The Lincoln Plawg - the blog with footnotes

2006-01-24T03:06:00.000Z

Tony Coelho: the Dem Tom DeLay?

Not a name I'd heard of - tipped off by chance by a stray Washington Times Abramoff piece.

The Cliff Notes version provided here dates the GOP's push for a money-gathering structure to its post-Watergate dive in support in the 1974 Congressional elections:

Two conditions were important to the new push: (1) conservative and business fears that the Democrats were about to embark on a new round of liberal economic and social policies, and (2) GOP fears of permanent minority status. The party's concern reached fever pitch after the Watergate hearings and President Nixon's resignation. Guy Vander Jagt, named chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee in 1975, grasped the nature of the perceived crisis and understood that it could be turned to advantage.

Thence a boom in corporate and industry group PACs.

Skipping forward,

Stung by their loss of the presidency and control of the Senate in 1980, the Democrats decided to seek corporate PAC contributions aggressively. Rep. Tony Coelho (D Calif.) persuaded big Democratic financiers to contribute to the party's congressional fund and at the same time helped the Democrats to organize more effectively to solicit corporate PAC donations.

And

Both major parties and politicians within each party established "clubs" to facilitate interaction between wealthy contributors and politicians.

It cites the DLC as an example.

"Access. Access," [Coelho] told columnist Elizabeth Drew, "that's the name of the game. They meet with the leadership and with the chairmen of the committees. We don't sell legislation: we sell the opportunity to be heard."

Comparing the take between the 1984 and 1986 elections,

...Democratic challengers and candidates for open seat races greatly increased their share of contributions from corporate, trade, and "nonconnected" PACs, while maintaining their near monopoly on labor PACs. Democratic candidates' share of corporate contributions rose from only 8 percent in 1984 to 28 percent in the 1986 off-year elections.

It seems that Coelho took a starring role in Brooks Jackson's 1988 book Honest Graft, and then resigned over the acquisition of some junk bonds (officially through ill health) before becoming chairman of the Gore campaign in 1999 and then resigning (ill health again) [1].

And he dissed Kerry's 2004 campaign, too.

Such a large footprint for a guy whose existence I'd never registered before. Not the first, won't be the last...

(There's much more besides, evidently; this is merely for possible future reference.)

There was also a criminal investigation into his doings as commissioner general of the United States Pavilion at the 1998 World Expo.

2006-01-23T19:26:00.000Z

Excellent piece on Murrow

Noted for future reference: Nicholas Lemann's piece in the New Yorker (off the George Clooney movie, mostly) about Edward R Murrow (oft mentioned here).

A useful debunking of latter-day gilding of the lily: the liberal wet-dream of Saint Ed slaying the McCarthy dragon, for instance.

It points out that Murrow's anti-McCarthy pieces came after the Tail-Gunner had already cut his own throat by going after the Army; and were vastly more overtly political than anything possible from today's network news operations (eg the Killian memos).

And says that Murrow's TV journalism was essentially offered as a sop of quality to the FCC - though how realistic the threat was of FCC retaliation in the 1950s, I know not [1].

Vox clamantis in deserto, poor old bugger!

(He did, it seems, get to boff Pamela Churchill during the war, though. Not all gloom and doom, then...)

Lemann says Murrow made the point in his speech to the RTNDA on October 15 1958. I've skimmed the speech: he refers to
the fact that the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission publicly prods broadcasters to engage in their legal right to editorialize.
but the prodding was clearly ineffective:
It is much easier, much less troublesome, to use the money-making machine of television and radio merely as a conduit through which to channel anything that is not libelous, obscene or defamatory.
In a largely despairing effort (this was pretty much the height of the quiz craze), he says, on the predominance of dross on screen,
The only remedy for this is closer inspection and punitive action by the F.C.C. But in the view of many this would come perilously close to supervision of program content by a federal agency.
Rather a sad valedictory.

2006-01-22T23:42:00.000Z

The Herb Morrison Hindenburg recording

A page full of facts. (At least, they look like facts; though they could be just truthiness...)

Apparently, excerpts from Morrison's recording were played on the NBC Red and Blue networks (once each) on Friday May 7 1937, the day after the accident - and not played on either network again.

And these broadcasts were the first recordings that NBC had allowed to be played,

and I can count on my fingers the other times that NBC broadcast recordings--knowingly and unknowingly--until the middle of WW II.

(I remember from the Ed Murrow bio Prime Time reference to CBS's mania for exclusively live broadcasting. One can see the point that recording equipment was expensive and cumbersome. But, if you've actually got the kit...)

Which leads one to ask, why, if recordings were verboten, was Morrison making a recording in the first place? His station, WLS Chicago, could play it in its own time, presumably. Would they have been planning to 'syndicate' it to other NBC stations to spread the cost?

Much geeky goodness in the piece. (And, on old-time US radio, on the site in general, that I can see.)

(Morrison only died in 1989, apparently.)

2006-01-22T22:33:00.000Z

Democratic skeletons: William Jefferson?

Clearly, the GOP will be looking to visit blowback on the Dems for piling on on the Abramoff business. (Though this indicates that the ethics truce is still in operation, according to La Pelosi.)

Rep William Jefferson (LA-2) is a clear candidate. This suggests that his argument against a Federal bribery or gratuity charge (18 USC 201(b) and (c) respectively) may well be that the deal in question was a private affair, and that there was no official act of his that can be linked with the benefits he received (a key element of both offences [1]).

That may do him some good in court; but will surely cut little ice with public opinion [2] which the usual GOP suspects will be playing like a violon as the Abramoff thing hots up (with White House photos threatened, and more, no doubt, to come).

The Swift Boat-ers managed a tidy coup with outright lies against poor old John Kerry; Jefferson looks as if he's a genuine sleazebag, even if he does manage to wriggle off a Federal charge.

There always was a reason for the Dems to cleave to that ethics truce...

The leading case on the point is, I think, the Mike Espy case, Sun-Diamond Growers v US.
I'm pretty sure that salience is damned low at the moment for Congressional ethics scandals in general and Abramoff in particular. Which may explain why the VRWC hasn't yet majored on the Jefferson case.

2006-01-22T17:58:00.000Z

Truthiness - 'sup?

Frank Rich has combined Stephen Colbert's t-word with the name of arch-hatee of the left in a behind-the-wall piece (helpfully archived here) under hed Truthiness 101: From Frey to Alito.

He contrasts the successful efforts of Alito's GOP handlers to clothe him in a truthiness of Horatio Alger rise from adversity with the failure of the Judiciary Dems to make the Concerned Alumni of Princeton bigotry thing work for them. (A dire warning that truthiness will give way to evidence, if you're not careful: better not be truthy about stuff where the evidence is handy!)

(And, natch, Rich mentions that Oscar-winning blub of Mrs A.)

Rich says we live in the age of truthiness. But when didn't we? (As ever, with Golden Agers, there's no haste to identify a comparator period. Even more so when the Golden Age is merely alluded to, as by Rich. So much truthiness there...)

Doesn't the idea of truthiness go back, at the very latest, to Walter Lippman's Public Opinion? I've yet to get to the end of the etext - but, from what I gather, his thesis is that truthiness is the best we can get in mass communication.

Viewers and readers interpret the news they consume by reference to schemata formed of social conditioning to create stereotypes that they can handle without an actual appreciation of the facts of the matter in question.

Of zillions of examples, one famous one is the first Nixon-Kennedy debate in 1960. There, radio gave us the truth, TV the truthiness. Kinda.

Can they sell truthiness as being a new concept? Wouldn't that necessarily involve some - lying?

[I suspect this may be a case of a transpondian just not getting the gag. In which case...]

2006-01-21T00:43:00.000Z

LBJ and the FCC - still just scraps

If someone's written the story of that long and profitable (to LBJ) relationship, I've yet to track it down (even on the new, tantalising Google Books).

There a snippet in Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio by Hilmes and Loviglio (p372):

Citing alleged interference with San Antonio's clear-channel WOAI at 1200 and Texas A&M station at 1150, KTBC, backed with Johnson's political clout, sought and obtained a reallocation from the [FCC] to an uncluttered area at 590 AM, and in the late 1940s it increased its power to 5,000 watts, making it the most powerful station in the Austin area by far, with a daytime coverage area that blanketed thirty-eight countries, extending from Dallas to Corpus Christi.

That's a tad over 400 miles, according to Mapquest.

GB also flags a passage (p140) in Erik Barnouw's Tube of Plenty:

During the closing months of 1952, a number of new stations received a go-ahead. Among the first was KTBC-TV, Austin, Texas, licensed to Mrs Lyndon B Johnson, wife of the US Senator from Texas; before it even reached the air, advertising sales were such that Broadcasting magazine reported: "AUSTIN'S BRINGING IN A GUSHER."

Johnson's pocket was bulging with peckers...

2006-01-18T00:00:00.000Z

That Diem closing still elusive

It seems simple enough: to track down exactly when, why and how USG decided to greenlight our friend Ngo Dinh Diem as leader of SVN. I noted on January 10 that Seth Jacobs' book on Diem says the papers on the decision are not yet declassified. But that's no necessary bar to there being decent steers on the record (Uncle Bob Woodward fills shelves-full of books with that sort of stuff!).

It's not, of course, enough to point to the goodly number of important friends that Diem had garnered during his sojourn in the US from 1950 on (Spellman, Mansfield, Kennedy, etc); these folks had nuisance value, but, so long as the Eisenhower administration found a puppet with staunch anticommunist credentials [1], it could surely have fought the Diem groupies off (the leading lights of the AFV, if that's any guide, were mostly (?) liberals and Democrats).

Or to the fact that Diem was top of the list of sixteen discussed at the May 10 1954 State Department analysts meeting (January 10 piece mentioned above).

Morgan in his Vietnam Lobby (earlier pieces - via Google Books) gives the initiative in the choice of Diem as that of Bao Dai, of all people (p9):

He instructed his representatives in Europe to contact American diplomats, and he decided to appoint Diem as the SVN's prime minister since "Washington would not spare him its support."

He goes on to say,

[State Department] records make no mention of direct American involvement in Diem's selection until May 1954. At that time, Ngo Dinh Luyen, a brother of Diem who claimed he was acting on behalf of Bao Dai, told American diplomats in Geneva of the emperor's intention to appoint Diem as premier if the United States supported Bao Dai's decision.

Following this approach, Douglas Dillon, ambassador in Paris,

...met with Diem in the following weeks and told Washington that Diem's "apparent sincerity, patriotic fervor and honesty are refreshing." He nevertheless expressed doubts about Diem's abilities, calling Diem a "yogi-like mystic" who "may have little to offer other than to reiterate that the solution to the Vietnamese problem depends on the assumption of increased responsibilities by [the] US."

Quite how well placed Dillon was to make an assessment of Diem's abilities I know not. I tend to doubt whether he had the materials by which to compare Diem with the other candidates for the job! An evaluation in the abstract might be thought less than useful - unless it was merely to give cover for a decision already made.

He goes on,

Members of the Eisenhower administration nonetheless favored Diem's candidacy. A military cable in early June reported that "Diem has received support and encouragement from American official quarters and this may be a reason why Bao Dai is considering him for the post."

Pretty thin.

There is some anecdotage in support of Dulles as Diem's main champion:

John W Hanes, one of Dulles's assistant, later claimed that the secretary of state's support for Diem was "rammed through single-handedly, through our intelligence and military communities." In his memoirs, Bao Dai mentioned a conversation he had with Dulles before asking Diem to act as premier, and in The Lost Crusade, Chester Cooper writes of a meeting between Dulles and Bao Dai that dealt with the role Diem would play in preventing a Viet Minh takeover of Vietnam.

And some more fingering the CIA:

Robert Amory, who served as the CIA's deputy director of intelligence in the 1950s, asserted that Justice Douglas had initially sparked the agency's interest in Diem. Another senior CIA officer, Richard Dissell, later recalled that the VIA was "deeply involved" in winning support for Diem. A few accounts have noted that Ambassador William J Donovan, the founder of the OSS, and Lieutenant Colonel Edward G Landsdale, a CIA operative, appeared in Saigon shortly after Ngo Dinh Nhu, another of Diem's brothers, organized the Front for National Salvation [2], a group that promoted Diem's candidacy.

Nhu as another of Diem's brothers indeed!

All in all, barely more than gossip.

The striking thing is how late, according to what I'm reading, the US started to contemplate a Plan B to deal with a French withdrawal from Indochina. The stuff that I've seen - the Pentagon Papers commentary, for instance - on the discussions (mostly in April 1954) within USG of possible US military intervention in support of Dien Bien Phu does not suggest that a twin track approach was then in operation. I find that hard to believe.

The May 10 meeting at State supports the idea that, whether or not a Plan B was in contemplation during the DBP discussions, actual decisions assuming a French loss had been put off [3].

The altogether weak and unsatisfactory treatment of question in Vietnam Lobby [4] suggests the Who chose Diem? question is currently beyond answering. I rather doubt that - but I think, for the moment, I'll leave it there.

Someone who had actually fought against the Viet Minh, for example!
No sign online of this organisation; or National Salvation Front or Front de salut national either, as relevant to Vietnam in 1954.
It's interesting to note that NSC 5405, United States Objectives and Courses of Action with respect to Southeast Asia dated January 16 1954, contemplates the possibility of the French suing for peace, but (so far as I can see) suggests no action to take if US persuasion against that course chanced to fail. I'm not clear at what date NSC 5405 ceased to be operative.
The Jacobs may have better information on the subject, but GB deems I've seen too much of the book already, and has barred me from looking at it!

2006-01-12T01:45:00.000Z

China Reporting interesting but mostly off the point

I've skimmed it (link downpage); it's mostly an oral history memoir of a great communal journalistic experience.

(Our friend from the Albert Colegrove saga, the Times' Tillman Durbin turns up, for one. Harrison Salisbury. A good many I'd never heard of.)

It's very much a reporter's eye view. There's stuff toward the end on relations with HQ which suggest that, a lot of the time, editors were convinced Joe Public wasn't that into China as a breakfast table topic.

(John Paton Davies, one of State's lost leaders (sez Halberstam in Best and Brightest), figures as a member of the Foreign Service in Hankow and Chungking; the Foreign Service and press guys seem to have been pretty pally until John Service got winkled out in the Amerasia farrago through having trusted in a journo.)

It's rather more relevant to another perennial topic here, the history of journalism. Limited nourishment here for any seeking to locate a Golden Age of American Journalism in the years leading up to Mao's victory in 1949!

For general interest, well worth a read. Rather a flavour of Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. They don't make them like that any more...

2006-01-11T01:26:00.000Z

The American China romance - the Madame Chiang factor

I'd forgotten about this piece, which gives a flavour.

Many more pieces of the puzzle to come, I'm sure.

2006-01-10T23:03:00.000Z

Another icon bites the dust?

Right and left, they all have them - and they come in all shapes and sizes. Rosa Parks and Terri Schiavo (who only became an icon years after she lost touch with the world), to name but two.

Generally, the stories associated with these icons are, at best, ones with which the facts are strictly prohibited from interfering. Or, more usually, a pack of lies.

Another left icon (the facts of whose life I know not, and thus do not speak to) is Cesar Chavez, founder of what eventually became the United Farm Workers union.

Miriam Pawel of the LA Times has a series running that places a bomb under both the UFW and its legendary founder. Under heds Farmworkers Reap Little as Union Strays From Its Roots , Linked Charities Bank on the Chavez Name and Decisions of Long Ago Shape the Union Today (one part of a four part series to come), she seems to have good stuff. The series title is UFW: A Broken Contract.

The unions in the US is a fascinating topic that I've touched on from time to time before (for instance, the truly evil CCPOA excited my ire for some time till I realised that Golden State citizens don't give a flying one about it), but more generally have been handicapped (not for the first time!) by a lack of actual knowledge.

If Pawel's work stands up, it might be something to come back to.

MORE

American exceptionalism has applied to its trade unions as much as anything else.

The growth of the AFL as a group of lily-white, craft-only unions, with industrial workers - miners, say - struggling to make much headway until the advent of the NRA's famous section 7(a) and (after NRA was held unconstutional), the Wagner Act; a spurt of activity - a Popular Front operation in the CIO, working to reelect FDR in states lacking a Tammany machine - and then having the rug pulled from under them by the full employment of the war years. And then Taft-Hartley, corruption, relocations to the hard-to-unionise South - all that jazz.

The unions should be a key element in Democratic Party politics and campaigning. Comparatively, you rarely hear talk of them in lefty circles online. The star of the SEIU's Andy Stern, Great White Hope of union revival and effective Dem linkage, seems to have slipped a bit since I was writing about him here last year. His profile on the lefty sites I've been looking at since my return to online seems more discreet than earlier bold talk might have suggested.

I have a feeling that there's a CW amongst lefty rags (Nation, American Prospect, etc) that union stories are both boring and unlikely to help the Dem cause. If so, they'd be half right.

2006-01-10T14:30:00.000Z

A personal note (don't ask!)

Barkis is willing.

2006-01-10T01:32:00.000Z

That Diem selection process

Seth Jacobs (p48) comes through with the knowledge (some of it):

As David Anderson notes, the Eisenhower administration's most crucial Vietnam decisions were made after the fall of Dien Bien Phu. For all his circumspection when it came to committing US forces to a land war in Asia, Eisenhower had no intention of allowing Ho Chi Minh to seize all of Vietnam.

Clearly, the French were a broken reed. So holding the line would have to be entrusted to a native:

In [an NSC] meeting on 4 February 1954, over three months before the red flag was hoisted over Dien Bien Phu, CIA Director Allen Dulles complained that "there was no dynamism in the leadership of the Franco-Vietnamese forces." Eisenhower "interrupted" to "inquire if it would be possible to capitalize on the religious issue." Given that "most of the people of Vietnam were Buddhists," the president wondered whether the United States might "find a good Buddhist leader to whip up some real fervor." The sources of the next remark is unnamed, but he clearly voiced a shared sentiment. According to the minutes, "It was pointed out the president that, unhappily, Buddha was a pacifist rather than a fighter." This led to laughter. Vice President Richard Nixon then "expressed some doubt as to the strength and conviction with which the people of Vietnam clung to their religious views." Eisenhower replied that "he still believed that there was something in the idea of religious motivation. While conceding that Emperor Bao Dai was an unlikely guiding star for religious passions, Eisenhower "pointed out how Joan of Arc had managed to defeat a large enemy force and place a timid king upon his throne in France." Picking up on the Joan of Arc theme, Secretary of State Dulles remarked that "there were, of course, a million and a half Roman Catholics in Vietnam, and they included some of the best brains of the country." Eisenhower "suggested the Catholics be enlisted."

That such a deeply informed and impartial discussion should lead to the selection of Diem can scarcely be surprising!

(Subsequently, on April 13 1955 [1], the Operations Coordinating Board

an organization the historian James Arnold Calls Eisenhower's "principal source of information" on Southeast Asia in the second half of the 1950s

produced a report Recommendations Concerning Study of Religious Factors in International Strategy which looks as platitudinous as Ike, to judge from the quotes.

It was, it seems, the foundation of the US policy to rely on Catholics in Vietnam for anything that needed doing around the place. Like fighting Communists.

Not all soi-disant Catholics embodied the paradigm suggested. But

Although neither Diem nor any other American ally was identified by name in the report, the South Vietnamese premier's celibacy, Spartan lifestyle, and repeated declarations of loyalty to the Catholic Church conformed nicely to the OCB's stipulations.

The substantive question not addressed is, of course: Were there any Buddhists who could plausibly have taken Diem's place, had USG's mind not been gradually closed in favour of the notion that the top man in SVN would have to be Catholic?

Skipping on to page 54, we find this:

The views expressed by the OCB and other government authorities give some indication why, when on 10 May 1954, analysts at the State Department's Division of Philippine and Southeast Asian Affairs produced a list of sixteen Vietnamese politicians whom they considered reliably anticommunist, Ngo Dinh Diem - who had held no political office for over two decades and who had not participated in the struggle to rid his homeland of colonial oppression - headed the list. The analysts described Diem as "[t]he most prominent Catholic leader in Vietnam, perhaps the most popular personality in the country after Ho Chi Minh." They added, "Probably has Vatican support." At least six of the sixteen candidates for South Vietnamese leadership were Catholics, a high number given that Catholics made up only about 10 percent of the population of Vietnam.

Is the list online? Dunno. Yet.

Apparently, the papers dealing with Diem's move from being one of sixteen to getting the job are still classified!

All very unsatisfactory.

I think that should be 1954!

2006-01-09T23:10:00.000Z

The American romance with China

Where we are with thinking on the Diem question is roughly this:

Books like Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest and Hallin's Uncensored War - where the main discussion starts with the inauguration of John Kennedy - and the relative volume of attention that VN under the JFK and later presidencies, compared to Eisenhower's, gets generally, might lead one to the conclusion that, no later than January 1961, all bets were still on.

My hypothesis is that that is not true. That, on the contrary, there was never any possibility of an outcome favourable to the US according to the criteria then shaping US foreign policy.

Dien Bien Phu fell on May 7 1954; the Geneva Conference started on April 26; Ngo Dinh Diem arrived in VN on June 26 to form a government as Bao Dai's prime minister.

I've looked at the process whereby Diem got an influential following in the US. What I haven't got is anything official from within USG on the process whereby he got picked for the job. The 1954 volumes on the UW FRUS online archive don't include any covering Indochina. (Yet - it's a work in progress, apparently.)

I'm looking for background on the mindset of the US political class on Far East affairs.

The gravitational pull of China was irresistible. Feeding the loss of China nonsense.

So I go to look more carefully at the China Reporting etext (mentioned before).

In the section on Thomas Millard, a journo who knocked around China for years, starting around the time of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, and was highly influential on subsequent generations of American reporters who came to cover the country.

It addresses the question of the (one-way?) Sino-American romance (emphasis mine):

From 1900 to 1930, Millard wrote seven books and reported for the New York Times, New York World, New York Herald, New York Herald Tribune, Scribner's, Nation, and others. Because it was a time of political transition in China characterized by disorder and lack of authority, Millard and those associated with him were able to engage effectively in advocacy journalism. But he quickly realized that the American public was not very interested in China, that editors stood in the way of getting the word out and educating the public. So he sought to influence the foreign policy elite, and in this task he was helped by friends with influence and money, such as Charles Crane, an influential Chicagoan who, after making a great deal of money, devoted his life to pushing the concept of a special US relationship with China and Asia. Millard was often subsidized by Crane to the tune of $500 a month, and at times by various Chinese governments. Besides writing, Millard went to Washington to try to influence the State Department and constituent groups such as missionaries and businessmen, relentlessly propounding the idea of a special relationship with China.
Millard failed in part because China was not a central concern to American interests. But in terms of influence on other journalists, Millard was more successful. It is interesting to see how many journalists from the Midwest in later periods developed similar motivations. Many had that same sense of mission, a willingness to advocate a particular view and a particular role for the United States and China. Not really understanding China very deeply, Millard used China as an instrument, as an object for achieving what he believed to be American goals.

So, if the American public wasn't interested in China in 1900, when did the romance begin?

I've mentioned Pearl Buck before, whose Good Earth appeared in 1931 and pulled down a Pulitzer for her [1]; which she followed up with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938.

Of course, 1931 was also the year of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria - which I imagine (evidence?) got a fair amount of press. The newsreels were talkies by then (I'm assuming), which must have had some effect (evidence?).

There is a thesis right on point - Americans and the issue of China : the passion and dispassion of American opinions about China, 1930 to 1944 - but it's not available to the public.

A GB book, Fdr's Good Neighbor Policy: Sixty Years of Generally Gentle Chaos by Frederick Pike, suggests a Depression angle:

Americans in quest of renewal...found primitives in virtually all parts of the world to fulfill their psychic needs and longings. For some questers, Chinese peasants afforded the proper models.

The Good Earth fed their appetite, he says. It's a theory.

However the whole thing started, the American romance with China had reached absurd proportions by December 7 1941. I happen to have to hand a dead-tree One World by Wendell Willkie, which is pretty much ga-ga on the subject. Willkie scarcely comes within anyone's definition of best and brightest. But I have a feeling that few were calling him on his other-worldly faith in Chiang Kai-shek and his band of venal cutthroats.

From there, there's a connection with FDR emissary, Oklahoman Patrick Hurley, and hence to our lost leaders at State, John Service and John Paton Davies; Hurley, I've read, was at the bottom of the witchhunt that winkled them out. From Hurley, one can also draw a line to the China Lobby, who terrorised Truman, and made him a fellow-traveller of the McCarran/McCarthy roadshow; and, as a bonus, kept JFK and LBJ in need of a regular supply of macho stances.

That's a whole lot of connecting-the-dots, and almost nothing in the way of actual evidence.

Of course, immediately before the events listed above, USG had, after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, arrived at a good decision on Indochina: not to intervene militarily on the side of the French.

A decision arrived at despite the loss of China, the threat of the commie-lover tag, the relatively early stage of the Eisenhower presidency.

The gilt is rather scraped off the gingerbread if one imagines that, at the moment Ike's boys were giving the Frogs the finger, they were preening themselves over their cunning plan to put Diem in as leader of the South.

The research continues.

According to this bio,
On March 2, 1931, John Day published Buck's second novel, The Good Earth. The book became an overnight sensation after Will Rogers lauded it on the front page of the New York Times as "not only the greatest book about a people ever written but the best book of our generation."
The Japanese attack on Manchuria came on September 18 1931.

2006-01-09T00:46:00.000Z

Stetson Kennedy was a fabulist

According to the Freakonomics boys' piece in the Times, at least.

His 1954 book was called I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan. It seems that, actually, he didn't. The material was OK, it was just his version of how he got it that included some stretchers.

It all came to light just because of a chapter in the Freakonomics book. The perils of publicity!

I've mentioned Kennedy's Jim Crow book before: fun facts about the crazy laws of segregation in and out of Dixie c1960. Hope that's kosher...

2006-01-07T22:03:00.000Z

Motherlode of 1959 US media pablum on SVN

In part 1 of the 1959 hearings on VVA (next door piece), pp31-44.

Among the hacks represented is the New York Times' Tillman Durbin (not named after Pitchfork Ben, surely?), whom no one (to judge from the pieces copied) needed to tell to get on the team.

Ambassador Eldridge Durbrow (p30) runs through the roster of resident journos: Brix (UPI), Wilde (Time-Life) and an unnamed freelancer for AP (or possibly Wilde doubling up - the text is unclear).

Holbrecht of UPI covered SVN from Japan; Durbin from Hong Kong.

The reprinted articles are mostly from Durbin; there are also pieces from Ernest K Lindley (Newsweek) and Igor Oganesoff (Wall Street Journal) - presumably parachute operations like Colegrove's.

MORE

The same search produces the report on hearings (July 27-August 14 1959) by the Subcommittee on the Far East and the Pacific of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, entitled The Current Situation in the Far East.

As with the Senate hearings, Colegrove puts in an appearance. Unlike the Senate report (that I've discovered on a quick skim), the House report gives the text of the articles of his that started the whole business off. The reprint starts on the last page of the sixth part, and goes on for 15 or so pages in the seventh and final part.

2006-01-07T21:32:00.000Z

VVA comes through on Colegrove

A search on "albert m colegrove" produces the goods - two dozen items: various (more or less) ephemera, plus the report of the hearings on 30-31 July 1959 of the Subcommittee on State Department Organization and Public Affairs of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee which the Colegrove articles (earlier piece) triggered. Which I'm skimming right now.

2006-01-07T19:57:00.000Z

A snappy treatment of the US/Diem farrago

In the VVA, by Herbert S Parmet, The Making and Unmaking of Ngo Dinh Diem.

[From a cursory search, Parmet seems to have the web seal of approval.]

He makes the case (towards which I am currently inclined, as mentioned a couple of days ago) that the problem was intervention in SVN after Geneva in support of a leader of such little competence and legitimacy as Diem.

By the advent of JFK, it was way too late. He might have been able to contemplate a withdrawal mañana (ie after November 1964) - as he is quoted as telling fellow Diem-lover Mike Mansfield (text to n102) - but, as the song almost says, we'll never know.

Parmet speaks of Diem's Catholic connection as as if it were already old hat. (His piece is undated.) I'm still intrigued, though.

Once Diem was in place, the condemnations of the likes of Lawton Collins (earlier piece) were overcome by the success of the evacuation of refugees from the North [1] and his crushing of the sects (something on which USG - in the shape of Dulles (p17) - was initially by no means keen.

Parmet doesn't (that I noticed on a first reading) deal with the possibility that JFK could have taken advantage of the Buddhist crisis in 1963 to withdraw from SVN on a tide of US popular outrage. (It's a suggestion I've seen made - but it sounds drutherful to me.)

The question of precedent needs to be addressed - I'll mention while I think of it:

The golden rule of any bureaucracy is, Don't do anything for the first time. So what were the precedents facing JFK?

There was the loss of China: I don't think (I have nothing to cite on the point, though) that any serious player seriously contemplated US military intervention against Mao's boys in support of the KMT. On the other hand, that was the GOP's Old Reliable big stick with which to beat the Dems. (Several political generations later, its effect could still be seen in the cramped and crabbed performance of John Kerry on national security matters in 2004.

On the other hand, Laos was neutralised in 1962 without Kennedy being run out of town on a rail.

Indonesia - a much larger country than SVN and next door to kith and kin ally Australia - was allowed to slide into something close to communism in the later years of Sukarno. The country enjoyed the attentions of the CIA (in the Sumatra rebellion in 1958 and the 1965 coup), but no sign of US combat troops!

The fear that US withdrawal from SVN would cause a fatal crisis of confidence amongst regional allies, leading to a tumbling of dominoes, I would hypothesise to be US cover for doing what they would have done anyway. I've seen umpteen dominoes quotes from US officials, but no analysis I can recall of how realistic the fear was. (I'm sure there's plenty somewhere!)

The relative contributions of Diem, the CIA and Tom Dooley - if the two last can be separated - I wouldn't guess at.

2006-01-07T02:19:00.000Z

Not forgetting China

When it comes to American delusions about Asia, if Diem's Vietnam was the moon, Chiang Kai-shek's China was the sun.

For one thing, as I've quoted Mike Mansfield - Asian scholar that he was, neither he nor most anyone else in the US knew much about Indochina back then. But most mid-century Americans not only knew of the existence of China, but had fuzzy feelings about it. After decades of Yellow Peril in the 19th and early 20th centuries, by the time Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, there was a whole slew of folk knowledge Stateside, missionaries had gone out, Pearl Buck's Good Earth was a smash that year, etc, etc.

There is - I stumble over - an etext, China Reporting by Stephen R. MacKinnon and Oris Friesen, in which journalists and others who reported on China back to the US in the 1930s and 1940s talk to historians on what they reported, and how it differed from what actually happened!

I've yet to read it - but it looks promising to give some clues to the wholly irrational passion that made the Truman lost China roorback such a powerful GOP weapon in 1950 and 1952.

In the 50s, one must always bear in mind, the salience of Indochina was pretty damned low (I'd feel happier with a bit of polling to back that up, mind you!) - no combat deaths having a fair deal to do with that [1]. Diem was, I'd surmise, a mania generally limited to the (supposedly) thinking classes, with a wider circulation among Catholics, thanks to the efforts of Spellman and Associates.

If CJCS Radford had had his way over bombing to relieve Dien Bien Phu in April 1954, things would have been rather different. I recall reading somewhere that Radford was at one stage proposing US bombers cross PRC airspace over Hainan Island (at the north of the Gulf of Tonkin) the sooner to reach their targets. No sign of this online, though, that I can see, so...

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From the same site, there's another etext, The Stubborn Earth: American Agriculturalists on Chinese Soil, 1898–1937 by Randall Stross, which may suggest further reasons for a delusional trans-Pacific empathy.

STILL MORE

Also there is Owen Lattimore and the "Loss" of China by Robert P Newman. Sounds as if it's on point.

2006-01-06T23:01:00.000Z

Michigan State, police state

It was not only pols and the press who were falling over themselves to get put their shoulders to the wheels of Diem's circus wagon: academe lent their shoulders too.

Except Michigan State University, which got into the wagon and took hold of the reins!

The (well-known?) 1966 article in Ramparts tells the tale entertainingly.

A possible future case for treatment.

2006-01-06T18:01:00.000Z

Meany: save us from lily-white unions

Too preoccupied with matters Indochinese at the moment.

But I record for future reference this, originally published in Harper's in 1971 under the title The Blacks and the Unions.

There was controversy over whether the Civil Rights Bill (which eventually became the Civil Rights Act of 1964) should have an FEPC provision (many earlier pieces here on previous attempts to enact an FEPC).

The AFL-CIO was strongly in favour. But only so that government could achieve what it could not (emphasis mine):

Both President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy were opposed to including an FEPC section because they thought it would kill the bill, but George Meany pressed for it. He did so for a simple reason. The AFL-CIO is a federation of affiliates which retain a relatively high degree of autonomy. The parent body can urge compliance with its policies, but the decision to act is left up to the affiliates. Meany felt that the only way the AFL-CIO could deal effectively with unions practicing discrimination would be to demand compliance with the law of the land. He testified before the House Judiciary Committee that the labor movement was calling for "legislation for the correction of shortcomings in its own ranks." And the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act greatly speeded the process of this correction.

VN: The Willard Hotel shindig

The more I read, the more I'm led to think that Uncle Sam's goose was cooked - burnt to a crisp, in fact - way before Saint Jack raised his standard high.

My impression - I've only picked at elements of the Indochina wars story to date - is that the CW story arc that characterises US Indochina policy in the period between the end of the implemention Geneva [1] and the formation of the National Liberation Front in 1960 was essentially vamping till ready - the DRV had its work cut out recovering from the French war, with military action in the South on the back-burner - until old Ike and his quiet-lifers gave way to the best and brightest.

All the while, however, the American Friends of Vietnam, aided and abetted by a media supine where it was not deliriously enthusiastic, worked to close off debate amongst policymakers, and leave Diem, the Miracle Man, as the only man conceivable as leader of SVN.

This was - so far as I can tell - a Swift Boating aimed largely at the political class.

Seth Jacobs (p241) gives an example:

Except for Diem's tour of the United States in 1957, the AFV's greatest propaganda masterstroke was a conference titled "America's Stake in Vietnam" held at the Willard Hotel in Washington in June 1956". [Leading AFV member Joseph] Buttinger volunteered to set a "top-level" agenda. Over the next few weeks, according to his reports, he courted "representatives from leading national civic, public, veterans, and foreign-affairs organizations; ...representatives of the diplomatic corps in Washington; [and] the press."

The response was overwhelmingly positive. State Department officer Paul Kattenburg met with AFV coordinator Gilbert Jonas to advise him that the department looked "quite favorably" upon the conference and would permit [ASS for Far Eastern Affairs] Walter Robertson to be a featured speaker.

Robertson was eager to participate, calling the conference "an excellent opportunity to focus public attention on the excellent progress the Republic of Vietnam has been making." Equally keen to speak at the conference was Senator Kennedy, who was contacted at the eleventh hour when his more prominent colleague Mike Mansfield became indisposed. The late substitute Kennedy would deliver the conference's most oft-quoted address.

The purpose of "America's Stake in Vietnam," according to the AFV's press release, was "to focus American attention on the nature of the current threat posed by communist demands for holding all-Vietnamese elections." This seemed a timely concern, given that less than a month after the conference was held, Saigon and Hanoi were to confer under the Geneva Accords to arrange unification. No US policymaker gave Diem a chance against Ho Chi Minh in a nationwide election. Diem, however, had declared he had no intention of abiding by the accords, and Ambassador Reinhardt counseled Secretary of State Dulles that it was "unwise...to focus attention" on the election issue. Reinhardt urge the State Department to persuade the AFV to "concentrate instead on means of expanding US-Vietnamese relationships." Young met privately with O'Daniel and convinced the general that the focus of the conference should be changed.

Lack of a unifying theme did not prevent "American's Stake in Vietnam" from being a public relations tour de force. The Willard Hotel had rarely seen a more star-studded panel. Luminaries from a variety of professions and organizations lent their voices to Diem's cause; from the military, O'Daniel; from academe, Professor Hans Morgenthau of the University of Chicago; from the Catholic Church, Monsignor Joseph Harnett; from the medical profession, Doctor Tom Dooley; from Capitol Hill, Senator Kennedy; and from the State Department, Assistant Secretary Robertson. The roughly two hundred people who attended the conference came from an equally broad spectrum: representatives of business firms, church groups, and labor and educational associations rubbed shoulders with academics, diplomats and military officers.

O'Daniel's welcome sounded the note that would echo throughout the conference. "from the very beginning, first as premier and then as president of South Vietnam," the general declared, "Ngo Dinh Diem has shown great courage and determination...This conference has been called to emphasize the progress made by President Diem and his people, Progress which inspires admiration and respect." Kennedy then praised Diem in extravagant terms, citing his "amazing success in meeting firmly and with determination the major political and economic crises which had heretofore continually plagued Vietnam." The senator strung together a sequence of metaphors that would become famous, appearing in most treatments of the Vietnam War: "Vietnam represents the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the keystone in the arch, the finger in the dike." In an expression of staggering paternalism, Kennedy asserted, "If we are not the parents of little Vietnam, then surely we are the godparents. We presided at its birth, we gave assistance to its life, we have helped to shape its future...This is our offspring. We cannot abandon it." Assistant Secretary Robertson also lauded Diem's accomplishments. "The free world owes President Diem a debt of gratitude," Robertson declared. "In him, his country has found a truly worthy leader." There was "no more dramatic example" of Diem's "moral fortitude," Robertson attested, than his "battle against the parasitic politico-religious sects in the spring of 1955."

There's evidently more, but that's all GB is poneying up right now.

(I find a longer extract from Kennedy's speech here.)

After Tulipmania came Diem-mania. Kennedy, whose shtick, as I recall, included a claim to be some kind of foreign policy expert - in the striking role of anticolonialist cold-warrior - seemed intent on boosting Diem into the stratosphere. Such a paragon was never seen on earth, let alone in mid-century Indochina!

Did he feel he needed any research to back up his claims? Had he ever been advised on SVN affairs by any Vietnamese not within the Diem orbit, I wonder?

This, I suppose, must be the American innocence of which I've heard spoken...

JFK is a guy whose sagacity and judgement have had some boosting of their own, notably on the speculation about his decision (if there was one) to withdraw from VN after reelection.

Does one conclude that he grew up between 1956 and 1961? Did the crush on Diem evident in his Willard ravings affect his judgement in dealing with VN as President?

Who, in 1956, was taking a public stand against the Diem love-in? Anyone?

To the extend the Accords were ever implemented, that is.

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There are, it turns out, further particulars to be found at the Virtual Vietnam Archive. A book containing an edited version of proceedings at the "America's Stake in Vietnam" meeting [1], plus much correspondence, memos and like material.

The VVA is full of good stuff, of course; but the search sensation tends to be that of opening a cupboard, and having its contents fall on top of you!

Search on "America's Stake in Vietnam" and "book on vietnam".

2006-01-05T00:00:00.000Z

Calling International Rescue...

(Can't help thinking Thunderbirds somehow.)

GB pot luck on Seth Jacobs' Diem book brings us to p234, in a chapter on the MO of the American Friends of Vietnam, which wrapped up all that goodwill and admiration for the Miracle Man (as outlined in previous pieces) into an organised lobby. (And the lefties complain about today's K Street!)

We join the chapter tantalisingly just after the passage on media manipulation:

...the leading figures in the AFV - Buttinger, Cherne, Oram and the diplomat Angier Biddle Duke - had spent many years working for the IRC, the largest nonsectarian refugee organization in the world.

IRC is International Rescue Committee.

The IRC gained international renown in the 1930s and 1940s for saving European Jews from Hitler's tyranny, and its anticommunist credentials were certified in the 1950s with well-publicized fund-raising drives to rescue East German and Hungarian victims of Soviet repression. An IRC résumé conferred enormous moral authority upon its possessor and tended to place that individual beyond suspicion of legally questionable activity. Moreover, even if such suspicion were piqued, there was little chance of harassment by the US Justice Department, as Oram pointed out in an interview with the historian William Brownell. "Even by 1962, there were only four lawyers to oversee the Foreign Agents Registration Act for the entire United States," Oran recalled. Hence, no one raised the issue of conflict of interest when Oram's firm received money from Diem's government while Oram continued to serve on the board of directors of the AFV. More important than lack of legal oversight was the vacuum of Vietnam expertise in the United States at the time of the AFV's emergence. Cherne remarked to Brownell that the AFV had "a clear field of fire...There was no alternate body of information on Vietnam."

This is, of course a consistent line, offered alike by those condemning the formulation and execution of USG policy in Indochina, and by those seeking to excuse its - shall we say, inadequacies?

We have - earlier piece - Mansfield, a former academic specialising in East Asia before his election to the US House admitting his ignorance of Indochinese affairs in 1949. And the roll call of Halberstam's best and brightest facing a similar gulf of ignorance a decade later.

In particular, the depredations of the Red Scare in the roster of FE are blamed. My hypothesis, raised from the most cursory of searches, is that the guys purged from State by the witch-hunters were like Mansfield - all China specialists.

Mansfield also said in that same 1949 quote that no one else (in the US) knew much about Indochina either. Presumably, if there had been IC expertise in the State Department, then-Rep Mansfield would have known about it. And, if that expertise had already been purged, then Truman would have done the purging!

John Service, John Carter Vincent, John Paton Davies and Edmund Chubb are mentioned by Robert McNamara in In Retrospect. I can find nothing that supports the idea that they were experts on Indochina. Both Service nor Davies come up empty.

(McNamara mentions the quartet for self-exculpator reasons, natch!)

Who else in America knew about Indochina? Certainly, the Michigan State University Group, who were up to all sorts in SVN during Diem's first five or six years in charge.

What about the French? Suez may have put the kibosh on official French assistance and advice - but there must have been some expertise to be tapped from non-governmental sources.

Surely the sheer intellectual curiosity of top USG men with Indochina responsibilities - JFK's, if not DDE's - would have driven them to seek knowledge - however unofficially - from whomsover might have it? (Mac Bundy was Dean of Harvard, for God's sake!)

The Red Scare ranks as an excuse with the Times' Bill Keller's explanation why Judith Miller pieces on national security continued to appear in the rag even though he'd directed her to leave the topic alone:

she kept kind of drifting on her own back into the national security realm.

Jacobs goes on:

James Fisher also notes that the crazy-quilt pluralism of the AFV's membership also worked in the group's favor, serving to distinguish it from other one-issue lobbies whose rosters featured only hard-line conservatives or liberal/leftists. The national committee of the AFV, Fisher observes, "comprised perhaps the most ecumenical coalition of opinion-makers ever witnessed," including [Mansfield and JFK], the Republicans Walter Judd and Clement Zablocki, [Luce and Hearst], the liberal academics Samuel Eliot Morison and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, the war heroes Audie Murphy and Mike O'Daniel, the Oscar-winning director Joseph Mankiewicz, the author and "celebrity saint" Tom Dooley, and even Norman Thomas, the president of the American Socialist Party.

One might note, in the first couple of years after the French returned to Indochina after WW2, the Communists in government in Paris opposed any moves towards genuine independence for the place. The PCF changed its tune later.

And also to point out its salutary warning against assuming merit in bipartisanship. Or even polypartisanship!

Thomas apparently joined

...with the proviso that "my interest in Viet-Nam does not extend to automatic endorsement of American participation in war to that end."

For example,

Thomas's signature on a letter arguing that Diem was justified in refusing to permit the scheduled elections was doubly effective; if the socialist leader believed that holding a single election in both parts of Vietnam could "only be regarded as an imperialist endeavor contrary to the will of the South Vietnamese people," then, it appeared, the AFV was not merely spouting a party line.

And

When William Donovan, an early chairman of the AFV, wrote to President Eisenhower to protest communist Chinese premier Chou En-lai's call for compliance with the Geneva Accords, Eisenhower responded personally within two days, assuring Donovan that he "completely agreed" with the chairman's position and that he would "instantly" take up the matter of Chou's "impertinence" with the State Department. "As you know," the president wrote, "I consider that President Diem is the most potent force we have in South Viet Nam to halt the arrogant march of communism."

God bless us every one...

2006-01-04T19:18:00.000Z

Diem: the media Hall of Shame

A window on the Age of Murrow [1].

Henry Luce gushed a Mississippi over the guy (p221):

President Ngo Dinh Diem is one of the great statesmen of Asia and of the world...In honoring him we pay tribute to the eternal values which all free men everywhere are prepared to defend with their lives.

At least, when Sulzberger, Raines and Keller published his crap, they weren't quite so effusive about Ahmed Chalabi!

And

It was a Life headline that tagged Diem "The Tough Miracle Man of Vietnam," and the world "miracle" became indelibly associated with Diem's name.

It came out in the wash in 1963, I seem to recall...

There are similar counterfactual accolades quoted by Jacobs from Newsweek, the New York Herald Tribune and William Randolph Hearst in the New York Journal-American.

And the New York Times does not disappoint. The Gray Lady casts dignity to the wind, and performs a knickerless can-can the length of 42nd Street in Diem's honour:

The [Times] "salute[d] President Ngo Dinh Diem" for carrying out a "five-year miracle" in South Vietnam.

The tail-end charlie of this roll of shame is - none other than the aforementioned Murrow:

In a radio interview in 1956, Murrow asserted, "Diem...has made so much progress in the past six months that some people use the overworked word 'miracle' in describing improvements in South Vietnam.

Note that Murrow is not (or not fully) endorsing use of the M-word. But his evident endorsement of the P-word is bad enough.

The dour US News and World Report joins the Diem street parade more than half-cut:

[It] presented a photograph of Diem surrounded by a cheering mob; alongside the photo ran the caption: "Ngo Dihn Diem, South Vietnam's president, has sought and gained popular support. The success of Diem's leadership has surprised the skeptics and aroused the anger of the communists.

Was it a lack of reporters in theatre? Or incompetence or ideological blindness to the facts? Or their being overruled by top editors anxious to be on the team?

The providers of fish-wrapping were not the only culprits:

Scholarly publications proved no less susceptible to the miracle legend. The prestigious journal Foreign Affairs asserts, "History may yet judge Diem as one of the great figures of twentieth century Asia." The author William Henderson claimed that prior to Diem's assumption of the premiership, South Vietnam "seemed certain to sink into the abyss of bloody internecine strife ending in complete collapse." Yet a mere two years later, "South Vietnam is very much in business...In short, a wholly unexpected political miracle has taken place in South Vietnam...[T]he principal credit should be given to [Diem].

Slaves to today's liberal conventional wisdom may find it strange that

The liberal press was most lavish in its praise, a development that seems counterintuitive give Diem's conservatism and religious zealotry. These traits were more than offset, however, by his uprightness and apparent independence. Whereas Asian Allies like Bao Dai and Chiang Kai-shek had, either through corruption or sloth, earned the label of puppet, Diem appeared immune to such obloquy. Self-denying in his lifestyle, he did not visibly profit from the aid America funneled into his regime. Further more, his determination to steer his own course, even if that meant initiating war with the Bihn Xuyen against the wishes of Eisenhower's personal representative, seemed to demonstrate his freedom from superpower coercion. The phrases "nobody's puppet" and "nobody's pawn" recurred frequently in the stories run on Diem in the American media. If Diem were no puppet, it followed that the United States was not practicing neocolonialism by supporting him, and cold war liberals like [Mansfield] and [Justice Douglas] could be secure in their own righteousness and confident that America would not repeat France's failure in Vietnam. The Miracle Man's appeal to the messianic liberalism of the early cold war - as distinguished from the more jaded liberalism of post-Vietnam America - ensured that, in James Fisher's words, "Diem was lionized...as beacon of non-communist Left internationalism in the 1950s.

General Pinochet should have been so lucky!

Because, as Jacobs points out, of all this hero-worship

...none...was a consequence of any programs initiated by Diem as leader of the Republic of Vietnam. On the contrary, Diem moved swiftly after consolidating power to transform his country into a police state structurally indistinguishable from the most oppressive dictatorships on either side of the Iron Curtain.

Ignorance serving wishful-thinking and ironclad conformism? Or cynical partisan politics? (The Dems were still raw from the electorally successful GOP claim - the Swift Boating of its day- that they lost China. Dissent from liberal pols and their media supporters on Diem's stellar evaluation in DC would have offered opponents a powerful wedge. The minimal salience of Vietnam would hardly justify the risk.)

A good many of those who read it, no doubt, genuinely believed it. But, then, half of today's Americans think Noah put animals two by two in an actual boat. So, go figure...

Close - my recall from Prime Time is that See It Now lost its sponsor - Alcoa - in 1955, and lost its regular slot to The $64,000 Question. This, this, and this are useful.
Oh - and: Golden Agers, prepare yourself for a nasty shock downpiece.

2006-01-04T17:39:00.000Z

Step forward Lawton Collins...

I'm establishing the cast list from Jacobs (see earlier pieces):

Collins was appointed Special United States Representative in Viet-Nam with the personal rank of Ambassador by Ike on November 3 1954, a time when implementing the Geneva Accords - or the parts that were going to be implemented - was still in progress.

Collins, a Catholic, was not a Diem groupie:

Although a Catholic himself, Collins correctly identified Diem's religious militance as tending to undermine indigenous support for his government...For over six months in 1954-55, the general furnished Washington with dozens of reports arguing for Diem's replacement by another South Vietnamese: a Buddhist, a coalition builder, a practical politician with experience in Vietnamese affairs.

There then followed by the battle against the sects (the Cao Dai, Binh Xuyen and the Hoa Hao); Collins was not impressed at all with Diem's decision to eliminate them by violence, nor with its execution. Eisenhower disagreed...

2006-01-04T16:49:00.000Z

Enter Dr Dooley...

Moving down the list of GB snippets from Seth Jacobs book about Diem (see next-door pieces), I come to p159, which mentions Dr Thomas Dooley, a sterling publicist for US engagement in Vietnam. His good works in theatre during the 1950s got him the Congressional Gold Medal [1].

His first book, Deliver Us from Evil, dealt with his activities in helping refugees from the North reach the South in 1954-55. It wowed the Catholic press; and got Mike Mansfield to his feet on the Senate floor:

If the United States had aboard more ambassadors Like Thomas A Dooley, I think it not only would be better off, but it would be better understood in the countries which are underdeveloped.

Jacobs lists as being amongst Dooley's cheerleaders DDE, Earl Warren, Eleanor Roosevelt and - surprise, surprise! - Cardinal Spellman. And our friend Diem, of course.

[ER, eh? No doubt she was looking at the operation as purely humanitarian, overlooking the CIA-organised stunt element to proceedings. Otherwise, for a parlour-pink anti-imperialist, it would be rather odd. She wanted the French kept out of Indochina in 1945, I gather, as her old man was proposing.

For another day.]

Much biographical info on this page. (I'm presently not interested in Dooley. But there's evidently no shortage of material there.) The murky details of the great move south are explored in a piece by John Prados.

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On p161, Jacobs gives us a flavour of Dooley speechifying. It's vivid stuff:

What do you do for children who have had chopsticks driven into their ears? Or for old women whose collarbones have been shattered by rifle butts? Or for kids whose ears have been torn off with pincers? How do you treat a priest who has had nails driven into his skull to make a travesty of the Crown of Thorns?

There were atrocities a-plenty perpetrated by the Communists in Vietnam; but Prados calls Deliver Us a

highly stylized account of the events [which] could have been written by one of Ed Lansdale’s CIA propaganda experts...

The Belgian atrocity stories of World War 1 naturally come to mind to counsel caution.

Added to which

American ignorance of Vietnam ensured that no one noticed when Dooley got his facts wrong. "My story is a story of Viet Nam, a country just a few miles wide and fewer miles long," he proclaimed in a Chicago address...In another speech, he claimed that the "tragedy in Vietnam was partly...of American's making, because we failed to completely crush the Chinese armies in Korea to the point where they could never have moved down...to Southeast Asia and taken over."

A pattern seems to be emerging...

2006-01-03T23:16:00.000Z

The Catholic mafia in America

Jacobs goes on (p79) to give a flavour of the Catholic political sway in the US during the 1950s:

With strength in numbers, improved schooling, and crescendoing economic power came political clout. The Catholic grip on local political machinery in some states, notably Connecticut, was nearly absolute. By 1960, twelve Catholic senators and nine-one representatives served in Congress - a representation greater than American Catholics had achieved previously, albeit one in proportion to their numbers. In terms of orientation on the left-right political spectrum, Catholic legislators ranged between two McCarthys, Eugene on the left and Joseph on the right, most tending to cluster the conservative pole. Even liberal cold war congressmen like John F Kennedy and Mike Mansfield were spirited in their hawkishness, while Senator Patrick McCarran of Nevada frequently out-McCartheyed McCarthy in his red-hunting exertions and in the Internal Security Act of 1950 that bore his name.
Some Americans were alarmed by what they perceived as political and cultural aggression by Catholics. Martin Marty, professor of history at the University of Chicago, noted with dismay the media's tendency to refer to "our" cardinal and "our" pope. Christian Century, a mainstream Protestant journal, ran an eight-part series that asked, "Can Catholicism Win America?" and concluded that, yes it could...

He continues:

...Charles Morris notes, "[b]y the 1950s, the Catholic Church was the country's dominant cultural force. No other institution could match its impact on politics, unions, movies, or even popular kitsch." Books with explicitly Catholic themes like Francis Spellman's The Foundling and Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain numbered among the biggest best-sellers of the fifties. Red Foley's song "Our Lady of Fatima" made the Hit Parade in 1950 and was recorded a dozen times throughout the remainder of the decade by artists as diverse as the Ray Charles Singers and Andy Williams. In 1959, the Catholic Press Association reported a record total of over twenty-four million subscribers to 580 Catholic newspapers in the United States. That same year, more than 150 radio stations carried "The Catholic Hour" to an estimated four million listeners. Bishop Fulton Sheen's "Life Is Worth Living" series not only captured the largest television audience of the mi-1950s, with over thirty million viewers per week, but also won every major TV award, many of them several times...hugely popular television personalities - Jackie Gleason, Ed Sullivan, and Perry Como, to name but three - made no effort to disguise their identity as Catholics, as they might have in an earlier time; on the contrary, they spoke openly of their devotion to the Church. Depictions of Catholic priests and nuns in the movies were overwhelmingly favorable, in sharp contrast to the brutish interpretations set forth in films from the thirties like Little Caesar and Public Enemy. Significantly, the Hollywood Catholic priest of the cold war era was a virile figure, prepared to back up his principles with his fists. In the film On the Waterfront (1954), Karl Malden's Father Barry flattened a form prizefighter. After viewing this multiple Academy Award-wining movie, Marty noted, "Catholicism tends to dominate the mass media."

As in other spheres of American life, the Church's influence on foreign policy was at its zenith during the early cold war, principally owing to shifting US attitudes toward the Soviet Union. Patrick Allitt has demonstrated that while millions of Americans did an about-face in the late 1940s and early 1950s and went from admiring the Soviets as gallant allies to condemning them as no better than the Nazis, "[f]or American Catholics...zealous anti-communism was nothing new; Catholics schools had been teaching it for the best part of a century, and the wartime alliance with Stalin had not effaced it." During the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations, American Catholics led the fight against US recognition of the Soviet Union. They also protested Roosevelt's closeness to the anticlerical and leftist Mexican regime of the 1930s and supported Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War, viewing Franco as the champion of Spain's Catholic Church against the Moscow-backed Republicans. While Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini divided up Europe, and Japan carved out an empire on the Chinese mainland, it was common for Catholic spokesmen in the United States to express a preference for fascism over communism as the lesser of two evils. Hence at war's end, when American public opinion turned against Russia, the nation's Catholic population was already fully prepared, and American Catholics benefited from being in the vanguard of the anti-red zeitgeist.

Warmly recalling this watershed moment when national political consensus fell in line with a time-honored Catholic view, Daniel Patrick Moynihan writes, "In the era of security clearances, to be an Irish Catholic became prima facie evidence of loyalty. Harvard men were to be checked; Fordham men would do the checking." Catholics became increasingly visible in the late 1940s and 1950s in organizations like the Federal Bureau of Investigation, where J Edgar Hoover recruited agents who were, in the words of an FBI historian, "young, aggressive, and - not coincidentally - alumni of Catholic colleges, particularly Notre Dame. They were holy terrors."

Sez Jacobs, at least. Is his analysis representative, and not cherry-picked?

Not sure. For instance, on the change between the pre-war and Cold War movie priest, which unfortunate who has sat through Boy's Town fails to note that the Spencer Tracy character gets a pretty good angle? And Bing Crosby in Going My Way is not exactly a cipher. (Though neither resorts to physical violence, as I recall.)

And what about the unions? How did left-footers get on in the Communist-dominated CIO in its breakthrough years in the Popular Front period?

As for favouring the dictators, what part did national origin, as distinct from religion, play in this? Italians supporting Musso, Germans - plenty of whom who have been Catholics - backing Hitler as a badge of community identity?

As for the Irish, they might [1] well have viewed the UK as a likely target of Hitler's aggression, and supported him on the old ground that England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity.

Pure supposition, this. Except that this dissertation seems to support the idea (I've just glanced at it).

2006-01-03T22:03:00.000Z

A dedicated Diem book!

I refer to America's Miracle Man In Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention In Southeast Asia 1950-1957 by Seth Jacobs.

On the question of alternatives to Diem, Jacobs denies my suggestion earlier that there were none (p4):

...anticommunism and ignorance of local political realities are insufficient to explain why America opted to sink or swim with Diem rather than some other South Vietnamese. As the record of administrative deliberations in the mid-1950s makes plain, several popular, qualified, and irreproachably anticommunist politicians in Saigon presented attractive alternatives to Diem, and every member of President Dwight Eisenhower's policy -making coterie was aware of their existence; indeed, one aspirant, former defense minister Phan Huy Quat, come close to unseating Diem, as J Lawton Collins, Eisenhower's "special representative" in Vietnam, relentlessly badgered Washington to effect such a change in command. Other suitable candidates included Foreign Affairs Minister Tran Van Do and General Nguyen Van Hinh. These men had all established their anticommunism, and all had greater political experience than Diem. Yet none was able to secure the backing of the Eisenhower administration.
Moreover, the contention that Diem initially governed South Vietnam as a liberal reformer and become an autocrat only in the final months of his reign - a narrative that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations promulgated in the early to mid-1960s - is simply false. Evaluations composed by American observers during Diem's first days in office identified the very same qualities that would bring about his assassination nine years later: discrimination against non-Catholics, refusal to share power, and easy resort to violence to quell dissent. None of these idiosyncrasies ought to have come as a surprise to Eisenhower, his chief advisers or those molders of American public opinion - the press lords Henry Luce and DeWitt Wallace, Senators Mike Mansfield and John F Kennedy, "celebrity saint" Tom Dooley, and others - who championed Diem in the 1950s and helped bankroll his despotism. Diem never pretended to be anything other than what he was, and he never changed.

Jacobs says

I propose to demonstrate how a particular body of ideas about religion and race helped cement the Eisenhower administration's alliance with Diem.

I have a theory...

On p25, he names Rep Walter Judd as one of Diem's groupies. Diem's

...Catholicism endeared him to elite figures in the Eisenhower administration and made him stand out among possible candidates for America's cold war surrogate in Saigon. Moreover, widespread assumptions that Asians were culturally, and perhaps racially, unready for democratic self-government predisposed US policymakers to excuse Diem's overtly dictatorial ambitions as appropriate for Vietnam.

[I'm assuming he checked that Quat, Do and Hinh [1] weren't Catholics!]

On his first days in the Land of the Free:

Diem first set foot on American soil in late August 1950...he came with impressive references. Edmund Gullion of the American embassy in Saigon informed [Acheson] that Diem was "the chief leader of the Vietnamese Catholics" and speculated that his visit might heighten Catholic awareness of "the communist danger to Viet-Nam."

The Ambassador in Tokyo had warm words on Diem's stopover and the State Department's Bureau of Far Eastern Affairs [2] threw a party for him.

He brought his brother, Bishop Ngo Dinh Thuc [3], who outdid his bro at State:

James Webb, acting secretary of state, cabled the Saigon embassy, "We were impressed that Thuc, through the Catholics, might be [an] important figure in [the] present IC [Indochina] complex...The [i]nfluence of Thuc's clerical background and position[,] with its evident bearing on his thinking[,] was apparent." Diem on the other hand, struck officials as "less precise, realistic, and authoritative...He fits more into [the] mold of [a] present-day Vietnamese politician, steeped in Oriental intrigue."

No facile stereotypes there, my word, no!

There's a flavour of the old Southern voting tests for Negroes in this, perhaps:

[The Ngos] were...incapable of advancing any strategy whereby the United States could displace the French in Indochina without damaging the recently inaugurated [NATO], and proved similarly unable to explain how American forces, nearly expelled from the Korean peninsula just weeks before, could fight two land wars in Asia at the same time. Diem in particular irritated Webb with his "resort to generalities." "Like other prominent Vietnamese," the acting secretary complains, "Diem is...either incapable or unwilling to [sic] offer any constructive solution to [the] current dilemma other than vague and defamatory ref[erence]s to Fr[ance] and implications that only [the] US can solve [the] problem, thru him of course."

The Ngos stayed a month in the US before leaving for Europe. Some contacts with 'lower-level functionaries' in the administration, but

associating primarily with clergymen and other individuals active in Catholic circles.

Dean Rusk wrote to one Father Frederick McGuire, an ex-missionary to Indochina and adviser to State, calling them

valuable allies in our common endeavor to preserve the rights of free men in Indochina.

That is, free in the sense used in the famous expression of the Truman Doctrine!

Rusk said the Ngos had

expressed themselves eager...to remain in touch with the Catholic clergy of the United States.

I bet.

This visit was, it seems, without fanfare:

No American newspaper mentioned Diem's visit...

Later on (p41), we get some more on some

individuals active in Catholic circles

that Diem kept in touch with.

Justice William O Douglas had Diem proofread sections on Vietnam in his war memoirs, in the preface of which he said that Diem was

a hero in Central and North Vietnam, with a considerable following in the South, too...Diem is revered by the Vietnamese because he is honest and independent.

And they say Clarence Thomas is not over-bright! Or - Heaven forefend! - perhaps he was lying...

He gave Diem a big leg-up, though, in introducing him to Mike Mansfield:

Nicknamed "China Mike," Mansfield was Congress's foremost authority on Asia, having been a professor of Far Eastern history before his election to the House of Representatives in 1942. The war in the Pacific generated a demand for individuals with Mansfield's academic background, and he acquired a seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee despite his lack seniority. In 1944, [FDR] sent him on a fact-finding trip to India, Burma, and China. Although FDR subsequently showed little interest in Mansfield's report, and despite the fact that Mansfield's criticism of Chiang Kai-shek left him vulnerable to attacks from McCarthyites after the Chinese communists won their civil war, the Montanan gained notoriety from this junketing.

Mansfield's specialisms were Japan and China; he said in 1949:

I do not know too much about the Indochina situation. I do not think that anyone does.

How's that for water's-edge Yankee arrogance! Borah in his prime couldn't have been sniffier [4].

The Livingstone-Stanley moment came

at a luncheon hosted by Douglas at the Supreme Court Building on 7 May 1953 [which] may have been one of the most fateful encounters of the postwar era. Also present at Douglas's luncheon were Senator John F Kennedy, Cardinal Spellman, Gene Gregory of the State Department, and Representative Zablocki, soon to become chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. When asked years later about the apparent religious homogeneity of the gathering, Mansfield insisted, "It wasn't a question of religion - the fact that we were all Catholics was just coincidental."

Yup.

Jacobs says China Mike wasn't a bigot. But goes straight on with a strange sentence:

The same, however, could be said for Douglas who followed up his tribute to Diem in North from Malaya with a denunciation of the Buddhist church of Vietnam...
It teaches very little social or community responsibility.

I assume that a not is missing between could and be. And Buddhism is hardly a church - Jacobs, not Douglas speaking.

Plus, as Jacobs said, most Viet Minh were Buddhist. He quotes the case of John Provoo, an American sergeant and Japanese POW accused of aiding the mistreatment of American POWs in the camp he was confined in. He was rumoured to be a Buddhist. And there is some connection with Douglas (on the next page - not available online!) [5].

Vietnamese names are tricky.
Formerly Office of Far Eastern Affairs - both colloquially known as FE - Richard Weigle's oral history interview explains. The post-doctoral grade at Dean Acheson's Cowardly College of Communist Containment; Truman-era witchhunt firings there supposedly explain (in part) the subsequent pisspoor performance of US Vietnam policy.
Who got at the guys at State even before Diem arrived? The UW list of online FRUS volumes does not include Vol VI of 1950 - East Asia and the Pacific - full list.
The celebrations for whose 25th anniversary of ordination sparked the Buddhist crisis of 1963, as related here.
Jacobs gets in an anachronistic PC jibe at Mansfield:
...his greater familiarity with the big powers of Asia did not preclude Mansfield from referring to the Japanese as "these small, myopic, buck-toothed sons of Nippon" or declaring that 'the Chinese smile and mean it; the Japanese smile and do not mean it. The Chinese are reasonable; the Japanese fanatical."
I'd be fairly certain that this would have been said during or shortly after WW2. Jesus!
(If his point is that the learned shouldn't stereotype, I'd tend to agree with it. If it is they did, but no longer do, I'd doubt he'd got the evidence.)
Provo is remarkably small of online footprint. This says
The most famous person to be caught under the sodomy law was John Provoo, a former Army sergeant who had his treason conviction overturned because his homosexuality had been injected into the trial by the prosecution. In 1958, he received three years in a reformatory for a "morals charge" involving an 18-year-old "boy."
A footnote gives the dead-tree references to the treason cases.
There is also this (PDF).

2006-01-03T19:19:00.000Z

Mansfield and Diem

Nosing around GB once more, to explore the left-footer Senator's connection with the oriental 'Winston Churchill' (LBJ's infamous comparison from his 1961 whistlestop tour of SVN).

From Leslie Gelb's The Irony of Vietnam (p207), one gets this:

While the period of confusion that followed Geneva was reflected in the public debate, the thrust of where different groups wanted the United States to go remained clear. On May 15, 1955, the Times told its readers that the United States had no alternative to supporting Diem in Vietnam. Only the Chicago Tribune espoused an anti-administration position, charging on May 3, 1955, that US aid was being wasted in Vietnam.
As for Congress, in early 1955 two senators, Mike Mansfield and Hubert Humphrey, along with prominent public personages such as Francis Cardinal Spellman, initiated a save-South-Vietnam drive by supporting the Diem campaign. Mansfield said the United States had no choice but to support Diem. Humphrey accused US policymakers of "wavering," saying that this was no time for "weakness," and that the fall of the South would threaten the rest of Asia.
No legislator and none of the elite press raised on word in protest when the July 1956 date for holding these elections passed. The backing for the anti-Communist Saigon regime even seemed to convert such former skeptics as Senator Knowland, who now urged support of Diem to avoid a "continental Dien Bien Phu."
And into 1959, as conservatives began to charge misuse and waste of Americans funds by the Diem government, Senator J William Fulbright rose to the defense, saying that although the aid may have been misused, it was still vital to continue in the long-term interests of the Free World.
It was the burgeoning crisis in Laos in 1959, however, that once again brought the American stakes in Indochina into full scope. Since early 1958 the elite press had been building up the Laos story, portraying Laos as the victim of Communist violations of the Geneva accords of 1954. In an editorial on May 10, 1961, the New York Times called it a "stepping-stone" for a Communist takeover and added in an editorial on May 12 that the situation "involved not merely Laos and South Vietnam but the danger that all Southeast Asia will fall to the Communists and that general war will be ignited. After the signing of the Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos on July 23, 1962, in Geneva, the establishment press closed ranks behind the President's settlement, but with no expressions of congratulations. The position of the elite press and the liberal senators, similar to that of many conservatives, was that a coalition government and neutralization meant losing. And when the Laotian accords quickly broke down and fighting resumed, the air was filled with "I told you so's." But as the Washington Post editorialized on April 15, 1963: "Is Laos worth the risk or the cost of a Viet-Nam?"
Congressional comment about the situation shifted from the serious questioning of 1954 to mildly questioning acceptance of the US involvement. On September 4 1959, Mansfield lamented that Laos was teetering on the brink of collapse and asked "What is the answer?" The administration's answer was more of the same, for these countries had to be saved from Communist control. The next day Democratic Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut went further: "We will do whatever becomes necessary to defend Laos, including armed intervention." On September 7 Mansfield asked the questions about Laos that were soon to become popular with respect to Vietnam as well. Who is running American policy in Laos? Have the Dense Department and the CIA been given too much responsibility? Where are the President and the State Department? The Conservatives, again, were not interested in these questions…

My QED in this mooch is (roughly) to gain more understanding of the perverse relationship between Ngo Dinh Diem and the US pols who groomed - and were groomed by - him during the course of the 1950s.

One has Cold War mentality; one has the Catholic connection; one has the lack of competition for the top job from Diem's cohort in SVN. There's more to it than that, obviously.

I note that Colonel Robert McCormick died on April 1 1955 [!], a few weeks before the critical piece noted by Gelb.

And Humphrey is one of the Diem boosters. And Fulbright brushing aside the corruption stories (from our friend Albert M Colegrove, I suspect - Gelb's CR reference does not give the date of his comment).

Not to mention the sterling performance by the New York Times - whatever USG might have said about Halberstam and his in-country colleagues, there was no need to tell the Times ed board to Get on the team!

Plus ça change...

As far as the odd ideological switcheroo - liberals supporting US intervention in Indochina, conservatives opposing [1] - there is the dissertation (PDF - I thought I'd mentioned it, but can't trace) Beyond the Solid South: Southern Members of Congress and the Vietnam War by Mark David Carson - the first part of which I've read, finding lots of good stuff therein.

Some pols in each category, some of the time.

MORE

One piece of the puzzle is undoubtedly the management of salience: the hardest thing to gauge, even with the benefit of the NYT full archive [1], is the relative weight of the various items on the public agenda at any particular time [2].

The eternal quest of USG from 1955 on was to minimise the salience of intervention in Indochina, whilst maximising the effectiveness of such intervention. (Hallin is the place to go on this, as much discussed here.) Clearly the Times had a reason to push Laos: pushing Eisenhower to toughen up? the hawk faction in USG making their move? Dunno: my knowledge of the Laos thing is way below Wikipedia.

Mildly curious, I go to the 'Times Select' page to find that those who pony up their fifty bucks are only allowed 100 archive pieces per year! I'd be pushed to limit myself to that per day...
I think back to the 04 campaign and newshole-packing ephemera such as the Kerry roorbacks (Swiss cheese on cheesesteak, looking French, the Swifties) and the Killian memos.

2006-01-03T17:55:00.000Z

Air America - tedious as ever, apparently

As the most cursory glance round here will attest, I think American politics are fascinating. Easily as gripping as, say, baseball. (The only American sport that I have the slightest knowledge of.)

But, in order to enjoy baseball, you have to have a knowledge of the basis rules. And Jon and Joe (or whoever) will assume the audience know them. New addicts have some homework to do before it starts to make sense.

The same with politics. Absorbing Riddick's from cover to cover isn't necessary. But familiarity with the basic functioning of the political world is.

AAR, broadcasting to a relatively small band of self-selecting lefty enthusiasts as its core audience [1], is, generally, a Groundhog Day of slogans, plus the gaudiest of the day's GOP gotchas.

Tuning in to Garofalo's show last night for the first time in three months, it was as if I'd never been away. Absolutely nothing of substance in the first 40-odd minutes - that old crock, the military-industrial-newstainment complex, reported for duty, as expected! - and that did it.

Rachel Maddow's show - an extra hour, and a more civilised start time - was chock full of filler. Hideously unconvincing banter with her guests to eke out the time; still only three sleeper stories noted, despite the doubling of running time; the unfunny Kent Jones, though, getting way more time.

Love the sense of priorities!

Restricted to an hour, the content was sufficiently rich to warrant downloading the MP3 (30 mins) and listening with a finger on the fast-forward button (another 30 mins). Now, the good bits are swimming in a soup of boring chat.

Example of what might replace the chat with something nutritious: the Houston Chronicle runs through some 06 races worth looking at. Starting, natch, with the Number One Blackhat, Tom DeLay, down there in TX-20.

And it tells me something I didn't know: the GOP is two short of a 2/3 majority in the Texas Senate; District 18 is heavily GOP, but the outgoing incumbent, Ken Armbrister, is a Democrat. (The pattern for a lot of seats in the US Congress in the South, in the decades following the Dems decision to dump the South back in 1963/4. They've almost all shifted GOP - as previously discussed here. A lot.)

Now is an exciting time for Dems, surely, with the prospect [2] of 30-40 competitive seats in the US House, and a plausible chance of gaining control of at least one house of Congress. Not to mention ensuring that the Governator will not be back!

But I get no sense that AAR wishes to engage with the detail.

I'm biased; as you can see, I'm all about the detail. A balance is needed for broadcasting, obviously. But, as of now, it's the thinnest of gruel.

My supposition. Even basic Arbitrons are held more closely than state secrets, let alone that depth of demo analysis!
Try the Crystal Ball for sketches and forecasts.

2006-01-02T17:20:00.000Z

Alger, I mean Adlai on the Powell Amendment

Hitting the Google Books once more, I find another gobbet on another object of obsession hereabouts (umpteen earlier pieces).

On page 119 of Civil Rights and Wrongs: A Memoir of Race and Politics, 1944-1996 by Harry S Ashmore [1], one finds a passage dealing with Adlai Stevenson's attitude to the Powell Amendment during the 1956 primary campaign.

Estes Kefauver had just kicked Adlai's ass in his own backyard in the Minnesota primary on March 20, majoring on desegregation. And, according to Ashmore (p119), "turned the issue against" Stevenson, who "saw no reason to mention it at all."

Next up was the California primary. Apparently, "Franklin Williams, the NAACP's West Coast representative" opposed the Stevenson line that "the implementation of Brown...could not be achieved by coercion." And threatened Stevenson with the loss of the Negro vote unless he at least supported the PA.

William's influence was not so much via the Negro vote (not too many in CA at the time) but over CA liberals. (Kefauver, it seems, was, despite his generally aggresively liberal stance, tapdancing around Brown implementation. He didn't sign the Southern Manifesto [2], of course - refusing to refuse did not entail a warm and gushing embrace.)

Stevenson gave a speech in Fresno which went down like a lead balloon. Adlai's answer:

Here among these intense young liberals it missed its mark. Evidently what they want to hear about is civil rights, minorities and Israel, and little else, and certainly no vague futures.

He braved a Negro audience in Los Angeles to tell them:

I will do everything I can to bring about national unity even if I have to ask some of you to come about it gradually.

Unsurprisingly,

Bill Lawrence of The New York Times, standing beside me in the back of the jam-packed hall, exclaimed, "He's blown it"...

Clearly, as far as Brown was concerned, the view that implementation needed more deliberation than speed was not confined to the Friends of Dixie (though Stevenson was a moderate who gained liberal support through opposing denizens of the farther shores of Cold War conspiracy).

Kefauver's campaign in the South were, it seems, not hollering but whispering nigger! Ashmore says he reported to Camp Adlai at the time

On the word-of-mouth level, Kefauver's people are undoubtedly making hay with the ain't-nobody-here-but-us Confederates approach to segregation...In the cracker country the standard technique is a broad wink and the question, 'Who do you think can handle them niggers better, a city fellow from Illinois or a country boy from Tennessee?'

The underlying fear amongst Dems was a Southern bolt, as in 1948. Ashmore suggested that both Southern Dems and voting (mostly Northern) Negroes could be kept in the Stevenson camp by careful use of this threat.

By April, Stevenson was trying to fix Eisenhower with the responsibility of driving the process of getting Southern and Negro leaders to agree a basis for implementing Brown.

And that's when the GB pages run out...

Adlai won, and then lost, of course. Perhaps one day I'll get the yen to look at him. Perhaps if a dead-tree Ashmore comes my way!

The other, related, threat to the Democrats in 1956 was the loss of the Negro vote to the GOP. It was, I think, thought a genuine possibility - certainly so long as the Dems in the Senate ensured civil rights bills were filibustered to buggery. Clarke Clifford's 1947 note I've discussed before. Adam Clayton Powell backed DDE in 1956.

Which is where - or at least, with whom - we came in.

Ashmore was a journo who took leave to work for Adlai's '56 campaign. Interview and review.
A snippet previously unknown to me: Kefauver's non-signature of the Manifesto was assumed to be a plus point for him over Stevenson.
Ashmore
...asked Senator Olin Johnson of South Carolina if he couldn't at least urge his colleague to delay release of the manifesto[. H]e replied, 'It's no use trying to talk to Strom. He believes that shit.'
The quote is well known, of course; the context, less so, I suspect.
Of course, Kefauver was loathed by Southern pols generally; Stevenson, on the basis of the enemy of my enemy, ought to have got some sympathy from that quarter.
Is Johnson to be believed? Thurmond is usually evaluated, and condemned, on his record on race. His political acumen is much less argued over, is my impression.

2006-01-02T03:29:00.000Z

Duck Hill lynchings - again

Searching in Google Books on "duck hill" lynching, we get some goodness.

In Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets, 1929-1959 by Anthony P Dunbar, for instance, this:

...[Howard] Kester...wrote a report on the lynching of two black men, Roosevelt Townes and "Bootjack"McDaniels in Duck Hill, Mississippi, which was published and widely distributed by the NAACP. Charged with murdering a white storekeeper, the pair were being led from the courthouse in Winona, Mississippi, on April 13, 1937, when twelve armed whites quietly and calmly kidnapped them. They were driven to a field near Windham's grocert in the community of Duck Hill, chained to two lonely pine trees, and then burned up with blowtorches. Their bodies were left hanging from the chains until a local white minister finally prevailed upon a Winona undertaker to cut them down and conduct a funeral service in the back room of his mortuary. The corpses were buried in a single pine box.
Piecing the scene together two weeks later, Kester found that "of the scores of people with whom I talked not a single one greatly deplored the lynching. The citizens of Duck Hill seemed rather well pleased with themselves."

Kester seems to have been a socialist and associate of Norman Thomas. He testified before the House committee (Judiciary?) dealing with the Gavagan antilynching bill, which duly passed and was filibustered in the Senate [1].

Also, in Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob by Dora Apel, more details (p212).

A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue: The Depression Decade by Harvard Sitkoff tells us (p290) that the Duck Hill story was told during a floor debate on the Gavagan bill by Rep Earl C Michener (R:MI-2) [2]. It says "The stunned House sat in silence until Michener finished."

Chapter 1 of the Keith Finley thesis has further details; also, my earlier pieces on the subject.
Amazing career in the House - represented MI-2 from 1919 to 1951, except for the 73rd Congress, when Dem John C Lehr kept his place warm. It was Lehr's only term.

2006-01-02T02:24:00.000Z

Nothing on LBJ and the FCC, apparently...

Trying out one or two things on Google Books:

The midget that sat on JP Morgan's knee (July 21 2004): nada.

Fine. But then - LBJ's intimate relations with the FCC (starting with the purchase, nominally by Lady Bird Johnson, of WTBC Austin in dubious circumstances), surely?

Snippets, yes (from Dallek's bio, mainly), but no work dedicated to this most egregious corruption.

Amazon strikes out too. So does Google Scholar. No ETD either, so far as I can tell.

On the way, I do discover an interesting, related, tome on GB, Manipulating the Ether: The Power of Broadcast Radio in Thirties America by Robert J Brown - first chapter on FDR, natch.

FDR faced a generally hostile press (it says there); the fireside chats were an end-run - like Congressmen cottoning on to remote feeds back to local TV stations in their districts back in the 70s and 80s.

A quote (p11) from "the executive secretary of the Democratic National Committee, Richard Roper" from 1934:

The average American's mind works simply and it is not hard to keep him behind the President if we can properly inform him as to what is going on in Washington, what the President is trying to do, and the specific objectives he is seeking. Only by providing information from a source of confidence like radio, would it be possible to make absolutely sure that the public gets all the facts we wish to present.

Nothing new under the sun...

Also,

To ensure that editorial opposition found no outlet on the airwaves, Roosevelt and FCC chairman Frank McNinch spearheaded a crusade to "divorce newspapers from station ownership." Not surprisingly, one of the first targets of the official ax was William Randolph Hearst, who had been steadily building a nationwide radio empire from the proceeds of his publishing activities.

Nixon and Agnew's working the FCC in the early 70s was just a tribute to a suaver corrupter.

And

According to radio commentator Drew Pearson, "FDR knew that his only hold on Congress was to be stronger with the country than they were." While the president communicated with his national constitutents dozens of times each year, Congress was allowed the air only on special occasions such as the opening and closing of a term or during emergency sessions, and thus was "never given the opportunity to bond with the public in any politically useful way."

2006-01-02T01:12:00.000Z

A little Diem follow-up

While I was away (it seems) the Google Books function has burgeoned. The MO looks tricky - even where full text is available, it's strictly rationed.

Duh! They want you to buy the book, dumbass!

Beggars and choosers, yet again, though. And a morsel is available on the subject of Albert M Colegrove and his disobliging journalism (following up my piece of December 31).

In The Vietnam Lobby: The American Friends of Vietnam, 1955-1975 [1] by Joseph G. Morgan, there is a passage (starting on p57) dealing with the business, and the involvement of the AFV in the Congressional fallout [2]:

The strongest reaction to a critical appraisal of developments in Vietnam was prompted by a newspaper exposé of the shortcomings of Diem's government and the US aid program. Journalist Albert M Colegrove worked for the Scripps-Howard papers and had been sent to Saigon in the summer of 1959 to investigate US foreign assistance projects. After a ten-day stay in the RVN, he returned to the United States and wrote six articles asserting that the American program had done little "to guide Vietnam to the day when she can support herself" and that Diem ran "a hard-fisted government" that ruled through "countless laws promulgated after police state practices." Colegrove's articles sparked an uproar in Washington and Saigon. US and Vietnamese officials angrily refuted them and congressional committees made plans to investigate their credibility.
The Colegrove articles also provoked an angry response from AFV members, who worried that the allegations posed a threat to the US aid program to Saigon. Walker Stone, the managing editor of the Scripps-Howard papers, received a letter from O'Daniel that castigated the pieces as "disgraceful” examples of journalism. A memorandum appended to this note disputed the articles, questioned Colegrove's qualifications and professional conduct, and asserted that the series had been the source of "much joy in Moscow, Hanoi and Peiping...because what the Communists failed to achieve in five years - to cast doubt on the Free Vietnamese and the American aid program there - was accomplished in one week of headlines." Father Raymond de Jaegher accused Colegrove of engaging in "unfactual muckraking," and Wesley Fishel condemned the reporter for writing "silly and irresponsible" pieces "filled with falsehoods, half-truths, and distortions."
The AFV also tried to influence the congressional hearings sparked by Colegrove's articles. It sent copies of O'Daniel's letter to Stone to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and asked if the general could appear as a witness. That request was turned down when the subcommittee conducting the inquiry decided to confine testimony to evidence given by Colegrove and senior US officials from Saigon, but the AFV had better success with the House Foreign Affairs Committee. No one from the AFV spoke to the representatives, but the head of the subcommittee conducting the investigation, Clement J Zablocki, represented a strongly anticommunist Polish constituency in Milwaukee and shred the AFV's conviction that leaders like Diem deserved US support. Together with Walter Judd, another AFV sympathiser, Zablocki sharply questioned Colegrove and criticized the negative tone of his stories. Moreover, Zablocki inserted letters and articles that contradicted Colegrove's allegations, including O'Daniel's note to Stone, into the record of the testimony...
The Colegrove articles marked an end to a period of AFV accomplishments in portraying Diem's regime as worthy of US support. The AFV had won the favorable attention of prominent and reputable private citizens and government officials, and its members had little trouble publishing laudatory assessments of Diem's leadership in national newspapers and journals. Moreover, they frequently rebutted or allayed doubts and criticisms of the Saigon administration. They were particularly successful in preventing leading figures of American's anticommunist Left from speaking out against Diem's policies. According to Jonas, the telegrams objecting to Ho Huu Tuong's death sentence forestalled open protests by American socialists, and the reassurances of an individual with left-wing credentials like those of Joseph Buttinger prevented public expressions of concern about the RVN's reported human rights abuses. This assertion is borne out in a letter in which Norman Thomas thanked Buttinger for sending a "long and careful, and, to me, convincing reply” concerning Vietnam's problems in the spring of 1958...
Much of the AFV's success in promoting and defending the Diem regime can be attributed to the unusually favorable environment in which it operated. Since conditions in South Vietnam were relatively calm in the late 1950s, the American press and public paid little attention, and the AFV faced, as Gilbert Jonas put it, "literally no organized force" to challenge its positive assessment of Diem's leadership. The AFV had little trouble in presenting its views to academics, journalists, politicians and officials who shared the group's conviction that communism must be stopped in Vietnam and that Ng Dinh Diem could do this with American help. Few Americans objected to the US presence in Vietnam, and critics such as Colegrove often called for more effective measures to shore up Diem's government, not an American withdrawal from Vietnam. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Colegrove declared that Diem had "accomplished a miracle" in creating a functioning government and that assistance to the Republic of Vietnam "is essential to the defense of America and the free world."

There are notes that go with this (on p183), that give a couple of the heds for Colegrove's series [3], as well as a snippet of commentary:

Mike Mansfield chaired the Senate subcommittee investigating Colegrove's charges. Although he admired Diem and applauded the AFV's work, he had misgivings about the character of the US aid program to Vietnam, especially its heavy emphasis on military assistance.

Mansfield, from what little I've gleaned so far, was, with JFK, one of the Catholic pols involved with Diem in his Maryknoll days.

He and all the other namechecks I hope to follow up by and by.

Back to playing with the new toy...

The URL for the book on the results page is hideous: surely there should be a simple link somewhere obvious to a page on which you can buy the damned book!
So I had to resort to an Amazon link...
My copy-typing - caveat lector.
The opening salvo in the Washington Daily News came under Fiasco in Vietnam, Our Hidden Aid Scandal on July 20, and the final under We Aren't Building Much Democracy in Viet Nam on July 25.

2005-12-31T17:39:00.000Z

Judith Miller - well, well, well...

Meanwhile...

Miller is positively paleolithic; mentioned here just to note the Mnookin and Auletta pieces on 'The State of the Times.'

The affairs of the NSA bugging (NYT) and location of 'torture' camps (Post) seem to invite plus ça change comparisons with the way things were done in the good old Cold War days.

(And let's not forget CBS's compliance with a DOD request to delay its Abu Ghraib broadcast for two weeks.)

There has never been the slightest doubt (not since the days of Hearst and McCormick, at least) that the media has definitively picked sides. Not for every case - the NYT's vendetta against Clinton is an obvious exception to the rule. But the default - or knee jerk - decision is to go along with USG.

The current dudgeon is, therefore, strictly for the tourists.

(I finally got down the Edward R Murrow bio Prime Time during my layoff - the suits' gradual squeeze on CBS News, from the glory days of See It Now in the early 1950s to the I Love Lucy incident in 1966 that was the straw that broke Fred Friendly's back, is a catalogue of going along in the so-called Golden Age of Television.)

MORE

Has anyone produced an economic model of media insurgency?

Imagine the Post were to decide to treat USG as a hostile witness: no more anonymice, no more so-called objectivity. The SOTU on A1 factchecked line by line in the text with supporting facts in a sidebar and inside.

That sort of thing.

Could it be made to pay? My guess is not in a million years: the pressure on advertisers from USG and friends would be immense, a large contingent of subscribers would dump the paper straight off the bat, many key journos would take fright and jump ship.

It's a no-brainer.

So why do nice folks get conniptions when evidence emerges of USG and the Fourth Estate hand in glove - and hidden from view of the paying public?

STILL MORE

While I'm recording URLs, not to miss Michael Massing's pieces The End of News? and The Enemy Within.

On a scan in their dead-tree versions, they seemed rather old hat for those following the US media scene with any attention. For story so far purposes in the future, they will likely prove invaluable.

2005-12-31T16:16:00.000Z

That strange love for Diem

Previously, in my delving into the history of the Vietnam War, I've worked outward from the Tonkin Gulf Incidents of 1964, back to the start of the breakthrough into public consciousness of the flakiness of the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem [1] starting with the Buddhist Crisis (notably, the self-immolation of Quang Duc; and forward to LBJ's 1965 decision to go big (without anyone noticing till it was way too late).

Without the great time-eater that is online, I've had the leisure to delve further back via the dead tree.

The French war is thoroughly depressing, and mostly hippogriff country to me [2]. But the emergence of Diem as Uncle Sam's favourite has caught my imagination.

It was, it seems, a left-footer thing.

The idea that a Catholic politician ipso facto could not offer an undivided allegiance to the US had long been a bar to the presidency. In JFK, the idea lost its power; but the fact he still had to address it [3] is striking.

In Diem, we find enough evidence of Catholic interference in US politics to give a KKK plenty of straw to build bricks with!

Most of South Vietnam was Buddhist. (Or animist. Not Catholic, at least.) Diem, though, as with many in the elite, was Catholic. And hated the French - which pressed the anti-colonial buttons of certain liberal(ish) US pols such as - the afore-mentioned JFK.

Diem chose to sit out the French war in the US, in a seminary of the Maryknoll mission [4]. There was, it seems, much fraternisation with Cardinal Spellman, generalissimo of American Catholics [5], and hobnobbing with some Catholic pols - including JFK - under the aegis of the International Rescue Committee and the American Friends of Vietnam.

Where, in their minds, the need to defend against Soviet hegemony ended and that to protect Catholicism in Vietnam began, I know not. The religion was, certainly, one of the few features that the average American Catholic would have with that land far away.

The suggestion in some quarters is that Diem was groomed by a cabal of leading American Catholics as a puppet successor (with Uncle Sam pulling the strings) to the fast-crumbling colonial regime.

A reason (not, perhaps, a very important one) for US loyalty to Diem in the face of the evidence. (More important, I suspect, was the persisent low salience of Vietna m, compared to Hungary, Suez, Quemoy and Matsu, Berlin, etc.)

Much more to tease out there.

There is also the question of media coverage. The general imperative was the Cold War Consensus. No need, by and large, to tell the media to Get on the team. They were on the team [6].

Usually. One exception was Albert M Colegrove [7]. I first came across the guy (mispelled as Colegrave) in a useful but colourful piece of journalism, Livre Jaune du Viet-Nam by Hélène Tournaire (1966 p 307), as the author of a series of articles for the Scripps-Howard chain unveiling the misappropriation of US aid on a vast scale [8].

Why the low impact? One can guess: the low salience of Vietnam, the Consensus, the stenography of objective journalism (no statement, no story). But this is clearly no substitute for actual facts.

In delving into the Eisenhower years, one is hampered by the fact that the Vietnam FRUS volumes for the period are not online at the State Department site. (The Kennedy and Johnson volumes are - go figure.)

There is an alternative site at the University of Wisconsin which has 200 odd volumes of FRUS (1861-1960) and is hoping to complete its set. (Inconveniently, it's in image form - but beggars can't be choosers.) None of the Eisenhower Vietnam volumes have made it yet, though.

Also on the list of things to investigate is the strange case of the Michigan State University Group (MSUG), whose dabbling in South Vietnam in the 1950s (in partnership with the CIA - who else?) seems utterly bizarre at a distance [9].

Homer Bigart's Sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem was the reality of US policy almost up to the end.
There are interesting interludes - the advent of General Gracey and his Indian Army contingent (one of the final adventures of that outfit before Partition), for instance; or the drutherful period of the March 6 1946 agreement and Voice of Reason Jean Sainteny - but nothing to have got me into the detail yet. (Sainteny, by the way, spoke in the BBC series transcribed in the book Many Reasons Why.)
There's a speech; help yourself to the link!
How many other knolls with a JFK connection, I wonder?
The full text of a Time article is available - for how long? - dated April 4 1955, under hed The Beleagured Man.
The seminary was at Lakehurst, NJ, location of the loss of the airship Hindenburg. Another not-so-good omen.
An iron grip, it seems, to match that of John Charles McQuaid in Ireland.
Just like the New York Times and the bugging story.
Who I had not heard of before. He doesn't appear in Hallin's Uncensored War, for instance.
Eisenhower was at his Heep-ish worst in a letter to Diem dated August 26 1959. The notes to the letter don't identify Colegrove, but do place the dates of the series as July 20-25 1959, as well as giving information on the (perfunctory) Congressional investigations of Colegrove's allegations.
A 1966 Ramparts article to be getting on with.

2005-12-31T14:43:00.000Z

A toe in the water

I'm still unclear about what to do with the blog.

But, since I'm now fully restored to online, and have matters on my mind, this is the most convenient place to put them.

2005-11-14T17:26:00.000Z

Long time, no blog...

A rather nasty accident, I'm afraid, heavy-duty analgesia, not pretty.

On the bright side, I notice an uptick in the traffic since the blog went dead so - silver lining, yay!

A case of requiescat in pace. Until further notice, at least.

For the American political history obsessive, though, much obscurity to enjoy!

2005-08-22T00:37:00.000Z

A Smathers-Pepper quotechase

I've talked about Florida Senator (later Represenative) Claude Pepper several times, notably on February 20.

The 1950 campaign that pitted Pepper against George Smathers was full of incident. Smathers was one of the new, post-Bilbo, breed of Southern pols; the line taken by his (fairly dirty) campaign was that Pepper was a Commie, rather than a nigger-lover. (Though the two smears could always be combined, in suggestions that civil rights was a Communist plot!)

Over at the Urban Legends boards, they challenge the veracity of an alleged Smathers quote:

Are you aware that Claude Pepper is known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert? Not only that, but this man is reliably reported to practice nepotism with his sister-in-law and he has a sister who was once a thespian in wicked New York. Worst of all, it is an established fact that Mr. Pepper, before his marriage, habitually practiced celibacy.

Smathers was supposingly bamboozling some of the more retarded - or, being charitable, less well-informed - of his prospective rural constituents.

Was this kosher or the product of the imagination of Pepper's Karl Rove equivalent? It first appeared in Quote magazine [1], and then

was published by Time magazine on 17 April 1950 and then by Life magazine in its 23 October 1950 issue. The infamous lines by then were considered fact, though they had never been printed during the campaign by any Florida newspaper following the candidates, not even by Nelson Poynter's St. Petersburg Times.

(On the other hand, there is no item returned by a search in the New York Times archive for calendar 1950 for either pepper and thespian or smathers thespian.)

There are namechecks for William F Buckley's 1954 McCarthy and His Enemies (a housebroken treatment of Tail-Gunner Joe's political case) and Howell Raines, no less, who wrote a piece on the campaign for the Times in 1983 [2] (while Pepper was not only still alive but was a serving Congressman from Florida).

The Urban Legends page suggests (with references) that an inspiration of the alleged quote may have been our old friend Senator Beauregard Claghorn (a sort of humourous Bilbo with the white supremacy toned down a bit), character of comedian Kenny Delmar on The Fred Allen Show (from 1942); also mentioned is Samuel Goldwyn and his Goldwynisms - supplied by scriptwriters, it seems.

All fine and dandy.

The wider point is the lack of a yardstick by which to judge how dirty that, and other, campaigns, actually were. It's all anecdotal, so far as I know.

Was Willis Smith/Frank Graham (also 1950) worse? How do either rate against Max Cleland/Saxby Chambliss (2002), to take a recent notorious example?

Intimidation, bribery, fraud in elections - retail crookedness - are surely as American as apple pie; a thespian-style roorback (a Swift-Boating) which operates wholesale via the media is perhaps more humane.

For the existence of which there is some slight evidence.
The NYT archive search comes up with the goods. There is no sign that Pepper was a source; or of a letter to the editor. (Smathers died in 1969, but has an oral history interview at the Senate site.)

2005-08-20T00:46:00.000Z

The many election days of America

Is there a list? Is there buggery! (That I can find...)

In Illinois in 1830, it seems that election day was the first Monday in August.

In Delaware, it was - don't know. But a law of 1855 apparently changed the date to conform with the new presidential election date (3 USC 1 - enacted originally in 1845 [1]).

There is sign of legislative activity on the LOC site - according to Voteview, a vote to table HR 80 passed 26-25 on June 14 1844 is the last on the subject in the 28th Congress that I can see. Nothing in the 29th.
A vote for a third reading on HR 432 passed in the House 187-1 on December 16 1844: I can't see a RCV on HR 432 in the Senate. I'm thinking it passed on a voice vote and was duly signed.

2005-08-19T04:34:00.000Z

Stephen Douglas and the Territories Committee chair

A note for possible future investigation:

Douglas was three terms in the House before being elected to the Senate for the 30th Congress.

The Chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories for the 30th was - Douglas!

I realise that the seniority system that later entrenched Southern power had yet to mature. But getting the chairmanship of such a politically useful committee in one's first year of Senate service?

I don't get it.

2005-08-19T03:26:00.000Z

Slavery cases - again

A skim of the Weinberg article (yesterday) suggests it throws an interesting light on antebellum history.

A facile assumption of a heroic Northern judiciary and a cruel Southern one is not borne out.

Thus, for instance, it seems (p9) that Chief Justice Shaw of that free-soil and (to an extent) abolitionist stronghold, Massachusetts, favoured the return of fugitive slaves (as distinct from slaves brought into the Bay State by their masters).

And, up till things got hot in the 1850s, in the South as well as the North, the judiciary was wont [1] to find technical means and evasions to find in favour of a slave's freedom (p12).

Even in the 1850s, it seems that Southern judges were slow to get steamed up by the fire-eaters: only in 1859, for Heaven's sake, does Mississippi decide in Mitchell v Wells to treat as null a manumission made in Ohio (p25). Georgia had preceded the Magnolia State in 1855. The Dred Scott case spanned the hardening of attitudes.

In the North, Shaw was the first judge (p33n) to find the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 constitutional (in Sim's Case in 1851, based on Prigg, which had found the 1793 Act constitutional) [2].

But many of the most inflammatory cases involved self-help by slave-catchers, as most unfortunately authorised by the Prigg ruling. Northern mobs felt equally authorised to engage in self-help of their own!

The Wisconsin Supreme Court lent a hand in the case that became Ableman v Booth [3] - Chief Justice Taney's ruling in that case is still good law, apparently (p38).

(Weinberg (p39) indulges her druthers in wondering whether SCOTUS could have ruled that slavery was unconstitutional. This, I suspect, suffers from the endemic disease of historical counterfactuals: no one ever thought it possible at the time.)

She suggests (p40), I think rightly, that nothing the North could have done in tightening enforcement of the fugitive slave laws could have mollified the South. That doesn't mean that the Northern courts could have simply nullified the 1850 Act [4]. If Northern mobs evaded the Act by interposing a little force majeure, that was hardly the judges' fault!

As I've said before, the fugitive slave laws were a wedge issue for Southern hard-liners, a means of poking the North in the eye under constitutional pretext, the better to stiffen Southerners' resistance and increase Southern demands. (The other questions raised in the debates over the Wilmot Proviso, the 1850 Compromise and Kansas-Nebraska were essentially remote from the bulk of the free state population. A single slave-catcher on free soil was a question of turf.)

The assertion is not backed up by quantatitive evidence. Perhaps hers is a contrarian reading based on a handful of outliers. I've no idea.
Also, the cases she cites seem confined to manumission and (p15n) domicile in free states (as distinct from mere temporary residence). No suggestion, that I can see, of any case in which a Southern court was prepared to give leeway to a fugitive slave.
The original Missouri trial court decision in Dred Scott was an example of a slave state court finding in favour of a slave's freedom on the basis of domicile on free soil (p22).
Weinberg calls Shaw
probably the most prestigious state judge of the nineteenth century
Not on Findlaw, which has complete SCOTUS cases only from 1890. It is on the free service on Lexis, which has all SCOTUS cases (and registration - ugh!).
Perhaps in the thicket of notes, there are details of cases in which Northern judges applied to the Act of 1850 the same sort of creativity as they had done in relation to manumissions.

2005-08-18T02:20:00.000Z

Slaves and conflict of laws

A interesting-looking article (PDF) Methodological Interventions and the Slavery Cases by Louise Weinberg considers the conflict of laws problems arising from claims for recovery of fugitive slaves - and claims of slaves for their freedom.

The problem she addresses is not the exercise of Federal jurisdiction (under the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850) but that of judges in state courts in slave and free states.

The first example she gives (p7a) is that of a judge in a slave state (Georgia, say) in suit brought by the pretended (Georgian) owner of a (Georgian) slave that temporarily resided in a free state (New York, say). New York law says that residence in a free state emancipates; Georgia law says that it does not [1].

Which state's law does the Georgia judge apply to the case?

Weinberg says [2]

The fascinating thing is that the courts of the slave states in such cases typically did rule in a slave's favor, at least until near the close of the antebellum period...

Now, the background to the passing of the 1850 Act that I've been talking about (August 16) was, I'd thought, the fact that Yankee enforcement (or the lack of it) of the 1793 was a powerful wedge issue for Southerners. (At least, it had been since the Wilmot Proviso first came on the Congressional scene.)

Yet, Weinberg is suggesting, Southern pols had failed to straighten out their own judiciaries on the issue!

Earlier (p5), I read

A mandatory resort in any court even to the best imaginable choice rule, on the face of it, would be akin to saying "eeny, meeny, miny, mo"—not a good way to secure someone's release from bondage.

I recall the the eeny meeny problem of air stewardess Jennifer Cundiff (January 28 2004) and admire Weinberg's pluck.

As we say over here, I bet (s)he drinks Carling Black Label...

My supposition. But if there's no difference in law between the jurisdictions, there can't be a conflict!
Much to my surprise - but, then, what do I know?!

2005-08-17T22:41:00.000Z

Those media whores - again

If ever you see some hack or outlet getting a good kicking and find yourself sympathising, there ought to be a yellow card you could pull from your pocket to remind you of the reasons why your contempt for the industry and its practitioners is virtually boundless.

A possible entry is the way media outlets cover megabucks damages awards doled out by juries. The immediate reaction is the audience of a Donny Osmond concert circa 1974.

Usually, such juror onanism is eventually curbed by appeals courts. But J-prof Tom Goldstein says it:

Journalists, by and large, are not as good as they should be in keeping up with what happens after a large verdict — even though they know full well from experience that the verdict will most likely be cut dramatically.

As I've said umpteen times, journalistic product is in code. Media outlets don't tell the suckers that. And, because pieces use an everyday vocabulary, you don't get the clues that it's in code that you would reading the NEJM, say.

Editors know that megabucks damages award stories are grossly misleading, but they run them because they move product.

They all should be where Judith Miller is right now, if there were any justice. Which, of course, we know there isn't.

2005-08-17T00:32:00.000Z

Prohibition: another case for treatment

Happening on the chapter in Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday on the subject (p245ff), and find the words that have characterised the venture for me:

The country accepted it not only willingly, but almost absent-mindedly.

He goes on

When the Eighteenth Amendment came before the Senate, in 1917, it was passed by a lop-sided vote after only thirteen hours of debate...

In fact, the vote [1] was 65-20.

Now, legislating in haste and repenting at leisure is a classic problem with popular democracy. But, with prohibition, there was no haste: the Senate vote overriding Woodrow Wilson's veto of the Volstead Act only passed on October 2 1919, 26 months after the amendment resolution became law.

Allen says

so half-hearted and ineffective were the forces of the opposition and so completely did the country as a whole take for granted the inevitability of a dry régime, that few of the arguments in the press or around the dinner table raised the question whether the law would or would not prove enforceable...

Now, Prohibition is not an area I've studied at all. And I've no inclination to hare off on a wild goose chase. As it were.

But the details of RC 121 are suggestive of lines of inquiry.

For instance, the large number of states - 14 in all - whose delegations were split down the middle, with a plain for and against [2]: AL, CA, GA, IL, KY, LA, MO, NE, OH, PA, RI, TX, WI, WY.

Pretty much all sections are represented on the list.

Of the Confederacy, AR, FL, MS, NC, TN and VA were solid for the amendment. SC's Tillman is shown as paired in favour. Why the four erring sisters? No idea.

And - what about Wilson? A South Carolina boy, brought up in North Carolina - a closet Wet all those years? There is no sign online of Wilson's veto message [3], which would have been a start [4] in the task of explaining his action.

Why would Wilson have chosen to defy national expectations and veto the implementing legislation for such a popular amendment? Again, no idea.

After the current antebellum jag has run its course (still three volumes of Nevins to go!), the mechanics of installing Prohibition looks a likely target. Assuming that I can lay my hands on enough explanatory material - which a cursory search suggests is not available online.

It was RC 121 on August 1 1917, to pass S J Res 17. Voteview shows seven or eight RCVs on the resolution.
Voteview says eight votes in favour were pairs, one vote against. How can an unequal number be paired? For another time...
The useful UCSB presidential papers site only has the papers for Hoover and later presidents.
A paper on the history of prohibition generally says that, sometime in the 1890s (I infer)
South Carolina introduced a state dispensary system in order to eliminate the motive of private gain from the liquor business.
Hey! Socialized medicine!
Also, the Carolinas were the only two states to vote against ratifying the 21st Amendment in 1933. And this case from the SC Supreme Court says
South Carolina first criminalized the sale of alcohol to an intoxicated person in 1874...in 1909, South Carolina enacted total prohibition...Although alcohol sales were also legalized in South Carolina in 1933, this state did not permit full-blown sale of liquor by the drink until 1973.
Not that Ol' Strom was much inhibited by such petty local tyranny, I'll be bound...

MORE

Another useful-looking page summarising the history of prohibition.

STILL MORE

There is some information on Wilson's views on the Volstead Act in Chapter XL (!) of the bio Woodrow Wilson As I Know Him by his secretary Joseph Tumulty.

Wilson's objection was not to the amendment but to the act:

While he was an ardent advocate of temperance, he felt that Congress in enforcing the amendment by the passage of the Volstead Act, so extreme and unreasonable in character, had gone a long way toward alienating the support of every temperance-loving citizen in the country, and that certain of its provisions had struck at the foundation of our government by its arbitrary interference with personal liberty and freedom.

He preferred a law allowing the sale of light beers and wines which would have freed enforcement officers for dealing with the real evil of hard liquor.

Oh, and a shout-out from Tumulty for an old friend:

This war-time prohibition act is breeding social, industrial, and economic discontent every day...If it is not repealed it is bound to cause more trouble than any other piece of Federal legislation since the Fugitive Slave Act.

This piece - Two of the Famous Stories About Woodrow Wilson -- And They're Not True - suggests that Tumulty is an unreliable narrator of his boss's doings and thinkings.

Quoting a cable to Wilson at Versailles, which quotes a New York World editorial on the wartime predecessor of the Volstead Act.

YET MORE

One the URLs thrown up is a Snopes forum page examining sources for the famous Wilson quote on Birth of a Nation that it was history written with lightning. Some thorough-looking dead-tree research, by the look of it.

Since it's a quote I've been known to refer to, I dare say I should return it to it.

2005-08-16T01:54:00.000Z

Fugitive Slave Act and Thaddeus Stevens

Continuing my thoughts on the FSA (August 14)...

Stevens, of course, was, way down, one of most hated of the authors of Radical Reconstruction - and guyed gleefully in DW Griffith's Birth of a Nation, of course, mulatto housekeeper-cum-lover and all.

He only arrived in the US House in the 31st Congress (the one that voted the 1850 Compromise, including the FSA) - though born in 1792.

The Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association has a 2004 review article on Stevens (a bio by Hans Trefousse), which says that Trefousse

reiterates that Stevens's controversial positions clearly did not enhance his political career. His opposition to the Compromise of 1850 on the basis of his antislavery principles, for example, cost him his seat in Congress for much of that turbulent decade...

Now, Stevens voted against the FSA on passage, and I'd be fairly certain (I'm not inclined to check) that he voted the straight freesoil ticket on the other elements of the Compromise.

Stevens' was the Eight District of Pennsylvania [1], which, to judge from the (rather inadequate) Voteview map, looks as if it covered somewhere around Lancaster County (trying to compare with Mapquest!) - west of Philadelphia, at least.

I've no idea to what extent freesoil notions formed part of Stevens' platform (as a Whig) in the 1848 election. We have a little information as to PA ideology on slavery in the shape of the DW-NOMINATE 2nd dimension scores [2] for PA Congressmen (no fewer than 24 of them in the 31st!):

Scores range from +0.456 (Casey W-13) to -0.787 (Howe FS-22); Stevens' score was -0.610, the third most 'liberal' of the 24 on the 2nd dimension.

Interestingly, though Stevens was indeed defeated, or decided not to run, this was not until the elections for the 33rd Congress. In other words, in 1852, the electors of the 8th District took Stevens' anti-Compromise votes in the 31st Congress under advisement - and voted for him anyway!

He later switched to the Ninth.
DW-NOMINATE scores range from +1 (most conservative) to -1 (most liberal); the 1st dimension measures a general liberal-conservative spectrum; the 2nd dimension is more troubling. Supposedly, it measures ideology on race matters (slavery before 1861, Jim Crow after 1890), but this is questioned by some of those (everyone!) more expert than I am.

MORE

The Lewis Tappan pamphlet I mentioned before namechecks Stevens (p13):

He says that the previous question was moved by James Thompson [1] but Stevens moved to table the PQ motion [2].

Since there was a clear majority for the bill, dilatory tactics were doomed.

After the votes, Stevens utter his famous quotation (Nevins Vol 1 p341):

I suggest that the Speaker should send a page to notify the members on our side of the House that the Fugitive Slave Bill has been disposed of, and that they may now come back into the hall.

Though the question of abstentions in Compromise RCVs is, as previously discussed, controversial [3].

Thompson's 2nd dimension score of -0.426 makes him 7th most liberal. Thompson (PA-23) was a Democrat; I've previously mentioned that the largest swing block in the House on fugitive slave legislation was the Northern Democrats, but Thompson was not among the switchers, having voted for the pro-FSA motion in the 30th Congress.
How can someone in favour of making it easier for slave-holders to reclaim their human chattels rate -0.426 on the DW-N scale? An example, perhaps, of what brings the 2nd dimension into disrepute?
Voteview calls the Thompson motion one for third reading. Perhaps it was a proxy PQ motion.
I note that the House vote (97-85) on passage of the Utah admission bill (RC 364 September 7 on S 225) was even more afflicted by abstentions than the vote on passage of the FSA!

2005-08-15T03:26:00.000Z

Media and subterranean rescues

An On the Media transcript from 2003 has some useful namechecks.

Floyd Collins inspired Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole, of course. (The journo who reported the Collins case, William Burke Miller of the Louisville Courier Journal snagged a Pulitzer for his pains, it seems.)

But, talking of movie connections, there's also Kathy Fiscus, a little girl who in 1949 fell into a well near Los Angeles. Her story featured in Woody Allen's Radio Days.

(I remembered there being a scene in the flick featuring the dad who's irate with his kid, and then turns on the radio, hear about the girl and decides to be grateful his kid is safe. I'd no idea the story 'broadcast' was based on fact.)

Some other cases are mentioned.

2005-08-15T02:57:00.000Z

The non-aggression pact in Congressional politics

A phenomenon I suspect is more widespread than the single instance of Nevada's US Senators Harry Reid and John Ensign.

On the face of it, it rather makes a mockery of the much-touted fifty state strategy of the Democrats. (Though I'm more than open to the suggestion that one ought not to take it on its face. What elements of bluff and double-bluff there are, I know not.)

But the idea that ostensible political opponents are in practice not as opposed as all that is hardly novel. We have, after all, the infamous US House ethics truce (much discussed here).

The working of the Senate (so dependent on unanimous consent agreements) could effectively be stymied by a scorched earth policy of a determined group of senators prepared to see their logs go unrolled forever thereafter.

(Dems are always popping up at USG photo-ops when some juicy piece of pork is being unveiled, or pandering bill is being signed.

And then there are those one-off bipartisan couplings like the Hillary-Newt health care team-up.)

There's the old gag about the novice British minister being taken through his paces at the despatch box by a more experienced, if not wiser, colleague. The Boy Wonder gleefully confesses his keenness to come face to face with the enemy.

"Those in front of you are the opposition. The enemy will be behind you."

2005-08-14T04:10:00.000Z

Fugitive Slave Act again

The QED (August 9) is to find a QED: a sensible question that can be answered by the fast-breeding spreadsheets that any RCV analysis (even the least competent!) inevitably generates.

I considered one or two possibilities:

Were free-state senators who voted for the FSA (or failed to vote against it) punished electorally for their votes?

The noise problem is terrible! The numbers are small; the extinction of the Whigs was imminent; senators in that era just didn't rack up Thurmond-like Senate careers [1].

Of 29 free-state senators at the time of the vote for the bill on passage [2], four voted for the bill, 11 voted against and 14 did not vote.

Of the four, so far as I can see [3], two (Davis (W-MA) and Sturgeon (D-PA)) did not seek re-election, one (Dodge (D-IA)) resigned to take up a government post, and the other (Jones D-IA) was re-elected.

Of the 11, none of the seven Whigs were re-elected; two seem to have run for re-election and been defeated, the rest to have chosen not to seek re-election. One of the three Dems (Dodge (WI)) was re-elected. The Free Soil Salmon Chase (OH) resigned to run as governor.

Of the 14, one Whig (of five), Seward (NY), was re-elected, as was Bright (IN) and Douglas (IL) of the eight Dems. The rest resigned or did not seek re-election, as did Free Soiler Hale (NH).

If fear that, however much logit and probit one applied, little value is to be had from such stats.

Second, I looked at the cases where, in the votes where a sectional line could be discerned [4], senators voted against their section.

The largest number of such votes (42 from the 10 RCVs) came from Northern Democrats. Of these, 17 were given by the Iowa delegation, 7 by Sturgeon and 5 by Cass (MI).

Why Iowa? This piece fills in some background, blaming the fact that Iowa had a significant proportion of Southerners in its population.

I suspect that this is an artefact: Illinois had its Southern element, for instance, but Douglas, though responsible for bringing the Compromise safely to harbour after Clay had failed, contrive to register in none of the ten FSA RCVs. The other senator, Shields, voted proslavery five times, but not on passage [5].

In sum, my QED is that I don't think there is one: not to be gained from the numbers alone, at least [6]. Genuine historical research would be needed to divine the reasons for the Iowa senators' votes. Delving into newspapers, and personal papers and all that pre-online jazz.

(Channelling Giles, it seems.)

Using the Congressional Bio page, it seems that the senators in the 31st Congress who were also senators in the 24th numbered precisely seven (out of 71 senators in the 31st).
By comparison, I make it that no fewer than 35 senators in the 109th have served since the 102nd - and that's not counting Lautenberg and others with broken service.
The third reading vote - as close to a RCV on passage as they got.
Most of these folks have a slim online footprint and sketchy Congressional Bio entry.
That is, a bias in favour of, or against, the interests of slavery discernable in the tenor of the amendment in question. (Rather than examine the amendments themselves, for this preliminary exercise, I used the characterisations given by Basinger in his summary!) I omitted RC 239 as not being clearly sectional.
Shields was the subject of a dispute about his qualifications. He came in, was refused membership, was re-elected and finally let in. The membership dates in his Congressional Bio do not tally with the dates he's shown as a member by Voteview.
More numbers might help. A state-by-state breakdown of Free Soil Party votes in the 1848 presidential election, for instance. Though, I believe I've read somewhere that, in some states, deals were done to give freesoil votes to other parties. Horribly messy!

2005-08-12T00:10:00.000Z

Jim Crow at Harvard

I've spreadsheeted the roll call votes on the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 (August 9), but have yet to draw any conclusions.

Meanwhile - I'm looking for the state-by-state breakdown of the 1848 presidential popular vote (can't find it) and, as luck would have it, stumble on a source of goodness on peripherally related matters: the Massachusetts Historical Review.

The Bay State was a leading centre of both abolitionism and anti-slavery (very much not the same thing, of course) - and that's my excuse to browse.

There's, for example, an article The Boston NAACP and the Decline of the Abolitionist Impulse on race in the city in the 1920s.

For instance, it points out (new to me, at least) that Boston's Negro population in 1920 was a mere 20,000, compared to 120,000 in upstart Detroit.

The reason, essentially, was that any but the most menial jobs in Boston were reserved for whites:

As Harvard graduate student Percy Julian noted: "Here in Boston you open to [the Negro] the door to a grand Opera House, but in nine cases out of ten you shut upon him the door to a factory which would afford him the means of a ticket."

The labor unions were lily-white, too (surprise, surprise!).

The city administration was Democratic, of course, with James Curley taking turns with others for Mayor. But Curley's bog-trotting constituents were, of course, those who insisted on Jim Crow in employment.

(The spine of the Democratic Party was the common loathing of Northern Irish Catholics and Southern Scots-Irish Protestants for the Negro and all his works!)

However, snobbery on the subject would be misplaced. Even that seat of high learning, Harvard University, was not immune from the impulse to segregate.

In fact, it seems that

the rising tide of immigration and in particular at the takeover of Boston politics by raucous Irishmen such as James Michael Curley

was behind the move, whereby Harvard President Lawrence

Lowell proposed a 15 percent ceiling for Jewish admissions to Harvard and surreptitiously banned blacks from the freshman dormitories. The latter decision resulted from a new mandate requiring freshmen—that is, all white freshmen—to live in the dorms. The ban eliminated the possibility that white southerners would end up rooming with black students, which would later be Lowell's excuse for the action.

Note that, in previous years (going back how long?), Negroes had been admitted to the dormitories:

A Whig theory of the history of race relations - ever improving - is, by this as by many other incidents, proved false.

Presumably, in previous semesters, Southerners had preserved their dignity by residing elsewhere; Northerners had to stifle their prejudices, I presume. (Has this inter-racial rooming been researched, I wonder?)

In any case,

Unfortunately for Lowell, the next black student excluded from Harvard dormitories was Roscoe Conkling Bruce, Jr., son of Harvard's 1902 class orator and grandson of Mississippi senator Blanche K. Bruce.

A Negro class orator in 1902, but his son kicked out the dorm in 1922!

Common sense eventually prevailed and Lowell's order was countermanded by the 'Board of Overseers':

students would select their own roommates rather than have them assigned, thereby avoiding the possibility of pairing a racist with a black student.

The article also gives further particulars about the Dyer antilynching bill (February 8).

The Dyer bill, it seems, was

Based on an earlier draft of an anti-lynching bill by Boston NAACP founding member Albert E. Pillsbury...

Key figures were NAACP national president Moorfield Storey [1], a white man, and secretary James Weldon Johnson, a Negro.

The bill passed the House, but was doomed to failure in the Senate. Johnson 'chose' to ask Henry Cabot Lodge to manage the bill - partly, it seems, because Lodge had led the charge on the 'Force Bill' in 1890 (June 26).

The story - as told at considerable length - is something of a soap-opera: William Borah chaired the subcommittee dealing with the bill, and he hated Lodge; Dyer managed to upset Lodge, etc, etc.

Given the personnel on the Southern delegation - and the tenor of their constituents - the bill was clearly DOA in the Senate.

But, following the inevitable filibuster,

Lodge told reporters that the bill should have passed and that the Republicans only reluctantly gave in to take up the shipping, appropriation, and farm bills.

Even Brahmin politicians lie fluently [2].

A local problem was that, during the 1920s,

while the Boston branch remained mostly white in leadership the rest of the NAACP had become predominantly black...

The operation faded out with an accounting snafu!

But not before a spat over

a "Colored Baby" contest, in which supporters offered contributions to the association on behalf of their favorite baby photo.

The Bostonians objected to the NAACP holding a Jim Crowed competition!

Who had initially had states rights concerns about the bill!
Quite to what extent ordinary members of the NAACP - let alone the Negro population at large - realised that the Dyer bill was for show, not for blow, I'm not clear.
The fuss over the civil rights plank at the 1948 Democratic convention may be similarly faulted as giving false hope to the ill-informed.
Such is politics.

MORE

From the same journal, a piece The Selling of Joseph:
Bostonians, Antislavery, and the Protestant International, 1689–1733 gives a sort of back-marker for anti-slavery in America.

The Selling of Joseph was the first antislavery pamphlet published in North America, it seems - as early as 1700.

My understanding is that there were Quaker slave-traders as late as 1750. Go figure.

MORE

I find a 2002 article from the Law and History Review happily online providing background on the early activity of the NAACP: Race, Class, and Legal Ethics in the Early NAACP (1910–1920) by Susan Carle. (Also a comment.)

2005-08-09T01:51:00.000Z

The Fugitive Slave Bill of 1850 - one or two puzzles

It's like starting watching a new TV soap - a combination of the strange and the familiar, with a whole new cast of characters to master.

Skimming through Nevins (July 31), I've rested my caravan at the fascinating period of the Compromise of 1850.

The first odd thing arises from the make-up of the rosters in House and Senate: the North controls the House by a substantial margin; but North and South are in perfect equilibrium, numerically, in the Senate. Fifteen slave states, fifteen free states.

All the struggles of the South in the Senate that I've looked at here - the earliest of which being the Force Bill of 1890 (June 26) - were essentially defensive, in which the aim of the South was to maintain the status quo. On antilynching bills, poll tax, FEPC, etc.

Its purpose of obstruction was adequately served by the unanimity requirement in the Senate, and its position only theoretically weakened by the introduction of cloture in 1917.

In 1850, the South had positive demands, and, with the support only of a single Northerner (or of a vice-presidential casting vote) could obtain a Senate majority in its favour [1].

Indeed, part of the significance of 1850 was the fact that the South realised that this happy state of affairs was about to come to an end:

Previously both slave and free states had been admitted so that any period of inequality in voting power was kept short, and kept within two votes [3].

In itself, the (essential) admission of California would not break the pattern; but the opening up of the West that it foretold was clearly going to lead to a succession of free state admissions wholly or largely uncompensated by slave state admissions.

(Hence the trail that lead to Kansas-Nebraska and the short-lived triumph of Illinois Golden Boy Stephen Douglas.)

Historically, the territorial element is, I infer, the most important in the ragbag of Southern gripes that inform the Compromise. But it's the road most travelled and pretty damned tedious.

The element that has me intrigued is the fugitive slave question. (Thankfully, the ground has already been broken by material available online [3].)

The question was essentially symbolic, for both North and South: the number of runaway slaves was relatively small; and runaways who made it to free territory were predominantly from border states - for obvious reasons.

The greatest heat, however, was generated by the sections least touched by the problem: New England and the Deep South (Nevins Vol 1 p382ff [4]).

In 1850, abolitionism had little appeal in the North; the view of most of those (adherents of the Free Soil Party) opposed to the machinations of the Slave Power (aka Slavepower) was, so far as I can see, that the South's slaves were its business, so long as it kept that business down south.

In the short session of the 30th Congress, the House defeated 100-79 a move to get a fugitive slave bill reported out of the Judiciary Committee [5]. Northern Democrats were, like Northern Whigs, overwhelmingly against the motion.

In the same session (Nevins p222), the House discussed a bill (drafted by Rep Abraham Lincoln) for the abolition of slavery in the District (of Columbia) [6].

Already, though, a pattern of large abstentions seems to be emerging [7].

Contemporary practice meant that the 31st Congress (barring a special session in March 1849) did not start its first session until December 1849. And, in the following January, the bill that became the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, S 23, was introduced by James Mason (VA) [8].

I've yet to read the debates in the Congressional Globe - working from the LOC site is like wading through treacle. (And that's before you get to the members' orotund stylings!)

But, bypassing the Senatorial cut and thrust, I'm driven to wonder why cutting the deal should have been so difficult; or so easy.

Theriault/Weingast (link in earlier piece) on p66a summarise the voting on the Clay and Douglas versions of the Compromise; with a 30:30 sectional split, you only needed one Southern senator in favour of compromise to vote for a measure favouring the North (and vice versa) for the whole thing to pass.

On the other hand, any handful of extremist senators - adopting a politique du pire with the aim of easing the process of secession - could have blocked the legislation entirely by means of a filibuster.

The fact that there was no filibuster - there's no reference to one in the commentary I've read, at least - suggests that even the extremists on both side were unwilling to derail a compromise if a majority could be found for it [9].

The voting summary, by the way, shows that the abstention rate on the Douglas bills was distinctly variable. But none of the bills secured less that 27 votes, and the idea that all abstainers were not only closet opponents but could all have been persuaded out of the closet at the same time is ridiculous [10]. Analysing the reasons why each senator chose to abstain would be a job of work, though potentially rewarding.

Passage of the Compromise in the House should have been more difficult with a clear Northern majority. The big movement seems to be in Northern Democrats [11], who flipped on the fugitive slave law between the 30th Congress vote against such a law and the vote on S 23. How did that happen?

The upshot of all this is that I'm still casting around for a nugget of interest in the 1850 Compromise; I'm thinking that the fugitive slave legislation is the most promising area.

We'll see...

Subject, of course, to a Northern filibuster. The state of the parties in the 31st Congress Senate on April 18 1850 was
Northern Whigs 13
Southern Whigs 12
Northern Dems 16
Southern Dems 17
Free Soil 2
From the beginning of the Republic up till 1850, the only time when the margin between North and South was more than one state was between the admission of Texas (December 19 1845) and that of Iowa (December 28 1846).
In Regulating Slavery: Deck-Stacking and Credible Commitment in the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 by Scott Basinger (PDF). There is also an 1850 pamphlet by abolitionist Lewis Tappan The Fugitive Slave Bill: Its History and Unconstitutionality with useful nuggets.
The 1860 Census estimates for 1850 alone (how?) a number of around 1,000 runaways, mostly border, not all gaining free territory - the 1850 Census places the total slave population in 1850 at around 3.2 million (from here).
RC 362 on January 8 1849.
There are a host - well twenty-odd - House RCVs in that session on matters relating to slavery and the slave trade in the District. There seem to be consistent majorities against motions to table anti-slavery measures - but no votes on the measures themselves.
The obvious conclusion is that Northern abstainers represent mixed districts of freesoil and slavery sympathisers and prefer to alienate both groups moderately rather than one group intensely.
I'm not sure whether that's right, though. One needs to consider whether the abstention rates are any worse than on other, non-slavery-related issues. And to determine that the abstainers' constituents were significantly more heterogeneous than than those comparable colleagues.
There does not seem to be a copy of the original bill available from the LOC page of 31st Congress bills: search on S. 23 and you get various amendments.
Neither Theriault/Weingast nor Basinger deal with the possibility of filibuster. Theriault/Weingast mentions the filibuster as a possible method of killing the Douglas compromise (p7a), but goes on
Because a majority could have prevented compromise but did not do so, voting theory implies that a majority preferred compromise to no compromise.
Which, apart from being virtually tautologous, fails to address the fact that it is minorities that use the filibuster!
Theriault/Weingast nevertheless dismantle it with math (p39a).
Basinger p21a.

2005-08-05T23:22:00.000Z

Astroturf down to Bentsen, apparently

According to a fascinating site, there is a documented first usage (in 1986):

Issue-oriented newspaper advertisements featuring clip-out coupons are often designed to show that the sponsor's goal has grass-roots support. But the "grass roots is AstroTurf in many cases, artificial turf," says Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, D-Texas.

And - a favourite here - anonymice - first appeared in print, it seems, under the byline of one Jim Slotek, rather than that of Jack Shafer.

2005-08-04T22:13:00.000Z

The Dem mountain in Congress

The simplest of tables at the Cook Political Report shows what leverage the apparently slimmish GOP margins represent.

For example, in the Senate, 33 seats will be contested in 2006, of which 18 have Dem incumbents (including the Dem-caucusing Jeffords). But 40 of 55 GOP seats stay in the bag.

Cook rates 9 GOP seats as solid - leaving a gap of precisely one seat to reach the GOP magic number. With their solid 8 seats, at 35, the Dems are 16 seats short!

Sixteen to one: I like those odds...

2005-08-02T22:05:00.000Z

A slice of Georgia politics under the New Deal

The good stuff online takes some winkling. (To suppose otherwise invites unnecesary frustration.)

A piece from 1986, Ed Rivers and Georgia's "Little New Deal" by Jane Walker Herndon is a case in point, bringing together in a modest 4,000 words an epitome of the governorships of one Eurith Dickinson Rivers ('Ed' Rivers to his friends) and the political scene of the time.

Rivers, Speaker of the Georgia House, ran in 1936 against Charles Redwine, protégé of incumbent governor Eugene Talmadge, who was barred from the election by a eunuch clause.

His platform was the New Deal - by then, strongly opposed by the Talmadge faction - and that was the platform to have in 1936.

(Also running was Richard Russell, who also ran on the New Deal, it seems [1]. And he was opposed in the primary by Talmadge - who else?)

The piece says that Talmadge

was especially chagrined by the minimum wage paid on relief projects. because it ran counter to his most deeply held convictions. Put simply, he could not bear the thought that black men would receive the same wages as white men.

Southern employers did their best, though [2].

Talmadge had a line for FDR:

The comment which most offended Georgia supporters of the President was Talmadge's cruel statement that "The next President who goes to the White House will be a man who knows what it is to work in the sun fourteen hour a day. . . . That man will be able to walk a two-by-four plank, too."

Which reopens the whole Who knew that the President was a cripple debate that I discussed at length on January 20 2004. Clearly, the insult would only have purchase for someone who knew that Roosevelt was wheelchair-bound.

The reference given in the accompanying footnote is to - the New York Times of April 19 1935: a search reveals this to be the piece in question (pay-only, natch) [3].

Did the Times explain the reference? If so, its many influential readers would have been let into the secret. If not, that implies that those readers were already wised up.

Once elected, Rivers, together with a liberal lege, passed a raft of legislation, some of it domestic - but a lot of it merely enabling Georgia to participate in New Deal programmes which demanded matching state funding - the Rural Electrification Administration, for instance, which so aided Lyndon Johnson's political career, and social security old age pensions [4].

Unfortunately, the money was not forthcoming - the lege turned conservative as Rivers scraped back in 1938 - so the ultimate result was disappointing.

Rivers had difficulties with corruption allegations - in particular, that he sold pardons - though Talmadge had a pardon factory with a much higher throughput, and had troubles of his own:

For example, when, as Commissioner of Agriculture, Talmadge was accused of stealing, he simply told the wool hat boys, "Sure I stole, but I stole for you."

Rivers' main difficulty was that the electoral system tended to exclude those who would have benefited from his policies - county unit, white primaries, poll tax, etc.

But the fact he was straight, rather than a rascal showman like Talmadge, didn't help either, it seems.

(Other interesting journal articles on Georgia politics in the FDR era on the same site.)

Though Russell was no liberal, according to the DW-NOMINATE scores: 45th most liberal Democrat in the 73rd Congress, 52nd in the 74th.
The Confederacy was still remarkably liberal at that stage: in the 74th, four of the ten most liberal Dems are graycoats: Black (AL) - natch! - Jimmy Byrnes (SC), Joe Robinson (AR) and Pat Harrison (MS).
A chapter from Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era by Patricia Sullivan gives details.
The immediate cause of the unpleasantness was, to judge from Times pieces on or about the day, was that USG had decided to federalise the administration of New Deal programmes in Georgia.
The non-contributory pensions mainly for those already retired in 1935.

2005-08-01T17:38:00.000Z

Catholic Church another area of Dem corruption

Not exclusively, of course.

But Catholics and machine politics [1] went together like a horse and carriage (or Sinatra and the mob), so the vicious triangle of laity, hierarchy and politicians would often - perhaps more often than not - have a Democratic tilt.

And the Catholic church, as we've found, is corrupt on an epic scale. (Ethically, for certain - criminally, perhaps.) And both laity and pols have pandered like buggery - as it were!

As, of course, have the media [2].

One might consider the case of Massachusetts Attorney-General Thomas Reilly who somehow managed to conclude that no prosecutions should be initiated arising from the clergy abuse scandal in the Boston diocese.

Reilly may or may not be a Knight of Columbus. But he is certainly a Democrat - and running for governor in 2006.

Apparently, giving a free pass to pederasts in purple is no bar to electoral success in the Bay State - or so Reilly is supposing, evidently.

References to Man on Dog Rick Santorum seem to wow the faithful. Priest-on-boy? Not so much.

Santorum famously suggested that

"It is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political, and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm" of the clergy sexual abuse scandal.

The Beantown barney that followed was intense.

The fact that A-G, now prospective Governor, Reilly chose not to exert himself [3] to bring the Boston Catholic hierarchy to book seems to have moved his voters much less.

Bummer...

City machines of the Golden Age were almost exclusively Democratic, except in Pennsylvania. State machines could be either party.
The LA Times and Cardinal Roger Mahony I discussed on February 27 2004.
I've no idea what success such prosecutions might have had. But I'm pretty clear that had allegations of the same magnitude been made against any other organisation, Reilly would have fallen over himself to get to grandstand on behalf of the young flower of the state.
It's the lack of exertion, not the quality of the case, which is telling.

MORE

The other area of corruption associated more with the Dems rather than the GOP I touched on on July 28: labor.

Searching on Arthur Coia of LIUNA, for instance, is like opening a cupboard and having half of Macy's fall on top of you. Labor racketeering involves serious criminals: the sort whose idea of payback is something a little more permanent than a Swift Boat Veterans campaign!

Coia seems to have been held in high regard by AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. SEIU golden boy Andy Stern's name crops up from time to time. And, as I mentioned in the earlier piece, there's the tantalising Clinton connection.

There are several sites dedicated to material on union corruption. Whether these are part of the VRWC, financed by Dr Evil himself, Richard Mellon Scaife, or are the genuine product of concerned unionists, I know not.

I have noticed that, in all the flurry of publicity the unions have got recently in lefty sheets and blogs, corruption has figured little or not at all.

Funny, that...

What it all amounts to, I'm not clear. For instance, the extent to which the willingness of some unions to consider endorsing and funding GOP candidates leads one to wonder whether some union bosses have a Bush II pardon in mind for January 2009.

Perhaps those nice people at the New Yorker could commission an 8,000 word piece on the subject.

2005-08-01T16:23:00.000Z

Has the Blade done it again?

First, there was Tiger Force. Then there was Coingate.

Now, it seems, Toledo Blade excavations have hit another rich seam.

The standard story arc of the Catholic Church and its altar-boy-loving priesthood has concerned parents being received by some flunky to the Hierarchy and either being threatened with hell-fire if they ever dare to repeat their allegations; or given buckets full of the old soft soap. The priests are, perhaps, moved on. The Purple Pandjandrums continue to bask in the adulation of their flocks.

It all stays within the seal of not of the confessional but of the mortal dread in which simpler folk hold their incense-scented demi-gods.

The Blade offers us something different:

Church leaders feared a popular priest known for helping wayward youths - the Rev. Dennis Gray - was raping and molesting boys at the cleric's cottage, and Father Thomas, superintendent of diocesan schools, wanted [Sgt John Connors] advice on what to do...
The officer said he told the priest to keep Father Gray away from kids, and that was it.
Case closed.

It seems that

Sergeant Connors was following an unwritten rule passed down from predecessors for decades.

The 5,000 word piece says that

The practice of concealment has been a part of local enforcement culture since the 1950s as the church was cementing its role as a social service powerhouse - an institution that urged young Catholics to seek careers in public service, including law enforcement.

The police chief back then, Anthony Bosch, was - surprise, surprise! -

once state leader of the church's largest fraternal organization, the Knights of Columbus.

Eventually - after two or three decades - a cop would cross the line:

Officer Bill Gray found the Rev. Robert Thomas in a Southwyck mall restroom receiving oral sex from a 16-year-old boy, who told the officer the priest had "made" him do it, police reports stated. Although the priest claimed the teen "motioned me with his eyes," Officer Gray would not be dissuaded from arresting the cleric.

The upshot:

The priest not only avoided jail time, but a judge agreed to seal the record of his arrest and charge. Judges and prosecutors said such a sealing, called an expungement, was rare at the time for those charged and convicted of sex crimes.

Was the judge a Knight of Columbus as well, I wonder?

The titular head of this seraglio of catamites is one Bishop Leonard Blair, whose concern for his flock is truly touching:

Many [victims] who have responded have spoken of their anguish at each republication of previously published stories about their experiences and those of other survivors, indicating that such repeated accounts actually impede their healing by reopening old wounds.

Ironic that, while the Ku Klux Klan has long passed into political irrelevance, the grip of its sworn enemy, the Catholic Church, appears not greatly to have diminished.

Mother of Mercy, whatever happened to RICO? A cursory search that bringing off a a civil RICO suit is as improbable as passing that camel through the eye of a needle - and no lube allowed!

As for criminal RICO, this suggests that

it is hard to find the prosecutor daring enough to charge the higher-ups in a religious organization, like the Roman Catholic Church, with serious crimes.

Even assuming the US Attorney himself isn't a Knight of Columbus. (Is Patrick Fitzgerald?)

2005-07-31T23:59:00.000Z

The 1850 Compromise and the polisci profs

Continuing my skim of Nevins (July 30 piece)...

The lesson of the Powell Amendment (umpteen pieces here) was to be extremely wary of polisci profs bearing gizmos.

There is some sort of rule, it seems, that old-fashioned analysis by text is uncool. Quantitative is King and political history serves the primary function of providing raw material for mathematical models.

One such is cyclical voting - to which a killer amendment (which the Powell Amendment was alleged to be) is supposed to give rise.

It's a tempting idea, story-wise: something of the LBJ senatorial shenanigan, but with purer lines, and susceptible of theoretical evaluation.

Trouble is, they don't exist. Or, at least, the Powell Amendment doesn't seem to be one of them. And a polisci guy called Gerry Mackie maintains that all the supposed examples put forward so far rely on a mistaken appreciation of the facts [1].

The 1850 Compromise is in the same neck of the woods. The conventional wisdom (as in Potter's Impending Crisis, for instance - which I have yet to read!) is apparently that the legislation that failed wrapped up in an omnibus bill (promoted by Henry Clay of Kentucky) succeeded when parcelled into a separate bills (stewarded by Stephen Douglas of Illinois). And that the reason for the different result was the packaging, not the content.

This CW is addressed in a 17,000 word article (PDF) Agenda Manipulation, Strategic Voting, and Legislative Details in the Compromise of 1850 by Theriault and Weingast. The upshot is that, according to the piece, it was substance, not procedure, that made the difference:

Douglas redrafted the bills in significant ways (summarised on p65a) so as to make them attractive enough to pass, however they were packaged [2].

From the opening of the session in December 1849, slavery-related issues were obsessing Congress. A glance at Voteview suggests at least 200 slavery-related roll call votes - the raw material for much that is quantitative - in the session. Plus acres of verbiage in the Congressional Globe.

My sense is that there is still goodness to be had from mining this stuff.

(The fact that, 150 years after the event, the very basis on which the legislation was passed is open to debate would seem to support that view.)

The problem may well be that the significance of particular RCVs (many of which are procedural) is not apparent either from the vote itself or the corresponding section of the Globe report of proceedings; and, for all the depth of his coverage (Vol 1 takes 560 pages to cover five years), Nevins's account of the the Compromise in Congress (pp219-345) is sparse relative to the volume of raw material.

He has a short paper (PDF) Is Democracy Impossible?: Riker's Mistaken: Accounts of Antebellum Politics - as well as a book.
Following the argument isn't helped by the fact that the spatial diagrams are not in the draft that's online.

2005-07-30T16:18:00.000Z

Politics then and now

A depressing slew of more or less objectionable bills passed Congress in time for the summer recess, most of them with the support of a substantial minority of Dems. (When the depression lifts a tad, I may return to them.)

Continuing my skim of Nevins, I get to the episode of the 1850 Compromise, in which those old knights of the Senate, Clay, Calhoun and Webster, are winched once more onto their warhorses for one last charge.

A noted set-piece of oratory came from Webster in his famous Seventh of March Speech - that's March 7 1850 - of which (according to this copy) the second sentence ran as follows:

It is fortunate that there is a Senate of the United States; a body not yet moved from its propriety, not lost to a just sense of its own dignity and its own high responsibilities, and a body to which the country looks, with confidence, for wise, moderate, patriotic, and healing counsels.

Nevins (Vol 1 p310) gives the lie to such bollocks: during a debate on the question of referring the various proposals for the admission of California, organising New Mexico, stiffening the Fugitive Slave Acts and so on, Thomas Benton (MO) accused the Southern leaders of blackmail in the cause of an artificial problem.

Henry Foote (MS) got up in their defence,

declaring them a band of patriots who would be held in veneration when their calumniators were regarded with loathing and contempt.

Time for some propriety and dignity?

Oh, yes!

At the word "calumniators" Benton left his desk and strode toward the Mississippian. Foote retreated toward the clerk's table, snatched out a five-chambered revolver, and cocked it. Benton, stopped by a friendly Senator, was turning back toward his seat when he saw the weapon. He instantly tore open his coat and shirt like Governor Berkeley facing Nathaniel Bacon, shouting, "I am not armed. I have no pistols. I disdain to carry arms. Let him fire! Stand out of the way and let the assassin fire!"

As things quietened down a little, Foote - who, I gather from Nevins, was something of a moderate amongst Southern Democrats - explained why he was carrying heat:

I brought it here to defend myself. I had been informed that I should be fired at.

Evidently it was taken as read that a magnolia-scented cavalier would be excused his having drawn on an unarmed man by that perfection of honour that was every Southron's burden. (Trent Lott would understand.)

Because not only were the Feds not called to clap the gunsel in irons, but a Senate committee set up to examine the incident could not bring itself to make any recommendations.

I am happy to remain without practical experience of handguns; but I should have thought cocking a pistol in such circumstances would have been extremely dangerous. What if Foote had killed a freesoil senator? Would that have merely advanced the timing of the civil war, or been a jolt that would have sent politics down the track of gradual emancipation? The former seems altogether more likely.

2005-07-29T14:11:00.000Z

Leadership PACs: you live and learn

Another modest success in pushing back the miasma of personal ignorance.

The leadership PAC, I learn from general mooching, is a device to evade contribution limits which - surprise, surprise! - is expressly permitted by the FEC.

ARMPAC is Tom DeLay's leadership PAC, for instance. But a member does not actually need to be in the leadership to have one. They are rather more frequently used by a pol to buy his way into the leadership.

As most exercises in corruption are, the leadership PAC is a thoroughly bipartisan scam.

There may be better reasons for the voter to void his bladder on his Congressional representatives; but the leadership PAC is as good as most.

(How many know the score, though? Your humble blogger is moderately wised up on matters political, and had no idea.)

2005-07-28T20:50:00.000Z

Antebellum Congressional corruption: Slidell takes the biscuit?

The competition is stiff (piece yesterday).

But Nevins (Vol 1 p169) presents a tough challenge in the form of Louisiana Senator John Slidell's

smuggling of the Houmas Land claim through Congress in early 1860. This was a claim to title in about 180,000 acres of fertile Louisiana land. The Federal courts had ruled that the old patent on which it rested was worthless, and Congress had blocked a direct attempt to validate it, but Slidell (who had acquired an interest in the claim) succeeded in inserting a disguised item covering the subject into a general land-claim bill referring principally to Missouri.

For checking suggestions like this, we have the resources of the Century of Lawmaking pages at the LOC [1].

Having done a little poking around, I've been daunted by the facts: before one gets to Slidell's jiggery pokery, there's a legal dispute of Jarndyce v Jarndyce complexity and antiquity to be understood going back to the years surrounding the Louisiana Purchase.

Since I have no guarantee that Slidell's chicanery will be apparent in the record, I'm loathe to do all this preliminary cold-towel work.

I have at least got wise to the need for a PDF convertor (I'm trying this one - which has the essential merit of being free) - the Congressional Globe pages are far more easily handled as PDF.

Incredibly frustrating in being in image form (TIFFs and GIFs); and for its absurd timescale - leaving a stupendous gap (1877-1988) before the THOMAS full-text period takes over (with the 101st Congress). But beggars can't be choosers.

2005-07-28T09:20:00.000Z

Stern and Sweeney: rivals and Doppelgänger?

My sense is that union politics operate on a different planet. The unions should be huge for lefties; and there's clearly a slew of fascinating stories for the scribes. But there's no juice there.

It's like a cult TV show that's on permanent hiatus: among the former fans, there's goodwill, nostalgia, but a lack of enthusiasm.

Except, of course, that unions are still in production.

A piece by

former union organizer

Robert Fitch picks at some of SEIU's Andy Stern's publicity.

On his success with recruitment, for instance:

He's been regularly putting out the figure of 900,000 new members since he came to power in 1996. But by claiming 1.8 million members, he would have to have started out with 900,000 members in 1996. That's the figure his press people give out. But government figures—based on numbers supplied by SEIU—show that the actual number was 1.1 million. So, he has added only 700,000 members.

And 10% or so of those aren't really workers at all, but people staying at home looking after housebound relatives.

And

The union claims it has more janitors than ever. But according to the Department of Labor there are 4.4 million building service workers in the United States. Only 225,000 belong to SEIU.

For those janitors that join, things have got worse - but not by quite so much:

In real terms, janitors are paid half what they were in the '80s. Even in the union's flagship janitorial local in New York, starting pay has fallen 20 percent since Stern took over in 1996.

The Shakespearianly tragic - and much remarked on - thing is that Stern took over from mentor John Sweeney when Sweeney left the SEIU to take up the AFL-CIO presidency.

And Fitch, back in 1996, reviewing Sweeney's ghost-written America Needs A Raise, was making rather similar points.

Sweeney also boasted about his increases in SEIU membership. But,

the truth is that the S.E.I.U. grew overwhelmingly not by organizing but through mergers and "accretion"-i.e., the employer added employees, so the union grew, too.

Though Stern does not seem to have had any equivalent to "Greedy" Gus Bevona, the man Sweeney put in charge of

Local 32B-321, the 70,000 member janitors' union mired in corruption. bossism, indictments, job-selling and secret collaboration with employers

when he took the top SEIU job - and who repaid the courtesy with a job for Sweeney as executive adviser and (purely incidentally) a total $400,000 snaffle on top of his presidential screw.

The process by which Sweeney got to be AFL-CIO Prez - as told by Fitch - is not pretty. Critical was Arthur Coia of the Laborers' International Union of North America - who, a cursory search suggests, was as dirty as hell.

This AFL-CIO valedictory makes Coia sound like Mother Teresa; and Bill Clinton was a Coia groupie, if one can believe this.

About what Stern's ties (if any) with organized crime might be, Fitch's latest piece offers no clues.

I may be beginning dimly to comprehend why lefties prefer to keep union affairs at arm's length...

2005-07-28T07:02:00.000Z

Andrew Jackson didn't say it

Under the heading of correction of ignorance (sc, your humble blogger's), I see that Wikipedia claims that Jackson did not, in response to the SCOTUS decision in Worcester v Georgia, say

John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!

What he actually said, it says, was

the decision of the supreme court has fell still born, and they find that they cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate.

It explains

because of a legal loophole, he had no grounds for becoming involved unless the Georgia courts formally defied the Supreme Court. That did not happen, since Georgia simply ignored the ruling.

Which hardly seems satisfactory. But I'm more interested in standing up the words alleged to have been used.

There is a collection A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents which covers Presidents from Washington to McKinley (and TR to the end of the 57th Congress). But - no surprise - the mot is not there.

The Wikipedia piece quotes a dead-tree tome by a guy called Prucha. Online, it's a dead end.

MORE

William Seward did say

But there is a higher law than the Constitution

though - or so it seems.

[It's on p14 of this copy of the full speech (PDF).]

2005-07-27T13:05:00.000Z

Roberts against affirmative action?

A whole filing-cabinet-ful of John Roberts' writings as Reagan hack have been made public.

And, it seems, amongst the dead trees is something on AA:

In December 1981, the United States Commission on Civil Rights issued a report broadly defending affirmative action as a way to combat pervasive discrimination. Judge Roberts wrote a blistering critique, saying the "obvious reason" affirmative action programs had failed was that they "required the recruiting of inadequately prepared candidates."

Some in lefty circles seem to feel that this may be the smoking gun needed to turn the Dems from acquiescence to filibuster on Roberts' SCOTUS nom.

Now, Reagan could work the symbolism when it came to race - he famously gave his first speech in the 1980 campaign in Philapdelphia, MS.

But, in practice, my impression is that he was milky on AA. This guy agrees.

Was Roberts speaking from the heart, or telling his boss (or some intermediary) what Roberts thought he wanted to hear?

Heart? He's a lawyer, for crying out loud!

A propos, this 1997 Post piece comes up:

The high court bloc against affirmative action is led by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, appointed by President Richard M. Nixon and elevated by Reagan to chief in 1986; Sandra Day O'Connor, appointed by Reagan in 1981...

Right there, you've got a moral! (Umpteen pieces here on the Michigan University cases, tracing the triumph of experience over hope.)

MORE

This review article agrees that AA was not high up on Reagan's agenda.

The Post's piece yields a familiar name:

Much of Roberts's time at the Justice Department was taken up by the debate over GOP-sponsored bills in Congress that would have stripped the Supreme Court of its jurisdiction over abortion, busing and school prayer cases. He wrote repeatedly in opposition to the view, advanced by then-Assistant Attorney General Theodore B. Olson, that the bills were unconstitutional. He scrawled "NO!" in the margins of an April 12, 1982, note Olson sent to Smith. In the memo, Olson observed that opposing the bills would "be perceived as a courageous and highly principled position, especially in the press."

Solicitor-General Olson's limp and pallid excuse for a government brief in each of the Michigan cases made the way straight for Injustice O'Connor to do her worst.

So much for GOP administrations' wars on affirmative action! Chance would be a fine thing...

2005-07-27T08:19:00.000Z

Gadsden Purchase: Now that's what I call corruption!

I've just started skimming Allan Nevin's Ordeal of the Union - he starts with a leisurely tour d'horizon of the US around 1848, the names mostly a blur - but I'm struck by his section (Vol 1 p165ff) on

Industrial pressure groups, contractors, lobbyists, claim-agents and other wire-pullers [who] infested Washington in hundreds, spending money lavishly, and creating an atmosphere in which suspicion of corruption often grew to certainty.

The treaties with Mexico were, it seems, a particularly fruitful source of enrichment for on-the-ball legislators (emphasis mine):

In 1854 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was discussing the Gadsden Treaty. "Clayton says," wrote Edward Everett, "that there has been the most frightful corruption in reference to the Garay grant in connection with the Gadsden Treaty. Sixty-seven per cent of it owned by members of the Senate."

Mass production!

That SFRC report is, of course, nowhere to be seen online. There is an etext Inversiones, especulación y diplomacia: Las relaciones entre México y los Estados Unidos durante la dictadura santannista which looks promising. (The Gadsden Purchase was indeed one of Santa Anna's shenanigans.)

There is also a paper (PDF) Visión del istmo de Tehuantepec durante la guerra con México e inmediatamente después that mentions Garay. Not much else online.

Is 67% a record? What proportion of Congress benefited from the Crédit Mobilier scam, I wonder?

2005-07-23T11:15:00.000Z

Critical mass on the Fair Labor Standards Act...

We had a gay old time trying to puzzle out the infamous Powell Amendment earlier in the year.

The problem was that the polisci profs had effectively deracinated the voting behaviour from the politics in the cause of identifying a real-life example of a killer amendment. And an extremely misleading impression of the politics was thereby created. (Misleading for novice kibitzers such as your humble blogger, at least - April 14.)

The problem was made insoluble (by said kibitzers) by the lack of online material explaining the politics in detail. (Every damned reference to Powell amendment seemed to be to some smartass Marquis de Condorcet de nos jours demonstrating his command of game theory rather than his knowledge of post-War US politics of education and race.)

What I'm looking for is a conjunction of

a genuine political saga worked out in Congress;
the turning-points of the saga evidenced in roll call votes picked up by Voteview (voice votes are so unfair!); and
sufficient online material describing the politics that explain the votes, eliminating the second-guessing.

I think we may have hit pay-dirt in the Fair Labor Standards Act.

I mentioned the Act first on December 31 2004 as pretty much the last hurrah of the New Deal - also, the paper The Southern Imposition: Congress and Labor in the New Deal and Fair Deal by Sean Farhang and Ira Katznelson.

Then, on July 21, I mentioned a paper covering the lobbying on labor matters of the WLJC during the 1930s, in particular the role of Labor Secretary Frances Perkins.

A critical - and superficially counterintuitive - feature of the politics of labor reform is the deep split between the AFL and CIO on the matter: the stalwart opposition of AFL President William Green, the equally strong support of the garment workers' champion Sidney Hillman. A useful article (PDF) Troubled passage: the labor movement and the Fair Labor Standards Act fills in a lot of blanks.

A piece on the Department of Labor site Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938: Maximum Struggle for a Minimum Wage also has good stuff.

The FLSA took legislative attempts in three sessions of Congress in 1937-8 - there was a special session called by FDR in November 1937 - before the act passed, with several RCVs thus generated [1].

There's a full cast list, too: one name that was new to me was that of Rep Mary Norton (NJ). Norton was the sixth woman to be elected to the US House and the first to serve two full decades.

The woman was born in Jersey City, of all places: stamping-ground of the brutal boss and associate of FDR Frank Hague. There is frustratingly little on what was - I guess to have been - a fascinating relationship: this very brief note of the deposit of her papers at Rutgers says

participated actively in local, county and state Democratic Party politics with the backing of Jersey City Mayor Frank Hague

Can you say blindingly obvious?

(There's an unpublished memoir that is surely worth having a look at.)

According to a New York Times piece of July 3 1932 by Arthur Krock on the Democratic Convention,

After Texas nominated [John Nance Garner as vice-presidential candidate] today, Mayor Frank Hague of Jersey City changed his mind about making the gesture of putting Representative Mary T. Norton in the contest.

Wow! Who was the first woman to have been placed in nomination for vice-president by either party? Hague as a feminist ahead of his time rather goes against my impression of the guy!

Norton was certainly not confined to women's work in the House: she was Chairman of the House Labor Committee from 1937-47 (75th-79th Congresses) - ousted by the GOP takeover following the 1946 elections. And it was in that capacity that she played a key role in eventually putting the FLSA to bed.

The Troubled Passage piece gives the result of a House vote I couldn't find on Voteview; turns out that, before 1971, there was something called a teller vote - but only in the Committee of the Whole - where a total votes for and against were recorded, but not the votes of individual members. The vote I couldn't find must have been a CotW teller vote, I'm thinking.

2005-07-22T14:13:00.000Z

Light shed on Cleveland Plain Dealer mystery

CJR helps us with our puzzlement (July 10) by directing us to a piece in the (hitherto unknown to me) Cleveland Scene

One of the two stories the Plain Dealer had under wraps came from an FBI affidavit seeking a wire-tap on ex-Mayor of Cleveland, Michael R White.

Now, Ohio has been something of a by-word for Dem accusations of dirty dealings, what with those Diebold machines, and Coingate and all.

White, be it noted was a Democrat. And, if it's relevant, black. (And, this being the US, it's always relevant.)

According to the FBI affidavit, White was running quite a racket, extorting money from city contractors.

Of course, for a wire-tap, all you need is probable cause. Rather than balance of probabilities to make a civil suit stick; or proof beyond a reasonable doubt to land a criminal charge.

The Scene's theory is that the Feds are waiting for bagman Nathaniel Gray to be convicted and facing a good long stretch in the hoosegow, whereupon they will make him a very tempting offer.

It also refers to Cleveland's corruption as legendary.

Illinois we know to be a state where corruption knows no distinction of party - it seems that Ohio, too, is bipartisanly wide open.

(Just down the road, in East Cleveland, Mayor Emmanuel Onunwor has been convicted on various charges of racketeering and corruption [1].

The guy, it seems, used to be a Democrat, but switched to Republican!)

All rather puts Tom DeLay's little TRMPAC angle in the shade...

His successor, one Saratha Goggins, apparently stabbed a guy to death in 1982 - she says, in self-defence.
However, according to this,
Mayor Saratha Goggins’ original sentence for killing a boyfriend more than two decades ago was up to 25 years in prison.
But then-Common Pleas Judge Timothy McMonagle gave Goggins a break, allowing her to serve a jail term of 30 days followed by nine months of weekends, a court record shows.
Nice work, huh? The piece goes on:
Why McMonagle suspended the prison term is not clear. Now an appellate judge running for a Common Pleas Court seat, McMonagle declined to comment. Goggins also declined through a spokeswoman to be interviewed.
You don't say!
This McMonagle was something of a creative jurist:
As part of her sentence, McMonagle ordered Goggins to serve three years of probation and to pay for Price’s funeral. But he excused most of the payments in 1987 and, in 1991, he agreed to expunge Goggins’ name from court records.
And that story did appear in the Plain Dealer!

MORE

There are more McMonagles returned by a search on McMonagle "east cleveland" than you could shake a stick at. And several of them carry the title of 'judge'.

On the list of results for the November 2004 election in Cuyahoga County - home of a million Democratic sob stories (or so it appeared) two Judge McMonagles appear: Christine McMonagle was returned unopposed as judge for the 8th District Court of Appeals; and Timothy McMonagle for the Common Pleas Court.

(This Nation piece from 1969 features a Judge George J McMonagle. There is also record from 2004 of a Judge Richard McMonagle in the Cuyahoga Common Pleas Court.)

Now, the frequent occurence of an uncommon surname (it's ranked 19,044th on the 1990 Census list) in a single location in a single job category is, in itself, not proof of corruption. Even where that location seems singularly prone to - corruption.

Perhaps the statute of limitations has run out on any Federal or Ohio crimes that Judge Timothy McMonagle and Saratha Goggins may have committed two decades ago.

Perhaps this has something to do with the other thing that the Plain Dealer is holding out on us with?

STILL MORE

The small matter of homicide certainly hasn't prevented her advancement in the counsels of her peers: an outfit called NBC-LEO - the National Black Caucus of Local Elected Officials - has appointed Goggins to its policy committee, according to its newsletter (PDF).

They obviously prize a woman of conviction. (I'm going so far as to assume that the singular noun is appropriate...)

2005-07-22T07:51:00.000Z

The Politics of 1948 and the Negro vote

The paper by James Rowe - discussed earlier today - may, as McCullough suggests, be only dubiously a source of Truman's 1948 electoral strategy.

But, as a piece of informed thinking from within the Truman camp, and unaffected by hindsight or the attentions of latter-day thought police, it's certainly of value.

I've just glanced at it so far; but the section on the Negro vote is striking.

For instance,

No less an authority than Ed Flynn has said privately in the past two weeks that Dewey will take New York from Truman in 1948 because he controls the Negro and Italian blocs.

Would Ed Flynn, boss of the Bronx and long-time FDR associate (until, like most such, he was unceremoniously tipped into the dumpster by the great man), be reliable on the point? I suspect so.

It says

Under the tutelage of Walter White, of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, other intelligent, educated and sophisticated leaders, the Negro voter has become a cynical, hardboiled trader. He is just about convinced today that he can better his present economic lot by swinging his vote in a solid bloc to the Republicans.

Senate Democrats, after all, had barred all reform - FEPC, poll tax abolition, antilynching bills. Whereas the GOP

make no great secret of their intent to try to pass a FEPC Act and anti-poll tax statute in the next Congress. Whether they are successful – or whether Democratic filibusters will block them – they can’t see how they can lose in such a situation either way.

Moreover,

The Negro press, often venal, is already strongly Republican.

How 'bout that! Not exactly part of the folk-memory.

And the remedy for the Dems?

Unless the Administration makes a determined campaign to help the Negro (and everybody else) on the problems of high prices and housing – and capitalizes politically on its efforts – the Negro vote is already lost.

Just like under the New Deal, the Negro gets a slice of the programmes aimed at the electorate as a whole; probably a rather smaller slice.

Because Rowe knows as well as White, or anyone else remotely paying attention, that the issues of specific concern to Negroes - the ones that go on to figure in Truman's Message to Congress of February 2 1948 (July 20) and in the Civil Rights Plank of the Democratic Platform - are a flight of dead ducks.

2005-07-22T06:09:00.000Z

Truman among the Zionists

Pursuing McCullough doggedly, I pass, for the moment, on the famous memo, The Politics of 1948, scribed by James Rowe, but purloined (in name, at least) by Truman's political Jeeves, Clark Clifford - McCullough says (p592) of the memo's influence on Truman's actions

Probably it was very little - certainly less than later claimed.

But the memo (or a draft of it) is available online [1]. So, on the Willie Sutton principle, I'll no doubt be returning to it.

Apparently, Rowe says that the Democratic Party

had been so long in power that it was "fat, tired and even a bit senile"

And by then, the party had only had control of Congress for 14 years: think how bad it had got by 1995!

Anyhoo - Zionists.

Partly, it was those 47 electoral votes of New York - Thomas Dewey's home state - that Truman had in mind. (In the end, Dewey got 'em, for all the good it did him.)

But it was also an emotional thing for Truman - David Niles, his special assistant for minority affairs (!) and a Jew, sensed, saith McC (p596),

a fundamental sympathy for the plight of the Jews that he had never felt with Roosevelt. Had Roosevelt lived, Niles later said, things might not have turned out as they did.

A matter to ponder as we get closer to a trial in the AIPAC espionage case.

McC does point out that, at the time, the Zionist cause was popular among Americans generally. King David Hotel, just summer high spirits...

But the souk of Zionist lobbyists leant toward Der Stürmer parody, and got right royally up Truman's nose. As with one Abraham Feinberg, a New York clothing manufacturer who was visited by Assistant Interior Secretary Oscar Chapman (McC quoting James Rowe - p598):

[Oscar] walked in and there was Feinberg standing with an umbrella. And when he saw Chapman, he put the umbrella up and all these bank rolls fell onto the floor.

If Truman would do something about Israel, all this moolah would be his. Chapman reported back.

Truman's reaction - according to Rowe:

Tell the bastard to go to hell.

Did he say bastard?

Apparently, he told the Cabinet at one point (p599)

Jesus Christ couldn't please them when he was on earth, so how could anyone expect that I would have any luck.

But his Zionist sympathies persisted.

The State Department's more balanced approached brought accusations of anti-semitism - plus ça change - and not being team players. Apparently, Niles told a guy from State

the most important thing for the United States is for the President to be reelected

That, of course, was the sentiment informing Vietnam policy in 1964.

Eventually, of course, the British (who were broke at the time [3]) and slashing their overseas commitments) gave in to Jewish terrorism, and the UN voted for partition as of March 14 1948 (nicely timed for the campaign!).

There is also a blast from the past on the military front[4] (p602):

Truman was warned by the Chiefs of Staff that military intervention to protect a new Jewish state would require no less than 100,000 troops.

But

The hard truth, as [Navy Secretary James] Forrestal reported to Truman, was that the deployable troops then available totaled less than 30,000, plus perhaps 23,000 Marines.

Thank the Bring Daddy Home' clubs for that. The pols had taken the line of least resistance, but the American people - who had had an incredibly comfortable war, compared to most other participants - were the ones to blame.

Though - ugh! - in JPEG form!
The UK had suffered the humiliating sterling convertibility crisis of July-August 1947 forced by the terms of the Shylockian American Loan of 1945.
Greece had gone earlier in 1947, leading to the Truman Doctine, etc.
There was a Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, but the JCS was given statutory authorisation in PL 81-216 §211 and, as such, came into existence on August 10 1949.
On the JSC site: all I could find was this (PDF). And there's this from the DOD.

MORE

The Politics of 1948 is available in manageable form - as Appendix B to an oral history interview with James Rowe at the Truman Library site. Thank Goodness...

2005-07-21T05:34:00.000Z

Switch in time as story arc

As a factual explanation (piece earlier today), the switch in time that saves nine is a bust: there wasn't so much of a switch, and what there was didn't do any saving. Changes in SCOTUS alignment were gradual and messy.

But the switch has the power of a narrative arc. For liberals (the victors who got to write the history), it is, in the motto of the so-called Frank Luntz Playbook, words that work:

The reactionary old fossilised relic of unbridled capitalism was something of a fixture in Hollywood movies of the time: the example that springs to mind is Potter, the Lionel Barrymore character in It's A Wonderful Life. Old Man John Rockefeller was his real-life equivalent.

Patrician FDR lead the Wave of the Future, with the Brain Trust and those nice young soft-handed men like Alger Hiss that never used a pick-axe handle either to swing a pick or brain a striking worker, men who devised alphabet-soup programmes for social, communal uplift of the ordinary people. (Cue Ma Joad...)

The Four Horsemen had served the Rockefellers; a biblical downfall was required.

(This from the media-political nexus conspired [1] to hide Roosevelt's wheelchair from the suckers. Er, voters.)

The form of the story, and the way it's told, will have changed over time - there should be a book about it somewhere.

With the nomination of John Roberts, we may be spared the need to bone up on the filibuster. But SCOTUS history will undoubtedly be traduced for present political gain by both parties.

It's not clear whether Roberts is one of the guys who want to turn the clock back to 1937. But, just in case, it would be an idea for those pontificating to refresh the memory about what actually happened in 1937!

Because, what they think happened almost certainly ain't necessarily so.

Most media owners hated FDR's guts. Some conspiracy! I looked at the question on January 20 2004, and found a dead-tree-only book on the subject, but no real enlightenment online.

2005-07-21T03:57:00.000Z

SCOTUS switch in time reminder

I mentioned in passing on July 12 the switch in time that saves nine - that monument to not letting the facts get in the way of a snappy catchphrase.

Just now checking out a handy site containing the text of several dozen recent law journal articles and come across a useful article The Great Depression and the New Deal with a solid treatment of the topic (though I'm hardly qualified to review it!).

In looking (p29ff) at the way SCOTUS decisions turned round on the constitutionality of wage and price regulation, the piece points out that there was no single decision in which flip became flop:

In 1930, Adkins v Children's Hospital struck down a DC minimum wage law for women. Then Nebbia v New York in 1934 - with the Four Horsemen in situ found NY price regulations governing the milk industry constitutional [1], and might be said to have started the rot:

"There is no closed class or category of business affected with a public interest," wrote Justice Roberts. The term meant "no more than that an industry, for adequate reason, is subject to control for the public good."

McReynolds wrote afterwards to a friend that Nebbia was

the end of the constitution as you and I regarded it.

SCOTUS took a step backwards in 1936 with ex rel Tipaldo [2], striking down a New York minimum wage act; but two steps forward with West Coast Hotel v Parrish in 1937 in upholding a Washington law minimum wage act. Roberts was the swing vote.

Now, on the switch, it points out that it's a crock:

Roosevelt’s proposal to add a new Justice to the Court for each Justice who had not retired within six months following his seventieth birthday was introduced on February 5, 1937. The vote to uphold the Washington minimum wage statute was taken in conference on December 19, 1936, more than six weeks before the plan, known only to a handful of the President’s most intimate advisors, was unveiled.

Roberts later (p32) explained his switcheroo between Tipaldo and Parrish. It's complicated; but the origin seems to have been the fact that

counsel for the state of New York had not requested that Adkins be overruled, but had instead sought to distinguish the statute from the law invalidated in Adkins.

The switch in time is comparable to an urban legend about Harold Wilson, according to which he won the 1966 general election (beating the (lately deceased) Ted Heath because England won the soccer World Cup that year).

Unfortunately, the election came before the Cup win!

But - twist! - in 1970, Wilson lost to Heath. And, in that year, England crashed out of the Cup before the election. So could have been a factor.

As the milk business was judged as being affected with a public interest - the class of business which, in the Lochner era, could constitutionally be regulated.
Which the article failed to reference - why, dammit? It's here.

MORE

A great 5,000 word piece covers the origins of the New York law [1] struck down in ex rel Tipaldo. Lobbying by the Women's Joint Legislative Conference was involved, which included (only name I recognise!) Frances Perkins as one of its leaders.

Perkins was FDR's concession to the 19th Amendment in his Cabinet - despite being a long-time associate of arch-enemy Al Smith. She was handily placed, though, as Labor Secretary, to lobby for Federal minimum wage legislation. Which, after the NRA fiasco and the SCOTUS flip, came with the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 [2].

The piece opens out to cover extensively the development of Federal labor laws in the New Deal, with loads of searchable circumstantial detail to fill in the bare story to be found in SCOTUS opinions and Voteview roll call information.

A similar piece on the Powell amendment (numerous, alas inconclusive, pieces here) would come in handy.

The act is described in the SCOTUS opinion as
chapter 584 of the Laws of 1933 adding article 19 to the Labor Law N.Y. (Consol. Law, c. 31)
- didn't they have short titles for NY acts back then?
I discussed on December 31 2004 the FLSA, and the extensive online material on it and related matters.

2005-07-20T21:37:00.000Z

Cooper and the taxonomy of anonymity

For a profession with such a developed cringing reflex, journalism weilds a surprising weight of chutzpah.

When it comes to whoring anonymous sources, one is familiar with the terms off the record and on background.
These may suffice for quotidian or journeyman rimming of Administration honchos.

But for sphincters demanding extra-special attention, one simply must have

double super secret background

This sort of childish, delusional, cloak-and-dagger nonsense from journos just makes Karl Rove's world go around, of course.

If he did set up the Killian memos, it was pandering to a similar instinct amongst the 60 Minutes crowd.

I'm not paying sufficient attention (millions of others are, of course) to know whether Matt Cooper believed his own publicity, as it were, or was just enjoying the game.

Now, I suppose, every middle level munchkin in USG will be insisting on double super secret background for his nuggets; expect pengö-style inflation of anonymity categories...

Perhaps journos might even give up anonymous USG sources in disgust.

Kidding.

2005-07-20T19:29:00.000Z

Bill Moyers - keeper of an LBJ secret

The running theme here is disconnect: Moyers now treated as a demi-god by lefties, but formerly Liemaster in Chief (aka press secretary) to warmonger extraordinaire Lyndon Johnson.

We've had a decade or more of the Robert McNamara Guilt Express: Moyers' mea culpas seem to have been rather more limited.

The Pierro thesis mentions (p68) a speech that 'Landslide Lyndon' gave in Austin (the Texan San Francisco) during his 1948 Senate campaign:

[The] Civil Rights Program is a farce and a sham – an effort to set up a police state on the guise of liberty...

Pierro comments sniffily

Such was the proud record of Lyndon Baines Johnson in the spring of 1948.

I loathe Johnson; but what does he expect for Texas in 1948?

The footnote to the quote refers to a book Harry Truman and Civil Rights: Moral Courage and Political Risks by Michael Gardner; it goes on:

Gardner writes that during the Johnson administration, the possible circulation of these statements was considered so politically damaging that White House staffers “were instructed by an official notice attached to the speech that read, ‘DO NOT RELEASE THIS SPEECH – NOT EVEN TO STAFF, WITHOUT EXPRESS PERMISSION OF [Special Assistant to the President] BILL MOYERS. As background, both Walter Jenkins [Johnson’s top administrative assistant] and [White House Press Secretary] George Reedy have instructed this is not EVER TO BE RELEASED.”

Given the stuff that Johnson put in the Congressional Record as a freshman senator - his We of the South maiden speech, for instance - this seems unduly sensitive. Perhaps there was worse stuff in it - nigger jokes, say.

The piquant idea is that today's champion journalist Moyers should once have been partially responsible for keeping this noxious information from the public.

2005-07-20T17:58:00.000Z

That Bush and the NAACP thing

The story so far:

It is widely put about the net that Bush is the first president since Herbert Hoover not to give a speech to the NAACP (piece earlier today). Yet both David McCullough and Julian Bond - neither members of the VRWC, so far as I'm aware - affirm that it was Harry Truman who first did so [1].

The claim would be falsified if one could show that FDR did not speak at any NAACP conference.

What's the online evidence?

We have a catalogue of microfilmed papers relating to the NAACP - the guide to Part I (PDF) lists, inter alia, speeches for each of the NAACP annual conferences held during Franklin Roosevelt's presidency. There is no record of an FDR speech - though Eleanor Roosevelt did speak at the 1939 conference, and her speech is on the list (p60a).

There is no guarantee that this collection of speeches is complete; but I can't help thinking that a presidential speech would make it into the archives!

To double check, I've looked at the FDR Public Papers for the relevant months. In 1938, Roosevelt sent a letter of two paragraphs described as Greeting to the NAACP to Walter White: presumably, in lieu of a personal appearance.

In 1939, he sent another letter - this time extending to three paragraphs.

From 1940 to 1944, nada: like Dick Cheney, he had other priorities. Though he did find time in May 1942 to send a note to the Daughters of the American Revolution's Mrs Pouch (!) for their fifty-first continental congress.

So, I'm properly double-sourced in maintaining that any suggestion that Bush is the first sitting US President since Herbert Hoover not to address the annual conference of the NAACP is an untruth.

QED.

A thesis " Everything in my power": Harry S. Truman and the fight against racial discrimination by Joseph Pierro (online only in this form) also states (p31) that Truman was
the first U.S. president to address a meeting of the NAACP
Although the form is yukky, and only the first three quarters of the thesis is in the file, it's the only extensive online treatment of Truman's race policies.
(It commits an unforgiveable howler (p22) that the cloture majority in the US Senate in 1946 was
three-fifths of the Senate (ie, fifty-eight votes)
when, of course, it was two-thirds of senators present and voting. Ouch!)
There is, confusingly, a separate claim made that Bush is the only President since Warren Harding not to meet the NAACP . I'm not clear what meet means in the context: a president could meet the Secretary, say; or the executive committee; and still not have given a speech, at an NAACP conference, or otherwise.
But let's stick with the claim about speaking at the NAACP annual conference - which should be more easily verifiable.

2005-07-20T16:00:00.000Z

Truman's Civil Rights Message

Truman's NAACP speech in June 1947 (piece earlier today) was full of warm, if non-specific, words about government action to ameliorate racial problems.

Truman went further with his Message to Congress on Civil Rights of February 2 1948 (which I discussed on February 22), making ten recommendations for Congressional action - including an antilynching law and an FEPC.

(As I mentioned, Truman could not even bring himself to use the word lynching in his NAACP speech. So there was progress of a sort right there.)

Clearly, there would be no legislation passing Congress to satisfy any of his ten points in the foreseeable future. Truman was making a gesture with a view to garnering Negro votes in 1948.

McCullough confirms this by saying (p586) that Truman's message had been submitted

without conferring with his congressional leaders

Either he thought it would be a waste of time; or he wanted to poke them in the eye (shades of the Bolton nomination!). My guess is the former:

My recollection from Caro's Master of the Senate is that Alben Barkley was not much cop as Democratic Leader in the Senate. (In 1948, he was Minority Leader, of course.) But I can find nothing online to support it [1].

But Barkley could have been the entire DC Comics roster of super-heroes rolled into one and still not got an FEPC bill through the Senate!

What did Truman really think? I suspect a similarity with Lincoln: just as Lincoln distinguished abolition of slavery (which he desired) and social equality of the Negro (which he did not) - making clear that the former did not entail the latter - so Truman distinguished between civil rights and personal preference: he would want the Negro to have the right to vote and be protected against job discrimination.

But - imagine if daughter Margaret had introduced a Negro as her fiancé: I would forecast presidential conniptions!

McCullough has a story (p588) about writer Jonathan Daniels [2] who was in Missouri researching a Truman bio: Daniels

recorded in his notes that as Mary Jane [3] drove him south from Independence to Grandview one morning, she turned and said: "Harry is no more for nigger equality than any of us"...

McCullough goes on

But Mary Jane, like others, failed to understand that Truman knew how, if they did not, that as president he could not sit idly by and do nothing in the face of injustice

However, as Professor CEM Joad would say, It all depends on what you mean by equality.

He then quotes a letter that Truman wrote at the time in which he makes the distinction:

I am not asking for social equality, because no such things exist, but I am asking for equality of opportunity for all human beings...

The examples of present injustices that Truman goes on to give are exclusively ones of violence to Negroes.

I can't see his vision of equality of opportunity embracing diversity as a ground for affirmative action, for instance!

Why isn't there a search engine that works so I can specific a person or a thing and a quality - good, bad, whatever - and pull up pages assessing the extent that that person/thing possessed that quality?
There are a thousand verbal formulations of Barkley was a crap leader/Barkley was a great leader - leaving Mr Google floundering.
Son of Josephus Daniels of North Carolina, Woodrow Wilson's Navy Secretary - to whom FDR was Assistant Secretary - and owner of the Raleigh News and Observer.
Mary Jane Truman - HST's sister.

MORE

According to the Pierro thesis on Truman and civil rights (p68), the great American public were positively Dixiecrat about his ten point race plan:

A nationwide Gallop (sic) Poll taken in April found that only 6 percent of all Americans supported passage of the Truman plan, as opposed to 56 percent in opposition. Even among Negroes outside of the South, support rose no higher than 58 percent.

America says neigh to civil rights! (Oops - couldn't resist...)

Bearing in mind the modesty of the plan, these are suprising numbers. Wasn't the war supposed to have changed minds in the North? It wasn't as if Truman was broaching sensitive issues like schools desegregation...

The polling continued suprisingly bad:

A follow-up poll conducted by the Gallup organization in July found that a majority of Americans opposed a federal anti-lynching bill, and only 39 percent believed the federal government should have any involvement in guaranteeing non-discrimination in employment. Even on the question of mandated segregation in interstate transportation, opposition to such policies enjoyed only 49 percent support nationwide. Forty-two percent of all Americans continued to support separate seating on buses and trains.

I find the antilynching bill response strangest of all: you would expect a large majority to oppose lynching; and the Northern objection to an antilynching bill - essentially states rights - was a technical one. Most respondents would have been from outside the Confederacy.

Doesn't add up.

The idea of a large body of Northern resistance to an antilynching bill surviving World War 2 had not occurred to me.

You live and - occasionally - learn.

STILL MORE

The question of greasing up Congressional leaders in advance of a controversial announcement - or not - arose when Roosevelt announced his court packing plans. He chose not to do so. (I say, to rile up a scapegoat oppositional Congress ahead of a Roosevelt Recession.)

And, with the nomination of John Roberts to SCOTUS, one sees, apparently , a shmoozefest of Democratic senators for a nomination intended to go through.

As opposed to a Bolton-style poke-in-the-eye designed not to go through, and thereby excite the base. (Or to be an each-way bet, at least.)

2005-07-20T04:40:00.000Z

Truman's NAACP speech - again

I've read on in McCullough's account (my piece earlier today).

First of all, a question arises over Truman's choice of words: McCullough (p570) says Truman

called for state and federal action against lynching and the poll tax, an end to inequality in education, employment, the whole caste system based on color.

But the Public Papers version of the speech does not include the words lynching or poll tax. You have to decode: to get the first, you go to the reference to

the threat of physical injury and mob violence

And, for the second,

the right to an equal share in making the public decisions through the ballot

I infer that, in 1947, lynching and poll tax are taboo words for a president to use.

I'm not inclined to dispute McCullough's parsing of HST's runes. But he does veer a tad uncomfortably towards the purple prose:

That someone of his background from western Missouri could be standing at the shrine of the Great Emancipator saying such things was almost inconceivable.

My hypothesis would be that Franklin Roosevelt, for instance, had uttered similarly warm words. (Not at the Lincoln Memorial, though.)

But, from what he quotes, NAACP Secretary Walter White was equally euphoric:

As he listened, [White] thought of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. "I did not believe that Truman's speech possessed the literary qualities of Lincoln's speech," he later wrote, "but in some respects it had been a more courageous one in its specific condemnation of evils based on race prejudice...and its call for immediate action against them."

Uh oh.

As we've discovered, a hallmark of Truman's speech was that it was non-specific. The - specific - word lynching came to Truman's lips as easily as Sorry came to those of the Fonz!

And White knew as well as Truman that

legislative action would be barred for the foreseeable future by the Senate; and
executive action could already have been taken had Truman had the will.

Since it hadn't been taken, he clearly hadn't.

Was Truman being completely cynical? I suspect not: he's in a bad spot poll-wise [1] and needs to maximise his Negro vote in '48. But he genuinely wants to help the Negroes, I'm sure. And perhaps he thinks that, with changed conditions, the legislative logjam might somehow be broken.

He is channelling Mr Micawber, probably [2].

According to McCullough,

Taking his seat again after the speech, Truman turned to White and said he meant "every word of it - and I'm going to prove I mean it."

It is just possible that someone of his background being applauded by ten thousand Negro enthusiasts for his message might have left him a little euphoric.

I'm not even looking for a fav/unfav polling series on Truman: he had been in bad shape, and would be again. I have no information how his numbers were looking on June 29 1947.
What action could Truman have taken by executive order in 1947? Desegregate the military, no doubt.
What about the Federal administration? Surely, just as Woodrow Wilson Jim Crowed Federal offices in Washington by fiat, Truman could have desegregated in the same way. In DC and the border states first, perhaps.
Perhaps he could have given the Justice Department's Civil Rights Section (created by FDR in 1939) more resources and a wider mandate (caveat: I have no idea how the way DOJ appropriations were allocated would have affected this).
He could, like Glendower, call spirits from the vasty deep - but how could he have enforced such changes? Wouldn't massive resistance merely have happened a few years earlier than it did?

2005-07-20T03:29:00.000Z

Those Hells Canyon Civil Rights Bill votes

Here we go again...

In my piece earlier today, I mentioned that ultra-liberal Wayne Morse had been a participant in one of the most famous pieces of Senatorial log-rolling, the Hells Canyon deal.

Keith Finley tells the story (Chapter 4 p30): briefly, Lyndon Johnson was trying to keep the civil rights bill HR 6127 out of the clutches of the Judiciary Committee [1], chaired by James O Eastland (MS). Senate Rules provide that if there is an objection raised when a bill is called up, that bill does not go to a committee but is placed directly on the Calendar. Pro-bill liberals arranged for such an objection to be made - by Republican Senator Knowland (CA).

Richard Nixon, in the chair, ruled that the precedents were unclear, so the Senate had to vote on the issue: the result was 39-45 on a point of order against Knowland's objection: a vote against the point of order was a vote in favour of bypassing the Committee.

Finley says that 12 Western senators voted with the Confederacy in favour of the point of order.

I get two GOP (Goldwater (AZ) and Malone (NV)) and a eight Dems, according to the Poole-Rosenthal regional classification:

Morse OR
Murray MT
Mansfield MT
Magnuson WA
O'Mahoney WY
Hayden AZ
Anderson NM
Bible NV

All of them are on the liberal side (negative DW-NOMINATE 1st dimension scores) of the line, though only Morse and Murray (12th most liberal) score -0.5 or lower. (The implication of the Hells Canyon deal narrative is that, without it, these votes would have been supported bypassing Judiciary; but wouldn't Goldwater have voted with the Confederacy in any case?)

How does Finley get to 12? Where does he draw the line for west? Including the Dakotas gets us two more (Young (ND) and Mundt (SD)), which brings the total to 12 if one includes Malone and Goldwater.

The quid pro quo vote - authorising construction of the Hells Canyon Dam, on June 21, saw no fewer than 17 Confederate Dems - including Eastland - voting with the Westerners. Only Robertson and Byrd (both VA) and our old chum Strom Thurmond voted against.

The scores on the doors: 45-38. So, if you think about it, fully seven Rebels decided to cast a futile vote to show their appreciation. (Assuming Nixon would have given a casting vote in favour; if not, make that six Rebels.)

Note that both ends of the deal failed: not only did the Westerners fail to prevent the bypassing of Judiciary, but the Hells Canyon Dam went on to die in the House. As everyone knew it would.

There's something positively Japanese about it: the Dam That Would Never Be against the Civil Rights Act with the minimum of civil rights in it!

It would be fascinating to see how the gentlemen of the press covered the story. The New York Times, say. Were attentive Times readers wise to the charade or not?

An earlier civil rights bill, HR 627, had died in the 84th Congress the previous year.

2005-07-20T00:31:00.000Z

Lincoln Memorial: Truman beat King to it!

Continuing my personal Ripley's series on Harry Truman, courtesy of David McCullough's bio, I see (p579) that Truman had the smart idea to address the NAACP from the Lincoln Memorial.

On June 29 1947, shortly after having seen his veto of the Taft-Hartley Act handily overridden thanks to renegade Dems, gave a short address at the end of the NAACP annual conference [1].

The veto - doomed to fail and further cement the conservative coalition - was designed to woo the unions after a year of massive industrial strife and confrontation between unions and Administration.

The NAACP speech was a similar constitutency-goosing exercise. The Negro vote, from a small base, was coming on like a train. Because of the migration north and the SCOTUS ruling in Smith v Allwright outlawing the white primary, to name but two factors.

The sentiments are all very laudable; and, no doubt, the fact that a US president would actually voice them was some progress (and a Democrat linking arms with Lincoln, too!) [2].

But there were clearly limits:

We must strive to advance civil rights wherever it lies within our power. For example, I have asked the Congress to pass legislation extending basic civil rights to the people of Guam and American Samoa so that these people can share our ideals of freedom and self-government. This step, with others which will follow, is evidence to the rest of the world of our confidence in the ability of all men to build free institutions.

Civics 101 teaches that legislative and constitutional changes do not lie in the President's power! He has to ask Congress.

And how many of his audience had the slightest interest in Guam and American Samoa? The mere mention strikes me as something of an insult.

At the end, he passes the buck to the Almighty - with a Lincoln quote:

if it shall please the Divine Being who determines the destinies of nations, we shall remain a united people...

The fact was, as speaker and audience well knew, that Congress was an immovable block on reforms needing legislative sanction [3].

And, as for those needing mere executive action - like military desegregation, for instance - there'd not been much doing.

At the top of the speech, he namechecks Eleanor Roosevelt and Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon.
ER during the 1930s gave her name to the notorious, fictitious Eleanor Clubs
for black maids who promised to get out of white people's houses and go somewhere else to work. "Whenever you see a Negro wearing a wide-brimmed hat with a feather in it," they said, "you know it's a sign of the Eleanor Club." There were warnings of "Eleanor Tuesdays," when black women were supposed to bump into white women on the street in honor of Eleanor.
The FBI seemed to think that these clubs actually existed. They were the equivalent of the Swift Boat Veterans' tales of John Kerry's Vietnam cowardice.
How did the roorback start? Perhaps it was J Edgar Hoover himself - who hated Eleanor: it seems he suspected a touch of the tar-brush - which was a rumour customarily spread about opposing candidates in US elections! On whether the tar-brush rumour was spread about ER, I have no information.
I wasn't aware that Morse (fascinating career - for another time) was an early adopter of the civil rights issue: not hunting where the ducks are for his lily white home state. The 1940 Census showed that Oregon had 2,565 Negroes - I learn from this excellent historical census page.
The lack of a Negro constituency in the West allowed the famous Hells Canyon deal that Lyndon Johnson engineered at one stage in trying to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957: Morse was of the party, it seems. Chapter 4 of Keith Finley's thesis has the (deliciously technical) detail.
McCullough calls it
the strongest statement on civil rights heard in Washington since the time of Lincoln
which is surely a stretcher. But, he says, it was
the first speech ever by a president to the NAACP
which is more interesting. Because it would make the commonplace lefty jibe that
President Bush [is] the first president since Herbert Hoover to not address the NAACP...
a lie!
And - lo and behold! - I find confirmation (DOC) that it's a lie from an impeccable source: Julian Bond, Chairman of the NAACP. In a 2004 speech, Bond says
Harry Truman became the first president to speak to an NAACP audience.
Now That's what I call a slam dunk!
Even the 79th Congress had made mincemeat of the proposal to set up an FEPC (several earlier pieces).

2005-07-19T18:27:00.000Z

Clark Clifford verdict on the Truman loyalty order

I've mentioned before the inaccuracy involved in naming the post-war rolling Red Scare McCarthyism. Until his fateful speech in the West Virginia panhandle (Wheeling to be precise) in February 1950, Joseph McCarthy was best know as the hapless champion of German soldiers sentenced to death for killing American POWs at Malmédy [1] in 1994.

By rights the scare should have been called Trumanism - because it was by his Loyalty Program under Executive Order 9835 that the thing ceased to be merely a series of partisan GOP stunts and received - literally - the Presidential Seal of approval (piece on January 16, amongst others).

Reading the McCullough book, I see (p529) that Truman wrote to Mrs T on November 18 1946 (after the disastrous mid-terms):

I'm doing as I damn please for the next two years and to hell with all of them

And Truman's press secretary Charlie Ross was also in combative mood [2]:

"The real Truman administration," Ross told White House reporters, "began the day after the elections."

It rather sounds as if Truman thought his number was up, and that he would be able to vote his conscience without thought of re-election-driven pandering.

EO 9835 was made on March 21 1947. Between the midterms and then, the Greek crisis blew up [3] and the Truman Doctrine was devised and sold to the Taftite GOP-controlled Congress.

The loyalty scheme was supposedly meant, like cowpox on smallpox, to inoculate the body politic against the more virulent Red-baiting in Congress - HUAC under Parnell Thomas, most notably. If Thomas and friends saw the executive branch kicking the pinkoes in government, they would feel less inclined to turn their flame-throwers on them.

In the event, just 212 security risks were booted out of three million employees screened. And Parnell Thomas' fun was inhibited only when the Feds came to call on a matter of fraud.

Eminence grise par excellence, Clark Clifford confirmed the obvious to Carl Bernstein (p552):

It was a political problem...Truman was going to run in '48 and that was it...
My own feeling was that there was not a serious problem...We never had a serious discussion about a real loyalty problem...the President didn't attach much significance to the so-called Communist scare. He thought it was a lot of baloney. But political pressures were such that he had to recognize it...

Some time between November 18 1946 and March 21 1947, Truman had decided that he was indeed running for re-election, and that, accordingly, he needed to pander like billy-o.

In his autobiography, Truman put the best possible complexion on the loyalty business. But in private told friends that the scheme was terrible.

Now, compared with - oh, say, initiating an illegal war of aggression, Truman's little scheme doesn't really measure up. But, as I said, it gave the imprimatur that only the president's word can to to a whole lot of unpleasantness and misdirected energy. And boosted the GOP (even after they lost control of Congress).

The victory in 1948 was, indeed, something of a dead cat bounce.

Eupen and Malmedy, spelling with or without accent allowed, apparently, once areas of Germany bordering Belgium, had previously had a bit part in international relations as having been granted the right in Article 34 of the Treaty of Versailles to a plebiscite on the question whether to 'secede' and join Belgium. Which obtained a 'yes' vote.
Unlike the Truman quote, the Ross quote is not referenced in the notes, which are hardly satisfactory in format, certainly; and perhaps also in content. (What's wrong with ordinary footnotes? Or, if printing considerations prohibit their use, at least use ordinary-format endnotes.)

2005-07-19T04:08:00.000Z

Before Hillarycare, there was Harrycare

One respect in which the Dems are half a century behind the surrender monkeys of Europe is health care. And, so far as one can tell from the proposals for reform made by the Democratic presidential candidates in 2004, the chances of catching up are not good.

My recollection is that, though the schemes and their cost varied much between them, every one of them was carefully calibrated to provide less than universal health care. With a view to keeping the Harry and Louise effect at bay.

Now, we have the reincarnated Howard Dean - now at a safe distance from policy responsibilities - coming out in favour of UHC at Great Falls, MT on Saturday.

I'm a little surprised [1] to find that Harry Truman included health care in his famous November 19 1945 Message to Congress.

His plan was for a national insurance scheme for workers - so clearly was less than universal. It's more than the US has at the moment, though.

This piece outlines the attempts to get things going in Congress. The basis of the Truman proposal was the so-called Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill (introduced in 1943 as S 1161 and HR 2861), which had died in committee.

The WMD bill (!), redrafted and backed by Truman's statement, fared no better in the 79th Congress, despite majority support amongst voters for government health insurance.

The lack of progress means there is little in the way of roll call vote action. Voteview supplies one, though, that I've spotted: on May 22 1946, there was a vote on a Claude Pepper (several earlier pieces here) amendment to HR 4908 (an appropriations bill?) providing for a health and welfare fund for employees and their families. It lost 40-12, with no GOP supporters and Southern Dems mostly opposed.

This was around the time when the conservative coalition between a Taftite GOP and Southern Democrats started to be reflected in roll call results [2]. Things got stickier for Truman in the 80th Congress of course, with both Houses controlled by the GOP. But the coalition certainly swung into action earlier than that.

The health insurance plan languished in Congress until Truman seemed to give up on it: it didn't figure in his 1948 State of the Union, apparently. But then, later on in the campaign, he brought it back.

It was a plank in the Democratic Platform. But then, so was civil rights - and that was doomed to die, too.

Lobbying from AMA representing the Neanderthals in white coats held the baby's head under the water till it stopped struggling. (Love those caring professions, boy!)

It's even suggested that the defeat of Frank Graham and Claude Pepper in the 1950 Senate elections (discussed here several times before) was, at the time, put down to the Rove-work of AMA hit-men.

The kicker a quote from HST himself:

I have had some bitter disappointments as President, but the one that has troubled me most, in a personal way, has been the failure to defeat the organized opposition to a National compulsory health insurance program. But this opposition has only delayed and cannot stop the adoption of an indispensable Federal health insurance plan.

Old soldier...

Though I shouldn't be: yet another lacuna in my knowledge identified, though not filled.
It's as if the Coalition, formed in embryo at the time of the court packing farrago, took that long fully to develop. I have seen a chart, but can't trace where, let alone supply an URL!

MORE

I make my 'discovery' in the McCullough bio (p473) - which may have more. I'm reading on!

There's more on the Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill here.

2005-07-18T16:57:00.000Z

Schools desegregation: what happened before massive resistance?

I mentioned (December 14 2003) at the time of the Strom Thurmond/Essie Mae Washington farrago an interesting little book from 1964, Mr Kennedy and the Negroes by Southern liberal journo Harry Golden.

The advantage of such books is that not only are they full of hard-to-find anecdotes but they preserve like a fly in amber the temper of the times untainted by hindsight [1].

On the anecdotal side, I see a reference to our old friend Olin the Solon, Olin Johnston of South Carolina. Johnston it was [2] who,

listening to one of Senator Thurmond’s diatribes on the subject of civil rights, 'Listen to ol’ Strom. He really believes all that shit.'

Implying that the rest of the Southern Caucus were as indifferent as a Western Republican to the Negro Question.

Golden has this (p23):

In 1938, when [then Governor Johnston] tried to unseat Senator "Cotton Ed" Smith, he charged that the incumbent Senator was a "nigger-lover".
"Cotton Ed," said Johnston, "voted for a bill that would permit a big buck nigger to sit by your wife in a railroad train."
Cotton Ed retaliated by boasting to his constituents that he had walked out of the Democratic National Convention in 1936 when a Negro minister was asked to recite a prayer...

(Democratic National Convention? Those were the days when Northern liberal Democrats were happy for the greater good - chiefly their own - to rub shoulders with hoodlums like Tom Pendergast of Kansas City and white supremacists like - almost all Dixie Dems.)

Golden draws attention (p78) to an interesting (if true) phenomenon of Southern reaction to the May 17 1954 decision in Brown v Board of Education: initially, there wasn't much.

Now, I'd understood that the border states had generally taken the decision in a mood of resignation. But, in some parts of the Confederacy, too, reaction was not hostile:

Governor Francis Cherry of Arkansas said: "Arkansas will obey the law;"...and Frank Clement of Tennessee said the Court was supreme "in interpreting the law of the land." Even Governor Thomas Stanley of Virginia, though he changed his mind six weeks later, promised he would call a meeting of state and local officials to "work toward a plan which shall be acceptable to our citizens and in keeping with the edict of the court."

Of course, Arkansas later gave us the ruckus at the Central High School in Little Rock; and Virginia, under Harry Byrd [3], was later a centre of massive resistance with the closure of the schools of Prince Edward County and so forth.

But - Golden argues - at the outset, there was a vacuum of leadership. He's suggesting that Eisenhower should have taken the initiative (not entirely in character with the man!) in leading the South towards integration. But, equally, one might wonder why the Southern Caucus in the Senate were not able to do take control and organise their countrymen with a view to achieving the opposite!

Chapter 4 of the Keith Finley thesis covers the period, but hasn't much: he soon skips forward to the Southern Manifesto was discussed in early 1956, and unveiled on March 12 of that year. That's 22 months after the in-principle decision in Brown!

Given that the schools desegregation cases (starting with Clarendon County, SC) had been progressing through the courts since 1950 (earlier pieces) - and were clearly the greatest threat to Jim Crow (aka the Southern way of life) - it's more than a little surprising that Southern senators, who were the main bulwark against encroachment, were so apparently ill-prepared.

Notably, between Brown and the Southern Manifesto came the Emmett Till case which so adversely affected Northern opinion.

The Caucus had already agreed that the way to go was to junk the old Bilboesque ranting (and Huey Long potlikker recipe filibusters) in favour of a calm and reasoned - and extremely leisurely! - defence of Jim Crow in the Senate in the face of measures like FEPC.

And had enjoyed success not only in stymieing all such measures, but in strengthening the filibuster by requiring two-thirds of all senators, not merely those present and voting, to pass cloture.

But when Der Tag finally arrives, courtesy of Earl Warren and his merry men, the Caucus goes off in all directions.

Odd.

What if there had been leadership from the likes of Richard Russell to implement in the Southern states the plan of temporising and minimising that had been adopted for use in the Senate?

Is it possible that the South could have managed affairs in a way that would have slowed down the process of integration to a crawl for decades? I doubt it: the necessarily immense self-discipline required was lacking.

As ever, favourable framing would have been vital. The aim would have been to provoke violence from Negroes discontented with procrastination over desegregation: they would be seen by the Northern public as the ones endangering the stability of the Union, and would be punished for it [4].

As it was, of course, after Till, there was Little Rock and - the clincher? - the Bull Connor Show in Birmingham, which provided exactly the opposite framing: the Negroes were the dignified, peaceable upholders of the Constitution, the Southern whites the worthy heirs of Rhett and Yancey, threatening, with all the talk about interposition, a sort of semi-secession; and demonstrating the Southern zest for violence and fantasy, the one reinforcing the other.

(Was the footage of Connor's dogs and fire-hoses the first instance of the CNN effect, I wonder? The Till case, though huge, happened at a time when TV news coverage was less advanced. And, of course, unlike Connor's police going ape, the deed itself wasn't filmed.)

No, this, surely, was another Lost Cause - and that's the sort that they of the South like the best. (As recently demonstrated during the Schiavo Circus.)

Both Gallica and the Million Book Project (the latter very much short of its target last time I looked!) have loads of such ephemera.
According to a paper (PDF) From Defiance to Moderation: South Carolina Governors and Racial Change by Tony Badger.
Stanley was presumably an emanation of the formidable Byrd machine. Did he clear that statement with the old man?
The inner city riots in Watts, Detroit and elsewhere (that led to the Kerner Commission) happened just too late for the South.

MORE

There are a couple of theses on the desegregation of Virginia schools that may be useful (I haven't read them): one on schools in Danville, the other on schools in Southampton County.

2005-07-17T00:35:00.000Z

Black stumped for Truman in 1940?

More panning for nuggets in McCullough's Truman picks up what is surely fool's gold.

In a chapter on Truman's difficult re-election campaign in 1940, says that a number of his colleagues came down to Missouri to support him in the primary against arch-enemy and FDR blue-eye boy [1], then Governor Lloyd Stark:

Carl Hatch, Sherman Minton and Hugo Black, three staunch New Deal senators came to give vocal support.

Now, as I've discussed in several pieces recently, Black was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1937.

So how in Sam Hill could he have been giving support to, let alone speaking for, a candidate in an election three years later?

It's a typo, no doubt [2].

Truman had been generally supportive of Roosevelt. But he had voted for Pat Harrison for Majority Leader (p227ff) against FDR's choice Alben Barkeley (who won by one vote!), and had on the floor of the Senate condemned the nomination of Maurice Milligan to another term as US Attorney for the district in which Kansas City fell (p237). Milligan had, with Stark's enthusiastic support, obtained the jailing of Tom Pendergast for tax evasion.
The edition I'm working from seems to be a first. Perhaps it's been corrected in later printings.

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The Truman family farm was notoriously foreclosed on during the course of the campaign. I hadn't realised that the Jackson County Court, which held the mortgage, had by then fallen under Republican control (p249).

The Missouri House delegation to the 76th Congress was all Democratic, except for the 7th District. In the 1940 election (for the 77th), the GOP also took the 6th and 12th Districts. (At the time, Missouri elected 13 Congressmen.)

Truman himself won his seat in 1934 from a GOP incumbent.

2005-07-16T11:48:00.000Z

PUHCA: the Truman connection

I mentioned on July 14 that the energy bill HR 6 will most likely repeal the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935.

Just leafing through David McCullough's Truman bio in search of nuggets, I find (p218) a PUHCA reference; Truman was on the Interstate Commerce Committee that dealt with the bill (S 2796), and, in the passing of it, much fun was had by all - including the lobbying of Wendell Willkie of Commonwealth & Southern (also this). Truman called it a propaganda barrage, apparently, with 30,000 wires and pieces of mail received.

And the utilities lobbyists went as far as taking trips to Kansas City and persuading the organ-grinder, Tom Pendergast, of the justness of their cause. The legendarily incorruptible Truman declined to heed his master's voice [1], and cocked his leg for FDR.

There were two roll call votes in the Senate (according to Voteview). The key provision of the bill (my understanding of it is limited!) was the so-called death sentence in §11(b) of Title I which limited utility holding companies to two decks of subsidiaries [2].

The first vote on June 11 1935 was on an amendment to remove the death sentence from the bill; it failed by just one vote, 44-45. One would expect the supporters of the amendment to be at the conservative end of the ideological range; but the amendment was sponsored by Dieterich (IL) who ranks as sixth most liberal senator in the 74th Congress according to his DW-NOMINATE 1st dimension score.

The vote on passage on the same day was much more comfortable - 56-32.

And not for the first time - McCullough is keen on lauding his subject, through examples, as a man who touched pitch but was not defiled thereof.
Truman was top man of Jackson County local government (technically, presiding judge at the County Court - not a judicial post!) responsible for construction of roads and public buildings. And he was insisting, so the tale goes, on handing out contracts fairly, and not on the Pendergast system. Pendergast - the Ready Mixed Concrete Company man - had him in to chat about the problem (p184) - but, instead of providing Truman with his own tomb of Company concrete, Pendergast allowed him to carry on with his officiously honest practices!
Why would he do that? And then, when Truman found himself term-limited out of his judgeship, why wasn't he junked by the machine? My guess (nothing in McCullough that my skimming has revealed) is that Truman was a bit like Al Smith was to Tammany: a guy tipped for stardom who was deliberately kept personally clean by the machine for use in fora (like the US Senate) where plausible cleanliness was an asset.
The point of the bill was to stymie the pyramid structures of the likes of Samuel Insull.

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This from 1999 on Alfonse D'Amato's earlier attempt to repeal PUHCA.

This (wacky-looking site!) on a deregulation bill (date?) of Gramm and Schumer which would have repealed PUHCA.

A 1999 CRS report on the origin and operation of PUHCA.

A 2005 piece on fast-expanding New Mexico utility holding company PNM Resources for which repeal of PUHCA would come in handy.

The 2005 SEC decision on the merger of American Electric Power with Central and South West provides an illustration of the current operation of §11(b). (I've yet to read it!) Also, the Public Citizen brief (PDF) in the case.

2005-07-16T02:12:00.000Z

The thought police of a free press?

Following the jailing of Judith Miller, there's been a babel of bleating from press panjandrums on the chilling effect on sources and rags alike.

An example happily comes our way (Romenesko's way, to be exact) which gives an insight into the thinking of at least one newspaper's management on freedom of speech.

At the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune [1], an editor emailed staff with a direction:

Refrain from using race to describe or identify people in crime stories, for example, 'a black man in a green jacket and baseball cap.'

One or two journos had the gall to challenge this edict (also by email) - and got themselves suspended for their pains.

Now, the golden rule of employee emails is: never write anything you wouldn't be happy to have read out in court. But the extracts in the piece don't seem so bad - no naughty words or personal attacks.

Apparently, the witchhunt was triggered by a complaint from an editor at another paper in the group (corporate politics as well as PC raising its ugly head?) that one email was

disgusting and offensive.

Freedom of speech only has value for stuff that offends someone. And I'm thinking this guy's tolerance threshold is pretty low.

Leading to an piece of defensive management.

Don't do as we do, do as we say would seem to be the media motto, if this example is typical.

Is it? A case for some actual journalism, I think.

That's Lawrence, MA.

2005-07-15T23:21:00.000Z

Scotty McClellan to take the fall...

...for criminally bad journalism? So demands the San Francisco Chronicle ed board today, at least.

It adopts the oldest weasel in the sneak [1]:

Every White House correspondent knows that a press secretary's job involves a good deal of "spin" and administration-friendly interpretations of the facts. But it can't involve what now seem like outright falsehoods.

As I've pointed out before, journalistic product is in code. And, as if you hadn't noticed, journalism is a game. A game with rules as arcane as real tennis. Which under no circumstances can be explained to the suckers who financially support it through their subscriptions.

Both the code and the game - like the Bush Administration media operation, in fact - are intended to insulate practitioners from lay criticism and to affirm (mostly for the benefit of the practitioners themselves) their indifference towards, or contempt for, the uninitiated.

What spin and lying have in common is the intent to deceive and misrepresent for the purpose of gain - gain in power, or campaign contributions, or corrupt payments, or whatever.

Both are perfectly human, of course, and, no doubt, deception and misrepresentation are essential element of any political system; but the distinction between the two is wholly artificial. But, not only do practioners show no shame at the fact: the very artificiality aids the hieratic nature of the operation!

Example: one pharma company falsifies the trial results for a drug. Another does two trials of a drug but suppresses the results of one trial that showed hideous side-effects.

Is there any difference in culpability (moral culpability, at least) between the two? I think not.

McClellan's job is to deceive: the hacks who quiz him every day accept that. There are loads of facts embarrassing to the administration that either are generally unknown, or are known but their significance is not appreciated. His job is to ensure that that happy state of affairs continues indefinitely.

What is the job of the those hacks? There's the J-school 101 answer. And the answer to be gleaned from study the transcripts and tapes of pressers with Scotty and with his boss. And from the umpteen USG background briefings that they attend.

Their job is to play the game. To not rock the boat.

And their beef is that Scotty broke the rules of the game so egregiously as to pique them into reacting!

I know. But, according to Mr Google's rather fallible verification service, it looks kosher: a sneak of weasels, like an unkindness of ravens or a parliament of owls. Wikipedia has stuff, of course.

2005-07-15T17:45:00.000Z

More on Hugo Black's SCOTUS appointment

There are a number of promising looking Harvard University Press books available as etexts, in similar format to The Rise of the Southern Republicans that I've discussed several times here [1].

The Warren Court and American Politics by Lucas Powe (a PDF) I've barely sampled before I come across (p22a) further intelligence on the appointment of repentent (he said) Klansman, Alabama's Hugo Black, to the Supreme Court in 1937 (which I discussed at some length on July 12).

Roosevelt had just been rebuffed by an embryo conservative coalition (bolstered by a good many liberals) [2], and Black was a provocative choice - designed to poke in the eye not only Black's current but also his future colleagues.

Powe says

When the president told [press aide Steven] Early, the latter responded with just two words: "Jesus Christ." Roosevelt grinned because Early got it right. The Senate was outraged.

On the Klan question, he says

Black refused to comment on his Klan membership but allowed Idaho Senator William Borah, who did not know the truth, to deny the rumors.

I don't know enough about Borah to know whether this is plausible. I doubt it: the second Klan got (almost everywhere [3]), and there was surely every reason why Black would be involved with it [4].

There was a roll call vote (on August 17) - I'd somehow thought that, with all that senatorial courtesy going on, a voice vote would be de rigueur... - with pretty much every section split (Borah voted against, for example, Nye (ND) voted for; Byrd (VA) and Bilbo (MS) likewise.)

Powe says the Klan revelations came from [t]he Scripps Howard newspapers - despite the fact that the Block's Pittsburgh Post-Gazettes Ray Sprigle got a Pulitzer for doing so!

I suggest you rootle about here.
Mission accomplished, according to my, as yet untested hypothesis (July 5).
There's a reference in this listing of memorabilia to a klavern at Fort Sherman, ID. No mention of Alabama, though. How about that?
Another piece of the Black/KKK puzzle from a fascinating 1920s US history trivia page:
An itinerant Alabama Methodist preacher, E. R. Stephenson, was incensed when his daughter became a Catholic. A gun-toting member of the Ku Klux Klan, he could no longer restrain himself when his daughter married a Catholic of Puerto Rican ancestry in a ceremony performed by Father James Coyle. On the evening of August 11, 1921, the crazed preacher shot and killed the priest on the porch of St. Paul’s rectory in Birmingham, Alabama.
At his trial, Stephenson pleaded temporary insanity.
Nothing - if the account can be believed - was left to chance:
The Klan was behind the Stephenson defense effort, and they hired Alabama’s best trial lawyer, Hugo Black, a Klan member noted for his fiery anti-Catholic lectures. The Klan controlled the defense team and secured lists of potential jurors. Only white Protestant males were selected. Writes Hugo Black’s preeminent biographer Roger K. Newman, “The majority of jurors were Klansmen, and the foreman was a field organizer for the Klan. Members in the courtroom used hand gestures to the jury during the trial. The judge, William E. Fort, was a Klan member.”
After Black browbeat witnesses, singling out Catholics for ridicule, and appealing directly to ethnic and religious fears and prejudices, the jury took only one vote and acquitted the itinerant evangelist on the grounds of self-defense. Jurors prayed and read the Bible while deliberating. Newman says Black “gave to Stephenson’s defense his professional devotion” because “he disliked the Catholic Church as an institution and treated prosecution witnesses not just as adversaries but virtually as mortal enemies.”
No wonder Al Smith had problems in '28!

2005-07-15T14:39:00.000Z

The maths of the Hispanic vote

It occurs to my thoroughly lay mind: if one looks at the 2004 exit poll, Bush's support by race was 58%, 44% and 11% of whites, Hispanics and blacks respectively.

One could figure the Hispanic vote as a blend of white and black votes: resort to a little simple algebra (all I can manage!) discovers that the 'blend' is around 70% white and 30% black.

Not a lot one can read into such a crude exercise, obviously. But it's clear that black voters have always been distinct in their behaviour from those of other ethnicities - Irish, Poles, Italians, say. (In supporting in massive majority the Republican Party before 1932, and the Democrats afterwards, with a dead cat bounce for the GOP under Eisenhower.)

And the voting behaviour of Hispanics, taken as a whole, fits into neither mould.

No doubt, the question has been researched, but I can't recall having seen anything. One to ponder further, I think.

MORE

The Pew survey of Hispanic voters in 2004 suggests caution: Hispanics supplied 50% of population growth in the four years 2000-04 but only 25% of the growth in the voting-eligible population (for non-Hispanic whites, the numbers were 29% and 46% respectively).

Only 39% of Hispanics, against 76% of NHWs, were voting-eligible, and they accounted for only 6% of ballots cast (against 5.5% in 2000).

One gaping hole in the analysis here, as well as in the Democracy Corps survey I mentioned on July 11: there is no breakdown of Hispanics by race.

My guess is that Hispanic support for the GOP is disproportionately concentrated amongst white Hispanics - and not just the Cuban exiles in Florida. But, without the analysis, it's impossible to say.

I assume that the absence of analysis by race is deeply deliberate.

2005-07-14T13:13:00.000Z

Energy bill knocks away pillar of New Deal

I've mentioned before (September 4 2004) the story of Samuel Insull and the law that dealt with his particular abuses: Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 - or PUHCA.

Now, it seems (I'd not realised) that both Senate and House versions of HR 6 repeal PUHCA. The versions differ in that

The Senate version couples repeal with some additional oversight authority on utility mergers granted to FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

This may turn out to be something of a fig-leaf, given that FERA is headed by Joseph Kelliher, who apparently

was Dick Cheney's point man in organizing the secret energy task force that drafted much of the energy bill.

My guess is that, for the porkmeisters that are (most of) the Senate Dems, a fig-leaf will do them fine.

But - remember all that fuss there was about Bush dismantling the legacy of FDR's New Deal with his social security privatization proposals?

Well, PUHCA was part of the New Deal: why aren't lefties hot under the collar about its being junked?

Not the old obstructionism kick, surely?

(There are a couple of Cato pieces (here and here) that are anti-PUHCA - natch - but supply narrative and searchables.)

2005-07-14T12:15:00.000Z

Lefty (self?) deception on the energy bill

This horrible bill (HR 6), I fear, is liable to pass in fairly short order. A conference is pending. (It's not a cinch; there's still MTBE to settle. But, then, we thought the Schumer amendment might serve to kill the bankruptcy bill as it had done to previous versions. And we all know what happened to that...)

A lefty piece makes a pathetic showing in trying to exculpate Dems from responsibility for the bill. There are even charts which are supposed to help.

All you need to know about Dem complicity in this act of legislative mayhem is that

the bill would not have passed the House without Dem support (April 23);
cloture in the Senate passed by 92-4.

David Sirota for one, I noted (July 2), is prepared to call the Dem fifth column on their perfidy. I suspect he will be in select company.

(A word that might stand reintroduction to describe them: doughfaces.)

2005-07-14T11:22:00.000Z

More K Street Kapers while minds are on Rove...

OMB Watch highlights yet another nifty idea for parting corporate America from some of its lucre for the benefit of pols and their very good friends, the lobbyists [1].

We're familiar with sunset clauses attaching to tax breaks and their peculiar merits (which I discussed on January 16) for the corporatist government the US now enjoys.

Well, USG has got out proposals to extend the notion: essentially, many kinds of government activity will come up for review every ten years by a sunset commission. And, if it's judged not to be worth the moolah, the commission recommends it be canned.

Ten years, though, is a long time to wait - for a president limited to two four year terms. So administrations will be able to propose reorganisations to a results commission to apply a veneer of respectability.

Now, of course, USG doesn't need a new law to be able to propose to reorganise or terminate a government programme. But - this is the bull point - in government, inertia rules. The new laws are meant, I surmise, to WD40 the wheels of bureaucracy.

At least so far as providing real enough threats and opportunities to government contractors (actual and prospective) to persuade them to stump up contributions to pols and fees to lobbyists. (And perhaps do creative real estate deals...)

Just like a commodities dealer can make money when prices are going up or down - but not if they're static - so pols and lobbyists can get no revenues by leaving things as they are. It's churning - which is frowned on in financial, but not in government, circles.

The Senate bill S 1155, I note, has 21 cosponsors (more than the House bill), all GOP. How much Dem enthusiasm will there be to block them, I wonder?

Not a job title mentioned in the Fats Waller classic, so far as I can recall.

MORE

There was a Rolling Stone story about the proposals on April 21. Who knew?

2005-07-14T08:07:00.000Z

For senators, terrorism is just another excuse for corruption

Especially in the light of the London attacks, you'd have hoped the minds of senators dealing with the homeland security appropriations bill would have been focussed on making the US safer.

They had the opportunity on Tuesday, with the Feinstein amendment to HR 2360. The amendment would have directed the DHS to spend its funds based on assessments of the threat posed to the various parts of the country. High risk, high spend.

Sounds logical. In fact, you wonder why it wasn't part of the legislation that set up the DHS in the first place!

But - oh dear! Prioritising spending by measures of threat would mean redirecting spending from rural backwaters to big cities. A whole bunch of states would find their funding cut.

Now, the duty of any senator of such a state is clear: the maximise his state's take of any cash that is going. Terrorism is not his problem.

Leading the charge toward the trough was Maine RINO Susan Collins, who had an amendment of her own passed. At stake, is Podunk's share of $2-3 billion. A few hours worth of Federal spending - but a slice will make a mighty fine ornament to show off to the rubes back home.

From the Nebraska Nelson, one gets:

small and rural states need to be ready to deal with terrorist attacks

Was that accompanied by a Rummy-style smirk?

In the event, the Feinstein amendment was lost 32-65.

Meanwhile, of course, the indignation of the lefties has been concentrated on the Karl Rove Show. What other fast ones will be pulled on the Hill while attention is elsewhere?

(Some background on the basis of DHS funding: it's horrible.)

2005-07-13T05:19:00.000Z

Pharma and media: a cascade of regulatory capture

Trudy Lieberman (relation of Joe?) of CJR covers in a useful 4,500 word piece the noxious conflicts of interest that warp coverage of pharmaceutical matters.

Essentially, pharma has immense influence over the way the FDA regulates the industry; and both the industry and the FDA have a similar influence over the media coverage of both.

That much, I think we could have guessed. Lieberman does a nice job in revealing how some of the forces have their effect, and - this is quite essential - gives examples with names for following up.

Also admirable, given the pressures she's writing about, is the number of on-the-record quotes that she's garnered.

It's not black and white: but just as the fact that the top papers run pieces on A1 that really hurt the Administration doesn't wash away the positive effect of the totality of coverage, so the fact that media outlets will from time to time run critical stories, including some investigations, on the drug industry doesn't hurt the sterling service the industry gets overall.

The TV network take of pharma ad spend is $1.5 billion a year [1]. (And the operating earnings of their news divisions is? Less, I'd imagine.)

Another driver of the need for publicity by the bucketload is that 77% of products approved are me-too drugs. Somehow, companies have to manufacture selling points that aren't there: same sausage, but a superior sizzle!

Meanwhile, it's All Rove, All the Time on the lefty blogs [2].

All right, Far Too Much of the Time...

The total spend has gone through the roof because of Direct to Consumer (DTC) advertising. This BMJ piece would be a place to start research.
The major revision in the FDA's legislative framework came in the FDA Modernization Act of 1997, S 830, PL 105-115. The voting record shows hardly any opposition - but it went to a conference. Whether this is in the same class as the FCC deregulation of 1996, I couldn't say. But it was more than just GOP and DLC that voted for the FDA bill.

MORE

A 1998 speech, with links, from a consumer group honcho outlines the effect on consumers of the 1997 FDA Act.

2005-07-13T03:39:00.000Z

Online not so big...

Triumphalism over the forces of dead-tree reaction has been a theme of booster bloggers.

Interesting to get a correction from the field of video streaming:

A piece trumpeting AOL says

In 2004, AOL accounted for a fourth of all U.S. streams served, at 24.9 percent...

A quarter of any US market must be huge, you're thinking.

Think again:

AOL's preeminence was in evidence 10 days ago with the streaming of the Live 8 benefit concert, which drew some 5 million users worldwide and at its peak served 175,000 streams simultaneously, a world record.

Jesus! Note that that's 175,000 streams for the entire planet - if it means what it says.

Now, 175,000 is low-end US cable news show territory.

And that's 0.35% of Americans with broadband connections.

(And as a percentage of world connections? No idea. The lack of a decent statistical engine that can fetch so basic a piece of information in the time Google takes to get the lyrics of My Boomerang Won't Come Back (two seconds flat) is a gaping hole in online provision.)

2005-07-13T00:18:00.000Z

Another Schweitzer profile to feed the CW

Who de man?
Schweitzer de man!

Nothing here to suggest otherwise.

For instance, when running for Montana governor, he was assailed by a roorback (or Swift boating) alleging dirty business deals in an attack ad from the Republican Governors Association [1].

Unlike the feeble Kerry campaign in the face of the Swifties' smears,

The Montana Democrats hit back with an ad highlighting the fact that Schweitzer's accusers had felony criminal records, as well as family and business connections to the Republican candidate for governor. The attack ad fell flat on its face.

I still say, though, that, until Schweitzer is reelected [2], he lacks the standing to be Democratic presidential candidate.

(The last three men to be elected president without having previously been elected twice to the same office were Carter, Eisenhower and Hoover.)

But, if all the ABH-ers have this time next year are deadbeats like Kerry and Biden, who knows?

Why would such an 'official' outfit get involved?
His term expires in 2007.

2005-07-12T23:07:00.000Z

McClellan briefing: the limits of press bravery

In Henry V, the inferiority of the French in the field of battle is demonstrated not by their tactical failure in the face of English longbowmen but by their attacking the undefended English camp (4.7.1ff):

Kill the poys and the luggage! ’tis expressly against the law of arms: ’tis as arrant a piece of knavery, mark you now, as can be offer’t...

The regiment of powder-puffs otherwise known as the White House Press Corps [1], after grooming and preening the Administration for four and a half years, and catering to its every need, however gross, has been stamping its feet and flouncing.

Around Scott McClellan.

A mood of something approaching euphoria seems to have arisen in lefty circles. The fact (Romenesko links) that the sad sack was pummelled mercilessly for a whole thirty minutes (bar some relief on other topics - more Jeff Gannons?) is supposedly Agincourt and Waterloo and Gettysburg all rolled into one.

How about this from one of the plumed knights of the press:

it is now clear that 21 months ago, you were up at this podium saying something that we now know to be demonstratively false.

Does McClellan care? He's just doing his job: why should he?

The same questioner goes on

Now, are you concerned that in not setting the record straight today that this could undermine the credibility of the other things you say from the podium?

Rimshot, Professor, please!

On second thoughts, I suspect our intrepid hack may not have been joking.

The $64,000 question for the questioners: after a real badass mauling for the monkey, when will they start with the organ-grinder?

It's hard to forget the George Bush press conference of March 6 2003 (March 13 2003) - on the brink of war, when American journalism, if it existed, would surely have been deployed with vigour.

Whereas, in fact, the softballs were Angelsoft and Bush joked about the presser being scripted. If that was a joke...

When one of the Press Corps milquetoasts confronts Bush about

saying something that we now know to be demonstratively false

- that will be reason for rejoicing.

I'm not holding my breath.

Why the military term? The Corps of Commissionaires, I can understand: those gentlemen were servicemen in earlier manifestations.
Perhaps the derivation is corps de ballet...

MORE

Dana Milbank is in playful mood at McClellan's expense [1]. He puts names to the questioners who, in the official transcript, remain - oh, delicious irony, anonymous!

I haven't, strange to say, noticed any bleating from lefty bloggers about Milbank's latest piece being unfair or bad journalism.

Which, considering the racket made over Milbank's piece on the John Conyers DIY hearing on the Downing Street Memo (June 23), may hint at a double-standard.

Partisan beasts!

The copy editor follows suit with the hed Spokesman Holds Tongue During Intense Grilling.

2005-07-12T21:21:00.000Z

Number and numbers in reporting

Journalism is all about editing, framing, manipulation, inclusion and omission. There is absolutely nothing straightforward about it. It is not flat glass, it's a hall of mirrors.

And that, with the best will in the world: most readers have long concluded that the US (or any other) media does not have the best will in the world.

Some issues are hard to get a handle on: fairly evaluating the extent of USG coercion on media product down the decades, for instance, is a job of work.

Others are easier to handle.

For instance, the characterisation of the number of sources on which an allegation is being based.

Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, for instance, together with the editors on the job (if they were paying attention), misled readers of his infamous Periscope column into thinking that there was more than one source for the allegation that there was to be an official acknowledgement in a Southcom report of that a Koran had been flushed down the bog at Guantanamo [1].

It's not an isolated incident.

Michael Getler, Post ombud, refers to

a front-page story July 4 by reporters Charles Babington and Susan Schmidt that began, "Democrats' hopes of blocking a staunchly conservative Supreme Court nominee on ideological grounds could be seriously undermined by the six-week-old bipartisan deal on judicial nominees, key senators said yesterday."

There was only senator. The other [2], that was supposed to justify the plural, spoke with studied ambiguity.

Another example: the Cleveland Plain Dealer got a hoo-ha going with its decision not to print a stories based on the leak of confidential information. Chocolate soldiers emerged from their editorial funk-holes to deride the PD's cowardice in the face of Patrick Fitzgerald.

And who should be in the van but that journalistic City on a Hill [3], who headlined a piece by David Cay Johnston Most Editors Say They'd Publish Articles Based on Leaks.

The PD did the work that the Times copy editor, presumably in a state of self-induced tumescence at the time, had failed to do: it counted the number of editors making the allegation.

On the most generous reading, there were four of them. Out of how many thousands in the US? How can that be most? You might well ask.

PD editor Doug Clifton wrote to new Times ombud, Byron Calame, to make the point.

No sign of any reply yet in the ombud kinda-sorta blog.

Takeaway message: if readers can't even trust the media

to count; and
to read through stuff before it publishes,

how on earth does the media expect to win sympathy for a Federal shield law, or anything else?

Jack Shafer (May 26) following your humble blogger (May 17) - post hoc sed non propter hoc, goes without saying. Ooops...
Grant the Post hacks their point, that there were two senators who said what they said was said. Is two enough to justify an indefinite plural?
For instance, if a journo had interviewed two Londoners after the bombings who had agreed on a point, would he be justified in saying, Londoners are saying that...?
I'd say, no.
If a paper says, Senators are saying something or other, the implication is that a politically significant minority, at least, are doing so. Now, senators are not like vox pop respondents: some matter much more than others. For instance, if a report in 1956 said that Senators are saying and those senators were Richard Russell and Lyndon Johnson, that was one hell of a politically significant minority. Whereas you could have named twenty senators of the time who, together, had less influence than either Russell or Johnson.
The point, as with most of these questions is, the reader is not informed that the text he is reading is in code. Hinc illae lacrimae...
Whose crap may therefore be showered on the rest of us by action of gravitym without consuming fossil fuels. Environmentally sensitive, is the Gray Lady.

MORE

Note also, this piece in the Carolina Journal - I don't know it - makes a valid point in its dek: Errors in news stories need more explanation than simple corrections.

It highlights two cases which have to be worse than those discussed above because mere negligence is negatived. One concerns an AP story in which Blair was said to have mentioned the Israel/Palestine problem in connection with global terrorism.

He had every reason to have done so. But he hadn't. No explanation from the AP, just an apology.

And a New York Times Editors' Note about an op-ed:

The writer, an Army reserve officer, did not say, "Imagine my surprise the other day when I received orders to report to Fort Campbell, Ky., next Sunday," nor did he characterize his recent call-up to active duty as the precursor to a "surprise tour of Iraq." That language was added by an editor and was to have been removed before the article was published. Because of a production error, it was not. The Times regrets the error.

What?!

A test for 'Barney' Calame.

MORE (July 19)

Calame has provided an explanation amounting to a shaggy dog story. Apparently a genuine chapter of accidents. Case closed.

2005-07-12T06:32:00.000Z

Hugo Black's Checkers speech

I discussed on July 5 the election, with Ku Klux Klan support, of Klansman Hugo Black to the US Senate in 1926.

Black [1] was an enthusiastic Jim Crow liberal [2] who took to the New Deal like a duck to water. And, no doubt, this was noticed in the White House whenever minds turned to Supreme Court nominations.

Eventually, in 1937, there was the court packing bill [3], and the switch in time that save nine, and Horseman Van Devanter decided to call it day.

Black will have been a perfect nom: not only an excellent voting record (one that supported FDR, that is), but a senator: precedent would dictate that, though Black would be perceived as a poke in the eye choice - much as Bolton was for UN Ambassador - his colleagues would confirm his nomination more or less on the nod.

Which, I read in the Beards' America in Midpassage (p363ff), is pretty much what happened - on August 17 1937.

There was Black's Klan connection; but, as the Beards point out,

if affiliations with the Klan were to be thoroughly aired, a number of Senators might actually blush.

Black then celebrated with a holiday in Europe. But then - miracle of miracles! - the soporfic or, as the case may be, toadying press sprang into action.

Not all of it; just the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, owned, then as now, by the Block family. Under Paul Block, one of the many newspaper owners who hated Roosevelt's guts, the rag's Ray Sprigle did some digging and found some dirt on Black (p365):

[The paper] published serially a number of documents and facsimiles purporting to show that Mr Black had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan, that he had received a life membership in that association, and that he had addressed his white-robed brothers in fulsome terms.

Uh oh.

Now, it seems that some senators [4] who had previously allowed senatorial comity and a desire not to rock the boat dictate their vote found a reserve of courage under the goad of Block.

Roosevelt came under a bit of pressure - but extracts from his September 14 press conference [5] suggest his contempt for the media was no less than that of the present incumbent!

When Black gets back from Civilisation, he, too, flips off the press. He's had an idea [6]: he will emulate the top man, and go on the radio.

Which he did, on October 1. There are commercial recordings available of Black's speech but no transcript, that I can find.

This has a word or two on what he said:

On the night of October 1, 1937, Mr. Black made his first and last public remarks on the issue to an audience estimated at 50 million. He admitted that he had been a member of the Klan, but categorically denied that he still was, saying that the "unsolicited card" given to him after his Senate nomination was not considered by him to be "membership of any kind."
"I never used it," he said. "I did not even keep it. Before becoming a Senator I dropped the Klan. I have had nothing to do with it since that time. . . . I have no sympathy with any group which, anywhere or at any time, arrogates to itself the un-American power to interfere in the slightest with complete religious freedom."

It also quotes a New York Times editorial in typically high dudgeon:

At every session of the Court, the presence on the bench of a Justice who has worn the white robe of the Ku Klux Klan will stand as a living symbol of the fact that here the cause of liberalism was unwittingly betrayed.

Undoubtedly, the editorial function at the Times, not to mention its Washington bureau, would have known all along about Black's Klan links. And they had decided to go along by keeping quiet about the matter.

Block, you can imagine, would have been desperately popular among his fellow owners!

(The Times published an interview with Black after his death in which he had a second crack at explaining away his KKK connection [7].)

My impression is that he went down well. Gallup polls apparently [8]

showed the country shifting from a solid majority supporting his resignation to a solid majority supporting his retention of the seat...

But, just in case, Roosevelt chose the first Tuesday in October to give in Chicago what is known as the Quarantine Speech (also here) in which he gets a little frisky with the European dictators.

That, it seems, smothered the Klan story.

Hugo Black makes a neat irony pairing with Walter White, boss at the time of the NAACP. Who himself, furthering the irony, could pass - and did so in researching his magnum opus on lynching, Rope and Faggot - and eventually married a white woman (July 6 2004).
The second most liberal Democrat senator in the 71st Congress, according to his DW-NOMINATE first dimension score.
I note that the party separation is almost complete, as it is today: four Republicans are more liberal than the most conservative Dem (Broussard of LA).
By FDR's first Congress, the 73rd, Black is most liberal senator, and the number of enclave Republicans rises to 8 - but only because of Huey Long, the Zell Miller of his age!
Black's 2nd dimension (race) score is in marked contrast: he's 52nd most 'racially liberal' in the 71st, 62nd in the 73rd. As I've mentioned before, though, the 2nd dimension is generally acknowledged to be unreliable - perhaps more so in congresses where there weren't many votes on racial measures.
An example of such a vote, I discussed on February 12 was that on the Costigan-Wagner antilynching bill in 1935: Black lined up with Bilbo and all but one of the Confederate senators to kill the bill.
Which, I've hypothesised before, was an intentional loss designed to secure a hostile Congress on which the Roosevelt Recession and the general failure of the New Deal to return the country to normalcy could be blamed.
Northerners, say the Beards, but they don't specify a party affiliation.
The only presser dealing with the Black KKK situation that I can see.
What part did the White House spin machine have in his selection of media strategy? No idea, as yet.
He says it was because all the other lawyers and many jurors were Klansmen, and it was a service to his clients that he should be one too.
The same piece has Black saying
Before becoming a senator, I dropped the Klan. I have had nothing to do with it since that time.
This is very much not the impression I got from the Webb article I discussed in the July 5 piece. One could well imagine that politicians would be supplied with paperwork showing them breaking links with the Klan, with a view to deception. But I've no evidence on the point.

MORE

Ray Sprigle got a Pulitzer Prize in 1938 for his work on the Hugo Black/KKK story.

Unfortunately, his pieces don't seem to be anywhere online. The guy did do a series in 1948 - which is online - in which he went down South to pass as Negro to showcase Jim Crow in operation. He didn't get a second Pulitzer for this!

According to this, Sprigle died in a car accident in 1957.

2005-07-11T22:51:00.000Z

Hispanic electorate poll - one or two puzzles

The survey (PDF) of likely Hispanic voters, taken in the first fortnight of June, comes from James Carville's Democracy Corps. It's well worth a squint.

For instance (Q10), given a list of alternatives, respondents were asked to characterise their ethnicity; the largest group by far (53%) said Mexican. The next largest (14%) said Spanish.

The US Census short report on the Hispanic population in 2002 has a chart (p1) showing 67% of the population as of Mexican origin [1]. And it doesn't have a classification of Spanish [2].

Clearly, not many of the 14% come from peninsular Spain. And it's odd given the polemic around the use of the word Hispanic - which is supposed to sound too much like Spain by the grievance grinders who push the point.

The language issue is also interesting: by 79-21, respondents were happier speaking in English (Q2). Only 9% spoke only Spanish at home, against 26% who spoke only English (Q11). Though only 5% watched only Spanish TV against 37% who watched only English (Q12).

The question begged is, What sort of Spanish? On February 6, I mentioned a thesis that looked at the experience of Mexican-Americans who attended a Spanish heritage course at a Mexican university. The greatest difficulty they faced was an inability to communicate in Spanish.

On the politics, Bush's fav/unfav (Q14) is 42-54; Democracy Corps main polling report has a fav/unfav of 48-50 (Q9).

Sounds pretty good, all told, given that, according to the (rather controversial!) exit poll, Bush scored 44-56 among Hispanics - the survey respondents said they voted 37-58 (Q78).

Even better news for the Dems, though; on the warm/cold feelings question (Q15), the parties rated D:60.1-R:47.8. The Bush-Kerry margin is less impressive - 49.0-52.8 - but these numbers don't come with confidence intervals [3].

And the Congressional intentions are even more striking: 57-26, they said they would vote for the D if the election were today. As were party identifications (Q117) - a similar split.

On social issues, they are suprisingly liberal on abortion (Q83) with a majority supporting it in all (13%) or most (38%) cases; and 40% say homosexuality should be accepted by society (Q75).

It's eminently plausible that more residents of Mexican origin are ineligible and fewer Mexican eligibles are likely voters than those from other Hispanic segments. (Though some sort of reconciliation between the two percentages would be nice.)
Other Hispanic on the Census chart is 6.5%.
The warmest of the pols and parties mentioned is Bill Clinton at 64.2%. He'd be into his fourth term now if it wasn't for that pesky 22nd Amendment! (The general poll warm/cold question (Q15) doesn't ask about Clinton.)
Kerry has more to squirm about: when asked to pick among various reasons why he lost, the top answer was Not clear on what he stood for from 39%; and the third answer, No plans or ideas on what he would do, from 21%, is downright bizarre. WS Gilbert's Major-General had fewer ideas!

2005-07-11T18:07:00.000Z

Klein's Hillary-smut a tribute to the Swifties

The VRWC's propaganda operation wins even when it loses.

Thus, Mark Klein's The Truth About Hillary gets widely panned by conservative commentators, and still makes it to #2 on the New York Times bestseller list (Post piece).

Klein's book is clearly an operation in pushing the envelope. It makes allegations that are grossly implausible - that Bill would need to rape Hillary is utterly ridiculous [1] - but sufficiently eye-catching in a supermarket tabloid way to recoup the costs of the venture.

It allows the likes of O'Reilly to cloak themselves in sanctimony by refusing to touch it - and loudly boast of their Simon-purity, of course.

And it allows the pollsters down the line to test just how much mud has stuck.

Just to ensure we're on the same page as Klein,

the publisher, Penguin's Sentinel imprint, described the book in its catalogue as one that would do to Clinton's 2008 presidential chances what the Swift Boat Veterans did to John Kerry.

Klein has a nice line in Rummy smirks, to judge from his comment:

A bit of marketing hyperbole that probably went too far.

Will Klein be allowed back into the fold of regular hacks after his experiments with the truth, I wonder?

On what Kerry did or did not do on the Mekong in the 60s, the evidence was scant. On Hillary's chronic weakness at the knees in the presence of the Love Machine, there's a mountain.

2005-07-11T17:35:00.000Z

SCOTUS abortion ready-reckoner

The Times helps a little.

Essentially, overturning Roe v Wade requires a two vote swing compared with Planned Parenthood v Casey. Assuming Rehnquist goes - and O'Connor doesn't stay as Chief Justice [1] - that requires a slate of three sucessful conservative SCOTUS nominations.

Overturning Stenberg v Carhart, the Nebraska partial birth abortion case, needs only a one vote swing. And Ayotte v Planned Parenthood on a NH parental notification law is down for next term.

Gonzales, presumably, is more reliable on these adjectival abortion laws than on overturning Roe.

What's up with that?

2005-07-10T06:50:00.000Z

Nothing Plain about the Dealer

The tale - we have a Times piece and an E&P piece - is that the Cleveland Plain Dealer is

withholding publication of two major investigative articles because they were based on illegally leaked documents and could lead to penalties against the paper and the jailing of reporters.

In the light of the Judith Miller jailing - editor Doug Clifton certainly namechecks Miller.

At first, it sounds like a phoney: if a crime has been committed (by the leaker), it's been committed already, and CD reporters are witnesses. Publication of the stories would make no difference.

There is a journalist's shield (or reporter's privilege) in Ohio, and this page has more information.

Apparently,

In order to overcome a privilege, a party must show that the information was relevant, could not be obtained from alternative sources, and furthered a compelling need.

And, also,

A reporter may be found to be in civil contempt for refusing to testify before a grand jury concerning a published interview where the subpoena was not issued for the purpose of harassment.

My suspicion, based on this sketchy information, is that, until there's a case that's reached the grand jury, no reporter could be compelled to give testimony.

And, without the reporters' spilling their guts, there's nothing to justify a grand jury hearing.

Whereas, if the paper had published the story, there might be.

That's enough reaching. Ed

2005-07-10T05:57:00.000Z

Journalist shield laws - state by state references, and Federal proposals

This page identifies the sections of each state's code that contain the text of the shield law (or reporter's privilege).

No links; but uncovering these provisions without such references is a job of work.

This page has many useful links on cases in which Federal subpoenas have been issued to reporters, and the various bills shield bills knocking around Congress.