Category Archives: American History

Quickie Quiz! What Do the Foreign Policies of Truman, Kennedy, Reagan, and Clinton Have in Common?

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Damn if I know, but whatever it is, it’s what Mittens wants to go back to.

The Romney campaign cast Obama as an outlier president who failed to continue a bipartisan tradition of a strong military and leadership in the world. Several times on the call, his advisers described Romney as following a tradition that included Presidents Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton while President Obama’s approach, they said, was similar to Jimmy Carter’s. Romney’s approach is “a restoration of a strategy that served us well for over 70 years” and will renew a “bipartisan vision” of foreign policy, Wong said. “[Obama’s] foreign policy is marked by passivity, by delay and by indecision.”

I question whether there was any one “strategy” that “served us well for over 70 years.” You’ve got to be completely ignorant of global history to even think such a thing. And the national security challenges of today are utterly different from what they were in the post World War II era, and these new challenges demand new approaches both diplomatically and militarily. There is simply no one-size-fits-all approach to foreign policy that might have worked in 1949 or 1962 and would still work in 2012. In particular, whatever happened to “9/11 changed everything”?

Again, Romney speaks of the military as if we need to be prepared to land on Normandy beach and advance to Berlin. But that sort of declared war between nations is unlikely to ever be fought again, or at least in our lifetimes.

Conservatives of the 1950s must be rolling over in their graves over praise of Truman who, after all, “lost China” and failed to win the Korean War. And Truman was the guy who said “I like Stalin.” Truman changed his mind later, but still …

Kennedy, Bay of Pigs? That was a bonehead move, although today people mostly remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. Historians are still arguing about how much Kennedy should be blamed for Vietnam.

Reagan’s incoherent Lebanon misadventure cost the lives of 241 servicemen, mostly Marines, in one terrorist attack. So Reagan withdrew and consoled himself by invading Grenada. If Reagan had been a Democrat, the Right would have put him in the Weenie Museum next to Carter. And Iran Contra? Really, Jimmy Carter never did anything that weird.

And conservatives had nothing good to say about Clinton’s foreign policies while he was in office. I’d agree that foreign policy wasn’t President Clinton’s strong suit, although he got better as he went along. And, of course, the Bush II administration (unfairly) blamed Clinton for 9/11. How soon they forget.

Even a fellow from the American Enterprise Institute understands that Romney has to do more than pretend to be Ronald Reagan: “Mr. Romney needs to persuade people that he’s not simply a George W. Bush retread, eager to go to war in Syria and Iran and answer all the mail with an F-16.”

Mitt will be speaking today at the Virginia Military Institute:

In a speech on Monday at the Virginia Military Institute, Mr. Romney will declare that “hope is not a strategy” for dealing with the rise of Islamist governments in the Middle East or an Iran racing toward the capability to build a nuclear weapon, according to excerpts released by his campaign.

The essence of Mr. Romney’s argument is that he would take the United States back to an earlier era, one that would result, as his young foreign policy director, Alex Wong, told reporters on Sunday, in “the restoration of a strategy that served us well for 70 years.”

But beyond his critique of Mr. Obama as failing to project American strength abroad, Mr. Romney has yet to fill in many of the details of how he would conduct policy toward the rest of the world, or to resolve deep ideological rifts within the Republican Party and his own foreign policy team. It is a disparate and politely fractious team of advisers that includes warring tribes of neoconservatives, traditional strong-defense conservatives and a band of self-described “realists” who believe there are limits to the degree the United States can impose its will.

In other words, Romney is a bit fuzzy about the details

Each group is vying to shape Mr. Romney’s views, usually through policy papers that many of the advisers wonder if he is reading. Indeed, in a campaign that has been so intensely focused on economic issues, some of these advisers, in interviews over the past two weeks in which most insisted on anonymity, say they have engaged with him so little on issues of national security that they are uncertain what camp he would fall into, and are uncertain themselves about how he would govern.

Truly, as in all things that don’t involve leverage and tax shelters, Mitt cannot make up his mind.

Indeed, while the theme Mr. Romney plans to hit the hardest in his speech at V.M.I. — that the Obama era has been one marked by “weakness” and the abandonment of allies — has political appeal, the specific descriptions of what Mr. Romney would do, on issues like drawing red lines for Iran’s nuclear program and threatening to cut off military aid to difficult allies like Pakistan or Egypt if they veer away from American interests, sound at times quite close to Mr. Obama’s approach.

And the speech appears to glide past positions Mr. Romney himself took more than a year ago, when he voiced opposition to expanding the intervention in Libya to hunt down Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi with what he termed insufficient resources. He called it “mission creep and mission muddle,” though within months Mr. Qaddafi was gone. And last spring, Mr. Romney was caught on tape telling donors he believed there was “just no way” a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could work.

You’ll like this part:

Liz Cheney, who served in the State Department during the Bush administration and is the daughter of Mr. Bush’s vice president, has begun to join a weekly conference call that sporadically includes Dan Senor, who served as spokesman for the American occupation government in Iraq. Since the Republican National Convention, Mr. Senor has been assigned to the staff of Mr. Romney’s running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan, who in recent weeks has made Mr. Obama’s foreign policy a particular target.

Please, people, this man must not become President. Must. not. become. President. A Romney administration would be a global catastrophe.

This Is What Freedom Looks Like

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Goshen College in Indiana has banned playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at sports events, including as a purely instrumental piece, because they think it is too violent. And naturally, rightie bloggers are righteously indignant about it. In a blog post filed under “liberals,” Robert Stacy McCain writes,

If Goshen College wishes to be even less significant than they already are, they’ve chosen a perfect path to obscurity. . . . It is pathetic that brave men died so that twerps like Goshen College’s president could have the freedom to repudiate their courageous sacrifice.

You see, in RightieWorld, the individual freedoms that brave men died for are just abstractions. You’re not supposed to exercise those rights if a majority of Americans do not approve. We are all supposed to think only conservatively correct thoughts and hold conservatively correct opinions, or else we are enemies of freedom.

For the record, I happen to love the “SSB.” Like “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the SSB is an anthem that grew organically out of U.S. history — a poem written by an eyewitness to a historical event sung to the tune of a popular drinking song. I can imagine what Francis Scott Key must have felt when he saw the flag flying over Fort McHenry in the dawn’s early light. If you can imagine being in Key’s place that day, the words “our flag was still there” ought to give you chills.

And it’s a plus for me that the whole thing is easily within my vocal range, including the high Gs at “glare” and “free” (when singing in C major; in the more common A flat major it’s only an F flat). I own that high G. At public events I sing the SSB very loudly and pity the poor mortals who have to switch to a lower octave.

Anyway, the catch to this story is that Goshen is a Mennonite college. I don’t think you can rightfully categorize the Mennonites as “liberals,” their commitment to nonviolence notwithstanding. My impression is they are pretty durn conservative about most things.

But it does show how warped our political definitions have become, that pacifism is supposed to be a litmus test for liberalism. Historically, American liberals have been no more likely to be pacifists than anyone else. Theodore Roosevelt was, IMO, one of the patriarchs of modern American liberalism, and he was no pacifist. Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were all presidents who were identified as, or called themselves, “liberals,” and none of them was a pacifist.

Even at the height of opposition to the Vietnam War, I doubt the majority of protesters were pacifists. It was that war we objected to, not war in general.

NBC:

Art professor John Blosser told The Goshen News that there is much national pride at the school, but that most people aren’t going to blindly accept what the country does.

That is genuine patriotism. Knee-jerk “my country right or wrong” sentiment is not patriotism but jingoism.

NBC Sports’ Rick Chandler weighed in, saying: “I suppose we could have followed the example of the Mennonites and simply fled, giving the nation back to the British. But then we’d all be playing cricket.”

I realize it is paradoxical to say that brave men died so that Mennonites have the freedom to oppose brave men dying, but that is in fact what they did. To try to ridicule or bully the Mennonites into compliance with social norms on the grounds of “patriotism” — or even more Orwellian, “liberty” — is a betrayal of the sacrifice so many brave men made.

The Mennonites can refuse to conduct ritual playings of a song about a war if they want to, just as Jehovah’s Witnesses (and me) can refuse to say the Pledge of Allegiance out loud, and not be punished for it. This is what political liberty is.

It would be a disaster for me if the national anthem were switched from the SSB to (as many propose) “America the Beautiful,” and not just because the melody is less interesting and it’s hardly ever sung in a key that lets me show off. “God shed his grace on thee” doesn’t work for me, and I suspect the nation’s atheists have similar opinions.

Give me “o’er the land of the FREEEEEEE [trumpet flourish] and the home of the brave!” any day.

Lessons from the Gilded Age

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Francois Furstenberg argues that the “welfare state” (I hate that term, btw) was initiated out of self-defense by the wealthy of the Gilded Age. The extreme economic disparities of the late 19th century was causing widespread violence and threatened to tear the country apart. And these were people with living memory of the Civil War, so tearing the country apart had a reality to them.

The Gilded Age plutocrats who first acceded to a social welfare system and state regulations did not do so from the goodness of their hearts. They did so because the alternatives seemed so much more terrifying.

I don’t think that’s all there was to it, but it’s an interesting thing to consider.

Short Takes

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Another good explanation of the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, this time from Lawrence Tribe. Tribe thinks that if the issue is decided by the Supreme Court, a majority of the justices will find the Act constitutional.

John Paul Getty III has died. Remember when he was a young man and was kidnapped and held for ransom? I had forgotten what colossal assholes his grandfather and father, Sr. and Jr., were. Sr. and Jr. refused to pay the ransom, so after about three months the kidnappers hacked off III’s ear and mailed it to an Italian newspaper, with the threat of mailing more pieces of III every few days until the ransom of $2.8 million was paid.

The threat led Getty Sr. to pay $2.2 million, which, according to The New York Times, his accountants said was the maximum that would be tax deductible. Getty Jr. coughed up the rest but had to borrow it from his billionaire father, repayable at 4 percent annual interest.

Kind of takes your breath away, huh?

Some troglodyte in the Ohio Legislature has introduced a “heartbeat bill” (warning: do not read comments to the article; they are beyond twisted) that would ban most abortions after the point at which a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which is about six weeks’ gestation. Lots of women don’t even know they’re pregnant at six weeks gestation.

According to 2009 data from the Ohio Department of Health, 56.6 percent of abortions in that state occur in the first nine weeks of pregnancy. And since the fetal heartbeat appears on monitors by six weeks into gestation in most cases, supporters of the bill believe that it could prevent thousands of abortions.

Correction — it would prevent thousands of medically safe abortions. However, the coat hanger industry would thrive.

Thinking about this got me thinking about the old brain wave question, which seems to me a lot more relevant than heartbeat as to when there’s a “person” there. There are tons of articles on the Web that say fetal brain waves can be detected as six weeks’ gestation, also, which is obviously wrong. I found a good article debunking the claim that says,

Remember, an EEG involves measuring varying electrical potential across a dipole, or separated charges. To get scalp or surface potentials from the cortex requires three things: neurons, dendrites, and axons, with synapses between them. Since these requirements are not present in the human cortex before 20-24 weeks of gestation, it is not possible to record “brain waves” prior to 20-24 weeks. Period. End of story.

There’s a lot more to it, but that’s the bottom line.

The Next Nullification Crisis

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At today’s TPM:

Incoming House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is part of a class of Republicans who say they want to change the country fundamentally — and to that end, Cantor isn’t dismissing a plan by legislators in his home state of Virgina to blow up the Constitutional system and replace it with one that would give state governments veto power over federal laws.

For several weeks now, conservative legal circles have been buzzing with Virginia House Speaker Bill Howell’s plan to amend the Constitution so that a 2/3 vote of the states could overturn overturn any federal law passed by the Congress and signed by the President.

The problem of individual states objecting to federal laws has come up time and time again in U.S. history. Here’s a quickie review:

In 1781 the United States officially began as a confederation of sovereign states, but it was soon apparent that a confederation was unworkable and left much of the country in chaos.

So the original U.S. confederation was scrapped, and in 1789 the government was re-booted under our current Constitution. This provided for a much stronger federal government and reserved for the states some autonomy that the feds couldn’t supersede. And ever since, Americans have squabbled over exactly where the line between state and federal powers should be drawn.

Although much of the squabbling has been framed as disagreement over political philosophy, in truth the horse pulling the philosophical cart often is money. For example, a federal embargo act passed in 1807 was thought by Massachusetts to be a threat to its economy, and the state legislature flirted with the idea of secession. In the early years of our republic, New England states complained that the federal government was too much dominated by Virginia plantation owners who didn’t appreciate New England’s problems. Along with the grumbling, there was more talk of secession and lots of heated town hall meetings.

But later, it was the South’s turn to complain. A tariff act of 1828 that benefited economic interests in some states was considered ruinous by South Carolina, which voted to “nullify” the act within its borders. President Andrew Jackson declared,

I consider, then, the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one State, incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which It was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed.

After much chest-thumping on all sides, in 1832 Congress authorized the president to take military action against South Carolina. However, Congress came to a compromise over tariffs before the troops actually began to march. This relieved the crisis but left the arguments about state nullification of federal law unresolved.

Many of the arguments used by the South Carolina nullifiers were recycled in 1860 to support secession of the slave states. The Declaration of Causes documents drawn up by secession conventions made it plain that these states were seceding to protect what they saw as the foundation of their economic interests — the institution of slavery.

The Southern plantation class, which ran the southern states like feudal lords, worried that if more “free soil” states came into the Union they would eventually be able to pass a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery. Several events of the 1850s made the slaveowners feel feel they were losing power in Washington, and the election of Abraham Lincoln, who ran on a “free soil” platform, was the last straw.

Ironically, to justify secession the slaveowners spewed out much rhetoric about their love of liberty and the tyranny of a federal power that might make them free their slaves. I’ll come back to this in a bit.

So, a Civil War was fought. The Confederacy went into the war with a number of advantages, the biggest of which was that it didn’t have to defeat the North militarily to win its severance from the Union. It only had to make itself a big enough nuisance for a long enough time that northern citizens would grow tired of the fight and concede. The North, on the other hand, would have to crush the South to win its compliance.

The South was crushed, however, and historians today cite two major reasons:

  • The North had more people and a big advantage in manufacturing capability.
  • The South was hampered by its “states’ rights” philosophy. With fewer resources, the Confederacy needed the full cooperation of every state to use what it had for maximum effect. Instead, several state governors refused to comply with Richmond’s requests for supplies and weapons, and they hoarded much-needed resources in arsenals and warehouses while the Army of Northern Virginia fought half-starved and barefoot.

The Confederate Constitution provided for a weaker federal government and a much diminished office of the presidency, and Jefferson Davis had less authority than did Abraham Lincoln to coordinate the war effort and make the most effective use of the resources at hand. In other words, “states rights” made the Confederacy vulnerable.

Of course, it didn’t hurt the Union that Lincoln was not only brilliant but was possibly the shrewdest politician who ever lived in the White House. But the main point is that once again, we see that a confederation of sovereign states has a big disadvantage over the federalized system provided by the Constitution.

Since the Civil War, “states rights” arguments have been most often associated with the “right” of states to deny equal rights to its citizens. Beginning in the early 20th century the federal government also has taken on a larger role in all manner of economic processes — product and workplace safety regulations, for example — and “states rights” arguments often are trotted out in opposition.

With no exception I can think of, the states rights issue pits the insular interests of the wealthy and privileged against the common economic good of the nation. And, of course, it also pits the “right” of local potentates to run roughshod over others against the protection of the civil liberties of United States citizens.

So today, in the spirit of the old southern secessionists who fought for the freedom to enslave people, Eric Cantor and his ilk have a plan to protect the Constitution by weakening the Union. Brilliant.

And Cantor is being supported by a movement of privileged citizens working on behalf of the narrow interests of the wealthy, in the name of liberty and patriotism. I swear, you can’t make this up.

But what this shows us is that it is in the interests of local authoritarians and powerful special interests to keep the federal government as fragmented and weak as possible. Weakening the federal government makes it so much easier to exploit and oppress the rubes, you know. I’m surprised no one on the Right has suggested bringing back indentured servitude, the 13th Amendment notwithstanding, although one could argue that the payday loan industry is creating a class of de facto indentured servants who can never work off their debt.

Now, it’s possible for these roles to be reversed. The federal government could become the power that limits individual civil liberties, and state and local authorities could become a bulwark against federal tyranny, but throughout United States history it’s usually been the other way around. You’d think people would have noticed this.

American Stasi

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Joe McCarthy

R.S. McCain Channels Joe McCarthy

Today the FBI released its extensive files on the late Howard Zinn, the popular historian known especially for his book A People’s History of the United States. The FBI opened an investigation of Zinn in 1949 because of his association with what were called “Communist Front” groups. Zinn denied being a member of the Communist Party USA when questioned by agents in the 1950s.

However, in the 1960s the FBI renewed its interest in Zinn because Zinn was critical of the FBI. Apparently Zinn was especially critical of the FBI’s investigations of the civil rights movement. Of course, we know now that J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO project attempted to infiltrate, disrupt and marginalize the civil rights movement from within, including the nonviolent movement of Dr. Martin Luther King. Dr. King himself was under FBI surveillance for much of the last few years of his life. COINTELPRO often operated outside of the law and constitutional prohibitions on warrantless government surveillance.

How much Zinn knew about what the FBI was up to I do not know, but at a civil rights protest in the 1960s he declared the U.S. had become a “police state.” This pissed off the Bureau, which then tried to get Zinn fired from his professorship at Boston University. Which pretty much proves that Zinn had a point. Apparently the files also contain detailed accounts of Zinn’s activities in the antiwar movement during the Vietnam years. At that time I don’t believe the FBI had evidence Zinn was doing anything illegal; it just didn’t like Zinn’s politics.

But just to show that leopards don’t change their spots, or something, our buddy Robert Stacy McCain apparently spent hours piecing together whatever he could find in the documents that tied Zinn to the Communist Party USA so that he could say Zinn lied about being a member.

I read through this as much as I could stand, and it’s mostly guilt-by-association stuff. For example, McCain finds it significant that Zinn thought the state of New York was liable for property damage caused by the Peekskill riots. These were riots in 1949 that stopped a concert by Paul Robeson, the African American singer “known for his strong pro-trade union stance on civil rights and his outspoken beliefs in international socialism, anti-lynching legislation and anti-colonialist movements.” McCain sneers that the riots were “a once-famous cause célèbre of the Left,” apparently siding with the rights of real American patriots to form a riotous mob and violently attack people because of their race and/or politics.

Zinn clearly was actively engaged in many of the same causes as the old CPUSA in those years. In the 1940s he was active in the International Workers Order, an “insurance, mutual benefit and fraternal organization” affiliated with CPUSA. Whether Zinn was a card-carrying member of CPUSA itself or just a fellow-traveler isn’t really clear, though.

And in any event, given the totalitarian activities of the House Un-American Activities Committee and Sen. Joe McCarthy’s relentless witch hunts, I wouldn’t blame Zinn for lying to the FBI if he was a member.

But finally McCain gets to his smoking gun — an FBI agent found that Zinn’s name and address were on a “list of addressograph stencils at Communist Party Headquarters.” Yes, my dear, Zinn was on the Communist Party’s mailing list. So he must have been a member. Like we’re all members of every organization that sends us mail.

Hey, I get email from the Tea Party Movement. Does that make me a teabagger?

I like this bit of McCain’s —

One of the things you can learn from M. Stanton Evans’ recent book on Joe McCarthy’s investigations, Blacklisted by History, is how deeply the FBI had penetrated CPUSA. One reason that McCarthy’s was sometimes unable to publicly substantiate his accusations was that he relied on secret information passed along by the FBI. McCarthy couldn’t identity the source of his information without compromising the FBI’s investigations, so when his critics tried to make it appear that McCarthy’s suspicions were without merit, McCarthy couldn’t simply say, “Here is the FBI file.”

One of the things you learn from other books on McCarthy, such as David Oshinsky’s A Conspiracy So Immense, is that after McCarthy started making a splash with his mysterious lists of spies, Hoover began feeding him names of people the FBI hadn’t been able to find enough dirt on to prosecute, but Hoover still suspected them of something. The fact remains that no one McCarthy targeted was ever found to be guilty of espionage, and this is still true after the release of the “Venona Papers,” wingnut myth to the contrary.

The point lost on McCain is that most of the time Zinn was under surveillance, Zinn was not doing anything criminal. He was under surveillance purely because of his political beliefs.

And the great irony is that if people like McCain were allowed to run America without restraint, he’d be rounding up everyone whose politics he doesn’t like (most of us) and sending us off to re-education camps. Just like the you-know-who. If McCain had his way, he’d organize an American Stasi.

Update: More by Justin Elliott at Salon — five different FBI special agents submitted surveillance reports on Zinn’s participation at one, and the same, anti-draft public meeting. He was also found to be on the mailing list of a Communist bookstore (I don’t know if this is the same mailing list already mentioned, or not).

“There’s also a fair amount here about Zinn’s 1974 trip to North Vietnam with the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, during which they received three freed American POWs,” Elliott writes. McCain also had brought up the trip to Hanoi as proof of Zinn’s communist activities, but McCain left out the part about freeing POWs. Fascinating.

Your tax dollars at work, folks.