Carry a Big Racket
A true American hero
“I spent 33 years…being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism…I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three cities…”
Who is this dastardly criminal confessing sins that his corporate patrons would have preferred stayed hidden? Let’s finish up the quote:
“…The Marines operated on three continents.”
The Marines, often led into far-flung ventures in the name of big business by Major General Smedley Darlington Butler. Never heard of him? Two-time winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, decorated veteran of the Spanish-American War, the Philippines – what do we call it? Occupation? Insurrection? Incursion? That little military operation that left perhaps 200,000 Filipinos dead and introduced the world to American imperialism – the Boxer Rebellion, World War I…well, the list continues. An officer called “a natural born warrior” and a soldier’s commander, because he would never ask his troops to do something he wasn’t prepared to do himself. The Smedley Butler who was a great American hero and is mostly unknown today.
The general asked to lead a plot against FDR.
The incident, like the man, doesn’t get much play in history books. I had come across him 30 years ago, doing research on Fascist groups in American during the 1930s, and was reminded of him as I recently read a Gore Vidal essay from the ‘90s. As hard as it may be to believe, monied elements in the United States were considering recruiting a 500,000-man army of military veterans to help with their plot to “ease” Roosevelt out of office. FDR, of course, was a crazy liberal, a socialist even, and the bankers and corporate giants feared what he might do to the country as the Great Depression went on.
All that was left of one Bonus Army camp after the real Army moved in
The corporate forces knew Butler was respected among the former troops. Retired as of 1931, he spoke up the next year when the Bonus Army of World War I vets marched on Washington, demanding money they were owed. Butler, unlike the military brass, supported them. He also began to speak out about his time as a “racketeer,” and he inveighed against U.S. military actions that weren’t necessary to defend the country or the Bill of Rights from direct assault. Oh, and he campaigned for Roosevelt, too, in 1932. Somehow, the big-business brains missed signs that maybe Butler really wasn’t there guy.
Still, he was popular and morally unimpeachable, so in the summer of 1933, they approached him. The contact man, Gerald MacGuire, assured Butler they had the money, millions of it (some from the heir of the Singer Sewing Company). They wanted to introduce a new position in government, “secretary of general welfare,” who would of course reflect corporate views. FDR would be pushed aside, perhaps even pressured to retire. For a time, Butler played along as if he were interested, then went public, exposing the plot against the president.
Was MacGuire a fraud or conman, some have wondered? Even Butler had his doubts at first. But then MacGuire told him about a new organization about to be launched, the American Liberty League. Its sole purpose: derail the New Deal. Its backers included wealthy industrialists, and one of MacGuire’s bosses would become its treasurer. When Butler saw MacGuire’s words become reality – the League was launched in 1934 – he took the plans for usurping constitutional rule at face value.
Both Butler and MacGuire appeared before the poetically named Special Committee on Un-American Activities Authorized to Investigate Nazi Propaganda and Certain Other Propaganda Activities. Butler spoke in detail about his meetings with MacGuire, who denied the general’s charges. The committee, though, only called the general to testify after he gave details of the plot to a Philadelphia reporter – and even though it had heard about the plot from other sources. So if Butler doesn’t go public, the Special Committee would have hushed it up. In the end, the committee gave some credence to Butler’s charges, but did not take any action. Butler lambasted them for not naming the “the big shots” he had claimed were involved in or knew about the plot (including Governor Al Smith and General Douglas MacArthur).
A few years ago, the BBC did a radio story on Butler and the plot and quoted U.S. journalist John Buchanan, who said no one was ever investigated for a simple reason: FDR and the plotters made a deal. Corporate America would mostly back off from attacking the New Deal, and the feds would not question anyone allegedly tied to the plot. I have not found anything to corroborate this, and some of the articles about the whole episode have a whiff on conspiracy theory. But Butler had nothing to gain by making his claim, and Time reported, while mostly denigrating Butler and the story, that the head of the VFW claimed he had also been approached to lead a 500,000-man “blackshirt” force.
So, if not for Butler, was there a real threat to the Constitution and democracy? I don’t know. But certainly corporations – if not the Republic – have done all right for themselves even without a putsch. For all the talk of our “socialist” president in some circles (umm, not full circles; I’d say they’re missing a few arcs, if you know what I mean), American politics is still pretty much a big racket. Big Business doesn’t need an army to have government leaders bestow huge military contracts, bailouts, corporate welfare. It’s all much smoother now. I doubt Butler would be any less pissed. We shouldn’t be either.
Postscript: Researching this, I came across some interesting historical nuggets. Like the American Legion was originally created by business interests tied to the House of Morgan to “offset radicalism.” This was, of course after the Russian Revolution and at dawn of the Red Scare. At times, the Legionnaires took part in strike breaking, with some clubbing striking workers.
And this: Yet again, lest we forget, the cozy relations between American corporations and Nazi Germany – sometimes even after we entered the war. And the role a certain political family played in that quest for profits. The BBC report cited above notes how, during the 1930s, the Hamburg America steamship line gave free passage to American journalists wanting to visit Nazi Germany and write glowing articles about the 1,000-year Reich. The U.S. manager of the line at the time: Prescott Bush, granddaddy of our last president. Of course, the connections between the Nazis and the Bush/Walker clan have been well documented.
The Technology of War
For more than 60 years, they sat deep in the waters off Hawaii. Their existence wasn’t a mystery – just their exact location. Now, research submersibles from the University of Hawaii have found the last resting place of two of Japan’s most advanced submarines from World War II.
At the end of the war, at Pearl Harbor, the United States studied five sample vessels from three classes of Japanese subs. Then, after whatever technological secrets they held were revealed, the Americans torpedoed them. Partly because the vessels were not seaworthy, but perhaps mostly to make sure the Russkies didn’t get a hold of the technology. After all, with one war over, another was already under way: the Cold War, which shaped American politics and culture for more than 40 years.
[A parenthetical query, from someone who has written many books about the Cold War for kids: Do students today really get the tensions, fears, of that era? Can the threat of random terrorist acts match the concerns over a military miscalculation or plain, dumb human error leading to global annihilation? Just wondering…]
A Japanese illustration showing part of the I-400 and one of its planes
The Japanese subs were ahead of their time. The I-201 was faster than any US sub of the era and had rubber covering its outer shell, to hide it from enemy sonar and radar. The I-14, its companion under the Hawaiian waters, was an undersea aircraft carrier; it held two small, foldable bomber planes that could be launched on the surface. The I-401, discovered four years earlier not too far away, was the largest sub of the day. The two members of the 1-400 class carried three planes and enough fuel to circle the world 1.5 times without refueling. The subs arrived too late in the war to help Japan. And U.S. intelligence was so precise, experts say, it’s doubtful the subs could have gotten close to U.S. mainland targets, as the Japanese hoped.
Thomas Paine, who rode on the I-401’s sister ship on its postwar trip to Hawaii, later wrote, “To anyone who would listen I argued the case for refitting the I-400 for submerged operation and evaluation. I was convinced that we should find out how such a huge submarine handled submerged, how her automatic trim system worked, what lessons her Japanese naval constructors had incorporated into her design from their long experience with big submarines, and all of the other things I felt she could teach us.” (Read more of Paine’s account here.)
Despite Paine’s pleas, the ships were scuttled, and the articles I’ve seen on the discovery didn’t mention what, if anything, the Americans learned from the Japanese subs. But the reports of the find off Hawaii did get me thinking about a very useful poaching of an enemy’s advanced technology: Operation Paperclip.
Built in America, designed in Germany
As World War II in Europe drew to a close, the Americans (and British) and the Russians raced through Germany from opposite ends. The Russians were interested in securing factories and other material goods that would serve as reparations; they and the Americans also wanted to scoop up German technology and the scientists who created it. In Operation Paperclip, U.S. intelligence officials covered up the Nazi past of several key scientists – most notably, Wernher Von Braun – and whisked them to America. Once again, the goal was twofold: use their knowledge for ourselves and keep it out of the hand of our new enemies. Nazi German know-how led to the first U.S. rockets and the space program. It also helped us build stealth planes. Other German military projects under way as the war drew to close: hardened armor, guided missiles, and nerve gas.
(Some fringe folks also claim the Nazi technology was at the bottom of the “flying saucer” sightings of the 1940s and 1950s, as the Americans developed designs of experimental German aircraft. No real evidence of this, but it keeps the UFO websites buzzing, especially after Nick Cook’s 2002 book on the subject.)
The Russians, in their technology grab, nabbed the Germans’ atomic research labs. Of course, they scored an even bigger coup when they received info from spies in the labs of Los Alamos, where the first atomic bombs were built. Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall were two of the most helpful spies, though today the Rosenbergs receive the most attention. The espionage let the Soviet Union develop its atomic weapons sooner than it otherwise would have. But make no mistake, spies or no spies, it would have. The science was known, the process was unstoppable. Perhaps like the development of nuclear weapons in “rogue” nations today, unless somebody wants to start a major war to stop them.
Science and technology have always been part of war, from better arrowheads and swords to the efficacy of today’s remote-controlled drones in the Middle East and Central Asia. Learning from the enemy is always crucial too. The Japanese subs may seem like relics, but they are reminders that knowledge is a powerful and sometimes deadly weapon in human conflict.
Blasts from the Past
“A successful intervention in Iraq would revolutionize the strategic situation in the Middle East…and all to the benefit of American interests.”
Success!
If you’re looking for stock tips or advice on where to place your money in the sixth race down at the track, Robert Kagan is obviously the man to see. He penned the words above back in 1998, and don’t you feel we have benefitted so much? Of course, Kagan doesn’t say what “successful” means; was it just the overthrow of Saddam? If so, then “mission accomplished.” We just might have to wait a bit longer for all the dividends.
I came across the Kagan quote in Andrew J. Bacevich’s The New American Militarism, a not-so-recent book (previously mentioned here) that I finally read, in preparation for writing a bio on the president who helped revolutionize the strategic situation in the Middle East. It struck me, as Bacevich traced the role of the neocons (especially Kagan and some select others) in providing the ideological rationale for much of the Bush-era foreign policy, how wrong these guys have been. Over and over again. As a group, the neocons disdain foreign policy realists. But when your world view is driven by an ideology — an arrogant one at that, built on the shaky base of American exceptionalism — you tend to lose sight of some things. Facts, say. Oppposing views that might have some credence. Any grasp of human (or at least American) failures and frailties.
Here’s another of the wonderful predictions from Neocon World, cited by Bacevich:
“A friendly, free, and oil-producing Iraq would leave Iran isolated and Syria cowed.” William Kristol offered this in February 2002, as he began the drumbeat for war in Iraq. Iran isolated? I guess, if you mean, does anyone want to take it to the dance. Yet it still manages to stir up a bit of concern here, hmm, and maybe has some lingering influence in the region?And Syria cowed? Maybe. I haven’t read much about Syria lately. But the US military in Iraq (a sure sign that the country is friendly, since they’ve let us stay so long) says Syria still allows insurgents to operate there. Doesn’t sound real cowed to me. Of course, maybe the problem is Iraq is not free, elections to the contrary. Or not oil-produc — no, wait, there’s about 2 million barrels a day flowing now, with more to come. Not what it could be, but still oil producing. So, again, why not more isolation and cowering in the region?
Is it this road, Bill?
Kristol and Kagan tag-teamed for this one: “The road that leads to real security and peace [was] the road that runs through Baghdad.” I hear Kabul has a road like that. Maybe Islamabad too. And one day, can you see it, wending its way through Tehran…
The neocon penchant for dazzling predictions has deep roots, back to one of the movement’s first lights, Norman Podhoretz. Of course, in his day communism and the Cold War consumed the neocons, leading Podhoretz to say in 1980: “Surrender or war are the only remaining choices.” Of course. And six years later, as Gorbachev and Reagan were already becoming buddies, and the economic collapse of the Soviet Union was becoming clear, if not foreordained: “‘The present danger’ of 1980 is still present today.”
The bum insight and advice we’ve gotten from the neocons wouldn’t be so bad if it just meant blowing this month’s rent on the ponies. But were talking hundreds of billions here, and still counting. Death tolls in the thousands (not including the locals), and still rising. And the lingering notion that we have a duty, a God-given right, to wage war so we can remake the world in our image.
I know, I know, it’s easy to cherry pick predictions and arguments from the past and show how wrong they were. But the consistency of the neocons’ mental meltdowns is what’s striking. Especially as I did some more Bush research and came across a February 2000 article in Harper’s by Kevin Phillips. The one-time Republican operative who popularized the notion of the party’s “Southern strategy,” now a prolific documenter of what is wrong with American politics (primarily, too much influence by the rich). He’s been called a “populist crank,” and sometimes I wonder about his depth of historical knowledge. But Phillips seems to have good insights on politics. And g0od predictions.
They don't make 'em like they used to; dynasties, that is
In the Harper’s article, he foreshadowed his 2004 book on the House of Bush, American Dynasty. His point/prediction in 2000 was, Dubya represented the restoration of a failed ruling line, and in the past, the sons of deposed leaders did not do so well. Phillips said Bush II, like past dynastic restorers, would likely “ride into office on an arrogant, memory-driven [He tried to kill my daddy] dynamic that quickly leads to mistakes and failure.” More specifically, Bush fils “would find himself bound to replay some version of his father’s endless pleading for capital gains tax reductions.” And Phillips suggested the possibility of a “Bush restoration implod[ing] on its own whir of cocky inadequacy,” leading to disaster for both the family dynasty and the Republican Party.
We don’t know if Bush’s presidency has assured dynastic destruction and Republican irrelevance. But I’d be more likely to take Phillips’s tip down at the track than the neocons. Give me clear vision over rosy glasses any day.
People Come, People Go
When I was a kid, my father pulled out an old arrowhead that came from somewhere around our house. I don’t know if he had found it; maybe the workmen who built our house had. Sadly, I also don’t know where it ended up, that little piece of Connecticut history.
If I still had that arrowhead, I could bring it to Nick Bellantoni. He, of course, would have seen its value as an artifact. He might have been able to date it and tell me more about who made it. And if he’d been around when it had been discovered, maybe he would have called off the house building and called in his team. Bellantoni is the state archaeologist.
Bellantoni holds a net sinker, used by CT Indians, well, to sink their fishing nets
Most states, by law, have a state archaeologist. Connecticut’s is supposed to “identify, manage, and preserve Connecticut’s archaeological resources.” In his job, Bellantoni works with Indian tribes to preserve skeletal remains; reviews privately funded development projects to watch for any impact on culturally important sites; and assists local officials in preserving history (among other duties). Last weekend, Bellantoni was in West Haven to speak about Connecticut’s Indian heritage, as he and other archaeologists understand it.
The talk was kind of an Archaeology 101, since the audience was mostly curious laymen attending a Native American arts and crafts festival. Bellantoni discussed the basic chronological periods archaeologists use to classify the different Indian cultures in North America: paleo (roughly 13,000 to 7,000 years ago), archaic (7,000 to 3,000 years ago), woodland (3,000 to 600 years ago), and contact (time of the first European explorations).
He also talked about the last great Ice Age, when the ice was a mile thick over Connecticut. The gigantic glacier, and later its melting waters, shaped southern New England. Pointing to Long Island Sound just a literal stone’s throw from the lecture hall, Bellantoni explained that it was once a fresh-water lake. The rising seas linked the lake to the Atlantic, and covered up some Indian villages in the region, meaning some archaeological treasures are almost impossible to find. The Mashantucket Pequots and scientist/deep-sea explorer Robert Ballard are teaming up to search for submerged sites off the New England shore.
Bellantoni described the hunter/gatherer lifestyle of Connecticut’s first settlers, noting that mastodons once plodded across the region. Archaeologists have located the huge mammals’ remains at six CT sites. Then he discussed the transition to a farming-based, more sedentary lifestyle, centered around the three main Indian crops across the Americas: beans, corn, and squash. But even as agriculture rose in importance, Connecticut’s Indians moved between seasonal sites. And the Sound, with abundant sea life, remained important to their culture.
Connecticut has about 5,000 known archaeological sites.
With no written records, archaeologists study the artifacts the Indians left behind, and the signs of their impact on the environment. High-powered microscopes let the history detectives decipher the “scars” on arrowheads and other stone tools. The distinct markings help the archaeologists determine which were used to cut meat, which were for leather or plants. Some tools contain microscopic blood residue from slaughtered game, letting the scientists pinpoint which animals a long-ago hunter killed.
Along with going over the nuts and bolts of his trade, Bellantoni made three observations that struck me. We modern folk, out of the Western/Near Eastern tradition, are a people of technology. We have made great changes in lifestyle based on technological advances, and we judge other cultures by their technology, or lack thereof. From Columbus on, the Indians were judged inferior because their technology was inferior—no guns, no mills, no metal tools. Never mind that they had adapted well to their environment and had developed a spiritual worldview that some would argue surpassed the West’s.
The second point was environmental. As much as some moderns praise the Indians for their rich, respectful relationship with nature, sometimes they had a negative impact on their surroundings. The archaeological evidence along the Sound shows signs of the overfishing of oysters. At one point, the Indians were hauling in oysters as big as a man’s shoe. Over time, the catch featured oysters more like the size of the modern mollusk. (And a recent NYT article showed a native people’s negative impact in South America: Deforestation of the ecologically vital huarango tree in Peru started several thousand years ago, as the Nazca cleared the trees to plant cotton and corn. The decimation continues today.)
So, maybe romantic notions of the pure aborigines and indigenous people of the world have to be put in perspective. The ancient Indians were people, people trying to survive. They did some things very smartly. They did some things that affected their environment in harmful ways. Of course, you can’t overlook the fact that an invading people basically destroyed their lifestyle and introduced their own ills.
And that leads to the third point. Several times, Bellantoni wondered what some far-future archaeologists will think of the remains they find from Homo sapiens Americanus. The long-abandoned refrigerators filled with plastic containers. The silicone breast implants near decayed bones (my example, not his). The radioactive waste dumps. I wondered if the audience had ever pondered this point, one I have: We Americans will not be around forever. For all the talk of a city on a hill and the indispensable nation, our empire will fall, as all the ones before it have. Americans will not endure, just as America will not endure, not over the epochs. We will be merely the studied; no longer the studiers or makers of history (assuming, as Bellantoni did say in a less-than-cheery moment, 21st-century humans don’t annihilate the world first with nuclear weapons).
Bellantoni’s work helps us learn more about the Indian world of long ago. Archaeology in general helps us see the links between our culture and distant ones, and hopefully remind us that any given people and their artifacts are just a blip in the grand historic scheme.
Different American Dreams
My recent post about Ralph Nader prompted a short debate with a stranger on a friend’s Faecbook page. No fan of Nader, my opponent didn’t buy my definition of the American Dream, as personified by Nader: Immigrants come to America, start a small business, raise a family, instill in their kids a sense of civic duty and responsibility. One of the kids – our boy Ralph – goes on to a great academic career and become the leader of the consumer-rights movement. Sure, he alienates some people along the way (especially in 2000…), but he rises from humble roots to make a difference. The American Dream – or at least a version I can relate to, despite my own modest accomplishments.
Hogwash, the unknown debater said. The American Dream is about getting wealthy. End of story.
OK.
I thought again about all this after reading an article in my hometown paper, the Citizen. A local historian looked at the Italians of Matson Hill, a region in South Glastonbury, Connecticut. The Italians, from several northern provinces, turned a hilly, rocky, mostly ignored part of town into a productive region of orchards. And my grandparents were part of the immigrant wave that helped make the apples and peaches and berries grow.
Part of my grandparents' farm, years after they sold it.
Their American Dream was: Leave the village of Fubine, Piedmont, Italy, for the States when they were teens, work different jobs, save enough to buy an orchard among the Italian pioneers who had come to Matson Hill a few years before them. Over the years, my grandparents’ children did well enough in school; one went into business for herself, another worked in a legal office. The third child – my mother – stayed on Matson Hill and raised a family, eventually sending her kids off to college. None of us achieved Nader-like stature or the wealth my opponent covets for his Dream. But to come from a tiny Italian village with little money or schooling and set in motion what they did – my grandparents did all right.
I want to go beyond the personal, though, and say a little more about the Italians of Matson Hill. Their achievements caught the eye of the U.S. Immigration Commission and were featured in the commission’s 1911 report. Before telling their story, a little background on the commission.
Those scary Italians at Ellis Island
Launched in 1907, the U.S. Immigration Commission included members from both houses of Congress. It was led by Senator William Dillingham of Vermont and included Henry Cabot Lodge, two members of the old-time WASP elite increasingly fearful of the “new” immigrants inundating America during the early 1900s. Who were the new immigrants? Slavs, Greeks, Jews, and Italians, non-Protestants, mostly poor and uneducated, sometimes swarthy. You know, not like the good “old” immigrants from the British Isles, Scandinavia, and Germany (Catholics excepted, of course).
Dillingham, among others, wanted to restrict immigration, especially from Southern and Eastern Europe. His commission members spent four years studying the homelands of the immigrants and their lifestyles here. (And stirred up some snarls from their Congressional cohorts. A 1910 NYT article reported that some lawmakers accused the commission members of taking wasteful junkets. “We have spent more than half a million dollars,” one rep said, “and all we have got is a ten-page report.” Dillingham and company showed him: their final report filled 41 volumes.)
And what of the Matson Hill Italians? The report noted how “the Italians have taken the rough uncultivated land abandoned by the Americans, made it productive, and established a community that is well known throughout Connecticut. “ These Italians were part of a ‘”good type of foreign colony” as opposed to the bad kind created by the Southern Italians, often stereotyped as shiftless, shifty, and prone to crime. No, Americans would approve of the Matson Hill settlers, who “are spoken of as being honest, hard working, and industrious. One merchant remarked that they were the best people to deal with. They pay their taxes before they are due and often meet the bank’s demands with the same promptness.”
But the report notes that even the “good” Italians faced a hard time at first, as they had “to make their way through a thick wall of prejudice. Every year they tried to have the district vote enough money to buy land and erect a new [school] building, but the Americans controlled a majority of the votes and each time voted down this proposition. Finally one of the Italians donated the land on Matson Hill, where the present schoolhouse now stands, others contributed money to buy the necessary lumber, a few contributed their labor, and in this way a new schoolhouse was obtained.”
Even as the Commission praised the immigrants, a little bit of condescension crept it. I love this observation about the good women of the “colony”: “[ They] know very little about housework, and seem to think that the house can care for itself. Cooking, washing, and giving a little care to their children include the total of their household responsibilities.”
Members of the Matson Hill Community Club (still standing) in 1935.
My grandparents had not reached Matson Hill in 1911, but I think they embodied the values the commission extolled (and my grandmother certainly did know something about household responsibilities as well as how to pick fruit right along side the men). But they did arrive before Dillingham finally got what he wanted – the first large-scale limits on immigration, which led to a quota system that favored the good immigrants, reduced the “new” Europeans, and almost totally shut down immigration from Japan (the Chinese already faced tough restrictions that dated back to 1882).
What does all this mean about immigration today and the American Dream? I’m not sure. I know that today’s immigrants still face prejudice and efforts to keep them out. Those who do make it overcome a lot to start businesses, send their kids to school, maybe even produce the next consumer crusader. Or history blogger. And while money’s nice, I think most are ok with just knowing they have the chance to better their lives, and their children’s. Just like the Italians of Matson Hill.
Broken, Not Breaking, News?
“Anyone with a laptop thinks he’s a journalist.”
Are you talking about me?
Actually, I think I was one of the few people at last night’s panel discussion who wasn’t typing away as the four participants ruminated on “The Future of News.” (The incessant keyboard clacking behind my right ear was particularly irritating.) The event at Yale featured some of the usual hand-wringing among some veteran journalists over the rise of the New Media (blogging, YouTube, Twitter, etc.) and the demise of the dinosaurish Old Media, a slow death many others seem to relish.
I don’t. And neither do the panelists: Ward Chamberlin, author of the opening quote, David Greenway, Robert Kaiser, and John Yemma. But we all seem resigned to the fact that changes are afoot, many of them not good. The Old Media is trying to adapt, but cultural and financial forces are a major obstacle.
Suffice to say, we will most likely not see again the Golden Age of American Journalism the four panelists represent. Between them, I would guess they have well over one hundreds years of experience. Chamberlin was present at the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and NPR; Kaiser has worked for almost 50 years at the Washington Post, as both a reporter and editor; Greenway has been at the Post and the Boston Globe; and Yemma worked under Greenway at the Globe and now works for the Christian Science Monitor.
Ward Chamberlin
Ah, the Golden Age: Chamberlin recalled the days of Fred Friendly and Edward R. Murrow at CBS, and mentioned their news programs that not only recorded events, but shaped them, in particular Murrow’s piece on Joseph McCarthy. Friendly’s ethos, as recounted by Chamberlin: “What the American people aren’t told [by governments, corporations] may kill them.” Without investigative reporting, the kind that goes on for months and requires big bucks to finance, what New Media outlets are going to uncover the deadly, hidden truths? The Huffington Post? Hmm…
CBS News set a high standard for foreign reporting too, with bureaus around the world. All the panelists lamented the decline in foreign news, while globalization speeds along. How can we deal with the economic challenges India and China will present (are presenting), not to mention the security challenges of foreign terrorists, when several major papers have closed all their overseas bureaus, and TV news virtually ignores all but the most obvious foreign stories?
Robert Kaiser
For the Washington Post, Kaiser said, the salad days meant huge profits, now-unheard-of levels of subscription “penetration” in the local market, and the kind of investigative reporting that helped bring down a felonious president. The Post once made $130 million in annual profits. It now loses about $100 million every year. Only the Post company’s cash cow, Kaplan Test Prep, keeps the newsgathering afloat. The other two remaining major dailies, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, also lose money.
New Media outlets are sometimes called aggregators, as bloggers gather up links and presents them in “their” news blogs (of course, most of the substantive links, the ones you regularly trust, go back to Old Media stories). The great papers were once aggregators of another kind, Kaiser said. They collected readers from a variety of backgrounds and gave them a common cultural identity. Everybody read about the JFK assassination or the first man on the moon. Now, the specialization of many New Media outlets fragments the audience, to the detriment of a sense of national culture (and forget about consensus). The papers also aggregated talent: Smart, young journalists wanted to work for the biggies, and they learned from smart old journalists and tried to keep some professional standards (in theory, anyway). The solitary bloggers are not part of a community, might have an ax to grind, just might not be any good. Some people like the free-for-all nature of it; so what if a little truth gets tossed aside along the way.
David Greenway
Greenway talked about the blurring of opinion and news. Now, I have always argued there is no such thing as objective news, but there is accurate news. The rise of opinion shows on news channels, especially Fox, seems to dampen the call for accuracy as networks put more emphasis on entertainment. On the Internet, Greenway says, the problem is even worse, since there is no gatekeeper of any kind, no concern for checking facts. Yes, we should get a variety of viewspoints – though I doubt many people who rely solely on the New Media for their news do – but if all the views are just plain wrong, what kind of conclusions can you draw? Pretty ill-informed ones. Greenway sums it up: “Civil discourse is being debased and dumbed down.”
John Yemma - yes, another old (oldish) white guy...
Yemma approached the subject form a different angle. The CSM, in the name of cost cutting, has stopped printing its daily paper (a “green” decision as well) and put almost all its content on the Web. (Yes, even a non-profit news organization has to think about losing less money.) And who knows, Yemma says, online ads and some subscription services could even make a profit for the Monitor. Yemma says web traffic is up, though story word counts are down (folks can buy the CSM’s weekly newsmagazine for deeper analysis of key events), and he trumpets the up-to-the-minute nature of the e-paper, something that has made the Post’s and Times’s websites popular too. But those are Old Media newsgathers using modern tools; it’s not really New Media.
The CSM approach may or may not be a model for others in the Old Media. Other alternatives include the non-profit, independent online “newspapers” that are popping up, with income (usually from grants and the like) paying real reporters to cover local events. New Haven has one, among other cities. But again, for the national stories, the foreign, the deep investigative reports, you need the funding a large corporation provides.
Or a billionaire. The great urban newspapers were mostly founded by wealthy citizens of a community. They and their families ran the paper as a public service – and an ego boost – not a source of income. As those papers die off or get swallowed up, the bottom line replaces the sense of responsibility, of the duty to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Maybe it will take a Gates or Buffet to use some of his billions to endow a newspaper foundation. Of course, some sort of wall between the paper’s journalistic duties and their benefactors’ business interests would have to be erected.
Newspapers are a fairly new development in the world’s cultural history – less than 400 years old. Electronic newsgathering is a mere tyke. The tools change, the formats change. But there’s one constant, at least in America - voters in a republic need access to accurate information from a source separate from vested interests. I know some New Media do that. And plenty of corporate Old Media is pretty well vested in the status quo. But the Drudge Report’s releasing a leaked memo or some guy videotaping a candidate saying “macaca” does not quite equal Murrow, Woodward, and Bernstein. (Though YouTube videos from Iranian protests were gripping, and the Internet does make it easier for Old Media companies to use foreign stringers to replace some of their shuttered bureaus.) Maybe the New Media will reach that level of relevance, as far as playing a role in meaningful civil discourse. But will it be something truly new that emerges from that media, or an adaptation of the Old Media to the new technology?
I close with quotes from two of the Founders on the importance of journalists, not bloviators and aggregators. Ben Franklin: “When Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.” And James Madison: “To the press alone, chequered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity, over error and oppression.” Let’s hope the New Media lives up to those standards, and the Old Media that have strayed return to their roots.
Nader Rides Again
According to Matt Groening’s Love is Hell, there are nine types of girlfriends, including “The Bosser.” The advantage to this type of girlfriend, the book says: “Often right.” The disadvantage to the Bosser, aka Ms. Know-it-all and the Sarge: “Often right, but so what?”
Ralph Nader at New Haven's Labyrinth Books
Before going to see Ralph Nader speak last night, the Bosser came to mind. In the past few years, America’s impatience with and, mostly, avoidance of Nader reflects that same “so what” attitude. And you could argue Ralph has no one to blame but himself. He could have been content to go down in US history as the greatest crusader against corporate malfeasance ever, the best friend consumers ever had, whether they realized it or not. But no. Nader had to run in 2000, convincing many people, mostly Democrats, that he was more concerned about himself than with defeating George W. Bush (and we all know how swell that turned out). To make things worse, he ran again in 2004. And, my god, is that — yes, oh yes, I mean, oh no, there he goes again! Another run in 2008.
With all those campaigns, Nader looked like he was shooting to be Eugene Debs, but without the votes, or Norman Thomas with only slightly better name recognition.
Before the talk, I scribbled in my notebook, on a variation of the Bosser’s down side: “Right, but irrelevant.”
Boy, was I wrong.
Full disclosure: I have always admired Ralph Nader. His doggedness in the face of dirty tricks as he tried to expose GM, the way he inspired young people to expand on his work with Nader’s Raiders, and even his life story, the American Dream fulfilled — as long as the Dream includes not striking it rich, and being vilified for most of your life. I had heard Nader speak before, seen him on TV, read his articles, voted for him in ’96 (yes, ‘96, when the moral vacuum that is Bill Clinton was already sucking. And before the other sucking.)
700 pages plus...hmm
Nader proved last night that he is still relevant, if only we’ll listen. He was in New Haven to promote his book “Only the Super-rich Can Save Us!,” an odd entry into fiction writing. Odd because he creates fantastic events for a team of real-life superheroes, whose not-so-secret power is their great personal wealth and willingness to use it and their celebrity status for the common good. The characters include Warren Buffet, Paul Newman, Ted Turner, Bill Gates Sr., Bill Cosby, and – talk about left field – Yoko Ono. Odd also because the massive book seems to contain some pretty sophomoric satire (an evil right-wing radio host appears as Bush Bimbo). And odd in how Nader described the book; when he referred to the characters’ actions, it was as if they really did these things, in real life, and not just on the pages of the book.
But the book is just a steppingstone for spreading the word on Nader’s real goals: more citizen involvement in the political process, particularly as watchdogs over the 535 members of Congress. Getting the money, from the superrich and others, to set the oversight procedure in place. And, at the heart of all his actions, reclaiming the political process from corporations. It’s corporatism, Nader believes, that makes the Republicans and Democrats largely interchangeable (outside of some key social issues), given their shared reliance on PACs and heeding the views of lobbyists over voters.
Listening to Nader recount the current political evils, he comes across as something of a gloomy Gus, with no reassuring proclamations of America’s inherent greatness or its “elect” status under the watchful eye of the one true God. Well, no wonder nobody wants to vote for him. But he calls “Only the Super-rich” a practical utopia. What seems like gloominess, if you value social justice over the unrestrained quest for profits, is just reality. And Nader still believes justice can be served, corporate greed tamed, if citizens will put down their iPhones, step away from the screens of all kinds, and get involved. Small numbers of people, with vocal and targeted efforts, can make a difference.
The crusader-as-boy in his Connecticut hometown of Winsted
Along with that idealistic streak is a genuine sense of humor, which helps temper the arrogance that can also emerge. The new book has “historic importance,” he told the 75 of us crowded into the basement of Labyrinth Books. It’s filled with humor, he assured us, which judging from his presentation I don’t doubt, though the broad parody in the novel might get a little wearying. And though Nader can come across as all brain and no soul, his tales about his immigrant parents and the lessons they taught him, the challenges they laid down (are you going to believe, or are you going to think?) resonate on a personal level. He has what he says all reformers have shared: the fire in the belly. At times that has fueled real change, certainly in his case. Today, though, the fire doesn’t spread far enough to spark others to do the hard work Nader sees ahead.
Leaving the bookstore, I had to change my assessment. Ralph is right, and he’s not irrelevant. He is more relevant than ever. I do think he and his supporters have an almost-impossible task, trying to shame the passivity out of even the progressives who know he’s right. Because I think history will show he is, just as he was right to take on GM. Corporate power has corrupted constitutional government in the United States. That, along with the tendency in some humans to feather one’s nest, look for loopholes, amass power, rather than serve the common good. I don’t know if I share his optimism that we can make huge changes. I’m glad he’s out there, still, saying what needs to be said. What he so passionately believes. I hope history books treat him better than the media and so many of his contemporaries do. But not many of us like to hear someone who’s right talk so much, remind us that deep down we know he’s right, but we’d rather buy a new HD TV, or forget buying, we don’t even know if we can pay the mortgage. In good times and bad, nobody roots for the Bosser.
Stars Over New Haven
For a few hours in September 1969, New Haven was Hollywood East.
I’d like to say, “And New Haven has never been the same since,” but that would be a lie. One thing remains true: New Haven functions as a semi-interesting city, exists at all, only because of Yale. And it was Yale that offered a 40th anniversary look back at the star-filled night in ’69, when Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid came to town.
Click for a larger view of the pic
No need to say who is who, right?
The 1969 event was the film’s premiere, attended by the two stars, Paul Newman (bearded and almost hippie-ish above) and Robert Redford, along with Joanne Woodward (bottom right) and Barbra Streisand. Thousands of people lined the street outside the old Roger Sherman/Palace Theater, hoping to catch a glimpse of Hollywood’s glitterati (decades before the phrase was coined). The opening event was captured on film, and some clips from it were shown before the anniversary screening of Butch Cassidy last week. The man responsible for the ’69 premiere, and the subject of the tribute that included the recent screening, was filmmaker George Roy Hill. A Yale graduate, Hill had arranged the New Haven opening as his own tribute to his alma mater.
(Yale tidbit: Newman also graduated from the university, the Drama School, and said after the premiere that he was “the campus drunk who made it.”)
At the anniversary event, scriptwriter William Goldman spoke, saying he was watching Butch Cassidy for only the second time since its release. The creative team of Hill and Goldman represented some of the cinema world’s elite. Hill had made his name directing live TV dramas before moving to Hollywood (and after two stints as a Marine pilot). He made a few movies before his iconic western, but Cassidy was the one that launched him into the stratosphere of filmmaking. He was nominated for an Oscar for that film, and finally won for The Sting, the even-more successful (at the box office, anyway) reuniting of Newman and Redford.
Goldman has written in just about every imaginable genre, always finding success, though he’s best known for his film scripts and two memoirs about life in Hollywood. He won an Oscar for Cassidy and a second for adapting All the President’s Men for the big screen. With Cassidy, it’s claimed, he invented the “buddy pic.” Goldman also shook up the conventions of the Western film. Heroes who run from conflict? Who (spoiler alert, if there’s actually someone who has not seen the film) die in the end? Hill’s direction was just as original, with the montage of photos during the New York sequence – a technique borrowed from documentaries – a contemporary pop song plunked into the middle of a Western, and the freeze-frame and pull-back on the last shot.
The real Butch, bottom right, and some of his gang in one of their nattier moments.
Goldman spent eight years researching the lives of his two heroes and Etta Place, the woman who joined them on some of their adventures. The specially hired posse to track them down, Sundance’s unerring accuracy with a six-shooter, the trip to Bolivia – all true. (Though Goldman, of course, took some license; somehow I doubt every moment of the bicycle scene is from life…) Goldman also offered tidbits about the history of the making of the film. Newman signed on first. He read an early draft of the script and told Goldman to let him know if/when he revised it. Newman, for a time, considered the role of Sundance, with Jack Lemmon (?!) as a possible Butch. Then Steve McQueen was suggested for Sundance, with Newman taking Butch. The deal fell apart, as the respective agents could not agree on billing.
It’s hard to imagine McQueen in either role, delivering the humor or subtle facial gestures Newman and Redford do, and which provide much of the film’s delight. On the whole, it stands up well after 40 years, with the amazing location scenery a huge plus. Less so is Katherine Ross. Goldman raved about her beauty (yes) and her acting (ummm….). She had already made a name for herself in one of the other great ’60s movies, The Graduate. Newman, too, was already an A-list actor before Cassidy. For Redford, the movie shot him off to stardom.
Goldman was effusive about Newman, as both an actor and humanitarian. Of course, Newman’s signature philanthropic effort, The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, takes its name from Butch’s gang in the movie. (For more on the ongoing charitable efforts funded by Newman’s Own, Inc., go here.)
The weekend’s tribute to Hill also included a showing of the documentary, The Making of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. In another bit of history perhaps not widely known, it was the first “Making Of…” film. The work is an award-winner too, having copped an Emmy for Best Television Documentary, and it’s now packaged with the DVD, allowing easy access to a great moment in film history.
[While doing some research for this post, I came across an Internet rumor from earlier this year: Tom Cruise plans to remake Butch and Sundance with him and John Travolta in the lead roles. Sweet Jesus, in the name of the nine Muses and all that is good and true, let this just be a rumor! We still have Hill and Goldman’s film, Newman’s and Redford’s performances, and that’s all we need.]
The “Unexpected” War?
Let’s get this out of the way right off the bat: What follows is totally intellectually dishonest. I’m going to take a swipe at a book I haven’t even read, basing my comments on a few points in a NYT book review.
The book is The American Civil War: A Military History, and the author is British military historian John Keegan. Judging from his lengthy and wide-reaching list of works, Keegan knows his way around redoubts and fusiliers and billets. I would never question him on any assertion about tactics and strategy. But one quote from the The American Civil War, cited in the Times review, kinda made me stumble a bit:
“The American Civil War is one of the most mysterious great wars of history, mysterious because unexpected…”
Unexpected?
The division slavery engendered was no mystery to American leaders. Certainly not in the decades before the war. And even back to the Constitutional Convention, with the disagreements slavery stirred there, no one could have been too surprised by conflict of some kind, if not all-out war. Maybe some Americans thought a peaceful disunion could come. That was the term used during the 1840s, with secession eventually following it. And it wasn’t just proslavery Southern forces who talked about a split; some staunch abolitionists sometimes suggested a parting of the ways between the North and South would be better for everybody. But the majority’s desire for compromise and perpetual Union kept the country together for a time.
"Ouch," Charles Sumner said.
For a time. But after the anger stirred by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and the violence in Bleeding Kansas, the caning of Charles Sumner in the Capitol, John Brown’s failed raid on Harpers Ferry – surely after all that few people were caught off guard by war? The 1850s saw deepening venom on both sides, and after 1856, a Northern president, James Buchanan, who seemed overly sympathetic to the slave-owing South, who was willing to cripple his own party rather than work for compromise, and who only got tough with the South after South Carolina had seceded in December 1860.
Fort Sumter ablaze, and the unexpected begins...
Was it unexpected that even a generally pro-South president would take action to preserve Federal property, once it came under threat from secessionists? Buchanan refused to turn over Fort Sumter. Of course, he took the easy way out and said he couldn’t without permission from Congress. Still, he was not going to give in, and Lincoln largely followed the plan he had laid out for resupplying and reinforcing the fort in April 1861. Although, once the firing started, Lincoln moved much swifter for all-out war than Buchanan would have – if he would have.
But maybe even Buchanan would have fought, or been pressured to fight, to keep the Union whole. Who knows? But whatever his feelings for states’ rights and the constitutionality of slavery, Buchanan was a Unionist. And he had thought since the 1830s that secession would split the country apart. Back then, he wasn’t sure if secession were legal; by January 1861, he declared it was not:
“No State has a right by its own act to secede from the Union or throw off its federal obligations at pleasure…even if that right existed and should be exercised by any State of the Confederacy the executive department of this Government had no authority under the Constitution to recognize its validity by acknowledging the independence of such State.”
So Old Buck, reviled by many then and now (he’s been called the worst president ever by some modern historians, and another lambasted his actions before the war as near treasonous), stated the case Lincoln would follow. Given that kind of thinking, and the strong feelings of the secessionists, how unexpected was the war that began three months later?
[Speaking of strong feelings, a Georgian expressed this view to his senator during the tumultuous debates over Kansas’s status: “If Kansas comes in as a free state, Buchanan will richly deserve death, and I hope some patriotic man will inflict it.”]
During my years of research, I’ve come across many selections from both Northerners and Southerners who feared an explosive split between the North and South, with slavery the fuse and keg all in one. And real scholars of the era before the war could probably make an even stronger argument against Keegan’s claim. You can say a lot of things about the Civil War – neither side was really prepared to fight it, no one thought it would be as long and bloody as it was. But unexpected? Hmm…
Jolting Bits of History
The recent passing of World Day Against the Death Penalty led to some personal reflections on capital punishment over at Crisis? What Crisis? It also got me thinking about some historical tidbits on the execution of the guilty (or presumed guilty).
Nothing like a day out at the arena with the family
It slices, it dices...
I’m sure some of the fun facts about state-sponsored death are pretty well known: stonings in biblical times, crucifixion with the Romans (a particularly slow form of death, in some cases: the history books record guys chatting while waiting for their final breath, or even signing contracts — maybe a book deal about their experience), or being devoured by beasts in the arena. The French went high-tech, for the 18th century anyway, with the guillotine. In a good year during the Revolution (“good” being relative), about two thousands people got the big slice.
Let him dangle, indeed
The death penalty came to America with the English colonists (not sure what the French and Spanish did in their settlements), and in 1612, Virginia called for executing grape thieves, among others (so says the Death Penalty Information Center, which has an informative history on the subject). The Pilgrims, influenced by both common law and the Bible, had a variety of capital offenses, including: treason; murder; everyone’s favorite, “solemn compaction or conversing with the devil by way of witchcraft”; arson; rape; and the deadly duo of sodomy and buggery (bestiality). In the capital cases, the guilty was, in a phrase I always find somehow quaint, “hanged by the neck until his body is dead.”
If death penalty fans thought the guillotine was a big improvement, they really got their rocks off with the electric chair. And who was one of its best-known proponents in the United States? The Wizard of Menlo Park, a guy who knew his way around a volt and an amp, Thomas Alva Edison. Ol’ Tom promoted the use of the chair in New York largely for business reasons. No, he wasn’t making the chairs. He was trying to show that AC current, a rival to the DC systems he was trying to install, was too deadly for residential or commercial use.
Imagine the scene: It’s 1888. Edison needs someone to spread the bad word about AC, largely the creation of his former employee, Nikola Tesla. The Serb now works for Edison’s business rival, George Westinghouse. The Wizard invites another AC opponent to conduct tests in his New Jersey lab. The tests involve electrocuting dogs, two calves, and a horse with AC current, as a precursor for using a similar system as a form of capital punishment. The process came to be called “Westinghousing,” and Edison did all he could to make sure AC current was used in the first electric-chair execution. That killing took place in New York in 1890, and by all accounts it was a horrific affair, with the condemned man surviving the first jolt. Despite Edison’s efforts, however, the better system won and AC went on to become the standard electrical current, for electrocutions and more benign uses.
Thankfully, as humans found more advanced ways to kill each other with legal sanction, a few wise souls began to argue against this barbarity. The call for abolishing the death penalty started during the Enlightenment, and by the 1840s, Michigan had eliminated capital punishment for all crimes except treason. Yet in the decades that followed, only several states stopped executions, and at times, social trends would lead states to reinstate them. Finally, by the mid-20th century, abolition seemed to pick up steam. Then the Supreme Court heard a number of cases, as death penalty opponents tried to argue executions were “cruel and unusual punishments” prohibited under the Eighth Amendment and its application to the states through the Fourteenth.
A major case came in 1972, Furman v. Georgia. In a 5-4 decision, the Burger Court struck down capital punishment laws in the 39 states then carrying out executions. But the judgment only dealt with laws that did not give juries guidelines or limits when deciding capital cases; it did not say capital punishment was always and everywhere unconstitutional (though in separate concurring decisions, Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall said it was). Four years later, in Gregg v. Georgia, the Court said capital punishment is cool if state laws set standards for sentencing, taking into account such things as aggravating and mitigating circumstances.
So that’s where we are today in the good ol’ USA. Execution is fine, though a growing number of states are taking capital punishment off their books. New Mexico was the latest, earlier this year. Connecticut’s General Assembly voted to as well, but Governor Jody Rell killed (haha) the bill. Still, if you’re a death penalty foe, as I am, the numbers remain bleak: 35 states do allow capital punishment, along with the federal government and the military. The folks behind World Day Against the Death Penalty still have some work to do.
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