Progressive Historians: History For Our Future

by idiosynchronic | 12/31/2007 07:04:00 PM

"Why do we have to cowtow to Iowans every f*cking 2 years? Pathetic." - John

"I find it difficult to understand why a candidate with less than one third of the votes in a single state which is hardly representative of the American society will be "anointed" by the MSM and bloggers alike." - jackalope

Nothing I, and probably most of us, haven't heard before. Some of us have even been saying it ourselves.

The netroots or blogistan's antipathy to the Iowa caucuses (and the overall primary schedule) has been well-known and widely written about. Markos has made it one of his signature issues. Atrios has railed about it on & off and on. Writing about what is on most liberal blogs usually will net one or two comments like the quotes posted above.

And here we are, 8 years after Gore, Bradley, & the anointment of Bush, still annoyed at the primary system. Here we are 4 years after Kerry, still grousing about how the system doesn't allow a people more representative to make the nomination. This week, Iowa will begin the 2008 nomination cycle all over again. A week or so later New Hampshire will follow.

And the only people we have to blame is ourselves. Every single one of us whom wants change in the primary schedule.

At its heart, the nomination schedule for both parties is a process borne of two things - circumstance and control.

A long time ago, Iowa farmers turned out in the middle of winter to work out political matters prior to the spring when their workload dramatically increased. Starting in 1952 when Eisenhower won the first run of the New Hampshire "beauty contest", the presidential nominating process was slowly dragged away from the cliche'd smoke-filled backroom. The real moment that enabled change was 1968 and the Chicago Chaos when parties and states demanded more citizen voice in the presidential selection process. The Iowa caucuses, never before a big deal, suddenly became important and and news people suddenly found the need for a story hook: winners and losers. In this, citing the quaint complexity of the caucus, Iowa Democrats, and later Republicans, began to move the date forward in order to have "the paperwork done on time." (Seriously, the Iowa Democratic Chair from '73-76 just claimed that this evening on an Iowa PBS special. With a smiling face.) With New Hampshire leading, the race to have greater influence on the US Presidential primaries was on.

But the party powers and management have retained control of the process, only submitting to change when it benefitted Party leadership to do so, or at least threatened their positions to not do so. The primary process may seem more accountable to the voters in comparison to the machine nomination politics of FDR or Hoover, but the current process substitutes small groups of men of power with small states with historically privileged populations (and still led by powerful party politicos) playing gatekeepers. As media has become more pervasive in our lives, the gatekeeper class has spread to the journalists and pundits whom produce the infotainment.

We also don't talk about campaign finance reform in conjunction with reforming the primary schedule. Viability = money in large part. Unless you have access to large sums of cash or wealthy donors whom can aggregate their contributions, you have no business trying to run for president. Without large sums of cash to buy advertising and 'purchase local & state voter lists', you're not a serious contender.

Worse yet, the worst opponent to change in the most people is uncertainty. No one really has a good grasp of a replacement system nor all the vulnerabilities it may have. Without the promise of a better idea, who's going to plunge headlong into change?

Both the states and the talking heads now have too much invested in maintaining their positions of power to ever change the current status quo. And It will take another massive outcry of pressure on the behalf of the rank-and-file citizens to change the primary system again. Last time it took 30 years and a national scandal to effect changes!

I may get run out of town Thursday night, but I'll be proposing a resolution for a national primary system for president that's nationally fair. What are you going to do?

Labels: idiosynchronic

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Paranoia Inc.

by Gordon Taylor | 12/31/2007 02:15:00 AM

The following article was published in Le Monde on December 27. It seemed to me, when I read it, that it needed to be seen by a lot more people, especially in the United States. Americans are famous for knowing little of the world, and our scattershot, drive-by media do nothing to correct the situation. Turkey, we are told, is a very important country, a great customer for our weapons merchants, and a "bridge between Europe and Asia." They are alleged to be a democracy, and Western in outlook. But I have yet to see an article in the American press which fully portrays the mad chauvinist police-state reality of modern Turkey. The following article by Guillaume Perrier begins to do that. Begins. Much more could be added, reams of material so damning to the Turkish state that the very rocks would cry out in despair. But the point which needs to be made is this: Turkey is not, cannot, will not be a truly viable candidate for membership in the EU as long as its government continues in its present form. And there is no power, domestic or foreign, that can change that government in any substantial way for the foreseeable future. Turkey is what it is: a nation where the politicians pretend to govern and armed bullies pretend to let them, a land where the average liberal has more courage than a thousand Americans. Those like me who cherish their memories of this land need to start speaking out. The years of diplomacy and forbearance, of hope for democratic change, have left us with ruined villages, imprisoned journalists, and good people murdered while their killers are congratulated by the police. With that kind of record we may as well try truth.

[Following article translated by Gordon Taylor, who is responsible for all errors herein. All material in brackets [] added by the translator.]

Separatist Paranoia in Turkey

Guillaume Perrier
Le Monde
27 December 2007

“Happy is he who calls himself a Turk,” proclaims the national slogan, first enunciated by Mustafa Kemal [Ataturk]. But in Turkey who really has access to this “happiness”?

Officially, it’s everybody in the land, without reference to race or creed. Yet in fact, members of religious minorities and certain ethnic categories remain second-class citizens. Remnants of Christian populations (Greeks, Armenians, or Syriacs), 15 million Kurds, and 10 million Muslim Alevis are regularly stigmatized. A part of the population continues to be perceived as a menace to national unity, eighty-four years after the foundation of the Republic. For in the collective mind, the “happiness of being a Turk” refers not to a territorial idea but to an ethnic definition based on race.

The repeated judicial harassment, the agression, indeed the murders committed against “internal enemies”, the “non-Turks”, bear witness to a climate of fear. [In 2007]First Italian priest Andrea Santoro, then Armenian journalist Hrant Dink were assassinated. In Malatya three evangelical Christian missionaries had their throats cut. More recently, on December 16, another Italian priest, Father Adriano Francini, was stabbed and critically wounded in Izmir. Furthermore, galvanized by the government’s anti-PKK campaign, groups of the extreme right have launched punitive expeditions targeting Kurds in Istanbul and Bursa. A series of racist crimes, by young indoctrinated ultranationalists, have been committed in the name of Turkish blood. And not for the first time in the country’s history. In 1955, for example, in the middle of the Cyprus crisis, rumor of an assault on the childhood home of Ataturk, in Thessaloniki, unleashed the “pogroms of September 6”. In Istanbul, businesses owned by Orthodox Greeks, also by Jews and Armenians, were sacked by the mob.

It was on the basis of such distorted ideas that Hrant Dink was made a target: first by the nationalist press, then by the judiciary, and last by a 17-year-old killer, Ogun Samast. What followed is typical: the inquest was never permitted to find out who was in charge of the operation. Accomplices highly placed in the state apparatus remained out of focus. Even worse, Samast has become a popular hero. Football stadiums have displayed his name. The police in charge of his arrest posed with him, the Turkish flag in their hands. [note: see below] And the day of his arraignment, the accused arrived in a military vehicle adorned with a favorite slogan of Turkish neo-fascists: “Ya sev ya terket!”--“Love it or Leave it!”

This kind of racist violence comes back each time Turkey is in the midst of an identity crisis. Growing rapidly since 2001, the local economy has embraced globalization. In 2004 Ankara began the long and painful negotiations for admission to the EU, a sudden shift which involves a loss of bearings and a challenge to [their need for separateness and autonomy.]

Conservative Kemalists, headed by the army, put on the brakes when faced with the democratic reforms and historical introspection required by this new environment. In the nationalist imagination, today’s western powers are the imperialist forces of yesterday. The same people who brought the Ottoman Empire to its knees have the same secret plans and are plotting together to divide the nation, with the aid of minorities. The borders of Turkey are threatened by Kurdish, Greek, or Armenian separatism. In fact, the PKK, whose bases in Iraqi Kurdistan have been attacked by the Turkish army, have abandoned secessionist ambitions since 1999, and Turkey is an established regional power whose borders are no longer contested. But paranoia serves as the cement. Trauma remains deeply anchored in Turkey’s collective memory.

A Change of Paradigm

Political scientist Baskin Oran [Ankara University] calls this obsession with territorial integrity the “Sevres syndrome,” after the treaty of 1920 which called for the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. It’s interesting nevertheless to see the groups which believe this in times of crisis: in Malatya, before the murderers’ trial, the local press led a campaign against the victims, [my emphasis – G.T.] accusing the evangelists of supporting PKK terrorism. The same accusation regularly strikes Armenians or “Zionists”.

For the Kurds, the majority of whom are Sunni, the argument is over cultural, linguistic, and political rights. The freedoms of Muslim Alevis also appear on the Brussels list. The adherents of this mystic and liberal branch of Islam are denied public financing for their public places of worship, the cemevis, even though Sunni mosques and imams are subsidized by the State. And Alevi educators must offer the obligatory religious courses, where only Sunni Islam is taught, a disparity comdemned by the European Court of Human Rights.

These minority communities are marginalised when compared with a (supposedly) uniform core idea, a standard almost mythical: Turk, Muslim, and Sunni. Turkey however is a crucible, a mosaic of refugee peoples from the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, mingled and melted together. Official ideology is always used to erase the differences.

Only the Kurds are unaffected by this assimilation. Ethnic tallies, taken in every census, have not been made public since 1965. And cultural purification concerns first names as well as gastronomy, the names of animal species or architecture. Scholarly programs boast about the history of the Huns, ethnic ancestors of the Turks. But they say not a word of the Anatolian cultures which existed before. Hrant Dink hoped, as does his friend Baskin Oran, that Turkey changes its paradigm, that it proclaims “Happy is he who says he is ‘Turkiyeli’”[i.e., from Turkey], and no longer “Turk.”

Guillaume Perrier
Article paru dans l'édition du 28.12.07

[translator's note: Orhan Kemal Cengiz, writing in the Turkish Daily News, describes the scene as he saw it on television: "Then our camera captures another scene in a completely different environment. A coffee house in the bus terminal in Samsun.[a city on the Black Sea -- g.t.] Ogun Samast, the murderer of Hrant Dink, is in the tiny police station in the bus terminal, he is about to be transferred somewhere else. There is hectic activity in the police station. Gendarmerie and police officers are in a queue, they are in competition, and they want to get a good pose with Samast, who holds a Turkish flag in his outstretched hand! Later on we learnt that the flag he was holding was in his pocket when he fired into the neck of Dink from behind, and it was given to him by one of the conspirators. Anyway, police and gendarmerie officers are satisfied because they were able to take a photo with Samast, the killer of the "Armenian".

Labels: Gordon Taylor

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History and the Kagans: Paradise and Power VIII

by Bastoche | 12/30/2007 02:01:00 PM

Victor Davis Hanson does not like echo chambers, and Washington, he claims, has become one. A number of notions, it seems, are flinging repetitively around the enclosed and reverberant spaces of the Beltway Bubbleworld and, as a result of the ceaseless reiteration, are being elevated to the status of “gospel.” One such notion is that “We need to talk to Iran.” Hanson will have none of that. Tyrannies such as Iran resort to diplomacy only when, as Hanson puts it, “their backs are against the wall or their appetites are for a time sated.” With Saddam eliminated and the Taliban, at least for now, posing no threat, Iran finds its back at a comfortable remove from any flat and vertical surface and its appetite whetted for mischief. It therefore feels no urgent need to discuss, among other items, its exasperating insistence on enriching uranium.

Before we talk to Tehran, we need to shove it back and make it simmer down, and Hanson knows exactly what that shoving and subduing entails. We must encourage “the Sunni world” to coalesce “into a general anti-Iranian bloc” and, of course, we must achieve victory in Iraq, thus establishing on the border of the theocratic state a viable democracy. Curiously, Hanson seems to think that Iraq will align itself with the anti-Iranian Sunni bloc he envisions, even though the Iraqi government, once stabilized, will almost certainly be a Shiite-dominated one with ties to Tehran. That small detail aside, Hanson is adamant: negotiations with Iran can only be conducted from a position of strength, and a unified bloc of Sunni nations reinforced by a victory in Iraq will put us in that position.

1. Discipline and Diplomacy

Not all neocons, however, are willing to wait for such eventualities to develop. Shelby Steele and Robert Kagan, for example, have recognized that negotiating now with Iran can prove in the long run distinctly advantageous to America. In his recent essay in The Wall Street Journal, “Obama is Right on Iran,” Steele defends Obama’s commitment to what has become “the most glamorous word in the Democratic ‘antiwar’ lexicon,” diplomacy. Steele’s defense, however, rests neither on an idealistic rejection of war nor on a realistic acceptance of war as a last resort, but rather on a distinction between two kinds of war: wars of survival and wars of discipline.

A nation, when attacked, engages in a war of survival in order to preserve itself as a sovereign and independent entity. The purpose of a war of discipline, on the other hand, is not to safeguard survival but “to preserve a favorable balance of power that is already in place in the world.” This favorable balance of power, supervised by the world’s “enforcer,” America, guarantees global peace. When “a menace” arises that threatens to upset the global balance, America responds, committing itself to war in order “to discipline the world back into a balance of power that best ensures peace.” Further, such wars, according to Steele, “are pre-emptive by definition.” That is, they preempt the menace before it gains such power and becomes inflated with such ambition that it threatens to shift the global balance precariously away from stability and order.

Steele, I assume, would not dispute that this “favorable balance of power” is tilted in favor of America. In fact, to speak of a “balance of power” is misleading since America stands alone as far and away the world’s predominant military nation. No other group of nations, let alone a single nation, can “balance” the colossal strength of each of America’s military arms. But from the perspective of neocons such as Steele and Kagan, this is exactly as it should be. From a foreign and realist perspective, the predominance of America’s military might indicates a potentially unsettling imbalance of world power. But from an American and idealist perspective, it is precisely America’s military might that guarantees a favorable balance of power not only for America but for the world.

According to the neocons, America’s role in the world is to promote freedom and to preserve peace. Unique among history’s nations, America puts its colossal power primarily at the service of these laudable and honorable ends, and, even though it is now enjoying a period of unipolar predominance, it would never think of misusing its military stature in order to advance, unjustly and dishonorably, its own “vital interests.” Therefore, when an autocratic or terrorist menace arises that threatens to destabilize the balance of power, America, secure in the knowledge that it is impelled by no covert motive of exclusive self-interest, can move preemptively to enforce discipline and chastise the outlaw.

Such a view of American power, it seems, reserves no place for diplomacy. When a new menace to global order arises and is identified as such, America must take prompt and decisive military action to eliminate it. But Steele has learned an important lesson from America’s conduct in the Iraq war. As he correctly points out, when attacked and threatened with annihilation, a nation has no choice but to fight. Also, when defending itself in a war of survival, a nation need not seek justification: defense against aggression supplies it with all the moral authority it needs.

However, a nation that threatens to disrupt the balance of power and disturb international peace poses no threat to our survival. The war that we wage to preempt its menace, therefore, is a war of choice, deliberately entered into for no other reason than to “discipline” the troublemaker and preserve the peace. But as Steele recognizes, when a nation engages in a such a war, a preemptive war of choice, “moral authority becomes a profound problem.” While a nation need not seek justification to wage a war of survival, it cannot remain morally cavalier when it chooses to wage a war of discipline. Quite the contrary, when the question hinges not on immediate survival but on a prospective threat, a nation must establish a secure moral ground before it commits itself to the violence of war.

Steele admits that we engaged Iraq in a war of choice, a preemptive war of discipline, and he also admits that we did so without having established a secure moral basis for our act. That lack of a moral foundation has had the inevitable effect of undermining both our military efforts in the field and our political relations with our allies. The lesson that we must extract from this episode is therefore clear. In the future we must conclusively establish our moral authority before undertaking to wage a war of choice. We must, that is, clearly demonstrate that the nation against which we choose preemptively to go to war has resolutely committed itself to disrupt the global balance of power. When we have demonstrated that fact, we will have securely grounded our moral authority and gained the “license” to fight this war of choice as if it were a war of survival, bringing to bear on the upstart the full weight of our military might. And how do we demonstrate that our prospective adversary has resolved to disrupt the global order, thereby rendering itself vulnerable to preemptive assault? By engaging it first in diplomacy.

Iran is a case in point. Clearly committed to disrupting the balance of power in the world, it has become a menace to peace and must be disciplined. However, before we discipline the miscreant, we must first establish our moral authority to do so by engaging it diplomatically. As Steele imagines it, an American president, in an act of heroic humility, flies to Tehran and entreats the Iranians to cease their disruptive behavior. Should they refuse to comply with our appeal to curb their ambitions and arrogantly dismiss our “high-risk” attempt at diplomacy, “then we would have the moral authority to fight as if for survival,” that is, without restraint and deploying the full preponderance of our power. Such a fight we would undoubtedly win, our victory preserving the balance Iranian ambition had threatened to disturb and protecting the peace Iranian malice had threatened to destroy.

2. Fine Word, Legitimate…

Like Steele, Robert Kagan counsels diplomacy, and like Steele he counsels it as a means to an end: providing America with the legitimacy it needs to take “strong action” against Iran. In his Washington Post essay, “Time to Talk to Iran,” Kagan argues that the NIE has, in regard to Iran, “broken” the two most effective “policy tools” in America’s geopolitical kit, military action and economic sanctions. Washington now has left at its disposal but one intact instrument: diplomacy. For Kagan, though, this seemingly negative development can have a positive outcome if the US is prescient enough to exploit it. “The next administration, especially if it is Democratic, will probably want to try to talk to Tehran,” Kagan says. Indeed it will, and if the outgoing administration has devoted a year to serious negotiation with Tehran, the incoming one will have ample evidence at hand to judge the likely results of its own diplomatic efforts. If Tehran has been and continues to be accommodating, the new administration can reciprocate by, for example, rescinding economic sanctions. If, on the other hand, Tehran has been and continues to be intransigent, the new administration will have the justification it needs to act decisively and with a clear conscience. That is, if the new administration “decides it must take strong action,” diplomatic isolation, for example, along with more severe economic sanctions, “it will have an easier time showing that all other options were exhausted.”

Kagan clearly details the demands to which Iran must accede. It must demonstrate to the IAEA that its enrichment facilities are for the purpose of civilian use only and that it has no covert program to develop nuclear weapons. Further, Kagan says, negotiations with Tehran “should go beyond the nuclear issue” and include its support of Hezbollah and Hamas and, what is most important, “its supplying of weapons to violent extremists in Iraq.” Kagan does not specify who these “violent extremists” are, but I assume he means the Badr Organization (the military arm of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq) and the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al Sadr, Shiite groups with ties to Tehran.

If Tehran accedes to these demands, especially if it ceases all enrichment of uranium and cuts its ties to violent factions in Iraq, “it will be welcomed into the international community, with all the enormous economic, political and security benefits this brings.” If, on the other hand, “the Iranians stonewall or refuse to talk -- a distinct possibility -- they will establish a record of intransigence that can be used against them now and in the critical years to come.” If, that is, Iran in its fanatic stubbornness refuses to acquiesce to the demands that America puts on the diplomatic table, if it balks at submissively playing its role in the scenario that America has scripted for the Middle East, if it continues to insist that its own independent interests as a sovereign nation be attended to and respected, then it will have put on display before the world its moral depravity. Conversely, America, having made a good faith attempt to talk to the tyrant, will have established in the eyes of its allies its moral legitimacy. America can then, without hesitation, act to isolate, punish, undermine—even, perhaps, preemptively to eliminate—a regime that refuses to yield to reason and that remains committed to the destruction of peace.

3. From the Particular to the Universal

Robert Kagan and Shelby Steele have derived from the political and moral wreckage of the Iraq War a crucial lesson: America must clearly establish its moral authority before it deploys its military might in preemptive wars of choice or initiates other “strong” actions against recalcitrant regimes. In pursuit of that end, these neocons, along with their allies, the liberal interventionists (the so-called “liberal hawks”), are now engaged in a far-reaching endeavor to construct a new theoretical and practical framework for American foreign policy. Kagan and Ivo Daalder, for example, have called for a Kantian Concert of Democracies whose multilateral voice will legitimate America’s future interventions in world crises. And, as “Time to Talk to Iran” makes clear, Kagan has seen that diplomacy, when appropriately deployed, can help America deal effectively with the deceit of autocrats and terrorists.

Since he published Of Paradise and Power in 2003, Kagan has not so much evolved as adapted to the new geopolitical reality that America’s war in the Middle East has created. Military force remains his tool of choice, but he has come to understand that it must work in conjunction with other policy instruments. Diplomacy and multilateral action, he now allows, are useful, even vital means to achieve America’s final end. But though he might have amended the means, for Kagan that final end, the one that America has been born to achieve, a paradise of world peace created and sustained by American power, has not changed and will not change.

As Kagan argues in the closing section of his book, the central fact about America as a nation is that it is expansionist. “The myth of America’s ‘isolationist’ tradition is remarkably resilient,” Kagan says. “But it is a myth. Expansion of territory and influence has been the inescapable reality of American history, and it has not been an unconscious expansion” (86). America’s expansion during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a deliberate and territorial one. But it is a fundamental error to think that America’s expansionist impulse since the end of World War II has been focused on physical territory. Demonstrably it has not. That impulse, sublimated and transformed, now seeks to expand the reach not of American territory but of American ideology. Born out of freedom, America is now striving to complete its historical mission: to universalize the particular, that is, to introduce its specifically American values of freedom and democracy into every nation on earth.

This expansionist impulse has been inherent in America since its birth, and it defines America’s transcendent importance as a nation in the grand narrative of human history. “The proof of the transcendent importance of the American experiment,” Kagan claims, is found “not only in the continual perfection of American institutions at home but also in the spread of American influence in the world” (88). The ongoing march of history has justified, and will continue to justify, America’s expansion of its ideological reach. America is the nation in which freedom and democracy were first incarnated and made flesh, and it has no intention of isolating these fundamental human values and keeping them confined within its own borders. Universal values will irrepressibly transcend the finite boundaries of the nation in which they originated and assimilate into themselves every other nation in the world. America’s destiny, its mission in history, is thus indisputably clear and indisputably transcendent: to take that which is particular, American democracy, and, by carrying it to every corner of the globe and installing it in every nation on earth, make it what it has always in essence been—universal.

America’s national ideal and national purpose are thus universal in nature and global in scope. But America seeks hegemony for its national ideology not because it seeks to deprive other nations of their autonomy and freedom but precisely because it wants to initiate other nations into their autonomy and freedom, to break the shackles of fanaticism and tyranny that enslave them and liberate them into their true potential as free and productive members of what Kant called the Federation of Peace. For this reason, Kagan says, Americans have always believed, and still believe, that by striving to introduce their American ideals into the world they “advance the interests of humanity” (88). As Benjamin Franklin said, “America’s cause is the cause of all mankind,” and this bedrock idealism is an inherent and unchanging aspect of the American character.

This enduring American view of their nation’s exceptional place in history, their conviction that their interests and the world’s interests are one, may be welcomed, ridiculed, or lamented. But it should not be doubted. And just as there is little reason to expect Europe to change its fundamental course, there is little cause to believe the United States will change its own course, or begin to conduct itself in the world in a fundamentally different manner. (88)

Indeed it will not. Neither will the neocons conduct themselves “in a fundamentally different manner.” They and their interventionist allies in the liberal camp will continue to provide the theoretical support for America’s long term and historically sanctioned endeavor. That theoretical support must now modify itself to take into account the lessons learned from Iraq, but the neocons will leave untouched their basic view of the world, a view that Kagan, in Of Paradise and Power, expertly presents in all its satisfying simplicity. Within the confines of their continent, as Kagan tells it, the nations of Europe have constructed a paradise of Kantian peace based on reason and rules. Outside those confines, however, remains and will remain for the foreseeable future a wilderness of Hobbesian anarchy in which autocratic states and terrorist networks renounce the rule of law and use only deceit and force to gain their ends. On the fragile boundary that separates the paradise of Kantian reason from the wilderness of Hobbesian anarchy stands the world’s Sheriff, America, bravely and steadfastly defending the paradise of reason and rules from the outlaws intent on destroying it. “Americans can still sometimes see themselves in heroic terms,” Kagan claims, “as Gary Cooper at high noon.” And like all good and steadfast men of the law, who clearly see the covert motives of the lawless, Americans are not swayed by the doubts and apprehensions of those they protect. “They will defend the townspeople, whether the townspeople want them to or not” (95).

The townspeople in Kagan’s scenario are, of course, the Europeans, who abide by a “logic of reason.” America, as the world’s Sheriff, also abides by that logic. But as the “enforcer,” the indispensable nation that guarantees stability and peace in a world still populated by rogues and outlaws, America must also abide by a different logic, a “logic of force,” and next time, in the last installment of this series, I’ll summarize Kagan’s argument and discuss the two logics that together define for Kagan America’s role in the world.

Crossposted at dailykos

Labels: Bastoche, History and the Kagans

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Iowa Countdown - 5 Days

by idiosynchronic | 12/30/2007 09:03:00 AM

Friday, I talked about the second choice and realignment - if you ask caucus-goers who they'd choose if they're forced to realign with a larger preference group. In short - Clinton picks up a lion's share of the 2nd prefernces - Clinton will flow to Obama, Obama and Edwards flow into one another, and the rest of the field flows to Clinton.

Combining the results of polls and realignment as a mental exercise, you see some interesting things take place.

I expected a poll this morning (Sunday) before the Thursday caucus night, but the local Register didn't come out with one - which is surprising since hyping the race is the local McPaper's thing. Zogby however has begun relasing daily tracking polls today. Zogby from 12/26-29:

Clinton 31%
Obama 27%
Edwards 24%
Richardson 5%
Biden 5%
Kucinich <1%
Dodd 2%
Gravel NA
Don't know 6%

Covert those to a pretend caucus numbering 100 people:
Clinton 27% +2%(Biden) +3%(Richardson) +3%(Undecided) = 30%
Obama 27%
Edwards 21% +1% (Kucinich, based on past history and his campaign) = 22%
And the uncommitted vote could be as high as 18%, if the remaining people join uncommitted. If they refuse to realign, and they go below 15%, they'll go uncounted as un-viable.

Zogby, in the same analysis, quoted results of, "Clinton 35.8%, Obama 33.4%, Edwards 30.8%." But he's being exceptionally optimistic in assuming that all realigning caucus goers will join a preference group - I've seen participants refuse to be counted and even stomp out of the room rather than be pressured into a group.

Another poll sample - this time from RealClearPolitics' poll averaging system from this morning:
Clinton 28.4% + 4% (Biden) +3% (Richardson) = 35.4%
Edwards 25.8% + 1% (Kucinich) = 26.8%
Obama 26.4%
4.2 % to realign + 7% undecided. - all will have to realign or be uncounted.

And then we get into how many each winning candidate gets in terms of delegates! For this, I refer all of you to Drew Miller's spreadsheet that bases delegate allocation according to the 2004 rules. Using the last example in the sheet, Clinton gets 3 delegates, Obama 2, and Edwards 2. In the Zogby example, the top 3 would each get 2 delegates (virtual dead heat), and undecided would get 1.

If you get into this, I'd suggest to the readers that you check around the tubes Friday and see if you can find how many delegates have been committed to each candidate.

Labels: idiosynchronic

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The Great Strike Wave of 1946

by midtowng | 12/29/2007 11:32:00 PM

[The 1946 coal strike] is the most momentous event in the country's peacetime history."
- Evansville Courier, 1946

When most people think of labor unrest in America they think of the 1930's, or the various major strikes of the 19th Century. The fact is that no year, before or since, saw so many strikes, and such a large percentage of people on strike, or so many industries effected by strikes, as 1946.
Never before had labor unions flexed so much muscle.

But that success also sowed the seeds of labor's long-term downfall.

Picketers (and dog) in jail during Rochester General Strike

The root of the labor conflict of 1946 was the no-strike pledge that so many labor unions took during WWII. This caused a build-up of labor disputes that was bound to explode once the war had ended. In addition, union membership literally doubled, from 7.2 million in 1940 to 14.5 million at war's end.
That's not to say that there weren't strikes during WWII. It only means there were very localized strikes. Almost none of the wartime strikes were over wages. The overwhelming number was over disciplinary and management issues.

These flash strikes were almost never individually serious, but their cumulative total was. If walkouts continue at the present rate, labor will hang up a new record in 1944 of 5,200 strikes in one year. (During the six-year period between 1927 and 1932, inclusive, the total number of strikes was 4,520, but only one-third the number of people working now were employed then.) This means that work stoppages, despite labor's no-strike pledge for the duration, are occurring more frequently now than at any time during the past 25 years.

But what occurred during the war was nothing compared to what happened when the war ended.

In 1937 there were 4,740 strikes involving 1,861,000 workers for over 28 million days, by 1945 there were 4,750 strikes involving 3,470,000 workers for 38 million days, and in 1946 there were 4,985 strikes involving 4,600,000 workers for 116 million days. The US strike wave of 1945-1946 is one of the great episodes in working class history...

The strikes began almost the moment that the bombs stopped dropping on Japan. In September 1945, 43,000 petroleum workers and 200,000 coal workers struck. In October 44,000 lumber workers, 70,000 teamsters, and 40,000 machinists joined them.
Then in November 1945, the UAW called its first major strike against GM since the company was unionized in 1937. Nearly a quarter of a million men walked out.
This was only a taste compared to what would happen in January.

To see the original news reels about the strikes, click here.

We are all leaders

In Stamford, Conneticut, the Yale & Towne lock company withdrew recognition of the International Association of Machinists. The official strike began on November 7, 1945, accompanied by arrests and clashes on the picket line.
The union-busting effort was extremely unpopular. On January 3, 1946 a general strike was called.

Workers all over Stampford reported to their jobs. But instead of going to work, they marched downtown to a mass rally. Many merchants closed their shops for the day. Others put signs in their windows announcing support for the strikers. Ten thousand people, accompanied by a band from the musicians union, paraded in front of the town hall, shouting slogans of support for Yale & Towne workers... Downtown Stampford's theatres, stores and streetcars closed down, while workers from industries in surrounding cities took the day off and sent contingents to the mass rally.
One prominent slogan on placards at the rally read: `We will not go back to the old days'.

The strike got increasingly violent until the factory was shut down in in March. By early April Yale and Towne caved in, accepting the union and a 30% pay raise.

Mounted police clear strikers from the street at Westinghouse strike

174,000 electrical workers, 300,000 meatpackers, and 3/4 of a million steelworkers went on strike in January 1946.

The 1946 steelworker strike was the first major steel strike since the bloody and disastrous steel strike of 1919. The two strikes were a study in contrast. In 1919 the police, militia, and company thugs were unleashed on the strikers in brutal fashion. The 1946 strike was peaceful and President Truman even put pressure on the companies to settle.
In the end the steel companies folded.

A protracted transport strike in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, led to a three day general strike in February. Pittsburgh saw a general strike in September to force the release of union leader, George Mueller, from prison.

In Rochester a general strike occurred because the Republican-dominated city council was attempting to bust unions that worked for the city.
But the most dramatic strikes haven't been mentioned yet.

Battle of the Titans

It's possible that no union leader was more powerful and more respected than John L. Lewis.
Lewis worked as a miner as a teenager in the 1890's. In 1911 he began organizing for the United Mine Workers full time and became the UMW's acting president in 1919, a position he would hold until 1960.

Lewis' rule in the UMW could be described as despotic. However, he commanded fierce loyalty throughout both the leadership and the ranks. Lewis left no doubt that his loyalty lied with the miners. He called for strikes during both WWI and WWII, leaving the pro-labor President Roosevelt with no choice but to use the military to seize the mines. Lewis was unapologetic.
In April 1946, Lewis called out a strike for 350,000 miners, joining the hundreds of thousands already on strike. In May, railroad workers joined the coal miners, threatening to bring the entire nation to a halt.

President Harry Truman decided that the unions had gone too far, and after the railroad workers rejected a settlement, he seized control of the railroads. Despite the government takeover, the workers continued with their strike plans. As a result, on May 24, 1946, Truman issued an ultimatum declaring that the government would operate the railroads and use the army as strikebreakers. When the deadline passed, Truman went before Congress to seek the power to deny seniority rights to strikers and to draft strikers into the armed forces. Just as Truman reached the climax of his speech, he received a note saying that the strike was “settled on the terms proposed by the President.”

Click on this link to see the news broadcast about the railroad strike.

The railroad strike was over and the coal strike ended just days later, but the wave of strikes was far from over.
In September the longshoremen on the west coast went out on strike.
In southern Canada, a bitter steelworkers strike spilled over the border, causing sympathy strikes at Firestone and Goodyear.

The year of strikes had one more chapter to write, and it was probably the most dramatic and unexpected of them all. It's catalyst was when the city council of Oakland made the poor decision to intervene in a modest strike against a downtown department store.

It was in the heart of downtown Oakland, at 7 a.m. on a rainy December day a half-century ago.

Dozens of strikers, picket signs held high, were gathered outside the Kahn's and Hastings department stores on Broadway on that wet, chilly morning in 1946. Suddenly, some 200 Oakland and Berkeley police, many in riot gear, swept down the street. They roughly pushed aside pickets and pedestrians alike as they cleared the street and the surrounding eight square blocks. They set up machine guns across from Kahn's while tow trucks moved in to snatch away any cars parked in the area.

It was a complete over-reaction and was sure to antagonize, and in 1946 that was something you didn't want to do.

The witnesses, that is, truck drivers, bus and streetcar operators and passengers, got off their vehicles and did not return. The city filled with workers, they milled about in the city's core for several hours and then organised themselves.
By nightfall the strikers had instructed all stores except pharmacies and food markets to shut down, Bars were allowed to stay open, but they could serve only beer and had to put their juke boxes out on the sidewalk to play at full volume and no charge.
[...]
By Tuesday morning they had cordoned off the central city and were directing traffic. Anyone could leave, but only those with passports (union cards) could get in.

On the second day of this general strike the union members marched to city hall and demanded the resignation of the mayor and city council. The Sailor's Union at the Oakland Army Base walked off the job. In all 130,000 workers had walked off the job, in a city of about 200,000. Nearby cities of Emeryville, Piedmont, Alameda, San Leandro, and Berkeley also experienced walk-outs.
The workers were in complete control, yet there was little sign of actual union leadership anywhere. It seems the general strike had not only caught the mayor of Oakland off-guard, but the local union leaders as well.

"These finky gazoonies who call themselves city fathers have been taking lessons from Hitler and Stalin. They don't believe in the kind of unions that are free to strike."
- Harry Lundeberg, Sailor's Union representative

The strike ended 54 hours old at 11 a.m. on December 5. The AFL decided to end the general strike with nothing more than a promise by the city council to never use scabs again. The AFL forgot to negotiate anything for the female clerks striking at Kahn's and Hastings Department Stores. The AFL leadership had sold them out.
In the aftermath every incumbent official in the major Oakland Teamsters Local 70 was voted out of office. The AFL put up challenging candidates to the city council in the next election and won four of the five open seats.

Blowback

Conservatives were livid at the amount of disruptions from the strikes. There were several other reasons for the Republican win in 1946 elections, including a recession and the fact that Truman wasn't as popular as FDR, but the strikes just added to that list.
The GOP gained 55 seats and regained control of the House for the first time since Hoover was still president.

The Republican Party immediately went after the base of the Democratic Party - labor unions. In 1947 they passed the Taft-Hartley Act. It prohibited jurisdictional strikes, secondary boycotts and "common situs" picketing, closed shops, and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns. Congress overrode Truman's veto on June 23. The law became known as the "slave-labor bill" in union circles.

Labels: midtowng

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ProgressiveHistorians Meetup at the AHA: Who, What, Where, When, Why

by Unknown | 12/29/2007 07:51:00 PM

WHAT: First (annual?) ProgressiveHistorians Meetup at the AHA

WHEN: Saturday, January 5, 2008, 12:00 PM

WHERE: City Lights Restaurant, 1731 Connecticut Ave NW (directions here)

WHY: To meet the people behind the usernames, and to hang out with some Progressive Historians

WHO: You! Everyone is welcome! (but please RSVP if you haven't already) We have nine comfirmed guests and would love to have more! Feel free to bring significant others, children, or anyone else you'd like.

Thanks to lurker Joanna for scouting restaurants in the area and making reservations for us. You're awesome!

PS: If you want even more blogger meetup goodness, looks like Another Damned Medievalist is planning a breakfast meeting for the same day. I'm going to try to make it, though I can't guarantee yet that I'll be there.

Labels: Jeremy Young

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117th Anniversary of the Wounded Knee Massacre

by Winter Rabbit | 12/28/2007 08:28:00 AM

The Sand Creek Massacre and the Washita Massacre both led to the Wounded Knee Massacre. The Sand Creek Massacre brought the realization that “the soldiers were destroying everything Cheyenne - the land, the buffalo, and the people themselves,” and the Washita Massacre added even more genocidal evidence to those facts. The Sand Creek Massacre caused the Cheyenne to put away their old grievances with the Sioux and join them in defending their lives against the U.S. extermination policy. The Washita Massacre did that even more so. After putting the Wounded Knee Massacre briefly into historical perspective, we’ll focus solely on the Wounded Knee Massacre itself for the 117th Anniversary of the Wounded Knee Massacre.

Black Kettle, his wife, and more than 150 Cheyenne and Arapaho had just been exterminated, and Custer’s 7th was burning the lodges and all their contents, thus stripping them of all survival means. Sheridan would wait until all their dogs had been eaten before “allowing” them into subjugation, then Custer would rape the women hostages in captivity.

Jerome A. Green. “Washita.” p. 126.

Far across the Washita Valley, warriors observed the killing of the animals, enraged by what they saw.

What did they see, feel, and think?

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=_8_i4RoC-c4C&oi=fnd&pg=PP9&sig=PzXXLM0CyHIihEXH2rAS7cmyOIg&dq=Half+breed+-+the+remarkable+story+of+george+bent-+caught+between+the+worlds#PRA1-PA95,M1"

And so, when the Chiefs gathered to decide what the people should do, Black Kettle took his usual place among them. Everyone agreed Sand Creek must be avenged. But there were questions. Why had the soldiers attacked with such viciousness? Why had they killed and mutilated women and children?

It seemed that the conflict with the whites had somehow changed. No longer was it just a war over land and buffalo. Now, the soldiers were destroying everything Cheyenne - the land, the buffalo, and the people themselves.

See it? Feel it?

They witnessed and felt the Sand Creek Massacre happen, again.

Consequently, a number of Cheyenne who were present at Washita helped defeat Custer at Little Bighorn.

So, let us proceed from the Sand Creek Massacre,

Why does this say Battle Ground after there was a Congressional investigation?

and from the genocide at the Washita “Battlefield” –

No, it was a massacre.

Petition to Re-name
The Washita Battlefield National Historic Site toThe Washita National Historic
Site of Genocide

AND WHERE AS:

According to the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethical, racial or religious group as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life
calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

WE, the undersigned members of the Native American community and the public at large, request that this site of the attack by the United States military against 8,500 Plains Indians camped as prisoners of war along the Washita River in 1868 be designated as the Washita National Historic Site of Genocide.

- to the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890.

Harjo: Burying the history of Wounded Knee

But Wounded Knee was 14 years after Little Bighorn. Would the soldiers have held a grudge that long and why would they take it out on Big Foot? They blamed Custer's defeat on Sitting Bull, who was killed two weeks before Wounded Knee. The Survivors Association members had the answer: ''Because Big Foot was Sitting Bull's half-brother. That's why Sitting Bull's Hunkpapa people sought sanctuary in Big Foot's Minneconjou camp.''

The Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890

The first intention of the U.S. Army in part was to detain Chief Big Foot under the pretext that he was a "fomenter of disturbance," remembering that Native Americans did not have equal rights at that time in the Constitution.

In addition, the real intention was doing a "roundup" to a military prison camp, which would have become an internment and concentration camp in Omaha after they were prisoners. Colonel James W. Forsyth had orders to force them into going there.

Speculating, I bet at least part of the rationalization for the massacre was so the soldiers wouldn't have to transport them to the military prison in Omaha. Murdering them would have been easier. Then, they could've had another whiskey keg, like they did the evening right before this massacre, when they celebrated the detainment of Chief Big Foot. The soldiers may have even been hung over, depending on amount consumed and tolerance levels; moreover, if the soldiers were alcoholics, tolerance levels would have been high.

massacre:

n : the wanton killing of many people [syn: mass murder] v : kill a large number of people indiscriminately;

"The Hutus massacred the Tutsis in Rwanda" [syn: slaughter, mow down]

Source

White officials became alarmed at the religious fervor and activism and in December 1890 banned the Ghost Dance on Lakota reservations. When the rites continued, officials called in troops to Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations in South Dakota. The military, led by veteran General Nelson Miles, geared itself for another campaign.

Source
Big Foot and the Lakota were among the most enthusiastic believers in the Ghost Dance ceremony when it arrived among them in the spring of 1890.

Chief Big Foot's arrest was ordered by the U.S. War Department for being a "fomenter of disturbance." Chief Big Foot was already on his way to Pine Ridge with his people, when the 7th U.S. Cavalry with Major Samuel Whitside leading them approached him on horses. Big Foot's lungs were bleeding from pneumonia.

Blood froze on his nose while he could barely speak. He had a white flag of surrender put up as soon as he caught glimpse of the U.S. Calvary coming towards them. At the urging of John Shangreau, Whitside's half-breed scout, Whitside "allowed" Big Foot to proceed to the camp at Wounded Knee. Whitside wanted to arrest Big Foot and disarm them all immediately. Ironically, the justification for letting Big Foot go to Wounded Knee was that it would prevent a gun fight, save the lives of the women and children, but let the men escape. The Warriors wouldn't have left their women and children to perish, but since the following was reported to Red Cloud:

Red Cloud

"...A white man said the soldiers meant to kill us. We did not believe it, but some were frightened and ran away to the Badlands.(1)

I believe Whitside didn't want the Warriors to have such an opportunity, under direct orders by General Nelson Miles.

(1): "Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee" by Dee Brown, pp. 441-442. (December, 1890).

"Later in the darkness of that December night (Dec. 28) the remainder of the Seventh Regiment marched in from the east and quietly bivouacked north of Major Whitside's troops. Colonel James W. Forsyth, commanding Custer's former regiment, now took charge of operations. He informed Whitside that he had received orders to take Big Foot's band to the Union Pacific Railroad for shipment to the military prison in Omaha.

Then, came the disarming.

..Colonel Forsyth informed the Indians that they were now to be disarmed. "They called for guns and arms," White Lance said, "so all of us gave the guns and they were stacked up in the center." The soldier chiefs were not satisfied with the number of weapons surrendered, so they sent details of troops to search the tepees. "They would go right into the tents and come out with bundles (sacred objects) and tear them open," Dog Chief said. "They brought our axes, knives, and tent stakes and piled them near the guns." Still not satisfied, the soldier chiefs ordered the warriors to remove their blankets and submit to searches for weapons...

Yellow Bird, the only medicine man there at the time danced some steps of the Ghost Dance, while singing one of it's songs as an act of dissent. Simultaneously, the people were furious at the "searches" when Yellow Bird reminded everyone of their bullet-proof shirts. To me, this was the void in time when the Ghost Dancers chose peace over war, and made it possible for the resurgence of their culture to occur in the future. A psychological justification for my saying so, is the Ghost Dancers would also have been Sundancers. Part of the well-known intent behind the Sundance is "that the people might live."

Continuing on; next, was false blame.

...Some years later Dewey Beard (Wasumaza) recalled that Black Coyote was deaf. "If they had left him alone he was going to put his gun down where he should. They grabbed him and spinned him in the east direction. He was still unconcerned even then. He hadn't pointed his gun at anyone. His intention was to put that gun down. They came and grabbed the gun that he was going to put down...(1) in proceeding paragraph, p.445.

Source

...The massacre allegedly began after an Indian, who was being disarmed, shot a U.S. officer.

Source

Hotchkiss guns shredded the camp on Wounded Knee Creek, killing, according to one estimate, 300 of 350 men, women, and children.

My Journey to Wounded Knee

More people survived if they tried to escape through this tree row, because there was more tree cover.

More were massacred if they tried to escape through this tree row, because there was much less tree cover.

The truth has still been tried to be slanted and concealed, even after over one century ago, because the old sign below said that there were 150 warriors.

The truth is, there were only 40 warriors.

It was nothing less than false blame, deceptive actions, and blatant lies by the blood-thirsty troopers that started the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. In recognition of the governmental policy of using smallpox infected blankets as germ warfare against Native Americans since the first presidency, the Sioux Wars, and all the "successful" extermination by the U.S. government prior to this last "battle;" would they have had the atom bomb, they would have used it too.

For that would have been more convenient, than loading their remaining victims (4 men and 47 women and children) into open wagons and transporting them to Pine Ridge during the approaching blizzard for alleged shelter at the army barracks, then to the Episcopal mission "unplanned." They left the survivors out in that blizzard in open wagons for who knows how long, while "An (singular) inept Army officer searched for shelter."(1)

What that tells me is: they didn't plan on having any survivors. They planned on exterminating them. Of course, there wasn't any room at all in the army barracks for 51 people, so they had to take them to the mission. Well...if they'd been white, they would've found room for a measly 51 white people.

Source

"...A recurring dream in the mid-1980s directed a Lakota elder to begin the ride as a way to heal the wounds of the 1890 massacre. It continues today to honor the courage of the ancestors and to teach the young to become leaders...The Big Foot Ride began in 1987 at the urging of Birgil Kills Straight, a descendant of a Wounded Knee Massacre survivor. Each year, the riders have come together to sacrifice and pray for the 13-day trip from the Standing Rock Reservation beginning on the anniversary of the death of Sitting Bull and ending at Wounded Knee on Dec. 28, the day before the anniversary of the massacre..."

Source

"...The two-week Ride started in 1986 after a dream told one of its founders that it would "mend the sacred hoop" and heal the wounds of the famous massacre. For the first four years, the ride was led in intense cold by Arvol Looking Horse, keeper of the White Buffalo Calf Woman pipe bundle in Green Grass, S.D. It is now carried on by youths from the Lakota nation, starting in Grand River near Mobridge, S.D. on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation and continuing south 200 miles to Pine Ridge..."

Labels: winter rabbit

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Iowa Countdown - 6 Days

by idiosynchronic | 12/28/2007 08:00:00 AM

retro-posted because Winter Rabbit has got a great headliner -id.

Did anyone else visit Zogby like I did, on a daily basis in 2004? In this cycle, I had completely forgotten about Zogby until just recently.

Turkana at The Left Coaster said something Wednesday, " . . my hunch has been that people who support dodd, biden, richardson, etc., are probably most unhappy with the ostensible leaders, which makes me think edwards will get a good chunk of their votes. hillary and obama are the big money, establishment candidates, and edwards has been running as a populist, so it makes sense that the disaffected would go to him."

Yes, no, or maybe so?

Zog actually says that, "Clinton was able to solidify her standing among some likely caucus–goers [in November] by increasing the number of people who said she would be their second choice. . . Last month [October], Obama and Edwards were much more preferred as a second choice among those candidates who appear to be unviable under Democratic caucus rules. Clinton appears to be gaining ground among those who might consider experience to be an important factor in choosing a nominee – she wins the lion's share of support among those who make Biden their first choice, and she does well among those who would first choose New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson.

"Among those who make Obama their first choice, Edwards is their second choice, and vice versa. Among those who make Clinton their first choice, Obama is the favorite second choice."

Which makes sense, if you think about surface perception. Based on perception - and let's step away from eriposte's analysis of who is actually representing progressive values and running typical Democratic campaigns - Edwards is running as a progressive reformer (if not revolutionary), Obama as a moderating change agent, Sen. Clinton as a trailblazing experienced politician from a better time in America, Richardson as an honest, stable and experienced bureaucrat, Dodd as a Senator who's seen the light, and Biden as Senator Biden.

Clinton's appeal as the second choice shouldn't be discounted - tomorrow, I'll run some practice numbers based on recent polling results and show how things could break down in next Thursday's results. And I'll be taking both comments and questions for future posts as idiosynchronic at gmail.

Labels: idiosynchronic

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Iowa Countdown -7 days

by idiosynchronic | 12/27/2007 08:34:00 PM

Now that man has been reminded of the necessity of peace and love, it's back to our already scheduled broadcast of lies, deceptions, push-polling and skin-deep candidate profiling. In the interest of keeping it more substantive, I'll be posting short details on the Iowa Caucuses and answering anyone's questions through January 5th. Email questions to idiosynchronic at gmail.

The Des Moines Register published a rather good online animation sequence of the caucus process for the GOP and Democrats. It gives the reader a really good example of what both parties' caucuses look like, as well as how they're supposed to be run - YMMV according to the local party member. The Democratic caucus is usually chaos incarnate, usually in a gym or auditorium, run by party volunteers whom may or may not have a good handle on procedure; the GOP caucus is very sober, orderly, and definitely run from a group of people perched on a high platform or stage. The irony is that the results from the GOP are more democratic - if it's done by secret ballot. The caucus chairman of your precinct may decide that a roll-call or voice vote will do just as well as a ballot.

The Democratic caucus is specifically designed to uniformly weed out weaker candidates by procedure so even weak chairs can do, whereas the GOP trusts the local chairs to be competent enough to squelch small minorities by rules of order. Ron Paul supporters, look out.

Labels: idiosynchronic

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Real Progressives and War

by badger | 12/26/2007 08:35:00 PM

For my first post at Progressive Historians, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about
actual, historical Progressives.

Once upon a time, a Democratic President wanted to take us into war, and he was opposed by Republican Senators. Not only did those Republican Senators oppose the war, they did it at a time when the press, both parties, and much of the electorate was in favor of going to
war. They did it even though one would be up for election the following year, and another
wanted to run for President. Not only that, they didn't listen to political consultants and
didn't apologize for or later try to obfuscate their positions. They didn't vote "Present".
They didn't 'flip-flop'.

Given what we've come to know in this age as the behavior of the two parties,Senators and Presidential aspirants, it sounds like a fairy tale, I know.

It isn't.

Democrat Woodrow Wilson won re-election in 1916 on the slogan "He kept us out of war", which he did, even though a German submarine had sunk the Lusitania and taken 127 American lives more than a year before the election. But by 1917, aided by several significant instances of German sabotage in the US and the "Zimmerman Telegram" that disclosed Germany was to resume unrestricted submarine attacks and encouraging a Mexican invasion of the US, and also to secure huge amounts of money loaned to the British and French by Wall Street, the national and political mood was turning toward favoring US entry into the European war.

In April, 1917, Wilson addressed Congress and asked for a declaration of war against Germany and Germany's allies. Senator LaFollette from Wisconsin took to the floor of the Senate to oppose a declaration of war - a war which was extremely popular nationally, and even in LaFollette's home state. Senator George Norris of Nebraska also opposed the war. Both Norris and LaFollette were Republicans, but Progressive Republicans.

The point of this exercise isn't to argue whether the US entry into World War One was justified or not. There is a lot of detail inLaFollette's and Norris' speeches (LaFollette's is here,
Norris' here) that discusses the actual issues surrounding the declaration of war. If you readLaFollette's speech in full, you may get the impression, looking back 90 years through the lens of large amounts of anti-German propaganda from WW I and WW II, thatLaFollette was sympathetic to the Kaiser. The Kaiser's Germany, for all its failings, was not Hitler's Germany.

I believe the case was that LaFollette was strongly anti-war and thought the British and Germans equally culpable, but Wilson was taking the side of the British, and LaFollette was answering that. LaFollette still favored Wilson's original position of strict neutrality, which by
April, 1917 had become a sham - he favored neither the British nor German sides.

What's more interesting to me is that LaFollette and Norris chose to vote and speak their conscience rather than choosing a course of political expedience or ambition, particularly in
light of the actions of Senators (especially Kerry, Edwards and Clinton) surrounding the Iraq
War Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) and their later votes and positions (which also include Obama's) regarding funding and conduct of the war. And what's eerily interesting is the similarity of some of the issues the early Progressives addressed and issues many Democrats failed to address regarding the AUMF and prosecution of the Iraq War.

LaFollette took the floor of the Senate on April 4th, 1917. After a brief introduction, he began the substance of his speech talking about the media's role in the run-up to war:

Quite another doctrine has been promulgated by certain newspapers, which unfortunately seems to have found considerable support elsewhere, and that is the doctrine of "standing back of the President" without inquiring whether the President is right or wrong. For myself I have never subscribed to that doctrine and never shall.

Later in the speech LaFollette came back to the same issue:

It is unfortunately true that a portion of the irresponsible and war-crazed press, feeling secure in the authority of the President's condemnation of the Senators who opposed the armed-ship bill, have published the most infamous and scurrilous libels on the honor of the Senators who opposed that bill. It was particularly unfortunate that such malicious falsehoods should fill the public press of the country at a time when every consideration for our country required a spirit of
fairness should be observed in the discussions of the momentous questions under consideration.

LaFollette, in his speech, performed a point-by-point rebuttal of Wilson's speech that asked for a declaration of war. Most of that is specific to the situation in 1917, but one other similarity caught my eye:

The President in his message of April 2 says:
The present German warfare against commerce is a warfare against mankind. It is a war against all nations.

Is it not a little peculiar if Germany's warfare is against all nations the United States is the only nation that regards it necessary to declare war on that account?

...

Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, Spain and all the great Republics of South America are quite as interested in this subject as we are, and yet they have refused to join with us in a combination against Germany.

LaFollette even argued that if a majority of the American people really supported going to war, as Wilson claimed (and LaFollette had cited thousands of letters and telegrams opposing US entry into the war), that a national referendum should be held to determine the course of action. He also pointed out that Wilson claimed to want to make the world "safe for democracy", but the
British and French governments we were siding with at that time had no interest in democracy in places like Ireland, India, Egypt, or North Africa.

Of course a declaration of war passed the Senate (we'll return to the fates of those who voted against war later). But LaFollette didn't give up his opposition to the war.

After war was declared, LaFollette fought against conscription (the draft), fought the passage of the Espionage Act and its censorship provisions, fought to force the government to clearly state the objectives of the war, and even attempted to force the expense of the war to fall on the rich and others who profited most from going to war.

In succeeding weeks, La Follette remained a tough opponent of the Wilson administration's program for war on the home front. When the president asked for an Espionage Act that would give him the right to censor newspapers, magazines and books, and send civilians to jail for criticizing the war, LaFollette fought the measure ferociously. He was able to persuade the Senate to reject direct censorship of newspapers by a presidential board but the rest of the measure was voted into law.

World War I's Forgotten Hero - Thomas Fleming

As mounting domestic oppression sent more and more anti-war activists to jail, La Follette emerged as their defender, berating his colleagues with the charge that "Never in all my many years' experience in the House and in the Senate have I heard so much democracy preached and so little practiced as during the last few months."

About Robert "Fighting Bob" La Follette - John Nichols

On August 11, 1917, [LaFollette] introduced a War Aims resolution that called on the US to declare definitely its strategic goals, to condemn the continuation of the war for the purposes of territorial annexation, and to demand that the Allies restate their peace terms immediately." This position was attacked by both the press and public officials.

Robert M. LaFollette, Sr.

Five months after war was declared, LaFollette gave a speech opposing the war in Minneapolis in which he repeated his assertion that the Lusitania was carrying arms and munitions - contrary
to our stated neutrality. The Wilson Administration would not allow LaFollette access to information that would either prove or disprove his claim - exploration of the Lusitania's wreck in recent years has proved him correct. But in reporting the speech, the AP misquoted LaFollette, and a subsequent NY Times headline screamed "LaFollette Defends Lusitania Sinking".

What he had said was

that while America had "suffered grievance…at the hands of Germany" they were not sufficient to provoke war. "I say this, that the comparatively small privilege, of the right of an American citizen to ride on a munitions loaded ship flying a foreign flag, is too small to involve this government in the loss of millions and millions of lives!!" He insisted that the President knew there was ammunition on theRMS Lusitania but hadn’t prevented Americans from boarding it.

Robert M. LaFollette, Sr.

From there, the Mighty Wurlitzer of the time cranked up and the tune it was playing was "Villify LaFollette".

The day after the speech, Secretary of State Robert Lansing released to the newspapers the text of an intercepted message that Germany's ambassador had sent to Berlin before America declared war, asking for $50,000 to influence Congress. The timing of the release was hardly accidental. Newspapers splashed it across their front pages, implying that LaFollette was Germany's hired mouthpiece. The secretary of state, satisfied with the damage he had done, blandly admitted he had no hard evidence connecting any federal legislator with German propaganda.

A movement was soon underway to expel La Follette from the Senate. The Democratic governor of Wisconsin staged a mass meeting in Madison, at which Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo, President Wilson's son-in-law, called La Follette a traitor. That same day, Secretary of State Lansing denied the American government knew the Lusitania was carrying ammunition. The Senate's Privileges and Elections Subcommittee announced it would hold public hearings on the senator's possible expulsion in December ...

The hate campaign against La Follete mounted in ferocity. Life, in those days a humor magazine, published a "Traitor's Number" featuring La Follette receiving the iron cross from the Kaiser. Another set of cartoons showed Satan inducting La Follette into the "Traitor's Club," with Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold and other members eagerly welcoming him.

Fleming, op. cit.

The very progressive and liberal University of Wisconsin, with strong political support from LaFollette, had served as a Progressive think tank since LaFollette's election as Wisconsin's governor in 1900, and did so into the 1940s, but -

In his home state La Follete endured humiliations that wounded him deeply. Various clubs expelled him. The state legislature passed a joint resolution accusing him of sedition. The faculty of the University of Wisconsin voted 421-2 to condemn his "unwise and disloyal utterances." A saddened LaFollette noted in his diary that "my picture was taken down from where it was hanging in all of the university buildings." His son Phil, a student at the university, had to endure face-to-face insults and sneers.

Fleming, op. cit.

Finally, on October 6th, 1917, LaFollette was allowed to defend himself on the Senate floor. Senate leadership manipulated the timing so that LaFollette would have little time to rebut subsequent speakers, and in fact he was never allowed to rise again in the Senate to rebut accusations against him.

LaFollette began his speech by rising on a point of personal privilege. The entire speech can be found here: Free Speech in Wartime. Once again, many of the points that LaFollette addressed in this speech seem applicable to the last six years. He cited extensively Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln, and others who had supported the right to criticize the government during wartime (in the case of the two cited, the war at issue was the Mexican War).LaFollette again criticized the media:

Since the declaration of war the triumphant war press has pursued those Senators and Representatives who voted against the war with malicious falsehood and recklessly libelous attacks, going to the extreme limit of charging them with treason against their country.

As one example of the vitriol and hatred directed at Senators opposing the war, he cited an AP article that quoted Judge Walter T. Burns, US District Court Judge, Texas, who named Senators he considered traitors - includingLaFollette - called for their indictment, and then went on Coulter-esquely:

"They ought to be tried promptly and fairly, and I believe this court could administer the law fairly; but I have a conviction, as strong as life, that this country should stand them up against an adobe wall tomorrow and give them what they deserve. If any man deserves death, it is a traitor. I wish that I could pay for the ammunition. I would like to attend the execution, and if I were in the firing squad I would not want to be the marksman who had the blank shell."

Foreshadowing opponents of the Iraq War being labeled as "hating America" or "objectively pro-Sadaam", LaFollette continued:

But, sir, it is not alone members of Congress that the war party in this country has sought to intimidate. The mandate seems to have gone forth to the sovereign people of this country that they must be silent while those things are being done by their government which most vitally
concern their well-being, their happiness and their lives. Today and for weeks past honest and law-abiding citizens of this country are being terrorized and outraged in their rights by those sworn to uphold the laws and uphold the rights of the people.

...

It appears to be the purpose of those conducting this campaign to throw the country into a state of terror, to coerce public opinion, to stifle criticism, and suppress discussion of the great issues involved in this war.

Citing the separation of powers and advocating action Congress refused to take - both then and now - he went on:

Mr. President, I believe that if we are to extricate ourselves from this war and to restore this country to an honorable and lasting peace, the Congress must exercise in full the war powers intrusted [sic] to it by the Constitution.

...

No war can be prosecuted without money. There is no power to raise the money for war except the power of the Congress. From this provision alone it must follow absolutely and without qualification that the duty of determining whether a war should be prosecuted or not, whether the people's money shall be expended for the purpose of war or not rests upon the Congress, and with that power goes necessarily the power to determine the purposes of the war, for if the Congress does not approve the purposes of the war, it may refuse to lay the tax upon the people
to prosecute it.

By the time LaFollette spoke, the nation already had - by Constitutional Amendment - enacted an income tax. LaFollette wanted progressive taxation, and moreover, wanted to tax war profiteers who benefited enormously from the war:

And yet today, Mr. President, for merely suggesting a possible disagreement with the administration on any measure submitted, or the offering of amendments to increase the tax upon incomes, or on war profits, is "treason to our country and an effort to serve the enemy".

...

We have not yet been able to muster the forces to conscript wealth, as we have conscripted men, but no one has been able to advance even a plausible argument for not doing so.

After the speech, LaFollette backed off somewhat in his war opposition - perhaps because of the attacks on him and his ability to function as a Senator, perhaps because of his son's serious illness. Certainly the kinds of attacks thatLaFollette faced were probably on the minds of Democratic Senators who supported the AUMF - but it's as likely that LaFollette, who by 1917 had served 3 terms in the House, 3 terms as governor of Wisconsin, and 11 years in the Senate, was equally aware of what to expect. He noted as much in the beginning of his speech opposing the declaration of war; he wasn't deterred.

More of a concern for those Democratic Senators voting for the AUMF might have been the effects on their future political prospects, especially campaigns for the Presidency. Six Senators, including LaFollette voted against the declaration of war. Oddly, Sen. William Stone of MO died a little more than a year after his vote, and Sen. Harry Lane of OR was dead less than two months after his vote against the declaration.

Senators Asle Gronna of MN and James Vardaman of MS (an avowed white supremist and lynching supporter) lost their bids for re-election.

But George Norris and Robert LaFollette were the most outspoken opponents of the declaration of war. Norris faced re-election in 1918, and went back to Nebraska to campaign.

Based on his feelings that pro-war sentiment was being promoted by big business, he voted against U.S. entry into the conflict. For this act of conscience he was vilified throughout the nation and at home. He returned to Nebraska to confront his critics. When he addressed Nebraskans he said simply, "I have come home to tell you the truth," and honestly explained his feelings and beliefs. After his address, Nebraskans responded with respect and enthusiasm for his honesty and they again returned him to the Senate.

Senator George Norris State Historic Site

Norris served in the Senate until defeated for re-election in 1942.

LaFollette was up for re-election in 1922. In 1921, preparing to announce his candidacy, his advisors told him, as consultants do today, to backpedal on his war opposition and minimize his stand on the issue, which had probably cost him considerable political support in Wisconsin. He might have apologized for his vote, as some Senators do, or tried to obfuscate his position. Instead,

La Follette began his speech with the formalities of the day, acknowledging old supporters and recognizing that this was a pivotal moment for him politically. Then, suddenly, LaFollette pounded the lectern. "I am going to be a candidate for reelection to the United States Senate," he declared, as the room shook with the thunder of a mighty orator reaching full force. Stretching a clenched fist into the air, La Follette bellowed: "I do not want the vote of a single citizen under any misapprehension of where I stand: I would not change my record on the war for that of any man, living or dead."

Nichols, op. cit.

No apology, no "I was against it before I was for it", no obfuscation.

LaFollette not only won re-election - in 1924, LaFollette stood as the Progressive Party nominee for the the Presidency, a third-party candidate. He took 17% of the national vote (a share unmatched by a third-party candidate until Ross Perot), won Wisconsin's electoral votes, and placed second in the balloting in 11 western states. LaFollette had first attempted a run for the Presidency in 1912, but was forced out by Teddy Roosevelt, so it was probably a consideration that was in his mind too when he chose to vote his conscience and oppose the war.

What both Norris and LaFollette had going for them, despite opposing the war based on conscience and in contradiction of the majority of the electorate in their respective states, was that both were effective Progressives. That meant that when in office they had long-championed causes that mattered to their constituents, they had opposed both corporate influence and self-enrichment, and had long-established records as both honest public servants and effective politicians.

It was enough for them to withstand the full force of the media, the Democratic Party, the Stalwart wing of the Republican party, and even condemnation by "Progressives" like Teddy Roosevelt and others. Neither Norris nor LaFollette were "purists" in any sense of the word - both valued accomplishment more than a dogmatic or ideological stance, but both had limits on the flexibility of their principles that went far beyond winning the next election.

Moreover, neither man's legacy suffered. LaFollette died in 1925 and was replaced in the Senate by his son, Robert M. LaFollette, Jr., who served until defeated by Joe McCarthy in 1946. His other son, Phillip, served a number of terms as Wisconsin governor. Both sons ran as Progressives, and in fact during the 1930s, most of the Wisconsin Congressional delegation was made up of Progressives. A grandson was later elected WI Attorney-General, and even the
current WI Secretary of State is a LaFollette (though not related, as far as I know) - both now Democrats, as the GOP no longer has room for Progressives.

In 1957, Sen. John F Kennedy chaired a committee to select five great Senators whose portraits would hang in the Senate reception room. The committee's first three picks were easy - Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Daniel Webster. To balance a more liberal pick, the committee chose conservative Ohio Senator Robert Taft.

The committee's first choice for the remaining portrait was George Norris of Nebraska, but the then-sitting Senators from that state - ultra-conservative Republicans Roman Hruska and Carl Curtis - let it be known they would block that pick. Instead, the committee chose Robert LaFollette, Sr.

In 1964, only two Senators opposed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that greatly expanded US involvement in the VietNam War. One was Sen. Wayne Morse of OR, who was born in WI the year LaFollette was first elected governor, grew up in a WI household that supported Progressives, and graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1923.

The other was Sen. Ernest Gruening of AK. In 1924, when LaFollette ran for President, Gruening, then a journalist, was the campaign's spokesperson and director of publicity.

Of the 23 Senators who opposed the AUMF, one was Ron Wyden of OR, often cited as Wayne Morse's protege, and another was Russ Feingold of WI, whose father had been active in the Progressive movement, and who cited LaFollette in his campaigns for the Senate.

While I'll support the Democratic nominee for President, none compare to Norris or LaFollette - either in their actions with respect to the Iraq War, nor in their overall records in office, nor, in my estimation, in their principles or political courage.

Call me an idealist - or call me a Progressive.

Labels: badger, First World War, Progressives

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Ronald Reagan's First Inaugural, Setting the Stage

by Ralph Brauer | 12/26/2007 05:57:00 PM

ronald reagan delivering his first inaugural

Ronald Reagan's First Inaugural is justly regarded as one of America's greatest speeches. It is also one of the most misunderstood. Like many great speeches it is a tangle of paradoxes, some of which we are still puzzling over. Those paradoxes all begin with the voice.

When is a voice no longer a voice, but something else, something coached, well-trained and practiced so it becomes not so much a voice but a mirror, its vowels and consonants referring not so much to the speaker but the listener, so that each person who hears it hears something from deep in the recesses of their own mind.

In the electronic age, this has become the new ideal, perhaps because the artifice of microphones and sound boards demands it. Once we wanted our politician’s voices to reflect them, now we want them to reflect us, for artifice forces us to search the ether for authenticity and the only judge we have of that lies in the sound studios of our own minds.

Perhaps no one epitomizes this more than Ronald Wilson Reagan. To listen to his voice is to be drawn even against your will into the sonic equivalent of soft focus. Something in the tone that can move effortlessly from a whisper-like confessional to an earnestness that seems to come from somewhere deep in the chest like a war cry, wins audiences over in the way that a master guitarist can summon so many emotions from six simple strings.

Ronald Reagan would make full use of those skills in the 1964 Presidential campaign. The ostensible title given the address was “A Time for Choosing,” but to Republicans and others it has since been known simply as "The Speech." Fittingly, it was not delivered on the floor of one of those wooden-raftered caverns with a name like The Wigwam or an immense amphitheater like Madison Square Garden, but from inside the little glowing box that had become a fixture in America’s living rooms. The wooden benches that had served as the galleries in political conventions of the past had been replaced by armchairs in people’s homes. It is also fitting that Reagan’s speech was part of a paid, prerecorded television commercial. It was a perfect setting for Reagan the actor.

In terms of its significance, “The Speech” deserves to be regarded with the “Cross of Gold” and a handful of other speeches that have not only electrified a campaign, but also defined the future of a political party. Columnist David Broder knew what he was witnessing, for he termed “The Speech:”

The most successful political debut since William Jennings Bryan electrified the 1896 Democratic Convention with the "Cross of Gold” speech.

Rarely are people swept away with waves of words. In the nineteenth century of “Cross of Gold” a significant percentage of Americans had heard enough stump speeches to qualify as experienced judges of their quality. In the twentieth century with radio and television lending politics all the stage-managed characteristics of a Hollywood movie, audiences have developed a more jaundiced attitude toward both speech and speaker.

But in 1964, the kind of speech Ronald Reagan recited was something relatively new. Most candidates had managed the transition to the new medium of television with the same trepidation Hollywood stars had managed the transition from silents to talkies. Speaking to a camera was a new skill for most of politicians, one that required many more significant changes than the transition from speaking to crowds to speaking over the radio. You had to learn how to modulate your voice, how to move your head so it did not appear wooden, how to look into the camera as if you were looking into the eyes of an unconvinced voter, and—as Richard Nixon learned in 1960—even such unpolitical skills as the art of makeup.

Ronald Reagan knew all these things. His best performances as an actor had been delivering heart-felt “values” speeches such as the one he gave as the dying Gipper in Knute Rockne, All-American. Yet for all this background, Ronald Reagan was a washed-up movie actor when he delivered “The Speech.” After his Hollywood career had turned sour he had been fortunate to find work with General Electric in 1954 serving as host for G.E. Theater, a now extinct programming genre which presented adaptations of popular plays, short stories, novels, magazine fiction and motion pictures. It was a role that certainly was a step down for the former sidekick of Errol Flynn, for all it required of the actor who once hungered for dramatic parts like that of the doomed George Gipp was that he read what are known as the “ins” and “outs,” introducing each week’s program and then signing off at the end.

He might have perished there were it not for the second part of the GE job which required him to barnstorm the country as the company’s goodwill ambassador. To Reagan’s credit, unlike other stars who might have sleepwalked through these functions, Ronald Reagan threw himself into his new role and in doing so found his true calling. Like actors who polish their skills in little theaters in small towns, Reagan honed his speaking skills at GE meetings, factory tours and appearances before local gatherings.

Reagan also found his voice, learning that Hollywood role playing could be placed in the service of delivering a political message. Instead of handing him a packaged script, GE, as people would later say, “let Reagan be Reagan.” So he gave full vent to the fanatical anti-communism that had characterized his reign as head of the Screen Actor’s Guild. Eventually Reagan became so good at what he was doing that his conservative opinions caused GE to let him go, fearing the corporation would be tainted as favoring right wing causes.

When it came time for Reagan to deliver “The Speech” he had been well-rehearsed. He also had the aid of several people, foremost of whom was his wife, the former Nancy Davis, a mediocre actress and the daughter of Chicago neurosurgeon Dr. Loyal Davis. Reagan had married Nancy Davis after his marriage with Jane Wyman went sour, in part because of his obsession with the Screen Actor’s Guild. Unlike Wyman, Nancy Reagan not only supported her husband’s conservatism, she had far bigger and different dreams for him.

"The Speech" would help propel her husband on his way to making those dreams real. Delivered in support of Barry Goldwater it showed he made a better Goldwater than Goldwater himself. Although Goldwater would be resoundingly trounced, "The Speech" would rise like one of those movie heroes who picks up a fallen banner and leads the troops to victory. It captured all the pent-up grievances of those on the right who had come to resent the Great Society and what they felt were the appeasement of the left toward the Soviet Union.

Officially titled "A Time for Choosing," "The Speech" contained many of the rhetorical elements that would become Reagan staples: the use of anecdotes and selective statistics to drive home a point, the rapier-like turns of phrase that skewered his opponents while bringing smiles to his supporters, the "common sense" logic that sounds good when you hear it and for which you can offer no counterargument without a great deal of research, and, of course, the almost messianic belief that there is only one way to interpret the Constitution and American history.

All these tactics were perfect for the immediacy of television where each viewer sits alone in the living room, their minds directly linked to the speaker's words like some Vulcan mind meld. In "The Speech" Reagan opens by referring to his switch from the Democrats to the Republicans--a move he officially made two years before.

I have spent most of my life as a Democrat. I recently have seen fit to follow another course.

Then he goes after the GOP's favorite target--taxes--in his third paragraph, saying:

No nation in history has ever survived a tax burden that reached a third of its national income.

After a brief recitation of the issues of war and peace comes the paragraph that some conservatives can still recite from memory:

If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

The remainder of the speech has examples from the farm economy and a long discussion of welfare and urban renewal programs that was to become the center of what would become the Republican Counterrevolution against the New Deal. Amidst all the recitations of welfare's shortcomings, Ronald Reagan raises the questions that America has struggled to answer over the last half century:

Well, now, if government planning and welfare had the answer and they've had almost 30 years of it, shouldn't we expect government to almost read the score to us once in a while? Shouldn't they be telling us about the decline each year in the number of people needing help? The reduction in the need for public housing?

This is a masterful paragraph. The rhetorical tactic of raising a question and leaving it unanswered has a long history, in part because it lets the readers fill in the blanks with their own answers. Reagan begins with a question that all but implies a "yes," especially because of the folksy way he frames it. Behind it lies the entire Counterrevolutionary doctrine of "accountability" that spawned measures like No Child Left Behind.

The implication behind the next two questions lies in an assumption that at some point people will not need government aid. We know that isn't true, there will always be people who, for whatever reason, illness, injury, disability, the economy, lack of skills, or just plain bad luck will need help. For Republicans who still believed in William Graham Sumner's "survival of the fittest," this question also had to have resonated with their own belief that the poor are responsible for their own bad luck.

If Reagan's questions raise uncomfortable issues, sprinkled in his discussions of them are classic Reaganisms that his audiences would later come to expect, but at the time must have pulled more than a few people out of their seats and onto their feet:

Well, I for one resent it when a representative of the people refers to you and me--the free man and woman of this country--as "the masses." This is a term we haven't applied to ourselves in America.

A government can't control the economy without controlling people.

In a program that takes for the needy and gives to the greedy, we see such spectacles as in Cleveland, Ohio, a million-and-a-half-dollar building completed only three years ago must be destroyed to make way for what government officials call a "more compatible use of the land."

Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn't so.

Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this Earth.

Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us that they have a utopian solution of peace without victory.

When you read them, these phrases have a certain in-your-face edge to them that even today is unusual for a political speech, yet delivered in Reagan's practiced voice the edge seems smoother, almost folksy so you are caught off guard. The former actor and GE spokesperson had learned his craft well.

These skills would come together in the famous closing of "The Speech" in which he appropriates one of Franklin Roosevelt's most memorable phrases for Goldwater, his audacity a rhetorical symbol of the Counterrevolution's intent to undo the New Deal:

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.

It would be almost two decades before "The Speech" would come to full fruition. Reagan would become Governor of California, challenge Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976 and finally win the Presidency in 1980. There is little question those who had first heard the speech and seen the speaker as a future president played a large role in that ascent.

When Reagan began planning for his inaugural address it seems appropriate that he would tell speech writer Ken Khachigian to use "The Speech" as a template. The use of Khachigian raises a long-standing question about Ronald Reagan. For some time, it was fashionable to wonder if Reagan really wrote his speeches or if he was just reading another script handed to him.

Recent books and studies have shown us that Reagan was extremely intelligent and that he did a great deal of his own writing. Reagan in His Own Hand details the radio addresses Reagan himself wrote between 1975 and 1979 to keep himself in the public eye. It shows a writer with a keen sense of language and a rare ability to make complex ideas understandable. Ronald Reagan was no Woodrow Wilson--he would probably be the first to concede that--but neither was he the empty-headed script reader portrayed by his enemies.

In what is probably the best biography of Reagan, Reagan's America, Garry Wills brilliantly draws attention to how Reagan purposely made mistakes in his speeches:

Reagan has often goofed to look more natural--broken the grammar of sentences, feigned embarrassment, professionally avoided the appearance of being a professional. It is an important art in democratic politics. [p. 193]

With the First Inaugural--as with "The Speech"-it is clear the effort was Reagan's. Much as Harry Truman took his advisor's ideas and even some of their phrasing and then delivered his Kiel auditorium speech off the cuff, Reagan took Khachigian's drafts and then rewrote the final speech himself. No source, pro- or anti-Reagan disputes this. Richard Reeves probably has the best portrait of the writing of the speech in President Reagan: A Triumph of the Imagination. He outlines how Reagan gave Khachigian a six-inch stack of 3x5 note cards that held the best lines of his previous speeches. In a discussion with Khachigian he also sketched out a broad outline of the speech:

The system: everything we need is here. It is the people. This ceremony itself is evidence that government belongs to the people....Under that system: our nation went from peace to war on a single morning, we had the depression etc....We showed that they, the people, have all the power to solve things....Want optimism and hope, but not "goody-goody."...There's no reason not to believe that we have the answer to things that are wrong. [p. 4]

But Reeves goes on to acknowledge:

The words were Reagan's own. He wrote the final version of the speech out in longhand on a yellow legal pad. (p. 5)

Reagan made an unusual choice about the location for the speech. Where other presidents had addressed the nation from the front on the Capitol, Reagan chose to use rear, which as millions of tourists know provides one of the most famous views in America as it looks down the mall towards the Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, and Jefferson Memorial and now the World War II Memorial. Across the river lies Arlington National Cemetery. There seems little question Reagan personally stage-managed this setting which he would invoke in his Inaugural Address.

Like a combination of political advance men and school teachers, Reagan's staff spent the days before the speech lecturing to the media about the importance of this view, using language they might have cribbed from a Hollywood Western or one the nineteenth-century handbills that circulated across the Atlantic enticing new immigrants. The rear of the Capitol, they reminded the reporters, looked to the West which to Americans had always symbolized the boundless manifest destinies of opportunity.

Reagan's Inaugural begins with a brief recitation of the importance of the "orderly transfer of authority," but then does something quite extraordinary in singling out his predecessor for his help during the transition. Perhaps this was to help soften the blow of what would follow, which indicts Jimmy Carter's leadership:

By your gracious cooperation in the transition process, you have shown a watching world that we are a united people pledged to maintaining a political system which guarantees individual liberty to a greater degree than any other, and I thank you and your people for all your help in maintaining the continuity which is the bulwark of our republic.

The man who could brilliantly write two-sentence teasers for his radio addresses (Reagan would have made a great blogger), then gets right to the point--the economy, noting the nation was suffering from one of longest inflations in history. His detailing of the consequences of that inflation allows him to make one of the clever rhetorical transitions that characterized so many Reagan speeches, moving directly from inflation to his long-time causes of taxes and government spending:

Those who do work are denied a fair return for their labor by a tax system which penalizes successful achievement and keeps us from maintaining full productivity

But great as our tax burden is, it has not kept pace with public spending.

Then comes the paragraph that is probably the most quoted portion of this speech:

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.

What is often omitted, though, is the final sentence of this paragraph:

The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price.

This sentence along with several others remains one of the paradoxes of Reagan's Inaugural.

Labels: Ralph Brauer

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