Progressive Historians: History For Our Future

by Mentarch | 5/08/2008 04:08:00 PM

It is now official: every single justification behind the Afghanistan War and its seeming never ending occupation have been disavowed - by the very politicos that have been not only responsible for the lauching and conduct of this war, but likewise by those who have been staunchly supporting this conflict.

In other words: the Afghanistan war was absolutely for nothing.

Let us re-visit the main justifications/objectives for the Afghanistan war, which began in October 2001:

1) Defeat the Taliban;
2) Defeat al-Qaeda;
3) Bring freedom and democracy to Afghanistan.

Over the span of seven years since this war began, major combat operations have kept on going and going in Afghanistan - despite the proclamation in May 2002 that major combat operations were over and in the face of repeated claims that this war has been a big success.

Defeat the Taliban? Whether fueled by drug trade or corrupted misappropriations of U.S.A. funds to Pakistan (!), the Taliban insurgency shows no signs of wavering - not only in the South of Afghanistan where it has been most active but slowly spreading to the North of the country as well - all the while profiting from Pakistan's ineptitude (or incompetence, or fear?) to deal with them on their own side of the border. Just recently, Pakistan released a senior Taliban leader on his pledge to cease attacks in Pakistan - proving once again that Pakistan looks out for itself first and foremost, despite being a much touted "ally against terrorism". In the meantime, there have been repeated calls to negociate with the Taliban, going as far as to promise them a significant presence in the Afghanistan government - with the tacit approval of the U.S.A., Canada (for which the Afghanistan war has pretty much become its war) and other N.A.T.O. allies. Why, even after a much publicized recent attack by the Taliban on Afghani officials and foreign dignitaries (of which the Afghani government had been warned about), Afghani President Hamid Karzai went as far as to demand that N.A.T.O. "leave the Taliban alone" in order to stop "undermining negociations" with them! And guess what? N.A.T.O. forces are apparently following suit by putting the word out to Taliban fighters that they want to talk!

"If we don't succeed in Afghanistan, the Taliban will return" indeed. Interestingly, many Afghanis are not unhappy to see the Taliban returning!

Yes siree, the Taliban has lost - definitely.

(To learn more about the Taliban and "how much" they know about us and hate our freedoms and whatnot, I strongly suggest that you to read/watch the series Talking to the Taliban, via Red Tory: part I, II, III, IV, V, VI and VII - but I disgress).

Defeat al-Qaeda? Osama bin Laden got away and is still in hiding, along with most of the al-Qaeda leadership, quite alive and well - thank you very much. In the meantime, Pakistan is once again of little help here - not only are bin Laden and al-Qaeda hiding in Pakistan, Pakistan freed suspected al-Qaeda members in 2006, whereas al-Qaeda funding keeps going through Pakistan. At one point, Pakistan even "lost" the trail of bin Laden - and recently, Pakistani President Musharraf declared that Pakistan was "not particularly looking" for him. All well and good, considering that al-Qaeda presumably assassinated opposition leader and staunch al-Qaeda opponent Benazir Bhutto, while continuing to cause much chaos in Pakistan alongside Taliban fighters. And through it all, the now-infamous "on and off" hunt for bin Laden by the U.S.A., Canada and other N.A.T.O. allies still goes on (or not) ... in Afghanistan! No wonder such a wild goose chase will be a very long one ...

Meanwhile, al-Qaeda keeps fighting alongside the Taliban in the continuing insurgency in Afghanistan, and is poised to launch more terrorist attacks around the world ... from Pakistan. That, in addition to the fact that al-Qaeda continues to be a source of inspiration for would-be extremists - especially in Iraq.

Yes siree, al-Qaeda is on the run - definitely.

Bring freedom and democracy to Afghanistan? Yes, there have been some positive steps towards democracy in Afghanistan - but such gains are far from being faits accomplis. Rampant corruption and the booming drug trafficking (and the Drug Lords behind it) are but two of the prevailing problems which keep undermining said gains. The biggest problem of them all lies with the remaining powerful, brutish Warlords. Although having been elected in 2004, President Karzai holds power in Kabul only ... with the consent of said Warlords who hold power practically everywhere else in the country, thanks to more short-sighted, expedient incompetence on the part of the Bush administration. It doesn't help either when one of the Warlords declares allegiance to Osama bin Laden. And Karzai's government remains hardly stable, thanks to the ongoing insurgency. Last, but not least, what of the Afghani women? Little has changed since 2001 and things are in fact worsening in this respect, while laws are slowly but surely returning to the "old style" Taliban ones. On a related note, freedom of the press is not that free just yet and is likewise worsening - all of this thanks to seven years after Afghanistan's liberation from the "Taliban Regime".

Yes siree, the Afghanis have freedom and democracy - definitely.

So all in all, after looking closely at the main justifications/objectives for the war in Afghanistan and how "successfully" they have been achieved, it is safe to conclude that for all the boasts from the Bush administration, as well as those coming from Canada's Harper government (and from the British, and the Australians, and the French, and so on and so forth), soldiers and civilians have been dying in Afghanistan over the last seven years for absolutely nothing.

But we know all too well why we've arrived to this point, which is more or less right back where the Afghanistan war began on all accounts, despite all the empty rhetoric of touting all the progress achieved "over there": botched pre-war planning, botched post-war planning and the disastrous diversion of the Iraq war.

This war is indeed a veritable catalogue of errors.

No wonder Afghanistan is a quagmire. No wonder it's damn hard work. No wonder the situation is grim. No wonder the Afghanistan "mission" is in trouble, if not actually in crisis. No wonder Afghanistan has been assessed as a 30-years long marathon "mission" while we keep running in circles.

For indeed, each one of the prime justifications/objectives for the Afghanistan war have now been either completely disavowed ("defeat the taliban"), more or less abandoned ("defeat al-Qaeda"), or outrightly dismissed/ignored ("bring freedom and democracy"), by the very same people who have been pushing and supporting said justifications and this war.

In essence, the core-reasons for going into Afghanistan are being put aside in lieu of political salvage operations of appearances - with the price continuing to be exacted with the lives of N.A.T.O. soldiers and Afghan civilians in the meantime.

To put it in other words: people and soldiers have been dying over the last seven years for nothing more than what in the end has amounted to a needless and ludicrous political exercize on the part of incompetent "deciders" as their response to 9/11.

The idea of military intervention as the crux of the strategy behind the Global War on Terror(TM) was wrong-headed to begin with and has proven itself to be wrong-headed ever since - if only because one does not wage war on a method/technique of fighting. In this respect, it is now safe to say that the Global War on Terror(TM) has been a colossal failure so far, in addition to fostering more terrorism and extremism than prior to its implementation.

And Afghanistan will forever constitute grave testimony to that effect.

Hip, hip, hooray.

(Cross-posted from APOV)

Labels: incompetence, Mentarch, War in Afghanistan, War on Terror, {URL}

Brief Open Thread

by Jeremy Young | 5/07/2008 02:02:00 PM

End-of-semester stuff, plus illness, has got me down. I'll return to more frequent posting in a few days, and will also be adding several new contributors to the site at that point.

Until then, enjoy this comparison of Pete Seeger and Bill Buckley by William Hogeland and this historically-minded takedown of Hillary Clinton by Ahistoricality.

Big night for Obama last night. Congratulations to his supporters (including me!).

What's on your mind?

Labels: Jeremy Young

"intihar etti"

by Gordon Taylor | 4/30/2008 11:45:00 PM

Guerrilla Girls: Kandil Mountain.

Some smiles can kill, some will break your heart; and it's easy to see that the picture above fits into the latter category. In October 2007, when I started posting online, I began by writing about a young PKK soldier code-named Devrim Siirt, who died on Cudi (Judi) Mountain, SE Turkey, in 2005. Her photograph aroused the same feelings--delight, sorrow, confusion, anger, more sorrow--that I feel when looking at these girls. Who are they? What path brought them to this snowy place, where life is hard and violent death a real possibility? I asked similar questions about Aynur, the beautiful girl who became "Devrim Siirt." Her ending was sad, I noted, but she probably had attained some glimpse of happiness and freedom. And it could have been so much worse. She could have died alone.

She could, in other words, have committed suicide. "On mourra seul," Pascal wrote: "We Die Alone" it is rendered in the title of David Howarth's classic book of wartime adventure. An alternate translation, "One dies alone," makes it sound aristocratic, part of a code that, like it or not, all of us must follow. But while the act of dying is of necessity something that we go through on our own, few people would deny that the presence of friends makes it seem a little more attractive, a little more human. In fact, the title of Howarth's book, which concerns a man who ultimately survives, tells only half the story. "We die alone," it should say, "but we live on with the help of others."

This is why suicide--and I am not speaking of suicide bombing, a low and repulsive act--is such a crushing event. When the remains have been carried away, and the last tears are fallen, we are left with the image of a human being, desolate and solitary, slouched in some dusty corner where her (or his) final thoughts are too terrible to contemplate.

And yet, it is an image that won't go away, especially to anyone who bothers reading the headlines from Kurdistan. One night recently I was scanning Firat News, the pro-PKK news service, for items of interest, and a story jumped out at me. The dateline was 19 April. A "young girl" had committed suicide (intihar etti, in Turkish) in a village in the southeast of Turkey.

The young lady in question was named Nazli, and she was seventeen. On the previous night, it was reported, she had taken the opportunity when the house was empty to go into a room and, using a rope, had hanged herself from the ceiling. The family found her when they returned.

This, of course, is as sad as death can get. And yet, something about it doesn't sound right. "The inquiry is continuing," said the story. Well, yes. But probably it won't continue very far. What can the police (or in this case, the military gendarmes who keep watch over Kurdish villages) do? They could start by asking the family why they all just happened to be gone at that moment. (This was in a dirt-poor village, in a high-altitude region called Baskale, where the temperature was probably near freezing and there surely wasn't a great tradition of going out on the town at night.) They could ask where Nazli got the rope, and whether or not she had been depressed. They could ask about family conflicts. They could ask if she had "dishonored" the family in some way.

The last question is the most important, for Nazli's death has all the hallmarks of the latest trend: compulsory self-administered honor killings. I refer, of course, to the Kurds' disgrace, a tradition that ranks right up there with genital mutilation, Indian bride-burning, and all the other ways in which women are brutalized, exploited, and murdered in the name of rules that were made up by men. Until a few years ago, "honor killings" in Turkey were not strictly classified as murder. If a girl did something to "disgrace" the family, such as wearing the wrong clothes, seeing the wrong boy, etc., then the family would get together and choose one of the girl's brothers, usually the youngest, to kill her and take the rap. If the boy was young enough, and below the age of majority, he would usually escape with a mild sentence.

Now the game has changed. The Turkish government, in response to demands from the European Union, has considerably stiffened the penalties. (Note that only demands from the EU got them to do it.) Life in prison is now the mandatory sentence. But this hasn't stopped the honor killings. Now the girls are required to kill themselves.

Think of it: "You have dishonored us. Only you can cleanse this stain from our family. Kill yourself." Now try getting it as a text message on your cell phone. That's the opening of a 17 July 2006 story from the New York Times. The girl in the story, Derya, got as many as 15 of these text messages a day from her uncles and brothers. In the end she got lucky and found a women's organization in Batman, her home town (pop. 250,000), that took in girls like her. But that only happened after she had tried without success to drown herself in the Tigris River and hang herself with a rope. (An uncle cut her down after the last attempt: presumably not the same uncle who initially texted her and told her to off herself.)

These stories are only the crocodile's eye peeking up from the river; the rest of the beast will show itself any time you choose. In this case, it's a matter of going to the "Ara" window ("Search" in Turkish) of Firat News and typing the words "intihar etti" in the blank space. A tap on the key and there it is: page after miserable page.

The stories don't all concern young girls, though they are a big part of it. Worldwide the majority of suicides are males. Though not the majority in Kurdistan, male suicides are plentiful enough. A disturbing number of them are young Kurds who have been drafted into the Turkish Army. These young men are especially vulnerable, subjected as they are to endless harangues about Ataturk, the Fatherland, and the superiority of the Turkish race, and this after having witnessed police brutality as a regular part of growing up. On April 3, for example, a young man in Istanbul set himself on fire rather than go into the Army, while only the day before a Kurdish soldier in Edirne (Adrianople), near the Greek-Bulgarian border, ended his life with a bullet. On April 1 Firat News summarized five suspicious Army deaths in the previous two months, and the headlines go on from there: a gendarme shoots himself near Baskale, a sergeant does it with a hand grenade, another soldier shoots himself in Diyarbakir, another in Silopi, on the Iraqi border. All this leads Firat News (7 March 2008) to dub the Turkish Armed Forces "the world's most suicidal army."

In Kurdistan, however, it is still the women and girls who commit the majority of suicides. In Diyarbakir, for example, from 1996 to 2001 fully 58% of suicides were women and girls, and similar rates hold true for other provinces in the region. Again, this goes directly against patterns documented throughout the world. In 2006 the U.N. sent a Turkish woman, Prof. Yakin Erturk, a Special Rapporteur on violence against women, to the southeast of Turkey to investigate the rash of female suicides. "The majority of women in the provinces visited live lives that are not their own," she reported: "Diverse forms of violence are deliberately used against women who are seen to transgress [the conservative patriarchal] order. Suicides of women in the region occur within such a context."

No surprise in any of this. Prof. Erturk goes on at length in the language of a sociologist, and she is unable to point to an exact link between the suicides and honor killings. But the message is clear: to be a woman in Turkey is bad enough; to be a woman in the Southeast is to court death. The bright spots are few. Women are organizing, often at great risk; NGO's are popping up, providing shelter and counseling to girls in danger. A nationwide organization, "The Purple Roof," based in Istanbul, works to provide resources. But still, the suicides go on.

All of which brings us back to the guerrilla girls and their smiling faces. Obviously they have put themselves in grave danger. If life is hard in places like Diyarbakir and Batman, it is twice as hard in the caves and rocks of the Zagros range. But these young women made a choice. They used their free will, such as it was, and went to the mountains.

And they are not the only ones who are striking out. Tuesday's (4/29/08) Kurdish papers carried a story about another woman, a traditional Kurdish woman who should have been passive but was not: a woman almost Sophoclean in her grandeur. The place: Cizre, a city on the Tigris near the Iraqi border. A totally Kurdish town, except for the Turkish troops that occupy it. The red banners with white lettering are stretched across the streets like a taunt: "How happy is he who calls himself Turk." This is as pro-PKK a place as you will find in the Southeast. In the '90s the two sides fought gun battles in the streets. On Monday an Army delegation arrived, carrying the body of Pvt. Mesut Sanir, killed in action among mountains near the town of Bingol. The private, the army messenger told his mother, had "fallen a martyr" in the battle.

But Kumru Sanir, the boy's mother, was having none of it. "My son has not fallen a martyr!" she told the spokesman. "You send brother to fight against brother and kill each other, and then you come to tell us he is a martyr. My son is not a martyr!" The soldiers, looking embarrassed, said nothing. The boy's older sister was equally bitter, noting that Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish Prime Minister, sends his children to school in America, "while he sends ours to fight in the mountains." The older sister says nothing about her plans for the future, but we can be sure that she is weighing her options.

On Richard Hofstadter and the Politics of “Consensus History”*

by Jeremy Young | 4/29/2008 04:31:00 PM

[The following review essay was written by James Livingston. It was originally published in the Fall 2007 issue of boundary2 and appears here for the first time online. Livingston will be available to answer comments on the thread. -- Ed.]

David S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Pp. xxiii, 237 + notes, bibliography, index.

The cultural function of the modern historian is to teach us how to learn from people with whom we differ due to historical circumstances (and such circumstances include the range of ideological commitments they can profess with plausibility). We “go back” to the people of the past in the hope of changing our perspective on the present and thus multiplying our choices about the future. But these people with whom we differ, and from whom we must learn, are, to begin with, other historians; for there is no way to peek over the edges of our present as if they aren’t there, standing between us and the archive, telling us how to approach it.

No one gets to the “primary sources,” whether they are constituted as the historical record or as the literary canon, without going through the priests, scribes, librarians, professors, critics—the professionals—who created them in retrospect, in view of their own intellectual obligations and political purposes. In this sense, history is not the past as such, just as the canon is not literature as such; it is the ongoing argument between historians, among others, about what qualifies as an event, a document, an epoch. It is the endless argument about what the future holds; for the form and the content of the past matter only to those with political commitments in the present, and so to the future.

Richard Hofstadter understood these obvious yet awkward facts better than anyone of his generation, even better, I think, than William Appleman Williams or Eugene Genovese or C. Vann Woodward, three great scholars whose published works had improbably profound political effects in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. “Historians do not have direct access to their subjects,” as he put it in 1956. So we do not have to “go back” very far to appreciate Hofstadter’s lasting effects on American intellectual life. Indeed I would suggest that we are just now catching up to him. For he stood at the heart of the social and intellectual changes specific to the 20th century, always trying to tell us where those changes might lead. He still stands between us and the archive; and his interference remains instructive.(1)

Hofstadter was born in 1916, in Buffalo, New York, then a prosperous port city and a vibrant manufacturing town. He was the son of a Jewish immigrant and a native-born Lutheran who raised him as an Episcopalian: America dreamed him. He attended the University of Buffalo in the early 1930s, where he took courses with Julius Pratt, a counter-progressive diplomatic historian avant la lettre—the American empire was a big mistake, he argued, an embarrassing by-product of sloppy thinking and high spirits at the State Department—connived with left-wing activists who promoted the Popular Front, and yet fell under the spell of Charles A. and Mary R. Beard, whose two-volume Rise of American Civilization (1927) was still a sensation both inside and outside the academy, in part because it reanimated the central principles of “Progressive” historiography. By the time he left Buffalo, however, Hofstadter had begun to complicate his identification with the Left, and had realized that the Beards’ forceful restatement of “Progressive” principles was a new instance of the Owl of Minerva, spreading its wings only at dusk, at the very moment of its eclipse. His senior thesis, soon after published in the American Historical Review, was a revisionist study of the tariff in the electoral politics of 1860.

Hofstadter moved to New York City in 1936 with his radical, charismatic young wife, Felice Swados, apparently to attend law school as per his family’s wishes. There he fell in with a new Popular Front crowd (including Alfred Kazin) which she and her brother, Harvey, cultivated. He actually joined the Communist Party in late 1938, lasting for all of four months, resigning before the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. Meanwhile, bored by the study of the law, Hofstadter enrolled in the graduate history program at Columbia. But, despite his extraordinary ability and accomplishments—how many undergraduates see their senior theses published in the AHR?—he struggled in the program until Merle Curti and Henry Steele Commager commandeered his career. Together they pointed him toward intellectual history and, not incidentally, deflected the old-school anti-Semitism that had stalled his applications for fellowships. He completed his PhD in 1942 by writing a dissertation on the reception of Herbert Spencer in the U.S., which became, in 1944, his first book, Social Darwinism in American Thought.

The book is an elegy for the “conservative thought” of the late-19th century which reached its apogee in the publications of William Graham Sumner, who never was as influential as later critics of laissez-faire, like Hofstadter, wanted to believe. It was also a celebration of the “dissenters” from Social Darwinism, particularly the early pragmatists. This rendition of intellectual history in the age of William James and John Dewey suffered from two obvious defects the author did not, and probably could not, address. On the one hand, the mainstream of American thought, then as now, was nowhere near conservative; if anything, it was alarmingly radical, even after the anarchist debacle of 1886, because, then as now, it subsisted on brute inversions of every received tradition. Like most left-wing intellectuals, then as now, Hofstadter wrote his own alienation from that imaginary mainstream into a past that could be adjourned and thus ignored. On the other hand, the so-called dissenters from this imaginary mainstream were intellectually and politically enabled by their endorsement of Darwin’s theory of evolution, for example in repudiating the “atomistic individualism” they inherited from the bourgeois epoch.(2)

Like every other ism we take for granted, including capitalism and socialism, Social Darwinism was neither conservative nor liberal; it was neither progressive nor regressive; it was neither scientific nor religious; it was all of the above. The author of the first (and, to my knowledge, only) book on the topic couldn’t acknowledge this ambiguity until it was reissued in 1955 with a new introduction. In that setting, he noticed in passing that “in America the roles of the liberal and the conservative have been so often intermingled, and in some ways reversed, that clear traditions have never taken form.”(3)

Here he also emphasized the central, and disturbing, insight of The Age of Reform, the book he had just finished: “Sumner expressed an inherited conception of economic life, even today fairly widespread among conservatives in the U.S, under which economic activity was considered to be above all a field for the development and encouragement of personal character. . . Today we have passed out of the economic framework in which that ethic was formed.” That momentous historic passage was rendered in a syntactical mode that would make Henry James himself wince: “And anyone who today imagines that he is altogether out of sympathy with that ethic should ask himself whether he has never, in contemplating the possibility of a nearly workless economic order, powered by atomic energy and managed by automation, had at least a moment of misgiving about the fate of man in society bereft of the moral discipline of work.” Like Daniel Bell, and like many neo-conservatives as well as ultra-liberals of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, Hofstadter had begun to worry about the very possibility of morality in the absence of economic necessity, in the presence of material abundance.(4)

He had meanwhile taken a job at the University of Maryland. Even this academic backwater looked better than military service in the worldwide struggle against fascism—“My father once confessed to me that he simply wouldn’t have had the courage to fight in the war,” his son noted—and indeed, because what Clark Kerr later called the “Great Transformation of Higher Education” was already underway in the 1940s, he found three colleagues there who would invigorate and inform his subsequent intellectual development: Frank Freidel, who knew more about FDR than anyone until William Leuchtenburg headed for Hyde Park; Kenneth Stampp, who was already determined to revise historical accounts of slavery and Reconstruction along the lines proposed by W. E. B. Du Bois and Howard Beale; and C. Wright Mills, the original outsider—“I am an outlander, down bone deep and for good,” he once said, having been educated in Texas and Wisconsin—who, like David Riesman, was trying to domesticate the Frankfurt School’s ideas about modern subjectivity and mass culture (Mills’s advisor at Wisconsin was Hans Gerth, a Frankfurt alumnus).(5)

Hofstadter published his way out of Maryland, as did his soon-to-be famous colleagues; by 1946, he was far into the writing of The American Political Tradition, thanks to a fellowship from Knopf, and had accepted an appointment as an assistant professor at Columbia, thanks to Commager and Harry Carman, another mentor from the early days as a graduate student. Felice had died of cancer in July, 1945; her husband kept writing, five pages a day, as a way of keeping this new reality at the distance required by the laconic, dispassionate historical analysis he was now perfecting.

The American Political Tradition (1948) is probably Hofstadter’s most accessible work because he was writing as a ventriloquist, speaking through the historians, among them Freidel and Stampp, who had spurred his rethinking of historiographical truisms, and trying to say something useful, as a public intellectual, about the political culture of the United States. It is a set of conjectures about modern politics, a collection of essays rather than a monograph; its attitude toward history borrowed heavily from the debunking imperative at work in Thurman Arnold’s caustic books on the anti-trust animus of the early New Deal. All politics was a matter of ritual, ceremony, and/or rhetoric—a studied evasion of reality which, at least in America, presupposed a “mute organic consistency” or a “common ground, a unity of cultural and political tradition,” in other words a consensus. Even Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln and FDR were politicians par excellence, so there was no point in accrediting the differences they claimed to have made, or in worshipping at the shrine of the other “great men” who had made the American political tradition.

And there was every reason to look elsewhere for the architecture of another American history. Hofstadter’s demolition of the received tradition was perfectly in keeping with the “Progressive,” debunking style, and, following in the footsteps of Fredrick Jackson Turner, it drew deeply on the Marxist tradition; and so it led toward—at any rate it allowed for—what we now call the new social history, which, just to begin with, broadened our notions of political agency by assigning causative historical significance to sailors, drunkards, whores, and midwives. That is probably why The American Political Tradition is still in print, and still in use (for example, I assigned it to my large survey class in the fall of 2006, and my daughter had to read it in 2005, in her first semester of college): it is consistent with the radicalism—the urge to repudiate the idiocies and atrocities of the American past—that permeates so much of social history.(6)

Between 1948 and 1955, when The Age of Reform appeared to great acclaim—except of course from The Nation’s reviewer, William Appleman Williams—Hofstadter immersed himself in social theory and literary criticism (starting in 1948, he read all of his colleague Lionel Trilling’s works), and somehow co-wrote several books on the history of higher education. His new engagement with the methods of sociology and psychology signified a new awareness and appreciation of what the Frankfurt School could bring to bear on questions of historical periodization; it also signaled the advent of what we call “inter-disciplinary” genres of history. As he noted in Fritz Stern’s collection, The Varieties of History (1956), “the historian’s contact with the social sciences is clearly of more importance to the present generation of historians than it has been at any time in the past.” Such “contact” was now more important because the rise (and undeniable success) of fascist and communist movements after World War I had shown that neither capitalism nor socialism was necessarily liberal or democratic: the social sciences, particularly the social psychology recently perfected by the Frankfurt School in The Authoritarian Personality (1950), and in David Riesman’s Lonely Crowd (1950), offered methods by which the composition and trajectory of mass movements—“current mass political behavior,” as Hofstadter put it—could be deciphered and the future of totalitarianism could be foretold.(7)

This new social psychology was built on two premises, both of which fed into Hofstadter’s Age of Reform and, for that matter, into serious questions about liberalism as a sustainable system in the 1950s and 60s. The first was that “individuality loses its economic basis,” as Max Horkheimer put it in Eclipse of Reason (1947), to the extent that the “reifying mechanisms” specific to large corporations, government bureaucracies, and mass communications turn almost everyone into middle-class, white-collared, “other-directed” clerks in the cultural apparatus. Could a liberal democratic society survive in the absence of those “inner-directed” proprietors of themselves, those omnicompetent citizens, who had made politics so popular in the 19th century? If not, that is, if the economic basis of modern individualism residing in the widespread ownership of productive property was now irretrievable, what other footing could be found for a liberal democratic society? Were there extra-economic, post-modern sources of individuality, thus of political conflict and collectivity—and vice versa?(8)

The second premise of the new social psychology to be learned in the Frankfurt School—to be derived from its promising curricular mix of Freud and Weber—was that reason and desire were not antithetical modes of apprehending the world. Rationality was informed by and consistent with the most perverse forms of emotional commitment, as witness the denouement of the dialectic of Enlightenment in the European charnel house of the 1940s. What, then, to do with the concept of ideology, which contained useful notions of “situated knowledge” as per Karl Mannheim, to be sure, but which also retained petrified ideas about class interests and “false consciousness” because it was predicated on a correspondence theory of knowledge as such (whereby good ideas are copies of an external reality, and right-thinking citizens/workers/activists know how to make those copies because they always already agree on their interests)? What to do with the irrational, indeed actively anti-intellectual rituals of modern politics, especially the mass cultural politics that characterized the mid-20th century? Was it enough to treat them as “contradictions” or trivialities that disarmed otherwise progressive—or otherwise necromanic—causes? Or must we dispense with the residual dignity of Ideology as a useful category of historical or political analysis, as Philip Converse, Angus Campbell, and other political scientists did in studying “mass belief systems,” and as Clifford Geertz and C. Wright Mills did for their cognate disciplines in the 1950s and 60s? Must we then treat the irrational, indeed actively anti-intellectual rituals of modern politics as constituent elements of their appeal to everyone, even the educated voters among us?(9)

These are the questions that animate The Age of Reform and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), Hofstadter’s two Pulitzer Prize-winning books, and that inform the extraordinary intellectual ferment of the 1950s and 1960s and beyond, leading toward the New Left, the New Right, and the radical redefinition of liberalism in our own time. You would never know it by reading David S. Brown’s new “intellectual biography,” as he calls it. Here you will find instead a search for the “ethnocultural roots of Hofstadter’s work” which can be read either as an earnest parody of Progressive historiography—by this account, the historians who defended Populism and who remained suspicious of Eastern, “ethnic” interpretations were Protestants from the Midwest and the South, precisely those provincial character types who led the Populist revolt in the first place—or as the attempted capture of intellectual history by the essentialism of identity politics.

Here you will find the story of brilliant Eastern Jews like Hofstadter trying to wrest control of the historical profession from benighted Midwestern Gentiles like John D. Hicks and William A. Williams. For example: “In practice, cultural cleavages had a way of hardening into intellectual divisions. While the days of Jewish student quotas at the major universities had passed [by the 1960s], Anglo-ethnic differences in historical methodology—evidenced in Wisconsin’s devotion to Progressive historiography and Columbia’s commitment to the social sciences—were clearly marked.” Or again: “the Wisconsin scholar [Frederick Jackson Turner] remained unequivocally committed to the familiar, Anglo-Saxon traditions. Blood, it seemed, remained thicker than professional training.” And here you will also find a happy ending, entitled, with no apparent irony, “The Twilight of Waspdom.”(10)

According to Brown, the Progressive/Protestant citadel and its Populist annex were protected by a “Wasp consensus” until Hofstadter finally demolished them in The Age of Reform. No matter that, by abstaining from the primal scene of confrontation between “civilized” white men and “primitive races,” by foregrounding the frontier and the financial revolution—the country and the city—as the real estate of American civilization, and by making capital as such the predator of the small holder and the freeholder, Progressive historiography became the setting in which class superseded race as the central category of narratives that offer to explain the national experience. No matter that Williams, the bona fide WASP from Iowa and the big fan of Beard from the University of Wisconsin, was always as deeply engaged as Hofstadter in the reconstruction of the Progressive edifice, and of the larger intellectual scene, by excavating their foundations and, where possible, building new narrative structures on the ruins of the old.(11)

It is of course true that Williams was Hofstadter’s fiercest critic in the 1950s and 60s. But both wrote “consensus” history, as John Higham named the post-Progressive disciplinary order. For both argued that the seemingly titanic struggles of the past had typically (not always) taken place within a cross-class ideological agreement, or rather a cultural system, which pacified social conflict by naturalizing possessive individualism and liberal capitalism. Both argued that as the imperatives of goods production and economic necessity receded in the 20th century, the capital-labor relation described a shrinking set of social relations, and, accordingly, that historians could no longer take the priority of class struggle for granted. Both argued that the large, privately-chartered corporations which erupted from the wreckage of late-19th century economic crisis were organic moments in the development of American civilization—it was a country created by corporations like the Massachusetts Bay Co., Williams noted—which had been fitfully disciplined by anti-trust law and then finally domesticated by the New Deal (Hofstadter actually used this metaphor in The Age of Reform: “by 1933 the American public had lived with the great corporation for so long that it was felt to be domesticated”). And both argued that neither the Populist Revolt of the 1890s nor the Popular Front of the 1930s would serve as a usable past for the American Left because neither represented a fundamental departure from the American consensus on possessive individualism and liberal capitalism.(12)

Together Hofstadter and Williams showed that the Populists were petty bourgeois men on the make. In doing so, they showed that the anti-monopoly tradition enfranchised by the People’s Party, then bought by the Communist Party, and later refinanced by neo-Progressive historiography, was a political dead end because it treated the small holder—the man who did not have to sell his capacity to produce value through work, and thus owned himself—as the epitome of the self-mastering individual. Hofstadter and Williams insisted that this honorable tradition could not acknowledge the legitimacy of the large corporation, and could not, therefore, accommodate either the new forms of subjectivity or the new possibilities of political community enabled by corporate capitalism. In this sense, their competing brands of “consensus history” were deeply indebted to the insights and methods of the Frankfurt School, but they rarely indulged the pathos of authenticity—the urge to stake out an ideal zone of use-value that is exempt from the demands of normal wage labor and the everyday atrocities of the commodity form—which, then as now, drives “critical theory” and regulates the historiographical mainstream.(13)

Like Williams, Hofstadter veered toward belabored, idiosyncratic statements of a post-Progressive political creed in the early 1960s, as the New Left took shape, mainly in the Midwest, and as the New Right took shape, mainly in the Southwest. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life is, by all accounts, including Hofstadter’s own, his least satisfying book, even though it won a Pulitzer. Every paragraph except those derived from his reading of a specific text—he is especially good at deciphering the sermons of the Great Awakening—groans under the verbal weight of the need to explain what he is not doing; the book is 300 pages too long.

Moreover, his distinction between the real intellectual and the journeyman professional (identified as lawyers, editors, engineers, doctors, some writers, most professors) is perfectly consistent with the quintessentially American suspicion of those “middlemen,” those paper-pushers, whose incomes are deductions from the sum of value, the stock of goods, created by genuinely productive labor; it is perfectly consistent, in other words, with the pathos of authenticity he elsewhere eschews: “The heart of the matter—to borrow a distinction made by Max Weber—is that the professional man lives off ideas, not for them. His professional role, his professional skills, do not make him an intellectual. . . .At home he may happen to be an intellectual, but at his job he is a hired mental technician who uses his mind for the pursuit of externally determined ends.” So his concluding indictment of democracy as the breeding ground of anti-intellectualism is less than persuasive because he has already endorsed the egalitarian notion that when ideas are for sale they will inevitably serve the purposes of the highest bidder.(14)

The next book, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (1968) was a reckoning with the intellectual tradition that had been demoted if not displaced by the cataclysmic changes of the 1930s and 40s. The author suggested that the return of the repressed urge to write the “history of ideas” without reference to their historical contexts, a professional urge exemplified by Arthur O. Lovejoy, had made “Turnerian environmentalism” unseemly. There was, however, more than a hint of autobiography in the larger explanation of fundamental historiographical change: “But Turnerism came under fire above all because its premises seemed incongruous with the realities of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Its intellectual isolationism seemed to belong to another age. Turner’s celebration of American individualism rang false at a time when too many were suffering from the excesses of the individualists. The latent pessimism in the exhaustion-of-free-land [frontier] theme—an aspect of his ideas that troubled Turner as well as others—was unsuited to the activist mood demanded by any radical attempt to cope with the Depression.” And so on.(15)

By Hofstadter’s accounting, World War II was more important than the Depression in creating an intellectual climate conducive to “consensus history,” a label he disliked because it emphasized the conservative consequences and obscured the Marxist sources of the methodological approach in question (“I believe it will be understood that the idea of consensus is not intrinsically linked to ideological conservatism,” he declared in his conclusion: “In its origins I believe it owed almost as much to Marx as to Toqueville”). He identified Louis Hartz and Daniel Boorstin as the “two leading consensus theorists,” and characterized their thinking as products of America’s sudden rise to world power. “Their works are distinctively books of the postwar era, works which could not have been written in the 1930s when Americans were still absorbed in their own domestic conflicts and when the preconceptions of Progressive historical writing were still persuasive,” Hofstadter claimed, and went on to situate them in other, larger kinds of conflict: “The efforts of Hartz in The Liberal Tradition in America (1955) and Boorstin in The Genius of American Politics (1953) come from the search for a usable past consistent with the sense of the world brought by the war, and responsive to the problems of foreign policy in the early phases of the cold war.”

But he did not reduce them to shills for a new American Empire; instead he noticed their refusal of the messianic urge to export, and then enforce, the ideas and institutions of a nation “born free.” In effect, he let Hartz and Boorstin reiterate what he wrote in January 1948, in the introduction to The American Political Tradition: “In a corporate and consolidated society demanding international responsibility, cohesion, centralization, and planning, the traditional ground is shifting under out feet. It is imperative in a time of cultural crisis to gain fresh perspectives on the past.” And then he mapped the near future of historiographical change by listing the “three major areas” of American history that would remain immune to the methods and the sensibilities of consensus: the Revolution, the Civil War, and “the racial, ethnic, and religious conflict with which our history is saturated.”(16)

Two more important books, The Idea of a Party System (1969) and America at 1750 (1971) followed—one was published posthumously, both were parts of a huge textbook project lavishly funded by Oxford University Press. The last book was an unflinching, even heartbreaking portrait of a people in bondage, not “born free”: slaves to be sure, but also the “surplus population,” the indentured servants and sturdy beggars and hapless vagabonds exported from Europe as so much chattel in the 17th and 18th centuries.(17)

For my money, however, 1968 was Hofstadter’s finest hour, the moment he became the most important historian of his generation. That was the year he sat through Mark Naison’s PhD qualifying exam even as student radicals occupied Fayerweather Hall, and, then, having observed all the relevant academic rituals, was escorted out of the building by the candidate by way of a window. That was the year he gave the commencement address at the request of the faculty of Columbia, who feared more disruption if the president of the university appeared before the graduating class. That was the year of The Progressive Historians, when he reopened the archive by interfering yet again with our attitudes toward history, by persuading us that, even in the final analysis, the people out of the past from whom we first learn are other historians.

1968 was also the year Hofstadter wrote an anguished piece for The New York Times Magazine on how to lose a war. On May 18, when it was published, “only” 20,000 Americans had died in Vietnam—the final toll was more than twice that—and there was no end in sight. But Hofstadter knew it was over. He also knew that the ideological aftermath would shape the remainder of the century. Here is how he concluded: “To absorb the sense of guilt and failure that Americans will take away from Vietnam is unquestionably a tax on our maturity. But the experience may be turned to some use if we can define more articulately than we have ever done the realistic limits of our national aspirations. It is essential for us to do so precisely because we are by far the world’s strongest power. For the rest of the world it would be reassuring to know that our aspirations are, after all, really limited. It might even be reassuring for ourselves.”

There are plenty of historians, political scientists, and journalists who can tell us why we will lose the current war, but very few who can tell us how—that is, how the humility induced by military defeat or stalemate might be consistent with the promise of American life. Hofstadter could have. Were he still among us, telling us where fundamental changes in our international posture might lead, we would know better than to equate the rise and fall of world power with military victories and losses. At any rate we would know that the cultural function of the modern historian was in question, but still intact.

*Author’s Note: In addition to the biographical information in David Brown’s book, I have drawn on (and sometimes disagreed with) acute essays by Stanley Elkins & Eric McKitrick, Paula Fass, Eric Foner, Daniel J. Singal, and Sam Tanenhaus, all of whom except Tanenhaus were Hofstadter students at Columbia, ca. 1959-1976 (Fass and Singal completed their degrees in 1974 and 1976, respectively, after Hofstadter’s death in 1970). I am grateful to Professor Singal for correcting my mistakes and to Jonathan Arac, Bruce Robbins, Louis Ferleger, James Oakes, Nick Bromell, Patricia Rossi, and especially Eugene D. Genovese for attempting to change my mind and mend my prose.
________________________________

(1) On Williams, see James Livingston, “Farewell to Intellectual Godfather of the New Left,” In These Times March 28-April 3, 1990, and “Social Theory and Historical Method in the Work of William Appleman Williams,” Diplomatic History 25 (2001): 275-82; the latter was part of a roundtable that began as a panel at the 2000 Meeting of the Organization of American Historians which included Justus Doenecke, Patricia Limerick, Leo Ribuffo, and Paul Buhle. See also Paul Buhle & Edward Rice-Maximin, William Appleman Williams: The Tragedy of Empire (New York: Routledge, 1995). On Genovese, see James Livingston, “’Marxism’ and the Politics of History: Reflections on the Work of Eugene D. Genovese,” Radical History Review 88 (2004): 30-48, with comment following by James Oakes, Peter Kolchin, and Diane Sommerville. On Woodward, see the special issue of The Journal of Southern History 67 (2001), devoted to discussion of his Origins of the New South (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1951) on its 50th anniversary. Hofstadter quoted from his “History and the Social Sciences,” in Fritz Stern, ed., The Varieties of History (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), pp. 359-70, here 368.

(2) Hofstadter did, in fact, acknowledge that the embrace of evolutionary doctrine had unpredictably ambiguous effects; for example: “Working primarily with the basic Darwinian concepts—organism, environment, adaptation—and speaking the language of naturalism, the pragmatic tradition had a very different intellectual and practical issue from Spencerianism.” Social Darwinism in American Thought, rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1955), p. 125. But he did not try to explain this ambiguity

(3) Ibid., p. 9.

(4) Ibid., pp. 10-11. Daniel Bell’s worries on this score eventually culminated in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic, 1976). But as early as 1956, he reiterated Hofstadter’s concenrns about the moral problem of a world in which “not only the worker but work itself is displaced by the machine”: see Bell, Work and its Discontents (Boston: Beacon, 1956), pp. 45-56. Long before this moment, and long before George Gilder and Michael Novak prescribed more family and fatherhood as the cure for what ails us, Joseph Schumpeter argued that “capitalist evolution not only upsets social structures which protected the capitalist interests. . . but also undermines the attitudes, motivations, and beliefs of the capitalist stratum itself. . . [e.g.] the loosening of the family tie—a typical feature of the culture of capitalism—removes or weakens what, no doubt, was the center of the motivation of the businessman of old.” Business Cycles, 2 vols. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939), 2: 699. The broader intellectual and political concerns about mass culture, “consumer culture,” etc., are analyzed in Paul R. Gorman, Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); on the current academic Left’s reading of consumer culture, see also James Livingston, Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of American History (New York: Routledge, 2001), chap. 1.

(5) On what Clark Kerr called the “Great Transformation of Higher Education,” see my treatment in The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century, forthcoming from Rowman & Littlefield, chap. 2.

(6) On Turner’s inflections of Achille Loria, the Italian Marxist, see Lee Benson, Turner and Beard: American Historical Writing Reconsidered (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960), pp. 1-91.

(7) On Hofstadter’s continuous and explicit engagement with Adorno, Riesman, Mills, et al., see “History and the Social Sciences,” pp. 362-66, and his “History and Sociology in the United States,” in Seymour Martin Lipset & Richard Hofstadter, eds., Sociology and History: Methods (New York: Basic, 1968), pp. 3-19. With respect to the new genre of social psychology as “analytical history” written in the Frankfurt style of The Authoritarian Personality, see also Hans Gerth & C. Wright Mills, Character and Social Structure: The Psychology of Social Institutions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953); and Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man (New York: Doubleday, 1960).

(8) Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (1947; Boston: Beacon Press, 1974), p. 141. The language of “inner direction,” etc., is of course drawn from David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven: Yale University press, 1950), who readily acknowledged the Frankfurt School’s influence in the development of his own character typology: see p. 176. C. Wright Mills pondered the possibilities of a post-modern subject(ivity) in “On Reason and Freedom,” The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 165-76.

(9) These and other pressing questions about the viability of popular politics and the utility of the concept of ideology are posed most pointedly in Philip Converse, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” in David Apter, ed., Ideology and Discontent (Glencoe, Ill: Free Press, 1964), pp. 206-61; Clifford Geertz’s seminal essay, “Ideology as a Cultural System,” appears in the same anxious volume at pp. 47-76. In a similar vein—that is, in a similar spirit of strategic retreat from Marxian metanarratives—see also Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960), and George Lichtheim, “The Concept of Ideology,” in The Concept of Ideology and Other Essays (New York: Vintage, 1967), pp. 3-46.

(10) See Brown, Hofstadter, pp. 4-7, 16-17, 31-34, 39, 53, 73-76, 100-03, 111-13, 133, 195-98.

(11) See Livingston, “Social Theory and Historical Method in the Work of Williams.”

(12) See Williams, The Great Evasion (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1964), and The Contours of American History (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1961), Part I; Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (New York: Vintage, 1955), p. 312.

(13) I treat the “pathos of authenticity” as the key constraint on fresh thinking about the future of subjectivity and politics as such in “Pragmatism, Nihilism, and Democracy: What is Called Thinking at the End of Modernity?,” an essay forthcoming in a centenary volume on William James’s Pragmatism edited by John Stuhr for Indiana University Press.; I borrow the phrase from Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture, trans. Jon Snyder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). See also my Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy, chaps. 1-2, 4, where I deploy Kenneth Burke’s distinction between tragic and comic “frames of acceptance” in the hope of detaching mainstream historians from their uniform fondness for narratives that combine energetically ironic form and inevitably pathetic content.

(14) Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage, 1963), pp. 55-74, 24-28, 406-12. It is no accident that Hofstadter’s early admiration for the original pragmatists evaporates in this book; for it is the work most deeply informed by the tragic sensibilities of the Frankfurt School.
(15) The Progressive Historians (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 92.

(16) The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Knopf, 1948), p. x; Progressive Historians, pp. 446-59.

(17) See America at 1750: A Social Portrait (New York: Vintage, 1973), chaps. 1-4.

Labels: James Livingston

Obama vs. Clinton: Report from Indiana

by Jeremy Young | 4/25/2008 03:15:00 AM

(Cross-posted at Open Left and Blue Indiana.)

Folks have been asking me about this via e-mail, so now that my state is officially ground zero for the Democratic presidential campaign, I thought I'd go ahead and briefly describe what I've been seeing here over the past few weeks. I've only lived in Indiana for the past eight months, so feel free to take this with a grain of salt.

Basically, Indiana is kind of like Ohio (that is, rural Midwest Hillary country), except with three hotspots that should lean heavily toward Obama. I live in the smallest of these Obama hotspots, the college town of Bloomington (home to Indiana University -- go Hoosiers!) in southern Indiana. The other two are the city of Indianapolis, in the central part of the state, and the Chicago suburbs in the northwest. I have no idea what's going on in the 'burbs, though I can imagine Obama is probably organizing his heart out up there. He may be hurt a little by the fact that he didn't campaign terribly hard in Illinois when it had its primary, so the Indiana 'burbs haven't had their media market saturated for months by Obama ads. On the other hand, it might as well be Illinois up there, so I'm sure Obama will do very well.

As for Indy, there's a bit of an interesting situation going on up there. There's a fierce primary battle for the Indy congressional seat (IN-07), currently held by newly-minted Congressman Andre Carson, who replaced his late grandmother in the seat. Carson faces opposition from several other prominent Democrats, most notably former Indiana State Health Commissioner Woody Myers. Carson is black and Myers is ~~white~~ black as well, but the other two candidates, including money leader David Orentlicher, are white. So at the most basic level, Carson's GOTV effort should be expected to help Obama, while Myers' should help Hillary. Incredibly enough, the DCCC is fundraising for Carson as part of its incumbent protection program. I have no idea why the D-Trip sees a six-week-old Congressman as an "incumbent," but the fact remains that the D-Trip is indirectly providing GOTV for Obama. While I don't know directly what's going on with Obama's field organization up in Indy, it seems like Carson's doing his work for him even if he doesn't lift a finger -- which I'm pretty sure isn't the case.

Over the flip, the part you really want to know: my own personal observations of the two candidates's campaigns here in Bloomington.

The closest I've ever gotten to a real live Presidential primary campaign was organizing for Dean in rural Arizona six months before the actual primary date, so I've got nothing really to compare this to. But I will say it's surreal -- the campaigning I've seen by both candidates is unbelievable. (Note: I don't have television, so I have no idea what's going on in terms of TV ads, but I'm guessing both candidates are blanketing the airwaves.) Hillary definitely got here first, and she primed the pump with guest speakers. Hillary, Bill, and Chelsea have all been to Bloomington, as well as actor Sean Astin (Lord of the Rings). Obama's response to this was to send actor Kal Penn (Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle) and -- more significantly -- to bankroll a free Dave Matthews concert. I was dubious about this at first; not being a popular music listener, I was under the impression that Matthews was considered retro. I actually collared a bunch of students and asked them whether they thought Matthews or Bill Clinton was a bigger draw, and almost all of them gave the edge to Matthews. Finally a friend got the attendance numbers for me, and apparently Matthews outdrew Clinton by something like 3 to 1. So I guess Obama wins the battle of the surrogates. Obama also stopped in town during Little 500 Weekend, which is basically the weekend when IU gets drunk and goes crazy. He didn't stay for a rally, instead just putting in a surprise appearance at the bike race, and then having a quick lunch at Nick's. Note to readers: if you're ever in Bloomington, please try to have better taste in restaurants than Barack Obama does.

Over the past six weeks or so, I've gotten to watch Obama's voter creation machine in action, and it is incredibly impressive. Obama's had people out registering voters since a week before the Texas and Ohio primaries at least. The strategy is to have folks stand at busy pedestrian crossings, bus stops, and the like, and ask you whether you've registered to vote (and have the forms in hand if you haven't). They never ask you to vote for Obama, but they wear Obama buttons and stickers, so the subliminal messaging is there. This campaign is amazingly effective; I only go to campus 3-4 times a week, and I was probably stopped nearly a dozen times by Obama volunteers sporting clipboards. Interestingly, only one of these volunteers was a little old lady; the rest were either college students or looked like them. I think this is smart on Obama's part, because students are more likely to listen to other students than to little old ladies.

About a week before registration closed (April 7), this part of the campaign heated up considerably. Obama took out a full-page ad on the back page of the Indiana Daily Student (the student newspaper) reminding students to register to vote and telling them how. Two days before the deadline, I was eating a late lunch in the student union (this was like 3 PM) when about a dozen Obama volunteers swooped down onto the dining area, going table to table with clipboards offering to register students. As I said, it was surreal.

All this voter creation work seems to have paid off. The IDS ran a story yesterday stating that Monroe County just finished processing 6,985 new registrations, nearly all of them from students. Of course, the campaign wasn't perfect; I overheard a student yesterday waiting in line to vote who hadn't registered (she was turned away with an exhortation to register in time for the general). But still, 7,000 new Obama voters is a pretty big deal in this sleepy town of 69,000.

Since the registration deadline passed, the Obama folks have had a non-stop roving "Obamamobile" -- a minivan commissioned by the Obama campaign that drives students to and from the early voting station. Since the early voting station is less than a mile from campus, that's some lazy students who are being ferried back and forth -- but it's still a good move by the Obama people. The Obamamobile has been advertised through the IDS but also through some innovative viral marketing, including chalk writing on well-trafficked sidewalks (the Ron Paul people did this first, in September 2007, but Obama's crew has learned well). Yesterday, there was a five-hour early voting polling place set up in the student union. I'd forgotten all about it until I ran into a student sporting -- you guessed it -- an Obama sticker who reminded me to go vote. I had about half an hour, so I figured I could go over there and get that done and still get to class. Nothing doing -- the wait was over an hour at 11, and it was still over an hour at 12. There was a guy standing there handing out literature for a local candidate (because the line was so long that he could stand the required 75 feet from the polling place and still talk to people in line). He told me that the wait is far shorter at the elections office, so I'll be heading over there within the next few days.

If you're wondering where Hillary is in all this, so am I. I've seen absolutely nothing from her campaign since her appearance here two weeks ago. Apparently she's supposed to be speaking here again this Friday, but that may be too late: this is the last week of classes, and most students won't be here to vote on Election Day (May 6), which is why the Obama people have been so desperate to get them to the polls early. Frankly, I'm stunned that there's been no organizing from Hillary, since she's gone to the trouble of priming the pump with two campus visits and a bevy of surrogates. Maybe she's trying to appeal to the "townies," but if so, why send people like Sean Astin and Chelsea Clinton here, whose appeal is strongest for college students? Here's my theory: Hillary isn't organizing GOTV here on campus because she doesn't have enough money to organize in Obama country. That's really telling, because I'm sure Obama is running GOTV in the eastern part of the state just as hard as he can, even though he fully expects to lose there by 20 points. The goal is to keep it from being 30.

As an aside, it's also worth noting that there is absolutely no Ron Paul presence on this campus whatsoever. Paul did have a very large and well-organized group here that was second only to the Obama group, but it completely collapsed after McCain clinched the nomination. This is important because, if Paul racks up the kind of numbers in Indiana that he did in Pennsylvania (16%), I can pretty much guarantee that it's not because of Paul organizing on the ground; it's genuine dissatisfaction with McCain among Republicans.

That's all I've got for the moment -- I may post further updates if anything important happens, but since it's the end of term for me I'll probably be pretty busy over the next two weeks or so.

Labels: Jeremy Young

Lessons from another forgotten American occupation

by midtowng | 4/24/2008 12:50:00 PM

We aren't fighting rebels, nationalists, or patriots in Iraq. We are fighting criminals and bandits in Iraq.
At least that is what we are told.

"Bandit" is a very interesting term. It implies that we aren't actually fighting a war against a legitimate military foe, but are instead just hunting a group of outlaws. Thus the rules of war don't apply.
Bandit was the term used by America when it occupied Nicaragua from 1925 to 1933 and failed to quash the Sandino Revolt. But where did the American propaganda machine create that term from?

It turns out that we learned it from Haiti several years before.
I want to introduce you to yet another American military occupation that the authorities would prefer you forgot.

P. 198 of Antoine book on Price-Mars name cacos came from the DR and signified peasants in revolt.

On February 25, 1915, Vilbrun Guillaume Sam seized power in Haiti in a military coup. This ruthless thug had no power base. Thus, when he began getting too friendly with American commercial and military interests a revolt broke out.
Afraid that he would end up like his predecessors, dictator Sam had all 167 political prisoners being held in a Port-au-Prince jail executed on July 27, 1915. The people of Haiti rose in revolt and forced Sam to flee to the French embassy. The mob stormed the embassy and found him hiding in a toilet. They literally tore his body to pieces.
Thus dictator Sam's rule ended after just five months.

The chaos that followed threatened the interests of the Haitian American Sugar Company (HASCO), which got President Wilson's attention. Also, the Haitian government was deeply behind on its debts to American banks.
Officially the reasons why America got involved was because a) we were afraid that Germany might use the chaos as an excuse to invade Haiti, and b) the American government was horrified at the violence committed against the Haitian dictator. Both reasons don't pass the smell test. As for Germany, invading Haiti while engaged in a two-front war in Europe was far-fetched by any measure. And as for the violence against the dictator, remember that this was 1915 and most Americans at the time had very little problem with a black man being lynched.

The First American Occupation of Haiti

The very next day a marine detachment of 2,000 was ordered to Haiti. One of these marines had already created a name for himself, Smedley Darlington Butler. It was in Haiti that he truly distinguished himself as a leader of men.
Port-au-Prince and most of southern Haiti allowed the huge neighbor to the north to occupy the country. But northern Haiti was home of the "cacos" (“or bad niggers as we would call them at home.” - Smedley Butler). In the local dialect cacos means "bird of prey". They feared no army, despite being armed with just machetes, pikes, and 19th Century firearms. The didn't grasp guerrilla warfare, despite that being their only viable option, and decided to attack the marines head-on. In other words, they were hopelessly out gunned and out trained.
It didn't take long before the cacos had retreated to Fort Rivière, an old French fortress that was perfectly situated for 18th Century warfare.

Butler, one private, and a sergeant named Ross L. lams together scrambled up the slope, bullets pecking into the ground around them, and reached the foot of the wall, to find that the only way in was a storm drain, through which the defenders kept up a steady fire. “I had never experienced a keener desire to be some place else,” Butler remembered. “My misery and an unconscious, helpless, pleading must have been written all over my face. lams took one look at me and then said, ‘Oh, hell, I’m going through.’ ”

Sergeant lams shouldered his way into the drain with Butler and the private right behind him. The startled defenders somehow missed all three, and before they could reload, the Marines were among them. Fifty-one were shot dead: twenty-nine inside the fortress, the rest as they jumped from the parapet and tried to flee into the jungle. Total Marine injuries: two teeth knocked out by a hurled rock. No prisoners were taken; no Haitian survived.

The first Cacos War was over and Smedley Butler received his 2nd Medal of Honor as well as being appointed commanding officer of the Haitian Gendarmerie.

Now that the first Cacos War was mercifully over, America decided to set up a representative government.

A few weeks later, the US State Department installs Senator Philippe Sudre Dartiguenave as the head of state. “When the National Assembly met, the Marines stood in the aisles with their bayonets until the man selected by the American Minister was made President,” Smedley Butler, a Marine who will administer Haiti’s local police force, later writes.

The man selected was Philippe Sudre Dartiguenave and he would be president of Haiti for the next seven years. Soon after assuming office he was presented with a treaty written by the American government and told to sign it. The treaty legitimized the American occupation, as well as gave U.S. control of Customs (something that America had requested just a year earlier) and appointed an American financial adviser (who at one point withheld the pay of the Haitian legislators).

Jim Crow and Dollar Imperialism

For some silly reason the Haitian legislature held onto the quaint notion that they should work for the interests of the people of Haiti. So when America drafted a new constitution for Haiti in 1917 which excluded a "provision from the country’s previous constitution which had prohibited foreign ownership of land" the Haitian legislature rejected it and began crafting their own constitution which would reverse the terms of the 1915 treaty. They even began moving to impeach Haitian President Dartiguenave because he failed to oppose the U.S.-drafted constitution.
Dartiguenave asked Smedley Butler to use the marines to dissolve the Haitian legislature just before they prepared to vote on the new constitution.

Smedley claims that the measure is necessary in order “to end the spirit of anarchy which animates it [the Hatian legislature].”

The U.S.-written constitution is submitted to a popular vote in June 1917 and it passes overwhelmingly. Of course only 5% of the population was eligible to vote.

"The Americans taught us how to build prisons. By the end of the 1915 occupation, the police in the city really knew how to hold human beings trapped in cages."
- Edwidge Danticat

One consistent theme of the Haitian Occupation was the blatant racism of it all.

Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan infamously said of the Haitian elite "Dear me, think of it! Niggers speaking French." State Department Counselor Robert Lansing believed that "[t]he experience of Liberia and Haiti show that the African race are devoid of any capacity for political organization and lack genius for government. Unquestionably there is in them an inherent tendency to revert to savagery and to cast aside the shackles of civilization which are irksome to their physical nature."' And Assistant Secretary of State William Philipps bemoaned "'the failure of an inferior people to maintain the degree of civilization left them by the French."

Of course the racism went beyond simply words. Jim Crow laws were imported from the American South to Haiti. Newly arrived U.S. personnel insisted on segregated hotels, restaurants and clubs. Curfews and press censorships followed.
The worst example of this was the reinstitution of the corvee system.

Haiti in 1917 had only 3 miles of paved roads outside of main cities. In order to more effectively control the country, the American military needed roads. To build the roads they needed labor. Thus they went back to the days of French colonialism to force Haitians to perform unpaid labor building roads three days a month.
Anyone who knows anything about Haitian history knows the brutality involved in the Haitian Revolutions. One third of the population of Haiti died fighting both British and French troops in the longest, bloodiest slave revolt in history. In order to win their freedom from slavery, Haitians endured hardships and atrocities that Americans could not even imagine (the French "civilization" that William Philipps spoke of involved burying people alive as well as boiling them alive in pots of molasses). To reimpose the corvee system in Haiti shows an incredible insensitivity that could only exist in a racist mind.

The reaction was predictable and inevitable.

The Second Cacos War

"Drive the invaders into the sea and free Haiti."
- Charlemagne Peralte

Charlemagne Masséna Péralte was born October 10, 1885, in Haiti. He was a military officer when the Americans invaded in 1915.
He was fiercely nationalistic, so instead of surrendering to the Americans he simply resigned his position and went home to care for his family. In October 1917, Charlemagne led 60 others in an failed attack on the house of the U.S. commander in Hinche, his hometown. He was captured and sentenced to five years of hard labor. After a couple months he escaped into the mountains with the help of his guard and started a revolt that surprised almost everyone.

During Charlemagne's time in prison, the corvee system was so unpopular that even the American administration noticed and began to phase it out. Too late.

Initial fighting occurred in June 1918 when a gendarme force, sent out to enforce the edict, was severely beaten by a group of cacos. During the summer and fall of 1918, the cacos developed a military force of 3,000 men, with the active assistance of about one-fifth of the entire Haitian people. Led by the charismatic personality of Charlemagne Peralte, they organized a fairly sophisticated system of intelligence and security, forcing peasants to join up whether they wanted to or not.

The cacos took the offensive to the gendarmerie, burning their barracks and, on occasion, administering severe defeats on the newly-formed outfit. The movement began to assume the proportions of a full-scale revolution, led by Charlemagne's cry to "drive the invaders into the sea and free Haiti." With the gendarmerie clearly on the defensive, the country tottered on the brink of disaster. In March, 1919, a belated call for another marine intervention was made by the government of Haiti.

Charlemagne's cacos revolt was so successful against the native gendarmerie police forces that by spring 1919 Charlemagne and his "Chief Minister of Revolution", Benoit Batraville, was in the process of setting up a new rebel government in northern Haiti where he had taken almost complete control.
The new marines commander in Haiti, Col. John Russell, was given the task of defeating this new threat to American control. But they soon learned that this wasn't the same cacos they had fought in 1915. This time the enemy had at least some grasp of the concept of guerrilla warfare eventhough they were using the same ancient weapons.

- NY Times news article

Using hit and run tactics, the Cacos managed to inflict at least minor damage and casualties on the marines while avoiding any major defeats. As the months drug on without a solution, Charlemagne grew more bold while the marines grew more frustrated.

Almost everyone stationed in Haiti during the early part of the year seemed to have some knowledge of the fact that both marines and gendarmeries were killing prisoners. It is very difficult to get any witnesses to testify directly, as in the opinion of the undersigned, they were all equally culpable.
- Major T. C. Turner. 1919 investigation report

"There was unquestionably some things done by the gendarmeries and some of the marines which deserved punishment."
- Secretary Daniels

There were at least 400 illegal execution of prisoners, but probably many more. Certain records related to the atrocities mysteriously vanished. An investigation by Secretary Daniels was actively undermined by the adjutant general of the Marine Corps with the approval of Major General George Barnett.
General Barnett had gone to the trouble of ordering the marine commander in Haiti to stop the "indiscriminate killing of natives."

"If one chances to 'pop off' a caco, there is not even the trouble of explaining, for one's companions will do that in their laconic report to headquarters."
- journalist Harry Franck

Despite this wholesale killing of anyone suspected of being a caco sympathizer, the revolt failed to diminish. In fact, it flourished, as guerrilla campaigns are liable to do in the face of widespread atrocities. Peralte proclaimed a holy war against the "white infidels". From April to October there was 131 separate attacks on the marines by the rebels.

On October 7, 1919, Charlemagne and Benoit launched their boldest attack of all - an assault with 300 men on Port-au-Prince itself. While the coordination with insurgents within the city was impressive, it failed on all accounts and the attack turned into a rout with at least 40 dead.
Nevertheless, the close-call forced the marines to face the idea that they were facing a full-scale revolution. Until this point information was covered up in the hopes of playing down the trouble. No longer. The order was put out to kill Peralte one way or another.

"It was a pretty big order. It meant running down one Haitian out of several millions of Haitians in a country as big as the state of New York. And that one Haitian was surrounded by his friends, operating in a country which was almost entirely sympathedc to him, was protected by a fanatical body guard, never slept two nights in the same place, and must be run down in a tangled maze of mountains and valleys and jungles, of which there were no accurate maps."
- Colonel F. M. Wise

The job of killing Charlemagne eventually fell on Sergeant H. H. Hanneken. Like Smedley Butler's victory in the first Cacos War, this plan was bold to the point of reckless. Hanneken needed help, and so he turned to Jean-Baptiste Conze. Conze was a wealthy Haitian that hated Peralte even more than Americans. He was also promised $9,600 for his help.

Conze publicly denounced the Americans, and even led a fake attack on an American base with men in his employ. On October 30, Conze, having now infiltrated into the ranks of the rebels, gave the location of Peralte to Hanneken.