Fists of Time

Would Tommy Wells Be D.C.'s First White Mayor?

Ever since charges surfaced about Washington, D.C. mayor Vincent Gray's alleged election law violations, speculation about the city's next mayoral candidacies have swirled.  The most high-profile candidate, city councilman Tommy Wells, launched an exploratory committee this week.  In the course of much of this speculation is the claim that Wells would be the city's "first white mayor."  (Although examples are too frequent to cite, this Washington Post article by staff writer Tim Craig is the most recent one that I've seen.)

Would Tommy Wells really be D.C.'s first white mayor?  No.  But he would be the first white mayor of Washington, D.C.

Confused?  That is because the "federal city," as it is also known, has been restructured several times over the last two hundred years.  (See this handy Wikipedia article for further reference.)  For several decades in the early- and mid-Nineteenth Century, the area was split into several jurisdictions, each with elected officials and federal oversight.  There were several 'mayors of Washington.'  However, there was no city government of "Washington, District of Columbia" until 1871, when Congress passed the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1871.  From 1871 to 1975, there were no elected mayors; this was reversed in 1973 by the District of Columbia Home Rule Act.

The most accurate way to discuss Wells might be to say that he would be the first white mayor "since Home Rule," as Colbert King has.

Perhaps this is being nitpicky with local trivia.  However, let this be a useful reminder: when you hear hyperbolic claims in the newspaper, like 'first white mayor ever,' do the fact-checking yourself!

Did Abolitionism Start in 1831?

I was excited to watch Part I of American Experience's series on the abolitionist movement in the U.S. last night.  I was particularly excited because Verizon's program guide said it would cover the 1820s.  After studying the early abolitionist movement in graduate school (some of my research is summed up here), I was very curious to watch a documentary on Benjamin Lundy, Quakerism, the abolition of slavery in the Northern states, and the American Colonization Society.

Part I did not cover any of those topics.

After a few minutes of reenactments, we are quickly brought to 1831, when William Lloyd Garrison prints the first issue of the Liberator.  This framing clearly establishes an argument that abolitionism began in 1831.  But did it?

Garrison formed his political philosophy, and learned the printing trade, while under the tutelage of Lundy, the most prominent American abolitionist up to that day.  In American Experience, he is not even mentioned.  The narrator does refer to a nameless, "one-man" newspaper publisher.  This makes Lundy sound like an isolated iconoclast.  In fact, he was a leader of a vast nationwide network of activists.  Garrison learned from the best.

Perhaps abolitionism did start in 1831.  But that begs the question (however exhausting it may sound): what was abolitionism?  Garrison's form was clearly different from Lundy's, or almost anyone else's that preceded his.  (The enigmatic David Walker, of course, being a notable exception.)  Lundy built alliances with colonizationists and slaveowners to help freed slaves; Garrison called for the immediate eradication of slavery.

By starting the story off in 1831, American Experience doesn't ask why abolitionism started, and exploded, in that decade.  The default explanation is the evangelical Christianity of the Second Great Awakening.  This argument is written most notably by James Stewart and Louis Filler, and reiterated today in a Huffington Post article on Angelina Grimke.  I question that explanation; the Grimkes were dissenters from the culture in which they were raised, and Garrison later renounced the religous basis for his anti-slavery beliefs.  Technological innovations in printing and postal delivery made abolitionist tracts ubiquitous; emerging humanitarian sensibilities made those tracts palatable.  But an alternate explanation would also have to tackle the contributions of Lundy and William Wilberforce in the 1820s.

In his recent presidential address, American Historical Association leader William Cronon asked that historians learn to tell stories and not get bogged down in the tedious academic questions that will bore "Mr. Everyman."  Perhaps I'm getting bogged down.  Does the average viewer care about what abolitionism means, or where it came from?  Is he getting cheated by missing the broader story?  In the macro version of history, how much does the much smaller network of pre-Garrisonian abolitionists actually matter?

According to CNN, the next installments of "The Abolitionists" will cover Abraham Lincoln.  As everyone knows, Lincoln modeled his political convictions after Henry Clay.  Clay was a harsh critic of slavery, but not, as I've pondered before, an abolitionist.  (How can a slaveowner be an abolitionist?)  To understand Lincoln, I would think you'd have to know Clay's early career, including his colonization activism and the American System, all predating Lincoln's career by decades.  Let's see how "The Abolitionists" tells the story of the past without dwelling on the antecedents.

FDR on Debit Limits

Citing a press conference transcript, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. on FDR and the concept of a debt limit:

A reporter asked in January 1935 whether he saw any limit beyond which the debt could not be permitted to rise.  Roosevelt replied by asking what he would do if five million people were starving: "would you let them starve in order to keep the public debt from going beyond a certain amount?" "Of course not Mr. President," the reporter said. "There you are," said Roosevelt, "I don't know."

-The Politics of Upheaval, p.264

What's Wrong With The New Library of Congress Catalog?

A few weeks ago I first noticed the redesign of Library of Congress's catalog.  This catalog gathers data on practically every copyrighted publication in U.S. history.  It is an extremely useful tool and valuable resource.  (Consequently, I use it at work every few weeks.)  Any changes to it could be either a boon or a headache to researchers.

New Catalog currently at catalog.loc.gov

Ominously, a warning was posted at the top of the new catalog site, saying "the ILS Program Office is aware of the slow response time," and apologizing for the delays.  Sure enough, a simple 'title browse' search took about ten seconds to execute, nearly ten times as long as it would take using the old catalog.

Library of Congress issued no press release about these developments.

A number of Google searches yielded little information about the redesign.  I did find one online statement from a Library of Congress employee, but it was not reassuring.  On H-Net, Military History Specialist Will Elsbury explained that the new catalog had destroyed its durable/permanent hyperlinks to the catalog searches he had coded on a Civil War history website.

I emailed the LC's Public Affairs office about the new catalog but, after waiting for over one week, received no response.

Since then, the LC has restored the old catalog format to its catalog.loc.gov site and put the new version on a beta site at catalog2.loc.gov.  The search links on Elsbury's website now seem to function properly.

This episode leaves many questions unanswered.  Why was the catalog switched so quickly, without any news release or beta site launch?  (Compare this to LC's new beta.congress.gov site, launched yesterday with a full press blitz.)  What improvements did the LC want to make to the old catalog?  Did data migrate?  Will the new catalog still be launched, and, if so, when?  And why is the response time so slow?

My opinion is that the Library of Congress has handled this situation poorly, but the new catalog design still has some promise.  Most of all, the new site is more aesthetically contemporary.  The old version is quite dated.  The colors are warmer, and there are wider margins, making the information easier to navigate.  There are clearly placed links to archival finding aids, the Copyright Office database, and LC Authorities - all sites that I might use in conjunction with the main catalog.

I still have complaints about the new design.  For example, the search results are displayed in a confusing manner.

New LC Catalog Search Results

In the old catalog, search result hits would organize horizontally, with the searched value displayed on the left, exactly where you would look first on the screen.

The new catalog displays search hits vertically, and couches the searched value (the title) between the author and publication data. (See my sample search results, a title search for "Telegraph Avenue.)  The thumbnails on the left, indicating the publication's format (book, microfilm, etc.) are unattractive, not terribly useful, and even a bit confusing.  (They look like the images that show up on your iPod when you don't have an image file for a record cover.  Is the book jacket cover for Telegraph Avenue supposed to show up?)

Sometimes change is hard to accept but ultimately beneficial.  Let's hope that is the case with the new LC Catalog.  In the meantime, perhaps the Library of Congress will start talking to us about what benefits we can expect.

Ernest Poole, Re-visited

The last time I wrote about Ernest Poole, I reflected on the pointlessness of publishing re-prints in the age of the e-reader.  Until that point, I did not know anything about Poole and his literary career.  Last week, I stumbled on Poole once again, this time performing some research for work at the National Archives.  His correspondence during World War I highlights some of the ironies of his social-realist literary work at that time.

While looking over the Records of the Committee on Public Information - the infamous World War I propaganda agency - I read through the papers of Executive Director George Creel.  I expected to find letters from influential leaders like Samuel Gompers or writers like Herbert Croly, both left-of-center figures who supported American military intervention.  What I did not expect to find were the letters to Creel from Ernest Poole and Upton Sinclair.  Both of these leftist luminaries supported the war effort and sought favor from Creel.

This participation with Woodrow Wilson's war agencies is ironic because the Wilson Administration was simultaneously persecuting many of Sinclair and Poole's former socialist colleagues.  Postmaster General Albert Sydney Burleson arbitrarily suspended circulation of socialist journals Masses and the Milwaukee Leader and even an edition of the mainstream liberal The Nation magazine.  The Department of Justice partnered with a vigilante group, the American Protective League, to conduct surveillance on labor and civil rights organizations.  In the most well-known episode, Eugene Debs was imprisoned for delivering a speech that contained passages decrying the draft.

These wartime abuses are rather well-known; the progressive and socialist support for the war is less so.  Reformers, labor leaders, and socialists were split for and against the war.  Woodrow Wilson actively sought the help of progressive reformers to conduct the war effort.  These reformers actually included Creel, a former muckraker, who in turn recruited reform-minded journalists Poole, Ida Tarbell, Will Irwin, and Ray Stannard Baker.  As David Kennedy has explained in Over Here, "muckraking was a quintessentially progressive endeavor.  It relied on publicity rather than the direct exercise of power, and it was content with agitation rather than accomplishment."  But while not directly excercising power, Poole still abetted an administration that persecuted the leftists that it could not persuade through its publicity.

Creel's collaborations with pro-war socialists are borne out in his correspondence at the National Archives.  During the war, Upton Sinclair drafted a pro-war novel starring a 'young socialist' protaganist.  Sinclair wrote to Creel requesting, ultimately unsuccessfully, an official endorsement for the book.  Poole also wanted to use his literary talents to make a pro-war appeal to leftists.  He wrote to Creel about his desire to reach, in his words, 'loyal radicals.'  The category of 'loyal radical' was a curious one.  Obviously, many socialists had sided with Wilson on the war, and loyalty to the government could be reconciled with a revolutionary spirit.  In this time of government persecution, however, the Wilson administration defined "loyalty" arbitrarily, almost rendering Poole's category an oxymoron.

As Dennis Drabelle wrote in the Washington Post book review that first drew my attention to Poole, "'The Harbor' is... [a] snapshot of a little-known period in American urban history, when labor agitators were making headway, a trend that did not survive the federal crackdown on left-wing organizations during and after World War I."  The irony of Ernest Poole is that his collaboration with George Creel underscored, or even exascerbated, those schisms of the left in the 1910s.

Re-Visiting Disputed Ground: The Life of the World Trade Center

This morning, I saw a remarkable time-capture video showing the progress of One World Trade Center.

 

It may be true that September 11th may have once again become an average day, but if you aren't going to reflect on the attacks on the World Trade Center, I'd like to at least use this opportunity to re-revisit my graduate student project, Disputed Ground.  Long before 2001, the WTC captured a unique place in the American imagination.

 

NOTE: The Quicktime plugin is required to view this video. Please allow a moment while the video file loads.

Anti-Colonialism Is As American As Apple Pie

A coworker tried to engage me in a conversation about the new film 2016 the other day.  If you are unfamiliar with the film, it is a cinematic version of Dinesh D'Souza's 2010 Forbes article on President Obama's alleged ideological influences, as well as D'Souza's subsequent book The Roots of Obama's Rage.  Perhaps I should have avoided such an obviously political conversation in our office but I could not resist questioning some of the claims and arguments that 2016 espouses.  Specifically, I could not help but question D'Souza's use of the word "anti-colonial."

What's so wrong with anti-colonialism?  D'Souza repeatedly chides Barack Obama (both Jr. and Sr.) for "anti-colonial" ideology.  It is clear that D'Souza disapproves of this ideology.  Yet he does not explain what is wrong with it.  I asked my coworker if anti-colonialism was not the ideology upon which the United States was founded.  Was not Jefferson anti-colonial?  'That is something different,' my coworker replied, admitting that she 'can't explain it as well as [D'Souza] can.'  This exchange has persuaded me that 2016 tricks its viewers.

The conflation of anti-colonialism with Marxism is insidious and anti-intellectual.  D'Souza is pulling the trick of misdirection: by showing a parade of leftist bogeymen (Frank Marshall Davis, Bill Ayers, etc.), the viewer takes his eyes off the idea of anti-colonialism.  It is a vague, undefined "ism" uttered with a chilling, pulse-quickening soundtrack in the background.

Make no mistake: no country deserves military occupation and exploitation.  Whether that colonial regime should be replaced with representative democracy or a Stalinist dictatorship is an entirely different question.  British colonialism provoked a range of responses, from Jefferson to Gandhi to the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya (of which, it must be noted, Barack Obama, Sr. took no part).

Furthermore, Twentieth-Century British colonialism was traumatic.  Besides the Mau Mau uprising, during which both sides committed atrocities, the 1943 Bengal famine and the India-Pakistan partition had deeply tragic consequences.  Public intellectuals like Niall Ferguson might continue to apologize for, or argue the benefits of, colonialism, but, by default, Dinesh D'Souza seems to be championing colonialism itself.

If anything in today's political discourse could be anti-American, this is it.  Because anti-colonialism is as American as apple pie.

Is Ancestry Overselling DNA Evidence in Obama/Punch Study?

By now you may have heard that Ancestry.com has released a new genealogical study linking President Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, to an early African settler in the North American colonies, John Punch.  Punch is notable because some historians contend he was the first slave in the thirteen colonies that became the United States.  (Although not literally deemed a 'slave,' Punch was sentenced by a judge to lifelong servitude.)

When Ancestry's report was released last week, most news outlets, with the backing of the scholars and experts they had interviewed, judged the report favorably.  New York Times broke the story first, followed by a Washington Post article; subsequent coverage that I've read attribute most information to those two newspapers.  This week, History News Network and The Root published more critical responses that parsed the report's semantic use of "slave," "indenture," "black," and even "white."  And while some of these responses suggested some skepticism of DNA evidence, none of them address my principal concern: the marketing of DNA sampling.

In the case of the Dunham/Punch connection, DNA evidence is employed responsibly.  The science makes a connection both circumstantial and convincing.  Punch's descendents provided samples, and both the paper trail (genealogical documents) and DNA showed these individuals were quite probably related.  This is the same combination that argues that Thomas Jefferson fathered children by Sally Hemmings.  The Jefferson/Hemmings connection is tenuous enough that people can still write screeds in the Wall Street Journal denying the affair, but, as Annette Gordon-Reed has painstakingly documented, the DNA and written evidence together provide a strong argument that the connection is much more likely than not.

The Ancestry report's authors employ careful language, writing that Obama is "most likely" a descendent of Punch.  The care with which the argument is articulated is impressive.  I can't help feel, however, that Ancestry's confidence is given an extra boost by its need to promote its own DNA services.

Ancestry.com is at the top of the genealogy business and is aggressively marketing itself on television.  Large businesses must grow, and genealogical manuscripts can only expand your business so far; offering DNA sampling as a new service seems to be a way to fuel that expansion.

The problem is that DNA sampling can be misleading. When the field of DNA genealogy exploded in the late 2000s, critics abounded in publications from Popular Science to Slate and The Daily Beast.  The sampling can tell you where other people with similar DNA now reside.  That can give you an impression of where your ancestors may have originated, but little else.  Even worse, the small pool of samples available could over-represent certain geographic areas and give you misleading information.

Perhaps more troubling is the way that Ancestry seems to be marketing DNA research to African Americans.  This study focuses on President Obama, the most powerful black American.  In an episode of "Who Do You Think You Are?," the Ancestry-sponsored show on NBC, Blair Underwood gives a DNA sample.  Perhaps Ancestry has publicized the DNA sampling of a prominent white, Asian, or Latino American but I am not aware of it.

Many genealogical records that exist for most Americans do not exist for African Americans because of our history of segregation, oppression, and slavery.  Black genealogists are more likely to hit dead ends.  I fear that offering DNA sampling might offer a false understanding of genealogy.  On television, Blair Underwood learned that a distant cousin lives in Cameroon; Underwood then visited his cousin there.  But Underwood likely has other distant cousins throughout the United States, the west coast of Africa, and, yes, even Europe.

Traveling to Cameroon can provide a cathartic experience that recovers some of the history lost during the violent and traumatic Middle Passage.  In my mind, though, the question is whether or not genealogy is about that cathartic quest for self-discovery, or the narrative of family history.  Although I may, as a white American, have a longer genealogical paper trail, I am more interested in the narrative history than the feeling of self-discovery.

 

Forgetting, Discovery, Secret Knowledge

Historical research often hits the news with somewhat sensational claims of discovery and forgotten knowledge.  Is this language accurate, sensational, or just a convenient shorthand for the research process?

Having researched a similar topic and setting quite recently, I am anxious to read Jefferson Morley's new book on Washington, D.C.'s 1835 race riot.  I am a little perturbed by the title, though.  The full name is Snow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835.  The source of my anxiety is that the "Snow Riot" isn't exactly a "forgotten" event.  I dabbled in D.C. history as an undergraduate and found that the topic is often discussed.  (See, for example, the work of Constance MacLaughlin Green or Carl Abbott.)  Furthermore, race riots were common in antebellum northern cities, as can be seen in works like Ira Berlin's Slaves without Masters or David Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness.

Even if the Snow Riot is be an obscure event known only by D.C. history specialists and enthusiasts, it is still unfair to say it is "forgotten."  What I am really hoping is that Morely's book will describe the event in a level of detail that previous historians have not yet accomplished.  Perhaps the event was so significant that it does deserve to be remembered more widely.  In that sense, Morely might be justified in saying that the event has been forgotten.

Perhaps the word "forgotten" is simply good copy.  Whatever the author's intentions, the "forgotten" label is smart marketing for the publisher.  I sometimes wonder if the appeal of history, whether to the layperson, amateaur historian, or even the expert or academic, lies in the promise of secret knowledge.  By promising a reader secret knowledge, the publisher is hawking something alluring for the passerby: being privy to a conspiracy for the ages.  That might be exciting, but I'm afraid that it might not contribute to anyone's greater understanding of the past.  On the other hand, it could be an interesting way to attractively package a substantive analysis.

A similar question was recently posed on the Atlantic.  If someone "discovers" something in an archive, is it really a discovery?  Last month, a team of researchers identified a document related to the Lincoln assassination that was apparently unknown to contemporary Lincoln scholars.  In a press release, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum wrote, "For nearly a century and a half, it has been tucked away in one of hundreds of boxes of incoming correspondence to the Surgeon General, until [researcher Helena Iles] Papaioannou discovered it." [*Disclosure: Papaionnou is a close personal friend.]

In the Atlantic, historian Suzanne Fischer stated, "If You 'Discover' Something in an Archive, It's Not a Discovery."  "So where was this document found? Was it in a suitcase in the attic of Dr. Leale's great-great-great-great granddaughter? Well, no, it was at the National Archives," complains Fischer.  "This document that had been excavated from the depths of the earth with great physical effort was right where it was supposed to be."  Snark aside, Fischer's argument has some truth to it.  Despite the Lincoln researchers' claims, it is entirely possible that a number of people knew about this document when it was written, or had read the document in the archives many years ago.  There is no way to know or disprove that.  The certainty of the language in the press release makes for good copy, but doesn't stand under scrutiny.

In response to Fischer, Papaioannou defends use of the word 'discovery.'  "by Fischer's logic... absolutely nothing created by anyone in history can be subsequently discovered," she argues.  "Surely if someone uncovers something unknown in living memory (or in the historiographical record) this counts as a discovery."  I actually agree with that logic, but Helena has exposed the absurdity of the semantic debate.  Can't we accept both views?  I think it would be most appropriate, and accurate, to label the find a "re-discovery."  Like the title of Morely's book, though, I suppose I can accept the rhetoric of secret knowledge to help interest the public in two of my own obsessions, D.C. history and archival research.

One Year of Fists of Time

Fists of Time turns one year old today.  Thanks to every reader, and especially those who have taken the time to comment!