Sunday, December 31, 2017

The Reading Year 2017: A Remembrance

Forthcoming.

Playing with Fire

As the year ends I am so enjoying the book "Playing with Fire" by Lawrence O'Donnell.  I will finish it next week.  It thrills me to read about 1968, such an exciting year though a year of unparalleled tragedy, the year I graduated from high school.  Lyndon Johnson was forced out of office rather than run for reelection.  Can the same thing happen to Trump?

Too Bad

Too bad life is not like chess so that when you're good you can plan 14 moves ahead

More

More energy. More stamina. More focus. Do I dare make such a New Year's Resolution? Or is this an impossible dream?

New Year's

I wish I had a blow-out New Year's party to attend. If only 2018 will be half as great as 2017 I will be ecstatic. If only I had black-eyed peas with all the trimmings tomorrow. If only I had ESPN to know what was coming in 2018.
No, not really. I am lying. I wish for none of these things. A good night's sleep tonight is all I ask for.

The Golfing Duel

The fact Republicans attacked Obama for golfing shows how little material he gave themto work with. An unusually ethical and well-run presidency.
-Jonathan Chait

Saturday, December 30, 2017

Elmer?

I've been trying to figure out that distinguished Republican that Senator Shelby voted for. Harold Stassen? Herbert Hoover? Ben Carson? I've decided its must be Elmer Fudd. Elmer has the diction and eloquence of a typical Republican.

Friday, December 29, 2017

From Wayne Flynt

Wayne Flynt: Alabama taught political lessons in 2017

flynt.jpg
Wayne Flynt
Guest VoicesBy Guest Voices 
on December 29, 2017 at 9:55 AM, updated December 29, 2017 at 9:57 AM
By Wayne Flynt, an historian of Alabama who has written nine books about the state. He is Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at Auburn University. 
Fortunately, my understanding editor allowed a delay updating "Alabama: History of a Deep South State, Bicentennial Edition" until after the December 12 senate election.
In case you were vacationing on Mars, this was not a good year for Alabama's Republican Party.  For the first time in 229 years of American democracy, the chief executive, legislative, and judicial officials of a state were removed from office for ethics violations.
So, in the tradition of "The Twelve Days of Christmas," I will list the six most important lessons learned and the six most embarrassing arguments made during the first twelve days of December, 2017.
  • Learn from your opponent. Donald Trump's strategist Steve Bannon focuses on the base above everything.  So did Doug Jones.  Without an unprecedented turnout of African Americans in an off year special election, he loses.  African Americans did not let him down. They constitute 26% of the population and cast more than 30% of the votes.  But Trump, Bannon and Moore saw the GOP base diminish, not grow.
  • Revenge is sweet.  Bannon crafted a slash-and-burn war against Alabama's Republican establishment to defeat Luther Strange.  On December 12, the GOP establishment got even.
  • Republicans who share Trump's misogyny should beware of college educated suburban women.  Although statewide a bare majority of such women voted for Moore, his percentage was well below their turnout for Reagan, McCain, and Romney.  And they were much more likely to believe charges of sexual abuse by Moore than white men.
  • American politics may indeed have a moral bottom.  Decency seems still to matter more than ideology and party in some places among some people.  Maybe not among white evangelicals, who gave Moore 80% of their votes.  But the white evangelical share of the vote dropped enough from the 2016 presidential election to account for Moore's loss. 
  • Most promising for Democrats was both the size and preference of millennials who voted by a small majority for Romney in 2012 but by a 20 point margin for Jones in December. 
  • The national press doesn't have a clue about Alabama history.   If I had a thousand dollars from every reporter from Sirius XM radio in Toronto, the American reporter for the largest paper in Sweden, their colleagues from NPR,  Associated Press, New York Times, Mother Jones, the Los Angeles Times, The Economist and others who kept reminding me that in the most conservative red state in America, Jones could not win, I could retire to the Redneck Riviera.  The starting place for understanding Alabamians is that they don't like to be told what to think or do, not even by presidents they vote for.
Then there are the six embarrassments.
  • State auditor Jim Zeigler deserves first place by comparing Roy Moore to Joseph: "Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter.  They became the parents of Jesus."  This startling revelation took Bible scholars by surprise because the Bible is silent on the age of Jesus' parents, forcing scholars to infer their age by the social customs of the times: By that measurement, Mary would probably have been in her mid-teens, Joseph in his upper teens (not his 30s as Moore was).  Some Moore followers compound the embarrassment by recalling fourteen-year old mothers who gave birth to them.  Before revealing too much family sexual genealogy, cheerleaders for teenage sex might want to reflect more deeply on the subject.  If your boy has sex with a girl under 16 in Alabama  that is considered statutory rape and a felony.
  • The women waited for decades to report what Moore did.  Actually they did not.  As the Washington Post story documented fully, they told mothers, aunts, cousins, and best friends.  Why the families did not report this to officials is unreported but pretty obvious in the well documented history of both sexual abuse and Alabama history.  They were mainly poorly educated, working class families in a manufacturing town with a long history of extralegal violence against African Americans, labor organizers, and outsiders.  Moore was a West Point graduate, a Viet Nam veteran, and a powerful public official.  If you think most Alabamians would believe women's accounts about such a man then or now, talk to any rape counselor of your choice.
  • Despite initial Republican revulsion at Moore, the party rallied round him except for Senator Richard Shelby, the nearest thing to a statesman in this benighted party. Trump urged voters to elect him, and Alabama's God-fearing Republican officials fell all over themselves endorsing him.  After Moore's loss, President Trump suddenly remembered that he knew Moore would lose though he had said three days earlier in Pensacola that he knew Moore would win.  Now Republicans just want to forget that GOP briefly stood for the party of Grand Old (alleged) Pedophile.  Funny how quickly we revise history.
  • Governor Kay Ivey's announcement that she believed the women accusers but would vote for Moore anyway.  That, of course, means that she knowingly voted for an alleged pedophile, which must cause some heart burn with an impending gubernatorial election next year.
  • It was only the women's word against Moore's.  Does that mean that the only way to convict a pedophile is eye witness testimony?  Does any rational person believe pedophiles invite friends over to watch the sexual abuse of a child?  Just for future reference, most pedophiles are found guilty because of repeated patterns of conduct over years involving many victims when one courageous person comes forward, opening flood gates of memory long repressed in others. 
  • Doug Jones was a baby killer, which is worse than being a pedophile.  That is moral equivalency on stilts.  The bizarre reasoning that led to such conclusions goes like this:  Jones believes in a woman's right to choose for herself the most intensely private issues of sexuality and reproductive rights.  Therefore, his critics reasoned, he believes in abortion.  Therefore, he is a baby-killer.  No ancient Greek familiar with the syllogism or half-literate Alabamian who never heard of one would give that argument a grade higher than F-.  The argument is rooted in  yearning for an American theocracy, where people who commune directly with God pass along  insights to the rest of us as Puritans in New England once did to dissenting Baptist Roger Williams, running him into the wilderness and enforcing their religious beliefs by colonial enactments and capital punishment. The result in December was this letter to AL.com: "I would vote for Satan over Doug Jones if Satan was pro-life, pro-Christian, pro-2 Amendment, and wanted to build a wall.  Jones is for everything God condemns."  If you believe nine women's accusations and Governor Ivey, that dude you voted for seemed like Satan to a lot of young Alabama women.  The bottom line to the abortion debate is actually pretty simple. If evangelicals cannot win this debate with their own children, in their own homes, churches, and Bible classes, they will not win it at all. They cannot establish by coercion what they cannot win by persuasion.  Especially is this true in light of recent cases in Tennessee and Pennsylvania where "family values," anti-abortion, male Republican congressmen admitted paying for their mistress's abortions.
As 2018 begins, I take pride that my deep red Republican state moved beyond journalist predictions and silly political arguments to act with reason to help preserve the integrity of American democracy.  

Sally

One of the TV staples of growing up in the 60's was The Dick VanDyke Show.  One of the characters was Sally Rogers, played by long-time actress Rose Marie.  I remember her and that show fondly.

I have always wanted to know a woman named Sally so I could call her "Sal." Sally Rogers on the Dick Van Dyke Show would have sufficed. Can't you see calling her "Sal?"

Confusion and Anger

The I.R.S. called into question a strategy of prepaying property taxes before the new tax law goes into effect. That could be just the beginning of the confusion.
NYTIMES.COM

Thursday, December 28, 2017

Senator Jones

BREAKING NEWS
Roy Moore, the first Republican to lose a Senate race in Alabama since 1992, had attempted to stop the certification of the election results. Moore had filed a legal complaint that alleged “election fraud” and asked the state not to confirm Jones's victory. A judge rejected the request.

Monday, December 25, 2017

Deal?

My philosophy is that if I can't get you to laugh at my corny jokes and comments then I invite you to laugh AT me. Then I will laugh WITH you laughing AT me and we can then laugh with each other even if it's at my expense. Deal?

David B. Woolner - The Last 100 Days - (Book Review)

Roosevelt scholars have made much of FDR's first 100 days when he came into office in March of 1933 with the country mired in what came to be called the Great Depression and the frenzied activity of what was called the New Deal as the Roosevelt administration took its first steps to attack the depression.  This book treats FDR's LAST 100 days as he inched toward his death in April of 1945 as he had just begun his unprecedented fourth term dealing with momentus issues before the world as World War II was coming to an end.

The book with FDR's last poignant Christmas at his home in Hyde Park, New York in December of 1944.  I'd like to visit his property there one day.

In January of 1945 the Germans mounted a vicious counterattack as the Allies pushed toward Berlin. Even at that late date in retrospect, the outcome of the war was uncertain.  FDR was dealing with this uncertain war situation along with Churchill and Stalin.  The Battle of the Bulge could have ended differently. We know today how things ended.  In January of 1945 no one knew for sure how things would end.

The author spend a lot of pages on Yalta.  FDR's trip to the Crimea in February of 1945 was a momentous undertaking.  The round trip took 5 weeks.  About 700 Americans were there.  The President traveled 1,382 miles, quite an undertaking for a man in a wheelchair.   My brain cannot deal with the intricacies of the meeting.  Poland was the most contentious subject of discussion between Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill.  Did Stalin pull the wool over a declining FDR? I am not knowledgeable enough and do wish to be knowledgeable enough to deal with this issue.  Let Yalta be.

Much of FDR's efforts in his last days was making sure the US continued to play a major part of pursuing world peace.  The country could not relapse into isolationism.  He was greatly concerned that the United Nations get off to a good start.  He believed the participation of the Soviet Union was critical.  Perhaps he was too solicitous of Stalin because of this concern?  FDR thought he could deal with Stalin.  Did he do so of did he let Stalin take advantage?

"The America that huddled around radios or gathered on the Washington to listen to FDR proclaim March 4, 1933, a day of national consecration was nothing like the America he left behind twelve years later.  FDR took watching out for the common people very seriously, and in focusing the efforts of his administration on providing for the social and economic well-being of the average American, through Social Security, unemployment insurance, worker's rights, and the regulation of the financial sector, not to mention massive investment in infrastructure, he fundamentally altered the relationship between the American people and their government."  P. 293-94

Roosevelt helped usher in an era that was more inclusive of racial and religious minorities.  P. 294

The author admits that FDR's secrecy had its downside as it left Truman unprepared to assume the presidency.  He covered up his disability to the end.  He was called a fascist, a dictator, and a socialist just like Obama.  Some people claimed he was superficial and lacked depth.  His closed personality hidden behind his ebullient exterior lent evidence this claim.   P. 296

Was FDR too old and too ill to stand up to Stalin?  I am not competent to decide.  P. 297

The more I read about Franklin Roosevelt the more I see how he was the most consequential Americn of the 20th Century and the importance of the New Deal becomes more pronounced as the Republicans seek to over turn it.

The terrible thing is that today's Republicans are trying to destroy the America that FDR created.  We cannot let them succeed.

Wednesday, December 20, 2017

Will companies spend tax savings to create jobs?

By Matt Egan
CNN
19 December 2017

CEOs may like the idea of a big tax cut for businesses, but that doesn't mean they'll use the savings to create American jobs.

Just 14% of CEOs surveyed by Yale University said their companies plan to make large, immediate capital investments in the United States if the tax overhaul passes. Capital investments, like building plants and upgrading equipment, can lead to hiring.

Only a slim majority of the CEOs, 55%, said the Republican tax package should be signed into law. The Yale CEO Summit surveyed 110 prominent business leaders of Fortune 500 and Fortune 50 companies last week.

The findings, along with other surveys, suggest that the tax plan may not have the dramatic impact on jobs that President Trump and Republicans in Congress have promised.

Trump tweeted over the weekend that "TAX CUTS" will lead to "higher growth, higher wages, and more JOBS!" The GOP tax overhaul would slash the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% and offer incentives for companies to bring foreign profits back home.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, who leads the Yale CEO Summit, said in an interview that it's "astounding" how few companies plan to reinvest their tax savings.

He called the idea of a jobs boom from the tax plan "a lot of smoke and mirrors," especially because the unemployment rate is just 4.1% and companies already have plenty of cash to make investments.

Sonnenfeld declined to name the CEOs who participated in the poll. He said it included "Trump supporters" and former members of the president's now-defunct advisory councils of business leaders.

There are other signs that tax cuts may not spark a hiring boom. Just 43% of CEOs polled in November by the Business Roundtable, a powerful business lobby that has spent millions on ads championing tax reform, said they plan to ramp up hiring over the next six months. That was despite rising confidence that the Republican tax plan would be enacted.

And at The Wall Street Journal's CEO Council in November, only a few business leaders raised their hands when they were asked whether the tax plan would lead them to increase investment in the United States. Gary Cohn, Trump's top economic adviser, was surprised.

"Why aren't the other hands up?" he asked from on stage.

Wall Street expects companies will use a big chunk of the tax savings to reward shareholders with fatter dividends and stock buybacks, which makes stocks more attractive. That's one reason stocks have surged all year, putting the Dow in sight of 25,000.

"Markets just love it," Michael Block, chief market strategist at Rhino Trading Partners, wrote in a note on Tuesday.

He said it's "malarkey" to think that cutting corporate taxes will boost spending and wages.

"As we've seen in history, this doesn't raise wages," he wrote. "What it does lead to is richer shareholders."

In 2004, when Congress offered tax breaks for companies to bring foreign profits back home, businesses used much of their cash on share buybacks.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities later concluded that the 2004 tax holiday "did not produce the promised economic benefits" because companies mostly bought back stock instead of investing to grow their businesses.

Trump tweeted on Tuesday that "stocks and the economy have a long way to go after the Tax Cut Bill is totally understood and appreciated." Specifically, he said "immediate expensing will have a big impact."

Trump was referring to an element of the legislation that would allow businesses to immediately and fully expense most new capital investments. The provision, which would end after five years, should encourage companies to shell out money on new plants and equipment.

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who chairs the Business Roundtable, recently predicted that tax reform will "lead to capital expenditures, productivity and wages," though he cautioned it may take time for workers to benefit.

One concern among the CEOs polled by Yale: the price of the GOP tax overhaul. The Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan scorekeeper for tax bills, estimates the legislation would add about $1 trillion to deficits even after accounting for projected additional economic growth.

Seventy-two percent of CEOs said it's "wrong" for the tax package to sizably add to America's mountain of debt.

Sunday, December 17, 2017

A Good Thing

It's a good thing I have no Christmas parties to attend. My conversation would be dated and stilted, if not abrasive. No one wants to hear about lunch at the Social Grill in Birmingham in the 70's or the mechanics at Goodyear in Pelham. Perhaps I would venture into Roy Moore Land and somebody might get a drink splashed in their face. You can't take me anywhere these days.

Always a Republican

THE GAME

The Republicans Are What We Thought They Were

First, they pass tax cuts and run up the deficit. Then, they use the deficit to ‘prove’ spending is out of control, and start slashing entitlement programs.

You’re surprised at Bob Corker? Really? Please. Yes, he’s a deficit hawk. And he’s a senator who has, from time to time, made some effort to work in a bipartisan fashion.
But come on. He’s a Republican. He likes tax cuts. He believes, as they all do, in supply-side economic theory. And he has donors and constituents in Tennessee who wanted this. See what he said in defending his switch from no to yes on the GOP tax bill: He changed because of “many conversations over the past several days with individuals from both sides of the aisle across Tennessee and around the country.” In other words, rich people.
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Besides, he’s not going to buck the team. Not on something like this. There’s a history here. Read Robert Kaiser’s great book Act of Congress, about how the Dodd-Frank bill became law. Corker was working with Chris Dodd. In absolute good faith! But Corker couldn’t—or wouldn’t—bring any other GOP senators along with him. A crucial defection, incidentally, was Richard Shelby, whom we’re praising this week for helping to save us from Sen. Roy Moore. Corker ultimately voted against it.
Marco Rubio? That was a joke from the start. He seems to have gotten a portion of what he wanted on the child tax credit. Rubio called the changed that leadership agreed to a “solid step.” We all know what words like that mean. They mean: Well, it kinda sucks, but it’s enough for me to save face, especially with Americans for Tax Reform and Club for Growth and all these other people threatening to find someone to primary my ass if I vote no.
Like the coach said, the Republicans are who we thought they were. So it’s done. Or is going to be. As I wrote in The New York Times Friday, it’s the second most unpopular piece of major domestic legislation of the last 27 years. The first most unpopular? The attempt to repeal Obamacare earlier this year. Nice work, 115th Congress!
You think this is bad, think about what’s next. What’s next are cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and other domestic spending programs. Because this is the Republican formula:
1. Pass massive tax cuts for the top 1 percent.
2. Run up the deficit.
3. A year or two later go, “Oh my God, look at the deficit! This proves that spending is just out of control!”
4. Start taking the axe to entitlement programs and the domestic discretionary budget.
That’s how it works, ever since supply-side became part of conversation. Ronald Reagan cut taxes and ran up deficits like mad, tripling, quadrupling them over Jimmy Carter’s level. George H.W. Bush raised taxes a little, but the economy was so in the doldrums that the deficit was still bad. Along came Bill Clinton, who had to fix it. He raised taxes. He did investments. He got the economy humming. He eliminated the deficit. Gave George W. Bush a surplus.
Then Dubya cut taxes. Twice. And started two unfunded-mandate wars. Up shot the deficit again. Ach, they all said! These deficits. We must cut spending. And bring Social Security under control. But they never did cut spending, and popular will against Bush’s Social Security privatization scheme was so strong that that one died on the vine fast. Meanwhile they turned the banking system into a casino, and that crashed.
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Then came Barack Obama, who, again, had to fix it. He wasn’t able to, quite enough, because his stimulus package should have been much larger than political realities allowed. But he did reduce the deficit substantially. As a percentage of GDP, it went from the 10 percent Bush handed him to around 2.5 percent. And he oversaw 75 consecutive months of job growth. He handed Donald Trump exactly the economy that 14 months ago Trump was saying was a disaster but now is saying is beautiful.
That’s the cycle, folks. That’s how it works. And now, thanks to the GOP, we’re about to open another gash in the deficit. They’ll try to slash away, but I hope and think that by and large they won’t succeed, because if you thought this tax bill was unpopular, wait till you see what happens when they start openly talking about tinkering with people’s nursing home care (Medicaid), prescription drug benefits (Medicare), and fixed pension distributions (Social Security).
And so a Democrat may well get elected in 2021, inheriting a mess from Trump. A deficit. Maybe a bad economy. And it will be on the Democrat to fix it again. And he or she will. But only to a point. The Republicans, then in opposition, will obstruct and not allow the next Democrat to really fix things, because Republicans will know deep down that public investment would fix the economy, but they’ll rail against it on the grounds that it will… increase the deficit! So they will try to engineer things so that the recovery is tepid, so they can get the Democrat out and cut taxes for the rich one more time and balloon the deficit and start the whole grim process again.
That’s the game. It feels like we’re fated to play it for the next 50 years.
There’s one way out. The next time the Democrats are in power, they need to really turn the tables on tax reform. Not nip and tuck, but really fundamentally do something different. This isn’t the place for all the details. Maybe some future columns. But that will be the only way to break the pattern. They can’t do anything about what Congress is about to do. But they can smash the glass next time they have the hammer, and they’d better do it.

Friday, December 15, 2017

Washington

His Highness

George Washington scales new heights.

Jared Sparks, thirty-seven, and known for his editorial eye, reached Mount Vernon by carriage just before sunset on March 14, 1827. He made no note of the grounds, the house, the stables, the slope of the hill. He sought only George Washington’s papers. It had taken him years to get permission to see them, finally securing it from Washington’s nephew and literary executor, the Supreme Court Justice Bushrod Washington, by pledging discretion, and, no less important, agreeing to split the profits from publishing an edition of Washington’s writings. A former chaplain of Congress, Sparks was the editor and owner of the United States’ first literary magazine, the North American Review, which, under his direction, was distinguished for its judiciousness. A man better suited to the work of editing Washington’s papers and writing his biography would have been hard to find, which makes it all the stranger that what Sparks did to those papers was, in his lifetime, called one of the most flagrant injuries ever inflicted by an editor upon a writer or by a biographer upon his subject—some swipe, even making allowances for hyperbole.
No one could have seen that coming when Sparks made his way from the carriage and into the house where he cloistered himself for more than a month. Diaries, notebooks, scraps, and some forty thousand letters: a biographer’s harem. He wrote to a friend that he was in Paradise. No one bothered him. “I have been here entirely alone,” he wrote in his journal, and you can almost hear his heart beating. In a garret, he pried open a chest: “Discovered some new and valuable papers to-day, particularly a small manuscript book containing an original journal of Washington, written in the year 1748, March and April, when he was barely sixteen years old.” Everything was a find. “It is quite certain that no writer of Washington’s biography has seen this book.” Maybe, at long last, Washington’s secrets would be revealed.
No biographer of George Washington has failed to remark on his inscrutability. In “Washington: A Life” (Penguin; $40), Ron Chernow calls Washington “the most famously elusive figure in American history.” Sparks eventually published eleven volumes of Washington’s writings, together with a one-volume biography. In 1893, Worthington C. Ford published the last installment of a fourteen-volume set. An edition of thirty-nine volumes was completed in 1940. Of the University of Virginia Press’s magnificent “Papers of George Washington,” begun in 1968, sixty-two volumes have been published so far. But, for all those papers, Washington rarely revealed himself on the page. Even his few surviving letters to his wife are formal and strained. Those diaries? Here is Washington’s entire diary entry for October 24, 1774, a day that he was in Philadelphia, as a delegate to the Continental Congress, debating, among other things, a petition to be sent to the King: “Dined with Mr. Mease & Spent the Evening at the New Tavern.” Here is how John Adams’s diary entry for that same day begins:
In Congress, nibbling and quibbling, as usual.
There is no greater mortification than to sit with half a dozen Witts, deliberating upon a Petition, Address, or Memorial. These great Witts, these subtle Criticks, these refined Genius’s, these learned Lawyers, these wise Statesmen, are so fond of shewing their Parts and Powers, as to make their Consultations very tedius.
Young Ned Rutledge is a perfect Bob o’ Lincoln—a Swallow—a Sparrow—a Peacock—excessively vain, excessively weak, and excessively variable and unsteady—jejune, inane, and puerile.
Mr. Dickinson is very modest, delicate, and timid.
Aside from chucking Washington in favor of writing about Adams, what’s a biographer to do?
Washington’s contemporaries saw in him what they wanted to see. So have his biographers, of whom there have been many, including a delegate to the Continental Congress (David Ramsay), a U.S. senator (Henry Cabot Lodge), a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (John Marshall), and an American President (Woodrow Wilson). There have always been Washington killjoys. Abigail Adams was troubled by the beatification of Washington: “To no one Man in America belongs the Epithet of Saviour,” she believed. Mark Twain once said that while Washington couldn’t tell a lie, Twain could, and didn’t, which made Twain the better man. The first Washington-was-a-fraud biography was published in 1926. Its author, William E. Woodward, had, in his 1923 novel, “Bunk,” coined the word “debunk.” Woodward argued, mostly, that the father of our country was dim-witted: “Washington possessed the superb self-confidence that comes only to those men whose inner life is faint.” The Times called Woodward’s biography tittle-tattle.
Every generation must have its Washington; ours is fated to choose among dozens. Ronald Reagan, in his first Inaugural Address, looked at the obelisk across the Mall and spoke about “the monument to a monumental man.” Since 1990, major American publishing houses have brought out no fewer than eighteen Washington biographies, a couple of them very fine, to say nothing of the slew of boutique-y books about the man’s military career, his moral fortitude, his friendship with Lafayette, his faith in God, his betrayal by Benedict Arnold, his “secret navy,” his inspiring words, his leadership skills, his business tips, his kindness to General William Howe’s dog, and his journey home to Mount Vernon for Christmas in 1783. George, a magazine of celebrity and politics featuring on its cover stars dressed up as Washington, was launched in 1995. By now, just about every Presidential historian and potboiler-maker in the business has churned out a biography of Washington. And still they keep coming. At nine hundred and twenty-eight pages, Chernow’s is the longest single-volume biography of Washington ever published.
George Washington was born in Westmoreland County, Virginia, in 1732. His father died when he was eleven. When he was sixteen, he went on a surveying trip in the Shenandoah Valley—during which he kept the diary that Sparks found—and, three years later, travelled to the West Indies. At twenty, he assumed his first military command; his reckless and often failed but indisputably bold campaigns, in the seventeen-fifties, gained him a reputation for invincibility. He was tall and imposing, at once powerful and graceful, and he rode a horse exceptionally well. “Well turned” is what people said in the eighteenth century about a man like that, which makes you picture God laboring at a lathe. More recent descriptions range from the fabulous to the immoderate. Woodrow Wilson, in his 1896 biography, made it sound as if Washington had grown up in Sherwood Forest: “All the land knew him and loved him for gallantry and brave capacity; he carried himself like a prince.” Chernow dwells on Washington’s manliness, describing him, every few pages or so, as “a superb physical specimen, with a magnificent physique,” “an exceptionally muscular and vigorous young man,” with an “imposing face and virile form,” “powerfully rough-hewn and endowed with matchless strength,” not excepting his “wide, flaring hips with muscular thighs.” (Chernow finds even Washington’s prose “muscular.” ) The mar to his beauty was his terrible teeth, which were replaced by unsuccessful transplant surgery and by dentures made from ivory and from teeth pulled from the mouths of his slaves.
Washington was elected to the Virginia Assembly in 1758 and was married the next year. Until the passage of the Intolerable Acts, he occupied himself managing his vast estate and wasn’t much animated by the colonies’ growing struggle with Parliamentary authority. But then he threw himself into it, serving as a delegate to the First Continental Congress, in 1774. The next year, he was appointed commander-in-chief of the Continental Army and rode to Cambridge to take command. During the war, and, even more, after it, Washington came to embody the new nation’s vision of itself: virtuous, undaunted, and incorruptible. Nothing earned him deserved admiration more than his surrendering of his command at the end of the war. That resignation—relinquishing power when he could so easily have seized it—saved the republic. He returned to public life in 1787, to preside over the Constitutional Convention, where he played a largely ceremonial but nonetheless crucial role. Washington knew the difference between ceremony and pomposity, and kept to one side of it.
He was elected President by a unanimous vote of the electoral college. In his Inaugural Address (likely drafted by James Madison), he said that “the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government” were fated by “the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained” and staked, finally, deeply, “on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.” Charged with leading a wholly new form of government, wherein his every decision set a precedent, he began holding, in 1791, what came to be called cabinet meetings.
His Presidency was marked by much debate about how he ought to be treated, and even how he should be addressed. (Adams had wanted to call him His Most Benign Highness, and Washington was fond of His High Mightiness.) Owen Wister began his 1907 biography of Washington with a story about what happened on Washington’s sixtieth birthday: “On the 22d of February, 1792, Congress was sitting in Philadelphia, and to many came the impulse to congratulate the President. . . . Therefore a motion was made to adjourn for half an hour, that this civility might be paid. The motion was bitterly opposed, as smacking of idolatry and as leaning toward monarchy.” (A century later, Washington’s birthday became a national holiday, now commemorated as a great time to buy a new car.)
Washington was a very good President, and an unhappy one. Distraught by growing factionalism within and outside his Administration, especially by the squabbling of Hamilton and Jefferson and the rise of a Jeffersonian opposition, he served another term only reluctantly. His second Inaugural Address was just a hundred and thirty-five words long; he said, more or less, Please, I’m doing my best. In 1796, in his enduringly eloquent Farewell Address (written by Madison and Hamilton), he cautioned the American people about party rancor: “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.” And then he went back to Mount Vernon. He freed his slaves in his will, possibly hoping that this, too, would set a precedent. It did not.
Washington isn’t like Adams, effusively cantankerous; he’s not like Jefferson, a cabinet of contradictions. He’s not funny like Franklin or capacious like Madison. If critics said that his inner life glowed but faintly, Chernow, who calls him “the most interior of the founders,” thinks his inner life was red hot, burning with pent-up passion. Washington wasn’t a tortured man, though, nor was he enigmatic. He was a staged man, shrewd, purposeful, and effective. Not surprisingly for an eighteenth-century military man, he held himself at a considerable remove from his men. But he also held himself at this remove from just about everyone else.
He played a role, surpassingly well. He dressed for the part (he was obsessed with his clothes), and studied for it (as a boy, he copied out a set of sixteenth-century Italian “Rules of Civility,” which read like stage directions: “Bedew no mans face with your Spittle by approaching too near to him when you Speak”). Washington’s theatrical reserve can look, now, like mysteriousness. But what he was going for was an imperturbability that had to do with eighteenth-century notions of honor, gentility, and manliness; its closest surviving kin, today, is what’s called military bearing. Chernow’s aim is to make of Washington something other than a “lifeless waxwork,” an “impossibly stiff and wooden figure, composed of too much marble to be quite human.” That has been the aim of every Washington biographer, and none of them have achieved it. Sparks, so far from doing it, only made things worse. “Setting Washington on stilts” is what Sparks was charged with, although, really, Washington was already up there, leaning on legs of wood.
Washington retired from public life just when biography was becoming a popular middlebrow genre. Lives have been written since before Plutarch, but the word “biography” wasn’t coined until the seventeenth century, and the modern genre began to take shape only with the publication, in 1791, of Boswell’s “Life of Johnson.” The United States was new; the Presidency was new; biography was new. How Washington’s life was written would set a precedent. What would biography be, in a republic?
In June of 1799, Mason Weems, an itinerant preacher and bookseller, wrote to the Philadelphia printer Matthew Carey to tell him that he had begun writing a life of Washington: “ ’Tis artfully drawn up, enliven’d with anecdotes, and in my humble opinion, marvelously fitted”; it “will sell like flax seed.” That December, Washington died, quite suddenly. The nation mourned, but the timing, so far as Weems was concerned, could hardly have been better. “Washington, you know is gone!” Weems wrote Carey. “Millions are gaping to read something about him. I am very nearly prim’d and cock’d for ’em.” Weems’s chatty and exuberant “Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington” was first published in 1800. It sold like flaxseed.
By then, Weems was already soliciting advance subscriptions for a quite different sort of biography, a wildly hyped but ponderous five-volume set, written by John Marshall. Adams, Washington’s successor, nominated Marshall as Chief Justice in 1801, in the last months of his Presidency; Marshall’s “Life of Washington,” a defense of Federalism and an attack on Jeffersonianism, is a testament to the party rancor that Washington despised. Its first two volumes came out in 1804, while Jefferson was running for reëlection. Federalists were disappointed in it; Republicans were disgusted by it. It was a terrible flop.
Marshall claimed to have relied “chiefly on the manuscript papers of General Washington”—those papers at Mount Vernon in the possession of Bushrod Washington, who was also an Adams appointee to the Supreme Court, and who gave Marshall permission to write an authorized biography. But it has since been discovered that Marshall actually copied a great deal from published sources, without attribution, and Jefferson liked to say that Marshall made most of it up. At the time, rules about evidence were changing. What Marshall ought to have put in quotes, by modern standards, he sometimes didn’t. It was unclear how much a biographer ought to rely on anecdotes. The story about young George chopping down a cherry tree—“I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet”—comes from Weems and is generally thought to be Weems’s invention (which makes a nice riddle: If “I can’t tell a lie” is a lie, what’s true?). But the story, Weems said, was “related to me twenty years ago by an aged lady, who was a distant relative.” And maybe it was.
Sparks believed that the aim of biography was “to bring together a series of facts which should do justice to the fame and character of a man, who possessed qualities, and performed deeds, that rendered him remarkable.” He first wrote to Mount Vernon in 1816, the year after he graduated from Harvard, asking for “a scrap of General Washington’s handwriting.” He got one. But it scarcely contented him. Beginning in the eighteen-twenties, Sparks travelled all over the United States and across Europe, gathering the lost, scattered, and junked papers of the Revolutionary generation. Sheaves of Benjamin Franklin’s papers had wound up in a tail-or’s shop on St. James’s Street in London; some of them had been cut into sleeve patterns. “Those who established our liberty and our government are daily dropping from among us,” Daniel Webster observed, at the dedication of the Bunker Hill monument, on June 17, 1825, the battle’s fiftieth anniversary. Adams and Jefferson died on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, in 1826. Six months later, Sparks set out for Virginia, intending to satisfy himself about Marshall’s and Weems’s reliability by talking to people who knew Washington well, before the last of them died. A nephew of Washington’s told him that Weems really had talked to a lot of old people, that his biography was “generally accurate as to facts,” and that his use of anecdote, although embellished, “seldom misleads.” Sparks visited Madison, who was seventy-six. Madison, Sparks reported, viewed Marshall’s volumes as “highly respectable” but riddled with “the bias of party feeling.”
At Mount Vernon, Sparks guessed that it would take him a year just to read Washington’s papers. He wrote to Bushrod Washington, begging permission to take them back home, to Boston. He planned the removal down to the last detail. He would build boxes. He would buy insurance. He would keep them safe in his study, and when he was away he would deposit them in a fireproof vault in a bank. The judge agreed, and, back in Massachusetts, Sparks later moved, with eight boxes, into a house in Cambridge that had briefly served as Washington’s headquarters, so that he could edit the papers where the great man had written them.
Sparks adored Washington, his courage, his character, his poise, even his handwriting, which he found “close and handsome.” He did not, however, adore his literary style. “That Washington was not a scholar is certain,” Adams wrote. “That he was too illiterate, unlearned, unread for his station and reputation is equally past dispute.” Washington was poorly educated, and—at least compared with the writing of men like Franklin, Jefferson, and Madison—a charming fluency on the page was not among his talents. On paper he could be clumsy, exactly the opposite of what he was in person. Sparks wanted to fix that, and did.
His ideas about editing came from the world of magazines, where he had a very heavy hand. One of his North American Review writers, the historian George Bancroft, was forever warning him, “You must not make any alterations or omissions without consulting me,” and Sparks was forever ignoring him. Sparks corrected Washington’s spelling and punctuation. What he found badly expressed, he rewrote. Where Washington called Israel Putnam “Old Put,” Sparks had him call him “General Putnam.” (Putnam was the general who is supposed to have told the Americans facing the British at the Battle of Bunker Hill not to fire till they saw “the whites of their eyes.”) When Washington called a small amount of money a “flea-bite,” Sparks changed this to an amount “totally inadequate to our demands.” Passages in which Washington criticized New England men, as when he remarked on the “unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class of these people,” Sparks simply struck out—silently, despite having been advised that any alterations should at least be marked with an asterisk.
The work of selecting, copying, and editing took ten years; Sparks’s “Writings of Washington” was completed in 1837. The next year, Sparks joined the faculty at Harvard, as its first professor of history. In 1849, a year after the cornerstone was laid for the Washington Monument, Sparks became president of Harvard. He had also published Franklin’s papers, along with Franklin’s autobiography, and launched a popular book series, the Library of American Biography. People called him the American Plutarch.
No one noticed Sparks’s changes to Washington’s prose until 1851, when several of them were separately observed by a British historian and by a contributor to the New York Evening Post. In a flurry of charges and rebuttals, Sparks was accused of exceeding “the limits of an editor’s license,” and told that he, of all people, ought to have understood “the power of even a comma to alter the complexion of a sentence.” The Democratic Review concluded, “Mr. Jared Sparks has made biography what it never was before—the lie to history.” (It was certainly bad, but was it that bad? The fuss had less to do with fleabites than with the stature of the man whose words had been messed with.)
As to the specifics, Sparks defended himself by pointing out that he had, after all, supplied a preface, describing, at least in part, his editorial methods. And, as to the principle, he invoked “the dignity of history”: Washington would not have wanted to be seen, exposed (which is doubtless true); these were his private writings, and if he had intended them to be published he would have hired someone just like Sparks to fix them up first (also true). The Literary World answered back that the point wasn’t what Washington wanted but what the reading public wanted:
Washington, we may be sure, will bear to be looked at in undress. His figure is a good one without the tailor. The public has seen him too exclusively on horseback and in his regimentals. We want to be nearer to the man. Every reader has felt this—and the biographer who will best supply this by personal anecdotes, even if they fall below that excessive bugbear, the dignity of history, will be the truest and best biographer.
This, of course, is exactly what the public has been given: celebrity intimacy. We want to be nearer the great. It sells like flaxseed.
Monumental biography is different today from what it was in Sparks’s day: the great used to be revered from afar; now they’re revered up close. Aside from Weems, Washington’s early biographers barely mentioned his childhood. Even the gossipy Weems ignored Washington’s mother, Mary, about whom little is known, calling her only a “charming girl.” Marshall dispensed with Washington’s childhood in a page and a half. Ramsay covered the first nineteen years of the man’s life in a sentence of twelve words.
When Sparks was in Virginia, he rummaged around, and asked, but didn’t find out much, except that Mary Washington was “little polished by education,” and “remarkable for taking good care of her ducks and chickens.” In print, he was circumspect: “Her good sense, assiduity, tenderness, and vigilance overcame every obstacle.” Chernow, having almost nothing more to go on, builds a character out of a stack of adjectives. On page 5, his Mary Washington is “pious,” “headstrong,” “feisty,” and “indomitable.” On the next, she is “crusty,” “anxious,” “stubborn,” “flinty,” “thrifty,” “plain,” “homespun,” and “unlettered.” Four pages later, she is “strong-willed” and “unbending, even shrewish,” as well as “frugal,” “demanding,” “forbidding,” and, in sum if not conclusion, a “trying woman.” One page further along, she persists in being “crude and illiterate,” and is now “slovenly.” In Chapter 2, we are reminded that George suffered from a “difficult mother,” alerted about “his mother’s domination,” and alarmed to hear that she was not only “self-interested”—surely a sign of wickedness in the female sex—but also “strangely indifferent” toward her eldest son’s towering ambition. Chernow elaborates:
The hypercritical mother produced a son who was overly sensitive to criticism and suffered from a lifelong need for approval. One suspects that, in dealing with this querulous woman, George became an overly controlled personality and learned to master his temper and curb his tongue. It was the extreme self-control of a deeply emotional young man who feared the fatal vehemence of his own feelings, if left unchecked. Anything pertaining to Mary Ball Washington stirred up an emotional tempest that George quelled only with difficulty. Never able to express these forbidden feelings of rage, he learned to equate silence and a certain manly stolidity with strength. This boyhood struggle was, in all likelihood, the genesis of the stoical personality that would later define him so indelibly.
The diagnosis has supplanted the document. Sparks thought he knew how Washington wanted to be remembered, but he never supposed he knew what it felt like to be Washington. Chernow does, not because he knows more than Sparks did but because he thinks differently than Sparks did about what it is to understand someone, which means that he also thinks a whole lot differently about feeling and understanding than Washington did—and that, right there, is the problem. “Washington: A Life” is a prodigious biography, expertly narrated and full of remarkable detail. But it is a psychological profile of a man who lived and died long before our psychological age, a romantic portrait of a man who was not a Romantic: Washington lies upon the analyst’s couch, teeth clenched, tormented by his mother, the madwoman in Mount Vernon’s cobwebby attic. All Sparks ever found up there was a diary.
In the end, “Mr. Jared Sparks’s Liberties with George Washington,” as one critic dubbed the affair, had less to do with gussying up the President’s prose than with editorial presumption set loose in an archive. A great deal that survives today of the founding era of American history survives because Sparks—in an extraordinary quest to which he devoted his life—found it and saved it. But much of what has been lost has been lost because Sparks never looked for it, or found it and didn’t bother to keep it. Sparks believed that “the machinery of society and government is kept in motion by the agency of a few powerful minds.” He kept only what he valued: the worthy political writings of great men. Papers he didn’t find interesting he cut up, handing the scraps out as mementos. In the margin of a seventy-three-page draft of Washington’s first Inaugural Address, he wrote, “Washington’s handwriting but not his composition,” and then cut it up, and gave the cuttings to friends. Correspondence with nobodies he threw away.
The papers of the obscure: are they garbage? About the time that Sparks was defending himself against charges of bowdlerizing Washington’s letters, Herman Melville was reading a “tattered copy, rescued by the merest chance from the rag-pickers,” of an out-of-print book called “Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter,” the memoir of a poor Rhode Island farmer who claimed to have been wounded at Bunker Hill and taken to England as a prisoner of war, where, a beggar on the streets of London, he scraped by, mending broken chairs. The “Life of Potter” is a cheap, tiny book, “forlornly published on sleazy gray paper,” about a very unimportant person—just the kind of book Sparks hated. “The present unfortunate propensity of filling tomes of quartos and octavos with marvellous accounts of the lives of men and women, who, during their existence, produced no impression on the publick mind, and who were not known beyond the circle of their immediate friends, or the mountains, which bounded the horizon of their native villages, is preposterous and absurd,” Sparks wrote. “Why should the world be called off from its busy occupations to listen to an ill told story of their little concerns?”
Melville knew what it meant to watch one’s writing reduced to wastepaper. “Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter,” he wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1851, predicting, rightly, that “Moby-Dick” would be a disaster. (The North American didn’t even run a review.) The next year, a Boston newspaper called “Pierre,” Melville’s bitterly satirical novel about the literary marketplace, “utter trash.” In 1854, Melville produced a difficult and messy comic novel based on Potter’s failed, forgotten, and pathetic memoir, thereby willfully defying, in about six different ways, popular taste. Like “Orlando” and “Edwin Mullhouse,” Melville’s “Israel Potter” is a parody of biography; it upends every convention of Sparks’s Library of American Biography. The glory of war? Melville skips over the Battle of Bunker Hill as a story too boring to tell: “Suffice it, that Israel was one of those marksmen whom Putnam harangued as touching the enemy’s eyes.” The rewards of patriotic virtue? After fifty years of indigence in England, Potter, a pitiful old man, returns to Boston on the Fourth of July, 1826, and a parade, passing by Faneuil Hall, nearly runs him over.
Melville, signing himself “the editor,” dedicated his bizarre and doomed novel about the Revolution and the American biographical tradition
TO
His Highness
THE
Bunker-Hill Monument
and, in that dedication, apologized—to two hundred and twenty-one feet of granite—that Israel Potter’s name had never “appeared in the volumes of Sparks.”
The life of Potter is the story of a man fated, at death, to be buried in a potter’s field. To the American Plutarch, it was rubbish. There is no humility in monumental biography. But there is humility in nature, in time, and in history. The same sun that shines on the Bunker Hill monument, Melville pointed out, shines on Potter’s unmarked grave. Come winter, the same snow falls, dusting us all. ♦
  • Jill Lepore is a staff writer and a professor of history at Harvard. “The Secret History of Wonder Woman” is her latest book.