I recently received two notes from readers of the Brazilian edition of A Little History: one an architect of urban spaces and the other a professor of law with an interest in the U.S. Supreme Court. Their kind words are very much appreciated and, as someone who is sadly innocent of the Portuguese language, I was particularly glad to hear from Professor Cássio Casagrande at the Universidade Federal Fluminense that the translation by Janaina Marcoantonio into Brazilian Portuguese is "of very high quality." I spoke of my frustration in having to pare down 500 years of history into 300 pages—though in some ways that is also a most engaging challenge—and mentioned that I had wanted, early in the project, to devote a separate chapter to the Supreme Court, centered on John Marshall. Professor Casagrande commiserated on the task of compression, appreciating the focus on the Constitution but missing FDR's Court-packing scheme during the Depression. As did I, but in the end I decided that I could not pack the Court-packing episode into an already stuffed chapter!
On the other hand, try condensing into eight pages the biggest event in human history—World War II—including the rise of Hitler and the run-up to war. That's the chapter that follows Roosevelt and the Great Depression—and talk about packing! My brief take on the Pilgrims, Squanto and the first Thanksgiving is in Chapter 7 of A Little History of the United States. The chapter is currently up on this website beginning on the Home page, if you don't have a copy. Or if you'd like an interesting Canadian perspective, an old friend and long-time correspondent of mine, Susan Felsberg of Happy Valley, Labrador, this morning pointed me to a post by Larry Dohey, archivist at the Provincial Museum and Archives in St. John's, Newfoundland. As I mention in Little History, Squanto's famous assistance given the Pilgrims—regarding fertilizing their crops with dead fish—was almost certainly not Indian lore but a European technique. Dohey provides more detail about Squanto's odyssey, which takes him from America to the slave markets in Spain, to England, and finally back to America by way of Newfoundland. Because of that journey, Dohey notes, Squanto was able to teach the Pilgrims "how to plant corn in hills, using fish as a fertilizer as he had seen in Newfoundland." Note, too, that it was the Indian crop of corn which helped the Pilgrims pull through. Three-hundred years later, in 1917, the U.S. Department of Agriculture was promoting the use of corn over wheat (citing the Pilgrims' example) due to the devastation wrought in Europe during World War I, which the United States had just entered. "Wheatless Wednesdays" (complementing "Meatless Mondays") were meant to wean Americans still hooked on European grains at a time when wheat, oats and barley were hard to come by. Few in those days could have foreseen the degree to which corn would conquer the world's dietary habits, not only in products made directly from it but also as an omnipresent sweetener (corn fructose) and as a food given to livestock and farm-raised fish.
Happy Thanksgiving! And don't make your feast entirely corn-based. The week after the election, “I know nothing” strikes home as a slogan to be embraced with a kind of sardonic dismay. Like so many others, I was blindsided by Trump’s victory. I recall, four years ago, the rise in prominence of Nate Silver’s 538 polling website, with its increasingly sophisticated coverage of the Obama-Romney race. Silver nailed the final percentages then, state by state, with uncanny accuracy. That, despite continual carping from the right that 538 was skewing its totals unfairly. Silver’s subsequent popularity led him to leave the position he had taken as the New York Times’ lead polling analyst to set up his own shop; and after he departed, the Times replaced him with a new regular feature on statistical matters, “The Upshot,” while the Washington Post began its own similar operation. These sites and virtually all other pollsters gave the edge in 2016 to Clinton—until around 8:45 or 9:00 pm election night, when the inflow of returns led television pundits to become increasingly subdued over the next hour. During those same vertiginous minutes, the Times’ live blog began to discount its earlier predictions of a Clinton success, from the 80 percent range to the 70s, then the 50s…then (gulp!) to odds favoring Trump. The bicoastal elites’ collective embrace of precise statistical projection swirled downward into the abyss. And what remained in the bubbling froth was the reluctant and inescapable conclusion: “I know nothing.” Given that ignorance, can anything be said about what’s ahead on the political scene? I’d like to adopt the historian’s traditional posture of looking forward by looking back. Because the slogan I know nothing points toward an older political movement sharing uncanny similarities with our present troubles. Consider the following scenario. A sharp influx of immigrants prompts many Americans to rage against the influence of foreigners. Not only do they take jobs that home-grown citizens might have filled, but their strangeness itself renders them suspicious. Furthermore, these immigrants are accused of spreading crime and disorder. Worse, a foreign religion threatens the republic, a religion whose autocratic values are antithetical to democracy. Meanwhile, across the globe revolutions and environmental disasters only increase the flood of unwanted strangers. In the face of such pressures, a new political movement spreads like wildfire, seeming to coalesce out of nowhere, upending the traditional system of political parties. The New York Times condemns the movement, noting that “bigotry and hostility to foreigners as such have had much to do” with the new party’s success. Still the movement grows. Its mem- bers particularly loathe old-style politicians and the corrupt deals they engineer. And finally, the new party’s most effective organizer is a New York merchant pursuing a fortune in real estate. He does not sell branded steaks but he is indeed also in the dry-goods business. Welcome to the 1850s and the Know-Nothing Party, aka the American Party, aka The Supreme Order of the Star-Spangled Banner. Earlier in the nineteenth century, immigration had proceeded at a modest pace. Between 1820 and 1840 only about 700,000 newcomers arrived on American shores. But that number jumped to 1.7 million during the 1840s. The sharp rise was fueled by difficult conditions in Europe, including a potato famine in Ireland and the failure of political revolutions in Germany which drove thousands of refugees across the Atlantic. Anti-foreign sentiments were strongest in urban areas like Boston and New York, where the new immigrants crowded. James W. Barker, the New York real estate entrepreneur who did most to organize the new party, was described as having “an abiding faith in American nationality” and a great “energy of character.” Under his leadership the American party grew throughout the North and Midwest. By the end of 1854 Know Nothing councils had been established in every northern state. Despite a smaller immigrant population in the Midwest, the Know Nothings were popular there too. In Indiana, one observer noted, “the ‘Know nothings’ are thick as the Locusts in Egypt.” Another commented, “the native citizens of the Northern Middle & Western States are so completely disgusted with the conduct of our leading politicians in bidding for the foreign vote…they are determined to make a strong effort to place the government of the country in the hands of those to whom it rightfully belongs.” The party organized itself as a secret society, as was the practice with many other splinter parties and reform movements of the era. Before the American Party formed, nativist organizations included the Native Sons of America, the United Daughters of America, the Order of the Star Spangled Banner and the Order of United Americans. To keep its doings secret, party members were advised, when asked about the movement, to simply reply, “I know nothing”—hence the nickname. In addition to its anti-immigrant bias, the American Party was openly anti-Catholic, viewing the hierarchical organization of the church as a threat to democratic values. When Archbishop Gaetano Bedini (above) came to the United States as a personal repre-sentative of the Pope, his “good-will” tour through the northeast was disrupted by mobs in Boston, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati. Feelings ran so high in New York City that the archbishop had to be smuggled on board his ship departing for Italy. Just as many of Trump’s supporters distrust Muslims and count Sharia law as dangerous threat to American sovereignty, Know Nothings charged that “the liberty we grant to aliens of becoming American citizens has been grossly abused,” and that “the Roman Catholic vote has been held in a compact, disciplined mass, under the immediate and supreme control” of priests and bishops. Furthermore, like so many Trump supporters, the Know Nothings looked down on established politicians of any party as all too willing to feather their own nests and cut corrupt deals. As one nativist newspaper put it, the people ”saw parties without any apparent difference contending for power, for the sake of power. They saw politics made [into] a profession, and public plunder an employment…They beheld our public works the plaything of a rotten dynasty, enriching gamblers, and purchasing power at our expense.” Young American men, buffeted by the dislocations of industrialization and forced to compete with immigrants for work, were the movement’s prime supporters. An idealized portrait of one such, “Citizen Know Nothing,” appeared in 1854 (below). The elections of that year swept Know Nothings into power in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Massachusetts. The Whig Party, once preeminent rival to the Democrats, tumbled toward oblivion as voters deserted it in droves. By 1855 over a million Americans had joined Know Nothing lodges and party leaders were boasting that in 1856, even the American presidency would be within reach. There is indeed some comfort to be taken from this historical parallel, for in the end, the Know Nothings failed to create a party with staying power. It collapsed after little more than another year, due in no small part to lack of experience. Those who disdained politics suddenly discovered that governing proved more difficult than expected and, when the party’s extravagant promises went unfulfilled, its members were voted out of office. As of this writing, the transition process underway in Trump Tower seems to have been similarly roiled by battling factions and lack of governing know-how. Though the kinks may be eventually ironed out—they must be, one way or another, by inauguration day—Trump will surely find it far more difficult to govern atop an administration riven by infighting and lacking a coherent, overarching vision. Several columnists have predicted that the quarreling, lax ethical standards, potential legal scandals (the Trump Foundation, Trump University) and the hidden conflicts of interest arising from yet unknown foreign investments will lead either to impeachment or resignation within a year or two. The precipitate fall of the Know Nothings provides at least some comfort, however cold, on the order of “this, too, shall pass.”
But the past never repeats itself precisely. Barker, the New York realtor who raised the Know Nothings to prominence, was outmaneuvered and defeated even though he helped seal the doom of the Whig Party. Trump has not started a new party, he has taken over an old one. And Republican members of Congress, who spent most of the election distancing themselves from what appeared to be an oncoming train wreck, are now eagerly pulling on red caps to Make America Great. The party will control Congress and the White House, with a Supreme Court nomination soon to cement a conservative majority there too. Trump may be untutored and incompetent, but he has amassed a lot more power than the Know Nothings ever did. He has the potential, in this world of nuclear rivalries and instabilities, to inflict a world of hurt. Moreover, it was not mere incompetence and infighting that brought the Know Nothings down. The end of the U.S.-Mexican War in 1848 reignited the question of slavery in the United States, as vast new territories were brought into the Union. Would these lands become slave or free? That debate stirred even deeper passions and interests than the issue of immigration; and the new Republican Party siphoned off more supporters than the American Party had ever mustered. As disjointed and divisive as today’s political scene appears, the 1850s were even more unstable. By decade’s end, the controversy over slavery and sectionalism led to the ultimate failure of the political system: outright civil war. So the most disheartening side of this historical comparison is not whether Trump, riding an anti-immigrant wave, will suffer a fate similar to that of the Know Nothings. It’s whether the forces unleashed by a demagogic charlatan in pursuit of power will destabilize a political system whose shared values of freedom and equality are already under siege. As before the Civil War, there are large social forces at work in American society whose interactions are hard to predict: the increasing inequality of wealth, growing global instabilities, a free press compromised by social networks promoting fake news, elections influenced by hackers from foreign nation states, a hyper-partisan political atmosphere where extremism is encouraged by the primary system and the gerrymandering of districts. Thus far in the twenty-first century two presidential elections have produced a winner losing the popular vote. Add to these variables a faux populist leader stoking ethnic and racial resentments, and you have as frightening a scenario as the prospect of civil war in the 1850s. It is distinctly no comfort to remember that during that decade, almost all Americans found it impossible to imagine the carnage and destruction to come. Could it happen here? Do we really face the prospect of civil war or some equally mortal threat to the republic? After the unexpected fallout from this most recent election, the unsatisfying and profoundly humbling conclusion may be, “I know nothing.” This blog has been quiet for some weeks, due to textbook deadlines but also, more pleasantly, because of a ten-day trip to the Philippines, where my wife’s father, Valentine Untalan, celebrated his hundredth birthday. Readers of A Little History of the United States will be familiar with his service as a Philippine Scout in World War II, where he joined thousands of other prisoners in the Bataan Death March. On that grueling trek, he attempted escape four times, finally succeeding and working his way back from Bataan to his home in Pangasinan province. He eventually became an American citizen and served tours of duty with the American army in Europe, Japan, Korea and Vietnam before retiring and returning to live in the Philippines. He remains active and engaged in farming mangoes and mahogany as well as bananas and fish.
History measured in biographical terms seldom encompasses 100 years. When it does, the events bracketing such a lifespan astonish. As Val Untalan’s daughter Virginia pointed out during his birthday celebration, in 1916 the Philippines remained under American rule. Woodrow Wilson was president, World War I was raging. The Filipino population stood at a little over 9 million; today, it’s over 100 million. Val grew up in a world where petroleum-filled lanterns lit the homes in his hamlet of Doyong, where one traveled in a calesa or ox-pulled cart, rode a bicycle if you could afford one, or simply walked barefoot along the dirt roads. There was not yet a radio station in the Philippines. When Val was still a young toddler, the flu pandemic of 1919 left him an orphan, to be raised by his grandparents. Now well into the twenty-first century, he has his own great-grandchildren who, if they share his luck, will live to navigate the early years of the twenty-second century. And look back with astonishment to remember what? That people in 2016 got around in automobiles that still required drivers? That Miami and New York back then were not regularly plagued by flooding? That the United States, before Trump, was still a republic as well as the most powerful nation in the world? The Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe Photo by Victor Grigas It occurred to me the other day that it may be worth saying something about the philosophy behind A Little History of the United States. For lay readers, the purpose of the book may seem almost laughably self-evident. They remember being bogged down in high school or college with textbooks nearly a thousand pages long and filled with a relentless procession of details. Those readers, having long ago left the world of textbooks behind, wish to approach history in a less intimidating way. All well and good. For those of us who teach history, however, regularly wandering through the world of lesson plans, syllabi, study guides and textbooks, it’s worth thinking about the assumptions behind such materials. I’ll borrow here from the introduction to my Explorer’s Handbook, an informal guide designed to accompany A Little History:
Thus there is a kind of double-paradox behind the philosophy of less is more. A book of 300 pages rather than 1000 doesn’t necessarily mean less effort. Learning fewer facts and theories but learning them well may require as much time spent as the hapless soul does who flounders through the unabridged edition of American history. Rereading a tightly packed narrative is not a sin but a virtue. Secondly, a shorter narrative is not an endpoint but a beginning. For those who wish merely to have a refresher course in the main points of American history before moving on to another life, best of luck to you. But I suspect the larger number of readers will come away wanting to jump into specific areas of interest and dig deeper.
For invariably, the deeper you dig, the stranger and more wonderful the story becomes. The Exploration Handbook makes suggestions for further readings on topics covered in Little History, and can be downloaded for free here. Statue of Columbus in the Library of Congress, Main Reading Room In June I wrote an entry about my friend and former college roommate, Mike McCann, who has been teaching for many years at Lakeview Academy in Gainesville, Georgia. Mike acted as a terrific sounding board for me when I was writing A Little History of the United States. He is now using the book with his high school students and zipped me an email about what he had done as the term opened, focusing on Columbus’s first native contacts in the Americas. As I am hoping to write a bit more periodically on the subject of education and history, this "first encounter" seemed like a good place to begin. I’m hoping Mike will send me more dispatches as the school year progresses. I had commented in an earlier email how I’d been struck by Columbus’s boundless confidence in his ability to master the essentials of the Taino language after only a few days’ exploration. He reports that as he traveled from one new settlement to the next, the natives he had taken with him would run “from house to house, and to the towns around, crying out, “Come! come! and see the men from heaven!” Ah yes—perhaps an all too human temptation for Columbus to suppose that he and his fellow Europeans were seen as no less than gods by these people. It turned out that Mike was using the same primary sources to help students explore some of the less obvious crosscurrents in Columbus’s account of his first encounters with the Taino people. Mike’s report:
As George Bush might have said, between Columbus and the Taino there was a bit of misunderestimation going on regarding cultural superiority. (Or perhaps I should say misoverestimation?) For students new to such primary sources, it’s easy to glide along without noticing at first some of the contradictions and underlying crosscurrents. I had a good deal of fun writing about the same problem, except instead of Columbus's recollections, I used Captain John Smith’s account of meeting the Powhatan Indians, in a book I did with Mark Lytle, After the Fact: the Art of Historical Detection. There, we discuss the long-contested question of whether readers can trust Smith’s version of his adventures. To quote from After the Fact:
And then we go on in After the Fact to speculate about what’s really going on when Pocahontas “saves” the life of Captain Smith. Smith tells it pretty much as a kind of adventure romance: hero saved by young damsel. (And this is not the first time he’s told such a tale. He narrates a similar adventure about his earlier travels in eastern Europe.) But Powhatan may have had his own reasons for threatening Smith’s life. Indeed, he may not have been intending to kill Smith at all, but merely subjecting him to a test of courage and making it clear that Smith and these strange new people from across the ocean were Powhatan’s vassals, not his superiors. When two differing cultures first meet, the chance for misunderestimation always remains high.
Earlier this summer I stopped at one of my regular haunts while up in the Adirondacks, The Bookstore Plus in Lake Placid, NY, and said hello to the folks who run the shop, Sarah and Marc. They have a good selection of titles—a particularly nice variety in my own areas of interest, history and the outdoors. It hasn't gotten any easier these days to run an independent bookstore, a truth vouchsafed by the very fact that you're reading these lines now on the Web—in the comfort of your home or even on the go, using a tablet or smart phone. How easy just to click through to a book and order without batting an eye! But it's worth thinking about how one comes across the best books. Sure, ordering off the Web is easy and quick, especially when you have a particular title already in mind. But the most interesting finds don't come when you proceed straight as an arrow. When I'm looking up a volume in the library for research, I always browse up and down the shelf, to see what else is there that I knew nothing about. Sometimes a really astute study is tucked six or seven books down, something that covers a subject far better than the book I was seeking. Other times an archaic tome surfaces, the dust still clinging to it but fascinating and useful for its own reasons. Sometimes the find is an utterly nutty artifact which relates to nothing in particular I'm doing, but leaves me grinning ear to ear. (I still have xeroxes I made in the 1970s, of a manual from the early twentieth century on stage hypnotism, as well as a handbook on trapping in the Canadian North, which laid out little-known tricks to hunting beaver in the dead of winter or "pulling" fox hearts. (Both books are good topics, come to think of it, for future posts...)
So stop by The Bookstore Plus if you're in Lake Placid and browse. Then take your newfound purchase a few doors down to Big Mountain Deli and dive into your read while sampling one of their 46 multigrain and multifarious sandwiches, each named after one of the Adirondacks' 46 mountains over 4000 feet. I recommend #17 Saddleback: smoked salmon and bacon, lettuce, tomato seasoned with cracked pepper mayo. Truly tasty whether you're cruising across the Atlantic on the Lusitania, being thrown out of a Milwaukee tenement, or beginning a 500-year journey across America.
Political dynasties have always been suspect in American politics. George Washington discovered this, to his dismay, when he agreed to serve as president of a new fraternal organization formed at the end of the Revolutionary War: the Society of the Cincinnati. Made up of army officers, its purpose was to assist soldiers’ widows and fellow comrades in need, as well as promote fraternal ties among veteran officers. Unfortunately, the organization also decided that membership should be hereditary, passed on through the eldest sons of its members.
This struck many Americans as antithetical to the new nation’s democratic creed. It was one thing to honor parents for worthy accomplishments, Benjamin Franklin commented, but why should descendants be honored merely because they had been born into a family? Some citizens suspected that the Society of the Cincinnati had placed Washington at its head to insinuate a hereditary monarchy into America’s republican government. The ruckus was loud enough to cause Washington to campaign for the elimination of any hereditary membership. When some state branches of the Cincinnati refused to go along, he gave up his position as president of the society. Over the past few years there has been grumbling from both sides of the political divide about the prospect of two rival families entrenching themselves in American government. Of course the Clintons and the Bushes are hardly the first to benefit from family connections. Despite the republican suspicion of hereditary dynasties, the second president of the nation, John Adams, was followed into office a quarter of a century later by his son, John Quincy Adams. William Henry Harrison took office in 1841 and in 1889 his grandson Benjamin became president. (The Harrisons were a prominent Virginia family: another Benjamin Harrison had served as governor of Virginia during the Revolutionary era.) Then too, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt were distant cousins, though members of different political parties. In truth, such family connections are common enough in all walks of life, which is why we use the proverbial aphorism about the apple never falling far from the tree. Hollywood acting dynasties are full of mother/daughter or father/son pairs: Kirk Douglas and Michael, Tony Curtis/Janet Leigh and their daughter Jamie Lee Curtis; Lloyd Bridges, sire of Beau and Jeff; Henry Fonda, father of Jane and Peter, not to mention grandfather of Bridget. Often enough, actors beget actors, lawyers bring up lawyers, historians raise more historians. You learn the ropes from your parents. In terms of today’s political dynasties, Donald Trump threatens to dispatch the hopes of both rivals. He already has put paid to the attempt by Jeb Bush to extend his family’s reign. Whether he will also block the Clintons remains to be seen. But Trump himself has taken great care at the Republican convention to showcase his own family. And that raises the possibility of a Trump dynasty too. Though daughter Ivanka has been active in her father’s campaign, at the convention son Donald Jr. exhibited the most strongly political profile and has admitted he may run for office in the future. "The Donald" and Don Jr. might usefully be compared with another father/son political duo, Ron and Rand Paul. Ron Paul’s aspirations for the presidency never quite escaped their roots in the fringe of the far right, with his gold bug ideology and conspiratorial views of the Federal Reserve. But Rand, now Senator from Kentucky and actually one of two notorious ophthalmologists on the current political stage, has shed his father’s wilder crackpot theories. (The other ophthalmologist, also the junior member of a father/son duo, is Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, who seems to have forgotten the Hippocratic oath, First do no harm, and instead doubled down on the bloodthirsty practices of father Hafez.) Will Donald senior prevail over Hillary Clinton? My own hunch (and fervent hope) is that Trump the candidate is not disciplined enough to alter his rowdy tactics of the primary campaign in order to appeal to a broader segment of the electorate. Like Ron Paul, he is just too far out of the mainstream. But Donald junior, like Rand, may rise for a second act as a more traditional representation of the Republican business class, as Jonathan Chait has perceptively speculated. Whether both Trumps triumph or neither depends in good part on how well they have gauged the mood of the electorate. Republicans have gerrymandered Congressional districts successfully enough to throw a tremendous amount of grit into the gears of government. When one’s philosophy is that government is never the solution, always the problem, being in a position to wreck the government does a good deal to advance your cause. Are enough Americans convinced that “bipartisanship” has failed on both sides of the aisle and a firm leader is needed to set things straight? Father and son may yet both have a chance at the brass ring. But if the Donald flames out, don’t count his son out in the years to come. When George Washington became president of the Cincinnati, a number of French officers who served with him made a present of the order’s badge, featuring a blue ribbon with bald eagle. It was designed, no less, by Pierre-Charles L’Enfant, who would later supply the master plan for the District of Columbia. The version of the badge presented to Washington was adorned with diamonds and emeralds. The general was mortified enough by the controversy over the Cincinnati that he never wore the medal and kept it hidden away in a drawer. One suspects that Trump would love nothing better than to pin a diamond-encrusted decoration to his chest...and then let his son inherit it. Update (9/21/16): Donald Jr.'s post convention role increasingly indicates that he inherits a good deal from his father, much of it suggesting that, unlike Rand Paul, the son is not interested in shedding the excesses of the father. At least not yet, according to this overview in the Times. Winner of the 500-year dash! The new Brazilian edition of A Little History of the United States is now available in Portuguese...
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James West Davidson
Occasional thoughts on history, teaching, paddling and the outdoors Archives
May 2019
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