Tit for Tat

No, it's not another type of English delicacy. It's an article by Paul Robinson in the London Spectator about the concept of honor in the American South at the time of the Civil War and now. Of course, I am all agog to hear our personal historians thoughts on the matter.

The Confluence of Thought

This morning I was helping the sibling move furniture, and the topic turned to British cuisine, such as it is, because for a party earlier in the week I made one of the finer pieces of British gastronomy, a steamed pudding, to be specific, a Spotted Dick.

Yes, yes, children, snigger madly. Everyone does, and yet I refuse to use the alternate (and almost as colorful) names such as "Spotted Dog" (even though this variant graces the the title of a wonderful cookbook ) or "Plum Bolster" or even the new and modern "Spotted Richard."

The Sib mentioned a bit wistfully that one of things he found amusing about England was that you could have a meal of Black Country Faggots, chips, and Spotted Dick, and no one would think it peculiar.

What happens when I turn to Lileks today? I see a whole entry on Mr. Brain's Pork Faggots.
I know this must mean something. Perhaps something in the betting line.

Harding and American collective memory

Listening to the Harding tour, I was also struck by how much this man from Marion, in his all-too-short 2 1/2 years in office, shaped and played a part in American collective identity. By this I mean our perception of our past. What other presidents can say they dedicated Plymouth Rock (1921), the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (1921), and the Lincoln Memorial (1922)? To say nothing of the Simon Bolivar statue in NYC? In addition, it was Harding who ordered the Declaration of Independence be preserved and eventually put on display at the National Archives, after languishing in various unprotected rooms and vaults over the years.

How many of those tourists know Harding's role in three of DC's most popular sites? Harumph!

The Pilgrimmage to Marion

I have returned, and while the trip to Hardingland was shorter than I would have preferred, I saw much and have much to say.

Marion, Ohio is still a farm city, pretty in its older core yet built-up with chainstores on the periphery, surrounded by dead level Midwestern farms. The southern approach via Columbus was initially ugly -- Walmarts, McDonalds, etc., plaza after plaza, plenty of traffic -- but thinned out eventually, and soon we were driving parallel railroad tracks thorugh pleasant rural central Ohio. You pass signs for Rutherford Hayes' presidential center on the way, reminding you that Ohio prides itself on being birthplace to eight presidents.

Harding's home (built in 1891) is located on Mount Vernon Ave, retains its green paint with white trim that Harding preferred back in the 1900s, and is in the midst of getting a serious facelift -- the famous "Front Porch" where thousands came to hear Harding speak during the 1920 campaign is being rebuilt. The parking lot is rather small (but was packed with cars, I was happy to see) and the museum/admissions hut is housed in the original 1920 press shack, ordered and built by WGH from Sears Roebuck so reporters would have a place to file their campaign stories. The grounds are well-kept and are studded with various Harding curiosities: a large mobile voting carriage from the 1880s, a small but handsome monument/sundial dedicated to WGH in the late 1980s, and a double-sided sign describing the 1920 campaign and helping visitors around Marion's "Harding trail."

Our tour (and those before and after) were full-up; many from Ohio, but the mix of accents suggested a pretty broad crowd. Once you step inside the backdoor and into the kitchen, you feel the air-conditioning and smell the musty odor of an old, closed-up house. And it really is a lovely house, with decorations quite typical of an era caught in-between late Victorian decadence and emerging modern simplicity, the era of velvet and walnut and another of electricity, iceboxes, and radio. What impressions did I have of the house? Three things came to mind:

1.) Harding was perhaps the most middle-class American president of the twentieth century (along with Truman probably). Think about it: son of a country doctor, highly religious parents, hates farmwork, moves to larger town when still a youth, tries but dislikes both the law and schoolteaching, works as a reporter because he has a love and gift for language (and gets fired because he was revealed as a Republican working for a Democratic newspaper), borrows $100 from father to buy a bankrupt Marion newspaper along with 2 friends, works hard to make it a success and eventually buys them out (selling the paper for $500,000 in 1923 -- it is still Marion's only newspaper, and you see red Marion Star paper boxes along all the roadsides), invests wisely and becomes moderately wealthy, enters Republican politics and by 1914 gets into the US Senate, works hard and maneuvers himself into the presidency in 1920. At the time of his death in 1923, his estate was worth $850,000. The house is a reflection of this, with its small library, its pretty front parlor complete with mobile Victrola, its rather small upstairs bedrooms, its many cigar humidors. This is not a mansion, along the lines of Oyster Bay, Hyde Park, or Hyannis. He built it for $3400 in 1891, mothballed it 1920, and planned to move back after the White House.

2.) That said, Let's not underestimate Harding's material comforts; he may have been middle-class, but it was in the upper echelons. The home is ornate in parts, with its heavily paneled rooms, carved woodwork, and parquet floors. When the original front porch collapsed around 1900, he had an immense replacement built for summer parties and political gatherings. Like many, he also employed one or two house servants to cook and clean.

3.) I was surprised at how European the house was decorated. The Hardings traveled in Europe before WW1 and returned with a number of goods they displayed proudy in their home: Italian marble busts, German and Italian china, elaborate French and Italian vases, several oil paintings. Again, WGH may have been middle-class, but he was gilded on the edges.

After leaving the house, running out of time, we drove across town to see his memorial. In my mind's eye, I thought it would be smaller; instead, the Harding Memorial stunned me by its size. It is huge and frankly impressive. Circular and white-columned, he and his wife are buried in the middle of a small Japanese garden at its center. There is little lettering on the walls, merely he and his wife's name and dates. No large quotes like Jefferson or Lincoln. What other presidents have been honored on this scale?

For more, take a look at this site and donate lavishly.

Mosquitoes and Madame Curie

A nice piece in Physics Today on one of the heroines of my youth, Marie Curie. (Thanks to A&L Daily for the tip!)

And while on the topic of youthful passions, locally transmitted malaria pops up in Florida. The media seems stunned; those of us who have always been interested in mosquito borne disease are not at all surprised.

Welcome to Hideousness

Now this is what a summer day in Virginia should be all about. You can smell the asphalt. The sun seems to reflect off the back of your eye sockets. There is a miasma of moisture that feels like steam...it shouldn't, it's only in the low 90's, but still...it just seems like there must be water boiling somewhere. Maybe it's the Chesapeake Bay.

It's a day when you want to take all that "air conditioning ruined our social and cultural community" cultural criticism nonsense and burn it outside, where you wouldn't notice the heat.

Mmmm....Doughnuts

I have to admit that there is an (urp) Krispy-Kreme in (smack) Charlottesville but that had nothing (belch), nothing to do with my decision to move here. Their coffee is really good too (loosens belt).

Yet good as they are, surely they're not this good? If the Tech Boom was worrying, shouldn't the Comfort Food Boom be worrying? Or is that a pattern of recessions? Maybe people just want those fatty sugary oh-so-good and warm sticky morsels to make them happy. Maybe they should try jogging instead.

Mark Noll is Wrong

He may be an eminent historian of American Christianity, and a heck of a nice guy, but I still want to quibble with Mark Noll's review of the movie Gods and Generals in the double-bumper Civil War issue of Books and Culture. Not that I've seen the movie, mind you, but why should that stop a film critic?

Besides, it's not the movie I'm complaining about, it's the movie review. Noll praises the movie for at least taking Christian belief and practice seriously, and then damns it because it does not "ask what a widely shared and often intense Christian faith meant beyond the strictly private sphere." He uses as an example of this a scene in which Stonewall Jackson and his cook George Jenkins are praying:

Jackson thanks God for his sovereignty over all events and prays feelingly for absent families, including George's. George's prayer begins in much the same way, but then broadens into an appeal that God would provide liberating justice for those who labor as chattel in bondage. After the prayers are over, Jackson is silent. The film rolls on...

Now, I think that Noll is wondering why this cat can't be a dog. What he is describing is an artistic choice of a way to convey deep and powerful truths which, precisely as Noll relates it, seems to be a very powerful moment. "...Jackson is silent." Isn't it courageous of Ron Maxwell, the director, to choose silence as a way of showing the gulf of perspectives between two men who can pray for each other?

In the end, Noll's review is insufficient artistic criticism that is sold to the reader as sober historical judgment. Thus we read that:

...In much of the movie, but especially in its battles, style prevails over chaos, majesty over carnage, valor over panic (which could be overcome, but was everywhere present), mannerism over authenticity, and lies over truth. This is a shame, because the movie, the companion volume, and especially Jeff Shaara's novel make very important contributions to recovering the role of religion in the Civil War. But recovery is not enough. We need to see as well what it meant, and to see with as much realism as possible. And we need these things not only for the sake of getting the Civil War "right" but also for assimilating the meaning of warfare in our own time...

These very strong, even harsh words are prompted by Noll's dismay at the lack of screaming wounded on the Fredericksburg battlefield. To be sure, the role of realistic portrayals in art is a sort of historical judgment. But it is also an artistic judgment, and Noll neglects that consideration. He does not consider why Maxwell might not have shown Fredericksburg as, say, Spielberg did D-Day in Saving Private Ryan. And are cannonballs taking off legs and heads in The Patriot capable of endowing that movie with a unique capacity for truth-telling? Or the graphic and accurate violence of Braveheart? This is something that needs to be considered in Books and Culture; but that's not what Noll chose to do.

A markedly better historical analysis of Gods and Generals was offered in National Review Online by Mac Owens. It's as much of an example of how to do a historical analysis of a movie as Noll's is not. For Owens the historical problem with Gods and Generals is that it perpetuates the Myth of the Lost Cause. That is the title given by historians for a set of ideas that is also related to a "Myth of Collective Victory". Owens explains it thus:

According to this vision, the Civil War was a noble test of national vigor between two adversaries who believed firmly in their respective causes. The war was followed by an interlude of bitterness and wrongheaded policy during Reconstruction. The war was an heroic crisis that the United States survived and a source of pride that Americans could solve their own problems and redeem themselves in unity. In this view, the Civil War was the original "good war," a necessary sacrifice, a noble mutual experience that in the long run solidified the nation.

Of course, this is the view that prevails for the most part among Americans today. It is visible in such popular Civil War magazines as Civil War Times Illustrated and Blue and Gray. It is visible in Civil War art by such artist as Morton Kunstler and Don Troiani. Such popular history and art reflects a longing for some transplanted, heroic place in the 19th century in which the troubling issues of race and slavery are banished from the discussion.

But such a vision is myth, the purpose of which, according to Roland Barthes, is to "organize a world which is without contradiction, because it is without depth, a world...[of] blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves." But myth should never be confused with history. The Civil War was a moral drama.

This leads to an analysis of the scene of the Confederate General praying with his African-American cook that is far superior to Noll's, if what is being considered is the historical content of the analysis:

The real problem of treating Gods and Generals as history arises from its failure to separate the true and false parts of the Lost Cause interpretation, which will permit critics to dismiss is as one more instance of a dissembling effort by slaveholders who lost on the battlefield. This failure is most acute in the movie's treatment of Jackson's relationship to his black cook, "Big Jim" Lewis.

In the movie, Jackson treats Lewis almost as an equal, something that may strike some viewers as fanciful. But their relationship merely illustrates the complexity of race relations in the antebellum south. In his biography of Jackson, James Robertson points out that Lewis's status was uncertain. He may have been a freedman or he may have been a slave that Jackson hired from Lewis's master.

It should be noted that Jackson, a man of God, accepted slavery as the will of God, but he did everything in his power to ameliorate the condition of his own slaves. While God may have ordained the institution of human slavery, Jackson believed, the souls of slaves were nonetheless worthy of salvation. In his hometown of Lexington before the war, Jackson established a very successful Sunday School for blacks, both slave and free. So Jackson's treatment of Lewis is what one would expect from a man who believed that the souls of black folk were equal in the eyes of God to his own.

The ways in which people take in historical truth and historical lies need to be of paramount interest to historians if we are at all serious about what goes on beyond the walls of the Academy. There are good ways and bad ways of doing this; Mac Owens', in this case, did it better.

While the Doc's Away...

The Doc is the Patron Historian of Lost Presidential Causes. I have a picture of him standing in front of Millard Fillmore's grave. And he is standing proudly, you betcha, and if crossed on the subject can give a long disquisition on the heroic dignity of the Fillmore presidency. Franklin Pierce? The Doc is, quite literally, writing the book on Franklin Pierce...or, rather, editing it. And when I last saw him in his sprawling compound located in the Monadnock Mountain region of southern New Hampshire, he was talking about the virtues of James Buchanan and his glorious four years in office.

So this visit to Harding's Memorial is par for the course. Heck, the admiration for Harding came before all else. There can't be many living rooms in America that have a portrait of Harding hanging on the wall. True. Not making that up.

And if you read Paul Johnson's Modern Times, maybe you too will be making the trip to Ohio. Stranger things have happened. Historical obsessions are an odd business. Just ask me about John Page some time.

House Guests From Hell

So there you are, at home in Mosul. You're enjoying a fruit juice and, maybe, Buffy the Vampire Slayer beamed to your new satellite dish. How did you buy that dish? Oh, with the money that the Husseins gave you. You're a Baathist, an ex-Baathist; and now it all seems like a dream.

You're wondering if tech stocks are undervalued when the doorbell rings. And when you open it, guess who's there?

The Titan arum excitement and the Screen on the Green selection for this coming Monday, the 1935 version of "Mutiny on the Bounty", has made me long yet again for some clever person to write up the best travel book not yet written With Gun and Camera in Little Known Borneo. I'd do it myself, but as Borneo now executes people who carry guns, it seems a bit unlikely I'd get to the publishing stage.

So touching, so plaintive, so desperate is the Doc's plea (Post on what strikes us? A rash offer.) that I am moved to respond.

Want to know what's hot with the cognoscenti in DC? Not that this is the last week of Congress before August recess and they are marking up bills like mad marking things, not the recent screening of Mel Gibson's movie The Passion, and not the fact that Dianne Feinstein has apparently been taken over by an alien and is supporting school vouchers in DC. (The money line from her piece: "I do not believe that money alone is going to solve the problem." At the risk of destroying her street cred, kudos to Dianne for applying thought to a senatorial opinion.) No, what's all the rage is the blooming of Titan arum, the Corpse Flower to those of us favoring the vernacular and Bunga Bangkai to those of us up on the semantics of Sumatra. Small droves of people head to the Botanical Gardens to catch a whiff of the plant that may best symbolize the essence of DC: It's big; it stinks; the stink attracts the entities that keep it going; and it looks good for only 48 hours.

When Titan arum bloomed at The Huntingdon one visitor remarked, "Never before have so many people waited so eagerly to smell something so foul." Clearly, this visitor has never seen lobbyists during a markup.

Since I am going out of town for a few days -- the long awaited, long postponed visit to Harding's house -- I must plead with my blogging comrades to pick up the slack and post what strikes them.

That is all.

This article about Dennis Miller's conversion to the right side is quite funny -- this guy is quick and witty even in a telephone interview!

This morning's Globe gives a rousing review of a new biography on John Winthrop, "America's Forgotten Founding Father," seeking to rescue JW (and seventeenth century New England) from the charges of religious fundamentalism and "reactionary" politics. As someone who is tired of many conservatives charging New England with most of America's ills, there must be merit here.

And Everywhere

A 108 year old NH woman attended her first ever baseball game yesterday at Fenway Park, and then sang "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" on the tv broadcast. I saw it. Unreal. She was born in PEI, Canada in 1895.

Did you every notice that people who comment on the news are called commentators, but rarely commenters. And, on the flip side, news commentators rarely commentate on the news, but comment? And that a person who is humble is said to have humility, but not humbility? And, on the flip side of that, a person who has humility is not called humile, but humble?

Just figured I mention it.

Here and There

Here are some interesting poll numbers done through the UK Spectator. They asked 798 Iraqis a series of questions involving the war, the peace, and the future. On the asset side of the ledger: they think the war was the right thing to do, they feel relatively friendly to the Americans, they don't want Sadaam back, they expect life to better one year from now (and 5 years from now), they want US and UK troops to stay long-term, and want a multi-party western-style constitutional democracy. On the liability side of the ledger: they think the war was either for oil or for Jewish interests, they think everyday life is actually worse today than one year ago, and they think essential services are woefully inadequate (electricity, water, medicine, crime, etc.) Much done, so much left to do, much cause for hope and optimism.

I've written about this several times already, but the Globe reminds us of the NH Episcopal Bishop vote later this month, and the schism it will likely cause in the US (and perhaps the world). This article in the conservative Anglican/Episcopal ezine Virtuosity predicts the outcome thusly: But what will happen, and this is by no means certain, is that Evangelical and Anglo-Catholic dioceses could (and should) declare themselves in "impaired" or "broken communion" with the Diocese of New Hampshire and any other disobedient ECUSA diocese, many of whom like Pennsylvania, have flagrantly disobeyed the Lambeth Conference resolution on human sexuality, not to mention Scripture, 2,000 years of church history, reason and tradition.

Zany Zinn

Found this book review of Jonathan Schell's The Unconquerable World in today's Globe, with Howard Zinn weighing in against violence (read: war) as a political tool. Here are a couple of excerpts I found particularly odd:

[War as an extention of politics] continues today, with the American invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, billed as a ''war on terrorism,'' but revealed more clearly in the official document ''National Security Strategy of the U.S.A.'' That document declares that the United States must maintain unchallenged military supremacy in the world, and reserve the right to make preemptive strikes on other nations.

Ugh. I shutter to think what the world would look like without the restraining influence of American power. Zinn and Schell see US power as inflicting pain, yet the pain and misery it prevents (and eliminates) is tenfold greater. If neither man wants to follow Clauswitz, then look instead to the Gospel of Luke, "Of those to whom much is given, much is expected." Much is given the US, and refusal to act against evil and terror would not only be dereliction of duty, but a sin of omission.

Violence, he says, "always a mark of human failure and a bringer of sorrow, has now also become dysfunctional as a political instrument. Increasingly, it destroys the ends for which it is employed, killing the user as well as his victim. It has become the path to hell on earth and the end of the earth.''

Ugh. Ugh. Of course, to endorse this is to hate the history of man, and by extension, man himself. Since man is a flawed creature, evil exists and will always exist. Violence has been and will always be perpetrated against the good; the good must defend themselves against perpetual attack. There will never be a day when men will not use violence in some way or another, which is why vigilance is critical. Such sentiments also stroll painfully close to declaring all violence is of the same shade; in other words, since violence is always wrong, vigilantly protecting the good in life is no different than violently committing evil. This is the greatest sin of pacifism, its utterly corrupt (and utterly self-destructive) ammorality beyond the empty phrase "violence is wrong."

It is a mistake, he says, to think that violence conveys power. Nonviolent action can be a greater power, and there is history (much of it overlooked) to demonstrate that. The epic revolutions of modern times - in America, France, and Russia - actually accomplished their goals with little bloodshed and only later became immersed in violence.

This seems contrary to fact. First, considering American Middle East policy over the past 20 years, the obvious failures came not from using or threatening to use violence, but from foreign aid/military aid bribery (are the Saudis listening?) and fruitless diplomatic outreach to undiplomatic, irrational extremists (the PLO for one). Nonviolent action has been a total failure. Second, it takes some rather creative historical accountancy to say those three revolutions were bloodless affairs that only later fell apart (does this mean that American, French, and Russian pacifists orchestrated those revolutions, and only later the nasty violent people took over? Now that is interesting. I've never thought of Sam Adams, Marat, and Lenin as Thoreavians. Perhaps because they weren't.) Let's see:

American Revolution: 10,623 American casualties and an estimated 10,000 British casualties -- now when Zinn says "little bloodshed," does he mean pre-1776 (which would be silly, because without the war to protect the Declaration, there would be no revolution) or post-1776 (also interesting, because this would mean 20,000 casualties is a pittance to Zinn).

French Revolution: Now I can't seem to find any good stats on this, so I'll let Simon Scharra (hardly a drooling right-winger) say it for me: "Before the promise of 1789 could be realized, then, it was necessary to root out Uncitizens.
Thus began the cycle of violence which ended in the smoking obelisk and the forest of guillotines. However much the historian, in a year of celebration, mav be tempted to see that violence as an unpleasant "aspect" of the Revolution which ought not to distract from its accomplishments, it would be jejune to do so. From the very beginning - from the summer of 1789 - violence was the motor of the Revolution."

Russian Revolution: More people had been executed in the first two years of the Revolution than had been executed by the Tsars in the previous 100 years. By far. Between mid-November and December 1919 ALONE 50,000 were shot or hanged just in the Crimea. Bloodless indeed.

I've worn myself out -- there was more, but my fingers are cramping.

Getting right with Jackson

Andrew Burstein's new book The Passions of Andrew Jackson is getting a lot of play recently, and I want to say a few things because I think it is off target. I also do not want to duplicate what has been said already by Donald Cole in his review, that Jackson was more savvy, controlled, and reasonable than Burstein allows, all of which I agree with.

Since Burstein attacks Jackson as a passionate, irrational rogue, the inference is that party he inspired was similarly motivated; as opposed to the Whigs, who in their unhappiness with Jackson it is inferred were cool clear thinkers. But remember that there was a difference between Jackson and the Jacksonians. Sure, AJ gave the Jacksonian Democrats their nickname and was the party's inspirational figure for a generation, much like FDR was in the twentieth century (albiet the party was mighty changed by 1930 -- this was not Jackson's party anymore, Arthur Schleisinger be damned). But while Jackson was often passionate, loud, forceful, and maybe too often a law unto himself, Jacksonians were usually reasonable, methodical, and wedded to the law. In fact, Whig and later Republican critics labelled the Dems "legalistic" for their strict loyalty to the letter of the law, even if they thought the law was wrong. While Jackson was often criticized for his battle against the Bank in the 1830s and his vetoes of internal improvements, moves seen my many Whigs as anti-social and anti-institutional, Jacksonian Democrats were champion institution builders at the state level -- Democratic states were studded with new state houses, courts, insane asylums, new town governments, etc. For the JackDems, it was not what government did, but what government did it.

So, while I agree with Cole that Jackson was not the raging force Burstein paints him to be, I also think the Jacksonian Democrats were not the raging force they are inferred to be. In fact, if passion and culture (not ideas) are your leadership barometers, and you buy Burstein's case (and the Whig case) that Jackson was a maniac, I should think your hero would be someone like James Buchanan -- a controlled, cautious, rigidly legalistic, intelligent country gentleman. It certainly would not be William Seward, Charles Sumner, or one of the loose-tempered abolitionists. Ah, but now we see -- is Burstein's book a backdoor celebration of Abe Lincoln, the quiet bumpkin from Illinois, who managed to combine a frontier upbringing with a calm demeanor?

Not so wild about Harry

This story flew under my radar recently, and I only found out about it reading R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr's column this morning. Apparently a previously unknown 1947 Harry Truman diary was found languishing at his presidential library in Missouri, in itself a great historical find that most probably supposed would further American wonder at this wit and intelligence. Instead, the candid writings exposed Truman a crude anti-Semite, writing at one point: "when [the Jews] have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the underdog." Of course, since Truman recognized Israel in 1948, defying the advice of many who said it was politically suicidal, these sentiments have called his motives and principles into question.

Yet some seem to tie themselves in knots trying to rescue HST -- one scholar said Truman's language was merely the common "cultural anti-Semitism" of the times; another added “Truman was often critical, sometimes hypercritical, of Jews in his diary entries and in his correspondences, but this doesn’t make him an anti-Semite. Anyone who played the role he did in creating the state of Israel can hardly be regarded in that way.” So, despite writing confidentially, in the most sincere and honest venue possible (a diary), that Jews were more cruel than Hitler or Stalin, Truman is not an anti-semite? If not, what exactly did he need to say? 1948 is a free pass for wildly intemperate and hateful language?

This brings to mind the diaires of a Truman contemporary, H.L. Mencken, who in his private thoughts savaged Jews and, well, just about everyone. Yet he came out in 1938 and publically rebuked Germany for persecution of the Jews. I am not the first to bring this up, see this, and this, but it is worth asking, what will become of their reputations hereafter? Mencken never recovered from the publication of his diary, yet it seems Truman remains buoyant. The crabby Baltimore columnist can be thrown overboard, but the Cold War Democrat Truman cannot. Is this hypocrisy, a matter of saving the reputations of those ideologically aligned with the left no matter their reckless comments? Or is it a practical matter, of not being able to understand and digest the Cold War era without a heroic Truman, so let's quelch and forget what the diary says to preserve the narrative? In this latter scenario, Truman MUST be a hero; where are we left if he is not? Why are we researching and writing history -- because we want to find out what happened, using the evidence as best we can and limiting our subjectivity as strenuously as possible, or because we want to build a useful narrative for today, emphasizing some things and glossing over others to shape the past as we want it to be? Disturbing questions, all around.

Making the Rounds

Spot-on editorial in today's Union-Leader, taking President Bush to task for being a domestic spending drunken sailor. Is this the party of Goldwater and Reagan, or Ford and Nixon? Looks the latter. Speaking of Ford, celebrating his 90th birthday, this marks the first time in American history that two presidents over 90 are among us. The other 90+ presidents? John Adams and Herbert Hoover.

A book review of yet another Lincoln book. The reviewer is half-right -- Lincoln did transform the understanding and implementation of the Constitution, but the Rebellion was hardly so simple as being limited government (CSA) versus unlimited government (USA). In fact, the Confederacy was America's first "total government," to an extent not seen again until the progressive and New Deal eras. If the USA was an unlimited government, why did so many northern states rights/anti-secession Democrats like Franklin Pierce back the war in 1861?

Which reminds me, my southern friends out there, the 1861-1865 war was not the "War between the States"; Illinois was not warring against Texas. Nor was it the "War of Northern Aggression"; last I looked Beauragard and assorted other rebels fired on Fort Sumter, not the other way around -- "War of Southern Aggression" would be more accurate. If you must, use "Civil War," but even better use the "Rebellion." Certain southerners lost patience with normal political methods like elections (isn't secession a kind of poor sportsmanship?) and decided to rebel against the Philadelphia Constitution and the 1788 Union.

Memo to self: if ever my compatriots come to visit, don't serve goopy lasagna.

Vindication

I have always disliked, even despised, lasagna. It is the big loser in the otherwise exalted world of pasta. In fact, I think it demeaning to even call it pasta, as it is really a doughy, gloppy goo that is often surprisingly tasteless and consistently revolting. (One of the few exceptions was a dish I had in the Vatican's cafeteria.) Now I understand why this is. Memo to the Italians: This is a gift of Providence. Just keep your mouths shut.

Teeth? Did someone mention teeth? Then take a gander at this picture, which should engender fear in all reasonable members of the species, Homo sapiens. If it doesn't, hand in your membership card to the human race now, because we don't need any slackers on the team.

Now, to be sure I have my suspicions about the veracity of the photo, and I am all for growing back teeth, but it would take an Anglo-French consortium of scientists to decide that growing teeth in a chicken is a worthwhile project. Only to the sons of Perfidious Albion and to cheese eating surrender monkeys would a betoothed chicken sound like a good idea.

Such gratuitous shots being taken. Harumph!

I think we should introduce a new phenomenon called "niall-envy," which my compatriot is unfortunately ill with. Pity of War was lovely and Empire was a fit follow-up. Ferguson is such an effective contrarian I would have thought my comrade-in-blog would smile and nod, but the Oxford inside knowledge he has colours his view.

And that Reason article (for all its libertarian looniness) made a solid point in the growing complexity of evil as seen in the later Potter volumes, a point actually made by Sir Albert while sitting in the passenger seat of my auto rather recently. Are those Cool Ranch or Original Doritos between your teeth?

A&L Daily Observed

Speaking of Niall Ferguson, he has an article in the Wall Street Journal linked to from the Arts & Letters Daily website. It's a review of a new book on the Suez Canal. But who cares about the book when we can read Niall! Right? He's the Gilderoy Lockhart of the World of History. (The Doc can't understand that, of course, since he has not yet dipped into the world of Harry Potter. And may I just add that people who search through Harry Potter looking for libertarian themes need to do other and better things, like shower regularly, and brush top and bottom, not just in front, to get all the Doritos residue out of their teeth.)

A&L Daily had a couple of other links in the last few days which I thought led to very interesting stuff. They linked to an article in Pravada, I mean the Chronicle of Higher Education which details, ro quote its headline, "Rescuing the History of Philosophy From Its Anaylytic Abductors." It's an interesting read.

Some good anecdotes...

At Harvard, regarded by the analytic establishment as a premier department despite its weaknesses in history, W.V.O. Quine, analytic epistemology's towering figure, declared philosophy and history of philosophy to be separate fields. A Harvard professor teaching early modern philosophy could abashedly ask his charges, as one did, "Descartes -- was he before Newton or after Newton?"

At Princeton, similar to Harvard in its ahistorical orientation, a philosophy professor famously posted a sign on his door, "Just Say No to the History of Philosophy!" Folks there frequently referred to major figures from the past as "Locke starred" or "Hume starred" to signal that the version of the philosopher cited wasn't historically accurate. "Locke starred" could be stipulated (for argumentative convenience) to hold a particular theory about color or consent, even though the real Locke didn't. It was a kind of "Do asterisk, don't tell" policy.

Reading those anecdotes put in mind of what political theorists do to political history. To heck with context, or development, or lack of development...just rip the ideas from the dead hand of the past, and slap them up wherever you feel like. It's not simply a question of methodology. It's a lack of sympathy, of aesthetic appreciation. Theorists can be such selfish little troglodytes.

So stay the hell off my lawn, you darn theorist kids!

Well, I finished Niall Ferguson's Empire last night, and in some odd way I was disappointed. The book has been advertised and reviewed as a great revisionist take on the British Empire, staring down raving post-colonialists who claim the Empire was a genocidal stain on Britain's name. But the book was hardly that -- in fact, calling Empire revisionist and contrarian says more about simplistic knee-jerk reviewers and scholars than about the author and his book. Rather than being an imperialist whitewash (no pun intended) or a spiteful fist-in-the-air defense of empire, Ferguson shows British imperialism as more complex.

Much of the book is critical of what the Empire did -- robbing the Spanish, aggressively trading in slaves, using private and public spheres to "develop" colonies, massacring natives (usually black) with modern technology, etc. In fact, I kept reading chapter by chapter wondering when the apologia was coming, or indeed if one was possible. But for all the blunt condemnation, Ferguson's essential "positive" take on empire comes at the very end: sure, the Empire did some nasty things and made life miserable for many people, but the other empires that would have happily superceded the British (French, Russian, Belgian, German, Japanese) would have made life immeasurably worse -- witness the French in Indochina, Russia in Poland, Belgium in the Congo, Germans in their African possessions, and Japan just about everywhere. Which leads to another oddity I had never thought of. According to Ferguson, the choices faced by the colonies was not Britain or national independence, it was Britain or another imperial power. That was the real tension.

In addition, British rule meant the presence and influence of civil law, private property, representative government, some degree of intellectual tolerance, anti-slavery, individualism, free trade, capital investment, and religious pluralism. None of this was perfect, Lord knows the British did not grant any or all of these to its colonies; but it was there, and was especially evident when these colonies became independent in the 1950s and 1960s. Former British colonies were much more likely than others to resemble the mother country, and that was a good thing compared to the murderous Third World communist regimes. No other empire left this residue.

Perhaps I expected too much from the book, looking naively for an imperial apologia; indeed, as an American historian woefully ill-informed about so much in Ferguson's book, I should have been more guarded in my expectations. But the apology is there, albeit an odd one, that the world had two choices: British-installed misery or really miserable misery installed by another power. And the implications for America are made clear; Ferguson calls on the USA to "step up" and embrace its world power as Britain did. Coincidently, I noticed that Max Boot is calling for an American Colonial Office modeled along British imperial lines in today's Weekly Standard. Imperialism is ugly, but American imperialism is preferable to anyone else's; American institutions and mores will someday help other nations (Iraq, Liberia, Iran perhaps?) stand on their own and disavow tyranny. In that, empire is not devilish but welcome.

Seems to be trend with me -- I've now been to three weddings in Niagara Falls...including my own.

Despite the fact that I haven't read a single volume in the Harry Potter series, I thought this was a very interesting review of the latest installment (or should I say tome, considering it is 870 pages), albeit a tad libertarian. Still, those of conservative tendencies will nod approvingly at the notion of the "banality of evil." Once I can get through my other books, I will try and potter through Potter.

I thought this was a clever opinion piece from this past weekend -- suggesting that if the Supreme Court follows the logic of constitutional privacy (as seen in the TX sodomy law case) and abolishes traditional marriage, legalize polygamy as well. If the government cannot interfere with love in the bedroom between consenting adults (of any sex), why not legalize the taking of several spouses?

Continuing slowly through the Civil War commentary, I thought that Harry Stout's article in Books and Culture was the best of the bunch. His concentration on the still incomprehesible number of casualties has always fascinated and appalled me as well. It is repeated quite often, but worth doing so again: if the Civil War were to happen today, with casualties at roughly the same percentage of the population, there would be 10 million dead, most in the same generation group. Our own little Leningrad, 1860-1865. And that does not factor in civilian casualties, as those have never been accurately counted.

Also some good points by Jay Winik on the growing awareness of contingency in historical events -- there are no such things as irrepressible conflicts, Seward be damned. Conscious human decisions at crucial points direct events, and the consideration of these decisions (and the possible opposite decision) opens up a rich vein of conversation.

Wedding in Niagara Falls?

How strange is that! Rather than having the honeymoon there, you have the wedding there...and then where do you go? The Pocono's?

I have been reading Richard Brookhiser's new biography of Gouvenour Morris. It is a nice read, one reason being that Morris had a very eventful life, but he is not a "Great Man", and Brookhiser doesn't go rummaging through his life trying to find any false and overblown significance hidden behind the curtains or under the bed. But Gouvenour did do and see and a lot...and one thing he did was have the first recorded honeymoon at Niagara Falls. This occurred, after a life of general rakish behaviour, when he was 61. It was a question of business with pleasure; he was part of a fact-finding enquiry into the Erie Canal, for which he was a major booster.

Brimming

After a quick four day hiatus in Niagara Falls (for a July 4th wedding), I am back and faced with a blog backlog. Let's clean off my desk, ok?

A nice article in the Boston Globe magazine about academic superstars and how they are being wooed by competing departments; historian Niall Ferguson is prominently mentioned (one of Doc's favorites, to my blog compatriots' chagrin I am sure -- my review of his Empire is coming soon). Isn't this what "we" all aspire to? Publishing important books and articles, getting noticed and appreciated, and then, out of the blue, comes messages (back-channel, mind you) that XYZ University wonders if you'd be interested in joining their department...XYZ's History Chair makes a point of talking with you at a conference, asking you about how you like where you are and if you'd ever consider leaving...mysterious Christmas cards from XYZs Dean of Liberal Arts...and then phone calls with offers (higher salary, money for travel, an apartment, fewer classes)...ah, the dreams!

Great article by Mark Steyn exposing Howard Dean and Vermont for what they are: a province of Canada. I should know. I lived there for four years. Nothing both takes your breath away and makes you laugh like Burlington. To quote Steyn: In electoral terms, Vermont is a polarising state. It’s the Hillary Rodham Clinton of states. It’s not like Kentucky or New Mexico or a gazillion others you’ve no particular view on. To most people in Bush-voting states, Vermont is a province of Canada and, unlike the kinky maple fetishist Paul Robinson and his commissioning editors at The Spectator, they don’t mean that in a good way. Neither do I.

Regarding the post on Lincoln, the Declaration, and the Calhounians, I am mixed. Lincoln certainly regarded the Declaration in mystical terms and saw it, more than the Constitution, as America's founding document. But the Declaration (a thoroughly contextual document, rather than a timeless one -- the bulk of it is a list of supposed grievances, not a philosophy of life) is all sail and no anchor, all justice and no domestic tranquility. You need the Preamble and its list of purposes, none more important than the others, to make life livable, a fact abolitionists too seldom understood. I also think of antebellum politicians in two broad varieties: ends men and means men. Ends men have justice, salvation, and heaven squarely in their eyes, and with such absolute good with them, they cannot fail; opposition be damned, even if it means thousands die for it. Means men say, "justice is indeed what we are aiming for, but how you get it matters." If it doesn't matter, then why have federalism, elections, and constitutions? Wouldn't a theocracy be better suited, where men who know what justice is rule for us. If democracy means anything, certainly we must be debating and deciding what justice is. So while I thoroughly agree with Lincoln's sentiments, I cringe at his ends philosophy. I want justice too, but I want it done in the right way, not at any cost. Process matters.

Calhoun is indeed a radical, and his divination in some conservative circles perplexes me. Here we have a brilliant man, a truly American political philosopher, suggesting all sorts of peculiar constitutional innovations to pervert majority will (and certainly we cannot understand Calhoun's minoritarian philosophy without reference to the protection of slavery -- let us not be silly) -- dual presidencies, concurrent majorities, secession, interposition, nullification. There is no reverence for the Philadelphia Constitution here, no respect for the intelligence of America's fathers, no veneration of Madison, Hamilton, and Jay -- it is rewriting the Constitution to suit South Carolina. What is conservative in that? Look to the Federalist Papers and Webster instead for your conservative bearings, not JCC.

That's it for now -- I need a breather.

A&L Daily Observed

You could devote an entire blog to just batting around ideas that occur, as links, on Arts and Letters Daily. Let me just settle on one.

Anne Applebaum, the author of the recently published and ravingly-reviewed Gulag, has an interesting review of another recent book on the world Communist movement, Robert Harvey's Comrades: The Rise and Fall of the World Communist Movement. She begins with some interesting observations worth reapeating:


Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Ceausescu, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Salvador Allende, Mengistu, Castro, Kim Il-sung: the list of murderous communist leaders is long, diverse and profoundly multicultural. Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Albania, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Vietnam, China, Cambodia, Laos, North Korea, Angola, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Chile, Cuba: the list of countries that have attempted to create communist societies is equally broad.

Looking back over the 20th century, it is stunning, in retrospect, to think how far and how fast communist revolutions spread, in such a relatively short period of time. It is no less stunning to think that the ideas of an exiled German philosopher, a failure in his own country, were put to the test over and over again, in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, in Christian, Buddhist, Confucian and animist societies.

Yes, it is indeed breathtaking to consider the scope and pancultural force of the Communist movement, and its success. Harvey apparently makes several suggestions as to why Communism was so successful. He regards it as a modern anti-modernity movement, deploying modern techniques to fight the forces of modernization. I am delighted to see that he agrees with my friend Dr. Rick Hernandez' thesis on the civil religion of Communism. As Hernandez has argued, Harvey also says that (in Applebaum's summary) commisars had "to offer a quasi-religious creed, powerful enough to replace indigenous religions." Rick, I think, takes this to interesting conclusions; he shows in his dissertation that it was the mechanisms of economic modernization that, once controlled by the state, were held up as objects of the people's veneration.

Anyway, it sounds like a good read. BTW, where's all the Civil War book review stuff, Doc?

The Ghost of Calhouns Past...

But who can resist a little bit of a downer? Not me! Mac Owens had a piece on National Review Online that proves to me he is the most thoughtful historian writing on the web. He is writing about the legacy of Lincoln and Calhoun, and he is giving kicks to both left and right...the right including not just those boobs at Chronicles and the so-called American Conservative but several of his colleagues at NRO, most of them English.

I'll just quote him, at length. But read the whole thing:

In Lincoln's view, America is a nation by virtue of its commitment to the principle of equality, by which he meant simply the idea that no person has the right to rule over another without the latter's consent. For Lincoln, what made the United States unique, and constituted the foundation of American nationhood, was the incorporation of this moral principle into the Union. This belief lay at the heart of his opposition to slavery, an affront to the very idea of republican government.

Of course, defenders of slavery such as South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun, Georgia senator Alexander Stephens, and Chief Justice Roger Taney and "don't-care" politicians such as Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas disagreed. Taney and Douglas argued that Jefferson did not mean to include blacks when he wrote that all men are created equal. Calhoun and Stephens contended that he did mean to include them but that his view was false.

The irony is that while Lincoln's view prevailed with the Union triumph in the Civil War and was subsequently incorporated in the Constitution via the 13th and 14th Amendments, it is the Taney view that often predominates today. The rejection of Lincoln's view of American nationhood is visible on both today's political left and political right.

The best part of that, btw, is "Calhoun and Stephens contended that he did mean to include them but that his view was false." That is why, as the Doc likes to say, Calhoun was the ultimate political radical in American history. He believed that both the Declaration and Constitution needed to be destroyed in order to conform to the new reality of human existence. Calhoun, Stephens and Louisa McCord despised Jefferson; they did not believe that they were conforming to the spirit of the founding, they wished to kill it off once and for all if equality of races was what it meant. And they believed that that is what it did mean.

The Glorious Fourth

Hope that all out there had a most excellent Fourth of July. Mine was outstanding, esp. as it is the first I have had here in the States knowing that I will not be returning to the United Kingdom. I am here to stay, in other words, and this gives the Fourth a certain tabasco-like bite. As Jim Lileks says, grilled meats, gunpowder, the outdoors...what's not to like?

One thing I have noticed since my return to the USA on D-Day is the massive increase of patriotic decoration over previous National Holiday Seasons. Quite frankly, and I don't mean to accuse anyone, there is a lot more bunting out there. Some (in a Wall Street Journal piece, to be precise) have attributed this to the desire to decorate the house whenever, for whatever reason. Fourth of July decorations, in other words, are the logical extension of Halloween decorations, and it is all part of a process that means that soon we will have special Columbus Day decorations. Well, I don't think so. I think that is the supply meeting a demand. My first trips to the States after 9/11 showed me that people were hanging flags in new ways that I had hitherto seen only in the Boy Scout Fieldbook. There were, for example, lots of vertically hung flags, something I had never much seen before. Now there is bunting galore, swags upon serried swags of it. Sure, the bunting factories are pumping the stuff out, 24/7. But there is demand. From the looks of it, the month of June, in between Memorial Day and the Fourth as it is, now has become the patriotic equivalent of Advent.

Fulfilling the old yarn that "if you give 'em an inch, they'll take a mile," Blair's Labor Party voted a complete ban on fox hunting in England and Wales, in the face of Blair's wish for a more limited ban. Squishy soft Laborites have been led by their sentimentalities rather than their brains (or is this akin to asking a fish to walk and talk?), buying wholesale Oscar Wilde's silly line that fox hunting was "the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable." First, anyone taking their political-social advice from Wilde has their own issues to work through. Second, it is eminently "speakable" with a fascinating and storied history going back to eighteenth century England. Third, according to Roger Scruton, the fox is also edible, although I haven't tried it myself -- cook it like rabbit, he advises. Scruton's book "On Hunting" is a must read, for both the issue of fox hunting and as an autobiography of England's pre-eminent conservative philosopher.

Bishop George Langberg of the Anglican Church in America predicts that if Gene Robinson (the openly gay Anglican priest recently elected Bishop of New Hampshire) is ratified as NH bishop, conservative Anglicans will leave their parishes for more traditional venues. Langberg reminded NH parishioners on a recent visit that "the church is not the Kiwanis Club — it’s not man-made." Good line and amen to that. Considering how mainline Protestatism is bleeding away, you would think the Robinsonites would see the impracticality of this election (beyond the Scriptural and moral problems, but that is asking too much). Churches that stand for everything soon stand for nothing, and preach to no one. Interesting too, that Bishop Langberg's traditionalist ACA has 7 parishes in NH, more than any other state, and 17 in all of New England -- in comparison to 7 total in NY, NJ, and PA and 12 total in CA, OR, and WA.

On a related note, the venerable University of New Hampshire is bundling classes together across several disciplines to offer "certification" in "Queer Studies," certainly a first step toward a major and department of the same name. Let me get this straight (no pun intended): students can't spell, name more than 5 presidents, tell me when the Civil War began, or speak a sentence without using "like," and UNH finds it necessary to begin a "Queer Studies" track? Might I suggest that our priorities are out of whack?