Week of February 11, 2008

Ms. [Susan Jacoby, author of “The Age of American Unreason”], dressed in a bright red turtleneck with lipstick to match, was sitting, appropriately, in that temple of knowledge, the New York Public Library’s majestic Beaux Arts building on Fifth Avenue. The author of seven other books, she was a fellow at the library when she first got the idea for this book back in 2001, on 9/11.

Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:

“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.

The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”

“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.

At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, “I decided to write this book.”

As the candidate who prides himself on disagreeing without being disagreeable, Obama takes on a Christlike quality for lots of people, especially white people. If a white American doesn't feel guilty about race, you can be almost certain that he feels anxious about it. Believe me, if these people had a street address where they could go and get absolution, they'd take the next taxi. Obama has a talent for extending forgiveness to the guilty and the anxious without requiring an apology from them first. Go forth and sin no more, he almost says, and never mind the reparations. No wonder they call him the brother from another planet.

As anyone who has ever sat on a committee or conducted a confidential inquiry can testify, historians are notorious gossips. From the vast dustheap of the past, the historian scavenges for secrets to divulge, either personal or societal. Ever since the nineteenth century, this peculiar, indeed pathological variety of indiscretion has been dignified with the title “historical research”, and since “research” is now the holy grail of British academia, with the vast majority of university-based historians determined to obtain “research funding” as a means of improving their chances in the government’s absurd “research assessment exercise”, the rivalry between historians to divulge other people’s secrets can exhibit all the dignity of a gang of transvestites squabbling over a wig.

There are now upward of 15,000 books about Lincoln, more than about any other person except Jesus (though there are more about Lincoln than about God, reckons [historian Jean] Baker). In our lifetime Lincoln has supplanted Washington as the most revered president.

Since 2004, I have predicted that Hillary Clinton would be the nominee. But, given the consistently amazing performance of Obama, his superior organizational and fund-raising skills, his inspiration of young people, and the flat and completely uninspiring performance by Hillary, it looks to me like it will be Obama as the Democratic nominee.

The South, as its great historian C. Vann Woodward once noted, developed into the United States’ “most distinctive region.” Among its distinctions — bound up with but outlasting its peculiar institution of chattel slavery — were white Southerners’ preoccupations with human limitations, guilt and evil. Not for them the optimistic creed or “dream of perfection” associated with their Northern brethren. In that sense, Woodward argued, the South’s outlook was “a thoroughly un-American one.”

Which brings us to the central irony underlying “Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950,” by Glenda Gilmore, a native North Carolinian and the Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward professor of history at Yale University. In the early to mid-20th century, Gilmore argues, it was primarily individuals and groups judged “un-American” by their contemporaries who took on the daunting task of bringing the South in line with the American “dream of perfection” — at least insofar as perfection could be measured by adherence to the promise of equal protection before the law.