August 23, 2007
Eisenhower’s Reputation III Posted by Alexander Burns at 08:05 PM EST Fred Smoler and John Steele Gordon have been discussing Dwight Eisenhower’s reputation. It’s a good discussion to have, as Eisenhower remains relatively difficult to judge. Mr. Smoler does a first-rate job of laying out the man’s virtues and failings. On the one hand, historians should appreciate his “enormous tact in coalition warfare . . . the moral splendor of the letter he wrote in anticipation of a failure on D-day, his caution during the Cold War.” On the other hand, one ought not understate the problematic nature of his relationships with Joseph McCarthy and powerful segregationists. An interesting footnote to this discussion is that Eisenhower may be the only man to have served as President who actually adjusted his behavior based on a poll ranking the American Presidents. Ike campaigned energetically in the 1962 midterm elections after Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., released a survey ranking him twenty-second among the Presidents. At the time, John Kennedy told Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “It’s all your father’s poll. Eisenhower has been going along for years, basking in the glow of applause he has always had. Then he saw that poll and realized how he stood before the cold eye of history—way below Truman; even below Hoover. Now he’s mad to save his reputation.” Eisenhower himself, as the younger Schlesinger described it in a 1997 article, blasted the 1962 poll for conflating “an individual’s strength of dedication with oratorical bombast; determination, with public repetition of a catchy phrase; achievement, with the exaggerated use of the vertical pronoun.” I agree with Fred Smoler that much of Eisenhower’s “rise in public estimation . . . came from his seeming to have been a do-nothing but to have been followed by do-somethings who often did something dangerous.” In the midst of the growing enthusiasm for the Eisenhower Presidency, however, it’s important to remember that this apparent do-nothingness actually had consequences for the country. John Steele Gordon is probably right that Eisenhower sometimes presented himself as verbally unclear “because he wanted to be unclear, not because he was incapable of clarity.” But I’m not sure the most useful lesson to take away from this is that Eisenhower fooled a lot of gullible liberals and college professors. When then-Senator Kennedy campaigned for President in 1960, he consistently faulted the Eisenhower administration for allowing the country to slip into a state of torpor. A famous refrain of his campaign was the exhortation to “get this country moving again.” In his fourth debate with Richard Nixon, Kennedy argued, “We haven’t met our problems in the United States, because we haven’t had a moving economy.” He also exclaimed: “We’re not moving ahead in education the way we should.” Even Nixon had to adopt some of this vocabulary, declaring in an October 25, 1960, speech: “We want to see this country move forward. We want to see it move forward, because it will never grow old.” There’s a reason why this rhetoric was appealing to voters in 1960. Fairly or unfairly, many Americans felt dissatisfied with the modest goals and humdrum, inoffensive tone of the Eisenhower White House. Eisenhower’s Presidency featured shrewd—Nixon called it “devious”—management, focused on quietly strengthening America’s hand abroad. His administration did not demonstrate strong, inspiring moral leadership of the variety that garners applause from both historians and the general public. I don’t really think it’s right to blame Americans for not thinking Eisenhower was a genius masquerading as a simpleton. We’re not all writers in search of a counterintuitive thesis, and, after all, sometimes a person who acts bumbling or senile is really just bumbling or senile. Eisenhower wasn’t either, but if he cultivated a benign, geriatric image, then his weakened reputation was in large part a consequence of his own choosing.
August 23, 2007
Assessing the Marshall Plan Posted by Alexander Burns at 02:25 PM EST There’s an article in this week’s New Yorker by Niall Ferguson that is nominally a review of Greg Behrman’s new book, The Most Noble Adventure: The Marshall Plan and the Time When America Helped Save Europe. While it does discuss the quality of Behrman’s work, in generally favorable terms, Ferguson’s piece also functions as an independent consideration of the Marshall Plan’s historical impact. As a historian of the global economy, Ferguson seems qualified to judge the post–World War II plan for aiding liberated Europe. The Harvard professor is indeed effective at rendering the financial scale of the initiative: “The total amount disbursed under the Marshall Plan was equivalent to roughly 5.4 per cent of U.S. gross national product in the year of Marshall’s speech. . . . A Marshall plan announced today would therefore be worth closer to seven hundred and forty billion dollars.” I’m sure that was not a difficult calculation for Ferguson to make, but it’s an impressive and illustrative sum all the same. Ferguson is clearly an admirer of the Marshall Plan—at least of its spirit, if not of all its details. In framing his own judgment of the aid program, however, he indulges in the kind of counterfactual speculation that’s almost sure to diminish its reputation. At the time of Marshall’s speech announcing the proposal, Ferguson writes, one member of the House of Representatives asked, “What would it cost not to aid Europe?” “That remains the key question,” Ferguson continues. “If there had been no Marshall Plan, would Western Europe’s economies have failed to recover from the postwar crisis? It would seem not.” His argument proceeds by asking and answering a series of more specific questions, such as: “If there had been no Marshall Plan, would Stalin have brought some or all of Western Europe into the Soviet imperium? Again, no; the principal deterrent to Stalin was not American dollars but American firepower.” This is a rather frustrating and not entirely persuasive method of argument. Ferguson scrutinizes the Marshall Plan by acting as though its proponents expected it to single-handedly win the Cold War. His questions are leading, and they set unrealistic expectations for a foreign-aid program that was an important but not solitary instrument of American international policy. Using a similar rhetorical method, one could ask about another Cold War program: How important was the creation of the Peace Corps, really? Could America have succeeded in promoting democracy and fighting tyranny without it? I think it’s fairly obvious that, yes, we could have, but that conclusion lacks a certain subtlety. Perhaps more problematically, Ferguson fails to imagine the wider consequences of a hypothetical postwar America prioritizing budgetary parsimony over vigorous international engagement. It’s good to challenge widely accepted versions of history, and questioning the success of the Marshall Plan is a worthy task. A number of Ferguson’s conclusions, in the end, are good ones, with this as the most convincing: “The Marshall Plan was . . . to West Europeans struggling to make ends meet . . . the most visible manifestation of American good will—and a mirror image of the Soviet policy of mulcting Eastern Europe. This, more than its macroeconomic impact, explains its endurance in the popular imagination.” However, the practice of counterfactual and counterintuitive assertion through which Ferguson reaches this conclusion is less than perfectly sound. Imaginging alternative historical outcomes is an interesting and challenging exercise, but it’s not always a reliable way to approach truth.
August 23, 2007
Eisenhower’s Reputation II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:20 PM EST Being a little older than Fredric Smoler, I can remember the Eisenhower era a little better. For some mysterious reason I remember quite clearly seeing a picture in the paper in January 1953 (when I was eight) showing a moving van outside the White House as the Trumans prepared to depart. Harry Truman as well, of course, left office with the cognoscenti sniggering and pronouncing him a national joke. He too has seen his reputation rise and rise. The most recent presidential poll (that I know of) of historians has Truman at No. 7 and Eisenhower at No. 9, both in the near-great category. This, I think, does not say much for the snap judgment of historians. Mr. Smoler writes, “Eisenhower’s verbal clumsiness was constantly mocked, and the mockery was tinged with a sense of bitter loss: They could have had someone they loved and passionately admired, and they got that dull clown instead.” Adlai Stevenson was certainly more witty than Eisenhower (I especially admire the opening of his 1952 concession statement: “A funny thing happened to me today on the way to the White House. . . .”). Wit and wisdom, however, are not synonyms, as Mr. Smoler points out. But regarding Eisenhower’s verbal clumsiness. One way this was mocked at the time was to publish uncleaned-up transcripts of his press conference remarks. They were, of course, a verbal and syntactical mess. But this was very unfair. Few of us speak spontaneously in Augustan prose, and transcripts do not convey the body language that is so important a part of verbal communication. So if Eisenhower was often unclear as to what he meant, I strongly suspect that that was because he wanted to be unclear, not because he was incapable of clarity. I remember my father, who did not have a political bone in his body (I don’t think he ever voted in his life), snorting with derision at the idea that Eisenhower couldn’t say what he meant. My father spent five years in the army during World War II, rising from private to lieutenant colonel, and he told me that at Officers Candidate School he spent a lot of time learning how to give orders. According to him, in class the students would, over and over and over, be given orders to carry out an operation and told to prepare the orders they would give in turn as a platoon leader. The officer candidates would then read out those orders, and if anyone in the class had a legitimate question as to what they meant, they flunked. Eisenhower went to the oldest and biggest officers candidate school of them all, and I’d be very surprised indeed—given how richly military history is endowed with stories of avoidable disaster because of faulty or ambiguous orders—if he didn’t have the same drill pounded into his head. So it seems to me that the idea that the man who organized and successfully executed the largest and most complex military operation in the history of warfare couldn’t be clear in expressing himself is an idea so stupid, to quote George Orwell’s ever apt phrase, that “only an intellectual could believe it.” Add in the fact that it was an operation involving the always mutually antagonistic air, sea, and land forces not just of one but two Great Powers and numerous smaller countries, each with its own notions about how to do things, and Eisenhower comes across as a very major-league politician indeed.
August 22, 2007
Carolyn Goodman Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 01:15 PM EST Carolyn Goodman, the mother of the slain civil rights activist Andrew Goodman, died last week in New York at the age of 91. A trained psychologist and emeritus professor of clinical psychiatry at Yeshiva University’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Goodman was best known to the world as the grieving parent of one of the three young men whom a lynch mob brutally murdered at the start of Freedom Summer in 1964. In June of that year, Cecil Price, the deputy sheriff of Neshoba County, Mississippi, delivered Andrew Goodman, age 20, James Chaney, age 21, and Michael Schwerner, age 24, into the hands of a lynch mob. Schwerner and Goodman, both Jewish and both from New York City, were each killed at point-blank range by a single bullet to the chest. Chaney was beaten, then shot in the head and chest. The execution party placed the bodies in the trunk of a nondescript sedan and buried them at a remote site where contractors were in the process of erecting an earthen dam out of several tons of muddy, thick red clay. The FBI uncovered their remains on August 4. A few years ago I interviewed Carolyn Goodman at her Upper West Side apartment in New York. At the time, I was considering a book project on the legacy of the Chaney/Schwerner/Goodman murders, and while that project did not ultimately come to fruition, I was able to fold the interview into a long cover article I wrote for the October 2006 edition of American Heritage magazine. Then in her late eighties, Goodman was graceful and resolute. A longtime advocate of improving black-Jewish relations, she also remained a passionate advocate of civil rights. When New York City police officers shot an unarmed Guinean immigrant to death in 1999, Goodman was one of many demonstrators arrested while protesting outside City Hall and Police Headquarters. In later years, Carolyn Goodman would relive the moment when her son announced his decision to participate in Freedom Summer. Neither she nor her husband, Robert Goodman, wanted to see Andy walk into certain danger. “Suddenly,” Carolyn said, “here was Andy ready to commit himself in a most real and perhaps terrifying way to a belief which all our lives we had cultivated in our children. Was I to say, ‘Andy, this is none of your business?’ If my son now felt that a fight for human dignity in Mississippi was his business—was the business of his generation—was I to say, ‘No, no, I lied when I said a person must act on his beliefs. I didn’t mean it.’” Both Carolyn Goodman and Fannie Lee Chaney—James Chaney’s mother—lived to see the mastermind of the murders, Edgar Ray Killen, convicted of state murder charges in 2005. Fannie Lee Chaney died earlier this year.
August 22, 2007
Eisenhower’s Reputation Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:50 AM EST If you are a certain age, Alexander Burns’s lead piece on Eisenhower yesterday leaves a certain mystery intact, which is the contempt liberal intellectuals and academics had for Eisenhower during his Presidency. At the end of Eisenhower’s second term, American historians were confident he would be remembered as one of the worst American Presidents, but by the end of the century his stock had risen so sharply with the same crowd that he was ranked as one of the best twentieth-century Presidents. What happened? I remember schoolyard chants of “Whistle while you work./ Stevenson’s a jerk./ Eisenhower’s got the power./ Whistle while you work,” but they were done without the knowledge of our parents, who greatly admired Stevenson. My own knowledge of adult contemporary attitudes is indirect, because I was born the year before Eisenhower won his first election, and my sense of the mystery was thus derived from listening to adults look back on the 1950s. So what did the adults seem to resent or dislike? For one thing, Eisenhower was the first Republican to break the 16-year Democratic lock on the Oval Office, so he represented the end of the New Deal political culture they had grown up in and loved. For another, a certain sort of educated liberal American was besotted by Adlai Stevenson, and it seemed incredible that a man as superficially mediocre as Eisenhower could twice defeat a man as superficially enthralling as Stevenson. Eisenhower’s verbal clumsiness was constantly mocked, and the mockery was tinged with a sense of bitter loss: They could have had someone they loved and passionately admired, and they got that dull clown instead. When I got old enough to read biographies of Eisenhower, one oddity of the experience was the discovery that there had been excellent reasons to dislike him, but those had not registered on me at the time, and people rarely mentioned them in retrospect. He had been timid about McCarthy, shamefully so, and in 1952 permitted a very ugly campaign to be waged in his behalf. Most shamefully, he refused to denounce Joseph McCarthy even when McCarthy foully slandered George Marshall, a genuinely great man to whom Eisenhower owed everything. After the election Eisenhower consistently avoided confronting McCarthy, and he similarly shrank from leadership in the wake of the landmark schools-desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education; he had hoped to preserve separate-but-equal schooling and only reluctantly enforced the law. His moral prestige was enormous, and his leadership might have had an enormous effect; he instead allowed Southerners to believe he was secretly on their side. This was surely the great moral challenge of postwar American politics, and Eisenhower failed it. These failings were not, however, mentioned by the adults who disliked Eisenhower. Eisenhower’s real virtues were similarly invisible, at least in those days—his enormous tact in coalition warfare, which made a genuine contribution to victory, the moral splendor of the letter he wrote in anticipation of a failure on D-day, his caution during the Cold War, when he was at the helm and was being urged to very risky endeavors. He was not a daring general, but neither was he a shamefully timid one, and he had some of the subtler military virtues. It seems strange to reflect that neither his virtues nor his vices contributed to my perception of local adults’ sense of him while I was growing up. His rise in public estimation, I think, came from his seeming to have been a do-nothing but to have been followed by do-somethings who often did something dangerous. Even when he was mocked and scorned, he was never hated, which is striking in an age when political hatred thrives. His age seems a very long time ago.
August 22, 2007
The New Ireland Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:00 AM EST There was a fascinating article in last week’s Sunday New York Times about Ireland, which finds itself in an unfamiliar position as a magnet for immigrants from Eastern Europe and Africa. From the potato famine of the 1840s until recent times, the chief export of Ireland has been its people. Unable to sustain themselves at home, over half of the country’s prefamine population of eight million either died or picked up stakes, with most migrants choosing between the United States, Australia, and Canada. Like other newcomers to America, most Irish émigrés left Eire in search of economic stability, for want of political freedom, or to join family and friends. But in its songs, literature, folklore, and politics, the Irish-American disapora envisioned itself as an exilic culture. According to this rendering of history, the Irish were victims of criminal acts on the part of English and American Protestants, designed to drive them from their homeland. The potato famine itself became the central theme of this narrative. Though many historians agree that the blight owed in large part to a lethal combination of outmoded agriculture, overpopulation, and natural disaster, as well as to the stubbornly laissez-faire economic policies of the British government, for generations of Irish-Americans it would be remembered as a deliberate would-be genocide perpetrated by willful English neglect. The Irish-American disapora was thus a special sorrow to be borne with equanimity. It bore great possibility, but its causes were tragic. Today, Ireland’s booming economy has attracted workers from Poland, Lithuania, Nigeria, and other countries, turning an exilic nation into a polyglot society, much like our own. Some demographers believe that if growth continues at a steady pace, Ireland’s population will reach prefamine levels in 25 years or so. From an economic standpoint, this could be good news for the Irish. Whereas other Western European countries are aging because of sluggish population growth, Ireland’s median age is holding steady at 33. A higher ratio of workers to retirees translates to a more secure social welfare state and reduces the need for higher taxes to support retirees’ benefits. How Ireland deals with its new immigrants culturally, socially, and politically is another matter. From the days of Jean de Crevecoeur, whose 1782 tract, Letters from an American Farmer, celebrated the new nation’s heterogeneous roots, Americans have liked to think of themselves as a nation of immigrants. It hasn’t always worked smoothly, as the crude caricatures of the antebellum Irish that once filled the pages of Harper’s Weekly well demonstrate. But writers like Israel Zangwill, who coined the term “melting pot,” and Horace Kallen, who developed competing ideas about cultural pluralism, helped perpetuate a national self-image that largely embraced the concept of immigration, if not always immigrants themselves. Ireland is a different case in point. Its history and self-image are rooted in exile and emigration. Acculturating large numbers of people from elsewhere will require a great deal of national reinvention. What will it mean, half a century from now, to be Irish? Will the famine years become part of the collective self-consciousness of the newcomers and their families, or will immigrants to Ireland seek to weave their own narratives into Irish history, much as Irish immigrants did in their adoptive home of America? One can only hope that the Irish, whose ties to the United States run deep and strong, will look to our example both to see what we’ve done right and what we’ve done wrong.
August 21, 2007
Pete Stemkowski’s Revenge Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 06:00 PM EST In their excellent interview on this blog about baseball-related songs, Allen Barra and Jerry Silverman scoff at the idea that there might be songs about hockey. In fact, there’s a band called the Zambonis that plays nothing but hockey songs, and they’ve been around for at least 10 years and put out half a dozen albums. (Here’s their MySpace page, if you’re interested in such things; I can’t make head or tail of it.)
Some of band’s most memorable songs include “Lost My Teeth,” a furious minute-and-a-half punk assault; the elegiac “Bob Marley and the Hartford Whalers,” a sensitive lament about losing the people and things we love; “Hockey Monkey,” which seems to be the theme song to something called “The Loop,” on Fox (here again I’m clueless); and my favorite, “Johnny Got Suspended,” about a boy who suffers the consequences for wearing an “Islanders Sucks” [sic] T-shirt to school. I once suggested through their website that they should do a song called “Kick Save and a Beauty” about Manon Rheaume, a woman who has played goal in various men’s professional leagues, but they showed a strange lack of interest. On the classical side, John Zorn, the avant-garde musician and composer, has released an entire album called Hockey, a description of which can be found here. (According to the blurb, Zorn has also made albums called Lacrosse and Pool.) So you see? I’ve come up with two sources of hockey music, and we’re still in the Z’s. There must be plenty more.
August 21, 2007
The Great Songs of Baseball: An Interview with Jerry Silverman (Part 2) Posted by Allen Barra at 03:45 PM EST This is the conclusion of the interview that begins here. You write in your introduction that your choice of material is based “on textual interest and inherent musical value (i.e., singability).” Which are your favorites among the 41 songs included? Did you uncover any that were popular in their time but are just too awful by today’s standards? I’ll start with some of the problem songs. The strangest song in the collection was originally entitled “Base Ball” when it was composed in 1914. To avoid confusion with another song with the same title written in 1908, I amended the title slightly to “Base Ball [With You],” borrowing that line from the song itself. It is a song about a woman sitting in the stands and admiring her hero on the field. It has a very nice syncopated, sentimental melody, but the lyrics were all but incomprehensible. However, I liked the tune well enough to want to include it in the collection, so I took the liberty of changing the lyrics so that would make some sense. Here are the words to the original chorus: How you take my eye,
How I love to love,
To be your never never good,
But now I’m going to try,
I am going to try.
It’s true as I am looking into your little eye.
To never lose to never
No greater game I can play
Than baseball for you. See what I mean? To find out how I translated the song into English just turn to page 159 in the book. The next problem song presented a problem of a very different nature. Despite the existence of black baseball teams with their own panoply of stars, no published songs were found that sang of this aspect of American baseball. A call to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Omaha confirmed this inexplicable absence. The only song that was mentioned was “Brother Noah Gave Out Checks for Rain” (1907), which I had already included in the collection. This song, which puts a humorous baseball interpretation on Biblical events, was written by a white composer in the so-called “Negro dialect” that composers of the period knew would draw laughs from audiences. The song is quite clever despite itself, but the sheet music cover illustration is an embarrassment to our twenty-first-century eyes. The hundred-year span from 1907 to 2007 has witnessed a slow but steady change in what we deem acceptable. The concept of political correctness didn’t exist back then. This artistic and linguistic difficulty is one that I have had to deal with often in editing my collections of Civil War songs, blues, and other songs where contemporary composers and publishers used language and images that to our present-day sensibilities may be offensive. There are no easy answers here in the balance between authenticity and sensitivity. I generally have come down on the side of authenticity, with an apologia in advance if the material is really racist). Along the same lines, but perhaps less blatant, are a number of “Irish” songs, where the Irishman in question (umpire, fan, or player) is treated in the stock vaudevillian manner as a cross between a drunkard and a buffoon. Among these songs are “Finnegan, the Umpire” (1890) and “O’Grady at the Game” (1891). Interestingly, the tune to “McGuffin’s Home Run” (1891), where the McGuffin in question is a hero, was composed by Gussie Davis, one of the late nineteenth century’s first successful African-American composers and one of the charter members of Tin Pan Alley, which came into being in New York in 1885. It probably never occurred to Davis to compose a song about a black baseball player; or if it did, he or his publishers no doubt thought it “wouldn’t sell.” Too bad. As far as my favorite songs in the collection are concerned, well, each one of them has something to recommend itself, including the aforementioned problem songs, or I wouldn’t have included it. However, there are a few that really stand out for various reasons. The very first song, “The Bat and the Ball” (1867) was composed when the wounds of the Civil War were still bleeding in the nation. It contains certain significant lines that could not have escaped notice: “We gather in numbers on the field once again . . . The contest is bloodless . . . And victors and vanquished are friends as before.” “Told Between Ticks” (1891) describes how baseball (and other) news was transmitted across the nation by ticker tape. I have vivid memories of listening to Red Barber broadcasting the away games of the Brooklyn Dodgers during the 1940s when, as the song says, “all of this news is heard between ticks.” “Who Would Doubt That I’m a Man?” (1895) is a “baseball aria” from an opera entitled “The Mormons,” in which a woman dressed in a man’s baseball uniform outhits, outruns, outcatches and generally outplays her male counterparts. This one is a real gem. Then, for complete nuttiness, there is Irving Berlin’s contribution to the repertoire: “Jake! Jake! The Yiddisher Ball-Player” (1913). The singer bets a “half a dollar” on the game, but at the critical moment Jake doesn’t come through. “Jake, I lose my half a dollar, Poison you should swallow, Jake, Jake you’re a regular fake.” I could go on and on discussing the merits of all 41 songs, but I’ll leave it right here. If you compiled a songbook from 1920 to the present, what might be on your list? Actually, I had hoped to begin the collection with this little gem, which dates historically somewhere between the high jinks expressed in “Brother Noah Gave Out Checks for Rain” and the post–Civil War “The Bat and the Ball.” The earldom of Murray, or Moray, was one of the seven original earldoms of Scotland. It dates back to about 1314, when Sir Thomas Randolph, a nephew of King Robert Bruce, was created Earl of Moray. By the fifteenth century the earldom had shifted to an illegitimate branch of the royal House of Stuart. The earldom of Huntly was established in 1449. On February 8, 1592, George Huntly, the fifth Earl of Murray, set fire to to the castle of James Stuart, “the bonnie Earl of Murray” and stabbed him to death. He was a braw gallant,
And he played at the ball.
And the bonnie Earl of Murray
Was the flower of them all. He was a braw gallant,
And he played at the glove,
And the bonnie Earl of Murray,
He was the Queen’s own love. There was a time when momentous events and exploits, such as those described in this Scottish ballad, “The Bonnie Earl of Murray,” were invariably celebrated in broadside and song. The bonnie Earl may have been adept at the ball and glove, but he was no match for the knife-wielding Huntly. One hopes that this unfortunate incident was simply a matter of rival earls duking it out over fair maidens, castles, and land rather than a bloody dispute on the ballfield. But alas and alack, my editor didn’t quite see it my way, and so this tragic tale ended up—not on the cutting room floor but eliminated with a click of the delete button. Moving right along, then, to the twenty-first century, following the chronological order of the songs in the collection (1867-1922), the next few songs that I was considering for inclusion start with “Bucky Boy” (1925), a paean to Bucky Harris, who as player-manager of the Washington Senators led his team to the World Series Championship against the Giants in 1924. His return home to Pittston, Pennsylvania, after the Series on October 29, 1924, was declared Bucky Day. There was an all-day celebration to mark the occasion. The song compares Bucky (favorably) with George Washington and Babe Ruth, and ends with “Bucky, now we’ll have to ask you one thing more,/ To do in twenty-five as you did in twenty-four.” But it was not to be. They lost to the Pirates in 1925. “The Card’nals And Mr. Hornsby” (1926): The Cardinals, with Rogers Hornsby as player-manager, defeated the Yankees in the 1926 World Series four games to three. Hornsby went 7 for 28 (.250). The sheet music was published with ukulele chord diagrams, a sign of the times. The lyrics are somewhat less than immortal: “Oh Mister Hornsby, Oh Mister Hornsby, You’ve got the pep, you made them step . . .” “The Galloping A’s” (1929): Apparently all you had to do to get a song written about your team in the twenties was win a World Series. The Philadelphia Athletics, won the American League pennant by 18 games, with a won-lost record of 104–64, and defeated the Cubs 4–1 in the Series. To get to the Series they beat out the Yankees, and the song rubs it in: “Tho’ the Yanks were striving it did not do, For the ‘MACKS’ were wearing the old ‘HORSE SHOE.’” In capital letters and quotation marks, “MACKS” referred to owner-manager Connie Mack. There were other songs, like “It’s A Grand Old Game” (1931) and “The Baseball Blues” (1931), but that old devil copyright reared its ugly head. It turns out that 1922 is the current last year in which songs are in the public domain, so these, and, for example “Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio” (1941) and “Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?” (1949) were definitely out of bounds. So no collection of more recent songs. Pity.
August 21, 2007
The Great Songs of Baseball: An Interview with Jerry Silverman (Part 1) Posted by Allen Barra at 12:35 PM EST Jerry Silverman—folksinger, guitarist, musicologist—has published over 200 books, including folk song collections, anthologies, and instructional books for guitar, banjo, and fiddle. He is also the author of The Immigrant Song Book and Of Thee I Sing: Lyrics and Music for America’s Most Patriotic Songs. His latest, The Baseball Songbook: Songs and Images from the Early Years of America’s Favorite Pastime (Alfred Publishing, 172 pages, $19.95), is a fascinating history of early baseball songs from 1867 to 1922, complete with music and lyrics, and a CD of Silverman’s renditions. You can check out his website at www.jerrysilverman.org. We spoke at such enjoyable length that this interview is running in two parts. A subtitle for your book might be “A Secret History of Baseball in Song.” College football fight songs have always been popular, but aside from those, I don’t think I could name a song for any other sport except baseball. What do you think it is about baseball that has inspired so much music? You mention college football fight songs. There are lots of those, but they only resonate on the individual campuses and are trotted out only (when they are sung at all) at games or at sentimental alumni gatherings. The lyrics to these songs seldom rise above the level of rah-rah, and the tunes, which are composed mainly by the alumni themselves, are, shall we say, less than inspiring. Sort of on the level of official state songs, and nobody sings those either. It is hard to imagine anyone in California, for example, getting inspired by a song extolling the glories of either the Yale Bulldogs or the state of Connecticut. Baseball, on the other hand, was hailed as our “National Game” as early as the 1860s. Something about the pastoral setting in which the games were played captured the imagination of the public. Indeed, the very first game played under modern rules took place in 1846 in New Jersey (yes, New Jersey!), in a pleasant outdoor recreation area just across the Hudson River from lower Manhattan called the Elysian Fields. You can’t get more pastoral than that. The song “Hurrah for Our National Game” (1869) pictures on the sheet music cover a bald eagle standing on a crag, majestically clutching two bats, an olive branch, and a shield emblazoned with the stars and stripes. And you can’t get more American than that. So we have the patriotic and the pastoral—a surefire nineteenth-century “doubleheader” image of our country. That’s all the songwriters needed to get going. And going they got! With a vengeance. Composers and lyricists, sensing a good thing churned out baseball-themed songs in the musical styles of the periods in which they were active: marches, ragtime, waltzes, two-steps, polkas, jazz, etc. They cranked out ballads, comic songs, sentimental ditties, songs about the heroes (real and imaginary) on the field, songs about killing the umpire, taking a girl to the game and proposing in the stands (trying to “get to first base” with your best girl). They tried to top the last hit song, hoping that the vaudeville and music hall stars of the day would popularize their latest effort and send the people rushing to music stores to buy the sheet music and, later, the records. The result: hundreds and hundreds of songs—some delightful and others best forgotten. Football is not the only team sport that didn’t inspire America’s songwriters and fans. Can you name one—just one—song about basketball or hockey? Fuggeddaboudit! Lacrosse? Gimme a break! Polo? Are you kidding? That leaves us (happily) with the 1869 lyric “Then hurrah for our National Game, hurrah,/ Here’s a cheer for its well-earned fame./ Success to it ever, hurrah, hurrah,/ Hurrah for our National Game.” I can think of one song about hockey, but it’s in French. Of course, the most famous song in your collection is “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” What is the story behind that? On the face of it, there is little to distinguish “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” from the many other jolly three-quarter-time songs of its period. Next year is the hundredth anniversary of its composition, in 1908, but why it has endured as the “anthem” of baseball is something of a mystery. In fact the 1906 song “It’s Great at a Baseball Game” anticipated not only the mood and meter of “Take Me Out,” but its “menu” as well. Instead of “peanuts and crackerjack” we are offered “hot buttered popcorn and peanuts.” It was composed by two giants of Tin Pan Alley of the day, Fred Fischer, “Peg o’ My Heart,” and Richard Whiting, “Sleepy Time Gal,” to name but two of their enduring hits. The tune of “It’s Great” is catchy and eminently singable, but seventh-inning stretches come and go, and nobody sings it today. Then in 1908 the celebrated songwriter and showman George M. Cohan (“Give My Regards to Broadway,” “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy,” “Over There”) teamed up with two other well-known tunesmiths to turn out “Take Your Girl to the Ball Game,” which scans rhythmically exactly like “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” This one offers “cool lemonade” and also offers some advice in affairs of the heart. Do you see a pattern emerging here? But another strikeout. Turning our attention now to “Take Me Out,” let’s look at its composers, Albert von Tilzer and Jack Norworth. Von Tilzer was a prolific composer (“Put Your Arms Around Me Honey, Hold Me Tight, “I’ll Be With You in Apple Blossom Time”), but the key to the success of “Take Me Out” is due in great measure to the collaboration of Jack Norworth and his wife, the immensely popular vaudeville singer Nora Bayes. Together in 1903 they had composed a song that became a “standard,” “Shine On, Harvest Moon.” [Note to younger readers of this interview who may never have heard of these songs and composers: This was big-time stuff in its day, and beyond. Everybody knew these songs. —A.B.] Anyway, if you want your song to be successful, there’s nothing like having your famous wife sing it on stage. Nora introduced the song in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1910, and it was an instantaneous hit. It quickly moved from the stage to the diamond and was soon being sung in all the big-league (and other) ballparks. All the more amazing when you realize that the recording industry was in its infancy and radio broadcasting was non-existent. A new wrinkle was added to this saga 55 years later. On August 25, 2005, in honor of Jewish Heritage Day, the Jewish Peoples’ Philharmonic Chorus sang “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” before a Mets Game at Shea Stadium—in Yiddish!
August 20, 2007
Churchill and India Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:25 AM EST A couple of days ago Alexander Burns linked to a review of a couple on books on the partition of the Indian sub-continent, which appeared in a recent article in The New Yorker. I have now read the piece, by Pankaj Mishra, and I think it makes a number of unpersuasive remarks about British responsibility for the creation of Pakistan, and particularly Winston Churchill’s “destructive role in the history of the Asian subcontinent.” Mr. Burns concludes his post by noting that “it’s not as easy to plan the future of men and states as some would like to believe, and the history of India and Pakistan is a good reminder of that.” This is true and wise, but it is also true that after a certain point, some historical outcomes seem very likely. My sense is that long before Churchill had anything much to do with the history of the subcontinent, partition was such an outcome. Mishra writes that “As late as 1940, Winston Churchill hoped that Hindu-Muslim antagonism would remain ‘a bulwark of British rule in India.’ Certainly Churchill, who did not want his views on India to be ‘disturbed by any bloody Indians,’ was disinclined to recognize the upsurge of nationalism in India. . . . In the nineteen-twenties and thirties, Churchill had been loudest among the reactionaries who were determined not to lose India, ‘the jewel in the crown,’ and, as Prime Minister during the Second World War, he tried every tactic to thwart Indian independence. . . . In 1942, as the Japanese Army advanced on India, the Congress Party was willing to offer war support in return for immediate self-government. But Churchill was in no mood to negotiate. . . . Churchill’s divisive policies had already produced a disastrous effect on the Indian political scene. Congress Party leaders had refused to share power with Jinnah, confident that they did not need Muslim support in order to win a majority vote in elections. These attitudes stoked Muslim fears that the secular nationalism of Gandhi and Nehru was a cover for Hindu dominance. While the Congress leaders were in prison, Jinnah, with Churchill’s encouragement, steadily consolidated Muslim opinion behind him.” Churchill could be nasty (and remarkably foolish) about Gandhi, and he was certainly hostile to the prospect of Indian independence, but I don’t think any hopes he may have had about the effects of Hindu-Muslim antagonism had any discernible effect on the fact, intensity, and consequence of sectarian consciousness, and my guess is that in the long run his aggressive hostility to Indian independence probably had little effect on the course of Indian history. Churchill was out of power when he made some of his silliest remarks about India (from 1929 through 1932), and while the offensive remarks he made at that time have hurt his reputation, they had little if any effect on British policy. After 1935 Churchill’s attention turned from the threat of Ghandi, which he misread, to the threat of Hitler, which he did not. When he became prime minister, in 1940, he was generally more concerned with the latter threat, and after 1941 with the threat of Imperial Japan, than with the challenge of Ghandi, except when they intersected, as they did in 1942. There is a school of thought that blames Churchill for the failure of the 1942 Cripps Mission—which is what Mishra does (the Cripps Mission was an attempt to secure Indian support for the war effort in return for full dominion status and, if desired, full independence after the war). There is also a school of thought that blames Gandhi and the Congress Party for the failure of the Cripps Mission, and a theory, which Mishra seems to share, that had the Cripps Mission succeeded, there would have been no bloody partition of India. There is something to be said for both of the first two positions, but the last, I think, is almost certainly wrong. Mishra writes that “nothing in the complex tragedy of partition was inevitable.” Maybe, but my impression is that much current scholarship tends to push back rather than forward the date at which partition became very, very likely, back, in fact, to the 1920s, when Jinnah (the founder of Pakistan) left the Congress Party over differences about Muslim needs and rights. I think current scholarship tends to put more of the blame for partition on Congress and specifially on Nehru, both of them being unwilling to take Muslim fears of Hindu domination with sufficient seriousness, and a bit less of the blame on malevolent and inept British authorities. British authorities were sometimes inept and malevolent, but after the First World War Indians made more and more of their own fate. Jinnah did not need encouragment from Churchill to reject a strong, unitary state, and had Churchill not jailed the leaders of Congress in 1942, they seem unlikely to have successfully reversed decades of growing Muslim sentiment. There was indeed a long period during which Indian Muslims would have accepted a weak federal state, but Congress kept demanding a strong and centralized one. These were incompatible demands, and partition was the result. Mishra implies that Congress was made obdurate by British policy (such as holding elections, which Hindu majorities won), but it seems a little strange for an anti-imperialist to greatly blame a colonial power for holding honest elections. Mishra is right to point out that (as in Iraq) simple majority rule in multi-confessional and multi-national states can have ugly consequences, but the acceptable moral alternative (other than partition) is not wholly clear. Mishra does not like British imperialism. Fair enough, although I am generally struck by the fact that in most respects its record compares well to all the other varieties of imperialism we know about, including the ones practiced by various subcontinental regimes before the British arrived, and in some cases after they left (if you think about Kashmir or Afghanistan). The tragedy of partition, real and ghastly, contains many lessons. The notion that it was largely the fault of post–World War I British imperial policy is not, I think, one of them. As for Churchill, while he tried (and failed) to protract British imperialism, it may be worth recalling that he did manage to cut short the career of German imperialism. Old-fashioned souls persist in thinking that the latter achievement may outweigh the former intention.
August 19, 2007
Warren G. Harding and Barack Obama II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 06:10 PM EST I certainly agree with Alexander Burns that if Warren Harding had a black ancestor, that does not make him “black” in any modern sense of the term. So it is ridiculous to say that he might displace Barack Obama as the first black President, assuming—and it’s a very big assumption at this point of course—that Senator Obama is elected. But the story goes back much further than the racist Professor Chancellor. Indeed, it goes back further than Warren Harding, who was born in 1865. As his most recent major biographer (Francis Russell, The Shadow of Blooming Grove: Warren Harding in His Times; Russell also wrote the article in American Heritage Mr. Burns referred to) wrote, “In church and meeting, in ownership of land and in the quality of their gravestones, the Hardings appeared the oldest and most prominent family in the village. Blooming Grove [Ohio] was even referred to as Harding Corners. Yet there was a flaw in this successful family, a shadow that the Hardings could not escape, a rumor that would not quite die down, that they and every family in Blooming Grove were aware of. For it was said, usually in whispers, and had been said almost from the arrival of the Hardings in Ohio, that the Harding veins had Negro blood in them.” President Harding’s great-great grandfather, Amos Harding, who was the first of the family to move to Blooming Grove and died there in 1839, told his descendants that the rumor had been started by a man whom he had caught stealing corn from him and who had soon thereafter left town. But whether or not the rumor was true doesn’t really matter. The rumor was always there. And that did matter in the nineteenth century. Warren Harding had it thrown in his face in every schoolboy quarrel. It never went away, and it profoundly affected Harding and many of his relatives. Indeed, the shadow in the title of Russell’s biography was the rumor of Negro blood. Harding hardly ever referred to it, but the one time he did, he told a reporter friend of his, “How do I know, Jim? One of my ancestors may have jumped the fence.” There is little if any evidence to support the rumor, but Harding’s ancestry, while as well studied as all presidential genealogies have been, has some large gaps in it. One great grandmother is only probably known, and another has “said to be” parents. So there is room for the rumor to fester in the absence of evidence to the contrary. What interests me here is that as far as this country has come in race relations in the last 60 years, the fact remains that 170-year-old utterly unsubstantiated rumors about the supposed black ancestry of an American President who died 84 years ago can still be regarded as newsworthy by a respectable newspaper.
August 19, 2007
Warren G. Harding and Barack Obama Posted by Alexander Burns at 02:20 PM EST A friend of mine recently e-mailed me a column from Massachusetts’s Worcester Telegram & Gazette with the arresting title: “Barack Obama Might Not Be First Black President.” Factually, this headline sounds true—if Obama doesn’t start outrunning Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries, he may never reach the presidency. The point of the Telegram & Gazette article, though, was not to speculate about the possible failure of the Illinois senator’s campaign. Its claim is stranger than that. “Barack Obama is campaigning to be the first man with African blood to become president of the United States,” the author writes. “It is a noteworthy aspiration. But even if he is successful, will he be the first to fit that description? Probably not.”
The article goes on to argue that Obama will have been preempted by Warren G. Harding, who “is widely credited with having a Negro ancestor, probably a great-grandmother.” Leaving aside the bizarre use of the term “Negro,” this assertion seems to kind of miss the point. Warren Harding never identified himself as a black man, and neither did many other people classify him as such. The leading spreader of the rumors about Harding’s ancestry, in fact, was a source no more reliable than the virulently racist professor William Estabrook Chancellor, who “held that Mr. Harding’s nomination was part of a plot to establish Negro domination over the United States.” American Heritage ran an article that dealt with several odd aspects of Mr. Harding’s career, including his antagonistic relationship with Chancellor, in 1963. I think it does a better job of laying out the murky areas of Harding’s life story than the column linked to above.
It’s illustrative of a weird (and widespread) view of race that this Worcester paper would bring up Harding as a possible forerunner to Obama. The idea that one drop of African-American blood, so to speak, would have made Harding as much a black President as Obama is profoundly misguided. I doubt this is what the author of the Telegram & Gazette article intended to say with this piece, but his column plays into that notion all the same. The false equivalency it creates between Harding’s experience, possibly having had one black great-grandparent, and Obama’s, as a quite obviously biracial man, is almost as ugly as the questions about whether Obama is “black enough” to win over African-American voters. The column also makes one wonder at what point in the process of history-making people start treating rumors as facts. There is, so far as I know, no conclusive evidence that Harding had any black ancestors. So are we left to go on the word of a long-dead white supremacist? Harding equivocated on the possibility of his having multiracial ancestry, but this, combined with Mr. Chancellor’s screeds, hardly seems like evidence enough to reach a worthwhile conclusion. And in any case, it seems like questionable methodology to stake one’s argument on the claims of a delusional propagandist. When a Jewish person is nominated for the Presidency, can we expect to see similar articles suggesting that FDR was actually the first Jewish President, as some anti-Roosevelt propaganda had it? I hope not, and I think it’s unlikely, but apparently it can’t be ruled out.
August 17, 2007
White (House) Wedding Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:25 AM EST From the White House this week comes the news that one of the President’s daughters, Jenna Bush, is engaged. Ms. Bush will be marrying Henry Hager, a former White House intern and Bush campaign worker four years her senior. The President’s daughter has received no small share of grief from the press during her father’s time in the White House, and this hasn’t exactly stopped with the wedding announcement. The Washington Post, for example, takes care to remember Laura Bush’s description of Mr. Hager in February 2005: “This is not a serious boyfriend.” Then again, it’s probably not right to blame the Post for dredging up that quote—after all, the First Lady was the one who offered it on national television. The Post also speculates on whether a Bush wedding would take place at the White House: “Jenna would be the first presidential daughter to wed at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. since Tricia Nixon married Ed Cox in 1971. Glamorous, sure, but the smart money is on Texas or Maine—the White House just isn’t the place Jenna considers home.” It’s true that Ms. Bush would be the first presidential daughter to marry at the White House in 36 years. Hers would not be the first wedding to take place there in that interval, however. In 1994 Hillary Clinton’s brother, Tony Rodham, was married to Nicole Boxer, the daughter of California Sen. Barbara Boxer, in an event at the White House. Perhaps Jenna Bush will avoid a fully presidential wedding because of the unlucky precedent Rodham and Boxer set: The couple divorced in 2001. The history of White House weddings is a mixed one. When Cox and Nixon married in 1971, it was indeed a glamorous affair that brought favorable coverage to the First Family. The couple remains married, with a son, and Cox briefly ran for the U.S. Senate in New York last year. The White House wedding most deserving of fame is surely the only one with a President as the groom: In 1886, Grover Cleveland married Frances Folsom in a ceremony there. The wedding was not untouched by scandal. Folsom was 27 years younger than the President and was the daughter of one of his former law partners. Folsom and the President seemed an ungainly match, not least of all because of the rumors of a shady personal life that dogged Cleveland’s first national election campaign. Despite this shaky start, Frances Folsom Cleveland ended up as a successful first lady and gave birth to two little Clevelands in the White House. I wonder, if the Bushes decide against a White House wedding, whether it might not be in part in order to avoid comparisons with one that took place almost exactly 40 years ago. In 1967 Lynda Bird Johnson wed there, marrying the Marine Corps veteran and Bronze Star recipient Charles Robb. A newsreel about the event is available here. In the midst of an unpopular war, and as his own popularity gradually disintegrated, Lyndon Johnson’s daughter married a dashing example of the best the military had to offer. As her father struggles with a Johnson-like predicament, Bush’s daughter is engaged to a former aide to Karl Rove, who is also the son of a tobacco lobbyist and GOP apparatchik. (John H. Hager, coincidentally, served as Virginia’s lieutenant governor in the 1990s, while Chuck Robb was its junior senator.) There’s something appropriate about that contrast, but I doubt it’s one the President would want to highlight.
August 17, 2007
Winston Churchill and Islamic Nationalism Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:40 AM EST On August 15, Fred Smoler noted the anniversaries of V-J Day and the partition of India and Pakistan. He linked to a New York Times piece “noting India had begun teaching some of its own political controversies in its schools and suggesting that this is a sign of India’s new wealth, confidence, and political maturity.” He added that readers who “may be newly accustomed to hearing that non-Western societies do not value democracy when it can possibly be suspected of having been imposed on them by another culture” might look to India for a more complex example of democratic development. I couldn’t agree more. I recently read another, similarly substantial reflection on the partition of India and Pakistan in The New Yorker. As is the frequent custom of publications like The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, Pankaj Mishra’s essay considers the legacy of partition through a review of current literature on the subject. Mishra describes some of the contours of contemporary scholarly thought, not least interestingly of thought on Winston Churchill’s destructive role in the history of the Asian subcontinent. Read the article for the full details, but there’s one argument that struck me as especially noteworthy. “As late as 1940, Winston Churchill hoped that Hindu-Muslim antagonism would remain ‘a bulwark of British rule in India,’“ Mishra writes. In his desire to keep India a possession of the crown, Churchill supported the Muslim separatist factions at odds with independence advocates like Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. This was, history has shown, a risky maneuver. The consequence, according to Mishra and the historian Alex von Tunzelmann, was that Churchill was “instrumental in creating the world’s first modern Islamic state.” At a moment when Churchill is an inspirational icon for the most enthusiastic proponents of a literal war on radical Islam, this is a historical irony worth noting. Mishra observes that it might be unfair to tar Churchill with the sins of the current state of Pakistan, especially since the founders of Pakistan were hardly Al Qaeda–style Islamists. It would be quite a stretch to blame Churchill for the terrorist refuge that northern Pakistan has become. But it wouldn’t be contrived at all to take this as a lesson in the unpredictable and contingent nature of international history. A dear friend of mine once had a history professor shout, at her seminar: “It’s all about contingency, you ----heads!” Mishra puts the point more elegantly, but in a manner no harder to understand. It’s not as easy to plan the future of men and states as some would like to believe, and the history of India and Pakistan is a good reminder of that.
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