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Occupy: You Can’t Evict an Idea

by Ruth Rosen

As snowstorms and freezing rain announce the arrival of winter, it’s hard to remember that the Occupy Wall Street movement emerged just a few months ago, in September.  Enraged by the government bailout of Wall Street, but not of those who had lost their jobs and homes, angry at the rise of university tuition, frightened by the precarious decline of the middle class, several generations—not only the young—began a movement that quickly spread from Zuccotti park in New York across the nation.  “We are the 99 percent,” they chanted, until it became the slogan of the movement.  The 1 pe rcent, they explained, owned as much wealth as the rest of the population.Now that the police have dispersed most of the encampments, often with gratuitous and unnecessary cruelty, many protesters are asking, “What next?”  The answer to that question is unclear and will unfold in time, but now is a good time to pause and assess how the Occupy movement has affected American political culture.

Theodore and Barack in Osawatomie

by Walter Nugent

On August 31, 1910, Republican ex-president Theodore Roosevelt gave a rousing speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, against inequity of wealth.  On December 6, 2011, Democratic President Barack Obama did the same.  What was similar and what was different about what they said?  (Osawatomie, by the way, is pronounced “Ah-so-WAH-to-me.” Network newscasters who mispronounced it should have checked with a historian who has lived in Kansas, like me.)

Miss USA and Mr. FAA: Our Latest Drunk Drivers

by Barron H. Lerner

When I opened my web browser earlier this week, two all-too-familiar news stories jumped out at me.First, Virginia police had arrested Randy Babbitt, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration, on suspicion of drunk driving.  Babbitt, ironically, had recently participated in a panel with MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) on the topic of alcohol use among pilots.  He subsequently resigned his position.Second, Michigan police had arrested Rima Fakih, Miss USA from 2010, on—you guessed it—the same charges.  She had been speeding and weaving in heavy traffic.  Her blood alcohol level was 0.20%, more than twice as high as the legal limit of 0.08%.

Newt Gingrich the Galactic Historian

by Ray Smock

Trying to figure out Newt Gingrich has become a cottage industry now that he is running for president.  He is a self-confessed revolutionary who wants to fundamentally change America.  He is ambitious, power hungry, and ruthlessly focused.  He is a natural for Washington, where such attributes are both feared and admired. How did Newt get this way?  What makes him tick? Much has been written about him since he sprang into public consciousness in 1994 with his “Contract with America” that was instrumental in upsetting the Democratic Party’s 40-year control of the House of Representatives and eventually gained him the Speakership. But little has been written about his big vision as a transformational figure not only for the United States but for the whole planet.If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, Newt Gingrich is from the planet Trantor, a fictional world created by Isaac Asimov in his classic Foundation series about galactic empire.   Newt’s master plan for America does not come from a Republican Party playbook.  It comes from the science fiction that he read in high school.  He is playing out, on a national and global scale, dreams he had as a teenager with his nose buried in pulp fiction.

Occupy Should Remember: The Public Blamed the Protesters for the Kent State Shootings

by Christine Lamberson

As police continue to evict Occupy protesters from their various encampments, most recently from Washington D.C., the Occupy movement is struggling to decide how to move forward and maintain its relevance.  After the brutality of the evictions and continued animosity between police and protesters, a few media commentators have made comparisons to the civil rights movement's confrontations with the brutality of racist Southern law enforcement during the 1950s and 1960s.  These commentators are right that the movement should look to this earlier moment of political activism as it figures out how to proceed; however, the more apt comparison is to events like the 1970 Kent State shootings.  The clear lesson from these earlier protests is that the activists should not shift their primary focus from income inequality and “the 1 percent” to the law enforcement officials who evicted them from their encampments.

Save and Preserve Our American System

by Vaughn Davis Bornet

I regret that a system that really can work is being damned once again by those who declaim in the mainstream of long-ago radicalism.  I fear that the youth among us are unable to recognize and decipher the prose used by yesterday's Populists, LaFollette Progressives, Wallace zealots, Socialist Worker Trotskyites, Socialist Labor debaters, and similar related radicalisms.  They are taking to the streets and even sloganeering in our community newspapers. These super-critical and super-activist people know perfectly well that ours is in form a representative democracy that exists in a welfare capitalist system.  Most of the time—but not always—the system ends up working.  Violence of invective, born of understandable frustration and impatience, can be potentially revolutionary.  Remember the violence in the turbulent 1960s, which would be an unacceptable outcome from today's street convulsions.

Will The Occupy Movement Fade Now That Most of the Occupations Have Been Cleared?

by Mark Naison

The tent cities have been bulldozed and the parks have been cleared.  Big-city mayors see clean spaces, washed and sanitized, and hope that the Occupations were a bad dream.  Obama supporters hope that the three months of protest represented a brief detour in a progressive movement that will ultimately come to its senses and concentrate on re-electing the president and campaigning for Democratic candidates for Congress, realizing—with the help of a collection of bizarre and frighteningly ill-informed Republican presidential aspirants—that the most important initiatives to achieve a more just society take place at the polls, not in the streets.

Penn State and Violence Against Men

by Jim Loewen

The Penn State scandal brought forth a thoughtful commentary by Daniel Mendelsohn, Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College.  Mendelsohn begins his recent New York Times op-ed, “What if it had been a 10-year-old girl in the Penn State locker room that Friday night in 2002?”He concludes that then Mike McQueary, the graduate assistant to the football team, would surely have intervened or at least called the police.  "But the victim in this case was a boy," Mendelsohn notes.  He goes on to speculate that the university, too, would have taken the crime more seriously, had the victim been female.Even though we cannot know for sure without at least interviewing McQueary and Joe Paterno, Graham Spanier, and other Penn State officials, surely Mendelsohn is right.  As he puts it,Does anyone believe that if a burly graduate student had walked in on a 58-year-old man raping a naked little girl in the shower, he would have left without calling the police and without trying to rescue the girl?

Why Does the 99 Percent Let Athletes, Executives, and Movie Stars Get Away with Huge Salaries?

by Walter G. Moss

Occupy Wall Street has popularized talk about America's 99 percent versus the richest 1 percent.  A study by the Congressional Budget Office in October 2011 detailed the growing income gap between 1979 and 2007.  It noted that the fast-escalating earnings of the elite in sports, entertainment, and the corporate world had contributed to this increasing gap.  In 1985, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death claimed that TV was turning public life into entertainment.  Twenty years later, in an introduction to a new edition, his son Andrew argued that all the new media since then had just accentuated the trend.

A Modest Proposal for Occupy Wall Street: Take Our Children, Please!

by Steve Fraser

In 1729, when Ireland had fallen into a state of utter destitution at the hands of its British landlords, Jonathan Swift published a famous essay, “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being A Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public.” His idea was simple: the starving Irish should sell their own children to the rich as food. His inspiration, as it happened, came from across the Atlantic.  As he explained, “I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young, healthy child well nourished is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragoust.”

The Militarization of American Police Has Long Historical Roots

by Jeremy Kuzmarov

The images of militarized police units organized in platoon formation pepper spraying and beating peaceful demonstrators at UC Davis and at the Occupy encampments across the country have been disturbing to witness, though they provide a potent symbol of the times.  While staffed with people from working-class backgrounds, the police in American society have long served as “protectors of privilege,” as Frank Donner put it in a 1990 book, upholding the power of the wealthy 1% by frequently crushing labor protest, spying on and harassing civil rights and antiwar activists, and enforcing the War on Drugs primarily in ghetto communities.

The Growing Gap Between Civilians and the Military Could Have Serious Consequences

by Mary L. Dudziak

"A smaller share of Americans currently serve in the U.S. Armed Forces than at any time since the peace-time era between World Wars I and II," according to a new report from the Pew Research Center (hat tip New York Times).During the past decade, as the military has been engaged in the longest period of sustained conflict in the nation’s history, just one-half of one percent of American adults has served on active duty at any given time.1 As the size of the military shrinks, the connections between military personnel and the broader civilian population appear to be growing more distant.  

Why Didn't Mike McQueary Stop Jerry Sandusky? Why Didn't Anyone Help Kitty Genovese?

by Joseph De May

Apart from Jerry Sandusky, Joe Paterno, Mike McQueary, and the still unnamed victims, the person most often mentioned in connection with the Penn State sex abuse scandal is a woman who has been dead for almost forty-eight years.  If you don’t recognize her name, you’ve likely heard her story or some version of it.28-year-old Kitty Genovese was murdered in Kew Gardens, Queens, New York, on March 13, 1964.  As with Anne Frank, the story of Kitty’s death transformed her from an unknown to one of the most enduring of public figures.  That transformation began with the opening paragraph of a front page story from the March 27, 1964 New York Times.For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens.  Twice their chatter and the sudden glow of their bedroom lights interrupted him and frightened him off.  Each time he returned, sought her out, and stabbed her again.  Not one person telephoned the police during the assault; one witness called after the woman was dead.

How Long Will Mothers Have to Wait for Decent Prenatal Care?

by Janet Golden and Howard Markel

In 1909 Mrs. William Lowell Putnam, an anti-suffrage activist, philanthropist, sister of poet Amy Lowell and of Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell and wife of leading Boston Brahmin lawyer William Lowell Putnam Sr., attempted to answer a question:  would providing women with prenatal care lower infant and maternal mortality?  A five-year experiment, involving middle-class Boston women, provided the answer:  Yes.  From then on Mrs. Putnam, in addition to crusading against giving women the right to vote, became a leading public advocate for prenatal care.  In 1918 she became president of the American Association for Study and Prevention of Infant Mortality, the leading social welfare organization uniting physicians and reformers.  Both of Mrs. Putnam’s political endeavors failed.  In 1920, the 19th Amendment was ratified.  Today, in 2011, millions of women lack insurance coverage enabling them to access prenatal care.

Is Rising Isolationism in America Dangerous?

by Christopher McKnight Nichols

Wherever the public’s attention roams these days, looming in the background is a renewed danger:  Americans, and especially elected officials on the right, are becoming more isolationist.  National polls and the statements of GOP presidential candidates reveal a widespread insistence for the U.S. to pull back from its global commitments.  Even apparent successes, such as the limited multilateral intervention in Libya, do not restore, much less rebuild, confidence about the positive payoffs from U.S. engagement.  What is worse, today’s isolationists are both different from and in some ways more dangerous than those of the so-called “heyday” of isolationist politics, the 1920s and 1930s.

Why Teachers Must Become Community Organizers and Justice Fighters

by Mark Naison

There is a long history of teacher activism in the United States.  In New York City, the tradition goes back to the late 1930s when teachers associated with the Communist Party and the New York City teachers' union fought to have Negro History Month honored in the New York public schools, to force the replacement or reassignment of racist teachers, and to challenge the placement of black students in the lowest tracks and most decayed schools in a highly tracked school system.  This legacy of anti-racist activism, always done in collaboration with civil rights organizations and community groups, lasted into the late '50s, when many of the most effective teacher activists were pushed out of the New York school system during the Cold War.  This forgotten tradition is described in depth in Clarence Taylor’s new book Reds and the Black Board: Communism, Civil Rights and the New York City Teachers Union.

Mitt Romney: Interviews with Rogers M. Smith and Lou Cannon

by Alexander Heffner

Rogers M. SmithLou CannonRogers M. SmithRogers M. Smith, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania, is the co-author of Still a House Divided.When you think about Gov. Mitt Romney’s presidential bid, both in 2008, and 2012, what historical parallels to past American election cycles come to mind, if any?

Give Students A Break—An Election Break

by Leonard Steinhorn

Around this time next year, right after Election Day, the chattering class might once again bemoan the fact that young people are disenfranchising themselves by not voting in numbers even close to their proportion of the population. As in elections past, college presidents will lecture about civic responsibility and professors will write op-eds about apathy among the young. And then they'll do nothing about it.But there is something that can be done.

Can America Return to Normalcy? Should We Even Try?

by Alan Singer

In the 1920 presidential campaign, following the conclusion of World War I, Republican candidate Warren G. Harding ran for President of the United States under the slogan “Return to Normalcy”—which loosely translated meant a return to an idealized version of the American past.  As a historian, I see many parallels between the 1920s and the current era in the United States, especially when looking at the debates in the 2012 presidential campaign.  As a social studies teacher, I believe a comparison of the two periods will help students and the public in general better understand the problems facing the nation as well as recent political movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. The 1920s in the United States was a period of political and economic transformation and cultural turmoil. White Anglo-Saxon Protestant [WASP] rural America felt their country was slipping away from them.  Capitalist industrialization transformed the nation and turned it into a global economic and military power.  Political power was held by bankers and industrialists operating through the Republican Party, and the government served their interests.

Rick Perry: Interviews with Historians Edward F. Countryman and Greg Cantrell

by Alexander Heffner

Edward F. CountrymanGreg CantrellEdward F. CountrymanEdward F. Countryman, University Distinguished Professor, Southern Methodist University, and author of The American Revolution.In the larger context of American political history, what is most noteworthy to you about Governor Perry’s candidacy?