Philip Marshall on the Hugh Freeze Hiring

 #PMARSHONAU: The unbridled power of social media hits hard.

I have read and heard that new Auburn football coach Hugh Freeze harassed a sexual assault victim with direct messages on Twitter. Didn’t happen. The messages are easily available now. They are in response to the woman’s strong criticism on Twitter of Freeze and Liberty athletics director Ian McCaw. They include nothing out of line, nothing even bordering on harassment.

I have read and heard that Freeze was not tagged in the Twitter posts. He was tagged at least in the one leveling the vilest accusation of all. Check it out.

I have read and heard, even from reputable reporters, that Freeze gave up his Twitter account as a condition of employment at Auburn. Nope. That didn’t happen either. Freeze quickly denied it at his introductory press conference Monday with athletics director John Cohen sitting a few feet from him.

I have read and heard that Cohen left Mississippi State for Auburn just ahead of being pushed out. Sorry. That one didn’t happen either. Folks in the know at Mississippi State laugh at the notion.

I have read and heard that boosters and trustees forced Cohen to hire Freeze. Not true. Those people were calling others trying to find out what was going on. They were not involved in the search or the decision, Saying they were fits the popular narrative among some Auburn people that see a mean booster hiding behind every bush. It just isn’t true.

I have read and heard that Freeze personally cheated to get players to Ole Miss. I wasn’t there, but I can say that the NCAA found no evidence that he participated or knew it was happening. Thus, he did not receive a show-cause penalty.

Does anyone care that UCLA coach Chip Kelly left Oregon for the NFL with an 18-month show cause? Ever hear anybody say it meant he was a cheater who should not be hired? Didn’t think so.

I am mystified that the now public tweet/direct message exchange has seemingly been the main reason given for the outrage expressed by many and still being expressed by some. It’s OK to say Freeze would have been well-advised to not do it. But a reason to not hire him or proof that he can’t be trusted? That doesn’t even make sense.

But this isn’t all about whether Freeze was a good hire – I believe he was – or whether he should not have been hired. It’s about the unbridled power of the Internet in general, and social media in particular.

In the wide, wide world of social media, nameless and faceless people can make up stories, maybe with a kernel of truth and maybe with no truth at all. Those stories can soon come to be accepted as fact and even find their way into news stories. And that is a truly sad development for a business, truly a way of life, that has made it possible for me to make a living and take care of my family for more than half a century. And I fear it’s only going to get worse. I will be long gone, but I can’t imagine what it will be like 10-20 years from now.

I so fondly remember when reporters and their stories were consistently challenged by cranky editors who did not care if they hurt your feelings, when widely held journalistic standards were required to be honored, when second- and third-hand sources weren’t sources at all, when using the English language properly and using proper grammar was not just expected but demanded, when getting the story first was important but not as important as getting it right, when the circulation and advertising departments of the newspaper and the news-gathering part of the newspaper were separate entities, when there were no clicks to count (I don’t count them now), when quality mattered more than quantity, when openly cheering in public for a team you covered would get you fired, when writers’ opinions were confined to columns and to the editorial page, never to show up in news stories.

In the 38 years I spent in the newspaper business, I was not once asked to write a story to “sell newspapers.” Today it’s different almost everywhere. Clicks often matter more than quality and sometimes even more than accuracy.

Believe me, we all make mistakes. I have made my share, and every one of them has made me sick to my stomach. They still do. One of the benefits of working online is that, once alerted to mistakes, a reporter can repair them. In the newspaper days, there was not a thing to be done about it until the next paper came out 24 hours later. At least that was true most of the time.

When I was the sports editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, we produced an annual football section. I don’t remember the season, but we had a color drawing of an Auburn player and a drawing of an Alabama player on the cover. The section was printed in the wee hours of the morning, after the newspaper was printed. The publisher, a great and memorable newspaper man named Doyle Harvill, went to the pressroom to get a copy. I wasn’t there, but I heard what happened next.

Harvill immediately noticed that the Alabama player on the cover was blue and the Auburn player was red. He cut loose with a string of his favorite words, slung the copy he was holding to the floor and told the pressroom foreman to throw them all away and reprint it. That took away much of the profit margin from the ads in the section. He didn’t care. It had to be right.

There is little of that kind of thinking these days. And we are all worse off for it.

-Philip Marshall

Like Jake Barnes

 Like Jake Barnes I mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold together, because I am immediately suspicious that they are hiding something. Even that Robert Cohn was never a middleweight boxing champion at Princeton. After all his bent nose could have come from a horse stepping on his face, or maybe he had bumped into something as a child, or possibly his mother had once dropped him as a child. Believe but always verify their stories.

There Are Times

 There are times when I wake up feeling like a hapless goofball, with a silly grin on my face, like Oliver Twist, or ready to say something stupid like Charles Barkley. It's time to get this goofiness out of my system cause I have IMPORTANT work to do today. I'm a SERIOUS man with a SERIOUS plan so there. The bowl of porridge and stiff coffee I had for breakfast seems to be helping.

Today

 “My goal was always to do serious work in a joyful way, to show people what’s possible if we keep choosing to go high,” Obama writes. Will that suffice? Well, we saw Alex Jones ordered to pay more than a billion dollars for torturing the Sandy Hook families. And we just had a midterm election where the lows of big lies, fake outrage and charlatanism were (mostly) rejected by the electorate. As a country, we’re enjoying this moment — let’s hope it’s more than a moment — of “going high.” That’s a light we can all carry.

-Michelle Obama in the NYT

Junior's Farm

 I'm going down to Junior's farm today in Clanton town near the lake to eat leftovers on this drizzling, dismal looking day. Junior and Jill say they've got lots left. We'll eat then sit around a roaring fireplace and catch up on old times. Junior and I met at Auburn in the 70's. Junior was an ag econ major, I was a history major, and we met at Jill's party. At that time I kind of liked Jill myself but she married Junior. Good shared times.

Cheney Nailed It

 “There is a reason why people serving in our government take an oath to the Constitution. As our founding fathers recognized, democracy is fragile. People in positions of public trust are duty-bound to defend it — to step forward when action is required. … That oath must mean something. Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”

Rep. Liz Cheney June 9, 2022

The Trump Cult Doesn't Care

 After all the years of Donald Trump's corruption, lies, depravity, ineptitude, recklessness and greed, the Republican establishment has finally found their red line, the one thing they simply will not abide: losing. Or at least that's what they seem to have decided might be a winning message with Republican voters — who by and large have no problem with Trump's grotesque character or his unique talent for destroying everything he touches. GOP leaders apparently believe that Trump's loyal flock can be persuaded to abandon their Dear Leader because they want Republicans to win elections more than anything.

I have my doubts. Trump has a full-blown cult following and it has little to do with the Republican Party per se, or even with winning elections. Trump's fans worship him because he is their greatest martyr, the man who suffers for their sins and takes the slings and arrows they believe are aimed at all of them. They see these Republicans who are coming after him as no better than the hated Democrats. They don't blame him for losing the midterm elections any more than he blames himself.

-Heather Digby Parton in Salon.com

The Legacy of Daniel Webster

 

We Fought Over American National Identity During the Antebellum Period. The Fight Should Be Ongoing.

A new work of history finds the best antidote to today’s authoritarian politics in Daniel Webster’s nineteenth-century civic nationalism.

Indivisible: Daniel Webster and the Birth of American Nationalism

Joel Richard Paul

Buy on Bookshop

Riverhead Books, 528 pp., $30.00

It’s often forgotten that New England, not the South, was the first part of the country to flirt with breaking away. As the War of 1812 dragged on, the northeast region—battered by successive embargoes on trade with Britain and vulnerable to attack by the formidable Royal Navy—was fed up with a conflict it viewed as the fault of Southerners who didn’t have to suffer the consequences. Resentment had been brewing for a while. The South blasted the Yankees as traitors for their refusal to go along with the war effort; the Yankees countered that the South had rigged the system with the Three-Fifths Compromise—which included enslaved people when determining a state’s proportional representation in Congress—and locked the North out of power. Tensions grew so high that in late 1814, when New England’s political elite gathered in Hartford, Connecticut, to deliberate a response to the perceived attack on their regional interests, secession was not off the table. Just a few decades into its existence as something more than a hodgepodge of British colonies, the “United” States was less reality than aspiration, and “American” national identity was mostly a convenient fiction.

Joel Richard Paul’s new book, Indivisible: Daniel Webster and the Birth of American Nationalism, retraces the process by which that fiction became a reality. In his overview of the period between 1812 and 1852, the University of California law professor presents the great antebellum orator and statesman as a foundational figure in the American pluralist tradition, which holds that the United States represents “a coming together of many identities” under the rule of law. Webster’s vision of a nation united in allegiance to the Constitution profoundly shaped the development of American national identity and, Paul argues, remains its dominant expression. But the triumph of a liberal democratic conception of the body politic was not a foregone conclusion. Out of several alternative philosophies vying for supremacy, the racist populism of Andrew Jackson and his spiritual successors proved (and continues to prove) the strongest challenger to an inclusive civic nationalism of the kind Webster advanced. Indivisible makes the case that, then as now, Webster’s insistence on a common American destiny enshrined in law is the single best “antidote” to authoritarian politics.

Jeff Pearlman - The Last Folk Hero - Notes

 This is surely the definitive biography of Bo Jackson.  Right off the bat, it's absorbing, entertaining, and mesmerizing.  I learn so much first about his growing up in Bessemer.  Some overview highlights:

First of all, Bo Jackson came along before ESPN and the time when  every super prerp athlete is known about and impossible to hide.  The author calls Bo a folk hero because there are stories about Bo, some true and some not, about his feats and since he came along before cell phone cameras and 24/7 video and television, what he did wasn't always recorded.  Legends therefore abound with Bo.  There are stories about Bo.  True or false?  There is a story that he once jumped over a Volkswagen.  This author says that it is true.  No doubt there are other stories that apochphryal.  This is typical of a traditional folk hero.

What this meant is not everyone knew what a great athlete Bo was because there was little video or film of him in athletic action.   It was all personally seeing him in action.  His first love was track, and he could pretty much do it all.  But Pat Dye knew and the stupid Alabama coaches who were recruiting him apparently had no clue.

I'll get to it later, but it seems to me there is no certainty about how Vincent Edward Jackson because Bo Jackson although this author ventures a couple of guesses.   His father was A.D. Adams, not a Jackson with whom his mother also had children.  He grew up in a deeply segregated Bessemer, Alabama. The black world of Bessemer at this time was a world unto itself.

He was one of ten children.  Just amazing.

Yesteryear he would  have been called a juvenile delinquent.  He was not a "nice' kid.  He liked to throw rocks.  He stole bikes and repainted them.  He got into fights constantly.  He stole things.  The bottom line is that sports saved him; otherwise he might have ended up in prison.

The author tells a true story of a flight by the Chicaco White Sox baseball team of which Bo was on the plane.  The plane caught fire in flight.  The passengers expected to die.  But Bo took charge and kept everyone calm as possible and the plane landed safely.  But it is NOT true that he entered the cockpit and flew the plane himself safely,  Hence, a legendary story befitting a folk hero.

The big man with the bald head would show up on occasion.

On rare occasions.

That would be A.D. Adams, Bo's father.  He would show up randomly.  A quarter of football.  A few innings of baseball.  Emerging from a shadowy corner then poof!  he was gone.  What was his motivation?  Guilt?  Or maybe the dawning realization that his offspring was something special.  Who knows.  

Whatever his motivation it brought Bo no joy,  Bo resented and loathed his biological father.  He saw his mother working herself to death and must have considered his father a deadbeat.

The scouts began coming to Bessemer in the summer of 1981. The scouts always had a notebook and pen.  They saw in Bo a finely sculptured body inspiring awe;  Where did this body come from I personally wonder?   P. 48

Already this Bo Jackson was no boy,.  He was a man.  P. 49

He was raw but showed flashes of absolute brilliance.  P. 49

Even at this young age, Bo could make dazzling plays on the baseball field.  P.49

He was from the beginning the stuff of legends that people talked about.  Did you see that???

Bo was reluctant to talk and to trust and it wasn't all due to his stutter.  P. 49

In the summer games of 1981 the Dad was always in the shadows.  P. 49

He didn't do small talk.  P. 50

This book makes me think Bo Jackson is not an intellectual but he is one interesting dude.  

Freelon Abbot.  Freelon Abbot.  Freelon Abbot.  Finally the truth comes out.  Abbot was a local in the Bessemer area.  He had been a star baseball player at McAdoory.  He was also an Auburn booster.  He started slipping Bo money in high school.  Ah, ha!  Now I get it.  :)  P,. 51

Pat Dye never laid eyes on Bo Jackson until the spring of 1981 from some grainy film.  He said he'd never seen anything like it meaning Bo's athletic prowess.  P. 51

One of the biggest surprises in this book is to learn that Bo Jackson was a placekicker in high school.  P. 62  I had no idea.

Bo was known more in HS for track than football.  Good thing for that booster and Pat Dye who recognized his potential  that Auburn acquired his services.  P. 64

His senior baseball season he his .493 for McAdory.  His heroics on the baseball field field were legendary.  P. 67

In his senior season Auburn and its local booster had to be concerned that Bo would opt to sign with a major league baseball team.  Amazing maybe that he didn't.  P. 67 MG

Bo wanted to be the first in his family to go to college.  Amazing that he turned down the money to play baseball instead.  What did Auburn give him if anything?  P. 68

Auburn tried to blockade Bo from baseball people.  P. 69

He was a superman on the baseball field his junior year.  P. 69

The Yankees spread lies about Bo to keep him from going to Auburn.  I despise the NY Yankees. P. 75

Bo had no idea the Yankees & the Red Sox were a thing.  P. 76

Reverse psychology if I understand it.  Auburn put out the lies that Bo was getting paid to attend Auburn rather than sign with the Yankees to mislead the Bronx Bombers,  or so this book would lead the reader to believe.  And it worked.  P. 77

Bo arrived to the Auburn campus a mere 10 days after graduating from HS to a campus that was 985 white.  P. 78

It's hard  to fathom that Bo Jackson moved to Auburn in the summer of 1982 40 YEARS AGO.

I have forgotten that Auburn ditched the wishbone for Bo's senior season in favor of the I-formation to feature Bo's running.

When Bo won the Heisman in 1985 there was real drama.  He was the favorite, but it was not clear that he would win.  There was uncertainty.  There was the Iowa QB Chuck Long and the Michigan States running back Lorenzo White who had rushed for over 2,000 yards.  When Bo was announced there was celebrating in Auburn.  There wass celebrating at the home of Florence Bond in Bessemer.  Great relief from all Auburn people.  P. 196

After winning the Heisman, Bo returned to New York for the Heisman banquet bringing his Mother, fiancee, AND his father along.  In the four years he had been his relationship with his father had improved A BIT.  P. 200

Bo's twenty minute speech was Bo at his finest.  He recognized his parents.  Referred to his fiancee as his girlfriend.  Spoke well showing off the improvement in his speaking.  P. 201

I had forgotten that Bo lost his senior season of baseball when he was misled into taking a plane sent by Hugh Culverhouse to visit the Tampa Bay Bucs.  The SEC rules were that that made him a pro so no more college sports.  He was misled by a Bessemer man who was in effect acting as an agent who lied to Bo about the trip being okay.

Bo was the #1 pick in the 1986 NFL draft selected by Tampa Bay even though he did not desire to play for the Bucs.  P. 219

Bo gets his first major league hit as a Kansas City Royal off of an aging Steve Carlton.  P. 246

George Brett said Bo did not have good baseball instincts and knew little about the game.  P. 247

Bo had something of an arrogant air about himself.  P. 247

Bo would refer to himself in third person.  "Bo thinks. . . . "  Certainly self-indulgent and arrogant.  P. 248

Early on Bo didn't know much baseball but his God-given athletic ability amazed everyone.  P. 251

Was Bo the second coming of Jim Thorpe?  P. 253

Once Bo's Auburn years pass, his story becomes much less interesting.

Bo was drafted by the Raiders even as he was acting like he was just a baseball player.  He had married Linda after seeing his 3-month old son Garrett for the first time.  He and Linda bought a house and seemed to be settling into Kansas City.  He was still a work in progress on the baseball field.  Moments of physical feats were great but a lack of experience was showing.

As Bo transitioned to try the NFL with the Raiders, he incurred the displeasure of his Kansas City Royal teammates.  P. 270

Bo is endearing to the Raider players speaking of himself in the third season.  Al Davis does not like Marcus Allen.  The Raiders admire Bo's speed in the 40 and his physique.  P. 276

A common comment from his teammates was that Bo wasn't likable.  P. 346

One criticism of Jackson is that his statistics were misleading, that his average gain was padded by one long gain per game, and that he wasn't consistent.  P. 347

In 1990 Bo was selected for his first Pro Bowl even as he decided that he would play only one more NFL season.  P. 348

Having been raised with an absent father, Bo knew the pain of the ignored child.  P. 348.

He became a husband and father when he left work.  P. 348

Bo never loved football.  It was a brutal and barbaric.  He did not want his sons to play football.  He was not close to any of his Raider teammates.  They were merely coworkers.  P. 348

The Fault

 I enjoy astrology, but I tend to believe Shakespeare is correct. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

Will They?

 

Trump’s prospective candidacy gives Republicans a chance to take a stand, does it not? There is nothing preventing Mitch McConnell (whom Trump recently called a “broken old crow,”) Kevin McCarthy, Ronna McDaniel, and anyone else in the party hierarchy from saying: “I wish he would not run, and I will not support him.” Twelve simple words. Will any of them utter them? This week, we’ll find out.

-Michael Tomasky in The New Republic

Over the Years

 Over the years I've been given to various self-help projects since I have so many ways to improve myself. Not much success. I once took the Evelyn Woods speed-reading course, then read WAR AND PEACE in 2 hours. All I remember is that it's about Russia. I took piano lessons as a child, but today all I can play is "Chopsticks." I took courses in college like Art Apprecation and Music Appreciation, but to this day I have no musical or artistic taste. I know the words to "Louie, Louie" and I was once enamored with Andy Warhol, but this is not something I'm proud of today. To top it off: I once tried Transcendental Meditation when it was all the rage in the 70's, but I kept falling asleep. So I suppose I am what I am.

All of the Focus

 All of the focus these days is on the latest research and theories in neuroscience or cognition as if neuroscience can explain everything. I get a headache just thinking about it. But my theory is that neuroscience will never be able to explain everything. Like why I love caramel. Like why I loathe rap music and Lil Wayne. Like why I love sun rises and am afraid of the dark. There's just no accounting for some things no matter how closely you dissect my mind.

When the Guns of August

 When the Guns of August finally ended 11/11/18 with Europe shattered, revolution in Russia, and a worldwide flu epidemic that killed millions, the Great War, the war to end all wars "over there," it must have seemed that everything had changed. Indeed, everything had changed and we live in that changed world today. Change has been the rule every since, and it seems like everything is radically changing today.

Hemingway's Krebs came home to the changes of 1918 to his soldier's home feeling permanently alienated. There must be many of Krebs today.

Midterms

 Except for the upcoming Senate runoff in Georgia, the midterms are over although the votes are still being counted in some states that will determine who controls Congress.  The Red Wave that some pundits and politicians predicted did not happen.  The Democrats did much better than expectations.  We can breathe a sigh of relief.  The better than anticipated Democratic performance seems to be tied to protecting abortion rights, Trump, and the poor candidates that Republicans fielded.

Michael J. Sandel - Democracy's Discontent - Notes

 A new edition for our times.  First published in 1996.  Since then democracy's discontent has deepened to the extent that there are doubts about democracy's future.  Preface to the new edition.  P. xi

The author is a professor of government at Harvard University and the author of many books on contemporary political and economic issues.

Some people will say, "Don't talk about politics."  I say it is impossible not to talk politics.  The issues we face today affect everything.  The political issues of today affect all of us as to the way we see ourselves, our fellow human beings, and how we we envision the kind of country we wish to live in.  Politics is unavoidable now.

Our Civic Life is not going well.  A defeated president incites a violent mob to invade the U.S. Capitol, in a violent attempt to prevent Congress from certifying the election results.  More than a year into the presence of Joe Biden, most Republicans continue to believe the election was stolen from Donald Trump.  Even as a pandemic claims more than a million American lives, angry disputes over masks and  vaccines reveal our polarized condition.  Public outrage over police killings of unarmed Black men prompts a national reckoning with racial injustice, but states across the country enact laws making it more difficult to vote.

Trump's presidency and its rancorous aftermath cast a dark shadow over the future of American democracy.  But our civic troubles did not begin with Trump and did not end with his defeat.  His election was a symbol of frayed social bonds and a damaged democratic condition.  P. 1

I did not know Sandel was such an historian.

Sandel points out in his positive presentation of Whiggism that the Whigs like Daniel Webster opposed territorial expansion as did the Democrats citing the cohesiveness required of republics.  What Sandel does not point out is that Jackssonians favored territorial expansion to maintain slavery.  Pl .58-59

Democrats Are

 Doing better than expected in yesterday's balloting although control of both houses of Congress are still up for grabs.

Republicans Choose Repression and Violence

 The larger point is that we should not treat the Republican effort to suppress and intimidate voters — or invalidate elections — as if it were a force of nature or the automatic result of some mechanical process. Republican politicians in Florida chose to respond to hard-fought elections by burdening their opponents. Republican leaders in Washington, likewise, chose to elevate their most irresponsible colleagues into positions of influence and authority. And Republican politicians nationwide chose to embrace the lies and the conspiracy theories that undergird the idea that the only legitimate elections are the ones Republicans win.

-Jamelle Bouie in the NYT

We Are Being Told

 We're being told that if WE happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time we don't need reasonable, stricter gun control laws like every other industrialized country in the world, that we should instead hope that there's a good guy with a gun handy to save the day. Sure, and did you happen to fall off a turnip truck last week?

Adam Hochschild - American Midnight - A Review

 An earlier version of this review incorrectly said that J. Edgar Hoover was appointed to head the Radical Division of the Justice Department in August of 1929. He was appointed in August of 1919. The text has been corrected. 

Too many Americans are indifferent to their own history and know too little about it. This ignorance makes the present more baffling than it needs to be. Adam Hochschild has written a fine book about a grim period a century ago that has largely disappeared from national memory but seems painfully relevant to America in the 2020s. “American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis” describes vividly a time when racism, white nationalism, and anti-foreign and anti-immigrant sentiment were rampant. Reading it is almost therapeutic. Realizing (thanks to this book) that American democracy survived that dark moment and a decade later began half a century of democratic renewal made this reader more hopeful than he has been in quite a while.

(Mariner)

Hochschild’s account demonstrates the folly of believing that Donald Trump and the era he has given us are departures from normal trends in American history. What’s normal in our past is the American vulnerability to mythical enemies, demagogues and ignoramuses. These dangerous forces abounded in the years Hochschild describes, from 1917 to 1921.

We do remember one event of that era: World War I. For the European powers involved in that killing spree, the war began in 1914, but an isolationist America remained aloof until April 1917, when President Woodrow Wilson finally declared war on Germany and its allies. Seventeen months later, after millions of American doughboys had taken up arms in Europe and 117,000 were killed, the Germans surrendered.

Exploring family history through the objects that connect generations

Victory in the war came at a high price that we’ve chosen to forget. The war provided justification for a brutal period in America that featured “mass imprisonments, torture, vigilante violence, censorship, killings of Black Americans … [and] a war against democracy at home,” Hochschild writes. His powerful 12-page prologue grabs readers by their lapels and confronts them with an ugly America sharply at odds with rosy, patriotic versions.

The nation’s delayed entry to the war stimulated intrigue and violence in the United States that set Americans sympathetic to Germany and those sympathetic to our traditional allies in Britain and France at odds. Wilson at first sought to stand apart from the propagandizing on both sides, and he waged a 1916 reelection campaign on the ultimately misleading slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.” In 1917, when the Germans began indiscriminate submarine warfare in the Atlantic that sank American ships, Wilson went all in for war.

Wilson is at the center of Hochschild’s tale. He is one of the most complex, contradictory figures in American history. Raised in Augusta, Ga., by a family that supported the Confederacy, Wilson clung to a Southern segregationist’s ugly racial views all his life. The first and last holder of a PhD to occupy the White House, he was the president of Princeton University before becoming governor of New Jersey in 1911. As governor and then as president (elected in 1912), he was a progressive reformer on economic issues and an internationalist. But once he led America into war, he became a dedicated jingoist. Hochschild calls out his many shortcomings.

Wilson signed the Espionage Act in 1917 and the Sedition Act in 1918, two laws that allowed restrictions on freedom of speech that were draconian by today’s standards. Once America joined the war effort, Wilson had no apparent qualms about imprisoning dissident Americans, including the Socialist Party candidate who had run against him for president in 1912 and won 6 percent of the vote, Eugene V. Debs. Debs was sentenced to 10 years in prison for making a speech in 1918 that the Wilson administration interpreted as discouraging participation in the war. Debs’s sentence was commuted by Wilson’s Republican successor, Warren G. Harding, in 1921.

Wilson allowed his postmaster general, Albert S. Burleson, a former Texas congressman, to deny left-wing and pacifist magazines and newsletters use of the U.S. mail’s special low rates for printed matter, which forced several widely read publications out of business. He banned a publication called the Gaelic American because it favored Irish independence from America’s ally Britain. Burleson’s chief legal officer, William Lamar, explained wartime censorship to Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of the New York Evening Post. “I know exactly what I am after,” Lamar said, “pro-Germanism, pacifism and ‘high-browism.’” Burleson also resegregated the post office’s workforce, with Wilson’s explicit approval. Wilson himself earlier resegregated the federal workforce in Washington.

How the right wing’s delusions went from ‘not normal’ to ‘dangerous’

Race, immigration and labor unrest, especially when promoted by socialists, were the most inflammatory domestic issues of these years. Anti-union sentiment was ferocious. The primary target of antilabor hostility was the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies), a union that tried to organize female, Black and unskilled workers ignored by the American Federation of Labor. The prosperous classes saw the IWW as a grave threat to the country, one much aggravated by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917. That unexpected event set off the first great red scare in the United States.

A. Mitchell Palmer, a Quaker from Pennsylvania who had served three terms in the House, became Wilson’s attorney general in 1919. On June 2, 1919, three months after taking up his post, Palmer was the target of one of eight bombs set off almost simultaneously in cities of the Northeast. He and his family were inside their house on R Street NW in Washington when the bomb collapsed the front facade.

A. Mitchell Palmer, a Quaker from Pennsylvania who had served three terms in the House, became Wilson’s attorney general in 1919. On June 2, 1919, three months after taking up his post, Palmer was the target of one of eight bombs set off almost simultaneously in cities of the Northeast. He and his family were inside their house on R Street NW in Washington when the bomb collapsed the front facade.

Surviving the bomb left Palmer “profoundly transformed,” writes Hochschild, and “marked the beginning … of a domestic war the likes of which the United States had never seen.” The infamous “Palmer raids” of November 1919 and January 1920 rounded up and imprisoned thousands of left-wing activists, Blacks and union activists. The perpetrators of the eight bombings were never identified.

Palmer’s raids assured him a place in American history, but another contribution he made to his country may have been more consequential. As he scrambled to respond to the bombings of June 2, Palmer decided he needed a new “Radical Division” in the Justice Department. As chief of the division, he chose a 24-year-old Washington native already working in the department. Thus began the career of J. Edgar Hoover, who would serve eight other administrations in various capacities, ultimately as director of the FBI, his tenure ending when he died in 1972.

Palmer appointed Hoover on Aug. 1, 1919. Two months later, Wilson suffered a massive, debilitating stroke and never really performed the duties of president again. The country wasn’t informed how seriously the stroke had disabled him, one of the great scandals of American history.

Wilson’s condition made it easy for Palmer to pursue the presidential ambitions he had long harbored. He and Hoover concocted an ambitious plan to round up thousands of new American immigrants and deport them, a ploy obviously intended to appeal to the anti-immigrant sentiments then flourishing in America.

Hochschild, who has written 10 previous books, adeptly juggles multiple narrative threads. His tale does include an unexpected happy ending that might encourage contemporary American readers.

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With Wilson permanently sidelined after his stroke, Hoover and Palmer felt free to arrest and deport thousands of immigrants in the most aggressive plan since slavery for suppressing residents of the United States. But a legal “roadblock,” to use Hochschild’s word, disrupted their effort.

Under the law, deportations of immigrants living in the United States legally had to be approved by the Labor Department. The acting secretary of labor, Louis F. Post, was a liberal civil libertarian and a founder of the NAACP. That Post, who served as assistant secretary of labor, found himself exercising the authority of the secretary of labor to approve or block deportations was a kind of dumb luck. He did not shy away from the opportunity. He blocked Hoover and Palmer from carrying out their plan.

Palmer had pumped up fears of a possibly revolutionary uprising of socialists and trade unionists on May 1, 1920, but May Day passed quietly, without an American revolution — and without mass deportations, either. Like the Republican officeholders who blocked Donald Trump’s efforts to upend the results of the 2020 presidential election, Post rose to the occasion with firm dignity and determination. Harding, elected to succeed Wilson in 1920, abandoned the fierce anti-immigrant and anti-socialist crusade. Calm was restored. Soon, as is our custom in this unique country, we turned the page and found ourselves swept up in the Roaring Twenties, dancing the Charleston and drinking illegal gin.

Robert G. Kaiser is a former managing editor of The Washington Post.

Peniel E. Joseph The Third Reconstruction

 In “The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century,” historian and professor Peniel E. Joseph uses our country’s history on race and racism to help make sense of such injustices. Joseph argues that, until recently, America was living through a Third Reconstruction: It dated, he argues, from the election of Barack Obama in 2008 through the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol. It was an era that echoed the periods following the Civil War and the civil rights movement, national moments of cultural ambition that centered and then upended the socially and legally enforced limits on Black inclusion in the American experiment. And in the wake of our Third Reconstruction, we face the same kind of retrenchment that followed those two previous periods.

Joseph’s consistent focus on racial inequities hidden in plain sight makes this book searingly relevant. Think, for example, of the water crises in predominantly Black cities, such as Flint, Mich., and Jackson, Miss. Or consider appraisal discrimination, which devalues Black-owned homes. Or recall the ever-growing, always heartbreaking list of unarmed Black men who have been killed by the police. Joseph aims to distill these strands into a single narrative that helps us understand why, decades after the end of chattel slavery and Jim Crow, the virulent racial animosity that helped produce the Jan. 6 Capitol breach persists. “For Black America,” he writes, “reconstruction remains a blues-inflected tone poem about the perils and possibilities of Black humanity.”

This pathbreaking Black journalist offers a model in uncertain times

He describes a national history in which two competing narratives collide. For Joseph, the First Reconstruction established the central tension between reconstructionism and redemptionism, a tension that encapsulates our national moment. Reconstructionism is based on a foundational belief in multiracial democracy and in the tools we have to enforce the federal government’s promise of equality: voting, protesting, boycotting and other types of civic action. Redemptionism, on the other hand, aims to concentrate power, access and opportunity in the hands of White people by any means, even and especially through physical violence. The clash between these two visions has produced enduring political divisions and racial violence based on false narratives about Black dangerousness and criminality. Convict leasing, lynching and mass incarceration are all redemptionist tools. Impressively, Joseph weaves each of these schools of belief through the narrative of his own life growing up as a first-generation Haitian American. We see the ways reconstructionism has expanded what was possible for him, and the way redemptionism has constricted it.

After the First Reconstruction, Black Americans were no longer enslaved, but the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy and its attendant lies about Black inferiority and criminality would justify decades of Jim Crow and other oppressive ills. The Union had won the physical war, but the narrative war had been lost. By contrast, the reconstructionist narrative won after the Second Reconstruction. From 1968 until the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision gutting the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder, Joseph argues, we had a national consensus on the importance of racial equality that led to major civil rights advances, including the election of Obama and the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement. Joseph’s Third Reconstruction resumes this struggle, with the most violent clash between reconstructionism and redemptionism in decades.

Joseph ably traces the through-lines that connect these three eras. This is especially pronounced in his account of the Jan. 6 insurrection. For many of us watching as the Capitol was overrun, the siege surely seemed like an unprecedented incident. But it was no mistake that the rioters strode through the Capitol waving Confederate flags. For Joseph, the noose and gallows erected in front of the Capitol by the insurrectionists and the violent mobs spilling into the building were old wine in new bottles.

Joseph also plays out the consequences of his analyses. When we recognize that mass incarceration is a tool of redemptionism, he shows, we can view the Black people whom the system sweeps up as political prisoners, not as a disposable population of criminals. In the process, we can recast them as the heroes in our national narrative instead of the villains, and our criminal legal system as the recent evolution of a race-based caste system instead of a model of fairness.

Ross Gay's 'Inciting Joy' is a gift that's meant to be shared

Like a therapist, Joseph is trying to reveal our past to help us explain our present national situation. He is trying to remake the story that we have internalized about ourselves — how we have behaved, how we have atoned, what we can learn and what steps we should take next. If we instead rely on true, nuanced stories that will allow us to confront harm with deeper understanding, we will take more thoughtful action and produce more just outcomes.

James Baldwin famously observed: “The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frame of references and identities, and our aspirations.” In “The Third Reconstruction,” Joseph tries to narrate our history as we live it, the better to understand the choices we make even as we make them.

-Robin Walker Sterling in the WaPost

Election Tuesday

 And I am apprehensive.

No Limits to Republican Lies

 

How Republicans Fed a Misinformation Loop About the Pelosi Attack

• Within hours of the brutal attack last week on Paul Pelosi, Republican officials and media figures circulated groundless — and often homophobic — claims.
• The misinformation came from all levels of Republican politics, including from a U.S. senator, a congressman and the world’s richest man.
• New York Times