by Henry Farrell on December 4, 2006
Two interesting arguments about the press and the 1960’s backlash against civil rights.
First, David Greenberg in a book review in _The American Prospect._
If the civil-rights movement represented one of American journalism’s finest hours, it carried a cost. It’s a shame that Roberts and Klibanoff don’t explicitly state the conclusion that much of their evidence suggests: Today’s right-wing bogeyman of “the liberal media” originated in this struggle. Coverage of the movement convinced much of the white South that the networks, papers like the Times, and magazines like Time and Newsweek were hostile and biased interlopers that told only one side of the story. … Roberts and Klibanoff also detail more subtle ways in which hostility toward the national media was voiced. In one fascinating section, they relate a conspiracy hatched among white Southern editors who belonged to the Associated Press to try to force the wire service to write about crimes by blacks in the North as avidly as it spotlighted the violence of the white South. Ultimately, politicians — notably Alabama Governor George Wallace — capitalized on this resentment. Wallace cited journalists alongside pointy-headed intellectuals and the Supreme Court in his litany of elitist villains who were screwing the little guy. Richard Nixon, too, picked up the strategy, which he bequeathed to men like Roger Ailes and Karl Rove.
Second, “Rick Perlstein”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w061127&s=perlstein112906 (free reg required) in _TNR._
Since the late ’60s, however–not coincidentally, around the time Kevin Phillips rose to fame–a new, unspoken set of rules evolved. It happened in a moment of trauma. After the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, all the top news executives sent a wire to Mayor Richard J. Daley protesting the way their employees “were repeatedly singled out by policemen and deliberately beaten.” Such was their presumption of cultural authority they couldn’t imagine how anyone could disagree. Then Mayor Daley went on Walter Cronkite’s show and shocked the media establishment by refusing to apologize to the beaten reporters: “Many of them are hippies themselves. They’re part of this movement.” Polls revealed 60 percent of Americans agreed with Daley. For the press, it triggered a dark night of the soul. In an enormously influential column, the pundit Joseph Kraft, shaken, wrote, “Mayor Daley and his supporters have a point. Most of us in what is called the communication field are not rooted in the great mass of ordinary Americans–in Middle America.” That air of alienation–that helpless feeling that we have no idea what’s going on out there–has structured elite discourse about the rest of the country ever since. A set of constructs about what “the great mass of ordinary Americans” supposedly believes–much more conservative things than any media elitist would believe, basically–became reified. Pundits like Kraft–a social class that spends much of their time among people like themselves, inside the Beltway–learned to bend over backward to be fair, lest they advertise their own alienation from everyone else. On subjects that chafed them–say, the relevance of certain ugly folkways of the South in electoral politics–they just had to bend harder. Or ignore the matter altogether.
Now the historical origins of a set of institutions and practices don’t necessarily dictate their current content. Much of the discourse around social welfare in the 1930’s had an unpleasant racist edge. But there does seem to be some continuity between what Greenberg and Perlstein (both of whom are excellent historians who are intimately familiar with their source material) document, and the ways that journalists tiptoe around the political importance of racism in the South today. Comments?
by Eszter Hargittai on November 4, 2006
Ooh, this is cool. You can view a tag cloud of the most common words in U.S. presidential speeches, declarations and letters since 1776. Slide the arrows on the bar to move from the representation of one document to another. The bottom of the page has a detailed description of how the tag clouds were generated, it looks like a careful approach. What a neat idea. [thanks]
by Brian on October 14, 2006
I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea that some propositions are self-evident recently. And it is hard to think about this without being reminded of the Declaration of Independence. But I realised when going back over it that I didn’t quite know what Jefferson meant at one crucial point. Maybe this is something completely obvious, or maybe there is some historical literature on this that I should know about. But it seemed to me to be an interesting interpretative question.
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by Kieran Healy on October 5, 2006
I just watched the “trailer for 300”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/300/, a film version of a “Frank Miller graphic novel”:http://www.amazon.com/300-Frank-Miller/dp/1569714029 (which I haven’t read) about the battle of Thermopylae. Looks like the core of it is a good old relentless battle in the spirit of “Zulu”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00008PC13/ref=nosim/kieranhealysw-20. There’s also some stuff on Sparta and its amazing toughness, Persia and its big golden thrones, and ambassadors to Sparta standing unwisely close to large open pits. The Spartan tradition of compulsory homosexuality was less in evidence in the trailer. My feeling is that the likes of Melanie Phillips, Christopher Hitchens and Victor Davis Hanson are already drafting the flinty Op-Ed pieces they’ll publish the week the film comes out. They can add themselves to the “wide variety”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molon_Labe%21 “of people”:http://irelandsown.net/Nation.htm “who have been”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Anthem_of_Colombia inspired by the story of Thermopylae. It’s all about juggling the analogy to make sure that you get to be one of the lonely 300, and not the vast invading foreign army.
by Maria on September 28, 2006
Yesterday in Kiev there was a commemoration at Babiy Yar, the infamous gorge in which tens of thousands of Ukraine’s Jews were murdered by the invading German army in 1941. (Later on in the occupation, Babi Yar was also used to massacre gypsies, other Ukrainians and Russian prisoners of war.) President Viktor Yuschenko and the presidents of Israel and Croatia all gathered for an event attended by thousands of Ukrainians. A quick taxi ride turned into an hour-long odyssey as traffic all over the city was at a standstill for hours as the scale of the commemoration was so huge.
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by Henry Farrell on September 27, 2006
“Sandy Levinson”:http://balkin.blogspot.com/2006/09/thucydides-weighs-in.html quotes from Thucydides.
“To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defence . . . and indeed most people are more ready to call villainy cleverness than simple-mindedness honesty. They are proud of the first quality and ashamed of the second.” Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War III, 82, trans. Rex Warner, The Penguin Classics, pp. 209-210.
One of the most deeply weird features of modern political discourse is how some conservative supporters of the Iraq war and associated numbskulls such as “Dan Simmons”:http://www.dansimmons.com/news/message/2006_04.htm cite Thucydides in support of their claims that we’re engaged in an epochal clash of civilizations where moderation amounts to appeasement of an enemy that will enslave us all if we don’t decimate em. I imagine that the appalling Victor Davis Hanson is to blame for most of this. I simply don’t see how one can read Thucydides without coming away with some quite emphatic lessons about the long term costs of imperial arrogance towards one’s political allies, how unnecessary military adventures turn into disasters, und so weiter. Not to mention Thucydides’ depiction of the dangers of cheap jingoism and pro-war demagoguery at home (it would be unfair to describe Glenn Reynolds and company as tinpot Kleons, if only because Kleon actually went out to fight the war that he had touted for).
by Scott McLemee on September 18, 2006
Some weeks ago, watching our Dear Leader answer questions on television, I was overcome with a wave of pity. Not for the president, but for those poor souls, many as yet unborn, who will one day specialize in studying his administration.
Can you imagine having to read countless transcripts of George W. Bush’s speeches? Let alone being obliged to posit them as meaningful? And yet, in the fullness of time, it must come to pass.
Then again, maybe not.
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by Jon Mandle on September 13, 2006
Although the U.S. Constitution of 1787 does not include the word “slavery”, there are five more-or-less direct references to it, and other more indirect references. Article IV, Section 2, is the fugitive slave clause – any person “held in service or labor in one state, under the laws thereunto, escaping into another … shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”
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by Chris Bertram on September 12, 2006
In a “recent comments thread”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/08/23/the-wealth-and-poverty-of-nations/ , I got into trouble for asserting that Christopher Hitchens had clearly never read Günter Grass’s ” _Crabwalk_ “:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0156029707/junius-20 since, in the course of “a polemic”:http://www.slate.com/id/2148094/nav/tap1/ that was nasty even by his standards, he described the book thus:
bq. suddenly there is Grass, publishing a large and cumbersome account of the sinking of a German civilian vessel in the Baltic in 1945 ….
By contrast, Dan Jacobson gives “an accurate and balanced account”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2006/09/writers_choice__1.html of the book (warning: plot spoilers), coupled with some reflections on Grass’s recent disclosures about his SS membership as part of the “Writer’s Choice” series at Geras’s site. (I wrote about _Crabwalk_ in “a post last year”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/02/27/crabwalk/ , before the recent revelations.)
Update: Ian Buruma, in the New Yorker, has “an interesting piece”:http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/060918crat_atlarge on l’affaire Grass.
by Scott McLemee on September 9, 2006
“The Path to 9/11 is produced and promoted by a well-honed propaganda operation consisting of a network of little-known right-wingers working from within Hollywood to counter its supposedly liberal bias. This is the network within the ABC network. Its godfather is far right activist David Horowitz, who has worked for more than a decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit mainstream film and TV production. On this project, he is working with a secretive evangelical religious right group founded by The Path to 9/11‘s director David Cunningham that proclaims its goal to ‘transform Hollywood’ in line with its messianic vision.”
Plenty more where that came from, here.
by Scott McLemee on September 8, 2006
A group of prominent American historians is calling on ABC not to broadcast The Path to 9/11. (For a quick reminder of how propaganda-rific it is, see Mark Grimsley’s recent item at Cliopatria. It quotes an endorsement by Michael Medved and provides some pertinent links.)
The list of signatories starts with Arthur Schlesinger — who, whatever else you may think of him, is pretty much the guy to have out in front on this sort of complaint, for rhetorical appeal to the center (rhetorical construct thought “the center” may be).
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by Henry Farrell on August 22, 2006
This “Los Angeles Times”:http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-vietnam20aug20,1,7586489,full.story story (free sub or bugmenot required) deserves more attention than it’s getting.
In early 1973, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Creighton Abrams received some bad news from the service’s chief of criminal investigations. An internal inquiry had confirmed an officer’s widely publicized charge that members of the 173rd Airborne Brigade had tortured detainees in Vietnam. But there was a silver lining: Investigators had also compiled a 53-page catalog of alleged discrepancies in retired Lt. Col. Anthony B. Herbert’s public accounts of his war experiences. “This package … provides sufficient material to impeach this man’s credibility; should this need arise, I volunteer for the task,” wrote Col. Henry H. Tufts, commander of the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. Now, declassified records show that while the Army was working energetically to discredit Herbert, military investigators were uncovering torture and mistreatment that went well beyond what he had described. The abuses were not made public, and few of the wrongdoers were punished. Tufts’ agents found that military interrogators in the 173rd Airborne repeatedly beat prisoners, tortured them with electric shocks and forced water down their throats to simulate the sensation of drowning, the records show. Soldiers in one unit told investigators that their captain approved of such methods and was sometimes present during torture sessions. In one case, a detainee who had been beaten by interrogators suffered convulsions, lost consciousness and later died in his confinement cage. Investigators identified 29 members of the 173rd Airborne as suspects in confirmed cases of torture. Fifteen of them admitted the acts. Yet only three were punished, records show. They received fines or reductions in rank. None served any prison time.
The LA Times story leaves no doubt that there was a coverup.
In the spring of 1969, about a dozen members of the 172nd MI organized a letter-writing campaign to complain to higher-ups about the abuse, Stemme said. “Next thing we know, we have this major coming up from IG’s office who is Miranda-izing us and asks us if we’re admitting to committing war crimes,” Stemme said, referring to the inspector general. “It was all about us, when this was de facto command policy. It was really scary.” They decided as a group not to give any statements, he said. … Records show that Stemme detailed specific instances of maltreatment, offering names and approximate dates. Yet a case summary produced by the Army chief of staff’s office reported that investigators closed the investigation because Stemme “declined to provide any specific information concerning his allegations.” “I spent hours with these guys,” said Stemme, now 63 and retired from his job as an investigator for the San Francisco public defender’s office. “There was no reason for me to be reticent.”
by Henry Farrell on August 16, 2006
I’ve just finished reading Brian Cowan’s _The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the English Coffee House_ (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/s?kw=Brian%20Cowan%20social%20life%20of%20coffee&PID=29956, Amazon) which I really enjoyed a lot (thanks to Rick Perlstein for the recommendation). Its structure is a little unwieldy – the first part is an essay in the history of consumption, the second a semi-related exercise in intellectual and social history – but it really lays out a very strong historical case for something that I’ve suspected and presumed was true, but haven’t seen treated systematically. The typical academic view of the coffeehouse has claimed it as the herald and avatar of a far reaching civil society of intelligent discourse. London coffeehouses have been depicted as the empirical manifestation of Jurgen Habermas’s “public sphere,” a space in which individuals could come together to discuss art and politics, free from both economic pressures and the oversight of the state. They’ve been portrayed as sites of rational and civilized argument. Cowan provides compelling evidence that this view is, to be blunt, romanticized bosh.
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by Chris Bertram on August 15, 2006
I went to see “The Wind that Shakes the Barley”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460989/ last night, and thoroughly enjoyed it. There are at least three Timberites better qualified than I to judge of the historical accuracy of the film, so I won’t comment on that. There did seem to be points of universal interest though. A group of farm-boys with a semi-theocratic ideology successfully holding off the high-tech army of a modern industrialized power next door seems to be a theme that gets repeated in other times and places. And the way in which a revolutionary nationalist movement divides into warring factions in when faced with a pragmatic compromise of its maximal goals has some parallels with the Palestinian story. An unexpected pleasure was the close physical resemblance between pompous landowner Sir John Hamilton (played by Roger Allam) and Christopher Hitchens. Recommended.
by Belle Waring on July 2, 2006
You should go now to the NYT Magazine and click on the “Lives” photo-essay. A photographer made a project of hunting up many of the original “Freedom Riders” from 1961 and pairing pictures taken of them today with their mugshots. The first pair of images is of a woman named Helen Singleton. Her mugshot shows a strange and wonderful facial expression: ineffable, justified self-satisfaction. When we think of someone being “pleased with themselves” it usually means we think they are being stuck-up or irritating. Mrs. Singleton looks pleased with herself in that picture, and it is anything but irritating. I wonder what the Jackson police photographer thought about that cocked eyebrow and that smile?