“Lyndon Johnson was probably right to fret about the political consequences of civil rights. And even he, who knew more about the intricacies of Southern politics than any 20th-century president, could not have known how complicated the future would be.” By way of Cliopatria, Jefferson Decker, a former managing editor of Boston Review and one of my friends and colleagues here at Columbia, takes a look at two new books on the rise of the Republican Party in the South: Kevin Kruse’s White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism and Matthew Lassiter’s The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South.
Tag: History
Revisionist History.
“History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.” A personal note: At the kind invitation of Ralph Luker at Cliopatria, I’ve joined up as one of the founding bloggers of Revise and Dissent, a recently launched group effort by younger historians and historians-to-be over at the History News Network. I haven’t gotten around to posting there yet (and I expect I’ll be cross-posting quite often with GitM), but it’s now up-and-running and my new blog-colleagues are already posting, so check it out!
ADA or SDS?
As seen on Medley’s Furl, Columbia PhD, Rutgers professor, and Slate “History Lesson” columnist David Greenberg reexamines the current divide between liberal internationalists and anti-imperialists among the Dems — and seems to think more of Peter Beinart’s recent “Cold War Liberal” argument and the protective camouflage DLC-types than I do — in the Boston Globe.
Earth-2.
By way of Chris at DYFL, a guest blogger at Matt Zoller Seitz’s House Next Door offers a detailed comparison of the various cuts of The New World, which — as with Chris — is my favorite movie of the year thus far (despite it coming out in 2005…funny, that.)
Four dead in Ohio.
As seen at Blivet: On the thirty-sixth anniversary of the shootings, wood s lot remembers Kent State. (And, since it gets so much less press, let’s not forget the tragedy at Jackson State ten days later.)
Malreports from Minitrue’s Recdep.
“In short, more than one of every three documents removed from the open shelves and barred to researchers should not have been tampered with.” A recently-completed audit into the formerly secret Archives reclassification program finds that many more files were reclassified — and reclassified wrongly — than previously suggested. “In February, the Archives estimated that about 9,500 records totaling more than 55,000 pages had been withdrawn and reclassified since 1999. The new audit shows the real haul was much larger — at least 25,515 records were removed by five different agencies, including the CIA, Air Force, Department of Energy, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Archives.“
Crisis of the New Order.
“Observers describe Bush as ‘messianic’ in his conviction that he is fulfilling the divine purpose. But, as Lincoln observed in his second inaugural address, ‘The Almighty has His own purposes.’ Invoking also Lincoln’s remarks on the Mexican War, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. laments the rise of preemption, senses dark forebodings in Dubya’s saber-rattling with Iran, and concludes that “there is no more dangerous thing for a democracy than a foreign policy based on presidential preventive war.”
Worst President Ever?
“Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties — Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush — have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures — an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities.” As seen all over the place, historian Sean Wilentz wonders aloud in Rolling Stone if Dubya is the worst president in American history.
To my mind, the only other president that even comes close is James Buchanan. Sure, Warren Harding was lousy, but he knew it (“I am a man of limited talents from a small town. I don’t seem to grasp that I am President.“), and thus didn’t go out of his way to be actively terrible like Bush has been. (Plus, for all the corruption of the Ohio gang, Harding’s cabinet also included Charles Evans Hughes, Andrew Mellon, and Herbert Hoover, all impressive in their own right.) Speaking of Hoover, both he and Ulysses Grant have been given a bad shake. Even if the Depression basically ate his administration alive, Hoover — once renowned as the “Great Engineer” — was a more innovative president (and empathetic person) than he’s often remembered. And Grant’s administrations, although plagued by corruption, at the very least tried to maintain Reconstruction in the South. (In fact, I’d argue that Grant’s sorry standing in presidential history is in a part a reflection of the low esteem in which Reconstruction was once held by the now-woefully obsolete Dunning School.) Regarding the other Reconstruction president, Andrew Johnson is assuredly down near the bottom too, but to be fair, he faced an almost impossible situation entering office in the time and manner he did, and — as with Clinton — his impeachment was a bit of a frame-job. And Richard Nixon, for all his many failings, had China (as well as the EPA despite himself, and, although it didn’t pan out, the Family Assistance Plan.) Nope, I think it’s safe to say that we may be experiencing perhaps the most blatantly inept, wrong-headed, and mismanaged presidency in the history of the republic. Oh, lucky us.
Pulitzer Punches.
As you likely heard, the 2006 Pulitzer Prizes were announced yesterday. Special kudos go to the WP team of Susan Schmidt, James Grimaldi, and R. Jeffrey Smith for helping to expose Casino Jack; to the Post‘s Dana Priest for disclosing Dubya’s secret gulags; to the NYT‘s Nicholas Kristof for his consistently excellent commentary on world issues that merit more US (and GitM) attention; to historians David Oshinsky, Kai Bird, and Martin Sherwin for their recent books on polio and J. Robert Oppenheimer respectively; and to the inimitable Edmund Morgan — one of my favorite historians — who won a special citation for his “creative and deeply influential body of work” over the last half-century.
No More Secrets.
“For the National Archives to go into cahoots with the CIA and Air Force to mislead researchers about what was going on was over the top, and a strong signal of a secrecy system that is genuinely broken.” Following the recent uproar over re-classified documents, the National Archives pledges to forego secret arrangements in the future. Said the United States archivist, Allen Weinstein: “Classified agreements are the antithesis of our reason for being…If records must be removed for reasons of national security, the American people will always, at the very least, know when it occurs and how many records are affected.“