Category: Truman to Eisenhower

The Limits of Segregation.

“All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches,” decried Strom Thurmond in 1948 as he led the Dixiecrat segregationists out of the Democratic Party. Of course, as always in the Souths Old and New, the bedroom was another matter. To no one in South Carolina’s real surprise, 78-year-old Essie Mae Washington-Williams announces she is Thurmond’s mixed-race daughter. True to the character and hypocrisy of the Jim Crow South, here is a man who broke the Democratic Party and the filibuster record of the United States Congress trying to deny basic civil rights to his own child. How’s that for “family values?” Unbelievable. Update: Surprise, surprise. The Thurmond family confirms it.

Politics by other means.

Well, due to various other projects — end of term grading, freelance history textbook work, attending multiple job talks for a pending Columbia hire — my online note-taking has fallen even farther behind my orals reading lately. But, the spirit marches on. So, without further ado:

John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy.
David Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society.

Dust, Discrimination, and Domestic Containment.

Some thanksgiving orals reading, for you and yours…read with lavish amounts of stuffing and cranberry sauce.

Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era.
C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow.
Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s.

Consume and Progress.

Another wave of updates over at the Orals site:

Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939.
Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America.
Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State.
John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War.
Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America.
Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age.
Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920.

Don’t Know Much About History.

Sorry about the lack of updates since Sunday….As it happens, encroaching November has frightened me into working harder on my US history orals site. My note-taking is still two months or so behind my reading, but – in case you’re interested – I’ve recently put up notes and reviews on the following books:

John Morton Blum, Years of Discord: American Politics and Society, 1961-1974.
William Leach, Land of Desire, Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture.
Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right.
Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus.
Ellen Schrecker, Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America.
Robert Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941-1975.
Robert Weisbrot, Freedom Bound: A History of America’s Civil Rights Movement.

Gary Wills, Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home.

Updates to the orals site should come relatively frequently for the next few months, so expect more to come.

Hey, Dubya, I’ve found a “revisionist historian” for ya…

You must be joking. She’s been nutty for years, of course, but now Ann Coulter has really lost it. According to excerpts of her new bile-filled book on Drudge, Coulter has now taken to defending McCarthyism. According to Coulter, the “myth of ‘McCarthyism’ is the greatest Orwellian fraud of our times…Liberals are fanatical liars, then as now. Everything you think you know about McCarthy is a hegemonic lie…Liberals denounced McCarthy because they were afraid of getting caught, so they fought back like animals.” Wow. It’s pointless to even waste time on this book, I know. Still, this is ignorant on so many levels. Were Eisenhower, the Army, and the Senate all “liberals”? My advice to anyone out there interested in McCarthyism: consult a real historian on the subject. You’ll find that, contrary to Coulter’s swill, McCarthy had enemies – and supporters – on both sides of the ideological spectrum. If the conservative press wants to maintain any credibility at all, they’re going to have to renounce this garbage and soon, ’cause this is just off the deep end.

At long last.

Dubya may have tied up the release of the Reagan papers indefinitely (hmm, whatever for?), but at least one branch of government has the courage to air their dirty laundry. Senators Susan Collins and Carl Levin announce the release of the McCarthy hearing transcripts (available here.) There’s probably a number of good dissertation topics in there…

Dead Man Walking.

Further proof that only the good die young. See ya, Strom, and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. This piece mentions that he’s both the oldest and longest-serving Senator in American history. It neglects to mention his record for the longest filibuster (24 hours, 18 minutes), when he was trying to bury (and successfully diluted) the 1957 Civil Rights Act.