Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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.