By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
Published: April 6, 2013 212 Comments
A specter is haunting university history departments: the specter of capitalism.
A two-week history of capitalism “boot camp” at Cornell this summer aims to combine economic analysis with the insights of cultural history.
After decades of “history from below,” focusing on women, minorities and other marginalized people seizing their destiny, a new generation of scholars is increasingly turning to what, strangely, risked becoming the most marginalized group of all: the bosses, bankers and brokers who run the economy.
Even before the financial crisis, courses in “the history of capitalism” — as the new discipline bills itself — began proliferating on campuses, along with dissertations on once deeply unsexy topics like insurance, banking and regulation. The events of 2008 and their long aftermath have given urgency to the scholarly realization that it really is the economy, stupid.
The financial meltdown also created a serious market opportunity. Columbia University Press recently introduced a new “Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism” book series (“This is not your father’s business history,” the proposal promised), and other top university presses have been snapping up dissertations on 19th-century insurance and early-20th-century stock speculation, with trade publishers and op-ed editors following close behind.
The dominant question in American politics today, scholars say, is the relationship between democracy and the capitalist economy. “And to understand capitalism,” said Jonathan Levy, an assistant professor of history at Princeton University and the author of “Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America,” “you’ve got to understand capitalists.”
That doesn’t mean just looking in the executive suite and ledger books, scholars are quick to emphasize. The new work marries hardheaded economic analysis with the insights of social and cultural history, integrating the bosses’-eye view with that of the office drones — and consumers — who power the system.
“I like to call it ‘history from below, all the way to the top,’ ” said Louis Hyman, an assistant professor of labor relations, law and history at Cornell and the author of “Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink.”
The new history of capitalism is less a movement than what proponents call a “cohort”: a loosely linked group of scholars who came of age after the end of the cold war cleared some ideological ground, inspired by work that came before but unbeholden to the questions — like, why didn’t socialism take root in America? — that animated previous generations of labor historians.
Instead of searching for working-class radicalism, they looked at office clerks and entrepreneurs.
“Earlier, a lot of these topics would’ve been greeted with a yawn,” said Stephen Mihm, an associate professor of history at the University of Georgia and the author of “A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men and the Making of the United States.” “But then the crisis hit, and people started asking, ‘Oh my God, what has Wall Street been doing for the last 100 years?’ ”
In 1996, when the Harvard historian Sven Beckert proposed an undergraduate seminar called the History of American Capitalism — the first of its kind, he believes — colleagues were skeptical. “They thought no one would be interested,” he said.
But the seminar drew nearly 100 applicants for 15 spots and grew into one of the biggest lecture courses at Harvard, which in 2008 created a full-fledged Program on the Study of U.S. Capitalism. That initiative led to similar ones on other campuses, as courses and programs at Princeton, Brown, Georgia, the New School, the University of Wisconsin and elsewhere also began drawing crowds — sometimes with the help of canny brand management.
After Seth Rockman, an associate professor of history at Brown, changed the name of his course from Capitalism, Slavery and the Economy of Early America to simply Capitalism, students concentrating in economics and international relations started showing up alongside the student labor activists and development studies people.
“It’s become a space where you can bring together segments of the university that are not always in conversation,” Dr. Rockman said. (Next fall the course will become Brown’s introductory American history survey.)
While most scholars in the field reject the purely oppositional stance of earlier Marxist history, they also take a distinctly critical view of neoclassical economics, with its tidy mathematical models and crisp axioms about rational actors.
Markets and financial institutions “were created by people making particular choices at particular historical moments,” said Julia Ott, an assistant professor in the history of capitalism at the New School (the first person, several scholars said, to be hired under such a title).
To dramatize that point, Dr. Ott has students in her course Whose Street? Wall Street! dress up in 19th-century costume and re-enact a primal scene in financial history: the early days of the Chicago Board of Trade.
Some of her colleagues take a similarly playful approach. To promote a two-week history of capitalism “boot camp” to be inaugurated this summer at Cornell, Dr. Hyman (a former consultant at McKinsey & Company) designed “history of capitalism” T-shirts.
The camp, he explained, is aimed at getting relatively innumerate historians up to speed on the kinds of financial data and documents found in business archives. Understanding capitalism, Dr. Hyman said, requires “both Foucault and regressions.”
It also, scholars insist, requires keeping race and gender in the picture.
As examples, they point to books like Nathan Connolly’s “World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida,” coming next year, and Bethany Moreton’s “To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise” (Harvard, 2009), winner of multiple prizes, which examines the role of evangelical Christian values in mobilizing the company’s largely female work force.
The history of capitalism has also benefited from a surge of new, economically minded scholarship on slavery, with scholars increasingly arguing that Northern factories and Southern plantations were not opposing economic systems, as the old narrative has it, but deeply entwined.
And that entwining, some argue, involved people far beyond the plantations and factories themselves, thanks to financial shenanigans that resonate in our own time.
In a paper called “Toxic Debt, Liar Loans and Securitized Human Beings: The Panic of 1837 and the Fate of Slavery,” Edward Baptist, a historian at Cornell, looked at the way small investors across America and Europe snapped up exotic financial instruments based on slave holdings, much as people over the past decade went wild for mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations — with a similarly disastrous outcome.
Other scholars track companies and commodities across national borders. Dr. Beckert’s “Empire of Cotton,” to be published by Alfred A. Knopf, traces the rise of global capitalism over the past 350 years through one crop. Nan Enstad’s book in progress, “The Jim Crow Cigarette: Following Tobacco Road From North Carolina to China and Back,” examines how Southern tobacco workers, and Southern racial ideology, helped build the Chinese cigarette industry in the early 20th century.
Whether scrutiny of the history of capitalism represents a genuine paradigm shift or a case of scholarly tulip mania, one thing is clear.
“The worse things are for the economy,” Dr. Beckert said wryly, “the better they are for the discipline.”
Sunday, April 7, 2013
The Underside of the New Deal
‘Fear Itself,’ by Ira Katznelson
By KEVIN BOYLE
Published: April 5, 2013
Ira Katznelson heard his first political argument around the family table a few weeks before the presidential election of 1952. His grandmother started it, as only a grandmother can, by announcing that she wasn’t going to vote. Katznelson’s parents, who adored Adlai Stevenson, were suitably shocked. But Bubbeh Frima held her ground. “Since Roosevelt,” she insisted, “they are all pygmies.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt, circa 1937.
FEAR ITSELF
The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time
By Ira Katznelson
Illustrated. 706 pp. Liveright Publishing. $29.95.
.It’s easy to see why she thought such a thing. From the day in March 1933 when he first took the oath of office until his death in April 1945, Franklin Roosevelt dominated public life in a way no other modern president has matched. There’s the litany of policies he put into place — financial regulation, farm subsidies, public works, mortgage protection, union rights, Social Security, the minimum wage — that reshaped Americans’ relationship to their government. There’s the war he directed, which unleashed the nation’s power and remade the place of the United States in the world.
Most of all there’s the message Roosevelt delivered. So deep were the crises of the 1930s and 1940s that many observers wondered whether democracies were too weak to handle them. “The liberal state is destined to perish,” Benito Mussolini proclaimed in 1932. “All the political experiments of our day are anti-liberal.” It took 12 years of innovation and almost four of total war. But in the end Roosevelt proved how wrong the skeptics had been. “At a time when despair and alienation were prostrating other peoples under the heel of dictatorship, that was no small accomplishment,” David M. Kennedy says in “Freedom From Fear,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Roosevelt years.
Katznelson, Columbia’s Ruggles professor of political science and history, makes precisely the same point in the first few pages of “Fear Itself.” Then he gives it a twist. Roosevelt’s defense of democracy, he argues, rested in large part on his willingness to work with political forces that had no commitment to democratic ideals. Sometimes the connections were relatively benign, like the New Deal’s brief flirtation with quasi-fascist economic planning in 1933. Sometimes they were the lesser of two evils. Only by allying with Joseph Stalin, for instance, could Roosevelt assure victory over Nazi Germany. And only if he had turned on his ally and extended the war beyond Hitler’s defeat could he have stopped the Soviets’ occupation of Eastern Europe in 1944 and 1945. One connection, though, Katznelson considers utterly Faustian: to push their legislative programs through Congress, the New Dealers sold their souls to the segregated South.
The calculation was simple enough. Thanks to the disfranchisement of blacks and the reign of terror that accompanied it, the South had become solidly Democratic by the beginning of the 20th century, the Deep South exclusively so. One-party rule translated into outsize power on Capitol Hill: when Roosevelt took office, Southerners held almost half the Democrats’ Congressional seats and many of the key committee chairmanships. So whatever Roosevelt wanted to put into law had to have Southern approval. And he wouldn’t get it if he dared to challenge the region’s racial order.
Katznelson spends much of “Fear Itself” detailing the dismal results. During his first six years in office — the New Deal’s “radical moment,” Katznelson calls it — Roosevelt repeatedly let the Southern bloc write discriminatory provisions into his programs. When the Tennessee Valley Authority built model communities, Southern congressmen made sure they were strictly segregated. Southerners on the Senate Finance Committee cut farm laborers and domestic servants out of the Social Security Act because it simply wouldn’t do to have white families paying taxes on their black maids. They did the same thing to the administration’s minimum wage bills. The bloc’s power imposed other costs as well. Twice civil rights activists tried to make lynching a federal offense. Twice Southern Democrats blocked them, the second time by filibuster. Each time Roosevelt refused to intervene, though even a small signal of support might have kept the bill alive.
Late in the decade the dynamic shifted. Southern Democrats became Roosevelt’s most reliable allies in his fight against isolationism. And once the nation went to war they gave the president their vigorous support. On the home front, though, they began to defy him. Out went Roosevelt’s proposal to pack the Supreme Court, defeated by the Southerners’ sudden willingness to align themselves with their Republican colleagues. Out went the administration’s economic planning programs. Out went its attempt to create a national employment policy. Most important, out went the federal government’s unstinting support for the labor movement, which in the late 1930s and early 1940s had become a powerful advocate for racial change.
Roosevelt didn’t live to see the full force of the Southerners’ campaign. But by the time Harry Truman left office in 1953, Katznelson says, the New Deal had been tamed, its broad vision replaced by endless rounds of interest group politics, its foreign policy driven by a national security state more interested in grand crusades — and enormous military spending — than in democratic processes. And in the South, Jim Crow, described by the moral philosopher Avishai Margalit as “a regime of cruelty and humiliation,” still stood.
It’s a powerful argument, swept along by Katznelson’s robust prose and the imposing scholarship that lies behind it. Only at the very end of the book, though, does he acknowledge another side of the story. For all its compromises, the New Deal gave millions of Americans a sense of belonging — a sense of rights — they’d never had before. That sense swept through the industrial working class, where union buttons suddenly became badges of honor. It swept through all those ethnic communities that until the 1930s had been treated as not quite American. And despite the racial dynamics Katznelson so ably describes, it swept through African-American communities too.
No doubt that’s why Bubbeh Frima saw Roosevelt as such a towering figure, because where she lived up in Washington Heights, America seemed a better place than it had been before he took office. That’s also why, just a few years after Roosevelt’s death, Jim Crow began to come tumbling down, shattered by a social movement that had been invigorated by the promise, if not necessarily the practice, of the New Deal era. Roosevelt can’t be given credit for that extraordinary triumph, of course; that belongs to the men, women and children who risked their lives on the streets of the South. But he played a role, however indirect. And any assessment of his legacy has to set that fact alongside the concessions that marred his administration and blighted our less than perfect union.
Kevin Boyle teaches American history at Ohio State University. He is the author of “Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age.”
By KEVIN BOYLE
Published: April 5, 2013
Ira Katznelson heard his first political argument around the family table a few weeks before the presidential election of 1952. His grandmother started it, as only a grandmother can, by announcing that she wasn’t going to vote. Katznelson’s parents, who adored Adlai Stevenson, were suitably shocked. But Bubbeh Frima held her ground. “Since Roosevelt,” she insisted, “they are all pygmies.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt, circa 1937.
FEAR ITSELF
The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time
By Ira Katznelson
Illustrated. 706 pp. Liveright Publishing. $29.95.
.It’s easy to see why she thought such a thing. From the day in March 1933 when he first took the oath of office until his death in April 1945, Franklin Roosevelt dominated public life in a way no other modern president has matched. There’s the litany of policies he put into place — financial regulation, farm subsidies, public works, mortgage protection, union rights, Social Security, the minimum wage — that reshaped Americans’ relationship to their government. There’s the war he directed, which unleashed the nation’s power and remade the place of the United States in the world.
Most of all there’s the message Roosevelt delivered. So deep were the crises of the 1930s and 1940s that many observers wondered whether democracies were too weak to handle them. “The liberal state is destined to perish,” Benito Mussolini proclaimed in 1932. “All the political experiments of our day are anti-liberal.” It took 12 years of innovation and almost four of total war. But in the end Roosevelt proved how wrong the skeptics had been. “At a time when despair and alienation were prostrating other peoples under the heel of dictatorship, that was no small accomplishment,” David M. Kennedy says in “Freedom From Fear,” his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Roosevelt years.
Katznelson, Columbia’s Ruggles professor of political science and history, makes precisely the same point in the first few pages of “Fear Itself.” Then he gives it a twist. Roosevelt’s defense of democracy, he argues, rested in large part on his willingness to work with political forces that had no commitment to democratic ideals. Sometimes the connections were relatively benign, like the New Deal’s brief flirtation with quasi-fascist economic planning in 1933. Sometimes they were the lesser of two evils. Only by allying with Joseph Stalin, for instance, could Roosevelt assure victory over Nazi Germany. And only if he had turned on his ally and extended the war beyond Hitler’s defeat could he have stopped the Soviets’ occupation of Eastern Europe in 1944 and 1945. One connection, though, Katznelson considers utterly Faustian: to push their legislative programs through Congress, the New Dealers sold their souls to the segregated South.
The calculation was simple enough. Thanks to the disfranchisement of blacks and the reign of terror that accompanied it, the South had become solidly Democratic by the beginning of the 20th century, the Deep South exclusively so. One-party rule translated into outsize power on Capitol Hill: when Roosevelt took office, Southerners held almost half the Democrats’ Congressional seats and many of the key committee chairmanships. So whatever Roosevelt wanted to put into law had to have Southern approval. And he wouldn’t get it if he dared to challenge the region’s racial order.
Katznelson spends much of “Fear Itself” detailing the dismal results. During his first six years in office — the New Deal’s “radical moment,” Katznelson calls it — Roosevelt repeatedly let the Southern bloc write discriminatory provisions into his programs. When the Tennessee Valley Authority built model communities, Southern congressmen made sure they were strictly segregated. Southerners on the Senate Finance Committee cut farm laborers and domestic servants out of the Social Security Act because it simply wouldn’t do to have white families paying taxes on their black maids. They did the same thing to the administration’s minimum wage bills. The bloc’s power imposed other costs as well. Twice civil rights activists tried to make lynching a federal offense. Twice Southern Democrats blocked them, the second time by filibuster. Each time Roosevelt refused to intervene, though even a small signal of support might have kept the bill alive.
Late in the decade the dynamic shifted. Southern Democrats became Roosevelt’s most reliable allies in his fight against isolationism. And once the nation went to war they gave the president their vigorous support. On the home front, though, they began to defy him. Out went Roosevelt’s proposal to pack the Supreme Court, defeated by the Southerners’ sudden willingness to align themselves with their Republican colleagues. Out went the administration’s economic planning programs. Out went its attempt to create a national employment policy. Most important, out went the federal government’s unstinting support for the labor movement, which in the late 1930s and early 1940s had become a powerful advocate for racial change.
Roosevelt didn’t live to see the full force of the Southerners’ campaign. But by the time Harry Truman left office in 1953, Katznelson says, the New Deal had been tamed, its broad vision replaced by endless rounds of interest group politics, its foreign policy driven by a national security state more interested in grand crusades — and enormous military spending — than in democratic processes. And in the South, Jim Crow, described by the moral philosopher Avishai Margalit as “a regime of cruelty and humiliation,” still stood.
It’s a powerful argument, swept along by Katznelson’s robust prose and the imposing scholarship that lies behind it. Only at the very end of the book, though, does he acknowledge another side of the story. For all its compromises, the New Deal gave millions of Americans a sense of belonging — a sense of rights — they’d never had before. That sense swept through the industrial working class, where union buttons suddenly became badges of honor. It swept through all those ethnic communities that until the 1930s had been treated as not quite American. And despite the racial dynamics Katznelson so ably describes, it swept through African-American communities too.
No doubt that’s why Bubbeh Frima saw Roosevelt as such a towering figure, because where she lived up in Washington Heights, America seemed a better place than it had been before he took office. That’s also why, just a few years after Roosevelt’s death, Jim Crow began to come tumbling down, shattered by a social movement that had been invigorated by the promise, if not necessarily the practice, of the New Deal era. Roosevelt can’t be given credit for that extraordinary triumph, of course; that belongs to the men, women and children who risked their lives on the streets of the South. But he played a role, however indirect. And any assessment of his legacy has to set that fact alongside the concessions that marred his administration and blighted our less than perfect union.
Kevin Boyle teaches American history at Ohio State University. He is the author of “Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age.”
Entering WWII
The Fight Over America’s Entrance to WWII
Apr 7, 2013 4:45 AM EDT That was the question that tore apart America before Pearl Harbor. Lynne Olson talks to Sandra McElwaine about her new book on the battle for public opinion between FDR and Lindbergh—and Britain’s spies in New York.
In Those Angry Days, Lynne Olson tells the story of the bitter battle between the isolationists and interventionists over preparation for World War Two, and the dysfunction and mistrust that encompassed and stifled Washington, D.C.—much as it does today.
Those Angry Days By Lynne Olson 576 pages. Random House. $30. (New York Daily News, via Getty; Gamma/Keystone, via Getty )
“We’re living through those same angry days, again,” says the journalist and historian over a cup of coffee near her Georgetown home. "The country was as polarized then as it is now. There was a red state/ blue state divide and extreme anger throughout the nation and in the capital.”
The East Coast, especially New York City, was the hot bed of interventionism, while rural middle America ferociously supported the isolationists, or “America Firstness" as they became known. It was a tortuous period with millions caught up violent clashes between conservative and liberal factions which split families, friends, and neighbors.
The end result, of course, was to the world embroiled in a war like nothing ever seen before, and ultimately to destroy two militaristic empires (Japan and Germany) and set America on the path to world dominance. The rancorous debate ended on December 7, 1941 when the US entered the war after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
The author of several well-received histories set in Britain during the first half of the 20th-century, Olson has “recycled” some of her research to center this highly detailed and focused account on two figures: President Franklin Roosevelt, an interventionist who supported a clandestine effort to aid and abet England against Hitler, and his arch foe, famed aviator and leading isolationist, Charles Lindbergh.
Wendell Wilkie, a leading Republican businessman, also played a crucial role. Charismatic and pragmatic Wilkie actively endorsed conscription and support for Great Britain early on. To the fury of the old guard, he spurned the right wing of his party to win the Republican presidential nomination in 1940. He put country before political ambition and evolved into one of Olson’s heroes. “He came out of nowhere, and took the party by storm,” she says. “He was willing to take risk after risk for his beliefs and said if he lost he lost.”
After his defeat he swung his support to Roosevelt and served as his representative to England.” Is there anybody like him in the Republican part today,” she queries? ‘No, absolutely not.”
She depicts the conflict between Roosevelt and Lindbergh to influence public opinion as a venomous vendetta.
The President considered “Luck Lindy,” as he was derisively called, a Nazi sympathizer and a subversive. Lindbergh believed Roosevelt was dictator, a danger to democracy, intent on pushing America to war. Olson maintains Roosevelt did not use his bully pulpit for war but that he was exceedingly slow to act and hoped to avoid foreign intercession until the very end. Their fight involved propaganda, surveillance, and a plethora of dirty tricks.
One of the most intriguing undercover operations employed a thousand people in a top secret agency, The British Security Coordination, on two crammed floors in Rockefeller Center. It was sanctioned by Roosevelt and J. Edgar Hoover and helmed by the suave William Stephenson, a Canadian industrialist, who arrived in 1940 to become head of British intelligence for the entire western hemisphere and the prototype for James Bond.
His cadre of swashbuckling operatives, including novelists Ian Fleming and Roald Dahl and advertising whiz David Ogilvy, worked surreptitiously throughout the country.
His cadre of swashbuckling operatives, including novelists Ian Fleming and Roald Dahl and advertising whiz David Ogilvy, worked surreptitiously throughout the country—wooing prominent columnists and broadcasters, infiltrating anti war groups, bugging foreign embassies, and digging up dirt on conservative congressmen. It was sabotage and espionage par excellence.
Lindbergh, because of his admiration for Germany, his ties to the Third Reich, and ant-Semitic rhetoric, was the natural focus of these spies and the FBI. He was also a magnet for the media, who swarmed wherever he went, and he and his family moved constantly in an effort to avoid their unrelenting attention.
Olson expresses special empathy for the predicament of Lindbergh’s troubled wife, Anne Morrow, who was caught in the middle of the rage. She was from a wealthy and socially prominent New York family who were pro-British. Her mother and sister were active interventionists. She loyally supported her husband, however, despite many misgivings and found herself alone and exiled from most of her friends and relatives. They considered Lindbergh as she put it as, “the anti-Christ.” As his sole confidant she tried to alter his stance and soften his statements to no avail. He refused to budge, and Anne retreated further from public view squashed by his bullying and domineering manner.
Millions of other Americans were equally conflicted and over the pros and cons of fighting a war. By the time of Pearl Harbor the national discussion was so exhaustive that almost everyone realized that intervention was a necessity. By the time it came Olson observes that the previous two years of fraught public debate had helped prepare the nation emotionally and psychologically to be unified to fight.
In contrast most of the wars since then, from Vietnam to Iraq, are the exact opposite. They have been decided essentially by executive fiat with a minimal amount of discussion among congress or the public. "Congress rolled over and played dead," says Olson. "It’s certainly not what our Founding Fathers had in mind, and has not only resulted in considerable national disunity and dysfunction but presents a real danger to our democracy.”
But America’s conflicted decision to step forward in 1941 ultimately saved the free world. Olson has shone a dramatic light on the complexities of the issue and skillfully portrayed the protagonists of an almost forgotten crisis in American history
Apr 7, 2013 4:45 AM EDT That was the question that tore apart America before Pearl Harbor. Lynne Olson talks to Sandra McElwaine about her new book on the battle for public opinion between FDR and Lindbergh—and Britain’s spies in New York.
In Those Angry Days, Lynne Olson tells the story of the bitter battle between the isolationists and interventionists over preparation for World War Two, and the dysfunction and mistrust that encompassed and stifled Washington, D.C.—much as it does today.
Those Angry Days By Lynne Olson 576 pages. Random House. $30. (New York Daily News, via Getty; Gamma/Keystone, via Getty )
“We’re living through those same angry days, again,” says the journalist and historian over a cup of coffee near her Georgetown home. "The country was as polarized then as it is now. There was a red state/ blue state divide and extreme anger throughout the nation and in the capital.”
The East Coast, especially New York City, was the hot bed of interventionism, while rural middle America ferociously supported the isolationists, or “America Firstness" as they became known. It was a tortuous period with millions caught up violent clashes between conservative and liberal factions which split families, friends, and neighbors.
The end result, of course, was to the world embroiled in a war like nothing ever seen before, and ultimately to destroy two militaristic empires (Japan and Germany) and set America on the path to world dominance. The rancorous debate ended on December 7, 1941 when the US entered the war after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
The author of several well-received histories set in Britain during the first half of the 20th-century, Olson has “recycled” some of her research to center this highly detailed and focused account on two figures: President Franklin Roosevelt, an interventionist who supported a clandestine effort to aid and abet England against Hitler, and his arch foe, famed aviator and leading isolationist, Charles Lindbergh.
Wendell Wilkie, a leading Republican businessman, also played a crucial role. Charismatic and pragmatic Wilkie actively endorsed conscription and support for Great Britain early on. To the fury of the old guard, he spurned the right wing of his party to win the Republican presidential nomination in 1940. He put country before political ambition and evolved into one of Olson’s heroes. “He came out of nowhere, and took the party by storm,” she says. “He was willing to take risk after risk for his beliefs and said if he lost he lost.”
After his defeat he swung his support to Roosevelt and served as his representative to England.” Is there anybody like him in the Republican part today,” she queries? ‘No, absolutely not.”
She depicts the conflict between Roosevelt and Lindbergh to influence public opinion as a venomous vendetta.
The President considered “Luck Lindy,” as he was derisively called, a Nazi sympathizer and a subversive. Lindbergh believed Roosevelt was dictator, a danger to democracy, intent on pushing America to war. Olson maintains Roosevelt did not use his bully pulpit for war but that he was exceedingly slow to act and hoped to avoid foreign intercession until the very end. Their fight involved propaganda, surveillance, and a plethora of dirty tricks.
One of the most intriguing undercover operations employed a thousand people in a top secret agency, The British Security Coordination, on two crammed floors in Rockefeller Center. It was sanctioned by Roosevelt and J. Edgar Hoover and helmed by the suave William Stephenson, a Canadian industrialist, who arrived in 1940 to become head of British intelligence for the entire western hemisphere and the prototype for James Bond.
His cadre of swashbuckling operatives, including novelists Ian Fleming and Roald Dahl and advertising whiz David Ogilvy, worked surreptitiously throughout the country.
His cadre of swashbuckling operatives, including novelists Ian Fleming and Roald Dahl and advertising whiz David Ogilvy, worked surreptitiously throughout the country—wooing prominent columnists and broadcasters, infiltrating anti war groups, bugging foreign embassies, and digging up dirt on conservative congressmen. It was sabotage and espionage par excellence.
Lindbergh, because of his admiration for Germany, his ties to the Third Reich, and ant-Semitic rhetoric, was the natural focus of these spies and the FBI. He was also a magnet for the media, who swarmed wherever he went, and he and his family moved constantly in an effort to avoid their unrelenting attention.
Olson expresses special empathy for the predicament of Lindbergh’s troubled wife, Anne Morrow, who was caught in the middle of the rage. She was from a wealthy and socially prominent New York family who were pro-British. Her mother and sister were active interventionists. She loyally supported her husband, however, despite many misgivings and found herself alone and exiled from most of her friends and relatives. They considered Lindbergh as she put it as, “the anti-Christ.” As his sole confidant she tried to alter his stance and soften his statements to no avail. He refused to budge, and Anne retreated further from public view squashed by his bullying and domineering manner.
Millions of other Americans were equally conflicted and over the pros and cons of fighting a war. By the time of Pearl Harbor the national discussion was so exhaustive that almost everyone realized that intervention was a necessity. By the time it came Olson observes that the previous two years of fraught public debate had helped prepare the nation emotionally and psychologically to be unified to fight.
In contrast most of the wars since then, from Vietnam to Iraq, are the exact opposite. They have been decided essentially by executive fiat with a minimal amount of discussion among congress or the public. "Congress rolled over and played dead," says Olson. "It’s certainly not what our Founding Fathers had in mind, and has not only resulted in considerable national disunity and dysfunction but presents a real danger to our democracy.”
But America’s conflicted decision to step forward in 1941 ultimately saved the free world. Olson has shone a dramatic light on the complexities of the issue and skillfully portrayed the protagonists of an almost forgotten crisis in American history
Friday, April 5, 2013
Confederate Revisionist History Month
April Is Confederate Revisionist History Month
2013/04/04
By T. Steelman
Nah, this wasn’t that bad. We fed them, didn’t we?!
Hey, it’s April so, if you live in Dixie, it must be time to drag the stars and bars out, hit the bourbon and do some more history revising. The first two might not be so bad if the third wasn’t part of the mix. But, sadly, it is. Let me say right up front that my family – both sides of it – is from the South. My roots reach deep in the soil, going back even further than the Europeans who settled the region. So I know quite a lot about Southern history. More than the Press guy for the Sons Of Confederate Veterans does, that’s for damn sure. And remembering that history isn’t necessarily bad. It’s just the revisionists who make it so.
Ray McBerry is that PR guy who either doesn’t know or understand Southern history. Or perhaps he does and, like Tom Sawyer whitewashing that fence, he’s got a bucket and brush handy to whitewash the parts that he doesn’t like. To wit:
“So much is portrayed by Hollywood today that Georgia and the South were evil; when, in reality, the South was the most peaceful, rural, and Christian part of America before war and Reconstruction destroyed the pastoral way of life here.”
Wow. That there is some serious whitewashing! McBerry, who is a 2-time GOP candidate for governor of Georgia, appears to be a kind of PR Mr. Wolf (Pulp Fiction reference FTW), taking on lost causes like the Sons of Confederate Veterans. He also happens to be a member of that group. John Avlon of The Daily Beast decided to give Mr. McBerry a call to learn more about this month’s celebrations. “Do you understand why many Americans, especially African-Americans, might find your message offensive?” he asked. McBerry replied:
“I do. But they have been miseducated by our government-run school system.”
Uh-huh. Don’t you find it interesting that when history diverges from what they would like it to be, most wingnuts blame the education system? That, and they whip up elaborate conspiracy theories.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has its eyes on the SoCV but doesn’t classify it as a hate group, though it did note that the group has purged itself of nonracists in the past. No NONracists allowed? Sounds legit. They send out a lot of “educational” material which they see as helpful but if you have a look at their newsletter, you will note that there is much in it that most would see as decidedly UNhelpful.
Many Southern states celebrate April as Confederate History Month, not just Georgia (they were just the latest to make it official). Alabama, Virginia, Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana and Florida all observe Confederate History Month in April. The Georgia law pretty much sums up what all of them do, however:
“The month of April of each year is hereby designated as Confederate History and Heritage Month and shall be set aside to honor, observe, and celebrate the Confederate States of America, its history, those who served in its armed forces and government, and all those millions of its citizens of various races and ethnic groups and religions who contributed in sundry and myriad ways to the cause which they held so dear from its founding on February 4, 1861, in Montgomery, Alabama, until the Confederate ship CSS Shenandoah sailed into Liverpool Harbor and surrendered to British authorities on November 6, 1865.”
The problem is not with remembering (or even celebrating) history: the problem lies in misrepresenting history. The slavery culture that thrived in the South, their “peculiar institution,” was neither peaceful nor Christian. Not by the strict definition of those words. How peaceful could it have been for human beings to live in fear? To not know when the whip would fall across their back or for what reason. To be treated as property and traded, bought and sold like so much livestock. It is not a Christian thing to do, at least not in any understanding of that religion that I have. It may have been a peaceful and pastoral life for the slave owners, they may have thought that they were being generous, good masters. They may have told themselves that they were taking care of their slaves. But it is just not true. The cognitive dissonance that covered the South, clouding the Southern mind appears not yet to have dissipated. They still try to tell themselves that they were good and that the slaves were grateful but the reality is far from that. Anyone who tries to say differently is lying or trying to sell something. That something is revisionist history and it is a defective product.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
T. Steelman is a life-long Liberal. She has been writing online about politics since 2007. She lives in Western Washington with her husband, daughter, 2 cats and a small herd of alpacas. How can anybody be enlightened? Truth is, after all, so poorly lit…
.
2013/04/04
By T. Steelman
Nah, this wasn’t that bad. We fed them, didn’t we?!
Hey, it’s April so, if you live in Dixie, it must be time to drag the stars and bars out, hit the bourbon and do some more history revising. The first two might not be so bad if the third wasn’t part of the mix. But, sadly, it is. Let me say right up front that my family – both sides of it – is from the South. My roots reach deep in the soil, going back even further than the Europeans who settled the region. So I know quite a lot about Southern history. More than the Press guy for the Sons Of Confederate Veterans does, that’s for damn sure. And remembering that history isn’t necessarily bad. It’s just the revisionists who make it so.
Ray McBerry is that PR guy who either doesn’t know or understand Southern history. Or perhaps he does and, like Tom Sawyer whitewashing that fence, he’s got a bucket and brush handy to whitewash the parts that he doesn’t like. To wit:
“So much is portrayed by Hollywood today that Georgia and the South were evil; when, in reality, the South was the most peaceful, rural, and Christian part of America before war and Reconstruction destroyed the pastoral way of life here.”
Wow. That there is some serious whitewashing! McBerry, who is a 2-time GOP candidate for governor of Georgia, appears to be a kind of PR Mr. Wolf (Pulp Fiction reference FTW), taking on lost causes like the Sons of Confederate Veterans. He also happens to be a member of that group. John Avlon of The Daily Beast decided to give Mr. McBerry a call to learn more about this month’s celebrations. “Do you understand why many Americans, especially African-Americans, might find your message offensive?” he asked. McBerry replied:
“I do. But they have been miseducated by our government-run school system.”
Uh-huh. Don’t you find it interesting that when history diverges from what they would like it to be, most wingnuts blame the education system? That, and they whip up elaborate conspiracy theories.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has its eyes on the SoCV but doesn’t classify it as a hate group, though it did note that the group has purged itself of nonracists in the past. No NONracists allowed? Sounds legit. They send out a lot of “educational” material which they see as helpful but if you have a look at their newsletter, you will note that there is much in it that most would see as decidedly UNhelpful.
Many Southern states celebrate April as Confederate History Month, not just Georgia (they were just the latest to make it official). Alabama, Virginia, Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana and Florida all observe Confederate History Month in April. The Georgia law pretty much sums up what all of them do, however:
“The month of April of each year is hereby designated as Confederate History and Heritage Month and shall be set aside to honor, observe, and celebrate the Confederate States of America, its history, those who served in its armed forces and government, and all those millions of its citizens of various races and ethnic groups and religions who contributed in sundry and myriad ways to the cause which they held so dear from its founding on February 4, 1861, in Montgomery, Alabama, until the Confederate ship CSS Shenandoah sailed into Liverpool Harbor and surrendered to British authorities on November 6, 1865.”
The problem is not with remembering (or even celebrating) history: the problem lies in misrepresenting history. The slavery culture that thrived in the South, their “peculiar institution,” was neither peaceful nor Christian. Not by the strict definition of those words. How peaceful could it have been for human beings to live in fear? To not know when the whip would fall across their back or for what reason. To be treated as property and traded, bought and sold like so much livestock. It is not a Christian thing to do, at least not in any understanding of that religion that I have. It may have been a peaceful and pastoral life for the slave owners, they may have thought that they were being generous, good masters. They may have told themselves that they were taking care of their slaves. But it is just not true. The cognitive dissonance that covered the South, clouding the Southern mind appears not yet to have dissipated. They still try to tell themselves that they were good and that the slaves were grateful but the reality is far from that. Anyone who tries to say differently is lying or trying to sell something. That something is revisionist history and it is a defective product.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
T. Steelman is a life-long Liberal. She has been writing online about politics since 2007. She lives in Western Washington with her husband, daughter, 2 cats and a small herd of alpacas. How can anybody be enlightened? Truth is, after all, so poorly lit…
.
Plastics
.Redrum. Plastics. Rosebud. Single words that carry connotations and meanings intrigue me.
Hank Henley and Lorna Wood like this..
.Some days I think I should have been a Bluegrass singer. I do great versions of "What Was I Supposed to Do? (When You Walked Out on Me)" and "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." (Dylan has never heard it so good). I've written my own Bluegrass songs. Two of the best are "I Ain't Much, But I'm the Best You've Ever Had" and "Let Me Be Your Facebook Baby (I"ll Like Your Posts If You'll Like Mine)." I ain't much, but I'm the best I've got.
Lynda Kirkpatrick Don't answer the door. The men in white coats are coming.
· Like..Fred Hudson I'll sing to them.
.Had lunch today at an Indian restaurant. It was great but I got curried away and I'm paying for it now. I got Gupta stomach stress.
Lucy Horsley Lewis, Kimberly Scott Duval and 2 others like this..Don Waller A 60's Peptol Bismal moment?
.Many are called, but few are chosen. Some of us are neither. You "called" and "chosen" have mercy on the rest of us. But just because the doctor says we can't eat bacon there is no need to feel sorry for us. We got plenty of bread and jam. We keep our pigs in a poke. Not every piggy goes to market. We get special deals at the deli. The butcher gives us special cuts of beef and chicken. Maybe we are the real called and chosen.
L Vicky Bartholomew Griffin and Dinah Hollister Denison like this..
Hank Henley and Lorna Wood like this..
.Some days I think I should have been a Bluegrass singer. I do great versions of "What Was I Supposed to Do? (When You Walked Out on Me)" and "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." (Dylan has never heard it so good). I've written my own Bluegrass songs. Two of the best are "I Ain't Much, But I'm the Best You've Ever Had" and "Let Me Be Your Facebook Baby (I"ll Like Your Posts If You'll Like Mine)." I ain't much, but I'm the best I've got.
Lynda Kirkpatrick Don't answer the door. The men in white coats are coming.
· Like..Fred Hudson I'll sing to them.
.Had lunch today at an Indian restaurant. It was great but I got curried away and I'm paying for it now. I got Gupta stomach stress.
Lucy Horsley Lewis, Kimberly Scott Duval and 2 others like this..Don Waller A 60's Peptol Bismal moment?
.Many are called, but few are chosen. Some of us are neither. You "called" and "chosen" have mercy on the rest of us. But just because the doctor says we can't eat bacon there is no need to feel sorry for us. We got plenty of bread and jam. We keep our pigs in a poke. Not every piggy goes to market. We get special deals at the deli. The butcher gives us special cuts of beef and chicken. Maybe we are the real called and chosen.
L Vicky Bartholomew Griffin and Dinah Hollister Denison like this..
Wednesday, April 3, 2013
Can Handle
I can pretty well handle anything that life throws at me except change. Can't I stay where I'm at for a while? Even if I can't pass Go and collect my $200, can't I just stay right here on Baltic Avenue and not roll the dice?
Like · ·Unfollow PostFollow Post · Share · Promote.
Lorna Wood, Jo Heath and 2 others like this..Michael Dew lots of publishing folks rolling snake eyes
21 hours ago · Like..John D. Moore kids who work at Wal Mart can't handle "change "either.
20 hours ago · Like..Jimmy D Warren Roll the dice Freddie.
16 hours ago · Like..Fred Hudson 7 come 11 on a rusty dime.
Like · ·Unfollow PostFollow Post · Share · Promote.
Lorna Wood, Jo Heath and 2 others like this..Michael Dew lots of publishing folks rolling snake eyes
21 hours ago · Like..John D. Moore kids who work at Wal Mart can't handle "change "either.
20 hours ago · Like..Jimmy D Warren Roll the dice Freddie.
16 hours ago · Like..Fred Hudson 7 come 11 on a rusty dime.
Monday, April 1, 2013
Obama's Majority?
Today at 2:52 PM3CommentsWill Obama’s Majority Survive?By Jonathan Chait
President Obama, already thinking five election cycles ahead.
Since November, the prospective death of the Republican coalition has hovered over American politics, and the autopsy has gained renewed attention in light of the debates over gay marriage and immigration, both of which split the GOP from rising chunks of the electorate. I’m an advocate of the theory, first put forward a decade ago by Ruy Teixeira and John Judis, that the electorate is forming a natural Democratic majority. The Republican Party appears to be caught in a double bind, in which the electorate is growingly progressively less white, and even younger white voters hold less conservative views than older ones. What’s more, evidence suggests that voters maintain the partisan allegiances they form at a young age. The picture looks grim for the GOP.
The Emerging Democratic Majority thesis has always had its critics, though. Before the 2012 election, Sean Trende argued repeatedly that the apparently ineluctable rise of the nonwhite vote was non ineluctable at all. Since the nonwhite vote in fact did continue to rise in 2012, the critique has shifted, and it hasn’t come entirely from the right.
Political scientist John Sides provocatively argues in the Washington Post, “it’s premature to make similar predictions about a Democratic majority or write the GOP’s epitaph.” Sides’s primary evidence is that most voters in 2012 viewed Mitt Romney as ideologically closer to the center, and to themselves, than Obama. To Sides, this suggests the Republican Party does not have a fundamental image problem. To me, it suggests that abstract measures of proximity to the center aren’t a very good measure of a party’s standing – since, after all, Romney was seen as more moderate but still lost by five points.
The Nation’s Rick Perlstein has launched an epic three-part series arguing that conservative Republicanism will come back. Part one argues primarily that various pundits have, at various times, made predictions about the future that have turned out to be wrong — an argument that seems to have no real relevance at all. (You could compile an endless list of economists wrongly forecasting a recession, but it wouldn’t invalidate any particular prediction of a recession.) Perlstein, more interestingly, delves into the history of the sixties — his specialty — to detail the way the New Deal coalition crumbled apart over race. Perlstein concludes that the ability of conservatives to divide the public over racial and other fears is permanent and unyielding, that the strategy that was used to pry apart the New Deal coalition will keep working forever.
Here’s my very different version of that history. The Democrats forged a national majority beginning in 1932. That majority came apart beginning in the mid-sixties, from which point, through about the nineties, Republicans were generally able to cast Democrats as carrying out an agenda that redistributed resources from the white middle class to the (disproportionately nonwhite and presumptively undeserving) poor.
Bill Clinton built a political message that allowed him to thrive within this hostile environment. But over the last couple election cycles, the environment itself has changed. Racial and cultural divisions no longer naturally cut in the GOP’s favor. Another, very simple way to tell the story is this graph of partisan preferences, which political scientist Eric Schickler offers up in a persuasive rebuttal to Sides:
The large plural of voters who still saw themselves as Democrats largely endured through the seventies. Only by the end of the eighties had these voters stopped thinking of themselves as “Democrats who often vote Republican” and begun to think of themselves as “Republicans.” But beginning at the end of George W. Bush’s disastrous second term, the Democratic advantage has opened up again, and shows no signs of closing. And the partisan edge, while much smaller than the New Deal–era version, is more stable. The old Democratic coalition was ideologically diffuse, and depended on overwhelming support among white Southern conservatives who elected reactionaries to Congress and frequently defected on the presidential ballot. The current Democratic advantage represents a smaller but more stable ideological plurality.
As I always take care to note, the caveats matter. Parties that hold natural majorities can still lose elections. Something could happen to dissolve the new Democratic majority just as race and the sixties dissolved the last one. Even if it doesn’t, it won’t last forever. The Republicans will adapt to the new political climate, or else they’ll simply bore more deeply into the political institutions, discovering and expanding ways to exercise power without appealing to a majority of America. But the changing contours of America really do seem to have swept aside the old conservative majority, and there’s no foreseeable event to bring it back.
President Obama, already thinking five election cycles ahead.
Since November, the prospective death of the Republican coalition has hovered over American politics, and the autopsy has gained renewed attention in light of the debates over gay marriage and immigration, both of which split the GOP from rising chunks of the electorate. I’m an advocate of the theory, first put forward a decade ago by Ruy Teixeira and John Judis, that the electorate is forming a natural Democratic majority. The Republican Party appears to be caught in a double bind, in which the electorate is growingly progressively less white, and even younger white voters hold less conservative views than older ones. What’s more, evidence suggests that voters maintain the partisan allegiances they form at a young age. The picture looks grim for the GOP.
The Emerging Democratic Majority thesis has always had its critics, though. Before the 2012 election, Sean Trende argued repeatedly that the apparently ineluctable rise of the nonwhite vote was non ineluctable at all. Since the nonwhite vote in fact did continue to rise in 2012, the critique has shifted, and it hasn’t come entirely from the right.
Political scientist John Sides provocatively argues in the Washington Post, “it’s premature to make similar predictions about a Democratic majority or write the GOP’s epitaph.” Sides’s primary evidence is that most voters in 2012 viewed Mitt Romney as ideologically closer to the center, and to themselves, than Obama. To Sides, this suggests the Republican Party does not have a fundamental image problem. To me, it suggests that abstract measures of proximity to the center aren’t a very good measure of a party’s standing – since, after all, Romney was seen as more moderate but still lost by five points.
The Nation’s Rick Perlstein has launched an epic three-part series arguing that conservative Republicanism will come back. Part one argues primarily that various pundits have, at various times, made predictions about the future that have turned out to be wrong — an argument that seems to have no real relevance at all. (You could compile an endless list of economists wrongly forecasting a recession, but it wouldn’t invalidate any particular prediction of a recession.) Perlstein, more interestingly, delves into the history of the sixties — his specialty — to detail the way the New Deal coalition crumbled apart over race. Perlstein concludes that the ability of conservatives to divide the public over racial and other fears is permanent and unyielding, that the strategy that was used to pry apart the New Deal coalition will keep working forever.
Here’s my very different version of that history. The Democrats forged a national majority beginning in 1932. That majority came apart beginning in the mid-sixties, from which point, through about the nineties, Republicans were generally able to cast Democrats as carrying out an agenda that redistributed resources from the white middle class to the (disproportionately nonwhite and presumptively undeserving) poor.
Bill Clinton built a political message that allowed him to thrive within this hostile environment. But over the last couple election cycles, the environment itself has changed. Racial and cultural divisions no longer naturally cut in the GOP’s favor. Another, very simple way to tell the story is this graph of partisan preferences, which political scientist Eric Schickler offers up in a persuasive rebuttal to Sides:
The large plural of voters who still saw themselves as Democrats largely endured through the seventies. Only by the end of the eighties had these voters stopped thinking of themselves as “Democrats who often vote Republican” and begun to think of themselves as “Republicans.” But beginning at the end of George W. Bush’s disastrous second term, the Democratic advantage has opened up again, and shows no signs of closing. And the partisan edge, while much smaller than the New Deal–era version, is more stable. The old Democratic coalition was ideologically diffuse, and depended on overwhelming support among white Southern conservatives who elected reactionaries to Congress and frequently defected on the presidential ballot. The current Democratic advantage represents a smaller but more stable ideological plurality.
As I always take care to note, the caveats matter. Parties that hold natural majorities can still lose elections. Something could happen to dissolve the new Democratic majority just as race and the sixties dissolved the last one. Even if it doesn’t, it won’t last forever. The Republicans will adapt to the new political climate, or else they’ll simply bore more deeply into the political institutions, discovering and expanding ways to exercise power without appealing to a majority of America. But the changing contours of America really do seem to have swept aside the old conservative majority, and there’s no foreseeable event to bring it back.
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