Greater New York

A Class Act

2011-12-31T12:36:00.005-05:00

As a surpassingly ideological woman, Margaret Thatcher would probably recoil at how the new film The Iron Lady depicts her in distinctly personal terms as an aging, widowed, out-of-power politician struggling with dementia. But in at least one way the film reflects a political sea change that Thatcher helped set in motion: the decline of the idea that class is a relationship that structures both inequality and solidarity.

In The Iron Lady, class is a form of social distinction, a kind of snobbery that Thatcher overcomes in her own Conservative Party (along with sexism) to become prime minister. In this view, her rise is a triumph for pluck and meritocracy. The Labor Party politicians that she battles and the demonstrators arrayed against her are cardboard figures, either simpletons or hooligans.

Thatcher triumphed as a politician, the film suggests, because she remained true to herself in the face of all opposition. The content of her policies, and their impact, receive comparatively little attention. Yet this is the woman who did as much as anyone to popularize the neoliberal world we live in today, where society is a fiction, greed and gain are the engines of progress, and the most modest forms of social democracy are decried as nothing more than socialist dictatorship.

Some of this is unavoidable in a feature film organized around one central character. But I can't shake the feeling that some viewers will come away from The Iron Lady seeing Thatcher's career as a triumph for diversity (grocer's daughter overcomes the snobs) while never thinking that her vision of politics and government, which denied inequalities of class and exalted individualism at the expense of solidarity, brought us to the atomized, insecure, and massively unequal world that we inhabit today.

Hitch

2011-12-20T20:55:00.003-05:00

Everybody’s writing about Christopher Hitchens, so I thought I would add my two cents. I never met him, never exchanged apercus over aperitifs, and was never the recipient of his kindnesses or intellectual benefactions. Like other readers of the Nation over the past three decades, I just read him regularly, agreed with him sometimes, disagreed with him other times. Of course, he wrote brilliantly and facilely on any topic of his choosing, and generally asked the big questions, those worth asking. But he was basically a provocateur, a distiller of outrage, generally (except in his marvelous literary essays),a disdainer and avoider of nuance.

His politics were basically limited to foreign policy.(In this he is unlike his great model, George Orwell, most of whose best work was on the class structure in England.) His basic instincts were always right, insisting on the importance of asking about God’s existence, of the need to maximize human freedom, for eliminating the barriers against liberty. But figuring out to achieve this in an unfree world, with plenty of bad guys, and no unalloyed good guys, is always the rub.

I basically agreed with him on Serbia and Bosnia, which I think was his great turning point in his world-view, with his acquiescence in the use of western power to liberate peoples from tyrannical dictatorship. And I understand, and sympathized with his anger at Clinton in not doing enough in the Balkans, and doing what he did tardily and clumsily to advance this goal.

But I simply don’t understand how he went from blasting Clinton for his bombing of a purported munitions factory in 1998,to, three years later, starring in the Amen corner of cheerleaders for Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. It seems so unnecessary— there were plenty of leftists and liberals who managed to combine a detestation for Saddam Hussein with opposition to the war, but he was defeated by his basic inability to see nuance in any situation, and this was a war, with horrible people on both sides, that needed nuance slavered into every crevice. And when the war became a fiasco, he had ample opportunity to admit that he had been wrong, but I guess his vaunted courage deserted him.

Anyway his legacy is obscure. His politics for the last decade of his life, a hodge-podge of ultraleftist remnants and his newfound conservative human rights realpolitik, simply did not make much sense. He left no useful political legacy except as a cautionary reminder if how difficult it is to make one’s way through the mine field of our post-post Cold War world.

If he resembles anyone, its a funnier hipper less sententious version of Whittaker Chambers for our time (with Sidney Blumenthal a stand-in for Alger Hiss.) . He will be remembered, and pardoned by many, for writing extraordinarily well. I don’t think he would have thought that was enough.

Journalists Under Arrest

2011-11-16T22:47:00.003-05:00

According to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and spokesmen for the Bloomberg administration, the reporters arrested at the breakup of Occupied Wall Street and ensuing protests in lower Manhattan were arrested for their own safety. Or because they were trespassing on private property. Or because they had no right to be at the scene of an ongoing police operation. Hogwash. Reporters have been visiting crime scenes and accompanying police officers on dangerous and not so dangerous operations since the nineteenth century. The only conclusion I can come to is that the NYPD preferred to do its work in the dark, without independent observers. And that speaks badly for the NYPD.

The press passes that reporters carry--which are issued by the police department--clearly state that they permit the bearer to cross police lines in pursuit of a story. The idea behind the practice dates to 1836, when the newspaper editor James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald was admitted to a downtown brothel that was the scene of the murder of one Helen Jewett. As Bennett was admitted to the premises while others were kept outside, the story goes, a guard explained, "He is an editor--he is on public duty."

The notion of journalists as the eyes and ears of the public is thus an old one in New York City. It's an ideal worth taking seriously because police officers, like elected officials, act in the name of the public. If we don't have a chance to observe them in action through the eyes of reporters, then we are blinded to what is being done in the name of our city. And a blind democracy is not a healthy democracy.

Zuccotti Park may be spic and span, but something smells when the NYPD insists on arresting journalists who want to watch cops make arrests.

Order Reigns on Wall Street

2011-11-15T22:29:00.012-05:00

I arrived at Zuccotti Park today around 1 pm, too late to have seen the eviction in the early morning hours. I did, however, see plenty of examples of how NYPD policing strategies raise tension and curb dissent. I also got a chance to think about how the Occupy movement can grow from this latest turn of events.

Along Broadway at the eastern edge of the park, around 1 pm today, the police had demonstrators and pedestrians squeezed between metal police barriers on the park side and a double line of police officers on the Broadway side. On the sidewalk, that made passing by the park crowded and at times tense.

For me, it was one more example of a problem that dates back to the Giuliani years: the practice of treating public assembly as a problem to be controlled. In the end, that makes for demonstrations hemmed into holding pens patrolled by lines of grim looking cops. On both the police and demonstrators' sides, this was not a situation conceived to cool down hotheads.

I also want to note that the Times reported that reporters were barred from the park when the evictions took place. As was noted in "Police Clear Zuccotti Park..."

Reporters in the park were forced to leave. Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said it was for their safety. But many journalists said that they had been prevented from seeing the police take action in the park, and that they had been roughly handled by officers. Mr. Browne said television camera trucks on Church Street, along the park’s western border, were able to capture images.

That's more proof, if you need any, that the fate of honest and independent journalism is inextricably linked to other freedoms like the right to protest. The First Amendment, as my late friend Jim Carey liked to point out, is more than a guarantee of freedom for journalists: it is an exhortation to gather and speak freely in a democratic way of life.

In the long run, I've always thought that the Occupy movement should value a continued presence in the park over holding turf for 24 hours around the clock. Equally important, it has to make some demands or make itself the street protest division of a movement that raises coherent demands of its own to get us out of this economic crisis.

In the long run, OWS lost to the cops last night and the right to demonstrate took another beating. In the long run, however, this can become a chance to regroup and come back fighting for a more just future.

Paddling the Bronx River

2011-11-09T22:00:00.006-05:00

The wealth of outdoor adventures to be found within the borders of New York City always astounds me, from bouldering in Central Park to mountain biking in Highbridge Park to beach combing at Jamaica Bay. But nothing matches the autumn canoe trip that I took last week under sunny skies and luminous fall foliage on the Bronx River.

To dedicate the Thain Family Forest, a rare old-growth forest that has been given new pathways and environmentally educational signage, the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx held a festival with walks, poetry, music and more.

For me and my wife, the best part of the festival was a short canoe trip on the Bronx River run by the Bronx River Alliance. The Alliance has done great work to clean up the river and make it a setting for hikes, canoe trips, and communing with nature. Last Sunday, they brought canoes to the river and we had a great time paddling New York City's only true freshwater river. (The Hudson is a salt water estuary and the East River is a tidal strait.)

Afloat on the Bronx River, all we could see were forests, the shoreline and sun-dappled waters. The distant hum of traffic and stray soda cans occasionally reminded us of the city around us, but most of the trip was a great escape from concrete and traffic.

Thanks to the good work of the Bronx River Alliance, there are all sorts of ways to enjoy the river. We'll be back.

The festival continues for the weekend of November 12-13. If you want to paddle, get there early. On the day of our visit, there were lots of eager canoeists waiting to get out on the water.

Photo by Clara Hemphill.

Occupied Wall Street Journal

2011-10-11T23:02:00.004-04:00

Last night I visited Occupied Wall Street on my way home from work. I strolled around the encampment, took in the sights, and came home with the best example I have yet found of the depth, complexity and reach of this movement: a copy of the encampment's newspaper, The Occupied Wall Street Journal.

The front-page stories by Naomi Klein and Chris Hedges were nothing that you couldn't read in The Nation (not that there's anything wrong with that fine publication.) But the inside pages, with pieces on the "The Progress of Revolutions" and an international timeline on this year in dissent, and back pages featuring union endorsements of the occupation, and articles on the principles and practices of the occupation, give a sense of the movement's range and principles.

My Spanish-language edition of Occupied contained the most interesting thing I've seen on the encampment: a map of the site. As it shows, walking from the northeast corner of Zuccotti Park to the southwest you'll go from the library to the general assembly to the info desk to the kitchen to the sleeping area to the medical service.

There are plenty of flaky types participating in the occupation, but the people I met running the kitchen, library and information desk were all smart, hard-working, welcoming and organized. Their organizational capacities, which seem to hold the whole operation together, are the embodiment of new forms of politics and participation.

As Alexander Hamilton might have told you when he founded the New York Post to support the Federalist Party, newspapers are a great way to build and maintain a movement. Even in the age of Web, the local and global dimensions of The Occupied Wall Street Journal give the occupation a kind of gravity that should be taken seriously.

Lost in the Headlines

2011-10-06T08:51:00.006-04:00

In the Daily News and the New York Post, the peaceful nature of last night's protest at Zuccotti Park, which brought 10-20,000 people to downtown Manhattan, was lost in headlines that emphasized a confrontation between police and maybe 200 of the protesters that took place late in the evening.

The front page of the News trumpeted "Brawl St.," complete with a cop blasting pepper spray at a protester. Inside, a news story provided a much more accurate depiction of the evening's events and stressed how clashes broke out only after nightfall. And a column by Jimmy Breslin grasped the importance of the rally and its union presence.

The Post gave over its front page to the death of Steve Jobs and ran "It's Brawl Street" on page 7. The Post acknowledged that the protest was peaceful before it turned violent late in the evening but emphasized the confrontation, thus allowing the last act in the drama to define the story about the rest of it.

The New York Times ran "Seeking Energy, Unions Join Wall Street Protest" on the front page above the fold beneath a four-column photograph of the demonstrators. This piece, clearly the product of lots of reporting on the unions and the occupy Wall Street movement, relegated the post-demonstration violence to one paragraph. But what the piece ignored in breaking news was compensated for with strong analysis and a great map of Zuccotti Park that helps explain the organizational depth of the protesters who set up camp in the park.

As we saw in the Sixties, a peaceful protest was defined by disproportionate coverage of a trouble-seeking minority of protesters. As is so often the case, it was the photos and headlines that were most misleading. Photographs are great for capturing action and anger, but they just can't carry the nuances best conveyed by words.

Journalists can and should do better. At the same time, the protesters who ended the night by looking for a confrontation on Wall Street, which was beyond the site of the rally, made their own mistake. Their actions made it easier for headline writers and photographers to misrepresent their movement. At the next protest, we need to see wiser heads prevail.

Marching on Wall Street

2011-10-05T22:01:00.007-04:00

A few days ago, I walked through Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan to check out the occupation of Wall Street and found a ragtag mix of earnest protesters, young people, and homeless-looking folk. Tonight, I returned with thousands of marchers who trekked down Broadway to protest the our country's unjust and inadequate responses to the economic crisis. I marched with union members, teachers, musicians, white collar workers, peace activists, and environmentalists. This is a real movement for economic justice and the Democrats ignore it at their peril

The breadth, spirit and order of tonight's march were impressive. These were the left end of the people who elected President Obama--from radicals to liberal Democrats--and they are the foundation for any consequential movement for progressive change in the United States. They are also people who understandably feel ignored by the current administration.

Old faces from other protests, union members from Local 100 of the Transport Workers' Union and the Communications Workers, and smiling onlookers brought a great sense of energy, steadiness and purpose to the procession. The best piece of sloganeering I saw was a sticker that many people wore on their lapel, simply reading "99%." It was a great reminder that the marchers were part of the majority in the country and that the economy ought to serve us and not the other way around.

Up to now, reporting on the Wall Street occupation has depicted the protesters as everything form Sixties holdovers to nut cases. Gina Bellafante's piece in the Times was an example of this kind of journalism, managing to be snide and shallow at the same time. She focused on the weirdest people in the park, dismissed the rest of them as unrealistic, and then left. Tonight's demonstration is an answer to her. So was the occupants' committees organized to deal with cleanup, security, and arts and cultures. Some of those folks may be anarchists, but that doesn't mean that they don't know how to govern themselves.

After months and years of being kicked around by the Great Recession, tonight thousands of New Yorkers kicked back. It felt great.

If we find a just way out of this crisis, it will be because people in power--starting with the White House--hear the voices in Zuccotti Park.

Searching for VJ Day

2011-05-02T21:42:00.002-04:00

On my way to work this morning, I passed the World Trade Center site. There were lots of camera crews, lots of commuters and lots of cops. Everybody seemed to be taking pictures, but there was no obvious focal point to the scene--no waving flag, no inspiring orator, no sailor giving a nurse a passionate kiss as in Times Square at the end of World War II. I was glad that Osama bin Laden met his just end, but I couldn't shake the feeling that this was not a clear-cut ending, the way VJ Day was for World War II. I rode to work anticipating revenge attacks and an interminable war in Afghanistan. Then Peter, in one of our many conversations conducted by cell phone as I stride through Newark, gave me a new way of looking at the situation.

With bin Laden dead, the US can begin redefining its fight against Al Qaeda and its allies. That means enduring vigilance, but hopefully a giant step away from the wars like Iraq and Afghanistan that have done so much to tarnish our democracy and stain our reputation in the Muslim world.

John Kerry got it right in 2004: the United States' war against Al Qaeda and its allies should be conducted with the long-term goal of reducing it to something like our national fight against organized crime: something we do with complete seriousness, but not something that eternally defines us and our nation.

Kerry knows something about war, unlike George Bush and Dick Cheney, but that didn't stop the GOP from ridiculing him as an ineffectual, defeatist Democrat. Hardly.

For some time, we've needed a win in the fight against Al Qaeda that would restore our sense of strength, reduce our fears, and give us the confidence to wage this struggle in ways that are consistent with our best selves.

When US forces killed Osama bin Laden, they gave us a just and useful victory. Let the president make the most of it, even if it isn't the equivalent of VJ Day.

Mission Accomplished; New Mission Starting

2011-05-02T08:57:00.002-04:00

The death of Osama bin Laden is a moment for genuine national pride, a rough but necessary form of justice meted out to an evil, evil man, who was responsible for the death of thousands of innocent people. President Obama and all those involved in the operation deserve the gratitude of the nation. But the real question is, where do we go from here? Since 9/11 the hunt for Osama bin Laden has been seen by most Americans in an intensely personal way. Now that we have accomplished this, there is no better time to examine the two wars we have waging, with the ostensive purpose of destroying al-Queda, in Iraq and Afghanistan, though both wars long ago sprawled away from any such simple objective. It is time to, accurately this time, declare mission accomplished, and end American involvement in the wars. And while we’re at it, we can reexamine the security and surveillance state that has burgeoned since 9/11. There’s no restoring the World Trade Center, or the thousands of lives that were lost in its destruction, or going back to a pre-9/11 world, but perhaps now we can move forward, beyond the world 9/11 created. For the first time since September 11, 2001, a president of the United States has the moral and political standing to really explore how this country has changed, since 9/11, often in ways not for the better. I was reading the other day how by 1944, literally hundreds and books and studies had been produced on the questions raised by the "post-war world." It is time Americans started thinking a little about what the world would be like when the war on terror, or whatever the Obama administration calls it, is over. It is time to start contemplating a new post war world. I hope that President Obama makes the most of this unique opportunity to reorient America, and make it, and the world it so crucially shapes, better places to live, with brighter futures.

Black Watch in Brooklyn

2011-04-24T09:51:00.008-04:00

The war in Iraq, and military life in general, are so far from the experiences of most Americans that it takes a determined effort to understand them from the inside out. But if you seek to understand them, you should definitely see Black Watch, a brilliant play at Saint Anne's Warehouse in Brooklyn about soldiers in the famed Scottish regiment deployed to Iraq.

Grounded in interviews with Black Watch veterans, the play takes the form of encounters between a writer and soldiers in a Scottish poolroom that flash back and forth between the deep past, the present, and the war in Iraq. The play has already won many awards in Britain, and has returned to Brooklyn after an enthusiastic reception at Saint Anne's in 2007. Better than anything I have seen, it captures the complex mix of pride, courage, cynicism, anger, obscenity and solidarity that sustain soldiers in combat.

If you're looking for a critique of the history of the Black Watch in the British Empire, or an examination of British soldiers' relations with Iraqis, you'll have to keep looking. Neither gets much time in the play.

Where Black Watch excels, however, is in its exploration of the ideas, actions and emotions of soldiers. With monologues and dialogues, exquisitely choreographed scenes of combat and barracks brawls, pipe band music and Scottish folk songs, Black Watch takes viewers to a world that few of them will know first-hand. The final scene of the play, which blends an assault and close order drill, conveys the suffering and solidarity of the soldier's life in ways that are extremely moving.

Gregory Burke, author of the play, suggests in a program note that the sense of unity in the Black Watch can be traced to "the male psyche's yearning for a strong identity." He adds that "The army does not recruit well in London or any other big city; fighting units tend to be more at home with homogeneity than with metropolitanism or multiculturalism."

He's on to something, but his play does better than his writer's note at explaining the complex mix of motives and feelings that sustain soldiers. What carries the men in the Black Watch, despite all the pain and contradictions that surround them, is the knowledge that every one of them would risk his life for the other. As a university professor who can find it hard to get people to attend a meeting at 10 am, I know how that sense of solidarity is a rarity in the modern working world. And working class lads aren't the only people looking for a strong identity: the Princeton alumni who gather annually to sing the praises of Old Nassau are perhaps more besotted with their alma mater than these soldiers are with their regiment.

In the end, the veterans of the Black Watch are buoyed by stories: the stories of their predecessors on far-off battlefields and their own stories of Iraq. They guard them closely, but we are fortunate to have them shared with us in this play. If you have any curiosity about these lives and their world, don't miss Black Watch.

Angry Men

2011-04-12T15:55:00.004-04:00

With the passing of Sidney Lumet, we have lost one of the most gifted directors of the past half century, and one of the most gifted directors of films about New York City ever, to whom we owe Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, Network, Prince of the City, and many others. But for me, and I guess, for many others as well, his most memorable NYC film was his first, one that only shows the city in glimpses, 12 Angry Men, the ultimate jury room film.

Made in 1957, the film is often seen as a high water mark of post-war liberalism, in which prejudice, seen as a distorting filter that blinds people to their own less than rational motivations, is eventually exorcized through exposure to the honest discourse of unbiased seekers of truth. Of course, if they were making the film today, it would end with Lee J. Cobb making his day, Clint Eastwood-like, with a sniveling Henry Fonda, tearfully admitting on his knees that his Harvard elitism blinded him to the reality that a punk is a punk is a punk, and that he almost let a dangerous murderer back on the street.

The dominant metaphor of the film is the jury as democracy, in which people from different classes and backgrounds struggle to transcend their differences in their difficult search for a common ground. This doesn’t have too much to do with the reality of the jury system, with its origins lost in the Anglo-Saxon mists of the witenagenot and whatever, and the consensus the jury reached in 12 Angry Men with the notable lack of women and blacks, was not in the end truly representative of the country as a whole. Still it’s a powerful metaphor, one perhaps behind much of Obama’s efforts to convince Americans that what they share in common is more important than their differences. But if that's what he doing, he going about in the wrong way.

What the jurors in the film shared were not their attitudes or beliefs, but a common task, a common purpose. They were partners, equal partners, and everyone was of equal importance. Once they understood this, they were able to reach a common decision. This is what America so badly lacks today, and I'm not sure how Obama should go about trying to realize this, but you don’t start by stating how much you agree with those opposed to you.

Perhaps you start by finding a common enemy. Another Lumet film that perhaps speaks more to the spirit of our times, is one of his least characteristic films, Murder on the Orient Express, sort of the reverse of 12 Angry Men, in which—-spoiler alert—-twelve or so people of very different backgrounds and stations in life come together for the express purpose of killing someone they mutually loathe. If we really hated the recession as much as the travelers on the Orient Express hated the kidnapper-murderer they offed, as much as FDR hated the depression, we might begin to discover again what he had in common.

Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler

2011-04-10T20:15:00.001-04:00

Donald Trump is embarrassing himself (as if that was really possible) in his new campaign to demonstrate that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. But the more interesting question is what has been behind the birther movement, which has shown a remarkable strength despite the absence of the tiniest scintilla of evidence for its cause.

One answer can be found in an infamous little book written in 1850, one of the greatest composers of all time (he would definitely be in my top five), and one of the worst persons of all time (its hard to compare someone who was actually not responsible for the deaths of anyone with the Hitlers and Stalins of the world, but he would definitely make the top 25, I think.)

Anyway in this little screed he argues that composers of Jewish origin (he focuses on Felix Mendelssohn and the French opera composer, born in Germany, Giacomo Meyerbeer) can never really be German or European. Both of these gentlemen had converted to Christianity, but it wasn’t enough for Wagner, indeed it made things far worse. Because of their racial background, the most they could do was outwardly ape the forms of European civilizations, and appear to be German, while they really weren’t.

Wagner was at the beginning of a new, and as we know, horribly virulent phase in the history of anti-semitism. For centuries, Jews had been the “other” the non-Christian minority. They dressed different, they talked different, they lived among themselves, and prayed to a strange God.

But by Wagner's time Jews were no longer the other. Jews were us, apparently indistinguishable from good Germans. But of course Jews were still the other. But they had gone from despised outsiders to despised insiders, which meant they went from being despised for their powerlessness to being despised for their supposed powerfulnesss. Without putting all the sins of Hitler on Wagner’s head, a direct line leads from Judaism in Music to the death camps.

Barack Obama’s is Donald Trump’s Felix Mendelssohn, the outsider who has become the super-insider who is still an outsider, though they can find no rational basis for his outsiderhood, except his racial affinity to many genuine outsiders, immigrants and poor blacks.

Where does this leave us? Donald Trump is no Hitler, and the Tea Partyers not black shirts. But the most dangerous fury is not the hatred of the other, but the hatred of the almost like us.

Obama tries, but for people like Trump he can’t really be an American, because deep down, in his essence, he isn’t one. And this is where we are in America today, and this passion is bitterly and hatefully destructive, and will lead to no good.

Triangle Fire Legacies

2011-03-28T22:33:00.008-04:00

One hundred years ago Rosie Grasso, 16, lived at 174 Thompson Street, my old street in Greenwich Village. Although we lived decades apart, our workdays began the same way: a walk to the top of Thompson, then a right turn at Washington Square. I walked east to take the Lexington Avenue subway to Newsday. Rosie walked to the east side of the Square, where she worked at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. There she became one of 146 people to die in the infamous Triangle fire. When the centennial of the fire came on March 25, activists chalked her name on the sidewalk in front of her old building. I set down my thoughts on the fire, and its significance, in an op-ed published in The Record.

The one hundredth anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire will be a day of tragedy and irony. The tragedy lies in the deaths of 146 workers, most of them young Italian and Jewish immigrant women, who died because the laws of their time allowed them to work in a firetrap. The irony is that the labor movement, and the demand for strong government action on workers’ behalf galvanized by Triangle, are today under attack as never before.

After the fire, tens of thousands of workers marched through the rainy streets of Manhattan in a procession that mixed mourning and protest. Rabbi Stephen Wise blamed the fire on greed and inadequate industrial standards. Labor activist Rose Schneiderman, a veteran of bitter garment workers’ strikes in 1909, concluded : “Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement.”

Wise and Schneiderman lived in a time when ideas of reform and radicalism were part of everyday politics, and questions of corporate power, political corruption, and the tension between political democracy and economic inequality were widely debated. Socialism was not yet a scare word. Socialists could be found in city halls, state legislatures, and unions.

The young women who died in the Triangle fire were part of a generation that tested the boundaries of life and work in ways that shocked parents and employers. They went to amusement parks without chaperones, found jobs of their own, bravely walked union picket lines in the face of thugs and strikebreakers, and fought for the right to vote. If they were Yiddish-speaking Jews they read newspapers like the socialist Forverts, or Forward, published on the Lower East Side. If they were Italian anarcho-syndicalists they might have read L’Era Nuova, or The New Age, published in Patterson, NJ and Manhattan.

Such militancy made New York’s response to the Triangle fire less than revolutionary but still transforming. Reformers, and Tammany Hall politicians acting out of humanity and political self-interest, created new laws to regulate working conditions. Prominent among the activists were Al Smith, a Tammany man from the Lower East Side, and Frances Perkins, an economist and social worker who had watched in horror as Triangle workers leaped to their deaths.

When Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York State was elected President of the United States in 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, he brought to Washington ideas and people from New York. With help and pressure from radicals, union members and liberals, Roosevelt crafted the New Deal—a mix of programs to end the Depression that committed the federal government to protecting Americans against economic inequality. It also put the Federal government behind workers’ right to organize unions and bargain collectively with their employers. Years later Frances Perkins, Roosevelt’s secretary of labor and the first woman to sit in a presidential cabinet, said that the New Deal began with the Triangle fire.

The New Deal order wasn’t perfect. Initially, it often discriminated against African Americans and women. Its political base included racist Southern Democrats and unions that did not always welcome Blacks and Latinos. But over time, New Deal reforms became more inclusive and improved the lives of the vast majority of Americans. When veterans of the Triangle era gathered to observe the 50th anniversary of the fire in 1961, in the middle of an extended era of prosperity, some 30 percent American workers were in unions.

Now, the very notion of collective bargaining is under assault. In Wisconsin and in New Jersey, public sector unions are attacked. In private industry, unions have been ground down by hostile laws, conservative opposition, and industrialists’ ability to move factories to countries where unions are weak and wages are low.

Today, only 11.9 percent of American wage and salary workers are union members. Labor unions, along with the kind of strong social benefits set in place by the New Deal, are increasingly viewed as illegitimate obstacles to economic health.

Not all the signs are bad. Anti-sweatshop campaigns, polls that show support for the bargaining rights of Wisconsin pubic sector workers, and demonstrations on behalf of immigrant workers all suggest that labor still matters in America. It just doesn’t matter the way that it did in the days of the Triangle fire. To change that, more Americans will have to remember not just how the Triangle workers died, but how they lived.

Reprinted from The Record, 25 March 2011, www.northjersey.com

A Peak Experience in the Adirondacks

2011-03-26T13:15:00.010-04:00

Growing up in the New Jersey suburbs and living in Manhattan, I've lived with an inconvenient ambition: to climb a mountain in classic alpine style--roped up, with ice axe and crampons, surrounded by ice and rock and snow. But even though I've done a lot of hiking, including a trek to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, I never realized my ambitions for mountaineering until a recent trip to the High Peaks of the Adirondacks.

Saint Patrick's Day of 2011 was the date. Goal: the summit of Mount Colden.

The weather was bright, conditions were great, and my guide--Chad Kennedy of Adirondack Rock and River--was tops. Around 7:30 am we left the Adirondack Loj parking lot on skis, carrying climbing harnesses, crampons, snowshoes, and ice axes. (Chad carried our rope, carabiners and other climbing gear.) We skied to Avalanche Camp, stashed our skis, then trekked over the pass to Avalanche Lake and the foot of the Trap Dyke. The Dyke is essentially a steep gully that forms the first part of the ascent of Mount Colden.

There was lots of snow in the Dyke, but it was fairly firm underfoot and there was no need for crampons and roping up until we reached the first of two ice faces. The first went by quickly; the second took a little more work to climb. (My ice axe was an absolute necessity by this point.) Soon we were up on the slab, an open rock face covered with ice and snow.

We ascended the slab at a steady pace. I paid little attention to the scenery; most of the time I was looking for the best way to plant my crampons in Chad's footsteps.

My alpine form is far from perfect, and at moments I wished I'd put in a few more weeks of running stairs before making the climb. But I kept on plodding as Chad set a good course and a good pace. We reached the summit by around 1 pm and I whooped with joy: ice, snow, and spectacular Adirondack scenery, all under a glorious blue and sunlit sky.

We descended the mountain on snowshoes, put on our skis again at Avalanche Camp, and skied out to the Adirondack Loj. On this stage of the trip, gravity was our friend: we glided through the last few miles of the trek and finished around 6 pm. I was pleasantly tired, very happy, and glad to have taken my passion for mountains and hiking to a new level.

Mount Colden in winter is a good introduction to winter mountaineering. You need basic skills with ice axe and crampons and you need to be in shape. With a good guide--and Chad, like other guides at Rock and River, is first rate--Mount Colden can be a great trip. It certainly was for me.

The Halting March of Labor

2011-03-03T08:39:00.003-05:00

I always learn from my students at Rutgers-Newark, especially when their experiences and understandings differ from my own. Yesterday, I asked a class of 30--the majority of them journalism majors--how many felt reasonably well-informed about the struggles over unions, public sector workers, and state government in Wisconsin. Only one student raised her hand. This is striking in a school with many immigrant working-class students. Mind you, my students are fully plugged into social media. And at the start of the semester they were fascinated by events in Egypt. But labor struggles don't have any great interest for them.

This more or less accords with my experiences last Saturday, when I attended a demonstration at city hall in New York City. The crowd was not large, and the median age was about 50. Our numbers swelled when we joined forces with a somewhat younger crowd demonstrating for women's reproductive rights at Foley Square. But never did we assemble a large crowd. And both demonstrations--corralled by the police and carefully monitored--conveyed the impression that public assembly in New York City has gone from being a fundamental part of democracy to a nuisance in the eyes of city hall that must be tolerated at best and always controlled.

As the Egyptian revolution unfolded, some of my students interpreted the events in Cairo as proof of the power of social media. That's a partial truth. In Egypt, the uprising can be understood only as the product of social media, varied forms of labor organizing, civic dissent, the Muslim Brotherhood, and satellite television. All of these combined in fascinating ways.

In the USA, we have an abundant and growing world of social media. We also have massive inequalities and a labor movement under fire from many directions. Yet social media alone did not bring out crowds to support the Wisconsin strikers, nor did it reach my students with the Wisconsin workers' plight.

New media forms gain impact in part through their interaction with existing forms of consciousness. Among the young today in the USA, as networked as they are, workers' rights and the value of unions are just not a big part of their political vocabulary. I hope for a change in this, but I can't say that I'm optimistic in the short run.

Good News for Rochdale Village

2011-02-26T07:56:00.005-05:00

Peter is too modest to crow about this in Greater New York, but I'm happy to report that his book Rochdale Village: Robert Moses, 6,000 families, and New York City's Great Experiment in Integrated Housing, has just been awarded the New York Society Library's prize for best work of history on the city published in 2010.

Rochdale Village is a meticulously researched and beautifully written history of the cooperative where Peter spent part of his youth. In his analysis of the making and unmaking of integration in Rochdale, he tells us a great deal about race, politics and culture in postwar New York. Significantly, he takes on three big themes.

With regard to the 1968 Teachers’ Strike, he challenges the conventional understanding of the strike as a confrontation between liberal integrationists and radical nationalists. In fact, for all of the importance of black nationalism in 1968, he argues that the strike is best understood as an ideologically complex struggle over the meanings and possibilities of integration.

On housing, particularly high rise superblock housing, he shows that Jane Jacobs’ arguments--which lead you to believe that such housing inevitably produces blight and anomie--are much in need of revision. He also makes you appreciate the mixture of principles and pragmatism, in the persons of cooperative housing developer Abraham Kazan and power broker Robert Moses, that produced Rochdale. In a time when high housing costs are making life ever harder for low and middle income New Yorkers, that history is worth recovering.

Finally, in his honest but affectionate memories of Rochdale, which recognize both its strengths and its weaknesses, Peter resurrects the forgotten possibilities of integration. In an age when racial separation is the norm when it comes to residential living, Peter shows how radical, challenging and rewarding it was for the black and white residents of Rochdale to live together.

In winning this prize Peter deservedly joins some distinguished company, ranging from my sister Ellen Snyder-Grenier (who won the award for her book on Brooklyn) to my friend and coauthor Rebecca Zurier (who won the award for her book on the Ashcan Artists) to Josh Freeman, (who won the award for Working Class New York ) to Mike Wallace and Edwin G. Burrows (who won for the first volume of Gotham.)

Rochdale Village is a great book for anyone who cares about New York, its best possibilities, and its enduring struggles for justice. This award is richly deserved.

Egypt

2011-02-11T14:52:00.002-05:00

When I first learned about the demonstrations in Egypt, I was skeptical about whether they should be accompanied by "The Internationale." I'm still not sure about the place of "The Internationale" in Cairo, but Mubarak's departure from power is clearly a victory for the people of Egypt. Moreover, their demands for democracy and a just economy that supports a decent standard of living are the kind of demands that the left, whatever its incarnation, can meet better than totalitarians and free-market fundamentalists.

The demonstrators, at least those that we saw in Tahrir Square, were determined, brave, and admirably inclusive. They have won a great victory.

Of course, Mubarak's handing over power to the military raises legitimate fears that this will become a defeat for Mubarak and a victory for rule by generals. That's something to be wary of, but I'm not sure that it will happen. The Egyptian military may prove to be just the force that provides the stability that will give Egyptians the breathing space to build a democratic government. If that happens, American aid to the Egyptian military will finally have produced something useful.

Tea Party for Two II

2011-02-10T20:57:00.001-05:00

I just read that Dick Cheney was hissed and called a war criminal by some Ron Paul supporters at the current CPAC convention. I think that’s splendid, and I guess its way I’m not nearly as frightened by the tea party as are most progressives. I certainly find much to admire (and much that I disdain) in the hard libertarian core represented by Ron Paul, people who take the idea of smallness seriously enough to hate the big wars that America has been waging in recent years. I don’t know where the political enthusiasm for the bracing, radical change America so desperately needs will come from. One thing that is clear, is that it won’t come from progressives, and Obama’s presidency has been an opiate, utterly stultifying the chances for a revived liberalism.

This brings me to Bill Kauffman’s recent book, By Bye Miss American Empire, a call for separation and division of the fifty states, into many more, smaller entities, and looks with favor on secession of Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico (though he seems to be a bit on the fence about a separate South.) Kauffman is a genial reactionary anarchist, living nearby in Batavia, New York, and has written many books on the need for a revived localism and a foreign policy to match, and has written an interesting history of the America First movement before WWII. His books are all witty, generally well researched, and convey a sense of optimism about whatever hopeless cause he is writing about at the moment, which in this case are the efforts of upstate New Yorkers to separate from the big, bad city far away, and similar movements. I knew something about NY efforts, but knew next to nothing about similar movement in western Kansas, far northern California, and the upper peninsula of Michigan and elsewhere. And I had never considered before how the statehoods of Alaska and Hawaii were really chapters in a broader Cold War policy to expand, wherever possible, the effective limits of American influence, in which the wishes of local residents were almost as unimportant to American policy makers as were, say , the Guatemalans or Iranians of the time.
Me, I like New York State just as it is, stretching from Montauk to the Niagara River, and I am not convinced of the necessary virtues of smallness in political units. For every more or less peaceful breakup of a Soviet Union, there’s a Yuogoslavia; give me the relative centuries long peace of the Ottomans, to the Sykes-Picoted-Balfoured Middle East of the past century. But as a thought experiment, or as Kauffman refers to it more than once, an eidolon, it is worth thinking about dividing America into itty-bitty pieces. I think I am atmy political core an anarchist, though of a very different version than Kauffman. Still, Kauffman’s work is imbued with a sense of populist possibility which is heartening and infectious. He makes several paeans to the Tea Party in the course of his book, and if there were more Kauffmans and fewer Palins and Bachmanns, the Tea Party would get a whole lot more interesting.

Digital Success Story?

2011-02-09T21:55:00.003-05:00

Last night, on Channel 13, the usually admirable Frontline aired a documentary that lauded IS 339 in the Bronx as a school that rose from chaos to excellence by embracing laptops and digital media. The only problem is that the school's recent history doesn't bear out this rosy story.

Contrary to the story told in "Digital_Nation," the school is still very shaky. As reported on the website Inside Schools, founded by my wife,

the segment spotlighted the school's embrace of technology, including the extensive use of SmartBoards by teachers and laptop computers by students. It also reported the school's math scores for 2009, a year in which 62% of students scored at or above grade level in math. In 2010, after the tests were made more difficult to pass, only 19% of the middle school students scored at or above grade level.

Digital technology can be a great aid to learning, but it is no panacea. It needs to be used carefully, deliberately and with serious regards for its strengths and limits. By itself, it can't be credited with turning around a school in the Bronx. Frontline should know better,

The Fate of a Nation

2011-02-06T09:42:00.006-05:00

The courage and tenacity of the Egyptian protesters are deeply impressive. But equally important for understanding the rebellion in Egypt is an old idea that has sometimes been dismissed in our age of globalization: nationalism. Both the protesters and the defenders of the Mubarak regime claim to be fighting for the fate of their nation.

Exactly what they mean by "Egypt" is up for grabs. The thugs who beat up protesters and journalists seem to be angry at protesters because they make Egypt look like a less than orderly and well-governed place. The protesters themselves are famously varied in their views; they seem to range from Islamists to secular democrats. But all of the people battling in Cairo and Alexandria, whether they fight for change or the status quo, seem to be motivated by a desire to shape the politics and government of the nation of Egypt. In this sense, the emergent issue in Egypt is not a simple, uniform nationalism but the appearance different nationalisms.

American concerns about Islamist radicalism have blinded us to secular forms of nationalism in the Middle East. Equally misleading is the babble that we often hear about "the end of the nation state" in a a time of global movements of people, money and images

Yet even in an age of globalization, people are willing to fight and die to define what their country might become. That's an old pattern in history, but a remarkably persistent one. We ignore it at our peril.

Tea for Two: Part I

2011-02-05T19:44:00.002-05:00

The political phenomena of the past two years, alas, has not been the triumphant agenda of President Obama, sweeping all before it as sugar plums of a renewed liberalism danced in the heads of his progressive followers, but the noisy emergence of the Tea Party, which is shaping the national debate to an extent that seems almost inconceivable to those who of us who watched, with incandescent anticipation, Obama and his family on election night in 2008 in Grant Park, in what seems to be an eternity or two ago.

I don’t know what I can do about this other than my usual response to crises in the Republic, which is to read books about them, which is what I have done. Let me comment briefly on two of them. One that has received a good deal of attention is Jill Lepore’s The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History. Lepore, an award winning historian at Harvard and a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, has become one of the best-known historians in the country, and her short book, like everything she writes, is deftly argued, written, and researched, and she provides a history of the actual 1773 tea party, its subsequent historiography, and the connection between what actually happened and what people have thought happened to the rise of the new tea partiers.
The book has many virtues, but I found it a bit snarky, or to same thing in historiographicalese, a bit too Hofstaederian for my tastes, too intent on reducing the tea party to the latest version of the enduring paranoid style in American history, making fun of the tea partiers and the republic for which they stand. For Lepore they reduce the constitution to a version of fundamentalist originalism that relates to history the same relation to real science as astrology does to astronomy.
Now, I would be the last person to defend originalism as a theory of constitutional interpretation, but to attack it as anti-intellectual seems besides the point, and whatever one thinks of Antonin Scalia, as he would be the first to tell you, he ain’t stupid. Lepore blames the Tea Partiers for having a narrow one-dimensional view of the founding era, and blames academic historians for not writing enough multi-dimensional works of popular history to rouse the average American from their dogmatic slumbers, and then blames, somewhat bizarrely leftist historians in the 1970s, who tried to put a leftist tinge on the bicentennial, as the original presentist politicizers of the revolution. But this strikes me as being besides the point. But there is a difference between popular memory and history and the best history will never displace popular memory. What’s wrong with originalism, and what’s wrong with the tea party view of American history, is not that it’s illegitimate, but that’s its wrong. Originalism, states' rights, a heavy reliance on the 10th amendment, execration of the overuse of the commerce clause, all have a long history in this country dating back to 1790 or so. There are some crazy arguments, and some frothing conspiracy theorists (like Glenn Beck), but the core of what the tea party is calling for, smaller budgets, more localized governments, elimination of liberalism and all of its works, seems fully within the
field of acceptable discourse. I think those who disagree with the resurgent right need to try to listen to what they are saying, engage them, and not dismiss them a priori. I was going to comment on another tea party book, but this post is long enough, so stay tuned for my follow-up.

The Vinson Court

2011-02-03T12:15:00.001-05:00

Outside of Egypt, probably the most interesting story this week has been the Florida judge striking down the entirety of the Obama health care bill, in a decision that was a very original piece of originalism, a sort of abstract originalism, ignoring prior precedent with a free-hand Jackson Pollock- like splatter.

What is surprising about the ruling is that while all progressive pundits now expect a close 5-4 decision among the Supremes, a year ago they all predicted that the bill would not really face a stiff constitutional challenge. What has changed is not the standard interpretation of the commerce clause, but the united opposition of Republicans to the bill, and of course judges follow the election returns, and it never is difficult to come up with constitutional arguments for or against any position.
This is unfortunate, but I suppose not too surprising. And every piece of major legislation typically faces a similar trial by constitution, back to John Marshall and the Indians, Roger Taney voiding the Kansas-Nebraska Act in Dred Scott, the Lochner case, and the Schechter Poultry case, which ruled the NRA (National Recovery Act) unconstitutional in 1935. Politics then goes on to decide who, in the end, gets to win. Its interesting that in his decision to void the Obama bill, Judge Vinson cited Schechter Poultry several times, and the Health Care act is a similar type of fowl to the NRA, a close and very complex regulation of private business for a public purpose. And as we know, though the New Deal went onto triumphs after the Schechter Poultry decision, the NRA itself was never revived, and the New Deal thereafter either created programs that directed aided citizens (like Social Security), or regulated aspects of a business (the Wagner Act, the Wages and Hours Act), and not the purpose of business itself. Perhaps we will stand at a similar crossroads with health care. If the health care law is declared unconstitutional because of its myriad corporatist compromises, the lessons for progressives should be clear. A single payer law, a bill of unquestioned (I would think) constitutionality, is the way forward, as it always should have been in the first place.

Fighting in the Streets

2011-02-02T22:43:00.002-05:00

On Monday, when my students at Rutgers-Newark discussed the uprising in Egypt, some were inclined to think of it as a "media revolution." But with access to the Web and cellphones shut down, the protests in Cairo have taken on the oldest form of revolutionary struggle: fighting in the streets,
The discipline and orderliness of Egyptian protesters has been impressive. The violence of Mubarak supporters, riding into crowds on horseback to whip people, has been surpassingly ugly. And this from a man who has been bankrolled by the USA for decades.

If it is too early to know where the Egyptian revolt will lead, this much is clear: in Hosni Mubarak, the USA has been supporting a very nasty dictator. I deeply hope that the revolt does not descend into more and more violence. But if it does, we have the depressing knowledge that the biggest impediment to democratic change in Egypt is a man who we have helped to say in power.

"The Internationale"?

2011-01-31T16:51:00.003-05:00

That was the title to an e-mail that came to me a few days ago, from someone who thrills as I do to the overthrow of an undemocratic regime. But the course of rebellion and revolution since the 1970s makes me doubt that what will emerge from the ashes of the Mubarak regime is anything like democratic socialism.And that says a lot about the agonies of the left in the 21st century.

Once upon a time, when some people assumed that history had a clear direction and an obvious endpoint, it was safe (if not entirely discerning) to assume that the end point of human progress would be socialism. Those days are over. And the disappointing trajectories of Central and Eastern European Societies since the toppling of communism, the Iranian revolution, and China since Tiananmen are forceful reminders that rising up does not always lead to a better future.

In their calls for democracy and economic justice, the demonstrators in Cairo are demanding the kinds of things that one expects from the left. Whether something like a "left" will emerge out of this is not clear. I hope so, but the recent course of history doesn't make me optimistic.

Mubarak's regime rests on sand, and the policy makers in the USA and Israel who put their faith in Mubarak were sorely mistaken. Change is a constant, even if the direction of change is hard to predict and even harder to control.

Here's hoping that the people of Egypt get justice, democracy, peace and prosperity.

The Master Switch

2011-01-31T14:20:00.003-05:00

We purchased our first I-pod about a week ago, basically in order to start the Herculean task of downloading my many, many CDs into a little box, thereby obviating the need to hold onto the physical discs, and thereby obviating one of the most frequent issues of domestic discord between me and my always beautiful wife, Jane. As I was doing the downloading, I found myself reading Tim Wu’s new book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (Knopf, 2010), a history and meditation on communications history and policy in the United States since the rise (and fall, and rise, and fall, and rise) of AT&T, and the incestuous relationships between our phones, our radios and TVS, our computers, the companies they created, and the regulators who love them. I can’t think of a book I have read recently from which I have learned more .

Wu is basically, as far as I can figure out, something of a left-libertarian, whose hero is Thurman Arnold, the New Deal trust buster, and who believes that while regulation is necessary for the communications industry, to combat its inherent tendency to monopolization, it needs to be done lightly, and most communications regulation has always been a disaster, accentuating monopolization rather than curbing it, , and points to the 1996 Telecommunications Act as perhaps the worst offender, obviating most of the gains from competitiveness achieved in the initial break-up of AT&T.
Reading Wu, I think I understand for the first time how the packaging of information, so central to the internal, is inherently decentralizing of any communications network. And because no one created or owns the internet the way AT &T owned the long distance lines that were at the heart of its monopoly, this had led, rather than one huge monopoly largely controlling not only the communication network itself, but almost all the R &D associated with it, while the internet has spawned a million communication industry start ups. There surely is no industry that had been more stifled by regulation than communications. Wu is a defender of “net neutrality” and the larger point I came away with from Wu’s essential book is that, as the revival of ATT shows, that despite the inherently decentralized nature of the internet, without new Thurman Arnolds, new monopolies, that benefit only its owners, rather than the public as a whole, will proliferate as much as new technologies.

First Thoughts on the Egyptian Crisis

2011-01-30T08:15:00.000-05:00

First thoughts on the events sweeping the Arab world, which seem to be to the most significant events since the fall of the shah. The fragility of power, when it is suddenly exposed, is always breathtaking. This will fundamentally challenge the preconceptions of America’s role in the Middle East since the Carter administration, propping up sclerotic, increasingly unpopular regimes in the interest of an increasingly elusive “stability,” a stability that was fatally undermined at home, in the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, and the dots can be easily connected from the fall of Lehman Brothers to the impending fall of Hosni Mubarak. May the Egyptians and Tunisians take this opportunity to reshape their countries in a truly democratic fashion, and we have to trust moderate Islamism to find its own way. In any event, the end of the Nasserist experiment in Egypt is long overdue.

If I may be parochial for a moment, what impact might this have on Israel and its endless impasse with its neighbors? I suppose everyone will see this through their own preconceptions. Those who are not really interested in negotiations with the Palestinians will see this as additional proof that the instability of the region makes enduring peace impossible. Those who feel differently will see argue that the ending of the wobbly pax America in the middle east will and must finally light a fire under Israel and force it to stop haggling over settlements it never should built in the first place, and strike a deal similar to the one outlined in the Al-Jazeera releases this past week. (That deal is looking better and better.) I guess one of the big uncertainties is the impact of all this unexpected democracy on the shaky, western-backed PA. In the end this will either, in a way that all the worlds’ jawboning never could, compel Israel to seek real peace with the Palestinians. Or not.

How Did He Do?

2011-01-25T20:42:00.003-05:00

In 1994, I think I was, I had the great misfortune to spend about six months working with Jonathan Soffer. The problem, I should hasten to add, was not with Jonathan. We had been hired by two crazy people, married to each other, to update a very prominent one-volume encyclopedia, and we were sort of stuck in a room together, somewhere in midtown, surrounded by hundreds of reference works, writing about everything from sand slugs and berkelium, to Pure Land Buddhism and feminism. It was sort of fun writing about everything, but the people we worked for were impossible, and Jonathan and I spent the day talking, and plotting our escapes, and we both eventually did, and we both went onto our respective careers. (This was, BTW, the last time I was ever gainfully employed in the city of New York.)

Jonathan has just published the first scholarly biography of Ed Koch, entitled Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City. Koch cooperated with Jonathan on the biography, and knowing that Jonathan’s politics were somewhat to the left of mine (no mean feat), I have wondered for several years would he would have to say about hizzoner. Its an excellent book, respectful and thoughtful, offering an overview of the city as a whole during the three terms of Koch’s administration, from 1977 to 1989. Jonathan shows that in many ways Koch was the last white liberal mayor of the city, though his liberalism became increasingly attenuated as his tenure progressed. He gives Koch credit where it is due, especially in his housing program, and demerits when they are called for, and in all it’s a nuanced accounts of his ups and downs, highs and lows.
The most salient fact about the Koch administration is that New York City was widely seen as falling about in every possible way in the late 1970s, and by the time he left office, the city was firmly on the way to its 1990s rehabilitation. Koch did this by encouraging reinvestment and redevelopment, helping to make gentrification an (expensive) household word. Did Koch have an alternative? Probably not. Manhattan is not an island, outside of the more general forces of capitalism, and all the winds in the 1980s were blowing towards a free market. Would more or less the same thing have happened if someone else had been mayor? Probably, but the whole point of writing and reading historical biographies is get a reminder of the role that individuals play in history. Perhaps New York City had special advantages that explain the difference of its trajectory from, say, Rochester or Buffalo, but certainly Koch had a major role in what went right (and wrong) in the post-fiscal crisis city. The best thing that can be said about Koch is that he generally did the best he could under the tight constraints of a bad and illiberal time. And this is the best that can be said about any Democratic politician, with any real measure of power, on the local, state, or national level, in the two decades since Koch left the public stage. And compared to the very checkered records of the two post-Koch democratic presidents, Koch doesn't look all that bad.

No-State Solution

2011-01-24T14:27:00.002-05:00

The revelations and document drop from the Al Jazeera on Israel-Palestinian negotiations are more substantial than the recent hoard of wikileaks documents, and we don’t have to get into a discussion of Julian Assange’s sex life. (On that, Katha Pollit is certainly correct—whatever his contributions to prying open government secretiveness might be, if he did the crime, he should do the time.) And Ben Roethlisberger too. (Go, Packers. Boo hoo, Jets. )

But the Al Jazeera documents are truly depressing, showing a Palestinian Authority abjectly offering everything Israel could possibly want—on the settlements, on Jerusalem, on Palestinian return, on demilitarization—and Israel, sensing the weakness of the PA, just wanting more and more concessions. Here’s the current situation—Israel has no interest in making peace with the Palestinians. It will involve too many difficult internal debates, and most Israelis simply think its not worth whatever compromises Israel will have to make. All Israel really wants is “legitimacy”, or to translate, to be left alone, but it knows this will never happen as long as they control the Occupied Territories, directly and indirectly, so they make a pretense of negotiating, and blame their failure on everyone else. The PA desperately want a settlement, but Israel increasingly sees it as a mere puppet of its financial supporters in the EU and the US, and too weak to carry though on any agreement. And Hamas wants its legitimacy, which they see as inclusion in negotiations, but knows that, save some super-dramatic turn of events, Israel and the US will never let this happen, so it does what it can to destabilize the possibility of talks further, which ain’t too difficult to begin with. Perhaps its always darkest before the dawn, but if you ask me, we have never been farther from a genuine peace settlement between Israel and Palestine. In a land that is lousy with Gods, its time for a deus ex machina.

Back to the Articles of Confederation!

2011-01-22T13:54:00.002-05:00

I recently read Gilbert K. Chesterton’s first novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, written in 1904, set (as it happens) in 1984, in a London which had divided into separate duchies and fiefdoms, each with its own medieval heraldry, and toll barriers. Chesterton was an opponent of progress and his contemporaries conviction that the early 20th century would lead, ineluctably, to larger and larger states, of ever greater size. In Chesterton’s utopia, everything would crumble into ever smaller granular sovereignties.

I was thinking of the Tea Party when reading Chesterton. He has long been a favorite of conservative thinkers, though he is too supple and clever to fit cleanly into any pigeon-hole and his medieval fantasy is more than simply turning back the clock, but challenges not only progressive thinkers but retrograde types who simply pine for some version of the good old days. Why, I have been thinking, does the Tea Party honor the Constitution? Don’t they know it is a counter-revolutionary document that had, as its main purpose, moving power from the states to an enhanced central government? Why wrestle with the ambiguities of the 9th and 10th amendments when what they really want to do is to go back to the Articles of Confederation?
That’s a restorationist dream I could come to enjoy. What we need are not stronger states, but to try to deal with fifty -independent republics. And without the ridiculous requirement for equal representation in the Senate, many of the states would split or reform along more meaningful lines. Liberals could institute single payer health care in their countries. Conservatives could try to give their citizens absolutely nothing until they are overthrown in a popular revolution, a la Tunisia. Let the up and coming superpowers, China, India, Brazil, deal with the problems of trying to run the world from the vantage of a massive state. Americans have spent their time trying to run the world, and we have done, at best, a mediocre job of it. Time to retire, time to relax. If the Tea Party want to turn the clock back, let us, lets do them one better, and try to turn the clock back to the Articles of Confederation, or even further, to when there were thirteen separately governed colonies, or further still, to when a series of independent native bands and groups ruled themselves without any central supervision whatsoever, and return to America’s original nomadic and overlapping sovereignties, or to when, before 12,000 years or so, animals in North America managed to live their lives without any government at all.

Where Beethoven Never Gets Rolled Over

2011-01-21T09:46:00.002-05:00

We have had, in American culture, for some time, a rage for ordinality. Ranking things in order of importance has become a national tic, an obsession. And the end of the year is the time for end of the year lists of the top 10 in everything. I am not sure why or when this particular practice started. Did the Romans make lists of their 10 favorite gladiators? The rabbis make a list of their ten favorite biblical passages? I guess part of the fascination is trying to determine what, or who, is #1, and ersatz voting, like American Idol, often seems more genuine than real elections, which have more than their share of ersatz.
All of these comments are prompted by a fascinating series of articles by Anthony Tomassini in the Times on the top ten classical composers of all time, a subject close to my heart. Of course, it’s a useless and pointless exercise, but it does make you think about those who are truly great, and their wonderful music. I basically agree with Tomasinni’s list, which if I remember goes, Bach Beethoven Mozart Schubert Debussy Stravinsky Brahms Verdi Wagner Bartok. I would only drop Debussy and Bartok from that list, and probably add Shostakovich and Messiaen. And I would drop Bach to about sixth (making Beethoven my #1 pick (tell Tchaikovsky the news), followed by the four greatest composers of vocal music of all time--Mozart, Schubert, Verdi and Wagner-- but our sensibilities are pretty congruent, and like Tomassinni I would insist on placing opera composers on the list. (I’m not sure Bartok would make my top 20. If I had to pick a Hungarian composer, I would go for Liszt or Ligeti before Bartok, and I would pick Ravel before Debussy.)

Its a strange exercise, sort of like picking nine people for the Supreme Court—there really aren’t enough slots for representativeness, but at the same time you need some sort of mix, whites blacks women men Jews Catholics Protestants, to keep your selections from becoming too homogeneous. So you need some 20th century composers, and there is a strong case for going before Bach (Monteverdi, Josquin) to round off the list. But there is the inevitable crowding. Like Tomassini I have long marveled at the remarkable situation that one smallish city, Vienna, from about 1775 to 1830, produced Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, four exceptionally strong candidates for the top ten, and like him, I mourn the passing over of Haydn in the interests of representativeness. And if you’re serious about this, and you don’t make quirky picks, you are more or less forced to end up with a short list more or less like everyone else’s.
Well if anyone wants to play this game with me, I am ready to entertain suggestions. Chopin? Purcell? Dvorak? Tchaikovsky? Schoenberg, Berg or Webern? But I am more interested in thoughts about why our culture has such a rage for ordinality, and what it says about us.

Two Speeches

2011-01-20T12:02:00.000-05:00

I don’t have a clear memory of the two speeches that we are celebrating this week, Eisenhower’s farewell and Kennedy’s inauguration. I do remember the Kennedy inauguration however, reading about in the New York Post as a precocious five year old, asking my mom what the term “president-elect” meant, and slowly beginning to understand the meaning and nature of the political world, a realm of people and things somehow connected to me but
outside of my immediate experience. Everyone said Kennedy was young, though this is hardly self-evident to a five year old, but since the one thing a five year old knows is that he is young, I thought a young president was a good thing.

There have been a number of interesting articles this week about Eisenhower’s farewell address, how it has its roots in the “merchants of death” controversy in the 1930s, and how, if we really needed reminding, that Eisenhower was not opposed to the military, or to military contractors as such, or to the expansion of the American military, which went from something like 300 nuclear warheads to about 10,000 (I think) during Ike’s eight years. But he came of age professionally in the smallish interwar army, at a time when there was a clearer distinction between the domestic and the foreign than prevailed during the Cold War, and this division, I think, is what he wanted the country to maintain.
Kennedy’s (or the late Ted Sorensen’s) injunction to ask what you can do for your country became the dominant cliché of the early 1960s, and had as its greatest legacy, perhaps, the Peace Corps, managed by the late Sergeant Shriver. Fifty years later, there is a corrosive skepticism towards all governmental actions and activities, except of course in the one area Eisenhower set out for skepticism, the role of the military in American life, and its abetters in private industry. And if there is any idealism left in this country, we are regularly told that the only way to cultivate it is to separate it from the taint and contamination of government. The sad thing about the state of the nation in January 2011, is that is it impossible to imagine Obama, or any president, delivering either of those addresses today, at least without generating loud guffaws of incredulity.

Remembering the Alamo

2010-11-26T23:43:00.004-05:00

Texas is a state with a long memory, and nowhere more than at the Alamo, But on a recent visit to San Antonio, I found that the story of the battle of the Alamo is getting a more nuanced and truthful treatment that takes into account Mexican perspectives.

As a child in the early 1960s, I worshipped Davy Crockett. With my coonskin hat and long rifle, I spent many hours reenacting my last stand. For me, Davy Crockett and his comrades died defending freedom against overwhelming odds. I could not imagine a more honorable death

The chapel at the Alamo, which I visited, maintains this narrative. But exhibits outside the chapel, and in the Alamo's Long Barracks, tell a more complicated story. They depict the Texan war of independence as a struggle between a centralizing government in newly independent Mexico and supporters of a federal system. The Texas war, in this version, was one of a number of rebellions against authority in Mexico City. Exhibits also recognize Tejanos who fought for Texas independence.

What gets lost in this, of course, is the fact that Texans from the USA wanted to establish slavery. Once that becomes part of the story, the Alamo becomes something less than a full-blown fight for freedom.

That doesn't make the Alamo any less worth visiting. I made a point of standing at the site of the low wall defended by Davy Crockett and boys from Tennessee. I also read a plaque bearing the words of commander William Barrett Travis' letter from the Alamo that concludes "Victory of death," an recalled how many times I was stirred as I read those words.

But what most heartened me was a guide who told visitors that the story of the Alamo was not a story of good guys and bad guys, but a story of politics written in shades of grey. I'll take that over the old version any day. And I'll make a point of reading some more Texas history

First City, Second Edition

2010-11-24T08:29:00.002-05:00

The Encyclopedia of New York City has been very important to me. When I joined its staff in 1989 I was still searching vainly for a direction in my career as a historian. I eventually became its managing editor, and every success I have had in my subsequent career, directly or indirectly, comes from my involvement in the Encyclopedia. I owe it, and its editor, the redoubtable Kenneth T. Jackson, my deepest and most humble thanks.

And now, fifteen years after the encyclopedia appeared, a second edition has appeared. (A thanks to Ken and Lisa Keller for including the entire staff page for the first edition.) I have had very little to do with this second edition, and if I can offer my unbiased opinion, it is great. One of the truisms of the reference editing biz is that second editions of reference works are often more difficult than starting fresh, without any existing text as a constraint. One has to integrate the older edition into the new edition, and make it all seem seamless, and often, as is the case with the Encyclopedia of NYC, add a ton of new material, while keeping everything the same size. Ken starts his introduction by saying September 11th transformed all of our lives, and it hangs heavy over the book , though the general impression the book provides is one of continuity with the past, and that the city of 2010, despite 9/11, and such dramatic changes as the drop in crime and the financial crisis of 2008, is much the same as the city of 1995, in some ways more so, and in some ways less so.
There are a few errors in the updates. Chase Manhattan bank hasn’t gone by that name for over a decade, and is no longer located in NYC. Over two pages were added on the winners of the Forest Hill/Flushing Meadows tennis championships (perhaps a little too much), dating back to the late 19th century, but contrary to the table headings, they were only open championships after 1968. There were some nice additions, such as a table of retail establishments—Dunkin’ Donuts is in first place, with 341 in the city, beating out Subways, McDonald’s, and Starbucks, and one on executions of NYC criminals (which perhaps was modeled on a similar table in the Encyclopedia of New York State.)
I don’t know if print encyclopedias are essentially obsolete or not. Certainly Wikipedia has profoundly changed the nature of reference publishing, but it is a pleasure to be able to hold an encyclopedia and all of its contents in one’s hands, and I urge people to pick one up. Ken, Lisa, et al., congrats on a job well done.

Independent Historian

2010-10-06T15:15:00.002-04:00

This is a big week for me. I have a new book out from Cornell University Press, described below, and two pieces on the History News Network. In this one, I talk a lot about myself, and like most of us, I find myself to be a very interesting topic of conversation.

I have never been a big fan of the term “independent historian.” It always struck me as a subtle form of professorial condescension to those of us going through our careers without benefit of academic position, as if we had to prove to our tenured friends that we were “real” historians. Moreover, our independence largely seemed to consist of freedom from steady employment. But perhaps I was being just a wee bit too sensitive. I have come to embrace the term , with reservations, as I have come to understand that my career as a historian will never involve regular employment at an institution of higher learning. Of course, we are all entitled to our sour grapes. I sometimes think my academic friends really get paid to be teachers, administrators, counselors, etc., while they try to squeeze in a little history writing on the side. If we were to be accurate, their job title might be “academic teachers of history.” Me, I’m a historian. Writing history is my job and profession, and writing history is all I do.

None of this is to my credit, exactly. After all, when I came to the realization that there was apparently no history department in North America that wanted my services (save in the peonage known as adjuncting), I probably should have listened to the good advice of friends and family, to say nothing of the prudential spirit within, and retrained, and adopt a different profession. But I was just too stubborn and foolish. I had decided that a historian I would become, and a historian I would remain, regardless of the collective opinion of my peers about my employability.

Really, I have no complaints or regrets. And I have had a diverse and satisfying career. I choose my own topics to write about. I never report to a boss or supervisor. And every day, I get up, turn on my computer, and get to write about history. What could possibly be better?
For a number of years I worked as a historical reference editor, editing encyclopedias. It’s a perfect job for anyone like me, a Jeopardy contestant manqué with pretensions to omniscience. My work as an encyclopedia culminated in my stint as editor in chief of The Encyclopedia of New York State, which I directed from beginning to end, working with a staff of fifty, and a corps of contributors numbering well over one thousand. Unfortunately, too many historians still view editing encyclopedias as harmless drudgery, and as not a fully “serious” species of history, and most encyclopedias remain underappreciated and underreviewed. I hope this attitude changes. I know the Encyclopedia is one of the most comprehensive, and I don’t think it is immodest to say, one of the most important works ever published on New York State history.

But to return to the independent historian theme, one of the problems with working as an encyclopedia editor is that day by day, you are slowly laboring to put yourself out of work, and sooner or later you accomplish this great task. And it never gets any easier finding the next gig. So it was when then Encyclopedia was finished. Serendipitously, I found work as an editor of the Howard Thurman Papers Project, Howard Thurman being the most significant African American religious thinker of the 20th century. I moved up from New York City to Rochester in 1995 to be an editor on the papers project, but things didn’t really work out, and we parted ways in 1997. I never imagined I would ever return, but in 2005 I needed a job, they needed an editor, things were different, and it’s been much better the second time around. We have published one volume of his papers, others are on the way, and with a colleague, Quinton Dixie, I have written an introduction to Thurman’s life which we hope will introduce him to historians, and place him where he belongs, and as a prime creator of the tradition of African American radical non-violence.

And when I left the Encyclopedia, having accomplished all I ever wanted to do achieve in the world of reference editing, I left it behind, tired of chopping up the world of knowledge into 750 or 1,000 word chunks. I started writing a book about the housing cooperative in Queens in which I grew up, Rochdale Village, after becoming involved in a chatroom for former residents. Rochdale Village was unique in many ways, especially in that it was the largest experiment in integrated housing in New York City in the 1960s, if not all of the United States. The book has just been published by Cornell University Press. It covers a lot of topics; race, civil rights, black power, black/Jewish relations, crime, the teachers strike of 1968, the need for affordable housing, and the continuing rehabilitation of Robert Moses, but though it is not a memoir, it is primarily about the historical forces that shaped my early life. Researching and writing it was a thrilling experience, the most powerful involvement with a project in my career, and I found myself using my historical skills to ask and try to answer the most basic of existential questions, “who am I?” I would urge every historian to consider a similar project. I am sure you will find it as rewarding (and surprising, and confounding, and moving) as I did.

Parting advice to would-be independent historians? Money isn’t everything, though try to find a partner with a well paying job, preferably one at a major research university that will give you access to the library and the propriety databases that institutions of higher learning try to keep from the grubby fingers of independent historians. Purge your soul of bitterness, envy, and jealousy. Be happy with your lot in life.

Independent historians are outsiders, and we’re similar to other groups of outsiders. We underestimate our numbers, and we tend to isolate ourselves from those similarly situated. And we often feel badly about ourselves and our careers, and we search out and probe for internal flaws and limitations, when the real problem lies not in our capacities, but in the harsh, pitiless, and dog eat dog market for academic historians that we all have endured for our entire careers. And even if we independent historians are the dogs that were eaten, we are all dogs, and I think that more and more of us are going to spend our careers as independent historians. (We once were naught, we shall be all.) And I hope a day comes, in the not too distant future, when all us will just be called historians, and we will be judged by the quality of our scholarship, and not by the condition of our employment. That’s all any of ever wanted to accomplish.

Viva Nueva York

2010-09-25T09:38:00.004-04:00

Nueva York, the new exhibit at El Museo del Barrio, explores Gotham's relationship to Latinos and Spanish-speaking countries from 1613 to 1945. It's a fine show that will have you thinking "I didn't know that" soon after you enter and "tell me more" by the time you reach the end of the exhibit.

Most international understandings of New York are oriented on an east-west axis. Alter this to north-south, as historian and curator Mike Wallace observes, and a different perspective emerges. (Full disclosure: I'm a friend of Mike and the exhibit's main curator, Marci Reaven.) In this view of things, New York becomes a center for trade with the Spanish Empire in the Caribbean during the 18th century, a center for Latin American patriots plotting to liberate South America from Spain in the early 19th century, and a home for Latino writers, artists, immigrants and activists by the early twentieth century.

There are many things to be learned from Nueva York, but none more important than how the growth of the imperial United States changed the city's relationship to Latin America. Before the Spanish American War, and the U.S. rise to power in the Caribbean, Gotham was a city where Latin Americans worked to advance their own liberation and economic interests. After the Caribbean became an American lake, New York was more of an imperial city in a hemispheric empire. The relationship between less equal, more lopsided. Thus were some of New York's best traits as a city compromised by its presence in the larger United States of America. But not forever.

As the ending of the show and an afternoon walk around almost any part of New York makes clear, the migration of Spanish-speaking residents of the American empire to New York City since 1945 has transformed the culture and population of Gotham. While the show anticipates these changes, they really call out for an exhibit of their own.

Nueva York, produced in a collaboration with El Museo del Barrio and the New-York Historical Society, is a fine show that deserves a post-1945 sequel. The exhibit is on display at El Museo del Barrio until January 9, 2011.

George Steinbrenner's Monument

2010-09-24T14:23:00.004-04:00

They dedicated a monument to George Steinbrenner this week in monument park in the new Yankee Stadium, the Yankee’s Valhalla of heroes. Steinbrenner’s tablet was placed in the center of the area, and at about 1,500 pounds dominates the other monuments, twice the size of those afforded such minor baseball immortals as Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Joe DiMaggio. Perhaps this is only fair. The old Yankee Stadium was the house that Ruth built. It was also the house that Steinbrenner demolished, and if the new stadium has an “only begetter” it is George Steinbrenner.

When Steinbrenner passed away this July the eulogies set some sort of record for maudlin insincerity. Steinbrenner was, of course, a greedy and avaricious man, a bully and a tyrant, who used abused his position of authority to abuse his underlings mercilessly, occasionally appeasing his bad conscience by acts of sporadic generosity. It is the very definition of a paternalist, who treats people like dirt, demands loyalty, and then wants all to be forgiven because he throws his peons a Christmas party.

He was lucky enough to have purchased the Yankees in 1973 when the team and all of baseball was in a trough, and he rode the upturn of the market to his fame and fortune, and it would have more or less turned out identically, if one may play a counterfactual hunch, if Steinbrenner had remained in Cleveland or Tampa.
His baseball prowess was greatly exaggerated. He was the first owner to really understand the changed terrain of baseball after free agency, and he soon acquired some of the prized properties, like Catfish Hunter, Goose Gossage, and of course Reggie Jackson, and they led the Yankees to victories in the 77 and 78 World Series.

But other teams soon caught up, and Steinbrenner spent the next decade and a half acting as his own general manager, bullying his staff into trading away prospect after prospect for over the hill stars entering the downward inclines of their careers.

The turning point came in 1990 and 1991 he was kept out of baseball for trying to spy on Dave Winfield, and in the interim, his baseball people, loosed from his tyranny, started to make their own decisions, and cultivated a crop of prospects such as Bernie Williams, Mariano Rivera, and Derek Jeter that formed the core of the great turn of the 21st century teams, while Steinbrenner, happily for all, largely stayed on the sidelines.

But his arrogance remained undimmed and as always, unearned. Any boss who wants to be called “the boss” is only interested in being the Pharaoh of a land of prostrate sycophants. What is most disturbing about the legend of Steinbrenner is that it fits sp neatly with recent trends in American culture, the valorizing of the entrepreneur to such an extent that it reduces workers to insignificance, and the belief that leadership, with all of its authoritarian resonances, rather than collaboration of equals is the way to get things done. I suppose Steinbrenner really thought the Yankees were an extension of him, and that he was the most important Yankee of them all, the Babe not excepted.

To me his monument will always not be the new plaque, or the New Yankee Stadium itself, a $2 billion tribute to his vanity, an unnecessary boondoggle that New Yorkers will be paying for until the Yankees decide its time to build a third Bronx stadia, but the reality that the most famous sporting venue in all of the United States, one at which, as a Bronx inductee into the cult of Mickey Mantle I worshipped at with all of my youthful fervor by the age of six, has been reduced, by Steinbrenner’s whim and a snap of his fingers, to a rubble strewn future parking lot.

An Unmitigated Horror from Buffalo

2010-09-15T20:41:00.002-04:00

Reactions to the New York primaries from Peter Eisenstadt
So after a century, we have moved from a form of voting in New York State where you only had to do one thing—go into a booth and pull some levers—to one where you have to do two things, fill out a form, and then feed it into a computer—and the possibility of making a mistake in voting has greatly increased, since now it is far easier to vote for two candidates for the same office. I would hate to see what happens in a crowded polling place in November. I suppose this is progress. But the other story of the day is Carl Paladino trouncing Rick Lazio for the Republican nomination for governor.

Paladino is a Buffalonian, and though I live just an hour away in Rochester, I never heard of him until he decided to run against Lazio. He is an unmitigated horror, a vile racist who had the most extreme take of any NYS politician on the Lower Manhattan Muslim Cultural Center, and a candidate of undisguised white rage who offers nothing but his anger against Albany, and NYC, a walking collection of biases and prejudices.

Democrats are happy that the Tea Party surge is moving the Republicans further rightwards, supposedly leaving that ever-elusive vital center up for grabs. Perhaps, but my big fear that whether by winning elections directly or scaring the moderates, the Tea Party will just push the debate further rightwards. What is most upsetting about the Tea Party and people like Paladino they have energized is that the lesson they have taken from the past decade is that the Republican Party has not been conservative enough, that white people have to regain their rights from an America run by immigrants and minorities

I suppose Andrew Cuomo will still win easily, but he is not terribly exciting. There is much to be done, and the hour is late. Democrats and democracy in New York State are still recovering from the downfall of Elliot Spitzer, and four lost years of governance. Whatever happens, I fear our state will be far worse off for having to listen to Paladino’s frothings and foamings for the next two months.

Playing Into Bin Laden's Hands

2010-09-12T21:30:00.002-04:00

At his best, Ted Koppel represents the finest of the old American network news system. He's smart, informed, and deft in his judgments. His recent piece in the Washington Post about Osama Bin Laden brilliantly makes a point that can't be made loud enough

Bin Laden deserves to be the object of our hostility, national anguish and contempt, and he deserves to be taken seriously as a canny tactician. But much of what he has achieved we have done, and continue to do, to ourselves. Bin Laden does not deserve that we, even inadvertently, fulfill so many of his unimagined dreams.

It did not have to be this way.

As Koppel points out, the U.S. was perfectly right in crushing the Al Qaeda operation in Afghanistan after September 11. But since then, we have consistently blundered into wars, moral quagmires and errors of policy that weaken us and create recruiting opportunities for Bin Laden.

Read on.

Losing the Best of 9/11

2010-09-12T11:16:00.004-04:00

September 11 is a difficult anniversary, but the bile that distinguishes this one is particularly troubling. Here are my thoughts on the matter of 9/11 and the proposed Muslim communty center, reprinted from the Sunday, September 5, 2010 Record at www.northjersey.com.

Nine years after September 11, as debates rage over plans to build a Muslim community center in lower Manhattan, we stand on the brink of losing one of the best things about our region’s response to the assault on the World Trade Center: the inclusive spirit that animated our first wave of rescue efforts and mourning rites. And that would be a terrible loss to inflict on ourselves.

I saw that inclusion as a survivor of the attacks and as a historian who tried to interpret our responses in essays, documentaries, conferences and public lectures.

Inclusion wasn’t the only one reaction to the attacks—there were stupid, ugly things said and done in all sorts of ways--but the determination to share our struggles and our griefs in public harmonized with our constitutional freedoms and our need to overcome terrible losses.

We need to remember that today. It’s not only a matter of freedom of religion and showing the world that our fight is against terrorists, not Islam. It’s also about keeping faith with what was best in us after 9/11.

When the South Tower collapsed in smoke and flames, I was standing on Broadway near Liberty Street. I ran for my life, expecting any second to be buried under a mountain of falling debris. Instead, I was caught in a cloud of smoke that choked me and blinded me until I finally caught my breath and my bearings.

As I staggered eastward through the smoke, I came upon one man who looked to be from South Asia and then another man whose ancestry seemed to be Latin American. We locked arms to support each other and plodded forward.

As we trudged down a narrow side street, someone pushed open a door to an ordinary building and hauled us inside.

There, in a food court, we were helped by one man who probably came from the Middle East, another who might trace his family to Ireland, and women with roots in Africa and Latin America. We did the best we could to help each other: we rinsed our eyes and throats, shared cell phones to call our loved ones, and soaked towels in water to make improvised dust masks for when we ventured into the murky streets outside.

There might have been a Muslim among us, but we never got around to asking each other’s religion. All we did was recognize each other as human beings who needed help.

Still, not everyone was helpful as I trekked home covered in ashes and dust. I had to ask twice before someone loaned me a phone to call my mother in North Jersey. Once, when I knocked on a restaurant’s door to beg a glass of water, the staff told me they were closed.

But I saw enough kindness to convince me of something I have believed ever since: the good people in this world outnumber the bad.

When I made my way home to East 81st Street in Manhattan, I impressed on my wife and children the most important thing I had seen: in a crisis, ordinary people had stepped forward to do incredible things—and that would see us through.

Foxhole solidarity eventually gave way to something more subtle. As the shock of the attacks yielded to the grief of mourning, the ecumenical spirit of improvised memorials was apparent throughout the metropolitan area. Walking the streets of New York, I saw sidewalk memorials jammed with Jewish yarzheit candles, Roman Catholic mass cards, and a typewritten prayer from a Muslim cleric.

In Union Square, patriotic memorabilia rested next to signs that said “Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War.” The bitter smoke from the World Trade Center hung thick in the air, but never have I seen a better display of religious freedom and the right to dissent.

It was not all peaceful coexistence. In New York, and in Jersey City, some Muslim parents kept their children home from school for fear of attacks. Newspapers reported verbal abuse of Muslims in New York City. Conspiracy mongers and anti-Semites claimed that Israel was implicated in the attack.

Yet formal observances, both immediately after 9/11 and one year later, were visibly interreligious. “A Prayer for America,” a memorial service at Yankee Stadium held September 23, 2001, included Hindu, Muslim, Protestant, Sikh, Jewish and Roman Catholic devotions. One year later, at an interfaith memorial service, police officers, firefighters and rescue workers joined in as Muslim students from the Noor Ul Iman School at the Islamic Society of Central Jersey led everyone in the Pledge of Allegiance.

As we wept together in the aftermath of September 11, we learned about each other’s responses to common experiences. We could even grasp that, for all our differences, each of us contained something of the other: a Jew’s injunction to remember; a Roman Catholic’s sense of communalism; a Muslim’s feeling of fear in a familiar region that suddenly seemed threatening; and a Baptist’s faith that the city would rise again.

The hijackers attacked us with indiscriminate hatred: they killed Americans, Muslims, and people of many more nationalities and religions. Our response should distinguish between terrorists and Muslims. It should also affirm humanity and freedom. And that includes freedom for religion in the shadow of Ground Zero.

As we struggle to maintain justice and security in our region, we should embrace people of all religions and nationalities who are willing to work for a better tomorrow. That surely includes the people who want to build a Muslim community center in lower Manhattan. To do less is to violate the best spirit that our region displayed in the hell of 9/11.

Leaving Iraq, Remembering Frank Carvill

2010-09-04T23:54:00.003-04:00

The latest changes in the US position in Iraq inevitably make me think of my friend Frank Carvill, who was killed in action there in 2004. Many words have been written and spoken about Frank, but none truer than those of Sgt. Bart Prouty, Jr. at the Fallen Heroes site.

I knew Frank only for a short time. He took me to chow my first few hours in Iraq. He kind of gave me the inside scoop of how things were there. He is the first soldier that I had any contact with outside of my unit in Iraq. But he made a lasting impression.

I was a medic with the 984th MP Co at the time. He was in a Combat Livesaver class that I was teaching at one point (kind of an advanced first aid class) and he was always asking me questions, trying to expand his knowledge as much as he could. That really impressed me.

Most of the kids in that class were there because they were told to be. Not Frank. He was a sponge, absorbing everything, even during the breaks when I just wanted to relax, always wanting more. He really seemed to be a selfless man.

I was in a class at Camp Victory with some medics from C Co. and Frank was one of the guys who picked us up to take us back to Camp Cuervo. We had lunch at Victory and I noticed he stayed behind with the vehicles as a guard while everyone else had chow. Always looking out for the other soldiers.

Sgt. Prouty's reminiscences are a great reminder that in the middle of a war, Frank remained the same person he always was: intelligent, generous, curious, and responsible.

The concluding thoughts in Sgt. Prouty's post speak for many.

I still cry to this day even thinking about him. He was the most selfless man I have ever met. He was a good man and everyone could learn something from him... how to be a better person.

Images from the war still haunt me every day, but I know Frank would not want that. He would want us all to do every thing we can to be better people.

I am a better person just for knowing him, I just hope that I can be a fraction of the man that he was.

SGT Bart Prouty, Jr. bart.prouty@us.army.mil of 159 Med Co (AA), Wiesbaden, Germany

Ma-Nish Ta-Na

2010-09-03T11:02:00.002-04:00

A brief comment on the Israel-Palestinian peace talks. There is no good reason for optimism, and many good reasons for pessimism. For starters, Netanyahu and his far-right coalition will almost certainly not renew the settlement freeze, which will likely lead to the talks collapsing before they get started. Between Netanyahu’s intransigence, Abbas’s weakness, the absence of Hamas, my fears of Obama’s cluelessness and deftlessness, and issues such as Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees, which in the current context, seem unresolvable, it is easy to see ways for the talks to fall apart quickly. And at the various Oslos we have seen talks fall apart in the past, when the auspices were considerably brighter than they are now.

And yet the alternative is what, precisely? The Palestinians will not improve their bargaining position by not talking. I am deeply skeptical about the basic interest in the Israeli government and the increasingly conservative Israeli public in peace. And yet if there is hope of progress without mutual bludgeoning and bloodletting, the talks will be an absolute desideratum.
I see no chance that the Palestinians will get what they want from Israel, a final, permanent settlement of all outstanding issues. The talks will certainly end ambiguously, and it seems more and more likely the settlement of the Israel-Palestinian question will be ambiguous as well, neither a one or two state solution, but more of a one and a half state solution, or a two and a half state solution, with a de facto Palestinian state (or states ) unilaterally declared by the Palestinians. And the current negotiations, with an implicit if grudging recognition of the new reality by the US, would be the most likely positive outcome of the current talks. With Rob, if we look to Irish precedents, let us consider the famous words of Yeats:
What rough beast, its hour come at last
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Israel, the PA, Hamas, and the IRA

2010-09-02T23:18:00.008-04:00

The need for a just and lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians is so great that I'll hope for the best in the current negotiations while expecting something less. The obstacles to peace are many, and one of them can be illuminated by an example from Irish history--specifically the history of the IRA.

Carey McWilliams, my old professor, made the point in the 1970s: the IRA could never force the British into a settlement in Northern Ireland--but it could prevent any settlement that it did not like. Once, this was true of the PLO. Today it is true of Hamas.

The Israeli government may forge an agreement with the Palestinian Authority. But can the Palestinian Authority bring along Hamas? If it can't does that mean a civil war among Palestinians? Or a Palestinian state on what is now the West Bank and something else for Gaza?

The parallels between the two situations aren't exact, but the examples of Ireland, the IRA, the aftermath of the Irish war of independence, and the more recent decades of conflict in Northern Ireland, are sobering.

Arizona in Rochester

2010-08-30T17:26:00.001-04:00

When I was working on the Encyclopedia of New York State for seven years, from 1998 to 2005, the Amtrak connection between Rochester and Albany was my second home. I knew all the conductors; the guy in the club car who always saved me the last can of sparkling water on the way home on Fridays. And train travel is my favorite means of locomotion. Jane would drop me off, all tired at 6 AM. Shut my eyes for a few minutes, and then I roused myself, and read blissfully for the next four hours.
Imagine my surprise, and my extreme consternation to read Nina Bernstein’s powerful article in the Times this morning on the role that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement service now regularly plays on trains (and busses) on the Empire State corridor, on trains that never cross into Canada. Regularly going up and down the cars, asking people “what country were you born in?” a question that people are free not to answer, but rarely fail to give a response. And if you give the wrong answer—any country but the USA—you have to show your papers, and if you can’t satisfy the border guards, you are taking off the train In Rochester in 2008 over a 1,000 people were arrested. The numbers have dropped since evidently because immigrants are avoiding the busses and trains. In my seven years of traveling Amtrak, hundreds of trips, I was never once asked for my country of origin. Why have people been making such a fuss about Arizona when the same thing was going on in recent years in Rochester?
This will only end in one possible way, if the current trends continue. To avoid what is obviously going on, as Bernstein describes, wholesale racial profiling, everyone will have an internal national ID card, and everyone, on penalty of being taken away, will have to be able to produce it any time. And then this will be implanted with a chip, so the police and the government will be able to keep track of us. Okay, the latter is perhaps a bit paranoid, but we are going down the route of a permanent internal passport, sooner than later. Our native xenophobia, our unreasoning fear that every immigrant is a terrorist, our willingness to justify all sorts of abrogations of our rights in the name of security, will take away our rights, step by step. And unbeknowest to me, right here in little Rochester, the process seems well advanced.

Specters of Beck

2010-08-29T13:53:00.001-04:00

In 1946 the distinguished African American religious writer Howard Thurman wrote an interesting (and somewhat uncharacteristically political) essay, “The Fascist Masquerade.” He was worried about the revival and extension of a native American fascism. This was a very common worry at the time among progressives. Vice President Henry Wallace, writing in the New York Times in 1944, wrote that a “fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends.” With “several million Fascists in the United States,” Wallace claimed that one of the great challenges to face the United States after the war will be the fight against fascism “within the United States itself.” Thurman was broadly sympathetic to this perspective, and in his article, he pointed to several characteristics of an incipient American fascism, which was “committed to a fundamental inequality among men,” including a stalwart defense of Jim Crow, opposition to the rights of labor, a conservative Christianity, all wrapped in the mantle of an aggressive patriotism. Thurman identified certain organizations as manifesting these traits, including the revived Ku Klux Klan. They were pseudo-populist organizations, which had their support and sustenance from mid-sized and often large sized businesses who saw these reactionary groups as supporting and helping to institute their broader agenda. And these front organizations were useful in disseminating and obscuring the real source of this crypto-fascism. “Watch for the signs [of fascism] in your community,” Thurman cautions, “ whatever may be the banner or masquerade.”
This concern with fascism, and fascist subversion in the mid to late 1940s has sometimes been labeled the “brown scare,” an ironic precursor to the red scare, the irony being that many of those who were most concerned about fascist subversion, like Henry Wallace, found themselves subject to accusations of subversion themselves. If anything, the episode is a good reminder not to be too eager to make accusations of subversion. But Thurman was definitely correct that the Klan, and later the White Citizens Councils, were main bulwarks in the fight to retain segregation, and the “right to work laws” pushed by many of the groups he discusses played a major role in retarding the cause of labor in the post-war period.
So, is Glenn Beck a fascist? Was Glenn Gould a hypochondriac? Was Glen Miller ever not in the mood? This is a serious question, and Frank Rich in the Times this morning amasses evidence, quite similar to that assembled by Thurman and Wallace, to argue that Beck is in the end a self-promoting puppet for a vast right wing conspiracy. The answer to the question of Beck’s fascism is less important than posing it, and the need to be alert to the forces of reaction, which continue to be, even in the era of Obama, more resourceful and tenacious, it would seem, than anything the good guys can muster. Much has been made of the symbolism of the Beck rally on the anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington. The tragedy of America since 1963 is that in many ways it is a far better, and far more egalitarian society in some ways; and far worse and less equal in others. Whether or not Glenn Beck is masquerading as a fascist is for the reader to decide; what seems beyond doubt is that he has become perhaps the leading spokesperson for what might be called the “new inequality.”

A Mayor, a Governor, and a Muslim Community Cener

2010-08-11T22:15:00.003-04:00

The demands of my job directing the American Studies program at Rutgers-Newark have dramatically reduced my free time for posting on "Greater New York." However, the controversy over building a Muslim community center in lower Manhattan rouses me to post--in praise of Mayor Bloomberg and in condemnation of Governor Paterson.

Mayor Bloomberg got it right: this is a civil rights issue in a city that thrives on tolerating differences. Back off from either of these and we'll be in a terrible place. The terrorists who staged 9/11 will have scared us into tearing up the Constitution and frightening us into abandoning the open, welcoming spirit that has long made New York a destination and beacon for people all around the world.

To his shame, Governor Paterson has not risen to the same heights. He acknowledges the constitutionality of the community center, but he understands the pain of the families who want to see it elsewhere. To ease their pain, he's willing to consider using state land to build the center elsewhere.

Mr. Governor, what part of the constitution and the history of our city do you misunderstand? In the days of Jim Crow, if someone got uncomfortable eating alongside a black person at lunch counter, would you have offered to build a separate lunch counter to spare them their trauma? Of course not. You would recognize that constitutional rights, like freedom of association and religion, aren't things to be bargained with. Stand up for the Muslim community center in lower Manhattan.

Health Care and the Political Future

2010-03-25T08:58:00.003-04:00

The health care legislation that President Obama signed into law yesterday tilts American social policy in a more just and progressive direction that should bear fruit for months and years to come. Equally important, however, is the conservative reaction to the bill. In their fury at Democrats who voted for the bill, conservatives will alienate the very moderate Democrats that the Republicans might want as allies in the future.

Take the death threats against Bart Stupak.

Or Kathleen Parker's column calling Stupak a "backstabber."

Their single biggest consequence will be to remind politicians like Stupak that, for all their differences with their fellow Democrats, they have more friends in the the party of Obama than they do in the GOP or the Tea Party movement. That cements the opposition to the Republicans--a good thing for Democrats, but a bad one for the GOP.

As E. J. Dionne points out, Stupak in the end voted for the bill because to vote against it would have derailed health care reform--a cause that is big enough to include opponents of abortion who also value improvements in health care.

Dionne's thinking reflects the kind of broad-minded pragmatism necessary to sustain a Democratic majority. The Republicans and Tea Baggers who attack Stupak do not display the same cast of mind in support of their own cause.

Grateful Dead at the New-York Historical Society

2010-03-14T21:58:00.005-04:00

I've seen some popular exhibits at the New-York Historical Society, but yesterday I encountered the first show that had me waiting in line to get into the exhibition gallery: GRATEFUL DEAD: NOW PLAYING AT THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY.

Admittedly, part of the explanation for the line is that the the show was mounted in a relatively small space. Still, it was the lure of the Dead that drew dozens of visitors to the museum on a cold and windy afternoon. What they found was a great taste of holdings from the Grateful Dead Archive at UC-Santa Cruz and interesting lessons on the band's connections to New York City.

You enter the exhibit by passing a giant photo of the Fillmore East marquee, taken in 1969, announcing shows by the Byrds; Blood, Sweat and Tears; Jimi Hendrix and the Dead. I was impressed, but even more impressed to learn, to my surprise, that the Dead played at the Columbia takeover in 1968.

The show does a good job of sketching out such associations between the Dead and Gotham, but it does an even better job of show the band's complex cultural history. The Dead's reputation for psychedelics and extended jams sometimes overshadowed the eclecticism of their music, their deep relationship to their fans, and their innovative business models.

GRATEFUL DEAD gets at all of this with intelligent labels that are enthusiastic without being worshipful. It also deploys an impressive array of artifacts that allow visitors to explore the band's complexity: Pigpen's harmonica and a Warner Brothers contract citing the name of one Jerome Garcia; plans for the short-lived but impressive Wall of Sound; and a collection of letters from Deadheads.

My favorite artifact was a folding pyramid built in memory of the Dead's concert at the pyramids on 16 September 1978. One day later, Anwar El Sadat of Egypt and Menachem Begin of Israel signed the Camp David accords, which led to a cool but real peace between the two countries. The pyramid reads, on one side, "The living thank the Dead for the first chance at peace in 30 years."

The Dead archive at UC-Santa Cruz is still in development. When it is fully open, it promises to be a great resource for researchers with interests in everything from the Dead to business to the politics of fandom. For now, your best bet is to visit GRATEFUL DEAD at the Historical Society. Open through July 4, 2010.

A Bad Decision

2010-03-05T17:32:00.001-05:00

The Obama administration seems ready to overrule Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to try Khaled Sheik Mohammed (KSM) and his co-defendants in a civilian court and return the matter to a military tribunal. This would be such a bad decision on so many levels that I don’t know where to begin. First, Obama will never be able to satisfy his Republican critics. If Obama agrees to a military tribunal his critics will insist that it take place in Guantanamo. (And the odds that Guantanamo closes by the end of the Obama administration are going down steadily.) If the tribunal is held in Guantanamo they will insist that evidence gathered under torture be admitted. If the Obama administration concedes on everything, his critics will just say why don’t we just do away with all these formalities and just assemble a firing squad and be done with it? Obama will not win. But far more importantly, this will legitimize military tribunals for any similar case in the future. Obama will mumble something about the limited scope of the military tribunals he is authorizing, but all it would take would be another Republican president to vastly expand the scope of military tribunals for all sorts of cases. The Bush-Cheney administration has won, and the rule of law in this country has been permanently damaged.

But Republicans will be Republicans, and easily cowed Democrats will be easily cowed Democrats. I want to focus on the real culprits in this, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and the other NYC politicians who decided in a narrow NIMBY-ish fashion, despite the large number of civilian terrorist trials in recent years, that trying KSM would create to many traffic jams in Foley Square and so on. (And I don’t have a sense that Bloomberg’s decision is wildly unpopular with the average NYCer.) But, of course, if NYC doesn’t want to risk a civilian trial, why would any other municipality in the country want a trial that NYC thought was too dangerous? The logic will lead to a military trial in a military base, sure as shooting. It is Bloomberg’s decision to oppose civilian trials, and the acquiescence of all major NYC politicians, as far as I am aware, to go along, that has forced the easily forced hand of Obama. New York City politicians have done a grave disservice to the nation, and in real sense, to the entire world

Eric Massa

2010-03-04T15:50:00.000-05:00

The big news in our corner of western New York is that Eric Massa is not going to run for re-election. Massa is the first term congressman who represents a sprawling district (as are all upstate districts), from the outskirts of Rochester down to Corning, Hornell, and Olean. I am not in his district, but I can’t ride more than a few blocks without entering it. Massa is a former naval officer, resident of Corning, who first ran in 2006 to replace the retiring Amo Houghton, the longtime moderate Republican congressman and scion of the Corning Glass fortune . (Houghton was one of the few Republicans to vote against the Iraq war authorization in 2003.) Massa was defeated by Randy Kuhl an utterly undistinguished state senator, and then, in 2008, Massa, riding the Obama surge, narrowly defeated Kuhl.

Massa has been a lively energetic representative, a left of center Democrat in a right of center district. He held about twenty town hall meetings this summer over health care, and then was one of a handful of Democrats to vote against the health care bill in House from the left, though we will see what happens this time around. He continues to be, under Obama, critical of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has been a general breath of fresh air around here. As part of an Israel pro-peace group, we met with his staff a few months ago, and then he called me a few weeks later, to see if I had any other concerns to discuss with him.
Yesterday, he announced he would not be seeking re-election. He said it was because he had terminal cancer. There are other reports that his decision is connected to a sexual harassment suit brought by a male staffer. Whatever the reason it is very sad. He has been an independent Democratic voice, vigorous and very much his own man, and I was looking forward to hearing him speak on matters of local, national, and international interest for many years to come. He will be missed.

Governor Paterson Should Resign

2010-02-27T21:46:00.003-05:00

Governor David Paterson's announcement that he will not seek reelection is welcome news. Now the governor should take one step more and resign. Anything less will leave our state with a discredited, lame duck executive who can do little to improve the dismal condition of New York.

Pateerson's resignation would bring to the state's highest office Lt. Governor Richard Ravitch. In these awful times, with Paterson a badly discredited governor who assumed office after the resignation of Eliot Spitzer, New York needs someone of Ravitch's experience and depth to lead the state through difficult times.

After Spitzer and Paterson, it is easy to forget that New York once had a reputation for being a well-governed state. No longer. There is plenty of blame to go around the state's ills, but only a governor with credibility will have the slightest chance of fixing things.

Whether Ravitch serves for the next year or runs for a full term is something to think about later. Right now, the state is drifting. We need better executive leadership than Governor Paterson can ever provide. It's time for David Paterson to move over and make room for Richard Ravitch.

Paterson Falls

2010-02-27T21:06:00.003-05:00

Another governor, another tawdry scandal that will probably force him from office. Spitzer and Paterson are probably the worst executive tandem since Nixon and Agnew. (And Paterson, I think, has to go. I can't imagine how he can be an effective or even marginally respected governor the rest of the year.) And where would New York State be without Richard Ravitch, who is the lieutenant-governor by the narrowest of margins, saved by the split vote on the Court of Appeals, after all the lower courts ruled that Paterson couldn’t appoint Ravitch in the first place, and all the state’s Republicans and many Democrats howled that appointing Ravitch was a terrible abuse of power. Otherwise we would be looking at the Senate Pro Tem, Malcolm Smith I believe, who I guess is a nice guy, but is a total political nonentity. (And of course a year ago if this happened, it would have been the now convicted Joe Bruno who would now be ready for his gubernatorialship.)

For me, the bad run of governors is almost a diversion from the state’s main problem, the utterly dysfunctional state legislature, and there seems little chance that things will change this November. As we are seeing in Washington now, the legislature can reduce even the strongest executive to the position of seeming irrelevance. The NYS legislature doesn't even need the filibuster to make passing significant legislation almost impossible. Spitzer tried to bully the legislature, Paterson tried to get along with it , and neither strategy worked, and the financial crisis of the past two years has brutally revealed the incompetence of both Paterson and his legislative peers. And now we will be reading articles about Andrew Cuomo, the reasons for his divorce from the daughter of Robert Kennedy, and whatever other dirt is in his closet. (If we go back to 2006, with Spitzer, Paterson, Cuomo, and Hevesi on the Democrat ticket, Cuomo is the only one who hasn’t or shortly will be forced from office, so naturally he is the front runner for the governor’s spot.) After Spitzer I am really suspicious of the ability of attorneys-general to assume high executive position. Its a very different job. I don’t know, Cuomo seems like a nice guy, but I am not sure that electing a fortunate son is the way to really change things in this state. But of course the problem is, no one else really knows either. But Rob and I promise to consider this in forthcoming posts.

The Kingfish From Wasilla

2010-02-20T15:13:00.001-05:00

So there’s this Democratic president, elected to turn things around as a dedicated reformer during a catastrophic economic turndown, largely the fault of his predecessor. Well, he does his best, but you know, the economy is a difficult thing to turn around quickly, and many think he hasn’t done enough, is exhibiting a characteristic timorousness, didn’t do much the help the average Joe and Jill in their extremis, and let the Wall Street fat cats off with a slap on their paws. So a populist insurgency develops, that says the president has done too much in some ways and not enough in others, that the president is out of touch with real America, and that he has yet to turn the glittering platitudes of his campaign into meat and potatoes for the American people. Yes, we can all agree, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a real problem on when his hands when it came to the Kingfish, Huey P.Long.

Historians still debate whether Huey Long, and his fellow insurgents, c. 1934-1935, Francis Townsend of the Townsend Plan, a senior citizen pension, and Father Charles Coughlin, represented progressive populism or American crypto-fascism. Long was assassinated before one could tell, Townsend was co-opted, and Coughlin did of course move far to the right, but before he discovered the international Jewish conspiracy his politics and proposals were surprisingly progressive. The main planks in their platforms consisted of much closer regulation on Wall Street, confiscatory taxes on the rich, a whole array of social programs. All in all, they were a far more impressive bunch than Sarah Palin and the tea partyers, but I guess every generation gets the populists they deserve, and our degraded political times certainly deserves Sister Sarah and the Palinites. First time as tragedy, second time as farce.

The point is, everyone makes too much of a big deal about FDR’s first 100 days, and they made much much too much of a big deal about Obama’s first 100 days, but the most progressive phase of the New Deal, the part gave us social security, the Wagner Act, the Wages and Hour acts came not in mid 1933 but in 1935, as FDR niftly co-opted the populist insurgency to his right, or to his left, or wherever it was. And this is what Obama has to do. There was no way he could met all the expectations that was raised of his presidency in his first year. What he has to do now is more focused. Respond to his political challenges and challengers. Obama needs to remember the most successful populist president in American history always spoke in the clipped accent of a Hudson River aristocrat. Elitists always make the best populists.

Charlie O'Hegarty

2010-02-19T21:32:00.006-05:00

One of the great things about New York City is that it draws in talented people from all around the world, like Charlie O'Hegarty. Charlie's singing and storytelling cheered audiences at the Eagle Tavern back in the 1980s, where his sets might feature songs about long-ago sea battles, whimsical rhymes, and stories about his days in the Royal Marines. Charlie died recently in London, but one of his stories still has me laughing.

I'll leave it to my friend Dan Milner, to provide the informed assessment of Charlie's music. Dan ran the Eagle Tavern shows where I often saw Charlie, and I heard them together many nights.

Charlie was a great entertainer. When he had the mike, you stopped thinking about everything else and, at times, you felt as though you were alone in a conversation with him. But, because he was far funnier and had experiences way beyond your own, you only egged him on if you spoke at all. He was not a flashy guitar player but he had a great right arm, super solid rhythm.

The songs were clever, but not college-clever. They were well-crafted and precisely achieved the desired effect. "M-16" was about a guy who was mugged in the East Village (no doubt, Charlie himself) who got an M-16 "the Army made me a man with" and went back to sort out the gang who got his wallet. It was, of course, the fantasy of everyone who was ever mugged has had.

"It's a Beautiful Day" is a leveller, a common denominator. "We're all happy when the sun shines and it's a beautiful day." But it was vehicle for a gaggle of groovy little image rhymes too:

"There's faith healers and safe stealers, bar tenders and car benders
pawn brokers and pot smokers, red haters and head waiters
beer drinkers and clear thinkers, cello blowers and 'hello belowers'
rock 'n' rollers and save-your-soulers
and men who stuff hard boiled eggs into their mouths just to get their names in the Guinness book of records."

"Classic Yankee Clipper" was actually about a woman he met when he was working as a bartender:

"It was a dream to sail on her, to feel the breeze upon ye, to feel her responding to the wheel,
To feel the salt spray on ye as ye plowed through the water, the same way again, I know I'll never feel."

I still chuckle at the memory of taking a girl to the Eagle on a date. She turned to me as Charlie performed "Classic Yankee Clipper" and said: "That song is about a woman."

I still find myself singing Charlie's song "The Royal Oak," a great ballad of English tars battling the Turks on the high seas.

But most of all, I like to retell one of Charlie's stories from his days in the Royal Marines.

He was in basic training on a hot summer day, and a sadist of drill sergeant was marching Charlie and the rest of the troops up and down, bawling things like, "I'll make you beg for mercy. I'll make you curse the day your mothers gave birth to you. Leftrighleftrightleftright!"

Finally, the sergeant gave them a break.

From the back of the formation, in an impossibly proper upper-class English accent, came the words, "How beautiful is rest."

The sergeant jumped up and screamed, "Who said that?"

"I believe it was Shakespeare, sergeant."

Larry White

2010-02-10T22:55:00.001-05:00

For some reason, our website has been inundated with spam recently, and our nice clean posts are getting besmeared with scads of gobbledygook. What to do? Who knows? I tend to be a technological fatalist; whatever will be, will be, and trying to divine the functions of technology is beyond my ken. Technology giveth, technology taketh away, blessed be the name of technology.

This was definitely not the attitude of my cousin, Larry White, whose mother and my father were brother and sister. As long as I knew him, which was as long as I have known anyone, Larry was entranced with technology, especially imaging technology. Larry was a child of the age of mechanical reproduction. Larry never had any doubts about what he wanted to do, what he wanted to be, and how he wanted to spend his life. He wanted to work with cameras, with video equipment, with computers. And that’s just what he did. He studied photographic technology in college, and became a photographic engineer, and for many years was in charge of the photographic laboratory at Modern Photography, measuring lenses, timing f-stops, evaluating all the latest innovations in imaging. It has been a remarkable thirty years as we have moved from film to digital imaging, and gone through God knows how many generations of computing technology. Larry was on top of it all. For me, technology is a necessary evil. Whenever I figure out how something works, I am loathe to change my routine, which means I am generally dragged, kicking and screaming, into whatever the latest generation of innovation, and generally adapt only when it is absolutely necessary. Larry always had to have the latest in everything, just because it was there. Technology for most people was a means to an end. For Larry technology was an end in itself. For some, technology acquisition is a sign of immaturity, e-braggadocio. Not Larry. He needed to get the latest technology the same way I need to read the latest book, not to show off, but just to add to his store of knowledge.

For most of us, for me, anyway, technology is a form a magic, of which I have no real understanding. I press a few buttons, things work, and I am satisfied. But Larry not only had to have the latest technology, he needed to understand it, how to manipulate it, how to make it work to his advantage. Technological ignorance is one of the besetting sins of our age. We learn from our technology how to be manipulated, and the lesson sticks. Larry was an exception. Larry loved and understood technology, and love begets understanding, and understanding begets love. And Larry was generous. He would always share his knowledge, his possessions, and always try to explain, again and again, how things work. He was a decent, a caring, a happy man, who loved his family and friends, and without, as far as I knew, an edge or a dark side.

Larry died last Friday. He was only 54, one year younger than me. He leaves behind his lovely wife, Esther, and his grieving and uncomprehending parents, Helen and Billy. He was diagnosed with cancer on Labor Day weekend last, but the cancer was virulent, and after a valiant fight, he succumbed. The Eisenstadts have seemed like the House of Atreus recently, with unimaginable tragedy piled upon unimaginable tragedy. I don’t know what to say other than he was taken much too soon, and that it seems unfair that if God grants me another decade or so, I will get to play with some new technical toy that Larry never got to see. All of the eulogies at his funeral mentioned his abiding love of Star Trek. What can one say? He has been beamed up, and all of us, in the wake of his passing, are a little more dematerialized. Goodbye, Larry. Cameras can do a lot of things, but they can never capture the essence of a good man.

Margaret Allison Hemphill

2010-02-01T21:17:00.005-05:00

When Margaret Allison Hemphill retired from her career as a planner at the Windham Regional Planning Agency in Willimantic, Ct., a group of officials presented her with a plaque that identified her as a national landmark. It was a fitting tribute to a woman who combined a cheerful sense of civic engagement with a deep sense of history—above all her own, which linked the South and New England.

Mrs. Hemphill, my mother-in-law, was born in Minneapolis, Mn. in 1924 and lived more than half her life in New England. Yet both her parents were Southerners, and one of the persistent if muted story lines in her life was what to make of her Southern roots.

She grew up in Minneapolis, where her father was a doctor and her mother a journalist and later a botanist. She got to know the South on vacation stays with her aunts and by attending the boarding school of Ashley Hall in Charleston, S.C. Her family had deep roots in South Carolina. She counted among her ancestors Confederates and early members of the Klu Klux Klan.

In her teens, however, she rebelled against this inheritance and thought of herself as a liberal. In truth, she was on the left wing of liberalism. At Smith College during World War II, she led caravans of trucks across Massachusetts to collect supplies for Russian war relief. After the war, living in Minneapolis and working as a reporter at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, she was a member of the Farmer-Labor Party.

Her experiences in the Farmer-Labor Party, however, made her deeply skeptical of Communists. Over time she concluded that they would never be part of an alliance they couldn’t dominate and would wreck any coalition they couldn’t run. At the same time, she was viscerally hostile to McCarthyism.

She moved east with her husband George Hemphill when he took a job teaching English at the University of Connecticut at Storrs in 1954. After years of raising four children, including my wife, Clara Hemphill, she earned a Masters’ degree in public policy at the University of Connecticut and went to work as a planner. Always active in Democratic politics, she was an alternate delegate for Senator Eugene McCarthy at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

During the Vietnam War, when income tax time came around, she consoled herself by saying that her taxes went to pay the salary of Senator Fulbright. And she insisted on flying the flag on Independence Day, saying that she wouldn’t let Lyndon Johnson spoil her Fourth of July.

By the time I met her in 1990, she combined a Southern sense of graciousness and proper manners with a staunch liberalism. An heir to the best of the New Deal and the Great Society, she worked to weave a social fabric that brought people together, protected them against injustice, and nurtured their best selves.

At the Windham Regional Planning Association, she worked on affordable housing, expansion of public transportation, historic preservation, and the protection of open space. In her own village of Hampton, she was a long-time supporter of the Fletcher Memorial Library and helped found the Hampton Gazette, a village newspaper.

Six months ago, she moved to an assisted living facility in Cambridge, Mass. When she was hit with a stroke last week, I went there with my wife and children to be with her in what turned out to be her final days.

In her apartment we found a copy of The New Yorker by the door, an 1869 map of Hampton on the wall, and a Charles Dickens action figure sitting on her dresser. The combination of past and present, along with urbanity and a sense of justice, seemed just right.

Howard Zinn

2010-01-31T08:13:00.003-05:00

People seem to be of two minds about Howard Zinn, and I guess that’s okay. Subtlety was never his greatest strength, so I suppose it is fitting that his work is usually either loved or hated. Those who love it, see it as radical truth telling, speaking truth to power, exposing dark underbellies, naming things that others would prefer not to be named. Those who hate it see it as hamfisted history, caricaturing both the heroes and the villains in an effort to reduce the complexity of American history to a ten-point political program. Me, I’m sort of in the middle. I can see his limitations, and his tendentiousness, but I tend to like his political program. His immensely popular book, A People’s History of the United States, should be a way into American history, and not a stopping point. But if people read only one general history of America in their lives they could do a hell of a lot worse than a People’s History of the United States.

Zinn’s history, to its very title, is redolent of the strengths and weaknesses of a strain in history derived ultimately from the Popular Front of the 1930s, one that sees capitalism and capitalists as perpetually warring against “the people.” Many of Zinn’s critics, such as Michael Kazin, argue that “the people” don’t really exist, and are complicit in what actually happens, and are not a passive force screwed over again and again by the forces of capital. The enemy is us.

Fair enough, but let us consider the current health care debate. Is the fact that the single-payer option, the public option, and almost all of the reforms that progressives wanted died on the committee room floor the fault of the long hands of capital, manipulating the debate and debaters like the expert puppeteers they are, or is it because the people themselves are too implicated and imbricated in the existing system to ever be an effective agent for change, and what “the people” want, above all, is to disaggregated, to fit into their various slots and cohorts, and be left alone?

You can make an argument either way.. With Zinn you have a clearer sense of what and who the real enemies are. With Zinn’s critics, you have a clear sense of the challenges and impediments to transformative change. What do we need? We need a historiography that can explain both why Charlie Brown keeps on trying to kick the football, and a historiography that explains why Lucy keeps on pulling it away. There is a role for both Zinn style history and anti-Zinn history, and they should be combined in ways that do not cancel each other out, but transcend the limitations of both approaches. We need a historiography that can explain why Americans are both so self-satisfied and so unhappy, a historiography that is ironic enough to transcend its own irony, that has a problem telling the difference between triumphs and tragedies. Anyway, this rhetorical effusion aside, let me continue to eulogize. Howard Zinn fought many good fights over a very long career, and he will be missed.

The Structure of Political Revolutions

2010-01-22T21:04:00.002-05:00

I suppose all bloggers worth their salt this week have to try to provide an explanation for the current Democratic debacle, stand among their ruins, and prophesy. Here goes. Let us return to grad school and the first time you read Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I’m sure you remember it, with that pink cover, and the famous argument that most of the time science tends to go along quite nicely, with a self-confirming worldview, confirmed again and again by the experiments of those who share it. Now, there are occasional things that do not fit neatly into any world view. These are explained away as anomalies, and do not threaten the architectonic of the worldview, until the anomalies accumulate with sufficient number and gravity, leading to what Kuhn called a “paradigm shift” (he is responsible for popularizing paradigm in middlebrow argot), and uses the example of the paradigmatic paradigm shift, the Copernican revolution, overthrowing the Ptolemaic geocentered universe.

Okay. Enough astronomy. To make the analogy, we have lived under a Reaganite paradigm for lo these thirty years; government is bad, taxes are bad, the military (which is somehow seen as not really part of the government) is good, and free markets are good, and everything confirms this, except what doesn’t, and those become the anomalies, such as Medicare and Social Security, which do not count as being government. And since the people who control the paradigm get to declare what is and what is not anomalous, the Republican departures from these standards, as frequently happened under the two Bushes, get a free pass, while the Democratic departures are condemned as wrecking the system.
Well, under the second Bush, the anomalies piled up, fastly and furiously, until it seemed that the underlying system was beginning to crack and falter, and we were in the presence of a paradigm shift, heralded by the election of Obama. But I don’t think this has happened, and the old paradigm, though shaky, is beginning to recoalesce. And the main reason is, though Obama was elected as a Copernican, his governing style has been Ptolemaic, and without giving a clear enough alternative, too many Americans have engaged in retrograde motion, and returned to their Reaganite epicycles. There are always anomalies, things that don’t fit, but only the person who controls the paradigm gets to announce the anomalies, and that person is not yet Obama, and it is no longer clear, alas, that he ever will be.

Do you remember Tycho Brahe, the greatest astronomer in the generation before Galileo, who had a golden nose, and wrote about the supernova in Cassiopeia? Well, he also tried to combine the Ptolemaic and Copernican models, and argued that the earth was indeed in the center of the universe, and the sun revolved around the earth, but all the other planets revolved around the sun. This was an act of scientific bipartisanship, and Tycho Brahe was half-right. But sometimes, in politics and celestial mechanics alike, being half right can be the same as being completely wrong.

Visions of Haiti on Television

2010-01-17T14:26:00.003-05:00

To be honest, I don't usually turn to television in a time of crisis: as a wise friend of mine at the Media Studies Center observed, it makes you dizzy and is less reliable than the newspapers. Still, I dip into tv to see what my fellow Americans are seeing. For all the breaking news from Haiti on television, it is striking to see how quickly the medium falls into formulaic patterns of coverage. A desire to console, and an inadequate appreciation of history, are both apparent.

The desire to console was apparent in an exchange between an anchor and a reporter. The reporter had just finished trying to describe the depths of the devastation he had seen. The anchor then responded that while it was awful, perhaps this was a time for Haiti to finally overcome its problems. The reporter looked skeptical, but the anchor kept prodding him until he said the equivalent of "perhaps."

Another aspect of the consoling role is the medium's addiction to high emotion and strong graphics. This tendency leads to plenty of air time for rescues that work out. Unfortunately, as we're learning, the ones that work out are a rarity. The result is a false send of consolation from happy stories of rescue.

Amid all this, it would be good for Americans to learn more about their country's long involvement in Haiti. The fine author Tracy Kidder made the shrewd point that this earthquake was not a natural disaster, but a disaster that wreaked devastation because so many human actions had made so many people vulnerable. Americans are part of this. As one of the networks recognized in a thumbnail sketch of Haiti's history, the United States has been deeply involved in Haiti for many decades.

Haiti

2010-01-16T13:31:00.001-05:00

I feel a need to say something about the Haitian earthquake, if only to bear witness to the suffering of untold hundreds of thousands. But I really don’t have much to say, or add, to what has already been said to this latest chapter in Haiti’s long, proud, sad history. Let’s not to be quick to condemn people who trying to survive as looters. Let’s not be too quick, following Rebecca Solnit’s excellent recent book on the subject, to assume that in the absence of government, that people will revert to their supposed animalism, rather than help one another to the best of their abilities. And let’s not try to blame Haitians, or like David Brooks in the Times yesterday, their culture, for their basic problems. (Neither I wouldn’t lay the blame for Haiti’s poverty on America’s sorry history of imperialist involvement in Haiti, though the Aristide years, but that is at least as compelling a narrative.) Let’s not to be quick to praise our own generosity, though I must confess that in using the US military to aid the Haitians, we have finally found a use for our oversized military that I can approve of. Fighting natural disasters is the true moral equivalent of war. Great natural disasters should be a reminder that we are all, in some fundamental sense, equal in our fragility, and equal in our mortality, but once the earth stops shaking, we find out once again, alas, that our equality was only temporary. In any event, God have mercy on Haiti and Haitians, and let us see if the oldest republic in the western hemisphere can use this horrible occasion to find, after two centuries, a constructive way of relating to the second oldest republic.

On Carpetbaggerism

2010-01-13T16:35:00.001-05:00

So the talk is there is going to be a race for the Democratic nomination for the New York Senate seat between a white woman and a black man. I don’t know if the first time this happened, in recent years, it was a tragedy, but the second time is definitely a farce. Kirsten Gillibrand has been a relatively anonymous figure for her year in the US Senate. I am not sure if I could recognize her face or voice. She has moved from a moderately centrist Democratic politics to moderately liberal. Good for her, but I can’t say that I have strong feelings about her candidacy, either way. Harold Ford Jr was understandably a moderately conservative Democrat when he was running for the US Senate from Tennessee. But the same politics makes him far too conservative for New York State. He is beginning to move to the center, but basically New York State is one of the most liberal states in the country, and if it is not represented by a true liberal, it is a great opportunity wasted.

But the real question about Ford, who has lived in New York State for only three years, is why does New York State attract carpetbaggers so frequently, from Robert Kennedy to Hillary Clinton? First let me say that a carpetbagger is an honorable calling, and goes back to a time when southern politics desperately needed the assistance of outsiders, and the tragedy was that they didn’t stay longer and accomplish more. Carpetbaggers respond to a need, and the need that New York State Democrats have is that over the past few decades they have done a spectacularly poor job in producing likely candidates for top positions. The whole controversy over Gillibrand and Caroline Kennedy was a reflection of the lack of obvious candidates for the senate position. The basic problem is that NYS’s dysfunctional politics has produced few viable candidates for higher office. One can look at the difficulties that both Elliot Spitzer (leaving his assignations aside) and David Paterson have had in being effective governors, where the basic problem seems to be that Democrats in the legislature, secure in their seats, have no reason to come to the aid of their party’s governor. And for reasons I will let those who follow NYC politics more closely explain, Democrats have had relatively weak candidates for mayor of NYC for several cycles. So as a result, the candidates for statewide office often emerge from congress, and they are by definition not well known around the state, and most of them, lacking statewide reputations, seem too small for the task of representing or running something as big and complex as NYS. So it seems to me that if NYers wants to prevent more carpetbaggers descending on their elections, they need to start by creating a state politics which works, and which can produce politicians of which they can be proud.

The Negro Problem

2010-01-13T10:32:00.002-05:00

I guess we have all heard about the current hoo-hah over Harry Reid’s perfectly sensible remarks about Obama, and how this has become a minor scandal, with some comparing his remarks to Trent Lott’s support for Strom Thurmond’s segregationist Dixiecrat campaign for the presidency in 1948, which is of course asinine. I have two remarks to make. First, the remarks in question come from what is perhaps the least useful genre of political reportage ever invented, the unsourced trolling through the detritus of recent events, of the sort Bob Woodward has perfected, the book that gives the illusion that you are in the room with the policy makers when they are making real decisions. And illusions are what they provide.Though I don’t doubt that future historians will find the occasional stray remark to be useful, I think they provide a navel’s eye view of the world, from the vantage of campaign staffers with scores to settle, and who think that campaign staffers are the real story of the campaign. Such sleazy compilations of meretricious gossip, that consistently eschew any bigger issues, add little or nothing to the understanding of politics, and just further debases an already debased political process.

But what really has interested me is the anger about Reid called Obama a Negro. Negro is archaic, and hasn’t been an accepted term for persons of African ancestry living in the United States since about 1970 or so. Those of us who work in African American history know this, and live with it, but it complicates our task. When you are working, as I currently am, on black history of the 1930s and 1940s, and when every black person you quote uses the term Negro, you are constantly paraphrasing, and when someone says “Negroes will demand their equal rights” and you don’t want to quote it, you write “he called for blacks to demand their equal rights,” which is not quite saying the same thing. It always seem a bit sad, when refering to someone who proudly called himself or herself a Negro, we are not allowed to honor their chosen designation.

Negro was never a slur. Black nationalists like Marcus Garvey, of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, used it freely, and the big linguistic campaign by blacks in the mid-century was to ensure the capitalization of Negro in print. (The capitalization of black is far less consistent than Negro, in large part because capitalizing Black would seem to call for a balancing capitalization of White, which many deem ugly.)
Is it offensive to use an archaic term, that was never offensive, to refer to a racial or ethnic group? Probably more weird than offensive, like calling a Jew a Hebrew, an Israelite, or person of Mosaic persuasion. (Actually calling someone a Jew, as opposed to calling someone Jewish, strikes me as a bit archaic as well.) Negro survives as an adjective, in such terms as Negro spirituals, but otherwise has left the living language. This is a small price to pay for the tremendous positive change wrought by the upheavals of the 1960s, but I guess I wish those of us who write in the field could occasionally use Negro as a substitute for black or African American, especially when writing of a time when it was ubiquitous. But linguistic conventions are remorseless, and spare no one. In 1986 Ralph Ellison dedicated his second book of essays, Going to the Territory, somewhat cryptically, to “that vanished tribe into which I was born, the American Negroes.” I think I know what he means, and one of the things it means, as Harry Reid’s comments demonstrates, is that American may have a black president, but it will never have a Negro one.

The Extraordinary Life of Ernest Bokor

2010-01-10T22:34:00.007-05:00

From the 1960s to the 1980s, when Ernest Bokor worked in the gold district of New York City, he didn’t talk much about his past. By day he used his mechanical skills and an artistic streak to make jewelry molds. At night, he went home to his wife and two daughters in Passaic, NJ. Nothing suggested that he was a man of extraordinary courage, nerve and resourcefulness who saved his fellow Jews from the Nazis in Hungary during World War II.

I knew him only in passing through his daughter Raya, one of my college friends from the 1970s. When he died recently, she wrote a short chronicle of his life and gave it to friends and family. The story astounded me.

Born in southern Czechoslovakia in 1920, Mr. Bokor went to Budapest in 1939 to look for work. When Nazi Germany occupied Hungary in 1944, he was sent to do forced labor. Sensing imminent danger, he had his identification papers altered to conceal the fact that he was Jewish.

One desperate improvisation led to another. Eventually he used his forged identify, and his blond-haired, blue-eyed “Aryan” looks, to help the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg rescue Jews from deportation to concentration camps. Armed and dressed in fascist uniforms, Mr. Bokor and his comrades tricked real Nazis into releasing their prisoners into their custody. Then, they set them free with “Sheuss Passes” from Wallenberg that placed the holder under the protection of Sweden.

Mr. Bokor related one of his rescues as follows.

One day, Raoul Wallenberg called a meeting and gave us instructions. We were to take two open back trucks and go to a cinderblock factory where Jews were being collected for deportation on a death march toward Austria. We were to tell the guards that we had orders to get workers to help clear rubble from the streets so that the military could move trucks and supplies. We were to pick up as many as we could possibly fit into the two trucks.

It was already late fall, rainy and cold. Many people were without shoes or coats. When we arrived and the prisoners saw us they became very frightened thinking we were there to round them up, take them away, and kill them. There were old women, young women with children, and old men.

In order to seem convincing we shouted anti-Jewish slogans at them. At first it was difficult to get the people onto the truck.

As we got them on, they tried to jump off and run back into the crowd. I had to get some real Hungarian Nazis to help. One of them said he would help if we promised not to bring them back but to kill them all. We assured him that he would never see these people again.

They surrounded the truck and we squeezed in as many as we could. The people were terribly frightened as we packed them in tighter and tighter. We packed them in like pickled herrings and when we couldn’t fit any more, we drove away. They kept screaming and trying to escape.

I sat on top of the cab holding a submachine gun at the prisoners and yelled at them not to move or they would be shot. This was very harsh but necessary in order to fool the Nazis. If anyone suspected or looked carefully at our papers, we would be lost.

When we got far away fro the factory we stopped the trucks. It was late in the day, rainy and dark. Many people were crying in anticipation of being shot. Finally we could tell them the truth—that we were Jews as well and were there to save them. We gave them the Sheuss Passes, instructed them to fill in their names, and released them to go into hiding as best they could.

We didn’t have a place for them to go, but, at least for the moment they had a new chance to survive.

Ernest had more such experiences, and his share of sorrows, before the war ended. In peacetime he met Helen Lebovic, who had been in Auschwitz. They married in 1948. In 1949 they immigrated to Israel and in 1958 to the United States.

Only in his retirement years did he begin to speak publicly about his wartime experiences. When he did he deferred to his wife because she was an Auschwitz survivor.

Frank Yusko, a high school history teacher in Spotswood, NJ who worked with Mr. Bokor on Holocaust education, called him "a good friend and a great man" who should be remembered because he “made the choice to place himself in harm’s way to help others in desperate need. People such as these should serve as an example for all of us.” I can't think of a better way to sum up his heroism in World War II.

Learning From the Liberal Party

2010-01-07T19:35:00.003-05:00

A guest post containing some very sage advice from Daniel Soyer, who is both an active member of the Working Families Party, and a leading historian of the Liberal Party.

The Working Families Party (WFP), having displayed considerable muscle in this past year’s elections and legislative session, is now facing scrutiny from sections of the media and federal investigators concerning its rather complex finances. WFP leaders, of course, deny any wrongdoing, and argue that many of the accusations come from those who consider working people and the poor to be “special interests.” And indeed, the party’s legislative agenda from an increase in the state minimum wage to the recent green jobs bill has been a progressive one and its touted candidates largely of high quality (purist leftist quibbles aside).
But the Working Families Party needs to take care that it doesn’t follow the path of its predecessor on the New York left, the Liberal Party. Given its sorry end, it is often forgotten that when it was founded in 1944, and for several decades thereafter, the Liberal Party was a genuinely progressive force for civil rights, labor, affordable housing, fair taxation, universal healthcare, strong public education at all levels, and, yes, even good government. (The Liberals called for the abolition of the state senate more than half a century ago.) Sure the party was always a top-down affair, bossed by union leaders Alex Rose and David Dubinsky. But the bosses were personally honest and made sure the party stayed true to its liberal/social democratic principles. The Liberal Party also had a large social base, with dozens of local clubs and an ability to mobilize thousands of members from Dubinsky’s International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU).

The ILGWU was also the Liberal Party’s largest source of money. Its party affiliation meant the Liberals had a steady income to work (as the WFP now proudly does) not only as a campaign operation but also as a year-round pressure group and incubator of progressive ideas. The Liberals also attracted many idealistic young people, some of them looking for jobs that would enable them to make a living while fighting for a better world. From the start, the Liberal Party was a clearing house for patronage government and otherwise. Rose used to argue that there was nothing wrong with party activists getting jobs as long as they were principled liberals of high caliber, as they usually were.

But things started to change for the Liberal Party in the late 1960s. After Dubinsky’s retirement as president, the ILGWU disaffiliated from the party, taking its money and members with it. The Liberals were now left without much of a social base and the need to scramble for funds. Then, at the end of 1976, Alex Rose died. Raymond Harding emerged as the party leader, and by the early 1980s, the Liberal Party was shaking down candidates for cash and jobs. Liberal positions on issues became nothing but an afterthought. By the time it lost its ballot line in 2002, the Liberal Party was little more than a shell--- a lobbying firm with a ballot line (for sale).

The lesson for the WFP? It is at least that if they intend for the party to be a lasting force for good, party leaders, veterans of the movement left and the progressive labor movement need to think about the future, when they are gone. As James Madison put it long ago in a message to the people of New York, “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” Instead, structures need to be put into place now to prevent abuses.

On Caricatures

2010-01-06T13:49:00.001-05:00

The point of a caricature is to capture the essence of a person through exaggeration. It’s a neat trick. Too often a caricaturist errs on one side or the other of the equation, either its all exaggeration, and the person and the real personality is overwhelmed, or it is too much of a portrait, and the person’s essence is submerged. I don't know enough to provide a good history of caricatures or caricaturists, but the growth of the art is clearly connected to the rise of mass circulation magazines and newspapers in the 19th century, and can be separated from the cartoon in that a caricature generally doesn’t have a caption or an accompanying joke, but the image itself needs to be clever and amusing. If Daumier, who I confess might be my favorite French artist of the 19th century, all of your Delacroixs, Manets, and Seurats notwithstanding, the great master of the early 20th century was Max Beerbohm. ( Beerbohm was also probably the most gifted parodist in the English language, and my Christmas reading this year was Beerbohm’s A Christmas Garland, his famous collection of parodies of English writers c. 1912—the one parodying Henry James late, circumlocutionary style is perhaps the best—and my edition was illustrated by about 25 of his wonderful caricatures. And Beerbohm reminds us that a good caricature is a visual parody of someone’s face and personality.)

For those of us growing up in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s, there were only two caricaturists; Al Hirschfeld, whose illustrations, primarily of theater people, adorned the Arts and Leisure section of the NY Times for decades, and David Levine, the caricaturist in residence for the New York Review of Books, and whose images covered an astonishing range of people in cultural and politics, from the golden age of Aeschylus and Euripides to the bronze age of George W. Bush. Well, of course I liked Hirschfeld, and counted Ninas with the best of them, but compared to Levine, his caricatures were often superficial, capturing and exaggerating visual aspects of his subjects faces, without providing a deeper sense of who they were. Levine’s were different, with their huge heads and noses, and always seemed to be a commentary on the person in question. He is perhaps best remembered for his political caricatures, though he probably was best in his depictions of literary and artistic folk. And even when he was political, as in the famous one of Lyndon Johnson showing off his scar, but even in this image, the point was as much about Johnson’s personality, and his all-encompassing egocentrism and self-centered personality, as about the war in Vietnam. Levine could at times be mean, but he was never nasty. Now, a few years after Hirschfeld departed at the age of 100, Levine has left us as well. We might imagine what Levine’s Obama, or Palin might have looked like, but we will never know. The NYRB hasn’t been the same since Levine’s caricatures stopped appearing, and it will be further diminished.

Joe Ades, RIP

2010-01-05T22:00:00.004-05:00

Joe Ades, who peddled potato peelers on the streets of New York in a delightful British accent, was a pleasure to watch and mystery to behold. Now that he's gone, he turns out to be even more fascinating then I imagined.

As a fine piece by Dan Bergner in the Times explains, he was a native of Manchester, England who peddled goods in Britain and Australia before he moved to New York and fell in love with the city. His handsome suits and smooth patter carried him far: he earned a good living and spent his after-work hours sipping champagne in the piano bar at the Pierre.

And his potato peelers were no joke. I bought one years ago and it serves me well today, although I never mastered Joe's technique of turning whole carrots into sunflower sculptures.

At their best, the sidewalks of New York are the best show in the city. Surely Joe Ades was one of our stars.

Apologies to the Shinnecocks

2010-01-03T14:07:00.001-05:00

So the Shinnecocks finally have achieved federal recognition as an Indian tribe, only about 230 years or so belatedly. The basic criteria for federal recognition was whether or not you were fierce enough or formidable enough to require the federal government to recognize you in a formal treaty, and since the Shinnecocks were no longer a military threat when the Federal government came on the scene, they were allowed to languish for centuries without federal status, only with state recognition, But the Shinnecocks have been in the records of the English and Dutch since the 1630s and have managed to hold onto a reservation of about 800 acres, with about 500 residents, despite the best efforts of developers to despoil then of their land over the centuries.

The Shinnecocks want to build a casino, or somehow profit economically and I don’t blame them, though I hope they come up a more creative way of profiting from their new status than gaming. And I also hope they also find new ways to publicize their existence, perhaps through a museum. Of all the Alquonkian-speaking Indian nations, tribes, and bands that once roamed Long Island and the Lower Hudson Valley, there are only two small reservations left, both on eastern Long Island, the Shinnecocks, and the tiny Unkechaung Poospatuck reservation, at a mere 50 acres. The federal recognition of the Shinnecocks is a triumph not only for them, but for the Munsee, the Delaaware, the Lenape, the Raritan, the Wekquaegeck, the Hackensack, the Canarsee, the Kichtawank, the Esopus, the Mattinecok, the Montauck, and many others. Let us hope that the federal recognition of the Shinnecock is a first step to a more general acknowledgement of New York State’s Alquonkian heritage.

The Triumph of Willful Men (and Women), and What to do About It

2009-12-29T11:44:00.001-05:00

The best thing to come out of the health care debate, as far as I can tell, other than a lukewarm bill whose merits and demerits will continued to be debated ad nauseam (I’m for it, though I’m glad I don’ t have to vote for it, on the record) is the call for the reform of the filibuster. If the filibuster is changed or eliminated, that would be, in my opinion, real, lasting reform. I’m not so sure about the health care bill. And getting rid of the filibuster would be a salutary change in progressive thinking. For reasons that I cannot fathom, liberals, progressives, democrats, have been over the past decade profoundly uninterested in discussing structural reform of the American government. The Bush-Gore election should have been an occasion for serious talk about Electoral College reform, and no more Floridas should have been a top issue for any new Democratic administration. And likewise, on January 20th 2009, Obama should made clear that ending the filibuster (at a time when the Dems only had 58 seats in the senate) should have been a top priority, rather than wasting months with oleaginous talk of bipartisanship.

The complete lack of interest in the reform of any constitutional arrangement is a hallmark of contemporary progressives, and it distinguishes modern progressives from Progressive era progressives, New Deal progressives, or Great Society progressives, all of whom expressed great interest in changing the way the government works in fundamental ways, and often tried to neuter the filibuster’s potential for gumming up the government works. (But, BTW, kudos to the “little band of willful men” who tried to prevent US entry to WWI. ) Getting around the nine old men on the US Supreme Court, and if Roosevelt’s court packing was too blatant a way around it, the need to do so spawned all sorts of constitutional innovations. And trying to loose the southern grasp over the senate, both in terms of committee chairmanships, procedure, and filibusters, was a major cause for civil rights liberals in the 1950s and 1960s. But for all the talk of change that ushered in Obama, there has little serious talk until now of changing the structure of government. There are reasons for this. Sstructural change is not inherently partisan; changing the filibuster or electoral college rules could help either party. They are not bread and butter issues. And arguably the filibuster is more murky now then it was half a century ago. It is no longer the prerogative of dixiecrats but is an equal opportunity delaying tactic, used by both sides freely. But besides adding to the profoundly antidemocratic nature of the senate, it makes the senate a place where serious legislation goes to die. Its fine to expand the health care system, try to pass a cap and trade bill (good luck), or tackle immigration reform (good luck again), but it is only when progressives learn again that the forms of the government are not inviolately given, and are, in the hands of the people, possess an inherent plasticity, that reform will really matter. The rest is just soundbites. The Obama presidency has had its first real encounter with structural and procedural reality, and I hope they and we learn from it.

Incrementalism, in Part

2009-12-22T11:58:00.001-05:00

One of the major questions in the health care legislation and the endless conundrums of the debate is whether one can start with small gains and advance to bigger and bigger ones. And the answer is, of course, sometimes incrementalism works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Those who defend the current senate bill sometimes point to social security and civil rights as successful examples of incrementalism. Perhaps. One can read the evidence in both ways. While it is certainly true that by excluding domestic and agricultural works from the original social security act in 1935, at the behest of southern senators, there was a huge gap in the coverage and fairness of the social security act, which was only remedied in subsequent decades. On the other hand, the creation of social security system strikes me as a far more radical act than anything contained in the current health care bill, which fits into the model of regulated capitalism, and does not, it seems fundamentally transform the health insurance industry. (This might be debated in some quarters. Much depends on how the health exchanges work in practice.) And civil rights seems like an even worse case for incrementalism. This is a complex subject, but I would argue that though the series of executive orders and state and federal laws from 1941 through the early 1960s on civil rights were significant, but racial equality was really instituted in this country by a wrenching revolution in the mid-1960s, in one convulsive fell swoop.

One thing is clear. If all the big issues are delayed until a future date–I think of the Oslo accords between Israel and the Palestinians—incrementalism will get you nowhere, and the unresolved issues will unresolve all the issues the parties thought they had resolved. There is a Zeno’s paradox of incremental reform; of perpetually taking half steps and never arriving at one’s destination. This has me very worried. On the other hand, Edward Bernstein was right, and Kautsky and Lenin were wrong. I think the current bill is okay, and if I were a member of congress, I would support it. However, it does mean that for the foreseeable future, health insurance in this country will continue to be doled out by for profit private insurers, and the United States is likely to continue to have one of the worst health insurance systems in the developed world.

Obama and the Morning After

2009-12-02T16:41:00.003-05:00

President Obama's speech on Afghanistan left me hoping that he succeeds but deeply skeptical about the prospects of his escalation. The left and right are already picking it apart for obvious reasons, and if it fails he may well stand alone. The biggest fallacy behind it, I fear, is the belief that a surge in Afghanistan will have the same useful impact as the surge in Iraq. But any analogies between the two countries are badly flawed.

As Juan Cole points out, Afghanistan and Iraq are very different societies. And the factors that aided the success of the Iraq surge--some of them ugly forms of ethnic cleansing--won't necessarily apply in Afghanistan.

No two wars are alike, and it is a great mistake to assume that what works in one will work in another. In countries as different as Iraq and Afghanistan, the complexities and dangers of each nation make for vastly different military situations.

President Obama has devised a strategy that recognizes conservative desires for a military solution and liberal desires to get out. Both sides can find much to criticize in it.

My fear is that there is no war that the US and its allies can "win" in Afghanistan the way you win a conventional war. That will make for a very messy ending to this conflict. While I hope that President Obama's policies hasten the end of this fight in some form, I can only contemplate them with a deep sense of skepticism.

Learning from LBJ

2009-11-22T21:47:00.002-05:00

While the nation and the world await President Obama's decision on Afghanistan, it helps to look back on another president confronted with the prospect of escalating a war in a far-off land: Lyndon Johnson weighing his options in Vietnam. Comparisons between Afghanistan and Vietnam are a dime a dozen, but Bill Moyers has done an excellent job of bringing to life Johnson's agonized thinking.

So if you haven't yet seen it, check out the latest broadcast of Bill Moyers' Journal and LBJ's Path to War, Parts I and II.

LBJ's Path to War is composed almost entirely of still photographs accompanied by tape recordings of Johnson's telephone conversations with politicians, friends and government officials. Johnson's strong sense of Vietnam as a bad war, and his fear of the political consequences of withdrawal, make for agonized musings. I've seen references to these tapes before, but still find them riveting--and proof that you don't need "high production values" to make great television.

Moyers' broadcast is a great service. Let's hope our president and the country learn something from it.

The Mayoral Election in New York City

2009-11-04T07:51:00.002-05:00

Mayor Bloomberg's surprisingly narrow victory over William Thompson illuminates two important issues: the mayor's relatively thin popularity in the city and Democrats' failure to win mayoral elections

With all the money he had to spend, all his ads, and all the powers of incumbency, Bloomberg won by far less than expected. Early in the evening, when the returns had him and Thompson only one percentage point apart, some people were even talking about an upset.

Early explanations with the narrowness of the race have turned on pollsters' fallibility, voter disgust with the mayor's flipflop on term limits, and resentment of his massive spending. But there's also the gnawing fact that Bloomberg's New York seems less and less hospitable to the middle and working class people who form its majority.

In his victory speech the mayor promised more jobs and more affordable housing, but it is his relatively thin achievements in this area that explain a lot of voters' frustration with Bloomberg. In many ways, he has been a very good mayor. But it is hard to escape the feeling that his city functions better for the rich than for the rest of us. And that, I suspect, contributed mightily to Bloomberg's relative unpopularity.

Thompson ran a weak campaign and came closer than anyone expected to beating the mayor. There will be many explanations for why this happened, but it is part of a pattern in recent New York history: the Democrats' inability to come up with strong, winning candidates.

In a city where Democrats are the great majority, more than once we have seen Democrats lose narrowly to Republicans. Giuliani over David Dinkins and Ruth Messinger; Mike Bloomberg over Mark Green and Freddy Ferrer, and now Bloomberg over Thompson. The Democrats don't seem to be able to turn their advantage in numbers into consistent mayoral victories.

The explanation for why this is so will have to wait for another day. But the Democrats really have some soul searching to do. In retrospect, more than anyone imagined, this was an election that their candidate could have won. Now they job is to figure out why he lost.

A Needed Revision

2009-10-26T22:21:00.003-04:00

Political debates often turn on an interpretation of history, especially in today's New York. One of the most potent lines of attack is to say, "Do you want to go back to the bad old days of David Dinkins?"

Rudy Giuliani wields this tactic with relish. But as Michael Powell points out in today's Times, this charge involves a misreading of the Dinkins administration.

Dinkins was far tougher on crime than he is credited, and he worked to create more housing for the city. He had managerial flaws, but in general he worked far harder to meet his opponents than they did to meet him.

Powell's piece is a healthy antidote to the belief that only Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg know anything about running New York City.

If It Wasn't For the Irish and the Jews

2009-10-24T23:13:00.004-04:00

Mick Moloney's musicianship, scholarship and showmanship have long enriched our understanding and enjoyment of Irish music in America. Most recently, he has turned his talents to the little-known story of Irish and Jewish collaboration in vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley from the 1880s to the 1920s. The result is a splendid CD, "If It Wasn't For the Irish and the Jews," which was launched in great style tonight at Symphony Space in Manhattan.

The CD itself is a fine recording, thanks to Moloney's own musicianship and the playing of Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks, a band with a special talent for recovering the beauty of early jazz and show tunes. Tonight's launch was heightened by additional contributions from Dana Lyn, Jerry O'Sullivan, Billy McComiskey, Kerith Spencer-Shapiro, John Roberts, Susan McKeown, The Washington Square Harp and Shamrock Orchestra, and a splendid array of step dancers and more.

The result was an evening that honored Irish and Jewish musical traditions and their creative mixing in Tin Pan Alley. Thanks to Mick's research, the evening was filled with illuminating anecdotes about Jewish and Irish collaboration and competition in show business, Jewish songwriters penning sentimental Irish songs, and Irish performers passing as Jews.

I have admired Mick's work since I studied with him at New York University in 1980, where he forever enriched my understanding of Irish music in America. (He gracefully favored me tonight with an acknowledgment of my own work on vaudeville that helped him understand the setting of Irish-Jewish efforts.)

Mick's latest offering deepens our understanding of the greatest thing about American culture: its hybrid vigor. Nowhere is that clearer than in music, especially in the Irish-Jewish collaborations that he celebrated tonight. Buy the CD. And if he's on tour anytime soon, don't miss his show.

Art Tatum

2009-10-13T12:49:00.001-04:00

Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of the most phenomenal musicians America has ever produced, pianist Art Tatum, born in Toldeo, Ohio on Oct, 13, 1909. In his relatively short life—he died in 1956—the nearly-blind Tatum made hundreds of recordings, primarily of the American popular songbook, and all featuring his amazing technique with its blistering arpeggiations, harmonic creativity, and technical sureness. That he was the most virtuosic of jazz pianists has never seriously been doubted or challenged. But Tatum’s music is easy to admire, and perhaps difficult to love. I know. For a long time I was one.

The problem with Tatum is that he doesn’t fit into neat category, or school. Of the great swing era performers, he was the only one who was best heard by his lonesome. Playing with collaborators diminished, rather than enhanced his music making. He was unique. One- part 19th century piano virtuoso, the heir to Franz Liszt and Sergei Rachmaninov, one part cocktail pianist like Eddy Duchin and Carmen Cavarallo, endlessly tinkling the ivories in versions of the popular songs of the day, and one part jazz musician, the friend of Fats Waller and Coleman Hawkins, and he sounds like all three. The standard complaint about Tatum is that he doesn’t swing, that his endless runs get in the way of the underlying music. Well, hard swinging wasn’t what he was about, and ornamentation was the essence of his music, and he needed the song forms to confine his talent. And if his challenge was to find an expressive mastery equal to his unrivaled technical mastery, all that one can say is that he got better at this as he grew older, and I think his 1949 Capitol recordings, and his mid-1950s solo work for Norman Granz are the pinnacles of his career, though all the peaks are lofty. The thing is about Tatum, as is the case for all music, if you listen to what he is, rather than for what he is not, his genius becomes apparent, and you get washed over by wave after wave of musical pleasures. Anyway, I have been listening to Tatum all day, and you out there, whoever you are, should too. See Art run. And run. And run some more.

On Nobel Prizes

2009-10-09T12:20:00.001-04:00

You don’t expect to know the names of the people who win the Nobel prizes in chemistry, medicine, or physics. You count yourself well-informed if you knew anything the particular discovery that prompted the award. You expect to know the name of the person who wins the Nobel Prize for literature, and once again, I have been disappointed, and suspect I will continue to be as long the prize continues to be awarded to European authors who haven’t been much translated into English. (Hang in there, Philip Roth and Amos Oz. )

You never know about Peace Prize, what the criteria are, and why it doesn’t go to the Quakers or some other pacifist organization every year. And when it is awarded to the commander in chief of the world’s largest and most powerful military, currently conducting at least two major wars, the message can become unclear. But the message in awarding Obama the peace prize is simple. It is a thank you note to the American people for ridding the world of the hyper-militaristic and chauvinistic Bush administration, and not electing John McCain. It is an award to America for rejoining the concert of nations. It is an award for not making things any worse, which America is uniquely positioned to do. It is an award of encouragement, calling on America to do the right thing.
The most obvious criticism of the award will be that it is premature. (And the most obvious pleasure will be to see the right fulminate about the prize.) But when it comes to America’s responsibility for keeping the world peaceful, it can’t be awarded soon enough. Obama’s presidency at home has become mired in health care and other debates, and many progressives have begun to wonder about his priorities, and the bloom is off the rose. This is a healthy debate, but the award is a reminder of the way the rest of the world views America, and as Obama ponders what to do in Afghanistan, in Iran, in Israel and Palestine, I hope he remembers that what the world expects him to do is to keep the peace, end wars, and leave office with a safer, less vicious, less nasty world. This won’t be accomplished by easy political compromises or taking paths of least resistance. The American people, and now the world, are holding Obama to higher standards than those usually imposed on politicians. Whether this is fair or not can be debated. What cannot be is that if Obama fails to deliver on his promise, he will be the most disappointing president since the last sitting president to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, one Woodrow Wilson.

Springsteen at Giants Stadium

2009-10-01T23:19:00.001-04:00

I caught Bruce Springsteen at Giants Stadium last night. At 60 he is still fiery and exuberant and the E Street Band rocks along just fine. Together, they do something extraordinary: make beautiful music out of the bitterness and the sweetness of living in New Jersey.

A writer once knocked Springsteen for appealing mostly to white fans, but I think that misses the importance of African American culture to his music. Springsteen is deeply influenced by the Black idioms of rhythm and blues and gospel.

Most important, he embodies what Al Murray once called the greatest gift of the blues: affirming life in the face of adversity,

Last night, I was up on my feet dancing and pumping my fist to lines like:

Badlands, you gotta live it everyday
Let the broken hearts stand
As the price you've gotta pay
We'll keep pushin' till it's understood
and these badlands start treating us good.

I grew up in the working-class world of North Jersey. I've always cherished Springsteen's ability to turn its blend of big dreams, shitty jobs, and bruised spirits into moments of pure exultation.

In Springsteen's world, where I was raised, people are bred to what Yeats called "a harder thing than triumph." The greatest gift of Bruce Springsteen is that he finds beauty, resilience, and ecstasy there all the same.

Remembering William Safire

2009-10-01T22:31:00.004-04:00

I am uncomfortable speaking ill of the dead, so I will begin my comment on William Safire by noting that my late friend Frank Carvill once said that the Times columnist was the only right-winger he ever wanted to drink beer with. I know what he means: there was a humor to Safire that made him stand out among conservatives. Unfortunately, there was more to the man.

For my money, Safire rarely strayed very far from the mentality of a flack: bending the truth, attacking the enemies of his client, and gleefully poisoning a debate before he would see his side lose.

Of course, Safire was famous for his libertarian streak. To some, this makes him look like a man who knew how to balance extremes, a shrewd thinker who intelligently took no fixed positions. This line of thought could be particularly popular among journalists: admiring Safire made them feel like independent spirits who could admire liberals and conservatives alike--thereby inoculating themselves against the charge that they were knee-jerk liberals.

I'll give credit to Safire for opposing the Patriot Act. But the plain fact is that he spent the bulk of his career promoting the worst tendencies in the USA and Israel.

On Israel, he famously followed Ariel Sharon at his worst. Safire, who was never near a battlefield in his life, called himself a shtarker--a tough guy. In fact, he did as much as any American journalist to encourage the Israeli occupation of the West Bank that so undermines Israel's present and future.

In the US he was a wordsmith to Spiro Agnew, who helped launch Nixon's war on the press that continues to this day. And when Richard Nixon resigned rather than face the music on Watergate, Safire started the habit of calling every political scandal a "gate." In this way, he diminished the gravity of Watergate and contributed to the demonization of politics. Both the war on the press and the denigration of politics continue to coarsen our public life today.

But it was in the latter years of his career, in the runup to Iraq, that Safire committed what was to me his greatest crime. In the Times, he used his column to promote the idea of a link between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Al Qaeda--thereby making and invasion of Iraq look like an appropriate response to 9/11.

There turns out to be nothing to Safire's claim of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link. Nevertheless, this claim helped justify a disastrous war in which thousands, American and Iraqi, died unnecessarily. One of them was Frank Carvill.

Presidential Ordinality

2009-09-30T10:24:00.001-04:00

Why are Americans so obsessed with ranking things that really can’t be ranked? For me, it might be an early exposure to top 40 radio, which so mesmerized me that for several years I kept a record of top pop songs of the day, charting their rising and sinking fortunes in a notebook. (What’s your excuse?) Sports is of course the area in American life where this obsession reaches its peak, with every conceivable form of ranking available to the discerning sports nut. Perhaps Americans are so interested in rankings out of a growing sense of national decline—those who shout “we’re number 1” the loudest are probably afraid that we are actually number 2, or even number 3. But rankings exist for one reason, to try to quantify what is basically unquantifiable, and to reduce the complexities of taste and subjective preference to a single numerical value, and the feeling that somehow this is a “harder” and more reliable than mere qualitative evaluation. Nowhere is this American obsession with quantitative ranking more pronounced than for our presidents. Not a year goes by without another attempt at ranking the 43 men who have held the highest country in the land. Do other countries do this? Is there a cottage industry of books ranking the British prime ministers? Do priests in Rome sit around ranking the 264 or so popes? Do members of the imperial court rank Japanese emperors? I do have a book that ranks Canadian prime ministers, from which I learned a lot about Canadian history, but I attribute this to the nearness of Canada to America’s habitual obsessions.

And the problem with the ranking of the presidents is that they almost always come out the same way, with Washington, Lincoln, and FDR at the top of the list, and Buchanan, Pierce, Nixon, and our most recent ex-president, lurking on the bottom. This has the general effect of ratifying conventional wisdom, and has the pernicious effect of letting people think they know more about American history then they actually do. But a recent book offers the most interesting take on presidential rankings that I have ever read; Ivan Eland’s Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty. Eland is basically a paleocon; skeptical of military interventions overseas, and equally skeptical of governmental intervention in the economy or personal liberty at home. He opposes ranking the presidents according to what he calls an “effectiveness bias” (judging presidents on their ability to enact their agenda), a ”charisma bias” (their media appeal), or the “service during a crisis” bias (these crises are often self-created.)

This leads to some interesting rankings. For Eland, there have only been four excellent president, and none since 1897; John Tyler, Grover Cleveland, Martin Van Buren, and Rutherford B. Hayes, and six other good presidents, of whom the most recent was Jimmy Carter, and before him Eisenhower. (Clinton, is ranked average at #11; George W. Bush is ranked bad at #36.) The bottom feeders are not the usual denizens, Pierce and Buchanan, both of whom are put in the middle of the pack, but James Polk #37, William McKinley #38, Truman at #39, and the worst president of them all, Woodrow Wilson. I thoroughly agree with the ranking of Wilson, who led this country into a disastrous war, and then established a still unmatched record for suppression of civil liberties, and Polk, McKinley, and Truman were warmongers all. (He is somewhat kinder to FDR, surprisingly, ranking him #31, just below Nixon, and just ahead of LBJ, daddy Bush, and Reagn, quite rightly not seeing the latter two
as true conservatives.

Eland has the virtues of consistency, which I lack. I support big government at home, and want the US to mind its business elsewhere in the world. Without a big enough government, big business will simply run roughshod over the interests of average people, and Eland’s belief that
business is essentially self-regulating is more utopian and fanciful than any socialist could imagine. Eland ranks Lincoln #29, and his views on the Civil War are complex, and not reducible to simple neo-Confederatism, but when all is said and done, it seems to me that, as the current health care debate shows, if the southern states had stayed in the union after the election of Lincoln, using the power of filibuster and other tools to disrupt Lincoln’s agenda, there is no way that they would have ended losing all their slaves without compensation, and would have avoided a nasty war besides.

But of course the real reason to provide any subjective ranking is to start arguments, and I should probably end this post here, rather than going on and on. But I applaud his rethinking of the ossified rankings of the presidents, and could not agree more that the usual ranking of presidents seems to privilege war-making and war-waging over almost all other qualities, and the ability to keep America out of war should be seen as at least as valuable as the talent for getting America embroiled in them.

A Memory of Alicia de Larrocha and Richard Milhous Nixon

2009-09-27T11:01:00.001-04:00

The great Spanish pianist Alica de Larrocha passed away the other day, full of years and honors. She was one of the greatest pianists of our time, and one of the greatest pianists I ever saw live. She was peerless in Spanish repertoire, with no equal in the great Spanish masters of the early 20th century, Albeniz, Granados, and Mompou, and was no slouch when it came to the classical composers either, and was the epitome of pelllucidity, precise and profoundly coherent, in the music of Haydn, Beethoven, and, above all, Mozart. It was at a Mostly Mozart concert in Avery Fisher Fall that I saw her, and I will never forget the concert, or its date, August 8th, 1974.

For most readers of this blog, the date will require no further annotation, it was one of those days before the days when everyone remembers where they were, like December 6, 1941 or September 10, 2001. But unlike those two days, there was nothing surprising (though it was still very shocking) about what was going to happen; Richard Nixon was about to resign the presidency, and the week’s news was all about the drumbeat of Republican defections, all telling Nixon that the jig was up, the game was over.
Now, I had followed the two years of Watergate like no story I have followed before or since, watched countless hours of televised hearings, read all the articles and books, and knew all the players, major or minor, and watching the demise of the political career of Richard M. Nixon reach its denouement was deeply gratifying. By the time I left for de Larrocha recital, I knew that Nixon had a speech from the Oval Office scheduled that evening for 8 pm, and though I wanted to stay home and hear it, I wasn’t about to eat the ticket I had purchased for the recital, though I brought a transistor radio with me to catch whatever gleanings I could once the concert was over.
So I went, and the crowd was electric, and however much people wanted to hear one of the world’s great pianists, the only thing that everyone wanted to talk about, except no doubt for a handful of sullen Republicans, was the resignation speech that evening. It was the sort of night when strangers started animated conversations with strangers, and it felt more like a political rally than a classical concert.
I was wondering what Madame de Larrocha was thinking about all of this. She was, as far as I knew (and know) completely apolitical, but I also knew that her revered teacher, Frank Marshall, had been a fervent supporter of Franco (who of course was still alive—though his slow shuffling off the mortal coil was already the butt of jokes), and I assumed her politics were rather conservative and Francoist. Let’s just say I wasn’t expecting hear a piano transcription of “Los Quatros Generales” as an encore. And I wondered what the great pianist, who had lived for forty years under a near-fascist dictatorship, was thinking about the amazing eruption of democracy that America was then experiencing.
Well, before the recital began, there was an announcement over the loudspeaker system, to the effect that because of the tremendous interest in Nixon’s address that evening, Madame de Larrocha has consented to let the address be broadcast live. Everyone clapped. (I forget if the speech was before the recital, or during intermission, though my memory is that it was during intermission.) And as loud as we applauded her peerless performances of the K.330 sonata and the last movement of that never-fail crowd pleaser, the rondo alla turca of K.331, the loudest shouts of the evening occurred when Nixon got to the part of the speech where he said, “therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as President at that hour in this office.” I was a thrill to hear that speech in a public venue, with some 2,000 persons, most of whom shared my great excitement at the news.
Anyway, I don’t ever remember enjoying a concert, or being a New Yorker, as much as I did on that evening, walking to the subway with the special glow you can get from great music and the special sort of glee you get from seeing your enemies humbled and vanquished. And if it was the final fall from grace of tumbledown Dick that made the evening so special, we never would have gathered together were it not for the consummate artistry of Alicia deLarrocha, whose artistry will survive as long as people remain interested in the beauty of the piano.

Glenn Beck and Anarchism

2009-09-23T13:51:00.003-04:00

So all the talk this week is on the burning question, “just who the heck is Glenn Beck?” I dunno. I’ve never seen a minute of his talk show, so I am not really in a position to offer an educated opinion. Frank Rich thinks he is a descendent of conspiratorial populists like Father Coughlin in the 1930s, though of course the populist critics of FDR, like Coughlin and Huey Long, wanted more government, not less. (If Coughlin was around today, he would be denouncing Obama’s efforts to reform the banking industry as "half measures that coddle Jewish financiers.”) Conservatives seem to think that Beck is not a true conservative, which amounts to that he is consistent enough to sometimes attack American military adventures overseas as a symptom of “big government.” (The great worry of the conservative movement is that their followers would get the consistency to read paleocon websites like “antiwar”—which I heartily recommend—with regularity.) And it is certainly interesting to learn that Beck is a Mormon who follows some conservative Mormon thinker whom even the John Birch society thought was sort of kooky. ( I have nothing against Mormons or Mormonism, but it is a religion that has conspiratorial thinking woven into the warp of its theology.)

But enough about Glenn Beck. I want to speak instead of the left-wing alternative to conservative agrarian populism, anarchism. It is an ideology that has become increasingly fashionable on the left as of late, and I have often found myself with the stray anarchist urge. It is nowhere near as tainted as communism, is less wonky than socialism, and is a way to stand utterly outside the system while not necessarily calling for its immediate overthrow. And anarchism has the immense advantage that every generation, since, 1890, has reinvented in its own image.

These anarchist thoughts are inspired by a recent volume of essays by a young historian which I heartily recommend, John H. Summer’s Every Fury on Earth. He finds anarchism everywhere, in the work of C. Wright Mills, on whom he is completing a much needed biography, in the works of James Agee, in Noam Chomsky. Summer is trenchant is his excoriation of the “need to be connected” through information technology, which is creating a world that is ever more interconnected to nothing, and equally devastating in his account of Marxist orthodoxies. His skewering of British acolytes of C. Wright Mills in the late 1960s—notably the sesquipedalian Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn—who transformed Mills’s free-style radicalism into a jargonish anti-bourgeois hash is hilarious. There is a lot of interesting media criticism in the volume, especially an essay that my colleague Rob would like on the interesting question of why, after a century of sex scandals in the popular press, journalists from the time of Wilson through Kennedy eschewed through-the-keyhole reportage. “High standards,” and a disinclination to stimulate the masses seem to be the reason. And like all good anarchists, he brings his theories down to the personal and practical level, and provides withering accounts of his efforts to make it as a university teacher, and concludes that being a true historian is somehow incompatible with being part of the higher education knowledge machine. I’m not sure that I agree, but it provides an aura of principle to what has been my own inadvertent path to being an independent, untethered historian.

For me the biggest difference between conservatives and liberals is that conservatives believe that human nature is basically malign and evil, and needs to be constrained in various ways to prevent it from destroying us. (This was emphasized in the obits over the last week for the Neoconservative poobah, Irving Kristol. ) Liberals believe that human nature is basically good, that we were born without sin, and that whatever Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden stayed in the Garden of Eden. Anarchism merely takes the belief in human goodness to its logical conclusion, that the ends of human life should be, in the words of Summers, “voluntary associations vitalized by spontaneous effusions and organized around the latent potentialities of cooperation.” Now, I love the state, and its often over-ardent embrace, and I love paying taxes, and I think “bureaucrat” is one of the loveliest words in the English language, like violet or amethyst. So I am not an anarchist, but I often wish I was one.

Museum of Chinese in America

2009-09-22T21:59:00.005-04:00

The Museum of Chinese in America, like the history it relates, stands at a crossroads between Chinatown and Soho, New York City and the USA, and the past and the present. The wonder of MOCA is that it navigates all these intersections with depth and humanity, succeeding in its effort to explore "the Chinese American experience within the broader context of American history and culture."

The result is not a narrow museum of "identity," as a Times reviewer put it, but an exploration of many pasts that illuminates how life in America remade the Chinese and how the Chinese remade America.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I must state that I am a friend of the museum's founders, Jack Tchen and Charlie Lai, and I did some bits of work for the museum in the past. (Including helping to salvage some artifacts from a Chinese opera company.) More important, I have been taking friends and students to earlier incarnations of MOCA since the 1980s, when its predecessor was located in an old public school building. We found there aspects of American history and New York history that were too long ignored.

The story of the Chinese in America is much more than the rise to success of a "model minority." It illuminates the exploited labor of Chinese immigrants that built much of the West, reveals the deep strain of racism that once denied citizenship to the Chinese in America, and brings to life the combination of fascination, exoticism and alienation that colored so many American reactions to the Chinese. One look at this kind of history and your sense of the past and present is never quite the same.

The latest incarnation of MOCA, at 215 Centre Street, embodies the best of the old museum and orients it to the future. Like the old MOCA, which had its roots in a community history project, the new version is deeply democratic and egalitarian, honoring the voices of both famous achievers and unsung survivors. Yet the new museum, elegantly designed by Maya Lin, is welcoming and capable of accommodating many more visitors. It also makes great use of digital technology to explore the past and present in exciting ways that can evolve with the museum in the future.

I visited MOCA tonight to celebrate its opening. With all the crowds and my own hectic schedule, I left before I got a full chance to take in everything the museum has to offer--including films and an art exhibit. I'll be back with friends and students in the future.

Secondary Primaries

2009-09-17T20:28:00.001-04:00

Tuesday was primary day here in New York State. Less than 10% of the registered voters turned out in Monroe County here . (I am proud to say that I was in the thinning ranks of those who exercised the franchise.) And I gather the turnout in NYC was at about the same level, even for the important race to succeed Robert Morgenthau as Manhattan DA. Perhaps it is time to say goodbye to the primary, a political device invented during the progressive era to wrest government from the hands of the bosses, but has now become a tool of the permanent oligopoly, an apparent way to give people an apparent choice in who they will governed by, while counting on boredom and disinterest to ensure that very few people choose to vote.

Part of the problem are party-specific primaries. Perhaps they work for state wide voting (we will get to that) , but in local elections, where one party often doesn’t run any candidates, or mere tokens, party primaries effectively disenfranchise a large percentage of the electorate. And far from loosening the grip of parties, primaries provide a justification for their continued existence.
The alternative to primaries are run-off elections. On election day you have as many candidates run as you want, then the top two or three get to run off against each other, in an election, because it is mano-a-mano will attract more attention then a ten person race ever could.
And there is no reason the same couldn’t be tried in state wide elections, or for that matter, presidential elections. Let’s take last year. Rather than the series of silly state by state primaries, let the 20 or so candidates campaign and debate for a few months. Then, say in July there is an election, and all but the top two candidates are eliminated, who then run against each other. (Or perhaps a somewhat more complicated system where there a preliminary election that winnows down the field to perhaps five candidates, who then run against each other in a race for the final two. ) If this was done last year, who knows, the final race might have been Obama vs. Hillary, which certainly was the most compelling fight of the year.
In any event, rather then helping to create an interested electorate, primaries only serve as a demonstration of our apathy.

Music With a Past and a Future

2009-09-16T21:58:00.003-04:00

Over the years Andy Irvine, a stalwart on the Irish folk scene, has written great songs about historical figures ranging from James Connolly to Emiliano Zapata to Raoul Wallenberg. At the same time, as a recent concert at the Irish Arts Center reminded us, he's become a part of the history of Irish music.

It was the great idea of the folklorist and musician Mick Moloney to present Irvine in concert with the younger guitarist and singer John Doyle in a series that pairs older and younger players in the Irish tradition. The concert, last Friday at the Irish Arts Center, came off splendidly.

Irvine sang and performed some of his best songs on a variety of stringed instruments and reminisced about his years on the Dublin folk scene in the Sixties. As ever, his instrumental work incorporates the complex time signatures that he picked up from the Balkans.

Doyle sang with a mellow voice and played guitar with the tremendous chord changes and rhythms that have become the hallmark of more recent Irish guitar styles. Together, they were a tuneful reminder that Irish music has a great past and an exciting future.

For me, the most moving moment of the show came when Irvine and Doyle performed "Never Tire of the Road," Irvine's tribute to Woodie Guthrie. (Irvine also does a superb, driving version of Guthrie's "Tom Joad," the ballad version of John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath.")

Irvine inserted to last Friday's performance of "Never Tire of the Road" a verse about the time when Guthrie led a below-decks singalong on a troop ship during World War II to keep up morale during a torpedo attack. To complement the verse, Irvine injected a chorus that went something like, "Bound to lose, bound to lose, all you fascists bound to lose." I was one of a few voices on the chorus the first time it came around, but by the end of the song he had us all roaring along.

From the Guthrie song to the great musical pubs of Dublin in the Sixties to guitar playing that connects the past and the future, it was a very fine night of music.

Mannahatta/Manhattan

2009-09-05T10:42:00.002-04:00

Great museum exhibits make you think about the past in an entirely new way, and that's what Mannahatta/Manhattan does at the Museum of the City of New York. The show, presented as a partnership with the Wildlife Conservation Society, is a stunning evocation of Manhattan's landscape and how it has changed since the arrival of Europeans. It conveys a profound lesson: the same principles that make for a healthy ecosystem--diverse species, an accommodation of interdependence--are also important to a healthy city.

Mannahatta/Manhattan blends historical research, ecological analysis, artifacts and multi-media. The show is well-designed and instructive without being heavily didactic. I marveled at the range of wetlands once found on the east side of Manhattan and the variety streams and ponds throughout the island. And it was a treat to use a special computer program that displays the show's ideas on what contemporary blocks of Manhattan might have looked like 400 years ago. (My block on East 81st Street was a woodland.)

For all its attention to nature, the show persuasively argues that Manhattan was never utterly pristine. The indigenous peoples here had their own impact on the land--from the building of villages to the burning of lands in what is today Harlem to create open fields for hunting.

The genius of the show is to show how ecological thinking leads us a conclusion that nothing--from plants to people--lives in isolation. Eventually, the factors that help or hurt one species have an impact on another.

The show is a product of the Wildlife Conservation Society's Mannahatta Project, whose Web site deserves a visit of its own. Among its many features is the program that lets you look up what any block in Manhattan might have looked like in 1609.

Mannahatta/Manhattan is up through October 12. Don't miss it.

The Commodore

2009-09-04T14:55:00.001-04:00

You’ve been hearing about capitalism’s bad breaks recently, but it is, to continue the paraphrase of Lou Gehrig’s famous speech, the luckiest economic system alive, and, unfortunately, to switch clichés, reports of its death are greatly exaggerated. But even if capitalism never dies, it still had to be born, and debates on where and when capitalism emerged is one of the oldest of historical chestnuts. And if he wasn’t the first capitalist, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, as the title of an excellent book by T.J. Stiles has it, was the first tycoon, the first multi-multi-millionaire whose wealth simply existed on a totally different level of magnitude from ordinary wealthy people. Worth about $100 million at his death in 1877, when the total value of the US money supply was bout $900 million, he was very likely, in comparative terms, the richest man who ever lived.

Most of the great fortunes made in NYC were made by people like J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould , Andrew Carnegie, Michael Bloomberg, were made by people who moved to the city from elsewhere to make the fortunes. Of the great tycoons, perhaps only Cornelius Vanderbilt was native to the city (or to pre-Consolidation Staten Island, at least.) And Vanderbilt career was made in what the first great NYC industry, transportation, first in steamboats and then in railroads. Before NYC was anything else, it was a transportation hub and nexus. And as Stiles shows, Vanderbilt understood capitalism, and the emerging abstract world of stocks and bonds and how to buy and trade them better than almost anyone else. He was his own investment bank (they really didn’t exist in his time), and really, he was his own corporation, at a time when the corporate form of organization was only first gaining traction.
Well, having read Stiles book, I conclude there is nothing particularly admirable about Vanderbilt. He was a hard driving son of a bitch (though, as Stiles shows, generally honorable in his business dealings.) He left no great public benefactions, no museum, no library, no concert hall honors him in his city, and if he is remembered, he is not particularly commemorated in the city, that he as much as any single individual, transformed into a center of world commerce. This is, I suppose, okay with me. But if he doesn’t deserve a monument, he definitely needed a good biography, which he lacked until now. And Stiles book, which goes from his involvement in the landmark case Gibbons v. Ogden to his role in the Erie War of the late 1860s, fills the bill.

Farewell to Ted Kennedy

2009-08-30T22:56:00.005-04:00

Special post from Arlington Cemetery by Steve Zurier

The day after Ted Kennedy's burial, I just felt that I wanted to be there today to say goodbye to the last Kennedy brother. If I were a history or civics teacher, I would have all my students research and write a report on how Senator Kennedy's work touched their lives.

For me:

In the 1970s, Ted Kennedy fought against S-1, the draconian set of laws that would have put harsh restrictions on the press. I can remember those of us who wanted to pursue press careers being very grateful for Ted Kennedy's outspoken critique of the legislation.

In the 1980s Ted Kennedy fought the union busting that went on during the Reagan era. The owners of the newspaper I worked for would have fired all of us and hired stringers if they could, but I was able to hang on a couple of years for some much-needed experience because I was protected by the union.

In the early 90s, my wife Stephanie lobbied hard for the Family Medical Leave Act, which allows young mothers to leave work for 12 weeks of unpaid leave after the birth of a child. While our family did not take advantage of the law, others were helped because of Sen. Kennedy's efforts.

During the recession of 2001, I collected unemployment after being laid off. Sen Kennedy always supported unemployment insurance and any time a vote came up for extending benefits or raising the minimum wage, Sen. Kennedy could be counted on to support it.

One note about the shot with the flag at half-mast. In the background is Arlington House, which was originally owned by George Washington Parke Custis, the grandson of Martha Washington and step-son of George Washington. Custis inherited the land and between 1802 and 1818, and built Arlington House. It was the nation's first memorial to George Washington and a home for the Custis family.

In 1831, Custis' only surviving child, Mary Anna Randolph Custis married Lt. Robert E. Lee (the Robert E Lee) in the front parlor of Arlington House. For over 30 years Arlington House became the home of the Lee family. In 1861 when the Civil War broke out, the Lees vacated the property and federal troops occupied the estate, using Arlington House as headquarters. In 1863 Freedman's Village was established on the estate to assist refugee slaves in the transition from slavery to freedom. Later on during the Civil War, the property became a burial ground for the war dead. By the end of the Civil War there were nearly 16,000 dead buried on the old 1,100-acre plantation.

Anyway, the point is that the Kennedy brothers are all together again. Despite their foibles there's no question that the Kennedy family's story is tightly woven into our nation's history.

The Voice of Ted Kennedy

2009-08-27T22:49:00.005-04:00

I've always cherished the memory of my work on George McGovern's 1972 presidential cempaign, in part because it gave me a chance to hear the voice of a great liberal orator--Ted Kennedy.

The scene was a rally at the county courthouse in Hackensack, NJ. I was a young McGovern organizer working with other high school students. McGovern was, of course the main speaker of the evening. But what I remember most is the voice of Kennedy.

In strong, bold tones, he sized up President Nixon and offered him mock sympathy: it must be difficult, he said, to be stuck with your hand in the till, your foot in your mouth, and your eye on the polls. We went home laughing and talked about it for days.

Two other Kennedy speeches will always stay with me. I am haunted by his eulogy for his brother Robert ("Some men see things as they are and say why, I dream things that never were and say why not.") And his concession speech in 1980, when he summoned a Democratic Party drifting right to remain true to its liberal heritage, is still inspiring in its conclusion: "For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."

Kennedy was a great legislator, a great speaker, and a great steward of the best in the Democratic Party. I'll miss him.

Teddy

2009-08-26T11:52:00.001-04:00

I was going to blog on something else, but I suppose I have to blog on Teddy. I was born in 1954, and I have been trying to remember recently when I first gained an awareness of the news and world events. I clearly remember sitting in a barbershop in the Bronx with my friend Bruce and several disappointed Italian gentlemen on the afternoon of October 13th, 1960, watching Bill Maskeroski’s, home run clear the vines at Forbes Field, as the Yankees lost the 7th game of the 1960 World Series. A few weeks I remember watching, entranced, the coverage of the 1960 presidential elections, as the numbers were changed, and predictions were made.

However, I did not really start to follow the news at age 6, and only bits and pieces filtered into my awareness. I have no memory of the Bay of Pigs, though I remember Moise Tsombe and the breakaway province of Katanga (though I have no memory of Patrice Lumumba, or the death of Daj Hammarskjold) and I remember the Indian takeover of Goa in December 1961, (and Roger Maris hitting his 59th homerun a few months earlier.)
But 1962 is the year when my memory and knowledge of the world really started. I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis clearly. And I remember, at the beginnings of my horizon as someone who cared about the world I lived in, the controversies over the election of Ted Kennedy to the senate in the fall of 1962. As long as I have around or cared to notice, Ted Kennedy has been a senator, and for many decades he has been the standard bearer of the ideals of liberalism. I don’t have much to add to what has been and will be said. Granted a longevity denied his brothers, he is probably the most important of the three Kennedy’s in terms of his accomplishments (the Cuban Missile Crisis and Bay of Pigs aside.)

There has been much talk about the revival of liberalism under Obama, though the jury is still out on whether Obamism will be vigorous in its pursuit of needed change as Democrats accomplished in the Kennedy-Johnson years or under FDR. All that is clear is that the Democrats will have to accomplish without Teddy Kennedy.

Up Close, They Don't Look Strong

2009-08-20T11:15:00.004-04:00

Up close, the opposition to Obama's health care plan doesn't look all that strong, as I learned at a forum in Rhode Island last night.

Over the last few weeks, the assaults on the Obama plan have started to feel like a replay of the Swift Boat attacks of 2004. So when I heard that there was going to be a meeting on health care in Warwick, RI, near where I'm on vacation, I had to attend. I recruited my teenage son Max, dusted off a quote from John F. Kennedy about the importance of defending freedom when it is in danger, and drove an hour north to Warwick City Hall. There, Rep. James Langevin, a Democrat, was holding a town meeting.

The state chairman of the Rhode Island Republicans, Giovanni Cicione, had called for massive protests, so I expected to encounter only a few Obama supporters, cowed into silence. In fact, Obama supporters narrowly outnumbered opponents inside and outside the meeting. The opponents used volume to make up for what they lacked in numbers: in the meeting they shouted often, and outside they used a bullhorn.

There were some 200 people outside, where Max and I carried signs in support of health care reform. Our allies included union members, lab-coated medical students from the American Medical Student Association, and a broad range of liberal activists. All were in solid form and didn't seem to be intimidated by the opposition.

The opposition seemed weaker in person than I had anticipated. For all the lies about death panels and the reports of gun-toting conservatives, we were confronted by a motley crew of LaRouchites, opponents of immigration, disciples of Ayn Rand, conservative libertarians, anti-abortion protesters, anti-government activists and loudmouths.

Despite claims that this is an "astroturf" movement, the people I saw appeared to be fairly comfortable with political action. All of them seemed to have been doing this for some time. (In contrast, the tea party that I saw in Manhattan back in the spring contained a large percentage of uncomfortable-looking demonstrators.)

Yet for all the volume of the Obama opponents, their message didn't add up to much: lies about death panels, cheers at the mention of the name of Sarah Palin, chants of "no free lunch," and signs encouraging us to read the works of Ayn Rand.

For the opponents of Obama last night, the president's health plan is the focus of a wide range of emotions and ideas. That helps make them effective in opposition, but it is hard to imagine them getting together to propose anything constructive of their own.

Nevertheless, the Obama opponents effectively manipulate the media. Television news thrives on displays of strong emotion, and the shouting opponents of the health plan exploit that to win air time.

They also make great use of reporters' ignorance. Last night, the local news showed Barney Frank dismissing one woman's claim that the Obama plan is a Nazi plan. The woman appears to be a LaRouche supporter. And the news last night also panned over the LaRouchites' despicable poster that depicts Obama with a Hitler-type mustache.

At the very least, reporters have an obligation to identify the people who make absurd claims. If the wildest arguments against the Obama plan come from folks as utterly dishonest as the LaRouchites, people need to know that. "Consider the source," as the saying goes.

As for me, I carried a sign, moved through the crowd listening to people, and mostly kept mum. I lack my son's admirable ability to listen to despicable arguments without losing my temper.

I did get in one good exchange, though. A man who saw me carrying a sign in support of health care reform asked me if I was a fascist. No, I replied, I'm the son of a proud veteran of World War II. They guy gulped with incomprehension--he didn't know what to say.

Bottom line: the fight for health care reform isn't over. After a bad start, Obama is starting to act. We can beat these guys.

My Mom, Sarah Palin, and Death Panels

2009-08-18T12:08:00.003-04:00

I want to write about health care, and there will be a post on one of my favorite subjects, cooperatives, coming along soon, but first I wanted to write on the subject of the week, death panels, the Republican contention that comprehensive health care reform, by offering end of life planning, is the first step towards euthanasia. As far as I can tell, this campaign, as mendacious and meretricious as any Republican endeavor at dissembling in the recent past, is having a positive short term effect in slowing down the progress of Obama’s health care bill, though it was likely to find itself in the fillibusterable bog and muck of the US Senate anyway. So the death panel campaign has I guess it has been politically useful in the short term. But I cannot but think that it will be, in the end, a tremendous benefit for the democrats.

This debate has been unfolding over the past few weeks, since Jane and myself have moved my extremely physically and mentally debilitated mother (she doesn’t recognize me) into our house. Most people have said we were crazy to do this. The truth is, there really weren’t any other options, and without going into a very, very long story, nursing homes were too expensive, putting her into an apartment would be too much work, so it seemed easiest to follow the time honored expedient of placing an elderly and sick person under the roof of a relative.

And though I think that I and my surviving brother are reasonably smart (between me and wife and my brother and his wife there are two Ph.Ds and two law degrees) we badly screwed up end of life planning, in part because of the inability of my increasingly mentally burdened mom to cooperate with us, and in the end the government has given us little or no assistance, financially or otherwise.

Jane and I are doing our best to keep my mom comfortable and out of pain, and I think we are doing a good job, and it has its compensations. Jane has been a nurse for thirty years, but its only in the past month that I have discovered my inner Florence Nightingale.

But there are problems and tensions. We are frightened that unless we have all of our papers in order, if something happens, the government might force us to keep my mom alive on a vent or life support, against our will. In short, I think the Republicans have misjudged the public mood as badly as during the Terri Schiavo hoo-hah.

The worry is not that the government will intervene to end the life of a loved one, but that the government will intervene to keep someone alive against the wishes of their closest relatives. The fear is not that the government will officiously and ham-fistedly intervene to tell people how to live their declining years, but that the government, will, as it now does, do absolutely nothing at all, other than to say, as they have in effect to us—“okay, life is a goddamn bitch, and we’re sorry about your mom, but you know, it just ain’t our problem. You figure it out, and be sure to keep good records so we can make sure you didn’t do anything wrong.”

All of us will die, and most of us will need help in dying good deaths, and most of us don’t have the spiritual, intellectual, or financial resources to do this adequately without some sort of government assistance. Every time I put on a new pair of gloves to change my mom’s diaper, I think of Sarah Palin.

Down to the Sea in Kayaks

2009-08-16T22:08:00.005-04:00

I've always loved landscapes where ecosystems meet, and none more than the seacoast of southern New England, where forests tumble down to salt marshes and the sea. Like many northeasterners, I've glimpsed such terrain from Amtrak trains running between New York and Boston. But in southern Rhode Island, you can get close to this beauty in a kayak.

Thanks to Narrow River Kayaks, in Narragansett, RI, you can paddle down the Narrow River to Rhode Island Sound at the end of Narragansett Town Beach.

Along the way you'll pass long stretches of marsh grass and the nesting places of birds. At the mouth of the river, you can beach your boat, paddle out into the Sound, or surf your kayak in the waves. I've enjoyed all three.

Most paddlers who rent from Narrow River Kayaks head downstream on the route I've just described. But you can also paddle upstream from Narrow River's base, past more residential river banks, to the birthplace of the painter Gilbert Stuart, who is best known for his unfinished portrait of George Washington. That makes the Narrow River one place where a kayak trip can combine natural history and art history.

I haven't yet made the upstream trip, but I've rented from Narrow River Kayaks several times and I've always enjoyed the experience. Their staff is knowledgeable and friendly.

I've paddled down the Narrow River with my wife and children and it has something for everyone--from bird watchers to bathers to kids and former kids who like to mix it up in the surf.

I can't think of a better way to enjoy the coastal landscapes of southern New England.

At Sea in Queens

2009-08-15T14:07:00.002-04:00

Today's Times reports an extravaganza staged by New York City museums that seems like the ideal solution to dwindling museum attendance: a maritime battle in the reflecting pool at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. In the best spirit of contemporary museum practice, the event was public, participatory and historical.

Libby Nelson's delightful report captures the full lunacy of this event, which was organized by the artist Duke Riley and staged under the name of "Those Who Are About to Die Salute You." Conceived in the tradition of the sea battles staged in the Coliseum in Ancient Rome, the evening's event took the form of combat between "ships" cobbled together by the Queens Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and El Museo del Barrio.

The melee had everything going for it: guests in togas and armor, a rock band, and tomatoes microwaved for maximum splat when participants hurled them at each other. And participants they were, because this was one exhibition where people didn't stay on the sidelines.

The microwaved tomatoes, piled in boxes by the pool, were meant to be thrown during the mock battle, but they proved too much of a temptation. Soon people were flinging them across the pool at one another. A few unfurled umbrellas to protect themselves.

Then the audience began jumping into the thigh-deep pool as the first boat, the one from the Queens Museum of Art, emerged. An announcer grabbed the microphone: “Let’s get it started!” he said.

But that ship, as they say, had sailed.

“Get out of the pool!” the announcer yelled, trying to restore order and using several expletives. “Get out of the water! We’re not starting till you’re out of the pool!”

The audience complied, and the ensuing battle resulted in the disintegration of most of the boats within 20 minutes. Audience members refused to stay corralled and jumped back into the water and climbed onto the boats. The Queens boat collapsed, as did the Brooklyn one, meant to be a battleship. Only a giant pig-shaped boat made of wood, representing Manhattan, emerged mostly unscathed.

Eventually the combat ended, but the excitement stayed with people.

Afterward the spectators appeared exhilarated but slightly shell shocked. Some praised the participatory nature of the art; others were still recovering.

“It was radical, super radical,” said Catherine Harine Connell of Brooklyn. “The fact that it was in a public park in Queens.

“It was free form, but still organized,” she added.

Ms. Connell was euphoric; others were alarmed.

“That was wilder than I ever would have expected,” said Dorothy Trojanowski, who described the event as “out of control.”

“The danger factor was —— ” she paused. “Stimulating.”

I'm having a great time on vacation, but this sounds like something worth going home for. I hope this is one sea battle that is repeated next year

Woodstock Nation

2009-08-14T19:44:00.002-04:00

A few cultural notes. I was saddened to hear of the death of Les Paul the other day, an inventive musician in more than one sense, and hearing him gig at Sweet Basil’s or the Iridium was for many years one of life’s little pleasures available only to New Yorkers. And a few days before that was the death of Merce Cunningham, and with his passing, the era of high modernism in New York artistic culture, dating back to Alfred Stieglitz and the 1911 Armory Show, has finally run its century long course. Cunningham’s modernism (along with that of his life partner, John Cage) was so high and elevated that it encompassed and anticipated every type of post-modernism and post-post modernism that has or will yet be invented. But the cultural event of the week is, certainly, memories of the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock Festival, and I might as well share mine.

As frequent readers of this blog know, in the summer of 1969 I was at a socialist-Zionist summer camp in the Catskills, where, on July 20th, I listened to the moon landing. Well, about a month later, camp was about to wind up and we were to head back on Route 17 to NYC, but we kept hearing stories of this gigantic music festival about five miles away, that was attracting hundreds of thousands of ardent acolytes, and some of us figured, on the last night of camp, when staying up all night was more or less mandatory, that we would endeavor to check things out. So we tried, but we got no further than the far edge of the soggy mass of humanity that was Woodstock, and I don’t think we heard a single note of music.

The following day, the last day of camp and the last day of Woodstock, there was a monumental traffic jam, with all sorts of cool dudes sort of hanging out on the utterly congested highways, with the spirit of Woodstock pervading all, so that rather than road rage there was road joy, all of these people in and out of their cars. I guess Dylan’s song, “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” hadn’t been released, but if it had been, it would have been what everyone was singing. I think a trip that usually took two and half hours was at least twice as long, and we loved every minute, vicariously absorbing some of the last lingering vibes of Woodstock.

But, what, as cultural commentators asked insistently at the time, and really haven’t stopped asking since, what did it all mean? Was it a rock concert, or was it a harbinger of a new way of life, the dawn of a new form of culture, or whatever? It is easy, I suppose, to mock the pretensions of the Woodstock nation, and in many ways, Woodstock was, as Debussy once said of Wagner’s Parsifal, the dusk that thought itself a dawn. Was it a utopian moment, one that passed in the very act of perceiving it?

As long as we doing an obituary thing in this post, I don’t think that Greater New York has acknowledged the passing of the great Polish philosopher Leslek Kolakowski, and I have been rereading some of his essays recently. He was a Marxist who became a very fierce one–time Marxist. His essay “the death of utopia reconsidered” is a rather scathing look at utopianism, which he saw as one of the underlying sources of corruption in the entire Marxist tradition. I think he is mistaken, along with many other writers,to view totalitarianism as a part of the utopian tradition, because any real utopianism doesn’t consist of fitting people into a preset procrustean blue print, but has nothing to be with coercion or the state. All true utopias are free standing moments of anarchy, small glimpses of human possibility and transformation.

But I agree with Kolakowski, in what he says is a useful banality. “The idea of human fraternity is disastrous as a political program but is indispensible as a guiding sign.” Like all utopias worthy of the name, what is enduring about Woodstock is its very evanescence.

To Kill to Kill a Mockingbird

2009-08-09T11:48:00.003-04:00

When I was eight, my mom (who in a profoundly physically and mentally debilitated state, moved in with Jane and myself last week), took me and my two brothers to see “To Kill a Mockingbird.” It was one of the first films I ever remember attending, and the first impressions has never left me on repeated viewings; the story of a decent man, a good father, trying to deal with the usual foibles of humanity as well as the evil of racism in the South in Alabama c. 1935. I am not sure why my mom took us to see the film, but she had a way of schlepping us to all of the films of great social significance on the schedule at the local bijous. One reason that I am sure never occurred to her was that, as a caption in this week’s New Yorker put it, “In ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,” Atticus Finch (played by Gregory Peck in the 1962 film version) sought to humanize Jim Crow, not challenge it.”

This was conclusion of a provocative, but wrong-headed article by Malcolm Gladwell “The Courthouse Ring: The Truth About Atticus Finch,” that concluded that all of the praise the Atticus Finch character has received over the years has been misplaced. He was a garden variety southern racial moderate of the interwar years, who wanted to purge southern racial mores of their vulgarity but not their fundamental unfairness, and whose gentility and mild paternalism was enough to keep him from asking the bigger questions about the social system into which he was born.

Now, before proceeding I should acknowledge that I have never (or at least not for many decades) read the 1959 Harper Lee novel on which the 1962 film was based, and this is at least a partial disqualification for what follows, but I have to say that I found Gladwell’s article a rather ham-fisted attempt to deal with a profound question: can one be a moral person in an immoral society. There is no easy answer. And certainly Atticus Finch was not a rebel, not a Gandhi, not a Rosa Parks. He was an insider within white southern society. Gladwell assumes that by the 1950s the Atticus Finches of the south, after making a half-hearted attempt, would have learned to tow the segregationist line. Finch is a fictional character, of course, so there is no way of telling what would happened when push came to shove in the South; some southern moderates strongly supported Brown; many others, especially after the rising tide of “southern resistance” after 1954 learned to tow the line. Atticus Finch can of course can only be judged by what Harper Lee wrote.

But the bigger question raised by Gladwell’s article is how one fights evil. Gladwell criticizes Finch for his localism, his belief that dealing with individuals as individuals, in his own little corner of the world, rather than challenging the system as a whole, was enough of a challenge to Jim Crow. But this cuts two ways; if there is a single central flaw to Marxist-Leninism, is the belief that the only sort of change that matters is a global transformative revolution. Everything else is just busy work for do gooders, petite bourgeois reformism at best. And the record of communism amply indicates the pitfalls of trying to bring about revolutionary change, with an army of unanticipated consequences to what might originally be a noble impulse. And often, we change the little things because there is no clear or obvious way to change the big ones. We honor the righteous gentiles who saved Jews during the Holocaust because they saved individuals, not because they openly challenged Nazism as a whole, which could only be done effectively by Winston Churchill and FDR.

And the key point about Atticus Finch was not his belief in localism, but his belief in the law, and if there was a difference between totalitarian regimes and the Jim Crow South it was there was a possibility of the rule of law, and that the constitutional protection of equality, however traduced and besmirched, would in the end in the rescue the South from its evils, without a revolution, and this is what happened, to radically abbreviate a very long story.

Atticus Finch was a man who believed that he could do more good functioning within the system than agitating from outside the system, and while this is always a tough call, many good persons have made similar choices. And he was a man alert to the contradictions that existed within his society, and tried, in his own small way, to change things. May that those of us who have no choice but to live in the deeply flawed and contradiction-ridden America of our time, as Atticus Finch was obliged to live in his, be able to say as much.

Wisdom From A Soldier of the Great War

2009-08-07T13:26:00.004-04:00

Harry Patch, the last surviving British soldier of World War I living in the United Kingdom, was buried in England yesterday; John F. Burns covered the funeral with great sensitivity for the Times. The ceremonies for Patch had a New York connection--the singing of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" by Pete Seeger of Beacon--and even greater resonance for all who are willing to learn about war from a soldier who experienced the slaughter of the trenches.

Patch was past his 100th birthday, Burns reports, when he finally started to speak about his experiences in World War I. Instead of resting on his heroism, he talked about death and the common humanity of soldiers on all sides. The band Radiohead recorded a haunting song based on Patch's that you can hear on the BBC site.

Burns' piece memorably recounts how,

A Belgian diplomat read an excerpt from Mr. Patch’s 2007 autobiography, “The Last Fighting Tommy,” in which he described an offensive during the battle at Passchendaele, the bloodiest chapter in the Ypres fighting, when he came across a fellow soldier “ripped from his shoulder to his waist by shrapnel” during a British assault on German lines.

The episode reinforced in Mr. Patch, a devout Christian, the belief that there is a life after death. “When we got to him, he looked at us and said, ‘Shoot me,’ ” he recalled. “He was beyond all human help, and before we could draw a revolver he was dead. And the final word he uttered was ‘Mother!’ It wasn’t a cry of despair, it was a cry of surprise and joy.”

He added, “I’m positive that when he left this world, wherever he went, his mother was there, and from that day, I’ve always remembered that cry, and that death is not the end.”

Patch's pacifism fits better with World War I than World War II, but it is well worth recalling in the United States today, when military planners talk earnestly about endless war. Those who think along these lines should remember the words of my late friend Irving Weissman, a native New Yorker and a proud veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War and the US Army in World War II: "war is the ultimate obscenity."

Harry Patch would certainly agree. And if there is a world to come, as Patch deeply believed, I hope he runs into Irving Weissman. I'm sure they'll have plenty to talk about and wisdom to share.

Remembering Billy Lee Riley

2009-08-04T08:37:00.010-04:00

Billy Lee Riley, who grew up sharecropping in Arkansas and went on to become an early hero of rock 'n roll at Sun Records in Memphis, died Sunday of cancer. Today's Times obituary, picked up from the Associated Press, gets some of the highlights of his career, including his single "Red Hot," with he memorable line "My gal is red hot/Your gal ain't doodly squat." The Memphis Commercial Appeal ran an even fuller obit.

As the Appeal piece noted,

Riley is perhaps best remembered for his classic 1957 single, "Flying Saucers Rock and Roll" -- a novelty rockabilly rave-up inspired by the era's U.F.O. mania -- which proved a hit and prompted him to rename his band the Little Green Men.

Despite this promising start, Riley's commercial fate was sealed after Sun put its promotional efforts behind Jerry Lee Lewis' "Great Balls of Fire" -- a song Riley played on -- which zoomed up the charts and past his own follow-up single "Red Hot."

For a personal appreciation of Riley, who played despite ill health at a concert in honor of the historian Pete Daniel this summer in Memphis, check this dispatch from Pete.

"I met Billy Lee in 1992 when we interviewed him for the Rock 'n' Soul project, and we interviewed him twice more and collected clothing and instruments for the Rock 'n' Soul museum. Some ten years ago he came to the National Museum of American History for an interview/performance that was incredible. He was one of the finest persons I've ever known."

May we all go out with the courage, energy, and strong voice that Billy Lee Riley showed until the end of his life.

Riley's final years were scarred by numerous health problems, including his battle with cancer. According to the Commercial Appeal, he ran up some serious medical bills.

The Appeal obituary concludes with this note for all who are inclined to generosity: "Memorial services are pending, but arrangements will be handled by the Dillinger Funeral Home in Newport, Ark. Those wishing to send condolences or contributions directly can contact: Joyce Riley, 723 Crest Drive, Jonesboro, Arkansas, 72401."

Photo by Sally Stein. Thanks to Bruce Hunt for forwarding the obituary from the Commercial Appeal.

Abraham Lincoln and the Health Care Debate

2009-07-29T21:21:00.005-04:00

I urge anyone interested in American history to read the lengthy review essay of recent works on Abraham Lincoln by Sean Willentz in a recent issue of the New Republic. (For those of you who don’t read the New Republic regularly—and I don’t know anybody who does—the article can be read on the Arts and Letters Daily.) Willentz looks at some recent books on Lincoln very critically, and saves as the main target of his barbs an anthology on Lincoln and race edited by Henry Louis Gates (yes, that Henry Louis Gates) and a collective biography of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass by Harvard professor John Stauffer. Willentz’s main point is that the recent curve of Lincoln scholarship hypothesizes two Lincolns, the moderate racist whose biggest problem with racism was that it interfered with the rights of white men, which was the dominant Lincoln until about 1862, when, under the influence of white and black abolitionists, especially Frederick Douglass, Lincoln underwent a conversion (with some regrettable backslidings) to a true belief in racial equality, and this basically misconceives Lincoln. Lincoln was always first and foremost a politician, not a writer (Willentz has an animus against studies that emphasize Lincoln as a literary stylist), not a theorist of American democracy, not an agitator for radical change, but a canny politician, whose main focus was, in keeping with his deep anti-slavery convictions, the art of the politically possible. To give Douglass and others the agency in “converting” Lincoln is to fail to understand what made Lincoln tick, and how politics works.

If Willentz and his critics to some extent, as generally is the case in such debates, talk past each other, I am broadly sympathetic to his position; the change in Lincoln c. 1862 is probably best explained by the exigencies of the war and his ability to work towards creative solutions to his problems, rather than a sea change in his basic views on race, and if people like Douglass played a role in this, the main point is that the war simply narrowed the gap between anti-slavery free soilers and radical abolitionists, and no one was more responsible for the war and the way it was being fought than Abraham Lincoln.

Well I’ll let the civil war warriors thrash out the details of whose right and wrong in this dispute. Willentz is certainly acerbic in his criticisms, and several of his critics respond in kind, but what is most interesting about the debate is that much of it concerns Barack Obama, and Willentz’s very public defense of Hillary (and occasional blasts against Obama) during the primaries last year, and several historians treat Willentz’s views on Lincoln as a stalking horse for his views on Clinton-Obama, and that his basic point is to refight the primaries, with his opponents as naïve Obamaphiles, with Willentz positing a wise and temperate Hillarified Lincoln. Willentz says these sort of criticisms are besides the point, and he is no doubt right, but there certainly is, as with all historical debates, a contemporary angle.

If Lincoln is our greatest president, it is because of what he achieved and how he achieved it. He rose to the apex of political power in this country, and did so the only way to accomplish this; slowly and deliberately, making friends, making deals, with his two feet firmly planted on the political coalition that brought him into office. And yet, by early 1865, there was simply no gap between what he had achieved, and what the most radical of abolitionists, Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison had for so long fought for; the immediate, unconditional, uncompensated end of slavery, the institution that had shackled the American republic since its founding. The political pragmatist, without ceding his pragmatism, had become the true radical.

I don’t know what Wilentz thinks of Obama; and he says that since Hillary bowed out last June, he has been an Obama supporter, and I have no reason to doubt him. And what Obama has showed himself to be, above all, is a political pragmatist and a possibilist, a Fabian reformer. And the issue of our time is health care, and it has bedeviled our country almost as long as the time between the constitutional convention and the outbreak of the Civil War. It has hobbled our politics and well-being for over a half century, despite various Wilmot Provisos, Missouri Compromises and other half measures to change things. And Obama was elected, in part, to address it. If he is finding it difficult, it is because it is difficult, and there are vested interests galore to challenge and overcome. And, to paraphrase Lyndon Johnson, he will overcome, or at least he better. And since announcing his candidacy in Springfield, Illinois, Obama has compared himself implicitly, and been compared by others explicitly, to Lincoln. And we will see if he has the talent, the ability, and the fortune of being presented with the right set of circumstances, to see if he can use his genius for pragmatism and garnering a wide current of political support to the utterly radical ends the current situation demands.

Arresting Words

2009-07-27T22:14:00.002-04:00

While we work our way toward the bottom of the Henry Louis Gates case, some words from Lisa Keller's book, Triumph of Order: Democracy and Public Space in New York and London (Columbia, 2009), bear pondering. They were written to edify the London Metropolitan Police in 1830, but they might also have improved police conduct in Cambridge, Mass.

Defenders of Sgt. James Crowley will argue that he behaved coolly while Gates went off, setting off a spiral that ended in arrest. Defenders of Gates will argue that a police officer confronted Gates in his own home in a suspicious and authoritarian manner.

My hunch is that this was a confrontation between two strong-willed men from entirely different worlds, each of whom is accustomed to a great deal of deference on the job. My other hunch is that this was a confrontation that did not need to end in an arrest.

In the end, professors are paid to be knowledgeable and smart. Policemen are paid to be cool in a crisis.

In the words that Lisa found in London, police were admonished that "a Constable who allows himself to be irritated by any language whatsoever shows that he has not that command of his temper which is absolutely necessary in an officer vested with such extensive powers by the law."

Police officers would do well to remember those words today.