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A Hollywood Movie Could Help Either Democrats or Republicans in the Presidential Election

by Robert Brent Toplin

Sometimes a movie from the Hollywood studios has the potential to affect a presidential election. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, screened in theaters during the presidential race of 2004, appeared to boost the fortunes of the Democratic candidate. Then a conservative effort to discredit the film eventually blunted Michael Moore’s impact on public opinion. This year, a new movie in development about the hunt for Osama bin Laden appeared likely to remind voters of President Obama’s role in defeating the notorious terrorist. It was scheduled to appear in theaters in October. But once again, Republicans found a way to undermine cinema’s influence in a tight presidential contest. They pressured executives at Sony Pictures to delay the screening. Evidently, that pressure made an impact. Sony later announced it would release the movie after the November elections.

Our Latest Mormon Moment

by Matthew Bowman

A “Mormon moment” usually works like this. Every few years Mormons edge their way into the American national consciousness: Mitt Romney and his stiff smile, the whiskey-less 2002 Winter Olympics, state raids on polygamous compounds in Arizona in the early 1950s, and so on back to the life and death of Joseph Smith. Whatever the inspiration, in a Mormon moment Americans scrutinize Mormon history and beliefs with an eye for absurdity, and Mormon theology and practice with faint worry that these things are incompatible with the assumptions, unspoken and not, by which American public life functions. In a Mormon moment, Americans look at Mormonism and, generally, fail to see themselves reflected back.

The Two Elections that Dealt Unions the Biggest Blows Last Tuesday Didn't Happen in Wisconsin

by Kevin Boyle

Last Tuesday two elections delivered brutal blows to unions and their progressive allies. Neither was in Wisconsin.The Wisconsin results were bad enough. Scott Walker’s widely-watched recall campaign pit organized labor against a phalanx of incredibly wealthy private donors, led by the billionaire who’d financed the swift-boating of John Kerry in 2004. In the end Walker didn’t simply survive the recall. He won by a larger margin than he had when he was elected governor in 2010. He did considerably better in urban areas, where his percentage of the vote shot up by a startling eight percentage points. He even gained ground in union households. There’s no doubt about it. In Wisconsin labor had suffered a tough, tough defeat.

Will We Be Able to Preserve Yellowstone, America's Living Cathedral?

by George Black

With Memorial Day weekend now behind us, the crowds -- more than three million people in an average year -- have begun the great annual pilgrimage to one of America’s greatest national icons: Yellowstone.Planning my own visit this summer, I just checked the latest report from the National Park Service on travel conditions in the park. The news is not good. Eighty percent of Yellowstone’s 185 miles of roads, “are in a structurally deficient state, with poor quality road bases failing under the weight, speed and volume of modern traffic for which they were not designed.”

Mormonism: On the Wrong Side of White

by W. Paul Reeve

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormonism) has consistently found itself on the wrong side of white. In a recent New York Times article, “Black Mormons and the Politics of Identity,” an embedded video begins with a Times reporter commenting “it may come as a surprise to people that there are black Mormons in America.” It is a telling statement that captures the nexus of the LDS Church’s racial past and its efforts to realize a more diverse racial future.Although few in number, blacks have been a part of the LDS movement from its founding to the present. The first documented African American to join the LDS Church was a former slave known only in the historical record as “Black Pete.” He became a member at Kirtland, Ohio, in 1830, the year of the Church’s founding. More significantly, at least two black men, Elijah Abel and Q. Walker Lewis, were ordained to the Mormon priesthood in the Church’s early years. Abel participated in Mormon temple rituals at Kirtland and was baptized as proxy for a deceased friend and two relatives at Nauvoo, Illinois.

If He's Re-Elected, Will Obama be a Successful Second-Termer?

by Alfred J. Zacher

Barack Obama will face serious challenges if he's re-elected in November. Of the nineteen presidents who have won a second term, only seven have been judged to have succeeded during that time in office.

John F. Kennedy Wouldn't Vote for Scott Walker

by Martin Halpern

As voters go to the polls in Wisconsin June 5 to decide Scott Walker's fate and across the country November 6 to decide Barack Obama's, it's worth pausing and reflecting on a executive from an earlier time: John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Three related aspects of JFK's legacy are particularly worth recalling: his response to peace and justice movements; his view of government’s role in the economy and society; and his attitudes toward unionized public workers and labor unions. A focus on Kennedy’s legacy in these three areas may bring to the fore key issues that are central to whether Wisconsin -- and the country -- go forward or backward in the years to come.

The Lessons of People’s Park for the Occupy Movement

by Michael H. Carriere

Though it passed without much fanfare, May 15 was the forty-third anniversary of “Bloody Thursday” in Berkeley, California, a day in 1969 that began with 6,000 people marching down famed Telegraph Avenue towards People’s Park, a community-run free space (illegally constructed on land owned by the University of California system) that had recently been enclosed by a protective fence. Some demonstrators hurled rocks and bottles at the police, and the police answered back by firing birdshot and buckshot from shotguns. These blasts seriously injured over one hundred people: two individuals suffered punctured lungs, one was permanently blinded, and five were permanently disfigured with bird shot wounds to the face. Twenty-five year-old James Rector -- a bystander watching the events unfold from the roof of a building overlooking the protest– was shot and killed by a buckshot blast. As events threatened to spiral out of control Governor Ronald Reagan sent in the National Guard and declared a state of emergency.

Slavery, Gay Rights, and the Bible

by Fred Nielsen

Having announced his support for gay marriage, President Obama now faces the wrath of people who quote the Bible in opposition.They have reason to be worried. A growing plurality of Americans accepts gay unions, and approval is strongest among the young. So, changes in the law are probably inevitable.But those who base their opposition on scripture should have a deeper cause for concern. Time and again, history has shown that people who cite the Bible as a reason to deny rights to others have almost always lost. Their arguments, in the judgment of posterity, have discredited them and their faith. Simply put, a static, selective reading of scripture has been no match for the dynamism of ever-expanding rights in America.Few today would think of using the Bible to defend the divine authority of kings or to argue that seizing land from the Native Americans was ordained by God. Such beliefs, once taken seriously, now seem self-serving and misguided.Opponents of gay marriage can easily find Bible verses to buttress their case. They may have forgotten that before the Civil War defenders of slavery did exactly the same thing.

The Solution to the Voter's Dilemma: Split the Ticket

by Steve Hochstadt

The Republican Party has swung to the right, too far to the right for many Republican voters. This movement has not just been a shift of weight, but rather a full-throated repudiation of the legitimacy of moderate Republicanism. And of moderate Republicans.In order to compete as a Republican presidential candidate in a field crowded with extreme conservatives, Mitt Romney felt he couldn’t afford to present any moderate alternative, so he became a "severe conservative." Influential and experienced Republicans like Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, crushed in a primary by the Tea Party-backed Richard Mourdock, are tainted by their history of forging political compromises rather than scoring political points. Mourdock's campaign criticized Lugar's willingness to work with Democratic lawmakers.The current national Republican list of enemies far exceeds anything Richard Nixon compiled: "liberal traitors," the president, government employees, unions, and now any acceptance of their own policies from the late twentieth century.

What Does It Take for a Candidate to be President? Interview with Samuel Popkin

by David Austin Walsh

Samuel K. Popkin has quite an extensive track record of scholarship and political work. He received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969 and began his career as a scholar of modern Vietnam -- his The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam is considered a classic. It wasn't a coincidence that he was subpoenaed by the Pentagon Papers grand jury in 1972 -- he spent a week in jail after he refused to testify on the grounds of academic freedom.

Obama "Evolved" on Same-Sex Marriage -- Lincoln "Evolved" on Slavery

by Corey M. Brooks

Like Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, President Obama's declaration that gay and lesbian Americans deserve a right to marry is a historic statement of principle, even though its practical policy implications are limited because the states, not the federal government, hold most of the power to define marriage.Obama's assertion that state-level prohibitions on same-sex marriage are morally objectionable but legally sound rings familiar to this Civil War historian. I can't help but notice a close resemblance to the pre-Civil War views of millions of white Northerners (and perhaps more than a few white Southerners) on slavery. Northerners understood that the Constitution protected slaveholding as a matter left to individual states, and for decades many had found this a comforting justification for their tolerance of an institution they knew should be intolerable. Slavery was a Southern problem, and as long as it could be kept a Southern problem, Northerners' thinking went, they would bear little moral responsibility. It was this North that elected Abraham Lincoln in 1860. 

Why Did President Nixon Show George Romney the Door as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development?

by Michael H. Ebner

Mitt Romney coyly hints -- premised on his winning the presidential election in November -- that he might very well eliminate the Department of Housing and Urban Development. His father, George Romney, held this cabinet-rank portfolio from 1969 to 1972. It is self evident that Mitt Romney's rationale for excising HUD entails his ardor to cut costs -- and jobs -- in the federal bureaucracy.But largely forgotten is the fact that President Nixon unceremoniously pushed Secretary Romney out of his cabinet. (For the record, Romney was not fired. Understanding that he had lost the confidence of the president, he knew enough to resign. So did John A. Volpe, a another former governor of Massachusetts, who served Nixon as Secretary of Transportation).

Occupy Activists Resurrect May Day for Americans

by Peter Dreier

Unlike the rest of the world’s democracies, the United States doesn’t use the metric system, doesn’t require employers to provide workers with paid vacations, hasn’t abolished the death penalty, and doesn’t celebrate May Day as an official national holiday.Outside the U.S., May 1 is international workers’ day, observed with speeches, rallies, and demonstrations. Ironically, this celebration of working-class solidarity originated in the U.S. labor movement in the United States and soon spread around the world, but it never earned official recognition in this country. Since 2006, however, American unions and immigrant rights activists have resurrected May 1 as a day of protest. And this year, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street and the rebirth of a national movement for social justice, a wide spectrum of activist groups will be out in the streets to give voice to the growing crusade for democracy and equality.

How Mormon History has Shaped Mitt Romney

by Daniel J. Herman

In 1886, Miles Park Romney, great-grandfather to Mitt Romney, found himself giving three cheers to the Mexican flag and delivering a patriotic oration on Benito Juarez, hero of Mexico during its struggle against French occupation. Romney—who had spent several years in Britain as an LDS missionary, had helped Brigham Young colonize southern Utah, then helped colonize Arizona in the early 1880s—had been uprooted yet again. Having fled Arizona to escape prosecution for illegal cohabitation, he now sought to establish Mexican refuges for his fellow polygamists.Miles Romney’s flight—in fact his several flights—is old history. It is unlikely—despite the fears of Senator Orrin Hatch—that Democrats will use the “outlandish” deeds of long-dead Mormons to strike blows at Mitt in the presidential election. Yet the story of Miles Romney is far from irrelevant; it tells us much about modern Mormons and about Mitt Romney in particular.From Isolation to Acceptance

Mitt Romney Must Decide What Kind of America He Believes In

by Ian Reifowitz

We now finally know who the presidential nominees of our two major political parties will be this fall. Republicans and Democrats stand opposed to one another on a range of policy issues. As a historian who studies national identity in multiethnic societies like ours, I am especially concerned by the growing divide between the two camps. Increasingly, some very conservative political figures describe Americanness in starkly different terms than do moderates and liberals.The question of our national identity is not determined by specific legislation, although laws play a role in drawing the boundaries of who wins wide acceptance as a member of the American community. How we define Americanness is much more a matter of consensus, of broadly embraced terms, of offering inclusion, and seeing that offer reciprocated as mutual bonds turn a population into a people.The 2010 census documented demographic trends that have been noticeable for a long time. In the future our country’s population will consist of ever-greater numbers of Asian and Hispanic Americans. But this itself is nothing new. At the turn of the last century some feared the huge influx of non-Anglo-Saxon European immigrants, people, some said, who could never be truly American. Such fear of “outsiders” and “unassimilable” immigrants or racial minorities has long haunted our politics.

Peter Beinart and the Specter Haunting American Jewry

by Jack Ross

Since even before its release last month, Peter Beinart’s The Crisis of Zionism has been extravagantly denounced and praised.  To his everlasting credit, Beinart has described in vivid and uncompromising terms the corrupting and corrosive impact of the American Jewish Establishment he so courageously exposed in the New York Review of Books:

The Forgotten History of Milwaukee's Civil Rights Struggle

by Patrick D. Jones

The annual Organization of American Historians meeting has been taking place this weekend in Milwaukee, a city most often associated with beers and brats; Harleys and heavy industry; white ethnics, labor unions and “sewer socialists”; Lavern & Shirley. What is less well-known is the important place Milwaukee occupies in the history of the modern black freedom movement.Between 1958 and 1970, a distinctive movement for racial justice emerged from unique circumstances in Milwaukee. A series of local leaders inspired growing numbers of people to challenge employment and housing discrimination, segregated public schools, the membership of public officials in exclusionary organizations, welfare cuts, and police brutality.

The True Story Behind the "War on Moms"

by Mary C. Brennan

The Republican Party has a complicated history with mothers and motherhood. Although the modern party has associated motherhood with the American Way of Life, family values, and all that is right with America, individual politicians have tended to focus on the aspects of maternalism that fit their message of the moment while overlooking the reality of the women who occupy those roles. Ann Romney is certainly not the first Republican (or for that matter Democratic) wife whose commitment to her husband and children has been used to increase her husband’s credibility, moral standing, and/or humanity. From Mamie Eisenhower to Pat Nixon to Laura Bush, presidential candidates have touted their wives’ domestic skills as evidence of their own understanding of American virtues. Richard Nixon even held up the American housewife and mother as the perfect example of the superiority of capitalism when he argued with Nikita Khrushchev in 1959 during the famous Kitchen Debate.

Channelling George Washington: Obamacare -- The Monster Law

by Thomas Fleming

“It’s the law. The monster law!  Why doesn’t someone make this the main issue about Obamacare?”By now I had become expert at detecting when President Washington was upset. It so happened that I was upset about the same thing. I answered him, perhaps too enthusiastically. “I’ve been having similar thoughts. What can we do about it?”“More to the point, why haven’t you done something about it already?”“It’s the usual historian’s excuse, Mr. President. I’m trying to finish a book. I sense you’ve  gotten some ideas about confronting the problem?”“First of all the problem should be identified. It’s time somebody made more Americans aware of the excesses of the Imperial Congress. Since President Nixon was driven from office -- deservedly, I should add -- Congress has seized vastly more power than the Constitution ever intended it to have. This is a prime example!”“You think it’s unconstitutional?”