Liveblogging the State of the Union

Some blogs had "liveblogging" updates during the State of the Union. I find these speeches painfully boring, in part because they are constantly broken up by partisan applause. So I wondered what unique take I could offer on the SOTU...and what else besides tracking the (often cheesy) history references. So, here goes.

9:05: PBS Commentator Mark Shields suggests that having the new governor of Virginia give the response to the SOTU from the VA State House is like a "State of the Confederacy." Jim Lehrer is not sure how to handle this.
9:11: Obama opens with history of SOTU; "it's tempting to look back on these moments and assume our progress was inevitable." I am very disappointed to hear that America's greatness was not preordained.
9:12: references Bull Run, Civil Rights Marches, the landing at Normandy
9:13: "we must answer history's call" (Somehow it seems like nobody can agree how to pick up the phone to answer that call).
9:18: has a president ever laughed during the SOTU?
9:21: wow another joke? this may be historic.
9:27: "From the first railroads, to the interstate highway system, our nation has always been built to compete." The Smithsonian has that story covered.
9:34: "We made the largest research investment in history." John Quincy Adams would be proud; people thought he was nuts when he proposed that the govt support research in the 1820s.
9:49: points out that in 2000, we had a massive budget surplus. That does seem like ancient history.
9:51: announces no new spending for the next 3 years. Oh well, so much for Keynesian economics or learning from the Depression.
9:58: "the Supreme Court reversed a century of law" with the campaign finance decision. The camera pans to the justices and they stare foreword blankly.
10:00: the debates between parties are 200 years old and are "the essence of our democracy." Hoftstadter would love that.
10:03: "through-out our history, no issue has united our country so much as national security." Hmm, not sure about that. See Alien and Sedition Act backlash and then almost every national security move since.
10:09: on nuclear power--"I've embraced the strategy of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan." I'm confused. I think he just wanted to make sure to get their names in somewhere.
10:14: "It's our ideals, our values, that built America, values that allowed us to forge a nation made up of immigrants from every quarter of the globe. Values that drive us still." These values: the American dream of immigrants...and the nativism of Americans.
10:18: "The only reason we are here is that generations of Americans were unafraid to do what was hard."
10:20: "The spirit that has sustained this nation for 200 years lives on in you." Nice line.
10:28: Mark Shields says Obama was Reaganesque; "He invoked the country's past to give a sense of confidence about where we are now. And nobody did that better than Ronald Reagan."

Image: George Washington's State of the Union address--the first ever--on January 21, 1790

Saint Domingue's Legacy

Many historians had Haiti--or, as it was called in the colonial period, Saint Domingue--on their minds long before the massive earthquake there this past Tuesday. It has become the accepted wisdom in the field that the Haitian Revolution in the late 1790s was one of the most important events in the history of the Atlantic World. There's been a lot of research recently about slavery and rebellion in Saint Domingue (including by some of my friends), but historians rarely refer to that island nation as "Haiti." It's as if there's a total disconnect between the heroic, revolutionary Saint Domingue and present-day Haiti.

This week, an unlikely source brought past together with present. Televangelist Pat Robertson made the link rather grotesquely in his much-criticized remark on Wednesday:

"Something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about. They were under the heel of the French, you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said 'We will serve you if you will get us free from the prince.' True story. And so the devil said, 'Ok it's a deal.' And they kicked the French out. The Haitians revolted and got something themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after another."

Well, maybe not such a true story. I'd defy him to find that conversation in the archives. Oh, and he's got the wrong Napoleon.

Haiti's ambassador to America, Raymond Joseph had the perfect response:

"The independence of Haiti...[enabled] the US to gain the Louisiana Territory...that's 13 states west of the Mississippi that the Haitian slaves' revolt...provided America....So, [the] pact the Haitians made with the devil has helped the United States become what it is."

Ambassador Joseph is right--the loss of French money and lives during the Haitian Revolution compelled Napoleon to give up his presence in the New World and sell the Louisiana Territory to the US at an outrageously low price. But I don't think this is a fight about the past.

Robertson is using history to make claims of religious and racial superiority at the most tasteless time possible. What troubles me is that those who actually do know about Haiti's past seem to have so little interest in its present. Let's hope this catastrophe changes that.

image: Toussaint L'Ouverture receiving a Proclamation. (1821), NYPL Digital Gallery.

South Carolina's Scandalous History

While I'm in South Carolina on vacation, I've been thinking about the long history of major political scandals in this state--with 2 of the biggest coming in the past year. It's hard to imagine, as I look out the window at pines and oaks draped in Spanish moss and hear the slow, friendly drawl of the people here that this is the place that produced Joe Wilson. Wilson, who in fact represents the area where my family vacations, was the congressman who yelled "You lie!" during Obama's speech on health reform this past fall. It wasn't the accusation so much as where it was said and how. There is a decorum to criticizing the president, and a decorum to behavior in the chambers of congress.

Another South Carolina congressmen crossed similar lines in a scandal in 1856. Preston Brooks had a gripe with another member of congress, Charles Sumner. Protocol then dictated Brooks should challenge Sumner to a duel, but that would require acknowledging that Sumner was a gentleman--only gentlemen duelled each other. So, Brooks took what was to him the logical alternative--whacking Sumner with his cane in the Senate chamber. Sumner suffered such severe injuries he was unable to return to work for 3 years.

Both congressmen met with support from their constituents, cheers from the supposedly genteel voters for the indecorous acts of their representatives. Brooks received gifts of new canes, one reading "Hit him again." The phones at Wilson's office rang off the hook with calls of support. In both cases, opposition in the North erupted in response. I'm not the first to note the parallels--this NY Times column describes the Brooks/Sumner story in more detail.

I can't think of much in the way of historical parallels for the second big South Carolina scandal, Governor Sanford's "hiking the Appalachian trail" incident. But consider these other SC sex scandals:
-Strom Thurmond's secret, illegitimate black daughter revealing her identity in 2003
-the wife of an indicted SC congressman posed in Playboy and bragged about having sex with him on the US Capitol steps in 1981.

And some other SC political hits:
-the lieutenant governor shot and killed a newspaper editor in Columbia, SC in the early 1900s
-a coalition of state congressmen calling themselves "The Fat and Ugly Caucus" attempted a power grab and many were later indicted in a vote-selling probe
-a speech on the Senate floor--reminiscent of Joe Wilson--by a SC Senator which the New York Times called "coarse abuse of the president" under the headline "Senate Disgraced" in 1896

Oh, and let's not forget that South Carolina was the first to secede from the Union. One historian argues that "South Carolinians don't really want to be part of the United States, and they don't have any use for the political rules and processes the rest of us pretty much agree to." It's true that South Carolina was historically, and continues to be, one of the least democratic states in the country. It has been shaped by social hierarchy and deference since its beginnings, and it appears that South Carolinians are content to let their elected officials do as they please--and sometimes even cheer them on.

"The Most Unconquerable Place on Earth"

I was talking with a friend today about Obama's decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. Somehow I just cannot work up the energy to be angry, because it seems more laughable than anything. Really, if Genghis Khan couldn't conquer this place, what makes us think that we can? Maybe tanks, drones and machine guns aren't such game-changers after all. And perhaps Obama should have had an historian or two--or John Oliver--join his team to decide a course of action in Afghanistan.

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Party Politics

I have been frustrated the past few weeks by the same phenomenon in two different eras: the twisted convulsions of politicians trying to fit into our two-party system. My argument about the stalled health care debate in the Senate hinges on this fact: the Democrats are such a diverse party that the idea of a Democratic super majority is really meaningless. There are two subparties: the DINO's (Democrats In Name Only) from conservative states, and the Progressives. The third entity, mostly left out of the argument, is the Republican party, which is now almost wholly Southern and right-wing because of having bled moderates in the past few elections. At any rate, all of this means there are three factions with totally different interests, each accusing the other of heading the country into ruin.

How little things have changed...in the US history survey course I'm TA'ing, we've been covering the Second Party System in the past few weeks. From the fall of Federalists to the rise of Democrats and Whigs, to the fall of Whigs and rise of Republicans, plus those other pesky third parties thrown in, it's almost impossible to follow. The messiness of it does explain, though, why nobody could ever make any real progress on dealing with slavery. And, like today, politicians on both sides were accusing each other of destroying America. But the messiness is also frustratingly complicated to grasp.

It occurred to me that since we do know, in the case of the 19th century, the full trajectory of the party system, a diagram would be helpful to explain it. Surely somebody had created such a thing...and, thanks to Google, I found this amazing diagram courtesy of the UNC education school:

(follow the link to see a copy big enough to read)

Not that this whole jumble of political changes could ever be crystal-clear, but I think the diagram helps quite a bit. Historians are often loath to use images for explanations, preferring the written or spoken word. I wonder if part of our graduate school training should be in the use of images to tell historical stories and illustrate concepts; sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words (or a 50-minute lecture).

Defining terms, then and now

Here's a vintage NY Times story during the debates over forming Medicare that sounds oh so familiar...

Kennedy and Students Shout About Medicine
WASHINGTON, Nov. 30 [1960] (UPI)--President-elect John F. Kennedy and a group of Georgetown University medical students had a brief debate tonight on socialized medicine.

The students saw Senator Kennedy emerging from Georgetown Hospital after visiting his wife and shouted: "Keep out socialized medicine!"

Just before he stepped into his car, Senator Kennedy looked over the top and shouted back:
"I'm for medical care for the aged and you're against socialized medicine * * * * and there is no disagreement. It's a matter of definition."

Nearly fifty years later, that "matter of definition" is still proving a sticking point in the healthcare debates. But I think that the key underlying question then and now remains whether health care is a human right, and, if so, that means the government should provide it for those in need.

One of the conservative talking heads pointed out that if you check the Constitution, you won't see a right to health care. While that argument is so ridiculous as to be laughable--I never noticed one to public education, to voting for women or blacks, or other rights we now consider inviolable--it does point to the fact that what we consider to be an inalienable human right changes over time. That said, I have trouble seeing how health care could be a privilege or a commodity and not a right.

And so maybe it all really is about definitions--what we define as a human right, how we define a "public option," and what we mean by "socialized medicine" or a "government take-over." It seems likely that those who win in the war of definitions for this historical moment will win this round of the healthcare battle.

"Let it be told to the future world..."

The past and the future came together in Obama's inauguration this week. Among the many changes he is making, Obama is setting a very different tone down to the way he uses history. While his predecessor, President Bush, referred most often to history as that field which would vindicate him in the future, Obama is looking to the past to learn its lessons. That turn backward often leads to Philadelphia.

The inaugural weekend began with a train trip from Philadelphia to Washington, echoing the trip Abraham Lincoln made at his inaugural. Obama's new home street is so named because it connects the capitol and the White House, and Pennsylvania is where the Constitution (establishing these branches of government) was written. When he took his oath of office, he read words written in Philadelphia by the founders. Finally, he closed his speech with a rather strange choice of quotes: a writing by Thomas Paine, published in Philadelphia and read to the troops at Trenton during the American Revolution under George Washington's orders.

Paine, a radical revolutionary who is rarely quoted today, wrote a book called The American Crisis in the freezing winter of 1776 to boost the morale of the troops. Opening with the phrase, "These are the times that try men’s souls," Paine continued on with the words Obama quoted:
"Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it]." Just as Obama emphasized the need for all Americans to take action and effect change, Paine continued, "throw not the burden of the day upon Providence, but 'show your faith by your works.'"

I have a hard time imagining that what Obama calls "this winter of our hardship" is as desperate and daunting as the prospect before most American in the winter of 1776. Indeed, Obama's speech today was unusually grave. Will today be the start of a revolution? As I suggested before, I think it will be a peaceful revolution, more centered on how we live and think than how we govern ourselves. I hope it will be told to the future world that we succeeded in creating a new and better era in America.

Rallying together

"I didn't want to have to tell my kids, twenty years from now, that there was this amazing movement that drew thousands of people to rallies across the country--and I never went to one," I told my friend as we were leaving yesterday's rally in West Philadelphia. Obama has been to Philly several times in this campaign, and I've somehow missed the chance to see him every time. Until yesterday.

The rally at 52nd and Locust St was Obama's fourth of the day in Philly, scheduled to begin around 1 p.m. I boarded the bus from Center City at 10:15 to head over and get in line. As it turned out, almost everybody on the bus was going to the same place. When we got off of the bus, we joined a stream of people arriving in a neighborhood that usually doesn't draw visitors. As a blogger for The New Republic described it, the block closed off for the rally "could easily be a Hollywood backlot stand-in for any depressed inner-city strip in the country." The street is lined with awnings advertising fried chicken, pizza, and even "Cousin Danny's Erotic Den."

It took me a while to find the end of the line--by 11 a.m., when I arrived, there were two lines that each stretched over two blocks. For some reason, I didn't mind standing in line for two hours. Even when the whole system disintegrated and throngs just pushed into the area to watch the speech, I wasn't as annoyed as I would usually be at such unfairness. And when, from almost 2 blocks back from the podium, I could only catch a glimpse of the top of Obama's head--and only when I stood on tip-toes on the police barrier--I wasn't that frustrated. And somehow, it didn't matter that I didn't hear much of what Obama said, or that what I did hear was pretty much the same as what I've heard him say dozens of times before on t.v.

Yesterday's rally wasn't, for me at least, about seeing Obama up-close as much as it was about being part of a movement. While some have questioned or even mocked the optimism of Obama's campaign, I can find only hopefulness in a crowd of 20,000 people of widely-varying background coming together in an inner-city neighborhood in the spirit of improving their country. It was the most mixed crowd I've ever been a part of--whether by age, gender, class, or race. As the African-American man standing next to me said, "This is just wonderful. It's like a rainbow."

Ignorance and the American Voter

There are two things I think every voter in America should be at least vaguely knowledgeable about: recent political history and candidate's current policy positions. In both this campaign and the last one I worked on, I wanted to be able to engage with voters who were undecided and make the case for the candidate I was supporting. But as I wrote recently, American politics and the media coverage of it seem to operate on truthiness rather than truth, on instincts rather than facts. It's hard to engage with voters and have a meaningful debate when they are utterly uninformed.

The author of a recent book entitled Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter argues that once television news became more popular than newspapers, "shallowness was inescapable as Americans began judging politicians by how they looked and acted." Voters today are more ignorant than ever on even the basics of our political system. If only 2 in 10 Americans knows how many senators we have, can we really expect them to know the candidates positions on the issues?

Being informed is not just about reading up on policy during the elections, though. A deeper understanding of recent political history is often necessary to really understand candidates' positions. A perfect example is John McCain and the Keating 5, particularly given what's happening with our economy right now.

This amusing video from Blogger Interrupted illustrates my point about lack of both historical and policy knowledge perfectly. Enjoy!

Responses to Obama's speech on race

As promised, here are some responses to Obama's speech. Even those who continue to disagree with Obama's association with Wright concluded that the speech was one of the most important in the past 50 years. I think it's unfortunate that the controversy over Wright is interfering with people's ability to engage the real discussion about race Obama tried to begin: most of the t.v. news reports are so stuck on controversy that they can't move on to conversation.

Here are a few links to check out:

One historian offers a history of a tradition of sometimes inflammatory African American criticism of America through Christianity

The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson has the inside scoop

Jon Stewart's take and an attempt at dialogue with Senior Black Correspondent Larry Wilmore

NY Times' Nicholas Kristoff: "What’s happening, I think, is that the Obama campaign has led many white Americans to listen in for the first time to some of the black conversation — and they are thunderstruck."

"A part of our union that we have yet to perfect"

Driven by controversy swirling around his former pastor, Barack Obama made a major speech today about race in America. Speaking across the street from Independence Hall in Philadelphia, he didn't venerate the men who formed the nation, as many speaking in such a setting would. He spoke of the constitution as a document "ultimately unfinished" and "stained by this nation's original sin of slavery."

It was a striking beginning to a speech that was the most frank, open, and intelligent discussion of race I have ever seen by a politician. Certainly, there was some political pandering in the speech. But he acknowledged what so many politicians fail to: complexity.

Here's the transcript. The video is available there, or with slightly better quality on Youtube: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.

I'll post again when the press and historians react in the next few days.

Notes on a scandal

With the latest sex scandal--NY Governor Eliot Spitzer's involvement in a prostitution ring--I think I have reached political sex scandal fatigue. Not that such scandals are undeserving of exposition and attention, but I couldn't help but wonder why they seemed to happen so often. I found some possible answers to my question in a NY Times article which historicizes the trend and looks to a variety of scholars for explanations. Here are the possible answers the article presents:
-male politicians become the alpha male and thus think they have a right to sleep with whomever they'd like
-this happened all the time before and we just didn't hear about it as much
-politicians feel entitled, which makes them ignore the consequences of what they do
-politicians are risk takers who think nothing can bring them down
-politicians are thrill-seekers
and my personal favorite
-sex and power both express "this huge energy these people have"

Notice that none of these explanations have anything to do with things changing in our society--these scandals have always gone on. There's such a lengthy history of them that my alma mater George Washington University offered a seminar on the topic, and you have to scroll to get through Wikipedia's list of them (which is pretty incomplete, at least for the early years).

The most acrimonious one in early America was probably the Eaton Affair, in which Washington high society was thrown into tumult over the appointment of a cabinet minister whose wife, Peggy Eaton, was alleged to have been sexually improper. A strange post-script--at nearly 60, Peggy married a 21-year-old painter who then ran off with her money--and her grand-daughter. Let's hope Gov. Spitzer has a better fate.

A Rhetorical Question

Audacity: n., boldness; fearless daring. This is what Barack Obama invoked in the title of his most recent book, The Audacity of Hope. He acknowledges here that his message of hope is not one that people will accept readily; it takes a sort of determination to go against the tedium of politics to accept his rhetoric, the title suggests. Some people I've talked to would agree--and they just don't feel quite daring enough.

The question to me is not just why they can't summon the audacity, but why we should need it in the first place. I'm not by any means a naive idealist; I'm probably more cynical than most people about politics and the failures of our government. But when a leader takes hold of the zeitgeist of the time and speaks in a way that is compelling, intelligent, even emotionally stirring, this seems to me to be exactly what we ought to embrace.

This, in great part, is what we admire about our greatest leaders, from George Washington to Martin Luther King, Jr. Let me be clear: I am not comparing his leadership abilities (as yet untested) with these leaders', but his rhetoric resonates with the sounds of his predecessors. He has harnessed MLK's intonation, and he speaks of unity, the urgency of action, and the future in ways that great leaders have in the past. Here, for instance, is a bit of Jefferson's first inaugural address:

"Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things."

and FDR's third inaugural in 1941:
"In the face of great perils never before encountered, our strong purpose is to protect and to perpetuate the integrity of democracy. For this we muster the spirit of America, and the faith of America. We do not retreat. We are not content to stand still. As Americans, we go forward, in the service of our country, by the will of God."

and MLK's I Have a Dream speech:
"We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy...

We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back."

How, then, are these words of Obama's so very different?
"We are the hope of the future; the answer to the cynics who tell us our house must stand divided; that we cannot come together; that we cannot remake this world as it should be.

Because we know what we have seen and what we believe - that what began as a whisper has now swelled to a chorus that cannot be ignored; that will not be deterred; that will ring out across this land as a hymn that will heal this nation, repair this world, and make this time different than all the rest - Yes. We. Can."

If we know these men made great leaders, that they acted according to the boldness of their words, than why do we assume Obama is all rhetoric? It's a rhetorical question--but one very much on my mind this election.

Election time means history is up for grabs

That, at least, seems to be particularly true this year. From the comparisons between Romney's religion speech and JFK's, the controversy over MLK, Jr., brewing between Clinton and Obama, and Obama's Reagan reference, (ill-conceived) history as been at the center of some contentious debates. As historian Sean Wilentz wrote in a recent column, "In war, truth is the first casualty--but in politics, it appears that the first victim is history."

Can we really judge candidates by their invocations of the past? A group of NH newspapers which endorsed Hillary Clinton noted that her list of favorite presidents (later corrected to note that it was a list of presidential portraits she'd hand in the White House) "demonstrates how she thinks." Even worse is when historical references are deceptive or just plain wrong. Republican posturing with evangelicals often means invoking the religious faith of the founding fathers, ignoring the obvious deism and desire for separation of church and state among the founders. As one columnist notes in comparing how Romney and JFK used religious history, "Jack Kennedy had an eye for history; Romney has only a tin ear."

So what are historians looking for in a candidate this primary season? If the online endorsement of Obama by a lengthy list of history professors is any indication, they're looking for the attributes of greatness they've seen in presidents in our history who have changed "the mood of the nation." They cite Lincoln, FDR, and JFK. No founders there, but then their hopes that Obama will improve our role in the world and expand government programs wouldn't really have been on the early presidents' agendas.

Circumstances change, times change, and sometimes the examples of the past are more or less productive than others. We can't expect politicians to use history selflessly, but let's hope they can learn to use it wisely.

The political past

The New York Times and the liberal blogosphere have spent a fair amount of time lately discussing the legacy of Ronald Reagan--specifically, about a campaign speech he gave in 1979 that seems to have expressed solidarity with southern racists. Paul Krugman writes, "Why does this history matter now? Because it tells why the vision of a permanent conservative majority, so widely accepted a few years ago, is wrong." David Brooks, on the other hand, believes that "the truth is more complicated."

What struck me here is the contrast between how columnists like these analyse a historical event versus how historians would go about this. For people like Krugman and Brooks, it's an approach that my classmates note with disdain: a teleological one. This means, roughly, that they're starting with the end point and putting together evidence that leads up to that end. That end point is usually a political point for columnists, whereas historians are more likely to let readers infer the contemporary political connections on their own. Historians are concerned with how things might have turned out differently--in our terms, contingency.

Why is one stump speech Reagan made using coded political language for racism suddenly the topic of a flurry of debate? It probably has a lot to do with this year's campaign and republican invocations of Reagan, and very little to do with that speech's historical importance. To me, it's eerily familiar of what a superb Washington Post piece recently described as a debate about race in America that is "stuck in purgatory, a cycle of skirmishes." Columnists fixating on this speech in 1979 are doing just what historians try so hard to avoid: getting mired in the detail without figuring out the meaning and implications.

And so, for the final word on Reagan and race--and an example of what the historical method can bring to debates about the past's role in the present--I'll defer to another historian's take.