May 15, 2007
Writing About Buckley Posted by Alexander Burns at 02:50 PM EST Joshua Zeitz’s front-page feature today reviews a new biography of William F. Buckley, Jr. The verdict from Mr. Zeitz is disappointing: The book is “too much an appreciation, rather than a critical study of a man whose influence on American political thought has run both wide and deep.” For those interested in Buckley’s career, and especially the earliest part of it, I recommend a glance at the final chapters of Sam Tanenhaus’s 1997 biography of Whittaker Chambers. It contains a brief but vivid portrait of Buckley. He comes across as a phenomenally gifted young thinker, determined to cleanse the American right of kooks and bigots and make it into a movement worth leading. “He is something special,” Chambers tells his wife, Esther, after a meeting with Buckley. “He was born, not made, and not many like that are born in any time.” Tanenhaus also notes the “glamour and style, the heedless joy of privileged youth,” that Buckley brought to conservatism. He and his wife, Patricia Taylor Buckley, “a Vancouver heiress as tall and striking as her husband,” helped produce an atmosphere in which, for the first time in a long time, it seemed like conservatism did not have to be the exclusive domain of grouchy old men like Robert Taft. Buckley was also a flamethrower, willing even to sabotage the Republican Presidency of Dwight Eisenhower in order to advance his more staunchly rightist cause. Obviously, the 40-page conclusion of another man’s biography does not do justice to Buckley, nor does it render him in the intensely critical light he deserves. However, readers like Mr. Zeitz and myself, who believe this figure “deserves a first-rate biography,” may not have long to wait. Tanenhaus is at work on another volume that promises to reproduce the success of Whittaker Chambers. This time, his subject is William F. Buckley, Jr..
May 15, 2007
Edward Jenner Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:40 AM EST The front page of this website noted yesterday that May 14 is the anniversary of Edward Jenner’s 1796 first vaccination of a patient. Jenner had noticed that milkmaids did not generally get smallpox, and he inoculated an eight-year-old boy, James Phipps, with material gathered from cowpox blisters on the hand of a milkmaid named Sarah Nelmes. I think modern historians of medicine now count Jenner as one of six people who over a period of a quarter century tested the possibility of using a cowpox-derived vaccine to immunize people against smallpox, but when I was a small boy reading more simplified and heroic accounts, Jenner invented vaccination, and modern medicine was born. It may in fact have been born at any one of a number of earlier and later moments, depending on how you choose to define medical modernity; I remember learning only later in life that for almost all of history the medical profession was in many respects as likely to kill you as to cure you, and that this would continue to be the case for many decades after Jenner. The crucial episodes in changing that ratio of results, as I remember the heroic and simplified version of the story, included vaccination, antisepsis, and antibiotics. In the popular histories of my youth, there were a fair number of medical heroes and very few if any medical villains. Then, when I was in my thirties, HIV was discovered, and there were some reported cases of doctors refusing to work on patients who had been infected with the virus. It was shocking, and instructive: Doctors looked less systematically heroic than they had before, and the art and science of medicine looked less absolutely impressive. In the first decades of the antibiotic revolution, laypeople may have had an easy notion that all infections could be cured. It wasn’t true, HIV brought that home, and more skepticism about medicine, science generally, and technical expertise seemed to find expression in both mass and elite culture. But we tend to overcorrect mistakes. The great revolution in our technical culture is biotechnology, and over the next decades it seems as reasonable to expect fantastic increases in our power over disease as it is to expect new pessimism and humility. Possibly as a result, the antiscientific prejudices of some academics in the humanities are now starting to look as old-fashioned as that mid-twentieth century fawning on the medical profession. Some simplified stories, after all, remain largely true. In 1980, the World Health Organization declared smallpox an eradicated disease, and I remember reading about it and thinking that for almost all of history, that would have been a nonesense sentence. How, during all those millennia, could a disease possibly have been “eradicated”? Jenner remains a real hero, in fact a wonderful one, even after the more sophisticated versions of medical history have been written and widely circulated.
May 14, 2007
Gary Hart VIII Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:30 AM EST “Tomas” writes in the discussion section, “My point, exactly. Can any of you who are carrying on this discussion explain to me why, if Gary Hart’s error was in [not] knowing that media standards had changed, he was hounded out of his race for president even before it began by a media frenzy in 1987, and there is no such thing now about Giuliani, McCain and Gingrich? Even Clinton made it through the 1992 race relatively unscathed. By contrast, Gary Hart’s personal life has been relatively mild compared to the trio of leading GOP candidates now. Why the distinction? . . . I am curious as to what you think of the apparent contradiction. Have media standards changed back, or changed again, or just disappeared?” First, life isn’t fair, and the media most certainly isn’t. But I think the reason that Gary Hart found his private life politically fatal when it became public was in his explicit dare to the press, when the subject came up, to “follow me around. . . . They’ll be very bored.” Immediately after that less-than-wise challenge, given the reality, the Donna Rice story came out and the frenzy erupted. Had he evaded comment, I think he might have survived the Donna Rice episode, at least if his PR people had handled it well. But the combination of the chutzpah of the challenge and the immediate appearance of the story after the challenge was beyond what even the deftest public relations campaign could handle. Senator Hart was toast. In the case of the current crop of candidates, however, their peccadilloes are old news (unless, of course, some juicy new ones come to light). That doesn’t make their private behavior any less egregious than Hart’s, just less politically potent. Giuliani, for instance, has been asked about his marital track record, most recently on Fox News Sunday yesterday, and he has been forthright about it. He said that he, like everyone else, is a miserable sinner, that he has learned from his sins, and seeks forgiveness—which is a Christian duty. He asks to be judged on his positive achievements as a politician, not his acknowledged failures as a human being. Whether that will work we’ll have to wait and see, but people in my experience are pretty forgiving of bad behavior if they perceive honest contrition. They are a lot less forgiving of hypocrisy and arrogance, which is what they perceived in the case of Senator Hart.
May 13, 2007
Gloria Steinem’s Friends Posted by Alexander Burns at 08:20 PM EST John Steele Gordon and Joshua Zeitz have been discussing feminism, Bill Clinton, and Monica Lewinsky. Again, without any desire to interrupt, I think a minor bit of outside evidence might be useful. Messrs. Zeitz and Gordon are debating, in part, whether “Gloria Steinem et al.” treated Bill Clinton better than he deserved because he was a Democrat, and whether a “moderate Republican (like Bob Packwood)” would have been allowed to get away with such behavior. To add my two cents, I think Clinton’s behavior should have elicited a much more censorious response from leading feminists. My aim in posting, however, is not to hold forth about that man’s personal improprieties. Instead, I’d like to offer a little evidence that Gloria Steinem is somewhat more politically unpredictable than Mr. Gordon suggests. The Clinton scandal was not the only affair of the 1990s in which Steinem was offered the chance to comment on the sexual ethics of a Democratic politician. At the beginning of the decade, long before anyone ever knew the name of Monica Lewinsky, Democratic Senator Chuck Robb of Virginia, the son-in-law of Lyndon Johnson, was caught in a liaison with a much younger woman—a onetime Miss Virginia, as a matter of fact. This was surprising at the time, since Robb had long been viewed as an upstanding veteran and a “conservative, stodgy, almost boring family man.” In response to the revelations about his personal life, Robb, like Clinton, split hairs over the details of his affair. In the face of evidence that he had engaged in some sex acts with the former beauty queen, Tai Collins, Robb denied having committed adultery because he had never had sexual intercourse with a woman other than his wife. Despite Robb’s status as a Democrat in good standing, Gloria Steinem thought his explanations were too clever by half. “People do care very deeply about our leaders telling the truth,” she told the Washington Post in an interview during Robb’s 1994 reelection campaign. “By Robb’s logic in this case, it’s kind of like saying if he’d had oral sex with another man, he wouldn’t be homosexual.” While Steinem did not accuse Robb of committing sexual harassment or taking advantage of a younger woman (Collins was 30 at the time their affair began), she did make it obvious that she considered the senator a dissembler and a hypocrite. A secondary note is that Steinem may be, as Mr. Gordon and Mr. Zeitz agree, a staunch Democrat, but she has not always hewed so close to the party line. In 1980, an op-ed columnist criticized Steinem’s decision to raise funds through a NARAL mailing list for “a candidate for the U.S. Senate who had voted for the neutron bomb, for recision of their ERA votes by states that had already ratified, for arms sales to Chile, against public financing of Congressional campaigns and against hospital cost containment.” With a phrase that now seems ironic, the columnist continued: “Of course, the candidate is Sen. Bob Packwood of Oregon.” Before the scandal that unraveled his Senate career, Packwood was known for his pro-choice views and his easy relationships with liberals like Steinem. Together, Packwood and Steinem fought Henry Hyde’s eponymous anti-abortion legislation. It was in an act of principle that Steinem pivoted to oppose Packwood. And it may have been a result of the enduring antagonism between her and Congressman Hyde, who returned to prominence as Bill Clinton’s tormentor, that prevented her from turning similarly on the forty-second President.
May 13, 2007
Gary Hart VII Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:50 AM EST I have no desire to interrupt the exchange unfolding between Joshua Zeitz and John Steele Gordon. Just briefly, though, I’d like to respond to Mr. Gordon’s earlier post in which he writes that he is “interested . . . that neither Mr. Burns nor Mr. Smoler mentioned the 800-pound gorilla of American sex scandals, the Monica Lewinsky uproar.” I left it out of my post because I’m not sure it really serves as evidence of the kind of hypocrisy that I was arguing merits intrusion into a politician’s private life. There’s probably an argument to be made that Clinton’s behavior constituted hypocrisy. For example, it takes a certain degree of gumption to champion welfare reform designed to encourage responsible family behavior, while simultaneously wrecking your own family. That’s a more difficult case to make, though, than the one against Steve LaTourette. In his post, Mr. Gordon also says he doubts that “some latter-day combination of William Allen White, Edward R. Murrow, and Walter Lippmann could have brought himself to suppress” the Lewinsky story. Maybe so, maybe not. On the tail end of the Clinton impeachment affair, it actually came out that one mediocre reporter, no Murrow or Lippmann he, had been sitting on a hugely salacious story that arguably merited reporting even more than the Lewinsky news. Lloyd Grove, the author of the Washington Post’s gossip column, had known for some time about a rumored affair between House Speaker New Gingrich and a much younger aide, Callista Bisek. If one believes that the press ought to expose hypocrisy, then it would seem hard to justify keeping it secret that Bill Clinton’s most enthusiastic antagonist was carrying on an extramarital tryst of his own. Grove has never explained his decision in a terribly plausible way. The news of Gingrich’s affair came out, regardless of Grove’s discretion, and Callista Bisek is now what some former Gingrich staffers call “Wife No. 3.” If Gingrich decides to make his own bid for President, I suspect we’ll be hearing much more about this whole history. And if the former speaker expects everything to turn out well, he should talk to Gary Hart.
May 12, 2007
What Do Women Want? III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:30 PM EST Mr. Gordon has it backwards. He writes that if I think “that feminist leaders would have had the same reaction to the Monica Lewinsky scandal had Bill Clinton been a Republican, then that’s fine with [him]. It’s a free country, and one can believe what one wants: in a flat earth, that the world was created in 4004 B.C., in Santa Claus, that the moon is made of green cheese, that pigs can fly, you name it.” These five propositions have been roundly discredited by scientific evidence (though certain parties—namely, a few of my nieces and nephews—are still clinging for dear life to the Santa Claus narrative). Mr. Gordon has accused feminists like Gloria Steinem of hypocrisy and class bias. In earlier posts I produced evidence that second-wave feminism has been extremely attentive to matters concerning working-class and middle-class women alike, and I asked Mr. Gordon to produce evidence to the contrary, and/or evidence that prominent feminists have been hypocritical in their treatment of male politicians. He has done neither. In effect, it is Mr. Gordon, not I, who retains old prejudices without any sustaining evidence, and sometimes, in the face of evidence to the contrary. But, as he says, it’s a free country, and if he wants to believe in flying pigs, I’m all for his right to do so. Mr. Gordon is correct that Gloria Steinem is a partisan Democrat, though the notion that she considers herself a Democrat first and a feminist second I very much doubt. Steinem played an active role in the presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern and also clocked considerable time as a volunteer organizer and publicist for liberal outfits like the United Farm Workers of America. (Which, I might add, would bolster rather than weaken the case that she has been extremely interested in the issues effecting working-class women. It’s worth noting also that Steinem grew up in a working-poor family, in a working-poor neighborhood of Toledo, Ohio, attended Smith College on scholarship, and spent the first 20 years of her professional career living in a very cramped one-bedroom apartment in New York, barely scratching out a living as a freelance writer. Her working-class credentials, like those of many second-wave feminists who came to prominence in the 1970s, are impeccable.) But Mr. Gordon’s original point was not that many leading feminists are partisan; indeed, many are. His point was that they are upper-middle-class snobs who look down their noses at working-class women and stay-at-home mothers, and that they are hypocrites. He has not attempted to prove either of these points and has ignored all evidence to the contrary.
May 12, 2007
LoveMusik Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:35 PM EST A new musical, LoveMusik, chronicles the intertwined lives and careers of the composer Kurt Weill and the actress Lotte Lenya, who were first Germans and then Americans, part of that vast gift Adolf Hitler made to the United States of America when he forced a lot of fiercely talented Europeans across an ocean and almost all of them stayed. The musical is based on a published collection of Weill’s and Lenya’s letters to one another over a quarter century, Speak Low, edited by the music historian Kim Kowalke, which has been turned into a musical by Alfred Uhry, a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright, at the request of the director Harold Prince. I am not sure how good LoveMusik is—few if any of the very beautiful Weill songs in its score are sung in anything like their entirety, the play seems too long and by its end mawkish—but in places I found it wonderfully affecting. It begins in Weimar Berlin, with the first encounter of its principals, an occasion on which Lenya seduced Weill in a rowboat, and ends with an irritable and nervous Lenya putting on stage makeup, waiting to reprise what was arguably her greatest achievement with Weill and Bertolt Brecht, the 1927 production of The Threepenny Opera. She thinks she is running the risk of ridicule by reviving the role, and her director agrees, but they will prove to be mistaken, of which more below. Weill had other great operas, some of then with the same collaborator and singer—The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and Happy End—and a string of successes in America, where he died at the age of 50—but Threepenny Opera remains, I think, the most accessible and probably the most famous work from his period as a European composer. Weill remade himself into an American composer in exile (although did not think of it as exile; he was, in his view, very much an American) by assiduously studying American popular music, and he wrote for both our stage and our screen. Some of what he did in America has passionate admirers, and their admiration is not foolish; I have seen delightful revivals of some of the American musicals—One Touch of Venus and Lady In the Dark—but the Weimar period saw Weill’s most brilliant work. Neither that work nor the Berlin years generally become the focus of LoveMusik, which rather recounts Weill’s and Lenya’s complicated collective life (they were twice married, in 1926 and 1937, divorced in 1933, and both marriages had their difficulties). But the play does end with what I find a moving reference to the most influential recreation of The Threepenny Opera for an American audience, the 1954 production at the Theatre de Lys. That is the production the actress Donna Murphy is preparing for as LoveMusik closes, and she is wearing the costume her character Jenny wore in the photograph taken for the album cover of the recording of that famous production. It took me a minute to realize that, my visual memory only cueing when the orchestra began the raucous, thrilling overture to The Threepenny Opera, and the play ended. Walking out onto a New York sidewalk, I reflected that while Weill and Lenya were Americans, one thing immigrant Americans do is add to the great, fabulously rich intermixture of our culture. Weill and Lenya let Americans take possession of one of the most harshly brilliant periods of modern European culture; the memory (and reworking) of Weimar is now as much ours as it is anyone’s, a mass legacy probably in significant part inherited via the effect of that 1954 play revived in Greenwich Village. American culture is so easily exported that people annoyed by its ubiquity somehow imply that the business is done at the point of a gun, or the moral equivalent thereof, which is of course ridiculous—although it is true, as LoveMusik reminds us, that a fair amount of the culture we’ve imported arrived at the point of a gun.
May 12, 2007
What Do Women Want? II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:35 PM EST I’m afraid I will just have to leave my thought experiment as it is. If Joshua Zeitz thinks that feminist leaders would have had the same reaction to the Monica Lewinsky scandal had Bill Clinton been a Republican, then that’s fine with me. It’s a free country, and one can believe what one wants: in a flat earth, that the world was created in 4004 B.C., in Santa Claus, that the moon is made of green cheese, that pigs can fly, you name it. To use her as an example, it seems to me that Gloria Steinem is a partisan Democrat first, a feminist second. After all, she has referred to Kay Bailey Hutchinson as a “female impersonator.” Senator Hutchinson is another woman who, one would think, would be a feminist hero, having climbed the greasy pole of Texas politics all the way to the United States Senate on her own, with no pathbreaking from a husband or father. But, no, she’s not even a real woman in Ms Steinem’s view, let alone a hero. Why? She’s a Republican. I think the problem here is that Mr. Zeitz is taking a very lawyer-like attitude towards the scandal. It wasn’t sexual harassment under the law and therefore there’s no problem. Legally, as I said, he’s right. Politically, he and the leaders of the modern feminist movement who kept trying to change the subject are dead wrong. Bill Clinton’s desperate attempts to evade responsibility for his actions—including wagging his finger at the American people and telling them a bald-faced lie—is, I think, all the evidence one needs of that. Had Bill Clinton been, say, president of the Kiwanis Club in Frozen Sneakers, Iowa (a mythical town invented by William F. Buckley, Jr.), then perhaps his behavior would have been a matter for him, his wife, and his awestruck employee. But Bill Clinton was not president of the Frozen Sneakers Kiwanis Club, he was President of the United States. Only a lawyer with a hopeless case to win or a hopelessly partisan Democrat could fail to see how that makes a profound difference. He had no right whatever to do what he did, even if it was not technically illegal and Monica Lewinsky welcomed his advances with open arms, if that’s the relevant part of the human anatomy in this case. Mr. Zeitz attributes the crack about Leonard Woodcock in my post to me. I’m flattered, but it was coined by Garry Trudeau. I merely drafted it and sent it into rhetorical battle. I did, however, come up with “Real women don’t do housework; cleaning ladies do housework.” Since honesty forces me momentarily to set aside my characteristic modesty, I must say I rather like it.
May 12, 2007
What Do Women Want? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:35 PM EST John Steele Gordon’s last post was clever, but I’m not sure he answered two of my basic questions: (1) On what evidentiary basis does he accuse feminist leaders of hypocrisy in their reaction to the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal? And (2) on what evidentiary basis does he believe that the National Organization for Women—and, presumably, other feminist organizations—are class-biased? On the question of alleged feminist hypocrisy, Mr. Gordon proposes a “thought experiment”: Substitute a moderate Republican for Bill Clinton in 1998, and ask whether there is “a person on the planet not in custodial care for chronic political hallucination who thinks that Gloria Steinem and Co. would not have been howling for him to be hanged from a lamppost in Lafayette Square.” That’s not really an argument; it’s an ad hominem attack on Gloria Steinem et al. Mr. Gordon does not address the fundamental difference between what Bob Packwood did and what Bill Clinton did. Neither does he provide any past evidence that would suggest that Gloria Steinem or other prominent feminists have applied a double standard in their public reaction to sexual harassment cases. It’s possible that such hypocrisy exists, but until Mr. Gordon provides some example to this effect, his argument leans on either a vague hunch or personal ideological bias rather than the historical record. It’s worth remembering that many younger second-wave feminists of the 1970s came to politics through the civil rights and antiwar movements and proved outspoken critics of the misogyny that pervaded these liberal and New Left coalitions. Veterans of lunch-counter sit-ins, voter registration drives and campus shutdowns, these women came to feminism out of disillusionment with the left, not the right. When Stokely Carmichael, the chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, quipped that “the only position for women in SNCC is prone,” he unwittingly spurred an exodus of many prominent women activists from the movement; they openly denounced their former colleagues on the left and turned their attention to women’s liberation. When a prominent activist attempted to voice the concerns of women at an antiwar demonstration in January 1969, left-wing male protesters taunted her with cries of “Take her off the stage! Rape her in a back alley! Take it off!” In the aftermath of this episode, the activist Ellen Willis decided that a “genuine alliance with male radicals will not be possible until sexism sickens them as much as racism. This will not be accomplished through persuasion, conciliation, or love, but through independence and solidarity.” In other words, second-wave feminists have—historically, at least—turned their fire on the left as often and as assiduously as they’ve turned it on the right. On the question of NOW’s (and feminism’s) alleged class bias, Mr. Gordon “stand[s] by [his] statement that the modern feminist movement is mostly concerned with liberal politics and has a narrow, class-based conception of the proper place of women in American society. Be a high-power lawyer whose kids are raised by nannies from the age of three days? Good. Be a full-time housewife or pursue a career that allows one to raise one’s own kids? Bad. Not liberated. Real women don’t do housework; cleaning ladies do housework.” Historically, this argument is dead wrong. Ms. magazine, the flagship feminist publication of the 1970s, has a long history dating to its birth some 35 years ago of asserting the rights and dignity of women who choose to be stay-at-home wives and mothers. When asked what “the Movement [has] to say to those women who insist—as so many do—that they like being wives and mothers and are perfectly happy in these roles,” Gloria Steinem responded that the “Movement says the point is choice. If women really like these positions, then that’s fine. But women also should be able to be engineers and jockeys and truck drivers and nuclear physicists. The whole point of the Movement is individual choice—for both men and women. The point is to become individuals.” To that effect, her magazine ran profiles of, and articles by, stay-at-home mothers and housewives and explored issues like credit and banking equality, marriage equality, education, daycare, and women’s health, all of which concerned such women. Feminists writing in the pages of Ms. also forwarded the controversial argument that stay-at-home mothers and housewives were entitled to a portion of their husbands’ salaries and to a 40-hour work week, as they were no less integral to the working of the industrial economy than were their wage-earning husbands. This argument signaled respect, not disdain, for the work that stay-at-home mothers undertook. As for Steinem, she suggested that policymakers look to Sweden, where “men and women . . . work shorter hours, then have time together at home to run the household and rear children. Children need both mother and father. The trouble now is that they often have too much mother and not enough father.” My point is this: Second-wave feminism is much more complex and nuanced than the caricature that Mr. Gordon has offered, and historically feminists have pitched a big tent that included women who chose to work outside of the home, and women who chose to work exclusively within the home. As for his quip about Leonard Woodcock, the former leader of the United Auto Workers, again, Mr. Gordon has offered up some clever and biting prose, but this is no substitute for evidence. From the 1960s through the 1980s, organizations like NOW and publications like Ms. placed bread-and-butter issues affecting working women at the center of their agenda. Credit and banking equity, wage equity, restrictions against sexual harassment in the workplace—all are vital to the interests of working-class women. So, too, are questions like welfare reform, another key concern of second-wave feminism, given the increasing numbers of single mothers in America. So what of “NOW now,” as Mr. Gordon put it? A brief glance at the organization’s website shows that some of the issues it identifies as central to its mission are: reproductive rights; violence against women; constitutional equality; lesbian rights; disability rights; family; health; immigration; marriage equality; Social Security; Title IX/education; welfare; women-friendly workplace; women in the military; and “fighting the right,” a catch-all category that appears to be focused on responding to the claims of anti-feminists. There’s no denying that NOW’s agenda places it firmly in the liberal camp. The issue Mr. Gordon raised is whether NOW is overly concerned with issues effecting upper-middle-class women. All of the issues listed above have clear applicability to working-class women, and the ones I’ve italicized arguably apply more to working women than to wealthy women. On balance, the evidence does not sustain Mr. Gordon’s argument.
May 12, 2007
Gary Hart VI Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:50 AM EST A few points in response to Joshua Zeitz’s post on this subject. First, I am not a lawyer, but as far as I understand it, President Clinton’s conduct with regard to Monica Lewinsky did not violate any law. (His conduct with regard to the investigation is another matter, but not germane to the subject at hand.) But it most certainly violated his “contract” with the American people, who have a right to expect self-control from a President. He behaved despicably, and decent people of whatever political opinions should have said so. Therefore it was a legitimate news story. Indeed the media itself would have been violating its contract with the American people had it not covered the story. Second, as for the reaction of Gloria Steinem, Catherine MacKinnon, et al., to the scandal, he writes, “there’s a glaring difference between what Bill Clinton did and what Bob Packwood and Clarence Thomas did (or, in the case of the latter, [was] accused of doing). It’s one thing to enter into an affair with a subordinate; it’s quite another thing to chase employees around desks, grope them, or place erotica on their desks.” I propose a thought experiment. Assume everything is exactly the same as what happened in the Lewinsky scandal except for one fact: Bill Clinton was a moderate Republican (like Bob Packwood) instead of a moderate Democrat. Is there a person on the planet not in custodial care for chronic political hallucination who thinks that Gloria Steinem and Co. would not have been howling for him to be hanged from a lamppost in Lafayette Square, but would instead have said, as in effect they did, “That’s none of our business”? Third, he writes, “Many if not most of the women who staffed the commissions [on the status of women] were labor feminists and thus, by definition, working-class.” This reminds me of the famous line from Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury comic strip about Leonard Woodcock, then head of the United Automobile Workers: “All labor leaders are sensitive to the needs of the working class. That’s how they avoid belonging to it.” Fourth, he writes, “As a historian, I am more interested in what NOW was doing in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, but I have no reason to believe its agenda is any less concerned today with issues faced by working women than it was 30 years ago.” I guess Mr. Zeitz is more concerned with NOW then than NOW now. Sorry, couldn’t resist. But I stand by my statement that the modern feminist movement is mostly concerned with liberal politics and has a narrow, class-based conception of the proper place of women in American society. Be a high-power lawyer whose kids are raised by nannies from the age of three days? Good. Be a full-time housewife or pursue a career that allows one to raise one’s own kids? Bad. Not liberated. Real women don’t do housework; cleaning ladies do housework. Consider Martha Stewart. She started with nothing and created a business empire that put her on the Forbes 400 list entirely by her own efforts. One would think she would be a feminist hero of the first order. No, sorry, wrong empire. Nothing domestic, please, we’re feminists. When Martha Stewart was railroaded into jail for an offense that would have gotten anyone else a slap on the wrist, the silence from the feminist movement was deafening. Fifth, Mr. Zeitz writes that my idea that a zone of privacy should extend around not only the sex lives of politicians but their financial lives as well, absent credible evidence of wrongdoing, must mean that I disagree “with the requirement that congressmen release a yearly accounting of their financial holdings and transactions.” Heaven knows Congress has its bad actors, from Republican Randy Cunningham, with his less-than-arms-length real estate deals, to Democrat William Jefferson’s $90,000 in cash stored in the freezer next to the four-cheese pizza and Ben and Jerry’s new Mint Chocolate Chunk ice cream (which is utterly delicious, by the way). I have no well-thought-out solution to the genuine problem of keeping government officials honest while keeping their private affairs private. Perhaps a nonpartisan commission could receive the necessary information and have broad powers to demand clarification as needed, but be under the same strictures as the IRS about releasing it. Only if the commission launched a formal investigation or referred the matter to the Justice Department for action would the fact be made public. But that’s an off-the-top-of-my-head suggestion.
May 11, 2007
Gary Hart V Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 06:30 PM EST Two observations about John Steele Gordon’s last post. First, regarding the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, Mr. Gordon writes that because they did not call for Bill Clinton’s head, ”prominent members of the feminist movement show[ed] no little hypocrisy themselves, or at least political selectivity. But then I’ve long argued that the National Organization for Women might a good deal more accurately be called the National Organization for Upper-Middle-Class Liberal Women.” At first, I thought Mr. Gordon was arguing that prominent second-wave feminists should have made the case that the President’s conduct constituted a form of sexual harassment and as such violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and subsequent amendments, and the 1963 Equal Pay Act. As early as 1975, when a group of women at Cornell University accused a male professor of “sexual harassment” (they are widely credited with having first invoked the term), and when feminist legal scholars like Nadine Taub and Catherine MacKinnon began arguing that sexual harassment diminished women’s economic independence and thus constituted a violation of employment law, feminists have argued for stricter regulations governing sexual overtures and conduct in the workplace. In 1980 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission responded to these calls and issued its first guidelines, instructing employers how to remain within the limits of the law. Generally speaking, the EEOC’s “Guidelines on Discrimination” defined unwelcome sexual and romantic overtures as a violation of a woman’s civil rights. At the time of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, some conservative pundits took aim at prominent feminists like Gloria Steinem and Catherine MacKinnon, who had been outspoken in their denunciation of Clarence Thomas and Bob Packwood but who did not view Clinton’s conduct as falling under the rubric of sexual harassment. I suppose there’s some argument to be made here, inasmuch as Clinton was a man of great authority, and however much she may have consented to the affair, Lewinsky could never be considered a free and equal partner. (This is partly why military personnel are not permitted to become romantically involved with persons under their command, broadly defined. A staff sergeant simply cannot enjoy a level of romantic autonomy equal to that of a major.) That said, the rules governing military and civilian establishments are different, and there’s a glaring difference between what Bill Clinton did and what Bob Packwood and Clarence Thomas did (or, in the case of the latter, were accused of doing). It’s one thing to enter into an affair with a subordinate; it’s quite another thing to chase employees around desks, grope them, or place erotica on their desks. Though I’m inclined to agree with Steinem and MacKinnon on this matter, I assumed that Mr. Gordon’s argument with second-wave feminists had something to do with their alleged non-concern for working women (in this case, Monica Lewinsky). Why else quip that NOW should be renamed the “National Organization for Upper-Middle-Class Liberal Women”? This strikes me as an unfair and historically inaccurate barb. NOW was a creature of the state and federal Commissions on the Status of Women. These investigative bodies, which John Kennedy created by executive order in 1961, studied lingering inequalities in employment, wages, and education and sparked consideration of 432 bills at the congressional level, and countless others at the state and local levels, to redress these problems. Many if not most of the women who staffed the commissions were labor feminists and thus, by definition, working-class. Frustrated by the refusal of the EEOC to enforce the gender provisions of Title VII, in 1966 prominent representatives of the state and federal commissions founded NOW, an organization that focused primarily on wage, income, education, and credit inequality well into the late 1970s. As a historian, I am more interested in what NOW was doing in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, but I have no reason to believe its agenda is any less concerned today with issues faced by working women, than it was 30 years ago. At second glance, however, I’m not sure that this was Mr. Gordon’s beef with second-wave feminists. Later in his post, he argued that Clinton’s affair, unlike most instances of sexual misconduct on the part of public officials, was “legitimate news” because “Bill Clinton was President of the United States, entrusted by the people with the country’s highest office, and as such had a profound obligation to behave himself in a manner that did credit to the country. Having a tawdry affair with a White House intern less than half his age in the White House itself was an outrageous violation of that duty and very much a matter of public concern. He disgraced himself and therefore, ex officio, disgraced the country.” Maybe so, but earlier in his post Mr. Gordon wrote that the media and the public should stay out of the private lives of politicians “unless that private business is illegal or evidence of gross hypocrisy or other disqualification for office.” Nothing that Clinton did was illegal; and the term “disqualification for high office” is a loose one. It would seem to cut against the very argument that Mr. Gordon made earlier in his post. More to the point, exactly why does Mr. Gordon believe that prominent feminists were both hypocritical and class-biased in their response to the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal? He never says exactly why this was so, and I’m genuinely eager for some clarification. My second point refers to Mr. Gordon’s belief that “the zone of privacy should extend not only to their sex lives, but to such things as their income taxes. I see no reason whatever why candidates and officeholders should make their private financial affairs public unless there is credible evidence of something nefarious going on.” I can only assume that Mr. Gordon also disagrees with the requirement that congressmen release a yearly accounting of their financial holdings and transactions. The reason for these customs and regulations is that we can’t really know if something “nefarious” is going on unless we have access to some form of disclosure. Whether congressmen are accepting gifts from interested parties, buying houses at below-market rates and selling them at above-market rates (e.g., Randy Cunningham), investing in companies that their committees regulate and oversee, or improperly hiding income (which may have been improperly gained) is impossible to determine without some form of disclosure. I believe that’s the rationale for this level of scrutiny.
May 11, 2007
What the West Was Really Like: An Interview with Sherry Monahan Posted by Allen Barra at 02:45 PM EST With her books The Wicked West: Boozers, Cruisers, Gamblers, and More; Pike’s Peak: Adventurers, Communities, and Lifestyles; and now Tombstone’s Treasure: Silver Mines and Golden Saloons, Sherry Monahan has shot down more Western myths than Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and Wild Bill Hickok did bad guys. She discussed her new book with us from her home in North Carolina. In your latest book you tell us that Tombstone, Arizona, in its heyday had telephones, ice cream, and baseball. Come on now, is this frontier history or science fiction? How come we’ve never seen any of this in the movies? It’s total frontier history! It would be nice to see real history reflected in the movies, but most Westerns deal with cowboys and Indians, not people swimming or eating ice cream. Besides, who would believe that Wyatt Earp popped into Miss Leary’s ice cream parlor for a scoop of chocolate or vanilla? He was a tough lawman. Eating ice cream sort of softens his image (pun intended). Can you imagine Big Nose Kate or Josephine Earp in their Victorian swimming outfits at the pool? Now there’s an attractive shot!
 | | Sherry Monahan dressed as a Wild West faro dealer. |
Another point you emphasize that I seldom see in the movies is the cost of living in mining camps, particularly Tombstone. This was, you write, “primarily because most things had to be imported. Consumers not only paid for the goods, but they also had to pay for the cost of transporting goods to town.” In southwestern Arizona, lumber cost two to three times what it cost in other parts of the state, and nearly everything else from coffee to clothes had to be brought in by wagon. I imagine this was the case in nearly every western mining camp, including Deadwood and Virginia City. How, then, could average people get by? Or was there a strong trickle-down effect from the silver and gold being mined that pumped up wages?There was a trickle-down effect. Those who lived in towns like Tombstone and Deadwood did pay higher prices because of importing, but dressmakers, tailors, housekeepers, and others simply charged more for their services, proportionate to the cost of living. No one batted an eyelash at their prices. And, not unlike today, the higher one’s salary, the more luxury they could afford. A miner or laborer did not go out to eat every night, like a mine owner or wealthy businessman did. A miner or laborer also didn’t stay at the town’s fancy hotels. They lived in either a boarding house or a rugged miner’s cabin. The picture you paint of the classical Western saloon or at least the big saloons in Tombstone is certainly much different than the one we’ve been given all these years. The music, for instance. In the movies, all we’ve ever gotten is someone playing songs on a piano—usually from the wrong period. What kind of music could you expect hear in a mining camp circa 1880? The musical selections in the saloons were played by Italian string bands, brass quartets, and even classical pianists. Some of the fancier saloons hired a solo singer, usually female, who serenaded the patrons. However, don’t drudge up that Hollywood scene with her chest hanging out, feather boas, and corsets. A female singer wore a beautiful Victorian gown, maybe sleeveless and off the shoulder, but no cleavage. The traditional Stephen Foster songs were rarely being pounded out by a drunken cowboy. Remember that saloons, in a lot of instances, were social gathering places where the local men went to relax and discuss events or politics. But, just like today, some people got carried away with too much liquor and became obnoxious. They were usually escorted out by the barkeeper or the local law enforcement. Speaking of intoxication, one of the revelations of your books concerns the drinking habits of frontiersmen. Everyone in Westerns orders whiskey, which they immediately gulp down. It seems to me that a moment’s reflection would confirm that this wouldn’t quench thirst and would lead to almost immediate drunkenness. What did cowboys, miners, and townsfolk typically order in the saloons? As you indicated, most saloon patrons did not belly up to the bar and ask for a shot of whiskey. Yes, it did happen in very remote locations where supplies were hard to come by. However, the saloons in towns like the ones you see in the movies offered all sorts of fancy drinks. Some of the most popular drinks in 1881 included mint juleps, eggnogs, champagne flips, claret sangarees, and Tom and Jerries. Imported brandies, champagne, and wine were also enjoyed. Saloon owners prided themselves on hiring the top bartenders, or “mixologists,” and advertised that fact. Beer was also very popular, and many towns had their own breweries, usually run by German or Swiss immigrants. Saloons also offered imported beer from Ireland, Germany, England, and other European countries. In your chapter on entertainments, you write about cockfights, horse racing, boxing, wrestling, variety shows, and baseball. Give us an idea of how a rancher or businessman dropping into Tombstone for a long weekend might amuse himself. Wow! The sky was the limit. Tombstone had baseball teams, a racing track, a bowling alley, shooting ranges, a swimming pool, theaters, and more. If you were a man, you could choose from any of those, or head to one of the many saloons in town for a drink or gambling. Women, on the other hand, didn’t have too many choices. They attended the sporting events in town—except for the cockfights—and on certain days of the week they could go swimming. They also attended the performances at Schieffelin Hall, but dared not enter the Bird Cage or Crystal Palace theaters. The latter two were patronized only by men, and the women who were there were either performers or “soiled doves.” They became men-only establishments because proper women chose not to enter them so as not to soil their image. You’ve given faro exhibitions and written a book on classic Tombstone cuisine. So if you were there in 1881, what job might you choose for yourself? Would you run a gambling concession, a restaurant, perhaps, or might you choose the path of Clara Brown, the much respected journalist who went to Tombstone from California back in Wyatt Earp days? I think I would like to have been that rare exception, a female faro dealer. There were very few of them, and they were very classy and well respected. They wore beautiful gowns and jewelry, stayed at the finest hotels, ate in the best restaurants, and lived a pretty nice life. Who knows? Maybe I was one in a former life. But then again, being a journalist would have been pretty neat, too.
May 11, 2007
Gary Hart IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:10 AM EST Count me in along with Fredric Smoler and Alexander Burns when it comes to wishing that the media would butt out of the private business of public men and women unless that private business is illegal or evidence of gross hypocrisy or other disqualification for office. But I think that the zone of privacy should extend not only to their sex lives, but to such things as their income taxes. I see no reason whatever why candidates and officeholders should make their private financial affairs public unless there is credible evidence of something nefarious going on. Unfortunately I doubt that that genie is going back in the bottle, although Mr. Smoler’s idea of a trust fund to out overly nosey journalists who themselves have feet of clay is an intriguing one. It would certainly be refreshing, however, if a candidate, asked an unnecessarily intrusive question, would simply say, “That’s none of your or anyone else’s damn business, and if you don’t like it I suggest you tell your readers to vote for my opponent.” I bet it would gain him votes. Members of the media, after all, are even less esteemed than politicians, if that’s possible. I am interested, however, that neither Mr. Burns nor Mr. Smoler mentioned the 800-pound gorilla of American sex scandals, the Monica Lewinsky uproar. People have argued that since both she and the President were of lawful age—and certainly Bill Clinton never campaigned on the strength of his moral rectitude—it was a private matter. Among those so arguing were prominent members of the feminist movement, showing no little hypocrisy themselves, or at least political selectivity. But then I’ve long argued that the National Organization for Women might a good deal more accurately be called the National Organization for Upper-Middle-Class Liberal Women. So should the press in a perfect world have ignored the evidence of the Lewinsky affair when it came to light? (We do not, of course, live in a perfect world, and I doubt if even some latter-day combination of William Allen White, Edward R. Murrow, and Walter Lippmann could have brought himself to suppress a story of such obviously gigantic news value.) My take is that the story was legitimate news. Bill Clinton was President of the United States, entrusted by the people with the country’s highest office, and as such had a profound obligation to behave himself in a manner that did credit to the country. Having a tawdry affair with a White House intern less than half his age in the White House itself was an outrageous violation of that duty and very much a matter of public concern. He disgraced himself and therefore, ex officio, disgraced the country. Since Presidents are judged in the court of history, I have no doubt that Clinton will pay a fearsome historical price for his dalliance. A hundred years from now, the average man in the street will know little more about him than the average man today knows about William McKinley. Except, of course, for one thing. Late-night comedians, circa 2107, will still be making jokes about it.
May 11, 2007
Gary Hart III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:35 AM EST I agree with Alexander Burns that “there are some situations in which a public figure’s sex life is fair game for journalists. When a politician sets himself up as an advocate of moral virtues or family values, but leads a life that’s inconsistent with his own ethical prescriptions, it should be legitimate for journalists to challenge him.” I do not agree to this without some pangs, since there are degrees of hypocrisy, some more culpable than others, and I can imagine some hard cases making for bad law, but the broad principle seems right. I suspect Mr. Burns is also right when he writes that “we live in a time when public personalities have to lay open their private lives, and regrettable though that may be, I doubt that it’s possible to turn back the proverbial clock”—but I am not absolutely certain. I can imagine the United States adopting European Union–style privacy laws, although the EU instead moving in our direction seems more likely. If the U.S. did that, the courts might in the long run uphold such laws, despite current views of the First Amendment difficulties; if Congress felt sufficiently strongly, its use of the impeachment power would almost certainly contract the courts’ views of the First Amendment. The Internet, if it stays as weakly regulated as it is now, would in any event make such laws ineffective, although I suppose foreign politicians just might enforce laws protecting the sexual privacy of all politicians more vigorously than they police, say, child pornography; self-interest can make for impressive solidarity. As a general principle, I am not positive that any social or legal trend is irreversible, which is sometimes a comfort (slavery), and sometimes not (once again, slavery). My suggestion of deterrence by way of reprisal was not too serious, but when all is said and done, it might have some useful effect on what was once known, perhaps wishfully, as the respectable press. If salacious gossip appeared only in those tabloids you can buy at a supermarket checkout counter, the ones retailing news of UFOs and such like, people would probably be less likely to credit that gossip. And the threat of effective reprisal does sometimes work; tort law is not without its successes, ditto, in their day, both NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
May 10, 2007
Gary Hart II Posted by Alexander Burns at 11:30 AM EST Like Fred Smoler, I appreciated John Steele Gordon’s feature article on Gary Hart on Tuesday. Hart has distinguished himself in the last couple of decades as one of the relatively few men who continue to think productively about policy after leaving public office. Most of them tend to follow the example of Paul Laxalt or Dale Bumpers, both elected with Hart in 1974, who retired into comfortable lives of consulting and cushy legal work. Hart, whose life is doubtless just as comfortable, has stayed active in the realm of politics and public debate and earned a graduate degree from Oxford in 2001. One reader has noted this in the comments section of this website. It’s remarkable that a motivated and pretty thoughtful person like Hart could have let his presidential aspirations founder on such a stupid mistake. Also, like Fred Smoler, I think it would be nice if the press would be a little more reluctant to pry into the “legal aspects of [the] consensual sexual lives” of public figures. At the same time, I’m not sure I’d agree that “a politician’s sexual life is none of my business, any more than mine is of a politician’s.” I’d argue that there are some situations in which a public figure’s sex life is fair game for journalists. When a politician sets himself up as an advocate of moral virtues or family values, but leads a life that’s inconsistent with his own ethical prescriptions, it should be legitimate for journalists to challenge him. Recent history provides many examples of such hypocrisy. Congressman Steve LaTourette, for example, voted for the Defense of Marriage Act and then divorced his wife for a staffer he’d been sleeping with. This is hardly a vital matter of public concern, but if the press has a right to reveal insincerity and duplicitousness, then LaTourette’s sex life has to be in bounds. More recently, Representative Harold Ford lost a Senate election last November in which he presented himself as a Democrat with traditional social values. When it came out that he had partied at the Playboy mansion, Ford’s campaign unraveled fast. I find it hard to pity him. Investigations of a person’s private life can, of course, become too invasive. But we live in a time when public personalities have to lay open their private lives, and regrettable though that may be, I doubt that it’s possible to turn back the proverbial clock. The best and most realistic hope for the future is that reporters will focus on outing hypocrites, rather than on embarrassing basically decent but flawed people. Some good men will suffer, but if a few more two-faced politicians, like former Congressman Mark Foley or former Kentucky Governor Paul Patton, are made to answer for their errant ways, I’m not sure their constituents will be the worse off for it.
May 9, 2007
Branch Rickey, Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman: An Interview with Lee Lowenfish Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 10:55 PM EST Baseball, and all of America, recently celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s major-league debut. When he ran onto the field with the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947, he became the first African-American to play in the majors since the 1880s. The executive who signed him was Branch Rickey, and just as there is much more to Jackie Robinson than his time with the Dodgers—from his multi-sport stardom at UCLA and his defiance of segregation in the Army to his later career as a businessman and civil rights activist—there is also much more to Branch Rickey than the personnel move for which he remains so justly famous. Lee Lowenfish has spent a decade researching Rickey’s life and times, and the result of his labors has just been published by the University of Nebraska Press as Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman. A reading last month at Labyrinth Books, a Columbia University–area store whose stock in trade generally runs more towards Marxism and transgender studies, attracted better than a hundred baseball fans, visibly shocking the occasional granola eater who ventured upstairs in search of Chomsky’s latest treatise on post-colonial semiotics. I recently interviewed the author by e-mail to find out what made Rickey such a towering figure. Leaving aside his signing of Jackie Robinson, what would you say was Branch Rickey’s greatest contribution to baseball? Rickey's greatest contribution, I believe, was in streamlining player development. It was he who first talked about “five tools”: hitting with power, fielding, hitting for average, throwing, and running, perhaps in ascending order of importance. If you had a major-league-capable arm and could run with major-league potential, Rickey felt he and his staff of coaches could teach the rest (except for power). And he always looked for mechanical devices to improve technique, from sliding pits and batting cages to pitching machines and safety batting helmets. Rickey’s phrase “ferocious gentleman,” which appears in your subtitle, sums up his ideal of what an athlete should be. These days it sounds more old-fashioned every day, but was it ever realistic? Did baseball players in the first half of the twentieth century live up to the slogan any more than they do now? Rickey himself was very much a ferocious gentleman. He came out of the nineteenth-century school of “muscular Christianity,” which was not bellicosity for its own sake or in the service of a crusading religion. Rather, it was a “moral equivalent to war,” a term William James coined shortly before his death in 1910. Rickey cited this phrase a lot, and he quoted from a biography of Jesus Christ by Giovanni Papini, a onetime student of James, during his famous first meeting with Jackie Robinson in 1945. Was breeding “ferocious gentlemen” ever realistic in baseball? Not really. Rickey tried to lecture his players from that perch on the dangers of too much drink and carousing, but ballplayers being ballplayers, he had to let certain things slide. As a major-league catcher, Rickey’s greatest strength was his intelligence, and his greatest weakness was that he couldn’t hit (and, later, that his throwing arm was injured). What would you say his greatest strengths and weaknesses were as a field manager, and later as a general manager? As a field manager, Rickey was able to inspire players intermittently with his knowledge of the game and his fierce desire to win, but after a while his intensity made many players too nervous and afraid to make a mistake on the field. During games, Rickey was always pacing up and down in the dugout, showing nervousness himself, and when defeat did come, he was such a picture of dejection that the cumulation of losses began to have an adverse effect on his teams. He didn’t like the way St. Louis Cardinals owner Sam Breadon abruptly fired him as manager in May 1925, but he came to realize grudgingly that the front office was the ideal place for his talents. He had his strengths too, of course. Burt Shotton, a fleet outfielder who played for Rickey on the St. Louis Browns in 1913 and became a lifelong supporter, managed under him in Brooklyn for most of 1947–1950. Shotton said that Rickey was the first leader he ever had in baseball who encouraged players to think on their own. Rickey emphasized speed, speed, and more speed—knowing how to run the bases and cutting down on extra bases in the outfield by playing the angles well. The teams that Rickey managed often led the league in errors, but he preached tolerance of “the errors of enthusiasm.” His great strength, once he began working full-time in the front office, was his ability to predict accurately the future success or failure of raw talent. By the late 1930s he had more than 700 farmhands under the St. Louis Cardinals’ control, even after Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis had freed nearly a hundred of them in 1938 for being “hidden” in defiance of baseball regulations. It was a measure of their faith in Rickey's methods of training (and the lack of an alternative under the ironclad reserve system of the time) that the vast majority of those freed by Landis returned to the Cardinals’ chain. More often than not, Rickey's adage—“better trade a player a year too early than a year too late”—proved correct. Not always, of course, and I think long-suffering Cubs fans will enjoy learning in my book that ex-Cardinals played a major role in the Cubs’ 1935 pennant and, with Dizzy Dean, the 1938 pennant too. When Rickey came to Brooklyn after the 1942 season, he duplicated his St. Louis success by the same methods—tryout camps for thousands all over the country, even during World War II, and then honing the best in the rapidly growing Dodger farm system. He earned a commission virtually every time he sold a player to another team, but he felt, and I feel, that given the system of the time he was entitled to his riches. Sam Breadon thought otherwise after 1942, ditto Walter O’Malley after 1950, and ditto John Galbreath in Pittsburgh after 1955. What in Rickey’s background led him to become the first major-league GM to sign a black player? How did his fervently held religious views determine his racial attitudes? He was born in 1881 and grew up in southern Ohio near Portsmouth, which is virtually on the Kentucky line. His Wesleyan faith—his very religious parents named him Wesley Branch Rickey—made him sensitive to the issues of slavery and its legacy. John Wesley had condemned slavery in no uncertain terms in 1774. As a great devotee of the Protestant work ethic, Rickey was upset that the aftermath of slavery had led to the creation of a black underclass that wouldn't take a good white Protestant attitude toward work and, if it did want to, had no chance to rise in the world because of racism. These principles were bedrock to Rickey, but he also was a canny baseball businessman who saw great profits and perennial pennant contention from signing Robinson and other black players. He truly admired the dignity and class of Jackie and Rachel Robinson and later Archibald Carey, his colleague on President Eisenhower’s Committee on Government Employment Policy. He remained wary of less educated and less polite black (and white) activists. The only team Rickey did not succeed with was the Pittsburgh Pirates, where he was general manager from the 1951 through 1955 seasons. To what do you attribute his failure—or was he really a success, as can be seen in the Pirates’ 1960 World Championship? In the short run he did indeed fail in Pittsburgh. He inherited a very young team that was even further decimated when the Korean War military draft left him with fewer than two dozen prospects (compared with the several hundred potential players he left in Brooklyn). His one asset was the slugger Ralph Kiner, who was the team’s highest-paid player, its biggest fan attraction, and the kind of one-dimensional player—power was his main asset—that Rickey had never liked. That Kiner was getting involved in the nascent players union at the time didn’t help matters from Rickey’s standpoint. As the team fell and fell in the standings, fans stayed away by the hundreds of thousands, and many of those who did come left after Kiner’s last at-bat regardless of the score (usually the Pirates were trailing). When Kiner was finally traded, in June 1953, his value had sunk because, as with many power hitters, once injuries began to happen, the downslide was quick. Kiner retired after 1955. Rickey himself was kicked upstairs after that season, but in the long view of history (which is the hat as a historian I am proud to wear), his work in Pittsburgh established the nucleus of the 1960 World Series champion. He and his scouts plucked relief ace Roy Face from the Dodger farm system in 1952, the same year he signed shortstop Dick Groat out of Duke. His scouts signed Bill Mazeroski and Bob Skinner, and of course, most famously, they plucked Roberto Clemente out of the Dodger system after 1954. One final word on Rickey. His years as president of the projected Continental League in 1959 and 1960 threw enough of a scare into the established leagues, along with the threat of their antitrust exemption being lifted by Congress, that expansion was approved. Though Rickey was against 10-team leagues because it only increased the number of bad teams in the second division, there is little doubt that his leadership and the big bucks of the planned Continental League owners forced expansion. Rickey even had a chance to run the Mets, but he turned it down because he didn’t want it thought that he had supported a third league only to get a job in the existing leagues.
May 9, 2007
Near Misses Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:50 AM EST Reader Thomas Engel, in the Discussions section of this website, brings up the subject of near misses, people who just missed the train that crashed or the ship that sank and thus lived to become famous and important. He mentions Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., the poet (and father of the Supreme Court justice), who missed a train, and the future Duke of Wellington who was too sick to take a ship home from India, a ship that vanished. I have another candidate, the great Broadway composer Jerome Kern. Kern, a notorious night owl, failed to get out of bed on time on May 1, 1915, to catch the ship he was scheduled to go to Europe on. The ship, of course, was the Lusitania. Had Kern been less of a slugabed, there might have been no Princess Theater shows, no Show Boat, no “Smoke Get in Your Eyes,” or “Remind Me,” or “I’ve Told Every Little Star,” or “All the Things You Are,” or “The Last Time I Saw Paris.”
May 8, 2007
Gary Hart Posted by Fredric Smoler at 05:30 PM EST Today’s lead piece on this website, by John Steele Gordon, is titled “Gary Hart’s Monkey Business: How and Why a Candidate Got Caught.” Monkey Business, as Mr. Gordon points out, was the name of the yacht on which Hart was photographed with a woman to whom he was not married. The photographs appeared after the press had staked out Hart, after getting a tip that he was having an affair, and after reporters had seen the woman emerge from Hart’s townhouse. My memory is that when the press could not immediately prove that Hart had slept with the woman, a reporter asked him whether he had ever slept with any woman to whom he was not married. Hart, if I recall correctly, was understandably flustered when asked this question. Mr. Gordon concludes by noting, I think correctly, that “his political career ended because he failed to realize that the rules of the game with regard to the private lives of politicians had also fundamentally changed, thanks to the debacle of Watergate.” It would be nice if we could figure out how to restore the older rules. I think a politician’s sexual life is none of my business, any more than mine is of a politician’s. I find it disgusting that the press hounds politicians about legal aspects of their consensual sexual lives, and does so with orgiastic hypocrisy, claiming some purpose higher than boosting circulation by appealing to salacious interest and Grundyism. The First Amendment is normally taken to guarantee the press’s right to so invade the lives of politicians, so European-style privacy laws will not, apparently, survive judicial scrutiny. Here’s what might work: A rich and public-spirited citizen could endow a foundation to fund the similar hounding of reporters who write such stories and editors and publishers who print them. I think something like this briefly flared up, on a purely volunteer basis, during the hounding of President Clinton, when the sexual irregularities of a few reporters (and Republican elected officials) were circulated by some sauce-for-the-gander types. All of those thus exposed were outraged, but a few of them also shut up. A $100 million endowment, to fund absolutely tireless gossips who would be restricted to violating the privacy only of those who had cast first stones, but who would then hound such types to the grave, would be money well spent. This would not work with hard core exhibitionists, and we have a few exhibitionist-moralists in the press, but we do not have too many. People who exult in invading other people’s privacy are nonetheless generally more chary of seeing their own private lives on public view.
May 8, 2007
Where Are the Italian Girls? Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 03:15 PM EST A few weeks back, when the outside world was distracted by the Yankees’ pitching problems, this blog held a very interesting symposium on Andrew Roberts’s latest book, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900. What made the discussion so noteworthy was not the comments themselves; most of the debate consisted of quoting other critics and then saying, in effect, “What he said.” It wasn’t the level of invective, which was rather mild by American Heritage Blog standards, nor even the unexpected absence of Josh Zeitz, who usually has an opinion on everything but was probably busy promoting his forthcoming book, White Ethnic New York: Jews, Catholics, and the Shaping of Postwar Politics. The most fascinating thing about our debate over Roberts’s book can be seen in these excerpts: Fred Smoler: “I looked over a very few pages of a draft of a portion of his book, but I have not read the book . . .” Alexander Burns: “Not having read Roberts’s book, I won’t say that it’s worthless.” John Steele Gordon: “I haven’t read Roberts’s book either, so I’m in very good company.” I haven’t seen so many people discussing a book they haven't read since my Contemporary Civilization class in college. Yet that hasn’t stopped this blog’s contributors from taking sides pro and con, and while everyone paid lip service to the notion that it might be a good idea to actually read the book before deciding whether they like it, somehow, if they did all read it cover to cover, I doubt anyone would change his mind. As it happens, I haven’t read the book either. I do have a copy at home, but it has been sitting on my table for weeks, shunted aside in favor of a succession of novels (most recently Lucia in London, by E. F. Benson, since you asked). I was struck, however, in reading the odd mix of vehemence and hesitancy that characterized my fellow bloggers’ discussion, to see how great a role was accorded to trivia. The whole thing started after a captious New Republic reviewer made a detailed examination of the book’s 700-odd pages and found a number of mistakes, which he listed and then made the usual noises about how, while some may be minor, collectively they call into question the author’s trustworthiness, etc. That’s what proofreader/critics always say, and it may even be true, but by those standards, Ken Jennings would be the world’s greatest historian. As John Steele Gordon points out, much of the supposed decline in standards of accuracy is really a decline in the quality of proofreading and copyediting. I blame feminism for this. Decades ago, thousands of overqualified women spent their entire careers in low-ranking jobs in publishing because it was one of the few fields open to them. Now their daughters are off being genetic engineers and corporate executives and members of Congress, and the publishing industry—much more important, in my view—is greatly the poorer for it. I was reminded of all this last week, when I bestowed my coveted Dumb-Ass Right-Wing Commentator of the Week award on Tony Blankley of the Washington Times. (Mind you, I don’t have anything in particular against right-wing commentators; you might even say I’m one myself. I would willingly institute a similar award for left-wing commentators, except I don’t read them.) Anyway, my man Tony earned last week’s glittering prize, which entitles him to ride on the New York City subway for just $2, with the following passage: “But we all know that ‘hate speech’ is in the ear of the listener. In Europe, citizens can be—and have been—criminally prosecuted for calling elements of Islam violence-prone. The great crusading journalist Camille Paglia was forced to live out her last cancer-ridden days in exile to avoid paying the penal price for her honest (and accurate) expressions on that topic.” Camille Paglia is still alive, though you would hardly notice, since she has virtually disappeared from view after being overtaken in the outrageousness derby by today’s crop of Ann Coulter types. Mr. Blankley means Oriana Fallaci, of course, and this is another example of the poverty of the “gotcha” school of criticism. If Mr. Blankley had made the same statement in conversation, he would have noticed the puzzled looks on his listeners’ faces and said, “Oh, wait, not Camille Paglia—who do I mean?” Then someone would have corrected him, and he would have said thank you and gone ahead with his point. Mistakes of this type are like having your fly open—embarrassing, but they have nothing to do with whether you’re right or wrong. Maybe the reason I’m so peevish about this is that I just got a letter about my April “Time Machine” column on the Black Hawk War, declaring with exasperation that “Black Hawk was not chief of the Sauk people, pure and simple.” In fact, I called him “a chief,” and according to my sources, he was indeed a war chief, though not a hereditary chief. So there! This is the sort of mistake that letter writers always describe as a “glaring error.” Readers love to pounce on these, as if they invalidated everything the writer had ever spoken or thought. In fact, there are self-appointed fact checkers who specialize in certain specific corrections, firing off sarcastic letters whenever they see their favorite mistake. The more active members of this bunch are known in the publishing industry with nicknames like Big Apple Guy (who explains that the term “Big Apple” did not originate among Harlem jazz musicians in the 1930s but with a racing writer in the 1920s) or Hot Dog Guy (who shows that the story about hot dogs being named by the cartoonist Tad Dorgan after a 1901 baseball game is as bogus as it sounds). These people like to save all their clippings and show them off to journalists, or anyone else who will sit still for it. I suppose there are worse hobbies to have. Then of course there are those who spend their lives correcting fake errors, like the supposedly “wrong” period in Harry S. Truman’s middle name, on which see this. The other day I found a similarly “glaring” and trivial mistake in an excellent book whose author I will soon interview for this blog: Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman, by Lee Lowenfish. Early in the book, Lowenfish says that in 1908 William Howard Taft defeated Alton Parker for the Presidency. In fact, as everyone knows, he defeated William Jennings Bryan, making the Middle-Aged Boy Orator of the Platte a three-time loser. Parker ran against Teddy Roosevelt in 1904, when TR was so popular that Bryan realized he didn’t have a chance. I knew this without having to look it up (no, really, I did), and I would very much like to become known as Alton Parker Guy, but it’s hard to make a living that way. The last word on the subject, I think, can be found in this trenchant analysis of academic vs. popular history, which makes some worthwhile remarks despite the author’s unfortunate attempt to imitate my writing style. Academic historians are meticulous about accuracy on even the slightest points, as they should be. Popular historians, like the writers and editors of American Heritage, also strive to be as accurate as possible, which is why every one of our articles is fact-checked. Still, given the constraints under which we operate, a few errors inevitably slip past us from time to time, and as you can see by reading the magazine’s letters column, our readers are quite generous about pointing them out. Yet the main argument of a book or article is not invalidated by a few misspellings or inaccurate dates; after all, the contributors to this blog correct each other all the time. That’s why I think A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900 is a hell of a book despite its inaccuracies—and if I ever get around to reading it, I’ll be sure to tell you why.
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