Roundup: Historians' Take

Tom Chaffin: Mitt Romney: The Second Coming of James K. Polk?

Tom Chaffin is research professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is author of Pathfinder: John Charles Frémont and the Course of American Empire and a forthcoming book on Frederick Douglass's 1845-46 lecture tour of Ireland. Mitt Romney's campaign manager Matt Rhoades sent reporters aGoogling in August when he suggested that his candidate's presidential role-model might be James K. Polk. According to the Huffington Post's Jon Ward, "Rhoades and the rest of the members of Romney's inner circle think a Romney presidency could look much like the White House tenure of the 11th U.S. president."A Democrat who served as chief-executive from 1845 to 1849, Polk numbers among America's most intriguing, lesser known presidents. To be sure, the Tennessean -- though often a Machiavellian political maestro -- was in life, and remains in historical memory, an austere figure. Although he increased the nation's area by a third, Polk never possessed the leading-man allure of the likes of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Kennedy, and Reagan.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Media Shouldn't Dismiss Value of Romney, Obama Presidential Debate

Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of history and education at New York University. He is the author of “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory” (Yale University Press).In 1960, on the eve of the first televised Presidential debates in United States history, America’s leading newspaper launched a pre-emptive attack on them. Pitting Vice-President Richard Nixon against his telegenic opponent, John F. Kennedy, the debates would appeal to voters “who are influenced not so much by logic and reason as by emotional, illogical factors,” the New York Times warned. “The fear is that they will not discuss the issues as much as put on a show.”

J. David Woodard: The Role of Church, Military and Tradition

J. David Woodard teaches political science at Clemson University in Clemson, S.C. He is the author of "The New Southern Politics."The South is more conservative because, in the words of C. Vann Woodward, it was “the only part of the nation to experience the pain of a military defeat, occupation by a victorious external foe, and subsequent domination by its former servants.” Robert Penn Warren wrote that, “That kind of defeat, gives the past great importance.” Conservatives love the past, never more so than in the South....Related LinksNYT Room for Debate: The South's Enduring Conservatism

James C. Cobb: Party Identity Is Crucial

James C. Cobb, a professor of history at the University of Georgia, is the author, most recently, of "The South and America Since World War II."The fundamental explanation for the strong Republican support among working-class white Southerners is the striking disconnect between rural, overwhelmingly nonunion, Southern white workers and the national Democratic Party’s union-centric approach to labor issues.This makes it easier for blue-collar Southern whites to convince themselves (with the eager assistance of Republican politicos) that the primary aim of Democratic initiatives like federal worker-training programs was or is to put black people in a position to take their jobs. Even if there is little reason to think the G.O.P. might actually help working-class white Southerners, they know at least that the Republicans are infinitely less likely to do anything to help blacks....Related LinksNYT Room for Debate: The South's Enduring Conservatism

Todd Shaw: A Vehement Mix of Ideological Passions

Todd Shaw is an associate professor of African-American studies and political science at the University of South Carolina.George Lipsitz’s theory of "possessive investment of whiteness” partly explains why many in the white working class in the South remain strongly anti-Obama and strongly conservative. Given a history of racial discrimination against blacks and other minorities, Lipsitz reasoned that white identity has a “cash value” as accumulated from white advantages in education, occupational attainment, home values and wealth....Related LinksNYT Room for Debate: The South's Enduring Conservatism

Kareem U. Crayton: Religion Sets a Social Agenda

Kareem U. Crayton is associate professor of law at the University of North Carolina School of Law....Whereas economic issues tend to move a share of working-class voters toward more progressive or populist positions, social issues (some candidates commonly use the shorthand “guns, gays and God”) have a tendency to crowd out other campaign issues in Southern elections. The trend is especially strong in the South, which has a much higher rate of church attendance -- especially among protestant evangelicals -- than anywhere else in the country. And this trend has held true for decades....Related LinksNYT Room for Debate: The South's Enduring Conservatism

Joseph Crespino: Moderate White Democrats Silenced

Joseph Crespino, a professor of history at Emory University, is the author of "Strom Thurmond's America."...The passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act did not usher in immediate political influence for black Southerners. African-Americans and voting rights advocates had to work for years to overcome vote dilution schemes that preserved white political control. By 1982, when Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act, Congressional districts were redrawn in ways that led to significant gains in black representation. To do that, however, officials often had to pack those districts with high numbers of black voters, along with handfuls of liberal whites. In the process, surrounding districts became increasingly “white” and conservative. Republicans were well aware of how these packed districts would ease their election, and they eagerly supported the process. It made for an odd alliance between Southern blacks and white conservatives....Related LinksNYT Room for Debate: The South's Enduring Conservatism

Jonathan Zimmerman: America's War on Blasphemy

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University and lives in Narberth. He is the author of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory" (Yale University Press).In 2007, George Kalman received notice that he had violated a law against blasphemy. But Kalman wasn't in Pakistan, Egypt, or any of the other Middle Eastern countries that have burst into violence over an anti-Muslim YouTube video.No, Kalman was right here in Pennsylvania. After filling out a form to register his new film company as "I Choose Hell Productions L.L.C.," the Downingtown resident got a letter informing him that his request was rejected under a state law barring "blasphemy, profane cursing, or swearing" in corporate names.At the time, just five other states still had anti-blasphemy laws on the books. But such measures were ubiquitous across America for three centuries, from the founding of the colonies into the mid-20th century. As we try to understand the current anger and mayhem in the Middle East, then, we might pause to examine our own history of religious intolerance.

Stephanie Coontz: The Myth of Male Decline

Stephanie Coontz teaches family history at Evergreen State College and is the author of “A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s.”SCROLL through the titles and subtitles of recent books, and you will read that women have become “The Richer Sex,” that “The Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys,” and that we may even be seeing “The End of Men.” Several of the authors of these books posit that we are on the verge of a “new majority of female breadwinners,” where middle-class wives lord over their husbands while demoralized single men take refuge in perpetual adolescence.\How is it, then, that men still control the most important industries, especially technology, occupy most of the positions on the lists of the richest Americans, and continue to make more money than women who have similar skills and education? And why do women make up only 17 percent of Congress?

William Astore: Are Drones Keeping Us in a Losing Cause Longer?

William Astore teaches History at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. He retired from the Air Force as a lieutenant colonel in 2005, having taught at the Air Force Academy as well as the Naval Postgraduate School. He writes regularly for TomDispatch.com and History News Network.There's little question that unmanned aerial vehicles or drones are helping to save the lives of U.S. and NATO troops in places like Afghanistan while aiding in the killing of terrorist suspects in regions largely inaccessible to ground troops.But the bigger question is whether drones are in any way decisive to the war effort. Put bluntly, are they helping us to win wars, or are they essentially prolonging wars that are ultimately unwinnable?

Mark N. Katz: Yemen: The Way Forward?

Mark N. Katz is a professor of government and politics at George Mason University, and is the author of Leaving without Losing: The War on Terror after Iraq and Afghanistan (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).Washington, DC  I was in the audience for the address given by Yemeni President Abd Rabuh Mansour Hadi today at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC.  He emphasized how Yemen is working with the U.S. and others to combat Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and other Islamic terrorists, Yemen is implementing the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)-sponsored agreement (which Washington supports) for a democratic transition in Yemen, and his new administration (in office just since February 27, 2012) is working to establish peace and security among Yemen’s many disparate groups.  As he did in his speech to the UN General Assembly, President Hadi criticized the Assad regime in Syria.  President Hadi also accused Iran of interfering in Yemen’s internal affairs, noting that the Yemeni government had rounded up five Iranian spy rings and was in the process of rounding up a sixth.

Peter Beinart: Bibi's Botched History Lesson

Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is associate professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. His new book, The Crisis of Zionism, was published by Times Books in April 2012.Benjamin Netanyahu loves history. And he loves deriding his critics for not understanding it as well as he does. In his address to the United Nations General Assembly last year, he attacked journalists for their weak grasp of past events, calling for a “press whose sense of history extends beyond breakfast.”

Jill Lepore: Two Romneys -- George and Mitt

Jill Lepore, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 2005. She is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University.George Romney was fifty-nine when he ran for reëlection as Michigan’s governor, in 1966. In this half-hour television special (see a clip above or the full-length version below), he explains his policies and plans for the state. (I came across the film in the records of Campaigns, Inc., in the California State Archives, while researching a piece on the history of political consulting.)George Romney’s oldest son is now sixty-five. On television, he and his father look and speak uncannily alike. What they say, though, is strikingly different. Romney Republicanism in 2012 could hardly be more different from Romney Republicanism in 1966. The difference, of course, isn’t so much a family story as it is a story about the G.O.P.

Michael Kazin: Which U.S. President Does Romney Most Resemble? (Hint: It’s Not a Republican)

Michael Kazin’s most recent book is American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation. He teaches history at Georgetown University and is co-editor of Dissent. Which past president stood up most stalwartly for the anti-tax, anti-welfare, anti-union principles that animate today’s conservative movement? Of course, most activists on the right would confer that honor on Ronald Reagan. However, the only Republican chief executive with a major airport named after him often governed in ways that would place him on the tiny left fringe of today’s GOP: Reagan raised income and payroll taxes, increased federal spending on domestic programs as well as the military, and avoided attacking labor unions in the private sector.Some on the right speak kindly of Calvin Coolidge. But those who praise “Silent Cal” for cutting taxes on the rich are understandably mute about his fondness for the Ku Klux Klan, his racist attitudes toward all non-“Nordic” races, and his contempt for women who dared to drive cars, ride horses, or engage in politics. Moreover, Coolidge was no union-basher. In 1926, he signed a landmark bill which established collective bargaining for railroad workers, then a key sector of the labor force.

Jonathan Zimmerman: Death Penalty Morally Wrong

Terrance Williams was sexually abused by the two men he killed, according to his lawyers. He was poorly represented at his trial, where jurors never heard about these circumstances. And the widow of one of his victims wants Williams' death sentence commuted.But those aren't the strongest arguments for sparing the life of Terrance Williams, who is scheduled to be executed on Oct. 3. The best reason is the simplest: Capital punishment is inherently wrong, no matter the circumstances. And Philadelphians should understand that better than anybody else.That's because the movement to abolish the death penalty in America began right here, in the City of Brotherly Love. On March 9, 1787 - just a few months before the drafting of the Constitution - Philadelphia physician and patriot Benjamin Rush delivered a stinging rebuke to capital punishment at a lecture in the home of another famous local patriot, Benjamin Franklin.Part of Rush's argument would be familiar to us today: The death penalty won't deter the most vicious criminals. But his real concern - repeated until his own death in 1813 - was the effect of capital punishment on the rest of us....

Juan Cole: Is Paul Ryan Right that Obama’s Foreign Policy is Blowing Up in Our Faces?

Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History and the director of the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan.  His latest book, "Engaging the Muslim World," is just out in a revised paperback edition from Palgrave Macmillan. He runs the Informed Comment websitePaul Ryan knows nothing about the world or foreign affairs. I presume he may have been abroad at some point somewhere. I don’t know. As is usual in American politics, however, cavernous ignorance is no bar to holding forth, if it is not in fact a qualification. After all, ignorance is compatible with untainted national chauvinism (he would say patriotism), whereas if you actually know something it is harder mindlessly to wave the flag. Paul Ryan has been attacking President Obama’s foreign policy as weak and resembling that of Jimmy Carter during the Iran hostage crisis, and as ‘blowing up in our faces.’

Michael Ledeen: Between Two Worlds

Michael Ledeen is the Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for Defense of DemocraciesWe are somewhere between the old bipolar Cold War world, which we generally understood, and to which most of the rest of the world had adjusted, and something else, we know not what. The consequent chaos and uncertainty is remarkable, especially after the long peace and stable international environment that followed the Second World War.  That is the underlying cause of an entire generation of leaders who either are obviously unable to master their challenges, or are applying ideological models from the recent past that are embarrassing anachronisms. Leaders like Putin, or Obama, or Mursi, for example, trot out  various explanations for their behavior, but the explanations don’t “fit” the real conditions they are dealing with.To be sure, there’s a comic side to the spectacle:  the oracular class confidently laying out scenarios, most of which will be proven wrong in very short order.  Can you count the number or times you have read a presumably well-informed prediction of the Israeli assault on Iran? Or stories of clandestine U.S. military actions inside the Islamic Republic? Or detailed analyses of the Iranian nuclear program, based on IAEA data, at least some of which, the head of the Iranian program has said, were lies?

Conrad Black: Stand Up, America

Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, and, just released, A Matter of Principle. He can be reached at cbletters@gmail.com.

Victor Davis Hanson: Election, 1980-Style

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The End of Sparta. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.There was only one presidential debate in 1980 between challenger Ronald Reagan and President Jimmy Carter. Just two days before the October 28 debate, Carter was eight points ahead in the Gallup poll. A week after the debate, he lost to Reagan by nearly ten percentage points.Reagan’s debate quip, “there you go again,” reminded voters of Carter’s chronic crabbiness. Even more devastating was Reagan’s final, direct question to American voters: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” No one, it seemed, could muster a “Yes!”Yet there was more to the 1980 campaign than the final game-changing debate rhetoric — and some of the details are relevant to 2012....

Steven Conn: Mitt, Mormonism and the Problem of History

Steven Conn, editor of the forthcoming To Promote the General Welfare: The Case for Big Government (Oxford University Press USA/September 14th 2012), is Professor and Director of Public History at Ohio State University.The religious world was rocked this past week by a tiny piece of ancient papyrus which suggests that Jesus had a wife. Well, really... who among us thought that a nice Jewish boy who went into his father's business was going to stay single forever??!!The controversy that this scholarly discovery is already causing and will continue to cause isn't simply about the specifics -- did Jesus marry? did he have a female disciple? -- but rather about the role historical research plays in confirming or refuting traditional religious verities. For well over a century, science hasn't been the only threat to religious literalism; history has too.For example, when the epic of Gilgamesh was discovered and translated in the mid-19th century, many Christians and Jews were perturbed that it presents an almost identical version of Noah's flood and the garden of Eden as the one found in the Bible. Only Gilgamesh pre-dates that text. Genesis seems to be an act of plagiarism rather than divine inspiration.