“As the Hurricane Katrina anniversary coverage blows out to sea and New Orleans braces for another year of neglect, it’s worth pausing to consider the fallout from the disaster that was previously deemed the worst in U.S. history — the 1927 Mississippi flood.” Slate‘s David Greenberg takes a moment to remember the big 1927 flood, which significantly altered New Era attitudes about the appropriate duties of the federal government (and will also play a significant role in the latter half of my dissertation.)
Tag: The Twenties
Lion and the Snakes.
Listen up, Cornyn: “There never was a more vicious or insidious doctrine announced for the consideration of a free people than the doctrine that our constitution or any part of it is suspended during a state of war. Our constitution was made for war as well as peace. Equally vicious is the doctrine that you must disregard the guarantees of the constitution and trample upon our civil liberties in order to save the constitution…[W]e can never get anywhere if we resort to the theory that the minority has no rights which the majority is bound to respect or that the constitutional rights of the citizen must give way to some supposed emergency. I think the greatest service the true American can render to the cause of orderly liberty is to demonstrate in this critical situation that we can deal with every confronting situation and meet every emergency without violating or disregarding to the individual citizen any of his rights under our constitution. If we have reached the point where we cannot take care of the situation without resorting to arbitrary methods, to undefined official discretion, then the enemies of this government may well say that our system has proved a failure.” — Sen. William E. Borah, “Letter to Austin Simmons,” January 21, 1920.
Hiram to the DLC.
A word of warning from today’s archival research (re: photocopying binge): “The trouble with the Democrats in California is, first, they have no organization, and secondly, they wish, just as apparently as the Democrats in the East wish in this campaign, to be with exactly the same people with whom the Republicans have been sleeping for many years in the past. Apparently they don’t realize that there is no place for them with those who have been directing our politics, but nevertheless they covet the unique and often disgraceful position we occupy.” — Hiram Johnson, in a letter to Harold Ickes, September 1, 1928.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Silent Cal.
Jack Beatty of the Atlantic Monthly surveys the effects of a Great Depression on Calvin Coolidge.