Roundup: Talking About History
Monitors for Middle East Studies? Sounds Like an Attack on the Left
The National Park Service's Innovative Approach to the Underground Railroad
George Washington's Legacy: He Always Knew His Role as President of All the People Came First
A Cartoonist Takes on the Myth of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"
How the History of the Soviet Role in WW II Is Being Rewritten
Special Issue: US News & World Report Devoted to the History of Exploration
NYT: History Channel Documentary Implicating LBJ in JFK's Death Was "Harebrained"
Did Slaves Use Quilts to Help Escape Through the Underground Railroad?
The Enslaved Freedwoman Who Sued for Her Freedom--And Won It
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall: Do the Surveys Which Show Americans Are Ignorant About History Revealing?
It's Religion that Drives Some Countries to Succeed and Others to Fail
Outrage at the History Channel for Running a Documentary that Claims LBJ Killed JFK
Why the History of Black Women--Often Overlooked--Is Important
Colorado Hearing: Evidence that History Professors Are Biased
Historians Still Debating What Fueled the Survival of the USSR
How Ray Allen Billington Picks the Movies Listed as Historic by the Library of Congress
CIA's Refusal to Disclose Its Budget from Half a Century Ago Suggests It Has Something to Hide
Monitors for Middle East Studies? Sounds Like an Attack on the Left
Alisa Solomon, in the Village Voice (Feb. 25-March 2, 2004):
In a gesture that consolidates the 1990s culture wars, the post-9-11 chill on dissent, and the relentlessness of hawkishly pro-Israel lobbying, the U.S. House voted unanimously last fall to establish an advisory board to monitor how effectively campus international studies centers serve "national needs related to homeland security" and to assess whether they provide sufficient airtime to champions of American foreign policy. Currently the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions is considering a parallel provision for its upcoming higher education reauthorization bill. The bill will likely go to the floor in March.
Though it's just a few paragraphs in an arcane piece of routine legislation reauthorizing a relatively small amount of money to what's called "area studies," the advisory board provision represents an ominous offensive against academic freedom and oppositional views. For decades now, since the end of the McCarthy period that saw countless academics expelled from the classroom for their views and international research controlled by a Cold War agenda, the critical assault on left-leaning professors has been launched from books, articles, websites, and media broadcasts—unpleasant enough for the people targeted, but still the stuff of discourse. Even the creepy post-9-11 list of 40 profs accused by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni of giving comfort to America's adversaries turned out to have no teeth.
But the very possibility of legislation sounds old alarms anew. Even if the measure does not make it past the Senate—ranking Democrats on the panel don't expect it to get much traction—the very idea of ideological feds inspecting campus lecture halls takes the culture wars to a perilous new level.
The seven-member advisory board—which would include two appointees "from federal agencies that have national security responsibility"—would oversee the country's 118 international studies centers. This year, they shared about $95 million under Title VI of the Higher Education Act. Centers may use the funds only for graduate student fellowships, language instruction, and lectures and other public programs. They do not hire faculty or offer courses—traditional departments such as art history or political science do that. The centers then involve local faculty from across the disciplines who have expertise in such areas as Latin America, Russia, Africa, and East Asia. Only 17 of the nation's international studies centers focus on the Middle East—covering the Arab countries, Turkey, Israel, and Iran—but no one doubts that they are the intended targets of the legislation.
"The priority of those behind this is defending Israel from any criticism," says Zachary Lockman, director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center at New York University. "They understand that universities are one of the few places where debate and argument take place that cannot be heard in the media or anywhere else."
Indeed, the most vociferous critics of the centers have been three right-wing Zionist think-tankers : Stanley Kurtz of the Hoover Institution and a columnist for the National Review Online ; Martin Kramer, whose screed Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America was published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy; and Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum, whose website Campus Watch posted "dossiers" on professors whom Pipes deemed to hold unacceptable views on Islam, Palestinian rights, and U.S. or Israeli policy. Students were urged to send in reports on teachers who made any dubious remarks.
New Study: High School History Textbooks Are Inadequate
Chester E. Finn, Jr., on the website of the Fordham Institute; from the foreword to A Consumer's Guide to High School History Textbooks (Feb. 2004):
Within days of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, major textbook publishers began scrambling to revise their high school history texts to include information about 9/11. An understandable, even commendable impulse, but it went badly. Because these hasty updates or supplements had to be written by early 2002 in order to be included in the 2003 editions of the textbooks—publishing timelines are nothing if not long and slow—by the time they reached classrooms just about all the information in them was obsolete.
Far more troubling, because textbook publishers bend over backwards not to offend anybody or upset special interest groups, the 9/11 information, like so much else in today's history texts, was simplified and sanitized. The reader would scarcely learn that anybody in particular had organized these savage attacks on innocent Americans and citizens of 80 other nations, much less why. The impression given by most textbooks was more like "a terrible thing happened"—reminiscent of the two-year-old gazing upon the shards of his mother's shattered glass vase and saying "It broke."
I've dubbed such verb usages the "irresponsible impersonal" voice and, regrettably, they're more norm than exception in U.S. history textbooks. As with the vase breaking, things happen in these books (though not necessarily in chronological order), but not because anybody causes them. Hence, nobody deserves admiration or contempt for having done something incredibly wonderful or abominably evil. No judgments need be made. (To judge, after all, might upset a person or group who disagrees with the judgment or dislikes the way it makes them or their ancestors look.) The result: fat, dull, boring books that mention everything but explain practically nothing; plenty of information but no sorting, prioritizing, or evaluating; and a collective loss of American memory.
World-history texts present similar problems. It's hard to name a culture or era that doesn't turn up somewhere in these sprawling compilations, but no real story is told. There's no thread, no priorities, no winnowing of the important from the trivial, the history-shaping from the incidental. It's as if a car's chrome trim and speaker system were equivalent to its chassis and engine.
Why does this matter? Some successful countries— Japan and Singapore come to mind—get by fine with slender curriculum guides rather than enormous textbooks. That's because their teachers are subject-matter experts in fields like history and, when supplied with guidance about what state or national standard-setters deem most important, can easily generate their own lessons and find their own materials. They don't depend on textbooks except as reference works.
That's not true in the United States , where few history teachers ever learned much history themselves. More than half of high school history teachers did not major or even minor in history in college. Instead, most studied education or psychology or sociology, perhaps with a focus on "social studies education." As a result, teachers charged with imparting essential information to young Americans about the history of their country and world must rely heavily on the textbooks available to them—often textbooks that teachers themselves had little to do with selecting. Because these texts end up serving as students' primary sources of information, it's vitally important that they be accurate and interesting, and that they establish a narrative of events with a strong sense of context. They must tell "the main story" without neglecting lesser stories that form part of an accurate picture of the past. What they must not be is sprawling, drab assemblages of disjointed information in which everything matters equally and nothing is truly important.
How many—if any—of today's textbooks live up to that obligation? Unfortunately, few independent reviews of textbooks have been conducted to help answer that question. Hence, we at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, as part of our broader effort to strengthen history education and breathe new life into the moribund field of social studies, judged that it was time to look closely at widely used high school level textbooks in American and world history. In the spirit of being constructive as well as critical, we judged that a competent appraisal would provide practical help to educators tasked with the selection of history texts, to parents concerned about their children's education, to policymakers,
and even to publishers eyeing improvements in their products.
The National Park Service's Innovative Approach to the Underground Railroad
Jennifer Barnett Reed, in the Arkansas Times (Feb. 27, 2004):
We all know the elementary-school stories of the Underground Railroad: tales of Harriet Tubman's daring trips south to lead more slaves to freedom, of kindly white Northern abolitionists hiding fugitives in concealed cellar rooms, ushering them down secret passageways toward freedom.
But those stories, it turns out, are only the pale, one-dimensional, mythologized version of who and what made up the Underground Railroad.
The truth is a much richer epic: giant, sprawling, ever-shifting, the unwritten histories of slaves who ran and slaves who stayed behind, free blacks in the North, Native Americans in the West, and otherwise ambivalent whites moved to single acts of assistance.
The Underground Railroad was vaster and less formal than the memoirs of conductors suggest. Its routes started in the South, ushering slaves north to free states and Canada, but also west to Indian Territory and California, south to Mexico and the Spanish colony of Florida, aboard New Orleans steamships bound for the Caribbean, and onto New England whalers headed for the frigid waters off the coast of Alaska.
The National Park Service has been trying to recover and preserve this larger story since the mid-1990s. Its Network to Freedom project redefines the Underground Railroad broadly as "resistance to slavery through escape and flight" - in short, anything slaves did or used to steal away to freedom - and recognizes it as the first major chain of events in the fight for civil rights.
"This project is different from anything else the Park Service has done," said James Hill, head of the Network to Freedom region that includes Arkansas. "There's not a land base or any one particular site at this point."
The Network is set up like the National Register of Historic Places, Hill said. It includes sites connected with the Underground Railroad - homes, churches, even the Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina and Virginia - as well as educational programs and research facilities. There are over 125 so far in 25 states and the District of Columbia.
Ferreting out Underground Railroad sites has been easy in some Northern states (Ohio alone has 24 so far), Hill said. But they tell only part of the tale.
"To tell the story accurately you have to go down South, where people were leaving from," he said.
And that means Arkansas, where the Underground Railroad is a more elusive beast. A few histories of slavery in the state mention runaways, but no one's ever really sat down and studied the subject in detail.
Enter Charles Bolton, UALR professor and Arkansas history expert. Bolton has signed on with the National Park Service to do a three-year study of the state's fugitive slave phenomenon: how many and who they were, where they ran from and where they were headed, how they traveled and who might have helped them.
"Chances are [runaway slaves] were relying on other slaves and free blacks, instead of white abolitionists, in the South," Hill said. "And the truth is, if it weren't for the desire for freedom of African-American slaves, there wouldn't have been any Underground Railroad."
Daniel Pipes: Defund Middle East Studies
Daniel Pipes, in the NY Sun (Feb. 24, 2004):
Here's a prime example, one that involves me personally, of how the radical Left and the Islamists, those new best friends, readily deceive.
It has to do with a proposed piece of U.S. legislation passed by the House, the "International Studies in Higher Education Act of 2003," known familiarly as H.R. 3077, and awaiting action by the Senate. H.R. 3077 calls for the creation of an advisory board to review the way in which roughly US$100 million in taxpayer money is spent annually on area studies, including Middle East studies, at the university level.
This board is needed for two reasons: Middle East studies are a failed field and the academics who consume these funds also happen to allocate them — a classic case of unaccountability. The purpose of this subsidy, which Congress increased by 26% after 9/11, is to help the American government with exotic language and cultural skills. Yet many universities reject this role, dismissing it as training "spies."
Martin Kramer pointed to the need for Congressional intervention in his 2001 book, Ivory Towers on Sand . Stanley Kurtz picked up the idea and made it happen in Washington, testifying at a key House hearing in June 2003.
My role in promoting this advisory board? Writing one favorable sentence on it eight months ago, based on an expectation that the board creates some accountability and helps Congress carry out its own intent. While hoping the Senate passes H.R. 3077, I have otherwise done nothing to praise or lobby for this bill.
Well, that's the record. But why should mere facts get in the way? Seemingly convinced that turning H.R. 3077 into my personal initiative will help defeat it in the Senate, leftist and Islamist organizations have imaginatively puffed up my role.
- The American Civil Liberties Union accuses me of "enlisting the aid of the government" to impose my views on academia.
- The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee titles its alert "Academic Freedom Under Attack by Pipes and Big Brother."
- The Council on American-Islamic Relations states that I am "actively pushing" for the advisory board.
This deception prompted campus newspapers — for example, at Columbia, CUNY, Swarthmore, and Yale — to link me to the bill, as have city newspapers such as the Berkshire Eagle and the Oregonian , Web sites, and listservs.
What these folks missed is my skepticism about the advisory board's potential to make a major difference. It is important symbolically and it can throw light on problems. But odds are it won't be able thoroughly to solve them.
I say this because unlike comparable federal boards, this one has only advisory, not supervisory, powers. It also has limited authority, being specifically prohibited from considering curricula. Professors can teach politically one-sided courses, for example, without funding consequences. More broadly, such federal boards generally do too little. I have sat on two other ones and find them cumbersome bureaucratic mechanisms with limited impact.
Will a new board improve things? Sure. But Congress should consider more drastic solutions. One would be to revoke post-9/11's $20 million annual supplement for area studies at universities, using this money instead to establish national resource centers to focus on the global war on terror. They would usefully combine area expertise with a focus on militant Islam.
A second solution would zero-out all government allocations for area studies. This step would barely affect the study of foreign cultures at universities, as the $100 million in federal money amounts to just 10% of the budget at most major centers, funds those centers could undoubtedly raise from private sources. But doing this would send the salutary message that the American taxpayer no longer wishes to pay for substandard work.
Either step would encourage younger scholars to retool in an effort to regain public trust and reopen the public purse.
If the advisory board is not the ideal solution, it is the best to be hoped for at the moment, given the power of the higher-education lobby. I am ready to give H.R. 3077 a chance. But should the board not come into existence or fail to make a difference, I'll advocate the better solution — defunding — and work to spread these ideas among the public and in Congress. My opponents will then learn what happens when truly I am "actively pushing" for Congress to adopt a measure.
This article is reprinted with permission by Daniel Pipes. This article first appeared in the New York Sun.
Clarence Page: Why Isn't There a White History Month?
Clarence Page, in the Chicago Tribune (Feb. 25, 2004):
Black History Month was never intended to make people uncomfortable--unless maybe they ought to be.
Nevertheless, despite the best of intentions, a misunderstanding of what the month is all about can lead sometimes to a whopper of an embarrassment.
That's sort of what happened recently at Connecticut's Suffield High School when a group of sociology students decided to hang posters around the school to promote April as "White History Month."
Shortly after they were nabbed, the five students explained to their upset principal, Thomas Jones, that, alas, it was all a misunderstanding, according to The Hartford Courant. The students had been assigned to "explore the effect of rumors." They decided the posters would be a real nifty way to do that. Needless to say, their experiment triggered a lot of rumors, especially in the school's small but understandably alarmed black student population.
The principal scolded the white students for their insensitivity and turned them over to a teacher who reportedly specializes in civil rights and cultural sensitivity issues. In this way, the school at large was able to turn the incident into what one school board official called a "teachable moment," an opportunity to educate both offenders and the offended about differences in how the world looks through each other's eyes.
Good for them. No long-term harm done, I hope. This particular high school poster flap is the most embarrassing incident related to Black History Month that I can recall since early 2001. That was when then-Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore revoked a proclamation declaring May to be "European Heritage and History Month." The governor had learned to his deep dismay that the request for the commemoration had come from a white separatist group headed by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. Such an embarrassment.
But you don't need to be a klansman, past or present, to ask "Why don't we have a White History Month?" I've heard that question quite a few times over the years. So have other black people I know. Some of us have come up with a list of appropriate responses to it, such as:
1."Because every month is white history month."
2."Because white history has not been lost, stolen or suppressed over the years as much as black history has."
3."Yo' mama!"
4."History is taught so poorly in our schools these days that maybe we should have a white history month."
5."That's right. I said, `Yo' mama'!!!"Now, now. We should all try to manage our anger at such moments. Such encounters reveal precisely what Black History Month was intended to remedy: an ignorance about history--black and otherwise. That's why I oppose so-called "political correctness." We need more dialogue, not less....
when the late black scholar Carter G. Woodson dreamed up what was then called Negro History Week in 1926, he too dreamed of the day when it no longer would be needed.
He imagined a day when every student's education would include such African-American figures as Crispus Attucks, who died in the Boston Massacre; Matthew A. Henson, who co-discovered the North Pole with Robert Peary, and Benjamin Banneker, the pioneer scientist who helped conduct the first survey of Washington.
It was important, Woodson felt, that African-Americans understand that we had more to our history than our victimization. In fact, there was a much greater all-American story to be told in how mightily many of our ancestors had triumphed despite adversity.
Woodson imagined a day when the contributions of people from various races, ethnicities and, for that matter, genders would be taught fairly and properly. Then Americans might move more swiftly toward a society where such differences would no longer matter.
Unfortunately, history seems to be given such a low priority in today's schools that I sometimes wonder whether Woodson's dream day is slipping further away.
Simon Schama: Academic History Is Dull!
Jonathan Thompson, in the London Independent (Feb. 22, 2004):
Simon Schama, one of Britain's best-known historians , has accused fellow academics of making the subject too dull.
Professor Schama is calling for a return to a "golden age" of historians of the calibre of Gibbon, Macaulay and Carlyle. He says modern-day historians - with a few notable exceptions - have lost the ability to inspire the public with tales of the past in the same way as their predecessors.
"History's adventure has become a bit lost," said Professor Schama. "It's not as explosive or exciting as it used to be. What we need to recover is our reckless literary courage." He blamed the subject's demise on the "juggernaut of academic history" which is obsessed with scientific data and obsessive footnotes rather than good storytelling.
On the eve of his new BBC television series, Historians of Genius, Professor Schama holds up the great historians of the 18th and 19th centuries as examples of how history should be written. Three of these - Thomas Babington Macaulay, author of The History of England, Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , and Thomas Carlyle, who wrote The French Revolution - are dealt with in depth during the series, which begins on BBC4 tomorrow evening. Professor Schama won great acclaim for two lengthy and highly popular television series on the history of Britain
"Macaulay was the first person to really bring history to the mass reading public," said Professor Schama. "His writing had great propulsion and he was very proud of the fact that he could entertain people without making anything up.
"Carlyle, too, was an exhilarating read - a fantastic dramatist. It was as though he kicked open a window and dumped you in the very room you were reading about."
But Professor Schama, who teaches at New York 's Columbia University , said today's books pale in comparison with those of the Victorian era. Although he conceded that narrative British history does have some proponents - notably Antony Beevor and Niall Ferguson - these are the exception rather than the rule.
"Popular narrative history was never entirely lost. It was just condescended to by the juggernaut of academic history which seemed to dictate how and to whom you wrote."
Professor Schama's comments look certain to provoke argument within academic institutions, but he received support last night from another high-profile historian - David Starkey, the Cambridge don and television presenter.
"Undoubtedly, academic history is deadly," said Dr Starkey. "A lot of books have become rarely animated footnotes. In fact, they should really be written upside down, with the footnotes at the top and a drip of text underneath. Footnotes aren't new, but what is new is our worship of them."
Dr Starkey, whose series on Elizabeth I and the six wives of Henry VIII helped win him the title of Britain's highest-paid TV presenter, added: "When I was at university, writing a readable book was seen as the height of frivolity: academics were taught to write for each other. There's this entire lack of public presence. Things like revisionism have led to utter trivialisation in the name of scholarship."
Professor Niall Ferguson, whose recent Channel 4 series on the British Empire led to him being nicknamed "The Errol Flynn of British history", was more guarded on the perceived crisis. "Happily, most of my colleagues understand that to reach a mass audience, one must make certain sacrifices", said Professor Ferguson, who recently left Oxford University to teach in New York . "For example, sacrifice of footnotes and of long historiographical introductions. And one must also strive to write rather more fluently - indeed grippingly - than is usual in the academic world."
Despite Professor Schama's criticism, record numbers of history books were sold in the UK last year. According to figures from The Bookseller, sales in 2003 totalled pounds 32m - or 3 per cent of the total market.
Last night, the president of the Royal Historical Society, Professor J L Nelson, denied claims that history isn't as good as it used to be. "History is very much more diverse in the things it covers now," she said. "There are more people studying history - it's more popular than ever.
"People do write in a different style nowadays. There's not such a large vocabulary, but that doesn't mean we're not writing interesting things."
But Bettany Hughes, presenter of The Spartans and one of the new generation of television historians , was less convinced: "There is definitely a danger that academics will simply sharpen their wits on each other. Throughout the 1970s, history became increasingly scientific, focusing on data, process and analysis rather than on comment and argument. There was almost a denial that you could be passionate about your subject.
"We need to reinforce the idea that it is the study of the living rather than the study of the dead."
Rosie the Riveter Finally Gets a Museum
Dru Sefton, for the Newhouse News Service (Feb. 2004):
Rosie the Riveter -- the collective nickname evokes images of American women going from kitchens to factories in a home-front effort to win World War II, then relinquishing those jobs to returning soldiers after fighting ceased.
But the reality is far more nuanced, shaped by a massive propaganda effort, entrenched gender and race issues, and the need to move into a postwar consumer economy.
"Generalizations assume that all Rosies were the same, with the same motivations," said Sherna Berger Gluck, author of "Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War and Social Change."
Not so, Gluck said. Black women, for instance, "had a chance to earn very good money for the first time, and they wanted to keep those jobs."
The experiences of women who toiled stateside will be part of the new Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park, under construction in Richmond, Calif. The park, which focuses on the entire home-front experience during the war, is gathering stories and artifacts for its Rosies section. Assistance in the effort is provided by sponsors including Ford Motor Co. (www.ford.com/go/rosie).
The 150-acre park on San Francisco Bay north of Oakland is at the site of four Henry Kaiser Shipyards that produced 747 ships, more than any other domestic wartime complex. A Ford assembly plant was also there; workers built nearly 50,000 Jeeps and 90,000 tanks.
The home-front effort "was an enormously important part of the war story," said Judy Hart, park superintendent. "It was a time of great progress in equal opportunity, mixed with wide and deep discrimination. It was working through, on a personal, one-on-one basis, layers of prejudice and preconceived ideas, that so deeply and permanently changed America forever."
The memorial will strive to capture the diversity of the Rosies. "A story this rich and nuanced is best told by the individual," Hart said. "Once visitors listen to a number of stories, they will understand just how varied the experience was."
The number of employed women went from 12.8 million in 1940 to 13.9 million in '42, then 15.6 million in April '43 and 17.7 million in July '43, according to 1943 War Manpower Commission figures. Later statistics showed the peak in 1944 at 18.4 million -- more than 35 percent of the work force.
And each Rosie had "very different experiences, depending on where she was in her life cycle," said Gluck, director of the Oral History Program at California State University, Long Beach. She spent four years listening to Rosies before her book, a collection of reminiscences, came out in 1987.
After the war, "Some stayed in the work force, some got married, some went back home, others went home but returned to work in the 1950s," Gluck said.
It's hard to get precise figures, Gluck said, but it's estimated that half the women working on aircraft production in Los Angeles during the Korean War were former Rosies.
George Washington's Legacy: He Always Knew His Role as President of All the People Came First
Ron Chernow, in the NYT (Feb. 22, 2004):
As the Democratic primaries reach a critical stage, partisan spirit is running high, and the presidential campaign is already verging on blood sport. George Washington's birthday today serves as a reminder of how presidents can transcend politics and embody the national spirit.
From the time he was recruited as commander in chief in 1775, Washington personified the often tenuous hope of unity among the 13 fractious colonies. With most of the early patriot blood spilled in Massachusetts, the second Continental Congress wanted a Southern general who could lend a national imprint to the struggle. Washington shed his Virginia identity and forged a Continental Army that tutored its green recruits into thinking of themselves as Americans.
It is impossible to assess Washington's career without stumbling over the words "unity" and "unanimity" at every turn. He was unanimously chosen as president of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, where he presided with customary tact. Since it was assumed that Washington would be the first president, his taciturn but resolute presence reconciled many skittish delegates to the vast powers invested in the executive branch. Twice in a row, in 1789 and 1792, the Electoral College elected him president by a unanimous vote, confirming his status as a political deity who seemed to hover above the petty feuds of lesser mortals.
Nevertheless, Americans today tend to take George Washington for granted. He seems less soulful than Lincoln, less robust than Theodore Roosevelt, less charismatic than Franklin Roosevelt. His bloodless image as a remote, Mount Rushmore of a man — partly a byproduct of the craggy face recreated endlessly by Gilbert Stuart — has worked to obscure the magnitude of his achievement. Too often Washington seems a dull, phlegmatic figure, wooden if worthy, whose self-command stemmed from an essential lack of inner fire.
In fact, Washington was a strong-willed, hot-blooded personality. "I wish I could say that he governs his temper," a rich Virginian told Washington's mother when George was 16 years old. "He is subject to attacks of anger and provocation, sometimes without just cause." The young man mastered his wayward emotions by reading history, studying deportment, and learning how to dance and dress smartly. Like other founders, Washington was an ambitious, insecure provincial, committed to a strenuous regimen of self-improvement.
Over time, Washington would retreat behind an iron mask of self-control. Alexander Hamilton, his chief aide for four years during the Revolution, glimpsed the well-concealed inner man and found him unbearably moody and irritable. As with many passionate but guarded personalities, Washington sometimes burst out unexpectedly in anger....
The prodigious self-restraint enabled Washington to rise above the sectional strife that threatened to tear the 13 states apart. He adopted a detached, even cryptic facade to resist association with any particular faction or interest. In a noisy world of blustering politicos, he possessed the "gift of silence," as John Adams phrased it. Washington articulated his secret succinctly: "With me it has always been a maxim rather to let my designs appear from my works than by my expressions." ...
In his farewell address in 1796, Washington warned against "the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party." By this point, however, it was abundantly clear that the two-party system was here to stay. During his single-term presidency, John Adams, a nominal Federalist, tried in vain to perpetuate the notion of a president above party labels. When his successor, Thomas Jefferson, was inaugurated, he intoned famously, "We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists" — a neat rhetorical flourish that thinly disguised his status as the first president to head a political party.
Ever since, the occupants of the White House have experienced an uneasy tension between their role as party leader and as president of all of the people. George Washington never doubted which role should come first.
The Yom Kippur War--Why It Was So Important
David C. Unger, in the NYT (Feb. 15, 2004):
ISRAEL'S brief history falls into two periods. Four heroic wars shaped its first quarter-century. Defeat in any could have brought the end of the Jewish state. Yet Israel emerged victorious from all of them, each time extending, even if only temporarily, the amount of territory under its control. The second period, still under way, has been less dangerous but more frustrating as Israel has struggled to translate military strength and territorial gains into real security and diplomatic recognition by its Arab neighbors.
The Arab-Israeli war of October 1973 forms the hinge between these two periods. Never did the prospect of Israel's destruction seem more imminent than in the first days after Egypt and Syria's devastatingly effective surprise attack. Israel rallied its reserves, recovered its losses and added new territory along the critical Golan frontier. But Egypt, a country humiliated and demoralized by Israel's crushing victory in June 1967, regained enough of its pride to pursue peace. A direct line runs from the Egyptian Army's crossing of the Suez Canal in 1973 to Anwar Sadat's historic visit to Jerusalem four years later, and then on to the first formal peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state. Underscoring those connections, Islamic opponents of that treaty assassinated Sadat at an October 1981 military parade marking the anniversary of the 1973 war.
Sadat's example challenges the lifetime belief of Ariel Sharon, Israel's current prime minister, that Arab nations will not make peace with Israel unless they have been so thoroughly beaten and humiliated that they internalize the certainty of defeat. But in the absence of extraordinary leaders like Sadat, recovered Arab pride is no sure formula for peace. Consider President Hafez al-Assad of Syria, whose armies did as well as Egypt's during the early days of the Yom Kippur War, but who never followed Sadat's path to peace. The lessons of the war point in no single direction, but they have much to teach Israelis, Arabs and all who yearn for a comprehensive Middle East peace.
Two new books re-examine the events and lessons of the war. Abraham Rabinovich, the author of ''The Yom Kippur War,'' is an American who moved to Jerusalem in 1967 and covered the 1973 war for The Jerusalem Post. Howard Blum, who has written ''The Eve of Destruction,'' is a contributing editor of Vanity Fair. Both aim to knit together the military, strategic and political levels of the war much as Michael B. Oren's ''Six Days of War'' did for the June 1967 war. Neither fully equals Oren's magisterial achievement. But these authors are working with more difficult material. Sixteen days of grueling back-and-forth combat is not as inherently dramatic as six epochal days in which large Arab armies seemed to melt miraculously before Israeli arms. On their own terms, both of these books offer lively and informative accounts of a pivotal conflict.
A Cartoonist Takes on the Myth of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"
Steven Lee Beeber, in the NYT (Feb. 23, 2004):
What do you do 25 years after creating a new artistic genre? If you are Will Eisner, you do the same thing again in your late 80's.
"A Contract With God," set in the tenements of his Bronx youth and published in 1978, established Mr. Eisner as the father of the graphic novel. Now he has taken the adult comic-book format a step further, with a graphic history that applies his dark, 1930's-style illustrations to real events of a century ago.
This latest work, called "The Plot," tells the story behind the creation of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the infamous Russian forgery that purported to reveal a Jewish plan to rule the world. Mr. Eisner, the son of Jews who fled Europe, has reached into the past to say something about the present: a time, he says, when anti-Semitism is again on the rise.
"I was surfing the Web one day when I came across this site promoting `The Protocols' to readers in the Mideast," said Mr. Eisner, 86. "I was amazed that there were people who still believed `The Protocols' were real, and I was disturbed to learn later that this site was just one of many that promoted these lies in the Muslim world. I decided something had to be done."
Sitting in his studio-office, surrounded by the paraphernalia of 70 years in comics — honorary plaques, statues in the shape of a certain cartoon mouse, an Al Hirschfeld drawing of his profile — Mr. Eisner began his research. It did not matter that he was in a strip-mall office building outside Fort Lauderdale, while other elderly former New Yorkers trooped by on their way to the dentist. He was fighting for justice in a bleak world, the way his most famous comic-book character, the Spirit, did in American newspapers throughout the 1940's.
Soon Mr. Eisner realized that the story behind "The Protocols" was too confusing and myth-ridden to rely on the Internet. Enlisting the help of N. C. Christopher Couch, who teaches a course on graphic novels at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, the two began piecing together the facts, helped by a French comic-book fan, Benjamin Herzberg.
Historians say "The Protocols," first published in 1903, were fabricated in Russia by the czar's secret police as a way of undermining a growing social reform movement. Jews figured prominently in this movement, and the police theorized that they could discredit it by making it appear to be a front for a sinister Jewish agenda. Mathieu Golovinski, a propagandist, concocted the 24 fraudulent "protocols" or minutes, of an international meeting of Jewish bankers, journalists and financiers outlining a purported Jewish-Masonic plot to dominate world affairs.
The forgery was revealed in 1921 when the Times of London published a series of articles demonstrating that the actual source for the text was a a French political satire published in 1864 by Maurice Joly, in which Machiavelli and Montesquieu discuss a plan for world domination by Napoleon III.
"Golovinski simply took sections from Joly's `Dialogue in Hell' and claimed they were conversations from this alleged secret meeting," Mr. Eisner said. "In many cases he merely copied large segments of Joly's satire verbatim while substituting the phrase `the Jews' for `Napoleon III."
In "The Plot," which is about 100 pages, Mr. Eisner reveals this fabrication through three different methods that draw on all phases of his 70-year career. In a short introduction he provides an account of how he came upon "The Protocols" and learned the truth behind them.
Benny Morris Roils Middle East Politics (Again) (NYT)
Ethan Bronner, in the NYT (Feb. 20, 2004):
Of all the issues separating Israelis and Palestinians, nothing is more contentious than the Palestinian "right of return." Palestinian refugees say they must be permitted to go back to the lands they lost during the 1947-48 war inside what is today Israel. Even pragmatic Arabs who do not expect that Israel will ever permit large numbers of refugees to return believe that many Palestinians were pushed out of their homes through intimidation and force in a planned expulsion, and they believe that the right of return must be acknowledged, if not actually put into practice.
Israelis counter that the real aim of the right of return is to suffocate their state by flooding it with hostile Arabs — a sort of Trojan horse. Moreover, they argue, there is no historic sin that requires expiation because there was no Zionist plan to expel the Palestinians. They say that Zionist leaders urged the Palestinians to stay put, but that Arab leaders instructed them to leave so Arab armies would have a clear field.
In the Middle East, history is never a purely academic exercise. Evidence that Israeli forces drove out villagers at the point of a gun or that Palestinian leaders urged villagers to abandon their homes becomes not simply an interesting fact from the past but also a weapon in an ongoing struggle. One reminder of that is the current controversy over the Israeli historian Benny Morris.
There are few more prominent figures in the debate over the origin of the refugees than Mr. Morris, who in 1988 published "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem," a book that helped force Israelis to accept the idea that Palestinian expulsions did indeed occur. Now Mr. Morris is back with a new book that is a heavily revised and updated version of the 1988 account. Based on new Israeli documents, it adds more details of Zionist misdeeds, but also some pertinent new information shoring up the argument that the Palestinians were the authors of their own tragedy. And in the current climate of Palestinian suicide bombings and what he considers unyielding Palestinian rejectionism, Mr. Morris draws very different conclusions this time from his research.
The French philosopher Ernest Renan once said that a nation is "a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors." Mr. Morris's new book suggests that both Israelis and Palestinians fit that description to some extent. The book reinforces central tenets of each side's narrative.
How the History of the Soviet Role in WW II Is Being Rewritten
Benjamin Schwarz, in the NYT (Feb. 21, 2004):
A plucky Britain refusing to bow to the Luftwaffe's blitz, Patton and Rommel dueling in the North African desert, the D-Day invasion and the Battle of the Bulge — these tend to dominate American's conception of the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany.
But as important as the episodes were, military historians have always known that the main scene of the Nazis' downfall was the Eastern Front, which claimed 80 percent of all German military casualties in the war.
The four-year conflict between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army remains the largest and possibly the most ferocious ever fought. The armies struggled over vast territory. The front extended 1,900 miles (greater than the distance from the northern border of Maine to the southern tip of Florida), and German troops advanced over 1,000 miles into Soviet territory (equivalent to the distance from the East Coast to Topeka, Kan.). And they clashed in a seemingly unrelenting series of military operations of unparalleled scale; the battle of Kursk alone, for instance, involved 3.5 million men.
In short, the war fought on the Eastern Front is arguably the single most important chapter in modern military history — but it is a chapter that in many essential ways is only now being written. From evidence released from Soviet archives since the mid-1980's, scholars have learned, for example, that Soviet deaths numbered nearly 50 million, two and half times the original estimate; that the Red Army raped two million German women during their occupation to wreak revenge; and that an astonishing 40 percent of Soviet wartime battles were for deacdes lost to history.
In the last few years, academics have lamented that access to Russian archives has tightened considerably. Surprisingly, though, specialists in the field say that what may turn out to be a bigger problem is the dearth of Russian military historians in the West who can take advantage of the documentary material already available, coupled with the lack of money in the former Soviet Union to support those academics prepared to dive into the papers. So far, it's a "missed historiographical opportunity," said Col. David M. Glantz, now retired, the former director of the United States Army's Foreign Military Studies Office, who has written or edited more than 60 books on the history of the Soviet military in the Second World War. The extraordinarily prolific Colonel Glantz said he would need "three lifetimes" to mine the documents that have already been released.
Military historians like Williamson Murray, professor emeritus at Ohio State University and a defense consultant in Washington, hold that the Soviets probably documented their war more fully than any other of the combatant states. Yet the war on the Eastern Front is still obscure, largely because of the cold war. During that period, the U.S.S.R.'s immense archives concerning the conflict were essentially closed to Western scholars. At the same time, the decisive impact of America's erstwhile ally was often deliberately underplayed in the West for political reasons.
The Soviets also buried the history of the Eastern Front. Soviet military historians turned out accurate and detailed work, but since they could analyze only what Soviet officials permitted them to write about, they skirted, or, more significantly, ignored those facts and events the government considered embarrassing. Soviet propaganda, meanwhile, lionized the heroes of the "Great Patriotic War."
For the most part, then, scholars were forced to rely heavily on German sources, which presented an extremely distorted view of events. Only the Scottish historian John Erickson, whose two-volume history of the war in the East — "The Road to Stalingrad" (1975) and "The Road to Berlin" (1983) — remains the outstanding comprehensive study in any language, managed to get beyond such one-sided accounts. He did it by virtue of his close relationships with high-level Soviet officials and current and former military officers in order to gain access to closed records. But probably his greatest cache of Soviet material actually came from combing German records for captured Soviet documents.
What Did Jesus Really Look Like?
David Gibson, in the NYT (Feb. 21, 2004):
Whatever arguments there may be about the verisimilitude of Mel Gibson's film "The Passion of the Christ," one thing is certain: this Jesus is a Hollywood hunk who probably bears little resemblance to what the Jesus of history looked like.
The title role is played by Jim Caviezel, a dark-haired, blue-eyed star whose brooding good looks have been compared to those of Montgomery Clift. He doesn't exactly fit the archaeological evidence that the average man of Jesus' day was about 5 feet 3 inches tall and a bantamlike 110 pounds. Given the harsh conditions, especially for working stiffs like the members of Jesus' family, combined with Jesus' ascetic lifestyle, which included walking everywhere, scholars agree that he was most likely a rather sinewy peasant, as tough as a root and about as appealing.
Not that portraying Jesus as a movie idol is anything new. Jeffrey Hunter in "King of Kings" (1961) is commonly referred to as "the Malibu Jesus," while Willem Dafoe's celluloid savior was a perfectly credible love match for the lusty Barbara Hershey as Mary Magdalene in "The Last Temptation of Christ" (1988). And Max von Sydow was a handsome — and distinctly Aryan — Jesus in "The Greatest Story Ever Told" (1965).
Of course, figuring out what Jesus really looked like is impossible. One reason is that the question apparently held almost no interest for Jesus' followers, who were Jewish and raised in a faith that strictly prohibited representations of the divine.
Still, within a few decades of Jesus' death, the issue cropped up again, both from natural curiosity and as a defense against those, like the second-century philosopher Celsus, who argued that Jesus would not have been divine because God could not take a corruptible human form.
"God is good, and beautiful, and blessed, and that in the best and most beautiful degree," Celsus wrote. "But if he come down among men, he must undergo a change, and a change from good to evil, from virtue to vice, from happiness to misery, and from best to worst."
Celsus, a Platonist from Alexandria, was expressing the prevailing view of the day. In the ancient world, the gods were supposed to be, well, godlike. They stood above and apart from mere mortals. They were great warriors and often great seducers. Celsus' arguments, however, were enough to inflame Christian apologists like Origen, who were facing nasty persecutions from the pagan empire.
But rather than fighting back by building Jesus up as some kind of super Zeus, Origen took the opposite tack. Jesus, he wrote in his lengthy treatise "Against Celsus," was no different from ordinary men of his day, and this ordinariness was in fact a proof of his divine humility, as well as a fulfillment of the prophecy in Isaiah 53, which says of the future messiah, "He hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him" (King James version).
George Washington's Evolving Views About Slavery
From the CBS News show, "Sunday Morning" (Feb. 15, 2004):
Announcer: It's SUNDAY MORNING on CBS, and here again is Charles Osgood.
CHARLES OSGOOD, host:
George Washington was famously first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen. But it is his own Change of Heart that attracts our attention this morning. Martha Teichner has the story of a momentous decision he made just before he died.
(Footage of Mt. Vernon; paintings of George Washington; footage of Washington's will)
MARTHA TEICHNER reporting:
(Voiceover) George Washington died in winter, on December 14th, 1799, at Mt. Vernon. Months before, he had awakened in the night and told his wife, Martha, he'd had a dream he was convinced was a premonition of his own death. It was then he began to write his will with the urgency of a man racing against fate, and in absolute secrecy, because in it, he would do what not one of the other slaveholders among the founding fathers dared to do: He would free his slaves.
Mr. HENRY WIENCEK (Historian): There are a number of striking things about it. One is the ferociousness of the language.
(Footage of book cover illustration)
TEICHNER: (Voiceover) Researching his recent book on Washington, historian Henry Wiencek uncovered revealing documentation that helps to explain why Washington did what he did.
Mr. WIENCEK: He says that this clause respecting slaves must be carried out religiously, without evasion, neglect or delay. He said no slaves were to be sold.
(Footage of paintings of Washington)
TEICHNER: For most Americans, George Washington is an icon, not a man. But what his will makes clear is that he was a man of deep feeling, whose decision to free his slaves was the result of profound soul-searching. As a young man, he supported slavery.
Mr. JIM REES (Executive Director, Mt. Vernon): You start by inheriting slaves when you're 11, you know. It's--it's thrust on you. It's a part of your life, if you're a Southerner.
TEICHNER: (Voiceover) Jim Rees is executive director of Mt. Vernon.
(Footage of Mt. Vernon interior; slave quarters)
Mr. REES: I don't think I'd characterize Washington as that different from the average slave owner. I think he--he wasn't incredibly harsh on his slaves, but he wasn't terribly good to them, either. There was no question in my mind that the ones who worked here at this home were the lucky slaves, because they had light duty, in most cases, compared to the slaves who had to work on the outlying farms.
Mr. WIENCEK: They only got clothes once a year. They got two shirts, a jacket, two pairs of pants, and they got two pairs of socks, and those wore out very quickly from working outside all the time.
(Footage of Washington's wedding portrait; illustrations of slaves)
TEICHNER: (Voiceover) When George Washington married Martha Custis, the young widow of one of Virginia's richest men, slaves were more than just a source of labor. They represented wealth and status, and they were a source of revenue, if sold.
Mr. WIENCEK: The slave masters called the birth of children 'the increase.' It's like getting a dividend every year. If you owned a large number of slaves, it's as if you had an enormous self-replenishing bank account that you could dip into to pay off your debts, to build a new house.
(Footage of ad from Colonial newspaper)
TEICHNER: (Voiceover) It was common practice to break up families in these sales. Henry Wiencek found an ad in a Williamsburg newspaper demonstrating that George Washington once did something even more callous. In 1769, he took part in a raffle of slaves to collect on a debt owed to Martha's relatives.
Mr. WIENCEK: They raffled off some families intact. In other cases they just raffled off the children, one by one or--or two by two. It was shocking.
Mr. REES: He made many mistakes as a young person but seldom made the same mistake twice.
(Illustrations of Revolutionary War battles; Washington; footage of slave quarters)
Mr. REES: (Voiceover) I think George Washington saw, during the revolution, that the black soldiers fought beside the white soldiers and--and that's what helped change his mind.
TEICHNER: (Voiceover) When the Revolutionary War ended, General George Washington came home to Mt. Vernon uncomfortable with anything having to do with slavery. So he hid his new slave quarters in plain sight, next to his greenhouse.
Mr. WIENCEK: That's the great genius of Washington the architect. You don't know that those are the slave quarters. There are no doors, there are very small windows. He made it invisible. I mean, this is kind of a symbol of his struggle with slavery, architecturally, right here in front of us.
(Footage of painting of Mt. Vernon; drawings of West Ford and his mother, Venus)
TEICHNER: (Voiceover) Part of this struggle may have been because of something very personal.
Mr. WIENCEK: He--he may have seen a slave named West Ford, who was definitely his blood kin.
TEICHNER: (Voiceover) West Ford was the son of a slave named Venus, who belonged to Washington's brother, John Augustine.
(Footage of descendants)
TEICHNER: (Voiceover) His descendents are convinced he was George Washington's son.
Ms. LINDA BRYANT (Washington Descendant): George Washington is my fifth great-grandfather.
TEICHNER: (Voiceover) Linda Bryant is West Ford's great, great, great, great granddaughter.
Ms. BRYANT: West Ford was very fair, with blue-gray eyes and reddish hair, and he shared those same features with George Washington.
(Footage of Wiencek and Teichner; portraits of West Ford; Washington)
TEICHNER: (Voiceover) Historian Henry Wiencek considers it more likely that one of George Washington's nephews was West Ford's father.
Mr. WIENCEK: The resemblance to Washington's family is startling, so if Washington did met him and looked on that face, even when West Ford was a child, he would have seen that this was blood kin. It could have been one of the things that drove him to try to find an end to slavery.
(Footage of paintings of Washington)
TEICHNER: (Voiceover) In 1789, just before George Washington was sworn in as president, he told an aide the time had come to free his slaves. General Lafayette, who was like a son to Washington, pressured him to do it as an example to the nation. But then Washington decided not even he could pull it off.
Mr. WIENCEK: If he emancipated his own slaves, privately, he was afraid that it would have political repercussions which could cause a split in the country.
(Footage of Wiencek at Library of Congress)
TEICHNER: (Voiceover) In the Library of Congress, Henry Wiencek was shown an extraordinary document, notes handwritten by Thomas Jefferson about a conversation Washington had with his secretary of State, Edmund Randolph.
Mr. WIENCEK: (Reading) 'The president, speaking with Randolph on the hypothesis of a separation of the Union into Northern and Southern, he said, he had made up his mind to remove, and be of the Northern.
(Footage of Thomas Jefferson's note; portrait of Washington)
TEICHNER: So let me get this straight. Washington would have sided with the North.
Mr. WIENCEK: That's right.
(Footage of ceremony; memorial stone; portrait of a slave)
TEICHNER: (Voiceover) Every September, ceremonies are held in the old slave cemetery at Mt. Vernon, next to a memorial honoring the men, women and children who served the plantation. Many of the participants are descendents of those whose names are read out.
Unidentified Man: Simon...
Unidentified Woman: Diana...
(Footage of slave roster; painting of Washington family)
TEICHNER: (Voiceover) There were more than 300 slaves at Mt. Vernon. George Washington only owned about a third of them. He could not free the rest, because they belonged to the heirs of Martha Washington's first husband, who were utterly opposed to ending slavery.
Mr. WIENCEK: This was the house that was built by George Washington's granddaughter, Martha Custis Peter.
(Footage of Tudor Place; portrait of Washington; illustration of slaves at work)
TEICHNER: (Voiceover) At her Georgetown home, Tudor Place, Henry Wiencek found her husband's orderly accounting of slave sales, his record of lives listed as property.
Mr. WIENCEK: He was in the common run of slaveholders of that time. But that's the interesting thing about Washington is that he stood out and he tried to persuade his family not to do that.
Mr. REES: The real issue was money. The slaves were worth a tremendous amount of money, and they just did not want to give that up. Washington was the one who actually had a change of heart, who came to the conclusion that it's more important to free our slaves than it is to keep this economic system going.
(Footage of memorial site; bust and portrait of Washington)
Mr. WIENCEK: So we can look back and wish that he had pushed a little bit harder, but we can credit him for tremendous moral insight.
TEICHNER: (Voiceover) So in the end, it seems, George Washington, the man, was worthy of George Washington, the icon.
A Hateful View of the Jews: Gibson's Passion Play
Geza Vermes, in the London Sunday Telegraph (Feb. 15, 2004):
In the storm of publicity which has preceded the release of Mel Gibson's gory film, The Passion of the Christ, its promoters have claimed (though the Vatican has denied) that the Pope gave his blessing to the movie saying: "It is as it was." This is supposed to mean that the film is historically reliable. Gibson was less reticent and suggested that it was "directed by the Holy Ghost". For students of first-century Jewish history, I am afraid things are not that simple.
The Passion story of the New Testament can be seen in three distinct ways. The theological view is that the Son of God sacrificed himself to redeem the sins of all men. Each human being should feel responsible for his death on the cross.
Next we have the literal reading of the Gospel story. There we encounter determined Jews, headed by their high priest Caiaphas, wishing to see Jesus dead, and bullying a weak Roman governor into complying with their design. This understanding of the Gospel account of the Passion was twisted into the doctrine of deicide - the notion that the Jews killed God - and to the deplorable caricature of the Jewish people as Christ-killers. The Second Vatican Council - which Mel Gibson, as an ultra-traditional Catholic, rejects - explicitly condemned and exorcised this devilish teaching.
The objective of the third approach is to uncover the true Passion story lurking beneath the text of the New Testament by determining the purpose of the narrators, the identity of its readers, the wider historical setting and the use of textual interpretation.
The four Gospels were all written after the suppression of the Jewish revolt against Rome between AD 70 and 110. By the end of the first century the very large majority of the intended readers were non-Jewish inhabitants of the Greco-Roman world. They shared the prevailing strong anti-Jewish sentiment which followed the unpopular rebellion against the empire. For the Gospel writers to have advanced the claim that a Jewish Redeemer was crucified by Pilate - that Rome was to blame - would have been wholly counterproductive.
Given this highly specific context, it is no surprise that Jesus and his followers are not really presented as Jews. By contrast, it is the Jews that the Gospels - especially Matthew - blame for the death of Jesus. (In Mark, the chief priests ask for witnesses; in Matthew for false witnesses.) Again, Matthew alone carries the fateful words, "His blood be on us and on our children" - a curse upon all Jews for the rest of time. Every effort is made, on the other hand, to excuse Pontius Pilate of complicity in the crime, short of denying that it was he who ordered the crucifixion.
About Pilate a great deal is known. All the first-century sources other than the Gospels depict him as a harsh, insensitive and cruel figure, guilty of bribery, and responsible for numerous executions without trial. He was dismissed and banished by the emperor Tiberius. The portrait in the New Testament of a vacillating weakling, troubled by his conscience but eventually yielding to the bloodthirsty Jewish mob, is quite at odds with what we know of the real Pilate.
The governors were also the absolute masters of the Jewish high priests whom they appointed and sacked at will. It is complete historical nonsense, as is apparently implied in Gibson's film, to suggest that Caiaphas bulldozed Pilate into executing Jesus. The Passion of Christ is only the latest version of the story over the centuries to present Caiaphas as the villain of the piece. In fact, he found himself in an unenviable position. As the head of the Jews in Judea, he and his council were duty-bound to keep law and order for the Romans in a troublesome country and an even more turbulent Jerusalem, filled with crowds of international pilgrims around Passover. For the Jews, Passover was the feast of liberation and the moment of the year when the Messiah was expected to appear. In the powder keg of first-century Jerusalem any disturbance would have provoked violent Roman retaliation.
Jesus was guilty of causing a commotion in the merchants' quarter in the Temple when he overturned the stalls and tables of the dealers in animals and moneychangers. From the point of view of the authorities, he was a dubious charismatic prophet, preaching a new Kingdom of God. He had a following. He and his men were Galileans, and Galilee was a hotbed of anti-Roman agitation. Some of his companions were reputed to be revolutionaries like Simon the Zealot - and maybe even Judas Iscariot, if Iscariot derives from Sicarius, a murderous dagger man. So Jesus had to be dealt with to avoid disorder in which many might have been slaughtered.
According to the Gospel writers, Caiaphas judged Jesus to be a blasphemer for calling himself the Messiah. Such an assertion did not amount to blasphemy in any Jewish law, Biblical or post-Biblical. But if Caiaphas mistakenly thought it did, he should have condemned him to die by stoning, the prescribed Jewish capital penalty for a religious crime. Yet, having declared him guilty, the court abruptly changed tack. It abandoned the religious charge for a new political one and laid it before Pilate: Jesus was a rebel. Crucifixion was the Roman penalty for sedition and Jesus, like thousands of Jewish revolutionaries, died on the cross.
Here we need to pause and reflect. Why did Caiaphas not order his henchmen to proceed with the stoning of Jesus? The first three Gospels overlook the question. Only John makes the Jews give Pilate a legal tutorial in which they claim to him that they are not authorised to carry out the death penalty. But was this, in fact, the case? There is, it is true, some evidence to show that the right to put a criminal to death was the exclusive privilege of the Roman governor. But there are arguments that appear even stronger suggesting quite otherwise.
There were, it seems, circumstances in which the Jews themselves could impose capital punishment without Rome's permission. Philo of Alexandria, an older contemporary of Jesus, attests that entry into the innermost area of the Temple was punishable by death without appeal. The Jewish historian Josephus (37-c100) and an inscription from the Temple also proclaim that any non-Jew, even a Roman citizen, risked his life if caught inside the sanctuary. In such cases, there was no need for the Roman governor's consent. We also learn from the Acts of the Apostles that when St Paul was summoned before the Sanhedrin (the supreme court in Jerusalem) on a capital charge, he was so afraid of being found guilty and put to death that he used the privilege of a Roman citizen to appeal to the emperor's tribunal.
From all this we can draw an important conclusion: the decision of Caiaphas to hand Jesus's case over to Pontius Pilate did not reflect his legal incapacity to execute him, but his unwillingness to do so. He was passing the buck - and the decision to crucify Jesus was Pilate's and Pilate's alone.
This is not pure speculation. In AD 62, some 30 years after the crucifixion of Christ, another Jesus, the son of Ananias, was brought before the Jewish high court in Jerusalem on the charge of fomenting disorder during the pilgrimage Feast of Tabernacles. The magistrates first tried to silence him by a severe beating. It did not work, so they handed him over to the Roman governor Albinus because they were worried that he might be God's prophet. He administered an even worse beating to the accused before interrogating him. This Jesus refused to reply. But this story has a happier ending than that of Jesus of Nazareth. As Jesus, son of Ananias, was without followers, the governor concluded that he was a lunatic and let him go.
I hope that, seen in their genuine historical context, the New Testament accounts of the trial and execution of Jesus will become less perplexing and less likely to feed anti-Semitism. Perhaps the Pope's alleged verdict of Gibson's film should be reformulated to read: it would be better if it were not.
Estonia Hasn't Come to Grips with Its Nazi Past
Anna Badkhen, in the SF Chronicle (Feb. 15, 2004):
When the United States stripped Michael Gorshkow of his American citizenship and forced him to leave his Florida home 18 months ago, a federal judge said there was no doubt Gorshkow had helped slaughter at least 3,000 Jewish men, women and children during the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe.
But now, surrounded by the quaint medieval steeples and tranquil snow-swept farmland of his native Estonia, Gorshkow, 80, is a free man, and his case has barely stirred the interest of prosecutors in this tiny Baltic nation.
International Jewish groups say at least 17 unpunished Nazi war criminals may be living in Estonia, but investigators have not brought charges against a single one.
Experts say the reluctance to prosecute accused Nazi war criminals such as Gorshkow reflects Estonia's lingering ambivalence about the 1941-44 Nazi occupation.
Many Estonians continue to regard the occupation as an attempt to liberate their country from the rule of the reviled Soviet Union, which annexed the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 1940.
"Estonia is one of the countries that are in deep denial," said Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, which hunts down Nazi war criminals. "They think they have nothing to do with this, that the Holocaust didn't happen there, that they have nothing to regret and nothing to apologize for."
Experts say Estonia's lack of political will to prosecute war criminals undermines its attempt to portray itself as a nation that shares Western values. Estonia is scheduled to join the European Union on May 1 and to become a NATO member in the summer.
But Anatol Lieven, an expert on the Baltic states at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C., said Estonia's reluctance to address its role in the Holocaust "raises the question of how far the whole adoption of the Western persona (is) genuine and deep-rooted" or whether it could "evaporate again after they join the EU and NATO."
Having experienced the terror of the Soviet occupation, when thousands were deported to Siberia, many Estonians welcomed the arrival of German troops in 1941.
They voluntarily joined Nazi police and army units and helped exterminate not only Estonia's tiny Jewish community but tens of thousands of Jews brought here from other Eastern European countries to be slaughtered or interned in camps such as Vaivara, Klooga and Lagedi.
Jesus in America
Richard Wightman Fox, professor of history at the University of Southern California, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscribers only) (Feb. 20, 2004):
... the broad features of Christ's identity were passed along from one culture to another. At different times greater or lesser weight was assigned to his roles as divine king, sacrificial redeemer, holy child, apocalyptic prophet, miracle worker and healer, wisdom teacher, social critic and reformer, luminous personality. Jesus assumed regional and national shapes as those perennial features of his identity were adapted to local conditions. In 19th-century America, for example, urban and rural working-class Catholics, Baptists, and Methodists all appealed to Jesus for support as they sought leverage against mostly Anglo-American cultural, political, and economic establishments. They made Jesus a democrat, a man of the people, a crucified carpenter. That did not mean they stopped regarding him as "Lord" and "King." Those patriarchal labels were vital supports for working-class Protestant men as they eased women out of the few positions of authority they had managed to obtain during the hectic early-19th-century years of evangelical expansion. Hierarchical labels for Jesus were also important supports for the episcopal structures (bishops) of the Catholics, Episcopalians, and Methodists. Jesus was reborn again and again in 19th-century America, as one group after another construed his divinity or his humanity in novel ways.
In retrospect we might imagine that Jesus helped unite 19th-century Catholic and Protestant Americans. When they jointly encountered Native Americans or Asian immigrants, he probably did. But as they confronted each other in the 19th and even 20th centuries, Catholics and Protestants used Christ mainly to emphasize their differences. Each group tried to protect him from contamination by the other. Occasionally ethnic and religious animosity turned violent -- the burning of Catholic convents or churches, assaults on Protestant neighborhoods -- but in the main the war was ideological. Pitched cultural battles were fought over many issues, including the right way to represent and worship Christ. Catholics took heart from the image of Jesus as the physically abused, suffering servant, a depiction the Irish had already nurtured under English oppression. It was a portrayal guaranteed to alienate, if not disgust, most Protestants, who regarded it as medieval and idolatrous. Each group got to savor the conviction that it was being faithful to the original Jesus of the Gospels.
Protestants, especially educated, liberal ones, held Jesus up as the ultimate individualist, the model of the self-made man. Catholics and many other Protestants praised him as the consummate family man. Catholics, naturally, kept him tied to his Holy Family of origin, an only son and a celibate adult. Protestants gave him brothers and imagined he might have been married. Jesus could be pushed in either direction, autonomous individual or family pillar. The solitary divine-human person promoted the relentless American assault upon any customary practice that got in the way of personal development or social progress. Modernizing Americans liberalized Jesus into a God of pure "love" who had nothing but scorn for inherited "law," a radical critic of all old-fashioned limits and boundaries. Meanwhile, the Catholics' Holy Family member and the Protestants' personal Savior could stand for the importance of tradition. With Jesus as their hero, Americans could have their cake of old-time values and devour it, too. They could get divine sanction for making all things new while believing that they honored their most precious inheritance of all, Christ himself. They could see themselves as a chosen people -- the ancient Hebrew notion adopted in the 17th century by the Puritans -- but a people chosen now for free-spirited development as individuals. Jesus, the chosen Son, provided vital underpinning for this novus ordo seclorum (new order of the ages): a nation of individuals embarked on an open-ended journey of territorial expansion, economic innovation, and social experimentation. He was such a symbolically rich figure that he could offer moral support while also raising moral objections. Protestant and Catholic Americans could never have remade their nation in the 19th century without trusting Jesus to propel them forward while steering them away from sin.
Jesus has had a distinctively American incarnation over the past two centuries because the overall national infatuation with him has been supported by so many independent, subcultural traditions of allegiance to him. African-Americans, Latino-Americans, Asian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Anglo-Americans, Native Americans, and many others have developed their identities in relation to Christ. Within each group he helps to link the past and present. Individual immigrants can choose to worship him in ways familiar to them from the Old World or select new ones that stand for and help speed their adaptation to America. Today many Latino Catholics are combining old and new by relying on Catholic masses when marking important life events and attending evangelical or Pentecostal Protestant services when seeking emotionally potent encounters with Christ. Hispanic Protestantism takes over from the Catholic tradition a far more corporeal Jesus than most American Protestants recognize. This physical Jesus fits naturally with the body-transforming charismatic speaking and hands-on healing practices of much of the Protestant revivalism and Pentecostalism.
The African-American tie to Jesus is the most historically complex of all the ethnically differentiated faiths in him. While it stemmed originally from a forced adaptation to the white world, it ended up exerting a major impact on the Southern white Protestant culture to which black people had been forced to adapt. Early on Jesus emerged for some African-American slaves as the figure who bridged African past and American present. By the early 19th century, slaves had become Christians in large numbers. African convictions about the living presence of the dead, and the reality of the unseen world, made Jesus a powerful presence in dreams as well as wakeful states. Thanks to his paradoxical place as Lord and servant of both highborn and low, Jesus came to stand in African-American religion for the mysterious agency through which, against all appearances, the last would ultimately -- and even now, in faith -- be made first. The last had a forceful cultural impact on the first. White Protestantism immediately understood the religious power of the black spiritual. African-American creations such as "Steal Away to Jesus" or "Balm in Gilead" spoke of distinctively black yearnings for temporal as well as spiritual freedom and consolation. But white people could appropriate the songs as pleas for Jesus to free them from bondage to sin. "If you can't preach like Peter," declares the final verse of "Balm in Gilead," "if you can't pray like Paul, just tell the love of Jesus, and say He died for all."...
Even if Jesus is losing a small percentage of his religious disciples in America at the start of the 21st century, he is certainly an omnipresent symbol of religious, ethical, and philosophical seeking. He is so pervasive culturally that some representations of him have no apparent religious reference at all. Over the past generation, for example, his crucifix has taken on a secular life of its own as a hip fashion statement. But the commercialization of the cross -- and of Jesus himself in secular as well as Christian music -- may still carry with it a moral or spiritual yearning that marks it as religious. It is hard to separate religious from secular piety where Jesus is concerned.
NB: This essay is adapted from Mr. Fox's book Jesus in America: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession.
Freudianism Is Dead. Long Live Freudianism!
Todd Dufresne, in the LAT (Feb. 18, 2004):
What an utter disappointment the 1990s were for the fans of Freud. Time magazine asked aloud, and on its cover no less, "Is Freud Dead?" And the former analytic stronghold, the New York Review of Books, published lengthy feature articles debunking Freud's reputation as a man and as a thinker.
By the end of the decade, even the New Yorker was in on the action. Taken as a whole, these sensations of the 1990s, part of the so-called "Freud wars," capture the gist of a cause well lost.
The year 2000 — the centenary of "The Interpretation of Dreams" — should have been a triumph for Freudians. Instead, amid the celebrations was a funereal whiff of defeat: The psychoanalytic century was over before the 21st century had begun. Everyone knew the answer to Time's rhetorical question. Psychoanalysis was indeed dead.
Well, almost everyone knew. You can always count on intellectuals to keep a candle burning for whatever idea they've invested long years, enormous sums of money and, perhaps above all, limitless ego promoting.
Obviously, it's not easy to walk away from a venture of this magnitude — one that helped pave the way for tenure and the prestige of authorship. Over the years, there were so many books, so many reviews, so many lectures, all with so little perspective on Freud's limitations, and partisans were just not ready to give it all up. So the Freud industry soldiered on. ...
Diane Ravitch: The Language Police
Diane Ravitch, in the WSJ (Feb. 13, 2004):
While writing "The Language Police," I could not figure out why New York State had gone so far beyond other states in punctiliously carving out almost all references to race, gender, age and ethnicity, including even weight and height. In June 2002, the state was mightily embarrassed when reports appeared about its routine bowdlerizing on its exams of writers such as Franz Kafka and Isaac Bashevis Singer.
The solution to the puzzle was recently provided by Candace deRussy, a trustee of the State University of New York. Ms. DeRussy read "The Language Police," and she too wondered how the New York State Education Department had come to censor its regents exams with such zeal. She asked the department to explain how it decided which words to delete and how it trained its bias and sensitivity reviewers.
At one point, state officials said that since June 2002 (the time of the debacle) they have adhered to only one standard: "Test developers should strive to identify and eliminate language, symbols, words, phrases, and content that are generally regarded as offensive by members of racial, ethnic, gender, or other groups, except when judged to be necessary for adequate representation of the domain." Ms. DeRussy guessed (correctly) that the state was holding back the specific instructions that had emboldened the bowdlerizers. She decided to use the state's freedom-of-information law to find out more. Months later, a state official sent her the training materials for the bias and sensitivity reviewers, which included a list of words and phrases and a rationale for language policing.
So here is how New York made itself an international joke. The state's guidelines to language sensitivity, citing Rosalie Maggio's "The Bias-Free Wordfinder," says: "We may not always understand why a certain word hurts. We don't have to. It is enough that someone says, 'That language doesn't respect me.' " That is, if any word or phrase is likely to give anyone offense, no matter how far-fetched, it should be deleted.
Next the state asked: "Is it necessary to make reference to a person's age, ancestry, disability, ethnicity, nationality, physical appearance, race, religion, sex, sexuality?" Since the answer is frequently no, nearly all references to such characteristics are eliminated. Because these matters loom large in history and literature--and because they help us to understand character, life circumstances and motives--their silent removal is bound to weaken or obliterate the reader's understanding.
Like every other governmental agency concerned with testing, the New York State Education Department devised its own list of taboo words. There are the usual ones that have offended feminists for a generation, like "fireman," "authoress," "handyman" and "hostess." New York exercised its leadership by discovering bias in such words as "addict" (replace with "individual with a drug addiction"); "alumna, alumnae, alumni, alumnus" (replace with "graduate or graduates"); "American" (replace with "citizen of the United States or North America"); "cancer patient" (replace with "a patient with cancer"); "city fathers" (replace with "city leaders").
Meanwhile, the word "elderly" should be replaced by "older adult" or "older person," if it is absolutely necessary to mention age at all. "Gentleman's agreement" must be dropped in favor of an "informal agreement." "Ghetto" should be avoided; instead describe the social and economic circumstances of the neighborhood. "Grandfather clause" is helplessly sexist; "retroactive coverage" is preferred instead. The term "illegal alien" must be replaced by "undocumented worker."
Certain words are unacceptable under any circumstances. For example, it is wrong to describe anyone as "illegitimate." Another word to be avoided is "illiterate." Instead, specify whether an individual is unable to read or write, or both. Similarly, any word that contains the three offensive letters "m-a-n" as a prefix or a suffix must be rousted out of the language. Words like "manhours," "manpower," "mankind" and "manmade" are regularly deleted. Even "penmanship," where the guilty three letters are in the middle of the word, is out.
Diane Ravitch: States Should Drop Textbook Reviews
Diane Ravitch, in the Austin-American Statesman (Feb. 18, 2004):
The nation has come to expect a lot of laughs and outrage whenever Texas is engaged in the regular process of deciding which textbooks to buy (or "adopt") for public schools across the state.
In fact, schoolchildren in Texas and throughout the nation would be far better served if Texas eliminated the entire textbook adoption process.
Why should bureaucrats and elected officials have the power to tell publishers what to leave in and take out of their textbooks? Why should small advocacy groups have the power to demand that the books be revised to please them?....
History textbooks are subject to review by pressure groups that insist that words and events that offend them are removed. Feminists have gotten publishers to delete hundreds of words that begin or end with the three letters "man." Even the term Founding Fathers may no longer be used in U.S. history textbooks, because it offends feminists. Conservative groups have also gotten state education departments and publishers to drop words, sentences and paragraphs that refer to fossils, evolution, dinosaurs, witches and other topics that offend them.
In my recent book "The Language Police," I identified hundreds of words, topics and images that are carefully deleted from textbooks and state tests because of political pressure. Nowhere is this pressure more keenly felt than in the process of state textbook adoptions, where one-issue groups can intimidate state agencies and publishers with surprising ease by threatening to brand books "controversial."
State textbook adoption does not produce better textbooks. Because of the pressures exerted by the 21 states with adoption processes, all the books look like peas in a politically correct pod. All suffer from a dull uniformity. They carefully skirt controversy and avoid anything that might offend anyone.
Ironically, the states that do not adopt textbooks have higher test scores in reading and math.
Texas should show the way to the other 20 states that adopt textbooks by getting rid of this system. Its main effect is not to improve quality but to politicize and sanitize the books.
Garry Wills: About the First Negro President
An interview with Garry Wills on NPR conducted by Tavis Smiley (Feb. 16, 2004):
While we have recent memories of an especially tight presidential election in 2000 and, who knows, potentially a tight election this November, history tells the story of how in 1800, Thomas Jefferson won a close election on the strength of slave representation. Slaves did not vote, of course, but the original Constitution mandated that slaves be considered three-fifths of a person, giving a great deal of power to slave owners and slave states.
Gary Wills joins us now from the studios on the Northwestern University campus in Evanston, Illinois. He is an adjunct professor and cultural historian there. He's best known, of course, for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "Lincoln at Gettysburg," but his new book is called "Negro President: Jefferson and Slave Power."
Professor Wills, nice to have you on, sir.
Professor GARY WILLS (Author, "Negro President"): Thank you for having me.
SMILEY: My delight. So what does slave power mean in reference to the election of the president in 1800?
Prof. WILLS: It meant that the South was disproportionately represented in that election and in all things that involved the House of Representatives. The Southern states had a third more votes than they deserved by their free inhabitants because there slaves were counted at a three-fifths rate. The way that came about, when the South went to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, it said, 'We're going to be a minority in this new union and we don't trust you to have our interests at heart, so the only way we can be equal to you is if you count our slaves as part of our represented population.'
And the North said, 'We can't do that. That's immoral. It would reward you for owning slaves. Pierce Butler had 1,000 slaves, so he would get 600 extra votes just from that fact. It would give you a motive to acquire more slaves. The more you got, the more power you would have.'
And the South said, 'Well, if you don't accept our offer, then we're not coming in.'
So then they had to bargain and so they haggled back and forth and that's how we came up with that odd figure that most people don't understand, three-fifths. You know, some people think that that was an insult to blacks, that they were only counted three-fifths of a person, but, of course, they weren't counted as a person at all in terms of representation and voting. That was a count given to their owners to use at their owners' discretion. And it was the abolitionists who didn't want to count the slaves and it was the slave holders who wanted to count them five-fifths, a full count. It was only by bargaining down a little bit that some of their power was restricted.
SMILEY: I think I can figure this out but tell me then why Jefferson's detractors called him Negro president.
Prof. WILLS: Because they said he was borne into the temple of liberty on the shoulders of his Negro slaves; that it was the Negro vote that made him president, of course, in ironic tone. Then they called the Negro vote in Congress, which passed a number of bills against slaves, a Negro vote--a vote using the Negroes against the Negroes. So it was not a term of denigration to the slaves but to the slave holders. After all, since they did have that extra power, bill after bill wouldn't have passed but for that. The gag rules that said Congress couldn't even discuss abolition of slavery were passed only because of that slave margin, that count of the three-fifths.
SMILEY: Do you contend then that John Adams was actually re-elected president in 1800 and not Mr. Jefferson?
Prof. WILLS: Well, obviously, he was not in terms of the Constitution because that did count the slave vote. But he did not win by a free majority, which is what Jefferson and his followers claimed.
SMILEY: Thomas Jefferson has been portrayed as a man conflicted and ultimately "fair"--I put that in quotes--to his slaves and, of course, we all know the story now, Professor, of Sally Hemings, the slave who bore a child by Jefferson. You've written two books that were largely flattering toward Jefferson but what about his relationship to these slaves?
Prof. WILLS: Well, it was not a healthy relationship. Slavery never is. After all, he sold 85 of his slaves. You know, he liked to call the slaves 'My family.' You don't sell members of your family. And that was a huge proportion of his slaves. The most he ever owned at one time was 200. So selling them, which at that time meant selling them West to you didn't know what kind of treatment, was hardly a fair action. And every time there was a chance of extending slave territory, he pushed it. He wanted slavery in the territories acquired by the Louisiana Purchase. He wanted them in Missouri. He wanted them in the Floridas. He wanted slaves in Cuba, which he was also trying to acquire at that time. There's only one time that he did anything that was against slavery and that was under the Articles of Confederation, when he said that slavery should not be extended into the new territory after 1800. That was kind of a non-proposal because that gave 14 years for slavery to become entrenched there and it wouldn't have been uprooted under that program. But he got credit for being opposed to slavery in that case.
Some also say he was opposed to slavery because he was against the slave trade, both in the Declaration of Independence and in the Louisiana Purchase. But his whole state was against the foreign slave trade, because they had a surplus of blacks and they wanted to sell them into the states that didn't have that kind of margin. So when the king vetoed Louisiana Legislature's petition that the slave trade from England be canceled, he was doing it in response to Georgia and the other states that didn't have much of a slave population yet. So that was not really a thing in favor of the slaves but in favor of the Virginia slave holders.
SMILEY: I suspect so, because ultimately if they had the surplus, they can charge a higher price for the slaves they were selling.
Prof. WILLS: That's exactly right. They didn't want competition on the market.
SMILEY: Wow. The Haitian slave revolution was occurring during this same period of history, if I'm recalling this correct.
Prof. WILLS: Right.
SMILEY: How did Jefferson view that particular conflict off the shores of this new country, as it were?
Prof. WILLS: Well, he and all of the South were terrified. President Adams' secretary of State helped the black leader in Haiti, Toussaint L'Ouverture; sent the frigates of the United States Navy to help him and extended diplomatic recognition to his rebellious government. The minute that Jefferson came into office, he withdrew that recognition and he told Napoleon, against whose regime the rebellion was taking place, that if he wanted to crush Toussaint, America would help him. So the second revolution in the New World against an imperial government, the very thing that he had defended in the Declaration of Independence, he opposed when it was a question of blacks. And the secretary of State, Adams, brought that up to him and quoted the Declaration to him and said, 'What's the difference? There's only one difference here, color. You will not recognize the independence of people of color.' And Jefferson had no answer to that.
SMILEY: This year happens to be the 200th anniversary of Haitian independence, since you mention Toussaint L'Ouverture. Let me close our conversation by asking, Professor Wills, whether or not you think that Jefferson's election ultimately did, in fact, prolong slavery in the US?
Prof. WILLS: Well, not that election alone, but the slave interest certainly did and his government, his leadership, the fact that he was so popular and that he was so good in many ways was all thrown into the protection of the slave system. But I must say that that was true of every single Southern leader, whether Washington or Madison or Monroe, Andrew Jackson. They were all bound to protect the slave system and they all did it.
SMILEY: Gary Wills is an adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University and author of "Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power." You can find out more about his book and hear him reading a passage on our Web site at npr.org.
Special Issue: US News & World Report Devoted to the History of Exploration
Samantha Levine, in a Special Issue of US News devoted to the history of exploration (Feb. 23, 2004):
There's the Magellan spacecraft, the first to thoroughly map Venus. There's a Magellan mutual fund, a Magellan healthcare insurance company, and dozens of other businesses and products all named in honor of the Portuguese explorer known as the first man to circumnavigate the globe. But that admiration may be misdirected. It seems that Ferdinand Magellan's slave, Enrique, was actually the first man to complete the circuit.
Enrique did not make the journey by choice, of course. Most likely born on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, Enrique was sold to Magellan in nearby Malacca in 1512, during one of the navigator's earlier voyages. When Magellan set off on his quest to find a passage through the Americas to the East Indies, Enrique was part of the crew, ending up back in Malacca nearly 10 years later. Having started far to the east, he thus completed his circumnavigation before anyone else aboard--let alone Magellan, who was killed in the Philippines and never made it home.
Worldview. Still, Magellan's tenacity--even fanaticism--vastly enlarged the world that Europeans knew. Laurence Bergreen, author of a new book about Magellan, Over the Edge of the World, says the difference between Christopher Columbus's jaunts across the Atlantic and Magellan's trip across the vast breadth of the Pacific was like the "difference between going to the moon and going to Mars." Along the way, Magellan discovered and somehow navigated the 330-mile labyrinth of fjords and bays we now call the Strait of Magellan and was the first to note the Pacific's critical trade winds. "This was the first modern voyage that gave us our sense of what the world was actually like," says Bergreen.
The History Channel's Standards Are too Loose
Dorothy Rabinowitz, in the WSJ (Feb. 19, 2004):
Can there be a way to prepare one's mind for the spectacle now before us, in which the History Channel explains its worthy reasons for airing a film back in November -- part of the 40th anniversary of JFK's assassination -- identifying Lyndon B. Johnson as the criminal responsible for John Kennedy's murder? We can but try.
Start with a different theory put forward in 1997 by Jim Marrs, a former Texas newspaper reporter, which holds that the president's murder might well have taken place because President Kennedy had full knowledge of alien landings on earth -- and there were those who didn't want him spreading the news to the American people.
Hugh Aynesworth, a former reporter for The Dallas Morning News, tells us in his fascinating "JFK: Breaking the News" (International Focus Press) that at a debate after the publication of Mr. Marrs's book, which boasts confidences from the president about his deep wish to tell the public about the extraterrestrial visitations, Mr. Aynesworth had a question. Did he really believe, he asked the author, that JFK's alleged comments -- ascribed to sources like a former steward and the "loadmaster" for Air Force One -- constituted, as the book said, "tantalizing" evidence that the president had been killed to keep him from sharing news of alien visitations? To which he received the reply, "What should I have done, ignored it?"
The History Channel management would understand; its own explanation for the LBJ documentary reflects roughly the same point of view -- if one it put less forthrightly. The History Channel has, of course, plenty to be less forthright about. After all, claims about JFK and alien visitations aren't in the same league of offenses as the Johnson documentary, conceivably the most malignant assault on sanity and truth -- not to mention history -- in memory. Titled "The Guilty Men," the film is based in part on a book of the same name by one Barr McClellan, who provides a grand assortment of testaments from the fever swamps. Still, the documentary's ever deepening mess of charges and motives is never less than clear about its main point -- that Lyndon Johnson personally arranged the murder not only of the president, but also seven other people, including his own sister.
The work of British producer Nigel Turner, this story -- described by British journalists who looked into its claims as total nonsense when it aired in England -- didn't make much news when it appeared here in November. Though it did cause an appalled Tom Johnson, former head of CNN and now chairman of the LBJ Foundation in Austin, Texas, to try -- unsuccessfully, it would turn out -- to get through to the president of A&E, parent company of the History Channel, to ask for a rebuttal. For months there was silence from A&E, the History Channel. Not, however, from viewers who had, it seems, begun besieging the LBJ Foundation with threats to tear the place apart. They had, after all, seen the documentary on a network named the History Channel -- which would not, they assumed, present a story so horrendous in its implications if there was nothing to it. And indeed, after "The Guilty Men" first aired, the network seemed to defend the program with a statement saying it was "presenting a point of view that has been meticulously researched."
The Vinland Map ... And the Debate Goes On
Guy Gugliotta, in the Wash Post (Feb. 16, 2004):
When it surfaced in 1957, it was too good to be true: a purported 15th-century world map depicting an island to the far west labeled Vinilandia Insula -- the fabled Vinland -- proof positive, it seemed, that Norse explorers had reached North America long before Columbus.
Thanks -- but no thanks -- the British Museum told the intermediary who offered to sell it to them. It's a phony.
Later that year, however, New Haven, Conn., book dealer Lawrence Witten bought the map and an accompanying medieval manuscript for his wife, paying $3,500. Soon after, he visited Yale University Library to view a seemingly unrelated manuscript fragment purchased by Thomas E. Marston, the library's curator of medieval and renaissance literature. Witten asked to borrow it.
That night, Marston got an excited call from Witten. Marston's manuscript, Witten's manuscript and the map were all written in the same hand, Witten said. Furthermore, worm holes in all three works matched up. They apparently had been bound together, with Marston's manuscript as the meat in the sandwich. The map had to be real.
Thus began the affair of the "Vinland Map," a 13-by-19-inch sheet of parchment depicting not only Vinland, but also remarkably detailed renderings of Iceland and, especially, of Greenland, which -- if the map is real -- is portrayed as an island for the first time in history.
Forty-five years after the map's "discovery," its authenticity remains a subject of fierce debate. In the last two months, the journal Analytical Chemistry has published two articles by front-line combatants in the dispute.
One, by retired Smithsonian research chemist Jacqueline Olin, argued that the presence of anatase, or titanium oxide, in the ink did not mean the ink was modern, as had been alleged in earlier research. She suggested the ink may well have been medieval, made from a simple leaching process from the titanium-rich mineral ilmenite.
The other, by Kenneth Towe, also a retired Smithsonian analyst, reminded readers that the map's anatase had a crystalline structure identical to commercial anatase, a ubiquitous synthetic compound used to enhance colors in paint. Olin's analysis, Towe charged, was "a 'rehash' that is too often biased, misleading or inaccurate."
In May, Danish businessman Jorgen Siemonsen, a well-known debunker of Viking frauds who is agnostic on the map, will sponsor a debate between believers and skeptics as part of a conference on the "Dynamics of Northern Societies."
And coming a month later will be a book-length study titled "Maps, Myths and Men, the Story of the Vinland Map," which will make the case that it is a 1930s forgery by a German Jesuit priest intent on making the Nazis look like fools.
At this juncture, a preponderance of evidence points toward forgery, but the argument is not over, and the stakes are high. If it is authentic, the map is priceless, the oldest known depiction of North America. Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the map's current resting place, at one point reportedly insured it for $25 million. If it is not authentic, however, it is an amusing curiosity -- worth what Witten paid for it, perhaps, but not much more.
Harriet Tubman's Star Is Rising
Drew Gilpin Faust, in the NYT (Feb. 15, 2004):
The Post Office has issued not one but two Harriet Tubman stamps; the National Standards for United States History have named Tubman as a figure who should be familiar to students by the fifth grade; Google lists more than 90,000 entries under her name; Amazon.com offers more than 1,200 results in its book category, including one entitled ''Girls Who Rocked the World . . . From Harriet Tubman to Mia Hamm.''
Tubman is far better known in American popular culture and among schoolchildren than she is in the serious historical literature. There has been no adult biography since 1943. Now three scholars have published studies almost simultaneously. Who is Harriet Tubman and why should we care about her? What can we know of her life, how can we know it and how should it shape our understanding of American history?
Tubman was born a slave on Maryland's Eastern Shore sometime in the early 1820's. She saw her sisters sold, bore scars of whippings all her life and suffered permanent disability from a head injury incurred when an enraged overseer hit her with a weight hurled at another slave, who was trying to run away. In 1849, fearing she would be sold, Tubman fled north, connecting with antislavery activists through what came to be known as the Underground Railroad. She returned to the South more than a dozen times to lead her brother, parents and, ultimately, about 70 individuals to freedom. By the late 1850's, Tubman was appearing on the antislavery lecture circuit and was widely hailed as a heroine across the North. John Brown, who visited her in Canada to seek her help in planning his abortive 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, called her ''General Tubman.'' During the Civil War, Tubman served as teacher, laundress, cook, spy and scout for the Union forces, helping to connect Northern troops with networks of slave information. In June 1863, she played a crucial role in a Union raid in South Carolina that liberated more than 700 slaves.
After the war, Tubman settled in Auburn, N.Y., where she struggled economically the rest of her life, undertaking domestic work and public speaking to support herself and dedicating much of her energy to philanthropic efforts on behalf of the freed people. She also became a regular speaker at woman suffrage gatherings, demanding to know if women's wartime deeds ''do not place woman as man's equal, what do?'' Tubman sought government acknowledgment of her own wartime service -- ''as nurse and cook in hospitals and as commander of several men . . . as scouts,'' as her pension application attested. Her claim was rejected, and she was provided instead with a monthly widow's pension, raised from $8 to $20 in recognition of her work as a nurse. Even the intervention of her congressman did not win official validation of her role as a scout and spy. Deeply spiritual, Tubman died in 1913 with clergymen at her side and a profession of Christian faith on her lips: ''I go away to prepare a place for you.''
The Professor Who Insists John Wilkes Booth Got Away
Bill McCleery, in the Indiannapolis Star (Feb. 16, 2004):
Twelve days after killing President Abraham Lincoln, assassin John Wilkes Booth was gunned down inside a Virginia barn.
Or was he?
Inspired by a coded message written in the late 1860s, a retired Indiana State University professor has spent decades searching for information about Lincoln's assassination. For Ray Neff, that odyssey culminated in the publication last year of his book, "Dark Union."
Neff's most sensational claim: that Booth escaped his pursuers and lived almost 20 more years after killing Lincoln. The dead man purported by authorities to be Booth was someone else, the book claims.
Booth, Neff maintains, fled overseas to India and assumed the identity of John Byron Wilkes, a man who lived in Terre Haute and whose personal information Booth supposedly purchased. Among the evidence cited by the book is a copy of Wilkes' will that names friends and relatives of Booth as beneficiaries.
"Dark Union," written with co-author Leonard Guttridge, suggests that conspirators -- who originally plotted to kidnap Lincoln -- extended beyond Confederates embittered by the Civil War. It also included northerners enriching themselves through a food-for-cotton trade scheme, the authors claim. And, they add, it included radicals from Lincoln's Republican Party opposed to the president's hints of a lenient reconstruction of the South.
"We don't have all the answers," said Neff, 80. "But we do have a lot of answers to a lot of things."
Lost History: Slavery in California
Deborah Kong, for the Associated Press (Feb. 15, 2004):
Californians like to think of their state as a freewheeling, tolerant place, one that entered the Union back in 1850 unbesmirched by the stain of slavery.
But Joe Moore says there's just one problem with that sunny vision of the past - it isn't true. Though it was admitted to the Union as a ``free state,'' slavery still existed in 1850s California, and Moore is leading a project to shed light on its contradictory history.
His proof is in print: in an 1852 ad announcing the public auction of a black man valued at $300; newspaper accounts of fugitive slaves who were arrested; and, county records certifying slaves bought their freedom from their owners.
Moore and a team of researchers have uncovered these and other, often overlooked pieces of California's past after months of digging through the archives of museums, historical societies and libraries across the state.
``We believe this is one of America's lost stories,'' said Guy Washington, regional coordinator for the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom project, who has worked closely with Moore.
Moore and researchers at California State University, Sacramento have been converting the documents into digital files, and plan to post them on the Internet at http://digital.lib.csus.edu/curr next week. When completed, the new online archive will provide insight into the challenges blacks faced in California of the 1800s.
``The story that's being told is the diversity and richness and the determination of a small community in the 19th century,'' said Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, a history professor at Sacramento State who is supervising student researchers and is married to Joe Moore.
After gold was discovered near Sutter's Fort in 1848, blacks joined a stampede of others migrating West, hoping to strike it rich.
For those early black pioneers, the state's policies appeared promising. California's first constitution, adopted in 1849, dictated that: ``Neither slavery, nor involuntary servitude, unless for the punishment of crimes, shall ever be tolerated in this State.'' A year later, under the Compromise of 1850, California was admitted to the Union as a free state.
But many found California a far cry from the land of opportunity they'd envisioned. Officials were unwilling to challenge slaveholders who brought slaves into the state. And other laws, such as one allowing people to bring slaves into the state if they stayed only temporarily, undermined the constitution, Shirley Moore said.
NYT: History Channel Documentary Implicating LBJ in JFK's Death Was "Harebrained"
Editorial in the NYT (Feb. 13, 2004):
The History Channel, an entertainment outlet with a serious name to live up to, has finally agreed to reconsider its "documentary" charging that Lyndon Johnson conspired to have President John Kennedy assassinated. It's about time.
The channel initially promoted the show and its ludicrous accusation by darkly announcing that "the roots of the crime lie buried deep in the heart of Texas and revolve around" President Johnson. The show featured the freewheeling imaginings of Barr McClellan, a retired Texas lawyer whose book demonizing Johnson is rooted in supposed confidences from sources who are now conveniently dead. The book is rich in patently unhistorical touches, insisting that Johnson was at a shadowy meeting on the eve of the assassination with Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover and two Texas oilmen. This is the stuff not of history, but of the Texas conspiratorial satires of the late Richard Condon.
A demand to set the record straight was understandably pressed by the late president's outraged relatives and colleagues. This issue is about fairness and common sense, not the freedom to broadcast. After the initial controversy, the channel admitted it had failed to "make it apparent that the material presented in this program is a theory." The program was one of several taking up unproven but titillating conspiracy speculations, from the Mafia to Cuba; the channel insisted that some deserved "public debate" and that there had never been "one clear-cut finding." This stance seems to equate any and all bits of what-if fantasizing with the Warren Commission's lengthy inquiry and firm conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the murderer.
After public pressure, the channel is now pursuing an independent review by three respected historians. The History Channel's reputation, as much as Johnson's, is in urgent need of this corrective. The program has already generated a flood of truly misinformed complaints and accusations for the Johnson presidential library. In clinging to his harebrained narrative, Mr. McClellan admits that he dabbled in "faction": fictional projections. That's the last thing the History Channel needs to stand for.
The Soviet Union Planned on Going to Mars, too
Steven Aftergood, in Secrecy News, the newsletter of the Federation of American Scientists (Feb. 13, 2004):
Life will be discovered on Mars, the CIA predicted. Unfortunately, it will be communist!As late as 1989, the CIA estimated that it was "likely" that the soon-to-collapse Soviet Union would undertake a manned mission to Mars.
"We believe the Soviets are planning for a manned Mars landing mission some time after the year 2000," the CIA analysis stated.
See "Soviet Options for a Manned Mars Landing Mission," CIA Directorate of Intelligence, December 1989, released in "sanitized" form in 1999, here:
http://www.fas.org/irp/cia/product/sovmars.pdf
Numerous declassified intelligence documents on the Soviet space program, from the early 1960s to the early 1990s, have been declassified and disclosed by the CIA. A selection of such documents (thanks to Jeff Brower and AT) may be found here:
http://www.fas.org/irp/cia/product/index.html#sovsp
Anyone with even a passing interest in the history of Soviet space will want to get a copy of "The Moon Race End Game: A New Assessment of Soviet Crewed Lunar Aspirations, Part 1" by Peter Pesavento and Charles P. Vick, in the current issue of Quest Magazine (volume 11, no. 1, 2004).
The authors take full advantage of the latest declassified documents and, by interviews with government officials, go beyond what is in the declassified record.
The article is not available online, but information about Quest Magazine may be found here:
http://www.spacebusiness.com/quest/