In the days since Charlottesville, one of my favorite tweets from the past year has begun to appear again: “If you ever wondered what you would have done if you’d been alive in the 1930s, now’s your chance to find out.”
This message provides a powerful reminder that each of us can choose to be an active participant in the history-making events taking place around us. The future is not inevitable. Neither is our role in shaping it.
This is a particularly important reminder given how out of control things seem at the moment. In the last week, as in many weeks during 2017, we have experienced a year’s worth of events: the president seeming to goad North Korea into nuclear war on Twitter followed closely by the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville that culminated in the brutal attack and murder of Heather Heyer. Yesterday, as things seemed perhaps to be returning to whatever normality exists these days, President Trump delivered his stunning press conference in which he declared that “both sides” were at fault in Virginia.
The silver lining of the week, if such a thing can be said to exist, is that public figures who generally project an air of detachment or objectivity – news anchors, late-night hosts, and the like – have found the fortitude to denounce the president and the larger culture of hate and racism that he has refused to reject.
But having the courage to denounce bigotry and hatred in the larger culture is difficult, especially when elected officials tacitly support such views.
Recognizing that moral courage is always difficult is one of the most important lessons of history. I appreciate the suggestion to consider how we would have acted in the 1930s because it also invites us to think about how the people of that time responded to the rise of Fascism.
I recently found an original copy of A Great Time to Be Alive, a collection of sermons from World War II by Harry Emerson Fosdick. Fosdick was one of the most famous American ministers of the day, and as the pastor of New York’s Riverside Church he had enormous influence. The title of this collection of sermons was meant to be jarring. Really, he acknowledged, it was a “ghastly time to be alive.”
Fosdick’s point was that it was the ghastly times of history that had the potential to produce better societies, even great ones, provided the people living through them had the courage to change things. “One who knows history knows that in just such times as these, turbulent and revolutionary, whole generations have been brought to their senses.”
The problem, Fosdick declared, was that complacency kept people from coming to their senses. People “love to play safe by staying put,” he wrote. “There is in humanity a natural timidity.”
When we in 2017 imagine the world of the 1930s and 40s, and ask ourselves what we would have done had we been alive, we imagine stark contrasts. There were good guys and bad guys. The good guys of this “greatest generation” knew what they were supposed to do, and they did it without a hint of doubt or apprehension.
Going back to historical sources from that time reveals more complexity. People knew that what was happening around them was wrong. But, like us, this seemingly heroic generation struggled to muster the courage to act. A sense of being overwhelmed by rapidly shifting events and a deluge of world-changing circumstances is not unique to our moment of history.
If we in 2017 feel overwhelmed or anxious about acting, we shouldn’t feel that we are somehow less courageous than previous generations. We aren’t. Our struggles to act were theirs as well, but act we must.
Erin Bartram: In his weekly column, the more prominent of the two white men named David on the New York Times opinion pages wondered “where have all the real men gone?” Frustrated with the “varieties of wannabe manliness” he sees on display in the White House – the Bannonesque, the Scaramuccian, and the Trumpy – he urged us to consider his understanding of a Greek understanding of manliness instead. Be like the Greeks, he urged, which to him means be like John – Wayne, McCain, or Kelly. That, he believes, will rescue us from the “crisis of masculinity” we face today. Rarely will historians sanction the phrase “Throughout American history…” in a paper, but sometimes it feels like “Throughout American history, there has been a crisis of masculinity.” Today, we’re going to talk about how Brooks is using history to talk about gender roles, and how by doing so, he’s engaging in a long American tradition of freaking out about whether men are being the right kind of men. For once, the fact that we’re both 19th century American historians means we’ve read a lot about this.
Chris Bouton: It’s telling to me that Brooks immediately jumps to the Greeks as his exemplar of masculinity. He initially seems to idealize the Greek view of masculinity, but then complicates it. Suggesting that Greek views of masculinity had destructive elements.
Which of course, it did. The Iliad is all about honor and masculinity and its destructive force.
Then he pivots back to the US, where he sees 2 historical examples of the “magnanimous man.” George Washington and George Marshall, why those two? He never explains.
Erin: Another good Anglo name!
Magnanimity seems to be the key difference for him. If you look at his list of qualities, the one that he says is the problem is that the manly man is touchy: “He is outraged if others do not grant him the honor that is his due.” Frankly, it’s amazing he didn’t use George Washington as an example more thoroughly, or as the center of the piece.
Chris: And being magnanimous is about being generous to others, especially those below you. Brooks is writing in a frame of honor and masculinity, that there are those who have honor and those who aspire to it in some way, but fail
Erin: It sounds like the courtesy manual my students read in class, much like the one GWash copied over himself – respect thy superiors, despise not thy inferiors. A truly manly man (like a true aristocrat) just is, and doesn’t need external validation.
Chris: He’s also endorsing hierarchies of manliness and honor, but honor always relies on external validation. If honor is reputation, then it requires a societal judgment. At the top of his hierarchy are the Johns and the Georges and the thread that runs through all of them (McCain, Kelly and Washington, Marshall) is the military.
Erin: That, I think we can say, is something that is true and has been true for men and women, though the aspects of reputation/honor judged have been different.
Chris: Right they’re judged by different standards, but there is a judgment.
Erin: He’s trying to craft a definition of manliness that blends selflessness and sacrifice with the other manly virtues that are important to him. The willingness to fight, in a particular framework, is important. Would he consider MLK an ideal man? Or Father Daniel Berrigan?
Chris: Yes and as your framing question suggested, there’s nothing particularly new about it. Other than it’s been given the David Brooks gloss with crimes against the English language like “thrusting masculinity.”
How can masculinity thrust?
Erin: It can’t, that’s why it’s in crisis.
Also as a woman living in America, the crisis of masculinity is certainly thrusting itself into my space all the time
Honestly, much of my US I survey course centers around this perpetual, evolving crisis of masculinity, so Brooks’ paean to a masculine ideal of the past is familiar and frustrating. [I get that he wanted to go with Greece, but I was surprised not to see Cincinnatus in here]
Chris: I think this is a good chance to dig at the historical roots of this perpetual crisis.
Erin: As I think about how to get at those historical roots, I’m already expecting the question on the first day of my women’s history class in a few weeks, one that I always get: “So when did patriarchy…start?”
Chris: From the moment human beings attained sentience?
If we understand patriarchy as a social system of control, then from the moment those social systems/relationships began to emerge
Erin: Correct.
In terms of a colonial North American context, I think most of us think of gender order as one of the man things that informs the values of this colonial space, one that then shapes the racial system that emerges here. Whether you’re talking Edmund Morgan or Kathy Brown, you’re hard pressed to get away from the importance of particular ideas of what men deserve and expect in Anglo-Virginian society.
Chris: And what their concordant responsibilities are.
Brooks’ definition of a magnanimous man struck me as very much rooted in the American colonial/Revolutionary past. I’ll drop the whole quote in for context.
The magnanimous man has a certain style. He is a bit aloof, marked more by gravitas than familiarity. He shows perfect self-control because he has mastered his passions. He does not show his vulnerability. His relationships are not reciprocal. He is eager to grant favors but is ashamed of receiving them. His personal life can wither because he has devoted himself to disinterested public service.
Erin: He wants republican masculinity.
Chris: “Mastering passions” not reciprocal relationships, “disinterested public service.” He’s swallowed John Adams whole
Erin: Musical interlude #1
And it’s quite clear what historical ideas of masculinity he sees in the White House: Jacksonian masculinity, the liberal individual.
Chris:
Unrestrained by passion – “peacocking” as he describes it.
Erin: And “touchy,” which I took to mean: if he does the baseline decent thing in a situation, he gets pissed when you don’t give him a cookie for it.
Chris: I’m struck by this idea of “touchy” since it gets at the root of the “crisis.” So much of masculinity and honor culture depends on that public acknowledgement, and when men don’t get that acknowledgement, they’re “touchy” about it, because they measure their honor against one another. Go back to Achilles sulking in his tent.
Erin: Frankly it’s why his use of McCain in this situation is a bit of a tell. It reveals to us that when he says there should be no peacocking, he just means “not tooooooo much.”
Chris: And the problems come when the personal sense of honor doesn’t align with the public.
Right, because McCain’s vote on the health care bill was a masculine performance.
Erin: The two other Republican women – who embodied every one of the virtues he calls “manly” – just voted and got it over with.
Chris: He won, in Brooks’ eyes, honor for himself through his public behavior. In this case, McCain’s personal honor and his reputation were aligned (from Brooks’ perspective)
Chris: Yes, I’ve been thinking about Greenberg this whole time.
Erin: Brooks, like so many other men we study, seems desperate to find a way – or at least a living example – of blending the two.
Chris: Because a man should exercise self-control, but also needs to be able to kick some ass when needed. There’s a recognition that neither type of masculinity can solve the “crisis.” Restrained men can be too passive and martial men too violent.
Erin: And “his personal life can wither” because another person is supposed to take care of that anyway.
Chris: George Marshall had Mrs. Marshall to care for the children and the like.
Erin: He never says it, but there’s one thing that’s at the core of his ideal masculine world, one thing that I think he thinks is missing. The magnanimous man never takes favors (charity) and can think about public disinterested service only if one part of his life is secure. Without the economic security and credit he thinks men are due, they can never be the kind of men he wants.
Chris: To go back to the American Revolution context, he must free from dependence, he must independent.
Erin: Bingo.
Chris: Hence property owning requirements for voting and office holding. Now all of these colonial/Revolutionary men who proclaimed this ideal were in debt up to their necks…
Erin: And they were in debt even with the unpaid labor of their wives, children, and slaves.
Chris: Jefferson needed that French wine!
Erin: And when most white men can’t meet those requirements, the choice is either tell men they can’t vote even though their fathers could, or change the way one becomes eligible to vote.
I mean, I don’t actually want to read this column, but I would like to know, given what he claims as “manly” here, what is left for women? I’m not sure he actually even cares that much, so intent is his focus on men.
Chris: And that’s also historically fitting.
Erin: Defining white masculinity against a variety of dependents.
Chris: Exactly.
And it’s no wonder that masculinity is always in crisis when you look at the arguments and assumptions underlying it.
Erin: It also reminds us of the ways that Obama’s masculinity was constantly questioned. His fashion sense? Effete. His refusal to get angry? Submissive. His mustard choices? Elitist and possibly gay.
Chris: Out of all the figures that Brooks cites, Obama’s masculinity came closest to his definition. In terms of his behavior in office, I mean.
Erin: Absolutely, though I think few who read Brooks and agreed with him would acknowledge that.
He didn’t even let his private life wither away! He could do it all!
Chris: And that’s why his fashion sense is effete, his lack of anger meant he was submissive etc. You can’t be more masculine/honorable, he’s from a historically dependent and marginalized group.
Erin: I’m thinking of François Furstenberg on autonomy and Manisha Sinha’s great piece on reading the caning of Charles Sumner in the context of racialized masculinity. IIRC, she argues that [Preston] Brooks’ caning of Sumner, rather than challenging him to a duel, was essentially to communicate “If you’re going to associate yourself with enslaved people, I’m going to treat you like one”
Chris: Brooks did not treat Sumner like an equal.
Erin: Musical Interlude #2
And that’s the thing [David] Brooks consciously or less consciously avoids: that a key part of American ideas of masculinity involves hierarchy and dominance and differentiation from those not capable of full independence.
Chris: Yes, these ideals of masculinity that he’s mourning and celebrating all rely on notions of inequality.
Erin: Without saying as much, by defining manliness this way, and only including white men as examples, he communicates as much.
Chris: His examples of masculinity tell us everything we need to know. Greeks, the Georges, and Johns.
Erin: Not, as we saw, the Hillarys, the Elizabeths, the Kamalas.
Chris: The Lisas and the Susans.
Erin: They’ve got those characteristics in spades, but sorry, David Brooks has reserved them as “manly virtues.” At best, a woman displaying them remains invisible. At worst, she’s pilloried.
Chris: Brooks’ work is so rooted in this veneration of Western Civilization and its traditional masculine heroes. It’s like he was born a century too late. Or should’ve been teaching Solon in the Classics Department at Harvard in 1840.
Erin: I believe those are the qualifications listed when applying to be a columnist on the NYT opinion pages. Seriously, we’re pretty close to explicit faculty psychology with this column.
Chris: Or your ability to turn conversations with cab/Uber drivers into sweeping generalizations about globalization. That’s right I’m coming for you Thomas Friedman and your the world is flat BS.
Erin: Can’t A Man Get A Manly Sandwich Anymore?: The Collected Columns of David Brooks
Chris: I feel like we missed one other key piece of the column. David Brooks wrote the words “it’s man-craving all the way down” and I’m pretty sure he has no idea the other connotations that phrase could take.
Erin: I mean, he uses the term “man-crush” as well, which makes me wonder how he’d process 19th century male friendships.
Chris: To turn away from the joke, his unconscious use of language reveals the hetero-normativity of his understandings of masculinity. After all, he ignores the Greek understanding of masculinity which involved same-sex relationships and was intimately tied up in these ideas of honor. Why does Achilles go back into battle? Because Patroclus dies.
Erin: And Trump’s adoration for Putin is marked as something inappropriate, stemming from Trump’s own masculinity issues.
Give me a primary source of a dude talking about manliness and I can have a fruitful discussion with any group of students.
Chris: Seriously, look how long we’ve talking about it.
Erin: I guess, David, we’ll call it a draw: you get to keep having your column, and we get to keep thinking it’s wrong.
Today’s post comes to us from David Mislin. David is a historian of American religion who teaches in the Intellectual Heritage Program at Temple University. His first book, Saving Faith (2015), explores the embrace of religious pluralism by liberal Protestants during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is currently at work on a study of the idea of evil in American culture from the Revolution through the present. You can follow him on Twitter @dmislin.
President Trump left today’s much-anticipated meeting with Pope Francis with peace on his mind. The Vatican statement on the event noted that the two discussed “the promotion of peace in the world.” As part of their meeting, Francis gave Trump some art in the shape of an olive tree meant to symbolize peace.
The message seemed to stick, at least for the moment. “We can use peace,” the president told reporters. Before his plane took off for Brussels, he expanded on this idea on Twitter. “I leave the Vatican more determined than ever to pursue PEACE in our world.” Trump tweeted.
This interest in peace is notable for a president who during his campaign promised to kill not only terrorists but their relatives as well. Since taking office, Trump has proposed increasing funding for the military and overseen the dropping of the U.S.’s largest non-nuclear bomb on Afghanistan.
But even taking Trump’s statement at face value and crediting him with a newfound commitment to peace, he might find the pope holds him to an uncomfortable standard.
It’s worth noting that in recent years, popes have been extremely helpful in fostering peace agreements that the U.S. has supported. Francis was instrumental in brokering the deal to normalize relations between the U.S. and Cuba. He thereby ended one of the last remnants of the Cold War. In 2016, he stepped in to revive the U.S.-backed peace process in Colombia after voters narrowly defeated an agreement to end the conflict there.
But in the past, when popes publicly spoke of peace, it was often as a direct challenge to U.S. presidents.
In the early 1960s, with tensions rising between Buddhists and Catholics in South Vietnam, the U.S. government asked the Vatican for help dealing with the country’s Catholic ruler. Instead, Pope Paul VI repeatedly announced his willingness to negotiate a peace treaty. President Lyndon Johnson, who did not think Americans would accept any settlement that came out of such talks, was forced to sideline the pope. Otherwise he would face the embarrassment of rejecting the prospect of peace.(1)
Both George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush faced opposition from Pope John Paul II for the two wars in Iraq. In 1991, during the first Gulf War, the pope frequently called for peace. Despite widespread support for the military response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, the pope denounced the war as casting “a shadow over the whole human community.”
Twelve years later, as the U.S. prepared to invade Iraq, John Paul II again spoke out. But this time he was even more forceful. In the months before the 2003 invasion, the pope insisted that war was “not inevitable” and urged the two countries to “extinguish the ominous smoldering of a conflict which, with the joint efforts of all, can be avoided.” He also sent Bush – who had presented the war as a means to bring peace to the world — a letter calling on him to “search for ways of stable peace” without igniting a war. Bush, like presidents before him, ignored the Vatican’s plea. The result was a frayed relationship until John Paul’s death in 2005.
The lesson here is that if Trump espouses a language of peace, he should be prepared for the pope to hold him to it. He should also recognize that Francis will work for peace, with or without the backing of the U.S. After a contentious relationship with Francis during the 2016 campaign and despite their enormous differences on policy, the president and the pope managed to have a friendly meeting at the Vatican. But that is not certain to last.
Francis, like the popes before him, has already proved that he is serious about fostering peace. In his short time in office, Trump has proved equally persuasively that he intends to embark on a policy of military expansion and respond with force throughout the globe. The pope is perhaps the one person in the world who has greater power of persuasion than the U.S. president.
If Trump is not determined to “pursue PEACE in our world,” the world will surely hear it from Francis.
(1) These events are described in Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), 529-530.
The unveiling of the Trump administration’s budget, with its enormous cuts to hundreds of government programs, has prompted a lot of responses like this one. The budget is the brainchild of Mick Mulvaney, the head of the Office of Management and Budget. The cuts Mulvaney seeks are so extreme that many in the media seem incapable of taking them seriously, hence this talk about “wish lists.”
In fact, calling it a “wish list” just emphasizes how extreme it is. In a letter to Santa, you ask for normal stuff and some outrageous stuff, knowing that if you were to happen to get that outrageous stuff on Christmas morning, you’d be pleased beyond your wildest dreams. With this budget, Mulvaney has communicated his wildest dreams, and we would be wise to take those seriously.
When commentators say “even Republicans won’t cut PBS” or “SNAP is such a small part of the budget, though,” they make a fundamental mistake in assuming that these programs – and the orientation towards taxation and the role of government they suggest – are somehow fundamental to American society and values. If we look at the broad scope of American history, that’s simply not the case.
Most of the programs targeted in this budget are creations of the New Deal and the Great Society, meaning that they’ve existed for eighty years at most. That feels like a long time, but it’s really not, even in a young country like the United States. Moreover, it’s important to remember that there has been a strong current of opposition to these programs and department for as long as they have existed, as our Great Society week demonstrated. Mulvaney’s budget is the latest entry into a longer (Anglo-)American conversation about two questions that have been with us since before the founding of the republic:
What is the job of the (federal) government?
Are taxes good and right or fundamentally immoral?
Mulvaney argues that this budget considers the people paying taxes, unlike earlier approaches which have had too singular a focus on the people who benefit from these tax-funded programs. To him, this is a moralstance, echoing Calvin Coolidge’s 1920s argument that taxes were a fundamental restriction of personal freedom: “The object sought is not merely a cutting down of public expenditures. That is only the means. Tax reduction is the end.”
This might sound jarring to some people, the idea that reducing taxes is a fundamental goal. Most of the time these days, these sorts of program cuts are couched in language like “times are tough, we have to make cuts,” or “it’s a balancing act,” leaving open the possibility that in more flush economic times, they might be restored. While that sentiment has been expressed at times during the discussion of this budget, Mulvaney has expressly framed this as a budget that seeks to address the wrongs being perpetuated against taxpaying Americans through taxation.
It is important to recognize that the belief that taxes are a restriction on personal freedom isn’t a new idea, nor did it originate with Ronald Reagan or Calvin Coolidge. It’s also important to recognize that it is and has long been a real and deeply-held belief by many in America. We should not write off Mulvaney’s fundamental moral opposition to taxes as outside of the mainstream of American values.
Of course, everyone pays taxes, but Mulvaney’s framework implicitly suggests a second problem with taxation that sounds more familiar. This second problem is that there is an imbalance between what people pay in taxes and what they get back; it’s not just that taxation, takes from the rich, but that it takes from them and gives to the poor.
In this, Mulvaney echoes a more familiar theme in American political life, that there are makers and there are takers, and subsidizing the takers by taxing the makers is wrong. As the statement of purpose for the 1960s conservative youth movement Young Americans for Freedom frames it:
That when government interferes with the work of the market economy, it tends to reduce the moral and physical strength of the nation; that when it takes from one man to bestow on another, it diminishes the incentive of the first, the integrity of the second, and the moral autonomy of both…
Again, we see this language of personal and national moral strength echoed in Mulvaney’s words, and in some of the provisions of the budget. Mulvaney argues this will be an “America First” budget, a “hard power budget,” a budget that will grow the economy at rates most economists deem impossible. To that end, this budget makes it clear there’s no room in America for those who have “strength” but are unwilling to use it by allowing states to impose work requirements on those using federal programs like SNAP, especially those who are “able-bodied,” and have no dependents. Allowing those people to take government benefits without being forced to contribute, in Mulvaney’s conception, is simply perpetuating weakness.
[It should be noted that this budget also takes millions of dollars away from programs that assist people with disabilities, including Social Security. That says something profound, I think, but we’ll leave the Trump administration’s Social Darwinism for a later post.]
This language of the “undeserving poor,” the “lazy,” those who take but are unwilling to contribute is also as old as America itself, and far more mainstream than Mulvaney’s stance against taxes on moral grounds.
All this is to say that if you are someone opposed to elements of this budget, you should not assume that history is on your side and will preserve those elements. That things are one way and have been that way for a while is no guarantee against significant historical change; just ask slaveowners in 1865 . More pointedly, though, it is unwise to assume that there are broadly-held, fundamentally American values about taxation and the role of government that will carry the day. There’s no fundamental American truth to rest on here, only those willing to invest in making their argument.
During a meeting last Wednesday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, President Donald Trump revealed highly classified information regarding the operations of the Islamic State. According to the Washington Post, Trump had not been authorized to share that information since it had come from a U.S. ally. Initially, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson denied that Trump had done anything wrong. In a series of tweets this morning, however, Trump undermined his own officials and admitted to the leak:
As President I wanted to share with Russia (at an openly scheduled W.H. meeting) which I have the absolute right to do, facts pertaining to terrorism and airline flight safety. Humanitarian reasons, plus I want Russia to greatly step up their fight against ISIS & terrorism.
Trump’s claim that he has “the absolute right to” reveal classified information to whomever he wants has already garnered comparisons across Twitter and the news media to Richard Nixon’s 1977 interview with British journalist David Frost. Nixon responded to one of Frost’s questions about his use of executive paper by saying “Well, when the president does it that means that it is not illegal.”
The comments, while resulting from vastly different political contests, reveal the narcissism at the heart of the Nixon and Trump presidencies. Trump claimed this morning that he could reveal highly classified material to Russian diplomats for “Humanitarian reasons” and to get Russia “to greatly step up their fight against ISIS & terrorism.” Setting aside the vague reference to humanitarian reasons, the heart of Trump’s claim is that as president, he has the right to use whatever information he wants in order to pursue specific policy goals.
That logic is, to say the least, problematic. After all, Trump was not sharing information with Great Britain, Germany, Japan, or some other staunch American ally. Rather he was speaking with Russia, America’s greatest international rival. A nation that the U.S. intelligence community concluded interfered in the last presidential election to aid Trump’s presidential bid. Additionally, several top Trump presidential campaign officials had contact with Russian intelligence officials during the campaign. And to top it off, last week Trump fired F.B.I. director James Comey for continuing to investigate these connections. On the surface this seems deeply troubling, we have a president sharing highly classified information with Russia while his administration is shrouded in scandal over campaign officials possibly coordinating with a foreign power.
Or, as a New York Times article from today suggests a much simpler explanation. Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush wrote that Trump “a hasty and indifferent reader of printed briefing materials, simply did not possess the interest or knowledge of the granular details of intelligence gathering to leak specific sources and methods of intelligence gathering that would do harm to United States allies.” Either the president is sharing top-secret intelligence with America’s biggest rival or he’s too lazy or stupid to care about sharing it.
Frost-Nixon Interview
Nixon, on the other hand, had masterminded a criminal conspiracy to investigate, illegally monitor, and burglarize his opponents. In the same interview with Frost, Nixon compared his behavior to that of Lincoln’s during the Civil War. Nixon claimed that
Lincoln said, and I think I can remember the quote almost exactly, he said, ‘Actions which otherwise would be unconstitutional, could become lawful if undertaken for the purpose of preserving the Constitution and the Nation.’ Now that’s the kind of action I’m referring to. Of course in Lincoln’s case it was the survival of the Union in wartime, it’s the defense of the nation and, who knows, perhaps the survival of the nation.
When Frost pointed out that Nixon’s situation was in no way similar to Lincoln’s, Nixon replied that “This nation was torn apart in an ideological way by the war in Vietnam, as much as the Civil War tore apart the nation when Lincoln was president.” When pressed on the issue further, Nixon claimed that during war, “a president does have certain extraordinary powers which would make acts that would otherwise be unlawful, lawful if undertaken for the purpose of preserving the nation and the Constitution, which is essential for the rights we’re all talking about.” In other words, Nixon viewed the unrest generated by the Vietnam war as justifying his behavior—including using resources from the F.B.I., C.I.A., and the I.R.S. to investigate his political enemies.
The justifications of Trump and Nixon share a similar narcissism. In fact, Nixon’s efforts were not about protecting the United States, at all. Rather they were about protecting himself and ensuring his reelection. Trump’s claim of having the right to share classified intelligence with whomever he wants to, follows a similar selfish impulse. As Bruce Miroff, a presidential historian explained to TPM, “He [Trump] can’t stand thinking that either he’s in the wrong, as in this case, or that somebody else was in charge of a major move, as was the case with the Comey firing. He’s the man in charge.” So while the comments emerged from different historical contexts, they both came from men who placed their own needs over those who elected them to the presidency in the first place.
Erin Bartram: In a piece in The New Republic yesterday, Graham Vyse explores the idea that historians have been “radicalized” by the political events of the past year. He speaks with a number of historians about how they feel about using their expertise in the public sphere, and the difficulties historians might face in engaging with the public without appearing partisan or “too political.” Given that our blog is, ostensibly, one of the forms this “radicalization” has taken, today we’re going to take a look at some of the ideas presented in the piece, and talk about how we navigate these issues in talking with members of the public about history.
Chris Bouton: So what were your thoughts after reading this?
Erin: Well, there were a few things that caught my eye. One was the idea that historians are or have long been quiet and insular in this way, mostly because we’re also accused of indoctrinating in the classroom all the time. So one thing this raises for me is how much we construe work in the classroom as inherently separate from working with “the public”
Chris: The piece has a narrow definition of public, the writer seems to be focusing on the role of historians in the pundit class ala Arthur Schlesinger
Erin: Yes, and even more narrowly, the historian as talking head on the teevee, since there’s a longer, broader history of historians writing pieces for newspapers/magazines.
Chris: Yes, there are historians today who write for newspapers and magazines. Some very good historians at that. The piece does make a good point that historians can and should be using their experience to help contextualize what is going on right now. I’m less sympathetic towards the “appearing partisan” or “too political” argument.
Erin: I think that generally misconstrues what historians do when they insert themselves, honestly, but it’s not surprising.
Chris: It’s also a narrow view of what we mean by politics.
Erin: When historians got mad about the Andrew Jackson thing, it wasn’t because Trump got a fact wrong – anyone could look up AJ’s dates. It was about interpretation. Historians, by engaging in these debates, are making the argument that interpretation of the past is a skill, and it has methods and limitations and impact
Chris: Right, we can’t get worked up every time somebody messes up a date or a fact. That happens, we all do it. As I wrote, it was the arrogance of the entire claim. Hubris is the word I should have used on Monday. That a millionaire who inherited a real estate empire, engaged in multiple bankruptcies, brags about how little he reads or thinks critically about the world, thought he or Andrew Jackson could have avoided the Civil War? I mean, the statement is so revealing precisely because it shows how little he knows about what he doesn’t know about.
Erin: The most dangerous people: the people who don’t know what they don’t know.
But the issue of how to do this without “appearing partisan” has been on my mind. One of the historians quoted in there says there are historical truths just like there are scientific truths. And we do appeal to evidence. How many times can we point to the secession declarations and the cornerstone speech?
Chris: I don’t think the appearing partisan issue is one particularly worth worrying about
Erin: Well, but here’s where I encounter it. I’ve been teaching Reaganomics this past week, and I can explain supply-side economics and the ideas behind it, and I have evidence that it didn’t do what it claimed it would do. The sticky bits come when students say “But it seems really obvious that this wouldn’t work. It seems really obvious that you can’t make rich people invest in businesses and raise wages. Did people really think this would work?”
Chris: Well, yes, some of them did. But some of them did it because it was in their best interest. Not everyone involved in politics is honest or trustworthy. Like any other line of work.
Erin: But I think those are the moments where I am hyper aware of appearing “partisan,” because I am essentially saying “these people are liars and btw they are still in government”
Chris: If the claim is supported by the available evidence…
Erin: I have no problem looking at Thurmond’s CRA filibuster where he says “We in the South know how to deal with this and care for the Negro” or whatever and saying “that’s complete crap”
Chris: I guess I’d frame it as, no matter what you do by entering the political punditry/talking head class there’s no avoiding those accusations.
Erin: Indeed. I think one thing that shapes my anxieties is that as a woman, my understanding of politics and the economy is always in doubt for many of my students. The number of “Well, actually” gold standard lectures I’ve received in class is obscene. But I’m also a “feminazi” too so ::shrug::
Chris: This discussion also touches on a broader point, I think we’d like to believe that we, as historians, can marshal evidence to offer valid interpretations of the past. And that by marshaling evidence we can convince everyone. But that will never convince everyone, especially someone who has already let their own biases blind them. And that by marshaling evidence, we can convince everyone. But we can’t.
Erin: And to those people, we’re the “bias” ones.
This is why I think it’s not wrong of us to consider our work in the classroom to be an important part of public outreach. We can give analysis on CNN (well, not you and me, but historians in general), but teaching historical thinking skills takes time. It’s ultimately more productive, though.
Chris: Yes, I agree that we need a broader conception about what our work in public is. The classroom is a hugely important piece of that.
Erin: Different things can happen in different places.
Chris: Right, we have museums, public history sites, the classroom, op-eds, magazine features, popular history books etc. We need to recognize the values and virtues of each.
Erin: And there’s always been this discussion going on, and historians have always argued that the choices we make in teaching and the arguments we formulate are “political” in the sense that they have power.
I think, in some ways, this is being framed as “radicalism” because it’s more comfortable to say the historians have gotten extreme, when the problem is that the glib ahistoricism of the current administration is what got extreme. Every president, including the last one, was bad at talking about history sometimes, and used ideas about history to make arguments that didn’t hold up. Historians responded to them too.
Chris: The historical profession didn’t change on Election Day.
I also think that this can be a moment of reflection for those in the historical community. In that if we want to advocate for historians to become more active in taking their arguments to the general public, we need to create institutional incentives.
At least in my academic experience, if you’re on tenure track, you need to publish in a reputable journal, get the book done, write for the academic crowd, teach just enough to get by, but let your research, which few people can understand, guide you to the promised land of tenure. There’s no incentive to reach out beyond the narrow bounds of expertise until much later in your career.
Erin: And in an environment where state budget hawks love to find ways to defund public education, universities can see this sort of public engagement as a liability
I think part of what makes it hard is that what makes one an “expert” in history to the general public is knowing things, not knowing how to think and analyze in a particular way. Therefore anything that requires analysis becomes “that’s just your opinion, man”
Chris: Right and this is where I think the comparison with science that was made in the piece was a good one, that historical thinking is not knowing things, but a process of analyzing events/facts/whatever and then making informed conclusions. It is of course built upon knowing things.
Erin: History is not a thing, it is a way of doing things.
Chris: That should be our new motto.
I guess the other thing that struck me about the piece is the sense of, “Oh when did history education get so bad” part of it. It’s a little Helen Lovejoy “Oh, won’t somebody please think of the children!”
We know why it’s on the decline. Higher ed funding has been on the decline for years. And as a profession, we haven’t done a good enough job making public outreach a part of what it means to be a TT historian at an R1 university. We insulated ourselves far too much and pushed the incentives far too much towards talking to only one another and not enough to people outside our fields. Just think about how some scholars we’ve met and read respond to the idea of “public history.”
I realize I’m painting with a broad stroke here and this isn’t true in every case. As there are an army of public historians, museum curators, interpreters, and countless others who do a remarkable job in reaching out to the general public.
I guess my point is, the academic wing of professional historians could do a better job of recognizing what’s being done already (museums, teaching, historical sites etc.) and building off of that.
Erin: We should both learn from them and work with them.
Chris: Exactly. Teaching is hugely important, especially if we want people to teach the historical process and not just facts.
Erin: And teaching happens in lots of places. There’s supposedly really high public trust in historians. I’m not sure you’d know it, but if there is, we should see growing that relationship as a major goal for the discipline and as individual historians.
Yesterday, those of us who study 19th century U.S. history had one of those days. The president’s comments on Andrew Jackson, his “swashbuckling” nature, how he would have prevented the Civil War, and why no one has ever thought about this before were breathtaking in their historical arrogance, as Chris noted.
There’s lots in the statement to unpack, well beyond the issue of whether or not Trump was aware Jackson was dead at the time of the war. There’s also Trump’s idealization of the dealmaker, who comes in and gets things done. The best dealmakers, of course, are the ones who get their way and convince everyone else it’s for the best, a belief clearly evidenced by his support for people like Putin, Duterte, and Erdoğan.
The art of the deal in 19th century politics, however, was the art of the compromise. It was also the art of kicking the can down the road. When you think about it, most of the “compromises” you can name off the top of your head are from the period between the founding and the Civil War, and they all deal with issues of federal vs. state power, representation, the imperial expansion of the nation, and slavery: the 3/5ths Compromise, the Connecticut Compromise, the Missouri Compromise, and the Compromise of 1850. Republican voters elected Lincoln not on a platform of abolition, but on a platform that sought further compromise – a way to limit the expansion of slavery without eliminating it, to the benefit of white slaveholder and white free male farmers and industrial workers alike.
(If you are in any doubt about this, read Lincoln’s First Inaugural, delivered after secession had begun, which is basically “I am not going to take away your slaves and I brought receipts. Please come back.”)
A compromise involves both sides giving something up to get something, but when we’re talking about 19th century America, it’s important to remember that these compromises also involved some people – enslaved people and native people, people who were not part of the negotiations – having things taken away from them. They didn’t give something up to get something, they were just compromised.
A generous reading of Trump’s admiration for Jackson – a reading that presumed the president had a working knowledge of the American past – might tie it to Jackson’s willingness to use federal power to enforce the tariff in South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis. It might presume that Trump saw these previous compromises as weak, and that he believed a real dealmaker would have come in and sorted things out, once and for all.
Let’s get things sorted, boffins!
Setting aside the practical impossibility of all of this, it’s instructive to consider what deal Trump thinks Jackson would have made. I wish I could presume that the president understood the central compromise of 19th century America – that enslaved black Americans could be both people and property at the same time – but I can’t, and I’ve never heard him talk meaningfully about slavery. But I also can’t imagine that he doesn’t know Jackson was a slaveowner.
To that end, I actually cannot imagine what deal he thinks could have been worked out. I cannot conceive of it, and I’m not sure I want to know. What is worse, that our president honestly thinks maybe Jackson – JACKSON, of all people – could have and would have worked out a deal that ended slavery and made everyone happy, or that he honestly thinks Jackson could have worked out a deal that permanently enshrined a slave system in a way that made “everyone” happy because he doesn’t think of enslaved people as people at all?
You may have seen the recent news story about the re-reburial of James K. Polk, the 11th president. You may have then thought “Who even was that dude?”* For many Americans, there’s a stretch of 19th century presidents, broken only by Lincoln and maybe Andrew Jackson, who remain generally unknown. Why is this?
The Simpsons had one answer. They categorized these presidents as “mediocre,” as “caretaker presidents,” as “adequate, forgettable, occasionally regrettable.” Poor (Zachary) Taylor, (John) Tyler, (Millard) Fillmore, and (Rutherford B.) Hayes get mocked, along with William Henry Harrison (I died in thirty days!).
Polk, along with Pierce, Van Buren, Arthur, and W.H. Harrison’s grandson Benjamin didn’t even merit inclusion. Yet all of them did important things, and saw significant changes take place under their administration. Polk, for instance, oversaw significant territorial expansion, including the Oregon Territory and a massive cession of land as a result of the war he initiated with Mexico.
Despite this, 19th century presidents weren’t as powerful as 20th and 21st century presidents, and that wasn’t because of any personal failings. It was by design. America’s first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, had no real executive at all. While the subsequent 1787 Constitution (the first iteration of the one we have now) did provide for a stronger central government with a real executive branch, it was still nothing like today.
It’s not too hard to understand why the first generations of Americans were skeptical of a powerful executive, given some of the reasons behind the separation from England. Their lack of representation in Parliament was remedied by the creation of the federal legislature, but when it came to an executive, many Americans were still concerned with the potential abuses that could result from that much power concentrated in one man.
Just as Americans fought about whether the federal or state government should have more power, they fought about the limits of the executive branch’s power over domestic and even foreign policy. The reason we remember Senator Henry Clay and Senator John C. Calhoun rather than President Martin Van Buren and President James K. Polk is because senators and representatives were members of the branch of government their contemporaries saw as more important to a healthy republic.
How did we get to where we are now? It wasn’t a smooth or sudden change, but rather something like stretching out pizza dough. Late 19th and early 20th century expansions of executive power expanded and then contracted, but never contracted all the way. The Cold War, and the rise of the national security apparatus to facilitate it, stretched the executive ball of dough out to something like the shape it’s in now, and baked it into our national consciousness.
*It’s not enough to say “Well, Polk only served one term!” He got a lot done in that one term, and anyway, Carter only served one term and we remember him.
