“The Bull Moose has temporarily turned into a performing elephant. But the Moose will be back — around March 2008, if everything goes according to plan.” As much of the press hammers John McCain for his blatant re-positioning maneuvers of late, Slate throws a lovefest of sorts for the mythical maverick today, with Jacob Weisberg arguing he’s really a TR progressive and John Dickerson promoting him as the happy crusader. I’ve used this line before, but it fits to a tee. Given McCain’s frequent bouts of water-carrying for the Dubya administration, my view of the Senator’s vaunted independence — until proven wrong — is the same as Sen. George Norris’ take on his progressive colleague William Borah, who indulged a similar maverick reputation back in the teens, twenties, and thirties: He only “shoots until he sees the whites of their eyes.”
Tag: Dissertation
Plot Foiled.
A quick book bash: I wasn’t going to write about Philip Roth’s The Plot against America, which I read a few weeks ago, until seeing C.S.A tonight crystallized my problems with it. I should say up front that I run hot and cold on Roth — I quite liked Portnoy and American Pastoral, but kinda loathed Goodbye, Columbus. And, while The Plot Against America is getting good reviews all around, I had a strongly adverse reaction to it. For those of you who haven’t heard anything about it, Plot describes an alternate USA in which famed aviator and rabid isolationist Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR in 1940, makes peace with Hitler, and begins a pogrom of sorts against Jewish-Americans, forcibly enrolling Jewish children (including the narrator’s brother) in Americanization programs and, eventually, attempting to relocate Jewish families to the Midwest. As per Roth’s usual m.o., the tale is told from the perspective of a Newark family trying to find their way — not very successfully — amid the deteriorating events.
As alternate histories go, it’s a great idea for a book, and I was really looking forward to seeing what Roth did with it. But, unlike CSA, which clearly showed an attentiveness to both what happened and what might have happened, Roth here has written an alternate history without seeming to give a whit about the history. In short, I found the book stunningly, almost narcissisticly, myopic. One gets the sense from reading Plot that the rift beween Jews and Gentiles in America was not only the most significant but the only ethnic or cultural schism in FDR’s America. This is not to say anti-semitism wasn’t rampant and widespread at the time — Of course it was, as attested by Father Coughlin, Breckinridge Long, and Lindbergh himself, who — in a speech that tarnished his reputation much more than Roth lets on — blamed support for the war on the “large ownership and influence [of Jews] in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our Government.” But, in The Plot Against America, no one else seems to even exist besides Jews and (White) Gentiles — To take the two most notable examples, there’s no mention of the fact that Africans-Americans were being lynched in staggering numbers in this period (the only lynching mentioned is that of Leo Frank), or that we actually did intern Japanese-Americans during the war. (As a point of contrast, C.S.A.‘s central thesis is about slavery, but it moves beyond white-black relations to explore, or at least reference, the place of Asians, Latinos, and gay Americans in the new Confederate system.)
This isn’t about tokenism — it’s about doing justice to the people and the history of the period you’re writing about. And, frankly, the history in The Plot Against America strains credulity time and time again. I’ll skip over the final twist so as not to give it away, and because it’s so ridiculously implausible that Roth couldn’t have intended for us to take it seriously. But, even despite that, Lindbergh’s popularity — and the public’s taste for isolationism — by 1940 seem significantly overstated throughout. (To take one example, there is no way that the Solid Democratic South would up and vote GOP that year — With the Civil War only recently out of living memory, the Dems could’ve run a wet paper bag in the South, so long as it wasn’t of the party of Lincoln and didn’t threaten to upset the Jim Crow racial order. That didn’t even begin to change until Strom in ’48.) And, while Walter Winchell plays a large role here in calling out the Nazi-American pact and resulting Jewish pogrom, he seems to be the only public figure in America doing so. Where’s everyone else? It doesn’t make sense.
Finally (and I’ll admit, this really ticked me off), Plot basically commits a character assassination of progressive/isolationist Burton Wheeler of Montana, who here appears as Lindbergh’s Vice-President (or, more to the point, his Cheney — I’m assuming that’s what Roth was getting at.) At a certain point in Plot, we’re supposed to believe that Wheeler — a guy who refused to prosecute alleged dissenters as Montana Attorney General during the hysteria of WWI, helped lead the investigation into the government corruption of Teapot Dome, and turned on FDR because he thought court-packing was an unconstitutional powergrab — is going to, out-of-the-blue, declare martial law and start rounding people up? That makes zero sense, and is, in effect, a slander on a real historical figure. Roth is obviously one of America’s most gifted writers — but, lordy, I thought The Plot Against America needed more research, more attention to historical nuance, and more sense that injustice and suffering in this country has often run along more than one axis of discrimination.
In My Secret Life.
By the way, since people often ask me about it, and since I’ve been working on grant writing of late anyway, I’ve written up and html’ized a brief executive summary of my dissertation project. As always, subject to change…particularly the title. (Left-of-the-Colon probably isn’t the best place for a The The pun.)
Endless Summer (of the Gods).
“[B]elievers in science are now wondering how the rejection of Darwinian evolution, once presumed to be discredited, keeps returning to claim a place in high-school biology classrooms and in popular thinking. The answer is that we’re in thrall to the powerful legend of the Scopes trial. For anti-Darwinist beliefs aren’t returning; they’ve just never gone away.” Slate‘s David Greenberg invokes the misunderstood legacy of the Scopes trial to explain the persistence of creationist thought among Americans today.
Indian Summer of the Gods.
As seen in the NYT Science Times, a volunteer at the Smithsonian discovers a forgotten cache of photos from the Scopes trial, which took place eighty years ago this month.
Unpopular chic.
“If a book is conceived with only historiography in mind — with academic disciplinary debates and research agendas dictating the focus and the form — it’s unlikely to succeed in the public realm. If it’s conceived without historiography in mind, it’s unlikely to succeed as scholarship. So, how do we develop what we might call a Goldilocks approach to historiography?” In a very intriguing two-part article for Slate, David Greenberg of Rutgers University makes the case for historians breaking out of the Ivory Tower.
My friends and colleagues here have heard me rant about this on many opportunities — For all the talk of transnationalism and blurring borders in the field right now, the border between academia and popular history remains rigorously guarded by historians who too often equate accessibility with poor scholarship and second-rate thinking. On many occasions, we’ve been told by visiting scholars — including some very big names — that, for better or worse, we’re fated to do “history-professor history” that will have “no effect” on how Americans see their past.
In short, I find this line of thinking very disquieting. Frankly, writing American history tomes that only a rarefied community of scholars will “get” seems to me a rather sad way to spend a life in the discipline. Whatsmore, it’s no accident that right-wing interpretations of the past, be they neo-con or free-market fundamentalism, for example, tend to gain a wider currency in today’s political climate than left-wing ones do. It’s partly because academics on the right seem to have less qualm about popularizing their ideas for a mass audience (and they’ve got more institutions to disseminate them, but that’s another story.)
I find something profoundly irritating about scholars who claim that “ordinary people” will never understand their ideas, and then go on to complain about the nation’s right-wing drift. While it may be hubris to think that any one scholar’s work will make all that much of a difference, it’s still a worthier goal, to my mind, than composing a work of great theoretical insight that’s completely inscrutable to all but those academic elites similarly ordained in the historical arts.
Of Books and Bears.
A couple of navel-gazing notes from the past few weeks:
* I’ve successfully defended my dissertation prospectus, currently and very drably titled “The Legacy of Reform: Progressive Persistence in National Politics, 1920-1928.” So, now I’m really ABD (All But Dissertation), and all systems are go for my upcoming writing year.
* Although it won’t be out until October, and will require some minor last-minute revisions right up until then (to account for new developments such as the Pope’s probable passing), I’ve spent the past fall and winter researching and editing — and have now finished up — a third collaboration with Democratic commentator Bill Press, entitled How the Republicans Stole Christmas: The Republican Party’s Declared Monopoly on Religion and What Democrats Can Do to Take it Back. In a nutshell (and as you probably guessed from the title), its very timely argument is “The Religious Right is neither religious nor right.” At any rate, since the book is basically in the can and the book cover has made it to Amazon, it seems as good a time as any to tell y’all about it.
* “If you go out in the woods today, you’re in for a big surprise…” Steve Belcher, a high school friend of mine who recently finished a stint at the NY Film Academy — he’s the fellow I was making a few short films with over the winter — has sent along “Sleeping In,” his first very short project, in fabulous Quicktime. Just goes to show, pretty much can anything happen in Central Park these days.
Harding Eight.
Boogie Nights and Punch-Drunk Love wunderkind Paul Thomas Anderson (a writer-director I like a lot less than most people, although I caught Magnolia again on IFC recently and didn’t loathe it this time) announces his next project — Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, possibly starring Daniel Day-Lewis. Hmmm…looks like I had best write that dissertation chapter on Teapot Dome sooner rather than later.
The Most Dangerous Game.
John McCain, to many the face of campaign finance reform in Washington, struggles to avoid the appearance of impropriety regarding recent donations by Cablevision to the Reform Institute, an independent group with ambiguous ties to the Senator. After his awful performance prostrating himself before Dubya in 2004, I’ve run sour on the mythical maverick — to paraphrase Progressive era Senator George Norris (R-NB) speaking of his colleague William Borah (R-ID), McCain “shoots until he sees the whites of their eyes.” But, still, he’s campaign finance reform’s biggest blue chip, and he should know better than to endanger the cause with this type of shadiness…particularly with anti-reform forces gunning for him. What would be plausible deniability for anyone else seems rather implausible coming from McCain, given his place at the head of the movement.
Radicals of the Republic.
If it’s post-MLK day, it must be the beginning of the spring semester here at Columbia…and this term I’ve returned to America’s shores from East Asia. (How McArthur-esque.) So, for the next few months I’ll be TA’ing “The Radical Tradition in America” for the inimitable Prof. Eric Foner, which I’m greatly looking forward to (despite ending up with Thursday night section times that are less than ideal…but ah well. I can’t blame anyone but myself for that.) Since most of my work this term on the dissertation (on, put very simply, Progressive persistence in national politics, 1919-1928) is going to involve senators, governors, magazine editors, and other inner-circle types (“They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom, for trying to change the system from within“), I’m hoping the objects of study here — individuals and movements working to effect change outside the confining parameters of legislative politics — will make for a nice, dynamic, and thought-provoking counterpoint, and one that will help me shore up my own thoughts on civic republicanism, both in its persistence and its possibilities for renewal.