Thursday, November 30, 2023
Tuesday, November 28, 2023
Disappearing Into Our Phones
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“When you look at your phone,” she told me, “it’s as though you disappear.”
When it comes to having an unhealthy relationship with technology, I’m in good company. Most of us find that smartphones have made our lives better, but we struggle to use them in healthy ways. Nearly 60 percent of American adults told Gallup last year that they use their phones too often. American adults spend an average of four and a half hours on their phones each day, the research firm Insider Intelligence reported this summer. Almost all of us keep our smartphones within arm’s reach during waking hours, Gallup found, and most of us do so when we sleep.
-Chris Moody in The Atlantic
Monday, November 27, 2023
Joseph Ellis - American Dialogue - The Founders and Us - Notes
Joseph Ellis is my favorite American historian.
In the context of the Negro problem neither whites nor blacks, for reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further the past will remain horrible for exactly so long as we refuse to assess it honestly. . . . Appearances to the contrary, no one in America escapes its effects and everyone in America bears some responsibility for it.
-James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 1955
Which is why I am proud to be a student of American history in this time of politicizing our history by trying to distort and erase the truth. P. 49
Adams was a realist. Jefferson was a dreamer/hypocrite.
The dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in 2014 gave iconic status on the Mall to the liberal narrative of American history as an ongoing conversation within the trinity of Jefferson, Lincoln, and King about what "all men are created equal" means then and now. P. 57
Hence, Professor Richardson's current book is a case in point.
This country was not founded on the Declaration of Independence. Ellis points out that it was nothing more than rhetorical flourish. Jefferson did not personally believe what it ultimately came to stand for and mean. Jefferson was a total racist and hypocrite.
Adams points out that the deepest human drive is the irrational need to be noticed and loved. Why does he consider this need irrational? P. 94
The new aristocracy would be based on money, not family inheritance. P. 94
The U.S. doesn't have the European old-style to offset wealth as the primary measure of elite status. I can only imagine how disgusted and disappointed he would be with Trump. P. 95
He foresaw the country was headed toward a "moneyed aristocracy." P. 95
This new money aristocracy would be pathetic for the not have the emotional attachment of European elites, yet Trumpers love their messiah yet it's a one-way affection.p. 95
His work Davila highlights his comments on these matters.
Mocked as "His Rotundity. P. 96
The US was not immune to what happened in Europe throughout as the development oc embedded plutocracy: a political oligarchy. P. 96
Adams was a student of history to see where this country was headed, and he was right to do so.
The Past Makes the Present Coherent
In the context of the Negro problem neither whites nor blacks, for reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further the past will remain horrible for exactly so long as we refuse to assess it honestly. . . . Appearances to the contrary, no one in America escapes its effects and everyone in America bears some responsibility for it.
-James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 1955
The Survival of Democracy in the Balance
Let’s start with the good news: It has become untenable to treat Trump as a normal presidential candidate, thanks to his own evermore radical rhetoric, starting with his pledges to use the Justice Department as a tool for revenge against political enemies. The result is a partial but welcome shift in journalistic coverage recognizing Trump’s journey into what the New York Times called “more fascist-sounding territory.” The Economist, no avatar of left-wing politics, received wide attention for declaring that Trump “poses the biggest danger to the world in 2024.”
It’s true that most Republican politicians shy away from calling out the former president’s planned assaults on our constitutional democracy, but at least the issue is being joined outside the GOP’s cocoon.
We are paying far less attention to the long-term deterioration of the right to vote, the essential building block of a democratic republic. It’s easier to overlook because chipping away at access to the ballot has been a subtle, decade-long process. It began with the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision that gutted Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, thus sharply circumscribing the Justice Department’s power to enforce the law.
This led to an explosion of state abuses, including discriminatory voter-identification laws, targeted purges of electoral rolls, gerrymanders that undercut minority representation and changes in early-voting rules that often advantaged some groups over others.
Because such moves fall short of the wholesale disenfranchisement of Black voters during the Jim Crow era — it ended with the Voting Rights Act’s passage in 1965 — defenders of today’s restrictions insist they are not discriminating against anyone. But making it harder for some people to vote — often in the name of preventing the falsely imagined “voter fraud” that is at the heart of Trump’s election denial — is no less an attack on democracy.
And the attack continues.
In his decision in Shelby, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. claimed that even without a strong Section 4, the Voting Rights Act bans discrimination under Section 2, which “is permanent, applies nationwide, and is not at issue in this case.”
Permanent? Not if the 2-1 decision last week from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit is allowed to stand.
The court’s majority arrogantly tossed aside what Congress explicitly said it was doing when it passed the law, claiming miraculous powers to read the “text and structure” of the act as preventing private parties, including civil rights groups, from bringing cases under Section 2. As the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer noted, the ruling’s claim that only the Justice Department had this authority ignored “Congress’s intentions, Supreme Court precedent and decades of practice.”
This is no minor bit of judicial activism. Rick Hasen, a law professor at UCLA, wrote in the Election Law Blog that the ruling would eliminate the bulk of the cases aimed at protecting voting rights because “the vast majority of claims to enforce section 2 of the Voting Rights Act are brought by private plaintiffs, not the Department of Justice with limited resources.” Bye bye, Voting Rights Act. Indeed, there were immediate signs (in a key Louisiana case, for example) that the 8th Circuit ruling would be used to overturn earlier voting rights actions.
Preventing Trump from overthrowing liberal democracy is certainly a necessary step, but it’s not sufficient. Renewing the fight for a new Voting Rights Act and the access-enhancing reforms in the Freedom to Vote Act is essential. But it’s also time to address one of the major flaws of our Constitution: It does not contain an explicit, affirmative guarantee of every citizen’s right to vote. Enacting a constitutional amendment that would do so, Hasen argues, would bring our voting wars to an inclusive conclusion.
“Why do we let the state put barriers in front of people when they exercise their right to vote?” Hasen asked in an interview. The director of UCLA’s Safeguarding Democracy Project, Hasen details his proposed amendment and the case for it in a forthcoming book, “A Real Right to Vote.” A carefully framed amendment, he argues, could simultaneously protect voter access and assure election integrity. He’d link automatic voter registration with a nationwide, universal, nondiscriminatory form of voter identification.
Polarization makes amending the Constitution nearly impossible these days, one reason Hasen addresses fears on both the left and the right. But whatever chances Hasen’s amendment has, it calls on Americans to address the most important question facing our democracy: Are we truly committed to being a democracy? We’ll decide that at the ballot box next November, but we’ll have a lot more work to do even if we get the initial answer right.
Saturday, November 25, 2023
National Book Award Winner from the NYT
At the National Book Awards last night, the nonfiction chair Ada Ferrer explained what she and her fellow judges had been looking for as they narrowed the field from hundreds of submissions to five finalists and finally one winner (Ned Blackhawk’s “The Rediscovery of America”): They wanted books that somehow made a difference, in any of the many ways that books can do that, and that were well written, in any of the many ways that books can meet that definition.
Wednesday, November 22, 2023
Tuesday, November 14, 2023
His (Trump's) use—twice; once on social media, and then repeated in a speech—of the word “vermin” to describe his political enemies cannot be an accident. That’s an unusual word choice. It’s not a smear that one just grabs out of the air. And it appears in history chiefly in one context, and one context only….
This is straight-up Nazi talk, in a way he’s never done quite before. To announce that the real enemy is domestic and then to speak of that enemy in subhuman terms is Fascism 101. Especially that particular word….
-Chauncey Devaga in Salon.comMonday, November 13, 2023
Perry Bacon, Jr. on wapost
A Biden 2024 campaign isn’t worth the added difficulty that comes from his deep unpopularity. The Democratic Party should strongly consider embracing another candidate — or at least a truly open primary.
How can we reconcile the seeming contradiction between an unpopular president and a popular party?
They Are Telling Us
They are telling us in broad daylight that they want to rape the Constitution. And now Trump has told us explicitly that he will use Nazi rhetoric to stoke the hatred and fear that will make this rape seem, to some, a necessary cleansing. We may not get every voter to care about this. But for those of us who do care, this is what the election is about, and nothing else, and history is screaming at us to convince as many people as we can.
-Michael Tomasky in the New Republic
Heather Cox Richardson - Democracy Awakening - Notes
Well-known Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson tells a coherent liberal American story. Her scholarship is sometimes questionable, but this work serves as a valuable layman readable version of the American story.
Her story is based on the myth we like to tell ourselves that the United States was founded on the belief that we are created "equal" on democratic principles. Forget about indigenous peoples. Forget about people of color. Forget about women. Do that heavy intellectual lifting and she is right. The DOI is not in the Constitution. The country was founded on the Constitution, not the Declaration. Jefferson and Lincoln were both wrong.
You might think that after being confronted with the party's leading candidate for president ranting in public about "Communists, Marxists, Fascist and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country" on NBC's "Meet the Press," the chair of the Republican National Committee would be compelled to say something other than "I am not going to comment on candidates and their campaign messaging." But not Ronna McDaniel.
-Heather Digby Parton in Salon.com
Some hints: It’s not the midpoint between a center-left Democratic Party and an increasingly right-wing Republican Party. Nor will he find mathematically ideal forms of moderation by splitting the difference between a moderately progressive president dedicated to democracy and a much-indicted extremist given to saying kind things about dictators.
E.J. Dionne, Jr. in the WaPost
Max Booth in the WaPost
For the first time since the attack on Pearl Harbor, there is a substantial isolationist movement in the United States that wants to repudiate a bipartisan, stunningly successful post-World War II foreign policy based on free trade and security alliances with fellow democracies. If Donald Trump regains the White House — which, recent polls suggest, is quite possible — he would be likely to abandon both NATO and Ukraine. U.S. allies in East Asia that depend on U.S. troop deployments, notably South Korea and Japan, would also be at risk of abandonment.
The new generation of America Firsters seems hellbent on crippling the United States’ global power. They might succeed where challengers such as China, Russia, the Soviet Union, North Korea, Iran, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and others have failed.
Wednesday, November 8, 2023
Heather Digby Parton in Salon.com
I have a theory that Americans are so sour and despondent not so much because of the economy but because our politics seem to be so messed up. The right has been brainwashed into believing that our elections are all rigged and Democrats are trying to destroy them personally. Democrats see the likes of Donald Trump, currently a defendant in four felony trials, and kooks like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., running the Republican Party and it makes them feel like they're in a nightmare from which they can't awaken. Republicans are cheered up at the thought of Trump wreaking revenge on their hated enemies and Democrats are briefly mollified by winning elections but it all feels so futile. On some level, Republicans know they aren't really winning and Democrats know that the country is inches away from an authoritarian takeover by evil clowns. So, of course, 76% of the population thinks the country is going in the wrong direction!
What to Do About It
Such soothsaying is of little comfort, however, to those who can see the reality of the country’s worsening democracy crisis and the deep cultural and institutional failings that have created it. Moreover, the “it is going to be okay because how can it not?” narrative from the hope-peddlers and professional centrists is no protection for already marginalized communities who will have their rights and freedoms taken away by a second Trump regime. So, yes, given that the 2024 election is a de facto referendum on the future of democracy in this country (and the world), the American people should in fact be very afraid. The question is now, what to do about it?
-Chauncey Devaga in Salon.com
Monday, November 6, 2023
Trump Says It's All a Lie
As ABC News points out, Trump "faces 91 criminal charges across four indictments, two of which are related to election interference," but that doesn't seem to be slowing him down much when it comes to consistently refusing to admit that Biden took the win against him, and will likely do it again in 2024.
"The whole thing is a lie … the whole election is a lie," Trump continued on Saturday.
Earlier in the evening, former state governors Asa Hutchinson and Chris Christie did their best to offer alternatives to Trump, with Hutchinson reminding that "There is a significant likelihood that Donald Trump will be found guilty by a jury on a felony offense next year."
-Carlos Turnbull in Salon.com
Saturday, November 4, 2023
Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past
— George Orwell, "1984"
The historian is a prophet looking backwards.
— Friedrich von Schlegel, "Philosophical Fragments"
The phonetic resemblance of the word “history” to “story,” which can be anything from a factual narrative to a fairy tale, should warn us about the pretended objectivity of any interpretation of past events. The ambiguous nature of the discipline is even more obvious in foreign languages: In German, “history” and “story” are the same word, Geschichte. The French word histoire also does double duty; “Quelle histoire!” means “what a story!” but inevitably conveys a subtext of doubtful credibility.
It is hardly surprising that ideologues are tempted to hijack history to vindicate their worldview; the interpretive nature of the field makes it vulnerable to misappropriation in a way that math or physics, generally speaking, are not. As we have seen in Florida, Texas and other laboratories of autocracy, once Republicans obtain unified control of government, they are compulsively driven to monkey with the history curricula of the public schools.
This flare-up of officially sanctioned historical fiction (“slavery taught useful skills”) is just the most recent example of the long struggle over who gets to tell us who we are. The desire to seize history and manipulate it to flatter present-day conservatives and help them feel they are the culmination of an historical inevitability, while their opponents are doomed to defeat, is what motivates the historical polemics on the far right.
A glance through the catalog of Regnery or almost any other conservative or evangelical publishing house will reveal works of “history” covering just about every aspect of America, but they tend to concentrate on three eras. These eras were the key inflection points in the development of the United States.
The first of those is America at its inception. What is America supposed to be? Who gets to rule? What is the cultural foundation of the country? Who were the so-called founding fathers, and what were their intentions?
The second theme is America at its bloodiest moment of crisis, the Civil War. What was the war about, and what was the role of slavery, the most peculiar institution in all American history? Who were the heroes, and who were the villains?
Finally comes the great crisis of the 20th century, the Great Depression and World War II. Was it good or bad that the federal government assumed greater responsibility for the well-being of its citizens? Which economic theory would have worked best to end the Depression? Was a world war against fascism necessary to defend freedom, or a dangerous entanglement America should have avoided?
The pious Founding Fathers fraud
The near-deification of the founders has been a feature of popular histories for over 200 years; one need only think of Parson Weems’ legends about the flawlessly virtuous George Washington. This view was subscribed to across the political spectrum until relatively recently, when more critical scholarship spotlighted, among other things, Thomas Jefferson’s monumental hypocrisy in proclaiming the rights of man while owning slaves and never even manumitting them. That facts such as these weren’t obvious from the beginning only shows the power of myth in subduing skeptical thinking.
Overwhelmingly, conservatives still reject a balanced, critical view of the founders or the debates leading to the establishment of the Constitution, in favor of full-on adulation. The only exception is the lunatic fringe, such as the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Alabama, which believes the Constitution was a capitulation to central planning and the extinction of state sovereignty by the federal Moloch. But then, the anarcho-capitalists at the institute also believe in the right to drive drunk (no, really!).
Given that the modern-day American conservative movement is largely a political campaign against the Enlightenment and its fruits, the founders’ beliefs present a problem. Conservatives solve it by systematic distortion of the historical record, even as they hand-wave away the establishment clause of the First Amendment.
The vast majority of conservatives, with their alleged constitutional originalism, claim to venerate the founders. But there's a problem: The signers of the Declaration of Independence and framers of the Constitution were, if not exactly creatures of the Enlightenment like Voltaire or Hume, then heavily influenced by its political and social theories. While the great majority were formal members of some Protestant denomination or other, many were, at most, Deist by inner conviction. Tom Paine opposed organized religion altogether.
The best-known and most influential of contemporary pseudo-historians to take this approach is David Barton, whose history qualifications consist of a BA in religious education from Oral Roberts University. Among his more risible claims is that 29 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were lay ministers. This is technically known as a lie; only one was. Likewise his claim that the Constitution was derived verbatim from Scripture. Given Barton’s appeals to religious prejudice and his attacks on minorities, the Southern Poverty Law Center has profiled him as a bigot.
A favorite conservative technique is to place some delicious quote, concocted in the present, in the mouth of a founder, preferably Thomas Jefferson.
Nevertheless, Barton remains an influence, with Republican operatives like Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich endorsing him. His 2012 book "The Jefferson Lies" was a New York Times bestseller — until fact-checking by authentic Jefferson scholars found so many outright falsehoods that the publisher finally withdrew the book. But no doubt thousands of children afflicted by home schooling or attendance at Christian academies are being indoctrinated with Barton’s lies to this day.
A favorite conservative technique is to place some delicious quote, concocted in the present, in the mouth of a founder, preferably Jefferson. There are almost too many bogus Jefferson quotes to count; one of them is this: "My reading of history convinces me that most bad government has grown out of too much government." It makes him sound both prophetic and like a gung-ho disciple of Ayn Rand.
The uncivil war on historical truth
If the founding of the American republic was imbedded with ambiguities that conservatives refuse to acknowledge, the country’s greatest internal crisis ought to appeal to their generally binary, Manichaean worldview. What could possibly be a greater evil than slavery, the institution that mocked the claims of a nation conceived in liberty? But in this case, conservative chroniclers become agonizingly nuanced; so nuanced, in fact, that one glimpses definite signs of sympathy for the Confederate cause.
The key to conservative historiography on the Civil War lies in its claims as to causes: The war was supposedly about states’ rights or sectional rivalry or discriminatory protective tariffs or internal improvements or disputes over westward expansion and the transcontinental railroad — about pretty much anything and everything except slavery, in other words. You will notice that his viewpoint is highly consistent with the ex-Confederates’ Lost Cause myth that began to spread soon after the war ended.
That myth consistently downplayed the role of slavery, despite the plain words in the Southern states’ proclamations of secession, as well as the infamous cornerstone speech given by Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens. (The speech also gives the lie to Lost Causers’ claim that Southerners were simply trying to protect the liberties of the original republic from Yankee encroachment; Stephens used the word “revolution” several times to stress that Confederates were rejecting the old form of government.)
Central to the Lost Cause was the elevation of Robert E. Lee to sainthood. Lee was unquestionably a talented military leader, but he made his share of mistakes, as a glance at the field across which he ordered Pickett’s division on a suicidal charge at Gettysburg will attest. But according to Southern legend his leadership was faultless, and any disasters were the fault of subordinate commanders.
Conservative historiography on the Civil War is focused on causes: The war was about states' rights or sectional rivalry or tariffs or westward expansion — but never about what it was actually about, which was slavery.
The principal architect of Lee’s reputation was Douglas Southall Freeman. A native of Richmond, he received a Pulitzer Prize for his multi-volume biography of Lee in 1935. Freeman was very influential, teaching at the Army War College for seven years. Respectful study of Lee’s campaigns has been a feature of U.S. Army curricula right up to the present. Only recently has he become subject to critical evaluation, with Civil War scholar Eric Foner calling Freeman’s works on Lee “hagiography.”
Freeman's work, along with many other encomiums, resulted in a cult of Lee and a cult of the Lost Cause that curses us to this day. Its strength can be measured by the fact that it took 160 years to topple statues of Lee and other Confederates from numerous Southern cities, and the Army is only now in the process of rechristening bases named for Rebel generals. (Whatever one thinks of Lee, he was at least a capable commander; but there's no defense for sub-mediocrities like George Pickett or Braxton Bragg, not to mention disastrous incompetents like John Bell Hood — yet all were memorialized in military base names. Consistent with his sociopathic nature, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to restore Bragg’s name to the base in North Carolina.
Not until 2021 was a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest removed from the state capitol in Tennessee. Forrest was a monster even by Confederate standards: a slave trader, a war criminal (the Fort Pillow massacre, in which 600 Union soldiers were slaughtered, about half of them Black) and an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan. To gain some perspective, imagine the reaction if the postwar Federal Republic of Germany had erected a statue to Heinrich Himmler. It is a tribute to the crass pettiness of Tennessee’s political hacks that a statue of Admiral David Farragut was removed along with Forrest’s likeness. Farragut was a Tennessean who remained loyal to the Union and became a genuine hero; the zanies of the Tennessee legislature thought that if their beloved war criminal had to go, dumping Farragut was an acceptable "compromise."
Franklin D. Roosevelt: the archfiend in peace and war
The economic crash of 1929 descended on America like an ice age, ending a meretricious prosperity. In the four years of Herbert Hoover’s presidency, U.S. gross domestic product plunged by an astonishing 41 percent. Commerce was so completely frozen that by the eve of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933, according to William Manchester, money had very nearly ceased to circulate in parts of the country.
Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, as he cheerfully conceded, largely consisted of guesswork and experimentation. They also mostly worked: GDP increased in every year of his presidency but one, and that only happened because he gave in to fiscal conservatives and tried to balance the budget. Unemployment also fell significantly, and throughout his presidency was substantially better than under Hoover.
Trickle-down economics and fiscal austerity was precisely what had created and deepened the Great Depression (although those terms were not yet in use), and unwisely heeding conservatives’ advice resulted in the “Roosevelt Recession” of 1937-38. Yet despite their dismal record, conservatives have made a cottage industry ever since of claiming that the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression. Not only that, they have persistently characterized the Roosevelt years as un-American and akin to the fascist movements of the 1930s. As I have written elsewhere, when you consider the fascist sympathies of Charles Lindbergh, Father Coughlin and other FDR opponents, this looks like another example of the extreme right's propensity for psychological projection.
Indeed, the political reaction against Roosevelt’s presidency probably created American conservatism as we know it today. "The Conservative Manifesto," a 1937 document wrapped in the same high-minded language of fiscal probity and individual initiative that would be recognizable today, was the movement’s blueprint. Its lofty slogans about rugged individualism were code for “let ‘em starve” and the reference to states’ rights was decipherable as “no equal rights.”
Political reaction against FDR's presidency and the New Deal probably created American conservatism as we know it today, beginning with "The Conservative Manifesto" of 1937.
It seemed that everybody hated Roosevelt but the voters, and his blowout re-election victory in 1936 caused immense exasperation to his enemies. How could this charlatan possibly get away with it? From ex-President Hoover himself, who crisscrossed the country giving anti-New Deal speeches, down to present-day tirades in the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, FDR hatred is a wellspring that nourishes the roots of reactionary conservatism.
Political reaction against FDR's presidency and the New Deal probably created American conservatism as we know it today, beginning with "The Conservative Manifesto" of 1937.
It seemed that everybody hated Roosevelt but the voters, and his blowout re-election victory in 1936 caused immense exasperation to his enemies. How could this charlatan possibly get away with it? From ex-President Hoover himself, who crisscrossed the country giving anti-New Deal speeches, down to present-day tirades in the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, FDR hatred is a wellspring that nourishes the roots of reactionary conservatism.
One of the more recent and ballyhooed polemics against Roosevelt was "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression," a 2007 bestseller by Amity Shlaes. The author’s political views may be inferred from her hagiography of Calvin Coolidge, her work at the George W. Bush Presidential Center, and her co-authorship of a diatribe about America’s slide into socialism with none other than Peter Navarro, would-be overthrower of the Constitution and former Trump White House adviser. Ironically, Shlaes’ indictment of the New Deal was published just before the financial crash of 2008, during the last gasp of a Republican-engineered financial bubble similar in destructiveness to the one presided over by Coolidge.
As with David Barton, whenever Shlaes confronts inconvenient facts, she manipulates them to suit her narrative. She contends that FDR’s record with unemployment was miserable, but only because she omits government-provided jobs from the employment rolls, on the pretext that those were temporary jobs, with no long-term prospects. Workers, we might insist, do not eat in the long term. And never mind that those hired by the Works Progress Administration or the Civilian Conservation Corps learned skills in a wide range of trades that would later serve many of them well in the private sector. Go to any national park or look at any of thousands of post offices and libraries across America, and you will see their handiwork.
What good is an economic history that doesn’t discuss the economy as measured by gross domestic product? It’s a crude measure of well-being, but it's surely better than subjective and agenda-driven accounts. Yet "The Forgotten Man" contains none of this, despite the fact that "Historical Statistics of the United States" is available free online. Instead, Shlaes gives impressionistic sketches of “self-starters” who made good during the New Deal, and offers those as evidence that FDR’s programs were unnecessary. That also suggests that if people found success in private enterprise, then the New Deal was hardly a Stalinist command economy. As Jonathan Chait wrote when reviewing her book, “intellectual coherence is not the purpose of Shlaes’s project. The real point is to recreate the political mythology of the period.”
Reputable scholars tell us that while some of Roosevelt’s programs, like the National Recovery Administration, were clearly failures, he stabilized the economy enough to prevent a potential fascist takeover of government. Likewise, industry was sufficiently revived to make possible the Arsenal of Democracy that buried Nazi Germany. Without New Deal programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority or the Grand Coulee Dam, the U.S. might have lacked the surplus electricity to smelt the aluminum required for the 300,000 military aircraft it produced in the war, or to generate power for the enormous gaseous diffusion plants necessary for building the atomic bomb.
But no matter — conservative historiography was as quick to condemn Roosevelt’s war leadership as it was to pounce on his domestic record. In the right’s telling, FDR was either an icy manipulator, exerting a Svengali-like control over events to drive a reluctant America into war, or a naïve bungler who guilelessly handed over half of Europe to Joseph Stalin — if, that is, he wasn’t secretly in cahoots with the Soviet dictator. Sometimes he apparently managed the difficult feat of being all these things at once.
World War II revisionist Charles Tansill claimed that FDR, understanding the political strength of the isolationist movement, sought to “enter the war by the back door,” duping the Japanese into firing the first shot.
One of the earlier efforts that established the template for World War II revisionism is "Back Door to War," by Charles Tansill, published in 1952. Tansill had earlier been a historian of the U.S. Senate, and by the 1930s had become a staunch isolationist. His account of World War II claims that Roosevelt jawboned British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain into reversing his policy of appeasement by guaranteeing Poland’s sovereignty, a move that provoked an otherwise peace-minded Adolf Hitler into war. In reality, there is no evidence that Roosevelt forced any such decision; Hitler’s violation of the Munich Agreement by invading and occupying all of Czechoslovakia alarmed and outraged both the British public and establishment, leaving Chamberlain little choice but to forge alliances meant to contain German expansion.
Roosevelt then proceeded to supply Britain with armaments, and in Tansill’s narrative this was just a prelude to FDR driving the U.S. directly into the war. But since Roosevelt understood the political strength of the isolationist movement, Tansill claims, he sought to “enter the war by the back door”: By duping the Japanese into firing the first shot, he would get his pretext for war.
Another pop historian who replicated Tansill’s thesis was Harry Elmer Barnes, a pro-German apologist and rabid isolationist. During the war and for more than 20 years thereafter, Barnes amplified and embellished the ”back door to war” theory, making it even more extreme: Germany was blameless, while Roosevelt and Churchill were the villains entirely responsible for the war. And worse yet, either through stupidity or ideological allegiance, FDR then handed half of Europe to Stalin on a plate.
Barnes represents the interpretive bridge between wartime isolationists and the red-baiting McCarthyism of the postwar Republican Party; all the elements of conspiracism, scapegoating and a narrative comprising an implausible chain of events are evident. This kind of stuff lingers on into the present day: “the U.S. deliberately provoked Vladimir Putin into attacking Ukraine,” or “Biden’s deal with Iran to release U.S. citizens provided the financing for the Hamas attack on Israel” are contemporary examples of the paranoid style Barnes perfected.
Even more fatefully, Barnes forever conjoined World War II revisionism with right-wing extremism and Holocaust denial. Possibly his most important spiritual heir is the notorious Englishman David Irving, a veritable publishing machine who has cranked out countless paeans to the Third Reich with a side helping of Holocaust denial. His career received a considerable financial setback, however, when he had the poor judgment to sue a genuine scholar for defamation.
Another pop historian who replicated Tansill’s thesis was Harry Elmer Barnes, a pro-German apologist and rabid isolationist. During the war and for more than 20 years thereafter, Barnes amplified and embellished the ”back door to war” theory, making it even more extreme: Germany was blameless, while Roosevelt and Churchill were the villains entirely responsible for the war. And worse yet, either through stupidity or ideological allegiance, FDR then handed half of Europe to Stalin on a plate.
Barnes represents the interpretive bridge between wartime isolationists and the red-baiting McCarthyism of the postwar Republican Party; all the elements of conspiracism, scapegoating and a narrative comprising an implausible chain of events are evident. This kind of stuff lingers on into the present day: “the U.S. deliberately provoked Vladimir Putin into attacking Ukraine,” or “Biden’s deal with Iran to release U.S. citizens provided the financing for the Hamas attack on Israel” are contemporary examples of the paranoid style Barnes perfected.
Even more fatefully, Barnes forever conjoined World War II revisionism with right-wing extremism and Holocaust denial. Possibly his most important spiritual heir is the notorious Englishman David Irving, a veritable publishing machine who has cranked out countless paeans to the Third Reich with a side helping of Holocaust denial. His career received a considerable financial setback, however, when he had the poor judgment to sue a genuine scholar for defamation.
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