Forty-four: Newtered No More

So, who the heck is Saul Alinsky? And who the heck knows who he is? And given the fact that 99 out of 100 people, being generous here, haven't got a clue who he is, why is Newt Gingrich throwing his name around like it's a piece of common confetti?

Saul Alinsky was a Jewish community organizer who lived between 1909 and 1972. There is no connection between Barack Obama and Alinsky, except that Obama was briefly a community organizer. Hilary Clinton, apparently, wrote her undergraduate thesis on the guy. Machiavelli for the poor, is how he is described by CNN. He was a non-Marxist radical. Quintessentially American, in fact. A radical who was eschewing Marxism -- doesn't get more American than that!

But lets face it, who in Gingrich's audience has a clue about this? No one. Why does he say this then? It is the same red meat he is throwing at the audience with regard to race -- Obama, "the food stamp President." He can say that so that he doesn't have to be overtly racist, or at least so that a racist audience can feel comfortable imbibing what he is saying. But where there is racism, can anti-semitism be far away? The answer is no. This is an appeal to the old populism; where Obama isn't simply an African American radical, he has also to be sold as a European social democrat. How better to do that than to throw around the Jewish name of a largely forgotten radical?

Of course, one of the great things about this kind of bating is that it actually resurrects the names of people like Alinsky. For, in fact, he would speak to the 99 percent. He would speak to the Occupy movement -- which is, unquestionably, to speak to an American audience. The result is that we are not Newtered by the rhetoric, as the Grinch would want -- perhaps we can be empowered. Long live, Saul!!

Forty-three: More Pauline History Rewrites

Ron Paul has suggested that the Civil War was unnecessary. It was unfortunate, and slavery could have been eradicated by other mechanisms besides warfare. He points to the case of the British Empire, where the government paid compensation to the slaveowners for their slaves, and where slavery was brought to an end peacefully.

It goes without saying that this is not a very well thought out proposition on Paul’s part. For two reasons: first, because the situation in the United States was fundamentally different from that in the British Empire – on so many levels; second, because the notion that the U.S. government would pay this kind of compensation to one particular segment of the population, fundamentally undermines Paul’s own claims about the Constitution not really allowing such things, and that the government should remain small and should stay out of the economy.

I will take these, very briefly, in turn. Unlike in the United States, slaveholding in the British system (by and large) was not at the metropole – it was in the periphery of the empire. While slaveholders had lobbyists at Parliament, their representatives did not represent half of the constituencies of that body – as was the case in the Senate and the House of Representatives. Moreover, in Britain in the 1830s the wealth of the slaveholding areas of the empire did not compare with the wealth of the slaveholding States in the 1850s. Those 50 percent of the States where slavery existed were going through a major economic boom founded primarily on the profit from cotton, and from the collateral associated with property from the bodies of the slaves. To get slaveholders to back down from their position that their civilization was superior to that of a free labor economy – both economically and morally – was not something that could be done by mere compensation. Everyone knew this at the time and a Ron Paul coming along to suggest this idea would have been laughed out of court – both in South Carolina and in Massachusetts. One could go on, but if these points alone aren’t sufficient to make the case, then no amount of evidence would suffice for someone proposing such a specious argument.

But, add to this, how does a government that is supposed to have no income tax on which to draw revenue compensate slaveowners for the value of their property in slaves? How would then one not also compensate the slaves for their years of unpaid labor (though Paul wouldn't propose this, I am sure)? Such an act to compensate slaveowners would be a major intervention in the economy by the government, and if it was Constitutional do this, it would then be a precedent for any other similar act of government -- e.g. the New Deal, the War on Poverty (against which Ron Paul now rails). Dr. Paul may have some sensible things to say about foreign policy, though he invariably arrives at these things by a logic that undermines the soundness of what he is saying, but these particular economic ramblings of his are just sheer nonsense. 

Forty-two: Reserve Judgment

Ron Paul is suggesting that the gold standard is required by the Constitution. This is not the case. Gold is mentioned once in the Constitution, in Article 1, Section 10. This article basically says that no State is entitled to act like the federal government. Thus, “No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.”

So, if the Constitution were making a mere confederation of states with no other authority but the states themselves, then there might be a case for saying that gold and silver were a required basis for currency.

But this is not the case, as the authority of Congress overrides the States in this area. This is handled in Section 8 of the same article:

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

To borrow Money on the credit of the United States;

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures; [etc.]

Clearly, the Constitution would allow Congress to do pretty much anything that its members deemed was necessary to secure the wealth and prosperity of the United States.

One of these things has been the establishment, in 1913, during Woodrow Wilson’s administration, of the Federal Reserve System. This basically oversees the banking system and is intended to secure against the kinds of financial panics that are frequent occurrences in the capitalist system. The Fed was designed to protect capitalism from itself, and there have been plenty of cases where it has clearly achieved this – though it has failed on several occasions also, mainly due to faulty management (e.g., 1929 & 2008).

The assault on the Federal Reserve System from the right is intended to allow unfettered capitalism to reign once more. The notion that the economic cycles of boom and bust that preceded the 1913 creation of the Fed would be preferable to the oversight of the financial markets currently in place is absurd. Ron Paul’s grasp of history is flimsy at best – and he makes Gingrich look like a veritable scholar in this department – but this isn’t too much to grasp (though, of course, one has to note that one strand of Republican thinking wants chaos for its own sake – a return to the notion of the survival of the fittest, with everyone’s hands on the Bible and a gun – so it may not be that Paul is blind to these realities after all).

Republicans generally hope that people forget history altogether so that they can make up their own historical transcript out of their own fanciful whole cloth. They certainly excel in this area.

Forty-one: Birth of a President

The birther controversy seems to be absolutely bogus. If one is born outside the United States and not of American parentage one can be President of the United States, so long as he or she is elected to the office, of course. Examine Section 1, Article 2.  It says, “No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, AT THE TIME OF THE ADOPTION OF THIS CONSTITUTION, shall be eligible to the Office of the President.” So the statement of being a natural born citizen is qualified by the timing of when the Constitution was being adopted. All those people, by my reckoning, must be dead, though in Ron Paul’s world of Constitutionality, this may in fact be open to question.  How do we know that this is not meant to rule out foreign-born people altogether? We know this because of the statement that follows immediately after this: “neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, AND BEEN FOURTEEN YEARS A RESIDENT WITHIN THE UNITED STATES.” Why would it be necessary to say anything about fourteen years of residence if everyone needed to be a natural born citizen? The fact that this is in there means that for the time after that period when the Constitution is adopted this is the rule that should be applied.

And this makes sense in relation to the requirements for the House of Representatives and the Senate. The former required, the following: “No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.”

Meanwhile, the Senate required this: “No Person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen.”

Is it not obvious that there is a natural progression from the House to the Senate to the Presidency? Is it really credible that the founders who created the Constitution on the grounds of reason, would suddenly throw this all out with regard to the President? That they would suddenly make the presidency a position that is fundamentally different from the other positions is not credible. They were clearly concerned about foreign aristocrats coming in and trying to establish a monarchy, but the fourteen years residency was sufficient guarantee against this. Come now. These people were not simpletons. They were intellectuals. They could think their way out of a paper bag. They were not birthers, and they did not establish natural-born citizenship as a basic criterion for the position of President.

This issue has never been taken up by the Supreme Court. If it were, however, there is no question how they would rule. Unless, of course, they were birthers and simpletons themselves. Well, I suppose it is open to question then.

Forty: Xtreme History®

The X-Games, bringing together a multitude of Xtreme Sports, have been going on for many years. I learned the other day [December 2006] at a Christmas party that there is now something called Xtreme Programming taking shape. This is a new approach to programming founded on a relationship between programmer and client that is far more interactive than previously was the case. Heretofore, a programmer would be given a task by the client and would work away at her/his computer returning with a finished product, a program that would hopefully meet the needs of the client. Now, though, Xtreme programmers are approaching their task in a new way and based upon altered assumptions. They believe, quite reasonably, that the client doesn’t really know what he or she wants when hiring the programmer, and so, rather than hibernating until the project is done, the programmer needs to be engaging the client in the process of creating the program. Programmers need to present their clients with all the possible alternatives, make suggestions about different ways of approaching the project, and share their sense of the new vistas that get opened up as the programs take form. In this way they can more effectively teach the client how to use the program once it is finished and, they believe, the program can more efficiently meet the client’s needs. In addition, the program will spawn new approaches to programming that will continue to push the boundaries of interactivity. All this sounds promising. Perhaps we can apply this thinking to the world of History.

Now is the time, then, to establish Xtreme History®. Here, historians will work more closely with their clients (however these are to be defined), bringing them into the process of creating a history that is more usable for them. We could introduce historians into all walks of life, having them shadow public figures, to offer the historical alternatives. Let’s take American presidents as our example. Instead of having to wait around for popular historians to write their over-priced evaluations of the work of presidents who are long gone, we can have a historian sitting on the cabinet to provide instant historical assessments. “No, Mr. President, if you invade Iraq and you do not have a shred of evidence that Saddam is producing WMDs, it may not look good for your reputation in the future. Look what happened to Richard Nixon when he tried to lie to the American people. Mind you, in his case, resignation after threatened impeachment was followed by scholarly rehabilitation. In your case, it might mean you get through your presidency unscathed, but your historical legacy may be forever scarred.” Such Xtreme historical interventions might work wonders in an evenly divided cabinet dealing with tough issues. You know that Presidents are constantly thinking about their legacies, particularly in their second terms, so why not give them help in this area? After all, if they have to turn to other cabinet members for advice, people who have their own legacies and ambitions for higher office to take care of, they may not get the advice that they really need. Assign them an Xtreme Historian®, however, and they will be much better served. [Additional consideration: as we develop our Xtreme methodologies, we would need to go back to study some of the proto-Xtreme Historians® – there’s Arthur Schlessinger giving advice on matters historical to JFK, and, of course, Woodrow Wilson providing Divine historical guidance for himself.]

If we follow this bold historiographical path just think of the possibilities for the members of our American Historical Association to become bona fide public intellectuals. The President of the AHA could be assigned a space in the closet adjacent to the Oval Office, used so effectively by Monica Lewinsky, and services could be provided very directly to the President of the United States. The AHA President’s message every January at the Convention would become a national media event, as the Most Extreme Xtreme Historian® provided his or her “State of the President’s Legacy Address.” Once this becomes firmly established as a yearly ritual we might find Xtreme History® filtering down into all areas of American society and culture. Just imagine in season nine of the Sopranos, the show is revitalized by the introduction of an Xtreme Historian® who shadows Tony Soprano providing advice on how he will look to posterity if he blows away some minor character. “No, Mr. Soprano [Xtreme Historians® lose the appearance of objectivity if they use first names],” Ricordo Heatstatter says, “don’t ice Michael [Xtreme Historians® should endeavor to learn the language of their clients]; it won’t look good for the historical record if you kill one of your close relatives. If you’ve got to do it, have someone else take him out – and don’t let me know about it, as I’ll have to include it in my historical account.” 

The possibilities are endless. We finish with a possible public service announcement, or caption for AHA Perspectives:

Xtreme Historians® needed! Help save your ailing profession; help save the nation, even the planet! Opportunities available! You must be prepared to provide your services anytime, anywhere, and in any unsavory capacity. No job is too small. No history is too dirty. You too can help launder the historical record.

Thirty-nine: The Sir Walter Disease

In a chapter of Life on the Mississippi (New York: P.F. Collier, 1917) entitled “Enchantments and Enchanters,” Mark Twain begins with a memory of seeing Mardi-Gras festivities in New Orleans in 1850. He remembered seeing a procession of the Mystic Crew of Comus, “with knights and nobles and so on, clothed in silken and golden Paris-made gorgeousness, planned and bought for that single night’s use; and in their train all manner of giants, dwarfs, monstrosities, and other diverting grotesquerie – a startling and wonderful sort of show, as it filed solemnly and silently down the street in the light of its smoking and flickering torches.”(373)

He then notes that Mardi-Gras had been a relic of French and Spanish “occupation” of the city, but that any religious origins of the festivities had been “pretty well knocked out of it now.” The reason for this, Twain tells us, is that “Sir Walter has got the advantage of the gentlemen of the cowl and rosary, and he will stay. His medieval business, supplemented by the monsters and the oddities, and the pleasant creatures from fairy-land, is finer to look at than the poor fantastic inventions and performances of the reveling rabble of the priest’s day, and serves quite as well, perhaps, to emphasize the day and admonish men that the grace-line between the worldly season and the holy one is reached.”(373-4)

More’s the pity, Twain believes. He is pleased that such pageantry is unlikely to spread beyond Memphis, St. Louis, and Baltimore to infect the “practical North”, let alone London. But he is obviously less than happy with the fixation of his own natal region on all this romanticism. “For the soul of it,” he intones, “is the romantic, not the funny and the grotesque. Take away the romantic mysteries, the kings and knights and big-sounding titles, and Mardi-Gras would die, down there in the South. The very feature that keeps it alive in the South – girly-girly romance – would kill it in the North or in London. Puck and Punch, and the press universal, would fall upon it and make merciless fun of it, and its first exhibition would be also its last.” (374)

Now, while we may be less sanguine than Twain about the career of romance in the dens of practicality, he certainly makes an interesting case about the South, framed nicely in relation to the French Revolution. He writes:

Against the crimes of the French Revolution and of Bonaparte may be set two compensating benefactions: the Revolution broke the chains of the ancien régime and of the Church, and made a nation of abject slaves a nation of freemen; and Bonaparte instituted the setting of merit above birth, and so completely stripped the divinity from royalty that, whereas crowned heads in Europe were gods before, they are only men since, and can never be gods again, but only figure-heads, and answerable for their acts like common clay. Such benefactions as these compensate the temporary harm which Bonaparte and the Revolution did, and leave the world in debt to them for these great and permanent services to liberty, humanity, and progress.(374-5)

One imagines that Twain is capable of believing that “abject slaves” would not just mean Frenchmen, but could include the bonded Haitian, and his similarly situated brother and sister in the Old South. But, liberty, humanity, and progress, were to be taxed commodities in the domain of literature. “Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments,” Twain continues,

and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society.(375)

What Twain tells us is quite important, I think.  Perhaps there is a historian who in a footnote about the Old South has mentioned the appeal of Sir Walter Scott to members of the slaveholding society; but none that I know of has gone so far as to attribute the characteristics of that society to changes in literary taste. With few exceptions, historians have a more materialistic bent, seeing culture as a reflection of material conditions – the superstructure built upon the economic base. Now, obviously one might still wonder why Scott might have the appeal in the Old South that Twain claims for him, attributing this to the institution of slavery perhaps, but one would still have to recognize what impact is being afforded a mere writer of Scottish romances. Twain notes:

He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote.  Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so forcefully as a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully. There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization, and so you have practical common sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works, mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried.(375)

So, according to Twain, the South had been held back by its adoration for the romance of Scott and “but for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner…would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval mixed, and the South would be a generation further advanced than it is.”(375-6)  But the problems associated with the Scott disease were even more pernicious. For,

It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a major or a colonel, or a general or a judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter.(376)

Much of the honor code described by Bertram Wyatt Brown as central to Southern mentalité in Southern Honor, a work that come closer than most others to an idealist rather than materialist interpretation of the South, can be linked to this Scott fixation. And, more still, Twain claims that this fixation was one of its causes of the Civil War itself:

Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war. It seems a little harsh toward a dead man to say that we never should have had any war but for Sir Walter; and yet something of a plausible argument, might, perhaps, be made in support of that wild proposition. The Southerner of the American Revolution owned slaves; so did the Southerner of the Civil War; but the former resembles the latter as an Englishman resembles a Frenchman. The change of character can be traced rather more easily to Sir Walter’s influence than to that of any other thing or person.(376)

As one reads “Enchantments and Enchanters” one is reminded of both Connecticut Yankee in the Court of King Arthur and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The former work does a couple of things.  First, it places the representative of northern practicality in a Scott-like medieval setting, but with an unexpected twist. Rather than simply showing the idiocy of Arthurian society and ridiculing its conventions, as one might predict from this particular essay, Connecticut Yankee has its Yankee imposing his own conventions in such a way that “the modern” itself becomes problematic. Second, the work provides a parable about Reconstruction. While the South may have been a weird mix of medieval and modern, northerners’ attempts to reconstruct this region, without really knowing the extent of their own warped romanticism (and so their susceptibility to Southern wiles) and without understanding the region they were trying to reconstruct, would be abortive.

Huck Finn, by contrast, provides an antidote to Sir Walter’s fare. Twain ends the “Enchantments” essay by juxtaposing Scott’s work and that of Cervantes:

A curious exemplification of the power of a single book for good or harm is shown in the effects wrought by Don Quixote and those wrought by Ivanhoe. The first swept the world’s admiration for the medieval chivalry silliness out of existence; and the other restored it. As far as our South is concerned the good work done by Cervantes is pretty nearly a dead letter, so effectually has Scott’s pernicious work undermined it.(377-8)

Huck Finn provides an assault on the Scott-ridden South using Cervantine conventions. Huck is very much a Don Quixote maneuvering his way through the South’s pretensions to chivalric civilization, finding its limits in the contradictions and hypocrisies evident in the racism of the South. Huck’s companion, Jim, very much takes on the air of a Sancho Panza, uneducated and yet wise, especially by comparison with those who would keep him in bondage.

So, what of all this?  We have then a novelist who has transformed a society for ill – showing the power of the novel not just to tell us about particular kinds of societies and historical narratives, but also to mislead us, and in so doing create a historical memory that begins to shape history itself. We have another novelist attempting to put things to right in his own writing, and doing so via the muse of Miguel de Cervantes. As we have said in the introduction to these “novel histories” – all roads lead to Cervantes; we will get there yet.

Thirty-eight: The Transplanted

It goes without saying that The Graduate is an important movie. Few would disagree with this, I believe. The Graduate symbolizes for many an articulation of 1960s rebellion against the plastic world of the Organization Man. This was certainly how I viewed it when I first saw it. Although I was only thirteen, and it was my first weekend at my public (private) school, this was close to the sixties and the feelings of that decade were very much in the air. A few weeks later the school screened Lindsay Anderson’s If, which was asking for trouble since it ends with Malcolm McDowell standing atop Cheltenham Cathedral (if I recall correctly) raining bullets down on the parents and teachers of his own public school. The association of The Graduate with rebellion, which was probably there anyway, was further accentuated in my mind as a result of the juxtaposition of these movies. While confused in its own way – adopting the system’s mode of conformity (Benjamin’s desire to marry Elaine) to protest against conformity – The Graduate nonetheless opens a gaping hole in the monochromatic suburban landscape.

The movie also comes at the end of an era in Hollywood history, and represents an interesting counterpoint to The Jazz Singer. The earlier film represented the coming of age of the Jewish mogul bringing to the fore the internal conflict of the sons of immigrants endeavoring to assimilate into American culture. Produced in 1927, three years after the Johnson-Reed Act effectively cut off immigration, the story revealed Jake Rabinowitz turning himself into Jack Robin and dating fellow Broadway dancer and Jew, Mary Dale. While the movie appears on the surface to celebrate the continuity of Jewish traditions, alongside the emergent “American” culture (baseball and apple pie), the reality of a nation cutting off the immigrants from the “old world”, and the coming rush to the uniform suburbs, left the culture of the cantor and the synagogue seeming quaint and moribund. What followed in Hollywood was several decades of Jewish producers, directors, and actors, helping to create an image of America that was decidedly WASPish in most of its aspects.

The Graduate, however, does the exact reverse of The Jazz Singer. Made by Anglicized [Americanized?] Jews, like the director Mike Nichols, it turns a story of a WASP youth into that of a Jewish rebel thumbing his nose at the establishment. This was not a deliberate move on Nichols’ part, apparently, but rather came to fruition with the hiring of Dustin Hoffman (as opposed to Robert Redford) to play the lead role. Seeing Hoffman’s audition enabled Nichols to see that Benjamin’s alienation could be rendered as more than just a product of generational difference; it could become something embedded in Hoffman’s appearance as not being the tall, handsome, bronzed and blonde California male. The question would be asked, how did these goy parents have this Jewish kid? – though, of course, many Jewish parents would have endeavored to pass as WASPs throughout the 1950s. When you throw in the music of Simon and Garfunkel and Benjamin’s waving of a large cross at the wedding-goers – a reversal of sorts of Jesus cleansing the synagogue of the money-changers, since these were now being locked in the church – then the fact that “Jesus loves you more than you know” no longer amounts to a point of great importance, or anything more than irony. What comes to mind is William Jennings Bryan’s statement, “Thou shalt not crucify mankind on a Cross of Gold,” except the cross is now being waved by Hoffman at all the Christians – when Bryan would have had it the other way around.

In this guise, The Graduate takes on the form of a second pronouncement on the closing of the frontier and a revenge of the east against the west. California was the last land of the settlers, those who responded to the call to “go west young man,” and the most recently developed section of the United States as a result of the great growth of the military-industrial complex during and in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The establishment of a chemical industry, which provides the single word “plastics” for the movie, represents the coming of age of industrial capital in California, and Benjamin’s return from the East – a land associated in the minds of Dustin Hoffman and Mike Nichols with Jewish intellectuals (e.g., Dylan and Lenny Bruce) who had also been the backbone of the labor movement in the 19th century – is the injection of a foreign agent into this mix. De Tocqueville, one feels, is close at hand. While Benjamin doesn’t fit the mold of the radical protesting at Berkeley, there are allusions to these disturbances, and his protest is powerful nonetheless. In the process, he ends up transplanting Jack Robin back into his earlier persona as Jakie Rabinowitz, taking him out of his convertible (suburban) and placing him back on public transport (urban), all just in time for social historians to rediscover the immigrant community;