argue that America’s health care economy is inefficient. True, built into our system is a great deal of competition that theoretically keeps costs in check—something that monopolistic single-payer systems lack. On the other hand, competition creates an extra incentive for insurers to minimize their payouts, and as a result, America wastes a far greater percentage of its health care dollars on administrative costs (doctor’s offices fighting HMOs, HMOs fighting hospitals, etc.) than countries like France, which have single-payer systems. Krugman’s argument boils down to this: Why waste the money? Let’s spend it on insuring everyone. Which makes sense. On the other hand, my economist friends at Cambridge generally agree with Mr. Gordon that market competition is vital to keeping health care comprehensive and affordable. So what to do? It still seems to me that the much-maligned Clinton plan was on the right track, even if its political design was a disaster. It preserved market competition by creating large buying cooperatives—much like the highly successful Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan, which offers federal workers an enormous range of affordable insurance packages—that enlarge the risk pool and avoid the trap of discriminating between the healthy and the sick. It had the added benefits of portability (so essential in an age of high job turnover) and universal access. I’d be curious to know what my American Heritage friends think.
May 12, 2006
Did Bush Rob Geronimo’s Grave? Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 03:00 PM EST For years there have been rumors that a bunch of members of Skull and Bones, the secret society at Yale, dug up the skull of the great Apache leader Geronimo from its resting place at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, stole it, and put it on permanent display at Skull and Bones headquarters in New Haven, where new members (presumably including both Presidents Bush and John Kerry) have had to kiss it as part of their initiation rite. And one of the group that is supposed to have done this was Prescott Bush—future senator, father of President George H. W. Bush, and grandfather of President George W. Bush. It sounds very unlikely on the face of it, but now, Yale Alumni Magazine tells us, there’s new evidence supporting the old tale, in a letter that was just discovered. “The skull of the worthy Geronimo the Terrible, exhumbed from its tomb at Fort Sill by your club & the K--t Haffner, is now safe inside the T-- together with his well worn femurs[,] bit & saddle horn,” wrote Winter Mead, a member of the club, on June 7, 1918. (“K--t” meant knight, a member of the club, and “T--” meant the Tomb, the clubhouse in New Haven.) The rumor last got attention in 1986 when Ned Anderson, an Apache leader who was campaigning to have Geronimo’s bones moved from Oklahoma to ancestral lands in Arizona, received an anonymous letter from someone who said he was a member of Skull and Bones and said they had the skull. The letter included a photograph. Anderson arranged a meeting with two Skull and Bones alumni, including George H. W. Bush’s brother Jonathan (being a Bonesman seems to be a requirement for being a Bush man). The two Bonesmen showed Anderson a skull the club owned but said it was of a ten-year-old boy. Anderson thought the skull didn’t look like the one in the picture, but nothing further happened. So the matter rested until Marc Wortman, another Yale alum, discovered the new letter in university archives while researching a book about Yale World War I aviators. What does it prove? The consensus seems to be that Skull and Bones, whose lips, as ever, are sealed (it is a secret society), but which has always liked to pilfer things in a spirit of college hijinks, did dig up a skull in Oklahoma in 1918 and does keep it, or one like it, on display by the front door. But Geronimo’s grave was unmarked and overgrown in 1918. David Miller, a history professor at Cameron University, in Lawton, Oklahoma, told Yale Alumni Magazine, “My assumption is that they did dig up somebody at Fort Sill. It could have been an Indian, but it probably wasn’t Geronimo.” One thing everything agrees is that robbing the Apache leader’s grave would have seemed a lot more acceptable then than today. As the Yale history professor emeritus Gaddis Smith puts it, “There was a racial consciousness and a sense of Anglo-Saxon superiority above all others.” In New Mexico, Geronimo’s great-grandson Harlyn Geronimo is talking to lawyers. For more, see this article in the Yale Alumni Magazine.
May 11, 2006
Of Thee I Sing—Encore Posted by John Steele Gordon at 02:15 PM EST Fred Schwarz makes wicked fun of a less than ept critic over at the New York Sun regarding his article on the 1931 Gershwin musical Of Thee I Sing.
I’m all for making fun of critics, especially those who can’t tell the difference between Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt. But I wonder if that one was confusing—or more precisely, conflating—Of Thee I Sing with another 1930s musical spoof about Washington politics, Rodgers and Hart’s I’d Rather Be Right, which opened in 1937, starring George M. Cohan as President Roosevelt. (You can see James Cagney playing Cohan playing Roosevelt in the 1942 biopic of Cohan, Yankee Doodle Dandy.)
By the way, Of Thee I Sing was the first Broadway musical to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. But the prize was awarded only to George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, and Ira Gershwin. George Gershwin’s contribution to the show’s success (merely the music) was ignored.
May 11, 2006
Then There’s This Guy Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 12:15 PM EST I’m in a nitpicky mood today (as usual). At National Review Online, David Frum writes: “Nearly half the nation’s five year olds (45% to be precise) are now ethnic minorities, with most of the surge in minority population driven by Hispanic immigration. About half that immigration is illegal. In other words, the decision today not to enforce the immigration laws is guaranteeing that the US of the second half of the 21st century will cease to be a country predominantly populated by people of European descent.” Uh, dude? Do you know what “Hispanic” means? (Not to mention that some of the immigrants will go back, and there will be further immigration, and what’s wrong with non-Europeans anyway, but that’s a whole different topic.) I suspect that Mr. Frum wanted to say “nonwhite” but realized how that would sound, so he tried to come up with a euphemism. And he is not the first person to see the Spanish as being not really European. As I wrote in 1998 in “Time Machine,” at the time of the Spanish-American War, some Americans went to great lengths to explain why we were fighting against a white European power and for the mostly African and indigenous population of Cuba. “Harper’s Weekly [I wrote] was so fond of Europe and its people that when war broke out, it could barely admit that Spain was part of the continent: ‘The Spaniards are the last remnants of white barbarians, and, like their prototypes of the Middle Ages, whom they closely resemble, they have the savage instincts and methods that are found nowhere else in civilized Europe in this nineteenth century except in Turkey, and, with the exception of Spain and Turkey, are found only among the uncivilized red men of the remote regions of our own continent, and the brown and black and yellow men of Africa and Asia.’”
May 11, 2006
Health Insurance Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:15 AM EST No one, I fancy, disagrees with the idea that the way this country funds health care is a mess of the first order. We got into the mess the way democracies so often do: one casual, unthought-out step at a time. What these steps were can be found in an article I wrote for American Heritage fourteen years ago. I regret to report that not much has changed, except the numbers, which have gotten a lot bigger.
While everyone agrees there’s a problem, and a big one that is getting bigger, the arguments break out over how to fix it.
Some want to socialize American medicine, by having a single-payer system in which the federal government provides all health care, paid for through tax money. This has the virtue of being very easy to grasp as a concept. But as far as I’m concerned that is about its only virtue. First, why anyone would advocate turning over 15 percent of the American economy to those wonderful people who brought you the post office is a mystery to me. The federal Medicare and Medicaid programs are even bigger messes than the system as a whole. Second, an all-inclusive single-payer system, no matter how well designed and run, would still be both a monopoly (the only seller of medical services, drugs, and equipment to the public) and a monopsony (the only buyer of medical services, drugs, and equipment from doctors, nurses, pharmaceutical companies, etc.). And monopolies and monopsonies (which are much rarer, and usually involve government in some way—such as the American market for nuclear submarines) have several characteristics in common: they are invariably fat, lazy, uninnovative, ever-increasingly bureaucratic, devoted above all else to the maintenance of the monopoly or monopsony, and always willing to use their market power to set prices unfairly. I favor an incremental system of reform that would utilize, as much as possible, the enormous power of the free market to force efficiency on a system that is presently wasting money by the tens of billions a month, with the government funding the medical insurance of those who lack the wherewithal to pay for it themselves.
There is not enough space to go into the various steps I would advocate, although if there is interest, I can do so in a future post. But there is one step that would save billions by greatly reducing the cost of health insurance and would not cost the federal government a cent. All it takes is a simple act of Congress.
Insurance is the one major component of the American financial system that is regulated entirely by the states. As a result, insurance companies must jump through fifty different sets of hoops if they want to sell an insurance policy nationwide. Worse, state legislatures are much more susceptible to lobbyists than is Congress, which gets much more attention. As a result, many states mandate that health insurance cover many procedures and therapies that the purchaser of the policy might not want but has to pay for anyway. Most states require chiropractors to be covered. Eleven states require policies to cover acupuncture, seven hair transplants. Four insist that massage therapists be covered.
Many states require what is called guaranteed issue. That means that an insurance company must sell a policy to anyone who asks, whenever he or she asks for it, even if already in the hospital with a very expensive illness to be treated.
Those states that have the most of these mandates have the highest insurance premiums, of course, and the differential is not small. One online insurance brokerage, ehealthinsurance, found that a bare-bones policy for an individual ($1,000 deductible, with a 20 percent copay) varies in price by a factor of six. Such a policy would cost $54 a month in Long Beach, California, and $334 in New York City.
Rep John Shadegg, Republican of Arizona, has sponsored a bill (cosponsored by 78 other members of the House) that would allow people, regardless of the state they live in, to buy insurance from any company licensed in any state, under that state’s regulations. In other words, the person who now has to shell out $334 a month to buy a bare-bones policy because he lives in New York City could buy the same policy from a California company for about $54 a month. About 10 years ago, Congress passed legislation allowing people to do their banking out of state if they so chose. There is no reason not to allow them to do the same with insurance. One would think this would be a slam-dunk, as one would think that Congressmen would leap at the chance to offer their constituents radically cheaper health insurance. But no, there is much opposition in Congress to the idea, mostly coming from the representatives from the most highly regulated states. They seem to favor the interests of their pals in the state political establishment over those of their constituents. Further details are available at Rep. Shadegg’s website.
May 10, 2006
Of Thee I Sing Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 05:30 PM EST In yesterday’s New York Sun (not available online), Will Friedwald writes: “Gershwin’s 1931 show ‘Of Thee I Sing,’ which will be revived by City Center Encores this week, is surprisingly prescient.” (He means “the Gershwins’ 1931 show” rather than “Gershwin’s 1931 show,” but let that pass; and for the record, the book is by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, who go unmentioned in Mr. Friedwald’s piece.) In support of this supposed prescience, he mentions the show’s “silly senators” and “a goofy, spoonerism-spouting president.” This is the sort of thing that critics say when inspiration fails them, which is most of the time. Portraying authority figures as buffoons is hardly unusual in drama, and since it’s a situation that often accords with real life (Warren Harding was in office less than a decade before the show was written, for example), it can hardly be called prescient. I could write a play about a senator who takes bribes, for example, or gets involved in a sex scandal, and the next time either of those very common things occurred, someone could revive it and say, “That Schwarz was a regular Nostradamus.” Mr. Friedwald probably reads the horoscopes in the paper and thinks, “Wow, it’s like this guy knows me.” I’m reminded of the time a couple of years ago when I was reading my college’s alumni magazine (yes, I know—my fault) and one student remarked on the timeliness of an ancient Greek play they were studying: “It’s about a king whose father was king and who is fighting a controversial war.” And I thought: Let’s see, many ancient plays were about kings, war was a popular topic, wars tend to be controversial since people die in them, and due to the hereditary principle, most kings’ fathers were also kings. The notion that this not exactly striking set of coincidences might somehow make the play more illuminating than reading the newspaper is the sort of ludicrous idea that only a college student could propound with a straight face. (Okay, or a college professor—or a critic.) But that’s not what I came here to talk about. In the same paragraph as the sentence quoted at the start of this item, Mr. Friedwald goes on to say that the dim-bulb President in the show “mangles familiar expressions, as when Roosevelt’s slogan, ‘prosperity is just around the corner,’ becomes ‘posterity is just around the corner.’” He then states in parentheses, “I wouldn’t be surprised if Encores throws in a reference to duck hunting or the ‘Decider.’” This illustrates the time-honored journalistic principle that if you are criticizing someone else for being stupid, you should check your own facts, grammar, and spelling extremely carefully. If he is referring to Vice-President Cheney’s shooting accident, the intended target there was quail, not ducks. That makes three mistakes in a single paragraph. (And by the way, the prescience of the show’s writers failed them when it came to their Vice President. The word “Throttlebottom,” named after the VP in “Of Thee I Sing,” has become shorthand for, as one dictionary puts it, “a harmless incompetent in public office.” Neither his friends nor most of his foes would describe the current Vice President that way.) Mr. Friedwald’s attribution of “prosperity is just around the corner” to Roosevelt is worse than simple sloppiness, because twice in the article he mentions that Of Thee I Sing opened in 1931. I’ll admit that I skipped over the mistake the first time I read it, but when I saw 1931 again, I thought: Wait a minute—FDR in 1931? In fact, the statement is usually attributed to Herbert Hoover, although, as Hugh Rawson and Margaret Minor write in the American Heritage Dictionary of American Quotations, there is no record of his saying it: “This was the popular distillation of various statements of assurance made by Hoover and others following the 1929 stock market crash. . . . Eventually the phrase became an ironic joke, used mockingly as a political attack phrase by the Democrats.” My point, which I seem to be approaching rather circuitously, is that if I were teaching American history, I would make my students memorize all the Presidents along with the dates they entered and left office. I know that memorization is out of fashion these days (I’ve written on this subject before; see this), and concentrating on Presidents can distort one’s understanding of American history. But to me, learning the presidential chronology is like learning the names of the elements when you’re studying chemistry, or learning conjugations and declensions when studying a language—it’s the basis on which you build everything else. When you’re familiar with American history and you hear that something happened on a certain date, the first thing you usually think of is who was President at the time. (This can be carried too far, like the other day, when I bought some items in a store and the register showed a total of $18.81, so I thought, “Ah, James Garfield!”) When you know who was in power, you have an idea of what the background for the event was, and you can make much better sense of the chronology. Without this framework, events and trends swim about in a haze. Then it’s much harder to place things in context, and the pursuit of pedantry becomes much more treacherous. P.S. Here’s the link if you want to see the show, by the way:
May 10, 2006
Beyond Salem: It Happened in New York Posted by Ellen Feldman at 11:30 AM EST Joshua Zeitz’s perceptive comments about the contagious hysteria of displaced fear in both the Salem witch trials and the McCarthy years bring to mind the recently published New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan, by the Bancroft award winner Jill Lepore. Lepore explores a largely forgotten chapter in New York history during which rumors of a slave plot spread as rapidly and treacherously as the fires that gave birth to them. Although Lepore makes a connection between these events and the famous freedom-of-the-press trial of Peter Zenger in 1735, she also likens the episode to the Salem witch trials almost half a century earlier. In fact, an anonymous letter from Boston warned New Yorkers against “making Bonfires of the Negros & perhaps thereby loading yourselves with greater Guilt than theirs.” The city fathers were enraged at this sniping from their New England brothers. In 1741, one in five inhabitants in Manhattan was enslaved, making the city, in the words of the author, “second only to Charleston, South Carolina, in a wretched calculus of urban unfreedom.” In this urban racial tinderbox, after a brutally cold winter, ten fires raged during five weeks in March and April. As New Yorkers grew more fearful of where and when conflagration would break out next, rumors of a slave plot against white inhabitants spread. An account the previous February of a slave revolt in Charleston, South Carolina, that burned 300 houses to the ground and nearly destroyed the city only fanned the embers of suspicion, while the retraction by Peter Zenger shortly after, assuring his readers that “The report of the Negroes rising [in Charleston] was groundless,” did nothing to douse the terror. Presently a 16-year-old white indentured servant, Mary Burton, stepped forward with a vivid account of poisonous plots to murder white men, marry their women, and appropriate their wealth. “The happy instrument of all this discovery,” as Burton was called at the time, named names, including the white tavern keeper who was the brains behind the scheme. Surely, colonial white New Yorkers told one another, Negro slaves were not smart enough to hatch such a conspiracy. Burton was not the only one to implicate others. More than a hundred black men and women were imprisoned in a dungeon beneath City Hall, where, not surprisingly, many traded confessions for leniency. Ironically, as Lepore points out, the Enlightenment was behind this readiness to recognize a slave conspiracy. An earlier age might have blamed the fires on God’s vengeance or fate, but now there had to be a rational reason for events. Our main source of information for this scandalous episode is the journal of the self-serving and unreliable judge in the case, Daniel Horsmanden, which Lepore deconstructs brilliantly without dismissing entirely. She also brings to life the sights and smells and sounds, the manners and customs and culture of the infant city. The casualty count of the alleged New York uprising of 1741 was greater than that of the Salem witch trials. Thirteen black men were burned at the stake, seventeen blacks and four whites hanged, seven citizens banished from the city, and those countless others imprisoned beneath City Hall. New York Burning is a meticulously researched, beautifully written account of a shameful moment in New York’s history. It illuminates the different meanings liberty assumed in the fledgling colonies for whites and for blacks. It also reveals the bloody toll fear, both rational and irrational, can take on a populace.
May 10, 2006
An Answer to John Steele Gordon Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:30 AM EST Since 2001 two citizens, José Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi, have been detained without trial or charges. Hamdi was released and flown to Saudi Arabia after the Supreme Court upheld his detention but authorized him to challenge it in court. As for Padilla, the Bush administration has played a devious game, at first holding him as an enemy combatant on grounds that he plotted to launch a dirty bomb against U.S. civilian targets, but then transferring him to civil custody and charging him with conspiracy to “murder, kidnap and maim” persons overseas. Either the administration has tacitly admitted that Padilla was not, in fact, an enemy combatant involved in a dirty bomb plot, or it has decided that said plot was no big deal. Either way, it held Padilla as an enemy combatant and then, after a stretch of time, determined that it could no longer do so. In addition to Padilla and Hamdi, the administration has held hundreds of foreign nationals as enemy combatants, summarily ruling them beyond the reach of the Geneva Convention accords. Though he would like to write off liberals as dim-witted and soft on national defense, Mr. Gordon has glossed over a legitimate and important source of disagreement. He believes that we should compromise civil liberties in a time of war. Many liberals, as well as many serious libertarians and plenty of people in the political center, believe that to declare an open-ended war against a non-state entity and to use that declaration to detain people indefinitely, without formal charges, without access to counsel, and without a trial, is Orwellian. I’ll go further than that. It’s chilling. It offends standards of civilized behavior. It degrades us as a nation. In building his argument, Mr. Gordon cites Robert Jackson’s dissent in Terminiello v. Chicago, in which the future Nuremberg prosecutor argued that the government had the right to ban politically inflammatory speech in a time of war. Though Terminiello concerned the broad question of balancing civil liberties and national security, which is also the topic that Mr. Gordon and I are debating, it’s not a very useful parallel here. Denying someone the right to agitate for an unpopular cause is highly problematic, but it’s not anywhere near as damaging as jailing a person indefinitely, without due process of law. These are apples and oranges. In any event, Jackson was in the minority. The court came down for civil liberties. A better example would be Korematsu v. United States (1944), in which Jackson dissented from the court’s decision upholding the conviction of an American-born citizen of Japanese dissent who refused to report to a detention center during World War II. Jackson’s dissent was mixed. He scored the civil court’s conviction of Fred Korematsu for enforcing “the principle of racial discrimination in criminal procedure and of transplanting American citizens.” At the same time, he maintained that the military had a limited right, in a time of war, to detain citizens. In effect, Jackson wanted the civilian courts to keep their hands clean of the entire business, or to intervene if they felt the military had overstepped its bounds. Either way, Jackson appears somewhat more squeamish and equivocal on the matter of balancing civil liberties and national security than Mr. Gordon would have us believe.
May 9, 2006
Witches, Continued Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:00 PM EST I accept Joshua Zeitz’s birthday wishes with thanks and without a trace of antiliberal bias. Since my birthday was on Sunday, they are very timely. (As it happens, mostly bad things have happened on my birthday—the Lusitania was sunk, Herb Score, a great pitcher for the Milwaukee Braves, lost his eye and his career to a line drive, etc. But one very good thing happened: The Germans surrendered on my first birthday, May 7, 1945. Harry Truman, however, in an utterly shameless abuse of power, decided that May 8 should be celebrated as V-E Day. Guess what day is President Truman’s birthday!) But I have no zeal to “demonstrate the stupidity of liberals.” They can handle that task very well indeed on their own. They don’t need my help. As Woodrow Wilson famously advised, “Never murder a man who is committing suicide.” But Mr. Zeitz does not play quite fair here. He writes, “As for Mr. Gordon’s argument that it’s okay to imprison certain categories of people indefinitely, without trial, charge, or access to courts and attorneys—if he’s content with that reading of the law, than he only demonstrates my point about the bankruptcy of modern-day conservatism. Conservatives once placed a high premium on individual liberty. They have sold that important value for the cheap veneer of security.” First off, I do not represent modern-day conservatism. I represent myself alone. If others agree with me, that’s their prerogative, just as it is Mr. Zeitz’s to disagree. But more important, what I wrote was that “in wartime, alas, a balance must be struck between military necessity and constitutional protections.” That is a very, very different thing from what Mr. Zeitz implied I meant. Perhaps he disagrees with Justice Jackson on the subject. I do not. I asked him to name one American being held in such a way besides José Padilla. He didn’t name any. He writes, “As for his argument that the Supreme Court has (thus far) allowed for these incarcerations, so they must be okay, the Supreme Court once declared that Dred Scott was property. That didn’t make it okay.” Indeed it didn’t. But it made it legal, whether we like it or not, and had we been alive in 1857, I am quite sure that Mr. Zeitz and I would have stood as one on the subject of Dred Scott. It remains to this day the most infamous decision in the court’s history. But what I wrote was, “José Padilla was held as an enemy combatant and the Supreme Court has ruled that American citizens can be so held (ex parte Quirin, 1942).” Where in that simple declarative sentence do I say or imply that I agree with the Supreme Court’s ruling? Again, the Supreme Court ruling makes the Bush administration actions legal, not necessarily wise or even right. Under our Constitution, it is the Supreme Court that ultimately decides what is legal, not the ACLU. What I believe is simple. I believe we are in a war, and in wartime a balance must be struck between military necessity and maintaining the civil rights for which we fight in the first place. Compared with previous wars, the encroachment on civil rights in this one has been minuscule. José Padilla rots in jail alone. I agree with Justice Jackson, that the Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact.
May 9, 2006
On Witches Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:30 PM EST If I wished him a happy birthday on the American Heritage blog, I’m sure John Steele Gordon would accuse me of betraying an unforgivably facile left-wing bias. I just seem to draw out the contrarian in him. Which is fine. But in his zeal to demonstrate the stupidity of liberals everywhere, Mr. Gordon has misconstrued my argument. I wasn’t likening seventeenth-century witches to members of the Al Qaeda terrorist syndicate. I was drawing on Professor Mary Beth Norton’s historical analysis of the Essex County witch trials to liken the threat of violent Indian incursions against northern Massachusetts settlements in the seventeenth century to the threat of future terrorist attacks today. Both threats are real. By extension, some things are not real. In 1692 many Massachusetts residents refracted their legitimate fear of Indians through the fantasy lens of witchcraft. In 2006 many zealous supporters of the Bush administration refract their legitimate fear of terrorism through the fantasy lens of a broad terrorist conspiracy. There are no WMDs in Iraq. There was no connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. But many supporters of the Bush administration insist otherwise, and we are mired in Iraq because of it. These conservative faithful are scornful of empiricism and prefer a faith-based, from-the-gut approach to governance that, come to think of it, would have pleased seventeenth-century Puritan ministers who believed in spectral evidence. Let me be more precise still. In Arthur Miller’s day, there were, to be sure, Soviet agents operating in the United States. But most—in fact, the vast majority—of individuals fingered by anti-Communist zealots were not Soviet agents. In 1692 there were indeed practicing witches in New England. But most of the people fingered by the special court were not, in fact, practicing witches. I hope this clarifies things. As for Mr. Gordon’s argument that it’s okay to imprison certain categories of people indefinitely, without trial, charge, or access to courts and attorneys—if he’s content with that reading of the law, than he only demonstrates my point about the bankruptcy of modern-day conservatism. Conservatives once placed a high premium on individual liberty. They have sold that important value for the cheap veneer of security. As for his argument that the Supreme Court has (thus far) allowed for these incarcerations, so they must be okay, the Supreme Court once declared that Dred Scott was property. That didn’t make it okay.
May 9, 2006
The Crucible vs. Today Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:00 PM EST I agree with Joshua Zeitz that Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is a great play and the Salem witch trials are one of the those episodes in American history with enduring fascination. The New York Public Library has no fewer than 61 titles on the subject and many, many more on related subjects. Some of the fascination, I suppose, comes from the Lizzie Borden effect, in that we just don’t have quite enough information to definitively solve the mystery of what really happened. But I think he goes way too far in comparing the Salem witch trials with current events. Even accepting the reality of witches, as many, perhaps most, of the people of seventeenth-century Massachusetts did, they posed a threat in no way comparable to modern day terrorists. Witches threatened the souls of the unwary. Terrorists killed three thousand of my fellow New Yorkers on September 11, 2001. Hundreds of innocent people in Bali, Madrid, London, and elsewhere have died at their hands since. No one doubts that terrorists, given the opportunity, would kill tens of thousands more without a twitch of conscience. Witches were putative threats and all of the accused vehemently denied the charges, even as they mounted the gallows. Terrorists are real threats, and Zacarias Moussaoui gloried in his guilt at his trial. Mr. Zeitz writes, “Even as historians continue to sift through the grains of evidence, The Crucible still has a great deal to offer. In a time when foreign nationals and U.S. citizens are rotting in American prisons unable to learn the charges against them, consult with counsel, or receive a fair trial (or any trial at all) . . .” What American citizens are rotting in jail uncharged and without counsel? José Padilla was held as an enemy combatant and the Supreme Court has ruled that American citizens can be so held (ex parte Quirin, 1942). His case received a great deal of attention, both judicial and journalistic, with many able lawyers working pro bono on his behalf. He has now been charged with various crimes. Who else? As for the foreign nationals being held, they, too, are enemy combatants. None of them are entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention, which regulates the handling of prisoners of war and binds sovereign states that are signatories to it. Al Qaeda is neither a sovereign state nor a signatory. Legally the captors of these men could have just put a gun to the backs of their heads and pulled the trigger. I think the problem here is that the left still thinks of the War on Terror not as a war but as a criminal matter. And that those involved should be treated as criminals, with all the protections the law provides to those charged with a crime. But 9/11 was not a criminal act; it was an act of war, plain and simple. And in wartime, alas, a balance must be struck between military necessity and constitutional protections. As Justice Robert Jackson warned (in dissent in Terminiello v. Chicago, 1944), we must not “convert the Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.” I might point out that far worse has been done in the name of military necessity than anything the Bush Administration has done. In 1942 FDR threw tens of thousands of native-born American citizens into concentration camps for no reason other than their ancestry. Further, Mr. Zeitz writes, “In explaining his opposition to the Salem trials, Increase Mather, the great seventeenth-century Puritan minister, put it this way: ‘It were better that ten suspected witches should escape, than that one innocent person be condemned.’ Substitute ‘terrorist’ for ‘witch,’ and one suspects that, today, Mather might just receive an unwelcomed knock on his door.” Really? First, of course, witches in seventeenth-century New England were less of a clear and present threat than twenty-first-century terrorists (see above). Second, I may have missed it, but which intellectuals have had “an unwelcomed knock on his door” in the middle of the night? The editors of The Nation have been left to sleep soundly. So have countless bloggers of the Daily Kos stripe. Dennis Kucinich and Maxine Waters attend Congress unmolested. Street demonstrations by those opposed to the war have been unrestricted. Indeed, is there in the United States today a single person not diagnosed with paranoia who has feared his statements of opinion might bring the FBI?
May 9, 2006
War on Contraception Posted by Ellen Feldman at 10:00 AM EST The May 7 edition of the New York Times Magazine published an excellent, and terrifying, article by Russell Shorto on the religious right’s war on contraception. “I cannot imagine any development in human history, after the Fall, that has had a greater impact on human beings than the pill,” the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary told Shorto. The pill, however, is the least of it. These groups want to outlaw all forms of contraception, including condoms, which have been proven to stop the spread of disease as well as prevent pregnancy. This is not a fringe movement. Shorto goes on to report that last year when a reporter asked if President Bush supported the right to contraception, Press Secretary Scott McClellan said he would “not dignify the question with a response.” The White House has still not replied to a series of letters sent last July by a Congressional group led by Representative Carolyn Maloney asking if the President supports the right to contraception. Once again religious conviction masquerades as public policy. The same groups that are trying to outlaw all methods of birth control are, of course, in the forefront of the war against the right to abortion, despite the fact that studies show that countries where contraceptives and information about how to use them are available have far lower abortion rates. Thus, this is not a campaign for a “culture of life,” as they claim. It is a war against sex, even sex in marriage. Isn’t the law supposed to prevent misdeeds against the community and its members, not legislate personal morality? What these groups, which are opposed to any form of birth control, lack is a sense of history. They lament our sex-obsessed society. (Then why not go after the advertising rather than the contraceptive industry?) But they have no knowledge of what life was like for families, as well as independent-minded single women, before the advent of legal contraceptives. Margaret Sanger, the heroic mother of family planning, liked to tell the story of a woman called Sadie, who lived in a tenement on the Lower East Side of New York. Sanger’s biographers agree that Sadie may well have been apocryphal, but if she was, Sanger, a nurse, had undoubtedly treated scores like Sadie while working among the poor. Sadie, the mother of a large family, fell ill from the aftereffects of a self-induced abortion. When the doctor arrived to treat her, she pleaded with him for contraceptive information. Women in the slums suspected their better-heeled sisters had ways to prevent pregnancy. The doctor told Sadie she could not “have her cake and eat it too.” It is safe to assume there was very little cake in Sadie’s impoverished life. When she continued to beg him for information, he advised her to “tell Jake to sleep on the roof.” A few months later, Sanger returned to treat Sadie after another self-induced abortion, but she was too late. Sadie died from lack of information and the unavailability of a health product. Sadie’s fate was not uncommon in the slums of America before the legalization of birth control, well into the twentieth century. It was, of course, rarer in more upscale neighborhoods. Though some women with access to doctors who would provide contraceptive information were reluctant to avail themselves of the option—Eleanor Roosevelt complained of always being either about to have a child or just getting over having had one, but did nothing about it until she banished FDR from the marriage bed—others were less shy. ER’s outspoken cousin, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, made fun of Eleanor’s naiveté and boasted of her own worldly German physician who was a source of much useful prophylactic information. If the religious right and this administration succeed in turning the clock back on contraception, the poor will once again be the ones to suffer. Those with means can always hop over to Europe or find an idealistic or acquiescent physician at home. Those without will have to choose between another child they cannot afford to feed or clothe or educate and telling Jake to sleep on the roof. Surely we have enough spousal abuse in the country to know where that form of birth control will lead.
|
