July 31, 2007
Another Great Rightist IX Posted by John Steele Gordon at 06:45 PM EST Alexander Burns writes, “I disagree with his [i.e. my] statement that Churchill, de Gaulle, and Reagan were not really men of the right.” I don’t believe I made that statement. De Gaulle was certainly, at least by the standards of twentieth-century French politics, a man of the right. But both Churchill and Reagan began on the left. Reagan was a Roosevelt Democrat in his younger days and got his start in politics as a union president, not the usual job of a rightist, although to be sure it wasn’t the usual kind of union either. But Reagan was always a very practical (and gifted) politician first and an ideologue second, which is why he was so successful, making very significant deals with the likes of Tip O’Neill and Dan Rostenkowski. During his days of greatness, on a scale of 1 to 10 (1 being lunatic left, 10 lunatic right), I’d rate Reagan at about a 7 in rhetoric and a 6 in practice. To the Dan Rathers of the world, of course, everyone to the right of 5 is automatically a 10. Talk about lack of nuance. Before World War I, when liberalism was the mainstream left, Churchill was an advocate of increased government spending on such matters as unemployment insurance and old-age pensions and therefore definitely of the left. After the war, British politics moved sharply leftwards, and the old Liberal Party—the party of Gladstone, Palmerston, and Lloyd-George—ceased to be a major player in British politics; Labor, avowedly socialist, became the left, making Churchill a man of the right without his having taken a step. Also, of course, Churchill was both a romantic and impetuous. Frankly, he was not a very good politician, in the dog-eat-dog, back-stabbing, finger-to-the-wind sense, although he was an excellent administrator and strategist. He remained a supporter of the empire (“I did not become the King’s first minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire”) long after it had ceased to be fashionable in elite British circles. He opposed giving India dominion status, which was bad politics and, I at least think, plain wrong. The world had moved beyond Rudyard Kipling, and in some ways Churchill never did. And he defended Edward VIII and Mrs. Simpson out of a romantic sense of the divine right of kings, when almost everyone else in Britain, from dukes to dustmen, wanted them gone. Mr. Burns writes, “George H. W. Bush received a smaller percentage of the vote in 1992 than any incumbent President since Taft.” True, but not quite fair I think. He faced the first third-party candidate with major national appeal since Taft faced Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt was, of course, a far more formidable political force than Perot. My apologies to Roosevelt for even mentioning them in the same sentence. He writes, “It would be unsettling to think that the American people are incapable of a clear-eyed assessment of their Presidents.” Here’s where Mr. Burns and I seriously differ. I don’t think collectives can make “clear-eyed assessments.” Only individuals can do that. The people slowly (or not so slowly) zero in on a collective folk memory that soon becomes quite impervious to scholarly attempts to add a little clear-eyed assessment. Consider two examples: —James K. Polk was a remarkably successful President. Scholars rank him highly, the only president between Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln who isn’t totally in the rankings cellar. The panel here ranked him No. 10, ahead of Woodrow Wilson. (I wrote the article on Martin Van Buren but was not on the rating panel, made up entirely of academics.) But how many Americans have even heard of him? Maybe 2 in 10 could tell you he was a President. I bet not 2 in 100 could tell you what he did as President. —Queen Elizabeth I is not only known to everyone in the English-speaking world (and far beyond) but is universally regarded as one of England’s greatest monarchs. But was she? She was hell to work for and chronically unable to make up her mind or even keep it made up when she finally did make a decision. She was neurotically cheap, except when it came to spending (preferably other people’s money) on herself. She shamelessly played favorites, putting people like the earls of Leicester and Essex at the head of armies when far better qualified and talented men were available. (She finally wised up about Essex and had his head whacked off—she coined the phrase “I shall make you shorter by the head.”) She didn’t even defeat the Spanish Armada. It was an astonishingly badly conceived plan, and the weather did the rest. But she was a brilliant propagandist, tightly controlling her own image and never forgetting for a minute that the ultimate source of her power was the people, however much she believed in the divine right of kings, and she played to them always. (“Though God has raised me high, yet this I count the glory of my crown: that I have reigned with your loves.”) She was also, like Churchill, de Gaulle, and Reagan, a master of public speaking and an instinctive nationalist (“I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England too”—Could Shakespeare have written the Tilsbury speech better?). And so she is forever enshrined as the apotheosis of English monarchs, clear-eyed assessments be damned. —When Reagan ran against Jimmy Carter in 1980, he kept asking the question, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” It was a devastating ploy, for the answer was so clearly no, and Jimmy Carter became the first elected President since Hoover to be awarded what Churchill called, after his defeat in 1945, “the order of the boot.” Michael Dukakis did not ask the question, “Are you better off now than you were eight years ago?” when he ran in 1988, because the answer was so very clearly “yes, very much better off, thank you.” Reagan got the credit for that, and he will keep it, just as Carter got the blame for the dismal late 1970s, not all of which belonged to him. The English people in 1603 could equally answer the question if they were better off after Elizabeth than before her in the affirmative. That counts for a lot in the folk memory.
By the way, Rasmussen has a very interesting poll out: Survey of 1,000 Adults
July 24-25, 2007
Political Description of Candidate-Positive or Negative Pos Neg Net
Like Reagan 44% 25% +19
Progressive 35% 18% +17
Moderate 29% 12% +17
Conservative 32% 20% +12
Liberal 20% 30% -10 I sincerely hope we never add any more faces to Mt. Rushmore, but if we do, I’ll bet a very goodly sum that the two that are added will be FDR and Ronald Reagan and there won’t even be much of an argument.
July 31, 2007
Another Great Rightist VIII Posted by Alexander Burns at 01:55 PM EST I’ve spent a few days now—or, at least, parts of them—organizing some further thoughts on the subject of Presidential greatness. John Steele Gordon concluded last week’s exchange on this subject with some perceptive observations. Though I disagree with his statement that Churchill, de Gaulle, and Reagan were not really men of the right, he does an excellent job of sketching out some of the character traits that helped these men secure the lasting good will of their countrymen. Optimism, eloquence, nationalism, and emotional openness are certainly qualities that characterize the most popular political leaders. One of Mr. Gordon’s points nagged at me all weekend, though, and that’s his prediction that the public will never absorb the information that undermines depictions of Reagan as the winner of the Cold War. It would be unsettling to think that the American people are incapable of a clear-eyed assessment of their Presidents. This may be the case, but I’ve been looking over some data on the Americans’ recollections of their Presidents, and I’m not so confident that Reagan’s aura of greatness will last. There are a couple predictable patterns that affect public perception of former Presidents, and right now I think they’re skewing the feedback on Ronald Reagan. First, Presidents almost invariably gain standing with the public after leaving office. I chalk this up to a combination of nostalgia—that is, bad memories fading and good ones sticking around—and Americans’ habitual attitude of skepticism toward whoever occupies the Oval Office at any given moment. George H. W. Bush received a smaller percentage of the vote in 1992 than any incumbent President since Taft. Five months into his Presidency, only 27 percent of Americans said his performance was “excellent or above average.” In a 2002 Gallup poll, however, a whopping 69 percent said they approved of his performance in retrospect. That’s a pretty impressive improvement for someone who didn’t do anything all that extraordinary in the decade immediately following his Presidency. Or maybe it’s not impressive at all; that’s just the bump that ex-Presidents get. This is especially helpful to articulate and personable leaders, who are better at manufacturing good memories. Second, it seems crude to say this, but ex-Presidents always get more popular when they die. In a January 2006 Zogby poll, 17 percent of Americans said Gerald Ford was a “great or near great” President. Exactly a year later, that number had almost doubled to 31 percent. No new facts about the Ford administration had emerged, but Ford had passed away on the day after Christmas in 2006. If Malvolio was correct in Twelfth Night, and some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have it thrust upon them, then recently deceased Presidents tend to fall into the last of those three groups. Reagan certainly benefits from these two phenomena. His reputation has also been enhanced by one of the factors that enlarged John Kennedy’s: His political party regards him as its last truly successful President. Just three of the Presidents since 1932 consistently break 50 percent in general survey assessments of Presidential greatness—Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Reagan. Roosevelt is usually at the top of these polls, with Kennedy topping him occasionally and Reagan trailing a little behind. It’s no accident that the thirty-fifth and fortieth Presidents keep taking the silver and bronze medals. Major Democrats, and some Republicans as well, invoke the memory of John Kennedy constantly. Just last week, the Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen wrote an article for The New Republic asking, “Is Obama the Next JFK?” Across the aisle, Reagan is the ex-presidential model of choice. As Carl Cannon recently observed, President Bush is so unpopular that “the GOP characters seeking to replace him in 2009 are coping with the current political environment by closing their eyes and pretending they are succeeding Ronald Reagan.” With a parade of candidates and pundits perpetually touting their achievements, it’s no wonder that the public rates Kennedy and Reagan so highly. None of these grade-inflating phenomena will last. As the people who actually experienced the Reagan Presidency constitute a smaller and smaller proportion of the overall American populace, feelings of nostalgia and posthumous sympathy will fade. And if one makes the possibly risky assumption that at some point or another there will be another competent Republican President, Reagan’s stock with the public will fall further. I don’t know where he’ll end up in 50 years, but if I had to speculate I’d probably venture a guess that he’ll be ranked alongside George H. W. Bush, his “kinder and gentler” successor. I expect Kennedy’s catastrophic death will preserve his reputation a little longer, but I’d guess that he’ll end up placing closer to Truman than to Roosevelt. In Mr. Gordon’s post last Friday, he wrote, “Nuance is for historians, not the people.” Maybe so, maybe not. But in the long run, “the people” don’t diverge so much from historians in their rankings of the Presidents. Once the noise of state funerals fades and the pining of wistful op-ed columnists subsides, that’s when Americans really figure out who their great Presidents are.
July 31, 2007
Department of Useless Presidential Trivia II Posted by Alexander Burns at 01:00 PM EST I’ll add one or two quick observations to Joshua Zeitz’s post this morning. There is at least one additional scenario in 2008 that would pit two natives of the same state against each other in the presidential election, and it’s a good deal more likely than a Gore versus Thompson contest. If Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani are nominated by their respective parties—a fair, if not at all certain prospect at this point—you would end up with the subway series of presidential elections. As Mr. Zeitz notes, there has not been a home-state throwdown of this variety since 1944, when a different pair of New Yorkers fought for the Presidency. (Arguably, the 1992 election should qualify, since Ross Perot and George Bush were both Texans, albeit of different sorts.) It would be funny and maybe even appropriate if Clinton and Giuliani were the next two candidates to contest the same home state. For New Yorkers like myself, this outcome would be sweet recompense for the fact that our state hasn’t produced a presidential nominee since Thomas Dewey. The closest we’ve come to the Oval Office in the last 60 years has been with the brief Vice Presidency of Nelson Rockefeller, and the vice-presidential candidacies of Bill Miller, Geraldine Ferraro, and Jack Kemp. An even sweeter and more entertaining scenario that could play out, and that would, to my knowledge, be truly unprecedented, might actually pit three candidates from the same state against one another in an Empire State battle royale. If Mayor Michael Bloomberg runs as a third-party candidate against Clinton and Giuliani, the whole country will be resentfully singing “New York, New York” all through 2008. The winner of that contest would be anyone’s guess.
July 31, 2007
American Ceremony IV Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:40 AM EST A quick note on Alexander Burns’s post about pomp and ceremony. In describing Harvard University’s centuries-old tradition of having the governor of Massachusetts paraded into its spring commencement ceremonies by a mounted honor guard, Mr. Burns notes that it was Michael Dukakis, a “liberal Democratic governor [who] decided that he didn’t need the adornment of an honor guard. . . . I suspect Bill Weld, the scion of a venerable Harvard family, might have found the idea alluring. The trouble is, when a custom like this is disestablished in a populist, magnanimous-seeming gesture, it’s hard to revive it without looking like a prig.” Mr. Burns may be right that Dukakis’s liberal leveling instincts were operative in his decision to discontinue the tradition. (I think most political scientists would say that Dukakis, circa 1975, was not a traditional liberal, but rather a leader of the more centrist, “New Politics” movement within the Democratic party. But that is merely a quibble.) I suspect, however, that there may have been more to it. Dukakis was an alumnus of my alma mater, Swarthmore College, a Quaker institution that still retains a good deal of the temperament and political traditions historically central to the Society of Friends. Swatties, as they’re called (Spiro Agnew, ever a fan of alliteration, once dubbed the college the Kremlin on the Crum, after the creek that runs through its grounds), are long on reflection and short on ceremony. Certainly when Dukakis was enrolled there in the 1950s, students attended regular “collections” at the beautiful, but beautifully simple, meeting house. There they discussed politics, the arts, literature, what have you, with a strong dose of decorum and with an eye toward comity and understanding. If the college has traditions, as certainly it does, those traditions are quite plain. Coming from this perspective, I can imagine that the governor may have been mortified by the prospect of being paraded onto Harvard Yard by a mounted honor guard. Had there been an MTA line running through the yard, I’m sure a compromise might have been struck.
July 31, 2007
Department of Useless Presidential Trivia Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:05 AM EST From the Department of Useless Presidential Trivia, I realized this weekend that there’s an outside possibility that next year’s presidential election will come down to an all-Tennessee final. Should Fred Thompson win his party’s nomination (not implausible), and should Al Gore throw his hat into the ring and win the Democratic nomination (less likely, but also not implausible), both candidates will be resident Tennesseans. This is not a situation that occurs often. In the last century, Franklin Roosevelt, a resident New Yorker, squared off against Wendell Willkie in 1940 and Thomas Dewey in 1944, both resident New Yorkers. Though born in Indiana, Willkie had lived and worked in New York City since 1929; Dewey was a native of Michigan but served as governor of New York from 1943 to 1953. FDR, of course, was a native and lifetime resident of the Empire State. Looking back in time, the most famous example of this rare phenomenon was the presidential election of 1860, which saw longtime rivals Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas face each other for one last battle. Though Douglas was born in Vermont, and Lincoln in Kentucky, both men had lived out their adult lives in Illinois. The only significance of this possible but unlikely scenario is that Tennessee would be in play. In theory, candidates should easily carry their home states, which usually results in the home states of both nominees being overlooked in the larger campaign strategy. Al Gore took a drubbing in Tennessee in 2000, and then he took a second drubbing from the pundits for having lost his home state. In fact, it’s not that uncommon a phenomenon. Wikipedia has compiled a list of major party nominees who lost their resident or native states, and it’s fairly extensive. This list aside, there’s a prevailing assumption that candidates should be able to carry their home ground. Should Gore and Thomspon face each other next year, Tennessee might very well be up for grabs.
July 30, 2007
American Ceremony III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 02:40 PM EST Alexander Burns’s description of the governor of Massachusetts proceeding in stately procession to the Harvard commencement in a carriage with armed guards in scarlet uniforms reminds me of a family story too good not to pass on. My aunt’s great-great grandfather was Edwin D. Morgan, who served as governor of New York from 1859 to 1862. Both he and his wife were, shall we say, amply proportioned in the best Victorian manner. “Between us,” he once proudly said, “my wife and I dispose of better than a quarter of a ton.” On some ceremonial occasion, they were in a parade, going up Broadway in an open carriage. As the bands played, the soldiers marched, and, presumably, the people cheered, the bottom of the carriage suddenly gave way, depositing the governor and his lady unceremoniously onto the pavement, fortunately on their feet. All dignity instantly dispensed with, the two of them ran along, surrounded by what was left of the carriage, until the coachman could bring the frightened horses under control and halt them. How they finally extricated Governor and Mrs. Morgan from the wreck is not recorded, but I imagine the spectators on the sidewalk enjoyed themselves immensely at their expense.
July 30, 2007
American Ceremony II Posted by Alexander Burns at 12:25 PM EST I liked John Steele Gordon’s post this morning about Americans’ approach to ceremony. Informality has long been a distinguishing feature of American public life. The etiquette that instructs citizens to address their head of state as “Mr. President” rather than something grander sets a pretty clear standard from the top down. Such pompous customs as we’ve had have often been worn away over time by democratic impulses. One example of such a custom was Harvard University’s longstanding tradition of escorting the governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to commencement each year with an armed, mounted honor guard. The guard members came from the Massachusetts ceremonial militia, the National Lancers. Clad in crimson and carrying pikes, these escorts chauffeured governors to commencement from the age of John Winthrop to the more recent days of Francis Sargent. For centuries, the governor rode a carriage from the gold-domed capitol building to Harvard Yard; with the invention of the automobile, governors began traveling in stately open cars. In 1963 Governor Endicott Peabody went for a retro look and brought back the horse and carriage for his trip. The fashion didn’t catch–perhaps because one needs a name like “Endicott Peabody” to pull it off. The tradition came to an end some time in the 1970s, when, as I understand it, a liberal Democratic governor decided that he didn’t need the adornment of an honor guard. In fact, he preferred mass transit to any more elaborate means of conveyance. The governor’s name was Michael Dukakis. Subsequent governors may have been tempted to resurrect the practice. I suspect Bill Weld, the scion of a venerable Harvard family, might have found the idea alluring. The trouble is, when a custom like this is disestablished in a populist, magnanimous-seeming gesture, it’s hard to revive it without looking like a prig. And of course, it’s worth noting that Dukakis was right about the benefits of mass transit. Anyone who tries driving from Memorial Church in Cambridge to Beacon Hill at rush hour will find themselves wishing they had taken the subway. It might be an easier drive if you’re surrounded by pike-wielding bodyguards, but few of us could ever know that luxury.
July 30, 2007
American Ceremony Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:45 AM EST This country often takes a very cavalier attitude toward ceremony and punctiliousness. I often get letters and e-mails from total strangers who address me as “Dear John,” or even “dear john,” capital letters having become optional in e-mails. That’s fine with me and quite in keeping with the character of this bumptious, informal, everyone’s-a-friend-until-proven-otherwise, howdy-pardner country of ours. Even on state occasions the informal often intrudes, sometimes for better and sometimes not. While Ronald Reagan’s immense funeral was stage managed to perfection, intensely moving and with nary a wrong note, presidential inaugurations usually seem, to me at least, lacking in ceremonial pizzazz, a high school graduation ceremony on a larger scale. The British are supposed to do these things much better, although that reputation is of relatively recent vintage. Queen Victoria’s coronation in 1838 was more or less a shambles, thanks to a lack of rehearsal. At one point the Queen had to ask one of the peers, “Pray tell me, what am I to do now?” I was reminded of all this yesterday evening when I happened to turn on the television just in time to see Britain’s new prime minister, Gordon Brown, arrive at Camp David for his first meeting with the President. While not a “state visit,” the arrival was handled with some ceremony . . . up to a point. When the Marine Corps helicopter that had ferried Brown from Andrews Air Force Base landed, two lines of sailors and Marines in dress uniforms marched out and lined either side of the path from the helicopter, standing at rigid attention. Then the President—dressed in a tie and sport coat—appeared, accompanied by a naval officer in dress summer uniform. When they reached the bottom of the stairs, the prime minister descended and warmly shook hands with President Bush, who introduced him to the naval officer and led him between the lines of sailors and Marines, who were all saluting smartly. So far so good. Then the President led Brown to a golf cart. Brown got in the passenger side, the President slipped behind the wheel, did a 360 in front of the press corps, and “the leader of the free world” and the head of government of our closest ally went tootling off together to Camp David. Welcome to America, Prime Minister.
July 29, 2007
Hairspray Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:20 PM EST I went to see Hairspray last night, and I can’t remember the last time I left a movie feeling so good. I’ve never seen the show or the original movie, so I can’t say how this version compares. In terms of film criticism, I think A. O. Scott hits it right on the nose. “‘Hairspray’ is fundamentally a story about being young,” Scott writes, “about the triumph of youth culture, about the optimistic, possibly dated belief that the future will improve on the present—and its heart is very much with its teenage heroes and the fresh-faced actors who play them.” In celebrating the ebullience of young people, however, the film doesn’t fall into the predictable story line of a teen comedy. This movie isn’t Can’t Hardly Wait. Hairspray is a refreshingly unjaded celebration of the 1960s, highlighting the most uplifting, liberating aspects of that decade rather than its overplayed excesses. Changing fashions, newly popular kinds of music and dancing, and civil rights activism are woven together in a bright, upbeat story without a bit of meanness in it. It’s easy to condemn the 1950s as soulless, stifled, and segregated—as easy as it is to hate the ’60s for being chaotic and libertine. Hairspray doesn’t do this, and so it avoids turning into a heavy-handed, self-important work of politics. Even the bad guys in this movie—I use the word “guys” loosely, as Michelle Pfeiffer is the villain—are objects of cartoonish satire rather than real disdain. You’d have to be awfully humorless to take issue with the film’s portrayal of history. An additional charm of the movie is its positive portrayal of television. In Hairspray, television in general, and The Corny Collins Show in particular, is an instrument of social inclusiveness. It’s there, under the supervision of a good-hearted host with a sparkling smile, that black people, white people, fat people, and thin people come together to have fun. In the background, there is the specter of a dour-looking network executive. For the purposes of Hairspray’s main characters, this man might as well not exist. There’s something silly about the supreme importance of television in the film; obviously, integrating The Corny Collins Show is not an achievement like integrating Little Rock Central High School. But the movie’s makers know this, and that’s not a statement they’re trying to make. In our own time, when the networks’ idea of a good show is a nasty British music producer trashing ordinary people on live TV, Hairspray’s version of television has more than a little appeal.
July 28, 2007
The End of Turtledove's Confederacy Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:55 PM EST A year and a half ago I reviewed for AmericanHeritage.com a volume in Harry Turtledove’s vast cycle of novels about a Confederacy that achieved its independence in 1862. That volume was the second in a tetralogy called Settling Accounts, which recounted a series of campaigns of an alternate Second World War in part played out on American soil, just as earlier trilogies had recounted an American portion of the First World War and a couple of decades of political history describing the 1920s and 1930s in Turtledove’s alternate universe. On Monday he will publish In at the Death, the eleventh and perhaps concluding volume of a series comprising two trilogies and a tetralogy, plus the novel that set the whole thing going, How Few Remain, first published in 1997. So Turtledove has been knocking out better than one a year in this series for a decade. What can one say about the end of this enormous effort? It is impossible to say almost anything without revealing crucial plot details, so people who want to read Turtledove for the plot should stop reading this blog post now. For anyone else: The author has left room for at least one more trilogy about his postwar world, but his Confederacy is finally conquered, after attempting to exterminate its African-American population, and (spoiler ahead) having developed a nuclear weapon but neither an effective delivery system nor the capacity for repeated production. The two most popular settings for alternate histories are alternate versions of the American Civil War and the Second World War, with the more chilling and memorable books seeing the bad guys win. Turtledove, who alone in his profession has fused these two scenarios, may owe his comparatively big readership to that trick alone, although he has some other virtues. People who dislike his form of alternate history decry him for mechanically recycling actual history—there are a Confederate Hitler, Goebbels, and Manstein (in this case, real history’s Patton), a Confederate Stalingrad (Pittsburgh), a Confederate Auschwitz, etc. For the critics, they all seem too close to their inspirations in what alternate history buffs call “our time line” to give the pleasure the genre sometimes delivers, which includes more ingenious alteration, sometimes subtle, sometimes wild. There is something in this criticism, but it seems less damning of the final volume of the vast series than it may have been before. Turtledove is not simply restaging the known and real history of the New World; the present leaks in too, and to disturbing effect. He has incorporated elements of the Iraq War into his series for a few years now—there are suicide bombers, and a fair amount of other terrorism, including the mutilation of soldiers. For what is in effect a triumphal victory of a cause the author clearly supports, the book is much sadder and grimmer than one might have expected. When the Americans win and are afflicted by terrorists, either in the Confederacy or in Canada or Utah, there are systematic reprisals, usually mass shootings of hostages. It is not clear that they work, but neither is it clear that they fail, or that terror would subside faster without what were in the 1940s the traditional countermeasures. The American Final Solution does not seem an apology for the actual German version, a cry of “Anyone could do it,” because Turtledove’s American South, in the wake of the loss of a First World War, is quite plausibly one of the more tormented and race-obsessed industrialized cultures anyone has ever imagined. For that matter, the countermeasures Turtledove’s American Army takes against partisans are not the ones the Nazis took in real history; they are significantly less dreadful. In terms of military ethics, the soldiers who fight for his United States are recognizably the sort of people who fought for ours in the same decade. The worlds Turtledove has created are by no means the most interesting alternate history written in our time, even among the work characterized as genre fiction. As it happens, this year saw an American alternate history (Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union) that critics took as a work of serious literature, after deciding the same thing a couple of years ago about Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, and after having retrospectively upgraded Philip K. Dick’s 1962 The Man in the High Castle. But Turtledove, a one-man industry, has probably made it much easier for others to publish in his genre by producing the readers for other, and to my taste better, writers of genre fiction. Anyone who likes alternate history owes him something, and this latest effort will in no way disappoint anyone who made it through the first ten.
July 27, 2007
Another Great Rightist VII Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:45 PM EST Just a few observations to add to this most interesting colloquy. 1) I think these sorts of polls are basically meaningless because they are asking an unanswerable question. It’s a bit like asking which is more inherently delicious, a cheese soufflé or a bowl of strawberries with heavy cream (“Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did.”). Which is a greater work of art, Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, or Picasso’s Guernica?The only possible answer, as far as I’m concerned, is all of them. 2) I don’t think that being a “rightist” (whatever that might be) is what Churchill, de Gaulle, and Reagan have in common. Churchill backed programs early in his career (and crossed the floor of Parliament in 1904 to further them) that were definitely of the left. Only when British politics drifted further leftward, did Churchill come to seem of the right. He was a liberal, not a socialist. Churchill felt that the aim of socialism was to tear down the rich, and the aim of liberalism to raise up the poor. Much the same can be said of Reagan, who always felt that he didn’t leave the Democratic Party; it left him. 3) Varied as they were, Churchill, de Gaulle, Reagan, and the so-far-strangely-absent-from-this-discussion Franklin Roosevelt had a few things in common. First, they were all optimists. They had no trouble seeing the “broad, sunlit uplands” of the future whatever the terrible travails of the present. Second, they were all eloquent and able to connect with the people through words at a very fundamental level. Third, they were all nationalists, intensely proud of the history of their respective countries and entirely confident that their countries’ days of glory were not over. Fourth, all four were capable of thinking with their hearts, not just their minds. They could think—and speak—emotionally. Intellectuals seem never to understand that it takes two of the body’s organs to really find the truth in the human universe. The ordinary guy in the street has no problem with that concept at all. 4) Alexander Burns writes, “Many Americans remember Reagan as the winner of the Cold War. There’s plenty of evidence to complicate that perception of history, but it may be that popular memory hasn’t yet absorbed it.” Nor, I’m confident, will it. Nuance is for historians, not the people. Previous Presidents wanted to manage the Cold War; Reagan wanted to win it, and he did. He was captain of the ship when the enemy vessel became a flaming wreck. To be sure, a fire in the enemy’s boiler room helped mightily, but it was Reagan who helped force the enemy to overstress its dilapidated machinery. And it was Reagan who took over a country in deep economic distress and left it in the midst of an economic roll that the world has never seen the equal of. Was he entirely responsible? Of course not. But it wouldn’t have happened had Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale been running the country between 1981 and 1989. I have a very close friend who is a card-carrying liberal of the old school: boycotted grapes, backed the nuclear freeze, opposed every tax cut he ever heard of, you name it. For reasons I can’t remember now, someone gave him a list of the “great Presidents” including Reagan. My friend smiled and said, “Yeah, I guess he was pretty good after all.” That’s when I knew that Reagan had made it into the presidential seraphim. Historians will quibble about this and that, but the man’s greatness will never be seriously in question.
July 27, 2007
Reagan as Military Victor Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:15 PM EST Fred Allen writes “Fred Smoler and Alex Burns have basically been asking why so many Americans think Reagan was their greatest President when usually, around the world and through time, people name the winner of a major war as their greatest leader. Isn’t it possible that people think Reagan was the winner of a major war—the Cold War?” The traditional argument that Reagan did something that won the Cold War holds that Reagan’s defense budgets exhausted the Soviets while his moral clarity debunked them. I do not find either part of this argument particularly plausible. Most American Cold War Presidents, probably all American Cold War Presidents, were fairly explicit about their conviction that the United States was morally superior to the Soviet Union, and most of them spent a healthy chunk of money on defense. As it happens, most of the great strategic investments of the 1980s—assuming for the sake of the argument that those were what did the trick—were authorized by Jimmy Carter, who also championed human rights in the East Bloc, and who began aiding anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan (another alleged cause of our Cold War victory) six months before the Soviet invasion of 1979—and I say all of this as someone who has grown to think less and less of Jimmy Carter. So while it is certainly possible that people think Reagan won the Cold War, I am not sure why they think this. Even if they do think it, it seems implausible to admire as a military victor someone who never waged victorious war on any foe more formidable than Grenada, an occasion he absurdly called our finest hour, while allowing our forces to be massacred and driven into the sea in Beirut. Even by the most generous assessment, it is hard to argue that Reagan won the Cold War, since the Soviet Union disappeared on the next President’s watch, and the crucial decision, the Central Committee’s agreement to give up its monopoly of power, only occurred on February 7, 1990, also occurred on Bush’s watch. In any case, why admire the alleged and improbable victor of the Cold War more than one admires as victors people who commanded the forces that destroyed Hitler’s Reich?
July 27, 2007
Another Great Rightist VI Posted by Alexander Burns at 02:45 PM EST Fred Allen is right that many Americans remember Reagan as the winner of the Cold War. There’s plenty of evidence to complicate that perception of history, but it may be that popular memory hasn’t yet absorbed it. Going back to look at the specifics of the poll that selected Reagan (incidentally, it was run by the Discovery Channel, not the History Channel, as I first wrote), I think there may actually be a simpler explanation for his victory than anything I, Mr. Smoler, and Mr. Allen have suggested. In the final round of voting, the list of contenders had been narrowed down to Reagan, Lincoln, Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Martin Luther King, Jr. A traditional liberal voting in this contest would have been hard-pressed to decide between voting for Lincoln and King. Enthusiasts of pre-twentieth-century American history might have had a difficult time choosing between Lincoln, Washington, and Franklin. Meanwhile, Reagan would have had a compact, reliable base of support among conservative viewers most familiar with the recent past. By this rubric, you would have had Reagan winning the most votes, with Lincoln coming in second by picking up support from some of the liberals and some of the history buffs. King, Franklin, and Washington would have finished in the last three spots. Indeed, this is how the votes came out: Reagan (24 percent), followed by Lincoln (23.5), then King (19.7), then Washington (17.7), then Franklin (14.4). So maybe the American public, more broadly, might have preferred the winner of a traditional war—Lincoln or Washington—but couldn’t quite decide which one. If only Discovery had taken the contest to a runoff.
July 27, 2007
“Communist” China Posted by Alexander Burns at 01:45 PM EST It’s not easy for me to admit it, but I enjoy watching Lou Dobbs’s show. I might be alone on this blog in this respect. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not sympathetic to the man’s politics. If I don’t watch too often, or for too long a period of time, I find him hilarious. He always sounds like he’s auditioning for a TV movie about Father Coughlin. The language he uses is so over-the-top and inflammatory, I often wonder if he realizes that he sounds like the propaganda chief of a Third World dictator. When immigration reform failed last month, Dobbs called it “a glorious victory for the American people.” Replace “American” with “Iraqi” and you’re in the idiom of Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf. Of course, what’s not funny about Dobbs’s show is that he has plenty of viewers who take him seriously. The last time I watched Lou Dobbs Tonight, a few weeks ago, I was startled by a term the host used. Going back to look at transcripts of his broadcast, I see that he uses it rather frequently; for some reason, I’d never noticed it before. In a segment about regulation of imported commodities, Dobbs made reference to “Communist China.” That’s strange, I thought, for him to be using such anachronistic vocabulary. It wasn’t really surprising, as Dobbs presents himself as the table-thumping defender of middle-class capitalism. On Lou Dobbs’s list of favorite things, I’d guess Communism ranks somewhere between Mexicans and Michael Moore. All the same, it was weird to hear a twenty-first-century TV personality using a term that went out of fashion some time ago. Just when did calling China “Communist” go out of fashion? I didn’t know, so I did a little research. The product is the graph below. Searching The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times for the terms “Communist China” and “Red China,” I made up a little chart that attempts to illustrate the popularity of those terms over time. The results illustrate an obvious trend.
Over the 60-year period between 1946 and 2006, these four major newspapers were most likely to include the terms “Communist China” or “Red China” during periods of tension between the United States and the People’s Republic. Looking at the graph, you see a spike in use of these terms after Mao’s seizure of power and during the Korean War. There’s another spike in the mid- to late 1950s, around when you would’ve had the various crises in the Taiwan Straits. Unsurprisingly, the terms climbed to the heights of their popularity in the late 1960s, during the escalation of the war in Vietnam and the Cultural Revolution.There’s a steep drop-off with the beginning of the 1970s. It starts a little before 1970, but it really takes off come 1972. I hesitate to read too much into this graph, but it does look like the practice of calling China “Communist” or “Red” fell into obscurity around the time of Nixon’s visit to Beijing. If the dwindling use of this vocabulary is any indication of Americans’ feelings toward the Chinese, it should further confirm that ’72 was a turning point for Sino-American relations. Even during the 1980s, when anti-Communism was at the front and center of U.S. foreign affairs, China managed to escape these unfriendly labels. The terms still crop up a few dozen times each year (with “Communist China” far more common), but a good number of these appearances come in book reviews, where authors employ them only in historical contexts. Lou Dobbs is making an effort at bringing “Communist China” back into style, but it isn’t catching on outside his six o’clock broadcast. His job ought to get even harder as China’s status as a Communist state grows more ambiguous.
July 27, 2007
Another Great Rightist V Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 12:00 PM EST Fred Smoler and Alex Burns have basically been asking why so many Americans think Reagan was their greatest President when usually, around the world and through time, people name the winner of a major war as their greatest leader. Isn’t it possible that people think Reagan was the winner of a major war—the Cold War?
July 27, 2007
Another Great Rightist IV Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:10 AM EST Alex Burns writes that “there’s at least the semblance of a pattern that people today are reminiscing about right-of-center nationalists from the recent past. I suggested in my last post that this had to do with a popular yearning for “supposedly more straightforward times. . . . That most of these ‘greatest’ men—all of them but Salazar and Reagan—were accomplished anti-Nazis, seems to confirm this. If there’s one international conflict remembered for its moral clarity, World War II is it. In the midst of our comparatively muddled struggle with Islamic extremism, one inclines toward sympathy with this nostalgia.” I agree with Mr. Burns’s argument that the appeal of the Second World War when choosing a greatest fellow citizen derives from its moral clarity, at least among the general populations of France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the former Soviet Union, and very probably among Germans (although among some contemporary elites—academics, journalists, etc.—there is nowadays an attempt, in my view grossly excessive, to muddy the moral clarity of the war). In the popular mind, greatness, which is what the polls are measuring, still seems to consist of leadership in war and politics, despite an academic fashion for deemphasizing war, conventional political history, and the notion of “great men” generally (a recent book on Garibaldi, recently and extensively reviewed in The New Yorker, apparently argues that Garibaldi cannot have been a great man because we have learned that there are no such people). It is interesting that polls do not show people rejecting the very category of great men, but instead confirming a pretty old-fashioned idea of who fits that category. The polls may be silly, but perhaps those polled are less so. My guess is that ordinary people very sensibly think you are the greatest national figure if you stopped Hitler because they retain a lively impression of just how urgent a task that was, and I also suspect that Reagan’s current celebrity is a mark of the decline of history teaching in the schools, specifically an academic bias against war as an object of interest and profound achievement. If you do not put political and military history in the foreground, and I suspect many American schools no longer do, you seem to open up the door to Ronald Reagan dominating the popular mind. This is probably an unanticipated result, given the ambition of the people who revise curricula, but not, in a sour way, an entirely unamusing one. Mr. Burns also writes that “if we’re ever fortunate enough to live in generally peaceful times, I wonder whether we would find people choosing Martin Luther King, William Shakespeare, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, Louis Pasteur, and Johannes Gutenberg as their ‘greatest.’” Aristides de Sousa Mendes, who saved the lives of 12,000 Jews and issued visas to more than 20,000 other refugees from Hitler, was indeed a splendid man, but his choice as the greatest Portuguese would confirm the primacy of unpeaceful times when denominating greatness. If Mr. Burns is right, and I was making my choice in a peaceful time, I’d presumably have voted for Camoens, the Portuguese epic poet, in part because I once learned, with considerable difficulty, to pronounce a loose approximation of his name, and that was so much trouble that I’ve never gotten him out of my mind. But in fact I cannot imagine doing picking Camoens, maybe because I’ve read only a few lines of The Lusiads; I’d have no trouble picking Shakespeare, although I have no great objection to the choice of Churchill. Oddly enough, the sort of people who spend a lot of time attempting to debunk Churchill are often the same sort of people who spend a lot of energy trying to debunk Shakespeare (you may have to spend your life in universities to know a lot of such people). Churchill, of course, seemed to hold Shakespeare in rather lofty esteem. He would, though, wouldn’t he? It also occurs to me that a century ago, a lot of Americans would have ranked Goethe with (or at least close to) Shakespeare, and one reason for Goethe’s precipitous fall is his simple bad luck in having written in the language spoken by Hitler. I do not think Shakespeare’s reputation is too much dependent on his luck in writing in the same language as that spoken (to considerable effect) by Churchill, the man associated in the popular mind with stopping Hitler. But it probably hasn’t hurt.
July 26, 2007
Another Great Rightist III Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:35 PM EST Thanks to Fred Smoler for his thoughtful response to my musings on greatness polls. I particularly appreciate his insights on de Gaulle; I was not aware of some of the complexities of his place in French memory. Upon reflection, it probably makes more sense to classify de Gaulle as a nationalist first and a rightist second. I think it’s safe to say the same of Adenauer and Churchill, although it’s also true that virtually anyone looks moderate or liberal in comparison with Nazis. As much as he stood up for liberal values in opposing Hitler, Churchill was pretty reactionary when it came to Ireland and the empire, and he failed to champion the postwar social programs that Britons wanted. Mr. Smoler is right that Churchill was no “simple rightist,” but I’d assert that a rightist he was, all the same. On Reagan, I couldn’t agree more with Mr. Smoler’s analysis. One sentence in Mr. Smoler’s paragraph on Reagan spurs a further thought. I try to stick to the rule that one shouldn’t attempt to draw conclusions from bad data, and these polls are certainly bad data. But as I’ve already broken this rule, I’ll go a little further. Mr. Smoler writes, “For most of our history, Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln were thought our greatest Presidents, and I do not rate very high Reagan’s chance at keeping the top slot in memory.” I think this is true, and I would not expect many of these rankings to be the same in 50 years—so maybe these surveys tell us more about the times we live in than about the way nostalgia works, in general. Even with the complications Mr. Smoler points out, there’s at least the semblance of a pattern that people today are reminiscing about right-of-center nationalists from the recent past. I suggested in my last post that this had to do with a popular yearning for “supposedly more straightforward times.” Mr. Smoler’s observation that most of these “greatest” men—all of them but Salazar and Reagan—were accomplished anti-Nazis, seems to confirm this. If there’s one international conflict remembered for its moral clarity, World War II is it. In the midst of our comparatively muddled struggle with Islamic extremism, one inclines toward sympathy with this nostalgia. To reiterate, it’s likely foolish to draw any serious conclusions from these polls. But if we’re ever fortunate enough to live in generally peaceful times, I wonder whether we would find people choosing Martin Luther King, William Shakespeare, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, Louis Pasteur, and Johannes Gutenberg as their “greatest” forebears.
July 26, 2007
Another Great Rightist II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 07:00 PM EST Alex Burns posted today on what he thinks is a rule about admittedly dodgy polls about the people perceived to be the greatest leaders of nations. Conceding the silliness of some results, which may tell is more about the spirit in which some questions are answered than about the depth of popular conviction, he thinks such polls may "teach us something all the same. The conclusion I might draw is that right-of-center leaders from the recent past are generally the best focal points for popular nostalgia. Whatever their differences as leaders, Reagan, Salazar, Churchill, Adenauer, and de Gaulle are all remembered for their belligerent, can-do nationalism. This attitude may not always have produced the best policies, but it has allowed these men to live in popular memory as representations of supposedly more straightforward times." Maybe so, but here is another possibility: De Gaulle, for example, remembered as the greatest of Frenchmen because he stood against Vichy and Hitler, is admired as much as an imagined man of the left as of the right, in the Jacobin tradition of left patriotic militarism, and moreover as someone who restored republican government. De Gaulle was the man who outfought the French Communist Party for bragging rights to the Jacobin military tradition—a patriot rightist move—but then again, he was the man who decided to give up in Algeria, admittedly after overthrowing an elected government in a near coup, and he crushed a military movement that sought to hang on to Algeria. So de Gaulle was both a man of the right and something else; I am not certain his status in French eyes is fundamentally a tribute to his rightist incarnation. Churchill had once been a Liberal, he was never trusted by most Tories, and he preserved British parliamentary democracy against rightists who sought an accommodation with Hitler, some of whom feared the left more than National Socialism, and valued their empire more than a democratic order in Europe. Churchill was a liberal imperialist, an almost vanished species, not a conventional rightist, and he chose to lose the empire rather than preserve it at the price of any kind of liberalism. He said of his contribution that he had only been the roar of the lion—that the British people had been its heart. This sounds a bit like liberal democratic rhetoric. He was an aristocrat, but scarcely a simple rightist. Adenauer was an anti-Nazi, several times imprisoned by the regime, and he restored a German democracy; he was a rightist compared with the Social Democrats, a leftist compared with the actual and ghastly German right of very recent times. If the Germans most admired Bismarck, it would be another story. Reagan is tricky. For one thing, my honest guess is that Americans will go back to thinking Lincoln their greatest President, if they have ever really stopped, and (to say the least) Lincoln is not an obvious rightist. Americans also long admired Jefferson, not a rightist in his day or in ours, and also liked Washington, who declined both a throne and the leadership of a military dictatorship. Rightists get more rightist than Washington. For most of our history, Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln were thought our greatest Presidents, and I do not rate very high Reagan's chance at keeping the top slot in memory. Stalin is credited with very literally saving his country, from people who vowed to murder or enslave every Russian, and looked to come close to doing it; part of his status derives from that association. Some also derives from a contrast of national prestige and order compared with current decline and chaos. Some of it may be a reluctance to concede the horrors of what was done in one's name, by people like oneself. And where is the competition for greatest democratic Russian leader? Yeltsin, who presided over chaos and immiseration? The Stalin ranking is mad and sad, but it does not make for a rule.
July 26, 2007
Robert A. Heinlein Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:55 PM EST 2007 is the centenary of Robert A. Heinlein, one of the great American science fiction writers (July 7, 1907–May 8, 1988), and today Arts and Letters Daily, a splendid website, links to three pieces on Heinlein. All are celebrations. An article in The Wall Street Journal celebrates Heinlein’s politics—he was a strong anti-Communist, and also a libertarian—and, as was once traditional when admiring science fiction writers, his predictive powers, crediting him with foreseeing Chernobyl in 1940 and inventing, although not patenting, the waterbed. A piece on Reasononline centers on his politics, and is graced with a complicated understanding of them. Heinlein’s taste in politicians included both Upton Sinclair and Barry Goldwater; he evinced what was taken for a fascistoid streak in Starship Troopers, helped popularize hippies and the sexual revolution in Stranger In a Strange Land, and was, as the piece notes, his own kind of libertarian (in the 1950s, he tried to form a national organization, the Patrick Henry Leagues, to raise taxes for a stronger defense). The third article, at the Space Review website, charts Heinlein’s very considerable influence on people who have pushed for the American space effort. My vastly affectionate memory of Heinlein’s writing centers, as is probably appropriate for this blog, on his use of history. The first Heinlein novels I found were three of his young-adult books, Tunnel in the Sky (1955) Between Planets (1951), and Have Spacesuit Will Travel (1958), which were for some reason in one of my sixth grade classrooms. I must have been 10 or 11, I took them home, and read them enough times that years later I could quote pages at a stretch. I soon found the other young-adult novels in libraries, and was most rhapsodic about Starman Jones (1953), Farmer in the Sky (1950), The Star Beast (1954), and Citizen of the Galaxy (1957). There is an old tag about people inventing the past and remembering the future, and it seems to me that the latter half of that phrase is precisely what Heinlein’s best young-adult novels did. Farmer in the Sky was about sodbusters settling the Great Plains, disguised as the terraforming of Ganymede; Between Planets was the American Revolution restaged on Venus; Citizen of the Galaxy was in part about abolitionism; Starman Jones was a reworking of the voyages of exploration to the New World; etc. They were patriotic visions of our history fused with a sense that the American story would continue into the future, replaying similarly glorious themes. Heinlein could tell a story, and at least by the standards of an 11-year-old, he was a thrilling stylist. I read everything he wrote through the late 1960s, then trailed off. I am a bit abashed to reflect that very little I have ever read since has given me more pleasure. It is now the fashion to say that we must always contextualize and historicize works of imagination, with the implication that we should acknowledge that all writing about the future will be the future remembered rather than truly imagined. Maybe so, although it can be done in remarkably different ways, giving very different amounts of pleasure. If you were a certain sort, at a certain time, Heinlein gave astonishing pleasure. He had other tricks, old and good ones, beside restaging the pageant of American history—there were wicked stepfathers and journeys of development, a celebration of duty, and of the pleasures of old-fashioned American iconoclasm, also at moments a commitment to a kind of humanism, a vision glorying in what our species could be. Looking at the shattered remains of a vanished civilization of insectoid aliens, a teenager mused something to the effect that they had not let their environment push them around, they had mastered nature through reason and engineering, so he supposed that they were men. It is an old-fashioned sentiment, although by my lights not an unattractive one. He linked a number of his novels into a “future history,” which fascinated me and others. In an age that believed in the inevitability of history, a history of the future was not as scandalous as an alternate history of the past, but it could be almost as hypnotic. He had his quirks and his crotchets, but he was a very resonant voice in our mid-century popular culture, and maybe something more. By a historical irony, Heinlein is widely remembered as a fascist, on the strength of Starship Troopers (a novel inspired by successful wars against fascists), and became vastly popular because of counter-cultural enthusiasm for one of his least representative novels, at a time when he was about to support Goldwater. Along the way, he seems to have helped inspire a remarkable number of the people who designed and built America’s spaceships, when we used to do that sort of thing. If we do so again, or if anyone else ever does, the great days of Heinlein’s fame may still be ahead of him.
July 26, 2007
Another Great Rightist Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:35 AM EST The New York Times had an interesting story yesterday about a contest to name “the greatest Portuguese who ever lived.” The contest was held by the Portuguese television station RTP, and it allowed people to vote on their nation’s greatest son by telephone, much as winners are chosen on American Idol. This unscientific survey became controversial when the man who came out on top was António de Oliveira Salazar, the fascist dictator who ran Portugal from 1932 until 1968. He beat out Vasco da Gama and Henry the Navigator, among others. Some are interpreting this as a sign of Portugal’s increasing frustration with its second-tier status in the European Union. “Today,” the Times writes, “Portugal is the poorest country in Western Europe, and its recent history is marred by corruption scandals.” When it became a democracy in the 1970s, Portugal hoped for better fortunes than these. Similar nostalgia for autocracy has shown up in other frustrated states, like Russia. In 2003, a fifth of Russians remembered Stalin as “wise and humane,” and 31 percent said they’d take him as their leader. It’s not far-fetched to posit a connection between such sentiments and the disappointments of the Putin and Yeltsin presidencies. One thing that seems funny about Salazar’s performance in this survey, though, is that it fits in well with a growing trend in “greatest person” contests: Rightists almost always win. Churchill topped a 2002 survey that selected the 100 greatest Britons. De Gaulle was France’s choice for the leadoff slot, beating Napoleon and Marie Curie. Konrad Adenauer won out in Germany. In a History Channel survey, Americans picked Reagan as the first among equals. There are obviously differences between the kinds of rightism that these men represented, and it would be asinine to dump both Churchill and Salazar in any narrower ideological bracket. But the pattern is nevertheless striking: there are no men of the left topping these lists—except in Canada, where the welfare-state pioneer Tommy Douglas was designated that country’s “greatest.” It goes without saying that these greatness surveys are totally ridiculous. In Britain’s, Princess Diana beat Isaac Newton, and David Beckham edged out Charles Dickens. The pattern of winners might teach us something all the same. The conclusion I might draw is that right-of-center leaders from the recent past are generally the best focal points for popular nostalgia. Whatever their differences as leaders, Reagan, Salazar, Churchill, Adenauer, and de Gaulle are all remembered for their belligerent, can-do nationalism. This attitude may not always have produced the best policies, but it has allowed these men to live in popular memory as representations of supposedly more straightforward times. I’m not sure if that signals something good or bad about how memory works. I do know that if I lived in Portugal, I’d be disappointed.
July 25, 2007
The Clipper Ship of Today: An Interview with David Kaplan Posted by Allen Barra at 10:50 AM EST David A. Kaplan’s new book, Mine’s Bigger: Tom Perkins and the Making of the Greatest Sailing Machine Ever Built, is an exhilarating account of how Tom Perkins, the man most responsible for bankrolling Silicon Valley, created “the perfect yacht”—the biggest, fastest, riskiest, highest-tech, and most self indulgent sailboat ever: the Maltese Falcon. A modern-day version of the classic clipper ship, the Falcon is as long as a football field, more than 40 feet wide, and cost a cool $130 million to build. Kaplan, a senior editor at Newsweek, talked to us about Perkins and his amazing creation from his home in New York. First, I’ve got to tell you, I never thought a book on a sailboat could keep me so enthralled. You call Perkins’ amazing ship, the Maltese Falcon, a descendant of clipper ships. Could you give us the short form on the evolution of sailboats from clipper ship to super ship? The clipper ships, which fascinated the Americans and Brits and much of the world with their tales of speed and adventure, had their heyday for only a few decades, from the 1850s into the 1870s. They weren’t unconventionally rigged; they were multi-masted square-riggers, which had been around for centuries, but they were long and narrow and built for speed. And because they carried only light cargo, like tea, they could make the most of their large sail area. The clippers were called that because they either “clipped” off speed records or sailed “at a clip.” After the clippers faded from the scene, replaced by steam-powered vessels, sailing became recreational. The J-boats were beautiful and colossal sloops; catamarans could skim along the water and achieve great speed; the America’s Cup boats over the years experimented with new designs and materials. But the revolutionary rig of the Maltese Falcon represents the biggest advance in sailing in 150 years. Tom Perkins calls it a “clipper” because of its 15 square sails and because he aims to evoke the romance of yesteryear. But he also calls it a “yacht,” as the boat is over-the-top in luxury and high-tech materials and finish. Why revolutionary? Unlike the clippers of yore, the Falcon’s rig is automated and computerized, and there is no rigging whatsoever. The 35-ton carbon-fiber masts are freestanding—no stays or shrouds to support them—and to adjust course, the masts themselves rotate. On the old clippers, two or three-dozen deckhands had to maneuver the yardarms by pulling on ropes (sheets), in a complicated, time-consuming, and dangerous maneuver. On the Falcon, you press a button. It’s rather unbelievable. One of the interesting questions you raise is why any sane man would spend $130 million of his own money to build such a boat. Why don’t you take a crack at answering that for us? Well, it’s a lot easier if you have $500 million or so to begin with. And one certainly can rationalize that it’s a reasonable investment, given that Perkins says he’s had offers to sell the yacht for more than he paid for it. But the bigger answer is that he has spent his life on creating things—that’s part of what venture capitalists do—and this is his ultimate creation, as absurd or profligate as it might seem to some. Who are Perkins’s biggest rivals? Who’s come the closest to creating the equal to the Maltese Falcon? How close does it come to matching its performance? The Falcon has no rivals, given its unique design and that no other mono-hulled cruising boat comes close to it in speed. There are racing boats, ultra-light and stripped down, that will go faster in certain conditions, but it’s like comparing apples and elephants. And more important, from Perkins’s perspective, they’re so different as to not constitute rivals. None of that suggests that Perkins doesn’t watch what others are doing. As I discuss at much length in the book, the two other mega-yacht sailboats, both owned by Americans, were always on Perkins’s mind during the conception and construction of the Falcon. And he was on their minds, as the Falcon was built. Jim Clark, of Netscape fame, built the magnificent but plodding schooner Athena; Joe Vittoria, who made his fortune in the Avis buyout of the 1980s, built the largest sloop ever, Mirabella V. Both of those boats have their fine attributes—Athena is classic and Mirabella V can rocket upwind—but neither can match the Falcon in sustained speed. And of course, Perkins’s is bigger. The show down between the Maltese Falcon and the Mirabella V was something of a modern classic. There are those who maintain that the Mirabella V might have won or at least made a better show had she not sustained a two-foot tear in her mainsail. Can you describe their race and what it proved about the essential difference between the two ships? I think it was widely anticipated, but not quite a showdown. Not a real racecourse; more in the nature of two drag racers who saw an opening on the Interstate for a few miles. Unless you have a real racecourse, with different angles of sail and over a few hours of time, then you don’t have a real test. The breeze approached 20 knots, and both boats were really surging along. Mirabella V seemed to do better than the Falcon beating to windward. And that was to be expected, given that she’s a sloop, and no square-rigger’s going to excel upwind. When both boats bore off to the wind, the Falcon did better, also to be expected. But, alas, you didn’t have a real racecourse, with different angles of sail (which is why courses are typically triangular) over a few hours, so it wasn’t a true test. And of course, the breakdown of Mirabella V abbreviated what competition there was.
But it sure was exciting while it lasted. Two mammoth sailing machines in a stiff breeze and building seas off the coast of Monaco on a summer afternoon. Hard to imagine better nautical times! When one of the boats passed the other’s bow—heeling over, white foam rushing out from the sides—it was spectacular. One of the most interesting things about Mine’s Bigger is the information on the history and evolution of the clipper ships. I hadn’t realized that the era of the clippers was so short-lived. You write about the 1872 race by the British clippers Thermopylae and Cutty Sark from Shanghai to London, both fully loaded with more than a million pounds of tea. The Cutty Sark lost but earned the reputation as the superior ship, which it maintains to this day. Why is that? The era of the clippers was indeed short-lived. And given the rapid emergence of the steam engine and steamships, it might have been even shorter, except that the clipper ships still had value on some long runs that involved carrying light cargo.
The Cutty Sark won other loosely defined competitions. Remember, there weren’t races as such, but coincidental departures (no owner was going to keep his vessel around waiting for competitors who were likely carrying the same commercial cargo, like tea). But more than its reputation as a faster ship, I think it won over the hearts of the British, because though it lost to Thermopylae in that epic 1872 contest, its noble recovery from near catastrophe in the southern waters of the Indian Ocean seemed more worthy. And as it was, the Cutty Sark didn’t arrive in London that much later than Thermopylae.
The tragedy of the Cutty Sark is it was heavily damaged in dry dock in London a few months ago, after 50 years as a leading tourist attraction. It remains to be seen how much of the great ship will be restored. What’s the life expectancy for a great sailing machine like the Maltese Falcon? That is, given the inevitable advances in sailing technology, advances that the fame of the Falcon herself has helped push, how long is it likely to be before a bigger and better ship comes along? And in what area are the advances most likely to occur? “Bigger” could come any time some tycoon decides it needs to be. Sailboats don’t scale vertically, because most owners want to be able to fit under the major bridges of the world (Golden Gate, Verrazano, Bridge of the Americas), so the masts can’t be much taller than than the Falcon’s. If you get much longer, then you need to add additional masts. In theory, it wouldn’t be hard—just more expensive. I have heard that a well-known Mideast figure has considered a sailboat well over 400 feet, but it’s still just chatter, and in any event, that boat would most likely still be a traditional ketch or schooner. The interesting thing to me is that no other boat with this revolutionary rig, the DynaRig, or what some are calling the Falcon Rig, has yet been announced. I suspect the reasons are both economic and aesthetic. Cost worries even gazillionaires, and most yachties want a traditional-looking boat. Call Tom Perkins’s boat whatever you like—a magnificent, ultra-modern machine or a strange vessel only Darth Vader could love—but it ain’t traditional-looking. “Better”? Nobody I talk to theorizes a better mast material than carbon fiber, so I doubt you’ll see advances there any time soon. Hull material? Somebody will someday build this hull not out of steel but out of composite materials (like carbon fiber and other materials), but that will only marginally reduce weight and increase speed. Computers and fiber optics? It’s hard to see so far how the Falcon can be improved, though perhaps speed of mast rotation and sail deployment might get a little better. But sailing advances are very slow in the making, and that’s one of the reasons this boat, and its owner, so fascinated me. This “clipper yacht” represents a leap in the way megayachts are sailed—in some respects the kind of leap represented by the clipper ships of yore.
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