July 24, 2006
Time, Life, Books Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 01:25 PM EST A while back I read a novel called Life and Love, Such as They Are, by Anna Shapiro. It’s a comic story with serious aspects, and though the author has a weakness for shoehorning one too many gags into a paragraph, overall it is very well done. But there’s something strange about it.
Ms. Shapiro’s novel was published in 1994, and when I read it, I assumed that that was when the action was taking place. So did the New York Times reviewer, who called it “a novel of New York in the ’90s.” But a few weeks later, the Times published a letter from Ms. Shapiro in which she pointed out that “‘Life & Love’ is a novel of New York in the late ’70s and early ’80s” (in fact it’s almost all ’70s, with only a brief epilogue in the latter decade). She pointed to an ambiguous mention of the 1970s in the next-to-last chapter and to a church fire that readers were supposed to know had occurred then. Yet if, like me and the Times reviewer, you didn’t catch these references, late 1970s could pass quite easily for mid-1990s.
I experienced the same sort of confusion recently when I read Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. It never says when the action is taking place, and I was guessing 1880s until I saw a mention of somebody being taken to the train station in a “motor.” When coupled with the publication date of 1905, this narrowed down the possible range considerably, but for the first third of the book, I was off by 20 years. By the time she got around to writing The Age of Innocence, her Pulitzer Prize winner from 1920, Wharton had become wise enough to begin the very first sentence with, “On a January evening of the late seventies . . .”
Don’t you wish more authors would do that? Or at least put “Fall 1973,” or whatever the date is, in italics at the start? Maybe it’s just me, and perhaps it’s because I work at American Heritage, but it always bothers me to go through a book not knowing when it’s taking place. Consider a recently published novel, King Dork, by Frank Portman. The author, under his stage name of Dr. Frank, leads the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band, the Mr. T Experience (also known as MTX), and the title of his novel is also the title of one of the band’s songs. (The song can be found on their best album, . . . And the Women Who Love Them (Special Addition), and if you’re still reading this, for goodness sakes stop immediately, click on the link above, and buy the record.)
Anyway, King Dork is narrated by a high-school student, and it’s being sold as a “young adult” book. A few imprecise time references early on suggest that it’s set in the present or the recent past; near the end, the author gives enough information that we can place it in 2000, give or take a year. Yet any high school student who reads it will smell a rat immediately, because it was quite clearly written to take place during the author’s own late ’70s/early ’80s high-school days.
It’s not just that all the narrator’s favorite rock bands and other cultural references are from that period; that might simply suggest that he has retro taste. And while I seriously doubt that any high school in America still has a “mod” subculture like the one in the book, I could be wrong about that, too, since I don’t spend as much time hanging around schoolyards as I used to. No, what gives it away in an instant is the absence of current technology.
No one in King Dork ever sends an e-mail or a text message; in fact, the author mentions dating couples who use third parties to carry handwritten notes back and forth. Students fulfill dopey “research” assignments by copying from books with pencil and paper instead of downloading from the Internet. When the narrator wants to research a girl he’s met, he searches for her number in a printed phone book, and when he wants to find a verse in the Bible, he goes to the library and looks it up in a concordance. Computers are mentioned only a couple of times, and then only in passing. That most ubiquitous prop of today’s high-schoolers, the mobile phone, is entirely missing, as are portable music players, laptops, and video games.
I suspect that Mr. Portman originally intended his book for an adult audience and set it in his own high school days. Then, I’m guessing, the publishers decided to recast it as a young-adult title, and he did a hasty rewrite to make the dates work out but left most of the text intact. Or maybe he just decided that there was no way he could portray today’s high school scene accurately, so he wouldn’t bother trying. Not that it makes much difference. Whatever the story behind it, King Dork is a funny and telling book as long as you don’t mind the shaky chronology.
All this made me think about how technology can be used as a measure of that nebulous quantity, “how much life has changed.” As Ms. Shapiro’s novel shows, it was possible to write about daily life during the mid-1970s and have it still ring true in the mid-1990s. Technology changed a lot during that time, but very little of it became so ubiquitous that it would necessarily come up in a novel. Some people in the 1980s had home computers, for example, but most did not, and those who did generally used them for things like alphabetizing their record collections, not for interacting with others. Ms. Shapiro’s novel came out right when the Internet boom was about to start. Between the early 1990s and today, the differences in communication and information technology have been enormous, and they’re so deeply embedded in our daily lives that any description of a person’s routine activities today would be unrecognizable to someone from a dozen years ago—and vice versa, as we see from Mr. Portman’s book.
So are we living in an era of unusually rapid technological change? Not really. It would be more accurate to say that the 1970s and 1980s were an era of unusually slow technological change—or, more accurate still, that they were characterized by great advances that did not reach the saturation point until the end of the century. Consider the big transformative consumer technologies since the start of the Industrial Revolution: railroads, telegraph, telephone, electric lighting, automobiles, aviation, movies, radio, television . . . and what? After television, there wasn’t any great leap of this sort for about four decades. Socially, to be sure, there were enormous shifts, and there were lots of incremental technological improvements and major steps that remained hidden. But there was no single, dramatic new technology used directly by the average American that had a transformative impact.
Yet behind the scenes, the stage was being set for the revolution that the general public is experiencing today. These changes tend to happen in spurts, which is why life can seem stable for a couple of decades and then become completely unrecognizable in the space of a few years. All of which suggests that it’s important for novelists to get their details right—and that they’ll do their readers a big favor by telling them at the start when the story is taking place.
July 22, 2006
Richard Nixon Reconsidered Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:30 AM EST Fred Schwarz fears the world is in a hell of a state when John Steele Gordon and I agree with each other, as is most definitely the case on the question of gay marriage. What led us to this common ground was my anecdote of a few days ago about Richard Nixon, who predicted privately that gay marriage would be uncontroversial by the year 2000. Of Richard Nixon, Mr. Gordon wrote: “It is, I think, further evidence that Nixon was a remarkably complicated and conflicted figure, essentially tragic in nature. Shakespeare, I imagine, would have found him one of the most interesting twentieth-century American Presidents.” So we are agreed on a second point. Nixon is impossible to fathom. I stumbled across the Nixon-gay marriage anecdote in the course of background reading for a book I’m currently researching on America’s encounter with the turbulent 1970s. Nixon, who served as President from 1969 to 1974, figures prominently in the opening chapters. Thus far, it’s been great fun, but not at all an easy task, to figure him out. A good place to begin is David Greenberg’s fine book Nixon's Shadow,
which traces Nixon’s many—often contradictory—representations in the popular imagination. As Greenberg explains, a generation of political historians in the 1990s have largely rehabilitated Nixon’s reputation, finding much to be admired in his domestic and foreign policies. Some of Nixon’s achievements include a vigorous affirmative-action program targeting firms that contracted with the federal government (and unions whose employees worked on federally funded projects); a somewhat less aggressive but partially effective Justice Department campaign to bring court-ordered desegregation to Southern school districts; creation of the EPA and OSHA; detente with the Soviet Union; open relations with China; the SALT I agreements limiting the buildup of Soviet and American nuclear arsenals; and a new policy toward Native Americans that rejected the old, discredited assimilationist model in favor of increased tribal autonomy. But there is a sharp distinction between moderation and competence, and some of the historians who have sought to rehabilitate Nixon may be filtering their view of him through the lens of the “Reagan revolution.” Nixon was no right-wing ideologue—that much is true. But that doesn’t mean he was an effective administrator or a grand practitioner of international diplomacy. (The latter is an image he studiously cultivated for himself in the 1980s and 1990s). Nixon consolidated power at the White House, by and large cutting cabinet officials (and hundreds of high-level executive department experts) out of the decision-making loop and leaving important decisions to a small number of West Wing aides. Such heavy-handedness cost him important policy expertise and led to considerable gaffes, as when he and Henry Kissinger unknowingly surrendered important advantages during the SALT negotiations; when the administration unwittingly allowed the Soviets to corner the world grain market, which exacerbated inflationary pressures on the American economy; and when the President drew out negotiations with North Vietnam until 1973, ultimately agreeing to terms that had more or less been on the table for four years, but at great financial and human cost to the United States. Nixon’s disregard for Congress also led to some of his high-profile legislative failures. Top on that list was the administration’s inability to secure passage of the Family Assistance Plan, a bold initiative that would have replaced America’s complicated, motley collection of welfare programs with a “negative income tax” (a term Nixon carefully avoided) and a guaranteed income for poor families. The plan would have covered far more poor families than did AFDC, and it included incentives for work and training. But Nixon shunned House and Senate leaders from both parties and was unable to overcome bipartisan opposition to the bill. Even if Nixon’s policy accomplishments had been impressive—and my impression thus far is that they were good but not stellar—Greenberg makes a convincing case that Presidents are more than the sum of their policies. Nixon brought a toxic brand of politics to the public sphere. His White House tapes reveal an alarming level of criminal conspiracy, crude prejudices toward Jews, women, and African-Americans, an obsession with vengeance, and utter disdain for the free press. Had Nixon kept these notions to himself, that would be one thing. But he ordered illegal wiretaps of reporters and political opponents; used the IRS, CIA, and FBI to hound administration critics; attempted to defraud the federal treasury by backdating some of his personal-income-tax statements; laundered illegal campaign contributions through foreign banks; and undertook a deeply divisive campaign to polarize white and black Americans, both North and South. In light of all of this, it’s hard to follow the advice that Nixon’s Attorney General, John Mitchell, once gave to a group of civil rights leaders: “Watch what we do, rather than what we say.” To get back to John Steele Gordon’s point, indeed, Nixon was a remarkably complicated character. It’s a challenge to synthesize his presidential career. Perhaps my friends at American Heritage have some ideas.
July 21, 2006
Dummies for Darwin Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 03:20 PM EST Well, I think the world is in a hell of a state when John Steele Gordon agrees with Joshua Zeitz and Ellen Feldman agrees with me.
I don’t have much to add to Ms. Feldman’s excellent discussion of the Scopes trial and its image in the popular imagination. I’ve never seen the movie of Inherit the Wind, but we did read the play in my high school English class, and you can’t truly appreciate a text of that richness and depth until you’ve heard it read haltingly out loud by a bunch of bored teenagers.
The only comment I have on creationism is that as a private belief system—not something you impose on others, but something you believe yourself—creationism is no more irrational than evolutionism. It is non-rational—that is, it is founded not on reason but on revelation. But it is not irrational, because once you accept that revelation, what follows it is not contrary to logic.
Here’s what I mean. William Jennings Bryan’s version of creationism might be quickly summed up as follows: I know that God created the world and all its creatures, because the Bible tells me so. That’s an unquestionable fact. Everything else is just a detail, and anything that seems to conflict with the basic premise is not my concern. God is a lot smarter than me, and just because I don’t understand something doesn’t mean that it’s wrong.
This requires a considerable measure of faith, but to be honest, so does most people’s belief in evolution, including my own. I, Fred Schwarz, accept the theory of evolution completely and without reservation. That said, I’ll admit that my understanding of what is meant by “the theory of evolution” is quite hazy. It’s easy to imagine quadrupeds in prehistoric Africa competing for high-hanging fruit, and the ones with the longest necks survive the best, and that’s how we got giraffes. Neanderthals who could talk made better warriors than ones who could only grunt, and that’s why we have so many lawyers. That sort of evolution is easy to understand.
But how, for example, did sexual reproduction come about? Did all the organs and the plumbing and the internal chemical balance required for it spring into existence overnight, and species that had been reproducing asexually suddenly started shaving and buying breath mints? Sexual reproduction does seem to not fit the step-by-step model of evolution, and it’s hard for a layman like me to see how any sort of haphazard process could result in it.
And that’s the whole point. I don’t go from there to saying, “Sexual reproduction does not fit my understanding of evolution, so therefore it must be the result of intelligent design” (intelligent perhaps, but far from perfect, as any woman will tell you). Instead I think, “I’m sure the evolutionists have an explanation for this, or at least they have some theories, and even if they don’t, there must be a scientific answer that has yet to be discovered.” I have no idea what such an explanation might be like, and I don’t have the time or inclination to investigate the question myself. But I’m sure that an explanation exists—because I have faith in evolution.
To me, this is no different from a creationist saying, “I believe in creation, and when something doesn’t seem to fit that model, it doesn’t shake my faith; it’s merely one of many things in this world that I don’t understand.” True, either of us could try to resolve the whole mess by making a detailed study of paleontology, evolutionary genetics, archaeometry, and a host of other subjects. But the creationist has to feed his family, and I have half a dozen blog entries to catch up on, so neither of us has the time. Instead, we choose what to believe in based on what we know and have experienced, and we leave the details to the experts.
I’m sure any well-read creationist could rip me to shreds in a debate, if I were so foolish as to try to defend evolution. He would bring up a bunch of anomalies and unexplained events and challenge me to defend them, and I would keep clearing my throat and nervously taking sips of water, and finally I would have to admit that I didn’t know what I was talking about. This doesn’t mean that creationism is right and evolutionism is wrong—just that I personally don’t know enough about evolution to explain or defend it in any detail.
So, to repeat: As a private belief system, creationism is not irrational. I don’t think creationists are crazy or stupid or ignorant, just that their beliefs are different from mine. Now, if someone wants to start teaching creationism in public schools, they’ll have to prove that it can be deduced from something other than religious doctrine. That’s a much higher standard, one that I don’t think can be met. But creationists are not ignoring reality or shutting their eyes to the truth; all they’re doing is choosing a set of basic beliefs, sticking to them, and leaving the fine points to those with the leisure to consider them. And that’s something all of us do all the time.
July 21, 2006
John Bolton and Joseph Kennedy Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:35 PM EST Last year Senator George Voinovich, Republican of Ohio, opposed the nomination of John Bolton to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In a tearful speech to the Senate he thought him far too bumptious and unwilling to suffer fools gladly to be a good steward of American interests at the United Nations. Partly as a result, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee sent the nomination to the floor without a recommendation, a highly unusual move when the President’s party controls the Senate. When the Senate failed to act before recessing last summer, President Bush gave Bolton a recess appointment. Now Senator Voinovich has changed his mind about Bolton after he’s been on the job for a year. The White House has said the nomination is still before the Senate and would like it to act. Otherwise Bolton’s recess appointment will expire with this Congress at the end of the year and he will have to be renominated next year. This is all reminiscent of Franklin Roosevelt’s nomination of Joseph P. Kennedy to be chairman of the newly created Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934. Kennedy, of course, had been one of the most active and successful speculators on Wall Street during the bull market of the 1920s, deeply involved in all the shenanigans that the SEC was created to curb. Roosevelt’s more centrist advisers argued that Kennedy was a solid Roosevelt man and New Dealer and that if anyone knew where the bodies were buried on Wall Street it was Kennedy. FDR’s more liberal advisers thought that Kennedy’s appointment would be a classic case of setting the fox to guard the henhouse. There was an immediate uproar in the press. Newsweek wrote that, “Mr. Kennedy, former speculator and pool operator, will now curb speculation and prohibit pools.” The New Republic called him “the worst of all parasites, a Wall Street operator.” Although the Democrats had 60 of the 96 seats in the Senate, it indefinitely postponed his confirmation, and Kennedy went to the SEC as acting chairman. Kennedy, of course, was far too smart and ambitious—not to mention rich—to try to personally profit from his position. Instead, he threw himself into the job, hiring top-drawer talent (such as William O. Douglas, who would himself be the SEC chairman for three years and then sit on the Supreme Court for more than thirty), issuing new trading rules that protected investors and curbed speculators, and logging 65,000 miles by air, a huge amount for the early 1930s, in his first year on the job. Kennedy, an adroit practitioner of public relations as well as an effective executive, soon established the SEC in the mind of the country as an active and reliable policeman of Wall Street and as one of the better examples of the “alphabet soup” agencies created in the New Deal.
Six months after his tenure began, the Senate, without debate or dissent, confirmed him as chairman. I hope John Bolton fares as well.
July 20, 2006
All About Satchel Page: Five Questions for Dan Gutman Posted by Allen Barra at 10:40 AM EST Dan Gutman is probably the most popular writer of sports fiction for young adults in the country. Among his bestsellers are such as Honus & Me, The Million Dollar Shot, and Satch & Me. Here are five questions concerning Satchel Paige, the philosopher and folk hero who might well have been the greatest pitcher in the game’s history. Check Gutman out at www.dangutman.com.
Did we miss Satchel’s 100th birthday? When did he turn 100?
No one knows for sure, but a likely birth date is July 7, and we’re sure he was born in 1906. Satch himself probably didn’t know for certain.
Satchel Paige seems to have evolved into an American folk hero. Why does he fascinate us now, more than 60 years after his baseball career was winding down?
Satch is one of those figures, like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, who make us wonder “What if . . .” With Dean and Monroe, we wonder what heights they might have attained if they hadn’t died young. With Satch, we wonder what heights he might have attained if he had had the chance to prove himself when he was young. Legend has it he won 2,000 games and pitched 50 no-hitters in the Negro leagues. By the time black players were finally allowed in the majors, he was 42 and long past his prime. Was he the fastest? Was he the best? We’ll never know.
Paige was regarded as a great pitcher, maybe the greatest of his time, not just by his black contemporaries but by many of the white players he faced in barnstorming games. What exactly were “barnstorming games”? Didn’t his teams fare well against those featuring great white pitchers such as Dizzy Dean and Bob Feller?
Back in the good old days before TV, black and white teams used to travel around the country during the off-season and play exhibition games in small towns. They would attract big crowds, because most people had never seen top players perform. The black teams more than held their own against white major-leaguers, which is evidence that there were a lot of Negro-leaguers who were just as good as major-leaguers, if not better. It should be noted that the black players were certainly more motivated to win, while the white players might have been playing for the extra paycheck. In any case, some baseball fans believe that all pre-1947 major-league records and stats are meaningless, because pitchers like Walter Johnson never had to pitch to great black hitters like Josh Gibson. And hitters like Babe Ruth never had to face a Satchel Paige fastball.
What do you think the existing evidence indicates? Would Satchel have been a star in the big leagues back in the 1930s had he been given a chance? What white pitcher would you compare him to?
Personality-wise, I’d say Satch most resembled Dizzy Dean. Both had a slightly goofy and uneducated yet intelligent way of looking at life. Physically, I’d compare him to Randy Johnson. Both were impossibly tall and skinny—two goony birds. As far as skill level and dominance, Satch was just as good as Walter Johnson, Bob Feller, and Cy Young, plus he had a repertoire of pitches and deliveries like Luis Tiant. But I think that if Satch had been in the majors in his prime, he would have been better than all of them.
Like Yogi Berra, Satch is reputed to have said a lot of famous things, some of which he did say and some of which he didn’t. Of the things he said that he did say, what are your favorites?
”Age is a question of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”
”We don’t stop playing because we get old. We get old because we stop playing.”
”I never threw an illegal pitch. The trouble is, once in a while I would toss one that ain’t never been seen by this generation.”
”Just take the ball and throw it where you want to. Throw strikes. Home plate don’t move.”
”Don’t pray when it rains if you don’t pray when the sun shines.”
”Money and women. They’re two of the strongest things in the world. The things you do for a woman you wouldn’t do for anything else. Same with money.”
”Work like you don’t need the money. Love like you’ve never been hurt. Dance like nobody’s watching.”
”You win a few, you lose a few. Some get rained out. But you got to dress for all of them.”
”My pitching philosophy is simple; you gotta keep the ball off the fat part of the bat.”
”I never had a job. I always played baseball.”
”If you tell a lie, always rehearse it. If it don’t sound good to you, it won’t sound good to no one else.”
And you might want to know about “Satchel Paige’s Rules for Staying Young,” first published in Collier’s magazine in 1953:
Avoid fried meats, which angry up the blood.
If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts.
Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move.
Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society—the social ramble ain’t restful.
Avoid running at all times.
And don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.
July 19, 2006
History vs. Hollywood? Posted by Ellen Feldman at 01:30 PM EST I read with fascination (if somewhat tardily due to a holiday) Frederic Schwarz’s splendid “20 Questions About the Scopes Trial” on American Heritage’s home page. I am ashamed to say that, like many Americans, I grew up believing the Hollywood version of the story. Spencer Tracy was a witty, rational, generous-spirited Clarence Darrow (or rather, Clarence Darrow was a real-life incarnation of the heroic above-Hollywood character we had come to revere, Spencer Tracy). Fredric March was a bumbling, Bible-thumping, immoral (remember his manipulation of Scopes’s innocent girlfriend), gluttonous William Jennings Bryan. In the 1960 film Inherit the Wind, which like all historical fiction says more, or at least as much, about its own era as the one it is portraying, Tracy/Darrow lost the case, but the forces of reason and the power of free thought seemed to triumph nonetheless, especially when the humane Tracy/Darrow reprimanded the opportunistic Gene Kelly/H. L. Mencken for his unbridled cynicism. The movie is brilliant, but I agree with Schwarz’s point that it has done a certain amount of damage by misrepresenting history. (As a historical novelist, I am especially sensitive to this danger.) Bryan came to his fear and rejection of evolution by way of the savagery of World War I (he resigned from Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet after the President’s protest of the sinking of the Lusitania, which he deemed too bellicose) and what he believed to be the unraveling of the social fabric. The late Stephen Jay Gould, and more recently Garrison Keillor, have suggested that one reason for his opposition to Darwinism was its odious association with its less scientific younger sibling, Social Darwinism. To paraphrase Hemingway, wouldn’t it be pretty to think so? The textbook at issue in the trial, which Bryan quoted from and criticized, A Civic Biology, by George William Hunter, made a strong argument for eugenics. As Michael Kazin describes it in his recent book A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan, the textbook cites two families, the Jokeks and Kallikaks, plagued for generations by “immorality and feeble-mindedness.” Members of both families were “true parasites” who, if they were lower animals, “we would probably kill off to prevent them from spreading.” Reading these words more than three-quarters of a century later, we realize that perhaps Bryan was not such a backward-looking proponent of intolerance after all. Kazin, however, disagrees with Gould’s reinterpretation. He points out that, though Bryan railed against the textbook, he neglected to cite these passages or even mention the espousal of Social Darwinism. So while the movie perhaps goes too far in one direction, our tendency toward revisionism may tilt too far in the other. An interesting sidebar to the case is the subsequent careers of some of the attorneys involved. Bryan, as Schwarz points out, died five days later. Arthur Garfield Hayes, a secular Jewish New York lawyer for the six-year-old American Civil Liberties Union, who, with Darrow, represented Scopes, would spend a good part of the following decade fighting to free the Scottsboro Boys. Clarence Darrow, on the other hand, financially strapped by the stock-market crash, would refuse to represent the nine black youths, though their support by the Communist-backed International Labor Defense probably contributed to his unwillingness as much as his need for money. But the same year that he turned down the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, he defended Mrs. Granville Fortescue, a white society matron, who, when a Hawaiian jury found a dark-skinned youth not guilty of assaulting her daughter in the infamous Massie case, took justice into her own well-manicured hands and shot the man to death. Darrow was no more successful getting her off than he was Scopes. I offer no moral here, except perhaps that Hollywood’s myths are a lot more reassuring than history’s questions. And oh, yes: When I was fifteen, coming around a corner of a hotel corridor at high speed, I slipped on the well-polished floor, and fell right into the arms of a surprised Fredric March. He was strong as the Rock of Ages, to which he refers in the movie, and without a whiff of sanctimoniousness.
July 18, 2006
Gay Marriage Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:40 PM EST Joshua Zeitz has come forth with a remarkably interesting historical anecdote, certainly new to me, regarding Richard Nixon and gay marriage. It is, I think, further evidence that Nixon was a remarkably complicated and conflicted figure, essentially tragic in nature. Shakespeare, I imagine, would have found him one of the most interesting twentieth-century American Presidents.
I certainly agree with Nixon that 1970 was far too early for gay marriage to be a political possibility. After all, that was only one year after the Stonewall Riot, regarded by many as being to the gay rights movement what the fall of the Bastille was to the French Revolution, and three years before the American Psychiatric Association would remove homosexuality from its Manual of Mental Disorders.
And I agree that we have come far in the intervening 36 years. But have we come far enough to make gay marriage a legal fact?
He doesn’t quite say so, but I assume that Mr. Zeitz favors the legalization of gay marriage. I hope he will be pleased to learn that I do as well. I agree with the majority of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in its famous 2003 ruling in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health that as far as I can see there is no rational reason to deny gays the right to marry.
But I don’t agree with the majority’s conclusion that the marriage law of Massachusetts was therefore invalid under the state constitution’s equal protection language, written by John Adams in 1784. Because I (or the court majority) can’t find a rational reason doesn’t mean there isn’t one. We are not dealing with mathematics here; reasonable people can—and, heaven knows, do—disagree on the subject. Three of the seven members of the court, in fact, disagreed and dissented vigorously. New York’s top court, not a nest of troglodytes, recently came down on the opposite side.
Certainly, if one were to raise the shade of John Adams and ask him if he thought his language regarding equal rights guaranteed the right of two people of the same sex to marry, that most famously grumpy of Founding Fathers would give us a very grumpy answer indeed.
When reasonable people disagree, I think it is very poor public policy for a majority of a court to impose its opinion as a matter of constitutional law, usurping the power of the elected branches to make public policy. It says, in effect, “We, and we alone, know what is right. You peasants will do as we tell you.” It is not surprising in a democracy that the sovereign power (the people) often don’t take kindly to such pronouncements.
Many have argued that this decision is no different than Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed racial segregation. I disagree.
First, Chief Justice Earl Warren, who had spent years in the political arena, knew that the decision would raise a tremendous political uproar and therefore was very careful to see to it that the decision was unanimous, greatly adding to its force. The majority in Goodridge seemed oblivious to the fact that the existence of three dissenting justices greatly weakened the majority’s argument that “there is no rational reason . . .”
Second, Brown dealt with a constitutional provision that was unquestionably applicable to the case at hand. The Fourteenth Amendment had been written precisely to prevent state governments from oppressing racial minorities. In 1895, the Court had ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that separate facilities for blacks and whites did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, provided that the facilities were equal. Brown then argued that the country had had nearly 60 years in which to test the separate-but-equal doctrine put forth in Plessy, and that the doctrine didn’t work, that separate was inherently unequal.
Brown overturned a Supreme Court precedent; Goodridge changed the very nature of the oldest and most universal of human institutions, one that has always and everywhere consisted of a union between people of different sexes. If ever there was a matter of public policy that should be settled by the political process, this is it. As Mr. Zeitz has shown, public opinion has been moving steadily in the direction favorable to the legalization of gay marriage. Vermont has already legalized civil unions for gays that are marriage in all but name. Doubtless other states will follow in time. My guess—remember, dear reader, that I’m always excessively optimistic—is that in another generation, gay marriage will be no more controversial than, say, women voting was by 1930.
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, with their judicial chutzpah, may well find that they have delayed, not advanced, the day when gay marriage is non-controversial in Massachusetts. By taking the question out of the hands of the legislature and the governor, they have forced those opposed to gay marriage to try to amend the state constitution. They may well succeed. If one quarter of the members of the legislature twice agree (with an election intervening) to the proposed amendment and the people ratify it at the next election, then the prohibition against two people of the same sex marrying will be explicitly in the constitution, not just a statute, and changing it therefore will be much more difficult when a majority of the people support such a change.
With the tide of history clearly running in the direction of gay marriage, the action of the Massachusetts court did not do gays any favors.
July 17, 2006
Was Nixon Right? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:30 PM EST In the early 1970s Richard Nixon strongly considered appointing a woman to the Supreme Court, in part to defy conventional wisdom that he was a steadfast social conservative, and in part because his wife, Pat Nixon, who normally maintained an arm’s length from politics, had argued forcefully—though still privately—for the importance of such a move.
One of the people at the top of Nixon’s wish list was Rita Hauser, whom he had appointed U.S. representative to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. Hauser was an accomplished legal scholar who had Nixon’s ear on matters concerning gender equality. But when Hauser argued that same-sex marriages could be legal, the President decided she had outlived her usefulness. “There goes a Supreme Court justice,” he told his domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman. “I can’t go that far—That’s the year 2000. Negroes [and whites]—OK; but that’s too far.”
This conversation took place in 1970, only three years after the Supreme Court issued its decision in Loving v. Virginia, striking down state laws that banned interracial marriage.
Nixon, who was usually a shrewd student of political trends, may have been a little optimistic in his assessment of the American public’s capacity to absorb or embrace sweeping social changes. But not by much.
In 2004 the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 42 percent of the public strongly opposed gay marriage. In 2006 that figure dropped to 28 percent.
Broken down by age group, in 2004 32 percent of young Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 strongly opposed gay marriage, compared with 58 percent of those aged 65 and older. In 2006, only 25 percent of young people strongly opposed gay marriage, compared with 33 percent of senior citizens, 30 percent of Americans between the ages of 50 and 64, and 26 percent of those between the ages of 30 and 49.
He was off by a few years, but the trends seem to show that Nixon was right. By and by, Americans are becoming more comfortable with the idea of gay marriage.
July 17, 2006
Joltin’ Joe Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:30 PM EST Sixty-five years ago today, on July 17th, 1941, Joe DiMaggio did not get a hit.
That, you might well think, is not much of a historical event. Even the greatest of ballplayers, after all, go hitless now and then. But that game on July 17 brought to an end a hitting streak that had begun on May 15 and had lasted 56 games. The record still stands, and many think it always will. The closest anyone has come in modern times is Pete Rose, of the Cincinnati Reds, who hit safely in 44 consecutive games in 1978. Wee Willie Keeler (he was only 5 feet 4, probably the shortest man ever to play major-league baseball) also hit safely in 44 consecutive games, way back in 1897. Only 40 players have had hitting streaks that lasted 30 games.
Having taken a day off on July 17, DiMaggio proceeded to hit safely in the next 16 games.
DiMaggio was born to play baseball as Einstein was born to do physics or Mozart to compose music, not only a legendary hitter but an endlessly graceful centerfielder. Despite a relatively short career, only 13 seasons, he has joined the true immortals of the game, those whom everyone knows, even those who don’t know the difference between a sacrifice fly and a stolen base.
By all accounts DiMaggio was not a very pleasant man personally, moody and unclubbable. But there are two stories about him I have always cherished.
A few years before he died, in 1999, when baseball salaries had been going through the roof, a reporter asked DiMaggio what he thought he might be paid if he were playing baseball then. DiMaggio smiled and answered, “I’d just knock on Mr. Steinbrenner’s door and say, ‘Howdy, pardner.’”
The other story concerns his brief, disastrous marriage to Marilyn Monroe. Monroe was a film actress, used to working in front of cameras and technicians, not audiences. After their wedding, DiMaggio and Monroe went to Korea to entertain the American troops fighting there against the Chinese communists. There were perhaps 5,000 soldiers on the air-base runways waiting to greet them, and when they stepped out of the plane, the soldiers started cheering. Monroe, startled by the ovation, turned to her husband and said, “I bet you’ve never heard such cheering, Joe.” DiMaggio, who had brought a sold-out Yankee Stadium screaming to its collective feet more times than he could count, just said quietly, “Oh, yes I have.”
July 17, 2006
A Brief History of the Voting Rights Act Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:30 AM EST Late last week, John Steele Gordon and I debated the merits of reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act of 1965. On Friday, the U.S. House overwhelmingly reauthorized the legislation, preserving its pre-clearance sections and requiring jurisdictions with high numbers of non-English speakers to offer interpreters and foreign-language ballots to registered voters.
Mr. Gordon accused me of displaying an anti-Southern bias and specifically cited my support of the legislation’s pre-clearance provisions, which require certain states or counties to gain Justice Department approval of any changes to their election laws. In my original post, and in my reply to Mr. Gordon, I went out of my way to emphasize the national, not regional, importance of the VRA. Let me elaborate.
In addition to its strong regulations governing voter registration and participation, the original legislation suspended literacy tests and other devices meant to suppress the vote in Southern states or parts of states where less than 50 percent of the eligible adult population cast ballots in 1964; further, it required such jurisdictions to pre-clear changes in their election laws with the Department of Justice. Under these guidelines, the bill originally applied such standards to Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia, and to certain counties in Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho, and North Carolina. Note that Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho, and Alaska are not Southern states.
The original 1965 VRA was due to expire in 1970. That year Congress passed (and Richard Nixon signed) a five-year reauthorization bill. It imposed on the rest of the country the same standards, using voter turnout in 1968 as the new benchmark. Because of the new trigger, four additional non-Southern counties—Apache County, Arizona; Imperial County, California; Kings County, New York (Brooklyn); and New York County, New York (Manhattan)—fell under the pre-clearance section. The 1970 legislation also temporarily banned literacy tests nationwide.
In 1975 Congress again reauthorized the VRA, strengthening it with new sections that extended pre-clearance requirements to jurisdictions with large numbers of unregistered “language minorities” (e.g., Spanish speakers, many of whom were naturalized citizens or native-born citizens from Puerto Rico). The 1975 reauthorization also permanently banned literacy tests nationwide. The VRA was reauthorized again in 1982.
Because of the 1970 and 1975 reauthorization bills, which were passed with bipartisan support in Congress and signed into law by two Republican Presidents, the VRA’s pre-clearance section ultimately affected (or still affects) four counties in California; three counties in New York; two counties in South Dakota; two townships in Michigan; ten counties in New Hampshire; and parts of the South, including several counties in Florida. The extended scope of the VRA after 1970 also introduced federal election examiners in all or part of Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, California, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Washington State. Which is to say, the VRA does not target, and for most of its lifetime has not targeted, the South. It is national in scope.
Furthermore, as I pointed out last week, states, counties, and municipalities that fall under the VRA’s pre-clearance provisions can petition the federal courts for “bailout,” meaning release from pre-clearance regulations. If a jurisdiction can prove to a three-judge panel of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia that over the preceding 10 years it has met certain fundamental conditions (detailed here on the DOJ’s website), then it can be released from pre-clearance. Several parts of Virginia and several northern jurisdictions have succeeded in earning bailouts from the D.C. District Court.
So to Mr. Gordon’s charge that I harbor some terrible bias against the South, simply because I oppose the attempts of some conservative Republicans to water down the VRA, I would respond that the VRA does not single out any one section of the country. If the South has borne a disproportionate share of the VRA’s burdens, that is only because the South has historically been the prime offender in curtailing the voting rights of American citizens. But it hasn’t been the only offender, and the VRA is an important national corrective to a problem with which we sadly continue to live.
Finally, a minor correction: in discussing Lester Maddox, the arch-segregationist who served as Georgia’s governor from 1967 to 1971, I wrote, “Maddox actually out-polled his GOP opponent, Rep. Bo Callaway...” What I meant to say was that Maddox was out-polled by Calloway. Because Callaway won a plurality but not an outright majority of the votes cast, the election was thrown to the state legislature, which chose Maddox. My point remains the same. Both Maddox and Callaway were staunch segregationists.
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