Fists of Time

Fact Checking, Presidential Research, and Rick Santorum

This one goes out to reliable reader Laszlo, who asked that I not shy away from the political debates that might already occupy the blogosphere.

I do not have much to add about Rick Santorum's comments about JFK's 1960 speech on religion and government.  Because I have experience conducting research at Presidential Libraries, though, I do have some thoughts to offer on the response to Santorum's remarks.

Joan Walsh - a Catholic liberal and fervent Santorum critic - turned the tables on the former Pennsylvania senator yesterday.  In her Salon.com blog, she posted his remarks back to back with JFK's.  Looking at then-Senator Kennedy's words, you may believe, as I do, that Santorum's reaction was overblown and paranoid.

Holding political pseudo-history accountable should be easy.  That is why, this morning, Walsh expressed both thanks and dismay at the reaction to her own post:

This is one of those rare times when I’d rather not be recognized, because – don’t tell my editors – what I did was easy. It took me exactly 10 seconds to Google JFK’s speech and another few minutes to read it. Then I cut and pasted Santorum’s comments next to JFK’s and voila, kids, I had a story. The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart credited me with a “deep-dive,” and I appreciate the praise, but really, I barely got my feet wet.

The Atlantic did Walsh one better today and posted a YouTube video of Kennedy's speech.

Although I am basing my reaction almost solely on Walsh's critique, I am inclined to believe with her; major media organizations do not appear to have gone straight to the source of Kennedy's words to challenge Santorum's assessment of them.

Researching the public statements of U.S. presidents should not be difficult in this day and age.  The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library has an exhaustive speech file of Kennedy's presidential speeches, and even has a version of the 1960 address in text and audio.  The Atlantic actually posted from a third party, but cspan.org has a full version on its site here.  C-SPAN and the Kennedy Presidential Library are authoritative, trustworthy, and accessible sources.  Contacting them or browsing their online holdings shouldn't be considered 'digging deep.'

The reference librarians at the Presidential Library are amazingly easy to reach; from their main page, click on "Contact Us" and the Research Room phone number is in plain view.  Even the reference desk staff can field questions about detailed events such as the Sept. 12, 1960 Houston speech.

Fact-checking Santorum's other distortions of presidential history might require a couple hours at the library; but when it comes to televised presidential remarks, it can be quite easy.

Beyond "Beyond the Bonus March"

Following Freedom from Fear, I have been digging a little deeper into Depression/New Deal history.  I thank C-SPAN for recording and streaming an excellent series of discussions at the Roosevelt Presidential Library.  The most interesting of these talks was Stephen Ortiz, who has recently written Beyond the Bonus March and the GI Bill (NYU, 2009).  Ortiz's work is not very groundbreaking but offers some interesting questions and thought exercises.  Why, Ortiz asks, is Franklin D. Roosevelt's opposition to Bonus bills not more widely recognized?

(Note: although there were a number of bills in Congress to allow World War I veterans to immediately receive service certificate payment - some of which differed in various details - I am using the term "Bonus Bill" to refer to all of them generally.)

This question has both merits and flaws.  Of course, Herbert Hoover's reaction to the popularly-supported Bonus March (and General Douglas MacArthur's excessive use of force) is still decried to this day.  Because that incident helped deliver the 1932 election to Roosevelt, it is easy to assume that FDR supported the Bonus Army's demand for early benefit payments.

That assumption, of course, would be wrong, but let us not set up a straw man.  Is anyone actually making the assumption?  Any close reading of 1930s political history should at least gloss over FDR's views in favor of balanced budgets and opposition to advanced veterans' payments.  Ortiz is most interesting when he asks, more precisely, why the big news story of 1935-36 (the debate, veto, and passage of the Adjusted Compensation Payment Act) is hardly noted in today's history.  He cites large, front-page newspaper headlines, a Madison Square Garden rally, and a joint session of Congress that was presided over by the president himself (a unique historical event).  There is clearly a disconnect between the public's interest in the Bonus issue at the time and historians' interest in the issue today.

I have shared this experience during my historical research in college.  While studying 1970s Baltimore, I browsed newspaper headlines about rallies, strikes, and lawsuits that were - and are - historically significant but not a part of the big-picture history of the era that has emerged.  There is clearly something to be said about the forgetting of major controversies over the passage of time.

Nonetheless, I have quibbles about Ortiz's question.  I think that the question of FDR's 'forgotten' Bonus Bill veto can be resolved with a simple point: the veto was easily overridden.  It was a moot point.  On top of that, it does not appear to me that FDR's opposition was really that inconsistent with his program.  Early bonus payments - like the Share the Wealth or Townsend programs FDR also opposed - were massive expenditures.  Social Security was ostensibly contributory, and Harold Ickes' budgets were tightly run.  I wonder, too, if his defeat here actually foreshadows the difficult relationship he had with Congress in the late 1930s - a relationship widely acknowledged in New Deal history.

Additionally, I object to the idea that the Bonus March was a watershed in veterans' interest group politics.  Ortiz does acknowledge that the Grand Army of the Republic set a precedent for these politics but inexplicably writes off the political centrality of Civil War veterans.  It does not just suffice to cite Blight's Race and Reunion in this regard; I must point out that Civil War pensions constituted an enormous government expenditure, entitlement program, and political interest.

In spite of all of my objections, Stephen Ortiz's work is genuinely stimulating.  The question of the Bonus Bill ties into several different topics and questions about the Depression and New Deal: Hoover's similarities and differences with FDR; the question of the balanced budget; inflationary policies; silver; FDR's conflicts with Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and, at times, congressional Democrats.  New Deal history can, at times, be an endless list of events, legislation, and programs.  The topic of veterans' benefits bisects so many issues that it is quite unique.  Without reading the book, though, I wonder if it actually runs deeper that Stephen Ortiz even acknowledges.

Learning, and Recognizing, World War II

Sometimes you read and learn about something, and you can't stop seeing it and hearing it everywhere.  You might not have recognized it before, or it didn't resonate with you, but now you understand it.  That is the way that I feel after finishing Freedom from Fear and finally reading an extensive account of the U.S. experience in World War II.  (See my previous blog post about it here.)

In Freedom from Fear, David M. Kennedy discusses the German U-Boat threat to shipping vessels in the Atlantic Ocean, which resulted in the massive loss of the SS Port Nicholson.  Last week, I read that a treasure hunter says he has evidence to prove he has recovered the wreck.  Kennedy quotes Admiral Ernest J. King, who wrote, two days after that U-Boat attack, that "the losses by submarines off our Atlantic seaboard... threaten our entire war effort."

Kennedy writes about the troops who parachuted into France ahead of the D-Day invasion.  Days after reading about that, I heard about my town's loss of Bill Bladen, 86, who was wounded after jumping out of an airplane on June 6, 1944 and later in Holland.   According to Kennedy, members of Bladen's 82nd Airborne Division, "mindful of the slaughter of their comrades descending onto the Cotentin on the night of June 5-6, jumped over Nijmegen shouting, 'Remember Ste. Mere Eglise,' and with guns blazing."  (About that age discrepancy: according to a vernacular account I've heard, Bladen lied about his age to enlist.)

And then of course there is Red Tails, the new film dramatizing the experience of the 332d Fighter Group of the USAAF.  This group was an offshoot of the 99th Pursuit Squadron, which "distinguished itself in North Africa and Italy" and caused a "sensation, in both the white and black press."

Is there a name for the phenomenon of noticing things constantly after learning about them?

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Another note about our World War II veterans and Red Tails.  After Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy panned the movie as unrealistic, 91-year-old Tuskegee Airman Henry L. Moore wrote back with an epic rebuttal: "we really could fly them that way."

Bill O'Reilly and the Lavender Scare

Politicians and political commentators seem to provide a wealth of history-blogging fodder because they always seem to simplify or distort the past.  I'm trying to avoid blogging about these sorts of things, but the latest news about Bill O'Reilly's comments about gay rights and McCarthyism have me knocking my head against the desk.

Yesterday, O'Reilly (perhaps improbably) defended Ellen DeGeneres from attacks by social conservatives who want to boycott JC Penney for signing a business agreement with DeGeneres.  (Perhaps more accurately, O'Reilly may in fact be defending JC Penney, not exactly DeGeneres herself, subtly allowing himself to emphasize business rights as much as civil rights.)  In doing so, he compares would-be boycotters to McCarthy supporters who blacklisted Communists.

What a fascinating argument.  Perhaps O'Reilly has never heard of the "Lavender Scare"?  McCarthy and the hard-line anti-communists did more than blacklist suspected Reds.  They actually engaged directly in the persecution of homosexuals, coordinating their purge from federal government employment.  Comparing the persecution of DeGeneres to McCarthyism is quite appropriate - until you, ironically, leave out the part about McCarthy's actual persecution of homosexuals.  (Let's not even get started on Roy Cohn.)

We have already heard that Bill O'Reilly is not exactly the best historian.  I don't expect him to be a great historian, but I would like our society to have an improved perspective about history and sexuality.  This doesn't just extend back to the Lavender Scare.  Social conservatives (like a headline-making one from the next neighborhood over from mine) make claims about how marriage has "always" been.

Skepticism towards cheap, passing claims about the way things have "always" been is the fruit of a good education.  We might not need a 'gay history law' like California's, but acknowledging that both family and sexuality is historically fluid is a sound start.  As the Lavender Scare demonstrates, the history of sexuality, politics, and even foreign policy can be intimately intertwined.  After we acknowledge the diversity of sexuality, and the right to love one another, maybe that holistic version of American history will be common knowledge.

While You Were Protesting SOPA...

As prominent websites blacked out to protest SOPA on January 18, the Supreme Court of the United States delivered a landmark ruling to corporate copyright owners.  As media attention remained focused on the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act, the Court handed down its opinion in Golan v. Holder.

This timing was, ironically, advantageous for the entertainment industry.  While open access advocates such as website Boing Boing passionately condemn SOPA/PIPA, little attention was paid to the ruling in Golan.  Boing Boing, for example, had several posts on Golan as it headed to oral argument, but none in the wake of its ruling.  Similarly, Lawrence Lessig's twitter feed lit up against SOPA in December and January, but did not address the 6-2 court ruling.  The same goes for UPenn Cinema Studies professor Peter Decherney, who had written an amicus brief in the case and a New York Times op-ed on Golan in October, but has not spoken out prominently about the case's outcome.

Unlike legislation that has drastically enhanced copyright protection (i.e. the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, or the Digital Millennium Copyright Act), Golan has limited scope.  It pertains only to older works whose copyright status remain murky due to age and gaps in international law.  As the Conductors Guild famously argued in its amicus brief, an unfavorable ruling would mean that "student ensemble[s] no longer can perform Prokofiev’s [1936 composition] Peter and the Wolf or Stravinsky’s [1918 composition] Soldier’s Tale, among other titles."  While technically the ruling has limited implications, it enforces a trend toward unreasonable copyright extension and has educational implications beyond those of youth music ensembles.

Anyone interested in studying history should be concerned about this ruling.  Golan further restricts the amount of modern media that may be consumed, and studied, free of charge.  Imagine if we could view a vast library of early Twentieth-Century film online, without ads.  The educational value would be immense.  Sites like the Internet Archive and Wikimedia Commons, which currently house invaluable resources to historical researchers, are now threatened because they provide unlicensed versions of retroactively copyrighted content.  Unfortunately, the majority of the Supreme Court believes that corporations and the estates of long-deceased artists are more important than scholars who might use these types of resources.

The Golan ruling and SOPA represent a double threat to web-savvy historians and internet archives.  If SOPA were to pass, a site containing unlicensed, retroactively copyrighted content could be taken offline immediately without any due process.  The federal government itself might have to shut down its own websites.  This could conceivably happen if Time complained that the Smithsonian history blog Past Imperfect used items from their photo archive without permission, or if a major film studio that produced a video for the government found out that clips made their way into the National Archives Archival Research Catalog.

A ruling in favor of copyright holders does not mean that open access advocates should be resigned to failure.  The Court's right wing often defers (rhetorically, at least) to the authority of Congress.  Should our legislators actually follow the spirit of our Constitution - which offered copyright protection for "limited times," not lifetimes - they may reverse the trend towards copyright extension and begin to limit the unreasonable amount of time that copyrighted material is locked away for the benefit of corporations.

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(Note: while the actual opinion should be available at the Supreme Court website here (.pdf), it is currently unavailable - perhaps, if I might speculate, because of hacker interference?)