September 2005

Joshua Zeitz blogged on Wednesday that some liberal pundits, such as the Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne, are happily opining that the present troubles of the Bush Administration are turning the President into a lame duck if not a dead duck. Perhaps so, perhaps not. A week can be an eternity in politics, and a few bits of good news (such as a successful election in Iraq, a better than predicted situation in New Orleans, etc.) or bad news for Democrats (such as a budding scandal in the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee that The New York Times—surprise!—has not considered news fit to print, although its public editor is now wondering why), and the situation can look very different.

The 2005 Forbes 400 list is out, and once again, alas, I failed to make the cut.

And the cut this year is an altogether impressive $900 million. Only twenty-three on the list are worth less than a billion. A mere ten years ago, $340 million got you a spot among the American financial seraphim.

In truth, the Forbes 400 list has tracked the greatest period of wealth creation in the country’s history, for it isn’t only the super-rich who have done well in the last quarter century, it’s nearly everyone. Two-thirds of American families now own their own homes, and real estate has been among the best investments in the last quarter century.

In the wake of the federal government’s failure to quickly address the crisis wrought by Hurricane Katrina, and amid a growing sense among some that the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq and at home have become mired in bureaucratic corruption and legislative gridlock, some liberal pundits claim to hear the death rattle of George Bush’s political influence, an idea nicely encapsulated in a recent syndicated column by the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne, Jr.

“The Bush Era is over,” Dionne wrote on September 13. “…Recent months, and especially the past two weeks, have brought home to a steadily growing majority of Americans the truth that President Bush’s government doesn’t work. His policies are failing, his approach to leadership is detached and self-indulgent, his way of politics has produced a divided, angry and dysfunctional public square. We dare not go on like this.”

While George W. Bush—his legacy, his agenda—may or may not prove the great political casualty of 2005, the notion that Americans will now reject his brand of conservatism is probably misplaced.

My recent comments about Eleanor Roosevelt and the Bonus March seem to have incited two of my fellow bloggers to entries of their own. They were not in agreement with my views. I will not address the political issues, but I do apologize for my historical mistake. As Frederic Schwarz observed, the Bonus Marchers were not still there when FDR took office. Some of them had returned.

The dissents, however, did set me thinking. I am a runner. I usually jog around the Reservoir in Central Park, and while I still thrill to the sight of the New York skyline to the south, even four years later I cannot help noticing the gap where the Twin Towers used to be. There is an irony to this hole in the cityscape, and in the entire nation. Like most New Yorkers, I never regarded the towers as icons of the city. That role was reserved for the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings. 9/11, of course, changed all that.

Four times a year we read in the newspapers that “today is the official start of fall,” or whatever season it may be. The notion of some government functionary dictating the seasons is an odd one to begin with, and in most cases, starting and ending them at solstices and equinoxes is contrary to common usage. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, autumn is “reckoned astronomically from the descending equinox to the winter solstice,” but “popularly, it comprises, in Great Britain, August, September, and October [Samuel Johnson]; in North America, September, October, and November (Webster); and in France ‘from the end of August to the first fortnight of November’ (Littré).” That’s why in Britain the summer solstice was considered “midsummer night,” not the start of summer.

Ellen Feldman, in her posting of September 19, wrote about the Bonus March in the early 1930s and Eleanor Roosevelt’s visit to demonstrators in early 1933. Leaving aside her highly dubious suggestion that a President of the United States should walk through the streets of a blacked-out city where law and order are still, at best, problematical, I must take issue with some of her presentation of the history of the matter. She wrote, “In June 1932, when the Bonus Expeditionary Force, more than 90 percent of whom were Army and Navy veterans, marched on Washington, D.C., wanting no more than the military ‘bonus’ they had been promised …”

Ellen Feldman, in her posting of September 19, wrote about the Bonus March in the early 1930s and Eleanor Roosevelt’s visit to demonstrators in early 1933. Leaving aside her highly dubious suggestion that a President of the United States should walk through the streets of a blacked-out city where law and order are still, at best, problematical, I must take issue with some of her presentation of the history of the matter. She wrote, “In June 1932, when the Bonus Expeditionary Force, more than 90 percent of whom were Army and Navy veterans, marched on Washington, D.C., wanting no more than the military ‘bonus’ they had been promised …”

It’s also worth noting that the bonus marchers were not exactly Gandhi and his followers. According to a June 1963 article in American Heritage by John D. Weaver, their leader, Walter W. Waters, tried to organize the bonus marchers into what Waters called “a closely knit, semi-military organization” that would be “100 per cent American” and anti-communist. Weaver writes that Waters’s goons “had already attacked locally, pouncing on suspected Reds and hauling them before kangaroo courts to be sentenced to belt-lashings and forcible expulsion from Washington.” The morning before the U.S. Army moved in, a group of bonus marchers hurled bricks at police, and that afternoon came the more serious brawl to which Gordon refers, in which the two policemen and two marchers were killed (these were the only deaths in the whole episode; no one was killed during the Army attack).

In 1997 Gary Chapman of the University of Texas wrote that the unregulated development of technology was an enemy of social harmony: “There are many causes of income inequality, according to economists, and one cause is technological development itself….technological progress creates its own discontent….

“James K. Galbraith, an economist at the University of Texas, says that because corporate managers look to a small segment of the population as their target market—people with high disposable incomes—we get innovation characterized by over-engineering, ‘baroque’ product features and short product life cycles with built-in obsolescence.

“‘What inequality tends to foster, in terms of innovation,’ says Galbraith, ‘are “toys” for the rich instead of investments in mass use.’ That, he says, is why we favor $30,000 cars over mass transit, cellular phones and expensive services over universal access …”

On September 15, still trying to get it right, President Bush made his fourth visit to the area devastated by Katrina. Each trip has been, it seems to me, more carefully scripted. Gone are the off-the-cuff jokes about youthful hell-raising and the accolades to incompetent officials. The most recent game plan left no room for gaffes. The President, dressed uncharacteristically for a prime-time speech in an open-necked shirt, presumably to show he too was getting his hands dirty in the cleanup effort, spoke in a fenced-off area of Jackson Square with the iconic cathedral, lit by trucked-in generators, looming behind him. (When the President failed to visit the worst-hit sections of the city on his first visit, the White House explained that he did not want to disrupt rescue efforts.