May 8, 2007
Gary Hart Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:30 PM EST Today’s lead piece on this website, by John Steele Gordon, is titled “Gary Hart’s Monkey Business: How and Why a Candidate Got Caught.” Monkey Business, as Mr. Gordon points out, was the name of the yacht on which Hart was photographed with a woman to whom he was not married. The photographs appeared after the press had staked out Hart, after getting a tip that he was having an affair, and after reporters had seen the woman emerge from Hart’s townhouse. My memory is that when the press could not immediately prove that Hart had slept with the woman, a reporter asked him whether he had ever slept with any woman to whom he was not married. Hart, if I recall correctly, was understandably flustered when asked this question. Mr. Gordon concludes by noting, I think correctly, that “his political career ended because he failed to realize that the rules of the game with regard to the private lives of politicians had also fundamentally changed, thanks to the debacle of Watergate.” It would be nice if we could figure out how to restore the older rules. I think a politician’s sexual life is none of my business, any more than mine is of a politician’s. I find it disgusting that the press hounds politicians about legal aspects of their consensual sexual lives, and does so with orgiastic hypocrisy, claiming some purpose higher than boosting circulation by appealing to salacious interest and Grundyism. The First Amendment is normally taken to guarantee the press’s right to so invade the lives of politicians, so European-style privacy laws will not, apparently, survive judicial scrutiny. Here’s what might work: A rich and public-spirited citizen could endow a foundation to fund the similar hounding of reporters who write such stories and editors and publishers who print them. I think something like this briefly flared up, on a purely volunteer basis, during the hounding of President Clinton, when the sexual irregularities of a few reporters (and Republican elected officials) were circulated by some sauce-for-the-gander types. All of those thus exposed were outraged, but a few of them also shut up. A $100 million endowment, to fund absolutely tireless gossips who would be restricted to violating the privacy only of those who had cast first stones, but who would then hound such types to the grave, would be money well spent. This would not work with hard core exhibitionists, and we have a few exhibitionist-moralists in the press, but we do not have too many. People who exult in invading other people’s privacy are nonetheless generally more chary of seeing their own private lives on public view.
May 8, 2007
Where Are the Italian Girls? Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 03:15 PM EST A few weeks back, when the outside world was distracted by the Yankees’ pitching problems, this blog held a very interesting symposium on Andrew Roberts’s latest book, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900. What made the discussion so noteworthy was not the comments themselves; most of the debate consisted of quoting other critics and then saying, in effect, “What he said.” It wasn’t the level of invective, which was rather mild by American Heritage Blog standards, nor even the unexpected absence of Josh Zeitz, who usually has an opinion on everything but was probably busy promoting his forthcoming book, White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics, and the Shaping of Postwar Politics. The most fascinating thing about our debate over Roberts’s book can be seen in these excerpts: Fred Smoler: “I looked over a very few pages of a draft of a portion of his book, but I have not read the book . . .” Alexander Burns: “Not having read Roberts’s book, I won’t say that it’s worthless.” John Steele Gordon: “I haven’t read Roberts’s book either, so I’m in very good company.” I haven’t seen so many people discussing a book they haven't read since my Contemporary Civilization class in college. Yet that hasn’t stopped this blog’s contributors from taking sides pro and con, and while everyone paid lip service to the notion that it might be a good idea to actually read the book before deciding whether they like it, somehow, if they did all read it cover to cover, I doubt anyone would change his mind. As it happens, I haven’t read the book either. I do have a copy at home, but it has been sitting on my table for weeks, shunted aside in favor of a succession of novels (most recently Lucia in London, by E. F. Benson, since you asked). I was struck, however, in reading the odd mix of vehemence and hesitancy that characterized my fellow bloggers’ discussion, to see how great a role was accorded to trivia. The whole thing started after a captious New Republic reviewer made a detailed examination of the book’s 700-odd pages and found a number of mistakes, which he listed and then made the usual noises about how, while some may be minor, collectively they call into question the author’s trustworthiness, etc. That’s what proofreader/critics always say, and it may even be true, but by those standards, Ken Jennings would be the world’s greatest historian. As John Steele Gordon points out, much of the supposed decline in standards of accuracy is really a decline in the quality of proofreading and copyediting. I blame feminism for this. Decades ago, thousands of overqualified women spent their entire careers in low-ranking jobs in publishing because it was one of the few fields open to them. Now their daughters are off being genetic engineers and corporate executives and members of Congress, and the publishing industry—much more important, in my view—is greatly the poorer for it. I was reminded of all this last week, when I bestowed my coveted Dumb-Ass Right-Wing Commentator of the Week award on Tony Blankley of the Washington Times. (Mind you, I don’t have anything in particular against right-wing commentators; you might even say I’m one myself. I would willingly institute a similar award for left-wing commentators, except I don’t read them.) Anyway, my man Tony earned last week’s glittering prize, which entitles him to ride on the New York City subway for just $2, with the following passage: “But we all know that ‘hate speech’ is in the ear of the listener. In Europe, citizens can be—and have been—criminally prosecuted for calling elements of Islam violence-prone. The great crusading journalist Camille Paglia was forced to live out her last cancer-ridden days in exile to avoid paying the penal price for her honest (and accurate) expressions on that topic.” Camille Paglia is still alive, though you would hardly notice, since she has virtually disappeared from view after being overtaken in the outrageousness derby by today’s crop of Ann Coulter types. Mr. Blankley means Oriana Fallaci, of course, and this is another example of the poverty of the “gotcha” school of criticism. If Mr. Blankley had made the same statement in conversation, he would have noticed the puzzled looks on his listeners’ faces and said, “Oh, wait, not Camille Paglia—who do I mean?” Then someone would have corrected him, and he would have said thank you and gone ahead with his point. Mistakes of this type are like having your fly open—embarrassing, but they have nothing to do with whether you’re right or wrong. Maybe the reason I’m so peevish about this is that I just got a letter about my April “Time Machine” column on the Black Hawk War, declaring with exasperation that “Black Hawk was not chief of the Sauk people, pure and simple.” In fact, I called him “a chief,” and according to my sources, he was indeed a war chief, though not a hereditary chief. So there! This is the sort of mistake that letter writers always describe as a “glaring error.” Readers love to pounce on these, as if they invalidated everything the writer had ever spoken or thought. In fact, there are self-appointed fact checkers who specialize in certain specific corrections, firing off sarcastic letters whenever they see their favorite mistake. The more active members of this bunch are known in the publishing industry with nicknames like Big Apple Guy (who explains that the term “Big Apple” did not originate among Harlem jazz musicians in the 1930s but with a racing writer in the 1920s) or Hot Dog Guy (who shows that the story about hot dogs being named by the cartoonist Tad Dorgan after a 1901 baseball game is as bogus as it sounds). These people like to save all their clippings and show them off to journalists, or anyone else who will sit still for it. I suppose there are worse hobbies to have. Then of course there are those who spend their lives correcting fake errors, like the supposedly “wrong” period in Harry S. Truman’s middle name, on which see this. The other day I found a similarly “glaring” and trivial mistake in an excellent book whose author I will soon interview for this blog: Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman, by Lee Lowenfish. Early in the book, Lowenfish says that in 1908 William Howard Taft defeated Alton Parker for the Presidency. In fact, as everyone knows, he defeated William Jennings Bryan, making the Middle-Aged Boy Orator of the Platte a three-time loser. Parker ran against Teddy Roosevelt in 1904, when TR was so popular that Bryan realized he didn’t have a chance. I knew this without having to look it up (no, really, I did), and I would very much like to become known as Alton Parker Guy, but it’s hard to make a living that way. The last word on the subject, I think, can be found in this trenchant analysis of academic vs. popular history, which makes some worthwhile remarks despite the author’s unfortunate attempt to imitate my writing style. Academic historians are meticulous about accuracy on even the slightest points, as they should be. Popular historians, like the writers and editors of American Heritage, also strive to be as accurate as possible, which is why every one of our articles is fact-checked. Still, given the constraints under which we operate, a few errors inevitably slip past us from time to time, and as you can see by reading the magazine’s letters column, our readers are quite generous about pointing them out. Yet the main argument of a book or article is not invalidated by a few misspellings or inaccurate dates; after all, the contributors to this blog correct each other all the time. That’s why I think A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900 is a hell of a book despite its inaccuracies—and if I ever get around to reading it, I’ll be sure to tell you why.
May 7, 2007
Royal America Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:35 PM EST John Steele Gordon points out that Louis XVI was not the grandson but the great-great-great-grandson of Louis XIV. My error, and an embarrassing one; I once knew this, more or less (I might have been off by one or two grands) and wrote without thinking. He also notes, parenthetically, that “the counterfactual history of an undivided British Empire is toothsome to contemplate, but I prefer what actually happened.” “Toothsome” means agreeable, attractive, or delicious. I am pretty sure Mr. Gordon does not mean that he finds the idea of a durably hegemonic British empire purely exhilarating, or preferable to the history that actually happened, but rather that he finds it intriguing and not absolutely repellent to think about that alternate world, and if so, I agree with him. But while we agree, I am pretty sure many either don’t or wouldn’t, not least because of my strong impression that an undivided British Empire—undivided in the sense of retaining control of what is now the United States—is oddly underrepresented in novels of alternate history. So people who enjoy thinking about alternate historical worlds have been oddly chary about thinking about that one. Is that because a British empire including what is now the United States is too awful to contemplate? That seems unlikely. People write a lot of novels about dystopian alternate worlds—the most common themes of alternate history are Hitler victorious and the Confederate States of America victorious—but amazingly few people write about George III victorious. One exception is the 1995 novel The Two Georges, by Harry Turtledove and the actor Richard Dreyfuss, who imagined an imperial America abolishing slavery without a Civil War, with the results that technological innovation is much slower and the subversive, pro–American independence Sons of Liberty terrorist group is a viciously racist organization, with the result in turn that black Americans are very, very loyal royalists. I don’t remember whether this British Empire was also better for Native Americans, but it very possibly would have been. In the historical empire, the imperial authorities back in London tended to be less mass-murderous than the settlers on the expanding frontiers. Turtledove and Dreyfus seemed to be liberals thinking hard, and a bit pessimistically, about American populism and democracy; it was not a brilliantly-written book, but it was a mildly interesting one. Uchronia.net, the magisterial Internet resource for alternate history, contains a list of all points of divergence for alternate histories, and it looks as if Turtledove and Dreyfuss have rather few rivals in exploring this theme. Tracking it by looking at points of divergence in the 1760s and 1780s does not exhaust the possibilities. That approach would miss, for example, Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories, which are playful fantasies of an Angevin Empire grown to include North America and surviving into the twentieth century. But it is suggestive. There are more alternate histories of a British Empire that retained greater relative strength because the United States didn’t stay unified—not just the Confederacy-victorious books but also intriguing one like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine, where the British Empire develops computers in the early nineteenth century. There is a grim and fascinating novel, Simon Louvish’s The Resurrections, in which post–World War II decolonization never happens because the Second World War is averted, and there is The Peshawar Lancers, by a leading writer of alternate history, S. M. Stirling, which creates a world where the British Raj survives in India but nowhere else, and is the only superpower—but that is more of a playful homage to Anglo-Indian literature than a straightforward alternate history. A recent academic book, Unmaking The West, edited by Philip E. Tetlock, Ned Lebow, and Geoffrey Parker, contains essays imagining a world without Western hegemony, but none of its essays abolish the strongest Western power while preserving and strengthening its predecessor. So when you think about it, the almost-perfect absence of anyone thinking much about the downstream effects of the defeat of the American Revolution is pretty striking.
May 5, 2007
Someone Else’s Civil War IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 08:00 PM EST Let me hasten to assure Fredric Smoler that if Louis XVI’s head was the price of American independence, then, au revoir, Louis, et merci bien. While the counterfactual history of an undivided British Empire is toothsome to contemplate, I prefer what actually happened. Charles de Gaulle, to be sure, dismissed the lot of us as “les Anglo-Saxons,” so I’m not sure how much of a distinction the French make even today among the English-speaking peoples. And while the English do indeed produce that incomparable prince of cheeses, the Stilton, the French nonetheless have an often-justified saying that “hell is where the chefs are British.” Just for the record, Louis XVI was not the grandson of Louis XIV but rather his great-great-great-grandson, Louis XV being the great-grandson of his predecessor and the grandfather of his successor. It is remarkable that only three kings should occupy the French throne between 1643 and 1792. In that same time period the English throne had no fewer than eight occupants (not counting Mary II, who ruled jointly with her husband William III). Had there been no revolution and had Louis XVI lived to be seventy, then the three kings would have reigned for a total of 181 years, averaging more than 60 years each. I was idly thinking this morning that had a committee of wise men deliberately set out in 1774 to design a human being who was as utterly unsuited—intellectually, physically, and psychologically—as possible to be king of France at that point in time, they could not have done better than Louis XVI. He was a decent man, and no stupider than many kings, but the times called for someone who was farsighted, shrewd, attractive, brimming with self-confidence, at ease exerting his royal authority, and willing to be ruthless when crossed. Louis XVI was, alas, none of those things. What France needed right then was Elizabeth I. What it got was a cross between Don Knotts and Casper Milquetoast. And so France, not to mention Louis himself, paid a fearful price.
May 5, 2007
What Happened with Kids and Sports in America? An Interview with Regan McMahon Posted by Allen Barra at 04:45 PM EST Regan McMahon’s Revolution in the Bleachers: How Parents Can Take Back Family Life in a World Gone Crazy Over Youth Sports (Gotham Books, 304 pages, $25.00) is one of the most important sports books so far in the twenty-first century. Any parents stressed out from hours of ferrying kids to baseball, soccer, or lacrosse games, or who have lost sleep wondering what sports they should pressure their kids into specializing in, needs to read it—and to recommend it to other parents. McMahon, a deputy book editor for the San Francisco Chronicle, answered these questions from her home in California. Your book, Revolution in the Bleachers, is a fascinating take on how youth sports have come to dominate American life—interrupting family meals, disrupting family vacations, things like that. You have two children of your own. Was your book developed out of personal experience?
Yes. I have two athletic kids who have played multiple team sports since early in grade school, although they didn't start in kindergarten, like many kids do these days. My daughter is now 13 and my son is 16, and they're still playing sports.
A couple of years ago, I had this moment when I was rushing to get my daughter across town from the soccer field to the volleyball gym, and she was changing uniforms and wolfing down a sandwich in the car, and my husband was at my son’s soccer game in another part of town, and I thought, this is nuts. And however tough it was for our family, with my kids playing at the recreation-league level and for their school teams, it was even harder for families with kids playing for elite club teams who were traveling far distances every weekend and staying in motels. I wanted to know: How did we get here? Why have things changed so much from when I was kid? Does it have to be this way, or is there room for change? I explored my questions in an article I wrote for The San Francisco Chronicle Magazine in March 2005 called “How Much Is Too Much?” It generated a tremendous response from readers. My book came out of that, allowing me to widen my scope and examine the issue on a national level. I was particularly interested how the runaway sports culture is affecting kids and family life. You write in your opening chapter, “When I started to think about why we parents are running around so much more than our parents did, I realized the biggest factor is the rise of sports programs for girls.” Has this enormous rise in organized sports for girls become a solution to our problems or merely compounded the problem itself? More girls playing sports has been great for girls, but it has increased the logistical challenges for parents. If you’ve got a boy and a girl, you may be running around twice as much as my parents’ generation was, when perhaps only the boy was going to practices and games during grade school and middle school. And now it seems that nearly all kids start soccer when they’re four years old. Having gender equity in government-funded school programs through Title IX is morally and socially important, but one unexpected and potentially troublesome ripple effect is an increased focus on getting college scholarships. When the Title IX rules were clarified and fully implemented in 1992 (even though this amendment to the Civil Rights Act had been signed into law by President Nixon in 1972!), the floodgates were opened, and many colleges suddenly had to field teams and give out scholarship money in women’s sports that they had never had to before. Suddenly there was lots of opportunity for women athletes. The women who did so well at the 1996 and 2000 Olympic games and won the 1999 Women’s World Cup in soccer were referred to as “Title IX babies,” because they were the ones who had benefited from the explosion in women's collegiate sports. When parents saw the results on TV, many started thinking their daughter could be the next Mia Hamm or Brandi Chastain. And it wasn’t limited to girls. The notion that my kid can get a college scholarship if he or she starts early and trains hard enough really took hold in the youth sports culture for both boys and girls. But the reality is that less that one percent of all the children who play youth sports ever get a college scholarship. What’s happened, then, is that today’s kids are sacrificing a lot and giving up a lot of traditional aspects of childhood in service of this statistically unrealistic expectation, a goal that may stem more from the parents’ needs and desires than from what the children themselves truly want. One of the most interesting points you make is that youth sports culture has diminished one of the most important aspects of family life, namely family meals. “Eating together,” you write, “is the cornerstone of family life, the ritual that nourishes us in more ways than one. It’s the time kids learn manners, learn to listen to their siblings, absorb adult vocabulary, their parents express opinions about the day’s event in terms that reflect their values as members of this family and part of the community.” What’s your advice on how we can reclaim what’s being taken from us? I encourage parents to embrace eating dinner together as a family value and make it a priority. It can be a challenge with everyone’s busy schedules, but if you believe it’s too important to let fall by the wayside, you will make it happen—if not seven days a week, then five. If not five, then at least three. If you eat dinner together less often than that, family members can start to feel unconnected, and parents and siblings may start to lose track of what’s happening in each other's lives and in the life of the family. The family dinner is a great place for kids to feel listened to and understood. There’s been quite a lot of research done by Columbia University, whose National Center on Abuse and Addiction has conducted national surveys on this since 1996 and consistently found that kids who eat dinner often with their families are less likely to be depressed or get involved with drugs, alcohol, or cigarettes.
The trouble with sports schedules is that it’s hard to find practice times when the coaches—many of whom are volunteer—can make it and when fields and gyms are available. So if your team schedules a practice from six to eight, a typical window for dinnertime, what are you going to do? Well, if the coach values family dinners, or the parents made it clear that they value the family dinner, maybe that could be factored into the decision-making when the coach or the league or the school administration is deciding on practice times. But if you can’t change what the team is doing, you can make adjustments at your end, like eating together early, before practice, or late, after practice, to preserve the dinner ritual and all the benefits that come from it. You can also consider the dinner factor when you make choices about extracurricular activates. For example, when you think about signing up for a sport or a lesson or a class, or attending an “optional” extra practice per week, look at the calendar. If you realize, “But that would mean we’d only have two nights a week when we can eat together as a family,” maybe it would be appropriate to say no, or to look for an alternative at a different time. Children need time to relate to and communicate with their family in a relaxed setting. It helps family members stay in touch with what’s going on with one another and helps children feel grounded and loved, which will serve them in good stead during adolescence, when there are lots of temptations, distractions, and outside influences. My favorite chapter in your book is “Child’s Play,” which deals with what you call the most dramatic change in American childhoods over the last couple of decades, namely the “decline and near disappearance of unstructured play.” If I’m reading you correctly, you’re saying that we’ve allowed play to be taken out of our kids’ lives and replaced with training. Would you call that an accurate assessment? What would you recommend that all of us as parents could do to bring back the notion of play into children’s sports? Yes, that’s about the size of it. I sensed there was a problem, but I had no idea of the extent of it till I started doing my research. I had no idea that bike sales were way down and that the Lego company, which had been recession-proof since it went into business in the 1930s, had suffered a downturn and closed factories last year. These companies could be in trouble because kids don’t have time for free play anymore. As I say in my book, when little kids don’t have time to play with blocks, you know we’re in trouble. These days if kids are outdoors, they’re playing organized sports. They’re not playing in the park or even in their own backyards. They’re not playing pickup games at the playground, except maybe basketball in city neighborhoods. An exclusive soccer club in Michigan actually brought in a personal trainer to devise a program to make sure their athletes were coordinated, because, as their director of coaching explained to me, kids used to become coordinated by climbing trees and jumping fences, riding bikes, falling off them, and learning how to get up again. But today’s kids aren’t doing those things, because their parents aren’t comfortable letting them play alone outside, as we grownups did when we were young. The kids are dropped off and picked up at practice in a car, and they’re never out of their parents’ or their coaches’ sight. I encourage parents to let their kids play outside again and point out that the fear of abduction is overblown. I found that even kids who live in secure, gated communities or safe small towns in the Midwest were not playing outdoors, which tells me this fear is coming from something deep in our culture apart from realistic threats. There are important things kids learn from play, including conflict resolution and how to interact with people you don’t know as well as the guys on your team. Independent play develops creativity and independence, which we should be promoting in our children. I think parents should let their kids play on their own and make up their own games, instead of always having an adult there to tell them what to do. And if parents are worried about safety, they can always check in with their kids via cell phone. I also had no idea until I wrote this book that recess is an endangered species in pubic schools around the country. Seven to thirteen percent of U.S. elementary schools have no scheduled recess. And only 36 percent of states require P.E. for elementary school students. So kids aren’t playing and running around at school as much as they used to either. As for putting play back into sports, that’s exactly what the leaders of the youth sports reform movement want to do. Youth sports has changed from being about fun and participation and skill development for everyone to being a star system that weeds out the weaker players and supports the few top players. What can parents do now? They can seek out coaches who value fun and play. My son has a wonderful soccer coach who lets the boys play Aussie rules football for the last half hour of practice some days—sometimes as a reward for working hard and sometimes, when the practice isn-t going well, because he detects that the kids are burned out and could use a change of pace. And he even spent one practice a season for just Aussie rules football as a treat, and the boys would really look forward to it. At my son’s baseball practices, sometimes his coach will let the boys play three-flies-up or pickle or have a home run derby, bringing that playground feeling into a serious training session. The kids always appreciate anything that breaks the routine of practice and constant drills and the underlying pressure to win. Another thing parents can do if they value play is to try to make sure their kids have some downtime in their schedules for unstructured play. And they can get out and play with them. Throw the ball around, or a Frisbee, or build a sand castle or take a hike in the woods. And parents should remember that kids play sports primarily to have fun. It’s the adults who sometimes start to think it’s all about winning.
May 5, 2007
Someone Else’s Civil War III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:45 AM EST With reference to intervening in civil wars, John Steele Gordon writes that he’s “not sure that Louis XVI, as he approached the scaffold, would have thought his decision to enter the American Revolution on the side of the Americans had proved to be a good idea. French finances were already in terrible shape before France entered the war and were in much worse shape afterwards. . . . I think it was the expense of supporting the American Revolution rather than any intellectual inspiration that proved to be the match that set off the French Revolution. Then the pent-up fury of the French people provided the explosion. The collapse of the French financial system forced the government to call the Estates General for the first time since 1614. Once assembled, the King’s government could not control it and matters quickly spiraled out of control.” I agree with all of this. Maxim guns proverbially took the suspense out of Victorian colonial warfare, but eighteenth-century Whig oligarchs could with some justice have spent their time chanting “Whatever happens we have got/ The Sinking Fund and they have not.” British superiority at state finance was probably the crucial determinant of the British victory in what has been called The Second Hundred Years War. I agree that the expenses of intervening in the American Revolution helped destabilize the French monarchy, and that while the intellectual inspiration we provided didn’t help, the long-run fiscal crisis of the French state mattered more. However, I am not sure any of this contradicts my earlier post that “in the long run France did well out of its investment.” Louis XVI was not France, despite his grandfather’s probably apocryphal insistence that “L’État, c’est moi.” If you are going to go broke fighting Britain, you might as well get something for your money; the French state also went broke because it borrowed a lot of money to fight Prussians, Austrians, and Dutchmen. That was money spent for nothing; money spent successfully splitting the British Empire means that the French are now merely in the shadow of what they can depict as a crude provincial society, one they can console themselves by sneering at, rather than in the shadow, forever, of an ancient and hated rival whose citizens invented proper physics, the calculus, and an awful lot of the rest of modernity. Suppose the French were in the shade of a world empire that could count, say, Marlowe as a national poet, rather than, for example, Longfellow, and that numbered among its cheeses the noble Stilton, rather than Monterey Jack. That would really sting. The French would have gone broke in any case, which means their revolution happens anyway, which means nationalism spreads, which means German unification, and then those “Lafayette, we are here” boys become a very prudent investment. To forestall any misunderstanding, I am fooling around—as is, I suspect, Mr. Gordon. Without French support the United States becomes much less probable, and I do not think, not for a minute, that Mr. Gordon believes we would then live in a better world. Nothing in his modestly monarchist exchanges with Alex Burns suggests that Mr. Gordon assesses a French crown as too stiff a price to pay for Mr. Lincoln, nor his posterity, and the jubilees they would bring in their turn.
May 4, 2007
Kent State Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:15 PM EST The front of this website notes that the Kent State killings occurred on this day in 1970. I was in college at the time, and a couple of long-dormant memories are suddenly rather clearer than the meaning of the events at Kent State. Exactly what happened in Ohio that day remains a bit murky. Nixon had sent the U.S. Army into Cambodia on April 29, sparking widespread protests and some riots, and on May 1 there was a massive demonstration at Kent State, with some calls to “bring the war home.” Around midnight there was violence and looting in the town of Kent. The following day, Kent’s mayor declared a state of emergency and asked Ohio’s governor to send the National Guard, which arrived that evening, just in time to witness arson and the stoning of firemen and police who had tried to extinguish a fire. The following day, the 3rd, saw a thousand troops on campus trying to enforce a curfew. On May 4 the troops tried to disperse thousands of students, and some were stoned; in the course of attempting to disperse one crowd, 28 (on other accounts, 29) out of 77 Guardsmen fired between 61 and 67 bullets over a period of 13 seconds, some aiming into the air or ground, most aiming not at the students who seemed the likeliest threat to them, but at students further away (the nearest student to be wounded was 71 feet from the Guardsmen, and none of the four who were killed was closer than a few hundred feet). The Adjutant General of the Ohio Guard later said that the Guardsmen had come under sniper fire, a claim that remains unproven, and seems very unlikely. One witness claims to have heard an order to fire, which is also unproven, as are allegations that one Guardsman boasted of having taken deliberate aim at one of those killed. As for the four students who were killed, two of them were simply going from one class to another, and one was a member of ROTC. The other two students shot to death had participated in the protests. The Guardsmen, who claimed to have fired because they had been in fear for their lives, because a crowd was advancing on them, eventually saw their defense affirmed by juries in two federal trials, one criminal, one civil. A 1998 article by two Kent State sociologists makes for interesting reading. The article’s authors point out that “a prominent college-level United States history book by Mary Beth Norton et al. (1994), which is also used in high school advanced placement courses, contains a picture of the shootings of May 4 accompanied by the following summary of events: ‘In May 1970, at Kent State University in Ohio, National Guardsmen confronted student antiwar protestors with a tear gas barrage. Soon afterward, with no provocation, soldiers opened fire into a group of fleeing students. Four young people were killed, shot in the back, including two women who had been walking to class.’ (Norton et al., 1994, p. 732) Unfortunately, this short description contains four factual errors: (1) some degree of provocation did exist; (2) the students were not fleeing when the Guard initially opened fire; (3) only one of the four students who died, William Schroeder, was shot in the back; and (4) one female student, Sandy Schreuer, had been walking to class, but the other female, Allison Krause, had been part of the demonstration.” Here is what I remember: the killings necessarily added to the intense campus hostility to the Cambodian incursion, as it was then called, and provoked a national student strike. In the course of that strike, a student at my college somehow contacted a student from Kent State, who had seen the shootings, and whom she invited to address us. Who were we? My college, at that time a small, elite and until a few months back women’s college in the Northeast, was famous in those days, whether rightly or not, as a school full of upper class Bohemians, Left, arty, brainy, in many cases patrician. Kent State was famous for none of these things. The Kent State student, introduced by one of our radical leaders, was, on her account, to rouse us with an eloquent tale of unprovoked political murder and repression, and he would draw sharp lessons from the event. He didn’t—he had no gift as a demagogue, and apparently no interest in being one. He was ill at ease, possibly because he was addressing an audience most of which was, in several senses of the word, out of his class—that was an interpretation some of my classmates offered at the time—but more probably, I now think, because he was still greatly affected by something awful he had very recently seen, and because he was an honest man. A portion of his audience wanted him to make a very particular and politically useful sense of the events he had witnessed, but he was disinclined to cooperate; more precisely, he didn’t seem to understand that this was the reason he was there; he thought we wanted to know what had happened, and how it felt. On his account it had been first frightening and then horrific, and in immediate retrospect it was sad and almost stupefying; twenty-year-olds were dead. The shootings were unprovoked, our leader prompted him, the reports of violence by the crowd were lies, this showed what the government was prepared to do, and we would now know then for what they were. No, he said, people were throwing stones and other things, and there had been violence over the past couple of days. He was, as an agitator and propagandist, a very poor specimen. At the time, that seemed a pitiable shortcoming, and an irritating one, since it diffused our anger, whereas the point of having him speak had been to keep it white-hot. In retrospect, I think it makes him admirable, and perhaps more interesting. He may not have lacked the wit to rouse a mob; he may rather have lacked the will. Some people are strongly inclined to find the true, sinister, and concealed meaning of ugly things. They are not necessarily the sanest among us.
May 4, 2007
Someone Else’s Civil War II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:30 PM EST Fredric Smoler writes, “The French once intervened in what was in many senses a British civil war, the one known as the American Revolution. They backed the winner, and in the long run France did well out of its investment. There may have been blowback by way of encouraging their own revolutionaries, but after a while the investment paid off with a lot of young fellows shouting, ‘Lafayette, we are here!’” I’m not sure that Louis XVI, as he approached the scaffold, would have thought his decision to enter the American Revolution on the side of the Americans had proved to be a good idea. French finances were already in terrible shape before France entered the war and were in much worse shape afterwards. The French financial system was a century behind Britain’s, with no properly funded national debt, so the war was financed by short-term borrowed money at high interest rates. Tax farmers instead of bureaucrats collected taxes and it is estimated that less than half the revenue extracted from the French people ended up in the national treasury, making the citizenry overtaxed and the government underfunded. (That probably accounts for why so many of the tax farmers found themselves intimately, if briefly, acquainted with Dr. Guillotin’s bright idea a few years hence.) And the privileged classes were exempt from most taxation and fiercely resisted any reform of a system so advantageous to them if terrible for the country. In the event, I think it was the expense of supporting the American Revolution rather than any intellectual inspiration that proved to be the match that set off the French Revolution. Then the pent-up fury of the French people provided the explosion. The collapse of the French financial system forced the government to call the Estates General for the first time since 1614. Once assembled, the King’s government could not control it and matters quickly spiraled out of control. The result, in the memorable words of Margaret Thatcher, was “a pile of corpses and a tyrant.”
May 4, 2007
Reliving the Sixties Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:20 AM EST Last Friday the rock singer John Mellencamp performed for wounded servicemen at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. According to the Washington Post, it was a rousing concert. Though Mellencamp has been an outspoken opponent of the Iraq War, as he explained to MSNBC News, the appearance was purely apolitical; he was simply “going down there and showing support for these kids who really don’t make any policies and who basically are following orders.” Politics, however, has reared its ugly head. Several days before his visit to Walter Reed, Mellencamp invited his friend, the folk singer Joan Baez, to join him on one or two numbers. Baez agreed, but the Army flatly denied her entrance to the hospital, effectively squelching the plan. The official rationale behind this decision was the late timing of the request, though Mellencamp has claimed—not implausibly—that the Army simply doesn’t like Joan Baez, whose outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War placed her on the outer margins of respectable activism some forty years ago. In addition to the Yale University chaplain William Sloane Coffin, the linguist Noam Chomsky, the folksinger Pete Seeger, and—most famously—the actress Jane Fonda, Baez was one of several prominent Americans who paid visits to North Vietnam during the war. (See Richard Snow’s reflections on Jane Fonda in the pages of American Heritage Magazine.) She also refused to pay the portion of her income taxes—which, given her considerable earning power, must have amounted to a pretty penny that corresponded to the military’s portion of the federal budget, and she married a prominent draft resister, David Harris, who later served prison time for refusing induction. A few things stand out here. In an editorial criticizing the Army’s decision, the New York Times marvelled that “somebody apparently could not get past the image of willowy Joan singing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ nearly 40 years ago and thought troops so young they wouldn’t know Mimi Fariña from Cream of Wheat couldn’t or wouldn’t abide her presence.” Mimi Fariña, for those not in the know, was Joan Baez’s younger sister and a popular folksinger in her own right. She died almost six years ago. Insomuch as one can probably count on one hand the number of 20-something-year-old soldiers at Walter Reed who’ve heard of Fariña I’ll guess that maybe it would take two hands to count those who actually know who Baez is the NYT is absolutely right. Though I grew up on Baez’s music and am still very much a fan, I can’t believe that she remains relevant enough to merit an invitation let alone to be denied entry to the hospital. Yet as much as I admire Baez’s music, I’m not sure the NYT has it right. I’m reminded of an anti-war poster, popular in the day, that featured a picture of the Baez sisters—Joan, Mimi and Pauline—seated next to each other on a sofa, clad in miniskirts, all legs and jet-black long hair, above a caption that read: “Girls Say Yes to Boys Who Say No.” Consider that roughly 25 percent of all enlisted men who served in Vietnam were from poor families, and 55 percent from working-class families. In an era when half of all college-aged Americans claimed at least some post-secondary education, only 20 percent of Vietnam War servicemen had been to college, while a staggering 19 percent had not completed twelfth grade. To the grunt who either got drafted and sent to Vietnam, or enlisted in order to pre-empt the draft or send a paycheck back to his wife or parents, that poster must have inspired pure disgust. Its message, not terribly subtle, was that successful, attractive women like the Baez sisters only slept with middle-class men who had the social capital and economic wherewithal to resist the draft. To her credit, last week Baez told the Washington Post, “I have always been an advocate for nonviolence, and I have stood as firmly against the Iraq war as I did the Vietnam War 40 years ago. . . . I realize now that I might have contributed to a better welcome home for those soldiers fresh from Vietnam. Maybe that’s why I didn’t hesitate to accept the invitation to sing for those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.” She’s absolutely right that her conduct forty years ago was elitist and arguably counter-productive, and she’s a big person for admitting it. On the other hand, according to Baez, when Mellencamp called her after last week’s concert to make sure that she wasn’t angry with him for agreeing performing solo, she replied, “Of course not. It’s an honor to be turned down by the Army.” Despite her genuine attempt to do things differently this time around—to oppose the war without opposing the people who are fighting it—Baez fell back instinctively on the kind of rhetoric that still makes her persona non grata at Walter Reed. In fairness to her, Baez is undoubtedly a very sincere pacifist, and when it came time to put her body on the line in the 1960s, she did so willingly. She was not one of those performers who got airlifted into the occasional rally and airlifted safely out two hours later. In Grenada County, Mississippi, she spent several days with Andrew Young, Martin Luther King, Jr., and local residents, escorting black children past rows of menacing state policemen and angry white parents so that they could enjoy their court-mandated right to attend previously all-white schools. She also served two weeks in prison for leading nonviolent sit-ins against the draft. If one can be judged by the company she keeps, it’s worth noting that during Baez’s stay at the Santa Rita Rehabilitation Center in Oakland, King and Young (no strangers to political imprisonment) paid her a visit. Forty years ago the anti-war movement faltered on its own inability to transcend the petty prejudices of class, region and culture. This time around, the protesters seem to have it right, for the most part. They have been supportive of American servicemen while opposing the war—two aims that needn’t be mutually exclusive and which, in fact, are often complementary. But as last week’s hullabaloo over Joan Baez reminds us, we’re still living in the shadow of the Sixties.
May 4, 2007
Someone Else’s Civil War Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:05 AM EST Some modern newspapers, including both The New York Times and the Guardian, have added a feature for the online reader, one copied from blogs: at the end of opinion columns the reader can add a comment, or scroll through the comments added by previous readers. This is an example of the democratizing power of the Internet—anyone adding a comment can reach a fair number of other readers—and at its best the effect is immensely impressive. In the blogs the added comments feature is a remarkably efficient mechanism for pooling information, because the collective intellectual resources of even a rather small readership are staggering when compared to the breadth of any single author. At its worst, in the case of heated comments appended to pure opinion columns, something more dispiriting can occur, a cascade of repetitive cliché and invective. But it now occurs to me that this sort of writing has a peculiar value of its own, for it is the very repetition that sometimes lets a reader spot an emerging cliché, and ponder it. Here’s one example: Columns on the fight over funding U.S. troops in Iraq have begun to elicit very easy certainties about the manifest idiocy of intervening in a civil war. Reading through a list of comments appended to a recent Times column, it suddenly occurred to me that while there may be good reasons to set a deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, it is by no means obvious that we need such a deadline simply because Iraq has descended into civil war. Only after hearing for the thousandth time that we had to withdraw from Iraq for this reason alone did I begin to wonder what makes intervention in civil wars so obviously wrong. Is it that such interventions are doomed to defeat? That can’t be right, because they clearly aren’t. Most civil wars have winners, and as often as not interventionists pick the winning side. Hitler and Mussolini backed Franco, who won. That may not have done either Hitler or Mussolini much good, and there is evidence that it did the latter some harm, but not, I think, because he’d intervened in a civil war. Mussolini’s war on Abyssinia also did him some harm, as did his war on Greece, and neither of those was a civil war; Mussolini was an idiot to fight anywhere. The United States intervened in the civil war in Korea, and we secured at worst a draw. Would anyone be better off if all of Korea were now Communist? How about the Greek civil war? The U.S. sent money, weapons, and advisers, helping avert a Stalinist victory in Greece, for which some Greeks have not yet forgiven us, but both the Greeks and the Americans are pretty obviously better off because of that intervention. The French once intervened in what was in many senses a British civil war, the one known as the American Revolution. They backed the winner, and in the long run France did well out of its investment. There may have been blowback by way of encouraging their own revolutionaries, but after a while the investment paid off with a lot of young fellows shouting “Lafayette, we are here!” My father actually heard someone say that while going into combat in 1944, apparently unaware that he was actually in Belgium, but France clearly made out pretty well on the strength of the sentiment so expressed. How about cases where the U.S. failed to intervene in a civil war? Rwanda comes to mind, and in retrospect we are very properly ashamed of our hesitance. We were very chary about intervening in the civil war in Bosnia, and we ought to be more ashamed about that tardiness than is the fashion at this moment—because when we finally did intervene, the horrors there stopped very quickly. Destroying Saddam Hussein did produce an extremely cruel and many-sided Iraqi civil war. It is not so obvious that having produced that civil war, abandoning the Iraqis is the only ethical response to their tragedy. Assume, however, that the United States does precisely that, and the Iranians then intervene, and back a winner—one of the Shiite factions—and produce a satellite state wholly dependent on their continuing assistance. That outcome may not be entirely likely, but it is proclaimed as very likely by some of the people who are most certain that we are fools to continue to intervene in what has become a civil war, and who tell us that by destroying Saddam we have only expanded the Iranian empire. If those critics are right, and Iraq becomes an Iranian puppet regime, will the Iranians, too, have been fools to have intervened in a civil war? Possibly. But not, alas, certainly.
May 3, 2007
The People Who Shape Our World Posted by Alexander Burns at 05:20 PM EST It’s that special time of the year again, and Matt Drudge is hysterical. Time has unveiled its list of the “100 men and women whose power, talent or moral example is transforming the world.” Drudge is stunned that George Bush didn’t make the cut. Late last year, there was a discussion on this blog about the Atlantic Monthly’s list of the 100 most influential people in American history. Time’s list is a rather different affair and, in some ways, no less silly. To Time’s credit, some of the entries are rather more creative than they have been in previous years. A few of them inspire further reflections on my and Mr. Gordon’s exchange of the last few days. The first entry in the list’s “Leaders & Revolutionaries” category is Queen Elizabeth II. On a list that does not include the President of the United States, the inclusion of this ceremonial head of state struck me, at first, as fairly laughable. The blurb that accompanies the Queen’s name is somewhat illuminating. The author of Elizabeth’s profile, Catherine Mayer, writes that “the secret of the Queen’s success” is that “she understands the need for reforms, such as slimming the costs of her family to the taxpayer and opening her accounts to public scrutiny, but she has never compromised her identity.” In all fairness to Her Majesty, it is important to acknowledge that her recent reign has indeed seen considerably greater fiscal responsibility from the royal family, despite the still-massive public expenditures on their behalf. If she were not tarred by the sins of her children (and their spouses), I might find her easier to admire. More startling to me, though, than the Queen’s inclusion on this list, was the blurb written for another person’s entry. This remarkable woman, writes guest contributor Nelson Mandela, “overcame almost every obstacle that a person might face. She is an icon to people all over the world because of her commitment to help those who have faced similar obstacles.” Powerful praise indeed, coming from Nelson Mandela. You’d almost think, with his talk of overcoming all conceivable obstacles, that he was describing a female version of himself. So, who is this woman? Some political icon, perhaps? Another Third World leader who rose above her country’s turmoil to promote peace and prosperity? Someone, perhaps, like Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the president of Liberia? No, Mandela’s high praise is reserved for someone who may come closer than any American to playing the part of Queen: Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey’s charitable work is laudable, and to include her among a list of today’s most influential Americans is probably a good idea. At the same time, there’s something that strikes me as distasteful about a democratic revolutionary and transformative global figure like Mandela inclining his head before this monarch of daytime television. This is certainly a useful reminder that, when one trades in a ceremonial head of state, like Elizabeth Windsor, for a wholly elected one, like George Bush, the search for national idols does not cease. It just turns toward places like Hollywood, and toward institutions like Harpo Productions.
May 3, 2007
Presidents and Monarchs III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:30 PM EST Alexander Burns writes, “I’m not sure I agree with Mr. Gordon that there’s not much heart in my position. I have little patience for the monarchy, but I don’t think the alternative is necessarily so dry and unromantic. While Mr. Gordon disparages the office of prime minister as one for a ‘worn-out bureaucrat (the usual occupant of the office of head of state in a parliamentary government),’ I’d argue that there is more than a little glory in the succession of leaders from Walpole to the Pitts, to Wellington and Peel, running straight down to Thatcher and Blair. Maybe they haven’t ruled by the grace of God, but if they’ve done their jobs well, ruling by the grace of elections will do for me.” I did not, of course, disparage the office of British prime minister, nor any of the historical giants who have served in that office, but rather the putative office of a British president. Every country needs a head of state (or at least every country has one). In parliamentary systems, the offices of head of state and head of government are separate. The former gets the pomp, the latter the circumstance. In parliamentary republics, the office of president is usually filled by some has-been bureaucrat whose name no one can remember if they ever knew it. Quick! Who’s the president of Germany? See what I mean? But in parliamentary monarchies, the office of head of state is held by a king or queen, who holds it for life (although the Dutch monarchy has a tradition of abdicating in old age). In all cases the history of the royal family and the history of the country are deeply intertwined and so the sovereign is, quite literally, the embodiment of that nation’s history. And, as Walter Bagehot noted in the nineteenth century, royalty is magic. I wish a scholar would try to figure out why royalty has such a deep fascination for the rest of humanity instead of just dismissing it out of hand as a relic of a past time to be replaced by something “logical.” Since states, thank heavens, are not run by intellectuals, they have been much more sensible. I can think of no country, not led into political disaster by a monarch, that has chosen to abolish its monarchy. In one case, Japan, even though the monarch had indeed led the country into disaster, his retention on the throne was the one condition the country set before surrendering its sovereignty to a conquering foreign power. Instead, countries that have had monarchies have retained them, both because of their historic significance and in order to exploit the magic of royalty as a national asset. That exploitation can be seen, in spades, in this country beginning today with the state visit of Queen Elizabeth in honor of the four-hundredth anniversary of the founding of Jamestown. She later goes to Kentucky for the Derby and then to Washington for all the ruffles and flourishes of a state dinner, invitations for which are worth their weight in gold among Washington movers and shakers. The visit will—I fearlessly predict—receive wall-to-wall media coverage that no president of a middling power could dream of commanding. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to see the TV coverage of the horse race with a split screen, one half on the leading horse, one half on the Queen of England. I doubt the British people—who have survived and often triumphed for more than a thousand years as subjects of a monarch—would be so foolish as to throw away so priceless a national asset, just because their chattering classes can’t understand what is clear to everyone else.
May 3, 2007
Presidents and Monarchs II Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:10 AM EST Despite our continued and intractable disagreement, I don’t mind carrying on my conversation with John Steele Gordon about monarchies and Presidents. Mr. Gordon writes of his exchange with me: “On this subject, I think partially with my heart; he, it seems, only with his brain.” Maybe so, but if one is going to do some thinking, the brain doesn’t seem like a bad organ to use. Naturally, a little sentimentality is understandable in dealing with an institution like the monarchy. To quote Mr. Gordon, though: “A few points.” First, it’s not entirely true that “Buckingham Palace is not maintained with public monies, but with the gate receipts of people who pay to see the various royal palaces.” Last summer, due to a tight budget and expanding costs, the managers of Buckingham Palace had to appeal directly to the state for help with funding. Alan Reid, the Queen’s accountant, told the Times of London: “We are being squeezed by our water, gas and electricity bills, which last year were £2.1 million . . . leaving less for essential maintenance work at a time when the building industry is subject to higher than average inflation.” This request for additional funding came, by the way, on top of a previous annual grant of fifteen million pounds for royal palaces. Furthermore, it seems that not all of this money comes from gate receipts. Reid, at the time, explained that raising entrance fees was not an acceptable way of meeting the Queen’s revenue needs, as the monarch should not be “over-commercialised.” I’ll add, at this point, that I’m not an expert on Britain’s budget, so if I have, for whatever reason, misunderstood the funding of royal properties, I’d be grateful to Mr. Gordon for some hard information showing me where I’ve gone astray. Otherwise, it looks like Buckingham really is a “private residence paid for with public monies.” I’m not entirely unsympathetic to Mr. Gordon’s argument that I should be “a little more forgiving” of royal family members, “as perfection is hard to come by. Both princes and Presidents are made of the same stuff, human clay, and therefore equally miserable sinners.” This might be true. I suppose my point is, few people expect absolutely flawless personal conduct from a President, whereas it’s essentially the only thing that someone expects from a twenty-first-century Western European monarch. Fortunately for some Presidents, poor personal conduct or failure to “embody the nation’s spirit” can be balanced out by deft policy formulation and excellent governing skills. These days, a monarch—perhaps, one day, King Charles III—has no such alternative route to success. If citizens have to go through the exercise of pretending a leader is “Dei Gratia Regina,” they have a right to expect a record of truly exemplary comportment from that person. There’s really nothing else they can ask for. In the end, though, I’m not sure I agree with Mr. Gordon that there’s not much heart in my position. I have little patience for the monarchy, but I don’t think the alternative is necessarily so dry and unromantic. While Mr. Gordon disparages the office of prime minister as one for a “worn-out bureaucrat (the usual occupant of the office of head of state in a parliamentary government),” I’d argue that there is more than a little glory in the succession of leaders from Walpole to the Pitts, to Wellington and Peel, running straight down to Thatcher and Blair. Maybe they haven’t ruled by the grace of God, but if they’ve done their jobs well, ruling by the grace of elections will do for me.
May 2, 2007
Presidents and Monarchs Posted by John Steele Gordon at 06:05 PM EST I agree with Alexander Burns that we are not likely to agree on the British monarchy. On this subject, I think partially with my heart; he, it seems, only with his brain. Fortunately it is not up to us. It is up to the people of the U.K. and the queen’s other realms and territories. In theory she is Dei Gratia Regina. In fact, of course, she is Populesque Britannicus Gratia Regina. (My apologies if I have screwed up the Latin. Gaul wasn’t Caesar’s only conquest; he did a pretty good job on me 50 years ago.) The British monarchy is, paradoxically enough, a democratic institution. But a few points. Buckingham Palace is not maintained with public monies, but with the gate receipts of people who pay to see the various royal palaces. I wonder how much they would fall off if Windsor Castle were inhabited by the former minister for sewers and drains who had been kicked upstairs instead of by the queen of England with all the magic of that title. Bring in a Presidency and the British taxpayers might well find themselves worse off. Royalty, after all, is great for tourism. I did not say I agreed with the argument that royalty does not choose its status and therefore is under no obligation to behave well. They can always renounce their royal status, after all, and live ordinary lives. None do so, of course. No fools they. Mr. Burns writes, “It seems to me that the royal family can either be embodiments of their nation’s spirit or flawed, philandering elites—but not both.” I disagree. I think Mr. Burns might be a little more forgiving, as perfection is hard to come by. Both princes and Presidents are made of the same stuff, human clay, and therefore are equally miserable sinners. Presidents have often failed to embody the nation’s spirit. Is Jimmy Carter—that sanctimonious, humorless, anti-Semitic, Arab-money-grubbing hypocrite—the embodiment of America’s spirit? I certainly hope not. John F. Kennedy was a major-league philanderer, but he did a great job of embodying the nation’s spirit. Charles I so failed to do that job he ended up about eight inches shorter (and he was none too tall to start with). Edward VII philandered as much as JFK, and the British people loved him anyway. Way back when (in 1980, if you insist on knowing) I wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times proving—scientifically!—that a monarchical system is superior to a presidential one. I recommend it, here, to all who do not find the sheer meta-scientific magic of royalty sufficient.
May 2, 2007
Citizen Kane and Prince Charles IV Posted by Alexander Burns at 12:30 PM EST Well, it seems that John Steele Gordon and I agree on at least one thing: Gangs of New York was dreadful. Mr. Gordon makes a good point about Buckingham Palace: It “would be maintained in splendor whether a monarch or a President was living there.” I suppose it might just be a democratic (small d) hobbyhorse of mine, but I’d simply find the maintenance of such a massive palace more palatable if the residents were chosen by a process other than hereditary succession. I certainly don’t think it would be wasteful to maintain a historically significant building like Buckingham Palace if it were maintained as a public historical site. My objection, and my sense that its upkeep is wasteful, is grounded in the fact that Buckingham is a private residence paid for with public monies. More broadly, though, I think there’s at least a slight tension in Mr. Gordon’s discussion of the monarchy. On the one hand, he writes that royal heirs “could argue that they, like everyone else, did not get to choose their parents and therefore shouldn’t have to behave any better than everyone else.” On the other hand, Mr. Gordon says that a monarch is “someone with 1,200 years of the nation’s history in his or her veins . . . with all the very real if atavistic magnetism and charisma of a genuine monarch.” It seems to me that the royal family can either be embodiments of their nation’s spirit or flawed, philandering elites—but not both. An heir cannot really live a reckless life until the age of 50 and then expect to be viewed as a serious moral leader upon taking the throne. It also seems to me, sadly, that the younger generations of royals have decisively made the choice for vice. There’s also, I’ll add, something slightly unpersuasive about the argument that the civil list is a tolerable expense because it “amounts to about 11 pence per British subject per year.” This kind of argument is all too often deployed in order to avoid a substantive debate about public expenditures. I don’t mean to rap Mr. Gordon for this particular offense, since he actually is discussing the pros and cons of spending money on the royal family. The idea, though, that a large public expense can be reduced to a tiny per capita value is problematic. In the early 1990s, for example, defenders of the National Endowment for the Arts opposed cuts to the program by arguing that it cost each American only 64 cents. Arguing, in 2000, for large-scale Third World debt relief, Jeffrey Sachs touted a proposal that would require only 60 cents annually from each U.S. citizen, for only four years. I’m sympathetic to both Sachs and the NEA, but, obviously, tiny expenses like these eventually add up. The important question is not whether every citizen would willingly pay 50 cents or 95 or 12 to support a particular program, but, rather, whether the money should be spent at all. In the end, I suspect that Mr. Gordon and I have something of an irreconcilable difference of preference here. I don’t expect to persuade him that the royal family is useless, nor, I imagine, does he expect to convince me that my somewhat reactionary democratic impulse is a bad one. As has been the case before, though, this difference has led to a very productive conversation, and I thank him for that.
May 2, 2007
Ralph Ellison Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:05 AM EST In today’s lead article for AmericanHeritage.com, Jack Kelly reviews a new biography of Ralph Ellison by the author Arnold Rampersad. According to Kelly, “Rampersad lets the air out of the notion that Ellison’s inability to finish his novel-in-progress was connected to a house fire that destroyed much of the manuscript. At the time of the 1967 fire, Ellison acknowledged that he had lost only a few months’ revisions and some notebooks. Later, increasingly embarrassed by his writer’s block, he inflated the loss to hundreds of crucial pages. His failure to finish the book before his death in 1994 had numerous causes, starting with the daunting challenge of matching the success of Invisible Man.” Though he never completed work on it, Ellison’s long-awaited novel, Juneteenth, was published posthumously and reveals the author’s tremendous range and creativity. The novel opens in mid-century Washington, D.C., where a group of black Southerners have converged on the Senate gallery to watch Sen. Adam Sunraider, a crude bigot patterned roughly after Mississippi Sen. Theodore Bilbo, deliver one of his typical racial screeds. “Daddy” Hickman, the group’s leader, urgently tries to deliver a message to the senator, explaining to an unsympathetic Capitol secretary that he and Sunraider are old acquaintances. “Knows you?" she replies incredulously. ". . . the only colored he knows is the boy who shines shoes at his golf club.” In a remarkable plot twist, we learn that Hickman and Sunraider do indeed share a long and complicated personal history. Some writers develop a style and stick to it. Ellison didn’t. Juneteenth reads more like William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! than like Invisible Man. Heavy on stream-of-consciousness devices, its narrative is sufficiently fragmented to lend it a foreboding, gothic air. As Jack Kelly reminds us, Ellison worried that he might never match the literary accomplishment of his first novel. Arguably, he did.
May 2, 2007
Citizen Kane and Prince Charles III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:25 AM EST Alexander Burns writes, “By Bragg’s preferences, the producers of Gangs of New York should be liable to the estate of William Marcy Tweed. Except, I’d be quite flabbergasted if Tweed ever had an active estate.” I think the producers of Gangs of New York should be sued for making a terrible movie. But seriously . . . I doubt Tweed left an estate as well. He died in the Ludlow Street Jail. And while his little tin box had been very well stuffed at one time (Fifth Avenue mansion, Long Island estate, diamond stickpin the size of a robin’s egg, etc.), I don’t think there was much left by the end. Just for the record, however, Tweed’s middle name was almost certainly not Marcy, even though you can find that name in a million reference works. Tweed’s middle name, in fact, is unknown (unless it’s been found recently and I haven’t heard) but was probably Magear, which was his mother’s maiden name. He signed his name William M. Tweed. William Marcy, the New York governor in the 1830s and cabinet member under Polk and Pierce, is famous for having coined the phrase “to the victor belongs the spoils,” if not for much else. But he had nothing to do with Tweed. How his name got to be irrevocably concatenated with Tweed’s is one of the minor mysteries of American history. As for the British royal family. I agree that they should set an example, and the queen most certainly does. She has devoted her life to a hard, endless, and often thankless job. The other members of the family, I suppose, could argue that they, like everyone else, did not get to choose their parents and therefore shouldn’t have to behave any better than everyone else. Presidents, however, have no such excuse. They choose their fate and should behave as the country expects them to. I can think of one recent American President who behaved far worse in the improprieties and moral decay department than any member of the British royal family has in recent times. Mr. Burns writes, “Even then, though, public financial support of the monarchy still seems pretty wasteful. Mr. Gordon and I had a good exchange a while back about American politicians and their decorating expenditures. The wastefulness of the Clintons’ White House redecoration, which we both deplored, was insignificant compared to the millions of pounds poured down the drain each year keeping up Buckingham Palace and Balmoral Castle.” First, Balmoral is not maintained by the British government. It is the private property of the queen, who pays for its upkeep out of her own resources. Second, Buckingham Palace would be maintained in splendor whether a monarch or a President was living there. It is hard to believe that a historian would say that maintaining a building so drenched in history is pouring money down a drain. Third, the various palaces (all except Buckingham Palace open at least in part to the public, and many, such as the Tower of London and Hampton Court, now purely museums) are not maintained out of the civil list, which pays for the expenses of the royal family in carrying out their official duties. They are maintained out the income generated by entrance fees. Fourth, in exchange for the civil list (7.9 million pounds), the Queen surrenders the vastly greater income from the crown lands (190 million pounds last year). The civil list would be about the only savings that abolishing the monarchy would create, and that is less than the British government spends each year on finding lost cats. It amounts to about 11 pence per British subject per year. The British monarchy is the literal embodiment of British history, and the monarch has political power only as the last guardian of the constitution, not a situation likely to arise. Why anyone would prefer some worn-out bureaucrat (the usual occupant of the office of head of state in a parliamentary government) instead of someone with 1,200 years of the nation’s history in his or her veins and with all the very real if atavistic magnetism and charisma of a genuine monarch only in order to cut the budget of the British government by less than two one thousandths of one percent is an utter mystery to me.
May 1, 2007
Citizen Kane and Prince Charles II Posted by Alexander Burns at 01:45 PM EST Thanks to John Steele Gordon for pointing out my unclear wording. Undoubtedly, I should have written: “I suppose, by Bragg’s preferences, the producers of Citizen Kane should still be liable to the estate of William Randolph Hearst for possible distortions of the man’s character.” In any case, though, I intended this comment as a figure of speech. The producers of Citizen Kane, Orson Welles and RKO Radio Pictures, are no longer in any position to be sued. Alternatively, I could have said something like, “By Bragg’s preferences, the producers of Gangs of New York should be liable to the estate of William Marcy Tweed.” Except, I’d be quite flabbergasted if Tweed ever had an active estate. As for the British royal family, Mr. Gordon is probably right that “their improprieties and moral behavior” have not been “any worse than that of millions of other British families who do not have to live their lives in goldfish bowls.” Of course, those millions of other British families are in no way charged with providing moral leadership for the country. It seems to me that the only way to really justify the continued existence of the Civil List is for the monarchy to provide an instructive, ornamental example of traditional British values. Even then, though, public financial support of the monarchy still seems pretty wasteful. Mr. Gordon and I had a good exchange a while back about American politicians and their decorating expenditures. The wastefulness of the Clintons’ White House redecoration, which we both deplored, was insignificant compared to the millions of pounds poured down the drain each year keeping up Buckingham Palace and Balmoral Castle. In the previously mentioned series House of Cards, there’s a character who, despite his loathing of the king (Kitchen), admits that the monarchy saves Britons from “having to elect some godawful President.” Like Mr. Gordon, I’d choose Prince Charles as my leader over Edward VIII, but, frankly, I’d rather have a President.
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