Friday, November 30, 2012
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
The Lincoln Movie (2)
I've been reading a lot of comment on the movie. I am most interested in what Lincoln scholars might say about it. Harold Holzer offers what I consider trivial criticism. The leading Lincoln scholar on slavery is Eric Foner. I watched the streaming of a CNN interview. Foner makes the obvious point that the movie is "inadequate" in that it doesn't tell the full story of the end of slavery in the U.S. We have to remember that this is just a movie with the visual power that a good movie can bring, but with a specific story line that can never be the full story. Slavery was already eroding by January of 1865. I take the progressive view that the slaves liberated themselves by fighting for their freedom in the Union army. The movie creates the impression that there was a great rush to enact the 13th Amendment in Jaunary whereas Lincoln said he would call a special session of the new Congress that would be sworn in in March for the purpose of passing the amendment if necessary. I suppose, though, you can make the case that Lincoln felt the immediate enactment might hasten the end of the war. According to Foner from his book on Lincoln and slavery, the movie leaves out the fact that Lincoln offered compensated emancipated to Alexander Stephens at the Hampton Roads conference. Using this fact would have made the movie messier and would denigate Lincoln's halo. The other thing is that the 13th Amendment was sponsored by abolitionist groups and not AL. Lincoln didn't decide to support it until 1864. History is messy. Movies are not.
Sunday, November 25, 2012
Corey Robin on The Lincoln Movie
New post on Corey Robin
Steven Spielberg’s White Men of Democracy
by Corey Robin
Two weeks ago I wrote, “When Steven Spielberg makes a movie about the Holocaust, he focuses on a German. When he makes a movie about abolition, he focuses on a white man. Say what you will, he’s consistent.”
My comment was inspired by historian Kate Masur’s excellent New York Times op-ed, which argued that Spielberg’s film Lincoln had essentially left African Americans offstage or in the gallery. In Spielberg’s hands, blacks see themselves get rescued by a savior who belongs to the very group that has ravaged and ruined them. Just as Jews do in Schindler’s List. The difference is that in the case of emancipation, blacks—both free and slave—were actually far more central to the process of their own deliverance.
Thanks in part to documents from the National Archives that historians began to rigorously amass and organize in 1976—resulting in the multi-volume Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867—students and scholars have come to a completely different view of how emancipation happened. As three of the historians who were involved in that project wrote in the path-breaking Slaves No More:
The Destruction of Slavery [the first essay in the book] explicates the process by which slavery collapsed under the pressure of federal arms and the slaves’ determination to place their own liberty on the wartime agenda. In documenting the transformation of a war for the Union into a war against slavery, it shifts the focus from the halls of power in Washington and Richmond to the plantations, farms, and battlefields of the South and demonstrates how slaves accomplished their own liberation and shaped the destiny of a nation.
…
Emphasizing the agency of slaves and former slaves does not simply alter the cast of characters in the drama of emancipation, displacing old villains and enthroning new heroes. Abraham Lincoln and the Radical Republicans do not play less significant parts once slaves gain an active role in their own liberation, but they do play different ones. Focusing on events beyond Washington and outside formally constituted political bodies does not excise politics from the study of the past. Rather, it reveals that social history is not history with the politics left out, but that all history is—and must be—political. The politics of emancipation in the countryside and the towns of the South makes more comprehensible the politics of emancipation inside the capitol and the presidential mansion.
Which made Spielberg’s decision to focus on Lincoln and a few politicians in Washington all the more perplexing.
After I posted my comment, the estimable Freddie DeBoer asked me a simple, blunt question: Had I seen the film I was pontificating about? Shamefacedly I admitted I hadn’t. (One of the things I love about Freddie’s writing is how quickly and cleanly he cuts into his opponents. I love it even more when I’m not one of them.) But I promised I’d see the film—in return for Freddie reading some of the historical literature. He agreed.
Last night I saw the film. I’m pleased to admit that I was wrong—but in one of those ways that reveals I was more right than I realized.
One of the points my critics made in response to my original claim—Michael Brendan Dougherty pursued this line most forcefully (on Twitter)—is that the film is a biopic called “Lincoln.” Of course Lincoln is going to be center stage. (To which my exasperated wife responded, “Schindler’s List also has Schindler in the title. So what?)
But here’s the thing. Lincoln is most decidedly not a movie about Lincoln. The main character of the film is the 13th Amendment—and the politics of emancipation more specifically and more generally. The entire plot revolves around its passage. And what’s most fascinating about the film is that Spielberg, and his screenwriter Tony Kushner, shows that emancipation wasn’t the product of a lone heroic effort by a saintly Lincoln; instead, it depicts emancipation as a collective endeavor.
The film in fact does a remarkable job—this is one of its chief virtues, I think—of decentering Lincoln from his traditional role in our national narrative. Lincoln gets surprisingly little air time in the film. Many scenes are littered with the hapless attempts of three lowlifes—one is played by James Spader—to get lame-duck Democrats on board with the 13th Amendment through promises of sinecures and patronage. In terms of getting the Amendment passed, Lincoln’s role is rather small. He only intervenes successfully in getting two or three votes.
Lincoln is obviously important as a steward and an oracle: one of the other things I like about the film is that it shows what a fine line there is in politics between the prophet and the windbag; Lincoln’s stories and pronouncements often prompt either bemused bewilderment (in the case of William Seward, played by David Strathairn) or frustrated rage (in the case of Edwin Stanton, played by Bruce McGill). But his presidency, as it is depicted by Spielberg/Kushner, actually comports more with how the bloggers over at Lawyers, Guns & Money, and the poli sci literature more generally, understand the presidency: as a radically constrained institution, which is often buffeted by forces it can’t control—in Congress, and elsewhere.
So, yes, Lincoln plays a role in Lincoln, but it’s just that: a role. Seward, Spader and his goons, Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones), even crazy Mary Todd Lincoln (Sally Fields)—everyone has a hand in freeing the slaves.
Everyone, it seems, save the slaves themselves.
For all the decentering of Lincoln, for all the inclusion of multiple voices, the film studiously keeps black people in the audience—literally in the gallery, in one of the closing scenes, or in the bedroom or in the foyer, waiting, watching, attending. Black characters are almost always either looking up at their saviors (even allowing for the fact that Lincoln was tall) or wistfully after their saviors, as the latter depart for the halls of power. It’s true that the film opens with black soldiers telling Lincoln all they have done in the war, and telling him all that he should still do. Mary Todd Lincoln’s black servant speaks up every once in a while, as do some other servants. But that’s pretty much it.
What is so odd about this film—and something I would not have anticipated from Masur’s op-ed—is that it really is trying to show that abolition is the democratic project of the 19th century. Democratic in it objective (making slaves free and ultimately equal) and democratic in its execution, involving a great many men beyond Lincoln himself, and a great many lowly men at that. But it is a white man’s democracy. In the film, in fact, Lincoln tells his colleagues: “The fate of human dignity is in our hands.” Our hands. Not theirs.
The inclusion of so many white players makes the exclusion of black players all the more inexplicable—and inexcusable. It's just a weird throwback to the pre-Civil Rights era except that emancipation is now depicted as a good thing—just so long as it is white people who are doing the emancipating.
Lest I be accused—as I already have been—of imposing some kind of PC orthodoxy on a piece of mass entertainment, or of applying an anachronistic standard of inclusion to a film that marches under the banner of fidelity to historical truth, let me reiterate one point and add two others. Emancipation was not a white man’s affair. It was a multiracial affair, in which blacks, slave and free, played a central role. Spielberg and Kushner are not being faithful to the historical record; they are distorting it. Not by lying but by constructing the field glasses through which they would have us look at, and misperceive, the past.
Aaron Bady will be blogging about the film too, so I don’t want to steal his thunder. But he’s dug up two interesting factoids that are relevant: First, Spielberg was originally thinking of making a film about the relationship between Lincoln and the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. This is a topic that has generated a large and growing literature. Spielberg opted not to go that route. Second, though Spielberg chose to base the film on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, he decided essentially to use three pages from the book as the basis of his story. It was his decision to focus on the few months that led to the passage of the 13th Amendment in the House.
These unforced choices—his choices—effectively precluded the inclusion of blacks as political agents in their own right. It was not the constraints of history or genre, in other words, that produced this film; it was the blinkered vision of Steven Spielberg.
And, I’m sorry to say, the blinkered vision of Tony Kushner. If you think my pre-Civil Rights claim above is unfair, consider this statement that Kushner gave to NPR, which Aaron also found and pointed out to me:
The inability to forgive and to reconcile with the South in a really decent and humane way, without any question, was one of the causes of the kind of resentment and perpetuation of alienation and bitterness that led to the quote-unquote 'noble cause,' and the rise of the Klan and Southern self-protection societies. The abuse of the South after they were defeated was a catastrophe, and helped lead to just unimaginable, untellable human suffering.
I have to confess, I was truly shocked by this comment. Though it points to events after the Civil War, it reveals a point of view that I had thought we abandoned long ago: the Dunning School of American historiography, which essentially holds that Reconstruction was a “tragic era”—and error—in which a cruel and unforgiving North decided to wreak havoc on a victimized (white) South, thereby producing Jim Crow and a century of southern backwardness. When I was in high school—in 1985!—we were taught the Dunning School as an example of how not to do history, a way of thinking about the past that was so benighted no one could possibly believe it anymore.
Yet here we have one of our most esteemed playwrights—a Marxist no less (and whose effort to reclaim an honorary degree from CUNY, which he had been denied, I steadfastly organized for)—essentially peddling the same tropes.
When you have a screenwriter with Kushner’s range of historical vision, and a filmmaker with Spielberg’s gift for compression, it should be possible to make a different film. A truer, better—and, yes, entertaining—film. For reasons I can’t comprehend, they chose not to, opting instead for a 19th century American version of Schindler’s List.
I didn't like the original. And I'm not crazy about the remake.
Corey Robin
November 25, 2012 at 1:51 pm
Steven Spielberg’s White Men of Democracy
by Corey Robin
Two weeks ago I wrote, “When Steven Spielberg makes a movie about the Holocaust, he focuses on a German. When he makes a movie about abolition, he focuses on a white man. Say what you will, he’s consistent.”
My comment was inspired by historian Kate Masur’s excellent New York Times op-ed, which argued that Spielberg’s film Lincoln had essentially left African Americans offstage or in the gallery. In Spielberg’s hands, blacks see themselves get rescued by a savior who belongs to the very group that has ravaged and ruined them. Just as Jews do in Schindler’s List. The difference is that in the case of emancipation, blacks—both free and slave—were actually far more central to the process of their own deliverance.
Thanks in part to documents from the National Archives that historians began to rigorously amass and organize in 1976—resulting in the multi-volume Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867—students and scholars have come to a completely different view of how emancipation happened. As three of the historians who were involved in that project wrote in the path-breaking Slaves No More:
The Destruction of Slavery [the first essay in the book] explicates the process by which slavery collapsed under the pressure of federal arms and the slaves’ determination to place their own liberty on the wartime agenda. In documenting the transformation of a war for the Union into a war against slavery, it shifts the focus from the halls of power in Washington and Richmond to the plantations, farms, and battlefields of the South and demonstrates how slaves accomplished their own liberation and shaped the destiny of a nation.
…
Emphasizing the agency of slaves and former slaves does not simply alter the cast of characters in the drama of emancipation, displacing old villains and enthroning new heroes. Abraham Lincoln and the Radical Republicans do not play less significant parts once slaves gain an active role in their own liberation, but they do play different ones. Focusing on events beyond Washington and outside formally constituted political bodies does not excise politics from the study of the past. Rather, it reveals that social history is not history with the politics left out, but that all history is—and must be—political. The politics of emancipation in the countryside and the towns of the South makes more comprehensible the politics of emancipation inside the capitol and the presidential mansion.
Which made Spielberg’s decision to focus on Lincoln and a few politicians in Washington all the more perplexing.
After I posted my comment, the estimable Freddie DeBoer asked me a simple, blunt question: Had I seen the film I was pontificating about? Shamefacedly I admitted I hadn’t. (One of the things I love about Freddie’s writing is how quickly and cleanly he cuts into his opponents. I love it even more when I’m not one of them.) But I promised I’d see the film—in return for Freddie reading some of the historical literature. He agreed.
Last night I saw the film. I’m pleased to admit that I was wrong—but in one of those ways that reveals I was more right than I realized.
One of the points my critics made in response to my original claim—Michael Brendan Dougherty pursued this line most forcefully (on Twitter)—is that the film is a biopic called “Lincoln.” Of course Lincoln is going to be center stage. (To which my exasperated wife responded, “Schindler’s List also has Schindler in the title. So what?)
But here’s the thing. Lincoln is most decidedly not a movie about Lincoln. The main character of the film is the 13th Amendment—and the politics of emancipation more specifically and more generally. The entire plot revolves around its passage. And what’s most fascinating about the film is that Spielberg, and his screenwriter Tony Kushner, shows that emancipation wasn’t the product of a lone heroic effort by a saintly Lincoln; instead, it depicts emancipation as a collective endeavor.
The film in fact does a remarkable job—this is one of its chief virtues, I think—of decentering Lincoln from his traditional role in our national narrative. Lincoln gets surprisingly little air time in the film. Many scenes are littered with the hapless attempts of three lowlifes—one is played by James Spader—to get lame-duck Democrats on board with the 13th Amendment through promises of sinecures and patronage. In terms of getting the Amendment passed, Lincoln’s role is rather small. He only intervenes successfully in getting two or three votes.
Lincoln is obviously important as a steward and an oracle: one of the other things I like about the film is that it shows what a fine line there is in politics between the prophet and the windbag; Lincoln’s stories and pronouncements often prompt either bemused bewilderment (in the case of William Seward, played by David Strathairn) or frustrated rage (in the case of Edwin Stanton, played by Bruce McGill). But his presidency, as it is depicted by Spielberg/Kushner, actually comports more with how the bloggers over at Lawyers, Guns & Money, and the poli sci literature more generally, understand the presidency: as a radically constrained institution, which is often buffeted by forces it can’t control—in Congress, and elsewhere.
So, yes, Lincoln plays a role in Lincoln, but it’s just that: a role. Seward, Spader and his goons, Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones), even crazy Mary Todd Lincoln (Sally Fields)—everyone has a hand in freeing the slaves.
Everyone, it seems, save the slaves themselves.
For all the decentering of Lincoln, for all the inclusion of multiple voices, the film studiously keeps black people in the audience—literally in the gallery, in one of the closing scenes, or in the bedroom or in the foyer, waiting, watching, attending. Black characters are almost always either looking up at their saviors (even allowing for the fact that Lincoln was tall) or wistfully after their saviors, as the latter depart for the halls of power. It’s true that the film opens with black soldiers telling Lincoln all they have done in the war, and telling him all that he should still do. Mary Todd Lincoln’s black servant speaks up every once in a while, as do some other servants. But that’s pretty much it.
What is so odd about this film—and something I would not have anticipated from Masur’s op-ed—is that it really is trying to show that abolition is the democratic project of the 19th century. Democratic in it objective (making slaves free and ultimately equal) and democratic in its execution, involving a great many men beyond Lincoln himself, and a great many lowly men at that. But it is a white man’s democracy. In the film, in fact, Lincoln tells his colleagues: “The fate of human dignity is in our hands.” Our hands. Not theirs.
The inclusion of so many white players makes the exclusion of black players all the more inexplicable—and inexcusable. It's just a weird throwback to the pre-Civil Rights era except that emancipation is now depicted as a good thing—just so long as it is white people who are doing the emancipating.
Lest I be accused—as I already have been—of imposing some kind of PC orthodoxy on a piece of mass entertainment, or of applying an anachronistic standard of inclusion to a film that marches under the banner of fidelity to historical truth, let me reiterate one point and add two others. Emancipation was not a white man’s affair. It was a multiracial affair, in which blacks, slave and free, played a central role. Spielberg and Kushner are not being faithful to the historical record; they are distorting it. Not by lying but by constructing the field glasses through which they would have us look at, and misperceive, the past.
Aaron Bady will be blogging about the film too, so I don’t want to steal his thunder. But he’s dug up two interesting factoids that are relevant: First, Spielberg was originally thinking of making a film about the relationship between Lincoln and the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. This is a topic that has generated a large and growing literature. Spielberg opted not to go that route. Second, though Spielberg chose to base the film on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, he decided essentially to use three pages from the book as the basis of his story. It was his decision to focus on the few months that led to the passage of the 13th Amendment in the House.
These unforced choices—his choices—effectively precluded the inclusion of blacks as political agents in their own right. It was not the constraints of history or genre, in other words, that produced this film; it was the blinkered vision of Steven Spielberg.
And, I’m sorry to say, the blinkered vision of Tony Kushner. If you think my pre-Civil Rights claim above is unfair, consider this statement that Kushner gave to NPR, which Aaron also found and pointed out to me:
The inability to forgive and to reconcile with the South in a really decent and humane way, without any question, was one of the causes of the kind of resentment and perpetuation of alienation and bitterness that led to the quote-unquote 'noble cause,' and the rise of the Klan and Southern self-protection societies. The abuse of the South after they were defeated was a catastrophe, and helped lead to just unimaginable, untellable human suffering.
I have to confess, I was truly shocked by this comment. Though it points to events after the Civil War, it reveals a point of view that I had thought we abandoned long ago: the Dunning School of American historiography, which essentially holds that Reconstruction was a “tragic era”—and error—in which a cruel and unforgiving North decided to wreak havoc on a victimized (white) South, thereby producing Jim Crow and a century of southern backwardness. When I was in high school—in 1985!—we were taught the Dunning School as an example of how not to do history, a way of thinking about the past that was so benighted no one could possibly believe it anymore.
Yet here we have one of our most esteemed playwrights—a Marxist no less (and whose effort to reclaim an honorary degree from CUNY, which he had been denied, I steadfastly organized for)—essentially peddling the same tropes.
When you have a screenwriter with Kushner’s range of historical vision, and a filmmaker with Spielberg’s gift for compression, it should be possible to make a different film. A truer, better—and, yes, entertaining—film. For reasons I can’t comprehend, they chose not to, opting instead for a 19th century American version of Schindler’s List.
I didn't like the original. And I'm not crazy about the remake.
Corey Robin
November 25, 2012 at 1:51 pm
ON Anna
November 24, 2012
Is “Anna Karenina” a Love Story?
Posted by Joshua Rothman
A few weeks ago, on an appropriately snowy Wednesday, my wife and I went to see the new film version of “Anna Karenina.” It was the movie’s New York première, and, before it started, Joe Wright, the director, a dark-haired Englishman in a gray suit, stood up to say a few words. He introduced Keira Knightley, who plays Anna, along with the actors who play Kitty and Levin, Alicia Vikander and Domhnall Gleeson. Wright spoke earnestly, like a proud older brother, of having worked with Knightley since “Pride and Prejudice,” when she was only “an ingenue.” Meanwhile, he said, his new movie, “Anna Karenina,” was about love, and about all the ways in which love makes us human. Wright and his actors slipped out a side door, and the movie began.
Wright’s “Anna Karenina” isn’t a straight-forward adaptation of the novel, but a fanciful, expressionistic reinterpretation of it, with a knowing, self-conscious screenplay by Tom Stoppard. The sets are inventive and metafictional. Knightley plays Anna with an edgy sensuality; Vronsky’s steeplechase is vivid and terrifying; the Levin and Kitty story is sweet, patient, and even spiritual. Still—if you know and love the novel, something about the movie just doesn’t feel right. The problem, I think, is that it’s too romantic. The film, as Wright promised, is all about love, but Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” isn’t a love story. If anything, “Anna Karenina” is a warning against the myth and cult of love.
When I first started reading “Anna Karenina,” ten years ago—I’m obsessed with the book, and have read it seven times since then—I, too, thought of it as a love story. I was twenty-three, and thinking of getting married; to me, it was obvious that the novel was about love, good and bad, wise and unwise. I read the novel as you might read any novel about marriage and adultery. You think about the protagonists and their choices; you root for happy endings. When they come, you applaud, and feel they’re well-deserved; when they don’t, you try to figure out what the lovers did wrong. But this love-story idea of love isn’t really native to “Anna Karenina.” Tolstoy, when he wrote the novel, was thinking about love in a different way: as a kind of fate, or curse, or judgment, and as a vector by which the universe distributes happiness and unhappiness, unfairly and apparently at random.
Those thoughts aren’t very romantic, but they are Tolstoyan. When he turned to “Anna Karenina,” Tolstoy didn’t simply leave behind the themes of “War and Peace.” Instead, he found a way of thinking about many of same issues that had always interested him—fate, chance, our powerlessness against circumstances and our determination to change them—in a different context. In 1873, when Tolstoy began writing “Anna Karenina,” he was in the midst of planning a historical novel about Peter the Great. Starting in 1870, he had shut himself up in his study at Yasnaya Polyana, reading and making notes, while his wife and their enormous brood of children tried to keep quiet outside. Peter the Great turned out to be too epic a subject even for Tolstoy. (“I am in a very bad mood,” he wrote to a friend. “Making no headway. The project I have chosen is incredibly difficult. There is no end to the preliminary research, the outline is swelling out of all proportion and I feel my strength ebbing away.”) Tolstoy needed a more manageable subject. Then he discovered something: another way into his concerns that wasn’t overblown and historical, but personal, intimate, and sad. In his biography of Tolstoy, Henri Troyat explains the novel’s origins this way:
Suddenly he had an illumination. He remembered an occurrence that had deeply affected him the previous year. A neighbor and friend of his, Bibikov, the snipe hunter, lived with a woman named Anna Stepanovna Pirogova, a tall, full-blown woman with a broad face and an easy-going nature, who had become his mistress. But he had been neglecting her of late for his children’s German governess. He had even made up his mind to marry the blond Frÿulein. Learning of his treachery, Anna Stepanovna’s jealousy burst all bounds; she ran away, carrying a bundle of clothes, and wandered about the countryside for three days, crazed with grief. Then she threw herself under a freight train at the Yasenki station. Before she died, she sent a note to Bibikov: “You are my murderer. Be happy, if an assassin can be happy. If you like you can see my corpse on the rails at Yasenki.” That was January 4, 1872. The following day Tolstoy had gone to the station as a spectator, while the autopsy was being performed in the presence of a police inspector. Standing in a corner of the shed, he had observed every detail of the woman’s body lying on the table, bloody and mutilated, with its skull crushed. How shameless, he thought, and yet how chaste. A dreadful lesson was brought home to him by that white, naked flesh, those dead breasts, those inert thighs that had felt and given pleasure. He tried to imagine the existence of this poor woman who had given all for love, only to meet with such a trite, ugly death.
I suppose that there’s a love story here, but what really interested Tolstoy wasn’t love, per se, but its extreme consequences. As Tolstoy began writing “Anna Karenina,” he introduced other characters and other stories, including the love story of Kitty and Levin. But at its core—without the balm of Kitty and Levin’s romance—“Anna Karenina” remains troubled by what happened to Anna Stepanovna. This makes it different from other love stories—in them, love is a positive good. If you have it, you’re glad, and if you don’t have it, you’re not. (Think of Lizzie Bennett and Charlotte Lucas, in “Pride and Prejudice.”) In “Anna Karenina,” love can be a curse as well as a blessing. It’s an elemental force in human affairs, like genius, or anger, or strength, or wealth. Sometimes it’s good, but sometimes it's awful, cruel, even dangerous. It’s wonderful that Levin and Kitty fall in love with one another—but Anna would have been better off if she had never fallen in love with Vronsky.
This view of love sounds fine, in theory, but in practice it can be hard to accept, because it runs against the mythology of love, which sees star-crossed lovers as more romantic, more in love, than the rest of us. That mythology urges us to see Anna’s death as a noble sacrifice: She gave up everything, we want to say, for a chance at love. It’s a seductive, but crazy, way to think. The fact of the matter is that nothing good came of the romance between Anna and Vronsky, and everyone would have been better off if it had never happened. Their affair was a cataclysm for Anna, obviously, but also for Vronsky, for Karenin, and for Seryozha, their son. In teaching the novel, I’ve seen students try to wriggle out of this conclusion; most of them do it by posing counterfactuals. Some argue that Anna didn’t have to commit suicide; the suicide was the mistake, the thinking goes, not the love affair. And you can also question the inevitability of Anna’s circumstances. Anna spirals into suicide, you might argue, for many historically contingent reasons: laws that are biased against women, religious prohibitions against divorce, a system of courtship that pushes girls to marry too young, and so on. It turned out badly, you might argue, but that wasn’t Anna’s fault—if things had been different, she and Vronsky could have been happy. And yet the point is that things weren’t different for Anna. The laws were unfair, but they were still laws. As my Jewish grandmother says: “What is, is.” “Anna Karenina” is preceded by an unsettling, unattributed epigraph quote: “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” That’s the sentiment, to some extent, behind Anna’s suicide. But it’s also, from Tolstoy’s point of view, a statement of fact about the universe. It doesn’t budge. What is, is.
If Anna isn’t the novel’s heroine—if she isn’t a martyr to Love—then what is she? Deciding what to think of Anna is one of the central challenges of “Anna Karenina.” Some readers, perhaps because they feel betrayed by Anna, end up questioning her character, or her judgment, or her motives. Unable to see her as good, they end up seeing her as bad. Keira Knightley, in an interview taped at the New York première, seems to feel this way: “As far as the story of ‘Anna Karenina,’” she says, “most people, in most adaptations—and I haven’t seen all of them—have taken Anna to be the heroine, and to be the innocent, a sort of saintly creature who is wronged, by the world, by her husband, by society, by everything. I didn’t necessarily think that when I read the book, the last time. I think you could also say that about Anna. But I think she is also the anti-hero.” Knightley ends up playing Anna as just a little wicked. (Some people will feel that there is too much lust, and not enough love, in her relationship with Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Vronsky.) Ultimately, though, “anti-hero” might be too strong a term for Anna. Tolstoy, as the critic Gary Saul Morson has argued, is sensitive to the fact that much of the evil in the world results not from malice, but from ignorance. Anna does bad things, but often only because she underestimates just how bad the consequences of those things will be. Anna doesn’t plan to fall in love with Vronsky, as such—she's not a cougar on the prowl—and one of the reasons for her later unhappiness is that, in sleeping with him, she has disappointed herself. In the novel’s (and the film’s) first episode, Anna travels to Moscow to act as a peacemaker between her brother Stiva and his wife Dolly, on whom he has cheated. Leaving, she can’t wait to get back to her family in St. Petersburg: “Thank God,” she thinks, “tomorrow I’ll see Seryozha and Alexei Alexandrovich, and my good and usual life will go on as before.”
Anna, Tolstoy suggests, is like the watchman who, at the beginning of the novel, gets run down by a train: “either drunk or too bundled up because of the freezing cold,” he doesn’t hear the train coming. Her affair with Vronsky is less like a love story, and more like a tragedy, ruled by fate. And Tolstoy is careful to show that the same is true, in an obverse way, for Levin and Kitty, who are simply lucky where Anna is unlucky. Levin, it turns out, had been in love with Kitty’s two older sisters; as things worked out, they happened to get married to other men (one of them, Dolly, to Stiva). Had things been different, Kitty might have ended up married to Stiva, not Levin, and Levin to Dolly. At one point, it appears that Levin is about to give up on Kitty completely; but, at just that moment, Kitty’s carriage happens to pass by the field where Levin is walking, deep in the countryside. And, of course, there’s the fact that Levin and Kitty might not be together at all were it not for Anna, who steals Vronsky from Kitty at a ball in the novel’s early pages. Almost as a provocation, Tolstoy places this fact—that Anna’s adultery paves the way for Levin and Kitty’s happy marriage—at the center of his novel, where it sits, a mute and ironic reminder of how much our own successes can depend on others’ disaster.
Tolstoy, I think, doesn’t know exactly how to think about Anna’s role in her own downfall, just as he doesn’t know exactly how to think about the free will of the soldiers and generals in “War and Peace.” He believes that we make choices, and that our sense of free will is based on something real. But he also has a deep respect for the complexity and power of our circumstances, and he considers our personalities and psychologies to be “circumstances,” too. There are limits to what we can do out there in the world, and there are also limits to what we can feel, endure, know, and imagine within ourselves. These inner limits may be just as permanent as the outer ones. In Anna’s case, she may have been hemmed in on all sides: driven, in her soul, to love Vronsky, while living in a world that made acting on that love unwise and unendurable. Or, she may have made an unwise choice, giving into desires she could have resisted because she underestimated how unyielding the world would be. We will never know what happened, exactly, just as Anna could not know. That’s one of the dreadful lessons of Anna’s story: she herself could not distinguish between what she was choosing to do and what she was driven to do. In life, we sometimes relinquish our freedom too easily, while, at other times, we struggle unwisely against laws that will not change. Give in too easily, and you drift through life; struggle too much, and you suffer for it.
After Anna dies, much of the end of the novel is devoted to Levin, who struggles to come to terms with the very small role he has played in his own happiness. Levin is likable, thoughtful, and sincere, but he is not particularly wise, experienced, or brilliant. (Tolstoy’s wife, Sonia, told Tolstoy that Levin was “you, without the talent.”) He is like Anna, in that he spends much of the novel debating, in a more overt and deliberate way, the same questions that Anna faces. Should he try to force the people and institutions around him to change, so that he can live in accordance with the dictates of his soul (for example, by remaking his farm along “modern” lines, politically and agriculturally)? Or should he submit to one of the pre-determined possibilities his world offers him and become a completely conventional gentleman farmer? Because he’s a rich, independent man, the stakes for him are lower than they are for Anna, but they’re still substantive: Levin feels that none of the usual ways of life will be meaningful for him, and he doesn’t want his life to be meaningless.
The thing about Levin is that, through some accident of temperament and circumstances, he ends up figuring things out. He struggles and shapes his own destiny just enough to be happy, while never going out of bounds, and ending up like Anna, or like his brother Nikolai, a political radical, who dies impoverished and angry. Somehow, over the course of the book, Levin achieves everything he wants: he is married to Kitty, and they have a beautiful family. And yet, he senses, he has not really improved himself in his soul, and he has done nothing to deserve his happiness. He still feels powerless, pointless, useless. “Happy in his family life,” Tolstoy writes, “a healthy man, Levin was several times so close to suicide that he hid a rope lest he hang himself with it, and was afraid to go about with a rifle lest he shoot himself.” In the end, he is carried along by the flow of life, and keeps on living. He finds his way to a diffuse kind of faith. There will be no radical transformations, he realizes, either romantic or religious. What is, is. He will try his best to be a good person, within the constraints that his circumstances and nature have placed upon him, and that will be good enough:
I’ll get angry in the same way with the coachman Ivan, argue in the same way, speak my mind inappropriately, there will be the same wall between my soul’s holy of holies and other people, even my wife, I’ll accuse her in the same way of my own fear and then regret it, I’ll fail in the same way to understand with my reason why I pray, and yet I will pray—but my life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it!
The novel leaves us with an answer that is also a riddle. Why was Levin able to find this peace, while Anna was not? Levin’s realization itself suggests that there’s no answer to that question. In “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” Isaiah Berlin writes that, for Tolstoy, wisdom consists in the ability “to grasp what human will and human reason can do, and what they cannot.” The only way to find those limits is to struggle against them, but gently, with the goal of finding and accepting them. You can’t think your way to the limits. You have to feel your way, learning through experience and suffering. And there is a risk in experimenting with what will and will not work in life, which is that it might not work. You might move to New York to pursue your dreams, and end up with no career to speak of. You might think you can wait to find the perfect spouse, but wait too long, and end up alone. You might think you can have that affair and still have the love of your spouse and children—but you may be mistaken about what’s possible, and lose everything.
There’s a deep conservatism to this way of thinking. It’s fatalistic, in an off-putting way, since it suggests that the limits of what’s possible are just not knowable in advance, and that experience and tradition are probably our best guides. In Anna’s case, it suggests that she should have tried harder to accept her unhappy marriage with Karenin. If she did try, and found herself hemmed in by limits on all sides, then there’s no making sense, in human terms, of her suffering. “Vengeance is mine; I will repay” is from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans; it’s in the middle of a beautiful passage about the difficulties of accepting injustices and differences. “We have many members in one body,” Paul says, “and all members have not the same office.”
Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, whether prophecy, let us prophesy according to the proportion of faith; or ministry, let us wait on our ministering: or he that teacheth, on teaching; or he that exhorteth, on exhortation: he that giveth, let him do it with simplicity; he that ruleth, with diligence; he that sheweth mercy, with cheerfulness. Let love be without dissimulation. Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good…Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.
To read “Anna Karenina” is to care about Anna. She is one of the best characters in fiction; everyone in “Anna Karenina” loves her, and so do we. Reading about her struggle, it’s natural to want to understand it. Should Anna be applauded for her passion, or condemned for her foolhardiness? Is she to be admired, or spurned? Wright and Stoppard know that “Anna Karenina” urges you to push those questions aside. In its final minutes, their film asks you to contemplate the injustice and unknowability of it all. Watching Levin and Kitty with their baby in the film’s closing minutes, you feel how blessed they are. Vikander and Gleeson share a silent, reverent look, and in it you see their consciousness of their own undeserved happiness—of God’s grace. Even so, the movie can never quite escape its love-story roots. Its characters are too typed—wicked Anna, pure Kitty—and it doesn’t show us enough of their ordinary, unromantic lives for us to understand how similar they are to one another. Wright’s film only shows its characters falling in love. Tolstoy’s novel can take its time, showing how these characters struggle and hesitate, think and watch, imagine and debate, suffer and forgive. It can rise above the very human questions of admiration and condemnation, above the might-have-beens and should-have-dones, and simply say: this is the way things are. Be thankful for your happiness.
I
Is “Anna Karenina” a Love Story?
Posted by Joshua Rothman
A few weeks ago, on an appropriately snowy Wednesday, my wife and I went to see the new film version of “Anna Karenina.” It was the movie’s New York première, and, before it started, Joe Wright, the director, a dark-haired Englishman in a gray suit, stood up to say a few words. He introduced Keira Knightley, who plays Anna, along with the actors who play Kitty and Levin, Alicia Vikander and Domhnall Gleeson. Wright spoke earnestly, like a proud older brother, of having worked with Knightley since “Pride and Prejudice,” when she was only “an ingenue.” Meanwhile, he said, his new movie, “Anna Karenina,” was about love, and about all the ways in which love makes us human. Wright and his actors slipped out a side door, and the movie began.
Wright’s “Anna Karenina” isn’t a straight-forward adaptation of the novel, but a fanciful, expressionistic reinterpretation of it, with a knowing, self-conscious screenplay by Tom Stoppard. The sets are inventive and metafictional. Knightley plays Anna with an edgy sensuality; Vronsky’s steeplechase is vivid and terrifying; the Levin and Kitty story is sweet, patient, and even spiritual. Still—if you know and love the novel, something about the movie just doesn’t feel right. The problem, I think, is that it’s too romantic. The film, as Wright promised, is all about love, but Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” isn’t a love story. If anything, “Anna Karenina” is a warning against the myth and cult of love.
When I first started reading “Anna Karenina,” ten years ago—I’m obsessed with the book, and have read it seven times since then—I, too, thought of it as a love story. I was twenty-three, and thinking of getting married; to me, it was obvious that the novel was about love, good and bad, wise and unwise. I read the novel as you might read any novel about marriage and adultery. You think about the protagonists and their choices; you root for happy endings. When they come, you applaud, and feel they’re well-deserved; when they don’t, you try to figure out what the lovers did wrong. But this love-story idea of love isn’t really native to “Anna Karenina.” Tolstoy, when he wrote the novel, was thinking about love in a different way: as a kind of fate, or curse, or judgment, and as a vector by which the universe distributes happiness and unhappiness, unfairly and apparently at random.
Those thoughts aren’t very romantic, but they are Tolstoyan. When he turned to “Anna Karenina,” Tolstoy didn’t simply leave behind the themes of “War and Peace.” Instead, he found a way of thinking about many of same issues that had always interested him—fate, chance, our powerlessness against circumstances and our determination to change them—in a different context. In 1873, when Tolstoy began writing “Anna Karenina,” he was in the midst of planning a historical novel about Peter the Great. Starting in 1870, he had shut himself up in his study at Yasnaya Polyana, reading and making notes, while his wife and their enormous brood of children tried to keep quiet outside. Peter the Great turned out to be too epic a subject even for Tolstoy. (“I am in a very bad mood,” he wrote to a friend. “Making no headway. The project I have chosen is incredibly difficult. There is no end to the preliminary research, the outline is swelling out of all proportion and I feel my strength ebbing away.”) Tolstoy needed a more manageable subject. Then he discovered something: another way into his concerns that wasn’t overblown and historical, but personal, intimate, and sad. In his biography of Tolstoy, Henri Troyat explains the novel’s origins this way:
Suddenly he had an illumination. He remembered an occurrence that had deeply affected him the previous year. A neighbor and friend of his, Bibikov, the snipe hunter, lived with a woman named Anna Stepanovna Pirogova, a tall, full-blown woman with a broad face and an easy-going nature, who had become his mistress. But he had been neglecting her of late for his children’s German governess. He had even made up his mind to marry the blond Frÿulein. Learning of his treachery, Anna Stepanovna’s jealousy burst all bounds; she ran away, carrying a bundle of clothes, and wandered about the countryside for three days, crazed with grief. Then she threw herself under a freight train at the Yasenki station. Before she died, she sent a note to Bibikov: “You are my murderer. Be happy, if an assassin can be happy. If you like you can see my corpse on the rails at Yasenki.” That was January 4, 1872. The following day Tolstoy had gone to the station as a spectator, while the autopsy was being performed in the presence of a police inspector. Standing in a corner of the shed, he had observed every detail of the woman’s body lying on the table, bloody and mutilated, with its skull crushed. How shameless, he thought, and yet how chaste. A dreadful lesson was brought home to him by that white, naked flesh, those dead breasts, those inert thighs that had felt and given pleasure. He tried to imagine the existence of this poor woman who had given all for love, only to meet with such a trite, ugly death.
I suppose that there’s a love story here, but what really interested Tolstoy wasn’t love, per se, but its extreme consequences. As Tolstoy began writing “Anna Karenina,” he introduced other characters and other stories, including the love story of Kitty and Levin. But at its core—without the balm of Kitty and Levin’s romance—“Anna Karenina” remains troubled by what happened to Anna Stepanovna. This makes it different from other love stories—in them, love is a positive good. If you have it, you’re glad, and if you don’t have it, you’re not. (Think of Lizzie Bennett and Charlotte Lucas, in “Pride and Prejudice.”) In “Anna Karenina,” love can be a curse as well as a blessing. It’s an elemental force in human affairs, like genius, or anger, or strength, or wealth. Sometimes it’s good, but sometimes it's awful, cruel, even dangerous. It’s wonderful that Levin and Kitty fall in love with one another—but Anna would have been better off if she had never fallen in love with Vronsky.
This view of love sounds fine, in theory, but in practice it can be hard to accept, because it runs against the mythology of love, which sees star-crossed lovers as more romantic, more in love, than the rest of us. That mythology urges us to see Anna’s death as a noble sacrifice: She gave up everything, we want to say, for a chance at love. It’s a seductive, but crazy, way to think. The fact of the matter is that nothing good came of the romance between Anna and Vronsky, and everyone would have been better off if it had never happened. Their affair was a cataclysm for Anna, obviously, but also for Vronsky, for Karenin, and for Seryozha, their son. In teaching the novel, I’ve seen students try to wriggle out of this conclusion; most of them do it by posing counterfactuals. Some argue that Anna didn’t have to commit suicide; the suicide was the mistake, the thinking goes, not the love affair. And you can also question the inevitability of Anna’s circumstances. Anna spirals into suicide, you might argue, for many historically contingent reasons: laws that are biased against women, religious prohibitions against divorce, a system of courtship that pushes girls to marry too young, and so on. It turned out badly, you might argue, but that wasn’t Anna’s fault—if things had been different, she and Vronsky could have been happy. And yet the point is that things weren’t different for Anna. The laws were unfair, but they were still laws. As my Jewish grandmother says: “What is, is.” “Anna Karenina” is preceded by an unsettling, unattributed epigraph quote: “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” That’s the sentiment, to some extent, behind Anna’s suicide. But it’s also, from Tolstoy’s point of view, a statement of fact about the universe. It doesn’t budge. What is, is.
If Anna isn’t the novel’s heroine—if she isn’t a martyr to Love—then what is she? Deciding what to think of Anna is one of the central challenges of “Anna Karenina.” Some readers, perhaps because they feel betrayed by Anna, end up questioning her character, or her judgment, or her motives. Unable to see her as good, they end up seeing her as bad. Keira Knightley, in an interview taped at the New York première, seems to feel this way: “As far as the story of ‘Anna Karenina,’” she says, “most people, in most adaptations—and I haven’t seen all of them—have taken Anna to be the heroine, and to be the innocent, a sort of saintly creature who is wronged, by the world, by her husband, by society, by everything. I didn’t necessarily think that when I read the book, the last time. I think you could also say that about Anna. But I think she is also the anti-hero.” Knightley ends up playing Anna as just a little wicked. (Some people will feel that there is too much lust, and not enough love, in her relationship with Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Vronsky.) Ultimately, though, “anti-hero” might be too strong a term for Anna. Tolstoy, as the critic Gary Saul Morson has argued, is sensitive to the fact that much of the evil in the world results not from malice, but from ignorance. Anna does bad things, but often only because she underestimates just how bad the consequences of those things will be. Anna doesn’t plan to fall in love with Vronsky, as such—she's not a cougar on the prowl—and one of the reasons for her later unhappiness is that, in sleeping with him, she has disappointed herself. In the novel’s (and the film’s) first episode, Anna travels to Moscow to act as a peacemaker between her brother Stiva and his wife Dolly, on whom he has cheated. Leaving, she can’t wait to get back to her family in St. Petersburg: “Thank God,” she thinks, “tomorrow I’ll see Seryozha and Alexei Alexandrovich, and my good and usual life will go on as before.”
Anna, Tolstoy suggests, is like the watchman who, at the beginning of the novel, gets run down by a train: “either drunk or too bundled up because of the freezing cold,” he doesn’t hear the train coming. Her affair with Vronsky is less like a love story, and more like a tragedy, ruled by fate. And Tolstoy is careful to show that the same is true, in an obverse way, for Levin and Kitty, who are simply lucky where Anna is unlucky. Levin, it turns out, had been in love with Kitty’s two older sisters; as things worked out, they happened to get married to other men (one of them, Dolly, to Stiva). Had things been different, Kitty might have ended up married to Stiva, not Levin, and Levin to Dolly. At one point, it appears that Levin is about to give up on Kitty completely; but, at just that moment, Kitty’s carriage happens to pass by the field where Levin is walking, deep in the countryside. And, of course, there’s the fact that Levin and Kitty might not be together at all were it not for Anna, who steals Vronsky from Kitty at a ball in the novel’s early pages. Almost as a provocation, Tolstoy places this fact—that Anna’s adultery paves the way for Levin and Kitty’s happy marriage—at the center of his novel, where it sits, a mute and ironic reminder of how much our own successes can depend on others’ disaster.
Tolstoy, I think, doesn’t know exactly how to think about Anna’s role in her own downfall, just as he doesn’t know exactly how to think about the free will of the soldiers and generals in “War and Peace.” He believes that we make choices, and that our sense of free will is based on something real. But he also has a deep respect for the complexity and power of our circumstances, and he considers our personalities and psychologies to be “circumstances,” too. There are limits to what we can do out there in the world, and there are also limits to what we can feel, endure, know, and imagine within ourselves. These inner limits may be just as permanent as the outer ones. In Anna’s case, she may have been hemmed in on all sides: driven, in her soul, to love Vronsky, while living in a world that made acting on that love unwise and unendurable. Or, she may have made an unwise choice, giving into desires she could have resisted because she underestimated how unyielding the world would be. We will never know what happened, exactly, just as Anna could not know. That’s one of the dreadful lessons of Anna’s story: she herself could not distinguish between what she was choosing to do and what she was driven to do. In life, we sometimes relinquish our freedom too easily, while, at other times, we struggle unwisely against laws that will not change. Give in too easily, and you drift through life; struggle too much, and you suffer for it.
After Anna dies, much of the end of the novel is devoted to Levin, who struggles to come to terms with the very small role he has played in his own happiness. Levin is likable, thoughtful, and sincere, but he is not particularly wise, experienced, or brilliant. (Tolstoy’s wife, Sonia, told Tolstoy that Levin was “you, without the talent.”) He is like Anna, in that he spends much of the novel debating, in a more overt and deliberate way, the same questions that Anna faces. Should he try to force the people and institutions around him to change, so that he can live in accordance with the dictates of his soul (for example, by remaking his farm along “modern” lines, politically and agriculturally)? Or should he submit to one of the pre-determined possibilities his world offers him and become a completely conventional gentleman farmer? Because he’s a rich, independent man, the stakes for him are lower than they are for Anna, but they’re still substantive: Levin feels that none of the usual ways of life will be meaningful for him, and he doesn’t want his life to be meaningless.
The thing about Levin is that, through some accident of temperament and circumstances, he ends up figuring things out. He struggles and shapes his own destiny just enough to be happy, while never going out of bounds, and ending up like Anna, or like his brother Nikolai, a political radical, who dies impoverished and angry. Somehow, over the course of the book, Levin achieves everything he wants: he is married to Kitty, and they have a beautiful family. And yet, he senses, he has not really improved himself in his soul, and he has done nothing to deserve his happiness. He still feels powerless, pointless, useless. “Happy in his family life,” Tolstoy writes, “a healthy man, Levin was several times so close to suicide that he hid a rope lest he hang himself with it, and was afraid to go about with a rifle lest he shoot himself.” In the end, he is carried along by the flow of life, and keeps on living. He finds his way to a diffuse kind of faith. There will be no radical transformations, he realizes, either romantic or religious. What is, is. He will try his best to be a good person, within the constraints that his circumstances and nature have placed upon him, and that will be good enough:
I’ll get angry in the same way with the coachman Ivan, argue in the same way, speak my mind inappropriately, there will be the same wall between my soul’s holy of holies and other people, even my wife, I’ll accuse her in the same way of my own fear and then regret it, I’ll fail in the same way to understand with my reason why I pray, and yet I will pray—but my life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it!
The novel leaves us with an answer that is also a riddle. Why was Levin able to find this peace, while Anna was not? Levin’s realization itself suggests that there’s no answer to that question. In “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” Isaiah Berlin writes that, for Tolstoy, wisdom consists in the ability “to grasp what human will and human reason can do, and what they cannot.” The only way to find those limits is to struggle against them, but gently, with the goal of finding and accepting them. You can’t think your way to the limits. You have to feel your way, learning through experience and suffering. And there is a risk in experimenting with what will and will not work in life, which is that it might not work. You might move to New York to pursue your dreams, and end up with no career to speak of. You might think you can wait to find the perfect spouse, but wait too long, and end up alone. You might think you can have that affair and still have the love of your spouse and children—but you may be mistaken about what’s possible, and lose everything.
There’s a deep conservatism to this way of thinking. It’s fatalistic, in an off-putting way, since it suggests that the limits of what’s possible are just not knowable in advance, and that experience and tradition are probably our best guides. In Anna’s case, it suggests that she should have tried harder to accept her unhappy marriage with Karenin. If she did try, and found herself hemmed in by limits on all sides, then there’s no making sense, in human terms, of her suffering. “Vengeance is mine; I will repay” is from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans; it’s in the middle of a beautiful passage about the difficulties of accepting injustices and differences. “We have many members in one body,” Paul says, “and all members have not the same office.”
Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, whether prophecy, let us prophesy according to the proportion of faith; or ministry, let us wait on our ministering: or he that teacheth, on teaching; or he that exhorteth, on exhortation: he that giveth, let him do it with simplicity; he that ruleth, with diligence; he that sheweth mercy, with cheerfulness. Let love be without dissimulation. Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good…Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.
To read “Anna Karenina” is to care about Anna. She is one of the best characters in fiction; everyone in “Anna Karenina” loves her, and so do we. Reading about her struggle, it’s natural to want to understand it. Should Anna be applauded for her passion, or condemned for her foolhardiness? Is she to be admired, or spurned? Wright and Stoppard know that “Anna Karenina” urges you to push those questions aside. In its final minutes, their film asks you to contemplate the injustice and unknowability of it all. Watching Levin and Kitty with their baby in the film’s closing minutes, you feel how blessed they are. Vikander and Gleeson share a silent, reverent look, and in it you see their consciousness of their own undeserved happiness—of God’s grace. Even so, the movie can never quite escape its love-story roots. Its characters are too typed—wicked Anna, pure Kitty—and it doesn’t show us enough of their ordinary, unromantic lives for us to understand how similar they are to one another. Wright’s film only shows its characters falling in love. Tolstoy’s novel can take its time, showing how these characters struggle and hesitate, think and watch, imagine and debate, suffer and forgive. It can rise above the very human questions of admiration and condemnation, above the might-have-beens and should-have-dones, and simply say: this is the way things are. Be thankful for your happiness.
I
Saturday, November 24, 2012
Lincoln the Uncompromised
November 24, 2012
Lincoln, Uncompromised
Posted by Adam Gopnik
Universal praise goes, rightly, to the Spielberg/Kushner/Day-Lewis “Lincoln”—though the exasperating American habit of praising the director as though he wrote the words, took the pictures, and applied the actors’ makeup and the spirit gum that holds on their (in this instance, sometimes very stagy-seeming) beards, persists. What directors do, as actual directors know, is to inspire the actors—often as much by silent trust as by specific instruction—and lead the team. All praise to the much-sainted Steven, then, but let us add a few words about, well, Lincoln’s words, so perfectly imagined and recast by Tony Kushner, and so perfectly inhabited by the great Daniel Day-Lewis, who in his last few roles has been acting on some other plane than any we have been familiar with before. (Though has anyone mentioned that his voice here—not high really, so much as a clear tenor and firm—as well as his gait, is uncannily like that of James Taylor?)
The best scene in the picture, from this doubtless prejudiced perch, is the one in which Lincoln explains why the anti-slavery amendment to the Constitution, in spite of apparently duplicating the Emancipation Proclamation, is essential. It’s a tortuously ornate courtroom argument, written fearlessly by Kushner in all its complexity, and delivered by Lewis at what in lesser hands might have been tedious length. The point is that, in Lincoln’s view, the Southern rebellion is not just wrong but manifestly illegal: the Rebels have no more actually seceded from the Union than a bank robber can declare his secession from the laws against bank robbery. Rob a bank and you’re still a crook, no matter what you may say about it; put a Confederate army in the field, and you’re still a citizen of the United States, just one who happens right now to be shooting at your fellow citizens and burning down their houses. This means, Lincoln argues, a little paradoxically, that the laws of the South as they existed in their pre-war state still apply and must be respected—since if one doesn’t respect them, or acts as though some fundamental breach or disjunction has actually occurred, then you undermine the whole premise of the absolute argument, which is not that secession is wrong and should be undone, but that secession has never actually taken place, because it cannot. Therefore, the amendment is absolutely necessary and supersedes the Proclamation—which has been justified as the militarily necessary seizure of contraband “property.” If Lincoln is right, then the slaves are still slaves despite the Proclamation, unless the amendment is passed.
It’s a tricky lawyers’ argument, and in a certain sense ignores the way winners make up the laws, as the winner makes up justice for the losers. It was, ahem, the theme of my 2009 book, “Angels and Ages,” begun in these pages as an essay about Lincoln’s language, that for Lincoln the law was the lingua franca, the heart and the spirit, of his life. He made that kind of close legal argument, ornamented by bald plain speech, the sound of liberal rhetoric. (Kushner and Spielberg, too bad, couldn’t slip in one of the best scenes from the negotiation with the Rebel commissioners, who play a big part in the film. One of the commissioners said, intending to underline the absurdity of Lincoln’s absolutist case, “You mean that we are rebels according to your view of the case and we are all guilty of treason and liable to be hanged!” Lincoln replied, simply and coolly and in a manner not even unfriendly: “Yes, that is so.”)
There is another side to the film that needs some airing, though. The movie is inspired by Doris Kearns Goodwin’s much and justly praised “Team Of Rivals.” But good books often cast strange shadows, and Goodwin’s account of Lincoln’s enormous instinctive shrewdness in managing his stroppy cabinet of prima donnas has been confused with the idea that Lincoln’s genius was for conciliation and compromise. This leads, in turn, to the notion that Lincoln was a kind of schmoozemeister, reaching out across the aisle, a sort of Tip O’Neill on the Atkins diet. It can’t be said too often, or too clearly, that the whole point of Lincoln is that he—and the Republican Party he then represented—marked the end of the policy of conciliation and compromise and cosseting that had been the general approach of Northern Presidents to the Southern slavery problem throughout the decades before. When the South seceded, Lincoln chose war—an all-out, brutal, bitter war of a kind that had never been fought until then. “Let the erring sisters go in peace!” the editor Horace Greeley recommended, and Lincoln said, “Lock the doors and make them stay.”
A rational case can be made that this was mistaken, or even immoral. A friend, himself no ally to racism, God knows, wrote after seeing “Lincoln” that the real question is “whether he would have embarked on the Civil War had he known that its toll would have been so unfathomably great.” And, the details of Fort Sumter aside, it was a war for the North to make. The South did not seek to conquer the North; it merely sought to withdraw. It was the North that acted like some deranged abusive husband: “You’ll never leave me, not alive!” How, my friend asked, could the slaughter that followed provide an object lesson in the glory of democracy? Many quavers and objections might be raised to the above: if any one side had been the provocateur, it was, after all, the South; more important, secession from the Union would have involved the unwilled secession from all hope of the black population of the South. Still, any honest account of Lincoln’s life and its meaning must turn honestly not around conciliation and its joys, but around confrontation and its horrors, even when the confrontation is necessary and the horrors can be seen as honors. Spielberg and Kushner attempt to raise the question of confrontation, in the visual language of the movies, simply by having Lincoln, unhistorically, actually tour the battlefield of Petersburg, with the dead bodies all still gory and in place.
And the right answer, the plausible answer, remains that of the Gettysburg Address: that what was at stake was not just Unionist self-aggrandizement but the idea of government by the people (the male ones, anyway), itself, and by act and implication, as the movie demonstrates, thereby the ultimate end of slavery. Slavery was always the question, and to insist that, had the South seceded in peace, its peculiar institution would have vanished on its own is to suppose an inevitability in history that history never provides. (I am always reminded, in this instance, of the final absurd title card in the Kubrick-Douglas “Spartacus,” which explains that though Spartacus’s rebellion failed, it pointed the way towards the eventual abolition of slavery—which indeed happened, about two thousand years later.)
In any case, the liberals in Europe did look at the American experience and say: that’s exactly what we want—the great John Stuart Mill first among them. Both the Reform Act, in Britain, and the rebirth of the French Republic in the 1870s, drew direct inspiration from the demonstration of the power of democracy in America to end slavery and keep itself intact. Mass death and mass dying seem no barrier to moral envy, as we might recall if we remember the Greatest Generation mania of the nineties. Wouldn’t Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” with its brutal images of mass slaughter on the Normandy beach, have told you that so much death and dying might not have been worth any prize, especially given that by that point Hitler was not about to cross the Atlantic? Instead, everyone looked at it and said, why can’t our generation be less prosperous and peaceful (and lecherous), and more like theirs, dying face down in the surf! They were heroes, it’s true—but we are right to recall that heroism has a real, not a rhetorical, cost. Licoln was an uncompromising man who sponsored violence on a hitherto unimaginable scale; that he paid the highest price himself for the noble but hugely costly morality in which he believed is one of the things that makes his story still so fateful and, in its way, uncompromised.
Lincoln, Uncompromised
Posted by Adam Gopnik
Universal praise goes, rightly, to the Spielberg/Kushner/Day-Lewis “Lincoln”—though the exasperating American habit of praising the director as though he wrote the words, took the pictures, and applied the actors’ makeup and the spirit gum that holds on their (in this instance, sometimes very stagy-seeming) beards, persists. What directors do, as actual directors know, is to inspire the actors—often as much by silent trust as by specific instruction—and lead the team. All praise to the much-sainted Steven, then, but let us add a few words about, well, Lincoln’s words, so perfectly imagined and recast by Tony Kushner, and so perfectly inhabited by the great Daniel Day-Lewis, who in his last few roles has been acting on some other plane than any we have been familiar with before. (Though has anyone mentioned that his voice here—not high really, so much as a clear tenor and firm—as well as his gait, is uncannily like that of James Taylor?)
The best scene in the picture, from this doubtless prejudiced perch, is the one in which Lincoln explains why the anti-slavery amendment to the Constitution, in spite of apparently duplicating the Emancipation Proclamation, is essential. It’s a tortuously ornate courtroom argument, written fearlessly by Kushner in all its complexity, and delivered by Lewis at what in lesser hands might have been tedious length. The point is that, in Lincoln’s view, the Southern rebellion is not just wrong but manifestly illegal: the Rebels have no more actually seceded from the Union than a bank robber can declare his secession from the laws against bank robbery. Rob a bank and you’re still a crook, no matter what you may say about it; put a Confederate army in the field, and you’re still a citizen of the United States, just one who happens right now to be shooting at your fellow citizens and burning down their houses. This means, Lincoln argues, a little paradoxically, that the laws of the South as they existed in their pre-war state still apply and must be respected—since if one doesn’t respect them, or acts as though some fundamental breach or disjunction has actually occurred, then you undermine the whole premise of the absolute argument, which is not that secession is wrong and should be undone, but that secession has never actually taken place, because it cannot. Therefore, the amendment is absolutely necessary and supersedes the Proclamation—which has been justified as the militarily necessary seizure of contraband “property.” If Lincoln is right, then the slaves are still slaves despite the Proclamation, unless the amendment is passed.
It’s a tricky lawyers’ argument, and in a certain sense ignores the way winners make up the laws, as the winner makes up justice for the losers. It was, ahem, the theme of my 2009 book, “Angels and Ages,” begun in these pages as an essay about Lincoln’s language, that for Lincoln the law was the lingua franca, the heart and the spirit, of his life. He made that kind of close legal argument, ornamented by bald plain speech, the sound of liberal rhetoric. (Kushner and Spielberg, too bad, couldn’t slip in one of the best scenes from the negotiation with the Rebel commissioners, who play a big part in the film. One of the commissioners said, intending to underline the absurdity of Lincoln’s absolutist case, “You mean that we are rebels according to your view of the case and we are all guilty of treason and liable to be hanged!” Lincoln replied, simply and coolly and in a manner not even unfriendly: “Yes, that is so.”)
There is another side to the film that needs some airing, though. The movie is inspired by Doris Kearns Goodwin’s much and justly praised “Team Of Rivals.” But good books often cast strange shadows, and Goodwin’s account of Lincoln’s enormous instinctive shrewdness in managing his stroppy cabinet of prima donnas has been confused with the idea that Lincoln’s genius was for conciliation and compromise. This leads, in turn, to the notion that Lincoln was a kind of schmoozemeister, reaching out across the aisle, a sort of Tip O’Neill on the Atkins diet. It can’t be said too often, or too clearly, that the whole point of Lincoln is that he—and the Republican Party he then represented—marked the end of the policy of conciliation and compromise and cosseting that had been the general approach of Northern Presidents to the Southern slavery problem throughout the decades before. When the South seceded, Lincoln chose war—an all-out, brutal, bitter war of a kind that had never been fought until then. “Let the erring sisters go in peace!” the editor Horace Greeley recommended, and Lincoln said, “Lock the doors and make them stay.”
A rational case can be made that this was mistaken, or even immoral. A friend, himself no ally to racism, God knows, wrote after seeing “Lincoln” that the real question is “whether he would have embarked on the Civil War had he known that its toll would have been so unfathomably great.” And, the details of Fort Sumter aside, it was a war for the North to make. The South did not seek to conquer the North; it merely sought to withdraw. It was the North that acted like some deranged abusive husband: “You’ll never leave me, not alive!” How, my friend asked, could the slaughter that followed provide an object lesson in the glory of democracy? Many quavers and objections might be raised to the above: if any one side had been the provocateur, it was, after all, the South; more important, secession from the Union would have involved the unwilled secession from all hope of the black population of the South. Still, any honest account of Lincoln’s life and its meaning must turn honestly not around conciliation and its joys, but around confrontation and its horrors, even when the confrontation is necessary and the horrors can be seen as honors. Spielberg and Kushner attempt to raise the question of confrontation, in the visual language of the movies, simply by having Lincoln, unhistorically, actually tour the battlefield of Petersburg, with the dead bodies all still gory and in place.
And the right answer, the plausible answer, remains that of the Gettysburg Address: that what was at stake was not just Unionist self-aggrandizement but the idea of government by the people (the male ones, anyway), itself, and by act and implication, as the movie demonstrates, thereby the ultimate end of slavery. Slavery was always the question, and to insist that, had the South seceded in peace, its peculiar institution would have vanished on its own is to suppose an inevitability in history that history never provides. (I am always reminded, in this instance, of the final absurd title card in the Kubrick-Douglas “Spartacus,” which explains that though Spartacus’s rebellion failed, it pointed the way towards the eventual abolition of slavery—which indeed happened, about two thousand years later.)
In any case, the liberals in Europe did look at the American experience and say: that’s exactly what we want—the great John Stuart Mill first among them. Both the Reform Act, in Britain, and the rebirth of the French Republic in the 1870s, drew direct inspiration from the demonstration of the power of democracy in America to end slavery and keep itself intact. Mass death and mass dying seem no barrier to moral envy, as we might recall if we remember the Greatest Generation mania of the nineties. Wouldn’t Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” with its brutal images of mass slaughter on the Normandy beach, have told you that so much death and dying might not have been worth any prize, especially given that by that point Hitler was not about to cross the Atlantic? Instead, everyone looked at it and said, why can’t our generation be less prosperous and peaceful (and lecherous), and more like theirs, dying face down in the surf! They were heroes, it’s true—but we are right to recall that heroism has a real, not a rhetorical, cost. Licoln was an uncompromising man who sponsored violence on a hitherto unimaginable scale; that he paid the highest price himself for the noble but hugely costly morality in which he believed is one of the things that makes his story still so fateful and, in its way, uncompromised.
Friday, November 23, 2012
The Party of the Plutocrats
Content Section Off the Rails: How the Party of Lincoln Became the Party of Plutocrats
by Joel Kotkin
Nov 22, 2012 11:52 AM EST It’s time for Republicans to finally embrace the healthy role that Americans want government to play, writes Joel Kotkin.
For a century now, Republicans have confused being the party of plutocrats with being the party of prosperity. Thus Mitt Romney.
To win back the so-called 47 percent—an insulting description Romney doubled down after the election when he blamed his loss on Obama’s “gifts”—Republican might look farther back, past Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover to their first president, Abraham Lincoln.
Not only did he spring from the ranks of the plebeian, not the preps, but—as Michael Lind points out in What Lincoln Believed—he aimed to both increase opportunity and expand national power. A corporate attorney, he backed railroad interests and their expansion, which paced the nation’s economic ascendancy, but saw this as part of creating greater opportunity, particularly in the West, for the country’s middle and working classes. He also enacted the Homestead Act, which supplied aspiring settlers with a gift: 160 acres of federal land.
Whether or not these acts were populist in their intent, their effects helped people achieve their aspirations. Expansion westward was nothing less than the basis of the American dream, allowing millions, many from land-poor and feudalized Europe, an opportunity to strike out on their own.
This aspirational element should be the centerpiece of the Republican message in this age of growing class bifurcation. The loss of upward mobility long predates President Obama, though it has accelerated under him—with median household incomes down by more than $4,000 since he took office. Even the tepid economy has not done much to improve middle-class fortunes since nearly three-fifths of new jobs are in lower-wage positions.
Without some unforeseen economic rebound, class issues will dominate our politics in the future even more than they do today. To recover, Republicans, now losing consistently (and often deservedly) on cultural issues, need to outmaneuver the Democrats on their ability to provide opportunity and upward mobility to a broad range of Americans.
In the past, Republican deflected class concerns by focusing on cultural issues, national defense or ideology—but these tactics have worn themselves out.
In his time, Lincoln understood the usefulness of class warfare. Tied to industrial interests, he waged a bloody class war on the slave-owning gentry of the South, a group so detestable it makes today’s Wall Street elites seem almost saintly by comparison. Financiers and industrialists may have supported this brutal war between the states, but it was largely aspiring yeoman farmers, skilled workers, and small merchants—all beneficiaries of Lincoln’s expansive economic vision—who fought it.
In recent decades, Republicans—conscious of their patrician backers—have suppressed thinking about class, often criticizing Democrats for having no such scruples.
This made them unable to turn issues such as the bank bailouts to their favor; Romney, himself an economic royalist, could not bring himself to denounce the administration’s policies that have worked out wonderfully for large banks now enjoying record profits while pummeling the middle class.
In the past, Republican deflected class concerns by focusing on cultural issues, national defense, or ideology—but these tactics have worn themselves out. Of course, some conservatives will blame their defeat on a candidate of uncertain convictions and without commitment to the social regressive policies. Yet evangelicals mounted a record effort to get out the vote; it’s hard to see how Romney would have done better trying to sound more like Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock.
What should concern Republicans was declining turnout in traditionally GOP-leaning suburbs, the very places where middle-class professionals and business owners reside. These voters were not energized by Romney. So even though he improved the GOP’s 2008 vote among the middle class and independents, Romney’s total was about 1,000,000 below that of John McCain. Had Romney equaled McCain’s performance in four states (Florida, Ohio, Virginia, and Colorado), he would have won, rather than losing to a president who received 7 million fewer votes than in the previous election.
Let’s take a measurement of base stagnation: the nation’s population has grown 20 million since George Bush was elected in 2004, but the GOP vote has actually shrunk. This correlates as well with a stunning decline of roughly 8 million white voters compared to 2008. The white population may be getting old, but it’s not dying off that rapidly.
This low turnout is remarkable given how unfavorably Obama is viewed by much of the yeoman class. In fact, as Gallup notes, nearly 60 percent of small-business owners disapprove of Obama. The problem was many simply did not see Romney as a viable—let alone an attractive—alternative. In contrast, the Obama team did a far better job of turning out their base of minority, youth, single and childless women, and union members—an effort that delivered their margin of victory in swing states including Ohio, Nevada, and Colorado.
To change the political dynamic, Republicans need to address class concerns, particularly those of small property owners and aspirant small entrepreneurs. Yet the GOP has no program for this group other than lower taxes and hollow promises to cut the budget (which, of course, they have not done, even when holding both houses of Congress and the presidency). The party’s hodgepodge of corporate managerialism, social regressiveness, and, above all, protection of the plutocratic class is demonstrably not compelling to most Americans.
It’s hard for a Main Street business owner, or sole proprietor working from home, to relate to a plutocrat, like Romney, who pays lower effective tax rates than they do. Outrage against looming tax hikes would be justifiable, if the true motivation were not so plainly to preserve the privileges of the haute bourgeoisie. This is a politically doomed approach; while small business is widely revered by Americans, big business and banks are among the least well-regarded.
Class also would provide a means to define negatively the current regime. Instead of making silly attacks on President Obama as a “socialist,” he would be more accurately portrayed as the tribune of both the crony capitalists on Wall Street or Silicon Valley and of big labor, particularly public-employee unions. Obama should also be toxic to grassroots entrepreneurs, who will bear the brunt of the new regulatory regime, health-care system, higher energy prices, as well as rising income taxes.
Rather than label him as a radical, Republicans should identify him as an avatar of those who are doing best in our concussed economy, and presumably want things to stay that way. His most ardent backers include many of our richest, most celebrated citizens—fabulously wealthy Hollywood types, the Silicon Valley elite as well as those controlling our major media and universities. There’s a reason Obama bested Romney in eight of America’s 10 richest counties.
In Marin County, Calif.—where Obama claimed nearly 75 percent of the vote—expensive energy and higher housing prices represent not a burden but an environmental good, and, when it comes to housing, an economic opportunity for some to benefit from artificial, government-imposed scarcity. Ban new single-family homes, and the value of the existing stock goes up; for the elite investing class, incentives for “green energy” developments offer insider opportunities to enjoy windfall profits at the expense of middle-class-rate payers.
If Wall Street wants to join the “progressive” gentry parade again, as it did in 2008, Republican should encourage them. Being the candidate of the phenomenally unpopular financial overclass may have bought Romney the nomination, but it sealed his fate in the general election.
To reclaim its Lincolnesque transformation, the GOP needs to fundamentally pivot on the role of government. Laissez-faire ideology has its merits, but cannot compete successfully with a population weaned on the welfare state, whose members are keenly attuned to their vulnerability in our volatile era.
By admitting that government is sometimes a necessary partner in nurturing and sometimes financing infrastructure critical for economic expansion, Republicans can offer their own vision of what growth-inducing services such as new roads—as opposed to the increased regulation and transfer payments and pension bloat peddled by Democrats—government can and should provide. This could appeal to Hispanics, Asians, and younger people who would be the prime beneficiaries of tangible investments.
As generational chroniclers Morley Winograd and Mike Hais have suggested, most younger people support government action to solve problems but generally dislike the kind of top-down solutions often supported by Democrats. As these voters age, seek to buy homes and start businesses, they might listen to a sensible alternative that does not seek to enhance the left-wing clerisy’s ambition to control all aspects of their lives.
It’s time for Republicans to break with the traditions of Goldwater, Reagan, and, particularly, Bush and shift to something more akin to the party’s roots in the mid-19th century. This party needs less preaching and libertarian manifestos that essentially defend plutocracy. Instead it’s time to embrace class warfare on today’s gentry, and embrace the aspirations of today’s middle-class. Honest Abe in 2016?
by Joel Kotkin
Nov 22, 2012 11:52 AM EST It’s time for Republicans to finally embrace the healthy role that Americans want government to play, writes Joel Kotkin.
For a century now, Republicans have confused being the party of plutocrats with being the party of prosperity. Thus Mitt Romney.
To win back the so-called 47 percent—an insulting description Romney doubled down after the election when he blamed his loss on Obama’s “gifts”—Republican might look farther back, past Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover to their first president, Abraham Lincoln.
Not only did he spring from the ranks of the plebeian, not the preps, but—as Michael Lind points out in What Lincoln Believed—he aimed to both increase opportunity and expand national power. A corporate attorney, he backed railroad interests and their expansion, which paced the nation’s economic ascendancy, but saw this as part of creating greater opportunity, particularly in the West, for the country’s middle and working classes. He also enacted the Homestead Act, which supplied aspiring settlers with a gift: 160 acres of federal land.
Whether or not these acts were populist in their intent, their effects helped people achieve their aspirations. Expansion westward was nothing less than the basis of the American dream, allowing millions, many from land-poor and feudalized Europe, an opportunity to strike out on their own.
This aspirational element should be the centerpiece of the Republican message in this age of growing class bifurcation. The loss of upward mobility long predates President Obama, though it has accelerated under him—with median household incomes down by more than $4,000 since he took office. Even the tepid economy has not done much to improve middle-class fortunes since nearly three-fifths of new jobs are in lower-wage positions.
Without some unforeseen economic rebound, class issues will dominate our politics in the future even more than they do today. To recover, Republicans, now losing consistently (and often deservedly) on cultural issues, need to outmaneuver the Democrats on their ability to provide opportunity and upward mobility to a broad range of Americans.
In the past, Republican deflected class concerns by focusing on cultural issues, national defense or ideology—but these tactics have worn themselves out.
In his time, Lincoln understood the usefulness of class warfare. Tied to industrial interests, he waged a bloody class war on the slave-owning gentry of the South, a group so detestable it makes today’s Wall Street elites seem almost saintly by comparison. Financiers and industrialists may have supported this brutal war between the states, but it was largely aspiring yeoman farmers, skilled workers, and small merchants—all beneficiaries of Lincoln’s expansive economic vision—who fought it.
In recent decades, Republicans—conscious of their patrician backers—have suppressed thinking about class, often criticizing Democrats for having no such scruples.
This made them unable to turn issues such as the bank bailouts to their favor; Romney, himself an economic royalist, could not bring himself to denounce the administration’s policies that have worked out wonderfully for large banks now enjoying record profits while pummeling the middle class.
In the past, Republican deflected class concerns by focusing on cultural issues, national defense, or ideology—but these tactics have worn themselves out. Of course, some conservatives will blame their defeat on a candidate of uncertain convictions and without commitment to the social regressive policies. Yet evangelicals mounted a record effort to get out the vote; it’s hard to see how Romney would have done better trying to sound more like Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock.
What should concern Republicans was declining turnout in traditionally GOP-leaning suburbs, the very places where middle-class professionals and business owners reside. These voters were not energized by Romney. So even though he improved the GOP’s 2008 vote among the middle class and independents, Romney’s total was about 1,000,000 below that of John McCain. Had Romney equaled McCain’s performance in four states (Florida, Ohio, Virginia, and Colorado), he would have won, rather than losing to a president who received 7 million fewer votes than in the previous election.
Let’s take a measurement of base stagnation: the nation’s population has grown 20 million since George Bush was elected in 2004, but the GOP vote has actually shrunk. This correlates as well with a stunning decline of roughly 8 million white voters compared to 2008. The white population may be getting old, but it’s not dying off that rapidly.
This low turnout is remarkable given how unfavorably Obama is viewed by much of the yeoman class. In fact, as Gallup notes, nearly 60 percent of small-business owners disapprove of Obama. The problem was many simply did not see Romney as a viable—let alone an attractive—alternative. In contrast, the Obama team did a far better job of turning out their base of minority, youth, single and childless women, and union members—an effort that delivered their margin of victory in swing states including Ohio, Nevada, and Colorado.
To change the political dynamic, Republicans need to address class concerns, particularly those of small property owners and aspirant small entrepreneurs. Yet the GOP has no program for this group other than lower taxes and hollow promises to cut the budget (which, of course, they have not done, even when holding both houses of Congress and the presidency). The party’s hodgepodge of corporate managerialism, social regressiveness, and, above all, protection of the plutocratic class is demonstrably not compelling to most Americans.
It’s hard for a Main Street business owner, or sole proprietor working from home, to relate to a plutocrat, like Romney, who pays lower effective tax rates than they do. Outrage against looming tax hikes would be justifiable, if the true motivation were not so plainly to preserve the privileges of the haute bourgeoisie. This is a politically doomed approach; while small business is widely revered by Americans, big business and banks are among the least well-regarded.
Class also would provide a means to define negatively the current regime. Instead of making silly attacks on President Obama as a “socialist,” he would be more accurately portrayed as the tribune of both the crony capitalists on Wall Street or Silicon Valley and of big labor, particularly public-employee unions. Obama should also be toxic to grassroots entrepreneurs, who will bear the brunt of the new regulatory regime, health-care system, higher energy prices, as well as rising income taxes.
Rather than label him as a radical, Republicans should identify him as an avatar of those who are doing best in our concussed economy, and presumably want things to stay that way. His most ardent backers include many of our richest, most celebrated citizens—fabulously wealthy Hollywood types, the Silicon Valley elite as well as those controlling our major media and universities. There’s a reason Obama bested Romney in eight of America’s 10 richest counties.
In Marin County, Calif.—where Obama claimed nearly 75 percent of the vote—expensive energy and higher housing prices represent not a burden but an environmental good, and, when it comes to housing, an economic opportunity for some to benefit from artificial, government-imposed scarcity. Ban new single-family homes, and the value of the existing stock goes up; for the elite investing class, incentives for “green energy” developments offer insider opportunities to enjoy windfall profits at the expense of middle-class-rate payers.
If Wall Street wants to join the “progressive” gentry parade again, as it did in 2008, Republican should encourage them. Being the candidate of the phenomenally unpopular financial overclass may have bought Romney the nomination, but it sealed his fate in the general election.
To reclaim its Lincolnesque transformation, the GOP needs to fundamentally pivot on the role of government. Laissez-faire ideology has its merits, but cannot compete successfully with a population weaned on the welfare state, whose members are keenly attuned to their vulnerability in our volatile era.
By admitting that government is sometimes a necessary partner in nurturing and sometimes financing infrastructure critical for economic expansion, Republicans can offer their own vision of what growth-inducing services such as new roads—as opposed to the increased regulation and transfer payments and pension bloat peddled by Democrats—government can and should provide. This could appeal to Hispanics, Asians, and younger people who would be the prime beneficiaries of tangible investments.
As generational chroniclers Morley Winograd and Mike Hais have suggested, most younger people support government action to solve problems but generally dislike the kind of top-down solutions often supported by Democrats. As these voters age, seek to buy homes and start businesses, they might listen to a sensible alternative that does not seek to enhance the left-wing clerisy’s ambition to control all aspects of their lives.
It’s time for Republicans to break with the traditions of Goldwater, Reagan, and, particularly, Bush and shift to something more akin to the party’s roots in the mid-19th century. This party needs less preaching and libertarian manifestos that essentially defend plutocracy. Instead it’s time to embrace class warfare on today’s gentry, and embrace the aspirations of today’s middle-class. Honest Abe in 2016?
Brain-Dead Republicans
Grand Old PlanetBy PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: November 22, 2012 646 Comments
Earlier this week, GQ magazine published an interview with Senator Marco Rubio, whom many consider a contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, in which Mr. Rubio was asked how old the earth is. After declaring “I’m not a scientist, man,” the senator went into desperate evasive action, ending with the declaration that “it’s one of the great mysteries.”
It’s funny stuff, and conservatives would like us to forget about it as soon as possible. Hey, they say, he was just pandering to likely voters in the 2016 Republican primaries — a claim that for some reason is supposed to comfort us.
But we shouldn’t let go that easily. Reading Mr. Rubio’s interview is like driving through a deeply eroded canyon; all at once, you can clearly see what lies below the superficial landscape. Like striated rock beds that speak of deep time, his inability to acknowledge scientific evidence speaks of the anti-rational mind-set that has taken over his political party.
By the way, that question didn’t come out of the blue. As speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, Mr. Rubio provided powerful aid to creationists trying to water down science education. In one interview, he compared the teaching of evolution to Communist indoctrination tactics — although he graciously added that “I’m not equating the evolution people with Fidel Castro.” Gee, thanks.
What was Mr. Rubio’s complaint about science teaching? That it might undermine children’s faith in what their parents told them to believe. And right there you have the modern G.O.P.’s attitude, not just toward biology, but toward everything: If evidence seems to contradict faith, suppress the evidence.
The most obvious example other than evolution is man-made climate change. As the evidence for a warming planet becomes ever stronger — and ever scarier — the G.O.P. has buried deeper into denial, into assertions that the whole thing is a hoax concocted by a vast conspiracy of scientists. And this denial has been accompanied by frantic efforts to silence and punish anyone reporting the inconvenient facts.
But the same phenomenon is visible in many other fields. The most recent demonstration came in the matter of election polls. Coming into the recent election, state-level polling clearly pointed to an Obama victory — yet more or less the whole Republican Party refused to acknowledge this reality. Instead, pundits and politicians alike fiercely denied the numbers and personally attacked anyone pointing out the obvious; the demonizing of The Times’s Nate Silver, in particular, was remarkable to behold.
What accounts for this pattern of denial? Earlier this year, the science writer Chris Mooney published “The Republican Brain,” which was not, as you might think, a partisan screed. It was, instead, a survey of the now-extensive research linking political views to personality types. As Mr. Mooney showed, modern American conservatism is highly correlated with authoritarian inclinations — and authoritarians are strongly inclined to reject any evidence contradicting their prior beliefs. Today’s Republicans cocoon themselves in an alternate reality defined by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, and only on rare occasions — like on election night — encounter any hint that what they believe might not be true.
And, no, it’s not symmetric. Liberals, being human, often give in to wishful thinking — but not in the same systematic, all-encompassing way.
Coming back to the age of the earth: Does it matter? No, says Mr. Rubio, pronouncing it “a dispute amongst theologians” — what about the geologists? — that has “has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States.” But he couldn’t be more wrong.
We are, after all, living in an era when science plays a crucial economic role. How are we going to search effectively for natural resources if schools trying to teach modern geology must give equal time to claims that the world is only 6.000 years old? How are we going to stay competitive in biotechnology if biology classes avoid any material that might offend creationists?
And then there’s the matter of using evidence to shape economic policy. You may have read about the recent study from the Congressional Research Service finding no empirical support for the dogma that cutting taxes on the wealthy leads to higher economic growth. How did Republicans respond? By suppressing the report. On economics, as in hard science, modern conservatives don’t want to hear anything challenging their preconceptions — and they don’t want anyone else to hear about it, either.
So don’t shrug off Mr. Rubio’s awkward moment. His inability to deal with geological evidence was symptomatic of a much broader problem — one that may, in the end, set America on a path of inexorable decline.
Published: November 22, 2012 646 Comments
Earlier this week, GQ magazine published an interview with Senator Marco Rubio, whom many consider a contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, in which Mr. Rubio was asked how old the earth is. After declaring “I’m not a scientist, man,” the senator went into desperate evasive action, ending with the declaration that “it’s one of the great mysteries.”
It’s funny stuff, and conservatives would like us to forget about it as soon as possible. Hey, they say, he was just pandering to likely voters in the 2016 Republican primaries — a claim that for some reason is supposed to comfort us.
But we shouldn’t let go that easily. Reading Mr. Rubio’s interview is like driving through a deeply eroded canyon; all at once, you can clearly see what lies below the superficial landscape. Like striated rock beds that speak of deep time, his inability to acknowledge scientific evidence speaks of the anti-rational mind-set that has taken over his political party.
By the way, that question didn’t come out of the blue. As speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, Mr. Rubio provided powerful aid to creationists trying to water down science education. In one interview, he compared the teaching of evolution to Communist indoctrination tactics — although he graciously added that “I’m not equating the evolution people with Fidel Castro.” Gee, thanks.
What was Mr. Rubio’s complaint about science teaching? That it might undermine children’s faith in what their parents told them to believe. And right there you have the modern G.O.P.’s attitude, not just toward biology, but toward everything: If evidence seems to contradict faith, suppress the evidence.
The most obvious example other than evolution is man-made climate change. As the evidence for a warming planet becomes ever stronger — and ever scarier — the G.O.P. has buried deeper into denial, into assertions that the whole thing is a hoax concocted by a vast conspiracy of scientists. And this denial has been accompanied by frantic efforts to silence and punish anyone reporting the inconvenient facts.
But the same phenomenon is visible in many other fields. The most recent demonstration came in the matter of election polls. Coming into the recent election, state-level polling clearly pointed to an Obama victory — yet more or less the whole Republican Party refused to acknowledge this reality. Instead, pundits and politicians alike fiercely denied the numbers and personally attacked anyone pointing out the obvious; the demonizing of The Times’s Nate Silver, in particular, was remarkable to behold.
What accounts for this pattern of denial? Earlier this year, the science writer Chris Mooney published “The Republican Brain,” which was not, as you might think, a partisan screed. It was, instead, a survey of the now-extensive research linking political views to personality types. As Mr. Mooney showed, modern American conservatism is highly correlated with authoritarian inclinations — and authoritarians are strongly inclined to reject any evidence contradicting their prior beliefs. Today’s Republicans cocoon themselves in an alternate reality defined by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, and only on rare occasions — like on election night — encounter any hint that what they believe might not be true.
And, no, it’s not symmetric. Liberals, being human, often give in to wishful thinking — but not in the same systematic, all-encompassing way.
Coming back to the age of the earth: Does it matter? No, says Mr. Rubio, pronouncing it “a dispute amongst theologians” — what about the geologists? — that has “has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States.” But he couldn’t be more wrong.
We are, after all, living in an era when science plays a crucial economic role. How are we going to search effectively for natural resources if schools trying to teach modern geology must give equal time to claims that the world is only 6.000 years old? How are we going to stay competitive in biotechnology if biology classes avoid any material that might offend creationists?
And then there’s the matter of using evidence to shape economic policy. You may have read about the recent study from the Congressional Research Service finding no empirical support for the dogma that cutting taxes on the wealthy leads to higher economic growth. How did Republicans respond? By suppressing the report. On economics, as in hard science, modern conservatives don’t want to hear anything challenging their preconceptions — and they don’t want anyone else to hear about it, either.
So don’t shrug off Mr. Rubio’s awkward moment. His inability to deal with geological evidence was symptomatic of a much broader problem — one that may, in the end, set America on a path of inexorable decline.
More on LIncoln
My endless fascination with Abraham Lincoln is one of the main reasons I am a 19th Century person .
Abraham Lincoln: The Great Campaigner
by Sydney Blumenthal
Oct 15, 2012 1:00 AM EDT Some consider politics a dirty word. But the 16th president was a master of political ruthlessness—for the sake of the highest ideals.
The latest Lincoln boom—kicking off with the bicentennial of his birth in 2009 and the continuing sesquicentennial of the Civil War—shows no sign of abating. It may not even reach its apogee with the release immediately post-election of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, a biopic starring Daniel Day-Lewis in the title role. Spielberg, according to a source familiar with the production, has deliberately withheld the film until the current, divisive presidential campaign is over in order to prevent Lincoln from being seized upon to score political points.
But lifting Lincoln above the fray doesn’t remove him from politics. While the political Lincoln may be difficult for us to acknowledge at a time when politics and partisan commitments are widely denigrated, Lincoln’s presidency demonstrates that partisanship and political ruthlessness can be used to advance the highest ideals. And there were no clearer cases than during his 1864 battle for reelection (without which the slave-owning South would almost certainly have triumphed) and subsequent effort to pass the 13th Amendment, which at long last purged slavery from the Constitution. In the end, Lincoln became the master of events because he was the master of politics.
The mythology of Lincoln as too noble for politics began at the moment of his death, with his body sprawled across a small bed in a house across from Ford’s Theatre, where he was shot. At the president’s last breath, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton famously pronounced, “Now he belongs to the ages.” Every age since has invented its Lincoln. Martyred on Good Friday, Lincoln the Christ has rivaled Lincoln the Common Man and Lincoln the Idealist in America’s collective imagination.
The historical truth reveals one of the most astute professional politicians the country has produced. Many of Lincoln’s contemporaries viewed him as little more than a provincial hack—“a vulgar village politician,” as James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald put it. But they learned not to underestimate his political abilities. “He was the deepest, the closest, the cutest, and the most ambitious man American politics has produced,” observed Gustavus Fox, his assistant secretary of the Navy. “Lincoln was a supreme politician,” wrote Charles A. Dana, his assistant secretary of War. “He understood politics because he understood human nature.”
The self-made man transformed himself through relentless political aspiration. In the words of his law partner William H. Herndon, “Politics were his Heaven, and his Hades metaphysics.” From his first day as a state legislator to his last as president, he was in the middle of the dealmaking, or what was then called “log-rolling.” Running for the legislature at the age of 23, he was unrelenting in his aspiration to higher office. “His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest,” said Herndon. Lincoln became the Whig floor leader in the Illinois Legislature at 27 and was the state’s leading Whig politician until he emerged as the unifying figure at the founding convention of the Illinois Republican Party in 1856.
Once he reached the White House, his survival and that of the nation depended on his political skill. Lincoln never believed that politicians were unsavory creatures he was compelled to associate with out of unfortunate necessity. He was not a plebeian saint who withheld himself from the give-and-take of the political game; neither did he feel it was a sordid distraction from his higher calling. He loved the relationships of politics—the fraternity, friendship, and humor. He badgered journalists for gossip they didn’t report. If politics was his Heaven, it was also his school. He entered every legislative chamber and saloon, every political gathering and social party, every backroom and courtroom as a potentially invaluable learning experience. He called them his “public opinion baths.” There was little he liked more, especially in the White House, than a late-night conversation with a group of politicians—except perhaps a night at the theater.
Lincoln knew from experience that great change required a thousand small political acts. Never did he apply his granular political skills more cleverly and effectively than during his reelection campaign and the fight to secure passage of the 13th Amendment. His feat was all the more remarkable for having been set in motion during what looked to be the nadir of his presidency, when his reelection seemed almost impossible.
“This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this administration will not be reelected,” Lincoln wrote to himself on Aug. 23, 1864. Then he devised a plan to win the war and save the Union during the imagined desperate months of transition to a new administration, since the new president “will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterwards.” Alone in his office in the White House, Lincoln folded and glued his note describing the plan and called a cabinet meeting. There he brought out the mysterious piece of paper and instructed each cabinet secretary carefully to sign his name to its back, committing them to a future course of action he would not let them read.
If Lincoln lost the coming election, he expected the Confederacy would be recognized as a separate nation, the Emancipation Proclamation freeing its slaves rescinded, and the projected amendment to the Constitution to abolish slavery once and for all abandoned. Hundreds of thousands would have been killed and wounded as the price of defeat. Lincoln’s own personal losses since coming to Washington had been devastating enough. The first Union officer killed in the war, his Springfield law clerk Elmer Ellsworth, was shot through the heart after taking down a Confederate flag waving above an Alexandria, Va., tavern. “My boy! My boy!” Lincoln cried upon hearing the news. “Was it necessary this sacrifice should be made?” He insisted that Ellsworth’s body lay in state in the White House. A few months later, Lincoln’s best friend from Illinois, Sen. Edward Baker, was killed in the botched Battle of Ball’s Bluff. Then, in February 1862, Lincoln’s 11-year-old son, Willie, died of typhus. Mary Todd Lincoln sequestered herself in deepest mourning in the upper story of the White House for nearly a year.
Lincoln feared that if he lost the 1864 campaign, the South would triumph and slavery would endure. (Library of Congress via Getty Images)
Lincoln had begun his reelection year with high hopes of winning the war and enacting the 13th Amendment. In April the Senate voted in favor: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude ... shall exist within the United States ...” Though the House of Representatives fell short of the required two-thirds majority, Lincoln was not discouraged. His handling of the Emancipation Proclamation—waiting to announce it after a military victory, the Battle of Antietam—gave him a blueprint. He understood that he had to bring the public along through events to build momentum for change. He was playing a long game.
Lincoln believed that the abolition of slavery required a constitutional amendment and that the Proclamation was merely a temporary measure justified by military necessity. The Constitution enshrined slavery, and the Supreme Court had upheld it long before the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857 that ruled that blacks were “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” At the convention that nominated him as a candidate for a second term, in June 1864, Lincoln operated behind the scenes, instructing that the 13th Amendment be the subject of the keynote address and be treated as the “keystone” of the Republican Party platform.
But Lincoln knew that such efforts would come to nothing if he lost the election—and that he would likely lose if the war continued to go badly for the North. In Ulysses S. Grant, Lincoln had at last found the general in chief who would go on to win the war after a succession of arrogant, incompetent, and dilatory commanders. Yet within six bloody weeks, from May 5 to June 12, the Army suffered about 65,000 casualties, the equivalent today of about 880,000 killed and wounded. In a frontal assault on Confederate lines on June 2 at the Battle of Cold Harbor, more than 7,000 men, who had pinned their names on their backs expecting to be killed, fell in less than 10 minutes. Hospitals overflowed with the wounded. One nurse in the Washington hospitals, Walt Whitman, suffered a nervous breakdown. He described the triage in the wards: the “worst cases get little or no attention. We receive them here with their wounds full of worms ... Many of the amputations have to be done over again ... many of the poor afflicted young men are crazy ... it is perhaps a privilege that they are out of their senses.” “O years and graves!” Whitman wrote.
With the entire Army of the Potomac stalled in miles of trenches south of Richmond, Lincoln’s political advisers believed he was doomed. Running for reelection against former general George B. McClellan—the very man Lincoln had tapped to organize the Union Army in 1861 and whose indecisiveness had led to a string of bloody defeats for the North during the crucial opening months of the war—Lincoln was beset on all sides. Peace Democrats, who gained effective control of the party at the convention, assailed him as a military despot, enemy of liberty, and violator of the Constitution—and demanded an immediate end to the war and recognition of the Confederacy. From the opposite end of the spectrum, many abolitionists and Radical Republicans, scorning Lincoln as an equivocating politician, created a third party. “I would cut off both hands before doing anything to aid Abraham Lincoln’s election,” declared the prominent abolitionist Wendell Phillips.
The Democrats ran on two issues: the war’s failure—and racial-sexual panic. They coined a scary new pseudo-scientific word to describe Lincoln’s supposed hidden agenda of race mixing: miscegenation. “Miscegenation Endorsed by the Republican Party,” screamed a pamphlet published by the Democratic Central Campaign Committee. The New York World, the leading Democratic newspaper in the country and one that was strongly behind McClellan’s campaign, published a sensational story of a fabricated event, “The Miscegenation Ball,” complete with an illustration of “colored belles” shimmying with Republicans and Union officers at the Lincoln Club. Perhaps the most popular piece of campaign literature was entitled “Abraham Africanus I; His Secret Life Revealed Under the Mesmeric Influence; Mysteries of the White House,” featuring his dialogues with Satan.
The White House has rarely been occupied by a more devoted admirer of Lincoln than Barack Obama. (Pete Souza / The White House )
“Victory Certain” ran the banner headline across the New York World on the morning of Sept. 5. McClellan, with characteristic slowness, was in the fifth day of drafting his letter of acceptance to the Democratic convention that had nominated him on a platform declaring the war “a failure.” The public was unaware of a dispatch that had been received by the War Department. Sent by William Tecumseh Sherman, the man Grant had named general of the Army of the West, the telegram declared, “So Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.” It was the first news of the Battle of Atlanta—the fiery cataclysm later depicted in Gone With the Wind—and a decisive victory that marked the turning of the tide.
From the instant that Sherman’s triumph became known, the chances of Lincoln’s reelection dramatically improved. Lincoln himself did everything he could to ensure it. He purged his cabinet of disruptive figures, quelled third-party agitation, and worked to settle down his party. While his generals maneuvered armies, he mobilized his political troops. Under Lincoln’s direction, The New York Times founding editor Henry Jarvis Raymond, who was also the Republican National Committee chairman, dunned campaign contributions from every federal employee, contractor, and newspaper editor who received advertising from the government. The country was soon flooded with millions of pieces of pro-Lincoln propaganda cranked out by the Union League and the Loyal League. Behind the scenes Lincoln micromanaged the campaign, personally intervening to stymie potential challengers to supportive congressional candidates and advising state officials on tactics. When he heard that postmasters in Philadelphia and Chicago were deploying employees against incumbent congressmen who were his allies, he issued written orders calling on them to cease and desist.
Lincoln won resoundingly. A week after his victory, the president convened a cabinet meeting and unfurled the folded note that he had made his cabinet secretaries sign the previous August. Lincoln read it aloud, sharing his plan, in the event of a loss at the ballot box, to encourage a victorious McClellan to prosecute and win the war during the final lame-duck months of Lincoln’s presidency. Secretary of State William H. Seward spoke up, one politico to another: “And the General would answer you, ‘Yes, yes,’ and the next day when you saw him again and pressed these views upon him, he would say, ‘Yes, yes,’ and so on forever, and would have done nothing at all.”
With his contingency plan rendered superfluous by the outcome of the election, Lincoln now made it clear that he intended to use his victory to work for congressional passage of the 13th Amendment. The outcome of this culminating act in the greatest crisis in the nation’s history would depend upon the president’s political leadership.
For early help in executing his strategy, Lincoln turned to Charles A. Dana, a former journalist who the president and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton often deployed as their personal ears and eyes at the front—and for discreet political missions. Now, maneuvering to admit Nevada to the Union to guarantee a three-quarters majority of the states required for ratification of the amendment, Lincoln called on him again. “Dana,” said Lincoln, “I am very anxious about this vote. It has got to be taken next week. The time is very short. It is going to be a great deal closer than I wish it was.”
According to Dana, Lincoln “mentioned three particular congressmen who might be susceptible to persuasion.” “What will they be likely to want?” Dana asked. “I don’t know,” said Lincoln. “It makes no difference, though ... [W]hatever promise you make to them I will perform.”
Two of the congressmen asked to be appointed internal revenue collectors, while the other sought an appointment at the New York Custom House. In return for being granted these favors, all three threw their weight behind the amendment. “I have always felt,” wrote Dana, “that this little piece of side politics was one of the most judicious, humane, and wise uses of executive authority that I have ever assisted in or witnessed.”
By January 1865 the effort to pass the amendment in the House was floundering, with the measure falling 14 votes short. The congressman in charge of the vote, James Mitchell Ashley of Ohio, was the moralizing son of a minister. “You must help us one vote,” Ashley begged Lincoln. “Don’t you know of a sinner in the opposition who is on praying ground?”
Related StoriesGallery: Lincoln’s Memorabilia x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x Lincoln knew that to abolish slavery once and for all, more worldly means than prayer would be required. Congressman James S. Rollins, one of the largest slave owners in Missouri and an adamant opponent of the Emancipation Proclamation, was sitting at his desk on the floor of the House when he received an invitation from Lincoln, written in pencil. “Rollins,” he said, “I have been wanting to talk to you for some time about the 13th Amendment.” When Rollins arrived at the White House, Lincoln waxed nostalgic about old political times before beginning his pitch for the amendment. Rollins replied that he had decided to vote for it immediately after the election result. Lincoln wasted no time, running down a list of undecided congressmen from Missouri and assigning Rollins the task of persuading them to join their side. “Tell them of my anxiety,” he said. To provide an incentive, Lincoln kept vacant a federal judgeship in Missouri, whose appointment would be influenced by one of those voting in favor of the amendment.
The list of political favors paid out didn’t end there. Congressman Alexander Coffroth, a Pennsylvania Democrat, had won reelection so narrowly that Republicans were challenging the outcome. But opposition to Coffroth taking his seat miraculously disappeared as soon as he voted in favor of the amendment. Shortly after Democratic Congressman Moses Odell of New York came out in favor of the amendment, Lincoln named him the new naval agent for his home state. Congressman George Yeaman of Kentucky, who had introduced a resolution denouncing the Emancipation Proclamation as “an assumption of power dangerous to the rights of citizens,” announced his support for the amendment and was soon appointed minister to Denmark.
The formal debate lasted almost three weeks, with the final vote scheduled for Jan. 31. “The galleries, corridors, and lobbies were crowded to the doors, and the reporters’ gallery was invaded by a mob of well-dressed women, who for a time usurped the place of the newspaper men,” reported Noah Brooks. Five Supreme Court justices marched onto the floor to observe, led by the newly appointed Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln’s former secretary of the Treasury, a political rival who had tried to deny him a second nomination but whom Lincoln named to the court as an unbending abolitionist to sustain the amendment. Dozens of senators and members of the cabinet filled the chamber. Every Republican voted for the measure, 16 Democrats (five from New York), with eight Democrats strangely -absent—two votes more than the two-thirds majority needed. “Then,” wrote an observer, “there was an explosion, a storm of cheers, the like of which probably no Congress of the United States ever heard before. Strong men embraced each other with tears. The galleries and aisles were bristling with standing, cheering crowds.”
The next night revelers serenaded Lincoln at the White House, drawing him out onto the portico to speak. “This amendment,” he said, “is a King’s cure for all the evils. It winds the whole thing up.” He noted that Illinois had already ratified the amendment. “I feel proud that Illinois is a little ahead.” Lincoln was so buoyant that he signed the document, which required no presidential signature, in a gesture of enthusiasm: “Approved. February 1, 1865. A. Lincoln.”
At a packed Boston Music Hall four days later, the venerable William Lloyd Garrison joined in a celebration of the amendment’s passage. Mounting the stage, the founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society, who had once burned the Constitution as a “pact with the Devil” and proclaimed participation in American politics “sinful,” hailed the redeeming moment. “To whom is the country more immediately indebted for this vital and saving amendment of the Constitution than, perhaps, to any other man?” he asked the crowd of New England abolitionists. “I believe I may confidently answer—to the humble railsplitter of Illinois—to presidential chainbreaker for millions of the oppressed—to Abraham Lincoln!”
“The greatest measure of the nineteenth century,” Thaddeus Stevens, the Radical Republican congressman of Pennsylvania confided to a friend, “was passed by corruption, aided and abetted by the purest man in America.”
Two months later, on the night of April 11, the buildings of Washington were illuminated. At the War Department, gas jets lit up the huge letters, “GRANT,” and above that “PEACE.” It was two days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Thousands gathered at the White House, where Lincoln appeared on a balcony, quieting the throng with an unexpectedly complex talk on Reconstruction. He was already thinking about what would follow emancipation. It was not enough that the slaves be freed. He proposed they become citizens. Now, in what was sure to be merely a first step, he suggested voting rights for the “very intelligent” and “soldiers.” As Lincoln saw it, achieving Reconstruction of the bitterly divided nation would call for political acumen, charting “point to point” like a riverboat pilot, as he confided to a congressional leader.
Listening intently to the president’s speech was the renowned actor John Wilkes Booth. When he heard Lincoln endorse enfranchising blacks, he turned to his co-conspirator Lewis Powell and told him to shoot the president as he stood in the window. Powell refused. Afterward, Booth and Powell paced around Lafayette Square across from the White House. “That means nig--r citizenship,” said Booth. “Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.”
Abraham Lincoln: The Great Campaigner
by Sydney Blumenthal
Oct 15, 2012 1:00 AM EDT Some consider politics a dirty word. But the 16th president was a master of political ruthlessness—for the sake of the highest ideals.
The latest Lincoln boom—kicking off with the bicentennial of his birth in 2009 and the continuing sesquicentennial of the Civil War—shows no sign of abating. It may not even reach its apogee with the release immediately post-election of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, a biopic starring Daniel Day-Lewis in the title role. Spielberg, according to a source familiar with the production, has deliberately withheld the film until the current, divisive presidential campaign is over in order to prevent Lincoln from being seized upon to score political points.
But lifting Lincoln above the fray doesn’t remove him from politics. While the political Lincoln may be difficult for us to acknowledge at a time when politics and partisan commitments are widely denigrated, Lincoln’s presidency demonstrates that partisanship and political ruthlessness can be used to advance the highest ideals. And there were no clearer cases than during his 1864 battle for reelection (without which the slave-owning South would almost certainly have triumphed) and subsequent effort to pass the 13th Amendment, which at long last purged slavery from the Constitution. In the end, Lincoln became the master of events because he was the master of politics.
The mythology of Lincoln as too noble for politics began at the moment of his death, with his body sprawled across a small bed in a house across from Ford’s Theatre, where he was shot. At the president’s last breath, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton famously pronounced, “Now he belongs to the ages.” Every age since has invented its Lincoln. Martyred on Good Friday, Lincoln the Christ has rivaled Lincoln the Common Man and Lincoln the Idealist in America’s collective imagination.
The historical truth reveals one of the most astute professional politicians the country has produced. Many of Lincoln’s contemporaries viewed him as little more than a provincial hack—“a vulgar village politician,” as James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald put it. But they learned not to underestimate his political abilities. “He was the deepest, the closest, the cutest, and the most ambitious man American politics has produced,” observed Gustavus Fox, his assistant secretary of the Navy. “Lincoln was a supreme politician,” wrote Charles A. Dana, his assistant secretary of War. “He understood politics because he understood human nature.”
The self-made man transformed himself through relentless political aspiration. In the words of his law partner William H. Herndon, “Politics were his Heaven, and his Hades metaphysics.” From his first day as a state legislator to his last as president, he was in the middle of the dealmaking, or what was then called “log-rolling.” Running for the legislature at the age of 23, he was unrelenting in his aspiration to higher office. “His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest,” said Herndon. Lincoln became the Whig floor leader in the Illinois Legislature at 27 and was the state’s leading Whig politician until he emerged as the unifying figure at the founding convention of the Illinois Republican Party in 1856.
Once he reached the White House, his survival and that of the nation depended on his political skill. Lincoln never believed that politicians were unsavory creatures he was compelled to associate with out of unfortunate necessity. He was not a plebeian saint who withheld himself from the give-and-take of the political game; neither did he feel it was a sordid distraction from his higher calling. He loved the relationships of politics—the fraternity, friendship, and humor. He badgered journalists for gossip they didn’t report. If politics was his Heaven, it was also his school. He entered every legislative chamber and saloon, every political gathering and social party, every backroom and courtroom as a potentially invaluable learning experience. He called them his “public opinion baths.” There was little he liked more, especially in the White House, than a late-night conversation with a group of politicians—except perhaps a night at the theater.
Lincoln knew from experience that great change required a thousand small political acts. Never did he apply his granular political skills more cleverly and effectively than during his reelection campaign and the fight to secure passage of the 13th Amendment. His feat was all the more remarkable for having been set in motion during what looked to be the nadir of his presidency, when his reelection seemed almost impossible.
“This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this administration will not be reelected,” Lincoln wrote to himself on Aug. 23, 1864. Then he devised a plan to win the war and save the Union during the imagined desperate months of transition to a new administration, since the new president “will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterwards.” Alone in his office in the White House, Lincoln folded and glued his note describing the plan and called a cabinet meeting. There he brought out the mysterious piece of paper and instructed each cabinet secretary carefully to sign his name to its back, committing them to a future course of action he would not let them read.
If Lincoln lost the coming election, he expected the Confederacy would be recognized as a separate nation, the Emancipation Proclamation freeing its slaves rescinded, and the projected amendment to the Constitution to abolish slavery once and for all abandoned. Hundreds of thousands would have been killed and wounded as the price of defeat. Lincoln’s own personal losses since coming to Washington had been devastating enough. The first Union officer killed in the war, his Springfield law clerk Elmer Ellsworth, was shot through the heart after taking down a Confederate flag waving above an Alexandria, Va., tavern. “My boy! My boy!” Lincoln cried upon hearing the news. “Was it necessary this sacrifice should be made?” He insisted that Ellsworth’s body lay in state in the White House. A few months later, Lincoln’s best friend from Illinois, Sen. Edward Baker, was killed in the botched Battle of Ball’s Bluff. Then, in February 1862, Lincoln’s 11-year-old son, Willie, died of typhus. Mary Todd Lincoln sequestered herself in deepest mourning in the upper story of the White House for nearly a year.
Lincoln feared that if he lost the 1864 campaign, the South would triumph and slavery would endure. (Library of Congress via Getty Images)
Lincoln had begun his reelection year with high hopes of winning the war and enacting the 13th Amendment. In April the Senate voted in favor: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude ... shall exist within the United States ...” Though the House of Representatives fell short of the required two-thirds majority, Lincoln was not discouraged. His handling of the Emancipation Proclamation—waiting to announce it after a military victory, the Battle of Antietam—gave him a blueprint. He understood that he had to bring the public along through events to build momentum for change. He was playing a long game.
Lincoln believed that the abolition of slavery required a constitutional amendment and that the Proclamation was merely a temporary measure justified by military necessity. The Constitution enshrined slavery, and the Supreme Court had upheld it long before the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857 that ruled that blacks were “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” At the convention that nominated him as a candidate for a second term, in June 1864, Lincoln operated behind the scenes, instructing that the 13th Amendment be the subject of the keynote address and be treated as the “keystone” of the Republican Party platform.
But Lincoln knew that such efforts would come to nothing if he lost the election—and that he would likely lose if the war continued to go badly for the North. In Ulysses S. Grant, Lincoln had at last found the general in chief who would go on to win the war after a succession of arrogant, incompetent, and dilatory commanders. Yet within six bloody weeks, from May 5 to June 12, the Army suffered about 65,000 casualties, the equivalent today of about 880,000 killed and wounded. In a frontal assault on Confederate lines on June 2 at the Battle of Cold Harbor, more than 7,000 men, who had pinned their names on their backs expecting to be killed, fell in less than 10 minutes. Hospitals overflowed with the wounded. One nurse in the Washington hospitals, Walt Whitman, suffered a nervous breakdown. He described the triage in the wards: the “worst cases get little or no attention. We receive them here with their wounds full of worms ... Many of the amputations have to be done over again ... many of the poor afflicted young men are crazy ... it is perhaps a privilege that they are out of their senses.” “O years and graves!” Whitman wrote.
With the entire Army of the Potomac stalled in miles of trenches south of Richmond, Lincoln’s political advisers believed he was doomed. Running for reelection against former general George B. McClellan—the very man Lincoln had tapped to organize the Union Army in 1861 and whose indecisiveness had led to a string of bloody defeats for the North during the crucial opening months of the war—Lincoln was beset on all sides. Peace Democrats, who gained effective control of the party at the convention, assailed him as a military despot, enemy of liberty, and violator of the Constitution—and demanded an immediate end to the war and recognition of the Confederacy. From the opposite end of the spectrum, many abolitionists and Radical Republicans, scorning Lincoln as an equivocating politician, created a third party. “I would cut off both hands before doing anything to aid Abraham Lincoln’s election,” declared the prominent abolitionist Wendell Phillips.
The Democrats ran on two issues: the war’s failure—and racial-sexual panic. They coined a scary new pseudo-scientific word to describe Lincoln’s supposed hidden agenda of race mixing: miscegenation. “Miscegenation Endorsed by the Republican Party,” screamed a pamphlet published by the Democratic Central Campaign Committee. The New York World, the leading Democratic newspaper in the country and one that was strongly behind McClellan’s campaign, published a sensational story of a fabricated event, “The Miscegenation Ball,” complete with an illustration of “colored belles” shimmying with Republicans and Union officers at the Lincoln Club. Perhaps the most popular piece of campaign literature was entitled “Abraham Africanus I; His Secret Life Revealed Under the Mesmeric Influence; Mysteries of the White House,” featuring his dialogues with Satan.
The White House has rarely been occupied by a more devoted admirer of Lincoln than Barack Obama. (Pete Souza / The White House )
“Victory Certain” ran the banner headline across the New York World on the morning of Sept. 5. McClellan, with characteristic slowness, was in the fifth day of drafting his letter of acceptance to the Democratic convention that had nominated him on a platform declaring the war “a failure.” The public was unaware of a dispatch that had been received by the War Department. Sent by William Tecumseh Sherman, the man Grant had named general of the Army of the West, the telegram declared, “So Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.” It was the first news of the Battle of Atlanta—the fiery cataclysm later depicted in Gone With the Wind—and a decisive victory that marked the turning of the tide.
From the instant that Sherman’s triumph became known, the chances of Lincoln’s reelection dramatically improved. Lincoln himself did everything he could to ensure it. He purged his cabinet of disruptive figures, quelled third-party agitation, and worked to settle down his party. While his generals maneuvered armies, he mobilized his political troops. Under Lincoln’s direction, The New York Times founding editor Henry Jarvis Raymond, who was also the Republican National Committee chairman, dunned campaign contributions from every federal employee, contractor, and newspaper editor who received advertising from the government. The country was soon flooded with millions of pieces of pro-Lincoln propaganda cranked out by the Union League and the Loyal League. Behind the scenes Lincoln micromanaged the campaign, personally intervening to stymie potential challengers to supportive congressional candidates and advising state officials on tactics. When he heard that postmasters in Philadelphia and Chicago were deploying employees against incumbent congressmen who were his allies, he issued written orders calling on them to cease and desist.
Lincoln won resoundingly. A week after his victory, the president convened a cabinet meeting and unfurled the folded note that he had made his cabinet secretaries sign the previous August. Lincoln read it aloud, sharing his plan, in the event of a loss at the ballot box, to encourage a victorious McClellan to prosecute and win the war during the final lame-duck months of Lincoln’s presidency. Secretary of State William H. Seward spoke up, one politico to another: “And the General would answer you, ‘Yes, yes,’ and the next day when you saw him again and pressed these views upon him, he would say, ‘Yes, yes,’ and so on forever, and would have done nothing at all.”
With his contingency plan rendered superfluous by the outcome of the election, Lincoln now made it clear that he intended to use his victory to work for congressional passage of the 13th Amendment. The outcome of this culminating act in the greatest crisis in the nation’s history would depend upon the president’s political leadership.
For early help in executing his strategy, Lincoln turned to Charles A. Dana, a former journalist who the president and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton often deployed as their personal ears and eyes at the front—and for discreet political missions. Now, maneuvering to admit Nevada to the Union to guarantee a three-quarters majority of the states required for ratification of the amendment, Lincoln called on him again. “Dana,” said Lincoln, “I am very anxious about this vote. It has got to be taken next week. The time is very short. It is going to be a great deal closer than I wish it was.”
According to Dana, Lincoln “mentioned three particular congressmen who might be susceptible to persuasion.” “What will they be likely to want?” Dana asked. “I don’t know,” said Lincoln. “It makes no difference, though ... [W]hatever promise you make to them I will perform.”
Two of the congressmen asked to be appointed internal revenue collectors, while the other sought an appointment at the New York Custom House. In return for being granted these favors, all three threw their weight behind the amendment. “I have always felt,” wrote Dana, “that this little piece of side politics was one of the most judicious, humane, and wise uses of executive authority that I have ever assisted in or witnessed.”
By January 1865 the effort to pass the amendment in the House was floundering, with the measure falling 14 votes short. The congressman in charge of the vote, James Mitchell Ashley of Ohio, was the moralizing son of a minister. “You must help us one vote,” Ashley begged Lincoln. “Don’t you know of a sinner in the opposition who is on praying ground?”
Related StoriesGallery: Lincoln’s Memorabilia x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x Lincoln knew that to abolish slavery once and for all, more worldly means than prayer would be required. Congressman James S. Rollins, one of the largest slave owners in Missouri and an adamant opponent of the Emancipation Proclamation, was sitting at his desk on the floor of the House when he received an invitation from Lincoln, written in pencil. “Rollins,” he said, “I have been wanting to talk to you for some time about the 13th Amendment.” When Rollins arrived at the White House, Lincoln waxed nostalgic about old political times before beginning his pitch for the amendment. Rollins replied that he had decided to vote for it immediately after the election result. Lincoln wasted no time, running down a list of undecided congressmen from Missouri and assigning Rollins the task of persuading them to join their side. “Tell them of my anxiety,” he said. To provide an incentive, Lincoln kept vacant a federal judgeship in Missouri, whose appointment would be influenced by one of those voting in favor of the amendment.
The list of political favors paid out didn’t end there. Congressman Alexander Coffroth, a Pennsylvania Democrat, had won reelection so narrowly that Republicans were challenging the outcome. But opposition to Coffroth taking his seat miraculously disappeared as soon as he voted in favor of the amendment. Shortly after Democratic Congressman Moses Odell of New York came out in favor of the amendment, Lincoln named him the new naval agent for his home state. Congressman George Yeaman of Kentucky, who had introduced a resolution denouncing the Emancipation Proclamation as “an assumption of power dangerous to the rights of citizens,” announced his support for the amendment and was soon appointed minister to Denmark.
The formal debate lasted almost three weeks, with the final vote scheduled for Jan. 31. “The galleries, corridors, and lobbies were crowded to the doors, and the reporters’ gallery was invaded by a mob of well-dressed women, who for a time usurped the place of the newspaper men,” reported Noah Brooks. Five Supreme Court justices marched onto the floor to observe, led by the newly appointed Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln’s former secretary of the Treasury, a political rival who had tried to deny him a second nomination but whom Lincoln named to the court as an unbending abolitionist to sustain the amendment. Dozens of senators and members of the cabinet filled the chamber. Every Republican voted for the measure, 16 Democrats (five from New York), with eight Democrats strangely -absent—two votes more than the two-thirds majority needed. “Then,” wrote an observer, “there was an explosion, a storm of cheers, the like of which probably no Congress of the United States ever heard before. Strong men embraced each other with tears. The galleries and aisles were bristling with standing, cheering crowds.”
The next night revelers serenaded Lincoln at the White House, drawing him out onto the portico to speak. “This amendment,” he said, “is a King’s cure for all the evils. It winds the whole thing up.” He noted that Illinois had already ratified the amendment. “I feel proud that Illinois is a little ahead.” Lincoln was so buoyant that he signed the document, which required no presidential signature, in a gesture of enthusiasm: “Approved. February 1, 1865. A. Lincoln.”
At a packed Boston Music Hall four days later, the venerable William Lloyd Garrison joined in a celebration of the amendment’s passage. Mounting the stage, the founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society, who had once burned the Constitution as a “pact with the Devil” and proclaimed participation in American politics “sinful,” hailed the redeeming moment. “To whom is the country more immediately indebted for this vital and saving amendment of the Constitution than, perhaps, to any other man?” he asked the crowd of New England abolitionists. “I believe I may confidently answer—to the humble railsplitter of Illinois—to presidential chainbreaker for millions of the oppressed—to Abraham Lincoln!”
“The greatest measure of the nineteenth century,” Thaddeus Stevens, the Radical Republican congressman of Pennsylvania confided to a friend, “was passed by corruption, aided and abetted by the purest man in America.”
Two months later, on the night of April 11, the buildings of Washington were illuminated. At the War Department, gas jets lit up the huge letters, “GRANT,” and above that “PEACE.” It was two days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Thousands gathered at the White House, where Lincoln appeared on a balcony, quieting the throng with an unexpectedly complex talk on Reconstruction. He was already thinking about what would follow emancipation. It was not enough that the slaves be freed. He proposed they become citizens. Now, in what was sure to be merely a first step, he suggested voting rights for the “very intelligent” and “soldiers.” As Lincoln saw it, achieving Reconstruction of the bitterly divided nation would call for political acumen, charting “point to point” like a riverboat pilot, as he confided to a congressional leader.
Listening intently to the president’s speech was the renowned actor John Wilkes Booth. When he heard Lincoln endorse enfranchising blacks, he turned to his co-conspirator Lewis Powell and told him to shoot the president as he stood in the window. Powell refused. Afterward, Booth and Powell paced around Lafayette Square across from the White House. “That means nig--r citizenship,” said Booth. “Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.”
Another Lincoln Movie Review
This is what I've been waiting for: a review by a Lincoln scholar. Harold Holzer is, indeed, one of our leading Lincoln scholars. However, I find this article disappointing because Holzer focuses on the trivial. Who cares if Mary Lincoln was in the House when the 13th Amendment was passed? What matters is substance and Lincoln's honest place in history, not trivial details in the movie.
What’s True and False in “Lincoln” Movie
by Harold Holzer
Did Lincoln really do that? Was Mary Todd really there? Lincoln scholar and consultant on the movie Harold Holzer picks out what’s true and false in Spielberg’s movie—and says in the end it’s not the details that matter.
When the House of Representatives finally, dramatically votes to approve the 13th Amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery, Washington erupts in celebration. Members of Congress weep, throw themselves into each other’s arms, and begin singing “Battle Cry of Freedom.” Men parade through the streets and church bells chime.
And then, at least according to Steven Spielberg’s new film Lincoln, the widely despised old liberal lion of the House, Thaddeus Stevens, limps home through the throngs on his malformed club foot, serenely enters his house, removes an extravagant black wig to reveal a shiny bald dome, and then crawls into bed with his African-American housekeeper—clearly, we are meant to infer, his mistress—where they kiss and exult in the historic events of the day. Spielberg’s Thaddeus Stevens summarizes the extraordinary events of the day with this remarkable quote: the most liberating constitutional amendment in history, he alleges, had been “passed by corruption, aided and abetted by the purest man in America”—meaning Abraham Lincoln.
With the widely praised film overflowing with such startling scenes, it is little wonder that scholars, nitpickers, trivial pursuit pursuers, and history buffs have all been crowding their local movie theaters this week, many armed with legal pads, in a massive competition to unearth and report every factual error that has crept into the film.
To be sure, there is no shortage of small historical bloopers in the movie. First Lady Mary Lincoln, for example, never planted herself in the House Gallery to observe the final tally on the amendment. (Michelle Obama may routinely attend the State of the Union address each year, but such a visit would have been unthinkable in 1865.) Nor did congressmen vote by state delegations—a device that conflates the traditions of national political conventions with those of the House of Representatives. (Until the advent of machine voting, the House voted alphabetically by name; this I know from experience—I once worked for Representative Bella Abzug, number two on the roll call, and it was always a challenge to move her considerable frame from her congressional office to the House floor in time to answer the roll right after James Aboureszk.)
From time to time, even “Honest Abe” himself exaggerated or dissembled in pursuit of a great cause.
Lincoln’s presidential office was never adorned with a lithographic portrait of William Henry Harrison, of all people, the old Whig president who died in 1841, just a month after delivering the windiest inaugural address on the windiest inaugural day in American history. Lincoln may have given short, unmemorable speeches at countless flag-raising ceremonies in Washington, but never was he ever seen, as he is in the movie, fetching his manuscript from the lining of his top hat, or for that matter using a crank, not a system of ropes, to pull the flag up a pole. (At one such real-life ceremony, the halyards got tangled and Lincoln said he hoped it wasn’t a bad sign for the future of the country.)
The list of such oops-moments can easily go on. In one of the movie’s most riveting scenes, a trio of smarmy political operatives tells Lincoln they are having a hard time bribing undecided Congressmen to vote “yes” on the amendment because so many 50-cent pieces of the day bear the president’s unpopular likeness. Good joke, to be sure, but Lincoln’s face did not actually appear on 50-cent currency until four years after his death, and even then on paper notes, not coins. In yet another scene, Lincoln’s young son Tad plays with glass negatives on loan from photographer Alexander Gardner’s gallery. But Gardner would never have sent one-of-a-kind, fragile plates to the rambunctious little “sprite” of the White House. Not long before, Tad had shown his contempt for photography by locking a camera operator out of a White House closet where he was developing portraits of the president, angry that he had appropriated one of his private hiding places without permission. By the time Lincoln fetched the key, the images had been all but ruined. Tad liked photos all right—paper prints—and his souvenir picture of Fido, the pet dog the family left behind when they headed to Washington, was, shall we say, dog-eared.
As for the Spielberg movie’s opening scene, in which a couple of Union soldiers—one white, one black—recite the words of the Gettysburg Address to the appreciative Lincoln, who is visiting the front toward the end of the war—it is almost inconceivable that any uniformed soldier of the day (or civilians, for that matter) would have memorized a speech that, however ingrained in modern memory, did not achieve any semblance of a national reputation until the 20th century. Finally, Lincoln’s last moments—in a deathbed at the Peterson House across the street from Ford’s Theatre on April 15, 1865—look little like period descriptions of the gripping scene. Spielberg places his character in a nightgown, lying in what appears to be fetal position. In fact the tall victim was placed diagonally in the too-small bed, and was under a cover, naked, when he breathed his last (doctors had removed his clothes to search for other possible wounds). Perhaps Daniel Day-Lewis does not do nude scenes.
Point of full disclosure. I served not only as author of the young-adult companion book to the movie (also called Lincoln), but as a “Content Consultant” for the Spielberg film, as the director himself graciously acknowledged earlier this week as he delivered the Dedication Day Address at the National Soldier’s Cemetery in Gettysburg on the 149th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. But he was far too generous. The book tries to tell the real story of passage of the 13th amendment, but where Tony Kushner’s extraordinary, beautiful screenplay was concerned, not all of my suggestions were adopted. Not all of my advice was taken. And with my name up there on the credits (albeit nine minutes into the scrolling list), I know I’m going to be held to account for some of the bloopers.
For a few weeks, I haven’t known quite how I would respond. But yesterday at Gettysburg, Steven Spielberg provided the eloquent answer. “It’s a betrayal of the job of the historian,” he asserted, to explore the unknown. But it is the job of the filmmaker to use creative “imagination” to recover what is lost to memory. Unavoidably, even at its very best, “this resurrection is a fantasy ... a dream.” As Spielberg neatly put it, “one of the jobs of art is to go to the impossible places that history must avoid.” There is no doubt that Spielberg has traveled toward an understanding of Abraham Lincoln more boldly than any other filmmaker before him.
Besides, those soldiers who recite the Gettysburg Address may simply represent the commitment of white and black troops to fight together for its promise of “a new birth of freedom.” Mary Lincoln’s presence in the House chamber may be meant to suggest how intertwined the family’s private and public life have become. The image of “Old Tippecanoe” Harrison in Lincoln’s office may be an omen for his own imminent death in office. In pursuit of broad collective memory, perhaps it’s not important to sweat the small stuff. From time to time, even “Honest Abe” himself exaggerated or dissembled in pursuit of a great cause. Just check out the shady roads he took to achieve black freedom as “imagined” so dazzlingly in the movie.
As for that most audacious of scenes—a bald-headed Thaddeus Stevens in bed with his African American mistress, and acknowledging that Lincoln had made corrupt bargains to win passage of the 13th Amendment. Not a false note. He may not have pronounced those words to his housekeeper, but pronounce them he absolutely did. And his “housekeeper” indeed doubled as his common law wife—perhaps the worst kept secret in Washington. Sometimes real history is as dramatic as great fiction. And when they converger at the highest levels, the combination is unbeatable.
What’s True and False in “Lincoln” Movie
by Harold Holzer
Did Lincoln really do that? Was Mary Todd really there? Lincoln scholar and consultant on the movie Harold Holzer picks out what’s true and false in Spielberg’s movie—and says in the end it’s not the details that matter.
When the House of Representatives finally, dramatically votes to approve the 13th Amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery, Washington erupts in celebration. Members of Congress weep, throw themselves into each other’s arms, and begin singing “Battle Cry of Freedom.” Men parade through the streets and church bells chime.
And then, at least according to Steven Spielberg’s new film Lincoln, the widely despised old liberal lion of the House, Thaddeus Stevens, limps home through the throngs on his malformed club foot, serenely enters his house, removes an extravagant black wig to reveal a shiny bald dome, and then crawls into bed with his African-American housekeeper—clearly, we are meant to infer, his mistress—where they kiss and exult in the historic events of the day. Spielberg’s Thaddeus Stevens summarizes the extraordinary events of the day with this remarkable quote: the most liberating constitutional amendment in history, he alleges, had been “passed by corruption, aided and abetted by the purest man in America”—meaning Abraham Lincoln.
With the widely praised film overflowing with such startling scenes, it is little wonder that scholars, nitpickers, trivial pursuit pursuers, and history buffs have all been crowding their local movie theaters this week, many armed with legal pads, in a massive competition to unearth and report every factual error that has crept into the film.
To be sure, there is no shortage of small historical bloopers in the movie. First Lady Mary Lincoln, for example, never planted herself in the House Gallery to observe the final tally on the amendment. (Michelle Obama may routinely attend the State of the Union address each year, but such a visit would have been unthinkable in 1865.) Nor did congressmen vote by state delegations—a device that conflates the traditions of national political conventions with those of the House of Representatives. (Until the advent of machine voting, the House voted alphabetically by name; this I know from experience—I once worked for Representative Bella Abzug, number two on the roll call, and it was always a challenge to move her considerable frame from her congressional office to the House floor in time to answer the roll right after James Aboureszk.)
From time to time, even “Honest Abe” himself exaggerated or dissembled in pursuit of a great cause.
Lincoln’s presidential office was never adorned with a lithographic portrait of William Henry Harrison, of all people, the old Whig president who died in 1841, just a month after delivering the windiest inaugural address on the windiest inaugural day in American history. Lincoln may have given short, unmemorable speeches at countless flag-raising ceremonies in Washington, but never was he ever seen, as he is in the movie, fetching his manuscript from the lining of his top hat, or for that matter using a crank, not a system of ropes, to pull the flag up a pole. (At one such real-life ceremony, the halyards got tangled and Lincoln said he hoped it wasn’t a bad sign for the future of the country.)
The list of such oops-moments can easily go on. In one of the movie’s most riveting scenes, a trio of smarmy political operatives tells Lincoln they are having a hard time bribing undecided Congressmen to vote “yes” on the amendment because so many 50-cent pieces of the day bear the president’s unpopular likeness. Good joke, to be sure, but Lincoln’s face did not actually appear on 50-cent currency until four years after his death, and even then on paper notes, not coins. In yet another scene, Lincoln’s young son Tad plays with glass negatives on loan from photographer Alexander Gardner’s gallery. But Gardner would never have sent one-of-a-kind, fragile plates to the rambunctious little “sprite” of the White House. Not long before, Tad had shown his contempt for photography by locking a camera operator out of a White House closet where he was developing portraits of the president, angry that he had appropriated one of his private hiding places without permission. By the time Lincoln fetched the key, the images had been all but ruined. Tad liked photos all right—paper prints—and his souvenir picture of Fido, the pet dog the family left behind when they headed to Washington, was, shall we say, dog-eared.
As for the Spielberg movie’s opening scene, in which a couple of Union soldiers—one white, one black—recite the words of the Gettysburg Address to the appreciative Lincoln, who is visiting the front toward the end of the war—it is almost inconceivable that any uniformed soldier of the day (or civilians, for that matter) would have memorized a speech that, however ingrained in modern memory, did not achieve any semblance of a national reputation until the 20th century. Finally, Lincoln’s last moments—in a deathbed at the Peterson House across the street from Ford’s Theatre on April 15, 1865—look little like period descriptions of the gripping scene. Spielberg places his character in a nightgown, lying in what appears to be fetal position. In fact the tall victim was placed diagonally in the too-small bed, and was under a cover, naked, when he breathed his last (doctors had removed his clothes to search for other possible wounds). Perhaps Daniel Day-Lewis does not do nude scenes.
Point of full disclosure. I served not only as author of the young-adult companion book to the movie (also called Lincoln), but as a “Content Consultant” for the Spielberg film, as the director himself graciously acknowledged earlier this week as he delivered the Dedication Day Address at the National Soldier’s Cemetery in Gettysburg on the 149th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. But he was far too generous. The book tries to tell the real story of passage of the 13th amendment, but where Tony Kushner’s extraordinary, beautiful screenplay was concerned, not all of my suggestions were adopted. Not all of my advice was taken. And with my name up there on the credits (albeit nine minutes into the scrolling list), I know I’m going to be held to account for some of the bloopers.
For a few weeks, I haven’t known quite how I would respond. But yesterday at Gettysburg, Steven Spielberg provided the eloquent answer. “It’s a betrayal of the job of the historian,” he asserted, to explore the unknown. But it is the job of the filmmaker to use creative “imagination” to recover what is lost to memory. Unavoidably, even at its very best, “this resurrection is a fantasy ... a dream.” As Spielberg neatly put it, “one of the jobs of art is to go to the impossible places that history must avoid.” There is no doubt that Spielberg has traveled toward an understanding of Abraham Lincoln more boldly than any other filmmaker before him.
Besides, those soldiers who recite the Gettysburg Address may simply represent the commitment of white and black troops to fight together for its promise of “a new birth of freedom.” Mary Lincoln’s presence in the House chamber may be meant to suggest how intertwined the family’s private and public life have become. The image of “Old Tippecanoe” Harrison in Lincoln’s office may be an omen for his own imminent death in office. In pursuit of broad collective memory, perhaps it’s not important to sweat the small stuff. From time to time, even “Honest Abe” himself exaggerated or dissembled in pursuit of a great cause. Just check out the shady roads he took to achieve black freedom as “imagined” so dazzlingly in the movie.
As for that most audacious of scenes—a bald-headed Thaddeus Stevens in bed with his African American mistress, and acknowledging that Lincoln had made corrupt bargains to win passage of the 13th Amendment. Not a false note. He may not have pronounced those words to his housekeeper, but pronounce them he absolutely did. And his “housekeeper” indeed doubled as his common law wife—perhaps the worst kept secret in Washington. Sometimes real history is as dramatic as great fiction. And when they converger at the highest levels, the combination is unbeatable.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
New Republicans?
There is no soul searching in the Republican Party. There are no new Republicans. For Republicans who change their way of thinking get drummed out of the party. That party has room only for the true believers.
November 20, 2012, 12:03 pm110 Comments
The New Republicans by Paul Krugman
There has been a lot of talk since the election about the possible emergence of a new faction within the Republican party, or at least among the conservative intelligentsia. These new Republicans, we’re told, are willing to be more open-minded on cultural issues, more understanding of immigrants, and more skeptical that trickle-down economics is enough; they’ll favor direct measures to help working families.
So what should we call these new Republicans? I have a suggestion: why not call them “Democrats”?
There are three things you need to understand here.
First, on economic issues the modern Democratic party is what we would once have considered “centrist”, or even center-right. Obama’s Heritage-Foundation-inspired health care plan is to the right of Richard Nixon’s. Nobody with political influence is suggesting a return to pre-Reagan tax rates on the wealthy. Fantasies about Obama as a socialist, redistributionist hater of capitalism bear no more resemblance to reality than fantasies about his birthplace or religion.
Second, today’s Republican party is an alliance between the plutocrats and the preachers, plus some opportunists along for the ride — full stop. The whole party is about low taxes at the top (and low benefits for the rest), plus conservative social values and putting religion in the schools; it has no other reason for being. Someday there may emerge another party with the same name standing for a quite different agenda; after all, the Republicans were once defined by opposition to slavery, and the Democrats by rural voters (hence the donkey) and Tammany Hall. But that will take a long time, and it won’t really be the same party.
Finally, it’s true that there are some Republican intellectuals and pundits who seem to be truly open-minded about both economic and social issues. But I worded that carefully: they “seem to be” open-minded; indeed, they’re professional seemers. When it matters, they can always be counted on — after making a big show of stroking their chins and agonizing — to follow the party line, and reject anything that doesn’t go along with the preacher-plutocrat agenda. If they don’t deliver when it counts, they are excommunicated; see Frum, David.
Anyone who imagines that there is any real soul-searching going on is deluding himself or herself.
.
November 20, 2012, 12:03 pm110 Comments
The New Republicans by Paul Krugman
There has been a lot of talk since the election about the possible emergence of a new faction within the Republican party, or at least among the conservative intelligentsia. These new Republicans, we’re told, are willing to be more open-minded on cultural issues, more understanding of immigrants, and more skeptical that trickle-down economics is enough; they’ll favor direct measures to help working families.
So what should we call these new Republicans? I have a suggestion: why not call them “Democrats”?
There are three things you need to understand here.
First, on economic issues the modern Democratic party is what we would once have considered “centrist”, or even center-right. Obama’s Heritage-Foundation-inspired health care plan is to the right of Richard Nixon’s. Nobody with political influence is suggesting a return to pre-Reagan tax rates on the wealthy. Fantasies about Obama as a socialist, redistributionist hater of capitalism bear no more resemblance to reality than fantasies about his birthplace or religion.
Second, today’s Republican party is an alliance between the plutocrats and the preachers, plus some opportunists along for the ride — full stop. The whole party is about low taxes at the top (and low benefits for the rest), plus conservative social values and putting religion in the schools; it has no other reason for being. Someday there may emerge another party with the same name standing for a quite different agenda; after all, the Republicans were once defined by opposition to slavery, and the Democrats by rural voters (hence the donkey) and Tammany Hall. But that will take a long time, and it won’t really be the same party.
Finally, it’s true that there are some Republican intellectuals and pundits who seem to be truly open-minded about both economic and social issues. But I worded that carefully: they “seem to be” open-minded; indeed, they’re professional seemers. When it matters, they can always be counted on — after making a big show of stroking their chins and agonizing — to follow the party line, and reject anything that doesn’t go along with the preacher-plutocrat agenda. If they don’t deliver when it counts, they are excommunicated; see Frum, David.
Anyone who imagines that there is any real soul-searching going on is deluding himself or herself.
.
Never Forget that Paul Ryan is a Fraud
by Paul Krugman
November 19, 2012, 6:48 pm13 Comments
A Public Service Reminder: Paul Ryan is a Con Man
So now that the Unperson/Ryan ticket has lost, Republicans are clearly expecting Paul Ryan to move right back into his previous role as Washington’s favorite Serious, Honest Conservative.
He might get away with it; but I hope not.
The fact is that Ryan is and always was a fraud. His plan never added up; it was never, contrary to what people who should know better asserted, “scored” by the CBO. What he actually offered was a plan to hurt the poor and reward the rich, actually increasing the deficit along the way, plus magic asterisks that supposedly reduced the debt by means unspecified.
His genius, if you can all it that, was in realizing that there was a role — as I said, that of Honest, Serious Conservative — that self-proclaimed centrists desperately wanted to see filled, so that they could demonstrate their bipartisanship by lavishing praise on the holder of that position. So Ryan did his best to impersonate a budget wonk. It wasn’t a very good impersonation — in fact, he’s pretty bad at budget math. But the “centrists” saw what they wanted to see.
Ryan can’t be ignored, since his party does retain blocking power, and he chairs an important committee. But if he must be dealt with, it should be with no illusions. Fool me once …
.
November 19, 2012, 6:48 pm13 Comments
A Public Service Reminder: Paul Ryan is a Con Man
So now that the Unperson/Ryan ticket has lost, Republicans are clearly expecting Paul Ryan to move right back into his previous role as Washington’s favorite Serious, Honest Conservative.
He might get away with it; but I hope not.
The fact is that Ryan is and always was a fraud. His plan never added up; it was never, contrary to what people who should know better asserted, “scored” by the CBO. What he actually offered was a plan to hurt the poor and reward the rich, actually increasing the deficit along the way, plus magic asterisks that supposedly reduced the debt by means unspecified.
His genius, if you can all it that, was in realizing that there was a role — as I said, that of Honest, Serious Conservative — that self-proclaimed centrists desperately wanted to see filled, so that they could demonstrate their bipartisanship by lavishing praise on the holder of that position. So Ryan did his best to impersonate a budget wonk. It wasn’t a very good impersonation — in fact, he’s pretty bad at budget math. But the “centrists” saw what they wanted to see.
Ryan can’t be ignored, since his party does retain blocking power, and he chairs an important committee. But if he must be dealt with, it should be with no illusions. Fool me once …
.
Sunday, November 18, 2012
Out of Touch
HOME / Technology : Innovation, the Internet, gadgets, and more. Out of Touch
E-reading isn’t reading.
By Andrew Piper
Posted Thursday, Nov. 15, 2012, at 5:22 AM ET
Amid the seemingly endless debates today about the future of reading, there remains one salient, yet often overlooked fact: Reading isn’t only a matter of our brains; it’s something that we do with our bodies. Reading is an integral part of our lived experience, our sense of being in the world, even if at times this can mean feeling intensely apart from it. How we hold our reading materials, how we look at them, navigate them, take notes on them, share them, play with them, even where we read them—these are the categories that have mattered most to us as readers throughout the long and varied history of reading. They will no doubt continue to do so into the future.
Understanding reading at this most elementary level—at the level of person, habit, and gesture—will be essential as we continue to make choices about the kind of reading we care about and the kind of technologies that will best embody those values. To think about the future of reading means, then, to think about the long history of how touch has shaped reading and, by extension, our sense of ourselves while we read.
The significance of the tactility of reading could begin with St. Augustine. In the eighth book of his Confessions, Augustine describes the moment of his conversion to becoming a Christian:
In my misery I kept crying, “How long shall I go on saying, ‘tomorrow, tomorrow?’ ” Why not now? Why not make an end of my ugly sins at this very moment? I was asking myself these questions when all at once I heard the singing voice of a child in a nearby house. Whether it was the voice of a boy or girl I cannot say, but again and again it repeated the refrain, “Take it and read, take it read.”
Augustine is sitting beneath a fig tree in his garden, and upon hearing the voice he takes up the Bible lying near him and opens a passage at random and begins reading (Romans 13:13-14). At this moment, he tells us, “I had no wish to read more and no need to do so. For in an instant, as I came to the end of the sentence, it was as though the light of confidence flooded into my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled.” Augustine closes the book, marking his place with his finger, and goes to tell his friend Alypius about his experience. His conversion is complete.
No other passage has more profoundly captured the meaning of the book than this one. Not just reading but reading books was aligned in Augustine with the act of personal conversion. Augustine was writing at the end of the fourth century, when the codex had largely superseded the scroll as the most prevalent form of reading material. We know Augustine was reading a book from the way he randomly accesses a page and uses his finger to mark his place. The conversion at the heart of The Confessions was an affirmation of the new technology of the book within the lives of individuals, indeed, as the technology that helped turn readers into individuals. Turning the page, not turning the handle of the scroll, was the new technical prelude to undergoing a major turn in one’s own life.
In aligning the practice of book reading with that of personal conversion, Augustine established a paradigm of reading that would far exceed its theological framework, one that would go on to become a foundation of Western humanistic learning for the next 1,500 years. It was above all else the graspability of the book, its being “at hand,” that allowed it to play such a pivotal role in shaping one’s life. “Take it and read, take it and read” (tolle lege, tolle lege), repeats the divine refrain. The book’s graspability, in a material as well as a spiritual sense, is what endowed it with such immense power to radically alter our lives. In taking hold of the book, according to Augustine, we are taken hold of by books.
Nothing is more suspect today than the book’s continued identity of being “at hand.” The spines, gatherings, threads, boards, and folds that once gave a book its shapeliness, that fit it to our hands, are being supplanted by the increasingly fine strata of new reading devices, integrated into vast woven systems of connection. If books are essentially vertebral, contributing to our sense of human uniqueness that depends upon bodily uprightness, digital texts are more like invertebrates, subject to the laws of horizontal gene transfer and nonlocal regeneration. Like jellyfish or hydra polyps, they always elude our grasp in some fundamental sense. What this means for how we read—and how we are taken hold of by what we read—is still far from clear.
Aristotle regarded touch as the most elementary sense. It is how we begin to make our way in the world, to map it, measure it, and make sense of it. Touch is the most self-reflexive of senses, an insight affirmed by the German researcher David Katz, who established the field of touch studies in the early 20th century based on his work with World War I amputees. Through the feeling of touch, we learn to feel ourselves. Touch is a form of redundancy, enfolding more sensory information into what we see and therefore what we read. It makes the words on the page richer in meaning and more multidimensional. It gives words a geometry.
After completing his early masterpiece Dante and Virgil, the great French romantic painter Eugène Delacroix wrote in his journal, “What I must chiefly remember are the hands.” As Delacroix said of painting, so too of reading.
Books, like hands, hold our attention. As early as the 12th century, writers began drawing hands in the margins of their books to point to important passages. Such a device gradually passed into typescript and became a commonplace of printed books. It looked like this: ☞. The pointing hand in the book stood for the way books themselves were like pointers, making the world graspable. If books open us out into the world, they also constrain. They bring the world down to size, inoculations against the problem of patternlessness.
The child’s first drawing is often of his or her own hand. The footprint may be the first mark we make in the world (for hospital records), but the handprint is the original sign of self-reflection, of understanding ourselves as being in the world. The “handbook” or “manual”—the book that reduces the world into its essential parts, into outline form—is an extension of this art of measurement. It is one of the oldest types of books, dating back to Epictetus’s Enchiridion (second century), a short repository of nuggets of wisdom. In the eighth century, the Venerable Bede taught readers to count to a million on their hands in his On the Reckoning of Time (725). By the 15th and 16th centuries, the measuring hand would become the ultimate sign of our bibliographic relationship to the world, embodied in the new genre of the atlas. In its first incarnation, Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570), the entire world could now be held in the reader’s hand. The secular bravura on display in these books, where the reader assumed the divine view, cannot be overstated. By the 17th century, the great age of wars of religion, palmistry, and chiromancy, knowledge of and on the hand would become major sciences. Handbooks seem to proliferate in periods of intellectual and technological uncertainty, much as they are proliferating today.
In the 19th century, readers witnessed the birth of reading as touch, in the form of Louis Braille’s invention of a dot-matrix reading system for the blind in 1824. The method derived from an earlier request by Napoleon for a code that could be read by his soldiers at night in the field without the use of light. Braille’s innovation was to make the dot-matrix representation of letters small enough to correspond to a single touch of the finger. It made reading digital in a very literal sense. By the end of the century, libraries such as the National Library for the Blind in Britain contained over 8,000 volumes in braille, one of many subsequent technologies that aimed to bring reading to the visually impaired.
The turn of the 20th century was a period of numerous experiments with the tactility of reading, both practical and impractical, culminating in the modernist revival of experimental books between the world wars. Books made of sandpaper, cardboard, cheap notebook paper, wood, and even metal were some of the many ways that artists experimented with the touch of reading. In the Russian artist El Lissitzky’s celebrated Architecture of VKhUTEMAS (1927), we see how the disembodied hand of the divine voice from the medieval book has returned, now in the form of the drafting hand of modern science. With the compass needle seemingly woven into the hand’s grip, we can see Lissitzky performing a subtle visual pun. The compass needle is imagined to stand in for the sewing needle, one of the original tools of bookmaking through the sewn binding of the book’s spine. For the Russian avant-garde, the rectilinearity of modernism—the cube, plane, column, grid—was as much born from the book as it was the industrial Gargantua of the new machine age. The handbook was one of modernism’s secret muses.
How can we hold, and hold on to, our digital texts today?
It is not surprising that one of the most canonized pieces of new media art is Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv’s Text Rain, in which letters rain down a screen and come to rest on projections of viewers’ open hands, one of many new electronic works that take the hand as their conceptual starting point. Text Rain is a potent reminder of the way the digital, at least in English, is named after the hand’s component parts. The book’s handiness is recycled on the screen, only now the circuit that once enclosed us within a larger sense of self and place—that brought us into contact with God, as it did for Augustine—has become purely solipsistic: we see ourselves collecting words with our hands, as we become the new gods. But the words of Text Rain can never truly be grasped by our hands. They are like Platonic forms. They remind us how fragile our hold over words is, that we are only ever godlike.
For Augustine, the book’s closedness—that it could be grasped as a totality—was integral to its success in generating transformative reading experiences. Its closedness was the condition of the reader’s conversion. Digital texts, by contrast, are radically open in their networked form. They are marked by a very weak sense of closure. Indeed, it is often hard to know what to call them (e-books, books, texts, or just documents) without any clear sense of the material differences between them.
But on another level we could say that digital texts don’t so much cancel the book’s closedness as reinscribe it within themselves. Where books are closed on the outside and open on the inside, digital texts put this relationship in reverse order. The openness of the digital text—that it is hard to know where its contours are—contrasts with a performed inaccessibility that also belongs to the networked text. There is always something “out of touch” about the digital. Consider Kenneth Goldsmith’s online Soliloquy (2001), which was initially published as a printed book consisting of transcripts of his digitally recorded speech over the course of a single week. In the online version, words on the screen only appear when touched by the cursor (the electronic finger) and then only one sentence at a time. Every time we move the cursor to illuminate another sentence, the one before it disappears, just as the one after remains invisible. Like a jellyfish, the textual whole slips through our fingers.
This is not to imply that digital texts are not at some level “there.” This would be to fall prey to the “virtual fallacy” (computing culture’s equivalent to Ruskin’s “pathetic fallacy”). Digital texts are somewhere, but where they are has become increasingly complicated, abstract, even forbidden. We cannot see, let alone touch, the source of the screen’s letters, the electromagnetically charged “hard drive,” without destroying it. Unlike books, we cannot feel the impressions of the digital. The touch of the page brings us into the world, while the screen keeps us out. All that remains of the hand is a ghostly remnant of its having been there at the time of scanning, like the chance encounters with scanners’ hands from Google Books, accidental traces of the birth of the digital record. The hand no longer points, like the typographic manicule; rather, it covers over or gets in the way. Hand was there, we might say.
But digital texts can be grasped, you will say (I, too, own an e-reader or two). Touch has emerged as one of the most important new fields in contemporary computing. Falling under the heading of “haptics” (like optics for the hand), it encompasses the development of touch screens, virtual handshakes, and surgical training at a distance. But it is also part of a culture of the “handheld,” the way computing has steadily been migrating from large rooms to our desks to our hands. The more screenish our world becomes, the more we try to reinsert tactility back into it.
However much electronic books may try to look like their printed brethren, they still change how we manually interact with them and those changes matter for how we read. There are, for starters, no longer any pages to turn. There is no density to the e-book (all is battery), which is incidentally one of its greatest selling points. Open books can be measured by the sliding scale of pages past and future, like steps, just off to the side of the page. What lies after the digital page? An abyss. No matter what the page number says (and depending on which screen you’re reading it will say different things), we have no way to corroborate this evidence with our senses, no idea where we are while we read. Instead of turning the page, we now have the button, at least for a little while longer. The hand no longer points, and thus cognitively and emotionally reaches for something it cannot have (like Michelangelo’s famous finger), it presses or squeezes. The mechanical pressure that gave birth to the printed book in the form of the wooden handpress is today both vastly reduced in scale and multiplied in number through our interactions with the digital. There is a punctuatedness, a suddenness, but also a repetitiveness to pressing buttons that starkly contrast with the sedate rhythms of the slowly turned page. Buttons convert human motion into an electrical effect. In this, they preserve the idea of “conversion” that was at the core of reading books for Augustine. But in their incessant repetitiveness the meaning of conversion is gradually hollowed out. It is made less transformative.
Buttons also resist. Over time, their use causes stress to the human body, known as carpal tunnel syndrome. Like its related postural malady, “text neck,” these syndromes are signs of how computation is beginning to stretch us, both cognitively and corporally. The resistance of the button is an intimation of the way technology increasingly seems to be pushing back.
Perhaps it is for this reason that we are moving away from the world of the button to that of the touch screen. From the ugly three-dimensionality of the mechanical apparatus we ascend to the fantasy of existing in only two dimensions, a world of the single, yet infinite page. Here the finger no longer converts, but conducts. With capacitive touch screens your finger alters the screen’s electrostatic field thereby conveying a command. Instead of pressing to turn the page, we now swipe. Kinesthesia, the sense of bodily movement, overrides the book’s synesthesia, its unique art of conjoining touch, sight, and thought into a unified experience. In an electronic environment, corporal action overtakes reading’s traditional inaction.
The more my body does, however, the less my mind does. Interactivity is a constraint, not a freedom. Swiping has the effect of making everything on the page cognitively lighter, less resistant. After all, the rhythmic swiping of the hand has been one of the most common methods of facilitating “speed-reading.” And as one study after another affirms, the more time we spend reading screens, the less time we spend reading individual units of the text. Skimming is the new normal. With my e-book, I no longer pause over the slight caress of the almost turned page—a rapture of anticipation—I just whisk away. Our hands become brooms, sweeping away the alphabetic dust before us.
Tonight I will read to my children before they go to bed. Although the “bedtime story” was only invented as a common practice at the end of the 19th century, there has always been a durable physiological connection between sleep and reading. Unlike the nursemaid’s oral tales that were meant to frighten children into staying in their beds, the slightly monotonous rhythm of parents’ reading aloud is imagined to be a more effective way of accessing the unconsciousness of sleep.
Once the circus of getting ready for bed is over (why pajamas are so hard to put on is a mystery), we search out a clear plot of carpet and choose a book to read. Maybe it will be something from the Frog and Toad series or Tinker and Tanker or, the house favorite, George and Martha.
As I begin to read, the kids begin to lean into me. Our bodies assume positions of rest, the book our shared column of support. No matter what advertisers say, this could never be true of the acrobatic screen. As we gradually sink into the floor, and each other, our minds are freed to follow their own pathways, unlike the prescribed pathways of the Web. We read and we drift. “The words of my book nothing,” writes Walt Whitman, “the drift of it everything.”
New research continues to emphasize the importance of mind wandering for learning. It turns out that not paying attention is one of the best ways of discovering new ideas. Reading books, whether silently or aloud, remains one of the most efficient means of enabling such errant thinking. As our bodies rest, our minds begin to work in a different way. New connections, new pathways, and sharp turns are being made as we meander our way through the book, but also away from it. There is no way to tell if anyone is actually paying attention anymore as I read, including myself. This seems to be one of the great benefits of reading aloud, that you can think of something else while you do it. We may be holding the book together, but our minds are no doubt far apart by now. The fairy tale is the first story of childhood because it tells of such leaving behind (parents and home), of entering the dreamscape of the woods—and the mind. It tells of the crooked path of change. How can one know where reading books ends and dreaming in books begins?
Perhaps the patron saint of reading should be Dr. Faustus. Faust, which means fist in German, was one of the most important folk heroes of the early modern world, which saw the invention of printing. Faust was a product of all those books that were increasingly available to readers. Unlike Don Quixote, a rough contemporary who steadily devoured works of fiction, Faust tried to know too much about the world. Faust was Quixote’s serious side. He tried to surpass what could be known in a book, whether it was the Bible or the alchemical handbook, famously fleeing his book-lined study at the opening of the tragedy. Faust, the fist, in other words, is our modern day demon, not Mephistopheles, his devilish double. Faust reminds us of the way books are totems against ceaseless activity, tools for securing the somatic calm that is the beginning of all careful but also visionary thought. If we believe in the value of rest, and the kind of conversional thinking that it makes possible, then we will want to preserve books and their spaces of readerly rest.
But Faust also reminds us not to hold on too tightly. He shows us the risks of grasping. He reminds me that the meaning of reading lies in the oscillatory rhythms of the opening and closing hand.
Reprinted with permission from Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times, by Andrew Piper, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
E-reading isn’t reading.
By Andrew Piper
Posted Thursday, Nov. 15, 2012, at 5:22 AM ET
Amid the seemingly endless debates today about the future of reading, there remains one salient, yet often overlooked fact: Reading isn’t only a matter of our brains; it’s something that we do with our bodies. Reading is an integral part of our lived experience, our sense of being in the world, even if at times this can mean feeling intensely apart from it. How we hold our reading materials, how we look at them, navigate them, take notes on them, share them, play with them, even where we read them—these are the categories that have mattered most to us as readers throughout the long and varied history of reading. They will no doubt continue to do so into the future.
Understanding reading at this most elementary level—at the level of person, habit, and gesture—will be essential as we continue to make choices about the kind of reading we care about and the kind of technologies that will best embody those values. To think about the future of reading means, then, to think about the long history of how touch has shaped reading and, by extension, our sense of ourselves while we read.
The significance of the tactility of reading could begin with St. Augustine. In the eighth book of his Confessions, Augustine describes the moment of his conversion to becoming a Christian:
In my misery I kept crying, “How long shall I go on saying, ‘tomorrow, tomorrow?’ ” Why not now? Why not make an end of my ugly sins at this very moment? I was asking myself these questions when all at once I heard the singing voice of a child in a nearby house. Whether it was the voice of a boy or girl I cannot say, but again and again it repeated the refrain, “Take it and read, take it read.”
Augustine is sitting beneath a fig tree in his garden, and upon hearing the voice he takes up the Bible lying near him and opens a passage at random and begins reading (Romans 13:13-14). At this moment, he tells us, “I had no wish to read more and no need to do so. For in an instant, as I came to the end of the sentence, it was as though the light of confidence flooded into my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled.” Augustine closes the book, marking his place with his finger, and goes to tell his friend Alypius about his experience. His conversion is complete.
No other passage has more profoundly captured the meaning of the book than this one. Not just reading but reading books was aligned in Augustine with the act of personal conversion. Augustine was writing at the end of the fourth century, when the codex had largely superseded the scroll as the most prevalent form of reading material. We know Augustine was reading a book from the way he randomly accesses a page and uses his finger to mark his place. The conversion at the heart of The Confessions was an affirmation of the new technology of the book within the lives of individuals, indeed, as the technology that helped turn readers into individuals. Turning the page, not turning the handle of the scroll, was the new technical prelude to undergoing a major turn in one’s own life.
In aligning the practice of book reading with that of personal conversion, Augustine established a paradigm of reading that would far exceed its theological framework, one that would go on to become a foundation of Western humanistic learning for the next 1,500 years. It was above all else the graspability of the book, its being “at hand,” that allowed it to play such a pivotal role in shaping one’s life. “Take it and read, take it and read” (tolle lege, tolle lege), repeats the divine refrain. The book’s graspability, in a material as well as a spiritual sense, is what endowed it with such immense power to radically alter our lives. In taking hold of the book, according to Augustine, we are taken hold of by books.
Nothing is more suspect today than the book’s continued identity of being “at hand.” The spines, gatherings, threads, boards, and folds that once gave a book its shapeliness, that fit it to our hands, are being supplanted by the increasingly fine strata of new reading devices, integrated into vast woven systems of connection. If books are essentially vertebral, contributing to our sense of human uniqueness that depends upon bodily uprightness, digital texts are more like invertebrates, subject to the laws of horizontal gene transfer and nonlocal regeneration. Like jellyfish or hydra polyps, they always elude our grasp in some fundamental sense. What this means for how we read—and how we are taken hold of by what we read—is still far from clear.
Aristotle regarded touch as the most elementary sense. It is how we begin to make our way in the world, to map it, measure it, and make sense of it. Touch is the most self-reflexive of senses, an insight affirmed by the German researcher David Katz, who established the field of touch studies in the early 20th century based on his work with World War I amputees. Through the feeling of touch, we learn to feel ourselves. Touch is a form of redundancy, enfolding more sensory information into what we see and therefore what we read. It makes the words on the page richer in meaning and more multidimensional. It gives words a geometry.
After completing his early masterpiece Dante and Virgil, the great French romantic painter Eugène Delacroix wrote in his journal, “What I must chiefly remember are the hands.” As Delacroix said of painting, so too of reading.
Books, like hands, hold our attention. As early as the 12th century, writers began drawing hands in the margins of their books to point to important passages. Such a device gradually passed into typescript and became a commonplace of printed books. It looked like this: ☞. The pointing hand in the book stood for the way books themselves were like pointers, making the world graspable. If books open us out into the world, they also constrain. They bring the world down to size, inoculations against the problem of patternlessness.
The child’s first drawing is often of his or her own hand. The footprint may be the first mark we make in the world (for hospital records), but the handprint is the original sign of self-reflection, of understanding ourselves as being in the world. The “handbook” or “manual”—the book that reduces the world into its essential parts, into outline form—is an extension of this art of measurement. It is one of the oldest types of books, dating back to Epictetus’s Enchiridion (second century), a short repository of nuggets of wisdom. In the eighth century, the Venerable Bede taught readers to count to a million on their hands in his On the Reckoning of Time (725). By the 15th and 16th centuries, the measuring hand would become the ultimate sign of our bibliographic relationship to the world, embodied in the new genre of the atlas. In its first incarnation, Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570), the entire world could now be held in the reader’s hand. The secular bravura on display in these books, where the reader assumed the divine view, cannot be overstated. By the 17th century, the great age of wars of religion, palmistry, and chiromancy, knowledge of and on the hand would become major sciences. Handbooks seem to proliferate in periods of intellectual and technological uncertainty, much as they are proliferating today.
In the 19th century, readers witnessed the birth of reading as touch, in the form of Louis Braille’s invention of a dot-matrix reading system for the blind in 1824. The method derived from an earlier request by Napoleon for a code that could be read by his soldiers at night in the field without the use of light. Braille’s innovation was to make the dot-matrix representation of letters small enough to correspond to a single touch of the finger. It made reading digital in a very literal sense. By the end of the century, libraries such as the National Library for the Blind in Britain contained over 8,000 volumes in braille, one of many subsequent technologies that aimed to bring reading to the visually impaired.
The turn of the 20th century was a period of numerous experiments with the tactility of reading, both practical and impractical, culminating in the modernist revival of experimental books between the world wars. Books made of sandpaper, cardboard, cheap notebook paper, wood, and even metal were some of the many ways that artists experimented with the touch of reading. In the Russian artist El Lissitzky’s celebrated Architecture of VKhUTEMAS (1927), we see how the disembodied hand of the divine voice from the medieval book has returned, now in the form of the drafting hand of modern science. With the compass needle seemingly woven into the hand’s grip, we can see Lissitzky performing a subtle visual pun. The compass needle is imagined to stand in for the sewing needle, one of the original tools of bookmaking through the sewn binding of the book’s spine. For the Russian avant-garde, the rectilinearity of modernism—the cube, plane, column, grid—was as much born from the book as it was the industrial Gargantua of the new machine age. The handbook was one of modernism’s secret muses.
How can we hold, and hold on to, our digital texts today?
It is not surprising that one of the most canonized pieces of new media art is Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv’s Text Rain, in which letters rain down a screen and come to rest on projections of viewers’ open hands, one of many new electronic works that take the hand as their conceptual starting point. Text Rain is a potent reminder of the way the digital, at least in English, is named after the hand’s component parts. The book’s handiness is recycled on the screen, only now the circuit that once enclosed us within a larger sense of self and place—that brought us into contact with God, as it did for Augustine—has become purely solipsistic: we see ourselves collecting words with our hands, as we become the new gods. But the words of Text Rain can never truly be grasped by our hands. They are like Platonic forms. They remind us how fragile our hold over words is, that we are only ever godlike.
For Augustine, the book’s closedness—that it could be grasped as a totality—was integral to its success in generating transformative reading experiences. Its closedness was the condition of the reader’s conversion. Digital texts, by contrast, are radically open in their networked form. They are marked by a very weak sense of closure. Indeed, it is often hard to know what to call them (e-books, books, texts, or just documents) without any clear sense of the material differences between them.
But on another level we could say that digital texts don’t so much cancel the book’s closedness as reinscribe it within themselves. Where books are closed on the outside and open on the inside, digital texts put this relationship in reverse order. The openness of the digital text—that it is hard to know where its contours are—contrasts with a performed inaccessibility that also belongs to the networked text. There is always something “out of touch” about the digital. Consider Kenneth Goldsmith’s online Soliloquy (2001), which was initially published as a printed book consisting of transcripts of his digitally recorded speech over the course of a single week. In the online version, words on the screen only appear when touched by the cursor (the electronic finger) and then only one sentence at a time. Every time we move the cursor to illuminate another sentence, the one before it disappears, just as the one after remains invisible. Like a jellyfish, the textual whole slips through our fingers.
This is not to imply that digital texts are not at some level “there.” This would be to fall prey to the “virtual fallacy” (computing culture’s equivalent to Ruskin’s “pathetic fallacy”). Digital texts are somewhere, but where they are has become increasingly complicated, abstract, even forbidden. We cannot see, let alone touch, the source of the screen’s letters, the electromagnetically charged “hard drive,” without destroying it. Unlike books, we cannot feel the impressions of the digital. The touch of the page brings us into the world, while the screen keeps us out. All that remains of the hand is a ghostly remnant of its having been there at the time of scanning, like the chance encounters with scanners’ hands from Google Books, accidental traces of the birth of the digital record. The hand no longer points, like the typographic manicule; rather, it covers over or gets in the way. Hand was there, we might say.
But digital texts can be grasped, you will say (I, too, own an e-reader or two). Touch has emerged as one of the most important new fields in contemporary computing. Falling under the heading of “haptics” (like optics for the hand), it encompasses the development of touch screens, virtual handshakes, and surgical training at a distance. But it is also part of a culture of the “handheld,” the way computing has steadily been migrating from large rooms to our desks to our hands. The more screenish our world becomes, the more we try to reinsert tactility back into it.
However much electronic books may try to look like their printed brethren, they still change how we manually interact with them and those changes matter for how we read. There are, for starters, no longer any pages to turn. There is no density to the e-book (all is battery), which is incidentally one of its greatest selling points. Open books can be measured by the sliding scale of pages past and future, like steps, just off to the side of the page. What lies after the digital page? An abyss. No matter what the page number says (and depending on which screen you’re reading it will say different things), we have no way to corroborate this evidence with our senses, no idea where we are while we read. Instead of turning the page, we now have the button, at least for a little while longer. The hand no longer points, and thus cognitively and emotionally reaches for something it cannot have (like Michelangelo’s famous finger), it presses or squeezes. The mechanical pressure that gave birth to the printed book in the form of the wooden handpress is today both vastly reduced in scale and multiplied in number through our interactions with the digital. There is a punctuatedness, a suddenness, but also a repetitiveness to pressing buttons that starkly contrast with the sedate rhythms of the slowly turned page. Buttons convert human motion into an electrical effect. In this, they preserve the idea of “conversion” that was at the core of reading books for Augustine. But in their incessant repetitiveness the meaning of conversion is gradually hollowed out. It is made less transformative.
Buttons also resist. Over time, their use causes stress to the human body, known as carpal tunnel syndrome. Like its related postural malady, “text neck,” these syndromes are signs of how computation is beginning to stretch us, both cognitively and corporally. The resistance of the button is an intimation of the way technology increasingly seems to be pushing back.
Perhaps it is for this reason that we are moving away from the world of the button to that of the touch screen. From the ugly three-dimensionality of the mechanical apparatus we ascend to the fantasy of existing in only two dimensions, a world of the single, yet infinite page. Here the finger no longer converts, but conducts. With capacitive touch screens your finger alters the screen’s electrostatic field thereby conveying a command. Instead of pressing to turn the page, we now swipe. Kinesthesia, the sense of bodily movement, overrides the book’s synesthesia, its unique art of conjoining touch, sight, and thought into a unified experience. In an electronic environment, corporal action overtakes reading’s traditional inaction.
The more my body does, however, the less my mind does. Interactivity is a constraint, not a freedom. Swiping has the effect of making everything on the page cognitively lighter, less resistant. After all, the rhythmic swiping of the hand has been one of the most common methods of facilitating “speed-reading.” And as one study after another affirms, the more time we spend reading screens, the less time we spend reading individual units of the text. Skimming is the new normal. With my e-book, I no longer pause over the slight caress of the almost turned page—a rapture of anticipation—I just whisk away. Our hands become brooms, sweeping away the alphabetic dust before us.
Tonight I will read to my children before they go to bed. Although the “bedtime story” was only invented as a common practice at the end of the 19th century, there has always been a durable physiological connection between sleep and reading. Unlike the nursemaid’s oral tales that were meant to frighten children into staying in their beds, the slightly monotonous rhythm of parents’ reading aloud is imagined to be a more effective way of accessing the unconsciousness of sleep.
Once the circus of getting ready for bed is over (why pajamas are so hard to put on is a mystery), we search out a clear plot of carpet and choose a book to read. Maybe it will be something from the Frog and Toad series or Tinker and Tanker or, the house favorite, George and Martha.
As I begin to read, the kids begin to lean into me. Our bodies assume positions of rest, the book our shared column of support. No matter what advertisers say, this could never be true of the acrobatic screen. As we gradually sink into the floor, and each other, our minds are freed to follow their own pathways, unlike the prescribed pathways of the Web. We read and we drift. “The words of my book nothing,” writes Walt Whitman, “the drift of it everything.”
New research continues to emphasize the importance of mind wandering for learning. It turns out that not paying attention is one of the best ways of discovering new ideas. Reading books, whether silently or aloud, remains one of the most efficient means of enabling such errant thinking. As our bodies rest, our minds begin to work in a different way. New connections, new pathways, and sharp turns are being made as we meander our way through the book, but also away from it. There is no way to tell if anyone is actually paying attention anymore as I read, including myself. This seems to be one of the great benefits of reading aloud, that you can think of something else while you do it. We may be holding the book together, but our minds are no doubt far apart by now. The fairy tale is the first story of childhood because it tells of such leaving behind (parents and home), of entering the dreamscape of the woods—and the mind. It tells of the crooked path of change. How can one know where reading books ends and dreaming in books begins?
Perhaps the patron saint of reading should be Dr. Faustus. Faust, which means fist in German, was one of the most important folk heroes of the early modern world, which saw the invention of printing. Faust was a product of all those books that were increasingly available to readers. Unlike Don Quixote, a rough contemporary who steadily devoured works of fiction, Faust tried to know too much about the world. Faust was Quixote’s serious side. He tried to surpass what could be known in a book, whether it was the Bible or the alchemical handbook, famously fleeing his book-lined study at the opening of the tragedy. Faust, the fist, in other words, is our modern day demon, not Mephistopheles, his devilish double. Faust reminds us of the way books are totems against ceaseless activity, tools for securing the somatic calm that is the beginning of all careful but also visionary thought. If we believe in the value of rest, and the kind of conversional thinking that it makes possible, then we will want to preserve books and their spaces of readerly rest.
But Faust also reminds us not to hold on too tightly. He shows us the risks of grasping. He reminds me that the meaning of reading lies in the oscillatory rhythms of the opening and closing hand.
Reprinted with permission from Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times, by Andrew Piper, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
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