Roundup: Talking About History
Timothy Noah: We Still Don't Have a Name for the first Decade of the 21st Century
Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson: Kwanzaa -- "Racist Holiday from Hell"
Are the Rich Nations Rich Because of Their Christian Heritage?
William B. Waits: How the Celebration of Christmas Has Changed
Edward Rothstein: Should Tribes or Museums Tell the History Presented at Museums?
Victor Davis Hanson: Why Oliver Stone's Movie About Alexander the Great Is a Bore
Re: C.A. Tripp's New Book Claiming Lincoln Was Gay (London Times)
Larry Kramer Claims to Have Discovered a Diary Proving Lincoln Was Gay
Re: C.A. Tripp's New Book Claiming Lincoln Was Gay (Washington Blade)
Re: C.A. Tripp's New Book Claiming Lincoln Was Gay (Discovery News)
Re: C.A. Tripp's New Book Claiming Lincoln Was Gay (LA Weekly)
An Interview with Roger Kimball ... The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art
The Political Calculations of Richard Nixon that Lay Behind the First King Tut Visit
Israel's Attack on Osiraq: A Model for Future Preventive Strikes?
Francis X. Clines: Disneyfing History at the Lincoln and Washington Museums
Steve Hindle: Renaissance Lasted Longer Than Previously Thought
Author Facing Excommunication For Questioning Origins Of Mormonism
Why Academics Were Right to Pick Clement Attlee as the Best Prime Minister of the Last 100 Years
The Imperial History We Try to Overlook (Try Finding It on the Mall in DC--You Can't)
Timothy Noah: We Still Don't Have a Name for the first Decade of the 21st Century
Timothy Noah, in the Ottawa Citizen (12-30-04):
The precise midpoint of the 21st century's first decade will arrive on Saturday. You'd think by now the English-speaking world would have given this decade a name.
Back in the early 1980s, The New York Times tried to pre-empt all future uncertainty by pronouncing it the "ohs." But nobody bit. Robert Thompson, president of the Popular Culture Association, told Harry Wessel of the Orlando Sentinel that a consensus term would start to jell before the end of 1999. More than a year later, Andy Bowers of National Public Radio (and now Slate) was still taking suggestions. Four additional years have passed since then. Half of the 21st century's first decade is gone and still no one knows what to call it.
The most logical candidate is a term often used to describe the first decade of the 20th century: the "aughts." But despite heavy promotion from journalists and others, it's never caught on. (It must have struck most folks as too archaic -- note my compulsion to surround it with quotation marks -- or perhaps too precious.) In 1996, Barbara Walraff of The Atlantic reported in her "Word Court" column that there was much talk of calling the coming decade the "double-ohs." That never caught on, either. Scott Pederson, a self-described "entrepreneur," somehow managed to get a trademark on "Naughty Aughties," which is even more creaky than the "aughts," and he's been promoting that term energetically ever since. "Become an official licensee of Naughty Aughties," he invites visitors to his website, "and capitalize on this once in a century licensing opportunity." Strike three.
By not coming up with a name, society has created a serious rhetorical problem that spills over into the social sciences. It's a problem very much like that of the blind man who tries to size up an elephant in the famous parable. Because there is no name for the present decade, people seeking to describe the spirit of the times often resort to substituting the name of the entire century (or, in extreme cases, the entire millennium). This is pompous and stupid.
Some people would go further and say that measuring time as a progression of decades, each with an individual identity, is pompous and stupid. I don't go that far. I can live with the oversimplification inherent in using a phrase like "the '60s" to describe the political and cultural tumult that characterized the last few years of that decade, or "the '20s" to describe the reckless stock investments and giddy lifestyles of the wealthy that would end with the stock market crash and the Great Depression. I'm even ready to characterize the current decade as an era when the United States came under attack from Islamist terrorists and responded (not always wisely) by waging war in the Middle East.
But to refer to these as challenges of the 21st century presumes that we know a lot more about what will happen during the next 95 years than we really do.
...Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson: Kwanzaa -- "Racist Holiday from Hell"
Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson, at frontpagemag.com (12-29-04):
[Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson is the Founder and President of BOND (the Brotherhood Organization of A New Destiny). He is also the author of the book “SCAM: How the Black Leadership Exploits Black America.”]
While public officials, schools, and the ACLU worked overtime this year to ban every vestige of Christmas from the public square, the recently invented holiday known as Kwanzaa is gaining in popularity among black Americans. These occurrences are not unrelated.
In an earlier time, blacks held a strong faith in God. But over the past 40 years, the black community has largely let God slip away. Sure the community has maintained the outer trappings of religion, but the solid morality at its core is nearly gone.
Enter a God-hating black racist named Ron Karenga. Born Ron Everett on a poultry farm in Maryland, Everett invented Kwanzaa in 1966, based on an African harvest festival (though it takes place during the Winter Solstice!), and celebrating the first Kwanzaa with his family and friends.
Calling himself “Maulana” (Swahili for “Master Teacher”), Karenga became a black nationalist at UCLA, and formed his group, the United Slaves (US) for the purpose of igniting a “cultural revolution” among American blacks. US members followed Karenga’s “Path of Blackness,” which is detailed in his Quotable Karenga: “The sevenfold path of blackness is think black, talk black, act black, create black, buy black, vote black, and live black.”
The United Slaves had violent confrontations with the Black Panthers on campus, and were actually considered more radical than the Panthers.
The biggest dispute between the United Slaves and the Panthers was for the leadership of the new African Studies Department at UCLA, with each group backing a different candidate. Panthers John Jerome Huggins and Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter verbally attacked Karenga at the meeting, which infuriated Karenga’s followers. After the meeting ended, two United Slaves members, George and Larry Stiner, reportedly confronted Huggins and Carter in a hallway, shooting and killing them.
Incidentally, on March 31, 1974, it was discovered that both Stiner brothers had escaped from the family visiting area in San Quentin State Prison. Larry Stiner turned himself into the FBI in Caracas, Venezuela, on December 13, 1994. He remains in custody at San Quentin. But George Stiner remains at large and his whereabouts remain unknown. He is currently on California’s 10 Most Wanted List.
The shooting at UCLA apparently caused Karenga to become extremely suspicious. On May 9, 1970, Karenga and two others tortured two women who Karenga believed had tried to poison him by placing “crystals” in his food and water.
The Los Angeles Times described the events: “Deborah Jones, who once was given the title of an African queen, said she and Gail Davis were whipped with an electric cord and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered to remove their clothes at gunpoint. She testified that a hot soldering iron was placed in Miss Davis’ mouth and placed against Miss Davis’ face and that one of her own big toes was tightened in a vice. Karenga, head of US, also put detergent and running hoses in their mouths, she said.”
Karenga was sentenced to one-to-ten years in prison on counts of felonious assault and false imprisonment. At his trial, the question arose as to Karenga’s sanity. The psychiatrist’s report stated: “This man now represents a picture which can be considered both paranoid and schizophrenic with hallucinations and illusions, inappropriate affect, disorganization, and impaired contact with the environment.” The psychiatrist reportedly observed that Karenga talked to his blanket and imaginary persons, and he believed he’d been attacked by dive-bombers.
Eight years later, California State University Long Beach named Karenga the head of its Black Studies Department. By this time, Karenga had “repented” of his black nationalism and had become just a harmless garden variety Marxist. This must be our esteemed university system’s idea of repentance!
Karenga’s Kwanzaa celebration consists of seven “principles.” They are Umoja (unity), Kujichagulia (self-determination – code for “buy black”), Ujima (collective work and responsibility – groupthink), Ujamaa (cooperative economics – socialism), Nia (purpose) Kuumba (creativity), and Imani (faith – in man, not God).
To provide a symbol of his seven “principles,” Karenga used the menorah from Judaism with Kwanzaa’s colors (red, black, and green), and re-named it the "kinara."
Karenga also created a Kwanzaa flag that consists of black, green, and red. The Kwanzaa Information Center states the color red represents blood: “We lost our land through blood; and we cannot gain it except through blood. We must redeem our lives through the blood. Without the shedding of blood there can be no redemption of this race.” The Kwanzaa Information Center also notes that this flag “has become a symbol of devotion for African people in America to establish an independent African nation on the North American Continent.” (Emphasis added.)
When once asked why he designed Kwanzaa to take place around Christmas, Karenga explained, “People think it’s African, but it’s not. I came up with Kwanzaa because black people wouldn’t celebrate it if they knew it was American. Also, I put it around Christmas because I knew that’s when a lot of bloods would be partying.”
Karenga has explained that his creation of Kwanzaa was motivated in part by hostility toward both Christianity and Judaism. Writing in his 1980 book Kawaida Theory, he claimed that Western religion “denies and diminishes human worth, capacity, potential and achievement. In Christian and Jewish mythology, humans are born in sin, cursed with mythical ancestors who’ve sinned and brought the wrath of an angry God on every generation’s head.” He clearly opposed belief in God and other “spooks who threaten us if we don’t worship them and demand we turn over our destiny and daily lives.”
Through ignorance or racism, growing numbers of black Christians are either celebrating Kwanzaa or incorporating it into their Christmas celebrations. Now many preachers are incorporating Kwanzaa into their messages. This is a horrible mistake.
First of all, as we’ve seen, the whole holiday is made up! You won’t find its roots in Africa or anywhere else. Second, Kwanzaa’s “principles” are straight from Hell. Third, and most importantly, Christians who celebrate or incorporate Kwanzaa are moving their attention away from Christmas, the birth of our Savior, and the simple message of salvation: love for God through his Son. To add or subtract from that message is evil.
In recent years Kwanzaa has become increasingly popular and mainstream. President Bill Clinton commemorated Kwanzaa, stating that Kwanzaa’s seven principles “ring true not only for African-Americans, but also for all Americans…bring[ing] new purpose to our daily lives.” In 2002, President Bush, though a devout Christian, also commemorated Kwanzaa. The U.S. Postal Service issued a Kwanzaa stamp in 1997; the Smithsonian Institution sponsors an annual celebration; and greeting card companies churn out Kwanzaa cards for profit.
It is now clear that Kwanzaa is a phony, wicked holiday created by an ex-con who hates God, Christians, Jews, and blacks – yes blacks. Why else would he try to pull them away from Christianity and indoctrinate them in racialism and socialism? Blacks, particularly black Christians, need to stand up for Christmas and reject Kwanzaa. If they refuse, they will be helping to stamp out the true meaning of Christmas, and allowing evil to have its way in America.
This is a future we cannot allow.
Are the Rich Nations Rich Because of Their Christian Heritage?
John Kay, in the London Financial Times (12-28-04):
'Do they know it's Christmas?', the charity record from Band Aid, reminds us that the rich of the world have been celebrating and the poor have not. This is not because Christmas is a festival of the rich but because it is a Christian festival. The affluent Japanese are the main exception to the general rule that rich countries have a Christian tradition and poor countries mostly do not. The Japanese have not been celebrating Christmas either.
This critique may sound like pedantry of a sort that could be perpetrated only by the kind of people who do not know it is Christmas and spend that day penning columns for the Financial Times. But the observation contains a clue to the causes and cures of world poverty that may be more significant than Band Aid's emotional appeals.
The relationship between religious tradition and economic development was first explored 100 years ago by Max Weber, the German sociologist, who observed the correlation between the Protestant reformation and the growth of modern capitalism. Prosperous countries were mostly Protestant and even in Christian countries with a mixed Protestant and Catholic population - such as the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and the US - business was largely controlled by Protestants. In Baden, Weber's home, Protestants averaged almost twice the wealth of Catholics.
The historical origins of the relationship are complex. When Martin Luther began the Reformation by posting his 95 theses on the door of Wittenberg Cathedral, he did not imagine he was posting a capitalist manifesto. Indeed, Luther was actually protesting against the corruption of religion by the market, especially through the sale of indulgences.
These were documents that supposedly could not only relieve the burden of past sins but also provide immunity for sins yet to be committed. The corrupt clerics who hawked these papers are recognisable figures. They were to reappear almost five centuries later as accountants who sold audit opinions and equity analysts who bestowed "buy" recommendations on their banking clients. In both eras, the proceeds of indulgences enriched the sellers and financed the grandiose building plans of their employers. Cathedrals then, trading floors today.
The reformers despised the idleness and greed of worldly priests. In Geneva, John Calvin preached the virtues of austerity and hard work. Switzerland's highly successful capitalist model - very boring and very rich - was moulded there.
Weber gave the language a phrase - the Protestant ethic - that today refers not to religious belief but to workplace behaviour. The Protestant calling, he said, saw "the fulfilment of duty in worldly affairs as the highest form which the moral activity of the individual could assume". In contrast, the monastic life exalted by traditional Catholicism was "the product of selfishness, (of) withdrawing from temporal obligations".
John D. Rockefeller, the US industrialist, would describe his own calling in what may sound like bizarre hypocrisy to a modern ear: "I believe the power to make money is a gift from God . . . tobe developed and used to the best of our ability for the good of mankind."
The notion of business as a legitimate, morally demanding profession distinguished the Protestant tradition not only from other modern religions but also from the secular political cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. The ethic that Weber described as the spirit of capitalism was also very distant from today's world of annual bonuses and executive share options. The accumulation of wealth was associated not with greed and excess but industry and sobriety.
There was more to Protestant capitalism than the calling. Modern economic historians such as David Landes have given equal importance to the pluralist character of Protestant thought. The reformers emphasised education for all and seized control of knowledge from the priests. The Catholic tradition, organisationally centralised, stressed obedience to authority; the Protestant ethic was decentralised and free-thinking, especially among sects - such as Quakers and Puritans - that played a disproportionate role in economic life.
The Reformation released the spirit of scientific inquiry and organisational innovation that is fundamental to economic growth. The market economy derives its dynamism from this disciplined pluralism - the process of continuous organisational and technological experiment.
Innovations that fail, as they mostly do, are discarded: innovations that succeed are quickly imitated.
The Christmas Truce of World War I
David Brown, in the
Washington Post (12-25-04):
Nobody knows where the Christmas Truce of 1914 began. Nor is it certain, even today, whether the truce began in one spot and spread, or broke out simultaneously in many places, the convergent evolution of numberless human hearts.
What is known is that 90 years ago today -- four months into what would eventually be called World War I -- thousands of British, French and Belgian soldiers spent a cold, clear, beautiful Christmas mingling with their German enemies along the Western Front.
The mysterious beginnings are fortunate. For want of the name of the first person (probably German) who proposed fraternization, or the place where it occurred (probably somewhere in Flanders), the Christmas Truce has acquired the aura of a miracle. In lacking a hero or sacred site, it has kept a single emotion at its core -- the desire for peace of the most literal and personal kind.
It began in most places with nighttime singing from the trenches, was followed by shouted overtures and then forays between the lines by a few brave men. There followed, in daylight, a burying of the dead that had lain for weeks on the denuded ground called no man's land. After that, large numbers of soldiers poured over the front lip of the trench.
Throughout the day they exchanged food, tobacco and, in a few places, alcohol. Some chatted, usually in English, a language enough German enlistees spoke to make small talk possible. In several places, they kicked around a soccer ball, or a stuffed bag functioning as one, although contrary to legend there appears to have been no official, scored matches.
Mostly, the soldiers survived, which is what they wanted from the day. They did not shoot each other.
Almost everywhere the truce was observed, it actually began on Christmas Eve, the high point of the season for the Germans. In many places, it lasted through Boxing Day, the day after Christmas observed by the English as a holiday. In a few parts of the line, hostilities didn't recommence until after New Year's Day, a holiday with special meaning for Scots and, to a lesser extent, the French.
War did resume, though. It was a truce, not a peace. What followed was misery, waste, loss and degradation on a scale that is difficult to imagine....
Recent research suggests that in 1914 at least 100,000 people participated in the Christmas Truce, directly or indirectly....
The meaning of the truce has been debated for years.
Perhaps the most eloquent statement came from a British participant, Murdoch M. Wood, in 1930 in Parliament: "The fact is that we did it, and I then came to the conclusion that I have held very firmly ever since, that if we had been left to ourselves there would never have been another shot fired."
There's a much more recent story, though, that shows the truce has not retreated entirely to the realm of idealism and stirring rhetoric. Its subversiveness -- which every participant recognized -- is still alive. In some quarters, the truce is still a threat.
Christian Carion, the director of "Joyeux Noel," wanted to make his movie in France. He researched many sites and found an acceptable one on a military reservation. He sought permission to shoot there, but after many months was turned down. According to Carion, a general told him: "We cannot be partner with a movie about rebellion." He made his movie in Romania instead.
Steven Mintz: The History of Childhood
Fritz Lanham We normally think of childhood as being a stage in the history of an individual. What does it mean to say that childhood itself has a history?
Steven Mintz We assume that human beings in the past were just like us, except, like Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic, they wore different clothes. One of the most important lessons of history is that the past is a foreign country and that people are fundamentally different from us. So one of our challenges is to try to understand people who resemble us physically but who psychologically and emotionally are utterly different.
So to say that childhood has a history is to say that the way our parents lived, the way our grandparents lived, the way our great-grandparents lived was fundamentally different from the way we grew up.
Let me give you an example. In 1900, 15 percent of all kids are dead by the age of 1. Nearly a third are dead by the age of 15. Most children will lose one parent by the time they reach the age of 21. That creates a very different outlook on life than the one we have.
Another example. In 1900 half of the kids who enter first grade had left school by sixth grade. In 1900 2.5 million kids worked in factories six days a week, 10 hours a day. And that doesn't include all the kids who lived on farms, which was about a third of all children. Their world was completely different from our world.
Our challenge is to try to enter into their lives, to reconstruct their voices and experiences.
So there was never a golden age of American childhood?
In almost every way we can imagine children are better off today -- except in the ways that matter most.
Children are far less likely to die, have much more leisure time, much more disposable income. Compared to the baby boomers or their own parents, these kids are less likely to smoke, less likely to drink, less likely to use drugs. Even rates of adolescent sexuality have declined modestly.
Yet I want to argue that in what's really fundamental, kids may be worse off. They live in a world that's much more isolated from the world of adulthood, even though they know much more about that world than any other generation of kids ever did. Their school lives are less pleasurable -- about 40 percent of schools have gotten rid of recess, there's a lot more monitoring of kids than there used to be, there are a lot fewer sock hops and other events.
But the biggest problem of all is that kids have fewer and fewer ways to demonstrate their growing maturity and competence -- except unproductive ways.
What were some of the ways in the past whereby kids could demonstrate their growing maturity?
Kids worked. Let me give you an example. Mark Twain, by the time he is 11, has lost three siblings and his father, so he drops out of school and goes to work. By the time he is 18, he has worked in New York City, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, St. Louis and Keokuk, Iowa. He went through experiences that, for most kids, are unimaginable until they're in their 30s.
So, later, he would have a wealth of experiences to draw on when he writes. And he had the satisfaction of genuinely helping to support his family, not just washing the dishes or putting away his laundry.
My sense is that for many kids in the past, growing up like that was deeply meaningful.
William B. Waits: How the Celebration of Christmas Has Changed
William B. Waits, in the NYT (12-23-04):
[William B. Waits is the author of "The Modern Christmas in America: A Cultural History of Gift Giving."]
FINDING the perfect gift has long been a national pastime. But the celebration of Christmas, and the culture of gift giving that accompanies the holiday, have changed significantly in America over the years. Economic and social pressures have transformed how, and with whom, we celebrate Christmas, altering it from a holiday that was at times illegal, or limited to adult parties, or a gift-giving child-centered extravaganza like today's.
There are several popular misconceptions about the origins of the American version of the holiday. To start, Christmas was actually suppressed in New England's colonial days. The Puritans found no affirmative command to celebrate Christmas in the Bible and, being good Calvinists, frowned on the celebration. They even outlawed it for a time during the 17th century. Opposition to the holiday lingered well into the 19th century, when many New England children were required to attend school on Christmas Day. So take down your Currier & Ives prints of winter sleigh rides to Grandma's house in New England. True New England grandmas disdained Christmas - well into the 1800's.
In contrast, the colonial South provided fruitful soil for importing the traditional English Christmas celebration to this continent. It was a festive and sometimes boisterous adult affair characterized by the Yule log, boar's head and wassail bowl. Southerners put the kids to bed and passed the bowl. During the 19th century, much of the revelry was gradually moved to New Year's Eve, so now it's put the kids to bed and pass the champagne flute.
The symbols of Christmas that we know today - St. Nicholas, the Christmas tree and the wonderment of the holiday among children - were brought from the old country by people living in the Middle Atlantic states. The Pennsylvania Dutch, the Swedes of New Jersey and particularly the "true Dutch" of New York shared with their neighbors the traditions of their Northern European heritage, practices that have endured.
As the importance of New York City in national life increased with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, New Yorkers' ideas on celebrating Christmas circulated widely. Washington Irving made frequent use of New York settings and Christmas themes in his writings. Clement Clarke Moore supposedly wrote "A Visit from St. Nicholas" (which begins " 'Twas the night before Christmas...") while a professor at General Theological Seminary. Beginning in the 1860's, the drawings of Santa Claus by Thomas Nast of New York firmly established the appearance of the Jolly Saint as a cultural icon. In 1912, New York City, along with Boston and Hartford, put up the nation's first community Christmas trees.
Large New York area department stores, like Macy's and Bamberger's, played their part in particularly innovative ways. They Bambegan by hiring Santas for their stores throughout the season. Fittingly, the first school to train professional Santas was established in Albion, N.Y. in 1937.
Although the Christmas celebration existed in America from the settlers' earliest times, the holiday remained small in scale until the 19th century, when it began to play a larger role in national culture, building on the work of Moore, Nast, Irving and others. It achieved its much larger and truly modern scale only after the transformation of the holiday between 1880 and 1910.
Before 1880, American culture was predominantly rural, including the way it celebrated Christmas. Rural Americans gave many Christmas gifts to their families and neighbors. Food, small pieces of woodwork and sewed items were the most popular. Gifts to the immediate family were more substantial than those given to friends, but they remained modest by later standards. While almost all of these gifts were handmade, that imposed no heavy burden on givers because, in a farm economy, they had several months of free time after the harvest to make them.
When rural Americans moved to the cities in pursuit of employment and the other attractions of urban life, they brought along their rural habits of gift giving. But their new jobs in factories or offices - unrelated to the agricultural cycle - left them with no off season to fashion presents. As a consequence, they bought small, inexpensive manufactured items to give to their families and their new urban friends.
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James Kurth: The British Roots of America Are Real
James Kurth, in the introduction to the winter 2005 issue of Orbis:
A hundred years ago, at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was a commonplace among the political, social, and intellectual elites of the United States that America had been decisively shaped by its British origins. The British settlers in North America, the place of the American colonies within the British empire, and the revolution of those colonies against that empire had created a distinctive people, which Tocqueville had called "the Anglo-Americans." [1] This distinctive people in turn had created a distinctive political and social system, i.e., "democracy in America."
Of course, by the early 1900s, vast numbers of non-British immigrants had transformed an Anglo-American population into a multiethnic one or, as we would say today, into a multicultural society. But anyone could see and say that America-with its English language, common-law tradition, Protestant religion, free-enterprise economy, and Anglo- American upper and middle classes-was really a new variation on old British themes. Moreover, American political leaders, most notably President Theodore Roosevelt, were setting the United States on a course heading toward world power, power that would first emulate and then surpass that of the British Empire. The principle instruments in the rise of the new American world power would be the same as those that had been central in the rise of the British world power in previous centuries: commercial enterprise and naval mastery. It seemed only a matter of time until the British and Anglo- American peoples together would lead, shape, and order the entire world.
A hundred years later, the conventional wisdom is very different. The commonplace understanding about the distinctive British origins and Anglo-American nature of the United States has largely disappeared. One reason is that the old understanding was incompatible with the new realities and ideologies of our own time, particularly multiculturalism and globalization.
First, the United States is now not only a multicultural society (as it was a century ago), but it is also dominated by a multicultural elite, most of which promotes a multicultural ideology. Discussion of the distinctively British origins or Anglo-American nature of the United States now seems to be not only politically incorrect, but practically irrelevant or obsolete. This has been the attitude of most reviewers of Samuel Huntington's new book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, the first portion of which is devoted to making the case for the continuing value and importance of America's "Anglo-Protestant culture." [2] These reviewers have either vehemently denied or utterly ignored this part of Huntington's argument.
Second, the United States and especially its elites now promote a grand project of globalization, but it is a kind of globalization that entails American values. The American elites consequently want to portray American values as global or universal ones. As Michael Mandelbaum has written "peace, democracy, and free markets" are "the ideas that conquered the world." [3] Again, discussion of the distinctively British origins and Anglo-American nature of American values and ideas is not only politically incorrect, but positively disruptive of the U.S. globalization project and its universalist pretense. It is natural, therefore, that Huntington has described these globalist and universalist elites as being "cosmopolitan" rather than patriotic, and that in turn his reviewers-most of them clearly members of a cosmopolitan elite-have vehemently criticized him. [4]
THE BRITISH AND ANGLO-AMERICAN ORIGINS OF U.S. IDENTITY AND FOREIGN POLICY This issue of Orbis undertakes an examination, really an excavation, of the British foundations of the United States and of the U.S. role in the world. As we shall see from our ensemble of five articles on this topic, the ideas and practices of Britain and the British empire produced a distinctive Anglo-American identity in the colonial and revolutionary eras. They also produced distinctive Anglo- American ideas about international relations and about America's special place among the nations. Although formed more than two centuries ago, the Anglo-American identity and ideas continue to shape U.S. foreign policies today, right down to the way that the George W. Bush administration conceived of America's role in the world and the way it went to war in Iraq.
Walter McDougall shows that specific features of the eighteenth-century British empire-particularly its encouragement of expansive activity by entrepreneurial individuals-were reproduced within the American colonies. When, in the late 1760s, the imperial authorities in London abruptly changed course and put restrictions on the expansive and entrepreneurial projects of the colonists, Americans at first resisted and then, with the War of Independence, sought to continue their British-like imperial activities by separating themselves from the old British empire and establishing a new American empire of their own.
Jonathan Clark, a British historian teaching in America, analyzes the peculiar, even exceptional, definition of liberty in colonial and revolutionary America, which was very much a product of the religious conflicts and theological disputes that were so prevalent in Britain and the British colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The particular concept of liberty that prevailed in the United States after the Revolution was grounded in a particular version of Protestantism-one that was fundamentalist and evangelical. Clark concludes with the important, and controversial, assertion that the fundamentalist and evangelical concept of liberty has continued to drive U.S. foreign policy, especially the policy of the Bush administration.
In contrast, David Hendrickson sees the founders of the revolutionary era and the framers of the Constitution as having very informed and sophisticated understandings of the nature of international relations and the United States' role in the world. These statesmen sought to continue the best of the old British concepts and practices in international relations, while adapting them to fit American realities and interests. The Constitution itself was an exercise in simultaneously solving two different and difficult problems in international relations: it was both a "peace pact" among the contending American states and the construction of a greater American state that would be able to contend with the great powers of Europe. Hendrickson argues that the framers' thoughtful understandings about international relations should continue to guide U.S. foreign policy today, and that the policies of the Bush administration wrongly departed from this wise American tradition.
J. G. A. Pocock, a distinguished British historian of political thought who also has taught for many years in America, reviews the contending ideas about republic and empire, liberty and authority, that were prevalent in Britain and America during the colonial and revolutionary eras. He shows how, with the Revolution and the founding, America took a fundamentally different path from Britain as it developed its own version of British ideas. Indeed, it was the very American insistence upon getting to the foundations, or fundamentals, of these ideas that made the path of the United States so different from the paths of Britain and other nations.
Carl Hodge views both British and American history from a Canadian vantage point, which affords special insights and understandings. Hodge shows the great similarities and continuities between the earlier British role in the world, particularly in world order, and the contemporary American role. For both Britain and America, the achievement of international leadership and the establishment of an imperial order were driven by real economic and security needs. Hodge's approving portrayal of an American empire greatly contrasts, therefore, with the account given by Clark, who sees the contemporary U.S. drive toward empire as the natural outgrowth of America's fundamentalist and evangelical ideas, rather than of its economic and security interests. Hodge's account also contrasts with that of Hendrickson, who sees the contemporary U.S. drive toward empire to be a departure from the natural and traditional way the United States has conducted its international relations. [5]
Overall, this ensemble of five articles demonstrates that the British origins and the Anglo-American nature of the United States not only decisively shaped America and its world role in the past, but that they continue to shape America's relations with the world today. The United States is certainly no longer an Anglo-American nation in regard to its demography, the physical origins of its population. But it has been, is now, and perhaps ever shall be an Anglo- American nation in regard to its international behavior, the way that it thinks about and relates to the rest of the world.
Since the real America has always been an Anglo-America, it is appropriate that our frontispiece for this issue of Orbis depicts the first flag shared by all thirteen united British-American colonies. Created in 1775 and known as the Grand Union flag, it nicely combined the thirteen stripes for the American colonies with the British Union Jack, which in turn combined the English cross of St. George (also representing the Anglican church) and the Scottish cross of St. Andrew (also representing the Presbyterian church). This flag remains as accurate a representation of the identity and foreign policy of the United States as that other flag that we call the Stars and Stripes.
Endnotes
[1] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. I (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945 [1835]), chapters II-III.
[2] Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004).
[3] Michael Mandelbaum, The Ideas That Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy, and Free Markets in the Twenty-first Century (New York: Public Affairs, 2002).
[4] I have reviewed Huntington's book in my "The Late American Nation," The National Interest, Fall 2004.
[5] Yet another, and very different, explanation for the Bush administration's drive toward empire has been given by Claes Ryn, "The Ideology of American Empire," Orbis, Summer 2003. Ryn points to "a large number of American political intellectuals" and their "neo-Jacobin ideology." As his term suggests, he sees these intellectuals and their ideology to be largely alien to American traditions. Also see Neta Crawford, "The Road to Global Empire: The Logic of U.S.
Foreign Policy Post-9/11," Orbis, Fall 2004.
Iraq's Library Struggles To Piece Together National History
Rory McCarthy, The Guardian (London), 12/21/04
From the outside it is an unpromising sight. The brickwork of the three-storey building is scarred with black scorch marks from last year's looting, and the cold concrete wall and floors are still bare where the furniture and fittings were stripped away. Only the sign above the entrance was spared, a blue-tiled mosaic announcing to the few who still visit: The House of Books and Documents.
This had been one of Iraq's greatest treasures: a national library that held ancient works of Arab literature, a vast archive of Ottoman-era grandeur, the papers of the British-sponsored monarchy and latterly the obsessively recorded and often chilling evidence of the past 30 years of Ba'ath party rule. The daylight burning of the library, which the invading US military did not protect, was one of the first costly failures in the post-war chaos of occupation last year.
Now it is slowly being restored. But in a country where recent history remains bitterly disputed, resurrecting the library and national archive has turned into a remarkably sensitive and political operation.
Saad Eskander steps away from his desk in a small office in a building beside the library, and walks over to the tall metal safe in the corner to bring out one of his finds. It is a thin book dating from the end of the Ottoman era. Inside is a carefully handwritten ledger of property transactions, each entry neatly signed and sealed with a yellow paper stamp marked with a star and crescent. "It is extremely important," said Mr Eskander, the library's director. "We had 1,000 of these volumes. Now there are two or three."
In many cases, the property transactions recorded in the pages of these books still stand today. Visitors have come asking to look through the books, hoping to find the evidence that will allow them to reclaim family homes and land appropriated by Saddam Hussein's regime.
"We tell them: 'Sorry we can't help you,' because we don't know how much has been lost, perhaps 90%. It will break the heart of a lot of people," Mr Eskander said.
A Kurdish historian who lived in exile for many years and studied at the London School of Economics, Mr Eskander believes the fires that devastated the library last year were carefully targeted.
Two in mid-April destroyed all the records of the republican era from 1958 until the present, including most of the Ba'ath regime's documents.
He estimates the library lost about 60% of its archive, including most of its rare books. Many of the oldest books were moved out before the war and hidden in a nearby government tourist office. In July last year they were found floating in water because a pipe had burst.
Although most appear damaged beyond repair, they have been wrapped in plastic and frozen until Iraq's librarians have the skills and equipment to restore them.
Mr Eskander has found other rare books from the library for sale in street markets, apparently stolen or dumped during the looting.
During the Saddam years the library functioned as a quiet instrument of dictatorship. Little was done to preserve records, such as the important Ottoman property deeds, and many books were simply relegated to an unseen "forbidden books" section.
"This was a dictatorship afraid of new ideas, new theories, new concepts that would question their cultural conformity. They were afraid of anything new," said Mr Eskander. "They wanted conformity. They didn't believe in multiculturalism and the multi-party system."
Iran Unveils Historical Maps To Prove Name Of Persian Gult
Unsigned, The New Zealand Herald, 12/21/04
Last month, Iran banned the sale of National Geographic Society publications to protest against the "Arabian Gulf" inclusion. The issue has also caused widespread protests by Iranian intellectuals, historians, students and expatriate Iranians. Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi, who inaugurated the exhibition of ancient and historical maps, said the name of the Persian Gulf could not be changed. "Presenting historical evidences here is merely for the sake of reiteration," he said. National Geographic said it recognised Persian Gulf as the primary name but used Arabian Gulf alongside it to make is easier for users searching for that designation.
An Historical Look At The Holiday Of Christmas
James Carroll, The Boston Globe, 12/21/04
The single most important fact about the birth of Jesus, as recounted in the gospels, in one that receives almost no emphasis in the American festival of Christmas. The child who was born in Bethlehem represented a drastic political challenge to the imperial power of Rome. The nativity story is told to make the point that Rome is the enemy of God, and in Jesus, Rome's day is over.
The Gospel of Matthew builds its nativity narrative around Herod's determination to kill the baby, whom he recognizes as a threat to his own political sway. The Romans were an occupation force in Palestine, and Herod was their puppet-king. To the people of Israel, the Roman occupation, which preceded the birth of Jesus by at least 50 years, was a defilement, and Jewish resistance was steady. (The historian Josephus says that after an uprising in Jerusalem around the time of the birth of Jesus, the Romans crucified 2,000 Jewish rebels. Herod was right to feel insecure on his throne. In order to preempt any challenge from the rumored newborn "king of the Jews," Herod murdered "all the male children who were 2 years old or younger." Joseph, warned in a dream, slipped out of Herod's reach with Mary and Jesus. Thus, right from his birth, the child was marked as a political fugitive.
The Gospel of Luke puts an even more political cast on the story. The narrative begins with the decree of Caesar Augustus calling for a world census - a creation of tax rolls that will tighten the empire's grip on its subject peoples. It was Caesar Augustus who turned the Roman republic into a dictatorship, a power-grab he reinforced by proclaiming himself divine.
His census decree is what requires the journey of Joseph and the pregnant Mary to Bethlehem, but it also defines the context of their child's nativity as one of political resistance. When the angel announces to shepherds that a "savior has been born," as scholars like Richard Horsley point out, those hearing the story would immediately understand that the blasphemous claim by Caesar Augustus to be "savior of the world" was being repudiated.
When Jesus was murdered by Rome as a political criminal - crucifixion was the way such rebels were executed - the story's beginning was fulfilled in its end. But for contingent historical reasons (the savage Roman war against the Jews in the late first century, the gradual domination of the Jesus movement by Gentiles, the conversion of Constantine in the early fourth century) the Christian memory deemphasized the anti-Roman character of the Jesus story. Eventually, Roman imperialism would be sanctified by the church, with Jews replacing Romans as the main antagonists of Jesus, as if he were not Jewish himself. (Thus, Herod is remembered more for being part-Jewish than for being a Roman puppet. In modern times, religion and politics began to be understood as occupying separate spheres, and the nativity story became spiritualized and sentimentalized, losing its political edge altogether. "Peace" replaced resistance as the main motif. The baby Jesus was universalized, removed from his decidedly Jewish context, and the narrative's explicit critiques of imperial dominance and of wealth were blunted.
This is how it came to be that Christmas in America has turned the nativity of Jesus on its head. No surprise there, for if the story were told today with Roman imperialism at its center, questions might arise about America's new self-understanding as an imperial power. A story of Jesus born into a land oppressed by a hated military occupation might prompt an examination of the American occu pation of Iraq. A story of Jesus come decidedly to the poor might cast a pall over the festival of consumption. A story of the Jewishness of Jesus might undercut the Christian theology of replacement.
Today the Roman empire is recalled mainly as a force for good - those roads, language, laws, civic magnificence, "order" everywhere. The United States of America also understands itself as acting in the world with good intentions, aiming at order. "New world order," as George H.W. Bush put it.
That we have this in common with Rome is caught by the Latin motto that appears just below the engraved pyramid on each American dollar bill, "Novus Ordo Seculorum." But, as Iraq reminds us, such "order" comes at a cost, far more than a dollar. The price is always paid in blood and suffering by unseen "nobodies" at the bottom of the imperial pyramid. It is their story, for once, that is being told this week.
Historic Hastings Assessed
Ben Hoyle, The Times (London), 12/20/04
Long before Hastings, Bannockburn and Waterloo, another battle shaped England's national destiny -but its location has been a mystery for more than 800 years.
The bloodbath at Brunanburh in AD937 is often cited as the moment when Englishness was born, as the main Saxon tribes united for the first time to defeat an invasion force of Scottish, Welsh and Norwegian Vikings from Dublin.
Now research suggests that this epic confrontation took place by what is now a golf course on Merseyside, a millennium before the Beatles and football put the area on the international tourist map.
Beyond the belching towers of Stanlow oil refinery in the narrow Wirral peninsula lies the village of Bebington, a suburb of Birkenhead.
"This is where I believe the fighting took place," Steve Harding said, gazing out across Bebington heath. Professor Harding, 49, is a scientist and a Wirral native, who runs the National Centre for Molecular Hydrodynamics in Nottingham but has been obsessed with the Vikings for nearly 30 years.
The only clues to the battle's location were two place names mentioned in a contemporary account in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Brunanburh itself could have been Bromborough in Wirral but other historians had suggested locations in Scotland, Yorkshire, Northamptonshire and Lancashire. John of Worcester, writing in the 12th century, thought that it was on Humberside.
But nobody had convincingly identified Dingesmere, from which the invaders fled in disarray into the Irish Sea.
Together with Judith Jesch, Professor of Viking Studies at Nottingham University, and Paul Cavill, the research fellow for the English Place Names Society, Professor Harding has published a paper arguing that "Ding" refers to the Viking meeting place or "Thing" at modern-day Thingwall off the A551 in Wirral. The word would have been pronounced "Ding" by Viking settlers who had acquired a Celtic accent.
Dingesmere could then mean "marshland of the Thing", a name that warned travellers of the dangerous marshland of the Dee near by. Professor Harding's theory will form the backbone of an account of the battle which he has been commissioned to write by Cambridge University Press.
Today the grassy heath which he believes was once the Chronicle's "place of slaughter" is littered with debris. Crows wheel overhead and the only sound that rises above the hum of traffic is the distant thwack of golf balls.
Professor Harding says that the forces of Olaf Guthfrithsson, the Viking king of Dublin, King Constantine II of the Scots and King Owain the Bold of the Strathclyde Britons were finally cornered by a combined Saxon army under Athelstan, King of Wessex and Alfred the Great's grandson.
The starting positions for the battle are unclear but the "English" forces probably lined up towards the back of the heath. The invaders almost certainly made their stand on a slight ridge just below the woods on Storeton Hill looking down over what is now Brackenwood golf course.
The Chronicle recounts how the two armies advanced, forming a wall with their wooden shields. The wealthy had swords and chain mail; the rank and file had to rely on short stabbing spears, daggers and simple helmets.
The English broke through and began the pursuit, chasing their quarry up what is now the fairway of the par 4 11th hole.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records: "Never yet on this island has there been a greater slaughter." When it was over Athelstan and his brother Edmund returned to Wessex, leaving behind "corpses for the dark black-coated raven, horny-beaked, to enjoy".
Criticism For London's Maritime Museum
Will Bennett, THE DAILY TELEGRAPH(LONDON), 12/20/04
Naval historians fear that valuable records at the National Maritime Museum in London could be thrown away and lost to future researchers during a major reorganisation of its huge collection of documents and artefacts.
The world-famous museum in Greenwich has received more than pounds 1million funding in extra Government to help modernise its archive and in many cases digital records will replace traditional card indexes.
Members of MARHST, an internet forum to which 380 leading maritime historians and researchers from all over the world belong, are worried that some documents could be lost in the drive to computerise records.
Now the museum has decided to hold a seminar in Greenwich on March 23 where members of MARHST and others with an interest in maritime history will be able to discuss the reorganisation and air their concerns.
Roy Clare , director of the museum, said: "We want to provide a very much better archive and retrieval system for our researchers."
The museum says that it is "seeking to disperse or dispose of duplicate items and those of relatively lower historical significance" and is prepared to sell off a small proportion of its two and a half million items .
But Janet Macdonald, an expert on naval diet and author of the book Feeding Nelson's Navy, said: "Who is the judge of what is of relatively lower historical significance.
"Somebody at some stage in the past decided that it was not worth keeping either ships' surgeons' journals or pursers' accounts.
"Now we cannot fully study how sailors suffered from scurvy or the effect of flogging."
Edward Rothstein: Should Tribes or Museums Tell the History Presented at Museums?
Edward Rothstein, in the NYT (12-21-04):
Museums always make use of the past for the sake of the present. They collect it, shape it, insist on its significance. When that past is also prehistoric, when its objects come to the present without written history and with jumbled oral traditions, a museum can even become the past's primary voice.
But what if that prehistoric past is also claimed by some as a living heritage? Then disagreements about interpretation develop into battles over the museum's very function.
That was the result, for example, at the Smithsonian Institution's $219 million National Museum of the American Indian, which opened in September in Washington and calls itself a "museum different." George Gustav Heye's extraordinary collection of 800,000 tribal American objects is put in service of contemporary Indian cultures with tribal guest curators determining how their heritage is to be presented. The result is homogenized pap in which the collection is used not to reveal the past's complexities, but to serve the present's simplicities.
There are, however, other ways in which the prehistoric past can be revealed, as two exhibitions in Chicago suggest. At the Field Museum, "Machu Picchu: Unveiling the Mystery of the Incas," is remarkable not just for its careful exploration of the famed archeological site high in the Peruvian Andes, but also for demonstrating an almost devotional care to exhuming a lost past. At the Art Institute of Chicago, "Hero, Hawk and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South" is no less remarkable in its display of objects created by ancient American cultures, but it is subject to many of the same forces that molded the National Museum of the American Indian. Here though, rather than overturning the museum's enterprise, they merely distract from it.
First, the Machu Picchu exhibition. Created by the Peabody Museum at Yale, it offers the largest collection of Incan artifacts ever shown in the United States, including robust three-foot-high jugs for corn beer (which was fermented by the saliva of women who chewed the maize before brewing it); samples of bright, geometrically ornamented 500-year-old fabrics; and a corded "quipu," a linked collection of knotted strings used to record events and numerical accounts. The curators are Richard L. Burger, a Yale anthropologist, and Lucy C. Salazar, a Peruvian archaeologist.
The major question about Machu Picchu has not been who speaks for its past, but what that past actually was. The site, with its terraced, mountainous landscape and stone structures, was known to only a few local inhabitants when it was discovered by Hiram Bingham III, who led Yale's Peruvian Expedition in 1911. As Mr. Berger and Ms. Salazar explain various hypotheses by Bingham, including one that the site was a sacred nunnery for Incan "Virgins of the Sun," have been conclusively disproved. The curators established, instead, that it was a summer retreat for a ruling Incan family, built between 1450 and 1470 and used only for about 80 years before being abandoned in the face of the Incas' defeat by Pizarro's Spanish armies....
Still, there are subtle traces of contemporary claims evident in the portrayal of this prehistoric culture. After all, Machu Picchu is now a national symbol in Peru; in 2001, it was used for the inauguration of the president, Alejandro Toledo. It is also the object of almost mystical devotion. Hundreds of thousands of tourists climb its ruins every year.
Click here to read the rest of this article.Victor Davis Hanson: Why Oliver Stone's Movie About Alexander the Great Is a Bore
Victor Hanson, in National Review (12-18-04):
The consensus about Oliver Stone's Alexander is that the film's splashy gay motifs could not overcome the stilted dialogue, ludicrous Irish-brogue and Count Dracula accents, and excruciating minutes of dead screen time devoted to model-like poses, secretive eye contact, and soap-opera double entendres. Stone's apparent hope was that he could garner media hype by overt homosexual scenes of kissing and hugging, and by candor about same-sex relations: The world's first global conqueror was really more a sensitive and feminine creature of the bedroom and banquet hall than a great captain of blood and iron.
In reality, the movie proved not so much scandalous as boring. The problem with Stone's lurid sexual narrative is not his historical inaccuracies, but the movie's obsession with sexual intrigue, which causes much of Alexander's amazing story to be lost. The controversies that emerge from the extant historians of Alexander — Arrian, Curtius, Diodorus, and Plutarch — do not hinge on sex. Rather, the "good" and "bad" ancient and modern traditions of Alexander involve a number of far more fascinating issues — nearly all of them omitted by Stone.
Alexander helped to kill more Greeks at the victory of Chaeronea, the siege of Thebes, the campaigns in Ionia, and the battles of Granicus and Issus than the Persians killed in a century and a half of EastñWest conflict. The razing of Thebes — the dramatic setting of much of Athenian tragedy, home to Pythagoreans and Pindar — is ignored. The brutal siege of Tyre was considered a military masterpiece; it and the storming of Gaza go unnoticed. How or why Persepolis was torched is never really investigated, but has framed centuries of debate. There is a good-enough description of the battle of Gaugamela, but Granicus and Issus are unmentioned. Some sort of Vietnam-like elephant fight in the bush apparently substitutes for the set-piece against Porus at the Hydaspes. In any case, it resembles more Stone's mythodrama of Platoon than anything out of Arrian.
Alexander's ego killed more of his men in a needless trek through the Gedrosian Desert than Darius III ever did on the battlefield. That disaster and the dirty fighting in Bactria merit almost no screen time. Also omitted is Alexander's introduction to the Western world of decimation, crucifixion, and other phenomena.
SEX AND THE ANCIENT CONQUEROR
But the problems of Stone's three-hour sexual melodrama transcend the omission of important facts. This gay extravaganza ignores the great debate over the assessment of Alexander the Great himself. Was he an avatar of multiculturalism or, in fact, a mass killer of the Caesar and Napoleon stamp, wise enough to cloak his barbarity in intellectual pretension? Is his great decade in the East proof of military genius, or simply explained as the career of a ruthless young firebrand who inherited the army and generals of his far more brilliant father? Did Alexander really Westernize the East, or, in fact, provide only a thin veneer of Hellenism to Asia, and instead doom the five-century legacy of the free Greek city-state by importing Oriental despotism, theocracy, and crony corporate agriculture? Did he die exhausted on the altar of an idealistic "Brotherhood of Man," or was the worn-out alcoholic finally poisoned by reactionary Macedonian marshals who had enough of his wild-goose chases over the badlands of Afghanistan, India, and Iran? Stone is clueless about these debates over Alexander. Yet all of these issues are not the dry stuff of academia; they could easily have been captured on the screen, inasmuch as they were played out in mayhem and carnage on the battlefield. In lieu of such seriousness, however, we get a glitzy ancient Dallas or the sexual energy of Desperate Housewives....
Re: C.A. Tripp's New Book Claiming Lincoln Was Gay (London Times)
John Harlow, in the London Times (12-19-04):
A BIOGRAPHY which claims that President Abraham Lincoln was homosexual has provoked fierce criticism and prompted complaints that attempts to “out” historical figures have gone too far.
The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, to be published by Simon & Schuster next month, says that the president who won the American civil war and ended slavery had affairs with young men.
While homosexual campaigners have made similar suggestions in the past, the book by Clarence Tripp, a psychology professor, will propel them into the mainstream for the first time.
Tripp, who helped Alfred Kinsey, the controversial researcher, to carry out surveys of sexual behaviour in the 1940s, began his work on Lincoln after attending an American Historical Association conference in 1990. It debated whether Lincoln and three other presidents — George Washington, James Abram Garfield and James Buchanan — were gay, but reached no conclusion.
Tripp’s book is likely to strengthen a backlash against so-called “queer theory” which has been used to claim that figures from William Shakespeare to Adolf Hitler and from Florence Nightingale to Eleanor Roosevelt were gay.
Critics claim that gay activists are trying to seize control of the education agenda and a journalist who worked with Tripp has denounced his findings on Lincoln’s sexuality as a fraud.
Tripp, an influential gay writer who died two weeks after completing his manuscript, claims that Lincoln reached puberty at nine and became a sexual “outsider”, which supposedly influenced his decision to fight for the emancipation of slaves....
The publication of Tripp’s book was delayed after Philip Nobile, his early collaborator, alleged that some of his evidence had been fabricated.
Nobile, who exposed flaws in Alex Haley’s black history Roots, wants the publisher to pulp Tripp’s book. He is writing about the “scandal” for The Weekly Standard magazine.
Simon & Schuster says it “took note” of Nobile’s points but started delivering the book to warehouses last Wednesday. Vanity Fair magazine has commissioned an article by Gore Vidal, another Lincoln biographer who also believes that the president was gay.
The claims have angered some academics. A Yale historian who would not be named said gay activists may be right to restate homosexual achievements, but not to claim so many dead heroes: “Anyone who disagrees with them risks being branded homophobic.”
Dr Judith Reisman of the Institute for Media Education, an anti-pornography think thank, said: “They want to claim that everyone you have heard of in history, from Jesus Christ onwards, was secretly gay or something similar. This is patently untrue.”
Larry Kramer Claims to Have Discovered a Diary Proving Lincoln Was Gay
Carol Lloyd, in Salon (5-3-99):
[Editor's Note: In 1999 Larry Kramer, the AIDS activist and writer, claimed to have come into the possession of a secret diary by Joshua Speed that proved that Speed and Lincoln were lovers. Speed and Lincoln shared the same bed for four years when they were living on the frontier. Both were in their twenties.]
... Kramer doesn't pretend to be a Lincoln scholar or even an objective researcher. ("I have read all the biographies, and they are full of shit," he spits, and derides Pulitzer Prize-winning Lincoln scholar David Herbert Donald as "some dried old heterosexual prune at Harvard.") He's an unabashed gay rabble-rouser, beating the bushes of history to find gay heroes. But if he really does have the new primary sources he claims to, even the staunchest defenders of Lincoln's heterosexuality may be forced to reconsider. Kramer claims to have a trump card, a smoking gun: a hitherto unknown Joshua Speed diary, as well as a stash of letters in which Speed writes explicitly about his love affair with Lincoln. The secret pages, which were discovered hidden beneath the floorboards of the old store where the two men lived, now are said to reside in a private collection in Davenport, Iowa.
No sooner has Kramer mentioned the discovery and location of the papers than he grumbles, "That's already more than I wish I had said." Kramer is ambivalent about airing the entire subject. Even the reading, he explains, was a spur-of-the-moment stopgap measure to save him the trouble of writing another speech for a second appearance at the conference. "I didn't know there were any reporters there," he says, "and I didn't let anyone tape it."
Although Kramer refuses to share any portions of these documents, the Capital Times in Madison reported some of the juicier quotes from the reading: "He often kisses me when I tease him, often to shut me up. He would grab me up by his long arms and hug and hug," Speed reportedly wrote. Addressing his dear friend as "Linc," Speed allegedly described the young politician as a man who couldn't get enough hugging and kissing: "Yes, our Abe is like a school girl." Kramer also attested that Speed recounted conversations in which the two men wondered whether other men, too, had relationships like theirs.
Whether these quotes prove that Lincoln was gay is debatable -- although, of course, Kramer may possess others that are more explicit. But he goes further: He not only claims that honest, rail-splitting, nation-uniting Abe was a proto-bossy bottom, but that there existed a whole 19th century gay frontier subculture. For example, he says there was an underground travel agency that arranged for small groups of man-loving men to travel into the wilderness for nature appreciation and other earthy pleasures. Both Lincoln and Speed, Kramer says, frequented these camping trips while living in Springfield. In one circular, which Kramer shared by phone, a man named "Dapper Dan from Kansas" invited "fellow travelers" on a "holiday journey" to sleep outdoors. The passage he read was certainly suggestive but hardly explicit.
Repeating a claim long circulated in the gay community, if not in Hamilton scholarship, Kramer also claims that Alexander Hamilton was "essentially a cock-tease."
All these assertions, however, pale in the face of Kramer's most outrageous theory: that Lincoln's murder may have been a kind of gay-bashing, resulting from a kinky sexual set-up. "There's some evidence that shows that Speed presented Booth to Lincoln as a 'present' and the young Booth, who was a gorgeous man, was virulently homophobic, like the men who killed Matthew Shepard," he says. "If the murder turns out to have had a homosexual underpinning, that's going to freak everybody out."...
[Editor's Note: Five years have passed since Larry Kramer claimed to have found the Speed diary. To date he has not produced the diary for public inspection.]
Re: C.A. Tripp's New Book Claiming Lincoln Was Gay (Washington Blade)
Joe Crea, in the Washington Blade (11-5-04):
Resurrecting a four-decade old debate questioning the sexual orientation of President Abraham Lincoln, a new book asserts — based largely on circumstantial evidence — that the 16th president was gay.
“The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln,” written by the late Dr. C.A. Tripp, is slated for publication early next year according to a spokesperson for Free Press, the book’s publisher.
Tripp, who was a clinical psychologist, had worked closely with the controversial sexologist Alfred Kinsey. Using Kinsey’s famous scale that ranks the homosexual component of an individual from 0 to 6, Tripp wrote that, “By this measure Lincoln qualifies as a classical 5 — predominately homosexual, but incidentally heterosexual.”
The author died just two weeks after he completed his book.
According to a recent report in the L.A. Weekly newspaper, the book includes previously unreported accounts, including Lincoln’s stepmother admitting in a post-assassination interview that he “never took much interest in the girls,” his sharing of a bed with several men and a poem the teenage Lincoln wrote about two boys who get married.
A review copy of the book is not yet available, according to a spokesperson for the book’s publisher. But the L.A. Weekly story reported, “after assiduous and clandestine effort — we managed to obtain a copy of the book’s uncorrected proofs.”
Historians say the book is largely based on suggestive evidence and without concrete proof of Lincoln’s homosexuality, many historians are wary of Tripp’s claims.
“Highly circumstantial evidence at best,” said Craig Howell, a gay Civil War historian who leads professional historic tours. “It’s very difficult to interpret 19th century letters and customs. This information is suggestive but not conclusive.”
For four decades, some scholars and activists have asserted that Lincoln was gay. Many have focused on Lincoln’s long, intimate relationship with Joshua Speed, with whom Lincoln shared a bed for four years while both men were in their 20s.
Edna Greene Medford, an African-American history scholar at Howard University said there has not been much discussion of Lincoln’s supposed homosexuality at the various Lincoln scholarly conferences she regularly attends. Medford noted that many historians dismiss assertions that Lincoln was gay because sharing a bed with male companions was a common 19th century practice, Medford says.
Alan Kraut, a professor of history at American University, said males frequently shared the same bed in the 19th century because of poverty, tenement houses and the general confining nature of frontier life....
Re: C.A. Tripp's New Book Claiming Lincoln Was Gay (Discovery News)
Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News (12-8-04):
A forthcoming book claims that the sixteenth president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, was a homosexual, based on evidence ranging from a post-assassination interview with Lincoln's stepmother to a poem about gay marriage written by the Civil War leader.
The book, entitled "The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln," will be published on Jan. 11 by The Free Press, a Simon & Schuster company. It was authored by C.A. Tripp, associate professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York, and a researcher who worked closely with Alfred Kinsey on studies concerning human sexuality.
“ I think that his homosexuality was not noticed by either his wife, or many of his friends, which is one reason why we are only finding out about it today."
Tripp died at the age of 83, just two weeks after finishing the book, which he worked on over the last 14 years of his life.
A spokesperson at The Free Press told Discovery News that Tripp's book would not be available to the media until closer to January, but the L.A. Weekly published sections of the book, on which this article is based.
To argue his case that Lincoln (1809-1865) was gay, Tripp gathered biographical texts contemporary to Lincoln's time, private correspondence, and other books and documents culled from his database of more than 600 Lincoln-related texts, which now are housed at the Lincoln Institute in Springfield, Ill.
The L.A. Weekly also published Lincoln's poem about gay marriage. The poem, which he wrote when he was a teenager, may have been the most explicit of its kind for America in the 1800s. It reads:
"I will tell you a Joke about Jewel and Mary
It is neither a Joke nor a Story
For Rubin and Charles has married two girls
But Billy has married a boy
The girlies he had tried on every Side
But none could he get to agree
All was in vain he went home again
And since that is married to Natty
So Billy and Natty agreed very well
And mama's well pleased at the match
The egg it is laid but Natty's afraid
The Shell is So Soft that it never will hatch
But Betsy she said you Cursed bald head
My Suitor you never Can be
Beside your low crotch proclaims you a botch
And that never Can serve for me"
The book also includes affectionate correspondence between the former president and merchant Joshua Speed, with whom Lincoln shared a bed for four years from his late 20s to early 30s, and an account written by Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Chamberlain, a 19th century historian.
Chamberlain wrote that in Mrs. Lincoln's absence, the president would sleep, share nightshirts, and conduct an "intimacy" with David Derickson, who was captain of Lincoln's bodyguard Company K.
Additionally, the book contains descriptions of Lincoln from his stepmother, who said he "never took much interest in the girls," and poet Carl Sandburg, who wrote that both Speed and Lincoln possessed "a streak of lavender, and spots soft as May violets."
Jean Baker, professor of history at Goucher College and the author of "Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography," told Discovery News, "I believe that Lincoln engaged in homosexual acts with several men, but this was an era before any understanding of the concept of self-identifying as an homosexual. The word was not even used during Lincoln's life."
As for Lincoln's wife, Baker believes she knew nothing of her husband's purported relationships with men.
"I think that his homosexuality was not noticed by either his wife, or many of his friends, which is one reason why we are only finding out about it today," Baker said.
Tripp was not the first to theorize about Lincoln's sexuality. Charles Shively, University of Massachusetts at Boston professor emeritus of American history, described what he viewed was a homosexual relationship between Lincoln and Speed in his book concerning the private life of poet and naturalist Walt Whitman, whom many researchers also believe was gay.
Conservative groups have denounced the suggestions, and several historians remain skeptical about the Lincoln claims.
Douglas L. Wilson, co-director of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College, told the Southern Voice newspaper, "(Lincoln) and Speed were soul mates and all the indications I have seen show they had this close relationship. They were both the same age and in the same situation. They were concerned about this transition from bachelorhood to marriage and all that."
Wilson added, "I can see how that is suggestive and points in other directions
but it really indicates that they saw things in very similar ways and had the
same emotional take on the world."
Re: C.A. Tripp's New Book Claiming Lincoln Was Gay (LA Weekly)
Doug Ireland, in LA Weekly (Oct. 29-Nov. 4, 2004):
If the loving heart of the Great Emancipator found its natural amorous passions overwhelmingly directed toward those of his own sex, it would certainly be a stunning rebuke to the Republican Party’s scapegoating of same-sex love for electoral purposes. And a forthcoming book by the late Dr. C.A. Tripp — The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, to be published in the new year by Free Press — makes a powerful case that Lincoln was a lover of men.
Tripp, who worked closely in the 1940s and 1950s with the groundbreaking sexologist Alfred Kinsey, was a clinical psychologist, university professor and author of the 1975 best-seller The Homosexual Matrix, which helped transcend outdated Freudian clichés and establish that a same-sex affectional and sexual orientation is a normal and natural occurrence.
In his book on Lincoln, Tripp draws on his years with Kinsey, who, he wrote, "confronted the problem of classifying mixed sex patterns by devising his 0-to-6 scale, which allows the ranking of any homosexual component in a person’s life from none to entirely homosexual. By this measure Lincoln qualifies as a classical 5 — predominantly homosexual, but incidentally heterosexual."
Tripp also found, based on multiple historical accounts, that Lincoln attained puberty unusually early, by the age of 9 or 10 — early sexualization being a prime Kinsey indicator for same-sex proclivities. Even Lincoln’s stepmother admitted in a post-assassination interview that young Abe "never took much interest in the girls." And Tripp buttresses his findings that Lincoln was a same-sex lover with important new historical contributions.
Others, preceding Tripp, have proclaimed in print that Lincoln was gay. The first, some four decades ago, was the pioneer Los Angeles gay activist Jim Kepner, editor of ONE, the early gay magazine (the ONE Institute National Gay and Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California [http://www.oneinstitute.org/] is the largest collection of gay historical material in the world). Kepner focused on Lincoln’s long-acknowledged intimate friendship with Joshua Speed — with whom Lincoln slept in the same bed for four years when both men were in their 20s — as did later writers, like the historian of gay America Jonathan Ned Katz and University of Massachusetts professor Charles Shively. Gore Vidal has said in interviews that, in researching his historical novel on Lincoln, he began to suspect that the 16th president was a same-sexer. But all this has been little noticed or circulated outside the gay community.
In 1990, the American Historical Association presented a panel on "Gay American Presidents? — Washington, Buchanan, Lincoln, Garfield." Tripp was in the audience, and was seized with the desire to explore Lincoln’s sexuality and emotional complexity with the same brand of scrupulous methodology he’d learned from Kinsey. Tripp devoted the next decade to this research, and created an electronic database and index cross-referencing for more than 600 books of Lincolnalia, a historical tool now available at the Lincoln Institute in Springfield, Illinois.
One of the few traditional Lincolnists to describe (however obliquely) the lifelong Lincoln-Speed relationship as homosexual was the Illinois poet Carl Sandburg, in his masterful, six-volume Lincoln biography. In the tome titled The Prairie Years (1926), Sandburg wrote that both Lincoln and Speed had "a streak of lavender, and spots soft as May violets." "I do not feel my own sorrows more keenly than I do yours," Lincoln wrote Speed in one letter. And again, "You know my desire to befriend you is everlasting." In a detailed retelling of the Lincoln-Speed love story — including the "lust at first sight" encounter between the two young men, when Lincoln readily accepted Speed’s eager invitation to share his narrow bed — Tripp notes that Speed was the only human being to whom the president ever signed his letters with the unusually tender (for Lincoln) "yours forever" — a salutation Lincoln never even used to his wife. Speed himself acknowledged that "No two men were ever so intimate." And Tripp credibly describes Lincoln’s near nervous breakdown following Speed’s decision to end their four-year affair by returning to his native Kentucky.
In the preface to his massive biography, Sandburg wrote that "month by month in stacks and bundles of facts and legend, I found invisible companionships that surprised me. Perhaps a few of these presences lurk and murmur in this book." Tripp’s book is remarkable and precedent-shattering because, for the first time, he restores names and faces (more than just Speed’s) to a number of those previously invisible homosexual companions and love objects of the most venerated of America’s presidents, among them, Henry C. Whitney; the young Billy Greene, a Salem contemporary of Lincoln’s and another bedmate (who admired Lincoln’s thighs); Nat Grigsby; and A.Y. Ellis.
One of them was the handsome David Derickson, by nine years the president’s junior, captain of Lincoln’s bodyguard Company K, the unit assigned to ensure Lincoln’s protection in September 1862. Citing a variety of sources — including an autobiographical essay by Captain (later Major) Dickerson [sic], Lincoln’s letters, contemporary diaries and historical accounts written while many of the witnesses to the Derickson-Lincoln relationship were still living — Tripp describes in great detail how Derickson was the object of "the kinds of gentle and concentrated high-focus attention from Lincoln that [Lincoln’s law colleague] Henry C. Whitney, from having himself once been on the receiving end, well described: ‘[It was] as if he wooed me to close intimacy and friendship, a kind of courtship, as indeed it was.’"
Lincoln’s seduction of Dickerson was more than successful. Tripp discovered a forgotten volume of Union Army history, an account of The Pennsylvania Volunteers, Second Regiment, Bucktail Brigade, published in 1895 by Derickson’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Chamberlin, who was historian of the Bucktail Survivors Association, and in which he recounted:
"Captain Derickson, in particular, advanced so far in the President’s confidence and esteem that in Mrs. Lincoln’s absence he frequently spent the night at his cottage [at the summer White House], sleeping in the same bed with him, and — it is said — making use of his Excellency’s night-shirt! Thus began an intimacy that continued unbroken until the following spring, when Captain Derickson was appointed provost marshal of the Nineteenth Pennsylvania District, with headquarters in Meadville."
The Dickerson-Lincoln affair was common gossip in Washington’s high society, as Tripp notes with a citation from the diary of the wife of Assistant Navy Secretary Gustavus Fox: "Tish says, Oh, there is a Bucktail soldier here devoted to the president, drives with him, and when Mrs. L is not home, sleeps with him. What stuff!"
Lincoln was very fond of witty, and quite often ribald, stories, a great many of them having anal references. When a friend once suggested that he should collect his stories and publish them in book form, Lincoln replied that he could not, for "such a book would Stink like a thousand privies."...
An Interview with Roger Kimball ... The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art
[Mr. Kimball is managing editor of The New Criterion. He was interviewed by Jamie Glazov.]
FP: Mr. Kimball, welcome to Frontpage Interview. It is a pleasure to have you here.
Kimball: It is a pleasure to be with you.
FP: First things first, what inspired you to write this book?
Kimball: The primary inspiration was the spectacle of the damage being done to the study of art by academic art historians. In many ways The Rape of the Masters is a rescue operation: it aims to rescue art from the clutches of those who seek to enlist art in some extra-artistic political campaign. There are really two parts to my effort. One is polemical: I want to describe, and discredit, the various efforts by academics to sabotage art. My primary weapon is ridicule. Many of my readers have been amazed to discover what sorts of outlandish things are said about art by these supposed experts. But over and above the polemical aspect of the book there is what you might call a “recuperative” aspect. I try to provide an alterative account of the works discussed in the book, an account that endeavors to let the art work speak for itself. One of the chief losses incurred by the new academic art criticism is the simple aesthetic pleasure we take in looking at works of art. The Rape of the Masters speaks up for that pleasure.
FP: The Left has attempted to hijack art because, in large part, art obviously poses a threat to its progressive faith. Totalitarianism, after all, is always threatened by art, since it is a reflection of the world that is, rather than the utopian world that – in the eyes of the leftist – should be. Could you talk a bit about this?
Kimball: The great enemy of the totalitarian impulse, in intellectual life as well as in politics, is the idea of intrinsic worth. As Hannah Arendt and others have pointed out, one of the most toxic and destructive features of totalitarian movements is their attack on the integrity of the individual and his experience. When the enforcer O’Brien in Orwell’s 1984 induces Winston to say that twice four equals 5, he has won a great, if pernicious, spiritual victory, for he has violated Winston’s sense of reality. When it comes to art and intellectual life, the examples are not so dire, but they are in their own way just as significant. In the course of The Rape of the Masters I quote--twice--Bishop Butler’s great remark that “Everything is what it is, and not another thing.” In a way, that can stand as the motto for the book. For what we see in the academic art historians I discuss--it is something you see in literary studies, too--is an effort to discount, to deny the essential reality of things in order to enlist them in an ideological war. A family portrait of four young girls is no longer a family portrait of four young girls but a florid allegory of sexual conflict and gender panic. And so on. If one had to sum up the essential purpose and direction of the new academic art historians, one might say that, notwithstanding the variety of their political commitments, they are all engaged in an attack on the idea of the intrinsic. They start from the contrary of Butler proposition: nothing is what it is, it is always something else--and, they might add, something worse than it seems.
FP: You are an art critic yourself. Please tell us, what is an art critic? Can anyone be one? What motivated you to become one?
Kimball: T.S. Eliot once defined the task of criticism as “the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste.” I think that is a good capsule definition. But I would add that I believe that the role of the critic is actually quite modest. The image I like to use is that of a marriage broker. The critic can explain all sorts of subsidiary facts; he can provide some intellectual and historical context; but in the end, his most important job is to bring the viewer and the work of art together. Once an effective introduction has been achieved--making that introduction effectively can be trickier than it might first appears--the critic should just get lost and let the relationship develop on its own.
FP: You say the most important job for the art critic is to bring the viewer and the work of art together, but that in the end the critic should just get remove him/herself and let the relationship develop on its own. But this is precisely where the Left is threatened isn’t it? With its totalitarian foundation, it cannot allow the privatization of understanding. There cannot be a relationship between individuals that is not connected and ruled by the General Will, the Party Line, etc. Is this part of the problem?
Kimball: Yes, I remember a teacher I had in college--a poet--who wrote a marvelous poem called “The End of the Private Mind.” That title describes the goal of the Left. Just as socialism wishes to make us all wards of the state, so intellectual socialism--for that is what we are talking about--wishes to render us all particles of one great virtuous mass. You mentioned Rousseau’s idea of “the general will.” That prototypically totalitarian idea has, in one way or another, fueled nearly all left-wing utopian thought in past two and a half centuries. It seems far removed from the discipline of art history, but in fact you can generally see it peeking out from behind the prolix arras of “critical theory” in all its unlovely allotropes.
FP: Overall, crystallize for us why and how the radical Left took academic art history hostage.
Kimball: This is a long and complicated story. I told part of it in my book Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted our Higher Education. That book focuses on the humanities, showing how a sixties-style radicalism has insinuated itself into the curriculum. The goal is to transform education into an instrumental of radical political transformation. There are many, conflicting sides to the phenomenon. One common ingredient is an impatience with the idea of intrinsic merit or intrinsic worth: a poem, a novel, a “text” of any sort never means what it appears to say but is always an essentially subversive document whose aim is to undermine established values. The enemy are those inherited values--political, social, aesthetic, moral values--that constitute the texture of our society. The Rape of the Masters continues the story by showing how a similar animus is at work in the study and teaching of art history. What we see is scholarship used as a weapon. Think for example of the way in which outré sexual themes are imported into the study of art. They are used first and foremost to "challenge" or "transgress" not only art, but also the traditional fabric of manners and morals that stands behind the work of art. In this sense, the enemy is only incidentally the particular work in which hidden, generally outlandish, sexual themes are "discovered."
The real enemy is the received social and moral sensibility out of which the work emerged and in which it has its original meaning. Thus it is that the shocking sex stuff is always part and parcel of an effort to "destabilize" the hegemony of "white patriarchal capitalist" society, etc.
Indeed, a useful study might be made of the way in which the normalization of previously tabooed sexual attitudes and behaviors has been at the forefront of cultural radicalism since the 1960s. Sex is merely the first bridgehead, the easiest point of entry, for an ideology dedicated to revolutionary social change.
It is in this sense that much of what travels under the banner of sexual liberation is really part of a campaign for de-civilization. You see it at work as much in the coarsening of pop culture and the increasing vulgarization of formerly "polite society" as you do in the anemic if frenzied sexualization of academic language in the humanities. What it marks is not the triumph of the erotic but the defeat of reticence and modesty--reservoirs of hesitation and scruple that, ironically, are preconditions of any vital and humane erotic life.
FP: Could you expand a bit on how art must guide art criticism, and not politics?
Kimball: Today in the academy, art history is more and more about displacing art, subordinating it to "theory," to politics, to the critic's autobiography, to just about anything that allows one to dispense with the burden of experiencing art natively, on its own terms.
Here is what's happening: the study of art is increasingly being co-opted by various extraneous, non-artistic, non-aesthetic campaigns. Instead of seeking to preserve the distinctive pulse of aesthetic achievement, art history is pressed into battle--a battle against racism, say, or traditional notions of aesthetic achievement; it is enlisted on behalf of some putatively disenfranchised group or made an accessory to one or another version of academic arcana in which the political can barely be disentangled from the metaphysical or (to be more strictly accurate) from the floridly linguistic.
To a large extent, what is happening in art history parallels what happened over the past few decades to the study of comparative literature and kindred humanistic disciplines. Connoisseurs of that disaster will recognize many of the same names, a similar vocabulary, a kindred minatory tone. One thinks, for example, of the glorified place accorded to the German critic Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), whose essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" has become a kind of sacred text in literary and art historical studies. Why? Because Benjamin, writing under the influence of the Frankfurt School Marxist Theodor Adorno, argued that advances in artistic reproduction--especially the advent of film--had shifted interest away from the art object and its "aura" of uniqueness and onto art as an instrument of political transformation. "The instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production," Benjamin wrote, "the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice--politics."
What frissons of delight that statement produced! The extraordinary popularity of Benjamin's essay, for art historians no less than for literary theorists, lay partly in its effort to dethrone the work of art (and by implication the artist) and partly in its overt call for "progressive" spirits to "politicize" art. In Benjamin's essay, grateful academics found the perfect rationalization of their efforts to subordinate the ostensible subject of their discipline to an agenda, to reduce art or literature to an alibi for . . . you can complete the ellipsis by consulting this week's list of modish causes.
In a word, what we are witnessing today is the triumph of political correctness in art history. It's a pretty depressing prospect, not least because by subordinating art to a non-artistic agenda one drains art of its intrinsic dignity and pleasure. It is worth stressing that the chief issue, the chief loss, lies not in the particular program being espoused: the war on patriarchy, the struggle against capitalism, the march against "formalist values," "bourgeois ethics," or supposedly "outmoded" norms of representation. Whatever one thinks of those campaigns--love them or hate them--they all displace art, relegating it to the status of a prop in a drama not its own.
FP: So are we going to be able to rescue art from those who wish to destroy it and make it into a political weapon? What are some of the weapons art-lovers can employ to save art? Are you optimistic?
Kimball: Well, Candide and Pangloss were optimists. Candide woke up. He became a realist. And that’s how I think of myself. I think that the assault on art, on individuality, proceeds apace in the empyrean of the academy, the art gallery, and many other redoubts of high culture. But I also believe that there is an increasingly vigorous counter movement--witness The Rape of the Masters, witness this interview. There is a great passion for art, which is an expression of the innate passion for genuine experience of reality. Our professors and cultural commissars can ridicule that passion, they can deny its relevance, its political correctness, its sophistication. But they cannot stop its efflorescence. The emperor has no clothes and it turns out he is not even an emperor. He’s only a tenured professor. I would be the last to underestimate the threat--to education, to culture, to art--but in the end I do believe that reality counts for something. Maybe that does make me an optimist!
FP: Roger Kimball, we are out of time. It was a pleasure to speak with you. You are doing priceless work for which we are very grateful. Please keep up your noble fight to rescue and save art from those who dream of building a sterile and disinfected world.
Kimball: Thank you so much for taking the time to raise these important issues.
The Political Calculations of Richard Nixon that Lay Behind the First King Tut Visit
Thomas Hoving, in a letter to the editor of the NYT (12-17-04):
[The writer was director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1967-77. ]
The first Tutankhamun exhibition of 1976-79 was hatched for political reasons and to make money. It was Richard M. Nixon's idea to show America that Egypt was a friend. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was asked by Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger to choose the pieces and organize the six-city show.
From the start, the president of the Organization of Antiquities in Egypt demanded all admissions money. I explained that the National Gallery could not by law charge admission, and that the Metropolitan had recently begun a pay-what-you-wish general admission, banning charges for special shows.
I suggested that the Egyptians allow the Metropolitan to select and make reproductions of dozens of objects in the Cairo Museum to be sold in the American museums. We agreed that the Egyptian government would receive 100 percent of all proceeds from the sale of the objects and the catalog.
That first exhibition did not have "long lines," nor was it "overcrowded." We used reservations, and audiences were restricted to a certain number each hour. The arrangement was designed so that most of the glorious objects were placed in the middle of galleries and visible to as many people as possible.
How the Descendants of Burr Are Trying to Get Respect
Matthew Continetti, in the Weekly Standard (12-13-04):
"LOOK AT THIS," said Antonio Burr. "Look at what they're selling." Standing in the gift shop of the New-York Historical Society on Manhattan's Upper West Side, Burr held a magnet to the light. On it were portraits of his ancestor Aaron Burr, the third vice president of the United States, and Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury, whom Vice President Burr killed in a duel 200 years ago. Each man's portrait stared coldly at the other's.
It was a dull gray day in late October, and Burr had just spent an hour walking through "Alexander Hamilton: The Man Who Made Modern America," the blockbuster, $5 million bicentennial exhibition that opened in early September and will close on February 28. The show portrays Hamilton as a giant--a leading champion of the Constitution, the Founding Father of America's financial institutions, the visionary who saw that the United States would one day become an economic and military superpower. To Hamilton's many admirers, all this is beyond dispute. Not to Antonio Burr.
He is a small man, compact and bespectacled, with a graying goatee and pale blue eyes. He is 51 years old. Also, he is Chilean. He often ends sentences with "man." Sometimes he flails his arms wildly to make a point.
"This is what I don't understand," he continued, examining the magnet. "This whole exhibition, it criticizes Burr, it calls Burr a man without principle, it blames Burr for Hamilton's death. But when you get to the gift shop, what do you have? You
have them selling Burr and Hamilton together. Look at this."
He motioned to a stack of T-shirts with Hamilton and Burr's portraits on them, to a Hamilton-Burr mug, to a Hamilton-Burr keychain.
"But they still don't give Burr any respect," he said. "They still don't treat him as an equal."
Burr moved into the Historical Society's main foyer. Two bronze statues stood in the center of the hall, lifesize replicas of Burr and Hamilton (each 5'7"), shown just before the fatal duel. The Hamilton statue looked frail. It wore a pair of wire-rim glasses. Aaron Burr's statue was grimacing.
"My problem here, with this exhibit, is that this is hagiography," Antonio Burr said.
His voice echoed off the museum's stone walls.
"This is the life of a saint," he went on. "The whole story--Burr's story--isn't told."
He shook his head in frustration.
Here's why. For Antonio Burr, the lionization of Hamilton unfailingly means the demonization of his forebear. He's not alone in thinking so. Some of Aaron Burr's descendants have been working to advance their man's reputation for a very long time. And their numbers have grown. There are about 70 of them now, all smart and engaging people like Antonio Burr, and it was at their instigation that the town of Weehawken, New Jersey, agreed to host a reenactment of the Hamilton-Burr duel last July, on its 200th anniversary, with Antonio Burr in the role of his accursed ancestor. With the reenactment, the efforts of Burr's defenders seemed at last to pay off, for a few fleeting moments.
Russia's Refusal to Face Its Past
Duncan Currie, in the Weekly Standard (12-17-04):
[Duncan Currie is an editorial assistant at The Weekly Standard.]
THE GHOSTS OF 1917 have not been laid to rest." That's how Orlando Figes closed A People's Tragedy, his magisterial history of the Russian Revolution. Figes was writing in the mid-1990s, at a time when the success of democracy in ex-Soviet bloc nations did not seem a fait accompli.
Sound familiar? Of course it does. The spirit of the day touts Ukraine as ground zero for liberty-loving peoples everywhere. To borrow from an oft-used dictum, we are all Ukrainians now. And the democratic "Orange Revolution" may well reverberate throughout the former Soviet Union. At least Russian liberals hope so. Moscow's meddling in the Ukrainian election has become a stark emblem of Vladimir Putin's anti-democratic--and increasingly anti-Western--governance. "[I]t is time to see Mr. Putin as a challenger, and not a friend," opined the Economist last week.
Other commentators have gone further, proclaiming the onset of a second Cold War. Such talk is premature. Putin's Russia is not the USSR. Not even close. And it's too soon--way too soon--to say the Kremlin is resurrecting an "evil empire." But it's not too soon to discuss Russia's complete and utter failure to properly account for its Communist past. That failure, indeed, is closely linked to Putin's illiberal rule at home and abroad.
Consider: On September 11, 2004, Russians unveiled a new statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky in the Moscow suburb that bears his name. This event went almost wholly unreported in the Western press. It capped a two-year debate over whether to return a more notorious Dzerzhinsky monument to its plinth in Moscow's Lubyanka Square.
Who was Dzerzhinsky? In no particular order: a secret policeman, founder of the Cheka, architect of Lenin's Red Terror, father of the KGB, and planner of the first Soviet gulags. He was, in sum, the Hermann Goering of Soviet Russia. (Goering started the Nazi Gestapo and set up the initial concentration camps.) Dzerzhinsky, nicknamed "Iron Felix," directed the Bolsheviks' machinery of repression, torture, and executions during the Russian civil war. On a single night in 1919, by virtue of a "dreadful mistake," Orlando Figes writes, "1,500 Moscow prisoners were shot on Dzerzhinsky's orders." We'll never know precisely how many killings and jailings the Cheka chief sanctioned. But as Figes points out, "it was certainly several hundred thousand . . . [and] it is possible that more people were murdered by the Cheka than died in the battles of the civil war."
Dzerzhinsky's 40-foot-tall, 14-ton bronze bust stood outside KGB headquarters until August 1991, when thousands of Russians famously cheered its toppling. Now his menacing grimace is back, thanks in part to a campaign led by Moscow's ex-Communist mayor, Yuri Luzhkov. The mayor wants the original Iron Felix statue restored to its base in Lubyanka Square, citing Dzerzhinsky's work in behalf of the homeless and support for the Russian railway system. Luzhkov may eventually get his way.
If he does, it won't come as a shock to most Russians. Nor, for that matter, will most Russians disapprove. The Putin years have witnessed a steady sanitizing of Soviet history. Hence the attempted rehabilitation of Iron Felix. Or the treatment of Stalin on the 50th anniversary of his death in March 2003. Or Putin's celebration of the late Yuri Andropov, the "Butcher of Budapest," on Andropov's 90th birthday in June 2004.
None of this seemed especially unusual to ordinary Russians. Which tells us something about the Cold War's unique denouement. Following World War II, a defeated Germany firmly repudiated Nazism. Likewise Italy with Fascism. But the Soviet Union never had a Nuremberg-type day of reckoning. Thus, bloodstained ex-Soviet officials got off lightly, to say the least. Putin's government indeed draws heavily from the ranks of former KGB agents.
What does this portend for Russia's future? Nothing positive. A country that sugarcoats its bloody totalitarian past will never be a true friend of America and the West. Moreover, a country that fails to atone for a shameful history threatens to repeat that history. Figes was right: The ghosts of 1917 aren't dead.
As Vladimir Putin reminded the world, last month, in Ukraine.
Turkey Will Not Apologize For Armenian Genocide
Anthony Browne, The Times (London), 12/15/04
Turkey has reacted angrily to a demand by France that it accept responsibility for a "genocide" against Armenians nearly 80 years ago, which is thought to have influenced the Nazi Holocaust.
Michel Barnier, the French Foreign Minister, insisted that Turkey must officially recognise the 1915 genocide before it joins the European Union.
Historians believe that Turkish authorities orchestrated the killing of 1.5 million Armenian Christians, who were indigenous inhabitants of Turkey, in a brutal attempt to make an ethnically pure nation. However, the Turkish Government has always said that only a small number were killed in spontaneous acts of violence.
M Barnier said: "In the course of the accession negotiations, France will ask for a recognition of the tragedy at the outset of the 20th century. When the time comes, Turkey should face up to the requirement of remembrance. The European project itself is founded on reconciliation."
He said that recognition should not be a precondition for membership talks with Turkey, a step to be decided by EU leaders on Thursday. However, he insisted that Turkey recognise the genocide during the membership talks, which are expected to last ten years: "We have ten years to ask it. The Turks have ten years to think about their response."
He later referred to it as a genocide, the first time the French Government has used that word, having previously preferred tragedy. Many parliaments in Europe have called on Turkey to recognise the slaughter, which is marked by monuments in many European cities.
However, a Turkish government spokesman said: "There was no such genocide, so there is no question of recognising a genocide that did not happen."
One Turkish official said: "They are just trying to make us angry. It is their last chance to cause trouble against us."
History Demands Merger Of Scotland's Regiments
Ewen Macaskill, The Guardian (London), 12/16/04
Old soldiers, and serving ones, have been campaigning hard in Scotland to save Scottish regiments from merger. An announcement is expected from Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, today.
The campaign has been vigorously supported by much of the media in Scotland, recalling regimental histories going back to the 18th century. Typical is the columnist Magnus Linklater: "Merely reciting their names: Black Watch, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, Royal Scots, King's Own Scottish Borderers, is enough to stiffen the sinews, to summon up the whiff of cordite at Waterloo, or the thin red line at Balaclava. You cannot divorce emotion from the memories of great battles fought, or lives bravely sacrificed."
Most Scots are brought up on such stories of martial tradition, of Scottish regiments, especially the Highlanders, in the thick of bloody battles. But there is an alternative history, though one heard less often. It is more likely to be raised among what remains of the Highlanders than by those in Edinburgh and Glasgow prone to misjudged nostalgia.
I first heard this alternative history from Derick Thomson, the Gaelic poet and professor of Celtic studies, who spoke with bitterness of the Highland regiments as "cannon fodder". The regiments were raised in the 18th century, mainly as a way of helping to pacify the Highlands. The threat posed by the clans was removed by recruiting regiments and putting them in the front line - the Black Watch suffered 50% casualties at the Battle of Ticonderoga in 1758 - or sending them to disease-ridden places such as the West Indies.
School textbooks lauded the bravery of the Highlanders in General James Wolfe's battle for Quebec in 1759. Less often recorded is Wolfe's disdain for his own soldiers. Reflecting the British government view, he wrote: "They are hardy, intrepid, accustomed to a rough country and no great mischief if they fall." And fall they did, in large numbers, the deaths of so many men contributing, along with the Clearances, to the depopulation of the Highlands that persists until this day.
The historian Tom Devine, in The Scottish Empire 1600-1815, notes that estimates of the number of Highlanders fighting in the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars ranged from 37,000 to 48,000 men. "This is quite an extraordinary figure, given that the population of the Highlands was around 250,000 to 300,000 during the second half of the 18th century."
The regiments can rightly take pride in the part they played in the first and second world wars, and in post-war engagements. But the motives behind raising these regiments and the way they were cynically deployed should temper the views of those who oppose merger on grounds of regimental tradition. Unlike Linklater, my sinews do not stiffen in recollection at generations of Highlanders who ended up as cannon fodder.
An Historical Look At War-time Inaugurations
Neely Tucker, The Washington Post, 12/13/04
The inauguration fell during a time of war and national turmoil. Soldiers were dying in a shadowy conflict half a world away. The televised images were horrific.
The election had been bitter, nasty and close. Protesters clamored that American soldiers, some of them accused of atrocities, should come home.
So when the president delivered his inaugural speech, he set out a theme of peace, harmony and vision. He chose warm, healing words, often drawn from biblical images, and used them to soothe the nation's troubled heart.
"The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker," he intoned. "This honor now beckons America -- the chance to help lead the world at last out of the valley of turmoil. . . . We are caught in war, wanting peace. We are torn by division, wanting unity. . . . to a crisis of the spirit, we need an answer of the spirit."
Thus spoke Richard Milhous Nixon in 1969.
The Vietnam War and domestic troubles would continue for years, until the last Americans out of Saigon and the president himself disappeared into history via helicopter.
Thirty-five years later, President Bush and his administration tomorrow will announce the theme for the wartime inaugural events of this generation. Spokesman Steve Schmidt said in an interview last week that Bush would not have a "dance in the end zone" type of celebration -- the inauguration would strike a dignified tone between celebrating a hard-won political victory, the continuation of the nation's democratic process and honoring the men and women serving in harm's way in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The inaugural theme rollout will strike an important note in the social life of Washington and provide momentary symbolism to the world, but as the eloquent Nixon speech demonstrates, history has a habit of defining the president rather than the other way around.
Still, an inauguration during a time of war, and before a deeply divided electorate, affords Bush a landmark opportunity to wrangle images and themes in his favor for a few precious days, presidential historians say, and hope that they echo into the coming years.
"On the short list of great American rhetoric, inauguration speeches take up a fair amount of space," says Fred Greenstein, professor emeritus of political science at Princeton and author of "The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to George W. Bush."
"Think Roosevelt's 'We have nothing to fear but fear itself.' Think Kennedy's 'Ask not what your country can do for you.' It's a president's chance to address history, to rise above the fray."
Sheila Tate, former press secretary to both Nancy Reagan and the elder George Bush, has been eyewitness to some of that history. In the end, she says, it's all about The Speech.
"I can't for the life of me remember the theme of any inauguration," she says with a laugh. "What gets remembered is the speech. It's usually noted for its brevity, for two or three memorable lines -- but if it's delivered outside, believe me, for the participants, it's remembered for the brevity."
Inaugurations during a war are rare in American history -- only a handful of the 55 presidential inaugurations have been in times of open conflict -- and some of those rank as some of the most memorable.
The gold standard is Lincoln's second inaugural address of 1865, in which he invoked the full moral weight of the battle against slavery in the Civil War. It is famous for Lincoln's soaring conclusion: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds. . . ."
It was a transcendent moment in American history, but the practical reality that March afternoon was that weeks of rain had turned Pennsylvania Avenue into a sea of mud and standing water. It was not a glorious venue.
Second, historians generally agree, is Franklin D. Roosevelt's fourth inaugural address, in 1945. The nation was exhausted by World War II, and Roosevelt's health was failing. The inaugural parade was canceled, and the oath of office was delivered not on the steps of the Capitol but on the South Portico of the White House.
FDR, less than three months before his death, told the nation that it was passing through "a period of supreme test. It is a test of our courage -- of our resolve -- of our wisdom -- our essential democracy. If we meet that test -- successfully and honorably -- we shall perform a service of historic importance which men and women and children will honor throughout all time."
It was the rare magic touch, of defining history and making the terms stick. Half a century later, the monument to FDR stretches around the Tidal Basin. The men and women who listened to him over the radio are popularly referred to as "the greatest generation." The vast monument to the soldiers of that war was erected last year on the eastern edge of the Reflecting Pool. The west end of the pool ends at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
That said, if the war doesn't go well, no one remembers the inauguration in heroic terms, no matter how lofty the imagery of the president-elect.
[Editor's Note: The original piece contains more historical examples.]
Pamphlets From British Civil War Era Reveal World Of Fear
Louise Jury, The Independent (London), 12/13/04
Samuel Pepys may have been the best-known chronicler of the 17th century but he was not the only one. The passionate views of others affected by the turbulent events of the Civil War are revealed in more than 900 pamphlets being given to the British Library today.
Bound into 17 giant volumes by their unknown owner or owners, they were effectively the beginnings of the popular press in Britain and document the turmoil of a time when many citizens feared the overthrowing of the king might trigger the end of the world.
Stories of miraculous sea-monsters and traumatic natural events like volcanic eruptions were gathered eagerly as evidence of the danger of disrupting the perceived natural order by rising up against the monarchy. Other pamphlets, ranging from four to 16 pages long, address such issues as king, Parliament and the law, religious divisions and toleration, and betray clear Royalist sympathies.
As such, they provide a counterfoil to the biggest collection of such pamphlets in the British Library, which once belonged to George Thomason, a London bookseller sympathetic to the Puritan Parliamentarian Oliver Cromwell. The 17 volumes have been in the Home Office library for decades and are now being handed over by Fiona Mactaggart, the minister responsible for freedom of information, in the spirit of encouraging greater public access.
More prosaically, the department is having to sort its large collection of rare books prior to moving to new offices.
Giles Mandelbrote, a British Library expert, said the pamphlets dated from 1623 to the 1870s and some were very rare. The bulk are from the 1640s and 1650s, when Royalists and Roundheads were clashing in bitter battles, Charles I was beheaded and the Commonwealth declared. Armies involved in the war printed their own propaganda pamphlets with portable presses as they fought around the country. "This was a very exciting time in British history and this sort of collection is very important for the kaleidoscopic picture it gives of a range of opinions about the burning issues of the times," Mr Mandelbrote said.
"Its importance as a collection lies in the sense it gives us a different view of the whole time from other collections we already have. People were aware they were living in exciting times. They made collections of this material to show what it felt like to be living in the middle of the world turned upside down. But people also referred to their personal libraries as being, in literary terms, armouries. They were material to mount assaults on the opposition."
It is thought the collection may have been pulled together by someone with close connections to the court, but at least four different hands have annotated the pamphlets. At least two names inscribed on many of the pamphlets are identifiable in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Arthur Turnor was a lawyer who died in 1651. His son was one of the judges who, after the restoration of the monarchy, was responsible for prosecuting for treason those who had executed Charles I. The other name is Edward Northey, a younger lawyer who was at university in Oxford, the Royalists' stronghold, in the 1660s.
The pamphlets were apparently bound in the second half of the 17th century as the contents list is in a 17th century hand, Mr Mandelbrote said. But how they ended up at the Home Office is a mystery as it did not exist at the time. Other papers in the Home Office library, however, are thought to have been the private papers of early secretaries of state.
"Scholars, historians and anyone with an interest in 17th century politics will be able to give the English Civil War pamphlets the attention they deserve," Ms Mactaggart said.
NYT: Was Lincoln Gay? New Controversy
Dinitia Smith, in the NYT (12-16-04):
Was Abraham Lincoln a gay American?
The subject of the 16th president's sexuality has been debated among scholars for years. They cite his troubled marriage to Mary Todd and his youthful friendship with Joshua Speed, who shared his bed for four years. Now, in a new book, C. A. Tripp also asserts that Lincoln had a homosexual relationship with the captain of his bodyguards, David V. Derickson, who shared his bed whenever Mary Todd was away.
In "The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln," to be published next month by Free Press, Mr. Tripp, a psychologist, influential gay writer and former sex researcher for Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, tries to resolve the issue of Lincoln's sexuality once and for all. The author, who died in 2003, two weeks after finishing the book, subjected almost every word ever written by and about Lincoln to minute analysis. His conclusion is that America's greatest president, the beacon of the Republican Party, was a gay man.
But his book has not stopped the debate. During the 10 years of his research, Mr. Tripp shared his findings with other scholars. Many, including the Harvard professor emeritus David Herbert Donald, who is considered the definitive biographer of Lincoln, disagreed with him. Last year, in his book "We Are Lincoln Men," Mr. Donald mentioned Mr. Tripp's research and disputed his findings.
Mr. Tripp was the author of "The Homosexual Matrix," a 1975 book that disputed the Freudian notion of homosexuality as a personality disorder. In this new book, he says that early biographers of Lincoln, including Carl Sandburg, sensed Lincoln's homosexuality. In the preface to the original multi-volume edition of his acclaimed 1926 biography, Sandburg wrote: "Month by month in stacks and bundles of fact and legend, I found invisible companionships that surprised me. Perhaps a few of these presences lurk and murmur in this book."
Sandburg also wrote that Lincoln and Joshua Speed had "streaks of lavender, spots soft as May violets." Mr. Tripp said that references to Lincoln's possible homosexuality were cut in the 1954 abridged version of the biography. Mr. Tripp maintains that other writers, including Ida Tarbell and Margaret Leech, also found evidence of Lincoln's homosexuality but shied away from defining it as such or omitted crucial details.
Mr. Tripp cites Lincoln's extreme privacy and accounts by those who knew him well. "He was not very fond of girls, as he seemed to me," his stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln, told Lincoln's law partner William Herndon. In addition, Lincoln was terrified of marriage to Mary Todd and once broke off their relationship. They eventually had four children.
But in "We Are Lincoln Men" Mr. Donald wrote that no one at the time ever suggested that he and Speed were sexual partners. Herndon, who sometimes slept in the room with them, never mentioned a sexual relationship. In frontier times, Mr. Donald wrote, space was tight and men shared beds. And the correspondence between Lincoln and Speed was not that of lovers, he maintained. Moreover, Lincoln alluded openly to their relationship, saying, "I slept with Joshua for four years. " If they were lovers, Mr. Donald wrote, Lincoln wouldn't have spoken so freely.
Mr. Tripp charts Lincoln's relationships with other men, including Billy Greene, with whom Lincoln supposedly shared a bed in New Salem, Ill. Herndon said Greene told him that Lincoln's thighs "were as perfect as a human being Could be."
Lincoln's fellow lawyer Henry C. Whitney observed once that Lincoln "wooed me to close intimacy and familiarity."
Then there is Lincoln's youthful humorous ballad from 1829, "First Chronicles of Reuben," in which he refers to a man named Biley marrying another man named Natty: "but biley has married a boy/ the girles he had tried on every Side/ but none could he get to agree/ all was in vain he went home again/and sens that he is married to natty."
Mr. Tripp tries to debunk the popular opinion among scholars that Lincoln's lifelong depressions were caused by the death of his first love, Ann Rutledge. He writes that at the time she was supposedly involved with Lincoln, she was engaged to John McNamar and that her name appears nowhere in Lincoln's letters.
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Israel's Attack on Osiraq: A Model for Future Preventive Strikes?
Twenty-three years ago, Israeli fighter pilots destroyed the Osiraq nuclear reactor and made a profound statement about global nuclear proliferation. In light of the recent preventive regime change in Iraq, a review of this strike reveals timely lessons for future counterproliferation actions. Using old, new, and primary source evidence, this thesis examines Osiraq for lessons from a preventive attack on a non-conventional target. Before attacking Osiraq, Israeli policymakers attempted diplomatic coercion to delay Iraq’s nuclear development. Concurrent with diplomatic actions, Israeli planners developed a state of the art military plan to destroy Osiraq. Finally, Israeli leaders weathered the international storm after the strike. The thesis examines Israeli decisionmaking for each of these phases.
The thesis draws two conclusions. First, preventive strikes are valuable primarily for two purposes: buying time and gaining international attention. Second, the strike provided a one-time benefit for Israel. Subsequent strikes will be less effective due to dispersed/hardened nuclear targets and limited intelligence.
***
The overarching question remains: did Iraq lose all interest in obtaining a nuclear weapon after the Osiraq strike or did they redouble their nuclear efforts? The strike devastated Iraq’s nuclear program, decimated the regime economically, and hardened Saddam Hussein’s desire to become the leader of a nuclear nation. In his case study review, Patrick Morgan links deterrence to controlling conflicts by using appropriate threats and indicates that in spite of taking the correct deterrence steps, a motivated challenger can attack. The motivation of the challenger is a decisive issue in the level of success a deterrent relationship will have. Peter Lavoy indicates that a deterrence association between states can be offensive as well as defensive in nature. “The case studies show that many new actors plan to use unconventional deterrents both to support the status quo and to change it.”88 Iraq clearly desired nuclear weapons as an unconventional deterrent against the Zionist entity. Thus, in this thesis deterrence includes offensive actions such as preventive strikes and allows the examination of motivating factors in both Israel and Iraq.
1. Short Term Value
The policy of the Government of Iraq was a direct reflection of Saddam Hussein’s private desires. His regime implemented his policy without question. Khidhir Hamza mentions his unflinching obedience to illogical orders due to the deadly consequences of disobedience. According to Morgan, “No wonder it was difficult to deter Iraq…the trouble was the coalition promised to damage Iraq’s economy and society…that was entirely ‘bearable.’ The way to deter Iraq was to have promised to kill him [Saddam Hussein] or remove him from power – the only things he really cared about.”89 Power and regional hegemony motivated the Iraqi leader. In this manner, much of Iraq’s coarse foreign policy was a reflection of its dictator’s desire for power.
Saddam Hussein’s attempt to obtain nuclear weapons was a natural extension of his need for influence. The Israeli strike on Osiraq occurred before the reactor went critical. Thus, the bomb grade Uranium was still available to Iraqi scientists. According to Khidhir Hamza, they salvaged 25 kilograms from the rubble. Within six years after the strike, Hamza estimates Iraq had twelve thousand scientists and technicians working to develop a nuclear weapon. Economically, following the strike, Iraq poured an estimated ten billion dollars into its, now buried, nuclear facilities scattered throughout Iraq. These scientists were able to work relatively uninterrupted for 4 years before Desert Storm hampered their efforts. They developed viable shaped charges, manufactured their own explosive caps, and cast their own Uranium sphere. Although Iraqi scientists accomplished significant milestones in design technology, they lacked an enriched core able to sustain a significant explosion.90 It was only a matter of time before Iraqi scientists obtained this fissile material. However, Desert Storm interrupted this attempt and further thwarted the Iraqi dictator’s plan for nuclear weapons. Thus, the Israeli strike on Osiraq delayed Iraq’s nuclear development, but did not dissuade Hussein’s search for “the bomb.”
In attempting to dissuade Iraq, the Israeli government did not view Hussein as irrational. An intelligence dossier on Hussein correctly reported him as a power-hungry, calculating risk-taker. Lavoy states, “The common assumption is that we [the deterrers] are rational, they [the challengers] are constrained by culture.”91 Israel chose to restrain Saddam Hussein by attacking one of his instruments of power. While this action did not discourage Hussein from his desire for nuclear weapons, it did buy time for Israel in the conflict. One condition of successful deterrence is having a proper perspective of the challenger. While the Israeli preventive strike on Osiraq served several short-term goals for Israel, it had long-term repercussions for the world.
2. Long Term Value
The Israeli preventive strike solidified a long-term change in the deterrence landscape. The strike was the first example in the Middle East of a precision aerial attack on another nation’s nuclear facilities. This Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) opened new realms of possibility based on a modern air force’s capability. According to Morgan, “Why is this a revolution? The best answer is that it should greatly affect the way force can be used. Force has usually been a blunt instrument.”92 Morgan claims nations with precision strike ability will now find deterrence much more appealing. This is incorrect. Precise force is still force. Military action should be the last resort any statesman chooses, due to its life and death nature. As quick and surgical as any precision strike appears prima facie, the long-term effects lie within the deterrence relationship of the states and not the effects of the weapons. Eliot Cohen states: “The days of Osiraq-type raids on a single, easily located, and above-surface nuclear facility are over. Secrecy, camouflage, deception and dispersion will make preemption a far more extensive and uncertain operation than ever before.”
Osiraq was a one-time good deal for the Israelis. The lessons since Osiraq prove Cohen correct so far. The long-term effects of any surprise attack will produce the following results: “harder” targets and more staunchly antagonistic enemies. This does not mean this author condemns military strikes to serve the state’s purpose. On the contrary, a military strike should be devastating and used when a nation is prepared to follow with additional military action. Domestic political aspects often override significant international political factors. This was the case with Israel in June 1981. Every intelligence indicator Begin received indicated Israel had time to mitigate Iraq’s nuclear reactor by other than military means. Begin saw the attack as a political launching pad and his ideological responsibility to the people of Israel. Concerning domestic issues Morgan states, “there is recurring evidence that governments, elites, and leaders are often barely moved by general deterrence threats that they ought to take into account. Often short-term thinking, not attuned to larger implications and potential consequences of what they are considering, drives them. They seem caught up in domestic political or ideological preoccupations.”
Strategically, Israel has a lack of Geostrategic depth and extreme sensitivity to loss of Israeli lives. A nuclear weapon in the hands of a staunch, determined enemy provoked strong reactions in Begin’s government. Morgan also states, “Top decision makers rarely understand the military preparations made to deal with crises, resulting in force postures unsuitable for deterrence situations.”95 Such was not the case in Israel, Begin and his trusted advisors were all very familiar with the Israeli Defense Force’s capabilities. The ideological and domestic political factors drove Begin for an early June strike....
Conclusion
Preventive strikes are relatively simple to plan and execute. They make a global statement immediately. However, the repercussions of these strikes are lasting and costly. Currently, the United States can see the truth of this implication daily. Policymakers eagerly looked for a precision Navy Tomahawk or TLAM to meet momentary political needs in the Middle East several years ago. Now the United States is seeing the long-term consequences. The conclusion of Planning the Unthinkable encourages United States decision makers to be prepared. A one-size-fits-all precision strike course of action will not produce good results.
What Historians Can Learn from Anthropology
Kunal Parker, in Rednovanews (12-11-04):
[Kunal Parker is Associate Professor of Law, Cleveland State University.]
Anthropologists have long sought to establish a relationship to the discipline of history. In the United States, this effort may be traced at least as far back as the work of A. L. Kroeber (1966). However, with the explosion of interest in colonialism that gripped the U.S. academy in the 1980s and 1990s, it received especially influential articulations in the work of Bernard Cohn (1990) and John and Jean Comaroff (1992).1
For both Cohn and the Comaroffs (very explicitly for the latter), the need for anthropology to establish a relationship to history was part of the effort to rehabilitate anthropology after the anti- colonial critiques the discipline sustained in the 1970s and 1980s. Following these critiques, anthropologists were told to shed their colonial baggage as scholars interested in "others" rendered distinguishable from "ourselves" principally by their absence of history and by their immobilization in "cultures" understood as ahistorical frameworks. At the same time, anthropologists were exhorted to shed their nave epistemological assumption that a meaningful account of their subjects could be based upon nothing more than "presence" in the midst of their subjects. The proffered solution was a trip to the archives.
But if a trip to the archives was to save anthropology, what was to prevent anthropologists from becoming nothing more than historians? It is here that anthropologists from Kroeber to Cohn to the Comaroffs revealed not altogether without truth and often humorously-their pitying disdain for historians. In their renderings, there were many differences between historians and anthropologists, most of them redounding to the advantage of the latter. Thus, historians were supposedly naively interested in events rather than practices; they were either theoretically unsophisticated or wedded to empiricist bourgeois categories such as the individual, biography, causality, and so on, and they often wrote in a distinctly nonspecialist, indeed bellelettrist, idiom.
But the foundational difference between historians and anthropologists, we were told, inhered in the ways the two disciplines constructed a relationship to their sources. Thus, Cohn stated:
In loose terms, research in history is based on finding data; research in anthropology is based on creating data. Obviously the historian has to find the sources on which to base his research. If he cannot find them, then no matter how good his ideas are or how well thought through the problem is on which he wants to work, he cannot do the research. My suspicion is that most historical research is done because there is a known body of source material available. The anthropologist, on the other hand, often is interested in a problem, descriptive or theoretical, and the question is then one of deciding what types of materials he will need for pursuing the problem. (1990:6)
This is a marvelous rendering of why-in the eyes of at least one influential practitioner of historical anthropology-historians and anthropologists are different. But in what sense is it meaningful to say that historians find data/are motivated by existing data, whereas anthropologists create data/are motivated by intellectual problems?
I submit that Cohn's account of the difference between historians and anthropologists might be productively grasped if one sees disciplinary practices and styles in history and anthropology as emanating from different disciplinary fantasies about the finitude/ infinitude of sources. I believe that these different disciplinary fantasies are widely subscribed to by historians and anthropologists (although historians will, of course, balk at the negative spin that anthropologists have put on their disciplinary style and practice).
The historians' fantasy is that the sources are finite. They believe as a result that it is at least theoretically possible to go through them all. In my view, this is true even for historians who work in areas-for example, twentieth-century U.S. history-where the available materials are absolutely overwhelming. For Cohn, who grasps this historian's fantasy perfectly, the consequence is historians' document fetishism and their corresponding theoretical navet. In other words, simply bringing to light the sources-the "ideal type" being dusty boxes of slowly disintegrating documents- becomes enough. Precisely because the uncovering of the sources adds to the "fund" of knowledge about the past-i.e., represents an inching toward the ultimate cataloguing of all dusty boxes-it sanctions a relatively unmediated treatment of what the boxes contain.
For anthropologists, by contrast, the fantasy is that the sources are infinite. Indeed, the sources do not even have the character of discrete "sources" that can be lined up next to each other as boxes can. As a result, the question of cataloguing "everything" never arises. Beginning with a sense of the infinitude of sources makes the anthropologist focus first on his or her own purposes and then decide which of an inexhaustible supply of sources essentially inseparable from each other-the festival, the botched ritual, the village squabble-serves those purposes. For Cohn, the exhilarating open-endedness of the "field"-the anthropologist's term for the infinitude of sources that emerges from "presence" amidst his or her subjects-accounts for the anthropologist's relative theoretical sophistication.
But of course, as I have pointed out earlier, the anticolonial critique of anthropology that led anthropologists to the boxes in the archives was precisely that the allegedly open-ended "field," at least as traditionally configured within the discipline, had turned out to be something of a box after all, to the extent that it was sharply bounded in space and time. For a complex of reasons, research based upon "presence" in the "field" had ended up denying the anthropologist's subjects history altogether.
If anthropologists have sought to surmount the anticolonial critique by turning to the boxes in the archives, however, they have been unwilling to shed the fantasy of open-endedness associated with presence in the field. Instead, they have sought to transform the archives-those collections of dusty boxes-into a field imagined as being every bit as open-ended as presence amidst subjects was ever imagined to be. For the Comaroffs, it is this open-end-edness-which they do not problematize as a disciplinary fantasy-that will ultimately distinguish historical ethnography from social history:
A historical ethnography, then, must begin by constructing its own archive. It cannot content itself with established canons of documentary evidence, because these are themselves part of the culture of global modernism-as much the subject as the means of inquiry. As anthropologists, therefore, we must work both in and outside the official record, both with and beyond the guardians of memory in the societies we study. (1992:34, emphasis added)
From now on, in other words, even though anthropologists and historians will both work on the same dusty boxes in the archives, the anthropologist will allegedly not be limited by and to them, while the historian will allegedly be thus limited.
My object here is not to rehabilitate history as an academic discipline in the eyes of anthropologists. Nothing could be further from my purposes. My object is rather to evaluate anthropology's claims about its own historical method, specifically to examine whether its fantasy about the open-endedness of its sources can be sustained during the plunge into the dusty boxes in the archives. In other words, how successfully can boxes be rendered into "fields"?...
Francis X. Clines: Disneyfing History at the Lincoln and Washington Museums
Francis X. Clines, in the NYT (12-12-04)
John Wilkes Booth, skulking by the bushes outside the faux White House, will be the first test of true Lincoln buffs visiting the grand new Lincoln museum that opens this April in Springfield, Ill. How many will resist darting over immediately to leer at the assassin's lifelike figure rather than pausing thoughtfully at Lincoln's rustic beginnings at a nearby replica of his birthplace?
Such are the questions already in the air as the new museum installs cutting-edge verisimilitude. There'll be cannons that smoke, theater seats that rumble in sync with filmed battle depictions, and dozens of lifelike Lincolns and contemporaries waiting like docents, contriving to fulfill the museum's goal of a more powerful, "in your face" brand of history.
Detractors already are hooting about the Disneyfication of Old Abe in the museum's pioneering use of forensic science and computer technology to stoke the popular imagination. But controversy has also been a good impetus for museum attendance. Besides, another zeitgeist remake is under way on none other than George Washington. Curators at Mount Vernon have hired physical anthropologists to painstakingly produce science's best three-dimensional estimate of what the teenage Washington looked like.
The gaze and heft of Washington in his 50's was well recorded by artists and sculptors, but the aim is to present a fuller life story by "de-aging" the national patriarch down to 19 years. This could answer the question of how much Washington's painful, iron-springed false teeth might have brought about his late-life clench of invincibility. But the main idea is to make him relevant - the nation's first action hero, is how it's being put - to young people herded to Mount Vernon, already bored with the schoolbook Washington.
This has possibilities. Those still reading - as opposed to virtually wading in - history can find Abigail Adams waxing groupie-like at first spying Washington and gushing a Dryden lyric at her husband: "Mark his Majestick Fabrick!"...
The current touch-ups of Lincoln and Washington seem unavoidable considering that modern technology has made interactive morphers of us all. It was Lincoln, leaving Springfield, who understood how history marches on as "the strange checkered past." We can only hope good taste prevails, as it has not prevailed with the entrepreneur who is marketing a Kennedy assassination game with the computer-user sighting over Lee Harvey Oswald's shoulder. It will be refreshing to see replications of Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass taking their places in Lincoln's museum, so near the real-life copy of the Gettysburg Address in Lincoln's own handwriting.
Steve Hindle: Renaissance Lasted Longer Than Previously Thought
Chris Arnot, The Guardian (London), 12/07/04
We tend to think of the Renaissance as a movement confined to a European intellectual elite during the 15th and 16th centuries. Wrong on all counts, according to Professor Steve Hindle, who is to be a leading figure in a research project linking Warwick University with the Newberry Library in Chicago. Over three years, British and American historians, classicists and linguists will seek to re-examine the social depth, the geographical breadth and the historical length of a period that saw the rebirth of classicism in art, philosophy and literature.
"I would argue that it was a much longer period than previously thought," says Hindle, who is based at Warwick's Centre for the Study of the Renaissance. "Yes, its origins were in late 14th-century Italy, with the rediscovery of classical texts, especially Plato's. But its influence was still evident in New England from the 1620s onwards. By the 18th century, the shape that institutions and architecture start to take on is fundamentally influenced by classical antiquity.
"In fact, the very idea of American democracy is influenced by classical modes of thought, revived in 15th- and 16th-century Italy and refined by 17th-century English republicanism. By 1776, all kinds of other influences were making their presence felt in American culture, but the fundamental idea for America as a republic harks back to Plato and Aristotle."
The project, linking scholars in the West Midlands with American counterparts in the Midwest, has been made possible by a grant of £190,000 from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation, which finances educational projects with transatlantic links. Warwick academics will have access to manuscripts in one of the three leading research libraries in the US. And American scholars will be able to come to the Coventry-based campus for seminars and workshops and a few sight-seeing trips.
"Among the subjects we cover will be Renaissance attitudes to the afterlife," says Hindle. "One of the leading strands of English literature was what happens to the soul after death - Hamlet's father being a good example. In the Americas, meanwhile, Spanish humanists were discussing whether the indigenous population had souls at all. We'll also be looking at how new forms of knowledge affected the built environment. Our American visitors will see evidence of how the Renaissance affected the landscape of the English Midlands."
Visits to churches, almshouses and homes of the gentry will be on the agenda. Hindle argues that these buildings provide evidence that Renaissance ideas affected far more people than has hitherto been thought. Women, for instance. "The gentry employed classically trained tutors for their daughters as well as their sons," he points out. "As a result, women's writing as a genre developed in the 16th and 17th centuries."
As for the poor, their exposure to Renaissance thought was hardly confined to being groundlings at the Globe Theatre. "The way space was re-ordered in churches is significant," Hindle explains. "In the 15th and 16th centuries, men and women were segregated and a pecking order was established. The poor were given pews at the back. Notions of charity began to change as well. In medieval times, the prevailing attitude was that you gave money to the poor as a way of helping to save your own soul. With the Renaissance came greater efforts to control resources by trying to ensure that help was given to the most needy. Targeting relief, in other words."
To suggest that the Renaissance influenced New Labour thinking, however, might be to stretch its longevity a little too far.
Jonathan Chait: Why Academia Shuns Republicans
Jonathan Chait, in the LAT (12-10-04):
A few weeks ago, a pair of studies found that Democrats vastly outnumbered Republicans among professors at leading universities. Conservatives gleefully seized upon this to once again flagellate academia for its liberal bias.
Am I the only person who fails to understand why conservatives see this finding as vindication? After all, these studies show that some of the best-educated, most-informed people in the country overwhelmingly reject the GOP. Why is this seen as an indictment of academia, rather than as an indictment of the Republican Party?
Conservatives have a ready answer. The only reason faculties lean so far to the left is that deans, administrators and entire university cultures systematically discriminate against conservatives.
They don't, however, have much evidence to back this up. Mostly, they assume that the leftward tilt is prima facie evidence of anti-conservative discrimination. (Yet, when liberals hold up minority underrepresentation at some institutions as proof of discrimination, conservatives are justifiably skeptical.)
Conservative pundit George Will recently tied the dearth of conservative professors to the quasi-Marxist outlook in African American studies, women's studies and cultural studies. And at many campuses, those departments certainly don't amount to much more than left-wing propaganda factories. It's also true that radical multiculturalist theory — which sees white male oppression as the key to everything — has taken root in plenty of more mainstream disciplines.
This no doubt makes things hard on prospective conservative academics, not to mention mainstream liberal ones. A historian I know (a liberal) used to complain that history departments showed little interest in the traditional research he did, only caring about subjects like "buggery in the British navy."
But the rise of fashionable left-wing scholarship can be blamed for only a tiny part of the GOP's problem. The studies showing that academics prefer Democrats to Republicans also show that this preference holds in hard sciences as well as social sciences. Are we to believe that higher education has fallen prey to trendy multiculturalist engineering, or that physics departments everywhere suppress conservative quantum theorists?...
Last summer, my colleague Frank Foer wrote a cover story in the New Republic detailing the way the Bush administration had disdained the advice of experts. And not liberal experts, either. These were Republican-appointed wonks whose know-how on topics such as global warming, the national debt and occupying Iraq were systematically ignored. Bush prefers to follow his gut.
In the world of academia, that's about the nastiest thing you can say about somebody. Bush's supporters consider it a compliment. "Republicans, from Reagan to Bush, admire leaders who are straight-talking men of faith. The Republican leader doesn't have to be book smart," wrote conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks a week before the election. "Democrats, on the other hand, are more apt to emphasize … being knowledgeable and thoughtful. They value leaders who see complexities, who possess the virtues of the well-educated."
It so happens that, in other columns, Brooks has blamed the dearth of conservative professors on ideological discrimination. In fact, the GOP is just being rejected by those who not only prefer their leaders to think complexly but are complex thinkers themselves. There's a problem with this picture, all right, but it doesn't lie with academia.
Author Facing Excommunication For Questioning Origins Of Mormonism
Larry Stammer, Los Angeles Times, 12/09/04
A lifelong Mormon, church teacher and author said Wednesday he faced excommunication after he was accused of apostasy for publishing a book questioning the origins of the Book of Mormon.
A church disciplinary council near Salt Lake City was scheduled Sunday to take up charges against Grant Palmer, whose book, "An Insider's View of Mormon Origins," had come under scrutiny by church authorities since it was published two years ago.
In his book, Palmer traced scholarly challenges over the last 30 years to a number of fundamental teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, including the story that its founder, Joseph Smith, had been led by the angel Moroni to a set of golden plates in 1827 from which Smith translated the Book of Mormon.
Palmer is the latest Mormon scholar to face excommunication. In 1993, the church excommunicated five prominent scholars for their views on church policies, history and feminism.
Michael Purdy, a church spokesman, said Wednesday that the church did not comment on "confidential" matters.
But in an e-mail to the Los Angeles Times, he said disciplinary proceedings in general were intended to "help a transgressor to repent; to identify those who do spiritual or physical harm to Church members, and to safeguard the integrity of the Church."
Purdy said there were four possible outcomes of a trial. He said the council could take no action, place an individual on formal probation with restricted privileges temporarily suspend membership privileges, or terminate membership.
Palmer, 64, said that scholars, including himself, had found that accounts of Moroni's characteristics and personality had changed over time, and that the Book of Mormon had been influenced by the King James version of the Bible, 19th century evangelical Protestantism, other thinking of the day and Smith's family history.
"It's not a real ancient historical record for a real ancient people," he said of the Book of Mormon. "It was created by Joseph Smith -- an inspired text and inspiring, but I don't think it's [ancient] history," Palmer said in a telephone interview Wednesday.
He also said that Smith's accounts of his four major visions -- which constitute a significant part of the church's theological foundation -- had evolved over time, even in Smith's own telling. Among those accounts, one formed the basis for the church's belief that its priesthood was the only legitimate one.
The controversy appeared likely to focus new attention on the teachings of the church, which for the last decade has discouraged the use of the term "Mormon" and stressed that it is a Christian church, despite rebuttals from mainline Christian denominations.
"It's been a long time since a church has brought such a charge to a high-profile person," said Jan Shipps, a United Methodist and president of the John Whitmer Historical Assn., whose members are historians of the Mormon faith. "The church is facing modernity, and this is what happens."
Although scholars have questioned the origins of the Mormon canon over the last several decades, Palmer said he believed he came under fire from the church because his book made academic scholarship, including his own, accessible to the average reader.
"I have done nothing that warrants excommunication," he said.
Palmer said he was surprised that charges had been filed against him, especially since his book had been sold in church bookstores without incident for two years.
His family roots in the church go back six generations, he said. Until he retired about two years ago, he spent 34 years teaching high school and college Mormon history and theology for the Church Educational System.
Thirteen years ago he asked to be transferred from teaching to serving the church as a counselor and a teacher of the Bible, but not the Book of Mormon, at the Salt Lake County Jail.
"I was conflicted enough by teaching [Mormon] studies that I asked to go to the jail," Palmer said.
Former Mussolini Driver Exposes IL Duce's Love Life
Paddy Agnew, The Irish Times, 12/09/04
"Every now and again 'R' would have a fit of jealousy and indeed I personally witnessed one such occasion. One morning, she waited for us in the grounds of Villa Torlonia the Mussolini residence in Rome , hidden amongst the trees. All of a sudden, there she was in front of the car signalling to me to stop.
"She was in her dressing gown and she appeared upset. With a dramatic gesture, she flung open the car door, in the process displaying what little clothing she wore underneath her dressing gown, and then I could hear her perfectly as, sobbing, she shouted at Mussolini: 'So then, it's all over between us'?"
The above comes from the diary of Ercole Boratto, the man who for 20 years from October 1922 to July 1943 was the personal driver to Il Duce, Benito Mussolini. Written in 1945 and 1946, Boratto's diary has never gone into the bestseller list for the good reason that for the last 58 years or so it has been gathering dust in the US National Archives centre at College Park, Maryland.
Early in December 1945, "Dusty", an Italian informer of the OSS (US Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA) informed his OSS handler, agent CB55, that he had come across Boratto. Mussolini's driver, he said, was willing to write a diary of his life and times with Il Duce, on three conditions - (1) that the diary never be published in Italy, (2) that his name not be attached to it and (3) that he receive a "small lorry" by way of retribution for his literary efforts. Having agreed terms, Boratto kept his side of the bargain and delivered his text which, ever since, has remained on micro-film at College Park . . . until recently when the Rome newspaper La Repubblica published an illuminating, extended extract from the now declassified diary.
From the extracts, it would appear that Boratto's duties ranged far beyond those of the chauffeur. In effect, he comes across as something of a Leporello to Mussolini's Don Giovanni, cataloguing with cheerful equanimity Il Duce's frantic love life.
He portrays the dictator as an inveterate womaniser, someone who if he saw a good looking woman when out for his morning drive through Villa Borghese would promptly order his driver to turn around and drive past the lady in question. He recalls that, early in his service with Il Duce, he began to realise what his duties might entail when he travelled with him to Milan.
After a brief stop at the family house in Foro Bonaparte, Mussolini ordered him to take him to a house in Corso Venezia. Here, while he waited below in the courtyard, a rather too talkative maid servant filled in the picture. The Corso Venezia house belonged to Margherita Sarfatti, one of Il Duce's lovers (later discarded because she was of Jewish extraction). You will be spending a lot of time in this courtyard, the maid told him, and so it was.
During the long hot Roman summer, Mussolini moved out to the private beach resort of Castel Porziano, his favourite "love nest", made available to him by the King Vittorio Emanuele. Problem was that the nest became crowded and Boratto would routinely find himself detailed to head off a mistress who had arrived unexpectedly, whilst Il Duce was otherwise engaged with a rival.
Claretta Petacchi, Il Duce's last great love and the woman who ended up hanging upside from a rope alongside him in Milan's Piazza Loreto, cried regularly on Boratto's shoulder when she found he had betrayed her with yet another passing conquest.
While at Castel Porziano, Mussolini disliked being disturbed so much so that he had Boratto and two telephones installed in a beach hut, in order to concentrate on his womanising. Reluctantly, at the end of the day, Mussolini would return to Rome for two or three hours of work in Palazzo Venezia. All of which leads Boratto to ask how Mussolini managed to keep "the great ship of state afloat, especially during wartime".
Boratto's portrait of Il Duce tells us about more than just his womanising. For example, he describes a game of "bocce" (bowls) with Mussolini during which Il Duce became so annoyed with a good shot by Boratto that he threw the bowls down in disgust and walked off in a huff. He also recalls drives along the Roman coast at Ostia when Il Duce oftimes liked to stop for a glass of white wine. Seated at table, Il Duce nearly always invited his faithful driver to join him. On leaving the trattoria, however, Mussolini would also instruct Boratto to pick up the tab since he himself never carried money on his person.
What do historians make of this portrait of Mussolini? While pointing out factual inaccuracies on dates and while also lamenting the fact that Boratto's narrative seems to focus on the smaller picture rather than political events such as Il Duce's meetings with Hitler, Franco and others, historian Nicola Carraciolo nonetheless concludes: "Mussolini fascinated Italians, for good and for bad. This portrait of a Mussolini obsessed with sex, even if partial and unilateral, is nonetheless certainly true."
1914 Christmas Truce Reconsidered
Jim Regan, Christian Science Monitor (Boston, MA), 12/09/04
This Christmas will mark the 90th anniversary of one of the truly remarkable events in the history of modern warfare: when soldiers from the world's most powerful armies, locked in a conflict that would eventually cost millions of lives, decided that they wanted to take a few days off from killing each other in honor of the season. Surprisingly, there doesn't seem to be a single all-encompassing site dedicated to the Christmas Truce of 1914 on the Web - but with a bit of poking around, many of the details can still be found online.
One of the most common misconceptions about the truce concerns its very existence. Some believe it was an isolated incident made larger in the telling, or even a fantasy created out of whole cloth and preserved by romantics and pacifists. The first stop in this modest collection (a 1998 article by Historian Malcolm Brown for the BBC) puts that fallacy to rest, and then goes on to correct a few related errors. Said errors include the assumptions that the truce was unprecedented ("In the American Civil War Yankees and Rebels traded tobacco, coffee and newspapers, fished peacefully on opposite sides of the same stream and even collected wild blackberries together"), that only the lowest ranks took part in the cease fire, and that the event was 'hushed up' for the sake of public morale on the home front. (Additional proof against the last point can be found in this image and write-up from the Illustrated London News of January 9, 1915.)
While the BBC site's link to an audio interview with a veteran of the truce is no longer active, those interested in getting a glimpse of the more personal side of the phenomenon can peruse the Hellfire Corner page dedicated to the armistice. After a basic summary of events, the Hellfire site offers a half-dozen individual accounts, including one by a German lieutenant which describes a famous soccer match between soldiers of the two armies.
There were, of course, incidents of the truce being broken, and some participants saw more pragmatic reasons for observing the cease-fire. In one location it began as a simple agreement not to interfere with the recovery of the dead from No Man's Land, while others saw it as an opportunity to repair trench works and do a bit of reconnaissance on enemy positions if the opportunity arose. (Though even in the context of trench repair, there was at least one case of a British soldier borrowing a tool from some willing Saxons in order to reinforce his own barbed wire.) In addition to a handful of "front line" greeting cards, the 1914 Truce page at Kinnethmont.co.uk recounts a joint Christmas service (with a British chaplain and German divinity student doing the honors), and an extra element whereby both sides agreed to warn the others if any high-ranking officers (who would naturally insist on immediately resuming the war) were known to be approaching the front lines.
In different sectors of the front, the truce lasted from a single day, to well into January. But perhaps as bizarre as the truce itself, was the matter-of-fact manner in which the fraternization ended along one section of the line. First World War.com recounts the story of a captain in the Royal Welch Fusiliers: "At 8.30 I fired three shots in the air and put up a flag with 'Merry Christmas' on it, and I climbed on the parapet. He put up a sheet with 'Thank you' on it, and the German Captain appeared on the parapet. We both bowed and saluted and got down into our respective trenches, and he fired two shots in the air, and the War was on again." (First World War.com gives the most comprehensive treatment of the event from the historical standpoint - with background information on conditions and events leading up to the truce, such additional details as the Germans lining the parapets of their trenches with miniature Christmas trees, and a map of the trenches that observed the temporary peace.)
There is some overlap amongst these sites, little in the way of online extras, and, as mentioned above, none of these URLs will take you to a truly encyclopedic treatment of the topic. (In fact there isn't one that offers more than a single page on the truce.) But some materials are worth a little digging - and the spontaneous suspension of one of the 20th Century's greatest conflicts is a subject that deserves that extra bit of investigatory perseverance.
19 CEOs Named To Black History Museum Council
Jacqueline Trescott, The Washington Post, 12/08/04
The Smithsonian Institution has selected a roster of high-profile corporate leaders, including media empress Oprah Winfrey and the chairmen of American Express, Merrill Lynch, IBM and Time Warner, to lead the effort to establish the country's first comprehensive museum on African American life.
The Smithsonian Board of Regents yesterday appointed 19 executives to the founding Council of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which is scheduled to open in 2013. They also named a group of scholars to an advisory committee that will oversee the content of the White House-backed museum.
In the early stages of planning, the council will be involved in "every aspect of development," said Sheila Burke, the Smithsonian deputy secretary and chief operating officer. Yet the expertise of the members indicates that fundraising will be a primary concentration.
The museum is expected to cost between $300 million and $400 million. The legislation that gave the Smithsonian responsibility for the effort calls for the final cost to be equally shared by the government and private sources.
"The museum is a major statement, both physical and intellectual, of the African American experience in the United States. It should be on the Mall for everyone to experience, learn from and reflect on, just like the Holocaust Museum and the Indian Museum," said Robert Johnson, one of the new council members and the founder of Black Entertainment Television. Fundraising is key, he admits. "You know what they say -- give, get or get off."
That is only the beginning. The Smithsonian regents and the new council have to select a location for the museum.
The legislation pinpointed several choices: the historic Arts and Industries Building on the Mall; the open land near the National Museum of American History at the corner of Constitution Avenue and 14th Street NW; a site on 14th Street SW just at the entrance of the 14th Street Bridge; and the Banneker Overlook site on 10th Street SW south of L'Enfant Plaza. Burke said yesterday that decision would probably be made by regents in the next nine months.
The museum does not start with a vast collection of artifacts, as did the National Museum of the American Indian. The planned African American museum, first championed by Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) and others 15 years ago, does have a starting point: The vaults of other Smithsonian museums house an extensive collection of African American artifacts in history, music and art.
What stories of African American history will be emphasized also must be decided, though it is already clear the place will be a hybrid history and art museum.
The council "will be very active as we define the mission of the museum," said Burke, who is currently interviewing candidates for the director's position. The caliber of the members, she explained, "clearly indicates how serious this effort is. This is a board that is used to making decisions and doing strategic planning. This is a working board."
Homer A. Neal, a physicist at the University of Michigan and a former Smithsonian regent, said the time ahead is a challenge but a worthwhile one. "To have a site on the Mall dedicated to African American history is in itself a very powerful statement by the nation," Neal said.
Many of the new members are front-page names in the business world. They include chief executives: Kenneth I. Chenault, of American Express; E. Stanley O'Neal, of Merrill Lynch; Samuel J. Palmisano, of IBM; Richard D. Parsons, of Time Warner; Ann M. Fudge, of Young & Rubicam Brands and Franklin D. Raines, of Fannie Mae.
Fudge, who grew up in Washington, said the board is a way to help write the Smithsonian's future.
"I look forward to the day the National Museum opens and I can take my children and grandchildren to not only see history but be part of it," she said, in a statement.
Few, however, have the household recognition of Winfrey, the uber-successful talk-show host, philanthropist and president of Harpo Inc. Fortune magazine has estimated her worth at $1 billion.
In a conversation with Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence M. Small, also on the council, Winfrey said she had turned down all requests to serve on boards outside her company. But "she had tremendous enthusiasm about getting involved with this new museum," Small said.
This is the second African American museum effort Winfrey and Johnson have been involved in. Both were major donors to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, which opened this summer.
In addition to Johnson and Raines, other Washington power brokers on the committee are James A. Johnson, the former chairman of Fannie Mae and the Kennedy Center board; Anthony Welters, the president of AmeriChoice; Ann D. Jordan, a former University of Chicago administrator; and H. Patrick Swygert, the president of Howard University. Small and Wesley S. Williams Jr., a Washington attorney who is chairman of the Smithsonian regents executive committee, represent the Smithsonian.
Beside Winfrey, the producer and composer Quincy Jones represents the entertainment world. He is also involved with the Washington group that is trying to start a music museum. Linda Johnson Rice, the chief executive of Johnson Publishing Co., whose family company has published Ebony and Jet magazines -- themselves archives of black life -- is also on the board.
The other members of the council are James Ireland Cash, retired associate dean of the Harvard Business School, and Michael L. Lomax, the chief executive of the United Negro College Fund and former president of Dillard University.
The Smithsonian also appointed five people to a scholarly committee. The museum is expected to cover slavery, reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance and the civil rights movement, among other topics.
The committee members are:
* John Hope Franklin, the dean of black historians, who wrote the standard "From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans";
* Drew S. Days III, professor of law at Yale University, and former U.S. solicitor general and assistant attorney general for civil rights;
* Deborah L. Mack, a museum and academic consultant who has worked for the Field Museum of Natural History and the Underground Railroad Center;
* Alfred Moss, a professor at the University of Maryland, author of "The American Negro Academy: Voice of the Talented Tenth" and co-editor of "The Facts of Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of John Hope Franklin"; and
* Richard J. Powell, an art history professor at Duke University who has written extensively on art, race and representation.
Exhuming Franco's Enemies Stirs Emotions
Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times, 12/08/05
By noon, a small crowd gathers at the roadside. They peer down into the wide, shallow pit where Angel Fuentes leads a team of young scientists crouched on their hands and knees, carefully unearthing the bones and secrets of Spain's wartime past.
Maxima Perez, 71, clutching a black handbag, is waiting for the body of her father, Pablo, to be exhumed. "Que pena, que pena," she says over and over, holding a hand to the side of her face as if to contain her pain. Fernando Garcia Hernando expects to find the remains of his grandfather, a man he never knew. Diego Pena cradles his infant son and also wonders about an unknown grandfather; he asks many questions.
The dead here have been buried for more than half a century.
They are among tens of thousands of Spaniards executed by Fascist forces loyal to Gen. Francisco Franco in the country's 1936-39 civil war. They were tossed into unmarked mass graves and ignored for decades, first out of fear and shame and later, after Franco's death in 1975 and the advent of democracy, out of a politically expedient desire to move beyond the past.
"We have lived a collective historical and political amnesia," said Fuentes, the archeologist. "An imposed amnesia."
Now some families of the leftist victims have decided to end the silence, recover their dead, give them proper burials and restore dignity to their memories. They're being led by the grandchildren of the victims, who have the distance and freedom to explore areas their parents were terrified to touch.
The families' efforts are part of a wider willingness in Spain, finally, to examine the Franco regime and confront the brutalities of the period -- in museum exhibits, bestselling books, a flurry of movies and street rallies.
For the first time, the Spanish government is on board.
Since the last years of the 20th century, nations such as Bosnia-Herzegovina and Guatemala have used the exhumation of mass graves to pursue justice and as a catalyst for exploring the ways war tore apart their societies. But Spain, despite its position as a modern Western European country, has taken a long time to reach this point of historic self-analysis.
It wasn't until 2000 that sufficient time had passed for any action. But even as the Spanish parliament condemned Franco's fascism, the right-wing government continued to finance the Franco Foundation, run by the late dictator's daughter.
The election this year of a Socialist government raised hope for real movement in the quest for historical truth: Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero is the grandson of a man who also was shot to death by Franco loyalists.
This fall, the government created a commission, presided over by First Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega, and provided about $1.3 million for exhumations and reparations to victims of Franco's regime.
"Possibly, the ghosts are beginning to disappear," said Emilio Silva, who founded the Assn. for the Recovery of Historical Memory. His organization has exhumed 41 mass graves, with a total of more than 300 bodies, all over the country with the help of only volunteers and private donations. Activists estimate there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, more hidden communal graves from Spain's civil war.
Silva, a journalist, became involved when he embarked on a search for the clandestine grave of his grandfather, who was shot to death by Fascists with 12 other men in October 1936. Silva was able to disinter the remains of his grandfather and rebury them in a proper cemetery last year; in the meantime, he came into contact with hundreds of other families yearning to find their loved ones.
After a few weeks of digging at Villamayor de los Montes, 110 miles north of Madrid, 44 bodies were recovered. They were found lined up neatly, side by side, head first, feet first, head first. Fuentes, the lead archeologist, said investigators also found ammunition casings.
"This is about being able to close a painful part of [the families'] lives," said Fuentes, who teaches at Madrid's Autonomous University. "We try to say who died and how they died."
[Editor's Note: The original piece is much longer. Please see the Los Angeles Times' website for more.]
Exhumation of Garcia Lorca Engenders Controversy
Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times, 12/08/04
Where is my grave?
In my tail, answered the Sun.
In my throat, answered the Moon.
-- Federico Garcia Lorca
Lorca, Spain's greatest 20th century poet, was dragged from a home here in the dead of an August night in 1936, and shot dead by Fascist forces loyal to Gen. Francisco Franco.
The bodies of Garcia Lorca and three other men killed with him -- two bullfighters and a teacher with a limp -- were heaved into a low ditch, in a valley near an olive grove north of Granada, and left there.
It was barely a month into the Spanish Civil War, and thousands of people would meet a similar fate.
Given his fame and the global admiration that has been accorded Garcia Lorca, he would seem the consummate symbol for a new movement to locate the hidden graves of Franco's victims and provide proper burials.
Proponents, including relatives of the men killed with Garcia Lorca, are seeking exhumation of the long-hidden grave.
But the family of the celebrated poet objects.
In a letter to the public, the family said it agreed that "no stone should go unturned" in finding out the truth about atrocities committed during the war and under the dictatorship that lasted four decades, until Franco's death in 1975.
In the case of Garcia Lorca, however, the family argued that the facts were sufficiently well known, making an exhumation unnecessary.
"We are not going to discover new facts whose importance justifies the violence of disinterring the dead," the poet's niece Laura Garcia-Lorca de los Rios said in an interview.
Part of the lore surrounding Garcia Lorca is that his burial place is a mystery. In fact, the family and most experts agree on the general location, a ravine in the shadow of the Sierra Nevada near the village of Viznar, about five miles from Granada. It was a killing field, historians say, littered with the corpses of hundreds of people.
In a sense, the family argues, the mass grave itself is a fitting monument, a place of natural beauty that bears witness to an awful chapter of repression and political murder.
But others maintain that it takes someone of Garcia Lorca's stature to finally bring attention to Franco's victims, the vast majority of whom were buried anonymously, their families left to decades of uncertainty and shame. By contrast, pro-Franco dead have been honored by memorials and statues paid for by a string of governments.
In addition, say those favoring exhumation, recovering the poet's remains would complete the historical record and answer questions such as whether he was tortured.
Garcia Lorca ran afoul of the franquistas because he was homosexual and an intellectual and he wrote with a social conscience.
Garcia Lorca's work was infused with his love for Andalucia, its landscapes, people and history. He evoked earthy, sensual images of Gypsies and of sexual repression. After his death, his books were publicly burned and his plays banned until the 1970s.
"The past is very violent, and very recent here," Garcia-Lorca de los Rios said.
"It lives and it continues living. We have found an effective way to talk about the past, but it never ceases to be a fresh sorrow."
Prison Notebooks Reveal Mandela's Pain
Unsigned, Courier Mail (Queensland, Australia), 12/08/04
The contents of two notebooks written by former South African president Nelson Mandela when he was jailed on Robben Island have been revealed.
The letters were made public at the same time as news broke of Mr Mandela's only surviving son being in a critical condition in a Johannesburg hospital.
A spokeswoman from the Nelson Mandela Foundation said Makgatho Mandela's illness was a private family matter and would not reveal any details.
The notebooks contain 70 letters written to family and friends between 1969 and 1971, South Africa's Sunday Times newspaper reported.
In the letters, Mr Mandela reveals how much he missed those people closest to him.
Retired police officer Donald Card presented the former president with the two black-jacketed notebooks in September.
Mr Mandela wrote the letters during the early years of his sentence on the prison island, off the coast of Cape Town.
In one letter dated April 1971, he writes: "There are times when my heart almost stops beating, slowed down by heavy loads of longing. I would love to bathe once more in the waters of Umbashe, as I did at the beginning of 1935."
He also writes of how much he thinks about where he grew up in the former Transkei.
In one notebook there is a National Geographic picture of a dancing woman from the Andaman Islands near India.
Mr Mandela said he kept the picture because he saw it as a celebration of life.
The notebooks and their contents have been verified by University of Fort Hare historian Cornelius Thomas.
Verne Harris, from the Nelson Mandela Foundation, said Mr Mandela was a conscientious record-keeper and always wrote drafts of letters in his notebooks.
Mr Harris said Mr Mandela had no recollection of the letters, but did recognise his handwriting when shown the notebooks.
"He did not remember them at all . . . and so we went through a process of verification and even called in (another)," Mr Harris is reported as saying in The Sunday Times.
"We compared the handwriting with other documents he had written during that time."
In the notebooks, Mr Mandela writes of his heartache when his mother and his eldest son, Madiba Thembekile, both died between 1968 and 1969 and he was forbidden from attending their funerals.
Madiba was killed in a car crash.
Under apartheid, Mr Card had to sift through material from political prisoners checking for coded messages and censoring correspondence.
He decided to keep the the notebooks, which otherwise would have landed in a garbage heap, and he found them in his home earlier this year on top of a wardrobe.
The letters were written in English to ensure quick clearance by prison officials, who checked all letters to and from Robben Island prisoners.
Mr Card had given evidence against Mr Mandela during his trial in 1963.
Mr Card said he did not have the heart to sell the books, now valued at about $3.5 million.
"I obviously could have sold them but they are not mine," Mr Card said.
"I was a cop and honesty was the prime thing.
"I could not go and become a crook and sell something that was not mine."
LANDMARKS
1918: Nelson Mandela born in the Eastern Cape.
1956: Charged with high treason, but charges dropped.
1964: Charged again, sentenced to life.
1990: Freed from prison.
1993: Wins Nobel Peace Prize.
1994: Elected South Africa's first black president.
1999: Steps down as leader.
9/11 As Window To Understanding 12/7
Joel Rubin and David Haldane, Los Angeles Times, 12/7/04
To most sophomores in Cora Peck's history class at Irvine High School, today is just another Tuesday.
There are no ceremonies scheduled. No moments of silence planned. And only a few students recalled the date as the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which drew the U.S. into World War II.
When you're a teenager, 1941 may as well be ancient history.
Perhaps it's paradoxical, then, that while the events of this date 63 years ago mean little to Peck's students, they do believe that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, have afforded them an unexpected window on Pearl Harbor Day's importance to past generations.
"It has more significance to us now than it did before," said Bryan Beard, 16. "We've had 9/11. We know what it means to be attacked."
Indeed, while Dec. 7 continues to pack an emotional wallop for aging World War II veterans and other Americans who lived through it, most students view the event through the prism of what they've learned about it in class or gleaned from movies. That evolution, historians and educators agree, is largely to be expected.
"Pearl Harbor is one of the events that continues to have some saliency," said Sam Wineburg, a professor of education at Stanford University who specializes in how students understand history.
"But can students tell you its significance? What preceded it? The historical context? Probably not. Americans, especially American kids, get their history through the screen, not through books."
Yet recent events, perhaps enhanced by the visual poignancy of live television, appear to have given the Japanese sneak attack renewed import.
Jack Hammett -- an 84-year-old retired Navy man, Pearl Harbor attack survivor and founder of the Freedom Committee of Orange County, which sends combat veterans to lecture students on history -- understands this. That's why, whenever possible, he asks his 49-year-old daughter, Deborah, who was five blocks from the World Trade Center when the second plane hit on Sept. 11 and spent three days sifting through the rubble, to accompany him on his visits to schools.
"We sort of do a ham-and-egg thing," he said. "We draw a parallel, equating Pearl Harbor to the Twin Towers."
The result, Hammett said, is that many students gain a renewed appreciation of what previously may have seemed personally irrelevant and historically remote.
"Pearl Harbor was the first time in modern history that America was hit in its own territory," he said. "It's a history lesson about what it was like to bring a slumbering nation awake."
That message has not been lost on at least one of Peck's former students: Kenton Chen, 16, who is now a junior.
The attack on Pearl Harbor, he said, "seems like a Sept. 11 of the past. We don't have any emotional connection to it like our grandparents' generation would have.
"In the same way, today we [remember] 9/11 and ... I guess I wouldn't expect [future generations] to feel the same way that we do."
For Charles Myles, 82, who spent much of Dec. 7, 1941, on the deck of a Navy ship in Pearl Harbor pulling bodies from the water, the lessons of the two events decades apart are one and the same: Be prepared.
"I'll probably put the flag up," he said of his plans for a quiet, non-public commemoration today.
"There've been so many important things that have happened since -- including the attacks on the trade towers -- that it kind of draws attention away from the past."
Nonetheless, Myles said, those who survived Pearl Harbor will never forget it. And those paying attention to history won't either.
"Always keep America alert," he said, "because you just never know."
Henry VIII's Romantic Side Found In Margins Of Books
Unsigned, The Independent (London), 12/07/04
Clandestine love notes between King Henry VIII and his future wife, Anne Boleyn, have been discovered in the margins of books found during the first comprehensive investigation of the king's library.
In a 16th-century Book of Hours, Henry wrote, in French, to the then woman of his desires: "If you remember me according to my love in your prayers I shall scarcely be forgotten, since I am your Henry Rex for ever." Anne replied in doggerel English verse: "Be daly prove you shall me fynde/To be to you bothe lovynge and kynde."
But the investigation, published as The Books of Henry VIII and his Wives by the British Library yesterday, also shows the king's library had a practical purpose in affairs of state. Henry VIII quoted extensively from his books to defend his actions in seeking divorce and declaring himself the head of the Church in England.
Henry's personal annotations to Augustinus de Ancona's Compendium concerning Ecclesiastical Power, for example, reveal some of his thinking. Next to a passage that reads: "First, therefore, it must be said that to have several wives was not against nature in the ancient father", Henry notes: "Ergo nec in nobis." Therefore neither in ours.
The book, by Professor James Carley, has a preface by the historian David Starkey and is the result of two decades of research into the collection.
Efforts To Recognize 'Rosie the Riveters' Picks Up Momentum
Jeffry Scott, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 12/7/04
The nation was at war and Eloise Strom, a young mother of two young boys, rose every morning before dark and rode an hour and a half in a car pool with five other women to work at the aircraft plant in Marietta.
At the end of a 10-hour day, she would hurry home to fight the war on another front: the grocery store.
It was World War II. Food was rationed. First come, first served. Get there late and there would be no flour, no sugar, no milk, no coffee. No hamburger for dinner tonight.
"It seemed like everything was hard in those days," recalled Strom, a spry 90-year-old who lives in Buckhead and worked in the old Bell Bomber plant.
On the 63rd anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, more efforts are being made to honor the 6 million American women who worked in war factories and, regardless of what their specific jobs might have been, became known as Rosie the Riveters.
The national movement to remember the riveters happens to be based in Georgia, home of the 1,400-member American Rosie the Riveter Association, at the Little White House in Warm Springs.
The "riveters" not only provided the weapons and sustenance to win the war, they also altered the fabric of American life. The war was the first time most had worked outside the home and the first time they wore trousers, not dresses, in the workplace.
Rosies prompted the women's liberation movement two decades later the way that black Americans fighting in World War II set the stage for the civil rights movement, historians say.
That it took until 1998 before a Rosie group was formed is amazing, said Sadie Holt, the 73-year-old president of the Georgia chapter of the Rosie the Riveter Association.
"Most of the women went back home after the war, and returning soldiers took their jobs, so they were kind of forgotten," Holt said. "They went back to living their lives and raising families. But they need to be remembered."
Holt was an 11-year-old girl living in the Florida Panhandle when the war broke out. She did her part as a volunteer, helping with paper and scrap metal drives.
"We'd squeeze the toothpaste tubes, which were made of aluminum then, until we got all the toothpaste out, because there was a shortage of toothpaste too," she recalled. "Then we would recycle the tubes."
Carol Cain, a LaGrange middle school teacher, sparked the idea of forming a commemorative group after she performed as Rosie the Riveter for an event at the Little White House commemorating women war workers.
"I thought it was going to be a one-time show. Now look what it has turned into," said Cain, 44, whose grandfather worked at the Bell Bomber plant and whose grandmother was a volunteer who rolled bandages for the Red Cross.
For her performance, Cain, dressed in overalls and work boots, sings the "Rosie the Riveter" song made famous during the war by singer Kay Kyser ("That little frail can do/more than a male can do"), then tells real-life Rosie the Riveter stories and takes questions from the audience.
With children, she said, the most astounding revelation is that women did not wear trousers to work, only dresses, before Rosie. "That always gets a 'whaaaaaat?' " she said.
Frances Carter, the director and founder of the organization, said the greatest hope is to establish a Rosie museum, perhaps in Washington,, but little progress had been made so far.
"We're still trying to build membership," she said.
Strom hasn't joined because she never thought of herself as a riveter. "I was just doing what everybody else was doing, a part of the war effort," she said. "And I worked in an office, not on the assembly line."
The Bell Bomber plant, which eventually became Lockheed Martin, employed 28,263 at its peak --- about 10,000 of them women.
The factory produced 668 B-29 bombers, which were used mainly in the Pacific Theater to bomb Japan because they had longer range than the B-17s used by the Air Force in Europe.
The plant not only reshaped the work force --- workers made as much as three times the minimum wage then, which was 40 cents an hour --- but it also transformed Marietta from a sleepy town of 8,000 into a booming industrial center.
Eleven years ago, Strom's son, Coy Short, inspired by his mother's work and the role of B-29s during the war, decided to find one of the old bombers, restore it and return it to Lockheed for display.
He and a few partners located an abandoned B-29 in bad shape in Florence, S.C., but they didn't have enough financial backing to convince the government to bring it back to Georgia. So Short's mother lent him $10,000.
In 1997, in a dedication ceremony at Dobbins Air Reserve Base attended by Gov. Zell Miller, they unveiled the restored bird, which now had a new work of bomber nose art: A painting of a woman in a white swimsuit and the name "Sweet Eloise."
Strom says she never got the $10,000 back she lent her son. "If they needed another $10,000, I'd give it to them," she said. "That was one of the happiest days of my life."
Was Twentieth-Century Australian Racism A Myth?
Keith Windschuttle, The Australian, 12/06/04
Unless they have taken a university course in history in recent decades, most Australians would be surprised to learn they inhabit one of the world's most shamefully racist countries.
The academic consensus today is that the White Australia Policy -- a series of restrictions on non-white immigrants dating from the gold rushes of the 1850s and culminating in the commonwealth's Immigration Restriction Bill of 1901 -- made this country the moral equivalent of South Africa under apartheid. Some historians even label Australia at Federation one of the "herrenvolk democracies" -- a direct comparison with the "master race" nationalism of Nazi Germany.
Moreover, the White Australia Policy purportedly lives on today. The near-unanimous opinion of an academic history conference in December 2001 was that John Howard's border protection measures tapped into deeply embedded sentiments of "blood and race" to ensure his election victory that year. "One hundred years after the passage of the Immigration Restriction Act," quipped conference speaker Sean Brawley, "earlier reports of the demise of the White Australia Policy were premature."
Other prominent historians who support this interpretation include Henry Reynolds who claims the 1901 bill represented "the messianic pursuit of racial purity". Andrew Markus, Richard Broome, Richard White and others allege the dominant racial concept in 19th-century Australia was social Darwinism, the most brutal of all the theories about race that emerged at the time.
This thesis arose on the radical fringe of Australian historiography in the 1960s. Lacking any effective criticism, it has gradually made its way from one more extreme position to another. Today, the interpretation has become mainstream and university and high school teachers repeat it unchallenged.
But anyone who looks at the evidence with a sceptical eye will find the case so exaggerated it defies credibility. In their enthusiasm to play politics, academics have misread their culture and misunderstood their history.
A more plausible scenario is the following:
From 1788 onwards, the Australian colonies were always multiracial. As well as Aborigines, many non-white people from across the British Empire walked the streets of the early colonies. From the outset, Sydney had highly visible populations of Maoris, Tahitians, Indians, Ceylonese, American negroes, West Indians, and Africans from Cape Town and Mauritius. At least 1000 of the convicts sent to Australia before 1850 were not white. From the 1850s to the 1890s the Chinese constituted the second biggest foreign-born population in Australia, exceeded only by those born in the British Isles.
In the 19th century, the principal objections to non-white immigrants came from trade unions and labour movement politicians. They objected to Chinese immigrants not primarily because of their race but because many were "coolies", indentured labourers recruited in their home country at wages a fraction of Australian market rates, which left them an impoverished underclass. The union campaign against coolie labour was at the time a progressive movement to extend the freedom and dignity of labour, in the same mould as those to end black slavery and convict transportation.
Apart from two incidents on the goldfields in 1857 and 1861, there was no serious mob violence in Australia perpetrated by whites against non-whites. In both of the goldfields cases, colonial governments defended the Chinese victims, compensated them for their losses and took action against the white perpetrators. By far the most violent race riots in Australian history took place in the early 20th century when on three separate occasions the Japanese population of Broome took up arms against the Koepangers or Timorese, with fatalities on both sides. Elsewhere in northern Australia, there were substantial Asian populations in the 19th century, but no incidents of racial violence.
The Melanesian labourers who came from the New Hebrides and the Solomon Islands to work in Queensland's early sugar industry were not kidnapped and were never slaves. The familiar story of Kanaka "blackbirding" is a myth. Nonetheless, the commonwealth's decision to deport the majority of Pacific Islanders between 1904 and 1908 was a genuine injustice to a largely assimilated population.
From the 1900s until World War II, the main focus of the White Australia Policy shifted from China to Japan. Over this period, Japan was an aggressively nationalist and rapidly expanding imperial power in East and Southeast Asia, which had established population enclaves in Broome and on Australian territory in Torres Strait. Australian concerns about Japanese imperial ambitions were far from the neurotic anxiety mocked by today's historians. They constituted a sober recognition of the strategic realities of the Asia-Pacific region post-1905.
Mainstream Australian nationalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was not based on race and bore no parallels to the ideologies that emerged in Germany and some other European countries. Instead of racial nationalism, Australian identity was based on a civic patriotism, which encouraged loyalty not to race or ethnicity but to Australia's liberal democratic political institutions. Australians also owed loyalty to the British Empire, which specifically rejected the notion of hierarchies of race.
The greatest enthusiasts for White Australia, and the genuine racists of the time, were the members of the late 19th century republican Left, especially its writers, artists and other intellectuals. Their strongest opponents were traditional liberals, the purported reactionaries of their era who supported free enterprise against the growing power of the state.
Rather than the widely accepted theory claimed by historians, social Darwinism was something few Australians at the time had ever heard of. Its adherents were a small group of intellectuals at the extremes of opinion. Instead, the most familiar explanations of racial and cultural difference derived from the Scottish Enlightenment, which argued that the inferiority of some societies and cultures derived from the stage of history they occupied and was changeable, rather than grounded in biology and permanent.
Modern historians have seriously misrepresented the debate in the commonwealth Parliament over the 1901 Immigration Restriction Bill. While Labor leader Chris Watson and Protectionist Prime Minister Edmund Barton both made overtly racist arguments, the majority of parliamentary opinion was not "pervaded with ideas of race and blood", as historians claim. Two-thirds of the parliamentarians wanted to exclude Asian immigrants primarily because they would undermine the standard of living of Australian working people. Of almost equal concern was their fear that the creation of a racially based political underclass would undermine democratic egalitarianism. The Labor Party was most in favour of the bill and the Free Trade Party its strongest opponent.
Because Australian political identity was based on civic patriotism rather than racial nationalism, the White Australia Policy could be readily discarded once the political decision was made. Immigration restrictions were gradually liberalised, starting with the Menzies government in the mid-1950s and completed by the Whitlam government, with Coalition support, in 1975. Ending the policy required no cultural crisis and was accomplished by liberal politicians from both sides of parliament whose values were similar to those of the 1901 bill's original critics. The proof that Australia wore the policy lightly was the ease with which it discarded it.
Overall, the White Australia Policy had aspects that were both reactionary and progressive, discriminatory and humane. But its history shows no deep-seated racism has ever lurked permanently at the core of Australian culture.
Queensland Canefield Trade a 'Myth Perpetuated'
Peter Shadbolt, The Australian, 12/6/04
Historian Keith Windschuttle has turned his critical eye on the 19th-century trade in Kanakas to work the Queensland cane fields and has concluded it is a myth.
"And it's still on the school curriculum and the ABC's website, even though it has been disproved," Mr Windschuttle said.
Contrary to oral histories about the practice known as 'blackbirding', a term borrowed from the African slave trade that referred to the press-ganging of Melanesian islanders to work the cane fields, Mr Windschuttle claims the trade in slaves was exaggerated.
"There were a small number of cases around 1860, but it ceased soon after," he said.
"The government didn't want any suggestion there was a slave trade in Australia and launched several royal commissions into it.
"In the history of the labour movement, it had to be the most bureaucratic labour trade in the history of the world."
Not content with questioning the historical accounts of the massacre of Tasmanian Aborigines, Mr Windschuttle's new thesis is unlikely to win him fans in academia or in Queensland, where the descendants of Kanaka cane workers still live.
"That bloke doesn't know what he's talking about," said president of the Australian South Sea Island United Council, Joe Leo. "My grandfather was blackbirded and both my wife's grandparents were blackbirded. Call it indentured labour if you like, it was still a form of slavery."
He said oral history and documentation showed that while early arrivals from Vanuatu volunteered to become contract labourers on the cane fields, word had got back to the islands about the miserable pay and conditions in Australia.
"Some of them weren't paid in three years so when the boats came back, our people would run away and that's when blackbirding began."
Mr Leo said it was common practice to entice islanders on to ships where they would be then imprisoned in the hold.
"The stories we got from our people -- and this has been confirmed on Pentecost Island where our mob are from -- are that people would kick up a big ruckus down in the hold and then the blackbirders would kill a couple of them just to shut them up."
Mr Windschuttle's revisionist take on the history of blackbirding -- once condemned by Mark Twain in one of his travelogues -- is contained in his latest publication The White Australia Policy, to be launched today.
The book sets out to demolish the idea that the White Australia Policy, which dominated immigration policy from 1901 until 1973, was a piece of racist legislation that put Australia on a par with South Africa.
Ronald Reagan: Budget Cutter
Veronique de Rugy, at AEI Online:
Everyone talks about the Reagan tax cuts, yet there is more to President Reagan's legacy than tax cuts. There is also his courageous and largely unappreciated willingness to fight for reductions in domestic spending.
Ronald Reagan sought--and won--more spending cuts than any other modern president. He is the only president in the last forty years to cut inflation-adjusted nondefense outlays, which fell by 9.7 percent during his first term (see table 1). Sadly, during his second term, President Reagan did not manage to cut nondefense discretionary spending, and it grew by 0.2 percent. But his record is still quite remarkable if compared to other administrations. Every other president since Lyndon Johnson serving a full four-year term did not even do as well as Reagan in his less- impressive second term.
President Reagan understood economics, and he knew an unjustified economic subsidy when he saw one. He believed that the federal government had usurped private, state, and local responsibilities, and consequently he thought that most department's budgets should be cut. Table 2 shows how many agencies'
budgets were cut (in real terms) during each presidential term going back to the one full term President Johnson served. These interesting facts are revealing of the president's philosophy.
President Reagan cut the budget of eight agencies out of fifteen during his first term, and ten out of fifteen during his second term.
President Clinton cut the budget of nine out of fifteen agencies during his first term but cut none during his second term.
President George W. Bush has cut none of the agencies' budgets during his first term.
It is also interesting to see which president cut what and how much. Table 3 shows the change in real spending for each agency during each full presidential term served since President Johnson. Here are some other interesting facts about President Reagan:
President Reagan is the only president to have cut the budget of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in one of his terms (a total of 40.1 percent during his second term).
President Reagan is the only president to have cut the budget of the Department of Transportation. He cut it by 10.5 percent during his first term and by 7.5 percent during his second term.
During his first term in office, President Reagan cut the real budget of the Department of Education by 18.6 percent, while President Nixon increased it (that is the education part of what was then the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare) by 19.1 percent. That budget increased by 22.2 percent under Bush 41 and by 38.5 percent under Carter. Our current president has increased it by a whooping 67.6 percent.
Reagan managed to cut the budget of the Department of Commerce by 29 percent in constant dollars during his first term and by 3 percent during his second one. President Clinton by contrast increased the department's budget by 24 percent in his first term and then by 96.7 percent in his second term.
President Reagan cut the real budget of the Department of Agriculture by 24 percent during his second term in office. President Reagan never cut the budgets of the departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, Justice, or State.
America Was Born in Paris
Susan Spano, in the LAT (12-5-04):
Author Daniel Jouve likes to peer through an iron fence outside the Hotel de Coislin in Paris, where Benjamin Franklin emerged as a citizen of an independent nation. It was Feb. 6, 1778, and across the Atlantic, American colonists were fighting a bloody revolution that would last five more years.
But in terms of foreign relations, the United States was born that day in Paris, when Franklin, his diplomatic colleagues and a representative of King Louis XVI signed the Treaties of Friendship, Commerce and Alliance, making France the first nation in the world to recognize America's sovereignty.
That explains the title of Jouve's book, "Paris: Birthplace of the U.S.A.," which guides tourists to 23 sites in the City of Light bearing witness to the indispensable support France gave America in its pursuit of independence.
Alice Jouve, Daniel's wife and one of the book's co-authors, said in an interview that America wasn't organized and had no money until the French started sending battle-hardened soldiers and funds to the insurgent Colonies. In 1781, the French Royal Navy under Adm. Francois-Joseph-Paul de Grasse held off British warships at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay while French and American forces whipped the enemy at Yorktown, Va., a decisive battle in the War of Independence.
I like to remember such facts when I think of strained relations between America and France over foreign policy. Daniel, who is French, and Alice, who was born in Boston, reminded me that our countries had been at odds over the war in Iraq for just two years, a blink in time compared with 225 years of mostly cordial relations.
The alliance between France and America that Ben Franklin signed at the Hotel de Coislin in 1778 guaranteed America would never reconcile with Britain as long as France remained at war with its testy neighbor across the English Channel. But American diplomats did just that, signing a preliminary separate peace with England in 1782.
When I asked Daniel Jouve why the French didn't retaliate for this American betrayal, he smiled and said, "We'd lent you a lot of money to fight the Revolution and wanted to make sure we got it back."
Daniel Jouve, who has the frame of Charles de Gaulle and the high color of Santa Claus, has long been interested in French-American history. Diminutive Alice Jouve received a degree in French literature at the Sorbonne in Paris but returned home to teach French. She met Daniel in Boston while he was studying at Harvard Business School.
The Jouves, who live in Paris, have been married nearly 40 years and have three grown children, all of whom live in the United States.
Alice designs and leads historical-themed tours of France for American universities. She told me, unequivocally, that the French love Americans, though visitors find that out only if they meet French people.
Daniel, who runs an executive recruiting firm, said sometimes even he couldn't stand the narrow-mindedness of the French. "When a French person starts a sentence with 'les Americains,' " he said, "I know whatever is coming is likely to be wrong."...
Who Won the French and Indian War?
Len Barcousky, in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (12-4-04):
When in 1754 the French built Fort Duquesne, a sturdy log fort at the Forks of the Ohio, the British perceived a deadly threat to their coast-hugging colonies.
But what seemed like French aggression to royal governors in Williamsburg and Philadelphia was more a panicky defensive move, according to historian Jonathan Dull.
Dull, who has been editing the papers of Benjamin Franklin for the past 27 years, was one of a dozen speakers recently at a French and Indian War seminar on "Cultures in Conflict." The event drew more than 100 history buffs, re-enactors, park rangers, historians and journalists to Shenandoah University in Winchester, Va. The location was appropriate. Winchester was where George Washington placed his headquarters for overseeing a chain of frontier forts built to protect British colonists from Indian raiders.
Overreacting to the presence of a handful of English traders in the area around modern-day Pittsburgh, the French government had concluded that the British were seeking to drive a wedge between its territories in Canada and Louisiana. They began to build a series of forts in the Ohio Valley. " France went to war to save Canada," Dull said.
And what a conflict it became. Eventually spreading to Europe, Asia and Africa as the Seven Years' War, it is often called the first world war.
Control of the land around what became Pittsburgh was a prime objective in the early years of the struggle, which began 250 years ago. At what is now called Jumonville Glen in Fayette County, Washington, wearing a British uniform and nominally commanding militia and Indian troops, killed or captured all but one member of a French force sent out from Fort Duquesne.
Understandably, that hostile act angered the French who sent out a larger army and forced Washington's surrender at Fort Necessity.
The classic, and maybe only, joke about the conflict is: "Who won the French and Indian War? The French or the Indians?" The reality, of course, is that the war in North America embroiled French and British regulars, French-speaking Canadians, Colonial militiamen and almost a dozen Native American tribes. And it was this larger cast of characters that were the subjects of attention in Winchester.
"Who won?" turns out to be a really complicated question.
At first blush it seems like the British won. They claimed Canada, Florida and some rich Caribbean islands as spoils of war. They gained nominal control of the Ohio Valley, although they had to make vague promises, never kept, to their Indian allies to keep white settlers on the east side of the Alleghenies.
What the British soon found was that protecting a worldwide territorial empire was very expensive. That meant new taxes, and those new taxes produced restive colonials. While American farmers and merchants saw themselves as full partners in a crusade to defeat the French, the short-sighted British government treated them as ungrateful, greedy subjects.
When the war started, the Iroquois Confederacy, based in upstate New York, controlled a huge swathe of North America. Its tribal council had a 150-year tradition of successful diplomacy with the British and French. For much of the war, its component tribes stayed neutral.
War's end found their influence in the Ohio Valley reduced but their own villages mostly untouched. With the departure of the French, however, they had lost much of their bargaining power. They became overly dependent on the English Indian agent Sir William Johnson for trade goods and gifts. "Not warfare, but welfare marked the end of Iroquois autonomy," explained Timothy Shannon, an associate professor of history at Gettysburg College....
Why Academics Were Right to Pick Clement Attlee as the Best Prime Minister of the Last 100 Years
Anthony Sampson, in the London Independent (12-4-04):
Does a prime minister today really have to say something every day, to have a policy about everything, to keep flying round the world, to appear charismatic always? Wouldn't he be more effective if he said less, and kept in the background?
My question follows the results of the survey this week by academics at the University of Leeds, who asked 139 historians and political scientists to give marks to the most successful prime ministers over the past century. They reckoned the most important qualities were leadership and sound judgement. But they put the two most obviously charismatic leaders, Churchill and Lloyd George, second and third.
At the top was Clement Attlee, the post-war Labour premier who has always been seen as the most laconic and least charismatic of them all. It might seem ironic that Attlee, the "little man", the "sheep in sheep's clothing" who was the butt of so many of Churchill's insults, should end up more highly rated than Churchill, the heroic victor of war.
Yet there were good reasons, it seems to me, behind the choice of Attlee. The demands of wartime required charismatic leaders like Churchill and Lloyd George, who could inspire with their images and words: when Attlee (who was Churchill's deputy in wartime) was asked how Churchill won the war, he said: "He talked about it."
But peacetime, in many ways, requires more subtle leadership and judgement; and by remarkable good chance, as well as good judgement by the electorate, Britain found the right leaders in both war and peace.
Attlee, for a few years after 1945, successfully kept together a team of powerful but difficult ministers - including Herbert Morrison, Stafford Cripps, Ernest Bevin, and Aneurin Bevan - who successfully transformed Britain from a wartime to a peacetime economy, nationalised most public services and set the basis of the post-war settlement.
He understood how to delegate, and leave ministers to themselves. He liked to repeat, particularly about Bevin, "If you have a good dog, don't bark yourself". He never worried about his prima donnas taking the stage, for he was quite able to handle them, or put them down, off stage. He had no cronies, no favourites.
He was very decisive when required. When President Truman refused to share the American atom bomb with Britain, he insisted on Britain developing its own bomb in the strictest secrecy, concealing the cost in the budget. When Herbert Morrison as foreign secretary wanted to use force to protect British oil in Iraq when it was nationalised, he firmly said no.
And he knew how to get things done. John Freeman, the last surviving member of his government - who later became ambassador to Washington and is still very active in London - remembers Attlee as a master of the Whitehall machine, who knew all about paperwork, parliament and, above all, about timing....
Australia's Version of the Boston Tea Party?
Kathy Marks, in the London Independent (12-4-04):
IT WAS Australia's version of the Boston Tea Party when a ragtag band of gold-miners rose against their British colonial masters in protest at unfair taxation, igniting a chain of events that heralded the birth of democracy and independence.
Now a country in perpetual quest for a national identity is seizing on that short-lived rebellion, known as the Eureka Stockade, as the embodiment of Australia's defining moment.
Yesterday was the 150th anniversary of an incident that was largely forgotten until the 1970s but has gradually gained prominence as Australians search for national myths and symbols. It is being marked by a fortnight of celebrations including a dawn march tomorrow, numerous re-enactments, an art exhibition and a music festival.
But the bloody events of 3 December 1854, which culminated in the massacre of 30 miners, continue to be hotly debated. Passions rage about the Southern Cross flag, which, according to legend, was hand-stitched by women on the goldfields from their petticoats and was raised above the stockade in defiance of the British.
Some Australians are calling for it to be adopted as the national ensign, replacing a flag that still features the Union Flag. But there is ambivalence towards the Southern Cross, which has been commandeered, variously, by militant unions, right-wing supremacists and republicans. The Prime Minister, John Howard, a staunch monarchist, refused to allow it to fly above Parliament House this week, and is not attending the anniversary celebrations.
The violence at Eureka goldfield in Victoria, near the city of Ballarat, was the country's first and only armed uprising against colonial tyranny. A group of 120 angry miners made a stand against crippling taxes enforced by an over-zealous police force. They built a ramshackle blockade, raised the Southern Cross and confronted red-coated government troops.
Soldiers stormed the camp two days later, easily overwhelming the poorly armed rebels, who had come from 19 countries to seek their fortune. But victory was achieved, albeit at high cost.
Courts in Victoria refused to convict 13 men charged with high treason. Mining licence fees were scrapped, miners were given the vote and the colony acquired a democratically elected parliament.
The American author, Mark Twain, said: "It Eureka was a strike for liberty, a struggle for principle, a stand against injustice and oppression; another instance of a victory won by a battle lost."
But as Australians celebrate the 150th anniversary, debate is raging about the significance of the event. Some historians have dismissed it as an isolated protest by a self-interested mob. Others say the democratic reforms were already in train and would have taken place regardless of the stockade....
French Anti-Americanism ... And American Anti-Frenchism
John Thornhill, in the London Financial Times (Dec. 4, 2004):
Stroll into any Parisian bookstore and you will immediately appreciate one of France's great national obsessions: America. The display shelves are crammed with books on almost every aspect of American life. In the run-up to the US presidential election it seemed as though every opportunistic French writer with any connection to America had a theory to propound or a story to sell about the world's sole hyperpuissance. There has also been a ready market for translations of those American authors - such as Michael Moore, Paul Krugman and Kitty Kelley - who have been less than complimentary about their more rightwing compatriots....
In L'ennemi Americain, a fascinating genealogy of French anti- Americanism, Philippe Roger argues that the phenomenon is best viewed as a recurrent discourse that has periodically surfaced in French thought. At different times, anti-Americanism has been trumpeted by the hard right in French politics and then by the hard left. But this discourse has been constantly sustained by a corps of French intellectuals, for whom anti-Americanism has almost become a defining feature.
In Roger's view, this anti-Americanism remains something of an enigma: objectively, there is little reason why the French should have been so cool about the US for so long. The two countries share many of the same ideological values, boast similar political institutions, and have fought many of the same fights. The French general Lafayette helped American insurgents defeat their colonial British masters. The Americans have twice helped save France from the Germans. The French gave the Americans one of their most treasured national symbols: the Statue of Liberty. The Americans have sheltered France from the threat of the Soviet Union.
To bastardise Oscar Wilde, it seems as though France and the US are two nations divided by a common ideology.
According to Roger, French disillusion with the US set in soon after American independence, in spite of the fine rhetoric about the two sister republics' devotion to liberty and the rights of man. Talleyrand, the French foreign minister who visited the US in the 1790s, was an early and harsh critic. "America is completely English," he complained. With mounting frustration, he realised that the weight of past ties, a common language and national interests would more likely push the newly independent America towards Britain than France.
That early French disappointment with America crystallised into concern in the 1890s. It was then that the French public latched on to the image of the Yankee as a rampant capitalist at home and a budding imperialist abroad. The Yankee violently suppressed workers' rights in the US and aggressively pushed American products abroad as his economic might grew. "America is invading old Europe, she is flooding her, she is going to submerge her," wrote Joseph Emile-Barbier in 1893.
US successes in the Spanish-American war of 1898 only fuelled those fears. The capture of Cuba and the Philippines convinced French politicians of the "American peril", and also encouraged a sense of solidarity with a fellow European power. Not for the last time, the assertion of American interests abroad led to calls for a more unified European counterweight. Even the much-derided British were finally considered to be European.
The French were temporarily infatuated with President Woodrow Wilson for bringing the US into the first world war on their side. Two million people turned out to greet Wilson when in Paris to negotiate the settlement with Germany. But French politicians quickly grew to detest his stubborn rejection of their own views and his moralising ways. "Wilson speaks like Jesus Christ and conducts himself like Lloyd George," they grumbled in the corridors of Versailles.
Washington's subsequent retreat into isolationism and its lack of support for the League of Nations allowed another wave of anti- Americanism to wash over France in the late 1920s and 1930s. France's "philosopher-writers", many of whom came under the intellectual sway of Moscow, denounced the "American cancer", even though they remained almost wholly ignorant about the country. As Roger notes: "The US could be weighed and judged without ever having been visited."
Roger contends that France's distrust of the US was bound up with a sense of European decline after the collective madness of the first world war. Perhaps in fear of their own future, the French cavilled at the mechanisation of American society and the homogenising effects of its culture - in much the same way as anti- globalisation campaigners complain about the US today. The first French quota on US films was imposed as early as 1928....
If America's image has suffered at the hands of malign French intellectuals then it seems the US has finally caught on to the habit and is beginning to repay France in kind. Our Oldest Enemy, which has received glowing reviews in some rightwing American periodicals, amounts to little more than a polemical rant, with spurious claims to being a revisionist historical analysis.
The authors, a journalist and a historian, make little attempt to understand or explain why the French think the way they do; there are precious few references to any French sources in the bibliography. Instead, France's anti-Americanism is simply ascribed to resentment towards a more powerful and successful country.
Yet the book fairly bristles with a sense of outrage and self- righteousness that almost mirrors the worst of the French intellectual moralisers of the 1930s. In the authors' world view, it seems that an anti-American can be defined as anyone who opposed the war in Iraq. And they approvingly quote US congressman Roy Blunt as quipping: "Do you know how many Frenchmen it takes to defend Paris? It's not known. It's never been tried."
Blunt's "joke" must surely count as one of the most ignorant observations of all time - and it is shameful that the authors repeat it without comment. In the first world war alone, France lost 1.36 million soldiers - more than 3 per cent of her pre-war population. A similar scale of loss in the US today would mean the deaths of 9.5 million people. After such an experience, it is perhaps little wonder that French politicians concluded that war should only be the last resort. But that hardly makes them the "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" as pilloried by nationalistic American commentators.
The authors' reinterpretation of history continues with the claim that the French were just as much to blame as Hitler for starting the second world war, by imposing such an unjust settlement on Germany at Versailles. "From this perspective, the second world war was as much the product of French intransigence and vengefulness as it was the result of Hitler's lust for domination," the authors contend, in an extraordinary case of moral equivalence.
The French were also to blame for getting the Americans involved in Vietnam (as if US politicians were incapable of independent thought) as well as the massacres perpetrated by Pol Pot - for the reason that he studied in Paris for a while. And besides - horror of horrors! - the French were only acting in their national interests, rather than out of ideological sympathy, in supporting the infant American republic against the British....
Are we ever likely to emerge from this dismal cycle of name-calling and wilful mutual incomprehension? At times, it seems, some French and American intellectuals are only of one mind when believing the worst of each other.
Perhaps the "problem" with America from the French perspective, Roger observes, is that it is simultaneously too far away and too close. The French do not understand what makes the heart of America tick, while being exposed daily to its mass culture and its products. Conversely, in their current mindset, the Bush administration and its supporters have little interest in - or understanding of - a country that once considered itself to be the world's exceptional nation.
Roger's enigma seems unlikely to be unravelled anytime soon.
John Lukacs: When Did Liberalism Become a Dirty Word?
John Lukacs, in the Chronicle of higher Ed (subscribers only) (12-6-04):
The history of politics -- more, the history of human thinking -- is the history of words. Consider what happened to the word "liberal" in the United States.
It has become a Bad Word for millions of Americans. Confident that a large majority of the American people have come to regard, see, or hear the adjective "liberal" as definitely pejorative, the president of the United States found it proper and useful to affix it to his opponent in campaign speeches day after day, across this vast country. Meanwhile, his opponent thought it best not to identify himself as a liberal.
This accusatory label is reminiscent of the habit of some political speakers 50 years ago who declared that their opponents were "Communists" or "Communist sympathizers." Such a similarity, while not precise, is at least interesting, since the increasingly rapid fall of the popularity of "liberal" began just about 50 years ago. It may be worth tracing the curve of its descent.
In the year 1951 no less a demagogue than Sen. Joseph McCarthy still used "liberal" positively, at least on one occasion. In a speech he accused Gen. George C. Marshall and Secretary of State Dean Acheson of being part of "a conspiracy so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so bleak that, when it is finally exposed, its principles shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all liberal men." In that very year Sen. Robert A. Taft, idol of recent American conservatives, thought it necessary to state that he was not a conservative but "an old-fashioned liberal."
But lo and behold: By 1960 President Dwight D. Eisenhower would declare that he was a "conservative." A tectonic shift in the development of American thinking, and of politics, had begun.
I put "thinking" before "politics," since the history of the latter is often a slow -- and belated -- consequence of what is happening under the surface of publicity. In 1964 Barry M. Goldwater, the first outspokenly conservative candidate for the presidency, lost in a landslide. In 1980 Ronald Reagan, a self-designated conservative, won in a landslide. Thereafter, the congealing of the meaning of "liberal" as something bad and anti-American became one mark of the recent presidential campaign. But what was happening was something well beneath the verbal habits of electioneering.
"Conservative" was a word (and a political idea) that Americans eschewed for a long time. During the 19th century much of the political history of Europe and, in particular, of Britain was marked by the debate between conservatives and liberals. In the United States that was not so.
There was no Conservative Party in the United States. There were a few American authors and thinkers in whose writings and statements we can detect properly conservative elements; but they, too, with practically no exceptions, shied away from affixing the conservative label to themselves. Moreover, again practically with few or no exceptions, Americans believed in the concept of "progress"; indeed, it may be said that the more liberal a man was, the more he believed in and advocated progress. That American configuration, seen in politics in the association of liberalism and progressivism, prevailed until about the middle of the 20th century. In 1950 the cultural critic Lionel Trilling declared that the only dominant philosophy in America was the liberal one. In 1955 a Harvard professor, Louis Hartz, wrote that the perennial and prevalent American creed was liberalism.
They were wrong. Those reputable academics pursued the obvious (to quote Oscar Wilde) "with the enthusiasm of shortsighted detectives." Right before their eyes antiliberalism was rising fast. Within a few years antiliberals would adopt "conservative" as an adjective; they began to affix it to themselves proudly (and often imprecisely, but that is not the point). Symptoms and examples would fill a large book. Consider just one: In 1955 the first self-described "conservative" weekly of opinion appeared, The National Review, edited and directed by William F. Buckley Jr. It had few subscribers. Twenty-five years later its circulation was larger than that of The Nation and The New Republic combined. Its enthusiastic readership was the vanguard of the massive popular wave that propelled Ronald Reagan to power....
German Opera Honours Nazi Resisters
William Littler, The Toronto Star, 11-30-04
The names of Hans and his sister Sophie Scholl do not occupy much space in histories of World War II. Theirs was scarcely a moment in time.
Students at the University of Munich, they belonged to a small resistance movement known as White Rose. Caught distributing anti-Hitler propaganda, they were turned in by the superintendent of the university and decapitated in February, 1943.
That their names are remembered today is largely the consequence of post-war documentary accounts such as The White Rose: Munich 1942-43, published by their surviving sister Inge Scholl.
Another avenue of remembrance is a one-act opera by the distinguished German composer Udo Zimmermann, performed Sunday evening in the University of Toronto's MacMillan Theatre as part of Toronto's 24th annual Holocaust Education Week.
Zimmermann, who is also Intendant of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin, wrote the work while still a student, much of it in the atonal style of the Second Viennese School.
There are only two characters, the Scholls, and the story is set in Stadelehin Prison, hours before their execution.
Not that there is much of a story. The opera consists largely of their reflections and memories and in staging it, Judy Kopelow opted for the utmost simplicity, outfitting the stage with a bouquet of white roses, a couple of tables and matching chairs, a colour image of Jesus Christ and a series of poster-size black and white photographs.
Each of the photographs was worth at least a thousand words, especially the one showing a frightened child behind barbed wire and another showing brother and sister together, looking serious and oh, so young in the summer of 1942.
The man who took that photograph, the only living survivor of White Rose, was to take part in the discussion following Saturday's performance, but the infirmities of old age prevented Dr. George Wittenstein from attending, save in the form of a letter read to the audience.
In the letter he wrote that "personal responsibility is a way of life." At the cost of their own lives, the Scholls accepted such responsibility at a time when most of their fellow citizens either saluted the Führer or remained protectively silent.
To read their story today is to be deeply moved. To hear it set so effectively to music, sung by performers as obviously committed as soprano Marta Matulewicz and baritone Matthew Zadow, with Sabatino Vacca conducting a 15-piece chamber orchestra, was to appreciate how thoroughly art can enrich facts with feelings.
While listening, memory took me back to an afternoon spent walking wordlessly and almost alone through the impeccably preserved barracks, gas chambers and crematoria of Mauthausen, one of the most notorious of the Nazi concentration camps in Austria.
The great question that haunted me that day and returned during Udo Zimmermann's White Rose was not "why." Historians have ably documented the whys of the Holocaust. What they have not yet fully answered is the companion question, "how." How could human beings have behaved this way toward other human beings?
The beginning of an answer is surely the recognition that they did. Keeping alive, through words and music, the story of Hans and Sophie Scholl, provides precious evidence that they didn't have to.
Knights Templar Ask Vatican For Apology
Ruth Gledhill, The Times (London), 11-29-04
The Vatican is giving "serious consideration" to apologising for the persecution that led to the suppression of the Knights Templar.
The suppression, which began on Friday, October 13, 1307, gave Friday the Thirteenth its superstitious legacy.
A Templar Order in Britain that claims to be descended from the original Knights Templar has asked that the Pope should make the apology.
The Templars, based in Hertford, are hoping for an apology by 2007, the 700th anniversary of the start of the persecution, which culminated with the torture and burning at the stake of the Grand Master Jacques de Molay for heresy and the dissolution of the order by apostolic decree in 1312.
The letter, signed by the secretary of the Council of Chaplains on behalf of the Grand Master of the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Jesus Christ and the Temple of Solomon Grand Preceptory, with a PO box address in Hertford, formally requests an apology "for the torture and murder of our leadership", instigated by Pope Clement V.
"We shall witness the 700th anniversary of the persecution of our order on 13th October 2007," the letter says. "It would be just and fitting for the Vatican to acknowledge our grievance in advance of this day of mourning."
Apologies have already been made by the Roman Catholic Church for the persecution of Galileo and for the Crusades. The Templars hope that these precedents will make their suit more likely to succeed.
Tim Acheson, a Hertford Templar, who is descended from the Scottish Acheson family that has established Templar links and whose family lived until recently in Bailey Hall, Hertford, said: "This letter is a serious attempt by a Templar group which traces its roots back to the medieval order to solicit an apology from the papacy."
He added: "The papacy and the Kingdom of France conspired to destroy the order for reasons which modern historians judge to be primarily political. Their methods and motives are now universally regarded as brutal, unfair and unjustified.
"The Knights Templar officially ceased to exist in the early 1300s, but the order continued underground. It was a huge organisation and the vast majority of Templars survived the persecution, including most of their leaders, along with much of their treasure and, most importantly, their original values and traditions."
The Hertfordshire Mercury newspaper has reported newly discovered Templar links with Hertford, including a warren of tunnels beneath the town. At the heart of the maze of tunnels is Hertford Castle, where in 1309 four Templars from Temple Dinsley near Hitchin were imprisoned after their arrest by Edward II, who believed that they were holding a lost treasure. The treasure was never found.
When Subterranea Britannica, a group of amateur archaeologists, expressed an interest in investigating Hertford's tunnels last month, they received anonymous threats telling them not to.
The Templars captured Jerusalem during the Crusades and were known as "keepers of the Holy Grail", said to be the cup used at the Last Supper or as the receptacle used by Joseph of Arimathea to catch Christ's blood as he bled on the Cross, or both.
Interest in the Templars and the Holy Grail is at an unprecedented high after the success of books such as The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown, and the earlier Holy Blood Holy Grail, by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, which claimed that Jesus survived the Crucifixion and settled in France.
The Knights Templar were founded by Hugh de Payens, a French knight from the Champagne area of Burgundy, and eight companions in 1118 during the reign of Baldwin II of Jerusalem, when they took a perpetual vow to defend the Christian kingdom. They were assigned quarters next to the Temple. In 1128, they took up the white habit of the Cistercians, adding a red cross. The order knights, sergeants, farmers and chaplains amassed enormous wealth.
In Rome, a Vatican spokesman said that the demand for an apology would be given "serious consideration". However, Vatican insiders said that the Pope, 84, was under pressure from conservative cardinals to "stop saying sorry" for the errors of the past, after a series of papal apologies for the Crusades, the Inquisition, Christian anti-Semitism and the persecution of scientists and "heretics" such as Galileo.
Steven Gates' Case Could Affect Work Of Historians
Maura Dolan, Los Angeles Times, 11-29-04
Steven Gates figured his criminal past was so far behind him that his friends and colleagues would never learn of it. He was married, lived in a prestigious neighborhood in San Bernardino County, attended church regularly, had built a successful career in sales and owned a business with his wife.
Then came the breathless phone call from his mother one night: You are on the Discovery Channel, she told him.
Gates switched on the TV and discovered that all his efforts to put his past behind him had been in vain. "I was horrified," Gates said in an interview. "I almost threw up."
His name and photograph were shown on a program about a 1988 San Diego murder for hire in which Gates had pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact. The hourlong episode was aired several times.
Gates filed an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit but has not yet been permitted to take it to trial. In a ruling expected soon, the California Supreme Court will decide whether ex-felons like Gates are entitled to privacy when their crimes occurred long ago and they have fully rehabilitated.
"Gates is a man whose last offense took place ... years before, who has paid his debt to society and who has friends, family and co-workers who were unaware of his early life," said Niles Sharif, Gates' lawyer. "Gates has assumed a position in respectable society."
The news media and the entertainment industry, siding with the Discovery Channel, have warned that stories based on old crimes might not be written or produced if their subjects can recover big jury awards for loss of privacy.
...
Gates said he lost clients after the television show was broadcast. His wife also lost clients in the beauty salon the couple owned together. Worse, Gates said, was the anxiety he felt wondering if people he knew believed, wrongly, that he was involved in a killing.
"You just don't know who is looking at you and who is judging you because of what this show reported," said Gates, 51.
Last year, a San Bernardino County judge awarded Gates a certificate of rehabilitation, recognizing his rehabilitation and restoring his legal rights.
The show that unveiled Gates' past was an episode of "The Prosecutors," which reenacted crimes using the names of victims and perpetrators and included interviews with investigators and prosecutors.
The episode, "Deadly Commission," dealt with the murder for hire of Salvatore Ruscitti, a car salesman who was shot in the head in the doorway of his San Diego County home on Sept. 17, 1988. Ruscitti's wife and grandchildren were just steps away.
Will Nix, who owned an auto dealership in Pomona and employed Gates as an assistant manager, eventually was convicted of hiring a Mexican hit man, who has eluded police, to kill Ruscitti. Authorities said Nix wanted Ruscitti dead because he had initiated a class-action lawsuit accusing Nix's mother and stepfather of fraud at a car dealership they owned and at which Nix once worked, according to court records. Nix feared the litigation might force his parents into bankruptcy.
It took police years to crack the case, in part because Gates initially refused to testify about his boss. Gates said Nix told him after the killing that he had ordered it, but one of Nix's associates threatened to kill Gates' wife and parents if he told police what he knew. Gates had no criminal record.
Police initially charged Gates with conspiring in the murder. Gates said he had to hire a battery of lawyers and private eyes to prove that he had not been involved in the killing.
"Otherwise I would have gone to jail for the rest of my life for something I didn't do," he said. "They came after me with deal after deal after deal. I said no."
Finally, he was asked if he would testify against his boss and plead guilty to being an accessory after the fact. Am I an accessory after the fact? Gates said he asked his lawyer. The lawyer replied that he had "hedged" before a grand jury and could honestly plead guilty to the charge.
Gates was sentenced in 1993 to three years in prison and served 17 months, the last four on a work furlough. After his release, he worked hard to rebuild his life, he said. He sold jewelry for a while, worked as an office manager for a friend and finally found a job in the fastener industry, selling nuts, bolts and screws, and became a certified fastener specialist.
"I tried to live a life of anonymity," Gates said. "I went to church. I did what a person was supposed to do after he was rehabilitated."
"Deadly Commission," which first was broadcast on Feb. 13, 2001, falsely implied that Gates had been a conspirator in the murder, Gates said. He called a lawyer, who contacted Discovery and threatened a lawsuit if the episode were shown again. It was broadcast several times, and Gates sued.
Gates initially claimed defamation as well as invasion of privacy, but a judge ruled that the gist of the show had been accurate, a finding that Gates still disputes. A trial judge permitted Gates to proceed with his invasion of privacy claim. A Court of Appeal in San Diego overturned that decision, and Gates appealed to the state high court.
Gates' lawsuit relies on a 1971 California Supreme Court precedent called Briscoe vs. Reader's Digest Assn. In that case, Marvin Briscoe sued Reader's Digest for including him in a 1966 article about truck hijackings. The article failed to note that Briscoe's crime had occurred 11 years earlier.
The California Supreme Court, in ruling for Briscoe, said articles about past crimes deserve less 1st Amendment protection than stories about current events. The court concluded that there was a strong public interest in protecting the identities of rehabilitated felons.
During a hearing last month on Gates' case, several California Supreme Court justices expressed sympathy for Gates but observed that the U.S. Supreme Court had clarified the law to the benefit of the media since the Briscoe decision.
In particular, the justices cited a 1975 high court ruling in Cox Broadcasting Co. vs. Cohn. A court clerk in Georgia had permitted a reporter to see an indictment in a rape-murder case. The reporter broadcast the victim's name in violation of a Georgia law.
The victim's father brought an invasion-of-privacy suit, but the high court ruled that the media could not be liable for truthful publication of information obtained from public judicial records.
Lawyers for news media, including the Los Angeles Times, have argued that the Briscoe decision "continues to chill the work of documentarians, librarians, historians and the press, who are forced to self-censor their publication of information" from public records.
The Motion Picture Assn. of America which also opposes Gates, contends that the entertainment industry also must be protected from suits like Gates'.
"The motion picture industry has for decades used publicly available records to create countless and often classic motion pictures and television program," the industry's lawyers said in written arguments to the court.
A Romanian Looks at Her Secret File (Why Few Do)
Oana Lungescu, in the London Daily Telegraph (12-2-04):
It was in early 1983, on an anonymous street corner in central Bucharest, that I first met the man from the secret police. On the phone, he said he wanted to discuss a translation job and I was naive enough to meet him in the street. In his thirties, with an instantly forgettable face, he politely invited me across the road to a row of big metal doors, which looked like garages. But when he took out a key from his pocket and opened one of the doors, I got scared. As we stepped into a small room, which barely accommodated a desk and two armchairs, I realised it was a side entrance to the huge compound of the Bucharest police headquarters. The man who had taken me there was from the dreaded Securitate.
He had an offer to make. He would speed up procedures for me and my father to leave the country and join my mother, who had settled in Germany. He would also get cancer drugs for my father. Like most medicines, they were unavailable in Romania. In exchange, I would have to inform on Romanians living abroad. He called me in every Monday for several weeks until, one day, I broke down in tears and told him I just couldn't do it. A few months later, my father died. The drugs that my mother had sent had been returned at the Romanian border. I was eventually given a passport to leave the country in 1985.
On every return trip to Bucharest since then, I have somehow managed to avoid that street corner. But 15 years since the fall of Romania's communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, I felt the time had come to prise open that door into my past. Last September, I applied to see my secret police file. This became possible only three years ago, under a law passed when a centre-Right coalition was in power. The former communists, now the ruling social democratic party, showed little interest in shedding light on what had been Eastern Europe's most oppressive regime.
So far, only 12,000 Romanians have made such applications. "I'd like to see my file," a friend confessed, "but I'm afraid of what I might find."
In the western city of Timisoara, I met Alexandra Razvan, a lawyer who had joined the first anti-communist protests in December 1989. Reading her file, she discovered that a friendly colleague at law school had also been an assiduous informer. He was a bearded, pleasant young man, and I had often interviewed him for the BBC Romanian Service after 1989. He had become an MP for the ruling party.
For Radu Filipescu, an electronics engineer who spent three years in prison in the Eighties for spreading anti-Ceausescu leaflets, the discovery of his file brought back bitter-sweet memories. "I was very happy to read transcriptions of conversations I'd had with my father when he came to visit me in prison," he told me. Like Radu and Alexandra, I, too, made my way to a brown building, not far from the government headquarters, which houses the special parliamentary committee for the study of the Securitate archives, known as the CNSAS. An old friend, historian Claudiu Secasiu, who is a CNSAS member, had news for me. They were still looking for my personal file. "It's like a lottery," Claudiu said.
Under the law, the archives have stayed with the four information services that succeeded the Securitate. The main one, the Romanian Information Service, holds at least 12 kilometres of files.
But Claudiu had managed to find something. He placed two huge files in front of me, with the same title on their cardboard covers: "Operation Ether". This was the codename for the Securitate's surveillance of foreign broadcasters and, as I leafed through hundreds of pages, I recognised the microphone name I still use when broadcasting in Romanian: Ana Maria Bota. There were transcripts of interviews I had done for the BBC in the late Eighties, with or about Romanian dissident writers. "Must be referred to the National Council of Socialist Education," someone had scrawled in the margins. I had always suspected that some of my most loyal listeners were in the Securitate. The files contained personal letters, some photocopied, others in the original. "Sometimes," Claudiu explained, "the Securitate kept the letters, so you'd have to go into their archives to read your own mail." The smell of the ageing paper, the sheer amount of reports, the range of hand-writings and typewriters, the army of people involved in this bureaucracy of fear... suddenly, I was overwhelmed and began to cry.
...
How a Vietnam Vet Teaches the History of the Vietnam War
From the Chronicle of Higher Ed (12-2-04):
A glance at the fall issue of the "Michigan Quarterly Review": How a veteran learned to teach about Vietnam
Keith W. Taylor, a professor of Vietnamese cultural studies at Cornell University, writes about his 30-year journey from fighting in the Vietnam War to teaching about it.
Within a year of returning from a tour of duty in Vietnam, in 1972, Mr. Taylor began graduate study in Vietnamese history. However, rather than grapple with the country as he had left it, he focused on Vietnam's ancient history. For his own understanding of the war, he deferred to the antiwar campus left, whose arguments resonated with his own bitterness, he says.
But as an academic, he says, he felt a kind of nausea whenever he was asked to explain the conflict to students. "It was 25 years," he writes, "before I began to understand that this nausea came from the dissonance between the interpretive grid I had acquired for the war and what I felt in my heart."
He dissects three "axioms" central to that interpretive grid, which he sees as the dominant understanding of the war in academe, handed down from the antiwar movement. Those axioms are "that there was never a legitimate South Vietnamese government in Saigon, that the U.S. had no legitimate reason to be involved in Vietnamese affairs, and that the U.S. could not have won the war under any circumstances."
Mr. Taylor argues against each of those contentions, and redirects his bitterness at the "poor strategic thought and deficient political courage" of those who prosecuted the war.
"The tragedy of Vietnam," he concludes, "is not that the United States intervened when it should not have, but rather that the intervention was bungled so badly that the Vietnamese who believed in us were ultimately betrayed."
The article, "How I Began to Teach About the Vietnam War," is not online. Information about the journal is available at http://www.umich.edu/~mqr/current.htm
The Imperial History We Try to Overlook (Try Finding It on the Mall in DC--You Can't)
Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton, in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (12-3-04):
[Anderson and Cayton are the authors of a new master narrative of American history. This essay is adapted from the book, The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500-2000, to be published next month by Viking.]
... The rhetoric that justified the founding of the United States made inescapable connections between empire and tyranny. Perhaps for that reason, American historians have generally approached the imperial dimension of the nation's history obliquely, treating occurrences of jingoism like the war fevers of 1812, 1846, and 1898 as unfortunate exceptions to the antimilitarist rule of republicanism. No American Napoleon conquered this continent, no jackbooted legions subdued it; the United States grew by settlement. Apart from the regrettable Indian wars, the great movement west consisted of the essentially benign inclusion of ever-larger territorial realms into democracy's dominion, freedom's sphere. Or so Americans, for the most part, believe.
With great justification, Americans also think of the United States as a refuge from tyranny, where those willing to bear the burdens of work and the obligations of citizenship can share equally in the blessings of liberty. Since Americans believe themselves to be a peace-loving people, it is an article of faith that their wars have been forced upon them by those who would destroy their freedom. Thus since the autumn of 2001 Americans have remembered New York on September 11 as they have remembered Pearl Harbor since December 7, 1941 -- and as earlier generations remembered the explosion of the Maine, the bombardment of Fort Sumter, and the first shot fired at Lexington -- as a moment in which an enemy of liberty showed his barbarous hand and thereby justified the response of a free people, terrible in its wrath. So Americans tend to believe that by winning wars, they make the world a better, safer, freer place.
That is the argument that the monuments on the Mall sustain in marble and granite and bronze. That is why they make three great wars for freedom -- the Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II -- the central, defining moments of American history. And that is why there are no more important words on the Mall than those inscribed inside the Lincoln Memorial. The Gettysburg Address, composed in November 1863 to give meaning to the torrents of blood spilled in and around a small Pennsylvania town in early July, also gave meaning to the ordeal of the Union. There, in fewer than 300 words, Abraham Lincoln made the Civil War something much nobler than a struggle by one part of a riven nation to bend another part to its will. It was a test of the capacity of human beings for self-government, the supreme trial of a revolutionary United States "conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." And at the heart of America's agonies, Lincoln explained 16 months later in his Second Inaugural Address, was the need to expiate the great sin of slavery, to cleanse the Republic of the stain it had borne since birth.
It is impossible to imagine a more powerful conception of the nation's history than that. Because Americans so clearly identify liberty and equality as the core values of the Republic, they necessarily make the inception of those values in the Revolution, the extension of liberty's promise to all Americans, and the defense of liberty beyond America's borders central elements in their collective story. It is not, therefore, the size of the sacrifice but the transcendence of the ideals that motivated it to which the Washington, Lincoln, and World War II memorials speak.
If Korea and Vietnam make it only to the margins of the Mall, it is hardly surprising that the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, and the many wars against North American Indians are altogether missing from it. Less central to the grand scheme, they caused fewer deaths, created fewer heroes, and engaged smaller proportions of the population as soldiers and sailors. Controversial in their day, they seem in retrospect wars less to defend American liberty than to extend American power. They are, indeed, hard to see as anything but wars for empire. Yet these wars, too, are part of America's story.
The creation and preservation of the United States are events central to the history of North America, but the Revolution and Civil War cannot be fully understood unless they are seen together with those other, less-well-remembered wars. Indeed, the American Revolution and the Civil War can best be understood as unanticipated consequences of decisive victories in the great imperial wars -- the Seven Years' War and the Mexican-American War -- that preceded each by a little more than a decade. In both cases, the acquisition of vast territories created severe, protracted, and ultimately violent debates over sovereignty and citizenship. Those bitter postwar disputes over the empire's future led to civil wars and ultimately to revolutions that altered the fundamental meanings of rights and citizenship, and redefined the bases of imperial governance.
Our view of history begins with the proposition that war itself has been an engine of change in North America for the past five centuries. America's wars, however, have not been uniform in either their character or their consequences, and it is important to recognize that wars can have very different implications and consequences depending (among other factors) on whether they are localized conflicts between nonstate groups, large-scale contests between empires, revolutionary wars, wars by which a triumphant empire consolidates control over its conquests, or wars of foreign intervention.
At least from the middle of the 18th century to the present, American wars have either expressed a certain kind of imperial ambition or have resulted directly from successes in previous imperial conflicts. "Imperialism" is, of course, a loaded term, full of negative connotations. We suggest, however, that it can most productively be understood in the sense of the progressive extension of a polity's, or a people's, dominion over the lands or lives of others, as a means of imposing what the builders of empires understand as order and peace on dangerous or unstable peripheral regions.
To found a narrative of American development on the concept of dominion is to forgo the exceptionalist traditions of American culture -- those durable notions that the United States is essentially not like other nations but rather an example for them to emulate, a "shining city on a hill" -- in favor of a perspective more like the one from which historians routinely survey long periods of European, African, or Asian history. Indeed, our story makes the long-term pattern of America's development look broadly similar to those of other large, successful nations.
More than anything else, it is a story of power -- or, more precisely, a story of how power has been acquired, defined, used, contested, and lost in North America. It describes a past, and implies a present, in which human beings exercise far less control over events than they think they do: a past in which the unintended consequences of a persistent quest for power are often the most important of all....
Napoleon: The Self-Promoter Par Excellent!
Napoleon Bonaparte whose coronation in France 200 years ago is being marked this week left behind the formidable weapon of mass propaganda for future generations.
Experts believe the diminutive emperor whose legacy still provokes unease and fascination in France was probably the first person in history to use the tool of mass propaganda on such a scale.
The coronation ceremony itself on December 2, 1804, was largely re-invented for Napoleon's purposes in the gigantic painting by Jacques-Louis David who created a different reality.
Napoleon's mother Letizia had snubbed the ceremony perhaps to show her dislike for her daughter-in-law Josephine, but on the emperor's
orders David included her, affable and serene, in the painting.
On the other hand, Napoleon's minister of police Joseph Fouche who was present in Notre Dame church for the coronation is missing in the painting, unlike foreign minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand.
"That was not how it was, but that is how it will always be," historian Frederic Masson said.
In fact, it's not so far removed from the sinister official Soviet-era photos in which Stalinist propagandists rewrote history by erasing the figures of those who had been eliminated.
David in fact based his painting on that of his student Antoine-Jean Gros who had painted Napoleon visiting the plague-stricken of Jaffa, an apparently noble gesture by a leader but likely designed to distract attention from a disastrous military campaign in Egypt.
Gros had also rewritten history with his painting of a battle in 1796 at the bridge of Arcole in Italy by depicting Napoleon as the intrepid leader while in fact he had fallen into the river.
General Augereau was in fact the first to cross the bridge.
"The writers and painters around Napoleon were perhaps not the best but were certainly the most efficient," said Napoleon expert Ariane James-Sarazin, director of the History Museum of France.
"From the bridge of Arcole in 1796, Bonaparte, a young general, understands that what's needed for a politician is to create a diary and control the information," she said.
Napoleon Bonaparte whose coronation in France 200 years ago is being marked this week left behind the formidable weapon of mass propaganda for future generations.
Experts believe the diminutive emperor whose legacy still provokes unease and fascination in France was probably the first person in history to use the tool of mass propaganda on such a scale.
The coronation ceremony itself on December 2, 1804, was largely re-invented for Napoleon's purposes in the gigantic painting by Jacques-Louis David who created a different reality.
Napoleon's mother Letizia had snubbed the ceremony perhaps to show her dislike for her daughter-in-law Josephine, but on the emperor's
orders David included her, affable and serene, in the painting.
On the other hand, Napoleon's minister of police Joseph Fouche who was present in Notre Dame church for the coronation is missing in the painting, unlike foreign minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand.
"That was not how it was, but that is how it will always be," historian Frederic Masson said.
In fact, it's not so far removed from the sinister official Soviet-era photos in which Stalinist propagandists rewrote history by erasing the figures of those who had been eliminated.
David in fact based his painting on that of his student Antoine-Jean Gros who had painted Napoleon visiting the plague-stricken of Jaffa, an apparently noble gesture by a leader but likely designed to distract attention from a disastrous military campaign in Egypt.
Gros had also rewritten history with his painting of a battle in 1796 at the bridge of Arcole in Italy by depicting Napoleon as the intrepid leader while in fact he had fallen into the river.
General Augereau was in fact the first to cross the bridge.
"The writers and painters around Napoleon were perhaps not the best but were certainly the most efficient," said Napoleon expert Ariane James-Sarazin, director of the History Museum of France.
"From the bridge of Arcole in 1796, Bonaparte, a young general, understands that what's needed for a politician is to create a diary and control the information," she said....
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