Not the O.K. Corral

My recent reading includes THE LAST GUNFIGHT by Jeff Guinn.

This is a 2011 publication, from Simon & Schuster, about the showdown popularly known as the Gunfight at the OK Corral. More broadly the book is about Tombstone AZ and its surroundings in its heyday as a mining town.

And a mining town is what it was. Its brief golden age began with a major strike in 1878 of so-called “horn silver”  in the San Pedro Valley. The location of the strike was too far away from Tucson for that town to serve as a home base for the wave of prospectors who inevitably followed the first strike. So Tombstone grew up -- impression one gets from this book is that it almost immediately sprouted up out of the Arizona Territory desert floor!  and fulfilled just that function.

At its height it was important enough that when a San Francisco based acting troupe did a tour of the southwest, bringing a performance of the hot new comic opera “HMS Pinafore” to the unwashed – Tombstone was inevitably one of its stops.

But nowadays we only remember Tombstone for the confrontation on October 26, 1881, when seven men faced off, four to three, separated by only six feet of air, and fired about thirty shots at one another over the course of about as many seconds. It would have been four against four except that Ike Clanton, who had been very busy for hours provoking this confrontation, actually fled the scene just as guns were being drawn, or perhaps even five to four had not another of their companions likewise made himself scarce.

Ike Clanton’s brother and two of his friends were killed in that exchange. Among the party opposing, Doc Holliday and two of the Earps were seriously injured. Only Wyatt Earp walked away unscathed.

The fight was not literally at the OK Corral, although it is known as the “Gunfight at the OK Corral” because that became the title of a movie in 1957, which was still the golden age for westerns.  John Sturges’ movie made no pretense of historical accuracy.

Nonetheless, the connection between this confrontation (a block away) and that particular corral is not entirely accidental.  At one point in the crowded timeline leading to those terrible 30 seconds, the Clantons and their allies postured in that corral, in what Guinn calls “the worst tradition of overweening male pride” they were there “boasting loudly about what they would do if the Earps were foolish enough to bother them any further.”

There are a lot of reasons to recommend this book. I won’t recite them now, though. I’ll simply say that it inspires thought not only about what happened, but about how we know what happened, about the epistemological troubles in sorting through the conflicting accounts.

A Critique of Gambling with Borrowed Chips

In The Federal Lawyer, the monthly FBA publication, Jane Gravelle of the Congressional Research Service has written a critique of my recent book on the financial crisis of 2007-08, Gambling with Borrowed Chips.

Here is a link to the book.

Here is a link to the review section of The Federal Lawyer for June. Gravelle’s review begins at p. 3 of that pdf.  If you are reading this after that link has lapsed, try here instead.

As you will see at either site, Gravelle had some kind words about my book as “readable and entertaining.” She enjoyed the historical material, and appreciated my explanations of “a lot of concepts and practices.” So if my book is ever re-issued with a dust jacket, we may be able with judicious editing to mine this review for blurbs.

She spends most of her review arguing with my book though: arguing in particular that my analysis of the cause of the crisis, and my prescriptions for avoiding its like in the future, are thoroughly misguided. Thus, she has my gratitude for giving me a wonderful excuse for discussing that analysis and those prescriptions further, and I will take advantage of the same in a series of posts you’ll be able to read right here next week.

For now, though, I’ll limit myself to an observation about the kind of book this is. Gravelle writes, “Gambling with Borrowed Chips is not a scholarly work, in that it has no references or footnotes.”  

   

 

Yes, it is true that I did not use the usual scholarly apparatus of footnotes and bibliography. This isn’t because I am unfamiliar or disrespectful of that apparatus. I have employed it in earlier books, and may well employ it again if I give this particular argument the fuller work-up I believe it deserves. Still … this book was but a précis for some later complete scholarly study, and a précis that might indeed attract readers who are put off my small-print notes and lengthy lists of references.

The text itself does contain references to the works on which I depend, more-or-less explicit or allusive, it is true. Barney Frank’s great whistling-past-the-graveyard quotation, "There’s no immediate crisis,” may be found in The Washington Post for September 7, 2008, for example, as my book clearly indicates.

As to scholarly works, in my chapter “Sound Money” I allude to the work of economic-historian Robert Higgs on the unusual length of the Great Depression and the economic consequences of the Second World War. I also cite no less of an authority than Ludwig von Mises on the aftermath of the Bretton Woods monetary conference.

My own credentials are not those of an academic economist (or economic historian).  They are those of a reporter whose beat it has been for many years now to cover the world of finance, first at HedgeWorld (2000 to 2008) and more recently at The Hedge Fund Law Report and as the proprietor of Enfield Editorial Service. I believe this has been as valuable a perch whence to observe and learn as any other I could have occupied through the key period.  

That will do for the kind of book, and the kind of author, involved. Next week, we shall get to the substantive issues between Gravelle and your humble servant.

Romney Steamroller

My best guess at present is that the Romney steamroller, working at full power since its victory in New Hampshire,  will likely end the nomination fight fairly soon. Any kind of win in South Carolina on Tuesday ends the matter.

We will then have to see whether there is any sizeable number of anti-Romneyites who are willing to leave the party rather than get behind him. I have participated in on-line message boards in which some fervent anti-Romney types are threatening such a bolt. (Yes, it is shocking how I fritter time away.) I've seen enough of it to raise a question in my mind. If Santorum or someone of equal or greater prominence lets such a 3d party use him as its figurehead -- things look good for Obama.

That means, in terms of my "long-cycle versus short cycle" dilemma, explained here, that the "long cycle" has trumped the short. If Obama gets a second term, things will change in a very big way in coming years, whatever happens to the composition of Congress. We will be a very different country four years from now than we have been before.

If (1) the Romney steamroller works its way in terms of the nominating fight, and (2) there doesn't emerge any significant intra-party split as a result ... I will be left in uncertainty. A one-on-one Romney/Obama contest may well be decided by factors we don't know anything about yet, by events that will take place between now and November. But if it is decided by such contingencies, that would mean -- heaven forbid -- that we'd have to do without the whole idea of long-term predictive cycles.

The Democratic Party's Nominating Convention: 1896

Once in awhile I give you, dear reader, the dubious benefit of a brief random quotation from my recent reading.  That will be the case today.

I take this from THE TRAGEDY OF WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN, by Gerard N. Magliocca.

The leading obstacle to Bryan's nomination came from 'Gold Democrats,' who backed President Cleveland's policies, but they soon realized that they were outnumbered.  The president opposed Bryan's candidacy and told his supporters that 'a cause worth fighting for is worth fighting for to the end.'  Neverthelss, by 1896, Cleveland did not have much influence with the party faithful.  A Gold Democrat describing the scene in Chicago said that for 'the first time, I can undersand the scenes of the French Revolution.'  The conservative senator David Hill of New York, in a desperate plea to the delegates, said: 'I am a Democrat, but not a revolutionist.  My mission here today is to unite, not to divide -- to build up, not to destroy.'

Beginning a Discussion of the Supreme Court Term

Another term of the U.S. Supreme Court has come and gone.  Again, the court has issued a lot of decisions that are, in their own several ways, fascinating.  There is one that leaps out at me this year as THE decision of the term, in relation to my own usual net of obsessions, and I'll discuss that tomorrow.  Today, I'll do a round-up of others of this term's cases, in no particular order. 

I'll say nothing more about cases I've discussed in earlier blog entries, such as STANFORD v. ROCHE, the patent-law case I discussed on June 17.

1) Flores-Villar v. U.S.:  This is a sex discrimination case (the sort that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made her reputation litigating in the 1970s) in an immigration context.  It came out as a 4-4 decision, because Justice Kagan recused herself.   For these particular litigants, that means that the decision of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals remains the law.

The case turned on a quirk in US law regarding citizenship.  A child born out of the US, to a mother who is a US citizen, is a U.S. citizen, regardless of such matters as her marital status or the father's citizenship etc.  What then of a child born out of the U.S.,  to a mother who is not a US citizen, but with a father (acknowledged paternity) who is a U.S. citizen, in circumstances in which the parents are not married?

Under the law, this child is not a citizen of the US unless his citizen father had resided in the U.S. for at least 5 years after his 14th birthday. Thus, by obvious arithmetic, no one can become a US citizen in this way whose father is not at least 19 at the time of the child's birth.

Why are there different rules for citizen fathers than for citizen mothers?  Does that violate the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment?  This was the contested question -- contested under a body of law known as the "intermediate tier" doctrine, regarding sex discrimination.  Such a distinction is seen as suspect, but as somewhat less suspect than racial discrimination.  The appellate court upheld the law, and SCOTUS didn't muster the votes to change that. 

2) Bond v. United States.  This was the federalism case of the term, arising out of a bizaare mis-application of an anti-terrorism statute.   Sex-in-the-suburbs.  In this case the suburbs of Philadelphia.  Carol Anne Bond of Landsdale, PA was ticked off that her husband had impregnated a neighbor, and struck back by placing caustic substances on various surfaces she knew the Jezebel in question was likely to touch, including Jezebel's car door and mailbox.

Bond was convicted of a federal crime, violating the Chemical Weapons Convention Implementation Act of 1998.  You can almost hear her introducing herself to the other inmates.  "I'm Bond.  Carol Bond."

The decision, by Justice Kennedy, used some sweeping pro-10th-amendment language, explicitly giving the right to "vindicate" 10th amendment interests to individuals.  "Her rights in this regard do not belong to a state."

It is possible that the Court expects that next term it will overturn Obamacare or crucial parts of it on federalism grounds, and it saw this case as a helpful set-up to that decision.

3) Skinner v., Switzer.  A petition for a Texas inmate on death row.  Always dramatic.  In this case, it was Justice Ginsburg who wrote a 6 to 3 opinion that said that convicted inmates seeking access to DNA evidence in an effort to prove their innocence may use a federal civil-rights lawsuit in order to do so.

4)  Boeing v. United States.  The court somewhat limited the range of the "state secrets" doctrine in the course of contract disputes.  Further, hearteningly (for those of us who are not lovers of "state secrets" in general) it did so unanimously, in an opinion by Justice Scalia.

It is a rare case involving a defense-industry contracts dispute that draws such a range of amicus briefs, including a brief from the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation Inc., "in support of neither party," in which the Foundation's lawyers maintained that the court should inquire into the foundations of the state secrets doctrine itself, and should characterize it as a "common-law evidentiary rule of nonconstitutional provenance."   

I don't see any place in the opinion where Scalia takes them up on that.  He sticks to his knitting, in an opinion that declines to enforce a contract against private parties in a situation in which the invocation of the state-secret doctrine has precluded a prima facie valid defense to the governments claims.

5)  Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Assn.  Sale of video games to minors comes under the protection of the first amendment.

The cool thing about this case is that earlier in the proceedings it was known as Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants.  Given subsequent revelations, the puns there write themselves.
The really big case of the term ... tomorrow.

Why I Am Not A Conservative, continued

I tried recently to discuss some of the material in yesterday's post with a self-identified conservative.  He replied that he didn't think Goldwater's observation about liberals being "in a hurry" had anything to do with Linda Brown and the state's decision that she had to walk one mile, through a railroad switchyard, rather than attend the neighborhood school with white classmates.

My interlocutor said, further, that this should have been obvious even from the passage I quoted.  He re-pasted that quote, emphasizing the phrase "the satisfaction of economic wants".  Then he asked (this took my breath away):  "Linda going to school with her white neighbors has much of anything to do with 'economic wants,' how?"

The idea behind this question, if I understand it at all, is that Goldwater was defining liberalism as a view exclusively concerned with economic want.  Linda's wants were something other than economic, thus they didn't pertain to the liberal-versus-conservative riff he was engaged in, in that passage.

I gave the obvious answer:   people growing up together make connections with each other. They become friends, or at least get accustomed to each other, and become part of a common network. That network, in later years, has a lot to do with who gets what job. There's an old saying. "it's not what you know, it's whom you know." Segregating people from their earliest years helps ensure that the personal networks will be separate. It ensures that white people in the position to make employment decisions will think first of those whom they know best -- those they went to school with. Coercively enforced separation enforces inequality, as to economic wants. That is one reason why the expression "separate but equal" was always a lie.  That lie is what Goldwater was supporting when he called for a constitutional amendment that would undo the Brown decision. But there is a broader point here.  What the heck is an "economic want"?  A specific kind of want?  What would be a non-economic want, then?  A spiritual want?

Economics is "the study of how society allocates scarce resources and goods."

Resources are always scarce, however sacred or spiritual may be the use I want to make of them.  Land is a scarce resource, whether I want to build a factory on it, a school, or a church.  None of those three types of building is "non-economic."  Any of the three of them may be understood economically, or understood spiritually, but none of them is non-economic!  Likewise, no wants are non-economic.

Suppose the greatest want of my life is that I could pray more often.  Why can't I pray now?  Is it because my life is too hectic, and I haven't been able to set aside some time in which to focus on my gratitude to God?  If that's the problem, it is an economic problem -- I want to rearrange the use of my time, a limited resource.  How much am I willing to pay to get that extra time?  From which of my other activities am I prepared to take it.  That is the economists way of looking at such questions and, I submit, it is an essential way of looking at them.

To look down on economics, as somehow an unfitting or unspiritual study, as both Goldwater and my interlocutor seemed to do, is unserious at best and pragmatically disastrous for the society that engages in it at worse.  This may get to the heart of why I am not a conservative.

Colonel Roosevelt and Secretary Bryan

"Colonel Roosevelt" is the title of a new book by Edmund Morris, the final installment in his series on the life of Theodore Roosevelt, focusing on TR's post-Presidential years. I admit up-front I haven't read the book. I have only read the paraphrases and quotations from it provided by some reviewers, including Henry S. Cohn, who reviewed it for the latest issue of The Federal Lawyer.

Cohn paraphrases Morris thus: "Roosevelt could abide neither Wilson nor his secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, who viewed the war as an exclusively European affair. Roosevelt spoke out against the 'pacifist' Bryan until he was removed from the cabinet in June 1915 and, in April 1917, Wilson asked Congress to declare war." The scare quotes around the adjective "pacifist" there are appropriate.

Yes, unfortunately for clarity the term sometimes means anyone who is arguing against any particular military intervention, and Bryan was certainly doing that as a member of Wilson's cabinet. But the term is more appropriately used for a broader, principled, commitment to a laying down of arms among nations. In that sense, neither Bryan nor Wilson was ever a pacifist. Indeed, it is well to remember that Bryan seemed to be threatening the UK with war in the course of his famous "cross of gold" speech.

It was the Bank of England that, in the imagery of that speech, was threatening mankind with crucifixion to preserve the one-metal backing for money. It was imperialism, as Bryan saw it, and "the issue of 1776 over again". At least some of Bryan's 'pacifism' in the context of 1913-15 arose from his suspicion that Anglophiles like Roosevelt were on the wrong side, the side of the still regnant world-straddling Empire. His own sympathies were with the rising challengers to that empire -- in this instance, the Germans.

New York's Prominence

Years ago, some time in the 1990s, I began a ms on American history, aimed at the high school level, in the hope of selling it to a textbook publisher.

I fished about a bit for publishers, without any luck, then settled into some other project and forgot this one.

I mention this because I've just now rediscovered the long-forgotten partial ms. Leafing through it, my eyes fell upon my brief attempt to acknowledge, and to give some but not too much credence to, geographical explanations of NYC's rise to world prominence.

I observed that the Hudson River gave the holders of its southern extremity, from the era of Dutch dominance to the present, easy access to fertile lands along the long valley. Also, in English colonial times, this was "a highway to the lucrative fur trade and it could carry an intrepid traveller most of the distance to 'New France,' or Quebec. What is more: Hudson's tributary, the Mohawk, offered access to the western frontier."

I also noted, at a remove: "Also customary at this point is the observation that New York was positioned, in colonial times especially, to serve as the intermediary between Massachusetts and Virginia. As a geographical explanation for New York's rise to prominence this is unhelpful. First, it is also true of Baltimore and Philadelphia (which, likewise, possess fine natural harbors.) Second, it is true of virtually any point anywhere that it serves as an 'intermediary' between someone to its north and someone else to its south, so no site derives any especial benefit from that fact."

Okay, not a great piece of writing. But I have retained the ambivalent attitude toward geo-historical explanations that you can hear in my voice there.

Agawam, Mass.

In recent weeks I have been making regular contributions to a western Massachusetts community newspaper known as the Agawam Advertiser News.

I have long been perplexed and saddened by the fact that when one travels in the US, and picks up different papers along the way, one reads largely the same stories. The various 'local' papers fill most of their papers, and certainly all the ones near the front, with stories from Reuters and AP. Thus, such newspapers find themselves in serious economic difficulties. Anyone with access to the internet can go to Reuters' website. When not cut out the middleman?

I mention that only in order to acknowledge that the Agawam Advertiser doesn't have that problem. Nobody disintermediates it. First, it has no online presence. Unless you are willing to pay the dollar for the dead tree version, you won't read the stories it offers.

Second, and related, there are no wire stories. The stories are local in both topic and conception. The front page of this week's issue includes a story headlined "Council nixes zone change," written by Gregory Scibelli. The lede? "Resident concern and perceived lack of benefit to the community led the Agawam City Council this week to rule against a zone change at the corner of Maple and Spencer Streets."

If you don't know or care about the corner of Maple and Spencer in Agawam, Mass. -- well, you are presumably not the audience for that particular story. You'd rather read about who is going to be the next chair of various important committees of Congress in Washington? Go for it -- but the Agawam Advertiser carries no wares in that overcrowded marketplace. That is the better part of its charm.

What about the back pages? You won't find here reviews of the latest books on the New York Times best seller list. When there are book reviews, they involve local publishers, local authors, and local issues. One of my own recent contributions was a review of a book by an Amherst College professor on slavery in the Connecticut River in Massachusetts in colonial days.

So: the Agawam Advertiser News is an institution for which I believe the people of Agawam and environs have reason to give thanks on this thanksgiving day weekend.

Lincoln and McClellan

I've been reading a book by John C. Waugh, Lincoln and McClellan: The Troubled Partnership Between a President and his General.

Here's Waugh's website with the neat holograph of Waugh himself.

His story in Lincoln and McClellan is a somewhat familiar one to civil war buffs, but good stories always bear re-telling. Here is one sample paragraph:

"The new general-in-chief would not fight; he would continue to prepare. So all would continue to be quiet along the Potomac, and that was no longer generally considered a desirable condition but a curse. If there was quiet on the Potomac, there was very little silence from the people in the North. The public outcry was 'On to Richmond!' which the influential New York Tribune was running daily as its masthead."

About sixty pages later, we get to the climactic showdown between Generals McClellan and Lee.

"Displaying a quality of audacity that McClellan believed he lacked, Lee attacked on June 26, on a very clear, still, midafternoon....Lee's army slammed into McClellan's right flank north of the Chickahominy at Mechanicsville, opening a bloody week of fighting that would become known as the Seven Days battles. Porter fought the Confederates at Mechanicsville on this first day, and the battle was at best a draw -- in effect, therefore a Confederate failure. McClelland pulled back to Gaine's Mill, where an implacable Lee assailed him again the next day, June 27, in a fierce battle beginning at noon and lasting nine hours. McClellan got the worst of the encounter and the next day withdrew his army farther down the James to Savage's Station. Lee followed."

Book Note: Henry Clay

David S. and Jeanne T. Heidler have written a new biography of Henry Clay, the man who coined the phrase "I had rather be right than President."

David Heidler is a scholar who has been associated with Colorado State University since 1994. Here is his resume. Here is hers. Jeanne Heidler teaches at the Air Force Academy.

And here is a review of the new book, by a blogger who cautions that at 624 pages, "it's a long haul." But Larry Co, writing for Florida Weekly, is considerably more enthusiastic.

The authors have a joint facebook page here.

Remembering the Civil War

On this Memorial Day weekend, we might well think especially of the war that gave rise to Decoration Day, in time so renamed.

Nancy Pearl has made the observation that every generation of Americans since the end of the civil war has re-written that war in fictional form to reflect its own "dreams, desires, fears, and beliefs."

The nineteenth century was not over yet when Crane wrote RED BADGE OF COURAGE.

Forty years after Crane, Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND gave us a crystallization of nostalgia for the antebllum society of Tara and the O'Hara clan.

Twenty years after that, MacKinley Kantor wrote ANDERSONVILLE, a novelization of the horrors of life in that prisoner-of-war camp.

Identifying more recent books is easy. Deciding which of the more recent ones deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as those is more difficult. COLD MOUNTAIN by Charles Frazier, can make a strong claim. Pearl mentions others.

On a trip through Virginia a few years ago, I noticed that the sports teams of Appomattox High School call themselves "The Generals." I bet when they lose, the sportswriters of the towns of the rival team can't help but begin with a lede like this: The Appomattox Generals surrendered again Wednesday to the Jubreau Devil's crushing linesmen...."

Cooper's biography of Woodrow Wilson

A quote -- appropriate for a Sunday -- from Chapter 0ne. This chapter is titled "Tommy," because the real first name of the man history knows as "Woodrow Wilson" was in fact "Thomas." He started using his middle name as a first name only while in law school.

Anyway, here's the quote with which I want to leave you today:

"Still, Tommy Wilson's upbringing in one of the most liberal and sophisticated religious and intellectual environments in America at that time gave him familiarity with the basic concepts of Protestant thought, Lutheran as well as Calvinist. He believed that Christians were instruments of God's wil and must fulfill their predestined part, but his upbringing among learned Presbyterians stood in stark contrast to evangelicals who stressed emotional commitment and personal salvation. Attitudes and approaches borrowed from evangelical Protestantism had spawned the pre-Civil War moral reform movements, such as the temperance and anti-slavery crusades. These attitudes would flourish again in such varied incarnations as the Protestant Social Gospel, anti-liquor and anti-vice crusades, and an overall evangelical style of political reform. Yet despite a deep religous faith and a look and manner that would later strike some observers as preacherish, the man Tommy Wilson grew up to be would not adopt those approaches. It was not this preacher's-son-turned-president but rather his greatest rival, himself a religious skeptic, who would call their office a 'bully pulpit.' Wilson did not call the presidency by that name, nor did he think about it and politics that way, largely because his religious upbringing had inoculated him against such notions."

Random bit of history

"During the course of the 1790s the earlier enthusiasm of those in the Upper South to liberalize their society and to create a looser slave regime began to dissipate. Probably nothing did more to diminish the initial optimism of many whites in Virginia about the end of slavery than the black rebellion in the French colony of Saint-Domingue [Haiti] on the island of Hispaniola. The rebellion began in 1790 with an uprising of free coloreds, a diverse group who numbered about thirty thousand and included French-educated planters, tradesmen, artisans, and small landowners. The insurgents had been infected with French revolutionary principles and now demanded equality with whites. The whites numbered about forty thousand, but they were bitterly divided between the grand blancs and the disorderly and marginalized petits blancs. Beneath the whites and the free coloreds were five hundred thousand African slaves."

- Empire of Liberty, by Gordon S. Wood, p. 533.

Chimerica: An Exchange

Two valuable pundits, Niall Ferguson and James Fallows, last month discussed the question what is wrong with Chimerica, and how may it be fixed.

The premise of this discussion is that the People's Republic of China and the United States of America have entered into an implicit alliance, with China supplying the cash for the implicit hegemon.

So the world is run by Chimerica and Chimerica still has to figure out how it is to be run.

That is all the background you need. Click on the link and decide what you think. Thanks.

Handcarts and Mormonism

I'm just thinking this morning about how what looks like heroism and sacrifice from one point of view looks like a terrible misdirection of human energies and a waste of the lives lost, from another.

Few incidents illustrate this bit of perspectivism better than the death of more than 200 of the so-called "handcart pioneers" in the spring and summer of 1856, an odd subplot within the story of Mormon westward migration.

If you don't know the story, here's one account.

Mormons see the handcart pioneers, more even than those who before them had made it out to the Great Salt Lake in covered wagons, as their church's answer to the Pilgrims and the hazardous crossing that ended at Plymouth.

David Roberts looked upon the handcart saga with a jaundiced eye -- jaundiced regarding Brigham Young's leadership in this connection especially -- in his recent book, Devil's Gate: Brigham Young and the Great Mormon Handcart Tragedy.

Happy Birthday, Abe

We in the US usually force Abe to blow out the candles with George, because at some point two different holidays so close together became a pain in the butt, so they were fused into a single Monday event.

This year, on this day, Abe does get some special attention, throwing George into the shade, because it's his 200th. Still, even on this occasion, Abe has to share props with Charles Darwin.

This blog has done its bit for Darwin already -- last week Link here. So I'll devote the remainder of this entry exclusively to Lincoln.

In the filing cabinet of my mind, as in that of most conemporary Americans, there are any number of Lincoln myths, along with a more-or-less clear understanding that they are myths. There's the notion, for example, that the immortal language of the Gettysburg Address was dashed off on the back of an envelope while he was riding on the train to give the speech.

Lincoln actually showed a "rough draft" of this speech to James Speed, his Attorney General, on November 17, two days before it was to be delivered. He admitted to Speed that he had been laboring over it and was having difficulty.

That train ride from DC to Gettysburg, by the way, was a long one. It would take two hours today. It took fifteen in 1863. The train arrived at Gettysburg at 5 PM pm the 18th, and Lincoln (who may for all we know have continued to labor on the speech over those 15 hours -- that would hardly be a matter of dashing it off!) stayed overnight at the home of David Wills, the principal organizer of the dedication ceremonies.

We know that Lincoln was still working on the speech that evening. He apparently went to another home, where his Secretary of State William Seward was staying, at 11 PM and read him the speech looking for reactions. We don't know what Seward said or what revisions may have resulted.

So this was a product of turmoil. The point is important, I think, because the myth that eloquence is casual, just a 'gift' some people have when they toss things off, has had a pernicious effect. It helps contribute to the general notion that achievements are the product of talent, that effort is secondary, and that if something doesn't come easily to you, there's no point working at it.

"I can't write an immortal speech in a few moments on the back of an envelope, so why should I worry about composition at all?"

I doubt many people would put it just that way, but I do think it should be understood that eloquence, like so much else is life, is the product of effort, though perhaps effort working in co-ordination with talent.

Rest in peace, Mr. Lincoln.

Witch-hunting in the western world

Here's a brief quotation from the book The Enemy Within (my subject line above is the subtitle) by John Demos, a professor of history at Yale.

This is from p. 91, for those keeping score.

"Pennsylvania's founding came in 1682, relatively late; thus, it had a briefer, more attenuated involvement with witchcraft [than several other colonies]. ....Still, in 1684 the 'proprietor' William Penn and his council conducted a full-blown prosecution of charges that had come from within the ranks of the colony's Swedish minority. Two women, Margaret Mattson and Greta Hendrickson, stood accused of bewitching cows and practicing other 'sorceries' over a span of at least 20 years. The jury returned an unusual sort of split verdict: 'guilty of the common fame of a witch, but not guilty in manner and form as she stands indicted.'"

Then we're on to another subject. Mattson and Hendrickson never re-appear. Still, the passage bugs me.

Did the split verdict mean "they probably are witches, but we can't punish them because they weren't caught in the act"?

Or does it mean "guilty of acquiring the reputation of being witches, but nothing more"?

if it meant the latter, why was that different from a simple "not guilty" verdict in the laws in force in the early Pennsylvania colony?

Obama and Schlesinger

Emotionally distant, analytically engaged.

Though it all leaves me emotionally cold, this week's election results do have some appeal as an object of analysis. And in intellectualizing about Obama's victory, I find myself torn between two cyclical theories. According to one view, the subprime crisis that began last year will be a transformational event, akin to the stock market crash of 1929 or John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859. On such a reading, Obama is necessarily cast as Lincoln or Roosevelt.

According to another possible view, though, he isn't the beginning of anything. He is the end of something. I'll devote the remainder of this blog entry to that possibility, which depends upon a grasp of the 30-year cycles in American political history identified by Arthur Schlesinger.

Of course, the number 30 isn't divisible into 4. So in presidential election terms, on which the mind is focused today, a cycle must be either 28 or 32 years long. Let's look at the recent ones.

1. There's a reform election, in which a party (in recent cycles, always the Democratic Party) takes office -- executive and legislative -- promising sweeping change, generally leftward.

1932 was the classic reform election.

1960 (28 years later) was another.

1992 (32 years later) yet another.

2. Then there is a confirming landslide. Four years after electing the reforming Dems, the public says, "you're doing a good job," and the Republicans lose in a really big way. Consider in this light: 1936, 1964, 1996.

3. But the initial liberal-reform impetus has lost its strength by another four years out. The Republicans make a comeback to some degree, perhaps in alliance with discontented Dems who think the reformists have 'gone too far.'

1940 (preparedness issues had replaced domestic Reform on the Roosevelt agenda by this time, and Wilkie did much better than his two GOP predecessors had).

1968 (Eight years into the New Frontier/Great Society era, Nixon -- who had lost the election that began that era, deals it a blow, because Humphrey is unable to keep the George Wallace voters in the Great Society fold).

2000 (eight years after the Man from Hope, the advent of the man from Kennebunkport by way of Crawford).

Call these the loss-of-impetus elections.

4. Eight years after that loss-of-impetus election, the Democrats win in a quite distinctive way, with a relatively obscure figure who seems to many to have come from nowhere. A haberdasher from Missouri. A peanut farmer from Georgia. A community organizer from Hawaii by way of Chicago.

1948, 1976, 2008. Call this the guy-from-nowhere phase of the election cycle if you like.

One crucial thing to remember: the guy-from-nowhere election isn't the start for something. It is the end of something. It is the last win for the liberals/reformers/leftists/whatever within that cycle.

After the reformers of this cycle have had their say, there is usually a period in which the desire for "normalcy" and stability governs. After Truman's one term in his own right -- the final New Deal victory -- came Eisenhower. After Carter's single term -- the final New Frontier victory -- came Reagan. Then, eight or twelve years later, the cycle kicks up again with another reform election. But that's waaay ahead of us. For now, we face a guy-from-nowhere Presidency, with quite likely the usual issues and dissatisfactions of such a Presidency. Then Huckabee (or whomever) will pick up the pieces.

On this view, Obama's win is simply the final victory for the reformists who first won in 1992.

So: which is it? Is he more fittingly seen as the start, or as an ending? I don't know, since I've long managed to hold both of these cyclical views in my head simultaneously. Eventually, I'm gonna have to choose between them.

Antietam

Yesterday, September 17, was the 146th anniversary of the bloodiest single day in the history of the United States.

For on September 17, 1862, Union and Confederate forces met just to the east of Sharpsburg, Maryland, along a creek known as Antietam.

What might have happened had Lee forced McClellan to retreat from that ground on that day? Assume for example that the union retreat had been managed in good order, and that the Army of the Potomac kept itself thereafter between Lee and the district of Columbia. Assume then that although Lee won the battle, his hypothetical win was itself short of a "knockout."

Still, a victory for Lee's army that day might have been of enormous importance in persuading the UK and France to enter to war on the side of the rebs. It might have been, thus, through diplomatic indirection, a knock-out after all.

Here's a link to a map of the clash.