Why Don’t People Get It About Jefferson and Slavery?
David Post • December 1, 2012 10:54 am
We seem to have once again entered a period in which we will be subject to more Jefferson-the-Perpetuator-of-Slavery bashing – witness the rather appalling Op-Ed piece in today’s NYT by Paul Finkelman on “The Monster of Monticello.” The founding generation, Finkelman writes, helped perpetuate a “treason against the hopes of the world,” by “fail[ing] to place the nation on the road to liberty for all,” and “no one bore a greater responsibility for that failure than the master of Monticello.”
This is truly outrageous and pernicious and a-historical nonsense. The truth is that few people in human history did more, over the course of a lifetime, to “place the road on the road to liberty for all” — and indeed, to eliminate human slavery from the civilized world — than Jefferson. Don’t take my word for it - take Lincoln’s (who was himself, of course, one of those “few people”). ”I am sustained by Mr. Jefferson” he said, in 1858.
The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society. And yet they are denied, and evaded, with no small show of success. Some dashingly call them “glittering generalities”; another bluntly calls them “self evident lies”; and still others insidiously argue that they apply only to “superior races.” These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and effect—the supplanting the principles of free government . . . We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us.
This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.
All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.
That “abstract truth” being, of course, that all men were created equal, and that all had inalienable rights to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness. Taking his cue from the 25th chapter of the Book of Proverbs – “a word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver” – Lincoln went on:
“The assertion of that principle, at that time, was the word ‘fitly spoken’ which has proved an ‘apple of gold’ to us. The Union, and the Constitution, are the picture of silver, subsequently framed around it. The picture was made, not to conceal or destroy the apple; but to adorn and preserve it. The picture was made for the apple – not the apple for the picture. So let us act, that neither picture, or apple, shall ever be blurred, or bruised, or broken.
It was Jefferson, Lincoln wrote, who realized that “there was a question of God’s eternal justice wrapped up in the enslaving of any race of men, or any man, and that those who did so braved the arm of Jehovah – that when a nation thus dared the Almighty every friend of that nation had cause to dread His wrath.”
Maybe Lincoln didn’t understand what was going on as well as Paul Finkelman now does, but I regard that as unlikely.
Why is this so hard for people to see? Even if Jefferson had done nothing more than pen those words and get them inserted into the foundational document for the new country — and he did plenty more, see my paper here — declaring that principle to be a self-evident truth and at the foundation of any legitimate government was an act of political courage, not cowardice or hypocrisy, at a time when slavery was at the heart of the way of life and an economy across vast swaths of colonial America. Maybe Prof. Finkelman would have come up with a way to more quickly eliminate the institution from the new republic than Jefferson did, one that would have eliminated the horrible bloodshed of the Civil War. But nobody had such a plan, at the time – not Jefferson, not Washington, not Clay, not anyone.
Jefferson, Finkelman tells us, was not a “particularly kind” slave-master; he sometimes “punished slaves by selling them away from their families and friends, a retaliation that was incomprehensibly cruel even at the time.” And he believed that ”blacks’ ability to reason was ‘much inferior’ to whites’ and that they were “in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” So what? Really – so what? If you want to think that he was a bad guy — or even a really bad guy, with truly grievous personal faults — you’re free to do so. But to claim that that has something to do with Jefferson’s historical legacy is truly preposterous.
Sunday, December 2, 2012
The Jefferson Wars
The Jefferson Wars have reignited.
Some Scholars Reject Dark Portrait of JeffersonBy JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
Published: November 26, 2012
Henry Wiencek suspected he would be in for a rough ride when “Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves,” his scathing assessment of America’s third president, was published last month. But just how rough he may not have realized.
True, Mr. Wiencek, an independent scholar, has received the kind of attention most authors can only dream of: book excerpts on the covers of both Smithsonian and American History magazines, a C-Span interview at Monticello, almost universally glowing reviews from nonspecialists. (Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post called the book “brilliant,” while Laura Miller of Salon hailed it as one “every American should read.”)
But the Jefferson scholars who have weighed in have subjected “Master of the Mountain” (published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux) to a fierce barrage of criticism, blasting away at Mr. Wiencek’s evidence, interpretations and claims to originality. Reviewing the book in Slate, Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor of history and law at Harvard and the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning study “The Hemingses of Monticello,” declared that it “fails as a work of scholarship,” recklessly misreading documents and dismissing other scholars in pursuit of a “journalistic obsession with ‘the scoop.’ ” Jan Ellen Lewis, a historian at Rutgers University, writing in The Daily Beast, was even blunter, denouncing the book as a “train wreck,” written by a man “so blinded by his loathing of Thomas Jefferson that he can’t see” contrary evidence “right in front of his eyes.”
The divergence of response would seem to highlight the difference between the ways professionals and lay readers approach history, not to mention the sometimes tense relations between academic historians and independent scholars working the same beat, especially one as charged and contentious as the relationship between the founding fathers and slavery.
Mr. Wiencek (pronounced WIN-seck), the author of a well-regarded earlier book about George Washington and slavery, certainly sees it that way.
“Inside the Jefferson bubble, they are trying to discredit this,” he said recently in a telephone conversation from his home in Charlottesville, Va., a few miles down the road from Monticello. “It presents an image they don’t like.”
Mr. Wiencek’s main contention is that sometime in the 1790s, Jefferson became so convinced of the economic value of slavery that he completely abandoned his youthful antislavery sentiments.
To bolster his argument, Mr. Wiencek points to a note in the margins of a 1792 report to George Washington that he believes shows Jefferson, then serving as secretary of state, calculating the birth of slave children as delivering a reliable return on capital of “4 percent per annum” — a note, he claims, that no writer on Jefferson has ever mentioned.
In their reviews, Ms. Lewis and Ms. Gordon-Reed dismiss this “4 percent theorem,” as Mr. Wiencek calls it, as a speculative back-of-the-envelope calculation about slavery in Virginia as a whole, not evidence of any turning point in Jefferson’s thinking about his own investments in human property at Monticello.
But Mr. Wiencek defends his interpretation of the document, doubling down on what he sees as a “core truth” behind Jefferson’s lifelong equivocations about the evils of slavery.
“It was all about the money,” he said. “By the 1790s, he saw them as capital assets and was literally counting the babies.”
When it comes to his critics, Mr. Wiencek is equally direct: “They have turned what could have been a reasoned debate into a mudslinging fest.”
But even some who are sympathetic to Mr. Wiencek’s dark view of Jefferson say that if there is mud flying, Mr. Wiencek set it off by writing a sensationalistic book that repackages the work of scholars who have spent decades fighting for a full acknowledgment of Jefferson’s entanglement with slavery, only to be painted now as apologists for the man.
“I think Thomas Jefferson is one of the most deeply creepy people in American history,” said Paul Finkelman, a professor at Albany Law School and the author of “Slavery and the Founders,” which outlines the evasions of earlier generations of Jefferson scholars. “But for Henry to come along and say, ‘I am the first one to discover this’? Come on.”
Mr. Wiencek acknowledges some truth in the charge that he is repackaging the work of others, but defends his book as a real contribution.
“Yes, I’m repeating some of information that others have brought out,” he said. “But others brought it out and buried it in footnotes. I brought it all together. I connected the dots.”
Historians, however, tend to read footnotes first, and some have raised eyebrows at what they see in Mr. Wiencek’s. In particular, they point to his treatment of the work of Ms. Gordon-Reed, whose 1997 book, “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy,” was instrumental in breaking down the wall of resistance to the idea that Jefferson had a sexual relationship with Hemings.
Ms. Gordon-Reed’s name appears nowhere in the body of the text but three times in Mr. Wiencek’s endnotes, twice to mention her “erroneous and misleading” transcriptions of key documents relating to Hemings.
David Waldstreicher, a historian at Temple University and the author of several books about slavery and the founders, called those footnotes (which do not identify the errors or acknowledge that Ms. Gordon-Reed corrected one of the transcriptions a decade ago in a reissue of her 1997 book) “fighting words” and “about as nasty as it gets.” A professional historian, he continued, “would publish this in a scholarly journal and make it very clear how it makes a difference, instead of using it to say, ‘I am the last word.’ ”
Mr. Wiencek said in the interview that the transcription errors were minor. But his third reference to Ms. Gordon-Reed cuts to the heart of a larger continuing debate in the writing of academic history: How does one balance, or, now, rebalance, the shift from focusing on men of power, like Jefferson, to exploring the ways women, slaves and other marginalized people shaped their own destiny?
At the close of his book, Mr. Wiencek quotes a sentence from “The Hemingses of Monticello” as an example of the way two decades of scholarship that emphasizes the “agency” of slaves implies, as he puts it, that they “had no master.”
Ms. Lewis, in an interview, called that passage a “profound misreading” of Ms. Gordon-Reed’s work. “There are historians who in their eagerness to discover the slave perspective have averted our attention from the ways in which slavery really was a horrible, unjust institution, but he doesn’t cite them,” she said. “Instead, he cites Annette Gordon-Reed? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Since his book was published, Mr. Wiencek has been more direct in his claims, asserting that his work “systematically demolishes” Ms. Gordon-Reed’s portrayal of Jefferson as “a kindly master to black slaves.”
But Ms. Gordon-Reed, for her part, scoffs at the idea, noting that her books discuss many of the same instances of cruelty at Monticello that Mr. Wiencek cites. “That was Jefferson’s image of himself, as a benevolent slaveholder,” she said. “My work shows that’s impossible.”
Even some of the scholars who helped Mr. Wiencek have turned against him. In his acknowledgments Mr. Wiencek, who received a research fellowship from the International Center for Jefferson Studies, thanks Lucia Stanton, the recently retired chief historian at Monticello, whose decades of research on slavery at the plantation he credits with breaking “the seals on many hidden histories.”
But in a letter last month to The Hook, a Charlottesville newspaper that ran an article about “Master of the Mountain,” Ms. Stanton blasted him for a “breathtaking disrespect for the historical record and for the historians who preceded him,” including Edwin M. Betts, whose 1953 edition of Jefferson’s plantation records Mr. Wiencek claims deliberately left out a passage indicating that Jefferson knew that very young enslaved boys in the Monticello nail factory were being whipped.
“How can he know that Betts ‘deliberately’ suppressed this sentence, in what was a compilation of excerpts, not full letters?” she asked, noting that Betts’s edition contains many far worse details about Jefferson’s treatment of slaves.
Mr. Waldstreicher said Mr. Wiencek had raised legitimate questions about the editing of Jefferson’s farm records that scholars would need to untangle. But for the moment, Mr. Wiencek is not going to get the public forum with Ms. Gordon-Reed he says he is eager for. The museum at Poplar Forest, Jefferson’s other plantation, in Lynchburg, Va., has invited both of them to appear on a panel. Ms. Gordon-Reed, however, has declined.
Some Scholars Reject Dark Portrait of JeffersonBy JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
Published: November 26, 2012
Henry Wiencek suspected he would be in for a rough ride when “Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves,” his scathing assessment of America’s third president, was published last month. But just how rough he may not have realized.
True, Mr. Wiencek, an independent scholar, has received the kind of attention most authors can only dream of: book excerpts on the covers of both Smithsonian and American History magazines, a C-Span interview at Monticello, almost universally glowing reviews from nonspecialists. (Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post called the book “brilliant,” while Laura Miller of Salon hailed it as one “every American should read.”)
But the Jefferson scholars who have weighed in have subjected “Master of the Mountain” (published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux) to a fierce barrage of criticism, blasting away at Mr. Wiencek’s evidence, interpretations and claims to originality. Reviewing the book in Slate, Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor of history and law at Harvard and the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning study “The Hemingses of Monticello,” declared that it “fails as a work of scholarship,” recklessly misreading documents and dismissing other scholars in pursuit of a “journalistic obsession with ‘the scoop.’ ” Jan Ellen Lewis, a historian at Rutgers University, writing in The Daily Beast, was even blunter, denouncing the book as a “train wreck,” written by a man “so blinded by his loathing of Thomas Jefferson that he can’t see” contrary evidence “right in front of his eyes.”
The divergence of response would seem to highlight the difference between the ways professionals and lay readers approach history, not to mention the sometimes tense relations between academic historians and independent scholars working the same beat, especially one as charged and contentious as the relationship between the founding fathers and slavery.
Mr. Wiencek (pronounced WIN-seck), the author of a well-regarded earlier book about George Washington and slavery, certainly sees it that way.
“Inside the Jefferson bubble, they are trying to discredit this,” he said recently in a telephone conversation from his home in Charlottesville, Va., a few miles down the road from Monticello. “It presents an image they don’t like.”
Mr. Wiencek’s main contention is that sometime in the 1790s, Jefferson became so convinced of the economic value of slavery that he completely abandoned his youthful antislavery sentiments.
To bolster his argument, Mr. Wiencek points to a note in the margins of a 1792 report to George Washington that he believes shows Jefferson, then serving as secretary of state, calculating the birth of slave children as delivering a reliable return on capital of “4 percent per annum” — a note, he claims, that no writer on Jefferson has ever mentioned.
In their reviews, Ms. Lewis and Ms. Gordon-Reed dismiss this “4 percent theorem,” as Mr. Wiencek calls it, as a speculative back-of-the-envelope calculation about slavery in Virginia as a whole, not evidence of any turning point in Jefferson’s thinking about his own investments in human property at Monticello.
But Mr. Wiencek defends his interpretation of the document, doubling down on what he sees as a “core truth” behind Jefferson’s lifelong equivocations about the evils of slavery.
“It was all about the money,” he said. “By the 1790s, he saw them as capital assets and was literally counting the babies.”
When it comes to his critics, Mr. Wiencek is equally direct: “They have turned what could have been a reasoned debate into a mudslinging fest.”
But even some who are sympathetic to Mr. Wiencek’s dark view of Jefferson say that if there is mud flying, Mr. Wiencek set it off by writing a sensationalistic book that repackages the work of scholars who have spent decades fighting for a full acknowledgment of Jefferson’s entanglement with slavery, only to be painted now as apologists for the man.
“I think Thomas Jefferson is one of the most deeply creepy people in American history,” said Paul Finkelman, a professor at Albany Law School and the author of “Slavery and the Founders,” which outlines the evasions of earlier generations of Jefferson scholars. “But for Henry to come along and say, ‘I am the first one to discover this’? Come on.”
Mr. Wiencek acknowledges some truth in the charge that he is repackaging the work of others, but defends his book as a real contribution.
“Yes, I’m repeating some of information that others have brought out,” he said. “But others brought it out and buried it in footnotes. I brought it all together. I connected the dots.”
Historians, however, tend to read footnotes first, and some have raised eyebrows at what they see in Mr. Wiencek’s. In particular, they point to his treatment of the work of Ms. Gordon-Reed, whose 1997 book, “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy,” was instrumental in breaking down the wall of resistance to the idea that Jefferson had a sexual relationship with Hemings.
Ms. Gordon-Reed’s name appears nowhere in the body of the text but three times in Mr. Wiencek’s endnotes, twice to mention her “erroneous and misleading” transcriptions of key documents relating to Hemings.
David Waldstreicher, a historian at Temple University and the author of several books about slavery and the founders, called those footnotes (which do not identify the errors or acknowledge that Ms. Gordon-Reed corrected one of the transcriptions a decade ago in a reissue of her 1997 book) “fighting words” and “about as nasty as it gets.” A professional historian, he continued, “would publish this in a scholarly journal and make it very clear how it makes a difference, instead of using it to say, ‘I am the last word.’ ”
Mr. Wiencek said in the interview that the transcription errors were minor. But his third reference to Ms. Gordon-Reed cuts to the heart of a larger continuing debate in the writing of academic history: How does one balance, or, now, rebalance, the shift from focusing on men of power, like Jefferson, to exploring the ways women, slaves and other marginalized people shaped their own destiny?
At the close of his book, Mr. Wiencek quotes a sentence from “The Hemingses of Monticello” as an example of the way two decades of scholarship that emphasizes the “agency” of slaves implies, as he puts it, that they “had no master.”
Ms. Lewis, in an interview, called that passage a “profound misreading” of Ms. Gordon-Reed’s work. “There are historians who in their eagerness to discover the slave perspective have averted our attention from the ways in which slavery really was a horrible, unjust institution, but he doesn’t cite them,” she said. “Instead, he cites Annette Gordon-Reed? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Since his book was published, Mr. Wiencek has been more direct in his claims, asserting that his work “systematically demolishes” Ms. Gordon-Reed’s portrayal of Jefferson as “a kindly master to black slaves.”
But Ms. Gordon-Reed, for her part, scoffs at the idea, noting that her books discuss many of the same instances of cruelty at Monticello that Mr. Wiencek cites. “That was Jefferson’s image of himself, as a benevolent slaveholder,” she said. “My work shows that’s impossible.”
Even some of the scholars who helped Mr. Wiencek have turned against him. In his acknowledgments Mr. Wiencek, who received a research fellowship from the International Center for Jefferson Studies, thanks Lucia Stanton, the recently retired chief historian at Monticello, whose decades of research on slavery at the plantation he credits with breaking “the seals on many hidden histories.”
But in a letter last month to The Hook, a Charlottesville newspaper that ran an article about “Master of the Mountain,” Ms. Stanton blasted him for a “breathtaking disrespect for the historical record and for the historians who preceded him,” including Edwin M. Betts, whose 1953 edition of Jefferson’s plantation records Mr. Wiencek claims deliberately left out a passage indicating that Jefferson knew that very young enslaved boys in the Monticello nail factory were being whipped.
“How can he know that Betts ‘deliberately’ suppressed this sentence, in what was a compilation of excerpts, not full letters?” she asked, noting that Betts’s edition contains many far worse details about Jefferson’s treatment of slaves.
Mr. Waldstreicher said Mr. Wiencek had raised legitimate questions about the editing of Jefferson’s farm records that scholars would need to untangle. But for the moment, Mr. Wiencek is not going to get the public forum with Ms. Gordon-Reed he says he is eager for. The museum at Poplar Forest, Jefferson’s other plantation, in Lynchburg, Va., has invited both of them to appear on a panel. Ms. Gordon-Reed, however, has declined.
Good Novels with Bad Endings
November 27, 2012
On Bad Endings
Posted by Joan Acocella
Many of the world’s best novels have bad endings. I don’t mean that they end sadly, or on a back-to-work, all-is-forgiven note (e.g. “War and Peace,” “The Red and the Black,” “A Suitable Boy”), but that the ending is actually inartistic—a betrayal of what came before. This is true not just of good novels but also of books on which the reputation of Western fiction rests. The first half of “David Copperfield” leaves you gasping. You laugh, you cry, you think you’re going to faint. The scene where David, having been rescued by his Aunt Betsey and fed, given a bath, and put to bed, looks out the window at the moonlight on the Channel, imagining that he might see his dead mother there, with her baby in her arms (she died in childbirth): after I have forgotten most of the events of my life, I will remember that. But in the last chapters of the novel, the now-adult David marries a wise woman and succeeds in life, and from then on you die of boredom. Ditto “Wuthering Heights.” After the scalding passion of Catherine and Heathcliff, who cares about the amorous back-and-forths of their uninteresting children? Yet this occupies half of the book.
Willa Cather’s “Song of the Lark” is a similar case. The novel shows us how Thea, a girl from a dusty little town in Colorado, becomes a great a Wagnerian soprano at the Metropolitan Opera. Cather, like Dickens, felt that her young person’s apotheosis was a wonderful thing and needed describing. It didn’t. All the characters do in the final chapters is talk, talk, talk. Even when Thea accepts a proposal of marriage from a man who adores her, the transaction is clipped and dry. Cather eventually saw the problem, and when, more than twenty years after the book was published, she revised it, hacking off a lot of material, she included a preface explaining what she had done. “The chief fault of the book,” she writes, “is that it describes a descending curve; the life of a successful artist in the full tide of achievement is not so interesting as the life of a talented young girl ‘fighting her way,’ as we say. Success is never so interesting as struggle—not even to the successful.” She did not add that this was true of her life as well—that in the early period there was a great love and a great struggle, and in the later years, when she was famous, there was a correcting of galleys and punctual mealtimes. She repeatedly quoted the famous words of Jules Michelet: “Le but n’est rien. Le chemin, c’est tout.” (“Achieving a goal is nothing. The getting there is everything.”)
But the novel with the most shockingly bad ending is our country’s greatest novel, “Huckleberry Finn.” Here, after Huck and Jim’s revelatory journey up the river—a trip that seems to tell you everything important about America and is also a love story, in which a black man and a white boy become each other’s truest friends—Huck accidentally meets up with his old pal Tom Sawyer at Tom’s aunt’s house. While the whole point of going up the river was to release Jim from slavery, he now gets imprisoned as a runaway. Tom, the soul of amoral mischief, has good ideas about how he and Huck can tease and frighten Jim in the hut that is his holding pen. Huck agrees. One day, they go to the hut, and Tom asks Jim if he has any spiders in there:
“No, sah, thanks to goodness I hain’t, Mars Tom.”
“All right, we’ll get you some.”
“But bless you, honey, I doan’ want none. I’s afears un um. I jis’ ’s soon have rattle snakes aroun.’ ”
That’s a good idea, Tom says. He’ll bring Jim a rattlesnake. Jim can tame it.
“Tame it!”
“Yes—easy enough. Every animal is grateful for kindness and petting, and they wouldn’t think of hurting a person that pets them. Any book will tell you that…. Why, you can get him so in a little while that he’ll love you; and sleep with you; and won’t stay away from you for a minute; and will let you wrap him round your neck and put his head in your mouth.”
“Please, Mars Tom—doan’ talk so. I can’t stan’ it. He’d let me shove his head in my mouf—fer a favor, hain’t it? I lay he’d wait a pow’ful long time ’fo’ I ast him.”
Everybody comes out pretty much O.K. (Jim is freed from slavery), but it’s hard not to have a bad taste in your mouth as you close the book. How could Twain, so serious, morally, in the earlier part of the novel, have veered off into this cruel comedy? Bernard DeVoto, though he revered Twain, still wrote that in the history of English-language fiction there was “no more abrupt or more chilling descent.” Some critics, great ones, tried to defend the ending on formal grounds. T. S. Eliot wrote that Twain had to bring Huck back to where he started out: in a comic world, ruled by Tom. Lionel Trilling, with misgivings, said something similar. Leo Marx scolded both of them for this. As he saw it, we just have to admit that Twain had a “failure of nerve,” and backed off from what he had said, in the main body of the book, about race and morals. I believe that’s the best explanation. But what’s most interesting here is that readers can consider a book very, very great even when it has a fault as huge as this. We seem to be able to eat the good half of the apple and throw the mushy part away. The last time I read “Wuthering Heights” I was shocked by the lameness of the second half. I had forgotten it.
E. M. Forster, in “Aspects of the Novel,” said that nearly every novel’s ending is a letdown. “This is because the plot requires to be wound up. Why is this necessary? Why is there not a convention which allows a novelist to stop as soon as he feels muddled or bored? Alas, he has to round things off, and usually the characters go dead while he is at work.” That’s still not much of an explanation, though. Why do novelists feel that they have to round things off? Is it some basic conservatism? Or classicism?
Another possibility is that the author just gets tired. I review a lot of books, many of them non-fiction. Again and again, the last chapters are hasty and dull. “I’ve worked hard enough,” the author seems to be saying. “My advance wasn’t much. I already have the idea for my next book. Get me out of here.”
But even that reasoning, so attractively commonsensical, is inadequate. I think the tiredness may not be personal, but something about the universe in general: biology, physics. Art, whether fiction or not, is a challenge to entropy, a bumping up of something that must be flattened down again. When you think about it, it’s surprising that art is allowed to exist. It’s always a deviation: overly selective, overly concrete, and unfaithful, not to our actual experience but to our generalizing afterthoughts, the thoughts that get us through life. In “War and Peace,” when the excitable young heroine grows up and has kids and gets fat, young readers may be disappointed, but I think that adults may be comforted. Most of us want extraordinary things, after a while, to quit being extraordinary—to end. The stone fell in the water. The ripples ran. Now they should stop. The surface should be smooth again.
On Bad Endings
Posted by Joan Acocella
Many of the world’s best novels have bad endings. I don’t mean that they end sadly, or on a back-to-work, all-is-forgiven note (e.g. “War and Peace,” “The Red and the Black,” “A Suitable Boy”), but that the ending is actually inartistic—a betrayal of what came before. This is true not just of good novels but also of books on which the reputation of Western fiction rests. The first half of “David Copperfield” leaves you gasping. You laugh, you cry, you think you’re going to faint. The scene where David, having been rescued by his Aunt Betsey and fed, given a bath, and put to bed, looks out the window at the moonlight on the Channel, imagining that he might see his dead mother there, with her baby in her arms (she died in childbirth): after I have forgotten most of the events of my life, I will remember that. But in the last chapters of the novel, the now-adult David marries a wise woman and succeeds in life, and from then on you die of boredom. Ditto “Wuthering Heights.” After the scalding passion of Catherine and Heathcliff, who cares about the amorous back-and-forths of their uninteresting children? Yet this occupies half of the book.
Willa Cather’s “Song of the Lark” is a similar case. The novel shows us how Thea, a girl from a dusty little town in Colorado, becomes a great a Wagnerian soprano at the Metropolitan Opera. Cather, like Dickens, felt that her young person’s apotheosis was a wonderful thing and needed describing. It didn’t. All the characters do in the final chapters is talk, talk, talk. Even when Thea accepts a proposal of marriage from a man who adores her, the transaction is clipped and dry. Cather eventually saw the problem, and when, more than twenty years after the book was published, she revised it, hacking off a lot of material, she included a preface explaining what she had done. “The chief fault of the book,” she writes, “is that it describes a descending curve; the life of a successful artist in the full tide of achievement is not so interesting as the life of a talented young girl ‘fighting her way,’ as we say. Success is never so interesting as struggle—not even to the successful.” She did not add that this was true of her life as well—that in the early period there was a great love and a great struggle, and in the later years, when she was famous, there was a correcting of galleys and punctual mealtimes. She repeatedly quoted the famous words of Jules Michelet: “Le but n’est rien. Le chemin, c’est tout.” (“Achieving a goal is nothing. The getting there is everything.”)
But the novel with the most shockingly bad ending is our country’s greatest novel, “Huckleberry Finn.” Here, after Huck and Jim’s revelatory journey up the river—a trip that seems to tell you everything important about America and is also a love story, in which a black man and a white boy become each other’s truest friends—Huck accidentally meets up with his old pal Tom Sawyer at Tom’s aunt’s house. While the whole point of going up the river was to release Jim from slavery, he now gets imprisoned as a runaway. Tom, the soul of amoral mischief, has good ideas about how he and Huck can tease and frighten Jim in the hut that is his holding pen. Huck agrees. One day, they go to the hut, and Tom asks Jim if he has any spiders in there:
“No, sah, thanks to goodness I hain’t, Mars Tom.”
“All right, we’ll get you some.”
“But bless you, honey, I doan’ want none. I’s afears un um. I jis’ ’s soon have rattle snakes aroun.’ ”
That’s a good idea, Tom says. He’ll bring Jim a rattlesnake. Jim can tame it.
“Tame it!”
“Yes—easy enough. Every animal is grateful for kindness and petting, and they wouldn’t think of hurting a person that pets them. Any book will tell you that…. Why, you can get him so in a little while that he’ll love you; and sleep with you; and won’t stay away from you for a minute; and will let you wrap him round your neck and put his head in your mouth.”
“Please, Mars Tom—doan’ talk so. I can’t stan’ it. He’d let me shove his head in my mouf—fer a favor, hain’t it? I lay he’d wait a pow’ful long time ’fo’ I ast him.”
Everybody comes out pretty much O.K. (Jim is freed from slavery), but it’s hard not to have a bad taste in your mouth as you close the book. How could Twain, so serious, morally, in the earlier part of the novel, have veered off into this cruel comedy? Bernard DeVoto, though he revered Twain, still wrote that in the history of English-language fiction there was “no more abrupt or more chilling descent.” Some critics, great ones, tried to defend the ending on formal grounds. T. S. Eliot wrote that Twain had to bring Huck back to where he started out: in a comic world, ruled by Tom. Lionel Trilling, with misgivings, said something similar. Leo Marx scolded both of them for this. As he saw it, we just have to admit that Twain had a “failure of nerve,” and backed off from what he had said, in the main body of the book, about race and morals. I believe that’s the best explanation. But what’s most interesting here is that readers can consider a book very, very great even when it has a fault as huge as this. We seem to be able to eat the good half of the apple and throw the mushy part away. The last time I read “Wuthering Heights” I was shocked by the lameness of the second half. I had forgotten it.
E. M. Forster, in “Aspects of the Novel,” said that nearly every novel’s ending is a letdown. “This is because the plot requires to be wound up. Why is this necessary? Why is there not a convention which allows a novelist to stop as soon as he feels muddled or bored? Alas, he has to round things off, and usually the characters go dead while he is at work.” That’s still not much of an explanation, though. Why do novelists feel that they have to round things off? Is it some basic conservatism? Or classicism?
Another possibility is that the author just gets tired. I review a lot of books, many of them non-fiction. Again and again, the last chapters are hasty and dull. “I’ve worked hard enough,” the author seems to be saying. “My advance wasn’t much. I already have the idea for my next book. Get me out of here.”
But even that reasoning, so attractively commonsensical, is inadequate. I think the tiredness may not be personal, but something about the universe in general: biology, physics. Art, whether fiction or not, is a challenge to entropy, a bumping up of something that must be flattened down again. When you think about it, it’s surprising that art is allowed to exist. It’s always a deviation: overly selective, overly concrete, and unfaithful, not to our actual experience but to our generalizing afterthoughts, the thoughts that get us through life. In “War and Peace,” when the excitable young heroine grows up and has kids and gets fat, young readers may be disappointed, but I think that adults may be comforted. Most of us want extraordinary things, after a while, to quit being extraordinary—to end. The stone fell in the water. The ripples ran. Now they should stop. The surface should be smooth again.
Saturday, December 1, 2012
On Secession Theology
The more things change, the more they stay the same. This.Secession Theology Runs Deep In American Religious & Political History
Religious Secession
By G. Jeffrey Macdonald Posted: 11/30/2012 9:26 am EST Updated: 11/30/2012 9:23 pm EST
Corruption has gone too far. The righteous must break away. Hope now rests with a holy remnant that will honor foundational texts.
The message sounds familiar. A church schism? No, mounting calls for secession from the United States.
Since President Obama won re-election, more than 750,000 Americans have petitioned the White House website to let their respective states secede, from Alaska to Iowa to Maryland and Vermont. Those leading the charge are framing it, observers say, in terms that suggest a deep-seated religious impulse for purity-through-separation is flaring up once again.
But this time, it's playing out on a political stage.
"Today's secessionist movements are just the latest example of a long parade of breakaway groups (in American history) seeking to restore some lost ideal," said Peter J. Thuesen, professor of religious studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. "The problem is that the ideal is invariably a mirage."
Seeking purity through separation has marked American religious history since the Puritans sailed from Holland to establish a holy beacon in the New World. It helps explain why Baptists, Presbyterians and others have splintered into countless subgroups over the years, and why the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina disaffiliated from the Episcopal Church this fall.
The pattern commonly involves one group breaking off to re-establish a holy community by living in fresh accord with sacred texts. Religious purists have the Bible to guide their quest; secessionists look to the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Both insist these centers of authority have suffered neglect and must be restored.
"That's a persistent line of thought," said Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. "There are people who are disappointed with the direction the United States has taken. ... It's primarily political and economic, and then they just find a religious cover for it (as) they tap into pre-existent religious language."
Dismissing the United States as hopelessly corrupt, secessionists are picking up the breakaway-for-purity motif and running with it. Radio host Alex Jones, whose show airs in 60 markets, alleged on Nov. 15 that "foreign megabanks have hijacked the government" and have made secession necessary.
"We do not want to secede from the Union to destroy the republic, but to restore it," Jones said. "Go to the White House website. Do your own petitions to reinstall the Declaration of Independence. ... It's now time to launch the second American Revolution."
Secessionists, such as Russell Longcore of Marietta, Ga., take inspiration from history. He sees secession as pursuit of God-given liberty, such as when American colonies seceded from Britain in 1776, when Southern states left the Union in the 1860s and when the Soviet Union dissolved into 15 separate states two decades ago.
In his view, petitioning the federal government is "silly" because states don't need permission to secede, but he regards the petitioners' goal as nonetheless serious and moral in nature.
"The moral decay comes from the fact that Washington, D.C., has summarily ignored the Constitution," said Longcore, an insurance claims consultant who blogs at dumpdc.com. He offered the example of unsanctioned wars.
"Article One, Section Eight (of the Constitution) says Congress should have authority to declare war and to prosecute a war," Longcore said. "There hasn't been a declared war since World War II, but we've been in an awful lot of wars."
Other narratives help secessionists, as well as religious isolationists, understand their efforts as part of a noble tapestry. Evangelical groups have for years supported Christians in South Sudan, which broke off from Sudan last year after persistent clashes with Muslims in the north. Some now laud how Sudanese Christians separated and hope American Christians would do similarly by withdrawing at least culturally, if not legally.
Those inspired by such examples include Jim Rawles, an evangelical blogger and novelist who teaches survival skills for the coming day when America's economy collapses. He sees no point in seceding, since the federal government would "hammer" such efforts anyway.
Instead, he's getting more response these days, he says, to his call for Bible-believing Christians, Orthodox Jews and Messianic Jews to relocate to what he calls the American Redoubt: Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, eastern Washington and eastern Oregon.
One reason he gives on his website for separation: "Even if God has withdrawn his blessings from our nation as a whole, he will continue to provide for and to protect his remnant."
"It's time to distance ourselves from the vile corruptness that we see inside the Washington, D.C., Beltway," said Rawles, who blogs at survivalblog.com. "It is analogous to the Puritan exodus (from Europe). They couldn't fit in and said,'We're going to move to completely virgin territory and start afresh.' ... In effect, we're becoming pistol-packing Amish."
Some scholars still aren't buying it. As Wolfe sees it, calls for secession and cultural withdrawal are just sour grapes.
"It's not religious in inspiration at all," Wolfe says. "It's like in the Old South, where if you gave (secession) a religious cover, you made it sound better. But it's just people who basically have difficulty accepting that we have a two-party system. One party wins. One party loses."
But separatists insist the impulse to flee corruption and live rightly before God is genuine. And if that means clustering in ever more secluded enclaves, then so be it.
"The Bible teaches that the remnant will be small," Rawles said. "People who recognize that they are of the remnant, that they are God's elect, will in increasing numbers choose to vote with their feet."
Religious Secession
By G. Jeffrey Macdonald Posted: 11/30/2012 9:26 am EST Updated: 11/30/2012 9:23 pm EST
Corruption has gone too far. The righteous must break away. Hope now rests with a holy remnant that will honor foundational texts.
The message sounds familiar. A church schism? No, mounting calls for secession from the United States.
Since President Obama won re-election, more than 750,000 Americans have petitioned the White House website to let their respective states secede, from Alaska to Iowa to Maryland and Vermont. Those leading the charge are framing it, observers say, in terms that suggest a deep-seated religious impulse for purity-through-separation is flaring up once again.
But this time, it's playing out on a political stage.
"Today's secessionist movements are just the latest example of a long parade of breakaway groups (in American history) seeking to restore some lost ideal," said Peter J. Thuesen, professor of religious studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. "The problem is that the ideal is invariably a mirage."
Seeking purity through separation has marked American religious history since the Puritans sailed from Holland to establish a holy beacon in the New World. It helps explain why Baptists, Presbyterians and others have splintered into countless subgroups over the years, and why the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina disaffiliated from the Episcopal Church this fall.
The pattern commonly involves one group breaking off to re-establish a holy community by living in fresh accord with sacred texts. Religious purists have the Bible to guide their quest; secessionists look to the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Both insist these centers of authority have suffered neglect and must be restored.
"That's a persistent line of thought," said Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. "There are people who are disappointed with the direction the United States has taken. ... It's primarily political and economic, and then they just find a religious cover for it (as) they tap into pre-existent religious language."
Dismissing the United States as hopelessly corrupt, secessionists are picking up the breakaway-for-purity motif and running with it. Radio host Alex Jones, whose show airs in 60 markets, alleged on Nov. 15 that "foreign megabanks have hijacked the government" and have made secession necessary.
"We do not want to secede from the Union to destroy the republic, but to restore it," Jones said. "Go to the White House website. Do your own petitions to reinstall the Declaration of Independence. ... It's now time to launch the second American Revolution."
Secessionists, such as Russell Longcore of Marietta, Ga., take inspiration from history. He sees secession as pursuit of God-given liberty, such as when American colonies seceded from Britain in 1776, when Southern states left the Union in the 1860s and when the Soviet Union dissolved into 15 separate states two decades ago.
In his view, petitioning the federal government is "silly" because states don't need permission to secede, but he regards the petitioners' goal as nonetheless serious and moral in nature.
"The moral decay comes from the fact that Washington, D.C., has summarily ignored the Constitution," said Longcore, an insurance claims consultant who blogs at dumpdc.com. He offered the example of unsanctioned wars.
"Article One, Section Eight (of the Constitution) says Congress should have authority to declare war and to prosecute a war," Longcore said. "There hasn't been a declared war since World War II, but we've been in an awful lot of wars."
Other narratives help secessionists, as well as religious isolationists, understand their efforts as part of a noble tapestry. Evangelical groups have for years supported Christians in South Sudan, which broke off from Sudan last year after persistent clashes with Muslims in the north. Some now laud how Sudanese Christians separated and hope American Christians would do similarly by withdrawing at least culturally, if not legally.
Those inspired by such examples include Jim Rawles, an evangelical blogger and novelist who teaches survival skills for the coming day when America's economy collapses. He sees no point in seceding, since the federal government would "hammer" such efforts anyway.
Instead, he's getting more response these days, he says, to his call for Bible-believing Christians, Orthodox Jews and Messianic Jews to relocate to what he calls the American Redoubt: Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, eastern Washington and eastern Oregon.
One reason he gives on his website for separation: "Even if God has withdrawn his blessings from our nation as a whole, he will continue to provide for and to protect his remnant."
"It's time to distance ourselves from the vile corruptness that we see inside the Washington, D.C., Beltway," said Rawles, who blogs at survivalblog.com. "It is analogous to the Puritan exodus (from Europe). They couldn't fit in and said,'We're going to move to completely virgin territory and start afresh.' ... In effect, we're becoming pistol-packing Amish."
Some scholars still aren't buying it. As Wolfe sees it, calls for secession and cultural withdrawal are just sour grapes.
"It's not religious in inspiration at all," Wolfe says. "It's like in the Old South, where if you gave (secession) a religious cover, you made it sound better. But it's just people who basically have difficulty accepting that we have a two-party system. One party wins. One party loses."
But separatists insist the impulse to flee corruption and live rightly before God is genuine. And if that means clustering in ever more secluded enclaves, then so be it.
"The Bible teaches that the remnant will be small," Rawles said. "People who recognize that they are of the remnant, that they are God's elect, will in increasing numbers choose to vote with their feet."
Liberal Moments
Subscribe: Digital / Home Delivery Log InRegister NowHome PageToday's PaperVideoMost PopularTimes Topics.
Search All NYTimes.comThe Opinion PagesWorldU.S.N.Y. / RegionBusinessTechnologyScienceHealthSportsOpinionArtsStyleTravelJobsReal EstateAutos.EditorialsColumnistsContributorsLettersThe Public EditorGlobal Opinion
Timothy Egan November 29, 2012, 9:00 pm337 Comments
A Liberal Moment
By TIMOTHY EGAN
.Still hard to believe, I told a friend the other day while trying to fathom the election results, that pot is legal in my state, gays are free to marry, and a black man who vowed to raise taxes on the rich won a majority of the popular vote for president, back to back — the first time any Democrat has done that since Franklin Roosevelt’s second election in 1936.
And yet only one in four voters identified themselves as “liberal” in national exit polls. Conservatives were 35 percent, and moderates the plurality, at 41 percent. The number of voters who agreed to the “l” tag was up by three percentage points, for what it’s worth, from 22 percent in 2008.
What’s going on here, demography and democracy seem to be saying at the same time, is the advance of progressive political ideas by a majority that spurns an obvious label. Liberals have long been a distinct minority; liberalism, in its better forms, has been triumphant at key times since the founding of the Republic.
Abraham Lincoln’s push for the 13th Amendment, erasing the original sin of slavery from the land, was a liberal moment, as dramatized in Steven Spielberg’s new film. Teddy Roosevelt’s embrace of the income tax, eventually written into the Constitution after he left office, was a liberal moment. “No single device has done so much to secure the future of capitalism as this tax,” said John Kenneth Galbraith.
Women’s suffrage in 1920, Social Security in 1935, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — all liberal moments. Ditto the creation of national parks, and laws against child labor and poisoning the environment, and for giving most Americans access to health care.
Democrats were the knuckle-draggers on race and populist economic reform in the 19th century, Republicans in the latter half of the 20th. The party identities change; the arc of enlightenment does not.
Which brings us to the fascinating self-portrait of the United States at the start of the second half of the Obama era. A tenuous center-left majority wants to restore some equality to the outsize imbalance between the very rich and the rest of us. If a tenuous president can lead that coalition, without overreaching, he might be remembered among the greats.
In its simplest form, this will involve raising taxes at the high end and reforming entitlements enough to ensure their continued success and sustainability. Much of that, an accountant could do. But it takes a gifted politician for the heavier lifting. That leader will have to make his still-fledgling health care act work and earn his premature Nobel Peace Prize on an issue like climate change. In the process, he could restore the good name to traditional liberalism.
For at least a generation’s time, liberals in this country have been afraid to call themselves liberal. Was it the excesses of their creed, from race-based preferential programs that went on far too long to crude speech censorship by the politically correct and humorless (one and the same) that soiled the brand? In blindly embracing, say, the teachers’ union in the face of overwhelming evidence that public education needs a jolt or in never questioning the efficacy of government programs, the left earned its years in exile.
Or was it the relentless campaign by the broadcasting and publishing empires of the far right, associating liberals with tyranny, spiritual vacuity and baby killing, that drove people from the label that could not speak its name? “Godless,” “Treason” and “Demonic” are actual Ann Coulter book titles, and a representative sample of the profitable cartooning of liberals.
Liberalism, in the broadest sense, is about expanding human rights and opportunity, while embracing science and reason. What do they call the secularists in Egypt today pushing for democracy over a theocracy? Liberals.
The Progressives of the early 20th had an amazing run — direct elections of senators, regulation of monopolistic trusts, modernization of public schools, cleaning up the food supply — with only one major blooper: Prohibition.
The New Deal’s lasting legacy, Social Security, and its counterpart of the 1960s, Medicare, allowed millions of American to live out their lives in dignity. Those programs, attacked as socialistic abominations by the Fox News shills of their day, are now considered near sacrosanct by Americans of all political stripes.
Conservatives of the last decade lost their way by rejecting science, immigration reform and personal freedom, particularly in regard to choices made by women and gays. If you believe in climate change, finding a path to citizenship for millions of hard-working Hispanics and the right to marry the person you love, there is no place in the Republican Party of 2012 for you.
Their neo-con wing started a pair of disastrous wars that all but bankrupted the country. And for leaders, at least on television, the party put forth crackpots like Rick Santorum, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and the morally elastic Newt Gingrich. This chorus promoted an orthodoxy that forced this year’s standard-bearer, Mitt Romney, to sound even more out of touch than he already was.
All political moments are ephemeral. This one could vanish in the blink of a donkey’s eye. But here it is: a chance to shore up a battered middle class, make the promise of health care expansion work and do something about a planet in peril. Huge tasks, of course, and fraught with risk. For now, the majority of Americans have Obama’s back. But should he fail, the same majority could become something much worse — a confederacy of cynics.
Search All NYTimes.comThe Opinion PagesWorldU.S.N.Y. / RegionBusinessTechnologyScienceHealthSportsOpinionArtsStyleTravelJobsReal EstateAutos.EditorialsColumnistsContributorsLettersThe Public EditorGlobal Opinion
Timothy Egan November 29, 2012, 9:00 pm337 Comments
A Liberal Moment
By TIMOTHY EGAN
.Still hard to believe, I told a friend the other day while trying to fathom the election results, that pot is legal in my state, gays are free to marry, and a black man who vowed to raise taxes on the rich won a majority of the popular vote for president, back to back — the first time any Democrat has done that since Franklin Roosevelt’s second election in 1936.
And yet only one in four voters identified themselves as “liberal” in national exit polls. Conservatives were 35 percent, and moderates the plurality, at 41 percent. The number of voters who agreed to the “l” tag was up by three percentage points, for what it’s worth, from 22 percent in 2008.
What’s going on here, demography and democracy seem to be saying at the same time, is the advance of progressive political ideas by a majority that spurns an obvious label. Liberals have long been a distinct minority; liberalism, in its better forms, has been triumphant at key times since the founding of the Republic.
Abraham Lincoln’s push for the 13th Amendment, erasing the original sin of slavery from the land, was a liberal moment, as dramatized in Steven Spielberg’s new film. Teddy Roosevelt’s embrace of the income tax, eventually written into the Constitution after he left office, was a liberal moment. “No single device has done so much to secure the future of capitalism as this tax,” said John Kenneth Galbraith.
Women’s suffrage in 1920, Social Security in 1935, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — all liberal moments. Ditto the creation of national parks, and laws against child labor and poisoning the environment, and for giving most Americans access to health care.
Democrats were the knuckle-draggers on race and populist economic reform in the 19th century, Republicans in the latter half of the 20th. The party identities change; the arc of enlightenment does not.
Which brings us to the fascinating self-portrait of the United States at the start of the second half of the Obama era. A tenuous center-left majority wants to restore some equality to the outsize imbalance between the very rich and the rest of us. If a tenuous president can lead that coalition, without overreaching, he might be remembered among the greats.
In its simplest form, this will involve raising taxes at the high end and reforming entitlements enough to ensure their continued success and sustainability. Much of that, an accountant could do. But it takes a gifted politician for the heavier lifting. That leader will have to make his still-fledgling health care act work and earn his premature Nobel Peace Prize on an issue like climate change. In the process, he could restore the good name to traditional liberalism.
For at least a generation’s time, liberals in this country have been afraid to call themselves liberal. Was it the excesses of their creed, from race-based preferential programs that went on far too long to crude speech censorship by the politically correct and humorless (one and the same) that soiled the brand? In blindly embracing, say, the teachers’ union in the face of overwhelming evidence that public education needs a jolt or in never questioning the efficacy of government programs, the left earned its years in exile.
Or was it the relentless campaign by the broadcasting and publishing empires of the far right, associating liberals with tyranny, spiritual vacuity and baby killing, that drove people from the label that could not speak its name? “Godless,” “Treason” and “Demonic” are actual Ann Coulter book titles, and a representative sample of the profitable cartooning of liberals.
Liberalism, in the broadest sense, is about expanding human rights and opportunity, while embracing science and reason. What do they call the secularists in Egypt today pushing for democracy over a theocracy? Liberals.
The Progressives of the early 20th had an amazing run — direct elections of senators, regulation of monopolistic trusts, modernization of public schools, cleaning up the food supply — with only one major blooper: Prohibition.
The New Deal’s lasting legacy, Social Security, and its counterpart of the 1960s, Medicare, allowed millions of American to live out their lives in dignity. Those programs, attacked as socialistic abominations by the Fox News shills of their day, are now considered near sacrosanct by Americans of all political stripes.
Conservatives of the last decade lost their way by rejecting science, immigration reform and personal freedom, particularly in regard to choices made by women and gays. If you believe in climate change, finding a path to citizenship for millions of hard-working Hispanics and the right to marry the person you love, there is no place in the Republican Party of 2012 for you.
Their neo-con wing started a pair of disastrous wars that all but bankrupted the country. And for leaders, at least on television, the party put forth crackpots like Rick Santorum, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and the morally elastic Newt Gingrich. This chorus promoted an orthodoxy that forced this year’s standard-bearer, Mitt Romney, to sound even more out of touch than he already was.
All political moments are ephemeral. This one could vanish in the blink of a donkey’s eye. But here it is: a chance to shore up a battered middle class, make the promise of health care expansion work and do something about a planet in peril. Huge tasks, of course, and fraught with risk. For now, the majority of Americans have Obama’s back. But should he fail, the same majority could become something much worse — a confederacy of cynics.
Friday, November 30, 2012
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
The Lincoln Movie (2)
I've been reading a lot of comment on the movie. I am most interested in what Lincoln scholars might say about it. Harold Holzer offers what I consider trivial criticism. The leading Lincoln scholar on slavery is Eric Foner. I watched the streaming of a CNN interview. Foner makes the obvious point that the movie is "inadequate" in that it doesn't tell the full story of the end of slavery in the U.S. We have to remember that this is just a movie with the visual power that a good movie can bring, but with a specific story line that can never be the full story. Slavery was already eroding by January of 1865. I take the progressive view that the slaves liberated themselves by fighting for their freedom in the Union army. The movie creates the impression that there was a great rush to enact the 13th Amendment in Jaunary whereas Lincoln said he would call a special session of the new Congress that would be sworn in in March for the purpose of passing the amendment if necessary. I suppose, though, you can make the case that Lincoln felt the immediate enactment might hasten the end of the war. According to Foner from his book on Lincoln and slavery, the movie leaves out the fact that Lincoln offered compensated emancipated to Alexander Stephens at the Hampton Roads conference. Using this fact would have made the movie messier and would denigate Lincoln's halo. The other thing is that the 13th Amendment was sponsored by abolitionist groups and not AL. Lincoln didn't decide to support it until 1864. History is messy. Movies are not.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)