by Sean Wilentz
From The New Yorker 10/18/10
Some Republicans have tried to extend the Buckley tradition, but to little effect. The commentator David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, lost his job at the American Enterprise Institute after he complained about the Republicans’ obstruction of health-care reform and called the right-wing surge a threat to conservatism. In June, the congressman Bob Inglis, of South Carolina, a tough conservative who nonetheless backed Bush’s financial bailout, lost a vicious primary fight with a right-wing insurgent named Trey Gowdy. To his amazement, Inglis was confronted on the campaign trail by voters who were convinced that numbers on their Social Security cards indicated that a secret bank had bought them at birth. “And then, of course,” he recalls, “it turned into something about the Federal Reserve and the Bilderbergers and all that stuff.” Not even Karl Rove can afford open dissent with the Tea Partiers. Appearing on Fox News the night of the recent primaries, he described the Tea Party-backed Senate candidate in Delaware, Christine O’Donnell, as probably unelectable and said that some of her statements were “nutty.” Instantly, criticism came from Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and other right-wing Republicans. Within days, he was back on Fox, proclaiming himself “a huge Tea Party fan,” endorsing O’Donnell, and affirming that the National Republican Senatorial Committee would give her its full backing.
So far, Rove, an unlikely dissident, is the only prominent Republican leader to so much as gesture at stepping forward, as Buckley and his allies did. Even strong conservatives like Inglis have been pushed aside, as have such former G.O.P. stalwarts as Charlie Crist, in Florida, and Mike Castle, in Delaware, both beaten in the primaries by Tea Party candidates; Crist is now running a long-shot campaign as an Independent. Desperate for gains in the midterm elections, the Republicans are neglecting the struggle it took to make politics safe for Reagan.
Fifty years ago, President Kennedy deplored the far right’s “counsels of fear and suspicion.” Today, Obama’s White House is still struggling to make sense of its enemies. In the absence of forthright leadership, on both the right and the left, the job of standing up to extremists appears to have been left to the electorate. Candidates like O’Donnell may prove too eccentric to prevail, or voters may simply become disillusioned by politicians who campaign on their hatred of government. After the election, mainstream conservatives may well engage in what Richard Viguerie has forecast as “a massive, almost historic battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party.” (Already, Rove and some leading Bush political operatives, including the former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie, have been quietly supplanting the battered G.O.P. establishment in the effort to raise funds for this year’s candidates.) But, according to a recent poll, more than seventy per cent of Republicans support the Tea Party, and it seems almost certain that a Republican Party that has unstintingly appeased the far right will enjoy a strong and perhaps smashing victory in the coming midterm elections.
In 1906, early in the Progressive era, the humorist Finley Peter Dunne’s fictional barroom sage, Mr. Dooley, put the social and political tumult of the day into perspective. “Th’ noise ye hear is not th’ first gun iv a revolution,” Dooley remarked. “It’s on’y th’ people iv th’ United States batin’ a carpet.” A century from now, or even a year from now, Americans may say the same about the Tea Party. For the moment, though, it appears that the extreme right wing is on the verge of securing a degree of power over Congress and the Republican Party that is unprecedented in modern American history. For defenders of national cohesion and tempered adversity in our politics, it is an alarming state of affairs. ♦
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Princeton Historian Sean Wilentz on the Roots of Glen Beck Extremism
October 13, 2010
FROM NPR online
Listen to the Story
Fresh Air from WHYY
October 13, 2010
In the Oct. 18 issue of The New Yorker, historian Sean Wilentz examines "how extremist ideas held at bay for decades inside the Republican Party have exploded anew — and why, this time, party leaders have done virtually nothing to challenge those ideas, and a great deal to abet them."
Fox News host Glenn Beck addresses the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 20. Historian Sean Wilentz says "there are polls that Tea Party members respect Beck more so than anyone else, even Sarah Palin, and that they consider [Beck] not as an entertainer — as they describe Rush Limbaugh — but as an educator. ... People are believing that he is really trustworthy."
Wilentz, who teaches at Princeton University, argues that the rhetoric expressed by both conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck and the Tea Party is nothing new — and is rooted in an extremist ideology that has been around since the Cold War, a view that the Republican Party is now embracing.
"I think what's happening is the Republican Party is willing to chase after whatever it can to get the party back — to get power back," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "This is what's happening in the Republican Party, so instead of drawing lines, they're jumping over fences to look like they're in the good graces of these Tea Party types."
Wilentz says Beck, who has emerged as a unifying figure and intellectual guide for the Tea Party movement, finds fodder for his Fox News Channel and syndicated radio shows in the ideas espoused by the John Birch Society, an ultraconservative political group founded in 1958 that, Wilentz writes, "became synonymous with right-wing extremism."
Enlarge Daniel Kramer
Sean Wilentz is a history professor at Princeton University. He is the author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln and Bob Dylan in America.
Sean Wilentz is a history professor at Princeton University. He is the author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln and Bob Dylan in America.
"It's a version of history that demonizes the progressive era, particularly Woodrow Wilson," Wilentz says. "It sees it as the beginning of America's going down the road to totalitarianism, which ends in Beck's version with Barack Obama."
Particularly troublesome, Wilentz says, are the gross historical inaccuracies Beck makes on his Fox show, which now reaches more than 2 million people each day.
"On one of his shows, for example, he pulled out a 'Mercury' dime. On the back of [the dime] is the fasces, which is the symbol of fascism," Wilentz says. "So [Beck] says, 'Aha! Who brought the dime in? It was Woodrow Wilson. We've been on the road to fascism for a long time.' [But he's] neglecting the fact that fasces didn't become a fascist symbol until well after that dime was made and designed — and the man who designed it [knew that] fasces was a design of war and balanced it off with an olive branch. Those are the facts. It has nothing to do with the coming of American fascism under Woodrow Wilson."
Sean Wilentz In 'The New Yorker'
Confounding Fathers: The Tea Party's Cold War Roots
Wilentz says Beck is the latest in a long line of figures who have challenged mainstream political historians and presented an opposing view as the truth.
"Glenn Beck is trying to give [viewers] a version of American history that is supposedly hidden," he says. "Supposedly, all we historians — left, right and center — have been doing for the past 100 years is to keep true American history from you. And that true American history is what Glenn Beck is teaching. ... It's a version of history that is beyond skewed. ... But of course, that's what Beck expects us to say. He lives in a kind of Alice in Wonderland world, where if people who actually know the history say what he's teaching is junk, he says, 'That's because you're trying to hide the truth.' "
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Politics
The Brothers Koch: Rich, Political And Playing To Win
Glenn Beck: Reading Between The Coded Lines
Interview Highlights
On historical distortions made by Glenn Beck
"What he does that's odd is pick out what are historical facts but of limited importance and blows them up. He talks about the near 'Depression of 1946,' which he says was cured by 'good old-fashioned conservative economics' with a Republican Congress. Well, yes, in 1946 there was certainly an economic downturn — we were just coming out of World War II. That was expected. How much of that has to do with a vindication of conservative economics is highly tangential. He manages to talk about that as if it were as severe a problem as the Great Depression beginning with the crash in 1929. Beck has all kinds of tricks, though, and he's interested in all kinds of things with the idea that there's something hidden that he is going to expose."
On the John Birch Society
"The John Birch Society was founded in 1958 at a meeting in Indianapolis in which Robert Welch presided for a couple of days and read his manifesto of what's going wrong [in America]. ... The idea was the John Birch Society was going to influence local politics. They saw the country as having been taken over by the totalitarianists — by the communists. So they were going to try and undo that. And Welch says in the Blue Book, 'You know, it hasn't come to a military conflict quite yet. We don't have to overthrow these guys with a violent revolution.' So there's still a possibility for political action. And that's what the John Birch Society was devoted to: education and political action so that their people would get involved in local politics so the right people and the correct people would get elected to the school board, which was very important in deciding what kinds of books students would be reading in public schools. They wanted to make sure that the right kinds of people were running and getting elected. ... Somewhere by the early '60s, it was estimated that they had as many as 100,000 members around the country but many, many more sympathizers."
On the John Birch Society and racism
"The John Birch Society wanted to have nothing to do with segregation, wanted nothing to do with any of that as an expression of white supremacy. However, they did oppose all of the civil rights laws because they saw it as an overleaning federal government taking control of people's lives, of overstepping its boundaries. So they opposed all of that."
On the role extremists are playing within the Republican Party today
"The only [dissenting] gesture coming out of the Republican Party that I've seen is coming from Karl Rove, of all people — an unlikely dissident, but there he is, who on primary night pointed to one of the Tea Party candidates in Delaware and said some of her statements were nutty and she might not prevail in November ... after which he was set upon by Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh and the whole blogosphere and told to get back in line — which he did a couple of days later, coming back on Fox News a couple of days later and saying that he thinks 'Christine O'Donnell is a great candidate and should be supported.' So he was whipped back into line."
FROM NPR online
Listen to the Story
Fresh Air from WHYY
October 13, 2010
In the Oct. 18 issue of The New Yorker, historian Sean Wilentz examines "how extremist ideas held at bay for decades inside the Republican Party have exploded anew — and why, this time, party leaders have done virtually nothing to challenge those ideas, and a great deal to abet them."
Fox News host Glenn Beck addresses the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 20. Historian Sean Wilentz says "there are polls that Tea Party members respect Beck more so than anyone else, even Sarah Palin, and that they consider [Beck] not as an entertainer — as they describe Rush Limbaugh — but as an educator. ... People are believing that he is really trustworthy."
Wilentz, who teaches at Princeton University, argues that the rhetoric expressed by both conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck and the Tea Party is nothing new — and is rooted in an extremist ideology that has been around since the Cold War, a view that the Republican Party is now embracing.
"I think what's happening is the Republican Party is willing to chase after whatever it can to get the party back — to get power back," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "This is what's happening in the Republican Party, so instead of drawing lines, they're jumping over fences to look like they're in the good graces of these Tea Party types."
Wilentz says Beck, who has emerged as a unifying figure and intellectual guide for the Tea Party movement, finds fodder for his Fox News Channel and syndicated radio shows in the ideas espoused by the John Birch Society, an ultraconservative political group founded in 1958 that, Wilentz writes, "became synonymous with right-wing extremism."
Enlarge Daniel Kramer
Sean Wilentz is a history professor at Princeton University. He is the author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln and Bob Dylan in America.
Sean Wilentz is a history professor at Princeton University. He is the author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln and Bob Dylan in America.
"It's a version of history that demonizes the progressive era, particularly Woodrow Wilson," Wilentz says. "It sees it as the beginning of America's going down the road to totalitarianism, which ends in Beck's version with Barack Obama."
Particularly troublesome, Wilentz says, are the gross historical inaccuracies Beck makes on his Fox show, which now reaches more than 2 million people each day.
"On one of his shows, for example, he pulled out a 'Mercury' dime. On the back of [the dime] is the fasces, which is the symbol of fascism," Wilentz says. "So [Beck] says, 'Aha! Who brought the dime in? It was Woodrow Wilson. We've been on the road to fascism for a long time.' [But he's] neglecting the fact that fasces didn't become a fascist symbol until well after that dime was made and designed — and the man who designed it [knew that] fasces was a design of war and balanced it off with an olive branch. Those are the facts. It has nothing to do with the coming of American fascism under Woodrow Wilson."
Sean Wilentz In 'The New Yorker'
Confounding Fathers: The Tea Party's Cold War Roots
Wilentz says Beck is the latest in a long line of figures who have challenged mainstream political historians and presented an opposing view as the truth.
"Glenn Beck is trying to give [viewers] a version of American history that is supposedly hidden," he says. "Supposedly, all we historians — left, right and center — have been doing for the past 100 years is to keep true American history from you. And that true American history is what Glenn Beck is teaching. ... It's a version of history that is beyond skewed. ... But of course, that's what Beck expects us to say. He lives in a kind of Alice in Wonderland world, where if people who actually know the history say what he's teaching is junk, he says, 'That's because you're trying to hide the truth.' "
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Politics
The Brothers Koch: Rich, Political And Playing To Win
Glenn Beck: Reading Between The Coded Lines
Interview Highlights
On historical distortions made by Glenn Beck
"What he does that's odd is pick out what are historical facts but of limited importance and blows them up. He talks about the near 'Depression of 1946,' which he says was cured by 'good old-fashioned conservative economics' with a Republican Congress. Well, yes, in 1946 there was certainly an economic downturn — we were just coming out of World War II. That was expected. How much of that has to do with a vindication of conservative economics is highly tangential. He manages to talk about that as if it were as severe a problem as the Great Depression beginning with the crash in 1929. Beck has all kinds of tricks, though, and he's interested in all kinds of things with the idea that there's something hidden that he is going to expose."
On the John Birch Society
"The John Birch Society was founded in 1958 at a meeting in Indianapolis in which Robert Welch presided for a couple of days and read his manifesto of what's going wrong [in America]. ... The idea was the John Birch Society was going to influence local politics. They saw the country as having been taken over by the totalitarianists — by the communists. So they were going to try and undo that. And Welch says in the Blue Book, 'You know, it hasn't come to a military conflict quite yet. We don't have to overthrow these guys with a violent revolution.' So there's still a possibility for political action. And that's what the John Birch Society was devoted to: education and political action so that their people would get involved in local politics so the right people and the correct people would get elected to the school board, which was very important in deciding what kinds of books students would be reading in public schools. They wanted to make sure that the right kinds of people were running and getting elected. ... Somewhere by the early '60s, it was estimated that they had as many as 100,000 members around the country but many, many more sympathizers."
On the John Birch Society and racism
"The John Birch Society wanted to have nothing to do with segregation, wanted nothing to do with any of that as an expression of white supremacy. However, they did oppose all of the civil rights laws because they saw it as an overleaning federal government taking control of people's lives, of overstepping its boundaries. So they opposed all of that."
On the role extremists are playing within the Republican Party today
"The only [dissenting] gesture coming out of the Republican Party that I've seen is coming from Karl Rove, of all people — an unlikely dissident, but there he is, who on primary night pointed to one of the Tea Party candidates in Delaware and said some of her statements were nutty and she might not prevail in November ... after which he was set upon by Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh and the whole blogosphere and told to get back in line — which he did a couple of days later, coming back on Fox News a couple of days later and saying that he thinks 'Christine O'Donnell is a great candidate and should be supported.' So he was whipped back into line."
Bobby Bowden - Called to Coach (3)
And so I finish Bobby's book. You can't help but like BB and wish him the best. It's too bad it had to end for him the way it did---a 7 & 6 season and no chance for a final season. The 'Noles seem to be doing well this year under Coach Fisher. He's a good guy but I'm sure he can't help but be hurt by the ways things developed at the end.
Judge Breyer Instructs (2)
Here is another review of Judge Breyer's new book.
Giving Back Your Constitution
What the court needs, Breyer's new book says, is an engaged public.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 13, 2010, at 10:27 AM ET
For years, Justice Stephen Breyer has been struggling with an existential question: Why does the American public accept and respect the authority of the Supreme Court—an institution that seized for itself the power of judicial review in Marbury v. Madison and later, as he notes, snatched up the mantle of judicial supremacy as well? Why would the American people put up with that from the branch of government that has no power to enforce its decisions at all? Why don't Americans just declare that the court is irrelevant and move on?
Breyer likes to illustrate his point with a story about the Supreme Court's 1831 decision that would have barred white citizens of Georgia from booting Cherokee Indians off their own land. When he learned of the court ruling, President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce the court's decision (reportedly saying of the chief justice, "Well, John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it"). This is the stuff of Breyer's worst nightmares: a Supreme Court decision rejected by the public, nullified in the states, and then ignored by the executive branch. Things have changed a lot since 1831, and Justice Breyer wants to probe how it is that a court with neither a purse nor a sword (quoting Alexander Hamilton) is no longer the 98-pound constitutional weakling, why the public is today willing to abide by its decisions—from Bush v. Gore to the recent Guantanamo cases—even when we believe the court got it wrong.
It's a complicated question, made more complicated by the fact that Breyer's premise may be more aspiration than fact. There have been rumblings for years about the legitimacy of certain Supreme Court rulings—from talk of impeaching justices when they cite foreign law in their opinions to proposals to impose term limits on them. That means that Breyer's new book, Making Our Democracy Work, A Judge's View, is both an explanation of public deference to the court and a plea for it. He wants us to realize that the court is only as remote and elitist as we allow it to be. And to prove this point, he seeks to reveal in exacting detail how judges decide cases. He wants to prove that what judges do is both complex and comprehensible, and also that they would do it much better if we involve ourselves in their constitutional project.
Breyer is partly responding here to Justice Antonin Scalia, the nation's top-ranked salesman for originalism for the past 20 consecutive years. Textalists, originalists, and strict constructionists adhere to variations on the idea that the meaning of the Constitution is fixed by, and limited to, the words and intentions of the framers in 1789. Breyer never addresses Scalia directly in his book, but this is very clearly his effort to jump into a constitutional debate that has really had only one side in recent decades. Thus Breyer contends that the two biggest threats to broad and enduring public acceptance of the courts are interpretative approaches that confine constitutional interpretation to the "dead hands" of the framers, and a lack of court accountability to other government institutions. In other words, he argues, justices need to stop pretending to be infallible oracles, and they also need to start playing better with other institutions of democracy. And the truly radical part of it is that he and Scalia may actually agree that it's civic engagement that will guard America against judicial tyranny.
In a display of genuine judicial humility, Breyer argues that the justices are neither professional mind readers nor trained historians. The best they can aspire to, he contends, is to keep faith with the framers original "values." Public legitimacy for the court, argues Breyer, is not enhanced by being the best darn channel for the Founding Fathers (who in any event disagreed among themselves and deliberately used broad, ambiguous language) but by creating a Constitution that "works," with "pragmatic" solutions and careful compromise. You don't just stop at the text and history, Breyer argues; you also consider "purposes and consequences." He argues—again in response to an imaginary Scalia—that purpose-oriented judges are no more likely to impose their own subjective policy views in determining a statute's purpose than a text-oriented judge is. And here you can imagine Scalia miming repeated stabbing motions to his own head in response. Even Jeff Toobin, in The New Yorker (subscription only), chuckled some at Breyer's fascination with words like "pragmatism" and "workability," words better utilized in building a better snow plough than inspiring a nation to a deeper constitutional adherence. )
But Breyer might say there is in fact nothing more inspiring than an invitation to roll up one's sleeves and cooperate in the crafting of a Constitution that actually works—a democracy-enhancing Constitution that defers to the people whenever possible. It's not Breyer's Constitution that's living and changing, it's the American public. And Breyer happens to be remind us of this fact at a moment when groups like the Tea Party are claiming that they want to do just that. One wonders whether their respective views about reclaiming the Constitution are as radically different as each might believe.
Breyer views the role of the court as the great enhancer of the democratic process. He carefully explains (and his jurisprudence reflects this) that he prefers to adhere to court precedent, defer to other branches where possible, and he clearly has more than a passing crush on the greatness of the administrative state. But in Breyer's view, it is only by throwing the government, the president, the lower courts, and government agencies into the pool that we all become truly free. It is for that reason that Breyer is interested in the Constitution less as an immutable rulebook than as an ongoing marriage contract between every branch of government and the American people. Jeff Rosen describes this as "constitutional interpretation for adults," and he's right. Pragmatism and workability may not be the stuff of constitutional yearnings and election-year advertising. But in Breyer's opinion, the Constitution is less a religious instrument than an operating manual. And it's to Breyer's great credit that he's produced an operating manual that is both interesting and compelling.
Justice Scalia likes to answer questions about his own interpretive method by exclaiming that it's "easy" whereas Breyer never downplays how complicated his views must sound. What's interesting, then, is that both men are in some ways striving toward the same goal. Recently, Justice Scalia made the observation that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment should not have been used to protect the rights of women, since the language was intended only to promote the equal rights of freed slaves. Don't look to the Constitution or the courts to protect every little right and freedom, says Scalia; look to yourselves. If you want to protect the right to choose, or equal pay, or anything else, amend the Constitution. In his recent remarks at the University of California Hastings College of the Law about the application of the 14th Amendment to women and other minorities, Scalia said that "[i]f the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, you have legislatures." That's not all that different from Breyer's argument that the public shouldn't expect the judicial branch to work in a vacuum. Like Scalia, Breyer believes that the people need to be deeply involved in the protection of minorities and the development of the Constitution, through their legislatures, their votes, and their strongly voiced opinions. (Breyer is quick to point out that the justices read newspapers.) This isn't an anti-democratic view of the high court or the law. Both Breyer and Scalia depend on an engaged, informed public.
This isn't to suggest that the two justices don't differ profoundly on questions of constitutional interpretation, values, and minority rights. It's simply that the framing of Breyer vs. Scalia as an ongoing fight about a living Constitution vs. a dead one obscures some of what is really most interesting about two of the court's most interesting thinkers.
Making Our Democracy work is a great read to boot. The sections on seminal court cases and the interplay among the courts, various presidents, the states, and the public in each case are briskly told and full of colorful details. (The appendix on how the Supreme Court works is worth the price of the hardcover.) Breyer may not ultimately win any new converts to his ideas about pragmatism and compromise, patience and listening and respect. But at a moment in which most of us talk about the Constitution in tones of rage and betrayal, Breyer's optimism, modesty, and scholarly passion are a welcome change. Making Our Democracy Work is an invitation into a much more civilized and nuanced conversation about the relationship between Americans, their government, and their freedom.
Giving Back Your Constitution
What the court needs, Breyer's new book says, is an engaged public.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 13, 2010, at 10:27 AM ET
For years, Justice Stephen Breyer has been struggling with an existential question: Why does the American public accept and respect the authority of the Supreme Court—an institution that seized for itself the power of judicial review in Marbury v. Madison and later, as he notes, snatched up the mantle of judicial supremacy as well? Why would the American people put up with that from the branch of government that has no power to enforce its decisions at all? Why don't Americans just declare that the court is irrelevant and move on?
Breyer likes to illustrate his point with a story about the Supreme Court's 1831 decision that would have barred white citizens of Georgia from booting Cherokee Indians off their own land. When he learned of the court ruling, President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce the court's decision (reportedly saying of the chief justice, "Well, John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it"). This is the stuff of Breyer's worst nightmares: a Supreme Court decision rejected by the public, nullified in the states, and then ignored by the executive branch. Things have changed a lot since 1831, and Justice Breyer wants to probe how it is that a court with neither a purse nor a sword (quoting Alexander Hamilton) is no longer the 98-pound constitutional weakling, why the public is today willing to abide by its decisions—from Bush v. Gore to the recent Guantanamo cases—even when we believe the court got it wrong.
It's a complicated question, made more complicated by the fact that Breyer's premise may be more aspiration than fact. There have been rumblings for years about the legitimacy of certain Supreme Court rulings—from talk of impeaching justices when they cite foreign law in their opinions to proposals to impose term limits on them. That means that Breyer's new book, Making Our Democracy Work, A Judge's View, is both an explanation of public deference to the court and a plea for it. He wants us to realize that the court is only as remote and elitist as we allow it to be. And to prove this point, he seeks to reveal in exacting detail how judges decide cases. He wants to prove that what judges do is both complex and comprehensible, and also that they would do it much better if we involve ourselves in their constitutional project.
Breyer is partly responding here to Justice Antonin Scalia, the nation's top-ranked salesman for originalism for the past 20 consecutive years. Textalists, originalists, and strict constructionists adhere to variations on the idea that the meaning of the Constitution is fixed by, and limited to, the words and intentions of the framers in 1789. Breyer never addresses Scalia directly in his book, but this is very clearly his effort to jump into a constitutional debate that has really had only one side in recent decades. Thus Breyer contends that the two biggest threats to broad and enduring public acceptance of the courts are interpretative approaches that confine constitutional interpretation to the "dead hands" of the framers, and a lack of court accountability to other government institutions. In other words, he argues, justices need to stop pretending to be infallible oracles, and they also need to start playing better with other institutions of democracy. And the truly radical part of it is that he and Scalia may actually agree that it's civic engagement that will guard America against judicial tyranny.
In a display of genuine judicial humility, Breyer argues that the justices are neither professional mind readers nor trained historians. The best they can aspire to, he contends, is to keep faith with the framers original "values." Public legitimacy for the court, argues Breyer, is not enhanced by being the best darn channel for the Founding Fathers (who in any event disagreed among themselves and deliberately used broad, ambiguous language) but by creating a Constitution that "works," with "pragmatic" solutions and careful compromise. You don't just stop at the text and history, Breyer argues; you also consider "purposes and consequences." He argues—again in response to an imaginary Scalia—that purpose-oriented judges are no more likely to impose their own subjective policy views in determining a statute's purpose than a text-oriented judge is. And here you can imagine Scalia miming repeated stabbing motions to his own head in response. Even Jeff Toobin, in The New Yorker (subscription only), chuckled some at Breyer's fascination with words like "pragmatism" and "workability," words better utilized in building a better snow plough than inspiring a nation to a deeper constitutional adherence. )
But Breyer might say there is in fact nothing more inspiring than an invitation to roll up one's sleeves and cooperate in the crafting of a Constitution that actually works—a democracy-enhancing Constitution that defers to the people whenever possible. It's not Breyer's Constitution that's living and changing, it's the American public. And Breyer happens to be remind us of this fact at a moment when groups like the Tea Party are claiming that they want to do just that. One wonders whether their respective views about reclaiming the Constitution are as radically different as each might believe.
Breyer views the role of the court as the great enhancer of the democratic process. He carefully explains (and his jurisprudence reflects this) that he prefers to adhere to court precedent, defer to other branches where possible, and he clearly has more than a passing crush on the greatness of the administrative state. But in Breyer's view, it is only by throwing the government, the president, the lower courts, and government agencies into the pool that we all become truly free. It is for that reason that Breyer is interested in the Constitution less as an immutable rulebook than as an ongoing marriage contract between every branch of government and the American people. Jeff Rosen describes this as "constitutional interpretation for adults," and he's right. Pragmatism and workability may not be the stuff of constitutional yearnings and election-year advertising. But in Breyer's opinion, the Constitution is less a religious instrument than an operating manual. And it's to Breyer's great credit that he's produced an operating manual that is both interesting and compelling.
Justice Scalia likes to answer questions about his own interpretive method by exclaiming that it's "easy" whereas Breyer never downplays how complicated his views must sound. What's interesting, then, is that both men are in some ways striving toward the same goal. Recently, Justice Scalia made the observation that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment should not have been used to protect the rights of women, since the language was intended only to promote the equal rights of freed slaves. Don't look to the Constitution or the courts to protect every little right and freedom, says Scalia; look to yourselves. If you want to protect the right to choose, or equal pay, or anything else, amend the Constitution. In his recent remarks at the University of California Hastings College of the Law about the application of the 14th Amendment to women and other minorities, Scalia said that "[i]f the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, you have legislatures." That's not all that different from Breyer's argument that the public shouldn't expect the judicial branch to work in a vacuum. Like Scalia, Breyer believes that the people need to be deeply involved in the protection of minorities and the development of the Constitution, through their legislatures, their votes, and their strongly voiced opinions. (Breyer is quick to point out that the justices read newspapers.) This isn't an anti-democratic view of the high court or the law. Both Breyer and Scalia depend on an engaged, informed public.
This isn't to suggest that the two justices don't differ profoundly on questions of constitutional interpretation, values, and minority rights. It's simply that the framing of Breyer vs. Scalia as an ongoing fight about a living Constitution vs. a dead one obscures some of what is really most interesting about two of the court's most interesting thinkers.
Making Our Democracy work is a great read to boot. The sections on seminal court cases and the interplay among the courts, various presidents, the states, and the public in each case are briskly told and full of colorful details. (The appendix on how the Supreme Court works is worth the price of the hardcover.) Breyer may not ultimately win any new converts to his ideas about pragmatism and compromise, patience and listening and respect. But at a moment in which most of us talk about the Constitution in tones of rage and betrayal, Breyer's optimism, modesty, and scholarly passion are a welcome change. Making Our Democracy Work is an invitation into a much more civilized and nuanced conversation about the relationship between Americans, their government, and their freedom.
Bobby Bowden - Called to Coach (2)
In this memoir I learn that Coach Bowden seriously considered going to LSU after the 1979 season. He decided that he would leave FSU for LSU if his team failed to beat the Bengal Tigers in Baton Rouge that September. FSU won the game and Bowden stayed for the duration at Florida State.
He reveals that in December of 1980 that President Philpott offered him the Auburn job after Barfield had been fired. Bobby would have owed FSU $750,000, a heft sum in those days, if he left Florida State. We'll fight it out in court, Bowden says that Philpott told him. But no move was made. I get the feeling that Bobby Bowden really didn't want to coach at Auburn.
He definitely wanted to coach at Alabama. The Red Elephants could have had Bowden after the 1986 season after Coach Perkins left for Tampa Bay, but they hired Bill Curry instead. A good thing for Auburn!
He reveals that in December of 1980 that President Philpott offered him the Auburn job after Barfield had been fired. Bobby would have owed FSU $750,000, a heft sum in those days, if he left Florida State. We'll fight it out in court, Bowden says that Philpott told him. But no move was made. I get the feeling that Bobby Bowden really didn't want to coach at Auburn.
He definitely wanted to coach at Alabama. The Red Elephants could have had Bowden after the 1986 season after Coach Perkins left for Tampa Bay, but they hired Bill Curry instead. A good thing for Auburn!
Monday, October 11, 2010
Naive Reading
NYTimes.com
October 10, 2010, 5:30 pm
In Defense of Naïve Reading
By ROBERT PIPPIN
Remember the culture wars (or the ’80s, for that matter)? “The Closing of the American Mind,” “Cultural Literacy,” “Prof Scam” “Tenured Radicals”? Whatever happened to all that? It occasionally resurfaces, of course. There was the Alan Sokal/Social Text affair in 1996, and there are occasional flaps about winners of bad writing awards and so forth, but the national attention on universities and their mission and place in our larger culture has certainly shifted.
Those culture wars, however much more heat than light they generated, were at least a philosophical debate about values, about what an educated person should know, even about what college was for. All of that has been displaced in the last decade by another sort of discourse: stories about the staggering and growing expense of a college education; the national hysteria about getting one’s children into an “elite” school (or at least one the neighbors might have heard of); the declining impact of a college degree on one’s job prospects; rampant plagiarism; the vast multitudes of part-time or adjunct faculty, usually without health care or much of a future, now teaching our undergraduates; pronouncements on the end of the book, the end of attention spans, even the end of reading itself. But the question of what all this expense and anxiety might ultimately be about, or what the point of it all is, has not surfaced much lately.
It might now be possible to get a different sort of perspective on that discussion of 20 years ago. It is not as if anybody won. The underlying issues ─ especially the philosophical issues ─ have not been resolved. The debate, in the manner of many such public debates and old soldiers, just faded away.
While the public debates may have died down — and while there continue to be such methodological debates in sociology, anthropology and history — it is still the teaching of literature that generates the most academic, and especially non-academic, discussion. There are such debates in philosophy, too, but we tend to get a pass on this issue since debates about what philosophy is have always been one of philosophy’s main topics.
Poems and novels and paintings were not produced as objects for future academic study; there is no reason to think that they could be suitable objects of “research.”
Most students study some literature in college, and most of those are aware that they are being taught a lot of theory along with the literature. They understand that the latest theory is a broad social-science-like approach called “cultural studies,” or a particular version is called “post-colonialism” or “new historicism.” And there are still plenty of gender-theoretical approaches that are prominent. But what often goes unremarked upon in the continuing (though less public) debate about such approaches is that, taking in the longue durée, this instability is in itself completely unremarkable.
The ’80s debaters tended to forget that the teaching of vernacular literature is quite a recent development in the long history of the university. (The same could be said about the relatively recent invention of art history or music as an academic research discipline.) So it is not surprising that, in such a short time, we have not yet settled on the right or commonly agreed upon way to go about it. The fact that the backgrounds and expectations of the student population have changed so dramatically so many times in the last 100 years has made the problem even more difficult.
In the case of vernacular literature, there was from the beginning some tension between the reader’s point of view and what “professional scholarship” required. Naturally enough, the first models were borrowed from the way “research” was done on the classical texts in Greek and Latin that made up most of a student’s exposure to literature until the end of the 19th century. Philology, with its central focus on language, was once the master model for all the sciences and it was natural for teachers to try to train students to make good texts, track down sources, learn about conflicting editions and adjudicate such controversies. Then, as a kind of natural extension of these practices, came historical criticism, national language categorization, work on tracing influences and patronage, all contributing to the worry about classifying various schools, movements or periods. Then came biographical criticism and the flood gates were soon open wide: psychoanalytic criticism, new or formal criticism, semiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism, discourse analysis, reader response criticism or “reception aesthetics,” systems theory, hermeneutics, deconstruction, feminist criticism, cultural studies. And so on.
Clearly, poems and novels and paintings were not produced as objects for future academic study; there is no a priori reason to think that they could be suitable objects of “research.” By and large they were produced for the pleasure and enlightenment of those who enjoyed them. But just as clearly, the teaching of literature in universities ─ especially after the 19th-century research model of Humboldt University of Berlin was widely copied ─ needed a justification consistent with the aims of that academic setting: that fact alone has always shaped the way vernacular literature has been taught.
The main aim was research: the creating and accumulation and transmission of knowledge. And the main model was the natural science model of collaborative research: define problems, break them down into manageable parts, create sub-disciplines and sub-sub-disciplines for the study of these, train students for such research specialties and share everything. With that model, what literature and all the arts needed was something like a general “science of meaning” that could eventually fit that sort of aspiration. Texts or art works could be analyzed as exemplifying and so helping establish such a science. Results could be published in scholarly journals, disputed by others, consensus would eventually emerge and so on. And if it proved impossible to establish anything like a pure science of exclusively literary or artistic or musical meaning, then collaboration with psychoanalysis or anthropology or linguistics would be welcomed.
Will the sciences eventually provide the actual theory of meaning that researchers in literature and the arts will need?
Finally, complicating the situation is the fact that literature study in a university education requires some method of evaluation of whether the student has done well or poorly. Students’ papers must be graded and no faculty member wants to face the inevitable “that’s just your opinion” unarmed, as it were. Learning how to use a research methodology, providing evidence that one has understood and can apply such a method, is understandably an appealing pedagogy.
None of this is in itself wrong-headed or misguided, and the absence of any consensus about this at this still early stage is not surprising. But there are two main dangers created by the inevitable pressures that the research paradigm for the study of literature and the arts within a modern research university brings with it.
First, while it is important and quite natural for literary specialists to try to arrive at a theory of what they do (something that conservatives in the culture wars often refused to concede), there is no particular reason to think that every aspect of the teaching of literature or film or art or all significant writing about the subject should be either an exemplification of how such a theory works or an introduction to what needs to be known in order to become a professor of such an enterprise. This is so for two all-important reasons.
Literature and the arts have a dimension unique in the academy, not shared by the objects studied, or “researched” by our scientific brethren. They invite or invoke, at a kind of “first level,” an aesthetic experience that is by its nature resistant to restatement in more formalized, theoretical or generalizing language. This response can certainly be enriched by knowledge of context and history, but the objects express a first-person or subjective view of human concerns that is falsified if wholly transposed to a more “sideways on” or third person view. Indeed that is in a way the whole point of having the “arts.”
Likewise ─ and this is a much more controversial thesis ─ such works also can directly deliver a kind of practical knowledge and self-understanding not available from a third person or more general formulation of such knowledge. There is no reason to think that such knowledge — exemplified in what Aristotle said about the practically wise man (the phronimos)or in what Pascal meant by the difference between l’esprit géometrique and l’esprit de finesse — is any less knowledge because it cannot be so formalized or even taught as such. Call this a plea for a place for “naïve” reading, teaching and writing — an appreciation and discussion not mediated by a theoretical research question recognizable as such by the modern academy.
This is not all that literary study should be: we certainly need a theory about how artistic works mean anything at all, why or in what sense, reading a novel, say, is different than reading a detailed case history. But there is also no reason to dismiss the “naïve” approach as mere amateurish “belle lettrism.” Naïve reading can be very hard; it can be done well or poorly; people can get better at it. And it doesn’t have to be “formalist” or purely textual criticism. Knowing as much as possible about the social world it was written for, about the author’s other works, his or her contemporaries, and so forth, can be very helpful.
Secondly, the “research model” pressures described are beginning to have another poorly thought out influence. It is quite natural (to some, anyway) to assume that eventually not just the model of the sciences, but the sciences themselves will provide the actual theory of meaning that researchers in such fields will need. One already sees the “application” of “results” from the neurosciences and evolutionary biology to questions about why characters in novels act as they do or what might be responsible for the moods characteristic of certain poets. People seem to be unusually interested in what area of the brain is active when Rilke is read to a subject. The great problem here is not so much a new sort of culture clash (or the victory of one of C.P. Snow’s “two cultures”) but that such applications are spectacular examples of bad literary criticism, not good examples of some revolutionary approach.
If one wants to explain why Dr. Sloper in Henry James’s novel, “Washington Square,” seems so protective yet so cold about his daughter Catherine’s dalliance with a suitor, one has to begin by entertaining the good evidence provided in the novel ─ that he enjoys the power he has over her and wants to keep it; that he fears the loneliness that would result if she leaves; that he knows the suitor is a fortune hunter; that Catherine has become a kind of surrogate wife for him and he regards her as “his” in that sense; that he hates the youth of the suitor; that he hates his daughter for being less accomplished than he would have liked; and that only some of this is available to his awareness, even though all true and playing some role. And one would only be getting started in fashioning an account of what his various actions mean, what he intended, what others understood him to be doing, all before we could even begin looking for anything like “the adaptive fitness” of “what he does.”
If being happy to remain engrossed in the richness of such interpretive possibilities is “naïve,” then so be it.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Robert B. Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books on German idealism and on theories of modernity. His next book, on the problem of fate in American film noir, will appear in 2011.
October 10, 2010, 5:30 pm
In Defense of Naïve Reading
By ROBERT PIPPIN
Remember the culture wars (or the ’80s, for that matter)? “The Closing of the American Mind,” “Cultural Literacy,” “Prof Scam” “Tenured Radicals”? Whatever happened to all that? It occasionally resurfaces, of course. There was the Alan Sokal/Social Text affair in 1996, and there are occasional flaps about winners of bad writing awards and so forth, but the national attention on universities and their mission and place in our larger culture has certainly shifted.
Those culture wars, however much more heat than light they generated, were at least a philosophical debate about values, about what an educated person should know, even about what college was for. All of that has been displaced in the last decade by another sort of discourse: stories about the staggering and growing expense of a college education; the national hysteria about getting one’s children into an “elite” school (or at least one the neighbors might have heard of); the declining impact of a college degree on one’s job prospects; rampant plagiarism; the vast multitudes of part-time or adjunct faculty, usually without health care or much of a future, now teaching our undergraduates; pronouncements on the end of the book, the end of attention spans, even the end of reading itself. But the question of what all this expense and anxiety might ultimately be about, or what the point of it all is, has not surfaced much lately.
It might now be possible to get a different sort of perspective on that discussion of 20 years ago. It is not as if anybody won. The underlying issues ─ especially the philosophical issues ─ have not been resolved. The debate, in the manner of many such public debates and old soldiers, just faded away.
While the public debates may have died down — and while there continue to be such methodological debates in sociology, anthropology and history — it is still the teaching of literature that generates the most academic, and especially non-academic, discussion. There are such debates in philosophy, too, but we tend to get a pass on this issue since debates about what philosophy is have always been one of philosophy’s main topics.
Poems and novels and paintings were not produced as objects for future academic study; there is no reason to think that they could be suitable objects of “research.”
Most students study some literature in college, and most of those are aware that they are being taught a lot of theory along with the literature. They understand that the latest theory is a broad social-science-like approach called “cultural studies,” or a particular version is called “post-colonialism” or “new historicism.” And there are still plenty of gender-theoretical approaches that are prominent. But what often goes unremarked upon in the continuing (though less public) debate about such approaches is that, taking in the longue durée, this instability is in itself completely unremarkable.
The ’80s debaters tended to forget that the teaching of vernacular literature is quite a recent development in the long history of the university. (The same could be said about the relatively recent invention of art history or music as an academic research discipline.) So it is not surprising that, in such a short time, we have not yet settled on the right or commonly agreed upon way to go about it. The fact that the backgrounds and expectations of the student population have changed so dramatically so many times in the last 100 years has made the problem even more difficult.
In the case of vernacular literature, there was from the beginning some tension between the reader’s point of view and what “professional scholarship” required. Naturally enough, the first models were borrowed from the way “research” was done on the classical texts in Greek and Latin that made up most of a student’s exposure to literature until the end of the 19th century. Philology, with its central focus on language, was once the master model for all the sciences and it was natural for teachers to try to train students to make good texts, track down sources, learn about conflicting editions and adjudicate such controversies. Then, as a kind of natural extension of these practices, came historical criticism, national language categorization, work on tracing influences and patronage, all contributing to the worry about classifying various schools, movements or periods. Then came biographical criticism and the flood gates were soon open wide: psychoanalytic criticism, new or formal criticism, semiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism, discourse analysis, reader response criticism or “reception aesthetics,” systems theory, hermeneutics, deconstruction, feminist criticism, cultural studies. And so on.
Clearly, poems and novels and paintings were not produced as objects for future academic study; there is no a priori reason to think that they could be suitable objects of “research.” By and large they were produced for the pleasure and enlightenment of those who enjoyed them. But just as clearly, the teaching of literature in universities ─ especially after the 19th-century research model of Humboldt University of Berlin was widely copied ─ needed a justification consistent with the aims of that academic setting: that fact alone has always shaped the way vernacular literature has been taught.
The main aim was research: the creating and accumulation and transmission of knowledge. And the main model was the natural science model of collaborative research: define problems, break them down into manageable parts, create sub-disciplines and sub-sub-disciplines for the study of these, train students for such research specialties and share everything. With that model, what literature and all the arts needed was something like a general “science of meaning” that could eventually fit that sort of aspiration. Texts or art works could be analyzed as exemplifying and so helping establish such a science. Results could be published in scholarly journals, disputed by others, consensus would eventually emerge and so on. And if it proved impossible to establish anything like a pure science of exclusively literary or artistic or musical meaning, then collaboration with psychoanalysis or anthropology or linguistics would be welcomed.
Will the sciences eventually provide the actual theory of meaning that researchers in literature and the arts will need?
Finally, complicating the situation is the fact that literature study in a university education requires some method of evaluation of whether the student has done well or poorly. Students’ papers must be graded and no faculty member wants to face the inevitable “that’s just your opinion” unarmed, as it were. Learning how to use a research methodology, providing evidence that one has understood and can apply such a method, is understandably an appealing pedagogy.
None of this is in itself wrong-headed or misguided, and the absence of any consensus about this at this still early stage is not surprising. But there are two main dangers created by the inevitable pressures that the research paradigm for the study of literature and the arts within a modern research university brings with it.
First, while it is important and quite natural for literary specialists to try to arrive at a theory of what they do (something that conservatives in the culture wars often refused to concede), there is no particular reason to think that every aspect of the teaching of literature or film or art or all significant writing about the subject should be either an exemplification of how such a theory works or an introduction to what needs to be known in order to become a professor of such an enterprise. This is so for two all-important reasons.
Literature and the arts have a dimension unique in the academy, not shared by the objects studied, or “researched” by our scientific brethren. They invite or invoke, at a kind of “first level,” an aesthetic experience that is by its nature resistant to restatement in more formalized, theoretical or generalizing language. This response can certainly be enriched by knowledge of context and history, but the objects express a first-person or subjective view of human concerns that is falsified if wholly transposed to a more “sideways on” or third person view. Indeed that is in a way the whole point of having the “arts.”
Likewise ─ and this is a much more controversial thesis ─ such works also can directly deliver a kind of practical knowledge and self-understanding not available from a third person or more general formulation of such knowledge. There is no reason to think that such knowledge — exemplified in what Aristotle said about the practically wise man (the phronimos)or in what Pascal meant by the difference between l’esprit géometrique and l’esprit de finesse — is any less knowledge because it cannot be so formalized or even taught as such. Call this a plea for a place for “naïve” reading, teaching and writing — an appreciation and discussion not mediated by a theoretical research question recognizable as such by the modern academy.
This is not all that literary study should be: we certainly need a theory about how artistic works mean anything at all, why or in what sense, reading a novel, say, is different than reading a detailed case history. But there is also no reason to dismiss the “naïve” approach as mere amateurish “belle lettrism.” Naïve reading can be very hard; it can be done well or poorly; people can get better at it. And it doesn’t have to be “formalist” or purely textual criticism. Knowing as much as possible about the social world it was written for, about the author’s other works, his or her contemporaries, and so forth, can be very helpful.
Secondly, the “research model” pressures described are beginning to have another poorly thought out influence. It is quite natural (to some, anyway) to assume that eventually not just the model of the sciences, but the sciences themselves will provide the actual theory of meaning that researchers in such fields will need. One already sees the “application” of “results” from the neurosciences and evolutionary biology to questions about why characters in novels act as they do or what might be responsible for the moods characteristic of certain poets. People seem to be unusually interested in what area of the brain is active when Rilke is read to a subject. The great problem here is not so much a new sort of culture clash (or the victory of one of C.P. Snow’s “two cultures”) but that such applications are spectacular examples of bad literary criticism, not good examples of some revolutionary approach.
If one wants to explain why Dr. Sloper in Henry James’s novel, “Washington Square,” seems so protective yet so cold about his daughter Catherine’s dalliance with a suitor, one has to begin by entertaining the good evidence provided in the novel ─ that he enjoys the power he has over her and wants to keep it; that he fears the loneliness that would result if she leaves; that he knows the suitor is a fortune hunter; that Catherine has become a kind of surrogate wife for him and he regards her as “his” in that sense; that he hates the youth of the suitor; that he hates his daughter for being less accomplished than he would have liked; and that only some of this is available to his awareness, even though all true and playing some role. And one would only be getting started in fashioning an account of what his various actions mean, what he intended, what others understood him to be doing, all before we could even begin looking for anything like “the adaptive fitness” of “what he does.”
If being happy to remain engrossed in the richness of such interpretive possibilities is “naïve,” then so be it.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Robert B. Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books on German idealism and on theories of modernity. His next book, on the problem of fate in American film noir, will appear in 2011.
Eric Foner's New Lincoln Book
October 11, 2010
FROM NPR
The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery
By Eric Foner
Hardcover, 448 pages
W.W. Norton and Company
List Price: $29.95
Read an Excerpt
October 11, 2010
In 1854, Sen. Stephen Douglas forced the Kansas-Nebraska Act through Congress. The bill, which repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, also opened up a good portion of the Midwest to the possible expansion of slavery.
Douglas' political rival, former Illinois Congressman Abraham Lincoln, was enraged by the bill. He scheduled three public speeches in the fall of 1854, as responses to Douglas. The longest of those speeches — known as the Peoria Speech — was three hours long. In it, Lincoln aired his grievances over Douglas' bill and outlined his moral, economic, political and legal arguments against slavery.
But like many Americans, Lincoln was unsure what to do once slavery ended.
"Lincoln said during the Civil War that he had always seen slavery as unjust. He said he couldn't remember when he didn't think that way — and there's no reason to doubt the accuracy or sincerity of that statement," explains historian Eric Foner. "The problem arises with the next question: what do you do with slavery, given that it's unjust? Lincoln took a very long time to try to figure out exactly what steps ought to be taken."
Foner traces the evolution of Lincoln's thoughts on slavery in The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. He explains how Lincoln's changing thoughts about slavery — and the role of freed slaves — mirrored America's own transformation.
In the Peoria speech, Lincoln said that slavery was wrong, Foner says, and then admitted that he didn't know what should be done about it, even contemplating "free[ing] all the slaves, and send[ing] them to Liberia — to their own native land."
"Lincoln is thinking through his own position on slavery," says Foner. "[This speech] really epitomizes his views into the Civil War. Slavery ought to be abolished — but he doesn't really know how to do it. He's not an abolitionist who criticizes Southerners. At this point, Lincoln does not really see black people as an intrinsic part of American society. They are kind of an alien group who have been uprooted from their own society and unjustly brought across the ocean. 'Send them back to Africa' he says. And this was not an unusual position at this time."
Foner traces how Lincoln first supported this kind of colonization — the idea that slaves should be freed and then encouraged or required to leave the United States — for well over a decade. Like Henry Clay, Lincoln also supported repealing slavery gradually — and possibly compensating slave owners for their loss after slaves were freed.
It was not until the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared the freedom of all slaves and then named 10 specific states where the law would take affect, that Lincoln publicly rejected his earlier views.
"The Emancipation Proclamation completely repudiates all of those previous ideas for Lincoln," says Foner. "[The abolishment of slavery is] immediate, not gradual. There is no mention of compensation and there is nothing in it about colonization. After the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln says nothing publicly about colonization."
Foner says many factors led to Lincoln's shift in his position regarding former slaves. Neither slave-owners nor slaves supported colonization. Slavery was beginning to disintegrate in the South. And the Union Army was looking for new soldiers to enlist — and they found willing African-American men waiting for them in the South.
"As soon as the Union Army went into the South, slaves began running away from plantations to Union lines," Foner says. And this forced the question of slavery onto the national agenda."
"Almost from the very beginning of the Civil War, the federal government had to start making policy and they said, 'Well, we're going to treat these people as free. We're not going to send them back into the slave holding regions,'" Foner says. "And the Army opened itself up to the enlistment of black men. And by the end of the Civil War, 200,000 black men have served in the Union Army and Navy. And envisioning blacks as soldiers is a very, very different idea of their future role in American society. It's the black soldiers and their role which really begins as the stimulus in Lincoln's change [with regard to] racial attitudes and attitudes towards America as an inter-racial society in the last two years of his life."
Eric Foner is a history professor at Columbia University. He has previously served as the president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association and the Society of American Historians. His books include Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Man: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War and Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. He also appeared as the on-camera historian for the 2003 PBS series Freedom: A History of Us.
FROM NPR
The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery
By Eric Foner
Hardcover, 448 pages
W.W. Norton and Company
List Price: $29.95
Read an Excerpt
October 11, 2010
In 1854, Sen. Stephen Douglas forced the Kansas-Nebraska Act through Congress. The bill, which repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, also opened up a good portion of the Midwest to the possible expansion of slavery.
Douglas' political rival, former Illinois Congressman Abraham Lincoln, was enraged by the bill. He scheduled three public speeches in the fall of 1854, as responses to Douglas. The longest of those speeches — known as the Peoria Speech — was three hours long. In it, Lincoln aired his grievances over Douglas' bill and outlined his moral, economic, political and legal arguments against slavery.
But like many Americans, Lincoln was unsure what to do once slavery ended.
"Lincoln said during the Civil War that he had always seen slavery as unjust. He said he couldn't remember when he didn't think that way — and there's no reason to doubt the accuracy or sincerity of that statement," explains historian Eric Foner. "The problem arises with the next question: what do you do with slavery, given that it's unjust? Lincoln took a very long time to try to figure out exactly what steps ought to be taken."
Foner traces the evolution of Lincoln's thoughts on slavery in The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. He explains how Lincoln's changing thoughts about slavery — and the role of freed slaves — mirrored America's own transformation.
In the Peoria speech, Lincoln said that slavery was wrong, Foner says, and then admitted that he didn't know what should be done about it, even contemplating "free[ing] all the slaves, and send[ing] them to Liberia — to their own native land."
"Lincoln is thinking through his own position on slavery," says Foner. "[This speech] really epitomizes his views into the Civil War. Slavery ought to be abolished — but he doesn't really know how to do it. He's not an abolitionist who criticizes Southerners. At this point, Lincoln does not really see black people as an intrinsic part of American society. They are kind of an alien group who have been uprooted from their own society and unjustly brought across the ocean. 'Send them back to Africa' he says. And this was not an unusual position at this time."
Foner traces how Lincoln first supported this kind of colonization — the idea that slaves should be freed and then encouraged or required to leave the United States — for well over a decade. Like Henry Clay, Lincoln also supported repealing slavery gradually — and possibly compensating slave owners for their loss after slaves were freed.
It was not until the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared the freedom of all slaves and then named 10 specific states where the law would take affect, that Lincoln publicly rejected his earlier views.
"The Emancipation Proclamation completely repudiates all of those previous ideas for Lincoln," says Foner. "[The abolishment of slavery is] immediate, not gradual. There is no mention of compensation and there is nothing in it about colonization. After the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln says nothing publicly about colonization."
Foner says many factors led to Lincoln's shift in his position regarding former slaves. Neither slave-owners nor slaves supported colonization. Slavery was beginning to disintegrate in the South. And the Union Army was looking for new soldiers to enlist — and they found willing African-American men waiting for them in the South.
"As soon as the Union Army went into the South, slaves began running away from plantations to Union lines," Foner says. And this forced the question of slavery onto the national agenda."
"Almost from the very beginning of the Civil War, the federal government had to start making policy and they said, 'Well, we're going to treat these people as free. We're not going to send them back into the slave holding regions,'" Foner says. "And the Army opened itself up to the enlistment of black men. And by the end of the Civil War, 200,000 black men have served in the Union Army and Navy. And envisioning blacks as soldiers is a very, very different idea of their future role in American society. It's the black soldiers and their role which really begins as the stimulus in Lincoln's change [with regard to] racial attitudes and attitudes towards America as an inter-racial society in the last two years of his life."
Eric Foner is a history professor at Columbia University. He has previously served as the president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association and the Society of American Historians. His books include Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Man: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War and Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. He also appeared as the on-camera historian for the 2003 PBS series Freedom: A History of Us.
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