Roundup: Talking About History
In Memory of the First Black Columnist at the Chicago Tribune
Anniversary of the Single Most Consequential Law in American History
Are History Teachers Up to the Task of Educating Students About War?
Thomas Fleming: The Real Story Behind Napoleon's Sale of Louisiana
Students Don't Know Much About WW II Except the Internment Camps
The Battle that Made Great Britain Great ... The Battle of the Plains of Abraham?
What Accounts for the Renewal of the New York Review of Books ? Vietnam
Michael Klarman: The Supreme Court Has Never Been in the Vanguard of Social Reform
Evolution: Still Controversial (Teaching It Is Banned in Islamic Countries)
Charles Sumner Made the Case Against Segregated Schools a Century Before Brown
Thomas Sowell: We Are Still Paying the Price for the Faulty Reasoning in Brown
Christopher R. Waldrep: Why It Matters How Many People Murdered Emmett Till
Washington DC Is Running Out of Room for Memorials and Monuments
Jefferson Lecture: Harvard Poet Says History Is Not Essential to a Liberal Education
Rebecca Solnit: So Much for the Belief that Indians Are Vanishing
Jonathan Harris: Why Are Academics Misrepresenting Reform of Title VI?
Why We Argue So Much About War Memorials
Philip Kennicott, in the Wash Post (May 30, 2004):
Americans find the making of large national monuments so contentious and painful that it's surprising we build any at all. From 1987, when the idea was proposed in Congress, through this weekend's opening festivities, the National World War II Memorial has provoked so much controversy that it would be tempting to dismiss it all as just so much white noise from the black art of cultural criticism. But that would dismiss more than just an array of aesthetic and land use issues; it would dismiss a basic, contrarian stirring in the nation's psyche, a stirring as essential to the American democratic spirit as leavening to bread. Some cantankerous part of us does not like monuments at all. That is a good and important prompting, and something, if it weren't so paradoxical, that we should probably build a monument to honor.
What causes this unease? Consider stone. Stone is our central metaphor for things that are final, unassailable and commanding. Stonewall Jackson was unmovable; to stonewall is to be unyielding; a stony face refuses expression. And "set in stone" suggests that an idea, or a fact, has been placed in its ultimate form, beyond emendation and, often, beyond debate or contradiction.
Monuments are ideas set in stone, which is why they torment us. They are an attempt to place some fact, or some understanding of history, beyond dispute: This man was heroic; this war was good; these people should be remembered. They demand our assent to some basic proposition, which we can give or we can withhold. Successful monuments make clear statements, and earn (though not always at first) wide agreement; bad ones demand more than we can give, or lack clarity, and ultimately inspire resistance, indifference or division.
In a democratic society, there is a natural, healthy resistance to any kind of compliance with a final understanding of history. Historical understandings change. Good wars and good men don't necessarily seem so to later generations. And nothing, even a just war or a great man, is entirely good. The most basic message of any monument -- this war was good, or at least just -- brings with it other ideas, corollaries, embedded meanings that we are not so willing to agree with. And some essential part of American society -- call them critics -- refuses the finality of monuments with a reflexive unwillingness to cede any understanding to other people. At least not with the finality of stone.
Even as veterans, descendants, politicians and other celebrants gathered to participate in the opening of the World War II Memorial this weekend, debate about its merits continued, though you could hear a note of caution in the tone. It is taken for granted that the veterans of World War II deserve a memorial of some sort. And though that war has sparked controversy over Japanese American internment camps, the use of the atomic bomb, the firebombing of Dresden, none of this is on the table right now. The memorial simply assumes, and embodies, the language (and often the clichés) that have grown up around "the greatest generation," heroes all, who fought the "last great war."...
In Memory of the First Black Columnist at the Chicago Tribune
Les Payne, in memory of Vernon Jarrett, the first black columnist at the Chicago Tribune; in Newsday (May 30, 2004):
Two hours away from my lecture at Stillman College, I needed a grenade. Speakers should always arm themselves with this percussion device when steadying the wandering minds of students at college, even a Presbyterian one like Stillman.
I phoned Vernon Jarrett in Chicago for the exact language of the Alabama slave law that forbade the teaching of blacks to read. He quickly coughed up the 1848 law carrying a penalty of a $200 fine, imprisonment and public lashing. I hit the podium that Sunday with a scholarly sheen that Vernon had been polishing since I met the Chicago columnist in 1975. Google might issue up the slave act nowadays with the right words, but in a Tuscaloosa hotel room without a laptop, Vernon was the surest resort.
Besides, it had been Vernon who first disclosed the existence of the slave act to me at an earlier meeting of columnists. As the great-grandson of Alabama slaves, I knew vaguely of such laws. But hearing the chilling language rolling off Vernon's tongue hit me like a percussion bomb. That same effect was achieved among students attending historically black Stillman College, which was established in 1876 - a few years after the act was technically overruled by the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution.
The first time I met Vernon he spoke for 2-1/2 spellbinding hours at Morgan State University. On the second occasion, he again spoke for 2-1/2 hours, somewhat less spellbinding because of their familiarity. The third time went pretty much the same. The black history names were familiar - Frederick Douglass, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, Sojourner Truth, W.E.B. DuBois - but Vernon imbued them with a sense of daring. He made them curtsy and dance, flutter and wow. William Monroe Trotter was so engagingly reckless that I went on a dead run for his biography. This campaigning, turn-of-the-century Boston journalist, the first black Phi Beta Kappa Harvard graduate, ran the much-feared Guardian as a newspaper slashing to the bone of the powerful, both black and white.
Booker T. Washington, the most celebrated Negro of his era, was reduced in the Guardian to a token who owed his existence to white backers - which made him not very much of a black leader at all.
In a famous White House confrontation, Trotter took a delegation of black supporters in to see President Woodrow Wilson and discuss his joyful embrace and enforcement of the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. Legalized segregation had stimulated lynching in the South, rioting in the North and black oppression everywhere. "Segregation is not humiliating but a benefit," Wilson told Trotter and his group. Not one to kowtow, even in the White House, Trotter lit into so spirited an argument with the racist president that he had to be escorted out onto Pennsylvania Avenue. Front-page stories the next day reported that Wilson dismissed Trotter with, "Your manner offends me."
Rudeness in the defense of black human rights Trotter considered a virtue. Compromise, on the other hand, no matter how slight, Trotter considered a character defect. in any would-be Negro leader such as Washington. DuBois admired this in Trotter.
Vernon Jarrett admired it in both men, and he embodied these same traits as a journalist crusading for the rights of African-Americans. He blasted Bill Clinton as a sly slacker on race matters - and he was as tough as any critic on Jesse Jackson, relenting somewhat after he made his second presidential run in the 1988 Democratic campaign....
Anniversary of the Single Most Consequential Law in American History
From the Associated Press (May 29, 2004):
Take out your pencils and a clean sheet of notebook paper.
Sunday being the 150th anniversary of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, here's a pop history quiz.
Pretend the act died in Congress instead of being signed by President Franklin Pierce on May 30, 1854. With that in mind, answer these three questions:
When was slavery abolished in the United States?
What party has won six of the last nine presidential elections?
Whose picture is on the $5 bill?
The answer to all three questions: Who knows?
The law got Abraham Lincoln back into politics, led to the formation of the Republican Party and sparked what some historians consider the real first battles of the Civil War.
"It would be hard to find another single piece of legislation in all of American history that had greater consequences for the country - both good and bad - than the Kansas-Nebraska Act," said historian James McPherson of Princeton University.
To a 21st-century reader, the act appears fairly innocuous. It created the two territories out of land acquired through the Louisiana Purchase, and provided that residents of each would decide whether slavery would be allowed there.
But it had the effect of repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which prohibited slavery in new territories - creating worries that the southern "Slave Power" wanted to expand slavery nationwide.
A coalition of anti-slavery Democrats, breakaway Whigs and Free Soil Party members responded by forming the Republican Party. In 1860, the fledgling Republicans gained the White House.
In Illinois, the act's passage fell "like a thunderclap" on Lincoln, a former Whig congressman who had taken himself out of politics five years earlier.
"He was so outraged by the act that he got back in," McPherson said.
On Oct. 16, 1854, Lincoln vented that outrage in a speech at Peoria, Ill. He argued that Congress, not a popular vote in the territories, should determine the slavery issue in Kansas and Nebraska.
"If there is any thing which it is the duty of the whole people to never entrust to any hands but their own, that thing is the preservation and perpetuity of their own liberties and institutions," he said.
The speech revitalized Lincoln politically. Six years later, with the Democratic
Party split along sectional lines over slavery, Lincoln was elected in a three-way
race....
Are History Teachers Up to the Task of Educating Students About War?
Marissa Nelson, in Canada's London Free Press News (May 29, 2004):
Teachers are the key to keeping our country's history alive, but at least one noted historian questions their ability to handle the responsibility. "It's a bleak picture . . . I wish they were up for the job," says Jack Granatstein, chairperson of the Council for Canadian Security in the 21st Century. "Many teachers think war is something that should be taught as a bad thing, which neglects the heroism."
Schools teach children their rights in Canada, but not the responsibilities that come with citizenship, he says. We don't even know what opinions teachers are giving children, he adds, and whether they're sound.
"History is very important in a country that is as multi-cultural as we are. It's very important to understand the price we pay for that. "We teach a kind of human security, peacekeeping history, which strikes me as nuts, given all the violence. You need soldiers who can fight a war when you need to."
But Jonathan Vance, associate professor of history at the University of Western Ontario, is more optimistic because of the increased attention paid to history on television and in movies.
"They're tuning in more than we might imagine. I'm pretty optimistic about memory continuing," he says. "It's easy to make it boring but just as easy to make it interesting."
He says the key is making history relevant. He once grabbed a school's honour roll from the front foyer on his way into a Remembrance Day presentation and pointed out to the children that the men on the plaque sat in the same seats as them, 60 years ago.
"Suddenly they drew the connection with the past that seems so distant and the present they're living," he says.
...
Thomas Fleming: The Real Story Behind Napoleon's Sale of Louisiana
From the American Revolution Roundtable (June 2004):
On Tuesday, March 30, Tom Fleming treated Round Tablers to a highly unorthodox version of how the United States persuaded Napoleon Bonaparte to sell the United States the vast territory of Louisiana. He began with President Thomas Jefferson's startling 1801 offer to the French government to help it regain the island of Santo Domingo, and incidentally eliminate its black revolutionary ruler, Toussaint L'Ouverture. From there we roller- coastered with Tom as Jefferson discovered that Napoleon had secretly pressured Spain into retroceding Louisiana to France and the even more dismaying discovery that the "Man of Destiny" was shipping 15,000 troops to dispose of Toussaint and his "gilded Africans" (Napoleon's phrase) with orders to then head for New Orleans and begin setting up a French satellite state in the Mississippi Valley. Secretary of State James Madison took charge of foreign policy and decreed that the United States would NOT help the French army in Santo Domingo no matter what his friend Jefferson had said. When Toussaint and his black legions chose war rather than surrender, another player entered the drama, aedes egypti, the female mosquito that carried the yellow fever virus. Soon whole French regiments melted away and the combination of aedes plus Madison's intransigent hostility soon had Napoleon's dream of a revived North American empire in history's dustbin. Only then did the Man of Destiny decide to sell Louisiana to the startled Jefferson. Tom closed by urging Round Tablers to drink a Fourth of July toast to that unrecognized heroine of the republic, aedes egypti.
Students Don't Know Much About WW II Except the Internment Camps
Jay Matthews, in the Wash Post (May 28, 2004):
Tiffany Charles got a B in history last year at her Montgomery County high school, but she is not sure what year World War II ended. She cannot name a single general or battle, or the man who was president during the most dramatic hours of the 20th century.
Yet the 16-year-old does remember in some detail that many Japanese American families on the West Coast were sent to internment camps. "We talked a lot about those concentration camps," she said.
As Washington begins a massive Memorial Day weekend celebration of the new National World War II Memorial on the Mall, interviews with national education experts, teachers and more than 100 public school students suggest that Charles' limited knowledge of that momentous conflict is typical of today's youths.
Among 76 teenagers interviewed near their high schools this week in Maryland, Virginia and the District, recognition of the internment camps, a standard part of every area history curriculum, was high -- two-thirds gave the right answer when asked what happened to Japanese Americans during the war. But only one-third could name even one World War II general, and about half could name a World War II battle.
Diane Ravitch, an educational historian at New York University, said the big emphasis in high schools today is on the internment camps, as well as women in the workforce on the home front and discrimination against African Americans at home and in the armed services.
"Then, too, there was a war in the Atlantic and Pacific," she said.
Teachers and historians have been arguing for decades about how to teach World War II and other parts of American history. Many surveys, and interviews with students and teachers, indicate that there is less emphasis now on battles and victories, sparked in part by American failure in the Vietnam War, which had a significant impact on this generation of scholars and teachers.
At George Washington Middle School in Alexandria yesterday, seventh-grade history teacher Eric Bartels led his students through a spirited discussion of World War II that included mentions of Pearl Harbor, D-Day and other battles. But much of the emphasis was on the class's earlier visit to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, a visit to the school by African American World War II pilots and the causes of several of the war's major events.
Instead of seeking the details of the Japanese assault on Hawaiian-based forces on Dec. 7, 1941, Bartels asked: "Why did Japan attack Pearl Harbor?"
He got a big response when he asked about American women entering the workforce: "Rosie the Riveter!" several students said.
Charles Krauthammer: The WW II Memorial Is a Failure
Charles Krauthammer, in the Wash Post (May 28, 2004):
Those of us who publicly opposed placing the National World War II Memorial on the Mall in Washington argued that doing so was a prescription for failure. If the memorial were to respect the sight lines, symmetries and elegance of the Mall, it would be too small to do justice to the grandeur of the Second World War. And if the memorial were large enough to reflect the majesty of its subject, it would overpower and ruin the delicate harmonies of the Mall.
The World War II memorial has just opened, and it is indeed a failure. The good news is that the Mall survives. The bad news is that for all its attempted monumentality, the memorial is deeply inadequate -- a busy vacuity, hollow to the core.
The memorial is a parenthesis, quite literally so -- two semicircular assemblies of pillars cupping the Rainbow Pool on the invisible axis that connects the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument.
The pool, with its fountains, makes a nice space for tourists and toddlers to dip their feet on a hot summer's day. But as a remembrance of the most momentous event of the 20th century, it is a disaster.
Where does one start? The memorial's major feature -- 56 granite pillars 17 feet high, adorned with wreaths and marked with the names of the states and U.S. territories -- is a conception of staggering banality. One descends the main entry to the monument and the pillar to the left is marked American Samoa; on the right, the Virgin Islands.
What do the states have to do with World War II? What great chapter of that struggle was written by the Virgin Islands (or Kentucky, for that matter)?...
Fact & Fiction in the Movie Troy
Rachel Browne, in the Australian Sun Herald (May 23, 2004):
DR Blanche Menadier is an honorary research associate at Macquarie University who has excavated at Troy nine times. She gives her verdict on how the film Troy compares with The Iliad.
* Fact: The area believed to be Troy is situated near two rivers, overlooking a fertile plain.
* Fiction: The film Troy was shot in a sandy, barren area of Malta which looks nothing like Turkey's Aegean coast.
* Fact: In Homer's Iliad, the Trojan War takes place over 10 years.
* Fiction: No one ages in the film, and the war seems to wrap up in about three weeks.
* Fact: There is no development of Achilles as a romantic figure in The Iliad. In fact, historians widely agree he had a homosexual relationship with his friend Patroclus.
* Fiction: Brad Pitt's Achilles is depicted as a ladies' man, with a prominent love scene with Rose Byrne's character Briseis. There is no suggestion of a homosexual relationship.
* Fact: While Homer's Iliad does mention the existence of the Trojan horse, it is regarded as a literary device. There is no archaeological evidence to support the existence of a horse.
" Fiction: In the film, the horse plays such a starring role it almost
deserves its own credit.
The Battle that Made Great Britain Great ... The Battle of the Plains of Abraham?
Randy Boswell, in the Gazette (Montreal) (May 22, 2004):
Canada was the Ground Zero of modern history, says a controversial new book by a bestselling British author.
Historian Frank McLynn says the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, long understood by Canadians to be the pivotal event in this country's past, should really be seen as the turning point in the entire history of the modern world.
The victory over the French not only marked the birth of the British Empire and ensured the global dominance of the English language but also made possible the existence of the United States, he claims.
In 1759: The Year Britain Became Master of the World, McLynn urges scholars to reconsider the collective significance of a series of resounding British victories over France in Europe, India, the West Indies and North America.
He places General James Wolfe's Sept. 13, 1759 triumph at Quebec City over the Marquis de Montcalm at the centre of his narrative.
The victory helped eliminate future military threats from the French in North America and finally allowed Britain's restless Thirteen Colonies to begin imagining and plotting their independence.
"The taking of Quebec was probably the most spectacular success in the year of victories and certainly had the most momentous consequences," writes McLynn, whose other works have included epic treatments of Napoleon and the British exploration of Africa.
"The summing up is simple; no 1759, no victory in the Seven Years War, no victory in North America, no expansionist British Empire, no break-away colonies and therefore, conceivably, no United States of America."
How Other Memorials Have Been Greeted
Maria Puente, in USA Today, puttng into perspective the many criticisms of the new WW II memorial on the Mall (May 20, 2004):
Memorial building in America is a tendentious business. "Never was a memorial yet erected that was not subject to criticism," said Rep. John Boylan, D-N.Y. And that was in 1937. Here's what happened when some of America's most important memorials were proposed:
Washington Monument (1884) Architect Robert Mills
Construction began in 1848 but stopped for 20 years when funding ran out and the Civil War began. Also, a brouhaha erupted when a stone donated by Pope Pius IX was stolen by members of an anti-Catholic political party. The monument was finally completed almost 30 years after the architect's death.
540,000 visitors a year
Lincoln Memorial (1922) Architect Henry Bacon
Southern opponents of Lincoln didn't want it built at all. Lincoln supporters called the architecture "pompous" and disparaged the site on the Mall, at the time a swamp, as "unworthy" of the savior of the Union.
3.2 million visitors a year
Jefferson Memorial (1943) Architect John Russell Pope
It incited the angriest debate to that point in American architecture between historicists and modernists, who believed historical design lacked relevance. Some critics feared the design based on the Roman Pantheon would compete with the Lincoln Memorial. President Roosevelt had to intervene to get it built.
300,000 visitors a year
Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1981) Architect Maya Lin
Building the wall was almost as divisive as the war, both because of the times and the abstract V-shaped design; even the architect's Chinese-American heritage was attacked. Tom Carhart, a former Army platoon leader, called it a "degrading ditch." "Orwellian glop" wrote National Review magazine.
2.8 million visitors a year
Korean War Veterans Memorial (1995) Cooper-Lecky Architects of Washington
The criticism focused on a black granite wall etched with soldiers' faces. "The wall tugs the heartstrings, for sure, but it's also a bit obvious, a bit much," wrote Benjamin Forgey in The Washington Post. "It's a design disaster," said Carole Blair, professor at University of California-Davis.
2.4 million visitors a year
Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial (1997) Architect Lawrence Halprin
A 1960 proposal featuring granite slabs standing on edge was dubbed "instant Stonehenge." The finished monument was denounced by the disabled because a statue didn't show enough of FDR's wheelchair.
2 million visitors a year
Slate's Timothy Noah: Why I Like the New WW II Memorial
Timothy Noah, in Slate (May 24, 2004):
What is so godawful about Washington's new World War II Memorial? Not even Pappy Chatterbox, a card-carrying member of the Greatest Generation (he had a desk job in Florida, but still can't bring himself to laugh at Mel Brooks' "Springtime for Hitler") could muster any interest in seeing it during a recent visit. Like every other college graduate in America, he'd read all about what an eyesore it was. He figured it wasn't worth seeing. So did I, until I happened to drive past it and decided to take a closer look.
The memorial, set to be dedicated on May 29, has received a near-unanimous Bronx cheer from the critics. "This is all stock celebration," complained Blake Gopnik of the Washington Post, "not true commemoration … [O]ur soldiers' worst enemies would have felt equally comfortable with its design." In The New Yorker, Paul Goldberger similarly pronounced the new monument "banal and timid, overly concerned with being well mannered." Even the Post's architecture critic, Benjamin Forgey, who rather liked the memorial after it was scaled down from an earlier, more bombastic plan, found "something a bit stiff about the memorial's classically inspired design." Just about everybody agrees with the National Coalition To Save Our Mall that the memorial "drives a wedge between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial," which previously were separated only by park land and the Reflecting Pool, and that this is a bad thing.
The famous vista of the Mall from the top of the Lincoln Memorial—the site where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech—is indeed altered, slightly. The distant Washington Monument now appears, at its base, to be encircled by two white bands—the oval marble walkways surrounding the Rainbow Pool, a fountain around which the World War II Memorial was built—and, at the bands' far ends, a few vertical rectangles—the pillars that commemorate the participation in World War II of each state. It looks like a vaguely exotic necklace. Someone is bound to observe sooner or later that the most famously phallic building in our nation's capital has finally gotten laid. In any event, the feminizing effect is fairly subtle and not at all unpleasant.
As for the neoclassicism, well, what's the matter with it? Pierre L'Enfant's Mall and its environs are studded, for better or worse, with neoclassical buildings, and the World War II Memorial (unlike a disastrous but widely praised planned addition by Frank Gehry to the Corcoran Museum) harmonizes with that environment. In particular, the memorial relates nicely to a nearby monument to Washington, D.C.'s World War I dead, a handsome (if unassuming) Greek temple erected in the early 1930s....
How Your Generation Affects How You Think About Events
Liz Taylor, in the Seattle Times (May 24, 2004):
Over a decade ago, William Strauss and Neil Howe wrote a timeless book, "Generations," (Perennial, $16.95) in which they discussed the intriguing phenomenon they call the "peer personality" of the generations. That is, every birth group has a personality, shaped by events that happened to its members when they were young. No matter how different we are from each other, we tend to think and react similarly to people our own age.
"You and your peers share the same 'age location' in history," write Strauss and Howe, "and your generation's collective mind-set cannot help but influence you — whether you agree with it or spend a lifetime battling against it."
Why is this important?
Because where we're born in history has a huge impact on how we age, which in turn has a huge impact on what will happen to us — and society. Let's see what this means.
• The World War II generation — around 35 million people, now in their 80s and 90s — are known as America's "rational problem-solvers." They were victorious soldiers and Rosie the Riveters, "men's men" who knew how to get things done. Surviving the Depression, they experienced upward mobility and rising homeownership more than any other generation this century, say Strauss and Howe, becoming the most affluent elders of the 20th century. The entire modern growth in government spending coincided with their adult life-cycle. Valuing outer life over inner, they were stubborn, tight-fisted and lived by highly defined sex-roles in which men dominated.
• Next in line is the "Silent Generation." Born during the Depression in a birth "trough" (when many people couldn't afford to marry or have children), this relatively small group is now in their 60s and 70s, numbering around 30 million people. These are the "adapters," say Strauss and Howe, known for their gray-flannel suits and secure corporate careers (only 2 percent opted to be entrepreneurs). They were the earliest-marrying and earliest-babying generation in American history. Enjoying a lifetime of steadily rising affluence, they suffered relatively few war casualties (Korea) and held the 20th century's lowest rates for almost every social pathology of youth, such as crime, suicide, illegitimate births and teen unemployment. Squeezed like the "stuffing in a sandwich between the get-it-done WWII generation and the self-absorbed Boomers," the book says, they didn't make waves but spent their lives refining and humanizing the world.
• Then come the Boomers — 76 million people born between 1946 and 1964, accounting for fully one-third of the American population. A vast and varied group, they are the "idealists," say Strauss and Howe, pulling the rug out from under the nation on all sorts of issues that their WWII parents thought were set in concrete — war (Vietnam), work, sex roles, sexual behavior, music, drugs, race. From Hippie to bran-eater to Yuppie to Yoga Queen, the Boomers are — if nothing else — supremely self-confident, sassy and in-your-face. Plus, they aren't savers....
The Supreme Court Case that Got Right What Brown Got Wrong
Ian Haney Lopez, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, in the NYT (May 22, 2004):
With commemorations from coast to coast to remind them, most Americans already know that this week was the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. Unfortunately, what they don't realize is that the country missed an equally important anniversary two weeks ago, that of Hernandez v. Texas — the perennially overshadowed antecedent to Brown that was decided on May 3, 1954.
That case merits commemoration not just because the Supreme Court used it to finally extend constitutional protection to Mexican-Americans, important though that is, especially now that Latinos are the largest minority group. It's worth celebrating because Hernandez got right something that Brown did not: the standard for when the Constitution should bar group-based discrimination....
Because both sides insisted that Mexican-Americans were white, Hernandez v. Texas forced the court to confront directly a question it would sidestep in Brown: under precisely what circumstances did some groups deserve constitutional protection? Hernandez offered a concise answer: when groups suffer subordination.
"Differences in race and color have defined easily identifiable groups which have at times required the aid of the courts in securing equal treatment under the laws," the court wrote. But, it said, "other differences from the community norm may define other groups which need the same protection." Succor from state discrimination, the court reasoned, should apply to every group socially defined as different and, implicitly, as inferior. "Whether such a group exists within a community is a question of fact," the court said, one that may be demonstrated "by showing the attitude of the community."
How, then, did the Texas community where Hernandez arose regard Mexican-Americans? Here the court catalogued Jim Crow practices: business and community groups largely excluded Mexican-Americans; a local restaurant displayed a sign announcing "No Mexicans Served"; children of Mexican descent were shunted into a segregated school and then forced out altogether after the fourth grade; on the county courthouse grounds there were two men's toilets, one unmarked and the other marked "Colored Men" and "Hombres Aquí" ("Men Here").
The same sort of caste system that oppressed blacks in Texas also harmed Mexican-Americans. But it was Jim Crow as group subordination, rather than as a set of "racial" distinctions, that called forth the Constitution's concern in Hernandez v. Texas.
Joel Beinin: The Golden Age of the Israeli Military
Joel Beinin, in the Nation (May 13, 2004):
For the last three and a half years the Israeli army has deployed American-supplied F-16 fighter jets, Apache helicopters, armored Caterpillar bulldozers and Merkava tanks powered by engines made in the USA in an unsuccessful effort to suppress the second Palestinian uprising. According to both Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon, Israel is engaged in a war despite the spectacularly unequal military balance in the conflict. Moreover, Palestinian civilians and the infrastructure of Palestinian society have been its principal victims. Almost all of the 2,886 Palestinian fatalities since September 2000 have been civilians, about eighty of them "collateral damage" to 230 extrajudicial assassinations, which are themselves violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention. In the same period there have been 950 Israeli fatalities, 672 of them civilians.
The typical pattern for the first several weeks of the intifada was that Palestinian civilians engaged in peaceful protest marches. Toward the end of the protests, youths taunted and threw stones at Israeli troops. The soldiers fired on stone-throwers and non-stone-throwers alike, rapidly escalating their responses to all demonstrations against over thirty years of occupation in accord with previously devised plans. Palestinian police, fearing they would be discredited if they remained passive, eventually returned fire using the rifles they were issued in accordance with the Oslo agreements. Secular and Islamist Palestinian factions revitalized their military wings. As it became clear that they were hopelessly outmatched by Israel's military force, they resorted to the strategically and morally catastrophic deployment of suicide bombers, targeting civilians.
The conduct of the Israeli army in the second intifada, in sharp contrast to its prevailing image, has been singularly unheroic. Its tactics have been condemned by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and even the State Department's annual report on human rights. This less than admirable performance forms the context for a spate of new books celebrating a better era for Israel's armed forces, when victories were gained fighting armies, not a civilian population resisting occupation and seeking national self-determination.
First there was Michael Oren's Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of
the Modern Middle East, chronicling the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Though widely
acclaimed by mainstream reviewers as a definitive account of the war, Oren's
book was aptly described by the tireless Norman Finkelstein as "Abba Eban
with Footnotes"--a reference to Eban's eloquent but factually challenged
speech at the UN General Assembly justifying Israel's pre-emptive strike of
June 1967. While Oren's book is a serious work of scholarship, it essentially
restates the traditional Israeli account of the war as a defensive strike waged
against belligerent Arab states seeking to "throw Israel into the sea."
Oren does not adequately address three arguments that challenge this view. First,
according to interviews with former Defense Minister Moshe Dayan conducted in
1976 and 1977, which were kept secret for many years but published well before
Oren's book, Israel had been intentionally provoking Syria since 1948 in order
to establish sovereignty over the demilitarized zones on their common border.
Second, according to the evaluation of several different intelligence agencies
and the Israeli general staff, Israel did not face an existential danger in
1967 and could expect an easy victory. Third, Israel chose war because, as Shimon
Peres wrote in the pro- Labor Party daily, Davar, its leaders did not want to
negotiate over Israel's borders or the question of Palestinian refugees. The
second of these matters remains off the table as far as Israel is concerned....
A Mob Museum?
Harriet Baskas, National Public Radio (May 21, 2004):
After a brief attempt at selling itself as a family vacation land, Las Vegas is restaking its claim as America's most decadent destination.
Unidentified Man: Yeah, hi. I was wondering, could I get a wake-up call tomorrow morning please? Could I get that to go to my cell phone instead of my room? Well, here's the thing. I--I'm not quite sure if I'm going to be in my room tomorrow so...
BASKAS: A new national ad campaign sports the tag line 'What happens here stays here.' The ads are paid for by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. And while gambling and a bit of hanky-panky seem to be acceptable, the authority's Terry Jicinsky says illegal mob activity isn't an image the city wants to promote.
Mr. TERRY JICINSKY (Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority): It's part of our history. It was acknowledged as part of our history. It isn't really what Las Vegas is about today.
BASKAS: Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman doesn't entirely agree. In fact, the mob museum was his idea.
Mayor OSCAR GOODMAN (Las Vegas): If you had mobsters during a certain period of time that contributed to what we became today, that's all part of it, and I think it's as cool as it gets.
BASKAS: From his celebrity photo-lined office overlooking downtown Las Vegas, Goodman acknowledges his first-hand knowledge of the mob. Before becoming mayor in 1999, he was a noted criminal lawyer.
Mayor GOODMAN: And I represented a lot of mobsters around here, and my practice was about 5 percent mobsters. I'm not afraid to say I was a mob lawyer.
BASKAS: For better or worse, according to historian Hal Rothman, organized crime transformed Las Vegas from a bedraggled collection of desert gambling halls into an oasis of luxury hotels, fancy casinos, leggy showgirls and big-name entertainment.
Mr. HAL ROTHMAN (Historian): Anybody in their right mind knows that from sometime in the 1940s till sometime in the 1970s, the city was mobbed up. The sources of capital and power in the city were closely tied to organized crime.
BASKAS: Rothman is the author of "Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Began the 21st Century." He says the mob and its money first made a mark on Las Vegas when New York gangster Meyer Lanski sent Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel to town to oversee the mob's investment in the Flamingo Hotel.
Mr. ROTHMAN: The original face--you know, when Bugsy Siegel built the Flamingo and all the way up through the Stardust, the money came really from shoe boxes. Mobsters went around to each other and said, 'I'm building a hotel in Las Vegas. I'll sell you share for $50,000, and they'd get the shoe box out from under the bed and they'd give them the cash.
BASKAS: A downtown museum exploring this history strikes Mayor Goodman as a great tourist attraction. But when he first floated the idea round town, the local Italian American community voiced concern.
Mr. ROTHMAN: When I said 'the mob,' I was not thinking of Italian Americans. I really was thinking of the mob as I knew it here, where you had fellows who had reputations like Mo Dalitz, Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lanski, who was one of my clients. It was a Jewish mob that I was thinking of.
BASKAS: No one in the business community has actually come out publicly against the mayor's idea, even if privately they may be concerned about drawing attention to the seamy underbelly of Sin City.
Mr. DAVID MILLMAN (Nevada State Museum): I can understand not wanting to dredge out these so-called bad aspects of one's past, but I think to fully understand where we are today, you've got to understand where we've been.
Was There a Trojan War?
Manfred Korfmann, in Archaeology Magazine (May 2004):
Recorded sometime in the eighth century b.c., the Iliad represents the culmination of several centuries of oral epic poetry that wove a complex story of the relationship between mortals and gods. This narrative takes place against the bloody backdrop of the ten-year-long Greek siege of the city alternatively called Ilios or Troy, a war launched over the abduction of the beautiful Greek queen Helen by the Trojan prince Paris.
The ancient Greeks and Romans generally believed in the historicity of the Trojan War, and even Alexander the Great paid homage at what they believed was the site of the great battle. But eventually Troy was forgotten except for the Iliad, and it wasn’t until the late nineteenth century, when Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations at the site of Hisarlik in northwestern Turkey raised the possibility that Troy was rediscovered, that scholars would consider the battle between Greeks and Trojans to be more than Homeric fantasy. Some scholars, however, still cast doubt on the notion of a historical Trojan War, stressing that our belief in its existence is based ultimately on the creation of Homer, who was a poet, not a historian.
Manfred Korfmann, director of excavations at Hisarlik/Troy since 1988, is the first to admit that his team is not at the site to dig for evidence of the fabled event. But evidence in favor of a historical Trojan War appears to grow with each year, and comes not only from archaeologists but from specialists across academia. In an Archaeology exclusive, Troy’s chief excavator, with contributions from world-renowned specialists in the fields of Homeric and Hittite studies, explains why it’s time for doubters to change their minds about the Western world’s most famous—and mythic—battle.
Despite assumptions to the contrary, archaeological work of the new Troy project has not been performed for the purpose of understanding Homer’s Iliad or the Trojan War. For the past sixteen years, more than 350 scholars, scientists, and technicians from nearly twenty countries have been collaborating on the excavations at the site in northwestern Turkey that began as an Early Bronze Age citadel in the third millennium b.c. and ended as a Byzantine settlement before being abandoned in a.d. 1350. However, as current director of the excavations, I am continually asked if Homer’s Trojan War really happened.
The size of Troy
Troy appears to have been destroyed around 1180 b.c. (this date corresponds to the end of our excavation of levels Troy VIi or VIIa), probably by a war the city lost. There is evidence of a conflagration, some skeletons, and heaps of sling bullets. People who have successfully defended their city would have gathered their sling bullets and put them away for another event, but a victorious conqueror would have done nothing with them. But this does not mean that the conflict was the war—even though ancient tradition usually places it around this time. After a transitional period of a few decades, a new population from the eastern Balkans or the northwestern Black Sea region evidently settled in the ruins of what was probably a much weakened city.
The main argument against associating these ruins with the great city described in the Iliad has been that Troy in the Late Bronze Age was a wholly insignificant town and not a place worth fighting over. Our new excavations and the progress of research in southeastern Europe has changed such views regarding Troy considerably.
It appears that this city was, by the standards of this region at that time, very large indeed, and most certainly of supraregional importance in controlling access from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea and from Asia Minor to southeast Europe and vice versa. Its citadel was unparalleled in the wider region and, as far as hitherto known, unmatched anywhere in southeastern Europe. Troy was also evidently attacked repeatedly and had to defend itself again and again, as indicated by repairs undertaken to the citadel’s fortifications and efforts to enlarge and strengthen them.
A spectacular result of the new excavations has been the verification of the existence of a lower settlement from the seventeenth to the early twelfth centuries b.c. (Troy levels VI/VIIa) outside and south and east of the citadel. As magnetometer surveys and seven excavations undertaken since 1993 have shown, this lower city was surrounded at least in the thirteenth century by an impressive U-shaped fortification ditch, approximately eleven and a half feet wide and six and a half feet deep, hewn into the limestone bedrock. Conclusions about the existence and quality of buildings within the confines of the ditch have been drawn on the basis of several trial trenches and excavations, some of them covering a very large surface area. The layout of the city was confirmed by an intensive and systematic pottery survey in 2003. We have also discovered a cemetery outside the ditch to the south. The most recent excavations have determined that Troy, which now covers about seventy-five acres, is about fifteen times larger than previously thought....
World War II Was the Seminal Event of the 20th Century
Scott Galupo, in the Wash Times (May 21, 2004):
... The World War II Memorial, sober and sunk low in a long frame of elms, rests between the two structures that anchor the Mall.The monument to America's first great warrior, George Washington, towers over it on one side. The statue of America's great uniter, Abraham Lincoln, looks on from the other.
In such company, the location and initial look of the new memorial to those who fought in World War II had its doubters. It would trample on ground consecrated by the civil rights movement, some said. Its design smacked of imperialist architecture, others said.
The controversy, settled in granite and bronze, came down to this: Was World War II — the lives lost, the victories gained — a hinge event of American history, on par with the founding and the Civil War? Or not?
Historians say it was: The war transformed America, and, in turn, America transformed the world.
"World War II was the seminal event of the 20th century," says Victor Davis Hanson, military historian and classicist at the University of California in Fresno and author of "Carnage and Culture," a study of the military pre-eminence of Western civilization. "Quite literally, Western civilization as we know it hung by a thread — and was saved by the efforts of Americans."
"The totality of it is what made it unique for the American experience," says Edward J. Drea, a historian of World War II who lives in Fairfax. "It affected everyone, of every class."
From December 7, 1941, to Aug. 6, 1945, America spent 400,000 lives beating back German dictator Adolf Hitler's march across Europe and Japanese Emperor Hirohito's advance in the South Pacific.
Sixteen million Americans served during the war, fully 10 percent of the population at the time. The movement of so many young men and so much materiel radically reshaped our society.
The country literally was in flux, its industrial capacity energized like never before, its agrarian roots fading further from view. The population migrated northward and, drawn by a humming new industry centered on construction of aircraft, to California.
Global war demanded a rapid acceleration in the technology of weaponry and medicine. Mr. Drea, who focuses on the South Pacific theater in books such as "MacArthur's Ultra: Codebreaking and the War Against Japan," notes that the war led to wider use of malaria suppressants such as quinine and the insecticide DDT, which helped stop typhus epidemics.
The United States devoted all its energies to the war, rationing meat, sugar and metals on the home front.
A shortage of shellac, used to manufacture phonograph records, stunted the recording of new music. Short supplies of rubber and gasoline — and trains filled with soldiers — knocked touring musicians off the road. Popular bandleader Glenn Miller sent his own musicians packing to form the Army Air Force Band and died in 1944 when a military flight disappeared over the English Channel.
Yankee legend Joe DiMaggio and movie star Jimmy Stewart joined the war effort at the height of their careers by serving in the Army and Army Air Corps, respectively, and Mr. Stewart became a decorated pilot.
Up to 40 percent of the movies Hollywood cranked out between 1941 and 1945 propagandized for the war. Hum-phrey Bogart squared off against the Nazis in 1943's "Action in the North Atlantic"; Cary Grant captained a submarine in "Destination Tokyo" the same year; and future president Ronald Reagan teamed with Errol Flynn in 1942's "Desperate Journey."
Women flocked to jobs in the men's absence. Teenagers too young to fight also took jobs, setting in motion a new youth culture that would flourish as veterans and their wives created waves of new children for the next 20 years.
After vanquishing European fascism and Japanese militarism, the postwar nation assumed the leading role in defending the world against the other great poison of the 20th century, the menace of Stalin and expansionist Soviet communism.
"The self-destruction of Europe created the conditions for the ascendancy of the U.S. in world affairs," Mr. Hanson says, "and, tragically but necessarily, demanded a new responsibility to expend blood and treasure — immediately after our greatest sacrifice — to prevent the Soviet Union from capitalizing on the ruin of Europe."
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What Accounts for the Renewal of the New York Review of Books ? Vietnam
Scott Sherman, in the Nation (June 7, 2004):
... In the wake of the Vietnam War, the [New Yok Review of Books] became a formidable--and, in some sense, unique--journalistic institution. Many of its readers reside in academia, but the paper has a devoted following in the upper reaches of media, politics and philanthropy, which gives it an influence vastly out of proportion to its circulation of 130,000. (One recent essay, Peter Galbraith's "How to Get Out of Iraq," even caused a stir among some military intellectuals.) That influence translates into dollars: In contrast to virtually all serious literary and political journals, which drain money from their owners, the Review has been profitable for decades. But the formula is not without its imperfections, which have grown more pronounced in recent years. The publication has always been erudite and authoritative--and because of its analytical rigor and seriousness, frequently essential--but it hasn't always been lively, pungent and readable. A musty odor, accompanied by a certain aversion to risk-taking, has pervaded its pages for a long time. "In recent years," says the historian Ronald Steel, who has contributed since 1965, "the paper has sometimes verged on being bland or predictable, always using the same people."
But the election of George W. Bush, combined with the furies of 9/11, jolted the editors. Since 2001, the Review's temperature has risen and its political outlook has sharpened. Old warhorses bolted from their armchairs. Prominent members of the Review "family"--a stable that includes veteran journalists (Thomas Powers, Frances FitzGerald, Ian Buruma), literary stars (Joan Didion, Norman Mailer) and academic heavyweights (Stanley Hoffmann, Ronald Dworkin, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.)--charged into battle not only against the White House but against the lethargic press corps and the "liberal hawk" intellectuals, some of whom are themselves prominent members of the Review's extended family. In stark contrast to The New Yorker, whose editor, David Remnick, endorsed the Iraq war in a signed essay in February 2003, asserting that "a return to a hollow pursuit of containment will be the most dangerous option of all"; or The New York Times Magazine, which gave ample space to Michael Ignatieff, Bill Keller, Paul Berman, George Packer and other prowar liberal hawks, the Review opposed the Iraq war in a voice that was remarkably consistent and unified.
The firepower it directed against the liberal hawks reveals much about the Review's political mood these days. Like many in the liberal hawk camp, the publication sanctioned US military intervention in the Balkans on humanitarian grounds. But when Ignatieff & Co. invoked the logic of humanitarian intervention as a basis for military action against Saddam Hussein, the Review (which has showcased Ignatieff's work for years) insisted that Bush's crusade against Iraq was something closer to old-fashioned imperialism. As Ian Buruma wrote in a quietly devastating assessment of Paul Berman's 2003 book Terror and Liberalism: "There is something in the tone of Berman's polemic that reminds me of the quiet American in Graham Greene's novel, the man of principle who causes mayhem, without quite realizing why."
What blew the dust off The New York Review? In no sense, really, has the paper returned to its New Left sensibility of the late 1960s: Chomsky, Hayden and Willis have not been reinstated; young lions like The Baffler's Tom Frank and The Village Voice's Rick Perlstein have not been invited to contribute; Eric Foner, Bruce Cumings, Richard Rorty, Chalmers Johnson, Stephen Holmes, Anatol Lieven, Elaine Showalter and Carol Brightman continue to publish much of their finest work not in The New York Review of Books but in the more radical, eccentric and sprightly pages of the London Review of Books. In short, the Review's liberal (and establishment) soul remains intact. What has changed significantly, in the age of Bush, is the Review's style of rhetoric and degree of political focus and commitment....
What accounts for the Review's post-9/11 revival? One word that continually tumbles from the lips of seasoned Review-watchers is "Vietnam." Says Mark Danner, who worked for Silvers after he graduated from Harvard in the early 1980s, and who has recently produced some searching essays in the Review about Iraq, "If you look back over the Review's history, you'll find that periods of crisis bring out the best editorial instincts of the leadership of The New York Review. It certainly happened with Vietnam and Iran/contra. It gets the juices flowing."
Some observers point to a circular continuity between the Review's coverage of Vietnam and Iraq. "The late 1960s, for the paper, were, to some extent, the age of Chomsky," says Harvard professor Stanley Hoffmann. "The Review was a very strong critic of the Vietnam War. Gradually it became less militant, if you like. And indeed in the last year it has found some of its old vigor again, but it never lost what can be called a highly critical viewpoint about a number of aspects of international relations and foreign affairs." ...