“Well I hope I don’t die too soon, I pray the lord my soul to save. Because there’s one thing I know, I’d like to live long enough to savor. That’s when they finally put you in the ground, Ill stand on your grave and tramp the dirt down.” The soundtrack for today was written decades ago: I went with Elvis (who talks about this song here), but could just as easily have gone with Morrissey or Pink Floyd or Sinead O’Connor or a whole host of others.
“Britain no longer ‘makes’ much of anything, and when those lost jobs were replaced, they were replaced with low-wage, no-security service industry work…Really, it’s hard to argue with former London mayor Ken Livingstone, who remembered Thatcher on Sky News yesterday: ‘She created today’s housing crisis. She created the banking crisis. And she created the benefits crisis…In actual fact, every real problem we face today is the legacy of the fact that she was fundamentally wrong.'” (Last quote also birddogged by Dangerous Meta.)
“For the first time, I felt that numb terror that all of London has known for months. It is the terror of not being able to do anything but fall on your stomach and hope the bomb won’t land on you. It’s the helplessness and terror of sudden visions of a ripping sensation in your back, shrapnel coursing through your chest, total blackness, maybe death.”
“It’s not a question of being wrong, it’s just inadequate,’ Foner said…In fact, he says if the 13th Amendment had not passed in January 1865, Lincoln had pledged to call Congress into special session in March. ‘And there, the Republicans had a two-thirds majority and would ratify in a minute,’ Foner said. ‘It’s not this giant crisis in the way that the film’s portraying it.’“
Historian Eric Foner, who knows of what he speaks, fact-checks Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner’s Lincoln. I enjoyed the film quite a bit, and would recommend it to all comers, particularly Daniel Day Lewis’s typically amazing performance. That being said, I thought the excessive emphasis on the virtues of compromise in this story was fundamentally wrongheaded.
For one, the death of slavery would never have reached the House floor were it not for several decades of uncompromising agitation by abolitionists. “On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hand of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.” As many of y’all know, that’s William Lloyd Garrison in 1831, giving one of the most definitive statements against compromising with an evil like slavery. Point being, compromise didn’t end slavery in America — an abject refusal to compromise did.
For another, as Foner notes, Lincoln had the votes in the next Congress — so there was no real need to compromise in this situation in any case. And besides, is it really a heroic moment for Thaddeus Stevens to be downplaying his commitment on the House floor to basic human equality? Surely, misleading the public about one’s true beliefs in congressional debate is not something we should be applauding. Nor does Washington, now or then, need any more erstwhile reformers who think the right thing to do when confronted with a stand on fundamental principle is to obfuscate and capitulate.
Of course, this nation was founded on compromise — some of them quite repellent, like the Three-Fifths — and the United States wouldn’t exist without it. And at other times, intransigence on principle has lost battles that compromise would clearly have won, such as the stubbornness of Woodrow Wilson dooming the League of Nations to defeat in 1919 and 1920, But the problem with this — mostly contemporary — emphasis on compromise is that it leads the filmmakers to a flawed understanding of the history of this period.
However much research Tony Kushner did on Lincoln here — and the film is indeed very well-written — it’s unfortunately quite clear that he doesn’t know jack about what came after the War. Here’s what he said to NPR on the subject:
“I think that what Lincoln was doing at the end of war was a very, very smart thing. And it is maybe one of the great tragedies of American history that people didn’t take him literally after he was murdered. The inability to forgive and to reconcile with the South in a really decent and humane way, without any question, was one of the causes of the kind of resentment and perpetuation of alienation and bitterness that led to the quote-unquote ‘noble cause,’ and the rise of the Klan and Southern self-protection societies. The abuse of the South after they were defeated was a catastrophe, and helped lead to just unimaginable, untellable human suffering.'”
The noble cause and the Klan did not arise because the North was mean to the former Confederate states. They arose because many in the South refused to accord African-Americans the basic civil liberties for which the war had ultimately been fought. To “forgive and reconcile with the South” would mean acceding to the disfranchisement and general abuse that many whites desired to levy upon African-Americans in the former Confederacy. Indeed, when Kushner’s desired move to “forgive and reconcile with the South” came with the end of Reconstruction in 1877, it was followed relatively soon thereafter by the emergence of Jim Crow. In short, Kushner’s argument here is pure wishful thinking, and it has been exposed as bunk by the last 40-some-odd years of Civil War and Reconstruction histories.
TL;DR: Lincoln is an entertaining and worthwhile film, but, then as now, compromise can be overrated. (Kushner quote via Tropics of Meta.) Update: More from Foner.
“‘The whole era,’ concluded Bourne in disgust, ‘has been spiritually wasted.’” Let’s hope, down the road a-ways from 2012, the last few years won’t feel the same. Anyway, that line’s from the first paragraph of the now completed(!) dissertation, which I sent off to my advisor and the committee this afternoon. It’s been a very long road, and I’m sure the euphoria will take hold in a bit. As for now, I just feel as per the clip above — plus exhausted with a twinge of Comic Guy.
FWIW, the final draft, with footnotes and bibliography and all that, clocked in at 1269 pages. If anyone’s interested on what’s covered and the general layout, I posted the table of contents below. That is obviously far too long for public — or anyone’s — consumption. I mean, I wrote the damned thing and I only read, like, the conclusion and stuff…It’s about the 20’s, right?
Seriously though, I’m sure I could have condensed it more than I did. For example, here’s the part on p. 527 where I talk about how the Harding administration used the Herrin Massacre as a public relations coup against the labor movement in 1922:
“All work and no play makes Kevin a boring boy. All work and no play makes Kevin a boring boy. All work and no play makes Kevin a boring boy. All work and no play makes Kevin a boring boy. All work and no play makes Kevin a boring boy. All work and no play makes Kevin a boring boy. All work and no play makes Kevin a boring boy. All work and no play makes Kevin a boring boy. All work and no play makes Kevin a boring boy. All work and no play makes Kevin a boring boy. All work and no play makes Kevin a boring boy.“
That goes on for about 70 pages. And I think, if I’d just worked at it a little harder, I could’ve really gotten that down to 40. Ohhhhh well.
At any rate, I’m way too tired to be blogging at the moment, so I’ll leave it at that for now. Thanks to everyone for putting up with all the navel-gazing posts about this over the past few weeks, months, and years. FWIW, the general GitM readership got a shout-out on the acknowledgments page. With that in mind, work is crazy through election day, but this site should hopefully resume to normal status updates soon thereafter. First I need to sleep for awhile, clean up my paper-, book-, and dog-hair-strewn apartment, do some more sleeping, see all the movies I’ve missed — the only one I’ve seen in months was Looper (I liked it) — take my man Berk to the park, sleep some more, get a life, stuff like that.
Also, there is still the actual defense to consider, which will happen sometime in the next two months. But I am assuming that today was the day I destroyed the Ring, and that will be more of an “I’m a scarred, melancholy badass now, so let’s kick Saruman out of the Shire” Scouring-level event. Also, I’m not counting any chickens, trust me, but I did go ahead and put the batteries in my brand-new sonic screwdriver.
Uphill All The Way: The Fortunes of Progressivism 1919-1929
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v DEDICATION ix PREFACE x INTRODUCTION 1
The Bourne Legacy 1
Progressives and Progressivism 7
Cast of Characters 12
Review of the Literature 15
Chapter Outline 17
PROLOGUE: INAUGURATION DAY, 1921 22 PART ONE: CRACK-UP: FROM VERSAILLES TO NORMALCY 30
CHAPTER ONE: THE “TRAGEDY OF THE PEACE MESSIAH” 31
An American in Paris 32
A Human Failure 40
A Failure of Idealism? 47
The Peace Progressives 52
CHAPTER TWO: THE “LEAGUE OF DAM-NATIONS” 58
Collapse at Pueblo 58
The Origins of the League 61
The League after Armistice 67
The Third Way: Progressive Nationalists 71
The Treaty Arrives in the Senate 79
The Articles of Contention 82
Things Fall Apart 94
Aftermath 107
CHAPTER THREE: CHAOS AT HOME 111
Terror Comes to R Street. 112
The Storm before the Storm. 116
Enemies in Office, Friends in Jail. 133
Mobilizing the Nation 139
The Wheels Come Off 146
On a Pale Horse 150
Battle in Seattle 157
The Great Strike Wave 162
Steel and Coal 170
The Red Summer 184
The Forces of Order 193
Mr. Palmer’s War 205
The Fever Breaks 220
The Best Laid Plans 229
CHAPTER FOUR: THE TRIUMPH OF REACTION: 1920 241
A Rematch Not to Be 241
The Man on Horseback 245
The Men in the Middle 250
I’m for Hiram 254
Visions of a Third Term 257
Ambition in the Cabinet 260
The Democrats’ Lowden 263
The Great Engineer 265
The Smoke-Filled Room 275
San Francisco 285
A Third Party? 296
Mr. Ickes’ Vote 318
Countdown to a Landslide 331
The Triumph of Reaction 347
PART TWO: CONFRONTING NORMALCY 356
CHAPTER FIVE: THE POLITICS OF NORMALCY 357
The Harding White House 357
Organizing in Opposition 373
Lobbies Pestiferous and Progressive 393
The Taint of Newberryism 400
The Harding Scandals 409
Tempest from a Teapot 417
CHAPTER SIX: LEGACIES OF THE SCARE 439
The Education of Jane Addams 440
Prisoners of Conscience 444
The Laws and the Court 458
The Shoemaker and the Fish-Peddler 474
The Shame of America 491
The Right to Organize 518
Professional Patriots 547
CHAPTER SEVEN: AMERICA AND THE WORLD 565
The Sins of the Colonel 565
Guarding the Back Door 575
Disarming the World 589
The Outlawry of War 606
The Temptations of Empire 620
Immigrant Indigestion 650
CHAPTER EIGHT: THE DUTY TO REVOLT: 1924 671
Indian Summer 671
Now is the Time… 679
Hiram and Goliath 692
Coronation in Cleveland 712
Schism in the Democracy 723
Escape from New York 736
Fighting Bob 755
Coolidge or Chaos 767
The Contested Inheritance 777
Reds, Pinks, Blues, and Yellows 789
The Second Landslide 806
PART THREE: A NEW ERA 823
CHAPTER NINE: THE BUSINESS OF AMERICA 824
Two Brooms, Two Presidents 824
A Puritan in Babylon 833
Hoover and Mellon 842
Business Triumphant 865
CHAPTER TEN: CULTURE AND CONSUMPTION 883
A Distracted Nation 884
The Descent of Man 902
The Problem of Public Opinion 908
Triumph of the Cynics 925
Scopes and the Schism 946
Not with a Bang, But a Whimper 963
New World and a New Woman 975
The Empire and the Experiment 1017
CHAPTER ELEVEN: NEW DEAL COMING 1049
A Taste of Things to Come 1049
The General Welfare 1056
The Sidewalks of Albany 1073
For the Child, Against the Court 1082
The Rivers Give, The Rivers Take 1094
CHAPTER TWELVE: MY AMERICA AGAINST TAMMANY’S: 1928 1115
“But returning to their POW camps, the Americans carried a conviction that they had just witnessed overwhelming proof of Soviet guilt. The corpses’ advanced state of decay told them the killings took place much earlier in the war, when the Soviets still controlled the area…The evidence that did the most to convince them was the good state of the men’s boots and clothing: That told them the men had not lived long after being captured.“
Newly-released documents tell of how America learned of the 1940 Katyn Massacre seventy-two years ago, and worked to keep it quiet. “The directive was to ‘never to speak about a secret message on Katyn.’ During the 1951-52 Congressional hearings, for example, no material was presented to demonstrate that Washington knew about Katyn as early as it did.”
This has been languishing in the bookmarks: Awesome People Hanging Out Together. By “awesome,” read “famous” a lot of the time — but still, very fun to peruse.
“It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.“
Commander Neil Armstrong, the pioneer who took the first step on extra-terrestrial soil and towards our ultimate destiny, 1930-2012. “The important achievement of Apollo was demonstrating that humanity is not forever chained to this planet…our opportunities are unlimited.“
“And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.”
“So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
“At latest count, we have 1.5 million university professors in this country, 1 million of whom are adjuncts. One million professors in America are hired on short-term contracts, most often for one semester at a time, with no job security whatsoever – which means that they have no idea how much work they will have in any given semester, and that they are often completely unemployed over summer months when work is nearly impossible to find (and many of the unemployed adjuncts do not qualify for unemployment payments). So, one million American university professors are earning, on average, $20K a year gross, with no benefits or healthcare, no unemployment insurance when they are out of work. Keep in mind, too, that many of the more recent Ph.Ds have entered this field often with the burden of six figure student loan debt on their backs.“
By way a history friend, How the American University was Killed in Five Easy Steps. (Hint: It has to do with the Powell Memo.) I’m finishing up my PhD because I’m pot-committed at this point but, when anyone asks, I never recommend that they follow suit. It is UGLY out there. When the chips were down, I was fortunate enough to have a prior career in speechwriting to fall back on. Most people don’t have that luxury.
