Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged digestion

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Javier E

Safety Advice If You Must Visit the Grocery Store - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-the-grocery-store-11585336520

grocery shopping pandemic safety personal response

shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • if you must go to the store, what’s the best way to navigate the aisles and crowds? Information and guidance about the virus is changing quickly, so we asked the experts.
  • Try to minimize visits to the store. “The biggest risk factor is really being around other people,”
  • If you must go, maintain a buffer around yourself and try to go at off-hours. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends a 6-foot buffer
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • Wipes can also be used for other high-touch areas in the store like freezer handles or tongs used in self-serve bins.
  • all Americans to wear cloth face masks when out in public, which includes when in the grocery store.
  • wash your hands with soap and water before going out and when coming home, and use hand sanitizer when out.
  • If you use gloves, choose disposable ones and throw them before getting into your car or as soon as you get home
  • Try not to use your phone when in the store. If you do, clean it when you get home.
  • it’s a good idea to bring your own, mainly to wipe the grocery cart
  • Try to avoid exchanging money or credit cards with the cashier. Use a credit-card reader when possible.
  • To be extra cautious, you could heat food in the oven or microwave, though this hasn’t been specifically studied so it’s unclear if there’s a particular length of time needed.
  • People over 65 and those who have medical conditions that put them at greater risk of hospitalization and serious illness should avoid going to the grocery store, if possible. Try to order groceries online or have a family member or friend deliver them while taking precautions.
  • Though there have been no documented cases of transmission of the novel coronavirus through food packaging, a recent NEJM study found that the virus can live on cardboard for up to 24 hours and on hard surfaces such as plastic and stainless steel for two to three days.
  • the studies were done in a laboratory with high doses of the virus, so it’s unknown if in real life the virus can be transmitted that way. Most likely if someone were to sneeze or cough on a cardboard container, the virus would degrade more quickly due to environmental factors, such as sunlight.
  • experts say wiping down cereal boxes and other packages isn’t necessary. “Use the wipes when you need them,” says Dr. Chapman. If you’re home you can easily wash your hands. “That’s going to reduce your risk as much if not more than trying to wipe everything down,” he says.
  • instead of being preoccupied with wiping down packaging and containers, focus on washing your hands. “It’s much better to treat your hands, wash your hands, rather than dealing with all the surfaces,”
  • Your mouth is a gateway to both your respiratory system (your lungs) and your digestive system (stomach). Respiratory viruses like the novel coronavirus are believed to enter the body and reproduce through the respiratory tract, not the digestive tract.
  • Experts say it is possible that if the virus rubs off from any object to the inside of your mouth, it could infect you if it goes into your respiratory system. But there doesn’t appear to be any risk of infection via your digestive trac
  • doctors say getting the virus through ingestion of contaminated food seems unlikely. Gregory Poland, director of the Mayo Clinic’s Vaccine Research Group in Rochester, Minn., speculates that the gastric acid in the stomach would kill it. “My own speculation is that the GI route would be very low likelihood compared to known and efficient methods of infection,”
  • use self-checkout when possible and use hand sanitizer when you’re done.
  • If you touch virus particles on raw food and then touch your nose, eyes or mouth, that is a potential source of transmission. But experts note that is very unlikely. To be vigilant, thoroughly wash your hands with soap and water, and don’t eat your food with your hands.
  • Experts urge people not to wash fruits and vegetables with anything but water. The chemicals on wipes and chlorine solutions especially can be dangerous—don’t ingest those.
  • There’s no evidence that the virus can be transmitted through clothing, but it hasn’t been specifically studied
  • The good news is it can be killed by doing laundry. So if you were in a grocery store where people near you were coughing, it’s a good idea to remove your clothes when you get home. Don’t shake clothing. Place it in your laundry hamper.
  • The CDC recommends laundering contaminated clothes in the warmest appropriate water setting and drying them thoroughly.
  • The CDC says there are no known cases of the novel coronavirus being spread through the fecal-oral route, which is a common route of transmission for stomach viruses like the norovirus.
  • But a recent study that hasn’t been peer reviewed yet found the virus in the stool of some patients. This route of transmission remains unknown, and experts say it’s unlikely to be contributing significantly to the pandemic.
Javier E

These Truths: A History of the United States (Jill Lepore) - 1 views

DIIGO_FILE_HOME/7ui9/8e26ac21cd7c52b0c30ef317c94b7059

natural rights sovereignty American idea liberty truth democracy equality Founding politics philosophy book notes

shared by Javier E on 06 May 20 - No Cached
  • It was meant to mark the start of a new era, in which the course of history might be made predictable and a government established that would be ruled not by accident and force but by reason and choice. The origins of that idea, and its fate, are the story of American history.
  • It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.6 This was the question of that autumn. And, in a way, it has been the question of every season since,
  • I once came across a book called The Constitution Made Easy.7 The Constitution cannot be made easy. It was never meant to be easy.
  • ...297 more annotations...
  • THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT rests on three political ideas—“these truths,” Thomas Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people.
  • After Benjamin Franklin read Jefferson’s draft, he picked up his quill, scratched out the words “sacred & undeniable,” and suggested that “these truths” were, instead, “self-evident.” This was more than a quibble. Truths that are sacred and undeniable are God-given and divine, the stuff of religion. Truths that are self-evident are laws of nature, empirical and observable, the stuff of science. This divide has nearly rent the Republic apart.
  • The real dispute is between “these truths” and the course of events: Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?
  • The United States rests on a dedication to equality, which is chiefly a moral idea, rooted in Christianity, but it rests, too, on a dedication to inquiry, fearless and unflinching. Its founders agreed with the Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume, who wrote, in 1748, that “Records of Wars, Intrigues, Factions, and Revolutions are so many Collections of Experiments.”9 They believed that truth is to be found in ideas about morality but also in the study of history.
  • understanding history as a form of inquiry—not as something easy or comforting but as something demanding and exhausting—was central to the nation’s founding. This, too, was new.
  • A new kind of historical writing, less memorial and more unsettling, only first emerged in the fourteenth century. “History is a philosophical science,” the North African Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun wrote in 1377, in the prologue to his history of the world, in which he defined history as the study “of the causes and origins of existing things.”11
  • Only by fits and starts did history become not merely a form of memory but also a form of investigation, to be disputed, like philosophy, its premises questioned, its evidence examined, its arguments countered.
  • Declaring independence was itself an argument about the relationship between the present and the past, an argument that required evidence of a very particular kind: historical evidence. That’s why most of the Declaration of Independence is a list of historical claims. “To prove this,” Jefferson wrote, “let facts be submitted to a candid world.”
  • In an attempt to solve this problem, the earliest historians of the United States decided to begin their accounts with Columbus’s voyage, stitching 1776 to 1492. George Bancroft published his History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent to the Present in 1834, when the nation was barely more than a half-century old, a fledgling, just hatched. By beginning with Columbus, Bancroft made the United States nearly three centuries older than it was, a many-feathered old bird.
  • In 1787, then, when Alexander Hamilton asked “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force,” that was the kind of question a scientist asks before beginning an experiment. Time alone would tell. But time has passed. The beginning has come to an end. What, then, is the verdict of history?
  • In deciding what to leave in and what to leave out, I’ve confined myself to what, in my view, a people constituted as a nation in the early twenty-first century need to know about their own past, mainly because this book is meant to double as an old-fashioned civics book, an explanation of the origins and ends of democratic institutions, from the town meeting to the party system, from the nominating convention to the secret ballot, from talk radio to Internet polls. This book is chiefly a political
  • Aside from being a brief history of the United States and a civics primer, this book aims to be something else, too: it’s an explanation of the nature of the past. History isn’t only a subject; it’s also a method.
  • The truths on which the nation was founded are not mysteries, articles of faith, never to be questioned, as if the founding were an act of God, but neither are they lies, all facts fictions, as if nothing can be known, in a world without truth.
  • Between reverence and worship, on the one side, and irreverence and contempt, on the other, lies an uneasy path, away from false pieties and petty triumphs over people who lived and died and committed both their acts of courage and their sins and errors long before we committed ours. “We cannot hallow this ground,” Lincoln said at Gettysburg. We are obliged, instead, to walk this ground, dedicating ourselves to both the living and the dead.
  • studying history is like that, looking into one face and seeing, behind it, another, face after face after face. “Know whence you came,” Baldwin told his nephew.17 The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden. It can’t be shirked. You carry it everywhere. There’s nothing for it but to get to know it.
  • Nature takes one toll, malice another. History is the study of what remains, what’s left behind, which can be almost anything, so long as it survives the ravages of time and war: letters, diaries, DNA, gravestones, coins, television broadcasts, paintings, DVDs, viruses, abandoned Facebook pages, the transcripts of congressional hearings, the ruins of buildings. Some of these things are saved by chance or accident, like the one house that, as if by miracle, still stands after a hurricane razes a town. But most of what historians study survives because it was purposely kept—placed
  • As nation-states emerged, they needed to explain themselves, which they did by telling stories about their origins, tying together ribbons of myths, as if everyone in the “English nation,” for instance, had the same ancestors, when, of course, they did not. Very often, histories of nation-states are little more than myths that hide the seams that stitch the nation to the state.15
  • When the United States declared its independence in 1776, plainly, it was a state, but what made it a nation? The fiction that its people shared a common ancestry was absurd on its face; they came from all over, and, having waged a war against England, the very last thing they wanted to celebrate was their Englishness.
  • Facts, knowledge, experience, proof. These words come from the law. Around the seventeenth century, they moved into what was then called “natural history”: astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology. By the eighteenth century they were applied to history and to politics, too. These truths: this was the language of reason, of enlightenment, of inquiry, and of history.
  • Against conquest, slaughter, and slavery came the urgent and abiding question, “By what right?”
  • Yet the origins of the United States date to 1492 for another, more troubling reason: the nation’s founding truths were forged in a crucible of violence, the products of staggering cruelty, conquest and slaughter, the assassination of worlds.
  • Locke, spurred both by a growing commitment to religious toleration and by a desire to distinguish English settlement from Spanish conquest, stressed the lack of cultivation as a better justification for taking the natives’ land than religious difference, an emphasis with lasting consequences.
  • Unlike Polo and Mandeville, Columbus did not make a catalogue of the ways and beliefs of the people he met (only later did he hire Pané to do that). Instead, he decided that the people he met had no ways and beliefs. Every difference he saw as an absence.22 Insisting that they had no faith and no civil government and were therefore infidels and savages who could not rightfully own anything, he claimed possession of their land, by the act of writing. They were a people without truth; he would make his truth theirs. He would tell them where the dead go.
  • It became commonplace, inevitable, even, first among the Spanish, and then, in turn, among the French, the Dutch, and the English, to see their own prosperity and good health and the terrible sicknesses suffered by the natives as signs from God. “Touching these savages, there is a thing that I cannot omit to remark to you,” one French settler wrote: “it appears visibly that God wishes that they yield their place to new peoples.” Death convinced them at once of their right and of the truth of their faith. “The natives, they are all dead of small Poxe,” John Winthrop wrote when he arrived in New England in 1630: “the Lord hathe cleared our title to what we possess.”
  • In much of New Spain, the mixed-race children of Spanish men and Indian women, known as mestizos, outnumbered Indians; an intricate caste system marked gradations of skin color, mixtures of Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans, as if skin color were like dyes made of plants, the yellow of sassafras, the red of beets, the black of carob. Later, the English would recognize only black and white, a fantasy of stark and impossible difference, of nights without twilight and days without dawns. And yet both regimes of race, a culture of mixing or a culture of pretending not to mix, pressed upon the brows of every person of the least curiosity the question of common humanity: Are all peoples one?
  • Elizabeth’s best defender argued that if God decided “the female should rule and govern,” it didn’t matter that women were “weake in nature, feable in bodie, softe in courage,” because God would make every right ruler strong. In any case, England’s constitution abided by a “rule mixte,” in which the authority of the monarch was checked by the power of Parliament; also, “it is not she that ruleth but the lawes.” Elizabeth herself called on yet another authority: the favor of the people.48 A mixed constitution, the rule of law, the will of the people: these were English ideas that Americans would one day make their own, crying, “Liberty!”
  • In the brutal, bloody century between Columbus’s voyage and John White’s, an idea was born, out of fantasy, out of violence, the idea that there exists in the world a people who live in an actual Garden of Eden, a state of nature, before the giving of laws, before the forming of government. This imagined history of America became an English book of genesis, their new truth. “In the beginning,” the Englishman John Locke would write, “all the world was America.” In America, everything became a beginning.
  • England’s empire would have a different character than that of either Spain or France. Catholics could make converts by the act of baptism, but Protestants were supposed to teach converts to read the Bible; that meant permanent settlements, families, communities, schools, and churches. Also, England’s empire would be maritime—its navy was its greatest strength. It would be commercial. And, of greatest significance for the course of the nation that would grow out of those settlements, its colonists would be free men, not vassals, guaranteed their “English liberties.”
  • Beginning with the Virginia charter, the idea of English liberties for English subjects was planted on American soil and, with it, the king’s claim to dominion, a claim that rested on the idea that people like Powhatan and his people lived in darkness and without government, no matter that the English called their leaders kings.
  • Twenty Englishmen were elected to the House of Burgesses. Twenty Africans were condemned to the house of bondage. Another chapter opened in the American book of genesis: liberty and slavery became the American Abel and Cain.
  • To build his case against the king, Coke dusted off a copy of an ancient and almost entirely forgotten legal document, known as Magna Carta (literally, the “great charter”), in which, in the year 1215, King John had pledged to his barons that he would obey the “law of the land.” Magna Carta wasn’t nearly as important as Coke made it out to be, but by arguing for its importance, he made it important, not only for English history, but for American history, too, tying the political fate of everyone in England’s colonies to the strange doings of a very bad king from the Middle Ages.
  • Magna Carta explains a great deal about how it is that some English colonists would one day come to believe that their king had no right to rule them and why their descendants would come to believe that the United States needed a written constitution. But Magna Carta played one further pivotal role, the role it played in the history of truth—a history that had taken a different course in England than in any other part of Europe.
  • The most crucial right established under Magna Carta was the right to a trial by jury.
  • in 1215, the pope banned trial by ordeal. In Europe, it was replaced by a new system of divine judgment: judicial torture. But in England, where there existed a tradition of convening juries to judge civil disputes—like disagreements over boundaries between neighboring freeholds—trial by ordeal was replaced not by judicial torture but by trial by jury.
  • This turn marked the beginning of a new era in the history of knowledge: it required a new doctrine of evidence and new method of inquiry and eventually led to the idea that an observed or witnessed act or thing—the substance, the matter, of fact—is the basis of truth. A judge decided the law; a jury decided the facts. Mysteries were matters of faith, a different kind of truth, known only to God.
  • The age of mystery began to wane, and, soon, the culture of fact spread from law to government.
  • There would never be very many Africans in New England, but New Englanders would have slave plantations, on the distant shores. Nearly half of colonial New Englanders’ wealth would come from sugar grown by West Indian slaves.
  • One million Europeans migrated to British America between 1600 and 1800 and two and a half million Africans were carried there by force over that same stretch of centuries, on ships that sailed past one another by day and by night.42 Africans died faster, but as a population of migrants, they outnumbered Europeans two and a half to one.
  • In the last twenty-five years of the seventeenth century, English ships, piloted by English sea captains, crewed by English sailors, carried more than a quarter of a million men, women, and children across the ocean, shackled in ships’ holds.44 Theirs was not a ship of state crossing a sea of troubles, another Mayflower, their bond a covenant. Theirs was a ship of slavery, their bonds forged in fire. They whispered and wept; they screamed and sat in silence. They grew ill; they grieved; they died; they endured.
  • By what right did the English hold these people as their slaves?
  • Under Roman law, all men are born free and can only be made slaves by the law of nations, under certain narrow conditions—for instance, when they’re taken as prisoners of war, or when they sell themselves as payment of debt. Aristotle had disagreed with Roman law, insisting that some men are born slaves. Neither of these traditions from antiquity proved to be of much use to English colonists attempting to codify their right to own slaves, because laws governing slavery, like slavery itself, had disappeared from English common law by the fourteenth century. Said one Englishman in Barbados in 1661, there was “no track to guide us where to walk nor any rule sett us how to govern such Slaves.”46
  • With no track or rule to guide them, colonial assemblies adopted new practices and devised new laws with which they attempted to establish a divide between “blacks” and “whites.”
  • Adopting these practices and passing these laws required turning English law upside down, because much in existing English law undermined the claims of owners of people. In 1655, a Virginia woman with an African mother and an English father sued for her freedom by citing English common law, under which children’s status follows that of their father, not their mother. In 1662, Virginia’s House of Burgesses answered doubts about “whether children got by any Englishman upon a Negro woman should be slave or ffree” by reaching back to an archaic Roman rule, partus sequitur ventrem (you are what your mother was). Thereafter, any child born of a woman who was a slave inherited her condition.
  • By giving Americans a more ancient past, he hoped to make America’s founding appear inevitable and its growth inexorable, God-ordained. He also wanted to celebrate the United States, not as an offshoot of England, but instead as a pluralist and cosmopolitan nation, with ancestors all over the world.
  • No book should be censored before publication, Milton argued (though it might be condemned after printing), because truth could only be established if allowed to do battle with lies. “Let her and falsehood grapple,” he urged, since, “whoever knew Truth to be put to the worst in a free and open encounter?” This view depended on an understanding of the capacity of the people to reason. The people, Milton insisted, are not “slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to.”52
  • All men, Locke argued, are born equal, with a natural right to life, liberty, and property; to protect those rights, they erect governments by consent. Slavery, for Locke, was no part either of a state of nature or of civil society. Slavery was a matter of the law of nations, “nothing else, but the state of war continued, between a lawful conqueror and a captive.” To introduce slavery in the Carolinas, then, was to establish, as fundamental to the political order, an institution at variance with everything about how Locke understood civil society.
  • Long before shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, long before George Washington crossed the Delaware, long before American independence was thought of, or even thinkable, a revolutionary tradition was forged, not by the English in America, but by Indians waging wars and slaves waging rebellions. They revolted again and again and again. Their revolutions came in waves that lashed the land. They asked the same question, unrelentingly: By what right are we ruled?
  • Rebellion hardened lines between whites and blacks. Before Bacon and his men burned Jamestown, poor Englishmen had very little political power. As many as three out of every four Englishmen and women who sailed to the colonies were either debtors or convicts or indentured servants; they weren’t slaves, but neither were they free.61 Property requirements for voting meant that not all free white men could vote. Meanwhile, the fact that slaves could be manumitted by their masters meant that it was possible to be both black and free and white and unfree. But after Bacon’s Rebellion, free white men were granted the right to vote, and it became nearly impossible for black men and women to secure their freedom. By 1680, one observer could remark that “these two words, Negro and Slave” had “grown Homogeneous and convertible”: to be black was to be a slave.
  • Benjamin Franklin eventually settled in the tidy Quaker town of Philadelphia and began printing his own newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, in 1729. In its pages, he fought for freedom of the press. In a Miltonian 1731 “Apology for Printers,” he observed “that the Opinions of Men are almost as various as their Faces” but that “Printers are educated in the Belief, that when Men differ in Opinion, both Sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.”
  • But if the culture of the fact hadn’t yet spread to newspapers, it had spread to history. In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes had written that “The register of Knowledge of Fact is called History.”74 One lesson Americans would learn from the facts of their own history had to do with the limits of the freedom of the press, and this was a fact on which they dwelled, and a liberty they grew determined to protect.
  • Slavery does not exist outside of politics. Slavery is a form of politics, and slave rebellion a form of violent political dissent. The Zenger trial and the New York slave conspiracy were much more than a dispute over freedom of the press and a foiled slave rebellion: they were part of a debate about the nature of political opposition, and together they established its limits. Both Cosby’s opponents and Caesar’s followers allegedly plotted to depose the governor. One kind of rebellion was celebrated, the other suppressed—a division that would endure.
  • In American history, the relationship between liberty and slavery is at once deep and dark: the threat of black rebellion gave a license to white political opposition.
  • This, too, represented a kind of revolution: Whitefield emphasized the divinity of ordinary people, at the expense of the authority of their ministers.
  • he wrote in 1751 an essay about the size of the population, called “Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c.”
  • Franklin guessed the population of the mainland colonies to be about “One Million English Souls,” and his calculations suggested that this number would double every twenty-five years. At that rate, in only a century, “the greatest Number of Englishmen will be on this Side the Water.” Franklin’s numbers were off; his estimates weren’t too high; they were too low. At the time, more than 1.5 million people lived in Britain’s thirteen mainland colonies. Those colonies were far more densely settled than New France or New Spain. Only 60,000 French settlers lived in Canada and 10,000 more in Louisiana. New Spain was even more thinly settled.
  • he wrote about a new race, a people who were “white.” “The Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small,” Franklin began. As he saw it, Africans were “black”; Asians and Native Americans were “tawny”; Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, Swedes, and Germans were “swarthy.” That left very few people, and chiefly the English, as the only “white people” in the world. “I could wish their Numbers were increased,” Franklin said, adding, wonderingly, “But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.”
  • Franklin’s “JOIN, or DIE” did some of that, too: it offered a lesson about the rulers and the ruled, and the nature of political communities. It made a claim about the colonies: they were parts of a whole.
  • When Benjamin Franklin began writing his autobiography, in 1771, he turned the story of his own escape—running away from his apprenticeship to his brother James—into a metaphor for the colonies’ growing resentment of parliamentary rule. James’s “harsh and tyrannical Treatment,” Franklin wrote, had served as “a means of impressing me with that Aversion to arbitrary Power that has stuck to me thro’ my whole Life.”7 But that was also the story of every runaway slave ad, testament after testament to an aversion to arbitrary power.
  • The American Revolution did not begin in 1775 and it didn’t end when the war was over. “The success of Mr. Lay, in sowing the seeds of . . . a revolution in morals, commerce, and government, in the new and in the old world, should teach the benefactors of mankind not to despair, if they do not see the fruits of their benevolent propositions, or undertakings, during their lives,” Philadelphia doctor Benjamin Rush later wrote.
  • There were not one but two American revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century: the struggle for independence from Britain, and the struggle to end slavery. Only one was won.
  • The Revolution was at its most radical in the challenge it presented to the institution of slavery and at its most conservative in its failure to meet that challenge. Still, the institution had begun to break, like a pane of glass streaked with cracks but not yet shattered.
  • “I wish our Poor Distracted State would atend to the many good Lessons” of history, Jane Franklin wrote to her brother, and not “keep always in a Flame.”21
  • After Annapolis, Madison went home to Virginia and resumed his course of study. In April of 1787, he drafted an essay called “Vices of the Political System of the United States.” It took the form of a list of eleven deficiencies,
  • it closed with a list of causes for these vices, which he located primarily “in the people themselves.” By this last he meant the danger that a majority posed to a minority: “In republican Government the majority however composed, ultimately give the law. Whenever therefore an apparent interest or common passion unites a majority what is to restrain them from unjust violations of the rights and interests of the minority, or of individuals?”27 What force restrains good men from doing bad things? Honesty, character, religion—these, history demonstrated, were not to be relied upon. No, the only force that could restrain the tyranny of the people was the force of a well-constructed constitution. It would have to be as finely wrought as an iron gate.
  • At the convention, it proved impossible to set the matter of slavery aside, both because the question of representation turned on it and because any understanding of the nature of tyranny rested on it. When Madison argued about the inevitability of a majority oppressing a minority, he cited ancient history, and told of how the rich oppressed the poor in Greece and Rome. But he cited, too, modern American history. “We have seen the mere distinction of color made in the most enlightened period of time, the ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.”40
  • If not for the three-fifths rule, the representatives of free states would have outnumbered representatives of slave states by 57 to 33.44
  • Wilson, half Franklin’s age, read his remarks instead. “Mr. President,” he began, addressing Washington, “I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them.” He suggested that he might, one day, change his mind. “For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others.” Hoping to pry open the minds of delegates who were closed to the compromise before them, he reminded them of the cost of zealotry. “Most men indeed as well as most sects in Religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them it is so far error.” But wasn’t humility the best course, in such circumstances? “Thus I consent, Sir, to this Constitution,” he closed, “because I expect no better, and because I am not sure, that it is not the best.”
  • Except for the Massachusetts Constitution, in 1780, and the second New Hampshire Constitution, in 1784, no constitution, no written system of government, had ever before been submitted to the people for their approval. “This is a new event in the history of mankind,” said the governor of Connecticut at his state’s ratification convention.
  • Nearly everything Washington did set a precedent. What would have happened if he had decided, before taking that oath of office, to emancipate his slaves? He’d grown disillusioned with slavery; his own slaves, and the greater number of slaves owned by his wife, were, to him, a moral burden, and he understood very well that for all the wealth generated by forced, unpaid labor, the institution of slavery was a moral burden to the nation. There is some evidence—slight though it is—that Washington drafted a statement announcing that he intended to emancipate his slaves before assuming the presidency. (Or maybe that statement, like Washington’s inaugural address, had been written by Hamilton, a member of New York’s Manumission Society.) This, too, Washington understood, would have established a precedent: every president after him would have had to emancipate his slaves. And yet he would not, could not, do it.65 Few of Washington’s decisions would have such lasting and terrible consequences as this one failure to act.
  • In the century and a half between the Connecticut charter and the 1787 meeting of the constitutional convention lies an entire revolution—not just a political revolution but also a religious revolution. So far from establishing a religion, the Constitution doesn’t even mention “God,” except in naming the date (“the year of our Lord . . .”). At a time when all but two states required religious tests for office, the Constitution prohibited them. At a time when all but three states still had an official religion, the Bill of Rights forbade the federal government from establishing one. Most Americans believed, with Madison, that religion can only thrive if it is no part of government, and that a free government can only thrive if it is no part of religion.
  • The replacement of debtors’ prison with bankruptcy protection would change the nature of the American economy, spurring investment, speculation, and the taking of risks.
  • as early as 1791, Madison had begun to revise his thinking. In an essay called “Public Opinion,” he considered a source of instability particular to a large republic: the people might be deceived. “The larger a country, the less easy for its real opinion to be ascertained,” he explained. That is, factions might not, in the end, consist of wise, knowledgeable, and reasonable men. They might consist of passionate, ignorant, and irrational men, who had been led to hold “counterfeit” opinions by persuasive men. (Madison was thinking of Hamilton and his ability to gain public support for his financial plan.)
  • The way out of this political maze was the newspaper. “A circulation of newspapers through the entire body of the people,” he explained, “is equivalent to a contraction of territorial limits.” Newspapers would make the country, effectively, smaller.90 It was an ingenious idea. It would be revisited by each passing generation of exasperated advocates of republicanism. The newspaper would hold the Republic together; the telegraph would hold the Republic together; the radio would hold the Republic together; the Internet would hold the Republic together. Each time, this assertion would be both right and terribly wrong.
  • Newspapers in the early republic weren’t incidentally or inadvertently partisan; they were entirely and enthusiastically partisan. They weren’t especially interested in establishing facts; they were interested in staging a battle of opinions. “Professions of impartiality I shall make none,” wrote a Federalist printer. “They are always useless, and are besides perfect nonsense.”92
  • Washington’s Farewell Address consists of a series of warnings about the danger of disunion. The North and the South, the East and the West, ought not to consider their interests separate or competing, Washington urged: “your union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty.” Parties, he warned, were the “worst enemy” of every government, agitating “the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms,” kindling “the animosity of one part against another,” and even fomenting “riot and insurrection.”
  • As to the size of the Republic, “Is there a doubt whether a common government can embrace so large a sphere? Let experience solve it.” The American experiment must go on. But it could only thrive if the citizens were supported by religion and morality, and if they were well educated. “Promote, then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge,” he urged. “In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.”95
  • “Passion” or variants of the word appear seven times in the Farewell; it is the source of every problem; reason is its only remedy. Passion is a river. There would be no changing its course.
  • Adams and Jefferson lived in an age of quantification. It began with the measurement of time. Time used to be a wheel that turned, and turned again; during the scientific revolution, time became a line. Time, the easiest quantity to measure, became the engine of every empirical inquiry: an axis, an arrow. This new use and understanding of time contributed to the idea of progress—if time is a line instead of a circle, things can get better and even better, instead of forever rising and falling in endless cycles, like the seasons. The idea of progress animated American independence and animated, too, the advance of capitalism.
  • The quantification of time led to the quantification of everything else: the counting of people, the measurement of their labor, and the calculation of profit as a function of time. Keeping time and accumulating wealth earned a certain equivalency. “Time is money,” Benjamin Franklin used to say.
  • The two-party system turned out to be essential to the strength of the Republic. A stable party system organizes dissent. It turns discontent into a public good. And it insures the peaceful transfer of power, in which the losing party willingly, and without hesitation, surrenders its power to the winning party.
  • Behind Madison’s remarks about “lessening the proportion of slaves to the free people,” behind Jefferson’s tortured calculations about how many generations would have to pass before his own children could pass for “white,” lay this hard truth: none of these men could imagine living with descendants of Africans as political equals.
  • If the battle between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had determined whether aristocracy or republicanism would prevail (and, with Jefferson, republicanism won), the battle between Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams would determine whether republicanism or democracy would prevail (and, with Jackson, democracy would, eventually, win). Jackson’s rise to power marked the birth of American populism. The argument of populism is that the best government is that most closely directed by a popular majority.
  • He was provincial, and poorly educated. (Later, when Harvard gave Jackson an honorary doctorate, John Quincy Adams refused to attend the ceremony, calling him “a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name.”)68 He had a well-earned reputation for being ferocious, ill-humored, and murderous, on the battlefield and off. When he ran for president, he had served less than a year in the Senate. Of his bid for the White House Jefferson declared, “He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place.”69 Jackson made a devilishly shrewd decision. He would make his lack of certain qualities—judiciousness, education, political experience—into strengths.
  • Eaton, who ran Jackson’s campaign, shrewdly revised his Life of Andrew Jackson, deleting or dismissing everything in Jackson’s past that looked bad and lavishing attention on anything that looked good and turning into strengths what earlier had been considered weaknesses: Eaton’s Jackson wasn’t uneducated; he was self-taught. He wasn’t ill-bred; he was “self-made.”
  • Watching the rise of American democracy, an aging political elite despaired, and feared that the Republic could not survive the rule of the people. Wrote John Randolph of Virginia, “The country is ruined past redemption.”
  • “The first principle of our system,” Jackson said, “is that the majority is to govern.” He bowed to the people. Then, all at once, the people nearly crushed him with their affection.
  • The democratization of American politics was hastened by revivalists like Stewart who believed in the salvation of the individual through good works and in the equality of all people in the eyes of God. Against that belief stood the stark and brutal realities of an industrializing age, the grinding of souls.
  • The great debates of the middle decades of the nineteenth century had to do with the soul and the machine. One debate merged religion and politics. What were the political consequences of the idea of the equality of souls? Could the soul of America be redeemed from the nation’s original sin, the Constitution’s sanctioning of slavery?
  • Another debate merged politics and technology. Could the nation’s new democratic traditions survive in the age of the factory, the railroad, and the telegraph? If all events in time can be explained by earlier events in time, if history is a line, and not a circle, then the course of events—change over time—is governed by a set of laws, like the laws of physics, and driven by a force, like gravity. What is that force? Is change driven by God, by people, or by machines? Is progress the progress of Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan’s 1678 allegory—the journey of a Christian from sin to salvation? Is progress the extension of suffrage, the spread of democracy? Or is progress invention, the invention of new machines?
  • A distinctively American idea of progress involved geography as destiny, picturing improvement as change not only over time but also over space.
  • If the sincerity of converts was often dubious, another kind of faith was taking deeper root in the 1820s, an evangelical faith in technological progress, an unquestioning conviction that each new machine was making the world better. That faith had a special place in the United States, as if machines had a distinctive destiny on the American continent. In prints and paintings, “Progress” appeared as a steam-powered locomotive, chugging across the continent, unstoppable. Writers celebrated inventors as “Men of Progress” and “Conquerors of Nature” and lauded their machines as far worthier than poetry. The triumph of the sciences over the arts meant the defeat of the ancients by the moderns. The genius of Eli Whitney, hero of modernity, was said to rival that of Shakespeare; the head of the U.S. Patent Office declared the steamboat “a mightier epic” than the Iliad.18
  • To Jackson’s supporters, his election marked not degeneration but a new stage in the history of progress. Nowhere was this argument made more forcefully, or more influentially, than in George Bancroft’s History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent to the Present. The book itself, reviewers noted, voted for Jackson. The spread of evangelical Christianity, the invention of new machines, and the rise of American democracy convinced Bancroft that “humanism is steady advancing,” and that “the advance of liberty and justice is certain.” That advance, men like Bancroft and Jackson believed, required Americans to march across the continent, to carry these improvements from east to west, the way Jefferson had pictured it. Democracy, John O’Sullivan, a New York lawyer and Democratic editor, argued in 1839, is nothing more or less than “Christianity in its earthly aspect.” O’Sullivan would later coin the term “manifest destiny” to describe this set of beliefs, the idea that the people of the United States were fated “to over spread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given for the development of the great experiment of liberty.”23
  • To evangelical Democrats, Democracy, Christianity, and technology were levers of the same machine. And yet, all along, there were critics and dissenters and objectors who saw, in the soul of the people, in the march of progress, in the unending chain of machines, in the seeming forward movement of history, little but violence and backwardness and a great crushing of men, women, and children. “Oh, America, America,” Maria Stewart cried, “foul and indelible is thy stain!”24
  • The self-evident, secular truths of the Declaration of Independence became, to evangelical Americans, the truths of revealed religion. To say that this marked a turn away from the spirit of the nation’s founding is to wildly understate the case. The United States was founded during the most secular era in American history, either before or since. In the late eighteenth century, church membership was low, and anticlerical feeling was high.
  • The United States was not founded as a Christian nation. The Constitution prohibits religious tests for officeholders. The Bill of Rights forbids the federal government from establishing a religion, James Madison having argued that to establish
  • The separation of church and state allowed religion to thrive; that was one of its intentions. Lacking an established state religion, Americans founded new sects, from Shakers to Mormons, and rival Protestant denominations sprung up in town after town. Increasingly, the only unifying, national religion was a civil religion, a belief in the American creed. This faith bound the nation together, and provided extraordinary political stability in an era of astonishing change,
  • Slavery wasn’t an aberration in an industrializing economy; slavery was its engine. Factories had mechanical slaves; plantations had human slaves. The power of machines was measured by horsepower, the power of slaves by hand power. A healthy man counted as “two hands,” a nursing woman as a “half-hand,” a child as a “quarter-hand.”
  • With Walker, the antislavery argument for gradual emancipation, with compensation for slave owners, became untenable. Abolitionists began arguing for immediate emancipation. And southern antislavery societies shut their doors. As late as 1827, the number of antislavery groups in the South had outnumbered those in the North by more than four to one. Southern antislavery activists were usually supporters of colonization, not of emancipation. Walker’s Appeal ended the antislavery movement in the South and radicalized it in the North.
  • The rebellion rippled across the Union. The Virginia legislature debated the possibility of emancipating its slaves, fearing “a Nat Turner might be in every family.” Quakers submitted a petition to the state legislature calling for abolition. The petition was referred to a committee, headed by Thomas Jefferson’s thirty-nine-year-old grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, who proposed a scheme of gradual emancipation. Instead, the legislature passed new laws banning the teaching of slaves to read and write, and prohibiting, too, teaching slaves about the Bible.43 In a nation founded on a written Declaration, made sacred by evangelicals during a religious revival, reading about equality became a crime.
  • One consequence of the rise of Jacksonian democracy and the Second Great Awakening was the participation of women in the reformation of American politics by way of American morals. When suffrage was stripped of all property qualifications, women’s lack of political power became starkly obvious. For women who wished to exercise power, the only source of power seemingly left to them was their role as mothers, which, they suggested, rendered them morally superior to men—more loving, more caring, and more responsive to the cries of the weak.
  • Purporting to act less as citizens than as mothers, cultivating the notion of “republican motherhood,” women formed temperance societies, charitable aid societies, peace societies, vegetarian societies, and abolition societies. The first Female Anti-Slavery Society was founded in Boston in 1833; by 1837, 139 Female Anti-Slavery Societies had been founded across the country,
  • After 1835, she never again spoke in public. As Catherine Beecher argued in 1837, in An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with Reference to the Duty of American Females, “If the female advocate chooses to come upon a stage, and expose her person, dress, and elocution to public criticism, it is right to express disgust.”
  • Jacksonian democracy distributed political power to the many, but industrialization consolidated economic power in the hands of a few. In Boston, the top 1 percent of the population controlled 10 percent of wealth in 1689, 16 percent in 1771, 33 percent in 1833, and 37 percent in 1848, while the lowest 80 percent of the population controlled 39 percent of the wealth in 1689, 29 percent in 1771, 14 percent in 1833, and a mere 4 percent in 1848.
  • In New York, the top 1 percent of the population controlled 40 percent of the wealth in 1828 and 50 percent in 1845; the top 4 percent of the population controlled 63 percent of the wealth in 1828 and 80 percent in 1845.49
  • While two and a half million Europeans had migrated to all of the Americas between 1500 and 1800, the same number—two and a half million—arrived specifically in the United States between 1845 and 1854 alone. As a proportion of the U.S. population, European immigrants grew from 1.6 percent in the 1820s to 11.2 percent in 1860. Writing in 1837, one Michigan reformer called the nation’s rate of immigration “the boldest experiment upon the stability of government ever made in the annals of time.”51 The largest
  • Critics of Jackson—himself the son of Irish immigrants—had blamed his election on the rising population of poor, newly enfranchised Irishmen. “Everything in the shape of an Irishman was drummed to the polls,” one newspaper editor wrote in 1828.52 By 1860, more than one in eight Americans were born in Europe, including 1.6 million Irish and 1.2 million Germans, the majority of whom were Catholic. As the flood of immigrants swelled, the force of nativism gained strength, as did hostility toward Catholics, fueled by the animus of evangelical Protestants.
  • The insularity of both Irish and German communities contributed to a growing movement to establish tax-supported public elementary schools, known as “common schools,” meant to provide a common academic and civic education to all classes of Americans. Like the extension of suffrage to all white men, this element of the American experiment propelled the United States ahead of European nations. Much of the movement’s strength came from the fervor of revivalists. They hoped that these new schools would assimilate a diverse population of native-born and foreign-born citizens by introducing them to the traditions of American culture and government, so that boys, once men, would vote wisely, and girls, once women, would raise virtuous children. “It is our duty to make men moral,” read one popular teachers’ manual, published in 1830. Other advocates hoped that a shared education would diminish partisanship. Whatever the motives of its advocates, the common school movement emerged out of, and nurtured, a strong civic culture.56
  • With free schools, literacy spread, and the number of newspapers rose, a change that was tied to the rise of a new party system. Parties come and go, but a party system—a stable pair of parties—has characterized American politics since the ratification debates. In American history the change from one party system to another has nearly always been associated with a revolution in communications that allows the people to shake loose of the control of parties. In the 1790s, during the rise of the first party system, which pitted Federalists against Republicans, the number of newspapers had swelled. During the shift to the second party system, which, beginning in 1833, pitted Democrats against the newly founded Whig Party, not only did the number of newspapers rise, but their prices plummeted.
  • The newspapers of the first party system, which were also known as “commercial advertisers,” had consisted chiefly of partisan commentary and ads, and generally sold for six cents an issue. The new papers cost only one cent, and were far more widely read. The rise of the so-called penny press also marked the beginning of the triumph of “facts” over “opinion” in American journalism, mainly because the penny press aimed at a different, broader, and less exclusively partisan, audience. The New York Sun appeared in 1833. “It shines for all” was its common-man motto. “The object of this paper is to lay before the public, at a price within the means of everyone, ALL THE NEWS OF THE DAY,” it boasted. It dispensed with subscriptions and instead was circulated at newsstands, where it was sold for cash, to anyone who had a ready penny. Its front page was filled not with advertising but with news. The penny press was a “free press,” as James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald put it, because it wasn’t beholden to parties. (Bennett, born in Scotland, had immigrated to the United States after reading Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography.) Since the paper was sold at newsstands, rather than mailed to subscribers, he explained, its editors and writers were “entirely ignorant who are its readers and who are not.” They couldn’t favor their readers’ politics because they didn’t know them. “We shall support no party,” Bennett insisted. “We shall endeavor to record facts.”
  • During the days of the penny press, Tocqueville observed that Americans had a decided preference for weighing the facts of a matter themselves: They mistrust systems; they adhere closely to facts and study facts with their own senses. As they do not easily defer to the mere name of any fellow man, they are never inclined to rest upon any man’s authority; but, on the contrary, they are unremitting in their efforts to find out the weaker points of their neighbor’s doctrine.60
  • For centuries, Europeans had based their claims to lands in the New World on arguments that native peoples had no right to the land they inhabited, no sovereignty over it, because they had no religion, or because they had no government, or because they had no system of writing. The Cherokees, with deliberation and purpose, challenged each of these arguments.
  • Britain, Calhoun argued that if a state were to decide that a law passed by Congress was unconstitutional, the Constitution would have to be amended, and if such an amendment were not ratified—if it didn’t earn the necessary approval of three-quarters of the states—the objecting state would have the right to secede from the Union. The states had been sovereign before the Constitution was ever written, or even thought of, Calhoun argued, and they remained sovereign. Calhoun also therefore argued against majority rule; nullification is fundamentally anti-majoritarian. If states can secede, the majority does not rule.78 The nullification crisis was
  • New York abolished debtors’ prison in 1831, and in 1841, Congress passed a federal law offering bankruptcy protection to everyone. Within two years, 41,000 Americans had filed for bankruptcy. Two years later, the law was repealed, but state laws continued to offer bankruptcy protection and, still more significantly, debtors’ prisons were gone for good. In Britain and all of Europe except Portugal, offenders were still being thrown in debtors’ prison (a plot that animated many a nineteenth-century novel); in the United States, debtors could declare bankruptcy and begin again.
  • A nation of debtors, Americans came to see that most people who fall into debt are victims of the business cycle and not of fate or divine retribution or the wheel of fortune. The nation’s bankruptcy laws, even as they came and went again, made taking risks less risky for everyone, which meant that everyone took more risks.
  • the geographical vastness of the United States meant that the anxiety about the machinery of industrial capitalism took the form not of Marxism, with its argument that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” but instead of a romance with nature, and with the land, and with all things rustic. Against the factory, Americans posed not a socialist utopia but the log cabin.
  • Were all these vast designs and rapid strides worth it? Thoreau thought not. He came to this truth: “They are but improved means to an unimproved end.”112
  • Expansion, even more than abolition, pressed upon the public the question of the constitutionality of slavery. How or even whether this crisis would be resolved was difficult to see not only because of the nature of the dispute but also because there existed very little agreement about who might resolve it: Who was to decide whether a federal law was unconstitutional?
  • In the midst of all this clamoring among the thundering white-haired patriarchs of American politics, there emerged the idea that the authority to interpret the Constitution rests with the people themselves. Or, at least, this became a rather fashionable thing to say. “It is, Sir, the people’s Constitution, the people’s government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people,” Daniel Webster roared from the floor of Congress.14 Every man could read and understand the Constitution, Webster insisted.
  • The Notes, it appeared, could be read as variously as the Constitution itself. As one shrewd observer remarked, “The Constitution threatens to be a subject of infinite sects, like the Bible.” And, as with many sects, those politicians who most strenuously staked their arguments on the Constitution often appeared the least acquainted with it. Remarked New York governor Silas Wright, “No one familiar with the affairs of our government, can have failed to notice how large a proportion of our statesmen appear never to have read the Constitution of the United States with a careful reference to its precise language and exact provisions, but rather, as occasion presents, seem to exercise their ingenuity . . . to stretch both to the line of what they, at the moment, consider expedient.”22
  • A NATION HAS borders but the edges of an empire are frayed.23 While abolitionists damned the annexation of Texas as an extension of the slave power, more critics called it an act of imperialism, inconsistent with a republican form of government. “We have a republic, gentlemen, of vast extent and unequalled natural advantages,” Daniel Webster pointed out. “Instead of aiming to enlarge its boundaries, let us seek, rather, to strengthen its union.”24 Webster lost that argument, and, in the end, it was the American reach for empire that, by sundering the Union, brought about the collapse of slavery.
  • Although hardly ever reported in the press, the years between 1830 and 1860 saw more than one hundred incidents of violence between congressmen, from melees in the aisles to mass brawls on the floor, from fistfights and duels to street fights. “It is the game of these men, and of their profligate organs,” Dickens wrote, “to make the strife of politics so fierce and brutal, and so destructive of all self-respect in worthy men, that sensitive and delicate-minded persons shall be kept aloof, and they, and such as they, be left to battle out their selfish views unchecked.”
  • They spat venom. They pulled guns. They unsheathed knives. Divisions of party were abandoned; the splinter in Congress was sectional. Before heading to the Capitol every morning, southern congressmen strapped bowie knives to their belts and tucked pistols into their pockets. Northerners, on principle, came unarmed. When northerners talked about the slave power, they meant that literally.32
  • If the United States were to acquire territory from Mexico, and if this territory were to enter the Union, would Mexicans become American citizens? Calhoun, now in the Senate, vehemently opposed this idea. “I protest against the incorporation of such a people,” he declared. “Ours is the government of the white man.”
  • And yet, as different as were Wilmot’s interests from Calhoun’s, they were both interested in the rights of white men, as Wilmot made plain. “I plead the cause of the rights of white freemen,” he said. “I would preserve for free white labor a fair country, a rich inheritance, where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor.”
  • If the problem was the size of the Republic, the sprawl of its borders, the frayed edges of empire, couldn’t railroads, and especially the telegraph, tie the Republic together? “Doubt has been entertained by many patriotic minds how far the rapid, full, and thorough intercommunication of thought and intelligence, so necessary to the people living under a common representative republic, could be expected to take place throughout such immense bounds,” said one House member in 1845, but “that doubt can no longer exist.”45
  • even Americans with an unflinching faith in machine-driven progress understood that a pulse along a wire could not stop the slow but steady dissolution of the Union.
  • the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, under which the top half of Mexico became the bottom third of the United States. The gain to the United States was as great as the loss to Mexico. In 1820, the United States of America had spanned 1.8 million square miles, with a population of 9.6 million people; Mexico had spanned 1.7 million square miles, with a population of 6.5 million people. By 1850, the United States had acquired one million square miles of Mexico, and its population had grown to 23.2 million; Mexico’s population was 7.5 million.49
  • The Louisiana Purchase had doubled the size of the United States. In gaining territory from Mexico, the United States grew by 64 percent.
  • the territory comprising the United States had grown to “nearly ten times as large as the whole of France and Great Britain combined; three times as large as the whole of France, Britain, Austria, Prussia, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Holland, and Denmark, together; one-and-a-half times as large as the Russian empire in Europe; one-sixth less only than the area covered by the fifty-nine or sixty empires, states, and Republics of Europe; of equal extent with the Roman Empire or that of Alexander, neither of which is said to have exceeded 3,000,000 square miles.”50
  • Sentiment was not Fuller’s way; debate was her way. She was a scourge of lesser intellects. Edgar Allan Poe, whose work she did not admire, described her as wearing a perpetual sneer. In “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men, Woman versus Women,” Fuller argued that the democratization of American politics had cast light on the tyranny of men over women: “As men become aware that all men have not had their fair chance,” she observed, women had become willing to say “that no women have had a fair chance.”
  • In 1845, in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Fuller argued for fundamental and complete equality: “We would have every path laid open to Woman as freely as to Man.”56 The book was wildly successful, and Greeley, who had taken to greeting Fuller with one of her catchphrases about women’s capacity—“Let them be sea-captains, if you will”—sent her to Europe to become his newspaper’s foreign correspondent.
  • Reeling from those revolutions, the king of Bavaria asked the historian Leopold von Ranke to explain why his people had rebelled against monarchial rule, as had so many peoples in Europe that year. “Ideas spread most rapidly when they have found adequate concrete expression,” Ranke told the king, and the United States had “introduced a new force in the world,” the idea that “the nation should govern itself,” an idea that would determine “the course of the modern world”: free speech, spread by wire, would make the whole world free.61
  • Unlike Thoreau, who cursed the railroads, Free-Soilers believed in improvement, improvement through the hard work of the laboring man, his power, his energy. “Our paupers to-day, thanks to free labor, are our yeoman and merchants of tomorrow,” the New York Times boasted. “Why, who are the laboring people of the North?” Daniel Webster asked. “They are the whole North. They are the people who till their own farms with their own hands, freeholders, educated men, independent men.”
  • This attack by northerners led southerners to greater exertions in defending their way of life. They battled on several fronts. They described northern “wage slavery” as a far more exploitative system of labor than slavery. They celebrated slavery as fundamental to American prosperity. Slavery “has grown with our growth, and strengthened with our strength,” Calhoun said. And they elaborated an increasingly virulent ideology of racial difference, arguing against the very idea of equality embodied in the American creed.
  • Conservative Virginian George Fitzhugh, himself inspired by ethnological thinking, dismissed the “self-evident truths” of the Declaration of Independence as utter nonsense. “Men are not born physically, morally, or intellectually equal,” he wrote. “It would be far nearer the truth to say, ‘that some were born with saddles on their backs, and others booted and spurred to ride them,’—and the riding does them good.”
  • For Fitzhugh, the error had begun in the imaginations of the philosophes of the Enlightenment and in their denial of the reality of history. Life and liberty are not “inalienable rights,” Fitzhugh argued: instead, people “have been sold in all countries, and in all ages, and must be sold so long as human nature lasts.” Equality means calamity: “Subordination, difference of caste and classes, difference of sex, age, and slavery beget peace and good will.”
  • Progress is an illusion: “the world has not improved in the last two thousand, probably four thousand years.” Perfection is to be found in the past, not in the future.66 As for the economic systems of the North and the South, “Free laborers have not a thousandth part of the rights and liberties of negro slaves,” Fitzhugh insisted. “The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world.”67
  • HISTORY TEEMS WITH mishaps and might-have-beens: explosions on the Potomac, storms not far from port, narrowly contested elections, court cases lost and won, political visionaries drowned. But over the United States in the 1850s, a sense of inevitability fell, as if there were a fate, a dismal dismantlement, that no series of events or accidents could thwart.
  • over the United States in the 1850s, a sense of inevitability fell, as if there were a fate, a dismal dismantlement, that no series of events or accidents could thwart.
  • Douglas promoted the idea of popular sovereignty, proclaiming, “If there is any one principle dearer and more sacred than all others in free governments, it is that which asserts the exclusive right of a free people to form and adopt their own fundamental law.”75 Unfree people, within Stephen Douglas’s understanding, had no such rights.
  • the Fugitive Slave Law, required citizens to turn in runaway slaves and denied fugitives the right to a jury trial. The law, said Harriet Jacobs, a fugitive slave living in New York, marked “the beginning of a reign of terror to the colored population.”76 Bounty hunters and slave catchers hunted down and captured former slaves and returned them to their owners for a fee. Little stopped them from seizing men, women, and children who had been born free, or who had been legally emancipated, and selling them to the South, too. Nothing so brutally exposed the fragility of freedom or the rapaciousness of slavery.
  • February 1854, at their convention in Philadelphia, northern Know-Nothings proposed a platform plank calling for the reinstatement of the Missouri Compromise. When that motion was rejected, some fifty delegates from eight northern states bolted: they left the convention, and the party, to set up their own party, the short-lived North American Party. Nativism would endure as a force in American politics, but, meanwhile, nativists split over slavery.
  • Lincoln’s was the language of free soil, free speech, and free labor. He grounded his argument against slavery in his understanding of American history, in the language of Frederick Douglass, and in his reading of the Constitution. “Let no one be deceived,” he said. “The spirit of seventy-six and the spirit of Nebraska, are utter antagonisms.”
  • As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
  • “That negroes, whether slave or free, that is, men of the African race, are not citizens of the United States by the Constitution.” The implications of the ruling stunned his readers. Even Americans who held no strong views on the question of slavery—and they were rare enough—were nonetheless shocked by the court’s exercise of the authority to determine the unconstitutionality of the law.
  • “A large meeting of colored people” was held in Philadelphia in April, at which it was resolved that “the only duty the colored man owes to a Constitution under which he is declared to be an inferior and degraded being, having no rights which white men are bound to respect, is to denounce and repudiate it, and to do what he can by all proper means to bring it into contempt.”
  • “You may close your Supreme Court against the black man’s cry for justice, but you cannot, thank God, close against him the ear of a sympathising world, nor shut up the Court of Heaven.” Taney’s interpretation of the Constitution would be ignored, Douglass predicted. “Slavery lives in this country not because of any paper Constitution, but in the moral blindness of the American people.”102
  • APHOTOGRAPH STOPS TIME, TRAPPING IT LIKE A BUTTERFLY in a jar.
  • No other kind of historical evidence has this quality of instantaneity, of an impression taken in a moment, in a flicker, an eye opened and then shut. Photographs also capture the ordinary, the humble, the speechless. The camera discriminates between light and dark but not between the rich and the poor, the literate and the illiterate, the noisy and the quiet.
  • portraits were also closely associated with death, with being trapped in time, on glass, for eternity, and, even more poignantly, with equality.3 With photography, Walt Whitman predicted, “Art will be democratized.”
  • Morse had long predicted that the telegraph would usher in an age of world peace. “I trust that one of its effects will be to bind man to his fellow-man in such bonds of amity as to put an end to war,” he insisted.8 War was a failure of technology, Morse argued, a shortcoming of communication that could be remedied by way of a machine. Endowing his work with the grandest of purposes, he believed that the laying of telegraph wires across the American continent would bind the nation together into one people, and that the laying of cable across the ocean would bind Europe to the Americas, ushering in the dawn of an age of global harmony.
  • But war isn’t a failure of technology; it’s a failure of politics.
  • Debate is to war what trial by jury is to trial by combat: a way to settle a dispute without coming to blows. The form and its rules had been established over centuries. They derived from rules used in the courts and in Parliament, and even from the rules of rhetoric used in the writing of poetry. Since the Middle Ages and the founding of the first universities, debate had been the foundation of a liberal arts education.
  • (Etymologically and historically, the artes liberales are the arts acquired by people who are free, or liber.)10 In the eighteenth century, debate was understood as the foundation of civil society. In 1787, delegates to the constitutional convention had agreed to “to argue without asperity, and to endeavor to convince the judgment without hurting the feelings of each other.”
  • Some twelve thousand people showed up for their first debate, at two o’clock in the afternoon on August 21, in Ottawa, Illinois. There were no seats; the audience stood, without relief, for three hours.
  • They’d agreed to strict rules: the first speaker would speak for an hour and the second for an hour and a half, whereupon the first speaker would offer a thirty-minute rebuttal.
  • And, as to the wrongness of slavery, he called it tyranny, and the idea of its naturalness as much an error as a belief in the divine right of kings. The question wasn’t sectionalism or nationalism, the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. The question was right against wrong. “That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent,” Lincoln said.16
  • The price of slaves grew so high that a sizable number of white southerners urged the reopening of the African slave trade. In the 1850s, legislatures in several states, including South Carolina, proposed reopening the trade. Adopting this measure would have violated federal law. Some “reopeners” believed that the federal ban on the trade was unconstitutional; others were keen to nullify it, in a dress rehearsal for secession.
  • “If it is right to buy slaves in Virginia and carry them to New Orleans, why is it not right to buy them in Cuba, Brazil, or Africa and carry them there?”21 Proslavery southerners made these arguments under the banner of “free trade,” their rhetorical answer to “free labor.”
  • To George Fitzhugh, all societies were “at all times and places, regulated by laws as universal and as similar as those which control the affairs of bees,” and trade itself, including the slave trade, was “as old, as natural, and irresistible as the tides of the ocean.”
  • In 1855, David Christy, the author of Cotton Is King, wrote about the vital importance of “the doctrine of Free Trade,” which included abolishing the tariffs that made imported English goods more expensive than manufactured goods produced in the North. As one southerner put it, “Free trade, unshackled industry, is the motto of the South.”23
  • Darwin’s Origin of Species would have a vast and lingering influence on the world of ideas. Most immediately, it refuted the racial arguments of ethnologists like Louis Agassiz. And, in the months immediately following the book’s publication—the last, unsettling months before the beginning of the Civil War—abolitionists took it as evidence of the common humanity of man.30
  • The truths of the Confederacy disavowed the truths of the Union. The Confederacy’s newly elected vice president, a frail Georgian named Alexander Stephens, delivered a speech in Savannah in which he made those differences starkly clear. The ideas that lie behind the Constitution “rested upon the assumption of the equality of races,” Stephens said, but
  • “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea: its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery . . . is his natural and moral condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”52 It would become politically expedient, after the war, for ex-Confederates to insist that the Confederacy was founded on states’ rights. But the Confederacy was founded on white supremacy.
  • Opposition to free speech had long been the position of slave owners, a position taken at the constitutional convention and extended through the gag rule, antiliteracy laws, bans on the mails, and the suppression of speakers. An aversion to political debate also structured the Confederacy, which had both a distinctive character and a lasting influence on Americans’ ideas about federal authority as against popular sovereignty.
  • Secessionists were attempting to build a modern, proslavery, antidemocratic state. In order to wage a war, the leaders of this fundamentally antidemocratic state needed popular support. Such support was difficult to gain and impossible to maintain. The Confederacy therefore suppressed dissent.55
  • By May of 1861, the Confederacy comprised fifteen states stretching over 900,000 square miles and containing 12 million people, including 4 million slaves, and 4 million white women who were disenfranchised. It rested on the foundational belief that a minority governs a majority. “The condition of slavery is with us nothing but a form of civil government for a class of people not fit to govern themselves,” said Jefferson Davis.
  • There would be those, after the war ended, who said that it had been fought over states’ rights or to preserve the Union or for a thousand other reasons and causes. Soldiers, North and South, knew better. “The fact that slavery is the sole undeniable cause of this infamous rebellion, that it is a war of, by, and for Slavery, is as plain as the noon-day sun,” a soldier writing for his Wisconsin regimental newspaper explained in 1862. “Any man who pretends to believe that this is not a war for the emancipation of the blacks,” a soldier writing for his Confederate brigade’s newspaper wrote that same year, “is either a fool or a liar.”
  • Lincoln would remain a man trapped in time, in the click of a shutter and by the trigger of a gun. In mourning him, in sepia and yellow, in black and white, beneath plates of glinting glass, Americans deferred a different grief, a vaster and more dire reckoning with centuries of suffering and loss, not captured by any camera, not settled by any amendment, the injuries wrought on the bodies of millions of men, women, and children, stolen, shackled, hunted, whipped, branded, raped, starved, and buried in unmarked graves.
  • No president consecrated their cemeteries or delivered their Gettysburg address; no committee of arrangements built monuments to their memory. With Lincoln’s death, it was as if millions of people had been crammed into his tomb, trapped in a vault that could not hold them.
  • People running for Congress didn’t have to meet property requirements; they didn’t have to have been born in the United States; and they couldn’t be subjected to religious tests. This same logic applied to citizenship, and for the same reason: the framers of the Constitution understood these sorts of requirements as forms of political oppression. The door to the United States was meant to be open.
  • Before the 1880s, no federal law restricted immigration. And, despite periods of fervent nativism, especially in the 1840s, the United States welcomed immigrants into citizenship, and valued them. After the Civil War, the U.S. Treasury estimated the worth of each immigrant as equal to an $800 contribution to the nation’s economy,
  • Nineteenth-century politicians and political theorists interpreted American citizenship within the context of an emerging set of ideas about human rights and the authority of the state, holding dear the conviction that a good government guarantees everyone eligible for citizenship the same set of political rights, equal and irrevocable.
  • The Civil War raised fundamental questions not only about the relationship between the states and the federal government but also about citizenship itself and about the very notion of a nation-state. What is a citizen? What powers can a state exert over its citizens? Is suffrage a right of citizenship, or a special right, available only to certain citizens? Are women citizens? And if women are citizens, why aren’t they voters? What about Chinese immigrants, pouring into the West? They were free. Were they, under American law, “free white persons” or “free persons of color” or some other sort of persons?
  • In 1866, Congress searched in vain for a well-documented definition of the word “citizen.” Over the next thirty years, that definition would become clear, and it would narrow.
  • In 1896, the U.S. passport office, in the Department of State, which had grown to thousands of clerks, began processing applications according to new “Rules Governing the Application of Passports,” which required evidence of identity, including a close physical description Lew Wa Ho worked at a dry goods shop in St. Louis; the photograph was included in his Immigration Service case file as evidence of employment. Age, _____ years; stature, _____ feet _____ inches (English measure); forehead, _____; eyes, _____; nose, _____; mouth, _____; chin, _____; hair, _____; complexion, _____; face, _____ as well as affidavits, signatures, witnesses, an oath of loyalty, and, by way of an application fee, one dollar.12
  • The Fourteenth Amendment, drafted by the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, marked the signal constitutional achievement of a century of debate and war, of suffering and struggle. It proposed a definition of citizenship guaranteeing its privileges and immunities, and insuring equal protection and due process to all citizens. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,”
  • “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”20
  • During the drafting of the amendment, the committee betrayed the national phalanx of women who for decades had fought for abolition and for black civil rights by proposing to insert, into the amendment’s second section, a provision that any state that denied the right to vote “to any of the male inhabitants of such state” would lose representation in Congress. “Male” had never before appeared in any part of the Constitution. “If that word ‘male’ be inserted,” Stanton warned, “it will take us a century at least to get it out.”21 She was not far wrong.
  • Women protested. “Can any one tell us why the great advocates of Human Equality . . . forget that when they were a weak party and needed all the womanly strength of the nation to help them on, they always united the words ‘without regard to sex, race, or color’?” asked Ohio-born reformer Frances Gage. Charles Sumner offered this answer: “We know how the Negro will vote, but are not so sure of the women.” How women would vote was impossible to know. Would black women vote the way black men voted? Would white women vote like black women? Republicans decided they’d rather not find out.
  • In the federal census of 1860, 24,282 out of 34,935 Chinese toiled in mines. Although some Chinese immigrants left mining—and some were forced out—many continued to mine well into the 1880s, often working in sites abandoned by other miners.
  • An 1867 government report noted that in Montana, “the diggings now fall into the hands of the Chinese, who patiently glean the fields abandoned by the whites.” Chinese workers began settling in Boise in 1865 and only five years later constituted a third of Idaho’s settlers and nearly 60 percent of its miners. In 1870, Chinese immigrants and their children made up nearly 9 percent of the population of California, and one-quarter of the state’s wage earners.
  • Their rights, under state constitutions and statutes, were markedly limited. Oregon’s 1857 constitution barred “Chinamen” from owning real estate, while California barred Chinese immigrants from testifying in court, a provision upheld in an 1854 state supreme court opinion, People v. Hall, which described the Chinese as “a race of people whom nature has marked as inferior, and who are incapable of progress or intellectual development beyond a certain point, as their history has shown.”29
  • And what about the voting rights of U.S.-born Chinese Americans? Much turned on the Fifteenth Amendment, proposed early in 1869. While the aim of the amendment was to guarantee African Americans the right to vote and hold office, its language inevitably raised the question of Chinese citizenship and suffrage. Opponents of the amendment found its entire premise scandalous. Garrett Davis, a Democratic senator from Kentucky, fumed, “I want no negro government; I want no Mongolian government; I want the government of the white man which our fathers incorporated.”33
  • Douglass spoke about what he called a “composite nation,” a strikingly original and generative idea, about a citizenry made better, and stronger, not in spite of its many elements, but because of them: “I want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto and the Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours.”36
  • Tilden won the nomination anyway and, in the general election, he won the popular vote against Hayes. Unwilling to accept the result of the election, Republicans disputed the returns in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina.
  • Eventually, the decision was thrown to an electoral commission that brokered a nefarious compromise: Democrats agreed to throw their support behind the man ever after known as Rutherfraud B. Hayes, so that he could become president, in exchange for a promise from Republicans to end the military occupation of the South. For a minor and petty political win over the Democratic Party, Republicans first committed electoral fraud and then, in brokering a compromise, abandoned a century-long fight for civil rights.
  • As soon as federal troops withdrew, white Democrats, calling themselves the “Redeemers,” took control of state governments of the South, and the era of black men’s enfranchisement came to a violent and terrible end. The Klan terrorized the countryside, burning homes and hunting, torturing, and killing people. (Between 1882 and 1930, murderers lynched more than three thousand black men and women.)
  • Black politicians elected to office were thrown out. And all-white legislatures began passing a new set of black codes, known as Jim Crow laws, that segregated blacks from whites in every conceivable public place, down to the last street corner. Tennessee passed the first Jim Crow law, in 1881, mandating the separation of blacks and whites in railroad cars. Georgia became the first state to demand separate seating for whites and blacks in streetcars, in 1891.
  • “Capital buys and sells to-day the very heart-beats of humanity,” she said. Democracy itself had been corrupted by it: “the speculators, the land-robbers, the pirates and gamblers of this Nation have knocked unceasingly at the doors of Congress, and Congress has in every case acceded to their demands.”44 The capitalists, she said, had subverted the will of the people.
  • In the late nineteenth century, a curious reversal took place. Electoral politics, the politics men engaged in, became domesticated, the office work of education and advertising—even voting moved indoors. Meanwhile, women’s political expression moved to the streets. And there, at marches, rallies, and parades, women deployed the tools of the nineteenth-century religious revival: the sermon, the appeal, the conversion.45
  • 1862 alone, in addition to the Homestead Act, the Republican Congress passed the Pacific Railway Act (chartering railroad companies to build the line from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California) and the National Bank Act (to issue paper money to pay for it all). After the war, political power moved from the states to the federal government and as the political influence of the South waned, the importance of the West rose. Congress not only sent to the states amendments to the Constitution that defined citizenship and guaranteed voting rights but also passed landmark legislation involving the management of western land, the control of native populations, the growth and development of large corporations, and the construction of a national transportation infrastructure.
  • The independent farmer—the lingering ideal of the Jeffersonian yeoman—remained the watchword of the West, but in truth, the family farming for subsistence, free of government interference, was far less common than a federally subsidized, capitalist model of farming and cattle raising for a national or even an international market. The small family farm—Jefferson’s republican dream—was in many parts of the arid West an environmental impossibility.
  • Much of the property distributed under the terms of the Homestead Act, primarily in the Great Basin, was semi-arid, the kind of land on which few farmers could manage a productive farm with only 160 acres. Instead, Congress typically granted the best land to railroads, and allowed other, bigger interests to step in, buying up large swaths for agricultural business or stock raising and fencing it in, especially after the patenting of barbed wire in 1874.46
  • In 1885, an American economist tried to reckon the extraordinary transformation wrought by what was now 200,000 miles of railroad, more than in all of Europe. It was possible to move one ton of freight one mile for less than seven-tenths of one cent, “a sum so small,” he wrote, “that outside of China it would be difficult to find a coin of equivalent value to give a boy as a reward for carrying an ounce package across a street.”48
  • instability contributed to a broader set of political concerns that became Mary Lease’s obsession, concerns known as “the money question,” and traceable all the way back to Hamilton’s economic plan: Should the federal government control banking and industry?
  • No group of native-born Americans was more determined to end Chinese immigration than factory workers. The 1876 platform of the Workingmen’s Party of California declared that “to an American death is preferable to life on par with a Chinaman.”55 In 1882, spurred by the nativism of populists, Congress passed its first-ever immigration law, the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred immigrants from China from entering the United States and, determining that the Fourteenth Amendment did not apply to people of Chinese ancestry, decreed that Chinese people already in the United States were permanent aliens who could never become citizens.
  • Populists, whether farmers or factory workers, for all their invocation of “the people,” tended to take a narrow view of citizenship. United in their opposition to the “money power,” members of the alliance, like members of the Knights of Labor, were also nearly united in their opposition to the political claims of Chinese immigrants, and of black people. The Farmers’ Alliance excluded African Americans, who formed their own association, the Colored Farmers’ Alliance. Nor did populists count Native Americans within the body of “the people.”
  • In 1887, Congress passed the Dawes Severalty Act, under whose terms the U.S. government offered native peoples a path to citizenship in a nation whose reach had extended across the lands of their ancestors. The Dawes Act granted to the federal government the authority to divide Indian lands into allotments and guaranteed U.S. citizenship to Indians who agreed to live on those allotments and renounce tribal membership.
  • In proposing the allotment plan, Massachusetts senator Henry Laurens Dawes argued that the time had come for Indians to choose between “extermination or civilization” and insisted that the law offered Americans the opportunity to “wipe out the disgrace of our past treatment” and instead lift Indians up “into citizenship and manhood.”58
  • But in truth the Dawes Act understood native peoples neither as citizens nor as “persons of color,” and led to nothing so much as forced assimilation and the continued takeover of native lands. In 1887 Indians held 138 million acres; by 1900, they held only half of that territory.
  • In 1877, railroad workers protesting wage cuts went on strike in cities across the country. President Hayes sent in federal troops to end the strikes, marking the first use of the power of the federal government to support business against labor. The strikes continued, with little success in improving working conditions. Between 1881 and 1894, there was, on average, one major railroad strike a week. Labor was, generally and literally, crushed: in a single year, of some 700,000 men working on the railroads, more than 20,000 were injured on the job and nearly 2,000 killed.59
  • In 1882, Roscoe Conkling represented the Southern Pacific Railroad Company’s challenge to a California tax rule. He told the U.S. Supreme Court, “I come now to say that the Southern Pacific Railroad Company and its creditors and stockholders are among the ‘persons’ protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.”
  • In offering an argument about the meaning and original intention of the word “person” in the Fourteenth Amendment, Conkling enjoyed a singular authority: he’d served on the Joint Committee on Reconstruction that had drafted the amendment and by 1882 was the lone member of that committee still living. With no one alive to contradict him, Conkling assured the court that the committee had specifically rejected the word “citizen” in favor of “person” in order to include corporations. (A
  • Much evidence suggests, however, that Conkling was lying. The record of the deliberations of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction does not support his argument regarding the committee’s original intentions, nor is it plausible that between 1866 and 1882, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment had kept mysteriously hidden their secret intention to guarantee equal protection and due process to corporations. But
  • in 1886, when another railroad case, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, reached the Supreme Court, the court’s official recorder implied that the court had accepted the doctrine that “corporations are persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.”62 After that, the Fourteenth Amendment, written and ratified to guarantee freed slaves equal protection and due process of law, became the chief means by which corporations freed themselves from government regulation.
  • In 1937, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black would observe, with grim dismay, that, over the course of fifty years, “only one half of one percent of the Fourteenth Amendment cases that came before the court had anything to do with African Americans or former slaves, while over half of the cases were about protecting the rights of corporations.”63 Rights guaranteed to the people were proffered, instead, to corporations.
  • He devised an economic plan that involved abolishing taxes on labor and instead imposing a single tax on land. Tocqueville had argued that democracy in America is made possible by economic equality; people with equal estates will eventually fight for, and win, equal political rights. George agreed. But, like Mary Lease, he thought that financial capitalism was destroying democracy by making economic equality impossible. He saw himself as defending “the Republicanism of Jefferson and the Democracy of Jackson.”72
  • Between 1889 and 1893, the mortgages on so many farms were foreclosed that 90 percent of farmland fell into the hands of bankers. The richest 1 percent of Americans owned 51 percent of the nation’s wealth, and the poorest 44 percent owned less than 2 percent.
  • For all its passionate embrace of political equality and human rights and its energetic championing of suffrage, the People’s Party rested on a deep and abiding commitment to exclude from full citizenship anyone from or descended from anyone from Africa or Asia.
  • Many of the reforms proposed by populists had the effect of diminishing the political power of blacks and immigrants. Chief among them was the Australian ballot, more usually known as the secret ballot, which, by serving as a de facto literacy test, disenfranchised both black men in the rural South and new immigrants in northern cities.
  • to deliberate at length over the secret ballot. Quickest to adopt the reform were the states of the former Confederacy, where the reform appealed to legislatures eager to find legal ways to keep black men from voting. In 1890, Mississippi held a constitutional
  • Both by law and by brute force, southern legislators, state by state, and poll workers, precinct by precinct, denied black men the right to vote. In Louisiana, black voter registration dropped from 130,000 in 1898 to 5,300 in 1908, and to 730 in 1910. In 1893, Arkansas Democrats celebrated their electoral advantage by singing,         The Australian ballot works like a charm         It makes them think and scratch         And when a Negro gets a ballot         He has certainly met his match.82
  • One Republican said, “I felt that Bryan was the first politician I had ever heard speak the truth and nothing but the truth,” even though in every case, when he read a transcript of the speech in the newspaper the next day, he “disagreed with almost all of it.”85
  • In 1894, Bryan tacked an income tax amendment to a tariff bill, which managed to pass. But the populist victory—a 2 percent federal income tax that applied only to Americans who earned more than $4,000—didn’t last long. The next year, in Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan and Trust Company, the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that the tax was a direct tax, and therefore unconstitutional, one justice calling the tax the first campaign in “a war of the poor against the rich.”
  • POPULISM ENTERED AMERICAN politics at the end of the nineteenth century, and it never left. It pitted “the people,” meaning everyone but the rich, against corporations, which fought back in the courts by defining themselves as “persons”; and it pitted “the people,” meaning white people, against nonwhite people who were fighting for citizenship and whose ability to fight back in the courts was far more limited, since those fights require well-paid lawyers.
  • After 1859, and the Origin of Species, the rise of Darwinism contributed to the secularization of the university, as did the influence of the German educational model, in which universities were divided into disciplines and departments, each with a claim to secular, and especially scientific, expertise. These social sciences—political science, economics, sociology, and anthropology—used the methods of science, and especially of quantification, to study history, government, the economy, society, and culture.96
  • For Wilson’s generation of political scientists, the study of the state replaced the study of the people. The erection of the state became, in their view, the greatest achievement of civilization. The state also provided a bulwark against populism. In the first decades of the twentieth century, populism would yield to progressivism as urban reformers applied the new social sciences to the study of political problems, to be remedied by the intervention of the state.
  • The rise of populism and the social sciences reshaped the press, too. In the 1790s, the weekly partisan newspaper produced the two-party system. The penny press of the 1830s produced the popular politics of Jacksonian democracy. And in the 1880s and 1890s the spirit of populism and the empiricism of the social sciences drove American newspapers to a newfound obsession with facts.
  • The newspapers of the 1880s and 1890s were full of stunts and scandals and crusades, even as they defended their accuracy. “Facts, facts piled up to the point of dry certitude was what the American people really wanted,” wrote the reporter Ray Stannard Baker. Julius Chambers said that writing for the New York Herald involved “Facts; facts; nothing but facts. So many peas at so much a peck; so much molasses at so much a quart.”
  • Ballot reform, far from keeping money out of elections, had ushered more money into elections, along with a new political style: using piles of money to sell a candidate’s personality, borrowing from the methods of business by using mass advertising and education, slogans and billboards. McKinley ran a new-style campaign; Bryan ran an old-style campaign. Bryan barnstormed all over the country: he gave some six hundred speeches to five million people in twenty-seven states and traveled nearly twenty thousand miles.
  • But McKinley’s campaign coffers were fuller: Republicans spent $7 million; Democrats, $300,000. John D. Rockefeller alone provided the GOP with a quarter of a million dollars. McKinley’s campaign manager, Cleveland businessman Mark Hanna, was nearly buried in donations from fellow businessmen. He used that money to print 120 million pieces of campaign literature. He hired fourteen hundred speakers to stump for McKinley; dubbing the populists Popocrats, they agitated voters to a state of panic.108 As Mary Lease liked to say, money elected McKinley.
  • Turner, born in Wisconsin in 1861, was one of the first Americans to receive a doctorate in history. At the exposition, he delivered his remarks before the American Historical Association, an organization that had been founded in 1884 and incorporated by an act of Congress in 1889 “for the promotion of historical studies, the collection and preservation of historical manuscripts and for kindred purposes in the interest of American history and of history in America.”110
  • like journalists, historians borrowed from the emerging social sciences, relying on quantitative analysis to understand how change happens. Where George Bancroft, in his History of the United States, had looked for explanations in the hand of providence, Frederick Jackson Turner looked to the census.
  • The difference between Turner’s methods and Bancroft’s signaled a profound shift in the organization of knowledge, one that would have lasting consequences for the relationship between the people and the state and for civil society itself. Like Darwinism, the rise of the social sciences involved the abdication of other ways of knowing, and, indirectly, contributed to the rise of fundamentalism.
  • Across newly defined academic disciplines, scholars abandoned the idea of mystery—the idea that there are things known only by God—in favor of the claim to objectivity, a development sometimes called “the disenchantment of the world.”111 When universities grew more secular, religious instruction became confined to divinity schools and theological seminaries.
  • theologian at the University of Chicago’s divinity school defined modernism as “the use of scientific, historical, and social methods in understanding and applying evangelical Christianity to the needs of living persons.”112 Increasingly, this is exactly what evangelicals who eventually identified themselves as fundamentalists found objectionable.
  • Influenced by both Jefferson and Darwin, Turner saw the American frontier as the site of political evolution, beginning with the “savages” of a “wilderness,” proceeding to the arrival of European traders, and continuing through various forms of settlement, through the establishment of cities and factories, “the evolution of each into a higher stage,” and culminating in the final stage of civilization: capitalism and democracy.114
  • “American democracy is fundamentally the outcome of the experiences of the American people in dealing with the West,” by which he meant the experience of European immigrants to the United States in defeating its native peoples, taking possession of their homelands, and erecting there a civilization of their own. This, for Turner, was the story of America and the lesson of American history: evolution.116
  • Douglass, who, as the former U.S. ambassador to Haiti, had represented the nation of Haiti at the Haitian pavilion, was the only eminent African American with a role at the fair, whose program had been planned by a board of 208 commissioners, all white.117 There were, however, black people at the fair: on display. In the Hall of Agriculture, old men and women, former slaves, sold miniature bales of cotton, souvenirs, while, in a series of exhibits intended to display the Turnerian progress of humankind from savagery to civilization, black Americans were posed in a fake African village. “As if to shame the Negro,” Douglass wrote, they “exhibit the Negro as a repulsive savage.”118
  • “A ship at anchor, with halliards broken, sails mildewed, hull empty, her bottom covered with sea-weed and barnacles, meets no resistance,” Douglass said that day, turning the idea of a ship of state to the problem of Jim Crow. “But when she spread her canvas to the breeze and sets out on her voyage, turns prow to the open sea, the higher shall be her speed, the greater shall be her resistance. And so it is with the colored man.”
  • He paused to allow his listeners to conjure the scene, and its meaning, of a people struggling against the sea. “My dear young friends,” Douglass closed. “Accept the inspiration of hope. Imitate the example of the brave mariner, who, amid clouds and darkness, amid hail, rain and storm bolts, battles his way against all that the sea opposes to his progress and you will reach the goal of your noble ambition in safety.”124
  • The majority in Plessy v. Ferguson asserted that separation and equality were wholly separate ideas. “We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.” The resulting legal principle—that public accommodations could be “separate but equal”—would last for more than half a century.
  • The sole dissenter, John Marshall Harlan, objecting to the establishment of separate classes of citizens, insisted that the achievement of the United States had been the establishment, by amendment, of a Constitution that was blind to race. “Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” Harlan wrote, and it is therefore a plain violation of the Constitution “for a state to regulate the enjoyment by citizens of their civil rights solely upon the basis of race.”
  • What all these laws had in common, Harlan argued, was that they were based on race. And yet a war had been fought and won to establish that laws in the United States could not be based on race; nor could citizenship be restricted by race. The court’s opinion in Plessy, Harlan warned, was so dreadfully in error as to constitutional principles that “the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case.”128 This prediction proved true.
  • Four centuries had passed since continents, separated by oceans, had met again. A century had passed since Jefferson had declared all men equal. Three decades had passed since the Fourteenth Amendment had declared all persons born or naturalized in the United States to be citizens.
  • And now the Supreme Court ruled that those who would set aside equality in favor of separation had not violated the nation’s founding truths. In one of the most wrenching tragedies in American history—a chronicle not lacking for tragedy—the Confederacy had lost the war, but it had won the peace.
  • Lippmann started out as a socialist, when even mentioning the masses hinted at socialism; The Masses was the name of a socialist monthly, published in New York, and, especially after the Russian Revolution of 1917, which brought the Bolshevists to power (“bol’shinstvo” means “the majority”), “the masses” sounded decidedly Red.
  • But Lippmann soon began to write about the masses as “the bewildered herd,” unthinking and instinctual, and as dangerous as an impending stampede. For Lippmann, and for an entire generation of intellectuals, politicians, journalists, and bureaucrats who styled themselves Progressives—the term dates to 1910—the masses posed a threat to American democracy.
  • This change was wrought in the upheaval of the age. In the years following the realigning election of 1896, everything seemed, suddenly, bigger than before, more crowded, and more anonymous: looming and teeming. Even buildings were bigger: big office buildings, big factories, big mansions, big museums. Quantification became the only measure of value: how big, how much, how many.
  • To fight monopolies, protect the people, and conserve the land, the federal government grew bigger, too; dozens of new federal agencies were founded in this era,
  • “Mass” came to mean anything that involved a giant and possibly terrifying quantity, on a scale so great that it overwhelmed existing arrangements—including democracy. “Mass production” was coined in the 1890s, when factories got bigger and faster, when the number of people who worked in them skyrocketed, and when the men who owned them got staggeringly rich.
  • “Mass migration” dates to 1901, when nearly a million immigrants were entering the United States every year, “mass consumption” to 1905, “mass consciousness” to 1912. “Mass hysteria” had been defined by 1925 and “mass communication” by 1927, when the New York Times described the radio as “a system of mass communication with a mass audience.”3
  • And the masses themselves? They formed a mass audience for mass communication and had a tendency, psychologists believed, to mass hysteria—the political stampede—posing a political problem unanticipated by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson,
  • To meet that challenge in what came to be called the Progressive Era, activists, intellectuals, and politicians campaigned for and secured far-reaching reforms that included municipal, state, and federal legislation.
  • Their most powerful weapon was the journalistic exposé. Their biggest obstacle was the courts, which they attempted to hurdle by way of constitutional amendments. Out of these campaigns came the federal income tax, the Federal Reserve Bank, the direct election of U.S. senators, presidential primaries, minimum-wage and maximum-hour laws, women’s suffrage, and Prohibition.
  • And all of what Progressives accomplished in the management of mass democracy was vulnerable to the force that so worried the unrelenting Walter Lippmann: the malleability of public opinion, into mass delusion.
  • Progressives championed the same causes as Populists, and took their side in railing against big business, but while Populists generally wanted less government, Progressives wanted more, seeking solutions in reform legislation and in the establishment of bureaucracies, especially government agencies.6
  • Populists believed that the system was broken; Progressives believed that the government could fix it. Conservatives, who happened to dominate the Supreme Court, didn’t believe that there was anything to fix but believed that, if there was, the market would fix it. Notwithstanding conservatives’ influence in the judiciary, Progressivism spanned both parties.
  • Woodrow Wilson himself admitted, “When I sit down and compare my views with those of a Progressive Republican I can’t see what the difference is.”7
  • Much that was vital in Progressivism grew out of Protestantism, and especially out of a movement known as the Social Gospel, adopted by almost all theological liberals and by a large number of theological conservatives,
  • The Social Gospel movement was led by seminary professors—academic theologians who accepted the theory of evolution, seeing it as entirely consistent with the Bible and evidence of a divinely directed, purposeful universe; at the same time, they fiercely rejected the social Darwinism of writers like Herbert Spencer, the English natural scientist who coined the phrase “the survival of the fittest” and used the theory of evolution to defend all manner of force, violence, and oppression.
  • argued that fighting inequality produced by industrialism was an obligation of Christians: “We must make men believe that Christianity has a right to rule this kingdom of industry, as well as all the other kingdoms of this world.”9 Social Gospelers brought the zeal of abolitionism to the problem of industrialism.
  • In 1908, Methodists wrote a Social Creed and pledged to fight to end child labor and to promote a living wage. It was soon adopted by the thirty-three-member Federal Council of Churches, which proceeded to investigate a steelworkers’ strike in Bethlehem, ultimately taking the side of the strikers.10
  • Washington, in the debate over the annexation of the Philippines, Americans revisited unsettled questions about expansion that had rent the nation during the War with Mexico and unsettled questions about citizenship that remained the unfinished business of Reconstruction. The debate also marked the limits of the Progressive vision: both sides in this debate availed themselves, at one time or another, of the rhetoric of white supremacy. Eight million people of color in the Pacific and the Caribbean, from the Philippines to Puerto Rico, were now part of the United States, a nation that already, in practice, denied the right to vote to millions of its own people because of the color of their skin.
  • “You are undertaking to annex and make a component part of this Government islands inhabited by ten millions of the colored race, one-half or more of whom are barbarians of the lowest type,” said Ben Tillman, a one-eyed South Carolina Democrat who’d boasted of having killed black men and expressed his support for lynch mobs. “It is to the injection into the body politic of the United States of that vitiated blood, that debased and ignorant people, that we object.”
  • Tillman reminded Republicans that they had not so long ago freed slaves and then “forced on the white men of the South, at the point of the bayonet, the rule and domination of those ex-slaves. Why the difference? Why the change? Do you acknowledge that you were wrong in 1868?”14
  • The war that began in Cuba in 1898 and was declared over in the Philippines in 1902 dramatically worsened conditions for people of color in the United States, who faced, at home, a campaign of terrorism. Pro-war rhetoric, filled with racist venom, only further incited American racial hatreds. “If it is necessary, every Negro in the state will be lynched,” the governor of Mississippi pledged in 1903.
  • By one estimate, someone in the South was hanged or burned alive every four days. The court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson meant that there was no legal recourse to fight segregation, which grew more brutal with each passing year.
  • Nor was discrimination confined to the South. Cities and counties in the North and West passed racial zoning laws, banning blacks from the middle-class communities. In 1890, in Montana, blacks lived in all fifty-six counties in the state; by 1930, they’d been confined to just eleven. In Baltimore, blacks couldn’t buy houses on blocks where whites were a majority.
  • In 1917, in Buchanan v. Warley, the Supreme Court availed itself of the Fourteenth Amendment not to guarantee equal protection for blacks but to guarantee what the court had come to understand as the “liberty of contract”—the liberty of businesses to discriminate.16
  • A generation earlier, he’d have become a preacher, like his father, but instead he became a professor of political science.23 In the academy and later in the White House, he dedicated himself to the problem of adapting a Constitution written in the age of the cotton gin to the age of the automobile.
  • “We have grown more and more inclined from generation to generation to look to the President as the unifying force in our complex system, the leader both of his party and of the nation. To do so is not inconsistent with the actual provisions of the Constitution; it is only inconsistent with a very mechanical theory of its meaning and intention.” A president’s power, Wilson concluded, is virtually limitless: “His office is anything he has the sagacity and force to make it.”24
  • the U.S. Supreme Court overruled much Progressive labor legislation. The most important of these decisions came in 1905. In a 5–4 decision in Lochner v. New York, the U.S. Supreme Court voided a state law establishing that bakers could work no longer than ten hours a day, six days a week, on the ground that the law violated a business owner’s liberty of contract, the freedom to forge agreements with his workers, something the court’s majority said was protected under the Fourteenth Amendment.
  • The laissez-faire conservatism of the court was informed, in part, by social Darwinism, which suggested that the parties in disputes should be left to battle it out, and if one side had an advantage, even so great an advantage as a business owner has over its employees, then it should win.
  • In a dissenting opinion in Lochner, Oliver Wendell Holmes accused the court of violating the will of the people. “This case is decided upon an economic theory which a large part of the country does not entertain,” he began. The court, he said, had also wildly overreached its authority and had carried social Darwinism into the Constitution. “A Constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory,” Holmes wrote. “The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics.”
  • Wilson pointed out that the Constitution, written before mass industrialization, couldn’t be expected to have anticipated it, and couldn’t solve the problems industrialization had created, unless the Constitution were treated like a living thing that, like an organism, evolved.
  • Critics further to the left argued that the courts had become an instrument of business interests. Unions, in fact, often failed to support labor reform legislation, partly because they expected it to be struck down by the courts as unconstitutional, and partly because they wanted unions to provide benefits to their members, which would be an argument for organizing.
  • conservatives insisted that the courts were right to protect the interests of business and that either market forces would find a way to care for sick, injured, and old workers, or (for social Darwinists) the weakest, who were not meant to thrive, would wither and die.
  • “No other social movement in modern economic development is so pregnant with benefit to the public,” wrote the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association. “At present the United States has the unenviable distinction of being the only great industrial nation without compulsory health insurance,” the Yale economist Irving Fisher pointed out in 1916.36 It would maintain that unenviable distinction for a century.
  • In California, the legislature passed a constitutional amendment providing for universal health insurance. But when it was put on the ballot for ratification, a federation of insurance companies took out an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle warning that it “would spell social ruin in the United States.” Every voter in the state received in the mail a pamphlet with a picture of the kaiser and the words “Born in Germany. Do you want it in California?” The measure was defeated. Opponents called universal health insurance “UnAmerican, Unsafe, Uneconomic, Unscientific, Unfair and Unscrupulous.”
  • “Scientific management has no place for a bird that can sing and won’t sing,” answered Taylor. “We are not . . . dealing with horses nor singing birds,” Wilson told Taylor. “We are dealing with men who are a part of society and for whose benefit society is organized.
  • Jim Crow thrived because, after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, reformers who had earlier fought for the cause of civil rights abandoned it for the sake of forging a reunion between the states and the federal government and between the North and the South. This wasn’t Wilson’s doing; this was the work of his generation, the work of the generation that came before him, and the work of the generation that would follow him, an abdication of struggle, an abandonment of justice.
  • War steered the course of American politics like a gale-force wind. The specter of slaughter undercut Progressivism, suppressed socialism, and produced anticolonialism. And, by illustrating the enduring wickedness of humanity and appearing to fulfill prophecies of apocalypse as a punishment for the moral travesty of modernism, the war fueled fundamentalism.
  • Bryan’s difficulty was that he saw no difference between Darwinism and social Darwinism, but it was social Darwinism that he attacked, the brutality of a political philosophy that seemed to believe in nothing more than the survival of the fittest, or what Bryan called “the law of hate—the merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill the weak.”77
  • Germany was the enemy, the same Germany whose model of education had secularized American colleges and universities, which were now teaching eugenics, sometimes known as the science of human betterment, calling for the elimination from the human race of people deemed unfit to reproduce on the basis of their intelligence, criminality, or background.
  • Nor was this academic research without consequence. Beginning in 1907, with Indiana, two-thirds of American states passed forced sterilization laws.
  • In 1916, Madison Grant, the president of the Museum of Natural History in New York, who had degrees from Yale and Columbia, published The Passing of the Great Race; Or, the Racial Basis of European History, a “hereditary history” of the human race, in which he identified northern Europeans (the “blue-eyed, fair-haired peoples of the north of Europe” that he called the “Nordic race”) as genetically superior to southern Europeans (the “dark-haired, dark-eyed” people he called “the Alpine race”) and lamented the presence of “swarms of Jews” and “half-breeds.” In the United States, Grant argued, the Alpine race was overwhelming the Nordic race, threatening the American republic, since “democracy is fatal to progress when two races of unequal value live side by side.”79
  • fundamentalists were, of course, making an intellectual argument, if one that not many academics wanted to hear. In 1917, William B. Riley, who, like J. Frank Norris, had trained at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, published a book called The Menace of Modernism, whose attack on evolution included a broader attack on the predominance in public debate of liberal faculty housed at secular universities—and the silencing of conservative opinion.
  • The horror of the war fueled the movement, convincing many evangelicals that the growing secularization of society was responsible for this grotesque parade of inhumanity: mass slaughter. “The new theology has led Germany into barbarism,” one fundamentalist argued in 1918, “and it will lead any nation into the same demoralization.”
  • “If my re-election as President depends upon my getting into war, I don’t want to be President,” Wilson said privately. “He kept us out of war” became his campaign slogan, and when Theodore Roosevelt called that an “ignoble shirking of responsibility,” Wilson countered, “I am an American, but I do not believe that any of us loves a blustering nationality.”
  • Wilson had in fact pledged not to make the world democratic, or even to support the establishment of democratic institutions everywhere, but instead to establish the conditions of stability in which democracy was possible.
  • nearly five million were called to serve. How were they to be persuaded of the war’s cause? In a speech to new recruits, Wilson’s new secretary of state, Robert Lansing, ventured an explanation. “Were every people on earth able to express their will, there would be no wars of aggression and, if there were no wars of aggression, then there would be no wars, and lasting peace would come to this earth,” Lansing said, stringing one conditional clause after another. “The only way that a people can express their will is through democratic institutions,” Lansing went on. “Therefore, when the world is made safe for democracy . . . universal peace will be an accomplished fact.”88
  • Wilson, the political scientist, tried to earn the support of the American people with an intricate theory of the relationship between democracy and peace. It didn’t work. To recast his war message and shore up popular support, he established a propaganda department,
  • Social scientists called the effect produced by wartime propaganda “herd psychology”; the philosopher John Dewey called it the “conscription of thought.”89
  • To suppress dissent, Congress passed a Sedition Act in 1918. Not since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 had Congress so brazenly defied the First Amendment. Fewer than two dozen people had been arrested under the 1798 Sedition Act. During the First World War, the Justice Department charged more than two thousand Americans with sedition and convicted half of them. Appeals that went to the Supreme Court failed.
  • “If we want real peace,” Du Bois wrote, “we must extend the democratic ideal to the yellow, brown, and black peoples.” But after the United States entered the war, Creel called thirty-one black editors and publishers to a conference in Washington and warned them about “Negro subversion.”
  • Du Bois asked black men who could not vote in the United States to give their lives to make the world “safe for democracy” and asked black people to hold off on fighting against lynchings, whose numbers kept rising.91
  • Wilson signed a tax bill, raising taxes on incomes, doubling a tax on corporate earnings, eliminating an exemption for dividend income, and introducing an estate tax and a tax on excess profits. Rates for the wealthiest Americans rose from 2 percent to 77, but most people paid no tax at all (80 percent of the revenue was drawn from the income of the wealthiest 1 percent of American families).
  • Wars, as ever, expanded the powers of the state. It rearranged the relationship between the federal government and business, establishing new forms of cooperation, oversight, and regulation that amounted to erecting a welfare state for business owners.
  • As the war drew to a close, the reckoning began. American losses were almost trivial compared to the staggering losses in European nations. Against America’s 116,000 casualties, France lost 1.6 million lives, Britain 800,000, and Germany 1.8 million. Cities across Europe lay in ashes; America was untouched. Europe, composed of seventeen countries before the war, had splintered into twenty-six, all of them deeply in debt, and chiefly to Americans.
  • Before the war, Americans owed $3.7 billion to foreigners; after the war, foreigners owed $12.6 billion to Americans. Even the terrifying influenza epidemic of 1918, which took 21 million lives worldwide, claimed the lives of only 675,000 Americans. The war left European economies in ruins, America’s thriving. In the United States, steel production rose by a quarter between 1913 and 1920; everywhere else, it fell by a third.98 The Armistice came on November
  • Wilson left a lasting legacy: his rhetoric of self-determination contributed to a wave of popular protests in the Middle East and Asia, including a revolution in Egypt in 1919; made the nation-state the goal of stateless societies; and lies behind the emergence and force of anticolonial nationalism.100
  • Thirty black men were lynched in 1917, twice as many the next year, and in 1919, seventy-six, including ten veterans, some still wearing their uniforms, having fought, some people thought, the wrong war.101
  • IN 1922, when Walter Lippmann turned thirty-two, he wrote a book called Public Opinion, in which he concluded that in a modern democracy the masses, asked to make decisions about matters far removed from their direct knowledge, had been asked to do too much. “Decisions in a modern state tend to be made by the interaction, not of Congress and the executive, but of public opinion and the executive,” he’d once observed.108 Mass democracy can’t work, Lippmann argued, because the new tools of mass persuasion—especially mass advertising—meant that a tiny minority could very easily persuade the majority to believe whatever it wished them to believe.
  • The best hope for mass democracy might have seemed to be the scrupulously and unfailingly honest reporting of news, but this, Lippmann thought, was doomed to fall short, because of the gap between facts and truth.
  • Reporters chronicle events, offering facts, but “they cannot govern society by episodes, incidents, and eruptions,” he said.109 To govern, the people need truth, sense out of the whole, but people can’t read enough in the morning paper or hear enough on the evening news to turn facts into truth when they’re driven like dray horses all day.
abbykleman

Voters Increasingly Turning to Internet for Information, Survey Shows - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-information-survey-shows.html

shared by abbykleman on 25 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • abbykleman on 25 Oct 16
     
    Voters have stepped away from the television and are digesting the presidential and Senate races through the internet, a new poll of persuadable voters in five Senate battleground states shows.
Javier E

Minsky's moment | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...omic-ideas-looks-hyman-minskys

economics theory finance crisis

shared by Javier E on 05 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • Minsky started with an explanation of investment. It is, in essence, an exchange of money today for money tomorrow. A firm pays now for the construction of a factory; profits from running the facility will, all going well, translate into money for it in coming years.
  • Put crudely, money today can come from one of two sources: the firm’s own cash or that of others (for example, if the firm borrows from a bank). The balance between the two is the key question for the financial system.
  • Minsky distinguished between three kinds of financing. The first, which he called “hedge financing”, is the safest: firms rely on their future cashflow to repay all their borrowings. For this to work, they need to have very limited borrowings and healthy profits. The second, speculative financing, is a bit riskier: firms rely on their cashflow to repay the interest on their borrowings but must roll over their debt to repay the principal. This should be manageable as long as the economy functions smoothly, but a downturn could cause distress. The third, Ponzi financing, is the most dangerous. Cashflow covers neither principal nor interest; firms are betting only that the underlying asset will appreciate by enough to cover their liabilities. If that fails to happen, they will be left exposed.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Economies dominated by hedge financing—that is, those with strong cashflows and low debt levels—are the most stable. When speculative and, especially, Ponzi financing come to the fore, financial systems are more vulnerable. If asset values start to fall, either because of monetary tightening or some external shock, the most overstretched firms will be forced to sell their positions. This further undermines asset values, causing pain for even more firms. They could avoid this trouble by restricting themselves to hedge financing. But over time, particularly when the economy is in fine fettle, the temptation to take on debt is irresistible. When growth looks assured, why not borrow more? Banks add to the dynamic, lowering their credit standards the longer booms last. If defaults are minimal, why not lend more? Minsky’s conclusion was unsettling. Economic stability breeds instability. Periods of prosperity give way to financial fragility.
  • Minsky’s insight might sound obvious. Of course, debt and finance matter. But for decades the study of economics paid little heed to the former and relegated the latter to a sub-discipline, not an essential element in broader theories.
  • Minsky was a maverick. He challenged both the Keynesian backbone of macroeconomics and a prevailing belief in efficient markets.
  • t Messrs Hicks and Hansen largely left the financial sector out of the picture, even though Keynes was keenly aware of the importance of markets. To Minsky, this was an “unfair and naive representation of Keynes’s subtle and sophisticated views”. Minsky’s financial-instability hypothesis helped fill in the holes.
  • His challenge to the prophets of efficient markets was even more acute. Eugene Fama and Robert Lucas, among others, persuaded most of academia and policymaking circles that markets tended towards equilibrium as people digested all available information. The structure of the financial system was treated as almost irrelevant
  • In recent years, behavioural economists have attacked one plank of efficient-market theory: people, far from being rational actors who maximise their gains, are often clueless about what they want and make the wrong decisions.
  • But years earlier Minsky had attacked another: deep-seated forces in financial systems propel them towards trouble, he argued, with stability only ever a fleeting illusion.
  • Investors were faster than professors to latch onto his views. More than anyone else it was Paul McCulley of PIMCO, a fund-management group, who popularised his ideas. He coined the term “Minsky moment” to describe a situation when debt levels reach breaking-point and asset prices across the board start plunging. Mr McCulley initially used the term in explaining the Russian financial crisis of 1998. Since the global turmoil of 2008, it has become ubiquitous. For investment analysts and fund managers, a “Minsky moment” is now virtually synonymous with a financial crisis.
  • it would be a stretch to expect the financial-instability hypothesis to become a new foundation for economic theory. Minsky’s legacy has more to do with focusing on the right things than correctly structuring quantifiable models. It is enough to observe that debt and financial instability, his main preoccupations, have become some of the principal topics of inquiry for economists today
  • As Mr Krugman has quipped: “We are all Minskyites now.”
Javier E

The Guardian view on the Chilcot report: a country ruined, trust shattered, a reputatio... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...shattered-a-reputation-trashed

report iraq war UK US foreign policy Policy

shared by Javier E on 07 Jul 16 - No Cached
  • . Since the US-led, UK-backed invasion of Iraq in 2003, estimates of the lives lost to violence vary from a quarter of a million to 600,000. The number of injured will surely be several times that, and the number of men, women and children displaced from their homes is put at between 3.5 and 5 million, somewhere between one in 10 and one in six of the population.
  • In sum, failures do not come any more abject than Iraq, nor catastrophes any more pure.
  • this additional probe was impossible to avoid. None of the other investigations provided an official answer to the burning, central question, of how on earth the UK had got embroiled in this great misadventure in the first place.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • The 2.6m words of his report will necessarily take much longer to digest, but the defining sting was conveyed in just six words penned by Tony Blair himself, in a letter to Mr Bush in July 2002 – “I will be with you, whatever”.
  • Here, in essence, we have the private promise from which every abuse of public process would flow
  • Once committed, Mr Blair switched off the ordinary critical faculties that he applied to other affairs, and closed his ears to the warnings of the experts about the difficulties that could follow an invasion, and the grave doubts about Iraq being an imminent threat.
  • Regime change was the unabashed objective of the White House, and by hitching himself to Washington with no get-out clause, Mr Blair effectively made that his policy too. It was an appalling mistake, first of all, because it involved committing the country to a war of choice, for which there was no real rationale, only an angry impulse to lash out to avenge the twin towers without paying heed to the distinction between militant Islamism and secular Ba’athism
  • he negated the value of all this insight, and fatally compromised his own preference for constructing a UN-blessed route to war, by preceding it all with the bald vow that Washington could count on him.
  • Entirely out of character, the great election winner who always insisted that “the British people are the boss”, closed his ears to great swaths of the country. From radical leftists to commonsensical Tories of a that’ll-never-work disposition, thinking Britain – the Guardian included – smelt a rat. It took to the streets to protest in numbers not seen before. But in this case Mr Blair did not regard the British people but the US president as the boss.
  • A rightwing practitioner of realpolitik could have been straight about the calculation to hold fast to an American alliance that served Britain well, come what may. That would have been unsavoury to idealists, but would have been a cogent – hard-headed, if also hard-hearted – point of view
  • That, however, is not the tradition in which Mr Blair has ever placed himself. As the high emotion of his protracted and schmaltzy press conference today exposed once again – complete with a refusal to admit to having made the wrong call, and the bizarre insistence that the war had made the world safer – it is always important to him not only to be serving the national interest, but a greater good too. He knew he was right.
  • Seeing as he was in reality monstrously wrong, this certitude had dire consequences. The faith-based failure to plan for the invasion’s aftermath, rightly damned in trenchant terms by Sir John, was the most catastrophic for the Iraqi people, and indeed for the British service personnel in harm’s way.
  • But for the processes of governance, the political discourse, and the UK’s place in the world, greater damage was done by the political – and perhaps psychological – need to wrap up a crude decision to stick with the US in righteousness
  • he most damning of all Sir John’s verdicts is that the result of the invasion was not – as was claimed – to uphold the authority of the UN, but instead to undermine it
  • The gap between the public and the private rationale fed the mistrust which has since – amplified by the banking and MPs’ expenses crises – fuelled the Brexit vote
Javier E

Big Soda Makers Agree on Effort to Cut Americans' Drink Calories - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-americans-drink-calories.html

sugar consumption industry drink calories

shared by Javier E on 24 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • The three largest soda companies — Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and the Dr Pepper Snapple Group — have pledged to cut the number of sugary drink calories that Americans consume by one-fifth in about a decade, through a combination of marketing, distribution and packaging.
  • was an acknowledgment by the companies of the role their products play in the country’s obesity crisis and the escalating rates of diabetes and heart disease that accompany it.
  • in low-income communities, sugary sodas may account for a half or more of the calories a child consumes each day. Sugary soft drinks account for about 6 percent of the average consumer’s daily calories.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • They will expand the presence of low- and no-calorie drinks, as well as drinks sold in smaller portions, and use their promotional skills to educate consumers and encourage them to reduce the calories they are drinking.
  • The program will cover company-owned vending machines and coolers in convenience stores, as well as fountain soda dispensers like those found in fast-food restaurants and movie theaters. The companies control almost all of those machines, in addition to about one-third of vending machines and 80 percent of coolers.
  • It also will spill into grocery stores in end-of-aisle promotions and other marketing. “We’ll use the most critical levers we have at our disposal, and the focus really will be on transforming the beverage landscape in the U.S. over the next 10 years,”
  • “While they’re making this pledge, they are totally dug in, fighting soda tax initiatives in places like Berkeley and San Francisco that have exactly the same goal,” said Professor Nestle, who has just finished a book about the industry.
  • From 2000 to 2013, calories consumed through sugary drinks fell 12 percent, according to Beverage Digest, attributed to declining soda sales and increased consumption of water and low-calorie drinks.
  • “I suspect they’re promising what’s going to happen anyway,” said Kelly Brownell, an expert on obesity and dean of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. “All the trends are showing decreased consumption of high-calorie beverages, and so what better way to get a public relations boost than to promise to do what’s happening anyway?”
Javier E

Inuit Study Adds Twist to Omega-3 Fatty Acids' Health Story - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-fatty-acids-health-story.html

diet evolution human origins fat digestion

shared by Javier E on 18 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Today, at least 10 percent of Americans regularly take fish oil supplements. But recent trials have failed to confirm that the pills prevent heart attacks or stroke. And now the story has an intriguing new twist.
  • he journal Science reported that the ancestors of the Inuit evolved unique genetic adaptations for metabolizing omega-3s and other fatty acids. Those gene variants had drastic effects on Inuit’s bodies, reducing their heights and weights.
  • the discovery raised questions about whether omega-3 fats really were protective for everyone, despite decades of health advice. “The same diet may have different effects on different people,” he said.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The researchers found several genetic variants at different locations in the genome that were unusually common in the Inuit, compared with people in Europe or China. Several of these variations occurred within a cluster of genes that direct construction of enzymes called fatty acid desaturases. (The genes are called FADS, for short.)
  • This discovery was particularly tantalizing, because the scientists knew that these enzymes helped regulate the different fats in our bodies, including omega-3 fatty acids.
  • one of these gene variants was present in almost every Inuit in the study. It is much less common in other populations: About a quarter of Chinese people have it, compared with just 2 percent of Europeans.
  • Natural selection is the only known way this gene variant could have become so common in the Inuit. Dr. Nielsen said this adaptation might have arisen as long ago as 20,000 years, when the ancestors of the Inuit were living in the Beringia region, which straddles Alaska and Siberia
  • To uncover the effect of this variant gene, the scientists compared the Inuit in their study with others with more European ancestry. Some had inherited a European version of the variant. People with two copies of the Inuit gene had different blood levels of fatty acids than people without them, the researchers found.
  • The adaptation did more than just change blood levels of fatty acids, the scientists found. Inuit who carried two copies of the variant gene were on average an inch shorter and 10 pounds lighter than those without a copy.“That’s quite extreme,” said Dr. Nielsen.
  • Indeed, it’s rare to find a single gene that can influence height and weight so drastically. In recent years, scientists have run a number of large studies pinpointing hundreds of genes that affect height and weight, but each one played a minuscule role in the variation from person to person.
  • Those studies missed this influential gene variant because they focused mostly on people of European ancestry. So Dr. Nielsen and his colleagues also investigated how it affects Europeans. As it turns out, the gene variant is linked to a drastic drop in height and weight in that population, too.
  • natural selection might not have favored the FADS variant but a neighboring, as yet unknown piece of DNA that conferred evolutionary advantages.As that gene spread through the Inuit population, the FADS variant might simply have been passed down with it.
  • Dr. Nielsen and his colleagues are planning to investigate the long-term health effects of the gene variants they’ve found. They may help explain why some of us metabolize fats more effectively than others, and why omega-3s haven’t been the heart panacea once hoped.
Javier E

What Technology Wants - 0 views

www.carnegiecouncil.org/...0329.html

technology future Technium trends scaling culture evolution

shared by Javier E on 01 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Do you know what technology is? We commonly think about technology as anything that was invented after you were born. My friend Denny Hills made kind of a version of that through his statement, "It's anything that doesn't work yet."
  • Wired, which was not about the technology, but about the culture around the technology. We like to think of ourselves as a lifestyle magazine. We are a magazine about technology culture in the way that Rolling Stone is a magazine about music culture.
  • This book came out of a little bit of my own efforts to try to understand what technology meant and where it should fit into the realm of the world. When a new technology came along, should we embrace it, or hold off?
  • ...43 more annotations...
  • What's the theory behind technology? Do we just deal with each one, one by one, or was there a kind of a framework to understand and have a perspective on technology?
  • All these technologies that we have now made are interrelated, they are codependent, and they form a kind of an ecosystem of technologies. You might even think of it as if these were species, as if it was a super-organism of technology.
  • I'm interested in this super-organism of all the technologies. I gave it a name. I call it the Technium.
  • In the larger sense, the Technium is anything that we make with our minds.
  • all these things are connected together and they form an interacting whole, a kind of a super-organism, that has in many ways its own slight bit of autonomy, and its own agenda.
  • It wants in the way that a plant wants light and so it will lean towards the light. It has an urgency to go towards light. It's not intelligent, it's not aware of it, but that's what it wants.
  • If it does want things, it means that it wants it independent of our choosing. At the same time we are making it; it is there because we exist. It's not independent of us, but it has some slight bit of autonomy.
  • Biologists are slowly coming around to admitting that there are directions in evolution. The standard orthodoxy for many years was that it was completely random, and that there was no direction whatsoever. Any ordinary person found that shocking because they could definitely see a direction in evolution.
  • We see an arc of increasing complexity in the long journey of life.
  • Along the long history there is movement towards increasing diversity.
  • There is also increasing movement towards specialization.
  • There is a trend towards increasing structure. Things become more and more complicated.
  • There is a trend towards emergence
  • There are other trends—towards ubiquity, towards energy efficiency, towards degrees of freedom.
  • What I'm suggesting is that there is a continuum, a connection back all the way to the Big Bang with these self-organizing systems that make the galaxies, stars, and life, and now is producing technology in the same way.
  • The energies flowing through these things are, interestingly, becoming more and more dense.
  • The amount of energy running through a sunflower, per gram per second of the livelihood, is actually greater than in the sun.
  • The most energy-dense thing that we know about in the entire universe is the computer chip in your computer. It is sending more energy per gram per second through that than anything we know.
  • The other thing that is evolving over time is the evolvability of the system. One of the things that life is doing is it's evolving its ability to evolve.
  • Another way to think about this is that one of the things that life likes to do is make eyeballs. Life evolution independently invented eyeballs 30 different times in different genres and taxonomies. It invented flapping wings four times. It invented venomous stings about 20 times independently, from bees, to snakes, to jellyfish. It also has invented minds many, many times.
  • We are going to fill the universe with all different kinds of thinkings, because only by having many different kinds of minds can we actually understand the universe. Our own mind is probably insufficient to completely comprehend the universe.
  • The reason why we want to embrace it with our full arms is because what technology brings us is an opportunity for everybody's special mix of talents to be expressed. Just as we all have different faces, we all have a different mix of aptitudes and abilities. We use technologies to express those things.
  • The question is: Was Moore's Law inevitable? What drives Moore's Law? Where is this coming from?
  • Moore's Law, not in terms of transistors, but in terms of measuring computer power, was happening long before Moore or anybody even noticed it. The effect was happening before anybody believed it.
  • this suggests is that this is actually an inherent attribute of the physics, and it suggests that it is independent of the economy. Even if the silicon chip had been invented in Stalinist Russia under a command economy, it probably would still follow exactly the same kind of curve.
  • Geoffrey West at the Santa Fe Institute looked at a whole bunch of technologies, like solar and batteries and other kinds of things, and they show this this scaling law holds true in many industries.
  • It has something to do with the basic shape of the economy and of physics, and it's not really a self-fulfilling prophecy. In this way I suggest that these kinds of curves are inevitable. One of the characteristics of the Technium is it exhibits these scaling laws.
  • we do know that the media that we have does rewire our brains. We know this by studies of people who are literate. They took scans in Peru of people who were illiterate and those who could read and write. They found that in fact their brains work differently—not just when they're reading, but just in general. After having five, ten or twenty years of education and learning to read and write, it actually changes how your brain works.
  • It's also very clear that if you are spending five or ten hours a day in front of a computer, that is going to change how your brain works. It is going to rewire how we're doing things.
  • We have a dependency on the alphabet. That's how we think about things. We need reading and writing. We think in terms of words. We imagine it. We see it around us. It's ubiquitous. We are dependent on the alphabet. That doesn't seem to bother us very much.
  • As these technologies become more ubiquitous and as we become dependent upon it, that's what it is. We will be dependent upon it. It will be our exobrain. We'll use it to remember. It will always be around.
  • We invented the external stomach, it's called cooking, that allows us to digest stuff that could not otherwise increase nutrition. It changed our jaw and our teeth. We are physically different people because of our inventions. While we can live on a raw diet, it's actually very hard to breed on a raw diet.
  • What we have done is become dependent on our technology, and we will become ever more so. That's just the definition of who we are. We are the first domesticated animals. We are a technology ourselves.
  • What I'm saying is that there is only a little more good in technology than bad, but a little is all we need. If we create one-tenth of a percent more than we destroy every year, we can make civilization, because that tenth of a percent compounded over centuries is all that we need.
  • Every time there's a new technology that comes along, we have the possibility to use it for harm or for good. We also suddenly have a new possibility and choice that we didn't have before. That new choice is that little tiny tenth of a percent that's better, because we have now another freedom that we didn't have before. That tips it into the good side. It's not much better, but that's all we need over the long term. That's why over the long term it's good, because it increases choices and possibilities.
  • Technology is not powerful unless it can be powerfully abused. There is going to be a learning period. There are going to be phases that people go through and then become addicted. They don't know how to use it.
  • DDT is horrible. Don't give it a job as a pesticide, and spray millions of acres of cotton fields. That's a terrible job and causes all kinds of havoc. Yet used locally and sprayed around households, DDT eliminates malaria and saves millions of lives a year, and it has very little environmental impact that way. That's a better job for this technology.
  • We want to find the right jobs for these things and the right frame. Just like there are no bad children, there are also no bad technologies. You've just got to find the right place for them.
  • My research has shown that there are very few species of technology that ever go extinct. That's the difference between biological evolution and technological evolution; in technology things don't go extinct. They can be resurrected.
  • Very few people go backwards. Why? Because we have to surrender so many choices and options.
  • As wholesome and as satisfying as those lives are, the price of going back to these places is surrendering choices and opportunities. In general, the whole arc of evolution is towards expanding those, and that's why by embracing technology we can align ourselves with this long arc throughout the cosmos into the future.
  • I did a calculation that showed three-quarters of the total energy that we use on the planet right now, at least in the United States, is used in servicing technology. Roughly, three-quarters of the gasoline that you use in your car is used to move the car and not you. You're just a minor passenger in this whole thing. We have energy used to heat the warehouses that are holding the stuff that we have or to move the stuff that we have. Already this Technium is consuming three-quarters of our energy.
  • That is also where it's going. There will be more technology used to support more technology. Most of the traffic on the Internet is not people talking to each other; it's machines talking to other machines.
Javier E

The Truth About Harvard - Magazine - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...3726

harvard education culture academia

shared by Javier E on 04 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • the professor is not just a disinterested pedagogue. As a dispenser of grades he is a gatekeeper to worldly success. And in that capacity professors face upward pressure from students ("I can't afford a B if I want to get into law school"); horizontal pressure from their colleagues, to which even Mansfield gave way; downward pressure from the administration ("If you want to fail someone, you have to be prepared for a very long, painful battle with the higher echelons," one professor told the Crimson); and perhaps pressure from within, from the part of them that sympathizes with students' careerism.
  • Not every class was so easy. Those that were tended to be in history and English, classics and foreign languages, art and philosophy—in other words, in those departments that provide what used to be considered the meat of a liberal arts education. Humanities students generally did the least work, got the highest grades, and cruised academically
  • the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick once hypothesized that most professors oppose capitalism because they consider themselves far smarter than boobish businessmen, and therefore resent the economic system that rewards practical intelligence over their own gifts. I'm inclined to think that such resentment—at least in money-drunk America—increasingly coexists with a deep inferiority complex regarding modern capitalism, and a need, however unconscious, to justify academic life in the face of the fantastic accumulation of wealth that takes place outside the ivory tower.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • some areas of academic life aren't vulnerable to this crisis of confidence in the importance of one's work. Scientists can rest secure in the knowledge that their labors will help shove along the modern project of advancing health—and wealth.
  • Then there is economics, the new queen of the sciences—a discipline perfectly tailored to the modern market-driven university, and not coincidentally the most popular concentration
  • The humanities have no such reservoirs of confidence. And attempts by humanities professors to ape the rigor of their scientific colleagues have led to a decades-long wade in the marshes of postmodern academic theory, where canons are scorned, books exist only as texts to be deconstructed, and willfully obscure writing is championed over accessible prose. All this has merely reinforced capitalism's insistence that the sciences are the only important academic pursuits, because only they provide tangible, quantifiable (and potentially profitable) results. Far from making the humanities scientific, postmodernism has made them irrelevant.
  • The retreat into irrelevance is visible all across the humanities curriculum. Philosophy departments have largely purged themselves of metaphysicians and moralists; history departments emphasize exhaustive primary research and micro-history. In the field of English there is little pretense that literature is valuable in itself and should be part of every educated person's life, rather than serving as grist for endless academic debates
  • Sure, historians believe in their primary sources, English scholars in their textual debates, philosophers in their logic games. But many of them seem to believe that they have nothing to offer students who don't plan to be historians, or literary theorists, or philosophers. They make no effort to apply their work to what should be the most pressing task of undergraduate education: to provide a general education, a liberal arts education, to future doctors and bankers and lawyers and diplomats.
  • In this environment who can blame professors if, when it comes time to grade their students, they sometimes take the path of least resistance—the path of the gentleman's B-plus?
  • the Core's mission statement asserts, with a touch of smugness, that "the Core differs from other programs of general education. It does not define intellectual breadth as the mastery of a set of Great Books, or the digestion of a specific quantum of information … rather, the Core seeks to introduce students to the major approaches to knowledge in areas that the faculty considers indispensable to undergraduate education."
  • These words, which appear in the course catalogue each year, are the closest that Harvard comes to articulating an undergraduate educational philosophy. They suggest that the difference in importance between, say, "Democracy, Development, and Equality in Mexico" and "Reason and Faith in the West" (both offerings in Historical Study) does not matter. As the introduction to the history courses puts it, both courses offer a "historical" approach to knowledge that is presumably more valuable than mere "facts" about the past. Comprehending history "as a form of inquiry and understanding" trumps learning about actual events. The catalogue contains similarly pat introductions to the other disciplines. In each case the emphasis is squarely on methodology, not material.
  • The few Core classes that are well taught are swamped each year, no matter how obscure the subject matter. The closest thing to a Harvard education—that is, to an intellectual corpus that most Harvard graduates have in common—is probably obtained in such oversubscribed courses as "The Warren Court and the Pursuit of Justice," "First Nights: Five Performance Premieres," and "Fairy Tales, Children's Literature, and the Construction of Childhood."
  • As in a great library ravaged by a hurricane, the essential elements of a liberal arts education lie scattered everywhere at Harvard, waiting to be picked up. But little guidance is given on how to proceed with that task.
  • Harvard never attempted to answer that question—perhaps the most important question facing any incoming freshman. I chose my classes as much by accident as by design. There were times when some of them mattered to me, and even moments when I was intoxicated. But achieving those moments required pulling myself away from Harvard's other demands, whether social, extracurricular, or pre-professional, which took far more discipline than I was usually able to exert.
  • It was hard work to get into Harvard, and then it was hard work competing for offices and honors and extracurriculars with thousands of brilliant and driven young people; hard work keeping our heads in the swirling social world; hard work fighting for law-school slots and investment-banking jobs as college wound to a close … yes, all of that was heavy sledding. But the academics—the academics were another story.
  • What makes our age different is the moment that happened over and over again at Harvard, when we said This is going to be hard and then realized No, this is easy. Maybe it came when we boiled down a three-page syllabus to a hundred pages of exam-time reading, or saw that a paper could be turned in late without the frazzled teaching fellow's docking us, or handed in C-quality work and got a gleaming B-plus. Whenever the moment came, we learned that it wasn't our sloth alone, or our constant pushing for higher grades, that made Harvard easy. No, Harvard was easy because almost no one was pushing back.
Maria Delzi

Afghanistan's Worsening, and Baffling, Hunger Crisis - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nd-baffling-hunger-crisis.html

shared by Maria Delzi on 05 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Nonetheless, the numbers are still worrisome. Dr. Mohammad Dawood, a pediatrician at Bost Hospital, said there were seven or eight deaths a month there because of acute malnutrition from June through August, and five in September. Doctors around the country have reported similar rates.
  • In January 2012, for instance, Unicef and the Afghan government’s Central Statistics Organization released a survey of more than 13,000 households showing that some provinces had reached or exceeded emergency levels, with more than 10 percent acute severe child malnutrition.
  • While acute malnutrition can be fatal, chronic malnutrition can cause multiple health and developmental problems.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Unlike malnutrition crises elsewhere in the world, this one has not been connected to specific food shortages or crop failures. In addition, parents are not showing up malnourished, even when their children are.
  • His colleague Dr. Khan blamed another problem. “The main cause of malnutrition in Afghanistan is lack of breast feeding,” he said. “They see beautiful pictures of milk cartons, and they think it’s better.”
  • In addition, where women commonly have many children, often with less than a year between them, it is difficult for mothers to provide enough nourishment, by breast or bottle. Ahmed Wali, the 2-year-old Bost Hospital patient with kwashiorkor, is the ninth of 10 children of his mother, Baka Bebi, who is in her mid-30s. She weaned him onto powdered milk mixed with stream water as soon as she could.
  • Poverty is another factor. In Afghanistan, the poverty line is defined as a total income sufficient to provide 2,100 calories a day to each family member. Some 36 percent of Afghans are below that threshold, according to the Health Ministry.
  • In 2013, Unicef raised its target for providing therapeutic foods to severe acutely malnourished Afghan children, to 52,144 from 35,181. Therapeutic foods are specially made for the severely malnourished, who have difficulty digesting normal food.
  • “Managing a feeding system is difficult; there is a long way for Afghanistan to go,” he added. “But even countries like Sri Lanka, with an outstanding health system, are still struggling to manage therapeutic feeding supplies.”
  • Cases of acute severe malnutrition are running at more than 100 a month, including five to 10 deaths, at Indira Gandhi Children’s Hospital in Kabul, and such cases have doubled since 2012, said Dr. Aqa Mohammad Shirzad, who is in charge of pediatric malnutrition programs there.
  • Each of the hospital’s 17 beds for severely malnourished patients has at least two patients, and some have three. The malnutrition intensive care ward there has an incubator that does not work, one suction pump and oxygen bottles, for respiratory masks, propped up without stands or proper connection
  • A 5-year-old boy who weighs less than 20 pounds was being treated recently on a bench because the infusion line would not stretch to a bed. Two window panes nearby were missing glass.
Javier E

Enter the Age of the Outsiders - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-the-age-of-the-outsiders.html

reason anarchy institutions decentralization fringe spiritual meaning mission realism barbarism

shared by Javier E on 20 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • In the 1990s, the central political institutions radiated confidence, derived from an assumed vision of the post-Cold War world. History would be a slow march toward democratic capitalism. Nations would be bound in peaceful associations like the European Union. The United States would oversee a basic international order.
  • This vision was materialistic and individualistic. Nations should pursue economic growth and a decent distribution of wealth. If you give individuals access to education and opportunity, they will pursue affluence and personal happiness. They will grow more temperate and “reasonable.”
  • Since 2000, this vision of the post-Cold War world has received blow after blow. Some of these blows were self-inflicted. Democracy, especially in the United States, has grown dysfunctional. Mass stupidity and greed led to a financial collapse and deprived capitalism of its moral swagger.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • the deeper problem was spiritual. Many people around the world rejected democratic capitalism’s vision of a secular life built around materialism and individual happiness. They sought more intense forms of meaning. Some of them sought meaning in the fanaticisms of sect, tribe, nation, or some stronger and more brutal ideology
  • In case after case, “reasonableness” has been trampled by behavior and creed that is stronger, darker and less temperate.
  • The uncertain Republican establishment cannot govern its own marginal members, while those on the edge burn with conviction. Jeb Bush looks wan but Donald Trump radiates confidence.
  • The Democratic establishment no longer determines party positions; it is pulled along by formerly marginal players like Bernie Sanders.
  • Republicans blame Obama for hesitant and halting policies, but it’s not clear the foreign policy and defense apparatus believes anymore in its own abilities to establish order, or that the American public has any confidence in U.S. effectiveness as a global actor.
  • the primary problem is mental and spiritual. Some leader has to be able to digest the lessons of the last 15 years and offer a revised charismatic and persuasive sense of America’s historic mission.
  • This mission, both nationalist and universal, would be less individualistic than the gospel of the 1990s, and more realistic about depravity and the way barbarism can spread. It would offer a goal more profound than material comfort.
runlai_jiang

Spring Home Sales Could Be the Weakest in Years - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ears-for-home-sales-1520424001

shared by runlai_jiang on 07 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • The culprits: rising mortgage rates, a tax bill that reduces the incentives for homeownership and a growing weariness among first-buyers being priced out of the market—all of which are expected to damp demand for homes this year.
  • “It’s still going to be a tight market, but we’re moving from an extremely tight market to one that has some wiggle room around the edges for buyers,” said Daren Blomquist, a senior vice president at the housing-research firm Attom Data Solutions.
  • Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors, said he expects sales to be flat this spring from a year earlier. Roughly 2.06 million homes were sold between March and June 2017, up from about 2 million in the same period a year earlier, according to the National Association of Realtors.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Mr. Yun predicts sales will remain flat for all of 2018, due to inventory shortages and eroding affordability, as both prices and mortgage rates rise.
  • A homeowner with a median-priced home in the San Francisco area will receive $4,500 less in housing-related tax benefits in the first year of a 30-year mortgage this year, according to real-estate data company Apartment List. A homeowner in the same position in the New York metro area would receive $1,500 less annually.
  • Weakness at the high end is being driven by stock market volatility and the $10,000 cap the tax bill placed on deducting state and local property taxes
  • “People are being a little more cautious than they were before,” Mr. Glazer said. “Buyers have a number in mind, and they’re willing to stick their ground more than in the past.”
  • Kalena Masching, a Redfin agent in Silicon Valley, said she has seen a pickup in activity in recent weeks as buyers and sellers have digested the implications of the tax bill. Buyers are putting down larger down payments to bring the size of their mortgages below the new $750,000 cap. But that could be a challenge if the stock market continues to fluctuate, because buyers might want to hold on to more of their cash
  • s. Masching said she is also hearing more from older buyers who are thinking about selling their homes and using the proceeds to retire out of state, prompted in part by the changes to the tax law
  • “I’m hoping it’s going to be better. We never got any inventory last year,” said Ms. Masching. “The big concern for our sellers is: Where are they going to go?”
  • Rhian Daniel, a 50 year old who works for a medical startup, and his wife have been looking for a home for about four years, both in the Bay Area and further afield. The couple have largely given up for the moment, and are considering eventually moving to a place like Dallas, with lower home prices and property taxes.
  • Mr. Daniel’s wife is a therapist, and they both have student debt that limits the size of the mortgage they can get.
Javier E

For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here's What I Learned. - The New Y... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...wo-months-news-newspapers.html

news print information culture

shared by Javier E on 07 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • In January, after the breaking-newsiest year in recent memory, I decided to travel back in time. I turned off my digital news notifications, unplugged from Twitter and other social networks, and subscribed to home delivery of three print newspapers — The Times, The Wall Street Journal and my local paper, The San Francisco Chronicle — plus a weekly newsmagazine, The Economist.
  • I have spent most days since then getting the news mainly from print, though my self-imposed asceticism allowed for podcasts, email newsletters and long-form nonfiction (books and magazine articles). Basically, I was trying to slow-jam the news — I still wanted to be informed, but was looking to formats that prized depth and accuracy over speed.
  • It has been life changing. Turning off the buzzing breaking-news machine I carry in my pocket was like unshackling myself from a monster who had me on speed dial, always ready to break into my day with half-baked bulleti
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • Most of all, I realized my personal role as a consumer of news in our broken digital news environment.
  • And I’m embarrassed about how much free time I have — in two months, I managed to read half a dozen books, took up pottery and (I think) became a more attentive husband and father.
  • Now I am not just less anxious and less addicted to the news, I am more widely informed
  • We have spent much of the past few years discovering that the digitization of news is ruining how we collectively process information. Technology allows us to burrow into echo chambers, exacerbating misinformation and polarization and softening up society for propaganda.
  • With artificial intelligence making audio and video as easy to fake as text, we’re entering a hall-of-mirrors dystopia, what some are calling an “information apocaly
  • the experiment taught me several lessons about the pitfalls of digital news and how to avoid them.
  • I distilled those lessons into three short instructions, the way the writer Michael Pollan once boiled down nutrition advice: Get news. Not too quickly. Avoid social.
  • The Times has about 3.6 million paying subscribers, but about three-quarters of them pay for just the digital version. During the 2016 election, fewer than 3 percent of Americans cited print as their most important source of campaign news; for people under 30, print was their least important source.
  • What do you get for all that dough? News. That sounds obvious until you try it — and you realize how much of what you get online isn’t quite news, and more like a never-ending stream of commentary, one that does more to distort your understanding of the world than illuminate it.
  • On social networks, every news story comes to you predigested. People don’t just post stories — they post their takes on stories, often quoting key parts of a story to underscore how it proves them right, so readers are never required to delve into the story to come up with their own view.
  • the prominence of commentary over news online and on cable news feels backward, and dangerously so. It is exactly our fealty to the crowd — to what other people are saying about the news, rather than the news itself — that makes us susceptible to misinformation.
  • Real life is slow; it takes professionals time to figure out what happened, and how it fits into context. Technology is fast. Smartphones and social networks are giving us facts about the news much faster than we can make sense of them, letting speculation and misinformation fill the gap.
  • I was getting news a day old, but in the delay between when the news happened and when it showed up on my front door, hundreds of experienced professionals had done the hard work for me.
  • I was left with the simple, disconnected and ritualistic experience of reading the news, mostly free from the cognitive load of wondering whether the thing I was reading was possibly a blatant lie.
  • One weird aspect of the past few years is how a “tornado of news-making has scrambled Americans’ grasp of time and memory,” as my colleague Matt Flegenheimer put it last year. By providing a daily digest of the news, the newspaper alleviates this sense. Sure, there’s still a lot of news — but when you read it once a day, the world feels contained and comprehensible
  • What’s important is choosing a medium that highlights deep stories over quickly breaking ones.
  • And, more important, you can turn off news notifications. They distract and feed into a constant sense of fragmentary paranoia about the world
  • Avoid social.This is the most important rule of all. After reading newspapers for a few weeks, I began to see it wasn’t newspapers that were so great, but social media that was so bad.
  • The built-in incentives on Twitter and Facebook reward speed over depth, hot takes over facts and seasoned propagandists over well-meaning analyzers of news.
  • for goodness’ sake, please stop getting your news mainly from Twitter and Facebook. In the long run, you and everyone else will be better off.
Javier E

Opinion | The Moral Rot That Threatens America - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-europe-moral-rot.html

moral Trump crisis politics eu truth corruption

shared by Javier E on 18 May 18 - No Cached
  • From a French diplomat, I received a worried letter. President Trump’s scuttling of the Iran nuclear deal was “the best illustration of the Jacksonian moment the United States is going through, a mix of unilateralism and isolationism” that contribute to “a new world disorder” where there is “no more American power willing or able — or both — to be the last-resort enforcer.” In the vacuum, he could discern “no minimum level of convergence between the key players.
  • Europe is beginning to digest the severity of the schism. Federica Mogherini, the European Union’s senior foreign policy official, heaped scorn on Trump recently, saying that “screaming, shouting, insulting and bullying, systematically destroying and dismantling everything that is already in place, is the mood of our times.” Without naming the president, she warned that “this impulse to destroy” leads nowhere good. Hers was a requiem for “respect” and “dialogue” — in effect the post-1945 order
  • What eats at America — and so its place in the world — is moral rot: unrelenting blight that emanates from on high
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • the problem today runs deeper than Trump’s contempt for any multilateral order. That can be fixed, in time.
  • Trump alluded the other day to immigrants as “animals” who “aren’t people.
  • The deepest form of rot is the erosion of the distinction between truth and falsehood. Totalitarianism was one big lie perpetrated on human beings reduced to the often hopeless quest for survival in a fog
  • A universe where morality ceases is the one Trump is most comfortable in. “Mr. President, did you know about the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels?” Trump’s answer, on April 5: “No, no.” Except, as the president clarified in a recent financial disclosure, he did know.
  • This is Trump’s Ministry of Truth, the new American normal. It’s impossible to overstate the enormity of it. That’s why the Alliance is collapsing and Germany finds no basis for cooperation: Trump’s America stands for nothing
  • As Rex Tillerson, the former secretary of state, told recent graduates in a speech, going wobbly on the truth means “we go wobbly on America.”
Javier E

I was wrong on climate change. Why can't other conservatives admit it, too? - The Washi... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-bc79-68604ed88993_story.html

climate change conservatives conservatism denial crisis politics

shared by Javier E on 23 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • I used to be a climate-change skeptic. I was one of those conservatives who thought that the science was inconclusive, that fears of global warming were as overblown as fears of a new ice age in the 1970s, that climate change was natural and cyclical, and that there was no need to incur any economic costs to deal with this speculative threat.
  • I no longer think any of that, because the scientific consensus is so clear and convincing.
  • “Observations collected around the world provide significant, clear, and compelling evidence that global average temperature is much higher, and is rising more rapidly, than anything modern civilization has experienced, with widespread and growing impacts.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • “annual average temperatures have increased by 1.8°F across the contiguous United States since the beginning of the 20th century” and that “annual median sea level along the U.S. coast . . . has increased by about 9 inches since the early 20th century as oceans have warmed and land ice has melted.”
  • he National Climate Assessment warns that global warming could cause a 10 percent decline in gross domestic product and that the “potential for losses in some sectors could reach hundreds of billions of dollars per year by the end of this century.” Iowa and other farm states will be particularly hard hit as crops wilt and livestock die.
  • Compared with the crushing costs of climate change, the action needed to curb greenhouse-gas emissions is modest and manageabl
  • a carbon tax would increase average electricity rates from 17 cents to 18 cents per kilowatt-hour. The average household, he writes, would see spending on energy rise “only about $35 per month.” That’s not nothing — but it’s better than allowing climate change to continue unabated
  • I’ve owned up to the danger. Why haven’t other conservatives? They are captives, first and foremost, of the fossil fuel industry, which outspent green groups 10 to 1 in lobbying on climate change from 2000 to 2016. But they are also captives of their own rigid ideology
Javier E

U.S. intelligence reports from January and February warned about a likely pandemic - Th... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-b5f1-a5a804158597_story.html

intelligence reports us pandemic crisis trump politics policy

shared by Javier E on 31 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • U.S. intelligence agencies were issuing ominous, classified warnings in January and February about the global danger posed by the coronavirus while President Trump and lawmakers played down the threat and failed to take action that might have slowed the spread of the pathogen, according to U.S. officials familiar with spy agency reporting.
  • they did track the spread of the virus in China, and later in other countries, and warned that Chinese officials appeared to be minimizing the severity of the outbreak.
  • Taken together, the reports and warnings painted an early picture of a virus that showed the characteristics of a globe-encircling pandemic that could require governments to take swift actions to contain it
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • But despite that constant flow of reporting, Trump continued publicly and privately to play down the threat the virus posed to Americans.
  • Intelligence agencies “have been warning on this since January,” said a U.S. official who had access to intelligence reporting that was disseminated to members of Congress and their staffs as well as to officials in the Trump administration
  • “Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were — they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it,” this official said. “The system was blinking red.”
  • The warnings from U.S. intelligence agencies increased in volume toward the end of January and into early February, said officials familiar with the reports. By then, a majority of the intelligence reporting included in daily briefing papers and digests from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA was about covid-19, said officials who have read the reports.
  • The surge in warnings coincided with a move by Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) to sell dozens of stocks worth between $628,033 and $1.72 million.
  • A key task for analysts during disease outbreaks is to determine whether foreign officials are trying to minimize the effects of an outbreak or take steps to hide a public health crisis
  • At the State Department, personnel had been nervously tracking early reports about the virus. One official noted that it was discussed at a meeting in the third week of January, around the time that cable traffic showed that U.S. diplomats in Wuhan were being brought home on chartered planes — a sign that the public health risk was significant
  • Inside the White House, Trump’s advisers struggled to get him to take the virus seriously, according to multiple officials with knowledge of meetings among those advisers and with the president.
  • Azar couldn’t get through to Trump to speak with him about the virus until Jan. 18, according to two senior administration officials. When he reached Trump by phone, the president interjected to ask about vaping and when flavored vaping products would be back on the market
  • On Jan. 27, White House aides huddled with then-acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney in his office, trying to get senior officials to pay more attention to the virus
  • Joe Grogan, the head of the White House Domestic Policy Council, argued that the administration needed to take the virus seriously or it could cost the president his reelection, and that dealing with the virus was likely to dominate life in the United States for many months.
  • Trump was dismissive because he did not believe that the virus had spread widely throughout the United States.
  • By early February, Grogan and others worried that there weren’t enough tests to determine the rate of infection, according to people who spoke directly to Grogan
  • But Trump resisted and continued to assure Americans that the coronavirus would never run rampant as it had in other countries.“I think it’s going to work out fine,” Trump said on Feb. 19. “I think when we get into April, in the warmer weather, that has a very negative effect on that and that type of a virus.”
  • “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA,” Trump tweeted five days later. “Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”
  • But earlier that month, a senior official in the Department of Health and Human Services delivered a starkly different message to the Senate Intelligence Committee, in a classified briefing that four U.S. officials said covered the coronavirus and its global health implications. The House Intelligence Committee received a similar briefing.
  • Robert Kadlec, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response — who was joined by intelligence officials, including from the CIA — told committee members that the virus posed a “serious” threat, one of those officials said.
  • he said that to get ahead of the virus and blunt its effects, Americans would need to take actions that could disrupt their daily lives, the official said. “It was very alarming.”
  • Trump’s insistence on the contrary seemed to rest in his relationship with China’s President Xi Jingping, whom Trump believed was providing him with reliable information about how the virus was spreading in China, despite reports from intelligence agencies that Chinese officials were not being candid about the true scale of the crisis.
  • Some of Trump’s advisers told him that Beijing was not providing accurate numbers
  • Rather than press China to be more forthcoming, Trump publicly praised its response.
  • “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus,” Trump tweeted Jan. 24. “The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”
  • Trump on Feb. 3 banned foreigners who had been in China in the previous 14 days from entering the United States, a step he often credits for helping to protect Americans against the virus. He has also said publicly that the Chinese weren’t honest about the effects of the virus. But that travel ban wasn’t accompanied by additional significant steps to prepare
  • As the first cases of infection were confirmed in the United States, Trump continued to insist that the risk to Americans was small.“I think the virus is going to be — it’s going to be fine,” he said on Feb. 10
millerco

Senate Republicans Will Diverge From House in Sweeping Tax Rewrite - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-in-sweeping-tax-rewrite.html

senate US trump history politics republicans democrats election

shared by millerco on 09 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Senate Republicans, under pressure to pass a sweeping tax rewrite before year’s end, are expected to unveil legislation on Thursday that would eliminate the ability of people to deduct state and local taxes but would stop short of fully repealing the estate tax, according to lobbyists and other people familiar with the bill.
  • The Senate plan is taking shape as Republicans digest the drubbing they suffered on Tuesday night in affluent suburbs across the country, many of them represented by Republicans in the House.
  • Those areas are stocked with well-off voters who would be disproportionately hit by the elimination of state and local tax deductions.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • in the Senate, those high-tax areas are often represented by Democrats, which puts less pressure on Republican leaders to keep the state and local deduction, in any form, in their version of the bill.
  • Each of the bills reflects delicate political and fiscal calculations as Republican leaders seek to deliver on President Trump’s campaign promises to cut taxes on the middle class and on businesses — but also find the money to pay for them.
  • Eliminating the state and local tax deduction would increase tax receipts and therefore lessen the overall cost of the legislation, which by congressional budget rules cannot exceed $1.5 trillion over the next decade if it is to pass without Democratic support.
  • After the elections, Republicans understand they have to pass a tax bill in order to show a significant accomplishment. Big losses in Virginia and New Jersey on Tuesday exposed their vulnerabilities going into next year’s midterm elections.
  • in the Senate, the emerging bill suggests party leaders are less concerned with the potential fallout of eliminating breaks that benefit upper-middle-class taxpayers in high-tax states such as New York and California.
  • Republican officials say many more changes will be included in the Senate plan, which is planned for release on Thursday, the same day that the House Ways and Means Committee is expected to pass its version of the bill ahead of a full House vote next week.
Javier E

Congress, the Presidency, and the Difficulty of Majority Rule - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...618183

congress presidency majority rule anti-democratic bias US governance

shared by Javier E on 06 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • any project of reform needs to take something into account: Congress is no bargain either as a representative institution.
  • Despite the overall unpopularity of the post-Trump Republican Party, it is favored to retake the House of Representatives in 2022, because elections to the House systematically overrepresent Republican votes.
  • Here’s a way to dramatize how extreme the bias is. Compare the House elections of 2010 and 2020. In 2010, the Republicans won 51.7 percent of all votes cast; in 2020, the Democrats won 51.5 percent—almost exactly the same proportion. But in 2010, the Republican 51.7 percent converted into 242 seats, a decisive majority. In 2020, the Democratic 51.5 percent converted into 222 seats, a narrow margin.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • Analysis of district-level voting patterns suggests that Republicans enjoy an inbuilt 2.1 percentage-point advantage in contests for the House majority. Joe Biden won the national vote by 4.6 points in 2020. He won the median House seat, Illinois’s Fourteenth Congressional District, by 2.5 points.
  • Not since the mid-1990s have Republican senators represented a majority of American voters. The 50 Democratic senators elected in 2020 represent nearly 42 million more Americans than the 50 Republicans.
  • Shifting power from an overmighty presidency to a Congress that overindulges reactionary minorities will do democracy no good. The post-Watergate reformers recognized that logic, and joined their limits on the presidency to an attempted modernization of Congress.
  • the reformers of the 1970s understood the architecture of American democracy. Power flowed from Congress to the presidency precisely because the presidency was the most accountable branch of the federal government. If the flow was to be reversed, Congress needed to be democratized. This same problem presents itself with even greater force in the 2020s.
  • The 60-vote Senate has become an accepted fact of American politics, along with presidents who lose the popular vote, and state legislatures where 45 percent of the vote is converted into 55 percent of the seats, or more.
  • The Senate is defended by a sequence of rationalizations: It’s good that a Wyoming vote counts 68 times more than a California vote. It’s good that garnering 59 out of 100 votes does not suffice to enact laws. It’s good that any one legislator is able to disrupt the proceedings. These rationalizations have proved contagious. If minority rule is good sometimes, why not more of the time?
  • As the Senate has deviated further and further from majoritarian norms, the House and the state legislatures have followed. Among the great merits of Jentleson’s Kill Switch is that it reminds us how recent this trend is.
  • In the era of the 67-vote filibuster, the tools of minority rule were used to defend racial segregation, a cause that even its supporters did not like to defend openly.
  • In an important new book, Kill Switch, Adam Jentleson offers a harrowing portrait of how anti-majoritarian dysfunction has paralyzed the U.S. Senate.
  • The Framers’ constitutional design balanced majority rights as they were understood at the time—the rights of a majority of those persons possessed of full citizenship who voted in state and House elections—against a federal Senate to protect the rights of smaller states and a judiciary insulated from passing political passions
  • it’s one thing to respect regional and cultural minorities; it’s another to let those minorities impose hostile preferences upon an unwilling majority, year in, year out, with every exit from federal minority rule blocked by even more obdurate systems of minority rule at the state level.
  • Jentleson offers a program for reform that begins with the outright elimination of the filibuster. But without constitutional change more radical than anything contemplated today, the Senate will always remain counter-majoritarian—and Senate reform can accordingly take the country only so far toward the reanimation of the majority-rule principle.
  • the House, often falsely complimented as the “people’s House,” is the part of the government most in need of democratic change. Change to the House depends on change to the anti-majoritarian state legislatures that redraw congressional districts—and that change depends on renewal of the voting-rights laws the federal courts have so weakened over the past decade and a half.
  • In the meantime, the federal and state executive branches are the tools most available to the disempowered majority.
  • America got the imperial presidency in the first place in great part because of the defects of Congress. From free trade to civil rights, the post-1945 presidency would act to do things in the broad public interest over the truculent obstruction of Congresses dominated by narrow and backward-looking minority interests.
  • But presidents, even the greatest of them, are not magicians. Since 2010, the U.S. political system has been ever more extremely biased toward its narrow and backward-looking ideological minorities. Weaken the executive branches, federal and state, and you privilege those ideological minorities.
  • don’t overcorrect, and don’t overdo it. Under present rules and conditions, the executive power, state and federal, is the least antidemocratic power in the American political design.
  • The only hope for bringing majority rule to the rest of American politics is voting-rights enforcement by the federal Department of Justice—and maybe some forward-thinking governors—against the probable resistance of the U.S. Senate, the Republican-dominated federal courts, and the minority-rule state legislatures.
  • The presidency and the governorships have not always advanced the cause of majority rule in the past. They will not always do so in the future. But at this moment, that’s precisely what they’re poised to do. The enemies of the majority-rule principle understand that fact. The friends of majority rule should absorb it too.
aidenborst

Opinion: What Fauci's emails reveal -- and what they don't - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

politics US crisis Trump history Culture policy Pandemic Economics Fauci Emails

shared by aidenborst on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • This week, 3,234 pages of emails from Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to the President, were released through a Freedom Of Information Act request. I'm still trying to digest them all, as I expect many people are.
  • I also, of course, note what is missing -- namely, many details from the White House Task Force. We get just little hints: "Let us discuss this when we are together at the 4:00 PM TF Meeting," for example. That history will have to wait. Only occasionally does any frustration with the federal government's response show up in the emails, such as when he is commenting on current Covid-19 tests being "misleading" or defending his public presence to fellow public health scientists: "I genuflect to no one but science and always, always speak my mind when it comes to public health."
  • Fauci's emails reveal that by early April he was responding to a question about why face coverings were not being advised with: "That recommendation is in the works." I celebrate his willingness to say in March of 2020, "Will have to check," in response to a question from a follow doctor about post-infection immunity.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • In March of 2020, for example, he forwarded a correspondence about the possible Covid-19 immunity of indigenous people harvesting guano (bat excrement), as well as an idea from a psychiatry professor about using the antibiotic minocycline to slow viral replication. He commented on an email from a Swedish psychiatrist, "There may be nothing to this, but we should at least be aware." And in April of that year, he told a persistent doctor with multiple ideas for possible antiviral agents, "You are not being ignored."
  • I find the emails about the funding of Fauci's agency particularly fascinating. Over the course of the messages, budget discussions transition from small funding increases to tremendous week-on-week growths in expenditures -- particularly when the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was empowered by Congress to dream bigger thanks to $1.532 billion in supplemental appropriations. To put a finer point on this group of emails: it was these bigger dreams and bigger trials that provided us with important answers and, ultimately, with the vaccines.
  • At other times, it feels like looking at the celebrity photos on the front pages of People magazine: "He felt that way, too?!"
  • Finally, in between the lines, we watch him manage this pandemic as a human. There are emails where he is clearly overwhelmed, forwarding media request after speaking request to his assistants at the Office of the Chief of Staff. (One has to wonder: who wouldn't be overwhelmed by this number of requests?)
  • There are emails where he is tremendously kind, thanking people for their service, telling staff to "stay well and safe" or complimenting folks on well-written papers and columns.
  • Again and again, he responds to concerned citizens, scientists and journalists with: "Thank you for your note." He pays attention both to people he knows -- apologetically telling Ralph Nader at 7 p.m. on a Sunday, "I receive over 1000 e-mails per day and even with staff screening, I do not see them for days." -- and to those he probably doesn't. There are times when he's funny, times when he's frustrated and times when he's clearly exhausted, admitting that he's simply too tired to make sense of something.
  • He is just like us -- or, at least, he's how most of us like to imagine ourselves to be, on our best days.
1 - 20 of 34 Next ›
Showing 20▼ items per page