Roundup: Talking About History
Michael Ruse: Philosophers Rip Darwin, But They're Ignorant of Science
David Elstein: Daniel Goldhagen Recycles Fantasy on Kenya's Mau Mau Uprising
Melanie Bayley: Alice in Wonderland is a Parody of Nineteenth Century Math
Ramzy Baroud: Challenging History: Why the Oppressed Must Tell Their Own Story
Barnabe F. Geisweiller: Vestiges of War: How We Choose to Remember
Jimmy Carter: Walter Russell Mead Does My Presidency a Disservice
Deborah Blum: How the Government Poisoned People During Prohibition
Paul Kengor: Mikhail Gorbachev vs. the Evil Empire
Source: Hillsboro Times-Gazette (OH) (3-11-10)
[Dr. Paul Kengor is professor of political science and executive director of The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College.]
The media jumps at anniversaries of historical figures and events. For those of us who write about history, we, too, seize these opportunities to teach history, especially history Americans should know.
Here's one such case: Can you believe it has been 25 years since Mikhail Gorbachev came to power? Gorbachev seized the reins of the Soviet state on March 11, 1985. As an illustration of how much the world has changed since -in part because of Gorbachev - I was reminded of this anniversary by a journalist from no less than Pravda; that is, the Slovak version of Pravda....
This brings me to Gorbachev. Liberals in the West woefully exaggerated Gorbachev's positions and role in ending the Cold War. Their misunderstandings and misrepresentations were based on a fatal combination of wishful thinking, partisan politics, and blind adherence to ideology - an irrepressible desire to credit Gorbachev at the expense of Ronald Reagan....
The most important thing that liberals got wrong-even as Gorbachev himself reiterated it a thousand times-was their failure to understand that Gorbachev's first priority, from the outset, had been to save and sustain the USSR, not to mention the entirety of the Soviet Bloc in Eastern Europe, to the point where he even initially opposed taking down the Berlin Wall. This fact is undeniable, as Gorbachev emphasized in his best-selling 1987 book Perestroika. To this day, he calls the breakup of the USSR his greatest regret. (See, for instance, "Soviet Union 'should have been preserved,'" interview with Mikhail Gorbachev, USA Today, April 6, 2006.)
At the same time, however, Gorbachev also sought to create a peaceful USSR. He vigorously opposed totalitarianism. To get there-and here's where conservatives need adjustments in their understanding-Gorbachev took several monumental steps that, unwittingly, led to the implosion of the USSR and the Soviet Bloc. These ranged from freedom of press, speech, assembly, and religion, to the introduction of political pluralism (democracy) by formally ending the [Communist Party of the Soviet Union's] constitutional monopoly on power. These were wonderful feats....
Sure, the Gorbachev story is complicated, a mix of the intended and unintended. Ultimately, however, it has a happy ending. To mark the birth of Mikhail Gorbachev's ascension to power is to also mark the death of Stalin's Evil Empire. And that's a moment worth celebrating.
Michael Ruse: Philosophers Rip Darwin, But They're Ignorant of Science
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (3-7-10)
[Michael Ruse directs the program in the history and philosophy of science at Florida State University. His latest book, Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science, was just published by Cambridge University Press. He contributes to The Chronicle Review's blog, Brainstorm.]
Last year was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The anniversary was marked by conferences the world over. I will not tell you how many I attended; ecologically sensitive readers of The Chronicle might start whining about carbon footprints and that sort of thing. Let me just say that I found myself going no fewer than three times through the Quad City International Airport, in Moline, Ill. Moline!
I mention this as background to the publication of a new book by Jerry A. Fodor, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University, and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, a professor of cognitive science at the University of Arizona. The title of the book, What Darwin Got Wrong (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), tells you their opinion of the old English naturalist and of his theory of evolution through natural selection. If Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini were an isolated case, one could dismiss their book with a grimace (if you were a biologist), or welcome them with a cheer (if you were a creationist). But in the philosophical community, there is an increasingly vocal cadre of eminent philosophers harboring doubts about Darwin. To understand their critique, we must first put the clock back a year, to the beginning of the celebrations.
The anniversary conferences usually had a smattering of professional Darwin types like me—I am a historian and philosopher of science specializing in evolutionary theory—but the bulk of the presenters and attendees were evolutionary biologists. For two reasons, the atmosphere was universally positive. First, scientists deeply respect Darwin and his achievements. These people are evolutionists—they take the past seriously. Second, there was not a person at these conferences who was not excited about the science today. Evolutionary biology is on a roll, and that was a cause for celebration—and frenetic presentations that jammed in as much new science as possible. Moreover, to a person, the scientists saw that the first point led smoothly into the second. Everyone appreciates the tools of Darwinism, above all the mechanism of natural selection. But great science doesn't stand still. It picks up and carries ideas and findings way beyond the wildest hopes of its founders. Evolutionary biology today is deeply Darwinian, but it has outpaced the Origin in ways that its author could never have imagined. To use a hackneyed phrase, Darwin gave biology a paradigm, and biologists have been expanding it ever since....
Exciting times, which makes it all the more remarkable to hear voices from within the mainstream of philosophy questioning the veracity of evolutionary theory. I'll mention three. First there is Alvin Plantinga. Although he teaches at the University of Notre Dame, a Roman Catholic institution, Plantinga is North America's most distinguished Protestant philosopher of religion. A deeply sincere Calvinist, he has never hesitated to argue for his faith and has done groundbreaking work on questions of knowledge and belief. Even if you disagree with his conclusions, you can admire his skill and learn from his arguments. Plantinga, however, has long harbored a distrust, even an ardent dislike, of evolutionary theorizing in general and of Darwinian thinking in particular. In an essay published in 1999, he wrote, "Consider the role played by evolutionary theory in our intellectual world. Evolution is a modern idol of the tribe; it is a shibboleth distinguishing the ignorant fundamentalist goats from the informed and scientifically acquiescent sheep. Doubts about it may lose you your job. It is loudly declared to be absolutely certain, as certain as that the earth rotates on its axis and revolves around the sun—when it is no such thing at all."...
Much more surprising is the position of the New York University philosopher Thomas Nagel, who has established himself right at the top of the field thanks to a long series of dazzling essays on topics as diverse as the thinking apparatus of a bat and the nature of sexual perversion. Although he states firmly that he does not believe in a deity, he has now come out against Darwinism. If Nagel is not a supporter of intelligent design, one wonders why he says what he does. He has endorsed a book by Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperOne, 2009), naming it one of the top books of 2009 in the Times Literary Supplement....
Jerry Fodor, no less distinguished than Nagel and Plantinga, is well known for his claim that the mind is composed of separately functioning modules. And he, too, has taken to criticizing Darwinian theory, first in an article in the London Review of Books and now in What Darwin Got Wrong. Fodor finds something deeply flawed in contemporary evolutionary thinking: "An appreciable number of perfectly reasonable biologists are coming to think that the theory of natural selection can no longer be taken for granted. This is, so far, mostly straws in the wind; but it's not out of the question that a scientific revolution—no less than a major revision of evolutionary theory—is in the offing."...
I often joke, as one who spends a lot of time fighting creationists, that when one of them says something silly, that means more work for me: bread on the table. When one of them says something really silly, there is strawberry jam, too. In 2005, after a trial in Dover, Pa., a federal judge ruled that intelligent design should not be taught in schools. Pat Robertson's response—"God is tolerant and loving, but we can't keep sticking our finger in his eye forever. If they have future problems in Dover, I recommend they call on Charles Darwin. Maybe he can help them"—kept me and my family well fed for weeks.
Now those of us who love Darwin and his theory have got the philosophers to deal with, too. I see steak in my future. But in truth, I am not really happy. I might even turn vegetarian if I could persuade my fellow philosophers to start taking science seriously. Could they possibly entertain the idea that being at one with the living world does not make us any less worthy as human beings? After the Origin was published, the wife of the Bishop of Worcester supposedly reacted: "Descended from monkeys? Let us hope that it is not true. But if it is true, let us hope that it not become widely known."
A century and a half later, the time has come to shout the truth from the rooftops....
Jonathan Tobin: Smearing Theodore Roosevelt
Source: Commentary Magazine (3-1-10)
[Jonathan Tobin is executive editor of Commentary.]
The cultural vilification of the politicians and officials who launched the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq has not satisfied those intellectuals and activists who view American history as a continuum of racism, imperialism, and aggression. The authors of two new books have now extended the hunt for the spiritual antecedents of the George W. Bush administration. Their prey is an unlikely villain: Theodore Roosevelt.
For Newsweek’s Evan Thomas, author of The War Lovers, and James Bradley, who has just published The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War,1 Roosevelt is the source of much of what ails America today. Thomas offers an account of this nation’s drift to war against Spain in 1898 in which TR (as he was known in his day) is the central figure in a movement driven more by aristocratic male insecurity than national priorities. The author believes that this suggests “eerie” parallels with the invasion of Iraq. In his book, Bradley blames TR for not only inspiring neoconservatives to wage war and torture innocents but also for the fact that the United States was attacked by Japan in 1941, 22 years after Roosevelt’s death.
The stock of every historical personage rises and falls over time. Even George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were subjected to abuse from their critics before assuming their status as secular saints in America’s civic religion. Theodore Roosevelt’s seven and half years in the White House, from the middle of 1901 through 1909, were not marked by the sort of major conflicts that tested those other men. But he has always seemed to elude the grasp of revisionists. The enduring image of this energetic, eclectic scholar, soldier, naturalist, and politician has always appealed to a broad political cross-section of Americans. Staggeringly popular in his own day, the legend of the “Rough Rider” president has persisted in the nine decades since his death. Every survey of scholars or the general public has placed him among the first rank of America’s chief executives. Indeed, in a 1982 poll of historians in which the participants were asked to identify themselves as either liberals or conservatives, both ranked Theodore Roosevelt the fifth-greatest president, after Lincoln, Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, and Thomas Jefferson....
The steady stream of admiring biographies intended for popular audiences published in recent decades, a genre that has included books by David McCullough, Edmund Morris, H.R. Brands, Kathleen Dalton, and Douglas Brinkley to name just a few, testifies to TR’s ideologically diverse appeal. But the question now is whether smears of Roosevelt’s character rooted in the politics of our own day will finally topple him from his pedestal, as the Theodore Roosevelt found in both The War Lovers and The Imperial Cruise is the personification of vainglorious American hubris, a showy fraud whose machinations cost untold lives and constitute a blot on the honor of his country....
Roosevelt was a man with flaws as well as virtues, but what makes him truly objectionable to his new critics is not so much his politics as his personality. Roosevelt’s romantic sensibility is the quality both Thomas and Bradley find inscrutable. His desire to lead the vigorous life, to stand up for right against wrong, and to follow the flag to war are not explained but dismissed as a form of psychiatric disorder. And yet the legacy that has so endeared Theodore Roosevelt to successive generations is not so much his progressivism, enthusiasm for global American power, or even his environmentalism. It is, instead, based on an understanding that the spirit of adventure, service, sacrifice, and yes, valor that Theodore Roosevelt exemplified is one they find uniquely admirable regardless of the politics of his day or our own. Far from discrediting him, these virtues are precisely the ones that have earned him his enduring popularity. One suspects that as long as Americans admire courage, this will remain the case.
Diego Gambetta: The Legacy of the Red Army Faction
Source: The Nation (3-4-10)
[Diego Gambetta is a professor of sociology at Oxford University and the author, most recently, of Codes of the Underworld.]
On April 20, 1998, Reuters in Cologne received a letter mailed from Chemnitz, near the border between Germany and the Czech Republic. It read, in part: "Nearly 28 years ago, on May 14, 1970, the RAF was born in a liberation action. Today we end this project. The urban guerrilla battle of the RAF is now history." A bizarre coincidence: April 20, 1998, was the 109th anniversary of Adolf Hitler's birth.
The typewritten letter was anonymous and eight pages long--conciseness seldom being a virtue of violent extremists, even in the throes of dissolution. It was authenticated by the police on the basis of its style and paper. (Both had been used in previous communiqués by the group.) It also bore the group's emblem, a five-pointed star, with "RAF" (Rote Armee Fraktion, or "Red Army Faction") inscribed over a drawing of a Heckler & Koch submachine gun, a German-made weapon used by the military of the very state against which the RAF had declared war. The group had also been dubbed the Baader-Meinhof Gang by the media, after two of its main protagonists, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof. (The press spotlighted Meinhof because she was a well-known journalist before she went underground.) As Stefan Aust explains in Baader-Meinhof, the Gang had intended to adorn its emblem with the image of a Kalashnikov, the Russian assault rifle and symbol of liberation movements around the world. Instead, it made a mistake that stuck....
In 1968, in the group's prehistory, Baader and Ensslin firebombed two department stores. From then to 1991, the RAF robbed banks; bombed police stations, army barracks and embassies; took hostages; and killed people. Some of its victims were mistakes or "collateral damage," others the result of unplanned shootouts with police. Many of its attacks were "endogenously" generated--that is, aimed at freeing jailed comrades. But there were also a number of purely politically motivated attacks and, most shocking of all, targeted assassinations of industrialists, administrators and judges....
At the time of this writing, three RAF members are still on the run. Six died in some violent episode before being arrested, and sixty-six have been caught and sentenced to jail over the years. Among the latter, six died of natural causes and seven committed suicide. Fifty-one have been released. Only Klump and Hogefeld remain behind bars. Nineteen members are dead, a rate of mortality that, considering their line of work, is not particularly high for their age group.
Most of those freed now lead quiet lives far from media scrutiny. Not Horst Mahler, whose claim to infamy has taken a surreal turn. A lawyer and member of the original Baader-Meinhof Gang, he later recanted terrorism and was released from jail early, in 1980. He went on to join the NDP, a neo-Nazi party. In February 2009--exactly sixty years after his father, "a fanatical Nazi and anti-Semite, had shot himself," Aust notes--Mahler, who is now 74, was sentenced to six years in jail for posting videos on the Internet denying the Holocaust and for distributing CDs promoting anti-Semitic hatred....
Robert Fisk: Living Proof of the Armenian Genocide
Source: Independent (UK) (3-9-10)
[Robert Fisk is a columnist at the Independent.]
It's only a small grave, a rectangle of cheap concrete marking it out, blessed by a flourish of wild yellow lilies. Inside are the powdered bones and skulls and bits of femur of up to 300 children, Armenian orphans of the great 1915 genocide who died of cholera and starvation as the Turkish authorities tried to "Turkify" them in a converted Catholic college high above Beirut. But for once, it is the almost unknown story of the surviving 1,200 children – between three and 15 years old – who lived in the crowded dormitory of this ironically beautiful cut-stone school that proves that the Turks did indeed commit genocide against the Armenians in 1915.
Barack Obama and his pliant Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton – who are now campaigning so pitifully to prevent the US Congress acknowledging that the Ottoman Turkish massacre of 1.5 million Armenians was a genocide – should come here to this Lebanese hilltop village and hang their heads in shame. For this is a tragic, appalling tale of brutality against small and defenceless children whose families had already been murdered by Turkish forces at the height of the First World War, some of whom were to recall how they were forced to grind up and eat the skeletons of their dead fellow child orphans in order to survive starvation.
Jemal Pasha, one of the architects of the 1915 genocide, and – alas – Turkey's first feminist, Halide Edip Adivar, helped to run this orphanage of terror in which Armenian children were systematically deprived of their Armenian identity and given new Turkish names, forced to become Muslims and beaten savagely if they were heard to speak Armenian. The Antoura Lazarist college priests have recorded how its original Lazarist teachers were expelled by the Turks and how Jemal Pasha presented himself at the front door with his German bodyguard after a muezzin began calling for Muslim prayers once the statue of the Virgin Mary had been taken from the belfry.
Hitherto, the argument that Armenians suffered a genocide has rested on the deliberate nature of the slaughter. But Article II of the 1951 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide specifically states that the definition of genocide – "to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group" – includes "forcibly transferring children of the group to another group". This is exactly what the Turks did in Lebanon. Photographs still exist of hundreds of near-naked Armenian children performing physical exercises in the college grounds. One even shows Jemal Pasha standing on the steps in 1916, next to the young and beautiful Halide Adivar who – after some reluctance – agreed to run the orphanage.
Before he died in 1989, Karnig Panian – who was six years old when he arrived at Antoura in 1916 – recorded in Armenian how his own name was changed and how he was given a number, 551, as his identity. "At every sunset in the presence of over 1,000 orphans, when the Turkish flag was lowered, 'Long Live General Pasha!' was recited. That was the first part of the ceremony. Then it was time for punishment for the wrongdoers of the day. They beat us with the falakha [a rod used to beat the soles of the feet], and the top-rank punishment was for speaking Armenian."
Panian described how, after cruel treatment or through physical weakness, many children died. They were buried behind the old college chapel. "At night, the jackals and wild dogs would dig them up and throw their bones here and there ... at night, kids would run out to the nearby forest to get apples or any fruits they could find – and their feet would hit bones. They would take these bones back to their rooms and secretly grind them to make soup, or mix them with grain so they could eat them as there was not enough food at the orphanage. They were eating the bones of their dead friends."
Using college records, Emile Joppin, the head priest at the Lazarite Antoura college, wrote in the school's magazine in 1947 that "the Armenian orphans were Islamicised, circumcised and given new Arab or Turkish names. Their new names always kept the initials of the names in which they were baptised. Thus Haroutioun Nadjarian was given the name Hamed Nazih, Boghos Merdanian became Bekir Mohamed, to Sarkis Safarian was given the name Safouad Sulieman."
Lebanese-born Armenian-American electrical engineer Missak Kelechian researches Armenian history as a hobby and hunted down a privately printed and very rare 1918 report by an American Red Cross officer, Major Stephen Trowbridge, who arrived at the Antoura college after its liberation by British and French troops and who spoke to the surviving orphans. His much earlier account entirely supports that of Father Joppin's 1949 research.
"Every vestige, and as far as possible every memory, of the children's Armenian or Kurdish origin was to be done away with. Turkish names were assigned and the children were compelled to undergo the rites prescribed by Islamic law and tradition ... Not a word of Armenian or Kurdish was allowed. The teachers and overseers were carefully trained to impress Turkish ideas and customs upon the lives of the children and to catechize [sic] them regularly on ... the prestige of the Turkish race."
Halide Adivar, later to be lauded by The New York Times as "the Turkish Joan of Arc" – a description that Armenians obviously questioned – was born in Constantinople in 1884 and attended an American college in the Ottoman capital. She was twice married and wrote nine novels – even Trowbridge was to admit that she was "a lady of remarkable literary ability" – and served as a woman officer in Mustafa Ataturk's Turkish army of liberation after the First World War. She later lived in both Britain and France...
David Elstein: Daniel Goldhagen Recycles Fantasy on Kenya's Mau Mau Uprising
Source: openDemocracy (3-4-10)
[David Elstein is currently Chairman of openDemocracy. He is also Chairman of DCD Media, Screen Digest, Luther Pendragon, and the Broadcasting Policy Group.]
A scholar who makes large claims must expect to be held to an exacting test of accuracy. If it is failed, the integrity of the work is called into question. In this respect, Daniel Goldhagen’s treatment of events in colonial Kenya in the 1950s - which takes up thirty pages of his new book Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (Little, Brown, 2009) - deserves careful scrutiny.
Daniel Goldhagen made a name for himself with Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (Random House, 1997) in which he argued that millions of Germans - not just a hard core of evil Nazis - were directly involved in the extermination of Jews during the second world war. Worse Than War presents an overview of various historical and contemporary acts of “elimination”, whilst attempting to construct a way to prevent further “eliminationist” outbreaks (including genocide) in the future...
During the state of emergency in Kenya in 1952-60, British forces battled to suppress a violent uprising by radicals whose support-base lay among the country’s largest single ethnic grouping, the Kikuyu. The radical movement, which came to be known as “Mau Mau”, cemented support amongst its followers with bloodthirsty oaths and rituals. Daniel Goldhagen’s description of what happened in this period is emphatic. He refers, inter alia, to:
“Mass murder”; “mass slaughter”; “butchered victims”; “1.5 million Kikuyu incarcerated”; “tens of thousands killed (estimates range from 50,000 to 300,000)”; “perhaps a half million Kikuyu” driven into an “extensive and murderous camp system”; one million “restricted to deadly barbed-wire villages” where “the death tolls were enormous”; “worked to death”; “beaten to death”; “most of the Kikuyu dead resulted from British starvation policies”.
Goldhagen concludes his litany of British atrocities by saying they were “all, according to the British, in response to the putative threat and unsurpassable savagery of the Kikuyu liberation movement known as the Mau Mau. How many whites did the bestial Mau Mau kill? Thirty two?”...
In the first place, when Goldhagen contrasts what he believes to be 300,000 Kikuyu dead with thirty-two white settlers murdered during the conflict, there is a missed connection. For the emergency was declared not in response to the killing of whites but after a series of fatal attacks on Kikuyu leaders who supported British rule - a reminder in turn that the Mau Mau uprising was as much a civil war within the Kikuyu as it was a revolt against British rule and British land policy in Kenya. Nearly all of the 1,800 known civilian victims of Mau Mau were Kikuyu, killed for refusing to take oaths, or in settlement of old scores, or for staying loyal to Britain (see Daniel Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization [Cambridge University Press, 2009])....
In any case the Kikuyu, although the largest ethnic group in Kenya, represented only 20% of the country’s African population (it is not clear whether Goldhagen is aware of this). Few non-Kikuyu joined Mau Mau, and there is scant evidence that in Goldhagen’s own terms the colonial power targeted non-Kikuyu ethnic groups for “elimination”....
More generally, there are grave doubts over Goldhagen’s principal source for his account of Kenyan “genocide”: namely, Caroline Elkins’s book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (Henry Holt, 2005).
Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (as the book was called in the United Kingdom) may have been written by a Harvard University professor and won a Pulitzer prize; but it was widely criticised even by sympathetic reviewers for its shrill comparisons between British policy in Kenya and the Nazi holocaust (see, for example, Neal Ascherson, “The Breaking of the Mau Mau” [New York Review of Books, 7 April 2005]). Some academic reviewers were more dismissive. Susan Carruthers of Rutgers University, who noted that Elkins had managed to confuse the Hutu and the Tutsi in Rwanda, said: “she proves the least reliable guide to history: this was not genocide - history is not well served by its sloppy invocation”....
There is no doubt that many of the white settlers who joined in the military campaign to suppress the Mau Mau rebellion were deeply unpleasant and malevolent racists. The accounts of torture and murder of captured suspects – often given boastfully by the perpetrators themselves - are gruesome and almost certainly true. Some of those responsible were tried, convicted and imprisoned for their misdeeds, but the atmosphere of menace and hysteria that Mau Mau generated meant that much brutality and violence was either inflicted or condoned by British soldiers as well as their auxiliaries....
So where was the genocide?...
If Daniel Goldhagen had removed all reference to Kenya in Worse Than War, it would not in any way have affected his broad thesis. In retaining the section on Kenya, he exposes himself to the charge that he is the kind of scholar who is either unaware of the facts or prefers to exclude those which do not fit his thesis. Either way, he has done himself - and history - no favours.
Joan Waugh: Ulysses S. Grant Earned His $50 Bill
Source: LA Times (3-8-10)
[Joan Waugh is a professor of history at UCLA and the author of "U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth."]
Shame on the 14 Republican congressmen who last week proposed substituting Ronald Reagan for Ulysses S. Grant on the $50 bill. Their action suggests they need a history lesson about the Northern general who won the Civil War and went on to lead the country.
Having enjoyed brief acclaim during the Mexican-American War, the onetime farmer was toiling in obscurity when he answered President Lincoln's call for volunteers in 1861. He rapidly won fame in the Western theater, scoring decisive and morale-raising victories at Shiloh, Vicksburg and Chattanooga. When Lincoln tapped him in early 1864 to be the leading general, Grant directed victories that vindicated his strategic vision and guaranteed his president's reelection....
Aided by newly enfranchised Southern blacks in states reconstructed by Congress, Grant swept to victory with his famous campaign slogan, "Let us have peace." As president, he worked tirelessly over two terms to bring about Lincoln's vision of a unified America. He embraced emancipation, working to bring rights to African Americans that even went beyond those envisioned by Lincoln....
Although Grant commanded immense prestige at the time of his death in 1885, a campaign by historians sympathetic to the South whittled away at his reputation beginning in the late 19th century, wrongly portraying him as a drunk, a general who recklessly sent his soldiers into danger and a corrupt, incompetent president. All those images are distorted, reflecting a larger historical amnesia afflicting many citizens. The GOP should defend the former leader rather than trying to oust him from the $50 bill.
There was a time when Republicans did celebrate Grant. In a speech delivered in 1900, for example, Theodore Roosevelt maintained that among the past presidents, the trio emerging as the "mightiest among the mighty [were] the three great figures of Washington, Lincoln and Grant." Roosevelt's deeply appreciative comments reflected the widespread respect of his generation for Grant, and for good reason....
Rather than shunting Grant aside, Republicans should not only unite to keep him on the $50 bill but work to rekindle awareness of his stellar legacy.
Melanie Bayley: Alice in Wonderland is a Parody of Nineteenth Century Math
Source: NYT (3-6-10)
[Melanie Bayley is a doctoral candidate in English literature at Oxford.]
SINCE “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” was published, in 1865, scholars have noted how its characters are based on real people in the life of its author, Charles Dodgson, who wrote under the name Lewis Carroll. Alice is Alice Pleasance Liddell, the daughter of an Oxford dean; the Lory and Eaglet are Alice’s sisters Lorina and Edith; Dodgson himself, a stutterer, is the Dodo (“Do-Do-Dodgson”)....
Yet Dodgson most likely had real models for the strange happenings in Wonderland, too. He was a tutor in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, and Alice’s search for a beautiful garden can be neatly interpreted as a mishmash of satire directed at the advances taking place in Dodgson’s field.
In the mid-19th century, mathematics was rapidly blossoming into what it is today: a finely honed language for describing the conceptual relations between things. Dodgson found the radical new math illogical and lacking in intellectual rigor. In “Alice,” he attacked some of the new ideas as nonsense — using a technique familiar from Euclid’s proofs, reductio ad absurdum, where the validity of an idea is tested by taking its premises to their logical extreme.
Early in the story, for instance, Alice’s exchange with the Caterpillar parodies the first purely symbolic system of algebra, proposed in the mid-19th century by Augustus De Morgan, a London math professor. De Morgan had proposed a more modern approach to algebra, which held that any procedure was valid as long as it followed an internal logic. This allowed for results like the square root of a negative number, which even De Morgan himself called “unintelligible” and “absurd” (because all numbers when squared give positive results)....
In Dodgson’s day, intellectuals still understood “temper” to mean the proportions in which qualities were mixed — as in “tempered steel” — so the Caterpillar is telling Alice not to avoid getting angry but to stay in proportion, even if she can’t “keep the same size for 10 minutes together!” Proportion, rather than absolute length, was what mattered in Alice’s above-ground world of Euclidean geometry....
The Cheshire Cat provides the voice of traditional geometric logic — say where you want to go if you want to find out how to get there, he tells Alice after she’s let the pig run off into the wood. He points Alice toward the Mad Hatter and the March Hare. “Visit either you like,” he says, “they’re both mad.”...
How do we know for sure that “Alice” was making fun of the new math? The author never explained the symbolism in his story. But Dodgson rarely wrote amusing nonsense for children: his best humor was directed at adults. In addition to the “Alice” stories, he produced two hilarious pamphlets for colleagues, both in the style of mathematical papers, ridiculing life at Oxford.
Without math, “Alice” might have been more like Dodgson’s later book, “Sylvie and Bruno” — a dull and sentimental fairy tale. Math gave “Alice” a darker side, and made it the kind of puzzle that could entertain people of every age, for centuries.
Steven F. Hayward: Would Reagan Vote for Sarah Palin?
[Steven F. Hayward is the F.K. Weyerhaeuser fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of "The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counter-Revolution, 1980-1989." His most recent Outlook essay was "Is Conservatism Brain-Dead?" on Oct. 4. He will be online on to chat with readers on Monday, March 8, at 11 a.m. Submit your questions and comments before or during the discussion.]
Sarah Palin invokes him. Mitt Romney glorifies him. The "tea party" movement hopes to recapture him. And the Republican Party still can't get over him.
Six years after his death, and almost a century since his birth, conservatives are more transfixed than ever by Ronald Reagan, so much so that I fully expect a Gipper anxiety disorder to appear in the next edition of the psychiatrists' diagnostic manual.
"What would Reagan Do?" is a leading motto for the right. You can get the slogan -- or its WWRD acronym -- on a bumper sticker, a T-shirt, a coffee mug, a thong. There's even an iReagan app for your phone. And having renamed Washington National Airport for Reagan in the 1990s, last week congressional Republicans started agitating to have the Gipper replace poor Ulysses S. Grant on the $50 bill....
Reagan was the most popular and successful Republican president of the past century, so it makes sense that he would be the shining model for conservatives, just as FDR has been the gold standard for liberals. (No small irony, since Reagan voted for FDR four times and modeled his statecraft after the Democrat's.) But as the current occupant of the White House could warn, measuring yourself against historical icons is a recipe for disappointment. These days, President Obama is more likely to draw comparisons to Jimmy Carter than to Lincoln or FDR....
You can't assume the Reagan mantle simply by repeating his name ad nauseum or by bickering with primary opponents over who is more like him. (Romney and Huckabee duked it out in the 2008 campaign, engaging in a Reaganer-than-thou exchange memorable for its inanity -- lots of good it did them.) That said, there are two largely unrecognized elements of Reagan's statecraft that his imitators should recognize and study if they truly want to emulate him.
The first is the deliberate but unseen crafting of Reagan's public profile. As we have come to learn with the opening over the past decade of Reagan's personal papers, his public style was a product of enormous discipline, hard work and calculation. Long before Palin was ridiculed for writing reminders on her hand, Reagan was derided as the 3-by-5 note card candidate (actually, he used 4-by-6 cards) -- but his cards were his means of staying succinctly on point and delivering his message in a compelling way. Reagan's speeches, including his State of the Union addresses, were typically much shorter than average. He knew from show business the power of leaving your audience wanting more. Is there a politician today who you wish gave longer speeches?...
Conservative columnist George Will complained in 1985 that Reagan "is painfully fond of the least conservative sentiment conceivable, a statement from an anti-conservative, Thomas Paine: 'We have it in our power to begin the world over again.' " Will objected: "Any time, any place, that is nonsense." Will's voice is that of traditional, Edmund Burke-style conservatism, but that was not the idiom of Reagan; his belief in America's dynamism was at the core of his optimism, and that dynamism can have profoundly un-conservative effects....
This populist undercurrent is why I am certain that Reagan would have been an enthusiastic supporter of the tea party movement. While the tea partiers confuse the media and annoy the establishments of both political parties, Reagan would have seen them as reviving the embers of what he called the "prairie fire" of populist resistance against centralized big government -- resistance that helped touch off the tax revolt of the 1970s. That movement was often dismissed as a tantrum, but when The Washington Post called California's 1978 antitax Proposition 13 "a skirmish," Reagan replied that if so, then the Chicago fire was a backyard barbecue....
Wittingly or not, Palin hit the nail on the head in her keynote address at the Tea Party Convention last month: "Let us not get bogged down in the small squabbles; let us get caught up in the big ideas. To do so would be a fitting tribute to Ronald Reagan." Meaningful limits on the size of government is one such idea, and it offers a substantive opening for Palin and other would-be heirs to Reagan. To pull it off, one thing above all is required: Do your homework. Reagan did his.
Gabriel Partos: Karadzic reawakens ghosts of the past
Source: BBC (3-3-10)
[Gabriel Partos is a Balkans analyst for the Economist Intelligence Unit.]
In delivering the opening statement of his defence Radovan Karadzic set out to portray the Bosnian war as one of self-defence by the Bosnian Serbs against the Muslims who, according to him, were bent on dominating the country.
The wartime Bosnian Serb leader, who is facing 11 charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, elaborated on his controversial version of recent Balkan history by challenging the veracity of many widely-accepted interpretations of what happened during the Bosnian conflict.
Mr Karadzic called the massacre of nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995 a "myth".
He denied that the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, was under siege during the war.
He described the detention camps for Muslims and Croats in north-western Bosnia as "collection centres" which the inmates were free to leave.
And he argued that the authorities of the self-proclaimed Bosnian Serb republic had no plans for the mass expulsions of non-Serbs from the territories under their control.
There was little, if anything, that was new in Mr Karadzic's portrayal of events: by and large, it was a restatement of the case made by the Bosnian Serb leadership during the war, when it had extensive support among Serbs in Bosnia and elsewhere.
If there was a novel aspect to Mr Karadzic's interpretation of history, it was in the way that he ignored the verdicts of numerous trials held before the ICTY in The Hague and several national courts, including the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had established, beyond reasonable doubt, that these atrocities had taken place, as stated in the indictments.
The massacre at Srebrenica - generally regarded as the worst single atrocity committed in Europe since World War ll - has over the years been documented in the minutest detail...
Ramzy Baroud: Challenging History: Why the Oppressed Must Tell Their Own Story
Source: Foreign Policy Journal (2-27-10)
[Ramzy Baroud is an internationally-syndicated columnist and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is "My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story" (Pluto Press, London), now available on Amazon.com.]
When American historian Howard Zinn passed away recently, he left behind a legacy that redefined our relationship to history altogether.
Professor Zinn dared to challenge the way history was told and written. In fact he went as far as to defy the conventional construction of historical discourses through the pen of victor or of elites who earned the right of narration though their might, power and affluence.
This kind of history might be considered accurate insofar as it reflects a self-seeking and self-righteous interpretation of the world by a very small number of people. But it is also highly inaccurate when taking into account the vast majority of peoples everywhere.
The oppressor is the one who often articulates his relationship to the oppressed, the colonialist to the colonized, and the slave-master to the slave. The readings of such relationships are fairly predictable.
Even valiant histories that most of us embrace and welcome, such as those celebrating the legacy of human rights, equality and freedom left behind by Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Nelson Mandela still tend to be selective at times. Martin Luther King’s vision might have prevailed, but some tend to limit their admiration to his ‘I have a dream’ speech. The civil rights hero was an ardent anti-war champion as well, but that is often relegated as non-essential history. Malcolm X is often dismissed altogether, despite the fact that his self-assertive words have reached the hearts and minds of millions of black people throughout the United States, and many more millions around the world. His speech was in fact so radical that it could not be ‘sanitized’ or reinterpreted in any controllable way. Mandela, the freedom fighter, is celebrated with endless accolades by the very foes that branded him a terrorist. Of course, his insistence on his people’s rights to armed struggle is not to be discussed. It is too flammable a subject to even mention at a time when anyone who dares wield a gun against the self-designated champions of ‘democracy’ gets automatically classified a terrorist.
Therefore, Zinn’s peoples’ histories of the United States and of the world have represented a milestone in historical narration....
History cannot be classified by good vs. bad, heroes vs. villains, moderates vs. extremists. No matter how wicked, bloody or despicable, history also tends to follow rational patterns, predictable courses. By understanding the rationale behind historical dialectics, one can achieve more than a simple understanding of what took place in the past; it also becomes possible to chart fairly reasonable understanding of what lies ahead.
Perhaps one of the worse aspects of today’s detached and alienating media is its production of history – and thus characterization of the present – as based on simple terminology. This gives the illusion of being informative, but actually manages to contribute very little to our understanding of the world at large....
Barnabe F. Geisweiller: Vestiges of War: How We Choose to Remember
Source: Foreign Policy Journal (3-1-10)
[Barnabe F. Geisweiller, a Canadian, is a graduate student at Columbia University's School of Journalism. More of his work can be found at www.barnabeg.com.]
As a child my grandmother took me to the coast of Normandy so I could learn about the Second World War and see for myself the landscape and bunkers fought over at the cost of so many lives. Across the world, war is memorialized. Victories are celebrated and defeats bitterly remembered, and often even the most humiliating of losses are distorted into triumphs with tales of heroism and resistance in the face of pure tyranny.
We erect monuments and recite poetry—In Flanders fields the poppies blow, between the crosses row on row—in memory of wars waged and to souls lost. Often, in our efforts to pay tribute and to never forget, we sanitize the infamy of warfare into something aesthetically sterile but incredibly moving nonetheless. Those who have laid eyes upon the identical rows of white crosses that populate the American Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer cannot help but be stirred by their sheer number. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington D.C. is equally poignant because of its seemingly endless list of names.
In our concerted effort to remember we often also try to absolve ourselves of our wrongdoings. Those accused of committing massacres point to others who have equaled or outdone their own. Those whose crimes are too monumental for the national psyche to absorb without precipitating an identity crisis often choose not to recall at all and to move on. Thus no genocide was committed against the Armenians at the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the massacres at the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila were no worse than others committed during Lebanon’s protracted civil war....
In Syria, during the war of 1967, the town of Quneitra, situated in the Golan Heights, was captured by the Israeli army. They occupied the city for six years until it was briefly recaptured during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The Israelis repulsed the Syrians in a counteroffensive and held onto it until 1974 when a disengagement agreement was signed. However, before withdrawing, in what amounted to a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the Israelis systematically stripped the town of any valuable goods or materials which were sold to Israeli contractors. Bulldozers and tractors subsequently went to work. Every building, shop, bank, restaurant and the town’s hospital was destroyed....
How we are so alike! We cannot bear our dead to remain nameless or the pain of loved ones lost in vain. We cannot accept defeat so death, through a desperate metamorphic process, becomes righteous. We attempt to make of war a dignified affair. We swear vengeance in the face of injustice but justify injustice if done on to others by our own hands. And it is a charade we never tire of....
Gideon Rachman: How Reagan ruined conservatism
Source: Financial Times (UK) (3-1-10)
[Gideon Rachman is the FT’s chief foreign affairs columnist.]
Battling my way through Sarah Palin’s book, Going Rogue, last weekend, I began to wonder how American conservatism had come to this. Ms Palin’s book is smug, lightweight, nationalistic, entirely free of original ideas. How has this woman become the darling of the American right? How has she become so popular that some bookmakers make her the favourite to win the Republican party nomination in 2012?
And then I realised – the rot set in with Ronald Reagan.
This might seem an odd conclusion, since President Reagan is a conservative hero who won two presidential elections. But the ideas that are now known as “Reaganism” are, in fact, profoundly subversive of some of the most important conservative values. Traditional conservatives disdain populism and respect knowledge. They believe in balancing the government’s books. And they are pragmatists who are suspicious of ideology. Reagan debased all these ideas – and modern American conservatism is still suffering the consequences.
The most damaging idea propagated by the Reagan myth is the cult of the idiot-savant (the wise fool). You can see it in the very first line of Dinesh D’Souza’s admiring biography of Reagan, which proclaims: “Sometimes it really helps to be a dummy.” Mr D’Souza recounts numerous stories in which intellectuals – even conservative intellectuals – disdained Reagan. They scorned his tendency to spend cabinet meetings sorting jelly beans into different colours, and his taste for flaky anecdotes. But, Mr D’Souza concludes, the “dummy” was right and the pointy-heads were wrong.
A dangerous chain of reasoning flows from this popular version of history. Reagan was apparently stupid and often startlingly ignorant – but he was vindicated by history. Therefore, goes the theory, ignorance and stupidity are good signs. They show that a politician is in tune with the deeper wisdom of the people. Once you start thinking like that, it is but a short step to Sarah Palin.
If it is ignorance you are after, then Ms Palin is definitely your woman. Game Change, a recent book on the 2008 presidential election campaign, recounts how desperate advisers to the McCain-Palin campaign decided that they had to give her a crash-course in modern history, before the vice-presidential debate with Joe Biden.
“They sat Palin down at a table in the suite, spread out a map of the world, and proceeded to give her a potted history of foreign policy. They started with the Spanish civil war, then moved on to world war one, world war two, the cold war. When the teachers suggested breaking for lunch or dinner, the student resisted. ‘No, no, no, let’s keep going,’ Ms Palin said. ‘This is awesome’.”
The history of the 20th century? I suppose it is pretty awesome.
In fact, Ms Palin is much, much less qualified to be president than Reagan ever was. She is Ronald Reagan lite – and Reagan was pretty lite to begin with. But he had, at least, been governor of California, not Alaska, and had read widely.
The damage Reaganism did to conservatism extends well beyond the Palin effect. The late president also became associated with a couple of bad ideas that helped make the administration of George W. Bush such a disaster. The first was fiscal incontinence; the second is the view that the key to a successful foreign policy is a rigid distinction between good and evil, and a strong military...
Francis Lam: The Rice Fritter that Freed the Slaves
Source: Salon.com (2-25-10)
[Francis Lam is a frequent contributor to the Food section of Salon.com]
..."Calas came to New Orleans with the slaves from Ghana, where they grow rice," [Poppy Tooker] told me. "Today, if you go there, you can still see people frying them, and they call them cala."
"Starting in the 1700s, calas vendors would stand outside St. Louis cathedral, waiting for church to let out. They had a call," Poppy said. She opened her mouth wide, as if singing, and recited, "Calas, calas, belle calas. Tout chaud!"...
"And here's why it's important. Before Louisiana became American with the Louisiana Purchase, it was the Code Noir that regulated all the roles and relationships between whites, free blacks, and slaves. And in the Code Noir, there were two important rules. One, all slaves had to have Sundays off, so many women would spend the day making and selling calas in the street....
I smiled, gladdened by this story, but later I learned that perhaps the history of calas and slavery was not so tidy. "This is slavery, dear," the scholar Jessica Harris said to me. "Histories of slavery are rarely tidy. It's complicated in this case, because there were lots of free people of color; not all calas vendors were enslaved. And the ones who were often sold them for their mistresses. If they were lucky, they were allowed to keep a portion of the money, or perhaps have it go towards their freedom."
The Code Noir, I also learned, was hardly a warm-and-fuzzy slave code, despite containing such charmingly progressive directives as forbidding owners from feeding their slaves a diet consisting only of rum. (Also charmingly, the first article in the Code Noir basically says "NO JEWS ALLOWED.") And it was technically not under the Code Noir that slaves bought their own freedom. "Remember," the writer and filmmaker Lolis Eric Elie reminded me, "for much of the colonial era, New Orleans was under Spanish rule, and the Spanish slave codes included the practice of Coartacion, which is what gave slaves the right to buy their own freedom. So there were calas vendors who freed themselves. (That stopped when Americans took over, though, who proposed instead that free blacks choose a master and re-enter into slavery.)"...
Jimmy Carter: Walter Russell Mead Does My Presidency a Disservice
Source: Foreign Policy (3-1-10)
[Jimmy Carter was the 39th president of the United States.]
Although I have refrained from responding to gratuitous and incorrect analyses of my foreign policy, I feel compelled to comment on Walter Russell Mead's cover story ("The Carter Syndrome," January/February 2010), which the editors apparently accepted without checking the author's facts or giving me a chance to comment. I won't criticize or correct his cute and erroneous oversimplistic distortions of presidential biographies and history except when he refers specifically to me. I resent Mead's use of such phrases as "in the worst scenario, turn him [Obama] into a new Jimmy Carter," "weakness and indecision," and "incoherence and reversals" to describe my service. An especially aggravating error is his claiming, "by the end of his tenure he was supporting the resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, increasing the defense budget, and laying the groundwork for an expanded U.S. presence in the Middle East." None of these were late decisions based on a tardy realization of my earlier errors and misjudgments.
Except for obviously unpredictable developments like the fall of the shah, Iraq's invasion of Iran, and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, all the actions described below were planned and announced even before I took the oath of office. These included energetic moves regarding China, the Middle East, Panama, nuclear arms control, defense budgets, Rhodesia, and human rights.
To ensure clear and continued top-down direction of U.S. foreign policy, I regularly reviewed a comprehensive agenda of international issues with my key advisors. These included the vice president, the secretaries of defense and state, the national security advisor, the chief of staff, and often the director of intelligence services. My decisions were recorded by National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and quickly shared with others, and when necessary, he convened a meeting of the two secretaries during the following week to ensure compliance with my directives....
David Calleja: The My Lai Massacre – Vietnam’s Holocaust
Source: Foreign Policy Journal (2-24-10)
[David Calleja graduated with a Bachelor of Social Science and Master of Social Science from RMIT University in his home city of Melbourne, Australia. He has taught English in China, Thailand, South Korea and Cambodia, where he worked for a local NGO, Sorya, based in Tropang Sdok village]
On March 16, 1968, 504 village civilians were slaughtered by members of the U.S. Army’s Charlie Company, because of alleged sympathies with the Viet Cong (VC). In some instances, mutilation and rape took place against members of the female population before they were killed. Authors such as Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim have compared the operation to the tactics used by the Nazis against the residents of Lidice, Czechoslovakia, in June 1942. News of the killings were made public in the United States by independent investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in November 1969, more than one and a half years later, when extracts of his conversations with the only man ever found guilty of mass killings, Second Lieutenant William Calley, and other soldiers present in My Lai appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Calley, the man once referred to as America’s worst war criminal, was originally sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor by a military court. However, supporters of the war claimed that he was a scapegoat. One day after his sentencing in 1971, then-U.S. President Richard Nixon ordered for him to serve house arrest in Fort Benning, Georgia, pending an appeal. Calley was eventually freed in 1974.
For more than three decades Calley refused to speak about his role in the killing of civilians. In 2007, the British newspaper the Daily Mail tracked him down to Atlanta, Georgia. According to the Daily Mail, Calley insisted on being paid $25,000 prior to speaking “for precisely one hour.” The article continues:
“When we showed up at the appointed hour, armed not with a check but a list of pertinent questions, Calley scuttled away from the line of fire. It was an option the man who led the My Lai Massacre never afforded to his innocent victims.”
But in 2009, he broke his silence and formally apologized for his role in organizing mass killings, labeling his actions of following orders to kill as “foolish” and admitting that he felt remorseful for the deaths of Vietnamese civilians and family members.
Other members of Charlie Company were not so hesitant in speaking about their experiences. Private First Class Varnado Simpson, who served in the platoon that occupied My Lai. Simpson, declared,
“Do you realize what it was like killing five hundred people in a matter of four or five hours? It’s just like the gas chambers – what Hitler did. You line up fifty people, women, old men, children, and just mow ‘em down. And that’s the way it was – from twenty-five to fifty to one hundred. Just killed. We just rounded ‘em up, me and a couple of guys, just put the M-16 on automatic, and just mowed ‘em down.”...
There is no recognizable slogan reminding the world of the horrors that took place in the hamlet of My Lai Subsection 4 (or Tu Cung), Vietnam, more than four decades ago.
Situated 12 kilometers outside of Quang Ngai City, My Lai is divided into a number of sections or hamlets that collectively form the village of Son My (pronounced Sun Mee) in Son Tinh district. The village is home to an atrocity that aches within the hearts of all who are consumed by the tumultuous events that transpired within four hours, a slaughter referred to as one of the heinous crimes in modern history.
So you can imagine how surprised I looked to hear the ticket lady greet me with, “Welcome to My Lai, Vietnam’s Holocaust”, as the money was about to leave my hands.
This was totally unexpected. Never before had the possibility of being “welcomed” to a mass grave site popped into my head. Her voice tone suggested that I was about to become another statistic contributing to the genocide-remembrance tourism industry.
Had the smile been any wider, this could have been some macabre sector of a theme park....
John J. Pitney Jr.: FDR's Map Speech During WWII
Source: Bessette Pitney Text (Blog) (2-23-10)
[John J. Pitney Jr. is the Roy P. Crocker Professor of American Politics at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California. He received his B.A. in political science from Union College, where he was co-valedictorian. He earned his Ph.D. in political science at Yale, where he was a National Science Foundation Fellow. His scholarly works include The Art of Political Warfare, published in 2000 by the University of Oklahoma Press, and (with James W. Ceaser and Andrew E. Busch), Epic Journey: The 2008 Elections and American Politics (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009).]
Sixty-eight years ago today, President Franklin Roosevelt gave one his his "fireside chat" speeches on national radio. (You may find full text and audio here.) He reviewed the progress of the Second World War, which at the time was going badly for the United States and its allies. Pearl Harbor was just a couple of months in the past, and the remarkable victory in the Battle of Midway would not happen until June.
This war is a new kind of war. It is different from all other wars of the past, not only in its methods and weapons but also in its geography. It is warfare in terms of every continent, every island, every sea, every air lane in the world.
That is the reason why I have asked you to take out and spread before you a map of the whole earth, and to follow with me the references which I shall make to the world-encircling battle lines of this war. Many questions will, I fear, remain unanswered tonight; but I know you will realize that I cannot cover everything in any one short report to the people.
He then referred to the map to explain calmly why the war was difficult but winnable. He then spoke of trust between the government and the people.
Your Government has unmistakable confidence in your ability to hear the worst, without flinching or losing heart. You must, in turn, have complete confidence that your Government is keeping nothing from you except information that will help the enemy in his attempt to destroy us. In a democracy there is always a solemn pact of truth between Government and the people; but there must also always be a full use of discretion and that word "discretion" applies to the critics of Government, as well.
He laid out three "high purposes" for every American.
1. We shall not stop work for a single day. If any dispute arises we shall keep on working while the dispute is. solved by mediation, conciliation, or arbitration- until the war is won.
2. We shall not demand special gains or special privileges or special advantages for any one group or occupation.
3. We shall give up conveniences and modify the routine of our lives if our country asks us to do so. We will do it cheerfully, remembering that the common enemy seeks to destroy every home and every freedom in every part of our land.
This generation of Americans has come to realize, with a present and personal realization, that there is something larger and more important than the life of any individual or of any individual group- something for which a man will sacrifice, and gladly sacrifice, not only his pleasures, not only his goods, not only his associations with those he loves, but his life itself. In time of crisis when the future is in the balance, we come to understand, with full recognition and devotion, what this Nation is, and what we owe to it.
The speech powerfully illustrates points that we make in the text. As we note in the chapters on the presidency and mass media, radio changed the way in which presidents communicate with the public. Woodrow Wilson, for instance, could not have given such a speech during the First World War because most people did not yet have radios. More important, FDR was assuming that Americans could put patriotism ahead of narrow self-interest. He had often practiced interest-group politics himself, but he thought that people could rise above it, especially in wartime. He knew that there was such a thing as civic virtue.
Deborah Blum: How the Government Poisoned People During Prohibition
Source: Slate (2-19-10)
[Deborah Blum is a professor of science journalism at the University of Wisconsin and author of The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York.]
It was Christmas Eve 1926, the streets aglitter with snow and lights, when the man afraid of Santa Claus stumbled into the emergency room at New York City's Bellevue Hospital. He was flushed, gasping with fear: Santa Claus, he kept telling the nurses, was just behind him, wielding a baseball bat.
Before hospital staff realized how sick he was—the alcohol-induced hallucination was just a symptom—the man died. So did another holiday partygoer. And another. As dusk fell on Christmas, the hospital staff tallied up more than 60 people made desperately ill by alcohol and eight dead from it. Within the next two days, yet another 23 people died in the city from celebrating the season....
Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people....
The saga began with ratification of the 18th Amendment, which banned the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcoholic beverages in the United States.* High-minded crusaders and anti-alcohol organizations had helped push the amendment through in 1919, playing on fears of moral decay in a country just emerging from war. The Volstead Act, spelling out the rules for enforcement, passed shortly later, and Prohibition itself went into effect on Jan. 1, 1920.
But people continued to drink—and in large quantities. Alcoholism rates soared during the 1920s; insurance companies charted the increase at more than 300 more percent. Speakeasies promptly opened for business. By the decade's end, some 30,000 existed in New York City alone. Street gangs grew into bootlegging empires built on smuggling, stealing, and manufacturing illegal alcohol. The country's defiant response to the new laws shocked those who sincerely (and naively) believed that the amendment would usher in a new era of upright behavior....
Rosamund Bartlett: Remembering Anton Chekhov in Russia
Source: openDemocracy (2-19-10)
[Rosamund Bartlett is the author of Chekhov: Scenes from a Life, editor of Chekhov: A Life in Letters, and translator of two anthologies of Chekhov’s stories. She is Director of the Anton Chekhov Foundation, set up to preserve Chekhov’s house in Yalta.]
Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev chose to celebrate Chekhov’s 150th birthday on 29 January in Taganrog. This was entirely fitting, for it was in this southern Russian city that the writer was born. Medvedev turns out to know and appreciate Chekhov’s work. As a child, he distinguished him from Tolstoy by the length of his beard, it appears, while perceiving him to be just as old (Tolstoy was in fact Chekhov’s senior by thirty two years, and outlived him).
Medvedev now knows that Chekhov never got to be old. He admitted that this year’s anniversary made him realize just how much Chekhov achieved in his short life: at forty four, he is the same age Anton Pavlovich was when he died.
President Medvedev’s visit to Taganrog sends encouraging signals about the high regard the Russian state has for its great writers and the supreme contribution they have made to Russian and world civilization. That regard has not always been so obvious: in 2003 President Putin visited Chekhov’s house-museum in Yalta, but chose to ignore the plea for help addressed to him by its staff, who had been forced to witness its steady degradation since the collapse of the Soviet Union brought to an end its central funding....
Chekhov was always very clear about the cultural values he thought worth standing up for. For me they are encapsulated in the house that he pointedly built for himself in a Tatar village, away from Yalta’s bright lights. That is why, along with its many other merits, Chekhov’s house in Yalta deserves to be properly restored and maintained. Until Ukraine has the equivalent of the National Trust, or a mechanism for legally protecting buildings of historical value, we all have a duty to support the museum’s beleagured staff in their quest to safeguard its future. Meanwhile, we can also continue to hope that the governments of Russia and Ukraine will transcend whatever political differences have so far stopped them from embarking on a joint cultural project which would arouse the world’s admiration, and prove that their high regard for their shared cultural legacy is not circumscribed by narrow nationalist concerns....
Byron Williams: One Month Does Not Do Black History Justice
Source: Huffington Post (2-21-10)
[Byron Williams is a syndicated columnist, author, and pastor of the Resurrection Community Church Oakland, CA.]
February marks the annual commemoration of Black History Month -- a feeble attempt to condense 391 years of history into a 28-day cycle. I say feeble not out of disrespect, but rather acknowledging the undertaking, if it is be a serious one, is insurmountable....
When President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, many of the comparisons were obviously drawn between him and Dr. King. They were the nation's most historically prominent African Americans and both winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, but very little was said about the first African American to win the Nobel honor, Dr. Ralph Bunche.
Dr. Bunche was intellectual and a diplomat. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 for his mediation in Palestine, he was involved in the formation of the United Nations, and in 1963, President John F. Kennedy awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Last year, Attorney General Eric Holder, speaking during Black History Month, said we were a nation of cowards when it comes to race. We certainly lack the requisite maturity to confront sensitive issues authentically.
As a result, Black History Month, though its intent is a worthy exercise, in is current form has become a profoundly American endeavor. I define it a "profoundly American" because Black History Month carries a sound-bite aspect that is consistent with how most issues are addressed in our 21st century culture....
Black History Month is an arduous task because there is simply too much to cover in such a short period. And it hardly appears we possess the maturity to engage in an authentic integration of that history.
Therefore, the unintentional consequence of the current application of Black History Month denies all Americans a full and rich understanding of the contributions made by men and women who believed in America sometimes more than America believed in itself.
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