August 16, 2007
The First Torpedo Bombers Posted by Fredric Smoler at 01:35 PM EST More on anniversaries: paging through a book of (mostly Japanese) naval history yesterday afternoon, I learned that on this date 92 years ago, the Royal Navy’s Flight Lieut. W. L. Walsh flew a Sopwith Schneider float-plane off the 120-foot flight deck of the converted liner Campania as she steamed into a wind of 17 knots, becoming the first pilot to successfully take off from a ship at sea in wartime. That seemed plausible enough; in 1911 Eugene Ely, a U.S. Navy airman, had taken off from and landed on the USS Philadelphia, and 1915 sounded right for someone doing it for the first time under less controlled conditions. What astonished me was a preceding sentence, which claimed that a couple of days earlier, on August 12 Flight Cdr. C. H. K. Edmonds had become the first man to launch an aerial torpedo against an en enemy ship. The ship was a Turkish merchantman off the Dardanelles, and Edmonds, flying at 75 miles an hour, had to descend to 15 feet off the surface to launch his torpedo at range of 300 yards. He scored a direct hit. When an officer of the Royal Navy destroys an adversary it is normally seen as a case of dog bites man, so the astonishing part was that 1915 sounded a couple of decades too early for anyone to have done it with an air-launched torpedo, of which more below. Historical records are funny things, and people can be picky. It came out that the merchantman had actually been put out of action four days earlier by a submarine, which meant that Edmonds had not been the first pilot to sink a functioning enemy ship with a torpedo, so Edmonds went out again on August 17 and hit a Turkish supply ship under way in the Sea of Marmora. Less than an hour later another British pilot, Flight Lieutenant G .B. Dacre, torpedoed another moving ship, a Turkish steam tug. That made it all stranger—apparently aircraft were using torpedoes at sea on a daily basis in 1915. I’d not realized that anyone had torpedoed an adversary from the air until the Second World War, and when I called a friend, fellow-blogger, and editor, someone who knows more about navies than I do, he thought exactly the same thing. I think the main reason for our astonishment is that the standard story of naval aviation describes the effectiveness of carriers at Pearl Harbor as the great and shocking technological surprise of naval history. In this version of history, the deadliness of carriers was prefigured only by the Royal Navy’s devastating raid on the Italian fleet at Taranto on the evening of November 11 to 12 1940, the attack that gave the Japanese the idea for Pearl Harbor. In the conventional wisdom, carriers made battleships obsolete overnight, but now it turns out that carriers had been launching torpedo bombers for decades. I think another reason for our surprise was that World War I is normally seen as a sterile period in naval innovation, other than in the case of submarines. Wrong again. A third reason for our surprise is that if you have ever seen the first aircraft used in the war, a lot of them are spidery, minute, and fragile machines, some not much bigger than the pilots who flew them. A torpedo, by contrast, is a large and heavy weapon, and neither of us could imagine a First World War aircraft able to take off from a carrier possibly carrying one. Surprise: By the end of the war, the Royal Navy had deployed the Sopwith Cuckoo, with a 46-foot wingspan (and folding wings, being purpose-built for aircraft carriers), which carried a torpedo 18 inches in diameter (and mounted a warhead weighing more than 300 pounds). Some lessons from all of this: Technological history does not necessarily conform to the simplified versions of it you remember from school, where great innovations change the world overnight. Another lesson is that the First World War was not a case of complacent British generals and admirals hostile to innovation slaughtering their own men because of their inability to innovate under pressure. First World War British elites, both naval and military, deployed most of the innovations that would be associated with the Second World War, from the tank to tactical airpower to combined arms operations to the aircraft carrier, and they won. We do not associate them with extremely effective military innovation; we reserve that honor, if not too many others, for twentieth-century German elites, who indeed fielded, as the British author Peter Fleming once dryly observed, the mightiest and most innovative army ever to be defeated in war. But that is a mistake. Blundering Anglo-American armed forces, almost entirely composed of people who would rather have been civilians, are generally imagined to have simply muddled along, until, as a Hollywood screenwriter had a notional Frenchman put it in Casablanca, wrong in detail but correct in spirit, they blundered all the way into Berlin.
August 15, 2007
Two Annniversaries Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:45 PM EST Yesterday marked two vastly important anniversaries, that of V-J Day, the surrender of Japan, which got a single New York Times story in its honor, and the sixtieth anniversary of the partition of the Indian subcontinent upon British withdrawal, the date Pakistan celebrates its independence (India is celebrating its independence today). I read a couple of newspaper pieces on the famous kiss in Times Square, one in the Times pondering the recreation of the event on its sixty-second anniversary by some 75 couples, another today in the same paper perhaps a little snarkily asserting the improbability of anyone ever celebrating the end of the Iraq War with a memorable kiss. That seemed a backhanded tribute to V-J Day; at least it once meant something great and impressive to Americans, whereas Iraq, the comparison insists, never will. (Perhaps significantly, the piece does not bother to speculate on how Iraqis may remember the end of their war.) The transformation of a once-terrifying Japan into a peaceful and immensely rich democracy, largely achieved by American arms, is yesterday’s news, hence almost no news, and as it happens, the newer schoolbooks often teach that we didn’t even do it. Some of them insist it was the Soviet declaration of war that made Japan surrender (much-disputed by the specialists, and for my money very effectively disputed, but the specialists rarely write the schoolbooks). Americans, often depicted as deep-dyed with brutal and dishonest military triumphalism, seem to have this year missed V-J Day when glorying in our arms. What about consciousness of the creation of India and Pakistan? There were a couple of pieces in today’s Times, one of them very interesting, noting that India has 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. India, in my boyhood celebrated as the world’s largest democracy and nowadays one of the world’s most striking contemporary successes, ought to be big news. If you are the sort of person who reads op-eds on foreign policy, you 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, that the occupier only leaves when terrorism, the poor man’s only possible weapon, forces him out, that neoliberal nostrums do not make anyone rich, etc. The history of India ought to complicate this sort of conventional wisdom a little more than it does. Perhaps the history of Pakistan ought to complicate the conventional wisdom, too. Anyone whose knowledge of the world is largely based on reading op-eds and editorials can be forgiven believing Israel to be the only state in the world in which religious affiliation is intimately connected to ideas of full and idealized citizenship (and for that matter, privileged access to citizenship, enshrined in something not wholly unlike Israel’s law of return, also exists in Ireland, Greece, Hungary, Germany, Lithuania, Serbia, Japan, India, Armenia, Finland, Bulgaria, Spain, etc., another fact under-reported in op-eds). As a threat to world peace, Israel is probably oversold and Pakistan—which having started a fair number of wars seemed only five years ago on the verge of a nuclear war, and which seems to have exported the designs for nuclear weapons to North Korea, and which is widely accused of helping the Taliban kill Afghans, Americans, and various other people—remarkably undersold. Anniversaries are not only interesting when they make us remember some history; they are also interesting when they signally fail to do anything of the kind.
August 14, 2007
Bruce Springsteen Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 06:50 PM EST Ross Warner’s excellent feature story on Bruce Springsteen, which led the AmericanHeritage.com lineup yesterday, hearkens back to a time when rock music was badly in need of creative rejuvenation. Revolting against the soft-pop sensibilities of acts like Donny Osmond, the Bee Gees, Chicago, America, Elton John, and the Carpenters, all of whom dominated the charts in the early 1970s, Springsteen injected a much needed sense of working-class vitality into popular music. “In 1974,” remembered the rock journalist Bill Flanagan, “everything was either folky or everything was jazzy but everything was tasteful.” Combining elements of jazz, funk, Motown, and rhythm-and-blues, the various incarnations of Springsteen’s Band—Child; Steel Mill; Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom; the Bruce Springsteen Band; and finally the E Street Band—enjoyed increasingly wide appeal among working-class men and women who frequented the Jersey Shore music scene and who found the prevailing sound an inadequate soundtrack to their youth. In conceiving Born to Run, Springsteen set out to create an album that would “explode in people’s homes and minds and change people’s lives.” Set against the E Street Band’s energetic blend of horns, keyboards, guitars, and percussion, the album’s title song it was a rollicking ballad of escape, packed full of cultural references that any young person from a working-class town like Freehold or Asbury Park would immediately have appreciated. Its first lines introduced what became Springsteen’s favorite metaphor—the automobile as an engine of liberation. In the weeks following his debut performance of “Born to Run,” Springsteen recorded a rough, four-and-a-half minute track of the song. Sensing the need for build-up, his manager, Mike Appel, distributed it to select disc jockeys, and within weeks it became an underground hit. Young people flooded record stores seeking copies of the new single, which did not yet exist, and radio stations that had not been on Appel’s small distribution list deluged CBS with requests for the new album, which also did not exist. In working-class Cleveland, disc jockey Kid Leo played the song religiously at 5:55 p.m. each Friday afternoon on WMMS, to “officially launch the weekend.” Clearly, Bruce’s growing fan base not only liked the song; they understood it. In his analysis of “Thunder Road,” the opening track on Born to Run, Robert Hilburn, the music critic at the Los Angeles Times noted that the song was a “classic rock ’n’ roll tale of a rebel-underdog kid, pinned down by the restrictions of his environment, inviting his girl, who has her own doubts and fears, to escape to a better life.” Missing from Hilburn’s assessment was class; the young heroes in “Thunder Road” and “Born to Run” are in flight from a very specific condition. As Springsteen told a reporter several years later, “I know what it’s like not to be able to do what you want to do, because when I go home, that’s what I see. It’s not fun, it’s no joke. I see my sister and her husband. They’re living the lives of my parents in a certain kind of way. They got kids; they’re working hard. These are people, you can see something in their eyes. . . . I asked my sister, ‘What do you do for fun?’ ‘I don’t have any fun,’ she says. She wasn’t kidding.” When Kid Leo played “Born to Run” at 5:55 each Friday afternoon to “kick off the weekend,” he was offering musical flight to people like Bruce’s sister. “It’s like, you gotta watch out—that’s the way it’s gotta be to get control,” Springsteen observed. “All of a sudden you get kids, get them jobs and houses and mortgages and bills, all of a sudden. Jesus Christ, if they don’t work they’re gonna loose their house, they’re gonna lose their kid, they’re gonna lose their money, they’re gonna lose their self-respect, they’re gonna lose everything. That’s how America imprisons everybody.” In “Thunder Road,” the narrator begs Mary to “roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair/ Well the night’s busting open/ These two lanes will take us anywhere/ We got one last chance to make it real/ To trade in these wings on some wheels/ Climb in back/ Heaven’s waiting on down the tracks.” With 16 percent of non-college-educated youth either unemployed or underemployed, and many of their more fortunate peers awaiting the next round of layoffs or cutbacks, the promise in Springsteen’s music had special resonance. Musicians cannot reverse economic recessions or redress inequality. Springsteen understood this and focused on those matters he could tangibly address as an artist. “Things like Watergate,” Springsteen said, “—people have lost their ability to dream. It’s been knocked out of people.” For at least some Americans in mid-1975 the street poet from Asbury Park offered people a little bit more.
August 14, 2007
The Seinfeld Encyclopedia Posted by Alexander Burns at 03:05 PM EST Fred Allen mentions that he is a Yankees fan. I can’t say I share that particular preference, but there are specific Yankees I’ve liked. One of them was Phil Rizzuto, although I only knew him as an announcer. Rizzuto died today at the age of 89. The New York Times has a good obituary here. An odd coincidence about Rizzuto’s death is that it makes him the second popular culture figure featured on Seinfeld to die this week. In a popular episode in the show’s eighth season, Jason Alexander’s character, George Costanza, is given a keychain replica of Phil Rizzuto’s head. When he squeezes it, it says, “Holy cow!” When the keychain accidentally gets buried in a paved-over pothole, George is distraught. And every time someone drives over that patch of asphalt, the keychain blurts out its recorded message. Sadly, I haven’t been able to find a YouTube video of this episode, but the script is available online. Earlier this week, Merv Griffin, the successful game show and talk show host, died at 82. I was too young to watch any of his shows when he was hosting them, but I learned a thing or two about him by watching NBC’s greatest sitcom. During that show’s ninth season, the character Cosmo Kramer finds the old set of The Merv Griffin Show thrown out on the street. He takes it back to his apartment, puts it back together, and hosts his own version of the show. His friends are less than totally thrilled about this, and the project doesn’t last long. Some clips from the episode are, much to my amusement, posted on YouTube. All this has made me realize just how effectively Seinfeld took in the popular culture of its day. Phil Rizzuto and Merv Griffin are some of the first Seinfeld-noted figures to pass away, at least that I’ve been aware of. But in the future, Seinfeld’s cultural encyclopedia will help shape the memories of other celebrities—George Steinbrenner, Rudy Giuliani, Raquel Welch, Keith Hernandez, Marisa Tomei, and many more. At least, as long as the show still has fans.
August 14, 2007
That Which We Call a Fred/ By Any Other Name Would Be Less Sweet II Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 12:25 PM EST Speaking of Freds, since every other Fred here has already done so, I agree that most children dislike their first name, whatever it is. Why would any kid would want to be a John or Dick, for instance? Those are an open invitation for teasing. When kids teased me, the best they could come up with was Freddy the Freeloader or Fast Freddy. Who knew what those names even meant? I strongly agree with John that having both a commonplace first and last name can lead to trouble. If I were him, I’d be a magnificent-sounding John Steele Gordon too. I always feared I’d be confused with other people if I went simply by Frederick Allen, but I when started my career, at New York magazine, the editor there, Clay S. Felker, decreed that no one but himself could have a middle initial or name. Sure enough there was another Frederick Allen to confuse me with, a journalist for a long time with CNN and the Atlanta Constitution. By the time he wrote a very well received history of Coca-Cola, I was at American Heritage. We ran a short review of it and got a thank-you note from him. To make matters extra confusing, his personal stationery identified him as Frederick Lewis Allen III. But I am the grandson of the historian Frederick Lewis Allen, and this was no relative of mine. I got in touch with him and learned that his Frederick Lewis Allen was a Cincinnati ad man who is remembered for making Odorono into a success. FLA III told me that when he was in college he dated the daughter of a history professor, and her father couldn’t wait to meet him—figuring he was the grandson of my grandfather. He might as well have been. We have become one person, at least in one biographical sketch, accompanying an essay I wrote that has been anthologized for writing students. There it says that the author “has been, since 1990, the managing editor of American Heritage. . . . As a journalist and a political commentator he has worked for CNN and for several Atlanta TV stations. . . . He is also the author of Secret Formula (1994), a history of the Coca-Cola Company.” If the Freds of the world are to unite, they’ve already begun. As for Alexander Burns’s post a few days ago asking the rest of us how we feel about the all-time home run record, I don’t feel very strongly. I’m perfectly happy to recognize Barry Bonds as the leader—especially since Alex Rodriguez recently hit No. 500 at the youngest age of anyone ever. I think we can all comfort ourselves that there’s a chance the record will finally return where it has always belonged, with the New York Yankees.
August 14, 2007
That Which We Call a Fred/ By Any Other Name Would Be Less Sweet Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 10:00 AM EST When I was growing up in the 1970s, my father, Harold, used to complain that any man named Harold in an advertisement was invariably a drip. He was right, and the sentiment was not confined to Madison Avenue. In The Sweet Science, a book about boxing, A. J. Liebling writes of a 1952 bout between Archie Moore and Harold Johnson (won by Moore): “On the margin of my card I find a note, ‘imp. of H. fierce,’ which I take to mean the impossibility of Harold’s getting that way, or maybe the impossibility of any Harold’s getting that way; if the leaders had switched names, the Saxons might have won the Battle of Hastings.” (Not that “Archie” sounds all that macho either.) These days the name Harold is so uncommon that it’s never used in advertisements. Instead, the role of an all-purpose loser has been taken over by Fred: He’s the chump with a bowtie that a woman had a boring date with before she met the exciting guy, who has tousled hair and a manly pullover sweater and brings a six-pack of Heineken (or whatever is being advertised) to her apartment. Every Fred in an advertisement is that exact same guy. And, as Mr. Smoler points out, the same is true in books: Freds in literature tend to be dopey and “sweet,” which is girl talk for pleasant but dull. One example that Mr. Smoler left out is Freddie Eynsford-Hill in Pygmalion/My Fair Lady, literature’s most famous stalker (though this case is not clear-cut—the original play ends with him apparently marrying Eliza Doolittle, but the 1938 movie (with screenplay by Shaw) and My Fair Lady end with Eliza seeming to favor Professor Higgins). I’ve never seen The Pirates of Penzance, but I get the impression that Frederic in that operetta is kind of a dufus. When I was a child, my parents used to get their way by threatening to sing “I’m in Love With a Girl Named Fred,” from Once Upon a Mattress; it made a much more effective threat than spanking. And the pinnacle of mid-1960s British Invasion nerdiness was Freddie Garrity of Freddie and the Dreamers, whose hit “Do the Freddie” required him to jump in the air, spread his arms and legs, and nod his head from side to side. It’s amazing what you could get away with in 1965 if you had an English accent. That’s why my favorite Jane Austen novel is Persuasion. It contains many subtle and perceptive observations*, but so do the others; the reason I like Persuasion best is that the character named Frederick gets the girl. In pop music, meanwhile, counterbalancing Freddie and the Dreamers is the uncharacteristically tender Patti Smith song “Frederick,” written in 1979 for her husband (now deceased), Fred “Sonic” Smith, formerly of the MC5. (Smith is her maiden name, by the way; that’s the answer to the frequently asked question, “What do Patti Smith and Eleanor Roosevelt have in common?”) But if you really want an example of an alpha Fred, first look at Fred Thompson and then look at his wife. It just goes to show: There’s nothing more irresistible to women than a Fred with lots of money. And finally, on the subject of John vs. Fred, I recall a pertinent footnote in H. L. Mencken’s The American Language. I would give it to you exactly if our books weren’t in storage, but the gist is that after discussing the use of “john” as a euphemism for a bathroom, Mencken reports someone’s recollection that in the 1920s, at a women’s college in the Northeast (Vassar, I think), the bathroom was referred to as “the Fred.” Agreed, that’s hardly a compliment, but I like to think this usage came about because some poor Vassar girl had her heart broken by a man named Fred. We do tend to have that effect. _______________ * Persuasion is the book where Jane does her best job of portraying the exaggerated ups and downs of a love affair—how we amplify every little thing, turning good or neutral developments into bad ones when we’re feeling pessimistic, and doing just the opposite when our mood swings the other way. After Captain (Frederick) Wentworth sees Anne, his old flame, for the first time in eight years, a friend tells Anne that Wentworth said she was “so altered that he should not have known her again.” As you’d imagine, Anne is rather put out about this. Then at the end of the book, when they’re reunited and it feels so good, Wentworth tells her—just a bit too honestly, like a true Fred—that his brother “enquired after you very particularly; asked even if you were personally altered, little suspecting that to my eye you could never alter.” And of course Anne, flush with love, turns this clumsy remark into a compliment: “Anne smiled, and let it pass. It was too pleasing a blunder for a reproach . . . the value of such homage was inexpressibly increased to Anne, by comparing it with former words, and feeling it to be the result, not the cause of a revival in his warm attachment.” In other words: I know he really thinks I’m hideous, but isn’t it sweet that he loves me anyway, and cares enough to lie about it? (By the way, at the time all this takes place, Anne is 27 years old.)
August 12, 2007
Freds and History II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 06:00 PM EST I long ago noted that the people who blog for American Heritage were disproportionately named Fred—25 percent of the total and 37.5 percent of the male bloggers. But it might also be noted that each of them spells his full first name differently—Frederick, Frederic, and Fredric. I wonder if the diversity of ways to spell the name contributes to its sudden apparent scarcity. In other words is this a problem in methodology? For instance, this list of male first names shows the following rankings among American male names: Fred, 71; Frederick, 131; Freddie, 299; Fredrick, 303; Freddy, 533; Frederic, 720; Fredric, 992. Add those all together and you get a pretty common first name. There appears to be no danger of my first name falling out of favor. It’s No. 2 on the above list. Even among popular names for babies in 2005, John ranks No. 18. If you add in all the variant spellings (Jon being the most common) and all the foreign versions (Sean, Ian, Jean, Johan, etc.), I’m sure it is No. 1 by a country mile. Like many people, I have always disliked my first name, in my case precisely because it is so very common. Coupled with a very common last name (Gordon ranks 143 on this list of surnames), it results in a name of notable unmemorability, right up there with John Doe. That’s why I have always used my middle name, in hopes of distinguishing myself from the vast herd of John Gordons that roam the American landscape. I am not the only one to adopt this ploy. A friend once presented me with the following list of people with a first name of John who used their middle name:
John Quincy Adams
John Jacob Astor
John James Audubon
John Wilkes Booth
John Sherman Cooper
John Singleton Copley
John Foster Dulles
John Kenneth Galbraith
John Nance Garner
John Marshall Harlan
John Paul Jones
John Maynard Keynes
John Stuart Mill
John Ringling North
John Crowe Ransom
John Philip Sousa
John Singer Sargent
John Cameron Swayze
John Scott Trotter
Then there are also John Wellington Wells, the title character in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Sorcerer, and John Beresford Tipton, the mysterious moneybags who wrote the checks in the 1950s television series The Millionaire. I was nearly named otherwise. My father (fighting in Europe) wanted me named after my great-great grandfather, whose name was Powhatan Gordon (his mother claimed descent from Pocahontas—the direct surviving evidence is thin, to put it mildly, but the indirect evidence is very good, so who knows?). My mother was inclined to agree, but my grandmother Steele had a fit at the idea and that was that. I was stuck with John. I have always wondered if I would have disliked having the extraordinarily uncommon name of Powhatan as much as I have disliked the all-too-common John. Since one gets only a single trip through this vale of tears, that question will never be answered.
August 12, 2007
Freds and History Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:10 PM EST This group blog is unusual in having three contributors named Fred. Fred, once a common name, is now a relatively rare one; from 1885 to 1896, it was the fifteenth most popular boy’s baby name, but now it is no longer in the top 1,000. I know this last detail because one of the two Fred bloggers circulated this piece from the Washington Post to the other two Freds. It is a bit of journalistic whimsy provoked by the as-yet-unannounced presidential candidacy of Fred Thompson, and it generated a brief intra-Fred exchange of views on the name. I don’t know how one quickly determines the frequency of names for most historical periods, but for the United States in 1990, the Census Bureau has put the data online at http://www.census.gov/genealogy/www/freqnames.html, and as recently as 1990 Fred was still the seventy-first most popular name for a male American. Name frequency does change over time, sometimes quite sharply, and one theory for the phenomenon is that nowadays most Americans want names for their children that are uncommon but not too uncommon, so success in finding such a name leads to overkill. The name can catch on very broadly, in which case after a while it necessarily drops into relative obscurity. The census data tells nothing about the specific mental associations of particular names, but on the strength of the Washington Post piece, my own view, which is that the name Fred has long connoted affable stupidity, seems to be shared by a significant number of Americans. I don’t know why this should be so, but I have just been told—by neither Fred-blogger—that the two fictional Freds mentioned in the WaPo article, Fred Flintstone and Fred Mertz, both share the qualities of affability and at least mild stupidity, and this may explain the aura now surrounding the name; there was a further speculation that Fred Flintstone is named by mental association with Fred Mertz. This implies that one fictional Fred damned a whole tribe with a reputation for sweet-tempered doltishness, which seems odd, but I can think of few other possible explanations. I don’t think problem is literary association, because there are few Freds in high literature—off the top of my head, I recall only Fred Vincy in Middlemarch, and he is not doltish. There is Frederic Moreau in Sentimental Education, who is not stupid, but that is immaterial, for a co-blogger has pointed out that Frederics do not have the same reputation for sappiness. There are a fair number of stupid and affable Freds in P. G. Wodehouse, but an awful lot of Wodehouse characters are affable and stupid, not just the Freds. All of this leads to the thought that while more things have a history than we often think—I remember being quite startled to discover how rapidly the choice of American Christian names has come to change over time, versus how slowly French usage has changed, at least until quite recently (it was long controlled by law)—not all of history is readily explicable.
August 12, 2007
From Richard Nixon to Barry Bonds Posted by Alexander Burns at 12:50 PM EST Yesterday Joshua Zeitz noted that this blog had overlooked the anniversary of Richard Nixon’s departure from the White House, and he offered some thoughts on the occasion. In the same spirit of playing catch-up, I’ll note that there was another event in the last week, of greater public note, that went unmentioned on this site. On August 7, Barry Bonds, of the San Francisco Giants, hit the 756th home run of his career, breaking Hank Aaron’s longstanding record of 755. Bonds is among the most controversial people in professional sports today and has been accused of steroid use, perjury, and probably other offenses of which this writer is unaware. Whether his home run record has any legitimacy is a subject that sports fans are now debating. Whatever consensus they finally reach will have implications for the game known as America’s pastime. I’m curious whether there are any baseball fans among my fellow blog contributors, and, if so, what they think about the Bonds dilemma. I’m also interested to see what thoughts, if any, may arise in the discussion section of this site. For whatever it’s worth, it’s the opinion of this casual and intermittent baseball fan that Bonds’s record has some value but isn’t really equivalent to Aaron’s achievement. It’s well known that steroids have warped the great records of baseball, and I don’t think it would be exactly right to say that what Bonds has accomplished was as great a feat as what Aaron did, given the extra help Bonds probably had. At the same time, unless you’re willing to toss out all the top records from the last decade or so, it seems a little unsporting to single out Bonds for special disdain. Obviously that’s a pretty inconclusive, on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand kind of opinion, but I haven’t really found a more satisfactory view on the whole affair. Bonds has his defenders: “Bonds is the greatest hitter to ever play, steroids or no.” And he has his detractors: “Barry Bonds broke this record . . . by cheating and defrauding the good name of baseball.” It’s not at all clear to me which of these assessments is more appropriate, so naturally I’m floating somewhere in between. The most impressive reaction to Bonds’s record-breaking, not coincidentally, has been from the man whose record he topped. “No asterisk,” Aaron told reporters in response to a question about whether Bonds’s record should be qualified with a footnote. He said elsewhere, “I have been privileged to hold this record for 33 years. I move over now.” What class. Whether one wants an asterisk next to Bonds’s name or not, it’s impossible not to admire Aaron’s dignified reaction.
August 11, 2007
Goodbye to Richard Nixon II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 06:15 PM EST Just a couple of comments before I turn on the television to watch the greatest golfer who has ever lived ply his trade at the PGA. First, I am old enough to remember Watergate at first hand. It was certainly hog heaven for us news junkies. I doubt there have ever been so many banner headlines in The New York Times—a newspaper notoriously parsimonious with banner headlines—in so short a period, finally ending with only the second time in history that the Times had used war type in a headline: “NIXON RESIGNS.” The first time, for the record, was, “MEN WALK ON THE MOON” five years earlier. But equally, I hope the country never has to go through another series of events that require so many banner headlines. In many, many ways, the country has never recovered from Watergate. That’s why I’m puzzled when Joshua Zeitz writes, “. . . it’s still not clear that Nixon was especially competent or incompetent. He may well have been average. In which case, Watergate continues to matter.” It seems to me that Watergate would matter if Richard Nixon had been the very embodiment of competence (although, to be sure, had he been such, I doubt he would have made such an utter dog’s breakfast of it). Competent or not, moderate or not, accomplished or not, Richard Nixon is one of the most fascinating characters in American political history, indeed of almost Shakespearean dimensions. How many Presidents, after all, have had operas written about them? As more and more political actors of that era pass from the scene, more and more historical data will become available, and more and more books will be written and probably more operas. A hundred years from now, Nixon is going to take up a lot of shelf space—or whatever the digital equivalent may be in 2107. I think Mr. Zeitz failed to mention one of Nixon’s most egregious policy mistakes, price controls, imposed in the summer of 1971. Government price controls have a record going back all the way to the Emperor Diocletian and, except briefly in wartime, they have always been a disaster, as they were when Nixon tried them. Like so many people in the public sector, Nixon just never understood that market forces are a force of nature that cannot be turned off by political fiat. To quote a Vietnamese proverb, “Trying to stop a market is like trying to stop a river.” Finally, Mr. Zeitz writes, “. . . it’s important not to conflate the term ‘good’ with ‘moderate’/’liberal,’ and equally important not to confuse ‘conservative’ with ‘bad.’” I certainly agree with this, provided the slash mark is replaced with the word “or.” Moderates and liberals are not the same beasts in my book, by a long shot. Now, off to the television. Go, Tiger!
August 11, 2007
Goodbye to Richard Nixon Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 01:40 PM EST Last week, the American Heritage blog let slip by without mention the anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation as President on August 9, 1974. Here’s a modest attempt at correcting the oversight. By far the more lurid account of Nixon’s decision to step down came from Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, the award-winning journalists who cracked the Watergate story for the Washington Post. In their second collaborative book, The Final Days, they recounted a late-night summit between the President and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, that took place in the Lincoln Sitting Room, a small alcove on the second floor of the southeast side of the White House, then furnished with Victorian period pieces and appointed with a gray marble fireplace. Portraits of Abraham Lincoln lined the walls. Nixon sat off to the corner in his leather armchair—the only comfortable seat in the room—in close proximity to a stereo and two five-foot shelves that stored his classical records. It was clear to Kissinger that Nixon had been drinking. Other sources noted that the President enjoyed cranking up the air conditioning and lighting the fireplace, even in the dog days of summer, but Bernstein and Woodward didn’t mention that detail in their contested version of events. “Will history treat me more kindly than my contemporaries?” the President asked his Secretary of State. Kissinger nodded yes and joined Nixon in a long recitation of the administration’s foreign policy achievements: ending America’s military involvement in Vietnam, reaching détente with the Soviet Union, opening diplomatic relations with China, forging landmark agreements on arms proliferation and economic trade. Though the former Harvard professor assured his Commander-in-Chief that future generations would judge him by these accomplishments, and not for a third-rate burglary, Nixon was inconsolable. “It depends on who writes the history,” he observed. Since 1974, historians have changed their tunes considerably on Richard Nixon. Early accounts tended to emphasize self-destructive continuity throughout Nixon’s career, from his reckless partisanship in the 1940s and 1950s to the take-no-prisoners approach that led to such rampant criminality in his administration. In the 1990s, a new generation of policy historians revisited the Nixon Presidency and concluded that whatever his personal shortcomings may have been, he was, by and large, a political moderate who presided over effective foreign and domestic policies. The problem with this revisionism is that it confuses moderation for competency. Yes, Richard Nixon was no Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan; he signed or pressed into law several important environmental and civil rights measures and oversaw an expansion of social spending, even as he forged a détente with the Soviet Union and established diplomatic relations with China. But he also prolonged the Vietnam War at great human cost, ultimately accepting terms in 1973 that were largely identical to those he could have accepted in 1969, and he bore considerable responsibility for over-heating the economy in 1972 in order to aid his reelection campaign, thus igniting the hyper-inflation of 1973–1974. This isn’t to say that he was anywhere near as incompetent as a certain President who followed him, many years later. But if Nixon’s legacy is to be salvaged by focusing on his policies, it’s important not to conflate the term “good” with “moderate”/”liberal,” and equally important not to confuse “conservative” with “bad.” As many of us have recently come to appreciate, there’s just no substitution for competency, and it’s still not clear that Nixon was especially competent or incompetent. He may well have been average. In which case, Watergate continues to matter.
August 9, 2007
FDR’s Polio II Posted by Ellen Feldman at 10:45 PM EST Though I have not seen the series Eleanor and Franklin in many years, I agree with John Steele Gordon that it is a superb portrait of the Roosevelts and their brilliant political and less successful personal relationship. It is also, as Mr. Gordon points out, impressive in its accuracy. While I enjoyed HBO’s more recent Warm Springs and greatly admired Kenneth Branagh’s portrayal of FDR, I found myself occasionally raging at the inaccuracies on the screen. The movie’s depiction of the Roosevelt marriage is murky at best, misleading at worst. The viewer doesn’t quite understand why these two characters who are so obviously and blissfully in love are always apart. Even worse is the scene when FDR makes his agonizing walk to the podium to nominate Al Smith as the Democratic candidate for the Presidency in 1928. Though few in the audience knew how extensive his paralysis was, they sensed he had pulled off a feat of daring and courage, and went wild with admiration. All that is true, but in this movie, FDR, who was ever the consummate politician, nonetheless takes time before beginning his speech to blow ER, who is sitting in the balcony, a kiss. FDR could be affectionate, but not before thousands of delegates packed into Madison Square Garden. What I found most fascinating about Mr. Gordon’s blog, however, is his quibble with the “production values” in the recreation of Teddy Roosevelt’s house, Sagamore Hill. As he wisely points out, the Roosevelts were “old money” and had no need to impress. His comment reminded me of an interview Richard Heffner, the host of The Open Mind, conducted many years ago with Eleanor Roosevelt. Mrs. Roosevelt reminisces about turning the house in Hyde Park over to the government after FDR’s death. The Roosevelts were “old money,” but times were changing, and she could not afford to keep up the main house and all the land. She remained in her own cottage on the property, however, and in the interview she speaks of occasionally dropping in at the big house and listening to the comments of visiting tourists. Many were disappointed in, even disdainful of, the beautiful old house, which FDR had helped design and dearly loved. They found the furniture and decor old-fashioned and musty. If they could have afforded to live there, they would have spruced the place up. ER appears not to have engaged any of the visiting critics on the subject, but she does admit in the interview that like her mother-in-law, Sara, who was the mistress of Hyde Park until her death in 1941, she believes in making things last. She never quite says it, but you can tell from her voice that she finds redecorating merely for the sake of redecoration vaguely vulgar. It was probably one of the few opinions she shared with her famously difficult mother-in-law.
August 9, 2007
FDR’s Polio Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:35 PM EST Reading Ellen Feldman’s excellent article on FDR’s polio (or whatever it was in fact), I am stimulated to make a recommendation.
A couple of weeks ago I remembered watching, with great enjoyment, the television series “Eleanor and Franklin” based on the book of the same name by Joseph P. Lash, which won the Pulitzer Prize in biography in 1972. The TV program dates to the mid-70’s, so I last saw it thirty years ago. I turned to the estimable Netflix and ordered it. I have now watched the first half, “The Early Years,” which covers the Roosevelts up to his election as President.
I think it is excellent in every way, wonderfully capturing the characters of both Eleanor (beautifully played by Jane Alexander) and FDR (equally well played by Edward Hermann) and their complicated, all-too-human, and historically remarkable relationship. I found it deeply moving. Reading Ms. Feldman’s piece this morning, I am struck by how many of the details that she mentions about his early days with polio are mentioned or portrayed in the TV show. Joseph Lash was a consultant, so I imagine the show is equally historically fastidious throughout.
Indeed, about the only thing I could find to complain about was the house used to depict Theodore Roosevelt’s Sagamore Hill in one scene: it was too gilded-age fancy. Sagamore Hill, while large (23 rooms), is a much more homey, wicker-rockers-on-the-porch sort of place (the Roosevelts were old money and didn’t need to impress anyone). And, of course, there are TR’s hunting trophies all over the place, including, if I remember correctly, an elephant-foot wastebasket that fascinated me when I saw it fifty years ago.
So I would recommend people do what I did: get “Eleanor and Franklin” from Netflix or Blockbuster or wherever and spend a couple of evenings with one of the most extraordinary American couples of the twentieth century. As a bonus, “Going Home,” the greatest American folk song ever written by a classical Czech composer (Antonin Dvorák), is heard frequently as FDR’s funeral train makes its way slowly northward from Warm Springs.
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