NEW: Congratulations to the Common-Place management team for recruiting University of Oklahoma’s Cathy Kelly as the new editor. I can’t think of a better choice and love the idea of a theoretically New England-based publication moving its editorial HQ even farther away than Florida. I am sure there will be more on the site about the coming regime change soon.

NEW, BUT ACTUALLY REALLY OLD: I learn from Ralph Luker at History News Network that I made some list of the “The Top 100 Liberal Arts Professor Blogs.” Excellent! Unfortunately, the rush to get that kudo on my c.v. screeched to a halt when the list in question turned to be done by someone or something that did not even follow the links. The blog mentioned was my old one at HNN, last updated in 2003! Thanks to Ralph for flagging the mistake.

DEEP THOUGHT ON THE FOREGOING ITEM: Time and the Internet turn out to have a very complex relationship, up-to-the-second and rapidly changing on one hand, but weirdly timeless on the other. You have to check those dates and temporal clues very carefully. Decade-old items are already coming up on Google, often surrounded by a site’s present-day headlines and ads in a way that can be quite confusing. Of course, my old HNN blog is clearly labeled as “Inactive” but, as Ralph points out, the creator of the list just assumed that “Inactive Notes of a Left-Wing Cub Scout” was an extra-cute title.

One of the advantages (?) of having an Internet Presence is the ability to constantly maintain your past work, kind of like a worldwide electronic errata sheet. It so happens that I recently had to go back through my article on the Mammoth Cheese of Cheshire, Massachusetts and found an error I apparently persisted in making through multiple renditions of that piece. Citing the CD Presidential Campaign Songs, 1789-1996, I listed the recording artist as “Carl Brand” when in fact it was venerable folksinger Oscar Brand, whose work I subsequently became familiar enough with to regard that as a really stupid mistake. Oh well, at least I didn’t go with Max Brand or Neville Brand, though I might have noticed those.

By the way, the Oscar Brand links go to Emusic.com, a sight I highly recommend for anyone interested in unusual music. Historical Americana seems to be one of the service’s strong points, with a big chunk of the Smithsonian Folkways catalog available for download along with much much else. For fans of tunes that rocked the Early Republic, there are currently no less than eight different versions “Jefferson and Liberty” available, including the one from Janet Reno’s double-album of historic covers, Song of America. That sentence was a bit misleading, but definitely not a mistake.

In honor of the detestable former Reaganaut and current McCain campaign co-chair Phil Gramm’s too-revealing remark about the country being only in a “mental recession” invented by a “nation of whiners,” I thought I would throw in some links to a couple of other disastrous presidential campaign interventions by political luminaries who had fallen a little out of touch. These are from the early American republic, of course, and come courtesy of Google Books:

• 1796: Thomas Paine, A Letter to George Washington, in which Paine, writing from Paris and having just published The Age of Reason, managed to cement the Federalist linkage of the Democratic-Republicans with the sort of atheistic French wankery that few Americans of any politics much liked. Criticizing George Washington for his foreign policy was edgy enough without bringing Paine’s notorious religious views into the mix.
• 1800: A Letter from Alexander Hamilton, in which the Federalists’ preeminent figure unloaded the full measure of his jealousy and arrogance on the head of a Federalist president (John Adams) battling for re-election, and helped put his two other worst enemies (Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr) in power.

Not that Phil Gramm deserves to be put on the same plane as Paine or Hamilton, except for being uncontrollable, associated with a former regime, and having a little too much to say. However, John McCain did not need any more public reminders of just how far GOP leaders’ real concerns are from those of suburban and rural voters whose lives are rapidly becoming unfeasible thanks to high gas prices and job losses. The media always needs reminders, however, so tell us more, Phil, tell us more.

Postscript on Google Books: On the one hand, as a lover of physically browseable libraries, I imagine I should not approve of Google Books. On the other hand, as a back pain sufferer and a resident of mid-Missouri, Google Books is life-changingly awesome. It especially tickles me that many of Google’s scanned volumes on the Early Republic come from the Harvard Libraries and thus were quite likely once lugged home in 25-pound bags — on the #77 bus — by yours truly. Don’t knock it until you have carried a pile of tomes such as Wharton’s State Trials of the United States Under the Administrations of Washington and Adams and Scharf and Westcott’s History of Philadelphia, 1609-1884 (in 3 elephantine volumes) up several flights of stairs yourself.

A new holiday tradition here on the blog — hard-hitting Fourth of July toasts from back in the days when Americans enjoyed detailed political expression along with their picnicking and partying. These are from the Elizabeth (then Elizabethtown) New-Jersey Journal, 15 July 1795. Remember that each one of these sentiments would have been followed by a stiff drink, and not of Bud Lite either. Be sure to check out number 8, saluting the guillotine. Good times!

You just can’t make this stuff up. I have long thought of the Iraq Wars and the GWOT as Cold War phantom pains, the result of Cold War institutions and Cold War thought carrying forward without an appropriate object like a competing superpower. (This is why the U.S. spends so much more time and effort going after “state sponsors of terror” than actual terrorists.) But now we discover that the military literally brought out the Cold War playbook, the Red Chinese Cold War playbook, for interrogating prisoners at Gitmo. From the New York Times:

“An Expert Reveals Chinese Origins of Interrogation Techniques at Guantánamo“

WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency. [Read the rest]

While it was astonishingly moronic to deploy techniques designed to produce false confessions in an effort to ferret out real terrorist plots, the strategy was unfortunately quite consistent with the long-time predilections of the American Right and the U.S. government. There seems to be a part of the right-wing brain that is deeply attracted to the sort of “brutalitarian” (Joe McCarthy’s word) excesses it likes to detect and denounce in its enemies. During the Cold War, U.S. officials across the political spectrum repeatedly concluded that they needed to “fight fire with fire” and employ tactics as or nearly as harsh and devious as a Communist enemy that was seen as colossally evil. satanically ruthless, and unnaturally effective.

The article correctly relates the Air Force study to the “brainwashing” controversy of the 1950s, during which the government and the larger culture gave itself a panic attack over the apparent conversion of captive Korean War soldiers to Communism. In true fire with fire spirit, the CIA and other entities paid for both propaganda about the horrors of Communist brainwashing techniques and also for secret research that tried to duplicate those techniques for American use. The nature of the techniques was a subject regarding which a host of pulpy mind-control fantasies were spun and researched, involving hypnotism, telepathy, and most of all drugs. [Click the images at the bottom for an example of the propaganda. The brainwashing expert whose speeches are being advertised, Edward Hunter, worked for the CIA.] It was in pursuit of such a magic elixir that the CIA did things like try to corner the world market on LSD and then hand out supplies of it to secretly-funded university laboratories. You can read all about it in John Marks’s jaw-dropping book, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate.” What I was most shocked by was how little actually came of the CIA’s mind-control research. According to Marks, they never figured out how to make anybody do anything other than by sheer coercion or blackmail. Truth serum and zombie-like sleeper agents and hypnotic programming are such well-developed concepts that people tend to believe there must be something to them that the movies just exaggerate, but it seems that vampires and werewolves might actually be on about the same level of factuality.

What the NYT article does not quite explain is that the Albert Biderman study the Gitmo trainers drew on came from a more level-headed social scientific approach to the “brainwashing” issue that essentially debunked it, explaining that the confessions and conversions that the Chinese and Soviets got were achieved not through drugs or hypnotism but good old-fashioned police brutality and bureaucratic manipulation. I guess this lesson must have hung around in some military intelligence and right-wing circles ever since. Biderman also may have supplied the idea that, while brutal and deplorable, the methods he described were used by Communist governments specifically as alternatives to more traditional forms of torture. So, when today’s lefties and libertarians complain about the Bush administration creating its own gulag, we now know that that it is almost literally true.

One of Josh Marshall’s posts last week noted the dismal failure of the Bush administration’s attempt at a Radio Free Europe for the Arab world, al-Hurra (”The Free One.”) Like most of the Shrub crew’s schemes, this one was doubly incompetent, both erroneously conceived and poorly implemented. It was dopey enough to think that the situation in the present Middle East resembles Eastern Europe during the Cold War at all. Al-Hurra competes with a brace of widely-watched Arabic-language satellite channels and web sites while Radio Free Europe supplied peoples who were starved for outside information by their Communist state media monopolies. Then the dopey idea could not even be executed properly. The men behind al-Hurra turn out to be the news geniuses responsible for Casey Kasem’s “American Top 40″ and other syndicated national radio programs. It seems that none of the managers knew Arabic or much of anything about the Arab news media, but the founder (Norman Pattiz) is, like Casey, a Lebanese-American, so people in D.C. must have assumed that was qualification enough.

This story crystallized for me something that is going to be an historical hallmark of the present era. In this Age of Analogies, with television chat shows defining the public sphere, we have American leaders not just using dumb historical analogies as cheap talking points, but actually trying to put the dumb analogies into practice, as the basis for policy. We can’t just compare a foreign leader we don’t like to Hitler, we have to take the approach toward the world’s “bad guys” we think we would have taken towards Hitler, if we were time-travelling nincompoops from the 21st-century with 20-20 hindsight supplied by Hollywood. That is very close to what most of our current national leaders and pundits really seem to think they are.

So we have the current debate over “appeasement,” a word rolled out anytime someone suggests there might be some other way of dealing with regimes and peoples we don’t like other than bombing, invading, and overthrowing them, not necessarily in that order. The appeasement concept was problematic even back in the Cold War when it was cultural gospel, taught at the deepest level possible, that every conflict was a case of handing Czechoslavakia and your manhood over to the Nazis, or standing up and fighting. Westerns, Star Trek, The Brady Bunch could all agree on that. Fight, or Hitler wins and millions die! Interestingly, the promise that Cold War popular culture often made was that if you stood up and showed you could fight, the Romulans or the bully or the outlaws would go away and leave you alone. In fact, when the Allies stood up to Hitler they had to fight history’s greatest war machine for years, and millions still died. And that would have been the case even if the standing took place in 1938 rather than later.

But how much dumber is “appeasement,” and the implicit Hitler-Chamberlain comparison, when there is no continent-sweeping dictator demanding that we let him have some defenseless country? Who would we appease even if we wanted to? How would we go about it? What could we give the Islamists that we haven’t already? Pakistan and Iran aren’t enough?

Of course, “appeasement” is raised to twist the debate, not advance it. In the Bush-Cheney worldview any solution not imposed by force on a weaker foe is inherently suspect; any other form of adjudication or discussion is idle chit-chat of a particularly dangerous kind. Making every enemy into Hitler, the guy we know for sure was a psychopath bent on world domination, stacks the deck in favor of the force-first point-of-view:

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along,” Mr. Bush said, in a speech otherwise devoted to spotlighting Israel’s friendship with the United States.

“We have an obligation,” he continued, “to call this what it is: the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

(Yes, thank God Ronald Reagan finally cut loose and let our military show those Soviets who was stronger, otherwise the Iron Curtain never would have fallen. Oh, wait. . . . ) At any rate, the “appeasement” concept resonates very well with conservative hatred of egalitarianism and its suspicion of legal processes, but its universal application to real life is just a little lacking, considering that 99.9% of real conflicts actually do not end with the total defeat and suicide of the Big Bad. Really pretty much just that one. Not sure how to score the Pacific theater.

Munich and World War II have loomed over U.S. policy minds since the end of that war, but there is something particularly goofy and post-modern about way the analogies work today, when so few of the top policymakers or journalists have any first-hand experience that goes back earlier than the Kennedy era. The historical analogies are taken sooo literally, regardless of whether they are remotely applicable. So I saw Newsweek wondering from the airport newsstand a couple of weeks ago, “What Would Winston Do?” The accompanying article actually does a pretty reasonable job distinguishing past from present and puncturing some of the Munich myth, but that cover says the opposite, much more powerfully. In any case, Evan Thomas’s article seems to be one of many belated efforts to catch up with reality by the sort of pop-history-writing journos (like Tom Brokaw and Evan Thomas, among many others) who have worked so hard to build up the power of the World War II analogies.

P.S. Based on the quite good and relatively even-handed new museum at the Churchill Memorial in Fulton, MO (the site of the Iron Curtain speech), what Winston would have done is attack something.

Readers of my book, The Tyranny of Printers: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic, may be interested in a much more lavishly illustrated rendition of some of the book’s points that has been just been published in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s magazine Pennsylvania Legacies. The article, “Popular Constitutionalism in Philadelphia: How Freedom of Expression Was Secured by Two Fearless Newspaper Editors,” is part of a special issue on “Defining Civil Liberties in Pennsylvania.” Naturally, the two editors are Benjamin Franklin Bache and William Duane of the Philadelphia Aurora. It looks like you have to join HSP to actually read the whole thing, but there is a preview available here.

(I love the cartoon of a lightning-swathed printing press that the HSP has posted with the preview, which I am borrowing for this post. It looks like it should be the chest emblem of a printing-themed superhero, if there ever were to be such a thing.)

As usual with small assignments covering old ground, I tortured myself to put something new into this piece, only to have most of the extra material not make it into the final version. In this case, I tried to go a little further than the book did with the idea of popular constitutionalism — constitutional interpretation as worked out and enforced in the arena of popular politics rather than the courts — as the driving force behind what Americans came to see their constitutional rights. In the case at hand, the expansive American version of press freedom was worked out in the political battle of 1798-1801. Constitutional law and elite political thought only caught up many decades later. At any rate, I have posted a “director’s cut” of the article here. (Having an outlet for my long versions was a good chunk for my motivation for starting a website in the first place.) It is still unfootnoted and pitched to a relatively popular audience, like the Pennsylvania Legacies version, but it will be a starting point for an argument I hope to be making at greater length and with more scholarly rigor in the future.

Thanks to reader Ben Carp for pointing out the following item from The Politico that needed to be mentioned in this space:

Ben Smith’s Blog: From Jeffersons vs. Hemingses to McCain vs. Obama

A key organizer of John McCain’s meeting Saturday with former supporters of Hillary Clinton is best known for her role in another bitter American fight: The effort by some white descendants of Thomas Jefferson to keep his possible African-American descendants out of family gatherings.

Paula Abeles emailed Politico yesterday to complain that her group had gotten short shrift in a blog item, writing, “I initiated the teleconference with McCain on Saturday and was solely responsible for the guest list.” Another Clinton backer at the event, Will Bower, confirmed that she was “integral” to assembling the group.

But Abeles first made the news in 2003, when she and her husband, then-Monticello Association President Nat Abeles, led the fight to keep members of the Hemings family — descendants of Jefferson slave and, some historians believe, mistress Sally Hemmings — out of a gathering of the Monticello Association, which is made up of lineal descendants of the third president.

Abeles drew national attention for her role in an episode of online espionage.

The AP reported in May of 2003:

The wife of a Thomas Jefferson family association official said Friday that she masqueraded as a 67-year-old black woman on an Internet chat room in a bid to keep descendants of a reputed Jefferson mistress out of this weekend’s family reunion.

“It might have been somewhat unethical,” said Paulie Abeles of Washington, D.C., who participated for eight months in the Yahoo! message board created for relatives of Jefferson slave Sally Hemings.

“It might have been childish, but I really think I was working in the best interest of the majority of the family members to make the reunion a calm and civilized gathering,” she said.

The story goes on a bit from there. Many of The Politico’s commenters made the obvious point that this would seem to confirm what many Obama supporters have suspected about the racial views of some of Clinton’s more diehard supporters. Abeles and her ilk probably don’t think of themselves as racists, but their fury at the very idea of connecting African Americans with something they revere like the presidency or their own family heritage says it all.

Also, one correction to Smith’s post is in order: the “some historians” are on the other foot. Perhaps people are just keeping quiet about it, but my sense is that the vast majority of historians (especially under age 60 or 70) now accept that Thomas Jefferson fathered some or all of Sally Heming’s children. And not just scholars who are bent on trashing Jefferson.

The turning point for me personally was Annette Gordon-Reed’s 1997 case history Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. In a very even-handed work written before the DNA testing, Gordon-Reed reached their conclusions by sifting carefully and logically through the then-available written records and the various arguments that had been made over the years. The clincher for me was the fact that Sally Hemings never conceived a child when Jefferson was not living on the same premises, during the height of his political career when he was away from home, and Sally, much of the time. The DNA testing just confirmed what already seemed very, very likely. Even the modern-day custodians of the Jefferson legacy at Monticello basically accept the Jefferson-Hemings relationship, if that is the term. Why some white Jefferson descendants cannot accept it, and why they would switch parties to support McCain, I leave to the reader to decide.

I was amused by the  New York Times story last weekend about Alexander Hamilton’s country house, The Grange, getting moved “from its cramped site on Convent Avenue to an appropriately verdant new location a block away in St. Nicholas Park, facing West 141st Street.” Andy Robertson and I visited that lonely site (in terms of tourists) a few years ago. The house was indeed challenging to find, crammed in behind an Episcopal Church and surrounded by other buildings.  (In the picture above, you can see the portico of the Richardsonian-style church on the upper right.) We were the only people there except for one ranger, but we thought that the old site was actually rather appropriate. The Founder most devoted to economic development and high finance got his house completely overshadowed by the growth of exactly the sort of city he sought to foster, with all the sensitivity to the small, rural, and outmoded that such cities usually show. I am sure it is true that the new location will more closely replicate the house’s original setting, back when Harlem was a country village, but the old one sent a more accurate message about the what the historical figure stood for. Of course, the fact that Hamilton’s Monticello-like hilltop shrine will be created at public expense seems pretty Hamiltonian.

I did not work as a reporter for all that long, but I do remember the elation I felt when a “source” (as journalists like to call people they talk to on the phone) gave me a really awful, colorful quotation. The key was to find some exponent of a ridiculous or distasteful cause who liked to talk a little too much. I imagine the writer of the recent New York Times story on the latest evolutionary leap of the anti-evolution cause must have been pumping her fist in the air on the other end of the phone (or inwardly), when the head of the Texas state education board uncorked the following explanation of why it is perfectly appropriate to teach the evangelical Christian critique (a.k.a. “weaknesses”) of evolutionary theory in science classes:

Dr. [Don] McLeroy, the [Texas state education] board chairman, sees the debate as being between “two systems of science.”“You’ve got a creationist system and a naturalist system,” he said. . . .

Dr. McLeroy believes that Earth’s appearance is a recent geologic event — thousands of years old, not 4.5 billion. “I believe a lot of incredible things,” he said, “The most incredible thing I believe is the Christmas story. That little baby born in the manger was the god that created the universe.”

Believing incredible things - now that’s science. I imagine Dr. McLeroy is perfectly sincere about the “scientific” truth of his Christian beliefs. I have never been able to find a good book to read about this — please advise — but American fundamentalism does seem to have this strange scientistic streak. In literally interpreting the Bible, they believe one can find “the facts,” the objectively, universally true principles of all existence. They even tend to use scientistic, quasi-scholarly methods to get at the “real” meaning of the text.

At least this was how it was explained to me by a former graduate student who had attended a conservative Christian seminary. We were talking about the apparent contradiction between the belief in the transparent and complete inerrancy of the English-language biblical text and the requirement that students learn ancient languages in order to translate the originals. It seemed to me that anyone who had translated more than a few sentences of any foreign language, let alone ancient ones using a different alphabet, would twig to the gaps and multiple possibilities involved in the process. But if you think of translation as a quest for scientific fact, then perhaps that is less of a problem.