Harvard prof Jill Lepore’s new one-volume history of the United States, These Truths, has been showered with honors by the liberal establishment.
I’ve read reviews that make it clear that Lepore has simply added a heavy dose of Howard Zinn to the same Progressive “March of Progress,” applauding every increase in size and scope of federal authority, that we were reading back when I was in high school.
You all, I’m sure, are acquainted with the conventional professional historians’ ratings of US presidents in which Warren G. Harding invariably comes in at the bottom. We’ve been told, repeatedly, that Harding was a handsome complete airhead, who incompetently ran a corrupt administration (Teapot Dome Scandal) and who disgracefully had a mistress, but conveniently died and removed himself from office.
Harding’s presidency was before my time, so I had always accepted most of that as true, but Richard Epstein, at Ricochet, responding to Lepore’s book, points out some things about Harding I never knew.
The book covers many cultural and social issues—as well as constitutional and regulatory matters, on which she takes a strong and uncritical progressive stance that sees government intervention as an essential tool to correct the imbalances of the market.
In developing this idea, Lepore’s book covers multiple topics with stunning rapidity, elegant compression, and apparent erudition. One constant theme traces the interaction between constitutional law and technological development from the Founding period to the present, covering everything from the printing press to the Internet. But even that subject is too extensive to receive a full account, so on this occasion I will confine my attention to a small portion of that topic, covering the years between 1920 and 1945 dealing with the rise of broadcasting by radio and the government’s attempt to regulate the airwaves. This case study offers a contrast between the classical liberal view of limited government with strong property and contract rights that I have long defended, and Lepore’s clear endorsement of the progressive tradition that has in many ways displaced it.
Lepore’s narrative of this period begins with President Warren Harding, who, she writes, “in one of the worst inaugural addresses ever delivered,†argued, in his own words, “for lightened tax burdens, for sound commercial practices, for adequate credit facilities, for sympathetic concern for all agricultural problems, for the omission of unnecessary interference of Government with business, for an end to Government’s experiment in business, for more efficient business in Government, and for more efficient business in Government administration.†Harding’s sympathetic reference of farmers is a bit out of keeping with the rest of his remarks. Indeed, farmers had already been a protected class before 1920, and the situation only got worse when Franklin Roosevelt’s administration implemented the Agricultural Adjustment Acts of the 1930s, which cartelized farming. But for all her indignation, Lepore never explains what is wrong with Harding’s agenda. She merely rejects it out of hand, while mocking Harding’s conviction.
Given her doggedly progressive premises, Lepore may have predicted a calamitous meltdown in the American economy under Harding, but exactly the opposite occurred. Harding appointed an exceptionally strong cabinet that included as three of its principal luminaries Charles Evans Hughes as Secretary of State, Andrew Mellon as Secretary of Treasury, and Herbert Hoover as the ubiquitous Secretary of Commerce, with a portfolio far broader than that position manages today. And how did they perform? Lepore does not mention that Harding coped quickly and effectively with the serious recession of 1921 by refusing to follow Hoover’s advice for aggressive intervention. Instead, Harding initiated powerful recovery by slashing the federal budget in half and reducing taxes across the board. Both Roosevelt and Obama did far worse in advancing recovery with their more interventionist efforts.
To her credit, Lepore notes the successes of Harding’s program: the rise of industrial production by 70 percent, an increase in the gross national product by about 40 percent, and growth in per capita income by close to 30 percent between 1922 and 1928. [Emphasis added. –JDZ] But, she doesn’t seem to understand why that recovery was robust, especially in comparison with the long, drawn-out Roosevelt recession that lingered on for years when he adopted the opposite policy of extensive cartelization and high taxes through the 1930s.
Don’t miss the discussion of the Federal Radio Act of 1927. Who knew? Can you imagine what technological and cultural progress could have occurred over half a century of free market mass communications?
Wikipedia: “a popular early-1900s song credited to the married vaudeville team Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth. It was one of a series of Moon-related Tin Pan Alley songs of the era. The song was debuted by Bayes and Norworth in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1908 to great acclaim. It became a pop standard, and continues to be performed and recorded even in the 21st century. ”
natus.dk:In 1952 Thorvald Nielsen was dredging a ditch in a small bog at Rørby in western Zealand. He found an ornamented curved sword of bronze that had been stuck diagonally into the turf. The sword was from the beginning of the Bronze Age, around 1600 BC, and was the first of its kind to be found in Denmark. It was handed in as treasure trove to the National Museum, but the story does not end there. In 1957, when Thorvald Jensen was digging up potatoes around the same place, he uncovered yet another curved sword. The second curved sword was ornamented like the first, but it was also decorated with a picture of a ship. This is the oldest example of a ship image from Denmark.
A peculiar class of swords emerge in the earliest periods of the Danish Bronze Age, namely the curved sword. The specimens from Rørby Mose, western Zealand, are amongst some of the most impressive armament finds from the Early Bronze Age.
The first of these swords was found by chance in 1952. Five years later, again by chance, the second was found, only a few meters away from the location of the first. The two swords are nearly identical and both intensively decorated with geometric patterns which reveal a date of c. 1600-1500 BC .
The second of the swords found at Rørby, however, features a distinctive depiction of a boat on its blade and is the earliest known of its kind in the history of Denmark The depiction is strikingly similar to the boats contained in the many Bronze Age rock art panels of Scandinavia as well as the Hjortspring boat from around 350 BC. In a certain sense, the morphology of the Rørby swords, with their curved extremes, also bear some resemblances to these boats.
Although impressive, there is little to suggest that these curved swords had any combative function. They are massive and unwieldy and their morphology does simply not allow for any functional interpretation in combative terms. Being made of expensive bronze and so intensely decorated with fine geometric patterns, the swords can more appropriately be assigned to a symbolic role.
I’ve been saying all week that you could expect another late hit on Brett Kavanaugh over the weekend, and right on schedule, we have the New Yorker story, which, as Paul and Scott have already noted, is pretty thin gruel. But it was absolutely necessary for the left to come up with a story like this, for several reasons. …
[O]ne thing that is true in virtually all cases of sexual predation (think Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein) is that there is a pattern of behavior, and usually several other women stepping forward. This trait was conspicuously absent until now. We know that the media—and no doubt large portions of the Democratic establishment—have been trolling feverishly to find another woman with a story. This is the best they can do—a hazy, indirect, recovered memory?
I think this entire late gambit has been one huge bluff by the Democrats, intending to intimidate Republicans into dropping Kavanaugh. I don’t think Dr. Ford has any intention of testifying before the Judiciary Committee this week, and I expect come Wednesday we’ll get a self-serving announcement attacking Chairman Grassley and the Senate Republicans for “bullying†and creating a “hostile environment†in which Dr. Ford cannot “safely†tell her story. At that point, Grassley should call for an immediate committee vote to proceed with the nomination. This latest story in just another attempt to keep the intimidation fires alive. Fine: I say let’s call the bluff and request that Deborah Ramirez, the source of the new allegation, present herself for sworn testimony before the committee.
If you think that, you must not have read “To Kill a Mockingbird,” points out Ashe Schow in the Washington Examiner.
Atticus Finch is a monster. Sure, he’s one of history’s most beloved literary characters (he was even played by Gregory Peck in a film adaptation) but he’s also, to use the parlance of our time, history’s greatest rape apologist. …
With the increasing focus on sexual assault, if “To Kill A Mockingbird†were taught in women’s studies classes today, Finch would have to be labeled the villain of the book for not accepting at face value an accuser’s tale of rape and for posing difficult, painful questions to her on the witness stand.
Finch was the defense attorney for Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a white woman, Mayella Ewell. Ewell and her father both claimed that Robinson beat and raped her, but Finch dared question the account.
Ian Buruma, the 66-year-old Dutch-born writer and only the third editor in the history of the New York Review of Books, was forced to resign this week.
His crime? Buruma published a self-pitying essay by Jian Ghomeshi, a Canadian musician, writer, and talk show host of Iranian descent, who lost his job in 2014 when an ex-girlfriend accused him of non-consensual rough sex.
Buruma was quickly mobbed on social media where critics complained about the absence of fact-checking (NYRB employs no fact checkers), pointing out that, even though Ghomeshi was acquitted in court, a large number of women had come forward to accuse him of similar bad behavior and that one case was dropped on the condition that he apologize and post a peace bond promising to avoid future misbehavior.
Buruma told Slate:
I’m no judge of the rights and wrongs of every allegation. How can I be? All I know is that in a court of law he was acquitted, and there is no proof he committed a crime. The exact nature of his behaviour — how much consent was involved — I have no idea, nor is it really my concern. My concern is what happens to somebody who has not been found guilty in any criminal sense but who perhaps deserves social opprobrium, but how long should that last, what form it should take, etc.
In the end, Buruma chose to fall upon his sword for the good of the publication when university publishers, whose advertising was vital to NYRB, began talking about a boycott.
Toby Young, at Spectator USA, notes the left’s insanity, but seems to blame it on their 2016 defeat.
My own theory is that a small minority on the identitarian Left have used various Maoist tactics, including public shaming on social media, to persuade people that their doctrinaire positions on #MeToo allegations and a range of other issues … are much more ubiquitous than they really are, thereby stifling dissent. …
Who knows how long this paranoid atmosphere will continue. America seems to go through periodic bouts of hysterical puritanism, which partly accounts for the enduring appeal of The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s play about the Salem Witch Trials. I think it largely depends on what happens in the mid-terms. If the Democrats emerge the victors, Trump Derangement Syndrome will start to fade and reason may creep back into America’s liberal institutions. But if the Republicans win the day, the Democrats will likely descend into civil war and the identitarian Left may capture the Party, just as it’s captured the UK’s Labour Party. If that happens, don’t expect this hysteria to die down any time soon.
I don’t think the left’s appetite for blood is the result of losing. I think it comes from too much winning. The radical left flagrantly abuses the power it enjoys due to the cowardly spinelessness of the liberal establishment because it can. The more the American institutional establishment grovels to its demands the more extravagant those demands are going to get. Leftist Reigns of Terror do not stop because the Left side won an election. They only stop after the Revolution is done devouring its own.
