The Charisma of Calvin Coolidge
Speaking of Coolidge, I don’t think I’ve ever posted this Coolidge speech, the first film of a presidential speech with sound.
Pure charisma!
Van Buren
Sarah Kliff links to a study that correctly notes the tendency of historians to give high rankings to presidents who kill a lot of Americans in wars during their tenure. That’s a problem both for historical analysis and because it provides incentives to current presidents to believe they need an aggressive foreign policy to be remembered fondly. It’s certainly true that one measure of greatness can be the ability of a president to lead a country through horrible times. That’s one reason why Lincoln rates so high, as well as Franklin Roosevelt. But it’s hardly the only standard. FDR would be ranked very high had he left office in 1940. Moreover, I think there’s some name for the fallacy that argues that we should reconsider low-ranked presidents because we assume their inability to start a war means they are unjustly forgotten.
The danger is that modern presidents understand these incentives. Those who want peace should take historians` ratings of presidents seriously. Beyond that, we should stop celebrating, and try to persuade historians to stop celebrating, presidents who made unnecessary wars. One way to do so is to remember the unseen: the war that didn`t happen, the war that was avoided, and the peace and prosperity that resulted. If we applied this standard, then presidents Martin van Buren, John Tyler, Warren G. Harding, and Calvin Coolidge, to name four, would get a substantially higher rating than they are usually given.
Of course, Kliff and the study’s authors make one big mistake. There’s a reason we’ve forgotten about Martin Van Buren. He was a terrible president. His handling of the Panic of 1837 was bumbling in the extreme and while perhaps Jackson created that economic panic, it’s not like Van Buren wasn’t Old Hickory’s closest adviser. Politics within the nascent Democratic Party created that crisis. He also oversaw the Cherokee Removal on the Trail of Tears. Van Buren may be one of the greatest pure politicians in American history, but he was a lousy president.
How bad was Van Buren?
Libertarian crank Jeffrey Rodgers Hummel has called Van Buren our greatest president because he did nothing at all to alleive the Panic, among other reasons. This is a man who also lauds such legends as Rutherford B. Hayes and Grover Cleveland. So if completely ineffective governing is your thing, you love Van Buren.
Meanwhile, Tyler did more than almost any president to start the Civil War by thinking he could gain election for a full term by annexing Texas, a strategy that included naming John C. Calhoun Secretary of State, who immediately embarrassed the nation by issuing the Pakenham Letter (interesting analysis of the Pakenham Letter here). Harding was atrocious in a number of ways and arguably the least competent individual in the history of the office. I’m at least willing to hear an argument that Coolidge is underrated given his freeing of the many civil liberties prisoners from World War I and less godawful racial attitudes than most Republicans of the day (including his eugenicist successor Herbert Hoover); on the other hand, he did sign the Immigration Act of 1924, not to mention that he entered the national spotlight by busting a police union strike.
So while there’s some truth to the idea that we overrate presidents based upon the number of Americans they kill, it’s also important to realize that the lack of sending Americans off to war doesn’t necessarily mean that a president is inherently good. Most of our presidents have been mediocre to awful. Usually this reflects more upon the times than the individuals, but it’s only been in the post-World War II world that Americans have demanded presidents play the predominant role in determining American political life. That means there’s a lot of our first 31 presidents who did little of note, domestically or internationally.
Levon Helm
In my mind, The Band has the greatest two album stretch of any band in rock and roll history. Those first two albums are both perfect, not to mention their work backing Dylan. They combined fine lyricism with a combination of voices and amazing music. The first two of those voices, Richard Manuel and Rick Danko, destroyed themselves through substance abuse. Levon Helm tried to do this as well but he survived.
Levon Helm is in the final stages of a fight with cancer. I am hearing various reports on whether he has passed, but it will be soon. And it is very sad.
Labor Notes
Too many good labor stories out there to talk about them separately.
1. I’m sure that the union-based recall challenge against Scott Walker will be super successful so long as the supporters of the Democratic challenger keep attacking public sector unions. Keep up the spirit of Madison!
2. In the Second Gilded Age, the only natural response from a massively profitable multinational corporation after an explosion in one of its plants killed 7 workers is to demand huge concessions from the union.
3. Excellent conversation between Josh Eidelson and Richard Kahlenberg over why labor rights should be considered civil rights. Particularly interesting is the argument that current labor law is so broken that we should consider scrapping it.
4. The future of American jobs looks fantastic. Can we start hiring child labor too?
The Next Step in Destroying Academic Labor
Our highly valued commenter John Protevi leads us to the latest plan to eviscerate the humanities: get undergraduates to grade papers for free!
Koller, an artificial intelligence specialist who has taught computer science at Stanford since getting her Ph.D. there at age 25, said that the challenge of assessing student work in humanities-oriented MOOCs could be addressed through a system of “calibrated peer review.” Human readers, plucked from the ranks of the course registrants, could read short essays written by their peers and rate them according to a rubric developed by the professor. A critical mass of deputized students should be able to evaluate an essay “at least as [well] as a pretty good [teaching assistant],” Koller said in an interview.
I think I’ve written about Koller before though I can’t find any references to it, but I love the idea of a university professor spending her career dedicated to helping universities not hire academic labor. It must be very rewarding. And hey, get rid of all the TAs and we can hire another administrator for 125,000 a year!
The War on Women: Rhode Island Edition
Rhode Island seems like it would be the nation’s bluest state. While an former Republican holds the governor’s office, Democrats dominate the legislature by a 6-1 margin.
But it doesn’t work out that way in reality. Two major factors create some schizophrenic politics in Rhode Island. First, because Rhode Island is a one-party state, it means the Democratic Party holds almost no control over its members and that without that control, it tolerates any number of beliefs under the Democratic tent. Related, it means that any politician with ambition has to be a Democrat. Second, the nation’s most Catholic state means that culturally conservative Catholics can win elections.
My 9 months in Rhode Island has witnessed all sorts of disturbing events from a state this dominated by Democrats. Not only has the state declared war on public workers, slashing pensions and balancing the budget on the back of its employees, but it also passed a draconian voter ID law of the type you would expect from Arizona or Mississippi. Maybe the state’s biggest story in 2012 has been a young woman forcing her high school to take down the Christian prayer located on the wall of Cranston High School West; the powerful Democratic Rep from Cranston, Peter Palumbo called her “an evil little thing” on a local radio talk show.
Now you have Democratic Rep. Karen MacBeth calling for a forced ultrasound bill before a woman can have an abortion, citing her own anger that Planned Parenthood didn’t help her more when she was a single mother.
I don’t think this is going to pass. The chairwoman of the House Judiciary Committee, Edith Ajello, has also introduced a bill prohibiting the state to interfere in decisions regarding a woman’s pregnancy. I don’t believe Gov. Lincoln Chaffee has said anything publicly about this, but he is known to be pro-choice.
I highlight this story for a few reasons. First, to note that the war on women isn’t only a Republican war. Second, to question the “more Democrats” mantra of the netroots, something that should work in principle, but hasn’t always proven so successful in reality. And third, because politics in Rhode Island are a fascinating labyrinth of weirdness. It should be a progressive place, but I haven’t seen too much evidence of it.
Honduras: The Vanguard of the Republican Party
I now see from whom the Republican Party finds inspiration.
There is a terrible legislation being considered in Honduras which would send women to jail if they use the morning after pill. There is no exception for victims of sexual assault. The global activist group Avaaz is sounding the alarm on this terrible legislation, which is being actively debated in the Honduran Congress and may be “just days away.”
According to Avaaz, the one man who can stop this bill in its tracks is the President of the Congress. They have mounted a pressure campaign to convince President Juan Orlando Hernandez to squash this bill. As part of this campaign, the are circulating an online petition to show the Honduran government that this kind of anti-women legislation is not acceptable.
And don’t tell me Republicans aren’t also inspired by the massive overcrowding on Honduran prisons.
Controversy, Part 2
Last May, djw and I went to the Ohio Historical Society in Columbus to see the exhibit “Controversy.” In this exhibit, the OHS took 5 of their most disturbing objects and displayed them with minimal interpretation, allowing us to come to our own conclusions about these items. At the end of the 5 rooms, we could explore the history of the various objects, which included a KKK robe, a box from a mental aslyum that people were stuffed into, the state’s first electric chair, a weird deal to get kids to stop sucking their thumbs, and this amazing reusable condom from 1860.
At the end of the exhibit, visitors could leave their responses to the objects. More than one person said they wanted to meet the man who could fill that condom! The thing is in such good shape because a riverboat captain used it as a bookmark, of all things. Here’s a full review of the exhibit, with photos of some of the other objects, as well as the minimalist interpretation.
I post this now because the OHS has followed up on this extraordinarily successful exhibit (and financially lucrative, an important given the collapse in state funding for the institution under John Kasich) with Controversy 2, which includes a set of bowling pins for children, the heads of which each have a different ethnic stereotype. I would go and review it for the blog but I no longer live in Ohio. It looks pretty amazing though and I recommend any Buckeye State readers to check it out.
Robert Caro
The two Bobs, Gottlieb and Caro, have an odd editorial relationship, almost as contentious as it is mutually admiring. They still debate, for example, or pretend to, how many words Gottlieb cut from “The Power Broker.” It was 350,000 — or the equivalent of two or three full-size books — and Caro still regrets nearly every one. “There were things cut out of ‘The Power Broker’ that should not have been cut out,” he said to me sadly one day, showing me his personal copy of the book, dog-eared and broken-backed, filled with underlining and corrections written in between the lines. Caro is a little like Balzac, who kept fussing over his books even after they were published.
Cut out 350,000 words? Was the book originally supposed to be 2000 pages?
Thing is, I’d probably like to read those 350,000 words.
This also made me laugh:
He was always writing, and even then he wrote long. His sixth-grade essays dwarfed everyone else’s. His senior thesis at Princeton — on existentialism in Hemingway — was so long, he was told, that the college’s English department subsequently instituted a rule limiting the number of pages a senior could turn in.
The Romneys Truly Are Just Like You and Me
I never knew how hard Mitt and Ann Romney had it:
“They were not easy years. You have to understand, I was raised in a lovely neighborhood, as was Mitt, and at BYU, we moved into a $62-a-month basement apartment with a cement floor and lived there two years as students with no income.
“It was tiny. And I didn’t have money to carpet the floor. But you can get remnants, samples, so I glued them together, all different colors. It looked awful, but it was carpeting.
“We were happy, studying hard. Neither one of us had a job, because Mitt had enough of an investment from stock that we could sell off a little at a time.
“The stock came from Mitt’s father. When he took over American Motors, the stock was worth nothing. But he invested Mitt’s birthday money year to year — it wasn’t much, a few thousand, but he put it into American Motors because he believed in himself. Five years later, stock that had been $6 a share was $96 and Mitt cashed it so we could live and pay for education.
It’s really hard, having to put yourself through college by selling your stocks….
I’m fairly sure that selling that stock was just as hard for them as it was for me to work at a full time job when I went to school. I can’t even imagine the pain I would have felt if I’d had to pick up the phone and take some profits instead of working nights and going to classes in the daytime.
Now, the truth is that Ann and Mitt had their first children during this time, so they were up all night as well. I suppose I might have done that too, but it would have been unaffordable for me to go to school and work full time and raise a child so I was very glad to have birth control easily available through Planned Parenthood. But then I’m fairly sure that Ann and Mitt wouldn’t have approved of my sluttish co-ed lifestyle. I was unmarried, after all. And with no stock to call my own. At the very least, I should have first been married at the age of 19 to a man with a famous political name who was groomed to be president of the United States. That’s how nice young ladies “struggle.”
