It’s not only the Obama address that’s gone from Trump’s whitehouse.gov

We’re behind the times:

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See the full story here.

Then come back to our series on Obama’s farewell address.

Christmas in Colonial New England—or not

Re-running our Christmas Classic this year. Enjoy the holiday break!

In December we think of Christmas and the ever-evolving forms of celebration of that holiday in America. And being the HP, we think of the very long period over which Christmas was not celebrated in New England.

The Separatist Pilgrims and the Puritans, the two English groups who settled what is now New England, did not celebrate Christmas because they did not celebrate any holidays, because they believed that every day was given by God, and so every day was holy. It was humans who picked and chose certain days to be better than the rest, thus impugning God’s holy creation by identifying some days as unimportant and boring. Holidays were the creation of humans, not God, and an insult to God in more ways than one: not only was the creation of holidays a disparagement of other days, but the usual form of celebrating holidays in England involved raucous immorality. There were few silent nights during religious holidays in Europe. They were times of drunkenness, gaming, gambling, dancing, and licentiousness, and as a major Christian holiday, Christmas involved high levels of all these things—let’s just say there were a lot of babies born the next September. “Men dishonor Christ more in the 12 days of Christmas,” wrote the reformist Bishop of Worcester Hugh Latimer in the mid-1500s, “than in all the 12 months besides.”

While they lived in England, the Pilgrims and the Puritans withdrew from Christmas celebrations, conspicuous by their absence from the debauched partying in the streets. When they removed to America, both groups took great pleasure in putting an end to the observance of holidays, Christmas in particular. Both groups observed many special days, either of thanksgiving or fasting. When something particularly good happened, a thanksgiving was held. This involved a church service and then gatherings at home or in groups (see Truth v. Myth: The First Thanksgiving for more). When danger threatened, or something bad happened, a fast was held. This involved a day of church services preceded by fasting, which meant not eating and even refraining from sex the night before. (Puritans knew that nothing humbled people like hunger and celibacy.) No other special days were observed.

So December 25 was just like any other day for the Pilgrims and Puritans. If it was a Sunday, you’d go to church and perhaps hear a sermon that referenced Jesus’ birth. If it was a Tuesday, you got up and went to work as usual. In Plimoth, where the Separatist Pilgrims were outnumbered by unreformed Anglicans, Governor Bradford had a hard time stopping the Anglicans from celebrating Christmas. The Anglicans would not learn from the example of the Separatists, who were hard at work on Christmas day 1621. Here is Bradford’s good-humored account of a run-in he had with unreformed celebrants that day (he refers to himself in the third person here as “the Governor”):

“And herewith I shall end this year. Only I shall remember one passage more, rather of mirth than of weight. One the day called Christmas day, the Governor called them out to work, as was used. But the most of this new company excused themselves and said it went against their consciences to work on that day. So the Governor told them that if they made it matter of conscience, he would spare them till they were better informed; so he led away the rest and left them. But when they came home at noon from their work, he found them in the street at play, openly; some pitching the bar and some at stool-ball, and such like sports. So he went to them, and took away their implements, and told them that was against his conscience, that they should play and others work. If they made the keeping of [Christmas a] matter of devotion, let them keep [to] their houses, but there should be no gaming or revelling in the streets. Since which time nothing hath been attempted that way, at least openly.” [Of Plymouth Plantation, 107]

When the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony absorbed the Pilgrim Plimoth Colony into itself, and Massachusetts came under direct royal control in 1681 (losing its political independence), the Anglican governor assigned to the colony brought back Christmas celebrations. In 1686, when King James II created the Dominion of New England, composed of Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, and East and West Jersey, and designed specifically to destroy Puritan political independence and religious identity, the royal governor James chose, Edmund Andros, was bitterly resented by all his new subjects. When Andros went to church to celebrate Christmas in Boston in 1686 he needed an armed escort to protect him.

Now Christmas was associated with royal dictatorship and all the grief of the Dominion, and the people of New England and especially Massachusetts continued to boycott the holiday well into the 18th century. When the Revolutionary War began, Christmas boycotts rose in popularity as the day was again tied to royal control and tyranny. After the war, Congress met on Christmas Day, businesses were open, and while private celebrations were not uncommon, there was no official recognition of Christmas in New England. In fact, no state recognized Christmas as an official holiday until Alabama took the plunge in 1836. President Grant made it a federal holiday in 1870, and that was about the time that New England at last gave up the remnants of its ancient resistance. (Readers of Little Women, which Louisa May Alcott began to write in Concord, MA in 1868, will remember that while the Marches celebrate Christmas with gusto as well as reverence, Amy March is able to go to a store first thing Christmas morning to exchange a gift, revealing that Christmas was still a day of business in Massachusetts at that late date.)

It’s ironic, given this history, that the winter scenes created by Massachusetts-based lithographers Currier and Ives became the template for “a traditional New England Christmas” in the 1870s, complete with one-horse open sleighs and jingle bells. Sleigh rides, roasting chestnuts, spiced apple cider—all these Christmas traditions originated in New England, but they were not specific to Christmas when New Englanders enjoyed them in the 18th century. They were just part of winter. Even the “traditional” white Christmas relies on a cold northern winter, a defining characteristic of the region that no one in colonial times associated with the holiday.

Today, there are still branches of Protestantism that look down on “the observance of days”, and urge that all days be seen as equally holy and important. But Christmas is here to stay… for the foreseeable future, anyway.

Finding historical context for 2016–or manufacturing it?

Since the presidential election, many people, including historians, have stepped up to say that the nastiness of the campaign and the election of Trump are not unique in American history.

You think this election was nasty? Look at Adams v. Jefferson! You think Trump says crazy things? Look at Andrew Jackson! You think Trump is racist? What about Wilson!

This is meant to reassure us that nothing fundamental is changing in American politics or society. But this is critically inaccurate. This type of comparison normalizes Trump, and fits him into a continuum when he is actually unique in presidential history. First and foremost, no other person has come into office swearing to destroy our federal government. Aside from that, we have had about about 60 years of dedicated expansion of civil rights in this country, to black, Asian, and Latino Americans; to women; to gay Americans; to non-Christian Americans.

Trump goes forcefully against the tide of this history and he is the leader of a backlash against civil rights in this country that we fear will last many, many years. Backlash is inevitable, but the fury of it now is alarming. One can only hope that once all the forces of white supremacy and sexism and homophobia come parading out, real Americans can do battle with them and restore the mandate to offer liberty and justice to all given in our founding documents.

So to all historians and others saying we need more civility, we agree up to a point: civil discourse is crucial to democracy. But 2016 was not about civility. Yes, Jefferson v. Adams was uncivil—does that make it like 2016? No. Something much bigger is now at stake. Something much worse is happening.

We can’t use history to hide our heads in the sand and to (ironically) deny that this is a historic moment in our history. We can use history to inform our response to this historic moment.

CNN’s 10 “most bizarre” elections in U.S. history

We were looking for the video CNN uses in its ads for its new series Race for the White House, which shows the changing face of the White House from the mid-1800s to the present (very interesting—more and more barriers put between the street and the building). We couldn’t find it, but in the mayhem of features on the site we did find “10 of the most bizarre elections in American history”. The name implies that many more than 10 American presidential elections were bizarre, but likely they just mean 10 were actually bizarre.

At any rate, they do a pretty good job describing the 10 elections/campaigns they list. No glaring errors. They don’t say the 1824 election really was a corrupt bargain, they just note that Jackson claimed it was. They admit that the 1876 election was rigged by racist southerners to give the Republican candidate the presidency if he would end Reconstruction. And they focus on the real issue of the 1964 campaign—Johnson’s commitment to ending institutional racism—instead of talking about the Daisy ad.

This was more than we expected of CNN, so we thought we’d pass it along with our commendation.

Christmas in Colonial New England, or not

Re-running our Christmas Classic this year. Enjoy the holiday break!

“And herewith I shall end this year. Only I shall remember one passage more, rather of mirth than of weight. One the day called Christmas day, the Governor called them out to work, as was used. But the most of this new company excused themselves and said it went against their consciences to work on that day. So the Governor told them that if they made it matter of conscience, he would spare them till they were better informed; so he led away the rest and left them. But when they came home at noon from their work, he found them in the street at play, openly; some pitching the bar and some at stool-ball, and such like sports. So he went to them, and took away their implements, and told them that was against his conscience, that they should play and others work. If they made the keeping of [Christmas a] matter of devotion, let them keep [to] their houses, but there should be no gaming or revelling in the streets. Since which time nothing hath been attempted that way, at least openly.” [Of Plymouth Plantation, 107]

Watergate: The cover-up begins

Hello and welcome to part 3 of our series on the Watergate crisis, which ended 40 years ago this year. We left off in part 1 with the conviction of the CRP burglars for conspiracy, burglary, and violating federal wiretapping laws when they broke into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC in June 1972.

One of those burglars was Howard Hunt, a former CIA official who was identified as working for the Republican Party. Hunt was also one of the White House “Plumbers”, a group created in 1971 to stop the leaking of classified documents to the press. The most notable example of a leak was the publication of the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst working for the RAND Corporation who had access to top-secret government documents on the Vietnam War that revealed that President Lyndon Johnson had lied to the American public about U.S. military operations in Vietnam, and their success, and that the U.S. had secretly begun bombing suspected Viet Cong bases and suppliers in Cambodia and Laos. Ellsberg had come to question the war before he got access to the secret papers, and once he saw them, he became firmly against the war. He copied the papers and gave them to the New York Times, where their contents were made known. They were commonly known as the Pentagon Papers, and they created deep controversy in the U.S., and gave new momentum to the already growing anti-war movement.

Nixon was furious about the Pentagon Papers, and determined to find a way to smear Ellsberg and make him seem crazy. Nixon’s top advisor, John Ehrlichman, told the Plumbers to break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in Los Angeles, looking for notes that might cast doubt on Ellsberg’s sanity. They did not find anything, and Ehrlichman told Nixon only that there had been an “aborted” operation in Los Angeles. The Plumbers then used some of their members on the Watergate break-in, looking for documents that would reveal the Democratic election strategy, or some damaging evidence against their candidate, George McGovern.

When the FBI investigators on the Watergate break-in found Hunt’s name, Ehrlichman was afraid it would lead back to the Ellsberg break-in, and ordered John Dean, the president’s legal attorney, to open Hunt’s White House safe and burn everything in it. This was done by Dean and by Acting FBI Director Patrick Gray.

Nixon was told about the break-in at this point. He was also told about the attempt to erase Hunt’s connection to CRP, the Committee to Re-Elect the President, a group working to ensure Nixon’s victory in 1972. Nixon approved, and told his other top advisor, H.R. Haldeman, to have the CIA block the FBI’s investigation into the question of who paid the burglars to break into the DNC headquarters.

At a press conference a few days afterward, Press Secretary Ron Zieglar described the Watergate break-in in a phrase that would become infamous: he called it “a third-rate burglary attempt”. This was part of the White House strategy to downplay the event as the bizarre actions of a few unknown nobodies that no one should pay any attention to. On August 29, 1972, Nixon said that attorney Dean had investigated the break-in (which Dean had not) and that the result was that “I can say categorically that [no] one in the White House staff, no one in this Administration, presently employed, was involved in this very bizarre incident.” This was true to Nixon’s pattern of lying to the public; the disclaimer “presently employed” is a strange one: it plants doubt in the listener’s mind by giving them the idea that someone on Nixon’s staff had been involved in the break-in and been fired, so that as Nixon spoke, technically no one still employed by him was guilty. In reality, of course, men presently employed by the White House were responsible. So that addition made no sense, and may have been an indicator of Nixon’s nerves.

John Mitchell, the former Attorney General who resigned earlier in 1971 so he could run CRP, also claimed that he had no idea who had broken into the Watergate (when it was men working for him, who had told him the plan, which he had approved). The Nixon Administration ties to the break-in were being successfully covered up—until a check for $25,000 marked “Nixon re-election campaign” was found in the bank account of one of the burglars. The FBI investigated and found CRP money in all the burglars’ accounts, and also expense reports filed by the burglars and submitted to the CRP.

Next time—following the money trail

Gay Marriage defeats tyranny of the majority–again

We’re happy to announce appearance #9 of this post, which we run each time the issue of gay marriage is resolved by a state court in its favor. The first time was back on May 21, 2008, when California’s Supreme Court decided that banning gay marriage was unconstitutional. The original point was that whenever a court overturns a law, there are always those who squawk—incorrectly—that it has overstepped its authority. The judiciary in the U.S. is meant to overturn laws, even laws with great popular support, that are unconstitutional because they restrict peoples’ liberty for no good reason.

Overturning bans on gay marriage started out as an example of thwarting this “tyranny of the majority”, as de Tocqueville called it, but now that the majority of Americans support or do not care to ban gay marriage, this type of legislation is becoming a rebuke to tyranny of the minority. That’s heartening.

Here is the original post, resurfacing now as a district court overturns Utah’s ban on gay marriage:

The California Supreme Court’s decision that banning gay marriage is unconstitutional has been met with the by-now common complaint that the Court overstepped its bounds, trampled the wishes of the voters, and got into the legislation business without a permit.

A review of the constitutionally described role of the judiciary is in order.

The famous commentator on American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, talked a great deal in his books Democracy in America about the tyranny of the majority. This is when majority rule—the basis of democracy—ends up perverting democracy by forcing injustice on the minority of the public.

For example, slavery was an example of the tyranny of the majority. Most Americans in the slave era were white and free. White and free people were the majority, and they used their majority power to keep slavery from being abolished by the minority of Americans who wanted to abolish it. The rights of black Americans were trampled by the tyranny of the majority.

Before Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the majority of Americans were fine with segregated schools. They used their majority power to oppress the minority of Americans who were black, or who were white and wanted desegregation.

In each example, the majority is imposing and enforcing injustice which is incompatible with democracy. They are tyrannizing rather than governing.

The judiciary was created to break this grip of majority tyranny. The legislature—Congress—cannot usually break majority tyranny because it is made up of people popularly elected by the majority. But the appointed judiciary can break majority tyranny because its sole job is not to reflect the wishes of the people but to interpret the Constitution.

If the judiciary finds that a law made by the legislature perverts democracy and imposes the tyranny of the majority, it can and must strike that law down. This is what happened in California. The court found that although the majority of Californians (as evidenced by a previous referendum) had voted to ban gay marriage, that majority was enforcing and imposing injustice on the minority. So the court found the ban unconstitutional.

This is not beyond the scope of the judiciary, it’s exactly what it is meant to do.

We heard a commentator yesterday saying the California court should have left the issue to “the prerogative of the voters”. But if the voters’ prerogative is to oppress someone else, then the court does not simply step aside and let this happen.

The same people who rage against the partial and biased justices who lifted this ban are generally the same people who would celebrate justices who imposed a ban on abortion. People who cry out for impartiality are generally only applying it to cases they oppose.

So that’s what the judiciary does: it prevents the tyranny of the majority from enforcing injustice in a democracy. Like it or not, the “will of the people” is not always sacred, and sometimes must be opposed in the name of equality.

The Atlas of True Names

Some history lies forgotten; we came across this link from the AHA fortnightly newsletter–from a collection of maps that feature the original names of familiar places. They are somehow unnerving and satisfying to read.

Click here for maps of the United States;

click here to find maps for Canada, the British Isles, and the rest of the world.

Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States—conclusion

Hello and welcome to the last post in our unexpectedly long series on Oliver Stone’s new TV series, The Untold History of the United States, currently airing on Showtime. We are analyzing and judging Episode 1 – World War II on its historical accuracy, as Stone asks us to do in the intro.

We left off with 15 minutes to go, and the Allies yet to open a second front in western Europe to relieve the pressure on the Soviet Union, which was fighting off the Nazi invasion launched in 1941. At 51.00 Stone, narrating, shows a propaganda movie clip of Russian people of all ages swearing to fight the Nazis to the death, and describes the superhuman effort of the Russian people to push back the Germans. While their sacrifice was astounding, the lionization of the people ends up subbing in for a frank assessment of Stalin, whose incompetent leadership repeatedly betrayed his people. At last at 55.40 Stone does mention that Stalin decreed that anyone caught retreating or surrendering was to be treated as a traitor, and his family imprisoned. Over 135,000 Russian soldiers were executed during the course of the war for this “treason”; Stone also mentions the over 400,000 prisoners still held in Soviet gulags during the war. He does not say who they were, eliding the fact that many thousands were Polish citizens removed from their homes during the Soviet occupation of Poland. Instead, Stone turns away from a close inspection of Soviet policy under Stalin to focus once more on the heroism of Soviet soldiers.

At 57.52 the episode wraps up by saying: “Though the myth lives on that the U.S. won World War II, serious historians agree that it was the Soviet Union and its entire society, including its brutal dictator Joseph Stalin,who, through sheer desperation and incredibly stoic heroism forged the great narrative of World War II: the defeat of the monster German war machine.”

Again, as we mentioned in our first post, one immediately wonders who the “serious historians” consulting on this project were, but an examination of the credits brings up only three “Researchers” who are not listed as having advanced degrees or belonging to any university or institution. Dr. Peter Kuznick has a bio on the website; he specializes in atomic- and nuclear-era U.S. history. Clearly Dr. Kuznick’s expertise will be critical in later episodes that focus on the Cold War, but in this WWII overview episode, it can have been put to minimal use at best. Who else informed this episode?

We ask because the closing statement is full of holes. No reputable historian of WWII says that the U.S. won it; it is always acknowledged as the joint effort of Britain, the USSR, the U.S., forces from the British Commonwealth, and resistance movements, like the Polish Home Army, in occupied Europe. The Soviets holding on and keeping the Nazis from the Baku oil fields was critical in the Allied victory, but the Soviets alone did not win the war, either. Even if they had been able to force the Nazis out of their country, that would not have stopped fighting on other fronts, like Italy and North Africa, which Stone dismisses as small potatoes because Allied forces there generally “only faced about 10 German battalions.”

More crucially, had the Soviets won the war on their own, they would not have had to negotiate with Roosevelt and Churchill, and would simply have taken over as much of Europe as they possibly could have, fulfilling the same purpose Hitler had had in invading eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself. Winning the war is not winning the peace, and in this case, the peace was as hard-fought for by the Allied leaders as the war had been, as Churchill and Roosevelt tried to keep Stalin from seizing 3/4 of Europe and starting a war with Britain and the U.S. for the rest of it.

We have documented the extremely rose-colored view of Stalin and the Soviet Union throughout this first episode in our earlier posts. Stone says that the major goal of the series is to find unsung American heroes and to “explore the demonization of the Soviets.” So we know up-front that the USSR is going to be presented in a better light than usual, and that makes the “serious historian” uneasy. Whenever you have a goal of undermining the popular view of a person, group, or issue, you have to make your goal clear throughout your work. You can’t just present a radically different view without comment, and you have to back up your new theory with plenty of research. You have to say, for example, “Most people say the Soviets would only have started another war to take Europe if Churchill and Roosevelt hadn’t been firm with him, but I can prove that’s not true.” Then you make your contrary case and prove it with primary documents. Stone does not do this. He leaves out information that contradicts his theory, and that means he is not a serious historian, and cannot ask us to accept his series as serious history.

We can’t say for sure what the point of glorifying the Soviets is in this series; perhaps it will become clear in later episodes, or maybe it will just be put out there over and over with no explanation. It’s likely that for each glorification of the Soviets there will be a denigration of the U.S., since Stone wants to flip the US-good/Soviet Union-bad paradigm. But we are unlikely ever to know, since we won’t be watching any more movie-making masquerading as historical documentary, and will stick with serious history, radical and persuasive as it is.

Washington’s Farewell Address

Welcome to the first in a short series on President George Washington’s farewell address of 1796. Most students of American history learn a little about this address, and the one thing that usually sticks with them is that Washington warned the nation not to make permanent or even long-term alliances with other nations. While this was a guiding principle of Washington’s presidency, it’s not the only or even the main point of note in his address.

We have to say “address”, rather than “speech,” because contrary to common perception, Washington did not read his message publicly. He sent it to the Philadelphia Daily American Advertiser, which printed it on September 19, 1796, and it was picked up and reprinted by other newspapers around the country. But the address has become a speech since Washington’s time: in 1862, in the depths of the Civil War, the people of Philadelphia petitioned Congress to have the address read aloud at a joint meeting of the House and Senate to celebrate the 130th anniversary of Washington’s birth. Senator Andrew Johnson presented the petition saying, “In view of the perilous condition of the country, I think the time has arrived when we should recur back to the days, the times, and the doings of Washington and the patriots of the Revolution, who founded the government under which we live.” In 1888 it was read again to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Constitution, and since 1896 it has been an annual tradition to read the address aloud to the joint session each February (and was read by Jeanne Shaheen on February 27 of this year).

In this series we’ll look at the address and do one of our usual close readings to get at the messages Washington wanted to send to the nation he had done so much to found and protect and set on the right course.

Next time: the reading begins!