On the significance of J.D. Salinger and Howard Zinn.

Learning that J.D. Salinger died a day after learning that Howard Zinn had qualifies as a sufficiently surreal experience for that type of person who very much resembles me. Catcher in the Rye taught me how to channel my anger into antisocial behaviors—reading books in my bedroom foremost among them—but as I read it with the same critical acumen that led me to wear out not one but two VHS copies of Pump Up the Volume, the less I say about the book the better. (That and it violates the Five Year Rule three times over.)

Within two years of reading Salinger, I'd affected all the trappings of The Young Punk Who Would Be Vegan and read A People's History of the United States, but unlike Salinger's novel, Zinn's history resonated with me until my sophomore year of college, when I was disabused of its importance by the man himself. I had attended a lecture of his and somehow weaseled my way into a dinner that followed. I told him how significant A People's History had been to my political and intellectual development and that I had read it four or five times and that I was about to start it again when he stopped me short:

"My little book has served its purpose," he told me. "Perhaps it's time you started on the bibliography."

He smiled and was about to say something else when he was whisked away by some other sycophant eager to bend his ear, but after talking to other people who had very similar conversations with him, I think I know what he was going to say: namely, that his "little book" was meant more as a point of departure than a destination. Treating it the way Matt Damon's Good Will Hunting character did (and every newly-minted hipster firebrand does) violates the spirit of its polemic, because the book isn't meant to replace traditional histories so much as supplement them.

For example, if the significance of the Christian tradition is given short-shrift in the book, it isn't because that tradition's unimportant to the development of the nation, but because a robust canon addressing that issue already exists. Zinn never intended his book to be an education in itself, but many readers—especially non-serious ones involved in any of a variety of Zinn-friendly scenes—inflated its importance until it became the definitive source for the entirety of American history. The extensive bibliography in the back-pages indicates that it had no pretensions of being anything of the sort.

I could prattle on about its faults—foremost among them, Zinn's subscription to a dualism so powerful and pervasive that his accounts of internecine conflicts on the left border on unintelligible—but it is impossible to deny the attraction the book has for young adults whose knowledge of American history comes from the skeletal outlines of a public education. The simplicity of its dualistic worldview appeals to the adolescent in the first throes of rebellion because that worldview is itself adolescent. That sounds like an insult, but I mean it in the same sense that Zinn meant what he said to me: A People's History represents a stage in one's intellectual development.

It was never intended to arrest it.

Read more...

Presidential Reputation Addendum

Tracy Lightcap has a good comment in the thread below:

I'm not so sure that there are good and bad presidents, just good and bad opportunities.

I'm a big fan of Skowronek's scheme of political time and how it helps analyze how presidential leadership works. Johnson was in the same situation that John Tyler was when Harrison died: a veep chosen from the opposing party (or, at least, one faction of it) for purely political purposes. When he got to the presidency, he did exactly what Tyler did: he acted like a Democrat. Problem = that particular vision (especially the Jacksonian union aspect of it) had been cancelled by the Civil War and Lincoln's presidency. But expecting Johnson to realize that is simply expecting too much; he had been in politics for decades, had been a Democrat (though with Whiggish tendencies) all that time, and he was a prototypical Southerner of the day, given to concern about "principles" and just as prickly when crossed as Jackson or Polk. So he acted accordingly and got impeached for it.

In another time, I think he would have done ok at the job: he was a man of no mean capacity. But, like most presidents of his ilk, his time was wrong and, like most of us, he couldn't rise above his experiences or personality to meet the challenges.

I definitely agree with Tracy on a couple things. First of all, presidential rankings are indeed a parlor game and aren't scholarship even when informed by scholarly expertise; I happen to like such parlor games and do think they can illuminate some things, but if you prefer not to make these kinds of judgments and focus on explanations I can't argue with you. Secondly, I'm also a big admirer of Skowronek's structural approach, and tend to find explanations that focus on presidential character or psychology tend towards unhelpful tautologies and the concealment of normative judgments in ostensibly objective language. (At my wonkier blog, I actually have a couple of posts wondering how Obama will fit into Skowronek's framework, but I'll leave that for another post.)

With respect to the specific arguments about Johnson, though, I would continue to disagree in some respects. As I said, I think the "no bad presidents, only bad situations" argument does have a lot of purchase in the case of Buchanan and Pierce; it's hard to argue that they were effective leaders, but I've also never heard a convincing counterfactual explaining how even better leadership could have held the Democratic coalition together. (In a sense, their ineffectuality is what the situation demanded; a strong leader could never have successfully become the Democratic presidential candidate because too many people would have left the coalition.) Johnson, thought, is a whole different situation. I don't think the analogy to Tyler is apposite, because while Tyler's politics were different than Harrison's, they were different in a way that was consistent with the dominant ideological regime of the era. Johnson wasn't merely different than Lincoln; he was strongly opposed to the hegemonic politics of his time, which of course had been defined by Lincoln. Indeed, what makes Johnson so uniquely awful is that his behavior was highly unusual for a "pre-emptive" president that takes office during another party's ideological ascendancy. Cleveland, Ike, Clinton (at least post-94), Nixon on domestic policy -- they tried to attenuate and trim the existing ideological trends, but they also (for better or worse) fundamentally made peace with the larger political principles that dominated their era. Johnson -- who, after all, was put into office thorough an assassin's bullet rather than an election, and whose fundamental principles had not merely been rejected in a couple of elections but by a civil war -- had much more reason to be modest than those four presidents, but instead was much more obstructionist and arrogant. Those were his choices; they weren't demanded by his position.

Indeed, even Tracy seems to acknowledge that Johnson is one case where individualistic explanations say more than structural ones -- the stubborn commitment to discredited principles and thin skin Tracy cites where his personal characteristics, not the products of political time. Given this, to say that Johnson wouldn't have been such a catastrophic president in a different context is like saying that Juan Pierre would have been a better player in 1911 than Albert Pujols; if we're going to make judgments about effectiveness or value at all, I don't really think it's relevant. Johnson was a terrible president for reasons that were much more under his discretion than is the case with most of the other presidents with similarly bad reputations.

Read more...

The Van Buren Boys

I've been reading Daniel Walker Howe's superb What Hath God Wrought. Among its many strong points, it's much-more clear-eyed about Andrew Jackson than Sean Wilentz's similar history, and I've been meaning to post some of the good stuff about Jackson. For those who think that comparing modern Republicans to Hoover is a little unfair...to Hoover, however, note that in addition to emulating Jackson's racist imperialism modern Republicans still seemed enamoured with the crazy fiscal policies of his hand-picked successor:

Hard times blighted Van Buren's entire term. Yet the president offered his suffering country nothing by way of relief. "Those who look to the action of this Government for specific aid to the citizen to relieve embarrassments arising from losses by revulsions in commerce and credit lose sight of the ends for which it was created and the powers with which it is clothed," he told Congress. All the public could expect from the government was "strict economy and frugality," and a warning not "to substitute for republican simplicity and economical habits a sickly appetite for effeminate indulgence." The president rehearsed these stern platitudes not so much because they held out any economic hope as because they identified him as loyal to Andrew Jackson's legacy. (505)

To answer Glenn Reynolds's longstanding confusion about whether he's a Whig or a Jacksonian, he's pretty clearly the latter. Why some contemporary liberals continue to venerate Old Hickory -- largely, if I understand correctly, because of an expansion of the franchise to unpropertied white males that Jackson had essentially nothing to do with -- I can't tell you.

Read more...