A New Movie about....Calvin Coolidge?

What would prompt someone to make a movie about Calvin Coolidge? Well, for starters, it had never been done! And, golly gee, he was an interesting guy, says filmmaker John Karol

When the idea was first suggested to me I barely could muster a yawn. As a "liberal" filmmaker, what little I knew of Coolidge came from New Deal historians who view him as a somnambulant "capitalist tool" whose presidency served only as a prelude to disaster.

"Why Coolidge?"

"Read his autobiography — 250 pages, large print."

I did, and was intrigued. I moved on to his speeches, all of which he wrote himself. A master at delegating duties, Coolidge was not one to delegate beliefs. His speeches read like lay sermons to the American public, revealing fundamental values and ideals any small "d" democrat should embrace. I was hooked.

What did Karol learn? Well, among other things:

Others may disagree, but I can't imagine Coolidge rising to political bait like flag burning, the Pledge of Allegiance, gay marriage, or school prayer. In my opinion, he would have viewed these "hot-button" issues as inappropriate, having nothing to do with presidential business.

What's in the film and what conclusions are drawn?

"Things of the Spirit" takes a deeper than usual look at the personal and political life of our thirtieth President. We already have completed the research, preproduction, production and story edit. Among other things, "Things of the Spirit":

• Is the first fully researched film that has ever been made on Calvin Coolidge and the political and economic issues of the 1920's.
  
  
• Dispels the assumption of most American history textbooks that Coolidge was a small-minded materialist who served only as a handmaiden to business.
  
  
• Establishes clearly and finally that the Coolidge-Mellon tax cuts of the 1920's generated increased revenue to the federal government; that Coolidge ran surpluses in all his annual budgets; and that by the time he left office he had cut the national debt by one-third.
  
  
• Challenges the popular opinion of historians that the Coolidge Prosperity led inevitably to the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression of the 1930's.
  
  
• Illustrates America's leadership in post World War I European recovery, and prominence in worldwide economic and cultural development during the 1920's.
  
  
• Inspires viewers to give open minded consideration to the political beliefs, moral character and spiritual values of perhaps our most misunderstood President, Calvin Coolidge.
  

Regarding the Coolidge's economic record, Karol explains:

Harding, Coolidge, and Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon sought to kick-start the economy by reducing the top marginal tax rate to 25%. They did. Revenues increased dramatically, presaging Arthur Laffer by half a century. Both presidents ran surpluses in all their annual budgets. By the time Coolidge left office, the national debt had been cut by one-third.

New Deal historians maintain that the tax cuts of the 1920s reversed the progressive tax policies of Woodrow Wilson. Far from it. Exemptions increased so much that by 1927 almost 98% of the American people paid no income tax whatsoever. When Coolidge left office in 1929, wealthy people paid 93% of the tax load. During Wilson's last year in office they had paid only 59%.

Less remembered, and less appreciated by contemporary politicians, was Coolidge's aversion to farm subsidies. At great political risk, Coolidge twice vetoed the popular McNary-Haugen farm subsidy bill. As Coolidge put it:

"If the government gets into business on any large scale, we soon find that the beneficiaries attempt to play a large part in the control … and those who are the most adroit get the larger part of it." Although some may wish otherwise, Coolidge was not one publicly to condemn private organizations. Rather than censure the Ku Klux Klan following its massive 1925 march in Washington, Coolidge chose to address the annual meeting of the American Legion in Omaha on "toleration and liberalism," concluding:

"I recognize the full and complete necessity of 100 percent Americanism, but 100 percent Americanism may be made up of many various elements … Whether one traces his Americanisms back three centuries to the Mayflower, or three years to the steerage … we are all now in the same boat … Let us cast off our hatreds."

I can't think of any other public figure who would have dared deliver that message to that audience at that time.

Maybe forgotten Cal will become "cool" again.


Via Powerblog.

House Revises....um, Erases?...History on the Fly

According to the Politico:

Details remain fuzzy, but numerous Republicans argued afterward that they had secured a 215-213 win on their motion to bar undocumented immigrants from receiving any federal funds apportioned in the agricultural spending bill for employment or rental assistance. Democrats, however, argued the measure was deadlocked at 214-214 and failed, members and aides on both sides of the aisle said afterward.

One GOP aide saw McNulty gavel the vote to a close after receiving a signal from his leaders – but before reading the official tally. And votes continued to shift even after he closed the roll call - a strange development in itself.

***

The official House website did not show a record of the vote as of 1 a.m. Friday.

Breitbart has video. Will historians get up in arms if the Congressional Record is allowed to be "revised" like this? Would they tolerate similar actions by a GOP controlled House?

Kennedy Assassination: Ideological Turning Point of Democratic Party

I missed the first round of interviews and reviews of Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism by James Piereson. Rich Lowry has a new one up, though, which caught my eye:

[Kennedy's] kind of liberalism -- "tough and realistic," as Piereson puts it, in the tradition of FDR and Truman -- was carried away in the riptide of his death. In a crucial and counterintuitive interpretive act, the nation's opinion elite made JFK a martyr to civil rights instead of the Cold War. Kennedy had been killed by a communist, Lee Harvey Oswald, who a few years before had tried to defect to the Soviet Union. Liberals nonetheless blamed the assassination on, in the characteristic words of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, "the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots."

Thus, the assassination curdled into an indictment of American society: "Kennedy Victim of Violent Streak He Sought to Curb in Nation," read a New York Times headline. Until this point, 20th-century liberalism had tended to see history as a steady march of progress. Now, the march had been interrupted by the country's own pathologies. "Kennedy was mourned in a spirit of frustrated possibility and dashed hopes," Piereson argues, and that sense of loss came to define the new liberalism.

Fred Siegal disagrees:

Mr. Piereson's own argument is persuasive and well-presented, but liberalism was never as reasonable as he assumes. The irrationalism that exploded later in the 1960s had been a component of left-wing ideology well before. Herbert Croly, the liberal founder of the New Republic magazine, was drawn to mysticism. In the 1950s ex-Marxists fell over themselves in praise of Wilhelm Reich and "orgone box," hoping that sexual therapy might replace Marxist theory as the toga of the enlightened. And in the very early 1960s a veritable cult of Castro, informed by Franz Fanon's writings on the cleansing virtues of violence, emerged among intellectuals searching for an alternative to middle-class conventions.

It's not reason that is at the heart of modern-day liberalism but rather the claim to superior virtue and, even more important, to a special knowledge unavailable to the unwashed or unenlightened. Depending on the temper of the time, such virtue and knowledge can derive disproportionately from scientism or mysticism--or it can mix large dollops of both. "Camelot and the Cultural Revolution" lays bare the long-ignored failure of intellect that hastened the decline of American liberalism. If liberals can belatedly come to grips with their failure to acknowledge Oswald's political identity, they might be able to celebrate a revival that involves more than a Broadway show.

Ed Driscoll, too:

But the actual causes of liberal disorientation regarding Kennedy's death and the motives of his killer predate his assassination by several years. It was during the 1950s and early '60s that that liberal elites declared America's nascent and disparate conservative movements to be a greater threat to the nation than the Soviet Union, as illustrated by films of the day such as Dr. Strangelove and The Manchurian Candidate. And the subtext of those films was very much based upon "a vast literature that developed in the '50s and early '60s about the threat from the far right," Piereson says, specifically mentioning Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style In American Politics, and Daniel Bell's The Radical Right.

As Piereson writes, leading up to Kennedy's fateful trip to Dallas, there was a remarkable amount of violence in the south, caused by a backlash against the civil rights movement. In October of 1963, Adlai Stevenson, the Democrats' presidential candidate in the 1950s who had been appointed the ambassador to the UN by Kennedy, traveled to Dallas for a speech on United Nations Day. Stevenson is heckled, booed, spat upon, and hit over the head with a cardboard sign. Stevenson says publicly, there's a "spirit of madness" in Texas. And Kennedy's White House staffers believe that he should cancel his already announced November visit to Dallas.

Thus, at the beginning of November 1963 a framework has been established that the far right is the threat to American democracy, "and that they've moved from heated rhetoric to violent act," Piereson says.

"So when the news spreads that Kennedy has been killed, the immediate response is that it must be a right winger who's done it," Piereson notes. And while the Birch-era right definitely had severe issues, JFK's assassin on November 22, 1963 had, of course, a polar opposite ideology. "When the word is now spread that Oswald has been captured, and that he has a communist past, and they start running film of him demonstrating for Castro in the previous summer, there is a tremendous disorientation at this."

...

The shock that Kennedy was in reality a victim of the Cold War simply did not compute on a national level.

Got Tagged? Just say no.

Lauren tagged me.

I ain't doing it, sorry.

Why? Mostly because I'm not going to annoy people based upon some faux impulse to be nice-nice.

No offense intended, btw.

Medieval Hollywood

Well, here's an attempt to jumpstart the History Blogging. It looks like Hollywood is going to be offering a few medieval entertainment vehicles in the upcoming months.

Virgin Territory is a contemporized Decameron. Well, the language and mores are updated, the setting and time--the hills outside of Florence during a plague outbreak--remains the same.

The Last Legion is another attempt at a "historic King Arthur" story. We'll see.

CBS is going to produce a new series called "The Kingdom" about "four guys, one of whom is crowned king and reluctantly takes the throne despite preferring drinking and sex to procession and war." Heh.

I suppose I haven't been thinking historically lately

And that's why the lull. My focus has been on my more local obligations. Ah well, I await Clio to inspire...I'm sure she will.

Secular Tribes Here, Religious Tribes There

Paul Waldman wrote a piece in The Prospect in which--after pondering this study on the tribalization of evangelicals--he wonders if secularists are going to tribalize themselves. This has prompted some discussion by Ross Douthat (who also wrote a piece based on the same study) and the guys at The Corner. First, Waldman:

David Campbell of Notre Dame describes how evangelical voters are affected by the demographic makeup of their environment -- but not in the way you might think. Building on the "racial threat" hypothesis -- which states that as the number of African-Americans in a community increases, the more likely white voters are to support conservative candidates and oppose policies that benefit African-Americans -- Campbell set out to see whether he could identify a similar effect among evangelical voters. It turns out that, even when you control for factors like party identification, the more secular people there were within a county, the more likely that people from evangelical denominations living there would vote Republican.

In other words, the more that evangelicals saw non-religious people around them, the greater the likelihood they'd walk a straight line from the church door to the voting booth and pull the GOP lever.
...

So the question now is whether non-believers will, in large numbers, begin to define themselves as a tribe of their own. In order to do so, they'll have to feel at least some measure of antagonism toward those on the outside. That's what makes a tribe a tribe, after all. (What would Red Sox fandom be without the Yankees, or punk rock without the conformist corporate tools?) But one key question for secular people is who, exactly, the Other is. Is it anyone who is religious? Those who want to convert you to their beliefs? Those who want their beliefs to be enshrined in government policy?

Douthat summarized his take on the matter:

The argument, in short, is that just as the elite-level secularization of the 1960s and '70s (in the intelligentsia, the Courts, and the Democratic Party) produced backlash in the form of the religious right, so now that backlash has bred its own backlash, in the form of a mass secularism whose attitudes toward religion, politics, and church-state separation are more European than anything we've seen before in American political life. This, not the supposed right-wing religious revival that conservatives champion and liberals dread, is the newest new thing in American political life, and the trend that's likely to have the most impact on the culture wars over the next decade or so.

Jonah Goldberg, John Podhoretz, and Mark Steyn have all weighed in and Douthat has responded. Read their posts to see the argument over the particulars of how the tug-o-war between secularism and religion has played out over the last 40-odd years.

And then there's this study which indicates that adults who graduated from college during the last 10 years or so are more religious than their non-college educated peers.

Researchers found four-year college students and college graduates are the least likely to curb church attendance, to say religion is less important in their lives, or to completely disassociate from religion. Young adults who do not pursue a college degree are the most likely to abandon their faith.

"Many people assume college is public enemy number one for religion," Mark Regnerus, assistant professor of sociology and author of the book "Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers," said. "But we found young adults who don't experience college are far more likely to turn away from religion."

The evolution of campus culture might explain the surprising results, Regnerus said. As more universities shift attention and resources from liberal arts to professional programs, students are increasingly sheltered from philosophical questions or debates that challenge their beliefs. When they are challenged, they can gain support from campus religious organizations and like-minded peers.

"Religion and spirituality are becoming more accepted in higher education, both in intellectual circles and in campus life," Jeremy Uecker, graduate student and lead author of the study, noted. "Religious students are encountering a much less hostile environment than in years past."

It appears as if this study supports the idea of religious tribalization indicated in the study cited by Douthat and Waldman. Further, if a majority of the next generation of college-educated kids is more religious than their peers and if it can be assumed they will comprise the future "leadership class" in the U.S. Does that mean that their secular, college-educated peers will indeed be pushed toward tribalization? Well, I guess we'll see.

Civility in the Commons

While writing about the acute issue of the conservative side of the debate concerning immigration reform, Jonah Goldberg wrote:

The beauty of a democratic system is that it depends on democratic arguments. Even if every partisan is a villain, he has to make his case in a way that will convince people. And it's those arguments we're supposed to be dealing with. It's very easy for me to say that while my opponent may say X that he secretly believes Y because he is a member of a supersecret Satanic cabal or because his fern is speaking to him through his dental fillings. But unless I have proof, debate should be confined to X.

Dale Light adds:

He's right. We should be debating ideas, not attacking people or indulging sick conspiracy fantasies, but increasingly we don't, and it is important that rather than simply denouncing this disturbing tendency, we begin to ask why.

Historically speaking such things are characteristic of people and groups who are, or perceive themselves to be, powerless. It is telling that in these times so many people, of all political stripes, should feel that the powers that be are not only out of touch with, but actively hostile to, the best interests of the American people. In part this would seem to reflect the increasingly undemocratic nature of modern political institutions. In part it derives from the common, and to my mind accurate, perception that the major institutions that emerged in the Twentieth Century to organize our society are increasingly corrupt and dysfunctional and that they function to serve the interests of a narrow segment of our society.

These are things I have been thinking about a lot in recent years and to which I intend to return time and again in this forum. For now it is enough to point out, as Jonah Goldberg has, that a mode of discourse that formerly was a marginal element in our political culture has now become so widespread that it is manifested throughout the political spectrum, and that is something to worry about.

I can't help thinking that the "one bad apple..." canard also applies. The average Jill or Joe sees the "snipe and snark" and gets even more turned off. Then again, it may not be the "snipe and snark" so much as the language used: profanity-for-its-own-sake and the constant issuing of the same hyperbolic cliches (Bush=Hitler, Liberals are Commies, etc.). Responsible and respectable debate doesn't have to be boring, and it doesn't require ad hominem for spice. But I guess that, in a world where everyone is a pundit, the bar gets lowered. Rhetorical levelling, if you will.

Review: The Unknown Gulag

The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin's Special Settlements by Lynne Viola
(Oxford University Press).

Lynn Viola is a Professor of History at the University of Toronto. She specializes in the social and political history of twentieth century Russia and is well-published in this area of study. In The Unknown Gulag, Viola details how Stalin and his cohort planned and executed a policy that resulted in the exile of over 2 million "capitalist peasants"—kulaks—into the first gulags.
Whether planned or not, the release of the book coincides with the dedication of the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, D.C. and Viola does a fine job of portraying one group of those victims: the forgotten kulaks.

Stalin's primary motive for removing the kulaks from villages, she explains, was based on his and the Communist Party's political and ideological goals. Primarily, the Communists believed that the peasants stood in the way of their ideal of agricultural collectivization.

Their desire for collectivization was largely an outgrowth of the failure of past Communist economic policies. In 1927/28, the Party had implemented price controls that artificially held down the price of foodstuffs consumed by industrial workers while at the same time they expected the rural farmers to pay a premium for the goods coming out of the factories. This disregard for the natural self-interest of individual farmers led to unintended consequences. Instead of selling their goods at below market value, the farmers held their goods back or sold them on the private markets. In 1928/29, the Communists responded by implementing various laws and taxes to harass and punish the peasants and to force them to sell their goods to the government--at the government price.

The Communist Party came to believe that the "capitalist peasantry" needed to be removed for the sake of more efficient collectivization. Gradually—often based on whim or prejudice—anyone who was perceived as an obstacle to collectivization was declared a kulak. By 1929/30, collectivization efforts were in full swing and with it de-kulakization. Peasant farmers who didn't move into collective farms had their goods confiscated by "grain requisitioning brigades" composed of "urban communists and industrial workers" whose antipathy towards rural peasants was exploited by Stalin.

The Communist Party perceived issues of socioeconomic stratification through political and ideological lenses. That meant, in practice, that the (broadly defined) political behavior and actions of a peasant were often equally, if not more, important in determining social status than economic position in the village. During the collectivization of Soviet agriculture, almost anyone could be labeled a kulak—the village critic, the outspoken Red army veteran, peasants with large families (and therefore greater land resources), and a host of other village authorities, including priests, church council members, tradesmen, craftsman, byvshye liudi (village notables from the prerevolutionary regime), and even seasonal workers as well as the occasional prosperous peasant. As the state entered into what would be a protracted war with the peasantry, the kulak came to serve as a political metaphor and pejorative for the entire peasantry.

De-kulakization helped Stalin destabilize the traditional village social and political structure by removing leaders and intimidating any peasants left behind. Thus, the Communist party engaged in a "virtual war" that resulted in the destruction of the traditional peasant society that they neither understood nor trusted. In its place, the Communists erected agricultural collectives that would supply the food for the idealized industrial workers who were the true heart of the perpetual Communist revolution.

But what to do with all of the kulaks? G.G. Iagoda's OGPU (secret police) was charged with implementing the policies of that came to be known as de-kulakization. But little thought had been given to how to facilitate the removal of millions of kulaks. Or where to put them.

As a result, Iagoda made it up has he went along. Seeing the increasing disarray in the countryside, Iagoda developed a plan to relocate the kulaks to the Northern Territories, Siberia and elsewhere. Meanwhile, peasant riots broke out and local and regional mismanagement of the policy led to "excesses." Additionally, tensions arose between those territories who sought rid themselves of the kulak problem and those regions that were charged with taking them in. As so often happened, the "perfect" Communist plan somehow failed to materialize in reality.

Despite these problems, the relocation went forward. But a concrete plan was still lacking and kulaks languished in temporary settlements. Eventually, they were moved to remote areas where they began the slow, arduous and uncoordinated process of building permanent special settlements, usually located near prospective labor camps. These families worked together--though they were often separated, too--to scratch out an existence in the remote regions of the Soviet Union.

Such is the lead-in to the heart of Viola's work: the personal stories of those who survived life in these unknown gulags. Viola's work is both a solid institutional and an engaging social history. She accents her intricate sketch of the Soviet bureaucracy with the vivid and often heartbreaking accounts of those who survived the kulak gulags.

In the final analysis, Viola believes that Stalin's de-kulakization policy has been overlooked as a key component of his consolidation of power and that "the peasantry paid the highest price for the Soviet experiment..."

The Soviet superpower was built upon the poverty of the village, artificially fueled by an economy and a society that could not in the end sustain its growth and power. Long before 1991, to those who could see, it was evident that the Soviet Union was a Leviathan in bast shoes. Soviet modernity always remained moored to its agrarian legacy.

Soviet Communism relied on exploiting the common people it claimed it was trying to help. Eventually, the Iron Curtain was drawn and the world saw the fallacy upon which the Soviet utopia had been built. Unfortunately, it was too late to help a lost generation of small farmers.

ADDENDUM: Viola explained her research and previewed her work over at the Oxford University Press blog:

• Part I: Looking for the Kulaks
• Part II: The Central Archives
• Part III: The Provincial Archives
• Part IV: Why did the Soviets Document their Crimes?
• Part V: Another Source: The Survivors’ Testimony

Keeping the Gates at the Medieval Castle

Over at ADM's place, there is a fine discussion concerning academic gatekeeping. I tentatively entered the fray by quibbling with what I inferred to be condescension towards those of us who may not regularly translate texts for ourselves. Yikes! I got smacked around and explained my perspective after the fact (with some help). Ah well. The perils of attempting to scale the ivory tower with only a step ladder...

Ideology and Anglo-Culture

The Kirk Center's most recent University Bookman contains William Anthony Hay's review of J.G.A. Pocock's The Discovery of Islands. Begins Hay:

Each generation revises history to fit its own needs and preoccupations because, while the past itself remains constant, the prism through with it is seen changes. Besides helping people understand their own time, history shapes identity and provides a sense of place. These factors together explain how historiography—the principles, perspectives, and methods behind the writing of history—responds to questions driven by contemporary preoccupations.

Spot on. Take British History, for example:

The Whig interpretation in Thomas Babbington Macaulay’s nineteenth century History of England and Henrietta Marshall’s children’s book Our Island’s Story describes British history as the progressive movement toward increasing liberty and prosperity. As academic history emerged in Britain under the guidance of scholars like Macaulay’s nephew George Otto Trevelyan, it largely assimilated Whig assumptions to shape public culture into the 1920s. Declining power and a crisis of confidence posed new questions that led British historians to examine the past in different ways. Marxism and social science methodology turned historiography from constitutional history and focused instead on class conflict and social change. Postmodernism reflected the growing hold of expressive individualism from the 1960s with a consequent interest in identity that posed questions about sexuality and ethnic differences. Failure of the post-1945 social democratic consensus during the 1970s followed by Thatcherism further shifted the terms behind historical inquiry.

So, what about Pocock?

Decolonization, renewed interest in histories of component nations within the United Kingdom, and reorientation toward Europe as part of Britain’s membership in the European Union have also influenced historiography, and J. G. A. Pocock’s essays in The Discovery of Islands offer a profound reconceptualization of British history....Pocock argues for a British history that examines relationships within the Atlantic archipelago and its overseas progeny.

This rings familiar--the interpretive frameworks of the Anglosphere and Bernard Bailyn's Atlantic History came to mind. The seeming symbiosis of the latter with Pocock isn't too surprising, given both Bailyn and Pocock found themselves largely on the same side (forgive the implied oversimplification) of the "republican synthesis" debates of the '70's and '80's. This leads to the context that Hay provides concerning Pocock's point of view:

Far from nostalgic pining for a world he admits has been lost, Pocock’s emphasis on the British diaspora follows from his efforts to understand the terms in which people see themselves or what he would call “the nuts and bolts of the mind.” A noted historian of ideas, he pioneered a new approach to intellectual history that viewed texts in the context of their time so as to understand the language contemporaries used to communicate ideas. Instead of great books providing a debate amongst themselves across the ages, key texts could offer insight on how men at a specific point of time saw their world. Pocock’s approach to British history as the story of nations interacting with and occasionally seceding from an imperial state plays this theme from his other work in a different key.

Both Bailyn and Pocock dealt with how ideologies were formed and used to justify the actions of individuals and groups. Bailyn has gone deeper into how Anglo culture and society has been maintained and modified around the Atlantic basin. Pocock has turned his head to Europe.

“Europeanizing” British history involves downplaying the centrality of the state and refocusing relationships toward continental Europe rather than within the British isles or overseas. Deconstructing identities often involves a smug provincialism among elites who cannot see beyond their own times. Pocock warned that demolishing Whig history—even though it brought a deeper understanding of past and present—amounted to a program for “asking the present to live without a past that justifies it.” Much the same could be said of postmodernist enthusiasm for Europe without the compensating benefit of illuminating the past. Indeed, where revisionism opened doors, the politics behind the new historiography of Europe seems eager to close them. Pocock contends that a history of either Britain or Europe must consider how it is a creation of nation-states even before attempting to transcend that framework.

Too often this mistake is made: the present circumstance is taken as a priori. Little thought is given to the political, social or cultural structures or mores that were in place that allowed [insert currently en vogue enlightened state here] to flourish. Pocock is warning that we need to be careful. Finally:

Pocock’s concluding chapters highlight the symbiotic relationship between historiography and politics. History serves a central purpose in public culture, and, consequently, the question of how it is to be written never quite finds a resolution. Each generation rewrites its history to understand its present. Pocock gives a judicious and well-written overview of the process, and his essays leave a sense that the past may not be such a foreign realm as is sometimes thought.

Providence Journal Wins EPPY

And the awards keep coming....

The Providence Journal has won an EPPY in the category of "Best Special Feature in a Web Site - Enterprise, fewer than 1 million unique monthly visitors" for it's series "Unrighteous Traffick: Rhode Island's slave history." If you haven't checked it out, do so. It's really well done and shiny and all that.

"Sons of Providence" Wins Washington Book Prize

Charles Rappleye's Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution , which I've discussed before, has won the George Washington Book Prize, given to the best book written about the era of the Founding Fathers. In addition to the "prestige," Rappley receives $50,000. That's pretty sweet. The other finalists were A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation by Catherine Allgor and In the Name of the Father: Washington's Legacy, Slavery and the Making of a Nation by François Furstenberg.

National Maritime Day

As a former merchant mariner (KP, '91), I'd be remiss if I didn't take note that today is National Maritime Day. Here's the President's 2007 National Maritime Day proclamation and a link to USMM.org, a great spot to read up on the contributions made by the U.S. Merchant Marine during war time. Fair winds and calm seas...

Hamburger's "Separation of Church and State"

The latest University Bookman contains a review of Philip Hamburger's Separation of Church and State", which delves into this "stubborn ideology". Hamburger recounts the evolution of the "wall" argument, hitting all of the appropriate touchstones. But then there's this:

In fact, it was not until the 1840s that the idea of separation of church and state really began to gain wide acceptance, as native born Protestants, alarmed by increasing numbers of Catholic immigrants, and viewing the Catholic Church as an obscurantist, authoritarian institution that, ruled by a foreign prince, exercised a kind of mind control over its members, embraced separation of church and state as a way of limiting the grave threat they believed Catholicism posed to American freedom....Nativist Protestants used the idea of separation of church and state to restrict the influence of Catholic clergy in politics and to eliminate public support for Catholic education.

Particularly notable in this regard was the school question, where nativist legislatures, seeking to make the public or common school an agent of both Americanization and Protestant evangelization—the two were closely linked in their minds—promoted common schools in which a non-denominational Protestantism was taught, the (Protestant) King James version of the bible was regularly read, and textbooks filled with anti-Catholic propaganda were used, even as they refused public support for “sectarian” Catholic schools because such support would allegedly violate the separation of church and state. Nativists could hold these contradictory positions because...they did not think of themselves as part of a structured, hierarchical church; accordingly, as they saw matters, supporting a non-denominationally Protestant public school system while denying funds to Catholic schools on separationist grounds made sense because what they sought was the separation of church from state, not of (the Protestant) religion from government.

...recognizing that the Constitution did not actually mandate separation, nativists began in the 1870s to propose constitutional amendments intended to make separation the law of the land and to preclude any possibility of public funding for “sectarian,” that is, Catholic schools, while leaving the non-denominational Protestant public school system fully intact... Yet, ironically, while nativists recognized that the First Amendment did not in fact separate church and state, they do not seem to have recognized that the logic of separation, strictly applied, would require the secularization of the public schools...

Ah yes, unintended consequences...

Pawtucket "Officially" Historic

Now downtown Pawtucket, Rhode Island is more than just of old buildings. It's officially a bunch of old, "historical" buildings.

Downtown Pawtucket has been named to the National Register of Historic Places, the R.I. Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission announced today.

“The architectural and civic character of Downtown Pawtucket is preserved in this collection of solid historic buildings,” Edward F. Sanderson, the commission’s executive director, said in a statement. “Downtown’s historic core is important to Pawtucket’s heritage, and these structures are a resource for attracting new investment and revitalization.”

The district comprises 50 buildings on about 14 acres of land in the city’s central business district, two blocks to the west of the Blackstone River. “With its collection of architecturally significant banks, shops, offices and civic buildings, the Downtown Pawtucket Historic District represents the city’s growth as a prosperous industrial city between the Civil War and World War I,” the Preservation & Heritage Commission said in its announcement.

...the Blackstone’s 30-foot drop at Pawtucket Falls had made the region a magnet for early industrial efforts including Slater Mill, and the booming manufacturing economy attracted housing, institutional and civic buildings and commercial development.

The 1870s through 1890s, the state Preservation & Heritage Commission said, saw the replacement of horse-drawn streetcars with a street railway system, the advent of public utilities and the beginnings of a new central business district where small wood-frame shops and houses gave way to masonry structures up to five stories tall.

“The Downtown Pawtucket Historic District encompasses examples of all of these building types,” the commission said.

“North of Exchange Street stand three wood-frame residences that predate Pawtucket’s urban boom: two Italianate-style cottages on Grant Street and a Second Empire-style house on Montgomery Street.

“Fine examples of commercial buildings include the Late Victorian-style Beswick Building (1891) and the massive Summer Street Stables (1892) with its terracotta plaque containing the biblical verse, ‘How Do The Beasts Groan.’

“Municipal and institutional buildings like the Deborah Cook Sayles Memorial Library (1899-1902, designed by the Boston firm of Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson) and the Colonial Revival-style Pawtucket Boys Club (1902) embody the wealth and civic ambitions of this maturing city.”

Hazards of Late Antique/Germanic History--Don't just guess!

From Martin at Aardvarchaeology (this is all him, so don't be confused by formatting):

The concept of an Old Norse religion (as it has been used by e.g. Karl Hauck and Lotte Hedeager) is useless. Such a non-codified, orally performed and transmitted body of mythology and liturgy cannot be coherent across time nor space. So all statements about Old Norse religion must be qualified with two questions: Where? When? And when things don't add up, this is only to be expected.

Think about it. Even heavily codified religions, such as Judaism or Christianity, aren't coherent.

This skepticism of monolithic coherent entities in societies of the past and present is actually a post-modernist viewpoint, and to my mind a valuable one. Unlike real po-mos, however, I don't draw the conclusion that anything goes in interpretation. Quite the contrary, I find it a strong argument to drop all discussion of anything not strongly anchored in source material. Wovon man nicht reden kann, darüber darf man ganz bestimmt schweigen, po-mo Dummköpfe.

This reminds me of something I wrote the other day in a letter to a charming Aard regular:

"The problem is often called 'essentialism', as I think you may have seen in my review of Herschend's The Idea of the Good. The argument presupposes that there's this huge block north of the Imperial border called Germanic Society, that this block has the same essence from the border to the North Cape, and that when the block changes, all of it changes at the same time, in the same way. All this is in my opinion a) pure speculation, b) very, very unlikely."

Review: English History Made Brief, Irreverent, and Pleasurable

English History made Brief, Irreverent, and Pleasurable by Lacey Baldwin Smith (Academy Chicago Publishers).

Smith is Professor Emeritus of History at Northwestern University and has written a number of books centering around the history of Great Britain. English History not being my bailiwick, I'd never read anything by him before. After reading his recent work, however, that will change.

Smith opens his book by noting that “history is not what happened in the past, but what today is worth remembering about the past.” Setting aside the historiographical discussion that such a comment can engender, he has written a fine work of history. Smith hits the high--and low--points of English History (note, it's "English" and not "British"-- Smith explains the difference) in a conversational and engaging way. It's as if you're your history professor's office hours were held at a kegger. In short, Smith injects a little humor and verve into his narrative, which is complemented by some very funny illustrations from Punch.

As a medievalist--and if historians are considered "dry," medievalists are downright parched--I found his take on the early medieval period in English history refreshing and funny. For instance, while describing how the Angles and Saxons came and conquered Celto-Roman Britain:

The invaders proceeded over the years to divide Britain among themselves. The Saxons in the area of London broke up into the east, south and west Saxons--Essex, Sussex and Wessex. The urge to box the compass generated the splendid, but also apocryphal, story of a north Saxon kingdom called Nosex which naturally died out very rapidly, but doubtless inspired one of Britain's longest running plays: No Sex Please, We're British.

Keeping with a theme, Smith also explains the English resurgence after the Plague by explaining that "somewhere around 1485, the English started having more and better sex...rising from two to four million by 1600." He also takes the opportunity to weave in a zinger or two when he can. For instance, this observation about Elizabethan society:

The family, over which the father was supreme, was seen as the Kingdom writ small. In learning obedience to and respect for their parents, Tudor children learned deference to authority on every level of society. Thus the inferior bowed to all forms of superiority, the freshman stepping aside for the senior, the bachelor of arts for the master of arts, the master of arts for the doctor of divinity or civil law, and all six for the professor, a way of life that high-ranking academics today regret has disappeared.

Indeed! But Smith's work isn't all wit and snark. He gives very concise and readable accounts of historical events and explains how one affected the other (eg; the reign of James I and the Glorious Revolution or the evolution of Parliament). Though there are chronological demarcations in the narrative, a narrative it is, not a patched together pop-encyclopedia of sequential--though disconnected--events. Smith does a fine job of moving the story of English history along in a coherent and entertaining way.

Smith concludes the book with an extended treatment of the British royalty--"The Royal Soap Opera." He covers the breadth of the more personal shenanigans of English royalty, plumbing the depths and climbing the peaks, and shows that royal peccadilloes are a constant. Commenting on the leveling of the contemporary Royal Family, he offers that "what is eating at the soul of Kingship is not moral outrage, but boredom." Like the rest of the entertainment industry, if the progeny of Elizabeth II don't give the press enough scandalous fodder, what is left?

Overall, I found that Smith's English History lived up to the rest of it's title, especially the Pleasurable part. Go out and get it--you'll learn something between chuckles.

Southern Conservative History: It's not all Black and White?

The points made by Donald T. Critchlow in "What’s Wrong with the New Conservative History?" were:

First, I do not believe enough attention has been given to framing the history of conservatism more broadly within the context of modern liberalism. Second, we need to stop seeing the rightward shift in the electorate in the late twentieth century as simply a racial backlash. Both points suggest that many historians working in this field simply are not getting the full story.

Well, maybe they are:

...new wave of historians, many of them young, believe that one cannot understand today’s housing, schooling, economic development or political patterns without understanding the mostly apolitical white Southerners of that era. None of these scholars play down the inbred racism of the region, but they argue that the focus on race can obscure broader economic and demographic changes, like the dizzying corporate growth, the migration of white Northerners to the South and the shifting emphasis on class interests after legal segregation ended.

Critchlow and the "new wave of historians" point to the suburbanization of southern whites as a key factor in understanding the spread of Republican conservatism in the south.

Matthew D. Lassiter was motivated to research his own Southern roots. He found a gap between the history he had learned in school and his experience growing up in its wake in Sandy Springs, a white, middle-class suburb of Atlanta. “I was trying to find my own people, my parents and grandparents,” said Mr. Lassiter, 36, who wrote “The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South” (Princeton) published last year. “There were a few white Southerners who were liberals, a larger number throwing the rocks with the rioters and the vast group in the middle were left out of the story.”

As a graduate student at the University of Virginia, he taught undergraduates and assigned the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” in which he wrote, “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride towards freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than justice.”

Mr. Lassiter, who now teaches history at the University of Michigan, said: “Who are these moderates? They don’t seem to be participating, yet they’re completely complicit in the system of Jim Crow.”

Mr. Lassiter’s book looks at how the federal government subsidized white flight to the suburbs, where middle-class whites could embrace colorblind values but still maintain all-white enclaves and schools. “When you look at suburbs and middle class, then you start getting a national story,” he said. “White suburbs outside Charlotte are reacting the same as white suburbs outside Los Angeles or in New Jersey.”

Kevin M. Kruse, who grew up in Nashville and now teaches at Princeton University, focuses more on rank-and-file segregationists than moderates. In his 2005 book, “White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism” (Princeton), he argues that in moving to the suburbs, “white Southern conservatives were forced to abandon their traditional, populist, and often starkly racist demagoguery, and instead craft a new conservatism predicated on a language of rights, freedoms, and individualism.”

Hitchens on Jefferson and the Pirates

Christopher Hitchens has written a good piece on Thomas Jefferson and the Barbary Pirates. I've spent some time on the Barbary Pirates myself and there are a few things in the Hitchen's piece with which I'd quibble, but not right now. Here's the important point:

Perhaps above all, though, the Barbary Wars gave Americans an inkling of the fact that they were, and always would be, bound up with global affairs. Providence might have seemed to grant them a haven guarded by two oceans, but if they wanted to be anything more than the Chile of North America—a long littoral ribbon caught between the mountains and the sea—they would have to prepare for a maritime struggle as well as a campaign to redeem the unexplored landmass to their west. The U.S. Navy’s Mediterranean squadron has, in one form or another, been on patrol ever since.

And then, finally, there is principle. It would be simplistic to say that something innate in America made it incompatible with slavery and tyranny. But would it be too much to claim that many Americans saw a radical incompatibility between the Barbary system and their own? And is it not pleasant when the interests of free trade and human emancipation can coincide?