Great Borah’s Ghost!

A busy day traffic-wise here at GitM: In a speech before the Knesset today, Dubya compared Obama to Sen. William Borah of Idaho (and not in complimentary fashion, although that case could be made too.) Here’s GWB: “Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is –- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.“

Now, as it turns out, Sen. Borah was the subject of my undergraduate thesis and features prominently in my dissertation. So, notwithstanding the self-serving idiocy and sad invoking of Godwin’s Law in Dubya’s words, I do want to take a moment to defend Sen. Borah, before — just as Philip Roth Cheneyed up Burton Wheeler — he disappears down the memory hole and is reinvented as simply a kneejerk reactionary. (I know Dubya brought him up to bash as a weak-kneed surrender-monkey, but I’ve also read several left-leaning comments out and about today that make note that Borah was a Republican, and thus belongs in Dubya’s camp. He really doesn’t.)

However wrong he was about Hitler in his final years, and obviously he was very, very wrong (although not perhaps as wrong as George Prescott Bush), Sen. Borah is neither the apostle of appeasement nor the GOP stooge that Dubya and folks pushing back would respectively make him out to be today. With La Follette and Johnson, Borah was one of the leading progressives in the Senate for decades, and one of its strongest civil liberties advocates in the years after World War I. In fact, if Dubya wants to ponder aloud the words of Borah, may I suggest the following?

  • “It may seem incredible to many, but to me the most vital problem in American politics at the present time is the preservation of the great guarantees of civil liberty, found in our constitution, and so long supposed to be secure and indispensable…One of the most common traits of the political pharisees – the man who is always professing great devotion to the Constitution and always betraying it, or disregarding it – is that of constantly expressing the fear that the people may have their minds poisoned by false doctrines.” – Borah to the American Legion, 1921.

  • “Everybody is in favor of the Constitution when it favors them, but too many are willing to trample upon it when it gets in their way. The war disclosed that the great principles and guarantees of the Constitution are vital to a free people and at the same time are easily disregarded in an hour of passion or crisis.” — Borah to S.S. Bailey, 1921.

  • “I have no use for the ‘reds,’ nor for the lawless nor for the anarchists, but I have infinitely more respect for the man who stands out and is willing to suffer and sacrifice for his cause than for the miserable hypocrite who professes to be an American and is at the same time perfectly willing that every guarantee in the Constitution shall be trampelled under foot.

    The men who are destroying American institutions and who are a menace to American principles are not the ‘reds,’ nor the anarchistic…but rather the men who, professing like Augustus the Great, to preserve our Constitution, are subtly and with sinister and selfish purposes, undermining them.” — Borah to Frank Morrison, 1921.

    But, civil liberties aside, what should we take from Sen. Borah’s unfortunate remarks about Hitler (which he made at the age of 75, less than a year before his death?) Well, to me, it might suggest that age can cloud the judgement of all of us, even long-standing Senate mavericks much-beloved by the media. It’s just a good thing that ancient, venerable lion of the Senate didn’t win the election of 1936, eh?

    • 9 thoughts on “Great Borah’s Ghost!”

    2. It’s pretty undergrad thesis-ish, as you’ll see. Still, I’ll give myself points for youthful enthusiasm.

    3. I had recalled reading your excellent thesis a few years ago (wow! the site looks a lot better than the grays and dark blues I remember) immediately after seeing the name William E. Borah in connection with President Bush’s “appeasement” comment. I have to say it was a lot better than “undergrad thesis-ish” and is actually one of my favorite political biographies (while not as magisterial as The Power Broker, I felt that you really captured a time and the political culture that underlies progressivism better than anyone since Richard hofstadter. And Michael Kazin and Sean Wilentz could learn a lot from this site as well!). I still hope you turn it into a book one day. If that’s already happened, sorry I haven’t kept up with the site, but today’s news reminded me how valuable this site is. Anyway, enough encomiums. Anyone interested in the history of the progressive thinking should read Kevin’s thesis on the “Lion of Idaho.”

    4. Thanks for this post, it really put things in context. The rest of your site, including the thesis whose quality you’re far too humble about, is terrific too!

    5. Thanks for the kind words, Dave and Phil. They’re much appreciated.

      There’re no plans to turn this essay into a book just yet. But I’m revisiting Borah and his colleagues in my dissertation, and expect to do more with the Senate progressives in the future.

    7. Kevin, Do you have any doubt in your mind about whether Borah actually ever said this. David Kaiser does. See his History Unfolding blog. The wikipedia article on Borah cites a 1963 secondary source on Borah for the quotation.

    8. Well, I haven’t looked at Borah’s late-30’s papers in over ten years, and my copy of Marian McKenna’s Borah is currently packed away for my imminent move, so I can’t recheck the source. But I have little reason to doubt that he said it, particularly as it’s in keeping with the other Borah quotes regarding Hitler cited by McKenna.

    9. Four points, and a conclusion.

      FIRST, Borah and property

      When the focus turns to Borah and Republicans, as you properly remembered, the republican [sic] Borah stood, or rather led, moderates & progressives, among Republicans on a bill-by-bill basis through the New Deal, thereby refusing to march lockstep through any Republican platform, however fashionable such behavior has became under any Bush regime. As you cite from Michael Sandel, the New Deal Turned from a national consciousness of civic republicanism from that begun in the name of a rural Jeffersonian yeomanry, which effectively was at an end with the 1910 census, to the urban consumer citizenry of the modern nation. Borah too, disapproved a power aggregating New Deal initially embraced by renegade Republicans during FDR’s first administration.

      SECOND, American Neutrality and trading with the enemy.
      Borah stood, with Roosevelt, on the border between an old and a new United States. Borah was unlike the business class of the Bush family, whose interest seems so consistently that of the National Association of Manufacturers that lock stepped its platform of 1895 through the twentieth century. Borah too, was unlike the Bush Family, which actively participated in the rise and success of the terrorist of Europe, until the United States seized the offending family holdings in 1942, I believe the date was. If Borah was not simply a George Washington neutral, Bush’s forebears were demonstrably something far worse.

      THIRD, the changed conception of ‘person’
      Borah maintained a cool head, maintaining the popular tradition George Washington recommended in foreign affairs, while advocating a balanced approach to change neither party fully spoke too. The Bush administrations have seen nothing other than a rising tide of foreign interventionism in consequence of the changes brought to national security since the final days of Borah’s life so frequently in service of a coincidence of business and foreign interest, but not any business mind you, that the new Republicanism advocates.

      It is the business interest of the Corporation, originally and popularly disavowed by the Jeffersonians civic republicanism Borah admired. The Corporation found new life coincident with the final solution to the Constitutional issue of slavery. The vision of ‘fictional persons’ acknowledged by 1819 by Justice Marshal in 17 US 518, as the eternal form of the business organization, Corporation, were granted ‘equality’ with natural persons under the fourteenth amendment sometime following a Civil War intended to secure the Union for some future service as agent of the social contract. From this establishment, the solution to the question of slavery in the United States generates ever since. Yet, it is inequality between a form of business and living persons that will not find a fairness between natural persons so long as the interest of property is so thoroughly raised above the balance of inalienable rights of living persons.

      These ‘persons’ interests dominate the present Nation. IMHO, Borah was not entirely comfortable with that spectre, and here is yet another cause of the W. Bush excoriation of the 19th century patriot, for certainly the President Bush administrations proved remarkably pro Corporation, and to such an extent as to substitute the labors of these fictional persons for very bureaus of the US Government itself.

      This new nation, the one that has arisen since the civil war, and especially since the collapse of unfettered capitalism in 1929, is the successor population of the Jeffersonian yeomanry. It is persons propelled by a new conception of property… and here i offer addition to your writing… it is dominated by the business class conceptions of property, which replaced the slaveholder class conception of property after 1865. This was Borah’s republicanism, and his angst, IMHO, as a senator from a tiny rural state, and a 19th century Gentleman and a patriot whose ideology was defending the social contract, and not some industry’s bottom line. Small wonder our present occupant of the white house, President W. Bush, discovers his fellow republican reprehensible… but there is more reason as well.

      FOURTH, the Unitary Executive Concept
      Borah stood against the concentration of power in the Presidency. President Bush clearly has embraced an unprecedented, even anti-constitutional degrees of such concentration, evidence in executive orders, not to mention the signing statements and various executive department ‘opinions’ ranging from the balance of power among the branches of government, to the status of natural persons under the Constitution.

      President W. Bush stands to such extensive arrogation of power in the presidency he sAID early in his ‘administration,’ if administration is what we must call it: ‘…were only i dictator;’ words more appropriate, IMHO, of the Wizard of Oz, than a President of the United States.

      CONCLUSION
      Here, IMHO, are the source waters of President Bush’s hostile recollection of Borah. That senator would never tolerate the present progrom. So it appears to me bush’s comment to Israel stands in striking irony of historic burdens Mr.s Bush’s progeneration constructed. most curious.

      In the late 1700’s and early 1800’s corporations began to be chartered by the states. This was not without opposition. Thomas Jefferson said,
      “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

      any questions?

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