The 1950s in America… not the greatest time

The full 1950 Census results have been released–each Census is made completely available 75 years after it was taken. You can access them at The United States Census Bureau website.

We were scanning a collection of highlighted data and were depressed to see this roundup of questions:

One notes, of course, that “he” is used for “person” throughout, until that last question: “If female and ever married, how many children has she ever borne, not counting stillbirths?”

No questions about how long a woman has been working or how much money she has earned, or her potential service in the Armed Forces during the wars, or anything about her being a head of household. Of course women did all of these things, as the actual Census data makes clear. For women to have to answer questions clearly meant to exclude them, to make ridiculous or fantastical the idea that they might work or serve their country, was painful. But they did it. They refused to be turned into objects of reproduction whose only purpose or “service” to their country was to be pregnant.

It’s still painful today for women to be acknowledged as heads of household and breadwinners, but subjected to economic, physical, and mental discrimination and violence. And it’s frightening as well as painful to endure the hysterical insistence that’s been rising since the 80s to force women “back” into an existence as birthing objects. As we face the seemingly inevitable reversal of Roe v. Wade, the battle against sex education, and the refusal of many health insurers and employers to cover birth control, it’s very frightening to see how much some people want women to be pregnancy vessels and nothing else.

These “pro-birth” people demand that every pregnancy be carried to term, but then steadfastly refuse to offer any supports for the baby that is born, voting against free school breakfast and lunch, government-funded preschool programs, after-school programs, and affordable health care. Once a baby is born, the people who demanded that birth do their utmost to make sure the child does not thrive.

An important step in continuing the battle against sexism is to reject the myth that the Fifties were a golden age in America. Start that work today! Fight back against any and all programs and laws that relegate women to child-bearers, and so many children to lives of want.

Does the president have total authority?

We’re reposting this piece in response to President Trump’s recent claim that he wields “total authority” in his role: “When somebody’s the president of the United States, the authority is total. And that’s the way it’s got to be.” This specious claim was refuted almost immediately by the people you expect to see on TV–governors, Washington politicians, political experts, and academics.

But we sometimes fear that the average American begins to believe it–that a poisonous seed is planted in the American mind that in times of crisis, you need a dictator to force everyone to do the right thing, to take control and ensure that no one games the system. It’s a belief that begins as “you need might to do right” but, as human history teaches us, quickly and inevitably ends up as “might makes right.” Think of the cliche about Mussolini: he was a fascist, but the people loved him because “he made the trains run on time.”

When there’s so much friction and factionalism in Congress, people begin to yearn for a bulldozer to clear it all away, a Harry Truman-style “the buck stops here” leader who will tell people what to do, force them to do it, take credit or blame, and just get things moving again.

That’s the inherent problem in the general definition of leadership: that it’s an all-powerful person giving orders to obedient followers. It’s implied that the power is accompanied by wisdom.

But real leadership, as our Founders set us up to one day achieve, is not a Great Leader with an infallible Vision telling everyone else how to follow them. It’s a person who wants to make change mobilizing the talents and energy of other people to work with them to make change happen. It’s everyone sharing their ideas and everyone working equally hard to experiment, take chances, fail, learn, and try again. Incremental change, not Sweeping Edicts and Commands.

We don’t need a dictator. We have a government. It’s our government that makes Americans free. Unconvinced? It’s not surprising, after decades of “government is the problem” politicking. But read on, and we hope you are persuaded. That’s the incremental work we do here at the HP.

Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, has come to the conclusion that the most famous line in the Declaration of Independence, and perhaps in all American documentary history, is not what we think it is.

That’s the way we learn it. But Allen has convincing evidence that in the original document there was no period after “happiness”, which means that first line should read like this:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

In their regular waves of anti-government passion, which recur throughout our history, Americans often claim that the federal government in Washington interferes with our “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness”, and even that the federal government—or the bare concept of having a federal government—is at odds with Americans being able to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. But if the Declaration’s famous line has no period (as Allen seems to prove), then the only way Americans can pursue those rights given by God to all people is if they institute a government that derives its just powers from the consent of the governed.

This is how we have always seen it at the HP: what makes America great is not, as is so often suggested, “our freedoms”. It is the fair, representative, democratic government that makes those freedoms possible, that makes preserving those freedoms its first priority and understands them as its reason for being. Without a fair and free government, we cannot long maintain any national, political, or individual freedoms we currently possess. In our posts “What are the freedoms we have as Americans?” parts 1 and 2, we put it this way:

“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.”

The idea that the Founders did not want us to have a strong government is ludicrous. Their whole aim in breaking away from Great Britain was to create a new kind of government—the government was the point, the goal, the prize, the crowning achievement of the United States. They would create a government that was democratic and representative, strong but flexible, responsive yet authoritative enough to enforce its laws (which would be written by popularly elected representatives of the people). Without that kind of government, there could be no guarantees of life, liberty, or happiness. As Jack Rakove of Stanford puts it in the New York Times article on Allen’s quest to remove the inaccurate period from the Declaration, “Are the parts [of the Declaration] about the importance of government part of one cumulative argument, or—as Americans have tended to read the document—subordinate to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’?”

It takes energy to maintain a fair and free government. Energy on the part of citizens. We are so often lacking that kind of energy, particularly in the new millennium. George Washington warned us in his Farewell Address that the greatest threat to American life, liberty, happiness, and the government that provides them all comes from within America itself:

“The unity of government which constitutes you one people is also now dear to you. It is justly so, for [the government] is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very liberty which you so highly prize. But it is easy to foresee that, from different causes and from different quarters, much pains will be taken, many artifices employed to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth; as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed, it is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can in any event be abandoned; and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.”

Washington urges us to love our democracy and our democratic government, and to remember that it is a painfully new kind of government, and there are going to be many people—outside the U.S. and even within it, your fellow citizens—who don’t believe it will really work. They will try to tear it down, and tell you you’re crazy to defend it. You’ve got to remember that being united under your unique government is your greatest treasure. Forget the things that make you different, like religion or customs and focus on what you have in common, what you share that no other people on earth share: a democratic government of the people, for the people, and by the people.

That’s why we are quick to believe there was no period after “happiness” in the original Declaration of Independence. The Founders knew that good, tireless government was the only safeguard of life, liberty, and happiness. As the Fourth of July approaches, we would do well to remind ourselves of that fact.

Truth v. mythologizing the past

We were reading an interview with Jason Stanley, who has a new book out called How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. Of course when he mentioned truth v. myth, the HP’s bat senses were alerted:

Q: Anti-intellectualism has been present throughout much of American history. How is the kind of anti-intellectualism linked to fascist ideas different? Or is it the same?

A: Our suspicion of elites and what could be seen as anti-intellectualism can be healthy at times; we can see the American philosophical traditions of pragmatism and empiricism in this light, which can in fact serve as counterweights to the grandiose myths of fascist politics. But even this version has proven to be a weakness, one that makes us more susceptible to being manipulated politically. We have seen this play out in the case of climate change, where essentially apolitical scientists were successfully demonized as ideologues. We also have a history of what I think of as more classically fascist anti-intellectualism.

Fascist anti-intellectualism sets the traditions of the chosen nation, its dominant group, above all other traditions. It represents more complex narratives as corrupting and dangerous. It prizes mythologizing about the nation’s past, and erasing any of its problematic features (as we see all too often in histories of the Confederacy and the Reconstruction period, or of the treatment in history books of our indigenous communities). It seeks to replace truth with myth, transforming education systems into methods of glorifying the ideologies and heritage of the members of the traditional ruling class. In fascist politics, universities, which present a more complex and accurate version of history and current reality, are attacked for being places where dominant traditions or practices are critiqued. Fascist ideology centers loyalty to power rather than truth. In fascist thinking, the university is simply another tool to legitimate various illiberal hierarchies connected to historically dominant traditions.

If readers of the HP know anything, it’s that history is complex. That’s why we end up writing so many 12-part series on what seem like the simplest events. Anyone looking for a quick fix on the “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sermon we all read in college or high school, or on the Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech, or “Who was Anne Hutchinson?” will look in vain for the “short version,” the crux of the argument, in the first 3 or even 4 posts. A lot of context has to be set to make sense of that crux when it does come.

So while the words “Welcome to our series on…” may strike boredom or terror in the hearts of HP readers, we feel that in the end that careful and thorough setting up of a problem or question or person or event is necessary. That’s all we have to say here.

Truth v. Myth: “Born Fighting”

Senator James Webb (D-VA) published his book Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America in 2004; the Smithsonian Channel just broadcast the video adaptation recently. It was aired in two parts. Part 1 focused on Scotland, beginning with Hadrian’s Wall, and followed the eventual appearance of Protestantism in Scotland, the conflicts with England over non-conformism, and the recruitment of Protestant Scots by England into the north of Ireland to settle land seized by the English government from Catholic Irish landholders (thus changing the Irish population, it was hoped, and calming the place down for English rule). The Scots encountered growing hostility from the native population they were helping to colonize, and after the siege and battle of Londonderry, in which they received no help from England in beating off the Catholic Irish, many of the Scots—now called Scots-Irish or Scotch-Irish by the native population who did not accept even those born in the country as Irish, left for another English colonial land: America.

This first part of the documentary was not perfect, but it was at least technically accurate in most of its details. The second part goes dramatically off-course into the damaging kind of us-vs-them, who’s-a-real-American, America-is-about-violence, and racial politics that is characteristic of myth. We’re going to take the time to rebut the myth perpetuated by one of our Senators because it’s important to call people in high office on the damage they do to historical truth and our own citizens’ perception of what our country stands for.

Like most people who have a thesis that one group of people, one invention, one idea, etc., has shaped the course of world history, Webb consistently makes statements about the Scots-Irish that could be true of any group. “This culture shaped America”, he begins, “…creating the very basis of American democracy.” Which culture that is part of America has not shaped it? Which culture has left no imprint on our government, political history, treasured ideas, or important battles? And since our democracy has been constantly evolving since 1775, no one group can claim to have established the basis of that democracy. (If you had to choose, you’d have to say Americans of English descent. The men who framed our government and put its ideals and principles into law were overwhelmingly of English background.)

Webb’s elevator description of the Scots-Irish is “fight, sing, drink, pray”. This to him sums up their willingness to fight any war, their resolve and determination, their rebellious refusal to submit to “outside” law, and their strict morality. Again, it’s not hard to think of other groups do not have the same reputation: the Irish, Greeks, and Mexicans come to mind. But Webb begins part 2 with the story of the first Scots-Irish in America, again recruited by the English to put down the locals and act as colonizers. Scots-Irish people settled in Pennsylvania on the borderlands between Quaker settlement and Native Americans. Webb describes their experiences there in what he calls “the unimproved wilderness”. The word “wilderness” comes up frequently, and is never questioned as inaccurate (as the land had been settled, hunted, and known by its native inhabitants for millennia). The Quaker refusal to fight is mentioned repeatedly, and seems to be put out there to deride the Quakers and anyone else who questions the value of violence and war. This is a theme that runs through the show.

Again, at the end of the Pennsylvania section, Webb says that the “flood” of Scots-Irish immigrants that followed “would eventually transform America”, and again it’s a claim you could make about anyone, including the English, French, and Germans who preceded or came along with the Scots-Irish just about wherever they went.

It is almost funny when Webb describes the pioneers in the Shenandoah Valley who “carried their few belongings with them” (unlike all other pioneers?) into the “wilderness” only to discover “they weren’t alone”. The fact that the land was inhabited is, of course, the first indicator of its not being a wilderness. The Native Americans whose land the pioneers were settling are basically presented as threatening, though it is of course the natives who were threatened by white settlement and claims of land ownership.

When the French and Indian War began, Webb says, the Scots-Irish fought eagerly and made their name as “unflinching fighters”. He characterizes their attitude as “This is my land and I’m going to stay here and protect it and if I have to, I will fight for it.” Which again is the precise attitude of every group of people in human history who have been in a war on their own territory. Only the Native Americans, in this case, really had the right to say it.

Already, Webb is making a case he will repeat many times: the Scots-Irish a) like to fight, b) are brave (really braver than anyone else), and c) show their independence by fighting. The first tenet really discredits the second two. People who like to fight aren’t really brave, and they don’t fight for independence, but because it’s what they do. The Scots-Irish on the frontier fought because that’s what they had been hired to do by the British governors who brought them in (payment being the right to settle and the grant of religious freedom) and they wanted to keep the land they had settled. That is not really about bravery or independence.

In fact, we have seen the Scots-Irish now as established colonizers, people with no hesitation to help a colonial power destroy native people in return for those people’s lands. It is odd that this is never addressed in Webb’s tale of the Scots-Irish as freedom-loving people who always fought tyranny.

His description of the period between the end of the French and Indian War and the beginning of the Revolutionary War is, politely put, difficult to understand. “Britain tightened its grip over America’s east coast. And now, isolated from British colonial rule to the east, the Scots-Irish frontiersmen settled into their American roots… and turned their backs on bigotry in America’s colonial towns”.

The bizarre inaccuracies—British rule had always been most present on the east coast (which is why the British brought in the Scots-Irish to colonize the western frontier); but after the war concentrated more and more on controlling the western frontier; as frontierspeople the Scots-Irish had always been isolated from coastal society; and bigotry is never relegated to urban areas (see plantation life)—slowly make sense only as the show goes on and Webb talks about Andrew Jackson. Webb reveres Jackson, and has apparently bought into the idea Jackson and his followers evangelized for, that “elites” were running America and a cabal of “aristocrats” in the cities was ruining the nation. The idea that Jackson put power in the hands of average people is not true; he put his friends and financial backers into federal office regardless of their qualifications, he was a wealthy slaveholder, and he had no special regard for the rights of the “little guy”, as any Native or black American would tell you.

As for the idea that the previously isolated Scots-Irish were isolated still after the war, it’s not really true. Germans and Huguenots moved in large numbers into the American south from the mid-1600s right up to the Revolutionary War. Many of the Germans were Protestants unable to worship as they wished at home, and of course the Huguenots left everything behind in France to come to America in the name of religious freedom. Webb would have viewers believe the Scots-Irish were the only people in America (maybe in the world) who sacrificed for their freedom of religion, left everything behind, and braved the hardships of the frontier with no help from outside. All of the colonies of the south were first settled, of course, by the English. Most of them were non-conformists, just like the Scots-Irish, who refused to compromise their faith and left all behind in the name of freedom. In North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Kentucky, the Scots-Irish came in after the Huguenots and Germans.

The Revolutionary War saw many Scots-Irish enlist, just as it saw many members of all the groups in the colonies enlist. Webb focuses on the Battle of King’s Mountain of 1780, in which 900 Scots-Irish militia men routed 1200 British soldiers. The British, rigidly sticking to “European battle formation”, were mown down by the sniping Scots-Irish who were smart enough to use guerrilla tactics. Webb states there were 500 British casualties and 28 American. The ragged, poor militia “destroyed” the British army.

But it wasn’t completely that way. The British did not remain in formation, standing still waiting to get shot, but instead made repeated bayonet charges, which, while unsuccessful in winning the battle, at least made some sense. Of the five American militia leaders, one was of Huguenot descent (John Sevier), two were governors, two served in Congress, and two served in state legislatures; three were born into wealth, and one married into it. So the leadership was not completely rag-tag. The casualties were 244 killed, 163 wounded, and 668 taken prisoner for the British, and 29 killed and 58 wounded for the Americans. One reason for the high British death count was that the militia men continued firing after the British put up a white flag.

We’ll end this post with Webb’s second bizarre leap away from historical fact: he claims that “In 1783, America acknowledged the efforts made by the overwhelmingly Scots-Irish militiamen in the south in the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution”. First, the Second Amendment was adopted in 1791 with the rest of the original Bill of Rights (the Constitution wasn’t written and ratified until 1787). Second, a starkly modern political agenda is expressed here as historical fact. Webb goes on to say basically that people in the south care so much about gun ownership because they were once frontiersmen, and the frontiersman’s duty to protect his family over time turned into a right “for people with a long history of mistrust of the central government. There’s a saying around here: I’ll give up my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.”

Where to begin. First, what region of our nation never had a frontier? Is it that the north was never frontier land? The west? Every region of the present United States began as frontier land, where people had muskets or rifles to hunt with and to fight Indians and to use as part of the local militia in times of war. Second, either gun ownership is about self-reliance (the frontiersman) or it’s about not believing in government. If it’s that southerners never trusted the federal government, that’s not about the frontier. That’s a mistrust of the federal government that was shared by New Englanders, Mid-Atlantic states residents, and every other region you can think of. That’s what made creating the federal government in 1787 so difficult; even the “elites” on the east coast had their doubts about it turning into a tyranny. (It’s funny that this suspicious government is the one that made a special Amendment to preserve the rights of the Scots-Irish. One wonders what prevented them from looking more kindly on such a government.)

Webb, I think it’s fair to say, is looking at 1791 through the lens of 2011 and 1865 to say that the south is right not to trust the unfair northern government that oppresses it today and has oppressed it since the end of the Civil War. (You’ll see why I say this in the next post.) But the Second Amendment was not written to give people a way to create a state; our Founders believed that our system of law, our democracy, would keep people safe and free. It’s our government and the laws it is based on and that it enforces that create our liberty, independence, freedom, whatever you like to call it. Guns are not law, they are an alternative to law. So I quarrel with Senator Webb’s description of the origins of the Second Amendment, and the validity of the southern (as he calls it) attachment to weapons. The Amendment was not written as a thank-you to the Scots-Irish, and it is not about substituting gun ownershp for centralized government.

Next time: Jackson, the Civil War, and how the entire middle class is Scots-Irish

Truth v. Myth: Roger Williams

Roger Williams is a rarity: a Puritan minister who is viewed with great sympathy by modern Americans. How did this happen?

In this T v M series, we’ll look at Williams and learn his full story, and surprisingly, the basic outcome will remain unchanged, in that Williams did become a sympathetic and visionary leader we can all admire today. But it was a long road for him, and most Americans would not recognize the early Roger Williams. His struggles involved many important Puritan leaders, the powerful church at Salem, and at one point the attention of the entire Puritan population in New England. Williams was the closest thing to a celebrity—a rule-breaking, emotional celebrity with devoted fans and bitter enemies—that ever existed in early Puritan New England, and he came close to self-destructing before he found his way.

Williams was born to wealthy London parents (his father was a merchant) in 1603. He graduated from Cambridge in 1627 as an Anglican minister but he could not take up a position in an Anglican church because sometime during college, Williams had become a Puritan. This was not completely surprising; Puritanism was active in the universities, where bright and inquiring men were exposed (whether deliberately or by accident) to the newest ideas. Puritanism was also a very intellectual faith, well-suited to scholarly men.

Since he could not stand in a pulpit, Williams took a position as private chaplain to the family of Puritan lord Sir William Macham. In December 1629, he married Mary Barnard. Williams knew that the first group of Puritans were planning their journey to America, due to launch just four months later in April 1630. In fact, he had been made aware of those plans by the Puritan leaders themselves, showing that Williams was already becoming a well-known and well-esteemed Puritan leader himself. But he did not join them. Why? There are likely several reasons. First, Williams had a good position in the Puritan household of an influential man, and might have hoped to effect change at home in England. Second, he had not yet been persecuted for his faith. Third, and significantly, Williams was already finding Puritanism too compromised; he was becoming a Separatist (someone who wanted to leave the Church of England rather than reform it as the Puritans wanted to do).

By the time Williams left for America with his wife Mary later in 1630, he was an opponent of the Anglican Church and the Puritan program. How was he to fare in Puritan New England?

Next time: Williams makes waves in Salem.