“Born Fighting”: Truth v. Myth, part 2

Part 2 of our Truth v. Myth on Sen. James Webb’s take on Scots-Irish history in America, the broadcast of “Born Fighting” recently aired on the Smithsonian Channel, finds us in post-Revolutionary War America, following the Scots-Irish in their ever-westerly travels.

Webb reaffirms the group’s “hatred of tyranny… and the belief that personal freedom should be a right, not a privilege.” Again, continuing with the theme of this investigation, it seems one could say that of any and all Americans, barring slaveholders, and one could point out that the entire population of the new nation had just ratified a federal government dedicated to the principle that freedom is a right. So it would not be just the Scots-Irish who felt this way. But Webb, a Senator, is anti-government, as he makes more and more clear in this documentary, and so he separates the principle of freedom being a natural right from the government and locates it fully in this one particular group.

Webb also says that the Scots-Irish believed that “only ability should dictate success”, and uses this as a springboard for talking about his greatest Scots-Irish hero, Andrew Jackson. We have dealt with Jackson here and here, and hopefully laid aside the idea that he was any kind of hero. But Webb buys into Jackson’s self-created propaganda that he was a man who stood up for the rights of the downtrodden, and gave power to the average American, the frontiersman, and the little guy. To do so, Webb first says that, thanks to Jackson, all white males had the right to vote by 1840.

Universal white male suffrage had begun long before Jackson’s Administation: Vermont had always had full white male suffrage, and New Jersey, Maryland, and South Carolina had it by 1810; states entering the Union after 1815 either offered universal white male suffrage or an extremely low landowner’s tax requirement (a small farm would count to pay this tax); by 1821 Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York had universal white male suffrage. So the white male suffrage revolution did not come after 1828 but before it, and it benefited Jackson rather than being a gift he gave the nation.

Webb says Jackson’s populism “undermined aristocratic elites and protected the weak… Jackson said the poor and humble require the arm and the shield of the law.” The Americans Jackson enslaved on his plantation in Tennessee might not have realized he felt that way. Neither would the Chickasaws whom he “removed” from their land, which he then sold and made a fortune on. Neither would the Cherokees, whom he did his best to destroy after they proved they had the right to stay on their lands. Perhaps it is only the poor and humble white frontiersman whom Jackson wanted to protect. Webb’s one nod to this reality is his statement that Jackson’s “legacy isn’t flawless—he was a product of his time… but he stopped the notion of a permanent aristocracy.” Excusing slaveholding because someone is “of his time” is perhaps the emptiest of all defenses. Plenty of abolitionists were of the same time. And it’s not as if people did not debate the morality of slavery during Jackson’s time. Finally, no one group defines “permanent aristocracy” in “their time” like slaveholders, whom Jackson sought to shore up at every turn. Jackson was “of his time” as well in his reliance on political machines to control who got into office, and his insistence on giving political office to and pushing through legislation for party loyalists, many of them rich business men in the East.

We reach the Civil War. Webb states that the Scots-Irish enlisted in droves for the Confederacy, but, predictably, that “few fought to preserve slavery… they fought against invasion, to save their homes, and protect their families.” We’ve dealt this this idea here; we can sum up this stance that the average Confederate did not fight for slavery this way: revisionists say that while powerful southerners fought for slavery, the average Confederate in the trenches was a poor man who didn’t own any enslaved people, who only fought because his homeland was invaded. Most notable in spreading this idea was Shelby Foote in Ken Burns’ documentary The Civi War, who quotes a Confederate telling a Union soldier that he fought “because you are down here.” This is the argument put about now—that the average Confederate soldier did not fight for slavery, and therefore bears no shame for his part in the war. But why was the Union “down there” in the first place? Because the southern states had seceeded so they could continue slavery. If the average poor Confederate really did have nothing in common with, and even hated and resented the rich whites who held slaves, why fight their war? Why fight and die so those rich whites could continue to control society and politics, have slaves, and keep poor white people poor? No war is simple. There’s no one reason why poor southern men fought for the Confederacy. They fought, as all people do, for a mix of reasons; in this case, fear and anger at being invaded, a sense of having no choice but to enlist once war began, wanting to join their friends in the army, loyalty to rich white leaders in their own towns and counties, excitement at the prospect of war, resentment of the North’s “anti-southern” policies, and a host of other, private reasons. Union soldiers had the same mix, and many of the same inducements. But no matter why they fought, they fought, and they fought to preserve the Confederacy, which was a slave society. There’s nothing noble about that.

But Webb buys into the blameless Confederate soldier myth, quoting what he calls a “beautifully put”Confederate war memorial in Arlington Cemetery as saying the Confederate fought “in simple obedience to duty, as he understood it.” This monument was installed in 1912 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy; here is a description:

“Completing the frieze are six vignettes illustrating the effect of the war on Southerners of all races. The vignettes include a black slave following his young master; an officer kissing his infant child in the arms of her mammy; a blacksmith leaving his bellows and workshop as his sorrowful wife looks on; a young lady binding the sword and sash on her beau; and a young officer standing alone. The base of the memorial features several inscriptions. On its front face are the seal of the Confederacy and a tribute by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, followed by the Latin phrase: “Victrix Causa Diis Placuit Sed Victa Caton.” This phrase means: The Victorious Cause was Pleasing to the Gods, But the Lost Cause to Cato.”

This is the sort of revisionist, pro-Confederate insult statuary that flourished from the end of the Civil War to basically the 1960s. It celebrates slavery as a benign, even good institution, and states that while the terrible heartless North may have won, the truly righteous were on the pro-slavery side. “Simple obedience” to that kind of duty is no honor.

Now Webb really lays into the current United States by lambasting the North for its overwhelming cruelty to the South after the war. “The North would go on to enjoy the victor’s spoils, while the South was left a devastated wreck… two-thirds of Southern wealth disapeared…[and the south was]occupied and controlled by the North… economic decline suffocated individual opportunity… Economically, it resembled a colony” owned and controlled by outside forces. This was the sad state of things until WWI.

It’s truly astonishing that a U.S. senator would make these statements. First, because they are so patently false; second, because they are anachronistically pushing a radical right, Tea Party agenda into the late 1800s, and third, because they are part of his lengthy attack on the validity of our federal government.

The North had few “spoils” to enjoy. Its industry continued profitably as it had done before and during the war. Its farms prospered as they had always done. In other words, regular life went on. The South didn’t lose 2/3 of its wealth to the North; it lost the bulk of that wealth because it lost its slaves. The majority of that figure is loss of slave labor and investment in slave trading. And one can only wish that the north had occupied the south like a colony, instead of abandoning it and the Reconstruction effort in 1877, because then the return to slavery in all but name and the grinding decades of economic decay the south experienced would not have happened.

Instead, the federal government (“the North”) did not re-distribute plantation land, which all remained in the hands of the original slaveholding owners; pardoned all Confederate soldiers and politicians except for those in high office; and allowed former Confederates to be elected to state governments and to Congress. There was temporary military rule in 1867, which was necessary to keep whites from stopping black Americans from voting for the first time. Southern leaders refused to industrialize or give up the plantation system, using sharecroppers instead of slaves, and local white southern merchants were the ones who gouged the poor, black and white, by miring them in unpayable debt.

It was the north deciding to wash its hands of the south, feeling that enough money and blood had been spent there, that led to the south being ground down into poverty and misery. The refusal of the white power elite to give up plantation agriculture with strictly human labor guaranteed a future of poverty. Their refusal to grant blacks their full rights guaranteed generations of crime, fear, and hate.

Webb clearly feels the federal government has not changed since the war and that it is an instrument of oppression. As we move away from his clenched-jaw description of the south’s self-inflicted wrongs, we move west once again with the Scots-Irish. Leaving the south, to Webb, means that Scots-Irish culture “became the basis for its greatest American legacy. New European immigrants gravitated toward the embrace of the Scots-Irish, their values spread wherever they went: self-reliance, equality, fighting any domination from above [see federal government]… their values and traditions were re-shaping America from the bottom up… over time, they lost their Scots-Irishness and became harder and harder to identify. They became more and more the mainstream of American development. Against all odds, the Scots-Irish working class ethics are now basic American values.” All country music is Scots-Irish, and everyone in the military is, too. Basically, any time you see a church, you are looking at the Scots-Irish.

So in fact you are Scots-Irish if you don’t know you are, the entire middle class is basically Scots-Irish, and those fight, sing, drink, pray values that no other group on Earth shares are the American Way. Of course, as always, we can say the same things of almost every group of Americans, every ethnicity: the Germans, the Irish, the English, the Dutch, the Italians… every group has intermarried beyond recognition and fanned out across the country with ethics of hard work and independence. Because they are all Americans.

“Over the centuries,” Webb goes on, “the Scots-Irish defined mainstream American life.” If you are individualistic and ambitious, you are Scots-Irish. Rosa Parks was Scots-Irish (through her great-grandfather; how might that have happened?). The Scots-Irish are “the molten core at the very center of the unbridled, raw, rebellious spirit of America… they faced the world on their feet, not on their knees. They were born fighting, and if their cause is right (like colonizing for Britain, killing Indians for their lands, or fighting for slavery) they will never give it up.”

This relentless emphasis on rebellion, fighting, and the sins of the federal government sound all too familiar to us today. This is the mantra of the far right, the Tea Party, which tells Americans their government is a terrible mistake and must be destroyed; terrible because it regulates business and provides social services and makes sure our water and air are safe. Americans, this theory goes, must always reject every demand on them—taxes, regulation, equal opportunity laws, etc. What Americans do is shoot guns, fight the government, and look out for themselves first and foremost.

This is not really America. This is not our “molten core.” These are not our core values. We don’t have an unstable, dangerous, molten core, we have a core of law, justice, and democracy. We cooperate to create a fair government that can protect everyone in this country without taking away our basic freedom. We do not primarily fight and drink. We all pray in different ways, or not at all. We all sing everyone’s songs. We are not all Scots-Irish, and the Scots-Irish are not as they are described here, as people who fight only for their own profit rather than for ideals of communal justice and freedom. People who hold slaves are not heroes of liberty. People who prevent their fellow citizens from exercising their full civil rights cannot blame someone else for the problems that causes. Re-writing history to validate whatever people do because of their ethnicity is not history. “Born Fighting” is a slur on the Scots-Irish, our government, and our nation that we hope will continue to be countered by factual histories of this nation and its people.

Freedom to Vote Threatened… again

In Spring 2011, a bloc of Republican legislators and governors renewed the push to end alleged rampant voting fraud in the U.S. by requiring that people registered to vote show a government-issued photo ID, like a driver’s license, in order to vote. This caused an angry reaction amongst opponents of any move to set up what they call barriers to voting. Which side is right? What does the Constitution say about voting?

Surprisingly little. There is nothing about voting rights in the original body of the Constitution. That first Constitution simply states that officers of the government will be chosen by the People and the Electors. There were many Amendments made to the original Constitution in a very short time, and by 1791 the Twelfth Amendment addressed voting only to explain how the Electoral College was supposed to work. The Fifteenth Amendment extended the vote to black males in 1870, and the Seventeenth Amendment gave the People the right to vote directly for their Senators in 1913. In 1920, the Ninteenth Amendment extended the vote to women of all races, the Twenty-Fourth Amendment in 1964 abolished the poll tax. Finally, in 1971, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment made age eighteen the legal voting age.

So if there is nothing in the Constitution about who can vote, how can asking for photo ID be wrong, or illegal?

If we look at the six Amendments that address voting, we see that all but one—the one about the Electoral College—expands the definition of who can vote. Black men and then all women are given the vote, people are allowed to vote directly for their Senators (who had previously been chosen by the Electoral College), younger people can vote (voting age had been 21). Most significantly of all, the Twenty-Fourth Amendment in 1964 abolished the poll tax. Poll taxes were a shameful tool of white supremacists, who set up fees that “everyone” had to pay in order to vote. In reality, only black people were forced to pay a fee in order to vote, and the white supremacists running the polls made sure it was so expensive for most black citizens to pay the poll tax that they simply could not vote. It was an effective way of stripping black Americans of their right to vote and of keeping Civil Rights legislation moving at a snail’s pace, since only white people were voting, and most in the South did not vote for people who supported that legislation.

So the sum of all Constitutional Amendments regarding voting since 1870 has been to let more people vote, and to keep the process just. No one has to pay to vote in this c0untry. It is the right of a citizen to vote. All people have to do is register.

There have, of course, been ongoing attempts to make voting very difficult for the poor and the non-white. Minimal staffing at government offices ensure hours-long waits for registration, and often those who register find that they are not on the list of registered voters at their polling places. Polling places are often few and far between in poor districts, again ensuring a long drive or bus ride to the polling place and another hours-long wait to vote. Votes from poor districts are sometimes “lost” on the way to the official tallying places. Everything but a poll tax has been put in place to maintain the white and powerful status quo.

The reason usually given for these hindrances to voting is that there has been voting fraud—in poor and non-white districts only. The implication here is that of course the poor and non-white are not honest, and that the immigrants who make up this group either don’t understand democracy or want to destroy it. We have to protect the U.S. from immigrants, the poor, and the non-white, and so we must police voting very closely.

Evidence of massive and continual voting fraud is never presented, just as the hindrances already in place in underserved districts’ polling places are never acknowledged. Asking for a government photo ID is a blatant attempt to reinstate a racial and ethnic barrier to voting. Advocates say, Everyone has a driver’s license, so what’s the big deal? The only people who don’t have a driver’s license are illegal immigrants, and they shouldn’t be voting anyway. Those against the ID respond that many people don’t have a driver’s license, including many elderly people and some physically impaired people.

But the problem is not that photo IDs are not as common as we think. It’s that asking for anything but proof of registration—having your name on the list of voters for your polling place—is a poll tax. It’s a barrier to voting. It makes it harder for some citizens to vote, for no good reason. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say you have to have proof of citizenship to vote. You need that to register, and if you are registered, and your name is on the list at your polling place when you show up to vote, you do not have to show any further proof of your right to be there.

Once we demand proof of citizenship at the polling place, we may as well—and might well—ask for a small fee to be paid, or your photo to be taken, or your signature on a loyalty oath. This is not our democracy. We have to fight any attempt to require ID or any other proofs of citizenship or loyalty at the polling place vigorously, or our next Amendment will be a giant step backward from the previous five.

The 2010 Census data is in!!

It’s a very exciting historical moment when census data is published. It is a real example of the historic present; you see where your every day lived reality fits into much bigger, much longer historical frames—where you are in an era. We’re going to take a look at the census data from a few angles. The first step is to dive in to the raw data, which you can do in a fascinating way at Mapping the U.S. Census. Rollover a county to see general data, enter an address, zip code, or city at top right to get amazingly detailed maps–for example, if you put in your zip code just that area comes up (your very own “census tract”). Take a look at where you live, or have lived, and see the changes.

Then take a look at Prof. John Logan’s census analysis . Logan is a sociologist at Brown University who has studied census data for decades. He has interesting analysis on segregation and the impact of race—as in, what difference does it make if Asians begin moving to white neighborhoods, as opposed to Latinos, as opposed to black people?

Next time: How we are sorted

The problems of American freedom

We saw in the last post that Americans live in a unique situation: we enjoy all three types of basic freedom, national, political, and individual. Listing the nations that have offered all three freedoms to all of their citizens is a counting-on-one-hand proposition. Successfully providing and defending all three freedoms is what makes the United States great.

But it also presents some problems. Over the generations, Americans have veered between putting national freedom first and putting individual freedom first. We’re sometimes willing to give up individual freedom to be safe from attack, and sometimes unwilling to perform our duties of national and political freedom in the name of individual freedom. When the U.S. faces attack or threats to its safety, many Americans want to put laws in place curtailing individual freedoms like freedom of speech, religion, and assembly in order to at once weed out troublemakers and create a more homogenous society. Conversely, when the federal government tries to put sweeping legislation into effect, such as government-paid health care or social security or gun control, many Americans loudly protest the move as an infringement of their individual rights.

Individual rights also lead many Americans to neglect their political freedom to participate in government by holding office and/or voting. The feeling that participation in our democracy is unnecessary, an extra rather than a basic tenet of American citizenship, is pervasive. Resentment of “big government” leads many people not to want to participate in government at all, as if they would be supporting an invasive federal government by voting or running for office, although the way to change the nature of government is to join it or vote in those you wish to have representing your views. The belief that our government is an impediment to individual freedom is sadly prevalent.

Holding all three freedoms in equal esteem is difficult. Many Americans have come to see our individual freedoms as the wellspring from which national freedom is born, and thus individual freedoms are the most important. But these individual freedoms come from our government, from the Constitution, and last only as long as we have our national freedom. Without national freedom, there is no individual freedom, and national freedom only lasts as long as we have political freedom. Giving up our right to vote—for refusing or failing to vote is tantamount to giving up that right—is a dangerous step toward losing national and individual freedom. Once we stop demanding that our government really represent us, our democracy is crippled, and then the nation is open to outside threats. If individual freedoms are seen as separate from or at odds with national and political freedom, then we begin to prioritize our liberty to do whatever we want at the expense of national safety.

Individual freedom is really our freedom to live up to the founding principles of our nation. It’s our freedom to speak and worship and serve our country as we each see fit, and not really the freedom to be lazy and uninvolved and prioritizing our own choices over other people’s choices. It is the freedom to live together as one without having to be the same, not the freedom to push our own ways at the expense of everyone else’s.

Political freedom is our freedom to have a democracy, to be represented accurately in the federal government, and to preserve the individual freedoms we enjoy.

National freedom is the end result of the first two freedoms, because we who value our individual and political freedom will not allow our country to be destroyed by outside forces—or by those Americans who don’t believe in the full triad of freedoms.

Going forward, we’re seeking to bring our three freedoms into balance and remember that each is equally valuable, and each demands our equal time and effort to maintain.

What are the freedoms we have as Americans?

Citizens of the United States have been proud of their freedom for many generations. It has become a shorthand—we are admired for our freedom, hated for our freedom, we need to preserve our freedom, fight for our freedom… the list goes on. But, inspired by Dr. Rufus Fears’ interesting lecture on the topic, we thought it would be helpful to provide a clear definition of our “freedom” in the U.S. We’ll start by referencing Dr. Fears’ categories of freedom, then provide our own analysis of how they play out in American society.

As Dr. Fears points out, there are basically three types of freedom: national, individual, and political.

National freedom is the independence of a political state—freedom from occupation or other foreign control.

Political freedom is the right of citizens of a political state to participate in government (through voting or acting as a representative) and to have a fair trial.

Individual freedom is the freedom to do and say what you will so long as you don’t hurt anyone—freedom of speech, assembly, religion, freedom to choose where you live or what job you do or don’t do, freedom to make money and spend it as you please.

Of all these freedoms, national is the oldest and perhaps the most widely accepted. It’s hard to find a country, city-state, or any other unified entity that has not placed self-preservation at the top of its priorities. Historically, it has been the only freedom that is universally honored; that is, while many states still do not grant full individual or political freedoms, it’s hard to find one that does not stand for national freedom. Only completely failed states like Somalia or Sudan cannot and do not provide national freedom to their citizens.

Political freedom is about as ancient as national freedom; just about every society has a “ruling class”, whether it is Iron Age priests, medieval lords, or modern representatives to Congress. Rulers—kings, presidents, etc.—have almost always had political bodies advising them, managing the government, and/or curtailing the ruler’s powers. Extending political freedom beyond the top 2% of the population to the lower 98% of the people—granting real democracy—has been rare in human history. The concept of a fair trial has changed over time, and been infrequently offered.

Individual freedom—the rights Americans are guaranteed in the Bill of Rights—is the least common type of freedom. Very few societies have been willing to let their citizens do whatever they want so long as no one is hurt. Individual freedom is a result of true representative democracy, which has been rare in human history and is still not the type of government offered by most nations of the world. The only way for a tiny minority—sometimes just one person in the form of the ruler—to control millions of other people is to strip them of their right to complain, to move away, to become rich, etc. They must remain completely under the control and at the mercy of the ruler/governing class, whose power is exercised by deciding what is legal and what is not and finding that most things are illegal.

So where do we stand in the United States when it comes to these three freedoms? We are in the unique position of enjoying all three of these freedoms, a situation that is almost unparalleled in human history. The Founders worked unbelievably hard to create a government that was strong enough to protect the state (national freedom), offer fair representation before the law and equal participation in the government (political freedom), and give its citizens complete personal liberty (individual freedom). The latter is especially important; in fact, we as Americans believe national and political freedom cannot really exist without individual freedom.

This is what makes the United States unique and admirable, but it does create some problems, which we’ll get into in the next post.

Next time: The problem with triple freedom

Saying the Pledge of Allegiance: A Test of Citizenship?

Every so often a public debate occurs over the question of whether saying the Pledge of Allegiance aloud in public school classrooms should be mandated or abolished. As it stands, each school district is free to decide whether to require the Pledge to be recited aloud or not.

Those who want it to be recited usually do so because they feel that such recitation at once compels and displays patriotism. Students who say the Pledge in school will be more patriotic, in part because they are part of a town or city or district that demands public shows of patriotism, thus prioritizing them.

It’s unclear that reciting the Pledge each school morning really creates patriotism; anything performed by rote, without being explained and discussed and thought over, becomes just one more task to perform in the minds of the children saying it. The lack of explanation or discussion of the Pledge is bound out in the myriad examples of the misunderstandings children have of the words, such as “I pledge allegiance to the flag and the United States of America, and to the republic of Richard Stands…”.

But even above and beyond whether the Pledge recitals are thoughtful and thought-provoking is the issue of turning the Pledge into a test of citizenship. The Founders were against setting up tests of citizenship, such as those in Europe; having to swear loyalty to the monarch and/or the state church was anathema to them. They set up a republic in which citizenship was easy to get—if you’re born in the U.S., or naturalized, you’re a citizen. You don’t have to prove it in any way. Look at the Constitution: there is nothing in it defining citizenship beyond birth and naturalization, and even the naturalization process is not defined. The important thing is how to use your citizenship, not proving it through any kind of statement or oath.

In fact, you have to wait for the Fourteenth Amendment, in 1868, to get a reiteration of the definition of citizenship, and again it is straightforward: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Citizenship tests are “laws which abridge the privileges and immunities of citizenship”, and can lead to depriving citizens of life, liberty, and property. Requiring proofs of patriotism to justify one’s citizenship is un-American. Demanding that the Pledge be mandated on the basis that anyone who doesn’t agree is unpatriotic and doesn’t love their country is un-American. It is precisely the fact that Americans are not required to prove their patriotism through statements, oaths, or any act beyond upholding democracy by voting and obeying the Constitution, that makes Americans truly free.

Tea Party, Health Care, “Reload”—the long view

We don’t usually get into current-day politics here at the HP, but when big-ticket history is being made, we have to mention it. Right now, the United States is in the midst of a long, rolling series of major changes that will make this present day of ours as deeply studied and debated by historians as the run-up to the Civil War or the civil rights movement.

Right now, the health care bill that passed Congress this month is causing an almost inexplicable torrent of rage amongst a small portion of Americans. These are the small minority of very vocal people who always want to stop the American experiment of accepting and driving social change (see The Great American Experiment), a reactionary fraction who always believe the past was better than the present and far better than the ominous future the latest social change is going to unleash.

In these times, it’s good to be a historian, because you have the long view. You know that there have always been these reactionary groups, ranging from the inane to the harmful. The “Know-Nothings” or American Party in the 1830s and 40s terrorized Catholic Americans and won many political seats on a platform of stopping immigration from undesirable countries, eradicating Catholicism, and generally setting up a police state run by white Protestants. In the late 1800s, groups like the Immigration Restriction League and the Workingmen’s Party authorized terror against immigrants; WP leader Dennis Kearney led his men on a rampage through San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1877, destroying homes and businesses, to inaugurate his campaign against Chinese immigration. The state of California eventually passed several laws stripping Chinese immigrants of their civil rights.

In more recent history, the reaction of the fringe against the Civil Rights movement and the federal laws and Supreme Court rulings that championed equal rights for all races is fresher in our memory.

So when faced with the Tea Partiers and brick-throwing anti-health care fringe of 2010, we can defuse their seeming power by reminding ourselves, and others, that these groups come and go at moments of national crisis or change, they spew their hate and then after a decade or so they disappear. Temporarily, of course; there’s always the next fringe group to take over for them. But they remain fringe because of their illogic and their basis in hatred and fear.

A columnist at the New York Times presents a good summing up of the current situation, pointing out that the fringe has predicted doom and the death of America many times without accuracy. They are never right because they fail to take into account the fact that the majority of Americans are on board with the Experiment, with change and progress. The majority of Americans know, as we lay out in The Great American Experiment, that “America’s story is one of constantly tackling the big—the biggest—problems, ahead of everyone else, with very little to guide us but those founding principles that nag at our conscience. And each time we’ve made progress, extending civil rights to more and more people, it’s been because that old spirit of taking a gamble, of performing the ultimate experiment, took over and led us to the right decision.

“As we think today about what divides Americans, I think it boils down to the fact that some Americans no longer want to experiment. They want to close the lab down. We’ve gone far enough into the unknown, making it known, they say; now let’s stop—let’s even go backward. We were wrong to conduct some of our experiments in liberty, and that’s the source of all our problems. Gay people shouldn’t be treated equally. Black people shouldn’t run the country. Women shouldn’t hold high office. Muslims shouldn’t be granted habeas corpus.

“Whenever one of those Americans talks about the problem with our country today, they talk about how we should be like we once were, back when white people who defined marriage as one man-one woman and were Protestant veterans built this nation. They feel they are losing their birthright, their legacy.

But those Americans are wrong. What their ancestors really were was scientists. Experimenters. Radicals who always considered the impossible possible.”

Frank Rich agrees: “If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.”

But that won’t happen. You can’t fight demographics, and America’s population is changing and the result will be: America. Our population has always been changing, always been growing too fast, always been diluted with people from new regions and nations, and we have always kept on, struggling and fighting and eventually breaking through prejudice and habit to achieve new heights of civil rights and equality of opportunity. It’s what we do. It’s why we’re great.

So as you ponder the rage of the fringe, remember they are the fringe. The rest of us will keep on experimenting, like real Americans.

The Logic of Southern Secession, 1860-1

Often historians talking about the secession of southern states after Lincoln’s election to the presidency will stop to wonder just why it even happened. Not all the states were on board with secession after Lincoln’s win—the major southern states, including North Carolina and Virginia, were against it. There had been secession scares before, and most southerners believed the hysteria would blow over and they would go back to doing what they had always done: fighting for slavery in Congress and the courts. They had been very successful at this, and there was no reason to suppose that would change. In fact, with Lincoln in the White House and Republicans in the Congress, the south would have to fight harder and even more cleverly to protect and spread slavery, and that was a challenge most southern legislators were likely up for.

So the immediate secessions of the seven Lower South states was no guaranty at all that the rest of the south would go, and southern public opinion was divided, to say the least. So why did it happen? Why did the dominoes fall?

It’s a good question. In fact, it’s been pondered over in a completely different arena: World War I.

The similarities are striking: one nation declares war over an act of violence, the other side declares war back; a tense waiting period in which frantic diplomacy is employed to defuse the situation; the majority of the public against war, or at least neutral; and then the rest of the dominoes fall. Ever since the summer of 1914, people have been asking how this happened when it was so far from being inevitable and there was so much to lose on all sides by going to war.

I don’t have the answer, of course; I’m just noting, for the first time that I know of, the similarity of the two situations. I suppose there’s something always to be said for the human desire to act, and to react in kind. If one country or leader is violent, it/he can expect a violent reaction. And there’s always the need to be part of your group: if your ally declares war, you will likely follow suit, no matter what misgivings you have, because the relationship impacts your honor, your sense of yourself, and your public image. And then it’s just easy to go to war; when a situation is difficult, maybe impossible to untangle, you can always run a sword through it. Last, a declaration of war is a powerfully emotional moment that it is very easy to get swept up in: an unthinking, heady, exciting, join-or-die, shoot-now-and-ask-questions-later moment.

If anyone has a good idea of how to answer the question of 1861 and 1914, let us know!

The federal government invents Social Security

Our final post in the series on whether the federal government is capable of guarding the public health and well-being focuses on Social Security.

The reputation of the federal Social Security program is tarnished today because it is being strained by huge numbers of retirees and near-retirees, and there are justifiable fears that it will go bankrupt. But this cannot make us forget how important, how groundbreaking the program was. What, after all, is the fuss all about? Why care if Social Security goes bankrupt? The answer is that the Social Security program created and managed by the federal government was the first, and remains the only, safety net for elderly and other at-risk members of our U.S. citizenry.

The Social Security Act of 1935 was a response to the Great Depression. In the 1930s, the only form of financial support for the elderly was a government pension. You received a pension if you had served in the U.S. armed forces or worked for the U.S. government. This, of course, meant that only men could receive pensions. Widows and children of pensioned men could receive their male relative’s pension once he died, but only if they applied for it. And men who were not veterans or former federal employees had nothing unless their employers offered pensions, which was not usual.

These pensions were nothing to write home about. They were extremely small. Elderly people, widows and children with pensions lived very meagerly, and those without pensions had to have relatives willing to support them and even take them in. If you had no pension and no family to fall back on, you were forced to beg for public charity. End of story.

After the stock market crash in October 1929, many elderly, widows, and children lost their pensions and/or the support of their families. Their families had lost their income and were now penniless as well. It is estimated that by 1934 over half of all elderly Americans were unable to support themselves financially. That’s over half of Americans over 65 living on charity—charity that was drying up fast. Thirty states set up state pensions to try to relieve elderly poverty, but the states themselves were poor and the relief was slight, and only about 3% of elderly Americans were receiving any state money by 1935, when the Social Security Act was passed.

There was resistance to the idea of Social Security. Americans had convinced themselves that they weren’t a people who accepted charity, or even a helping hand, especially from the government. People were reluctant to admit that they had no family to depend on for help. One of the ingenious components of the Act was that it paid the elderly with money taxed on wages, taxes that would begin to be collected in 1937 so payments could begin in 1942. In other words, workers paid into the fund, so that when they retired, they would simply be taking back money they had set aside, rather than taking charity from others. This overcame the reluctance to lose face by taking a handout.

In a way, it wasn’t even the payments the elderly received that were so groundbreaking. It was the idea that the federal government, the government of any nation, would make it one of its responsibilities to provide for people in their old age. Government policies for the poor up to that date had consisted of various “poor laws,” which usually mandated prison for those poor who were deemed able to work but did not have jobs and those unable to work, or work farms/workhouses where the poor performed slave labor. If workers were to be taken care of once they grew too old to work, which was not a popular idea at all, then the companies they had worked for should provide a pension, but no one thought those companies should be forced to do so. Basically, no country thought the elderly poor needed or deserved special care, and in the U.S. there was an especially powerful idea that Americans could take care of themselves that foiled any attempt to help the vulnerable.

The Social Security Act included all workers, male and female. It was expanded in 1939 to include widows and children of working men. These people—the elderly, widows, and their children—quickly came to depend on Social Security, and the whole nation supported the idea that they should be reimbursed in their old age for the work they did in their youth. There was no shame attached to accepting Social Security by the 1950s, and the program came to be an accepted part of the American system.

Social Security was well-managed by the government that created it, although it is in serious danger now simply because of our massive population growth. It is perhaps the most important of the government programs put in place in the U.S. for the protection and care of its citizens. It is proof, along with federal highway safety programs and the FDA, of the ability and desire of the federal government to protect the public health and well-being. The fears expressed in 2009 about the federal government becoming involved in health care are just another example of Americans wishing to believe that we are different from all other nations and peoples, that we alone can always take care of ourselves without any help, and that we alone need to keep our federal government constantly at bay, as if it were a dangerous threat to our liberty.

But it is our federal government, our system of representative democracy, that truly makes us unique by creating our liberty. We should give it every opportunity to protect our equality of opportunity (that is, access to good and affordable health care) and justice for all (who seek health care). Our government is as good and as just as we demand it to be, and it is only by continually engaging with it, not fending it off, that we remain American.

Federal regulation of car safety–a success!

Last time in this series on successful federal management of public health and safety, we looked at Ralph Nader’s expose of automakers’ decision to put style ahead of safety. Now we see the federal government step in.

The 1966 Highway Safety Act mandated that the states create their own highway safety programs to reduce accidents, develop (or improve) emergency care for car accidents (this was when the paramedic program or EMS really came on the scene), and created the Department of Transportation (DOT), including the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), to oversee these efforts. From now on, drivers would not be blamed for all car accidents.

We have the NHTSA to thank for crash-test dummies, fuel economy standards, safety belts, air bags, auto recalls, and consumer reports (not Consumer Report itself, but the concept of giving car buyers objective analyses of how safe cars are). These are safety features we take for granted today, but I remember the 1970s, when older cars I rode in didn’t have seat belts, and even when cars did have them, drivers misled by automakers believed that the belts wouldn’t help in an accident, and that the best way to stay safe while driving was to not make mistakes that led to an accident—remnants of the “it’s the driver’s fault” mentality pushed by automakers prior to 1966.

Automakers have continued to fight the federal government on safety, delaying HID and halogen headlights, air bags, and safety features to promote seat belt use, such as those pinging alarms you get when you don’t have yours on.

In all, federal regulation of car and road safety has contributed significantly to American health and well-being. Next time, we’ll begin our conclusion to this series with perhaps the biggest federal health-and-well-being program of them all: Social Security.

Next: How big is Social Security?