U.S. History

The Not-as-Great Depression?

The news is full of commentaries about the worsening economic crisis in the United States.  Some people, such as multi-billionaire George Soros, are out there saying that the coming economic depression will rival (or perhaps exceed) the one of the 1930s in its severity.

Here is an article by Robert Gavin in the Sunday Boston Globe that tries to assess the comparability of the circumstances.  It's worth reading.   The quick take is:

The good news: Many analysts agree the current downturn will not topple into a full-fledged depression, and the Fed is taking unprecedented actions to prevent one. The bad news: there seems to be no clear way to stop the shock waves.

The Not-as-Great Depression?

The news is full of commentaries about the worsening economic crisis in the United States.  Some people, such as multi-billionaire George Soros, are out there saying that the coming economic depression will rival (or perhaps exceed) the one of the 1930s in its severity.

Here is an article by Robert Gavin in the Sunday Boston Globe that tries to assess the comparability of the circumstances.  It's worth reading.   The quick take is:

The good news: Many analysts agree the current downturn will not topple into a full-fledged depression, and the Fed is taking unprecedented actions to prevent one. The bad news: there seems to be no clear way to stop the shock waves.

Presidential Campaigns of Old

In the nineteenth century, presidential candidates were expected not to show any eagerness for winning the office.  Here's an interesting article explaining that institutionalized hypocrisy.

Battle of Gettysburg

The Battle of Gettysburg is generally regarded as a pivotal battle in the Civil War.  Had things gone the other way (had the South won that battle), the remaining course of the war may have gone very differently.  So, there is a general fascination with Gettysburg, on the part both of historians and of Civil War buffs.  It was a brutal conflict.

Here's a review of a new book about Gettysburg : Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood & Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War by Gary Gallagher.  It's an important book in part because it addresses the crucial question of how we know what we know (or think we know) about past events.

And here, thanks to Edge of the American West, are a couple of clips from Ken Burns's landmark documentary about the Civil War.

Populist Visions

Ruth Rosen reviews Charles Postel's new book, The Populist Vision:

What do pundits really mean when they describe a politician’s rhetoric as “populist”? Does that candidate recoil from the uncertainties and anxieties caused by globalization? Stand up for the little guy against elite corporate interests? Appeal to popular and irrational impulses and therefore pose an authoritarian threat to democracy? Is populism progressive or conservative? In the middle of this interminable electoral year, this is hardly an idle or academic question.

In 2004, former Sen. John Edwards introduced “populist” rhetoric into the presidential campaign when he described “two separate and unequal Americas.” In 2008, he addressed the plight of the poor so powerfully that both Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama felt obliged to embrace his language, as well as many of his policies. Although historian Michael Kazin has rightly observed that both the left and right have used populist appeals against “elites” throughout the 20th century, there was, in fact, an actual Populist movement that took root during the infamous “gilded age” of the 1880s and 1890s.

In his new book, The Populist Vision, Charles Postel offers an original and riveting account of the Populist vision that jump-started 20th-century social reform movements and is still relevant to our contemporary American society.

We can easily imagine how Populists viewed their world. Our generation of Americans also feels disoriented by living in a shrinking world. In the late 19th century, writes Postel, “The traumas of technological innovation, expansion of corporate power, and commercial and cultural globalization” left many Americans reeling from the speed of change. “Corporations grew exponentionally amid traumatic spasms of global capitalist development. The rich amassed great fortunes, a prosperous section of the middle class grew more comfortable and hard times pressed on most everyone else.”

Out of this alienating and disorienting experience grew a Populism that previous historians have often simplified.  Some have viewed Populists as radical visionaries who dreamed of a utopian, egalitarian American society. Still others have characterized them as nostalgic, rural reactionaries who yearned for an Edenic, agrarian past.

Postel, however, offers a far more nuanced interpretation.  Armed with a wide array of sources, he convincingly argues that American Populism, for all its flaws and failures—it eventually failed to promote racial equality—was fundamentally a modern social movement that offered a “divergent” path to the creation of a modern capitalist society.

By excavating the ideas, lives and organizational activities of Populist activists, Postel demonstrates that the women and men in the Populist movement largely valued “business methods, education and technology” and embraced the ideas of modernity and progress. He vividly describes, for example, the rich intellectual debates that rippled through the movement. “Few political or social movements,” he writes, “brought so many men and women into lecture halls, classrooms, camp meetings and seminars or produced such an array of inexpensive literature.”

By scrutinizing their politics, Postel also reveals that the Populists, who decried the corruption of the traditional political parties, sought “a new type of politics that would deliver rationalized, nonpartisan and businesslike governances.”

For the Populists, argues Postel, the Post Office represented the ideal government agency. An elaborate bureaucracy, the Post Office simply delivered a necessary service without favoring special interests or interfering with the lives of its customers. This was “the Populist vision of an alternative capitalism in which private enterprise coalesced with both cooperative and state-based economies.” The  Farmers Alliance, for example, “pursued the dramatic expansion of government regulation and control in the country’s economic life. This included demands for the public ownership of railroads and the telegraph. ... At stake was who should be included and who should wield shares of power—a conflict that all concerned understood as vital to the future of a modern America.”

Most historians of the Populist movement have focused largely on one region of the country, or exclusively on farmers or miners. Postel instead provides a far more expansive view of this national movement by including black and white farmers, wage earners, miners, railroad workers, rural women and bohemian urbanites. Taken together, those who participated in such a broad-based movement not only ranted against banks and farm policies, but also scrutinized the wages of workers, education, women’s rights, business, religion, race, science and technology.

It is Postel’s focus on women, however, that makes his interpretation of Populists so convincing. For decades, historians of gender have argued that whenever you study women as part of any social movement or political event, your interpretation will very likely change. We now know, for example, that middle-class women—for good or ill—have led most of the social and reform movements in our country’s past. 

By including women, Postel discovers a modern sensibility that other historians of the Populist movement have missed. Like their male counterparts, rural women sought a different path to progress and capitalist development. By taking seriously the dreams and hopes of women farmers, Postel explores the female Populists who struggled to end the whiskey trade that threatened their earnings and families, dreamed of leaving field labor for a modern education, fought for the right to vote, and sought their own economic independence as telegraphers, clerks, teachers and even professionals.

The Populist movement attracted hundreds of thousands of women. Why? Because it was the only institution that offered women equal political participation. In addition, it also “offered rural women hope for an expanded social cultural environment, improved methods in the kitchen and garden, a more just configuration of marriage and family relationships, and increased opportunities for education, employment, and perhaps participation in political affairs. In short,” writes Postel, “the Alliance movement attracted large numbers of women because it raised the prospects of a more independent and modern life.” And this vision of female independence, he emphasizes, is incompatible with an older historical description of “rural protest representing tradition-bound farmers heroically defending their communities and homes from the encroachments of modernity. ...”

Aside from demonstrating the modernity of Populism, Postel’s great insight is that the particular way American capitalism developed was not “predetermined.” The Populist struggle to develop a more regulated and equitable capitalism, he argues, was not defeated because it was a backward, traditional, agrarian movement. The Populist vision of progress lost because its participants could not defeat the more powerful political and economic interests they battled.

Elegantly written, meticulously researched, “The Populist Vision” is an enthralling history of the movement that created the most pervasive political impulse in American politics. Postel’s book has won both the Frederick Jackson Turner and Bancroft awards, which it justly deserves. His work also helps us to understand the actual Populist Vision that lies behind the superficial and shallow rhetoric to which we’ve been subjected during this election year.

  Ruth Rosen teaches history at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of “The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America” (Penguin, 2006) and is a frequent contributor to  Dissent Magazine  and  Talking Points Memo.

 

Thomas Paine, Revolutionary

Here's a look back at the radical influence of Thomas Paine, the often-overlooked founding father whose words sparked the American Revolution.

Capital Compromise

One of the intriguing thiings about the study of history is the opportunity it affords to contemplate how things might have gone differently if a single meeting had not occurred or if a decision had gone the other way.

Here's a brief take on the compromise that made Washington, DC the capital city.  Fergus Bordewich speculates about one of the important consequences of that compromise.

Zinn's Graphic People's History

Here's a brief video précis of Howard Zinn's new graphic book, A People's History of American Empire. 

Declaration of Independence

Happy Fourth, friends.  It's a good day to remind ourselves what the Declaration of Independence had to say.

It's good, too, to think about the courage required of the American rebels who wrote it and voted to adopt it.  Imagine the fear, trepidation, and excitement they must have felt in the face of their bold action!  England would regard their actions as traitorous, punishable by death.

One of the great things about the 2008 HBO mini-series on John Adams was its success in capturing the emotion of the times.  Here are two short clips from that series, the first showing Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin discussing the wording of the Declaration; the second focusing on the decision of the Continental Congress to declare independence.

Freedom Riders

Here's a comment about a book about containing important historical photographs of "freedom riders" in Mississippi in 1961 [the NYT Blog post at the preceding link contains photos that go along with the following text]:

Flipping through the coming weekend’s Book Review, you’ll find a quadrant of faces — two pairs, each featuring a mug shot and a present-day photograph. The images are from “Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders,” by Eric Etheridge (Atlas, $45), a book chronicling a remarkable moment in civil rights history that merits a few more words than the 30 we were able to give it in print.

Historical photographs including the one above lead off the book, along with essays recalling the passion and bravery of the riders, black and white, as they pushed their way through the South in protests against segregation; the cruelty and violence that met them there; and the momentous shifts they helped stir in both the nation’s consciousness and the government’s sense of accountability. In an introduction to the book, Roger Wilkins, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and professor of history at George Mason University, explains:

Their original protest involved riding vulnerable buses through some of the toughest territory in America at that time: Birmingham and rural Alabama, on to Jackson, then to Louisiana. As some Northern witnesses asked themselves whether these people had lost their minds, the Freedom Riders were waylaid at Anniston and their bus set on fire with them still inside (they escaped by a miracle). They were beaten in Birmingham. They kept on: through the dreaded landscape of rural Mississippi where mass arrests and the horrifying specter of Parchman, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, awaited them. Some were beaten bloody or had bones broken and skulls cracked.

The heart of “Breach of Peace” is the portraits — mug shots taken immediately after the riders’ arrests and the more recent photographs by Etheridge — and their accompanying text. The mug shots show people at the dawn of adulthood (many of the riders were students then); the faces convey defiance and weariness, but also hope and freshness. And though some of the expressions are glum, many exhibit a wry amusement, as if to say, “Yeah, you’ve got me now, but just watch what I do next.”

 

Fast-forward nearly 50 years and we do, indeed, get to see: The updated portraits project fatigue and wisdom, fierceness and serenity. There are soulful eyes and droll smiles, and of course all the faces bear the etchings of time.

 

The pictures draw you in, but the text makes you linger. What has happened, over the decades, to these young, earnest people? Brief interviews and mini-biographies become mesmerizing time capsules, allowing you to eavesdrop on details of the riders’ lives, as if overhearing snippets of conversation from an adjacent bus seat. Many of the riders are now retired, having worked as scientists and pastors, farmers and lawyers, social workers and doctors, journalists and politicians. An impressive number became teachers.

 

Perhaps most inspiring is to see how many stayed true to their convictions, working for civil rights and other social causes like fair housing, literacy, children’s advocacy and environmental health. Some are still engaged in civil disobedience: Joan Pleune, back then a senior at the University of California, Berkeley, joined the Granny Peace Brigade in 2005 and has been arrested several times for protesting the Iraq war; Theresa Walker, in the early ’60s a young mother of four, was arrested in 2000 in New York City during protests after the killing of Amadou Diallo. (You can see an excellent video of Etheridge interviewing Pleune and Hezekiah Watkins, who was in only the ninth grade at Rowan Junior High in Mississippi when he joined the protest, on the author’s blog. Also: an interview with Calvin Trillin, who covered the rides for Time magazine.)

 

Today’s generation of activists take to their keyboards and count their numbers in mouse clicks. Many do get out of their chairs — to organize and canvass, to join the Peace Corps or Teach for America, to climb trees and throw pies, to talk politics in the local pub. This is no small thing. But when propped up next to this book, our modern movements somehow seem to pale. As Wilkins writes in his introduction:

The courage and tenacity of the Riders electrified large segments of the American public … as no activity had done before. People began asking themselves, “What can I do?” Contributions flowed more freely into the coffers of the civil rights organizations. Blacks and their allies outside the South were motivated to take bolder actions themselves (“If those kids are willing to lay all that on the line, I should be able to screw up at least a little courage in order to support the movement”). Even many federal employees — some of them political appointees — joined a march against their own Justice Department in early 1963, which infuriated U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

So: Who will this era’s freedom riders be?