Many warbloggers and other assorted Iraq-war supporters fancy themselves to be followers of Winston Churchill.
And one of the most widely read biographies of Churchill is the two-volume hagiography by William Manchester. (As a boy, I read the first volume. For boys, it's a good history.)
I had never thought to connect the two, though, until I read the following, from a 1989 review of Manchester's second volume by David Cannadine, reprinted in his book History in Our Time:
[Manchester's] concern is to retell (and to reburnish) the familiar story of Churchill's wilderness years, which were, Manchester insists, undoubtedly the greatest and noblest of his career. For most of the 1930s, Churchill was out of office, out of power, out of favour, and out of luck. He was spurned, derided and rejected by the lesser men in government; he was regarded as an outcast by the Tory Party managers; and he was banned from speaking on the BBC. [...] Truly, Churchill was a prophet without honour in his own country. But, undaunted and undismayed, he put together a vast underground intelligence network, which meant he was better informed about German rearmament and territorial ambitions than the Foreign Office. He made a succession of brilliant, unanswerable speeches, in Parliament and throughout the country, damning appeasement as cowardly folly, and struggled to alert the western democracies to the growing menace of Hitler. And so, in the eleventh hour, when all the grievous events that Churchill had so valiantly and vainly foretold had finally come to pass, the people eventually turned to him, as the rejected prophet became the national saviour and gave his country its 'finest hour'.
While Manchester waxes thus fulsome in his eulogistic evocation of Churchill, he shows no mercy to the cynical Judases who were, he believes, the 'betrayers of England's greatness'. [...] Without exception, Manchester insists, they were weak, shabby, irresolute, provincial mediocrities, who vainly believed that Hitler could be trusted and should be appeased. And they were supported in their ignoble endeavours by [...] unimaginative and hypocritical politicians [...] who believed in peace at virtually any price. Nor, Manchester insists, was this the full extent of their duplicity. For it was not just that they did not want to offend the Führer. Obsessed as they were with the fear of Communist subversion, they actually wanted to support and strengthen Nazi Germany as the most effective European counterpoise to what they saw as the much greater threat of Soviet Russia. And in order to do so, they deliberately misled the British public about the true nature and intentions of the Nazi regime.
Does any of Manchester's mythology sound familiar? Sound, perhaps, like a mythology we have been hearing since 9/11?
If you wanted to pretend to be Manchester's Churchill — wanted to interpret the geopolitical crisis of your own time so that you could enjoy the thrill of posturing in that particular heroic way — then would you have acted much differently than the warbloggers and their ilk have over the last five years, with their fisking and their demonizing and their unrealistic idealism and their blood-thirsty sermonizing?
A fine fantasy for boys. But isn't it time they grew up?
The Atlantic Monthly has posted a list of the 100 Americans who a panel of historians consider to be the most influential in American history.
I suggested adding five people to the list:
I also noted five people I thought could be removed:
For an American coming of age in the last third of the nineteenth century, one of the surest ways to gain prominence or to secure it was to become a fine public speaker. Oratory was an indispensable element in both politics and religion, on every public holiday and anniversary, at every unveiling of a statue or laying of a cornerstone, and at the banquets obligatory for any group able to hire a cook and rent a hall. Dozens of lecture circuits had sprung up by midcentury, enabling farmers as well as city dwellers to hear the best-known politicians, writers, actors, and preachers in the land.
[…]
[…N]early every adult had been able to witness a variety of oratorical performances. They thus elevated public speaking with much the same mix of canny criticism and admiration we now apply to professional athletes and movie stars. Newspapers routinely published the full or nearly full transcripts of major political speeches and sermons by celebrated ministers; editorial "impressions" accompanied the texts.
-- Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan, pgs. 10-11.
If the empire had been afflicted by any recent calamity, by a plague, a famine, or an unsuccessful war; if the Tiber had, or if the Nile had not, risen beyond its banks; if the earth had shaken, or if the temperate order of the seasons had been interrupted, the superstitious Pagans were convinced that the crimes and the impiety of the Christians, who were spared by the excessive leniety of the government, had at length provoked the Divine justice.
-- Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XVI.
President Bush carried every state of the old Confederacy in 2004, most by substantial margins. White people in those states have generally supported the President's Iraq policies by greater margins than people in the rest of the country.
Which is odd, because most white Southerners are familiar with some portrayal or other of Reconstruction, which was the 12-year period (1865-1877) after the American Civil War when federal martial law was either a reality or a plausible threat throughout the defeated South.
Given that familiarity, why did so many white Southerners think it would be a "cakewalk" for Iraq to be invaded to free one people from the persecution of another? Or for it to be occupied by federal troops convinced of their moral superiority and with no understanding of or sympathy for the local mores? Or for the right of self-government to be first withheld completely, then granted only subject to military sufferance? Or for the existing elites to be disenfranchised in favor of carpetbagger exiles?
What did they think would happen? Did they think there would be no resistance; no equivalent of the original Ku Klux Klan? Did they think there would be no lynch mobs or brutal lawlessness? Do they think there will be no lasting bitterness; no "Iraq will rise again"?
A minor buzzword on the right wing of the blogosphere has been "Jacksonian", used to describe populists who support the occupation of Iraq.
But anyone who is familiar with Andrew Jackson will know how bitterly he resented the British occupation of his native South Carolina during the Revolutionary War. Jackson blamed the rigors of the occupation for the deaths of his family. For the final 62 years of his life, he carried the scars he received from the sabre of a British officer whose boots he refused to clean, and his hatred of Great Britain never died.
Do the people who call themselves Jacksonians see the possibility that the American occupation of Iraq will prove as lastingly counter-productive as the British occupation of the nascent United States?
[Christians] refused to take any active part in the civil administration or the military defense of the empire. […] This indolent, or even criminal disregard to the public welfare, exposed them to the contempt and reproaches of the Pagans, who very frequently asked, what must be the fate of the empire, attacked on every side by barbarians, if all mankind should adopt the pusillanimous sentiments of the new sect?
-- Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XV.
How often is it the interest of four or five ministers to combine together to deceive their sovereign! Secluded from mankind by his exalted dignity, the truth is concealed from his knowledge; he can see only with their eyes, he hears nothing but their misrepresentations. He confers the most important offices upon vice and weakness, and disgraces the most virtuous and deserving among his subjects.
-- attributed to the Roman Emperor Diocletian by Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XIII.
California has had two major riots in the last 50 years:
In Iraq, death tolls larger than these have been happening almost every single day. What in California is a memorable trauma is in Iraq everyday life.
Look at it another way:
Iraq has about 26.1 million people. The state of California has about 35.9 million people.
In the state of California, an average of about seven murders are committed each day.
In the country of Iraq, with only three-quarters as many people as California, massacres of 20-30 people are common, and those are on top of any single or double murders that are not notable enough to make the foreign news.
Just today, 40 Iraqis were killed in a single suicide bombing. Have 40 people ever been murdered on the same day in California? In Iraq, it will probably happen again before the week is out.
As a conquering nation, the United States has the duty to provide security and order in Iraq. The Bush administration has failed to do that, and thousands of people are dead because of that failure.
An excerpt from a letter written by President Theodore Roosevelt to U.S. Ambassador to Italy Henry White, dated September 13, 1906:
Just at the moment I am so angry with that infernal little Cuban republic that I would like to wipe its people off the face of the earth. All that we have wanted from them was that they should behave themselves and be prosperous and happy so that we would not have to interfere. And now, lo and behold, they have started an utterly unjustifiable and pointless revolution and may get things into such a snarl that we have no alternative save to intervene—which will at once convince the suspicious idiots in South America that we do wish to interfere after all, and perhaps have some land-hunger!
-- quoted in: Nevins, Allan. Henry White: Thirty Years of American Diplomacy. New York : Harper & Bros, 1930. 255.
Poor suffering "national greatness" Republicans. Ever liberating little peoples who never have the gratitude to just do as they're told. And those idiot neighbors and their unfounded suspicions!
Well! It's enough to make a body not want to liberate any more countries.
For a while, anyway.
Western Union no longer delivers telegrams.
(Link courtesy of Steve Goddard.)
In 1970, President Nixon secretly ordered the Air Force to bomb North Vietnamese supply lines running through Cambodian territory. When news of the bombing was published in the American press, the Nixon administration accused the press of harming national security by publishing secret information.
But to whom was the bombing a secret? The North Vietnamese knew they were being bombed. The Cambodians knew they were being bombed. The only people in the dark were Americans.
President Bush today harshly criticized the press for revealing that he ordered (and believes he has legally authorized) the National Security Agency to spy on American citizens without judicial warrant. He says that this revelation told terrorists things they hadn't known.
Is he arguing, then, that terrorists hadn't known that their telephone conversations might be monitored? Frankly, the United States has little to worry about from terrorists who are that incompetent.
No, the real news is not that terrorists are being monitored. The real news is that the President believes that his "oath to defend the Constitution" allows him to ignore his oath to preserve the Constitution.
The distortion of Soviet intelligence analysis derived, at root, from the nature of the one-party state and its inherent distrust of all opposing views. The Soviet Union thus found it more difficult than its Western rivals to understand, and therefore to use, the political intelligence it collected. Though the Soviet leadership never really understood the West until the closing years of the Cold War, it would have been outraged to have its misunderstandings challenged by intelligence reports. Heterodox opinions within the Soviet system always ran the risk of being condemned as subversive. […] [O]ne-party states have an inherent disadvantage when it comes to intelligence analysis, since analysts usually fear to tell the Party hierarch what it does not want to hear.
-- Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield, pg. 555.
At the time of the October Revolution, it had never occurred to Lenin that he and the Bolshevik leadership would be responsible for the rebirth of the [Czarist secret police] in a new and far more terrible form. In The State and Revolution, which he had almost completed in the summer of 1917, he had claimed that there would be no need for a police force, let alone a political police, after the Revolution. Though it would be necessary to arrange for "the suppression of the minority of exploiters by the majority of wage slaves of yesterday," such suppression would be "comparatively easy." The "proletarian dictatorship" which would preside over the rapid destruction of the bourgeois order would require a minimum of rules, regulation and bureaucracy. Lenin had never foreseen the possibility of mass opposition to a revolution carried out in the name of the people.
-- Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield, pg. 29.
The 1952 [presidential] campaign also saw what [Earl] Warren considered his "betrayal" by Richard M. Nixon. [Nixon] had, like all the California delegates, signed a pledge to support [Warren] at the [Republican National] Convention. Despite this, Nixon worked, both in and outside the delegation, to obtain support for Eisenhower. Nixon joined the Warren campaign train in Denver, on July 4, the night before it was due in Chicago for the Convention. The train was in a festive mood, as the delegates had been celebrating in orange baseball caps, with the letter "W." Nixon and his supporters went through the train, shaking hands, and whispering that Warren did not have a chance and they should jump on the Eisenhower bandwagon.
-- Bernard Schwartz, Super Chief: Earl Warren and His Supreme Court — A Judicial Biography, pg. 21.
Most discussions in the United States about France and the French are more heat than light, which makes this enlightening book especially welcome.
The authors are two Canadians who moved to France for two years (1999-2001) in order to understand how the French are different from North Americans. Some of the points they made:
• Most North Americans (or our ancestors) moved to North America within the last 400 years, and altered the continent to suit our purposes. The French, on the other hand, are in large part descendants of the ancient Gauls. The idea of starting anew and making sweeping changes is natural to us; the idea of continuity and tradition is natural to them.
• A related point to the above: History is alive for the French in a way it is not alive for North Americans. The French still use 12th-century churches. Many of their roads were once Roman roads. The distant past is a part of their everyday lives.
• North Americans often get poor service in France because we don't realize that the French consider stores and restaurants to be the private space of the owner, whereas we consider them to be a public space. Walking into a store or restaurant in France is similar to walking into a private home: You greet the owner, and perhaps make small talk. To not do that is rude, and rudeness (as the French see it) begets rudeness.
• Eating is also different: In France, eating a meal is a public act that is expected to follow rigid rules of decorum; whereas in North America, eating is a private act that can be done wherever, whenever, and however each person chooses. The French don't snack.
• "Americans are definitely irked by the French habit of contesting the United States on every issue, but what really bugs the French is that the Americans seem to expect everyone to agree in every instance. […] Americans want nothing more than a perfect show of harmony among allies. The French think that if a relationship is strong enough, it should be able to withstand strong differences in public."
• French unions complain when the administration does not send out enough riot police to keep order during union protests, because it makes the union look as if it were too weak to make trouble.
• "The French expect people in power to run the country, not set moral standards."
Those are just a few items out of many in this fascinating book. If you have any interest at all in France, it's worth your time to read.
WASHINGTON, Jan. 11 (AP)--A father of two sons killed in Korea said today he refused to accept the Medal of Honor on the ground that President Truman is unworthy to bestow it "on my boys or anyone's boys."
The 65-year-old father, Halsey McGovern, said he based his objection on Mr. Truman's "record" and the fact that he doesn't believe in the idea of awards for heroism.
"Boys are dying by the thousands," McGovern told newsmen. "Perhaps some receiving awards for their gallantry did not measure up to some whose deeds went unnoticed."
The tall, white-haired father said he not only rejected the Medal of Honor awarded posthumously to one of his sons but also the Silver Star awarded to another.
"I don't want any part of it," he said, "if it infers that Truman is a proper person to honor these boys and other boys who died over there."
from "Heroes' Father Rejects Medals---'Truman Unworthy'"; San Francisco Chronicle; January 12, 1952; page 1.
Learn more about the valor of the McGovern brothers.
Blame for the "wanton spilling of American blood in Korea" was placed upon the shoulders of the Truman Administration by the delegates to the State convention of the California Republican Assembly yesterday. In the concluding session of the convention at the Hotel St. Francis [in San Francisco], the delegates approved a plank declaring that "a strong, consistent foreign policy would have prevented the Korean war. Now that we are in it," the resolution declared, "appeasement of the enemy must stop."
"America's position in the world," continued the statement, "must be strong, dignified and respected by other nations. We will protect our citizens and the interests of our country from arrogant, blackmailing foreign countries."
It further declared that "the Republican party was inspired by the aims of the United Nations in a program of world co-operation to secure world peace" but added that the delegates believed that the United States now is "carrying an unfair burden" in the U. N. program. Insistence was made that all other U. N. members "assume their full share" in carrying out the "mandates" of the U. N.
from "GOP Assembly Blames Korea War on Truman" by Earl C. Behrens; San Francisco Chronicle; January 14, 1952; page 1.
Before Albino Luciani took the name "John Paul I" upon his accession to the Holy See in 1978, the last time a Pope had chosen a name that no Pope had chosen before was in 913.
Before the two John Pauls, the last Pope whose name ended in "the Second" was Marcellus II, who reigned in 1555.
During [the Teheran conference of 1943], Roosevelt had a private talk with Stalin and Molotov for the purposes of putting them in possession of certain essential facts concerning American politics. It was a cause of wonderment to the President that the Russian leaders appeared to be so inadequately informed as to conditions in the United States or the character of public opinion. They had their full quota of diplomatic representatives and the members of numerous wartime missions to furnish intelligence—in addition to which there was, presumably, the entire membership of the American Communist party. It could only be assumed that, as was so often the case with the most extensive intelligence systems, Moscow believed and trusted those agents who reported what Moscow most wanted to hear—whereas those who sent in objective and sometimes discouraging reports which approximated the truth were suspected of having been contaminated by their capitalistic environment and were transferred to less attractive posts, such as Siberia.
-- Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins (Harper & Bros., 1948), pg. 796.
I am inclined to think that history pays its way largely in the personal satisfaction of sitting on the fence and enjoying vicariously the trials and tribulations of men and times now ended; of enjoying the rare privilege of taking sides in their quarrels without in the least bearing responsibility; of sharing the good and the bad alike without the slightest feeling of guilt or a troubled conscience; of taking part in their victories and their defeats without the vanity of the one or the pain of the other; of enjoying their secrets to a degree that few shared them in their own time; of associating with kings and peasants, saints and scoundrels, without anyone questioning the kind of company we have been keeping.
-- Avery O. Craven, 1964
Did you know that the British hereditary aristocracy is still around?
I had thought it had mostly died out, since the British government has handed out so few important hereditary titles during the last 75 years (and so few of any kind during the last 40).
But, no, the hereditary aristocracy still exists, though considerably less powerful and wealthy than it once was (this book details why). If you are interested in which peerages are still active:
Dukes
Marquesses
Earls
Viscounts
Barons
I have finally read Bush at War, Bob Woodward's application of his patented you-are-there-right-now technique to the workings of the Bush White House after September 11. As with all of Woodward's books, it is a compelling and breezy read. A good sign about it is that I doubt its contents would surprise either Bush's supporters or his detractors were they to read (or re-read) it today; the book strikes me as a basically accurate rendering that can be interpreted in a number of ways.
In the book, Bush comes across best in Woodward's account (chapter 18) of the second-guessing of the American plan for the Afghan war in late October 2001. When the initial bombing of the Taliban positions seemed to be failing, and the administration faced mounting criticism, Bush stood behind his people, reminded them that the plan they had was the best one available, and urged them to make it work. Two weeks later, Taliban resistance crumbled.
A much less impressive view of the president—an insight that explains this press conference—can be found on pages 144-146:
"One of my jobs is to be provocative," [Bush] said, "seriously, to provoke people into—to force decisions, and to make sure it's clear in everybody's mind where we're headed. […]"
[…]
So provocation was going to be one tool. Did he explain or warn Rice or the other war cabinet members that he was testing, planning on being provocative?
"Of course not. I'm the commander—see, I don't need to explain—I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."
In 1999, facing the prospect of Governor Bush as President, I read the definitive biography of Warren G. Harding to begin to understand what a Bush presidency would be like.
People forget that Harding was a popular president: A handsome man with an attractive personality; a man who looked like a leader, but lived like one of the boys.
Only after Harding's death—when it was revealed how oblivious the President was to the corruption of his administration—did people realize how out of his depth Harding was in the White House. Since the late 1920s, Harding's presidency has been justly judged a failure.
One of the best takes on the similar failure of the Bush presidency is a recent post by Kevin Drum:
Bush styles himself a "CEO president," but the world is full to bursting with CEOs who have goals they would dearly love to attain but who lack either the skill or the fortitude to make them happen. […]
George Bush is, fundamentally, a mediocre CEO, the kind of insulated leader who's convinced that his instincts are all he needs. Unfortunately, like many failed CEOs before him, he's about to learn that being sure you're right isn't the same thing as actually being right.
So sure: George Bush is genuinely committed to winning in Iraq. He just doesn't know how to do it and doesn't have the skills, experience, or personality to look beyond his own instincts in order to figure it out. America is about to pay a heavy price for that.
Karl Marx was wrong. The first time was the farce. This time is the tragedy.
(Mark Schmitt writes a follow-up to Kevin's post.)
To my regret, this doubt has turned out to be prescient.
Living in the wake of Ronald Reagan, we forget that conservatism is not an unwavering optimism in an ideology; rather, it is a regrettable prescience—a sense of tragedy—about what people will and will not do, and about the limits of human good intentions.
In the last 50 years, several Presidential candidates who had been liberal or Left darlings during their serious runs for the office have been unable to resist going on to make a final vanity run that upsets and divides their erstwhile supporters.
Adlai Stevenson sought the Democratic nomination in 1960, and was predictably squashed at the Democratic National Convention by John F. Kennedy.
Eugene McCarthy ran as an independent in 1976, and finished about 38 million votes behind second-place Jerry Ford.
George McGovern sought the Democratic nomination in 1984, dropping out after finally losing Massachusetts.
And now Nader.
(Props to Jesse Jackson, who resisted the temptation to seek the party nomination in 1992.)
Ralph Nader has declared that he is again a candidate for President. As this 1971 article from The New Republic shows, the "Nader for President" movement has a long history (though Nader did not finally run for office until 1996):
A funny thing happened to Edmund Muskie in Dallas on July 1 [, 1971]. As he ambled out of a trial lawyers' gathering in the Sheraton, he was greeted by half-a-dozen young activists handing out Draft Nader leaflets and bumper stickers. The activists informed Muskie that a straw poll of 85 people in the hotel lobby had shown Ralph Nader getting more votes for President than either he or Richard Nixon. Then they told the same story to the waiting TV cameras. They also told the cameras that Muskie was a handmaiden of the military-industrial complex, soft on pollution, and indistinguishable except for his accent from Richard Nixon. It was an isolated incident, and Muskie may not have grasped its wider implication, which is that there is a movement afoot that could alter the shape of American politics, if not in 1972 then by the end of the decade.
The movement is the fourth party (counting George Wallace's American Independent Party as the third). Five states, including California, have a fourth party already on the ballot. A few weeks ago, liberals and radicals from 25 states met in Albuquerque and laid plans to get themselves listed on every ballot in the union. By the end of the year, a fourth-party presidential ticket, aided by a shadow cabinet, will be on the hustings. Among the issues raised will be the joint complicity of Republicans and Democrats in the Vietnam disaster (vide the Pentagon Papers), the indebtedness of both major parties to special monied interests, and the inability of either party to bring about fundamental change. Positive proposals will be put forward: an end to tax loopholes for the rich, creation of a national health care system, vigorous enforcement of antitrust laws, prohibition of presidential wars, amnesty for draft resisters, decriminalization of victimless crimes (including possession of marijuana), diversification of media control. By the time 1972 is over, a President may have been elected, or reelected, because of what the fourth party does.
[…] Nader denies fourth-party ambitions in Shermanesque terms. […] Among others who might be willing to lead a fourth party, none has a constituency broad enough to attract mass defections from both major parties.
Into this picture step the fourth party organizers who met in Albuquerque over Independence Day weekend. Sociologically they represent a small segment of the American electorate—almost all are white, middle-class intellectuals. […] Most of the ex-Democrats are affiliated with the Washington-based New Party […] The fourth party's more radical elements, in style if not in ideology, come largely from California's Peace and Freedom Party […]
At Albuquerque, some 100 representatives of these and other small political groupings (none of which has received more than three percent of the vote in any state or federal election) united under a banner called the Coalition. […]
Given the nature of American politics, the Coalition's success in 1972 will depend almost entirely upon its presidential candidate. [Gore] Vidal, Robert Kunst of the New Party, and many others believe that Ralph Nader would be the ideal nominee: he's a nonpolitician, is trusted by young people, widely respected in Middle Americans, and could, conceivably, win. […] But Nader has said no to a fourth party bid in 1972, and many Coalition radicals feel he's too authoritarian anyway […]
Voters in America are restless. There is every likelihood […] that they will become more so as the decade progresses. The trick is to translate their unease into a progressive political realignment. The Coalition seems unlikely to pull this off in 1972, but its founders believe they are building not so much for the next election as for the next generation.
-- Peter Barnes, "Toward '72 and Beyond: Starting a Fourth Party", The New Republic, 24 & 31 July 1971, pgs 19-21.
(Peter Barnes, the writer of the article, later co-founded Working Assets.)
In the event, the Coalition never coalesced, and Dr. Benjamin Spock became the leading leftist candidate in 1972, on the Peace and Freedom Party / Peoples Party ticket. His candidacy had no impact on the election.
However, a durable fourth party was created in time for the 1972 election, and a restless American electorate did indeed lead to a major political re-alignment "by the end of the decade" and "for the next generation".
Sometimes these things don't go as planned.
From the lead article in the February issue of Atlantic Monthly:
Many of you young people of [today] have not heard of Cassandra, for a little Latin is no longer considered essential to your education. This, assuredly, is not your fault. You are innocent victims of a good many haphazard educational experiments. New ideas in pedagogy have run amuck for the last twenty-five years. They were introduced with much flourish of drums; they looked well on paper; they were forthwith put into practice on the hapless young. It has taken nearly a generation to illustrate their results in flesh and blood. Have they justified themselves to you?
The rising generation cannot spell, because it learned to read by the word-method; it is hampered in the use of dictionaries, because it never learned the alphabet; its English is slipshod and commonplace, because it does not know the sources and resources of its own language. Power over words cannot be had without some knowledge of the classics or much knowledge of the English Bible—but both are now quite out of fashion.
[…] I recall serving upon a committee to award prizes for the best essays in a certain competition where the competitors were [college] seniors […]. In despair at the material submitted, the committee was finally forced to select as 'best' the essay having the fewest grammatical errors and the smallest number of misspelled words. The one theme which showed traces of thought was positively illiterate in expression.
Did I forget to mention that this article leads off the February 1911 issue of the Atlantic Monthly? I did? My apologies.
(And a tip o' the hat to Eddie Thomas.)
I had always thought of "The Wizard of Oz" as a fairy tale (or as the video for "Dark Side of the Moon").
In fact, it is an allegory of…bimetallism?
Read on…
(Warning! Simplifications ahead!)
In the 19th century, the United States was on the gold standard, which meant that gold was used as official currency, and that gold backed up the paper money that the United States Treasury issued (in other words, you could go to the local U. S. Treasury office, give them a dollar bill, and get a dollar's worth of gold for it). The "real" value of a country's currency (as opposed to its paper value) was ultimately limited to the value of the gold that that country had in its treasury.
In 1893, an economic depression began in the United States that would last until 1898. During the depths of this depression, millions of Americans (including one Frank Baum) passionately advocated one proposed economic solution: inflating the value of the currency by using silver as well as gold as money; or, "bimetallism".
Silver sentiment had grown swiftly after 1894, sweeping through the South and West […] Pro-silver literature flooded from presses and filled newspaper columns. […] People read, discussed, and believed. […] During 1896 unemployment shot up; farm income and prices fell to the lowest point in the decade. […] Silverites offered a solution, simplistic but compelling: the free and independent coinage of silver at the ratio of 16 to 1.
[…] The ratio of 16 to 1 pegged silver's value at 16 ounces of silver to 1 ounce of gold […]. The silverites believed in a quantity theory of money: the amount of money in circulation determined the level of activity in the economy. […] Silver meant prosperity. Added to the currency, it would swell the money stock and quicken the pace of economic activity. […]
[…] Frank Baum, a silverite from Chicago, [wrote] an enduring allegory of the silver movement, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Dorothy (every person) is carried from drought-stricken Kansas to a strange land of riches and witches. On arrival, she disposes of one witch, the Wicked Witch of the East (with obvious symbolism [the most powerful supporters of the gold standard were on the East Coast]), and frees the Munchkins (the common people) from servitude. To return to Kansas, Dorothy must go to the Emerald City (the national capital, greenback-colored).
She wears silver slippers and follows the yellow brick road, thus achieving a proper parity between silver and gold. A kiss from the good Witch of the North (northern voters) protects her on the way. She meets the Scarecrow (the farmer), who has been told he has no brain, but actually possesses great common sense; the Tin Woodman (the industrial worker), who fears he has become heartless, but discovers the spirit of love and cooperation; and the Cowardly Lion (reformers and politicians), who has lost the courage to fight. When the four companions reach the Emerald City, they find that the feared Wizard (the money power) is only a charlatan, a manipulator, whose power rests on myth and illusion. Dorothy unmasks the Wizard, destroys the wicked Witch of the West (those opposing progress there), and with the help of the good Witch of the South (obvious symbolism again), uses the silver slippers to return home to Kansas. Sadly the slippers are lost in flight. "Oz" was a familiar abbreviation to those involved in the 16 (ounces) to 1 fight.
-- R. Hal Williams, Years of decision: American politics in the 1890s, pgs 104-106.
So now I'm wondering…was Elton John's 1973 double album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road really about President Nixon's 1971 decision to completely de-link the value of the American dollar from gold? And, if so, what is the allegorical interpretation of the song "Jamaica Jerk Off"?
With his endorsement of Wesley Clark, George McGovern perhaps answers those who compare McGovern to Howard Dean.
Still, though, the similiarities between this account of the McGovern campaign in 1971 and what we've seen of the Dean campaign are interesting:
To run as an "insurgent," the term his aides use, McGovern must build his own organization, ferret out his own money supply, hopefully elbow out competition for the party's left and, with all this accomplished, show winning strength in the primaries. All this is based on the belief that a man from the party's left, playing to the public's yearning for an honest politician, can glue together a winning coalition of workers, farmers, students, minorities, academics, housewives and peace activists whom McCarthy and Kennedy split in 1968. If hard work is all that's needed to do it, McGovern can be counted on to put in the hours. He'll never be accused of "copping out".
Then why the doubts? Seldom have the prospects of a major contender—and, in the fall of 1971, McGovern must be accorded that designation—been haunted by so many phantoms. […Some] see a one-issue candidate, harping about a war that is fading from public consciousness. There are suspicions he's not the one to unite the left or to give it viability […]. To middle America he's all too often identified with the radical-chic establishment in the despised "East," if not with the bomb throwers. Some find him wanting because he doesn't "project" on "the media". In brief, George McGovern isn't "electible". […]
[…]
[…] McGovern's early decision to raise as much of his money as possible from small contributors is paying off—$600,000 thus far. Enough is pledged on a monthly basis ($30,000) to fund his headquarters operation, thus freeing him from total reliance on big money sources in the early stages of the campaign and making it possible for him to earmark big contributions for the long, costly primary season. […]
McGovern has clearly been helped by the dropout rate among left-of-center candidates—Hughes and Bayh, to be specific. To do well in the early primaries, McGovern will need to have the left side of the spectrum to himself, while Muskie occupies the middle and is besieged by one or more candidates on the right. […]
[…]
In the kind of multi-candidate situation which may arise in the early primaries, McGovern's hopes lie in the depth of commitment of his supporters and the strength of his organization. From what I've seen[,] their commitment and energy match his own and bring to mind the warning of Wisconsin's Don Peterson, a campaign aide to McGovern in one of his early races in South Dakota: "Everybody always underestimates George. Don't make that mistake."
-- from "The Workhorse Candidate: McGovern's Campaign", The New Republic, 30 October 1971, pgs 15-16, 20.
Future historians may well mark the mid-1980s as the time when Japan surpassed the United States to become the world's dominant economic power. [...] America's GNP may remain larger than Japan's well into the 1990s (depending on exchange rate measurements), but there are many reasons to believe that Japan will extend its lead as the world's dominant economic power in the years ahead.
-- Ezra F. Vogel, "Pax Nipponica?", Foreign Affairs, Spring 1986, pg 752.
According to the 2004 World Almanac, the United States in 2002 had a $10.4 trillion economy, while Japan had a $3.6 trillion economy, when measured in American dollars.
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the American economy grew 57.5% (after adjusting for inflation) between 1986 and 2001, measured in American dollars. According to the Japan Statistical Yearbook 2004, the Japanese economy grew 42.5% (after adjusting for inflation) during the same time period, measured in Japanese yen.
At that rate, "America's GNP may remain larger than Japan's" well into the 2090s.
In 1971, The New Republic noted an aspect of George McGovern's personality that I see as the biggest difference between him and Howard Dean:
Next to his "radical" image, McGovern's biggest liability is the feeling he doesn't project strength, that he's a "provincial," that he doesn't possess a room when he walks in nor incite fear or unrest in his colleagues. The personal commitment is there. But is the tough negotiator in an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation? Using the gavel doesn't seem to appeal to his innate sense of fairness. On TV, he's at his best when the cameras catch him in a rare moment of anger. In short, he comes across as decent but unobtrusive and uncommanding.
-- from "The Workhorse Candidate: McGovern's Campaign", The New Republic, 30 October 1971, pg 20.
Even after the slaughter of World War I, there could still be in 1937 an excessive faith in human progress:
Today, of course, we hardly know the meaning of the word "fear" in its medieval sense. Anesthetics have removed the fear of physical pain. Logic and intelligence have extinguished the fires of hell. We live in a world of such superabundance that the hideous nightmare of starvation no longer plagues us—or, at least, it should not. If all of us do not get enough to eat, we realize that it is the result of bad management and not the result of the actual absence of whatever we need. And as for the fear of foreign invasion—yes, such a thing is still possible, but even during the Great War, which was not exactly fought in what one might call a "gentlemanly spirit," no country suffered any of the horrors which up to a few hundred years ago were connected with the idea of an invasion by a hostile army. Here and there a few citizens might be inadvertently killed, but there was no question of exterminating the whole population or of selling hundreds of thousands of women and children into slavery, and even those cities which suffered most were carefully rebuilt as soon as peace had been signed.
-- Hendrik Willem van Loon, The Arts, pg. 146.
Three years after van Loon wrote this passage, he watched from New York as German armies invaded his homeland, the Netherlands, levelling Rotterdam, the city of his birth, as they advanced. During the five years of German occupation, tens of thousands of Dutch Jews were enslaved and/or exterminated, and the Dutch people suffered starvation and privation in the "hunger winter" of 1944-45.
Van Loon died in 1944. After the invasion, he never saw his beloved Zeeland again.
This is tragedy; the hubristic brought low; almost an ancient Greek play brought to life.
There are people who say that 9/11 "changed the world forever". These people know very little about the world.
The controversy over whether Howard Dean is another George McGovern and the endorsement of Joe Lieberman by The New Republic has inspired me to dig up some of what The New Republic wrote in 1971 and 1972 about George McGovern's presidential campaign.
Looking at contemporary writings can be interesting, because they can tell you what people were thinking when they didn't know what we know now (or when they knew things which we've forgotten). For example, in 1971, the name "George McGovern" did not connote "49-state loser", and people thought of McGovern in a different way than we do now: As a respected two-term United States Senator, and the architect of the South Dakota Democratic Party.
In this excerpt from the lead editorial of The New Republic after McGovern officially began his campaign in January 1971, you can see some similarities between the nascent McGovern campaign and the Dean campaign of several months ago:
Announcing his candidacy last week, McGovern said: "We must have the courage to admit that however sincere our motives, we made a dreadful mistake in trying to settle the affairs of the Vietnamese people with American troops and bombers. . . . There is now no way to end it and to free our prisoners except to announce a definite, early date for the withdrawal of every American soldier. I make that pledge without reservation." Vietnam is one of various controversies on which the Senator from South Dakota has taken a position "without reservation." It is his strength, because the old equivocations are sterile; it is his weakness, because again last week the Democratic Party, in the House of Representatives, showed how unready it is to become a modern party, one that commands the confidence of a disaffected and independent-minded new generation.
At first glance, McGovern's move appears audacious. Not because Mr. Nixon is invincible; on the contrary, he is highly vulnerable. The cities are getting sicker; the war has widened (though American casualities have declined); blacks and whites, young and not-so-young are at odds; unemployment and inflation are rising; and by such nominations as those of Carswell and Haynsworth, the President has lost credit even with conservatives, who were offended by his disregard for quality and his having played Southern politics with the highest tribunal. It takes no audacity to challenge Mr. Nixon. But it takes some daring for a Democrat in January of 1971 to take on Senator Muskie (and in the New Hampshire primary, too), for Muskie has been chosen by the polls and most political writers, prematurely we think, as the certain consensus candidate.
McGovern today is somewhat reminiscent of candidate Estes Kefauver in 1952. They start from behind the goal, they must maneuver end runs around the conventional power blocs and public opinion makers, so as to get to the voters themselves. They don't expect to be carried along by charisma. They gather force and following by demonstrations of concern for people and by highmindedness. Now of course, no Democrat who has twice been elected to the House of Representatives and twice to the United States Senate from Republican South Dakota is a barefoot boy, and McGovern is not. But it is one of his attractions that he looks nonprofessional. To many Americans, "politician" has come to signify self-seeking guile, which they distrust. Whether the distrust is a bit of folk wisdom or plain ignorance is beside the point. It is an asset of McGovern's that he conveys a disinterested dedication, the sort that leads a man to step in where more circumspect colleagues fear to tread.
-- from "The Audacity of George McGovern", The New Republic, 30 January 1971, pgs 7-8.
More to follow.
Josh Marshall excerpts an interview with Peter Drucker, who argues that India will be a greater economic power in the future than China.
I've long believed that India rather than China would be the nation to eventually supplant the United States as the world's leading superpower, for three reasons:
First (as Drucker notes), English is a main language in India, which would make a transition from American primacy to Indian primacy easier (just as the British to American transfer was aided by a common English language, and the French to British transfer was aided by a common knowledge of French).
Second, India has maintained the British legacy of democracy and relative freedom and tolerance, which, combined with the recent loosening of state controls on the economy, makes India more likely to foster innovation and change than China.
(A side note…Notice what kinds of work have been subcontracted to the two countries: China is best known for its industrial production; India for its software writing and technical support. Which country is more likely to become an economic leader: One which produces commodities or one which produces creative work?)
Third, because of the two reasons already stated, Americans would be more comfortable ceding leadership to the Indians -- people with whom we have important attributes in common -- than we would to China (which is not to say we'd like ceding leadership, any more than the British liked what happened between 1870 and 1945). In fact, I don't think the United States would step aside for China without being forced to by warfare.
In the aftermath of 9/11, I wondered if we would see a global re-configuration of alliances, with the United States and India against China and the Islamic world, with the European Union and Russia wavering in the middle (or possibly forming a lesser bloc of their own). That exact re-configuration seems less likely to me now, but I do believe that interesting times are ahead.
For a glance at how the Great Depression affected the popular view of Wall Street, see how the title of this book changed:
The 1930 title: Hetty Green, a woman who loved money.
The 1936 title: The witch of Wall Street, Hetty Green.
Same book: The 1936 edition was a reprint of the 1930 edition. Only the title changed.
As late as the fourteenth or fifteenth century there was no such thing as land in the sense of freely salable, rent-producing property. There were lands, of course—estates, manors, and principalities—but these were emphatically not real estate to be bought and sold as the occasion warranted. Such lands formed the core of social life, provided the basis for prestige and status, and constituted the foundation for the military, judicial, and administrative organization of society. Although land was salable under certain conditions (with many strings attached), it was not generally for sale. A medieval nobleman in good standing would no more have thought of selling his land than the governor of Connecticut would think of selling a few counties to the governor of Rhode Island.
-- Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers (6th ed.), pg. 28
"The choice of Athens as capital [of newly independent Greece], a town dominated by the imposing ruins of the Parthenon and with its associations with the glories of the Periclean age but in the early 1830s little more than a dusty village, symbolised the cultural orientation of the new state towards the classical past."
-- Richard Clogg, A Concise History of Greece, pg. 49
In 1834, Athens and Sparta were roughly the same size. Today, Athens is the center of a metropolis of three million people, while Sparta is a provincial town of 16,000.
Athens should be a larger and more important city today than Sparta: It is more centrally located, and is connected to an excellent port.
But Athens is a metropolis not because of its location or its port, but because a group of 19th-century Greeks and Western Philhellenes believed passionately that the Athenians of 2300 years before had been right, and the Spartans wrong.
The power of history.
An odd quirk of history: A Churchill led England in 1704 at the beginning of her days of glory, and a Churchill led her in 1945 at their end.
(G. K. Chesterton once made a similar remark, though he meant it disparagingly, about the Cecil family.
At first glance, it is puzzling that Jacques Chirac, the major French conservative of our time, led the effort (and went to such an extreme) to oppose the American government's decision to occupy Iraq.
But as the founder of the Rassemblement Pour la République, Chirac is, above all, a Gaullist, and his actions seem to have been intended to further the major goal of Gaullist foreign policy:
De Gaulle seems to be trying to evolve for France a very complex version of the balance of power policy [...] France would like, in a series of concentric rings, first to attain ascendancy in Western Europe and then to make Western Europe the leader in a Continental bloc between Britain and Russia. Ultimately that bloc would be established as a major peacetime voice in global affairs.
-- from "Foreign Affairs: de Gaulle — VI: Summary" by C. L. Sulzberger; New York Times; December 28, 1966; page 36.
In this light, the ties that Chirac built with Russia and Germany might seem to him to be more significant in the long run than the ties he frayed with the United States.