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Javier E

Reach Out and Elect Someone-Postman.pdf - 0 views

Postman media politics amusing text language censorship television print tyranny power freedom

shared by Javier E on 16 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Politics, he tells him, is the greatest spectator sport in America. In I 966, Ronald Reagan used a different metaphor. "Politics," he said, "is just like show business."
  • I~ politic~ were like a sporting event, there would be several virtues to attach to its name: clarity, honesty, excellence.
  • The television commercial has been the chief instrument in(. • creating the modem methods of presenting political ideas.
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  • In America, the fundamental metaphor for political discourse is the television commercial.
  • An \ American who has reached the age of forty will have seen well h ver one million television commercials in his or her lifeti~e, nd has close to another million to go before the first Social ecurity check arrives.
  • the practice of capitalism has its contradictions. I Cartels and monopolies, for example, undermine the theo,ry
  • evision commercials make hash of it. To take the simplest example: To be rationally considered, any claim-commercial ! or otherwise-~ust be made in language. More precisely, it i' must take the fomi of a proposition, for that is· the universe of II discourse from which such words as "true" apd "false" come. If that universe of discourse is discarded, then 'the application of/ empirical tests, logical analysis or any of the othtr instrum¢nts \ of reason are impotent.
  • Today, on television commercials, propositions are as. scarce as unattractive people. The truth or falsity of an advertiser's claim is simply_not an issue. A McDonald's commercial, for example, is not a series of testable, logically ordered assertions. It is a drama-a mythology, if you will-of handsome people selling, buying and eating hamb_urgers, and being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune.
  • t has accomplished this in two ways. The first_ is by requiring its form'AQ) to be used in political ca~p~igns.
  • the commercial insists ~n . , an unprecedented brevity of expression.
  • One can like or dislike a television commercial, of course. But one cannot refute it.
  • What the advertiser needs to know is not what l is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer. And so, the balance of business expenditures shifts from product .. research to market research. The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy. The consumer is a patient assured by psycho-dramas.
  • pear so to anyone hearing or reading it. But the commercial disdains exposition, for that takes tinie and invites argument. It is a very bad commercial indeed that engages the viewer in wondering about the validity of th~ point_ being made.
  • More9ver, commercials have the advantage of vivid visual symbols through which we may easily learn the lessons being taught. Among those lessons are that shor:t and simple messages are preferable to long and complex ones; that drama is to be preferred over exposition; that being sold solutions is better than being confronted with 1 questions about ·problems.
  • ninous form of pubhc commumcauon m our society, it was I inevitable that Americans would ac~ommo~~te themselves ,~o tl:le philosophy of television commercials. By accommodate, I mean that we accept them as a normal and plausible form of discourse. By "philosophy," I mean that the television commerl cial has embedded in it certain assumptions about the nature of communication that run counter to those of other media, espe( dally the printed word.
  • Such beli~fs would naturally have implications for our orientation to political discourse; that is to say, we may begin to accept as normal certain assumptions about the political domain that either derive from or are amplified by the tekvision commercial.
  • For example, a person who has seen one million television commercials might well believe that all political problems have fast solutions through simple measures-or ought to. Or that complex language is not to be trusted, and that all problems lend themselves to theatrical expression. Or that argument is in bad taste, and leads only to an intolerable uncertainty.
  • But what virtues attach to politics if Ronald Reagan is right? show business is not entirely ·without an idea of excellence, but its main business is to please the crowd, and its principal instrument is artifice. If politics is like show business, then the idea is not to pursue excellence, clarity or honesty but to appear as if you are, which is another matter altogether.
  • Such a: person may also come to believe that it is not necessary to draw any line between politics and other forms of social life. Just as a television commercial will use an athlete, an act<;>r, a musician, a novelist, a scientist or a countess to s~eak for the virtues (?f a product in no way within their domain of expertise, television also frees politicians from the limited field of their own expertise.
  • The commercial asks us to believe that all problems am solvable, that they are solvable fast, and that they are solvable fast through the interventions of technology, techniques and chemistry.
  • his is, of course, a preposterous theory about the roots of discontent, and would ap-
  • Although it may go ,too far to say that the politician-ascelebrity has, by itself, made political partie~ irrelevant, there is certainly a conspicuous correlation between the rise of the former and the decline of the latter.
  • The point is that television does not reveal whol the best man is. In fact, television makes impossible the determination of who is better than whom, if we mean by "better"
  • such things as more capable in negotiation, more imaginative in ) executive skill, more knowledgeable about international affairs, more understanding of the interrelations of economic systems, ._and so on. The reason has, almost entirely, to do with "image."
  • This is the lesson of all great television commercials: TheD provide a slogan, a symbol or a focus that creates for viewers a comprehensive and compelling image of themselves.
  • But not because politicians are preoccupied with presenting themselves in the best possible light. After all, who isn't? It is a rare 41d deeply disturbed person who does not wish to project a favorable image. But television gives image a bad name. For on television the politician does not so much offer the audience an image of himself, as offer himself as an image of the audience.
  • In the shift from party politics to television ·politics, the same goal is sought. We are not permitted to know who is best at being President or Governor or Sena~or, but whose image is best in touching and soothing the deep reaches of our discontent.
  • The historian Carl Schorske has, in my opinion, circled closer to the truth by noting that the modem mind has grown indifferent to history because history has become useless to it; in other words, it is not obstinacy or ignorance but a sense of irrelevance that leads to the diminution of history.
  • It follows from this that hjggr¥_can play no significant role in image politics. For history is of value only to someone who takes seriously the notion that there are patterns in the past which may provide the present with nourishing traditions.
  • "The past is a world," Thomas Carlyle said, "and not a void of [ grey haze." But he wrote this at a time when the book was the principal medium of serious public discourse.
  • Terence Moran, I be~ lieve, lands on the target in saying that with media whose structure is biased toward furnishing images and fragments, we are deprived of access to an historical perspective. In the absence of continuity and context, he says, "bits of information cannot be integrated into an intelligent and consistent whole."·
  • A book is all history. Everything about it takes one back in time-from the way it is produced to its linear mode of exposition to the fact that the past tense is its most comfortable form of address. As no other medium before or since, the book promotes a sense of a coherent and usable past. In a conversation of books, history, as Carlyle understood it, is not only a world but a living world. It is
  • We do opt refuse to remember; neither do we find it exactly useless to remember. Rather, we are being rendered unfit to remember. For if remembering is to be something more than nostalgia, .it requires a contextual basis-a theory, a vision, a metaphorsomething within which facts can be organized and patterns discerned.
  • But televisio. n is a ~peed-of-light me~um, a present-centered \ medium, lts grammar, so to say, penruts no access to the past. Everything presented in moving pictures is experienced as happening "now," which is why we must be told in language that a ideotape we are seeing was made months before.
  • The politics of image and instantaneous news provides no such context, is, in fact, hampered by attempts to provide any. A mirror records only what you are wearing today. It is silent about yesterday. With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present.
  • "History," Henry Ford said, "is_bunk." Henry Ford was a typographic optimist. "History," the Electric Plug replies, "doesn't exist."
  • profound cultural proolem until the maturing of the Age of ·l Print. Whatever dangers th~re may be in a word that is written, such a word is a hundred times more dangerous when stamped by a press.
  • We ought also to look to Huxley, not Orwell, to understand the threat that television and other forms of imagery pose to the foundation of liberal democracy-namely, to freedom of information.
  • To paraphrase J David Riesman only slightly, in a world of printing, information is the gunpowder of the mind; hence come the censors in their austere robes to dampen the explosion.
  • Thus, Orwell envisioned that ( 1) government c:ontrol over (2) printed matter posed a serious threat for Western: democracies. He was wrong on both counts. (He was, of course, right on both counts insofar as Russia, China and other pre-electronic cultures are concerned.)
  • The Bill of Rights is largely a prescription for preventing government from restricting the flow of information and ideas. But the Founding Fathers did not foresee that tyranny by government might_ be superseded by another sort of problen:i altogether, namely, the corporate state, which through television now controls the flow of public discourse in America.
  • I merely note the fact with apprehension, as did George Gerbner, Dean of the Annenberg School of Communication, when he wrote:
  • in fact, information and ideas did not become a
  • Television is the new state religion run by a private Ministry of Culture (the three networks), offering a universal curriculum for all people, financed by a form of hidden taxation without representation. You pay when you wash, not when you watch, and whether or not you care to watch .... 6
  • The fight against censorship is a nineteenth-century issue, which was largely won in the twentieth.
  • What we are confronted with now is the problem posed by the economic and symbolic structure of television. Those who run television do not limit our a.ccess to information but in fact. widen it. Our Ministry of Culture is Huxleyan, not Orwellian., It does everything possible to encourage us to watch continuously. But what we watch is a medium which presents information in a form ~ that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment.
  • Tyrants of all varieties' have always known about the value of providing the masses with amusement.s as a means of pacifying discontent. But most of them could not have even hoped for a situation in which the masses·would ignore that which does not amuse.
  • iri the Age of Television, our information environment is completely different from what it was in 1783; that we have less to fear from government restraints than from television glut;
  • That is why tyrants have always relied, and still do, on censorship. Censorship, after all, is the tribute tyrants pay to the assumption that a public knows the difference between serious discourse and entertainment-and cares.
  • hat, in fact, we have ~o way of protecting ourselves from information disseminated by corporate America; and that, therefore, the battles for liberty must be fought on different terrains from where they once were.
  • How delighted would be all the kings, czars and fuhrers of the past (and commissars of. the present) to know that censorship is not a necessity when ~II political discourse takes the form of a jest.
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.
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  • 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.
Javier E

Facebook Has 50 Minutes of Your Time Each Day. It Wants More. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...gagement-to-its-advantage.html

shared by Javier E on 10 May 16 - No Cached
  • Fifty minutes.That’s the average amount of time, the company said, that users spend each day on its Facebook, Instagram and Messenger platforms
  • there are only 24 hours in a day, and the average person sleeps for 8.8 of them. That means more than one-sixteenth of the average user’s waking time is spent on Facebook.
  • That’s more than any other leisure activity surveyed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with the exception of watching television programs and movies (an average per day of 2.8 hours)
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  • It’s more time than people spend reading (19 minutes); participating in sports or exercise (17 minutes); or social events (four minutes). It’s almost as much time as people spend eating and drinking (1.07 hours).
  • the average time people spend on Facebook has gone up — from around 40 minutes in 2014 — even as the number of monthly active users has surged. And that’s just the average. Some users must be spending many hours a day on the site,
  • Time is the best measure of engagement, and engagement correlates with advertising effectiveness. Time also increases the supply of impressions that Facebook can sell, which brings in more revenue (a 52 percent increase last quarter to $5.4 billion).
  • time has become the holy grail of digital media.
  • And time enables Facebook to learn more about its users — their habits and interests — and thus better target its ads. The result is a powerful network effect that competitors will be hard pressed to match.
  • the only one that comes close is Alphabet’s YouTube, where users spent an average of 17 minutes a day on the site. That’s less than half the 35 minutes a day users spent on Facebook
  • Users spent an average of nine minutes on all of Yahoo’s sites, two minutes on LinkedIn and just one minute on Twitter
  • People spending the most time on Facebook also tend to fall into the prized 18-to-34 demographic sought by advertisers.
  • “You hear a narrative that young people are fleeing Facebook. The data show that’s just not true. Younger users have a wider appetite for social media, and they spend a lot of time on multiple networks. But they spend more time on Facebook by a wide margin.”
  • What aren’t Facebook users doing during the 50 minutes they spend there? Is it possibly interfering with work (and productivity), or, in the case of young people, studying and reading?
  • While the Bureau of Labor Statistics surveys nearly every conceivable time-occupying activity (even fencing and spelunking), it doesn’t specifically tally the time spent on social media, both because the activity may have multiple purposes — both work and leisure — and because people often do it at the same time they are ostensibly engaged in other activities
  • The closest category would be “computer use for leisure,” which has grown from eight minutes in 2006, when the bureau began collecting the data, to 14 minutes in 2014, the most recent survey. Or perhaps it would be “socializing and communicating with others,” which slipped from 40 minutes to 38 minutes.
  • But time spent on most leisure activities hasn’t changed much in those eight years of the bureau’s surveys. Time spent reading dropped from an average of 22 minutes to 19 minutes. Watching television and movies increased from 2.57 hours to 2.8. Average time spent working declined from 3.4 hours to 3.25. (Those hours seem low because much of the population, which includes both young people and the elderly, does not work.)
  • The bureau’s numbers, since they cover the entire population, may be too broad to capture important shifts among important demographic groups
  • ComScore reported that television viewing (both live and recorded) dropped 2 percent last year, and it said younger viewers in particular are abandoning traditional live television. People ages 18-34 spent just 47 percent of their viewing time on television screens, and 40 percent on mobile devices.
  • Among those 55 and older, 70 percent of their viewing time was on television, according to comScore. So among young people, much social media time may be coming at the expense of traditional television.
  • comScore’s data suggests that people are spending on average just six to seven minutes a day using social media on their work computers. “I don’t think Facebook is displacing other activity,” he said. “People use it during downtime during the course of their day, in the elevator, or while commuting, or waiting.
  • Facebook, naturally, is busy cooking up ways to get us to spend even more time on the platform
  • A crucial initiative is improving its News Feed, tailoring it more precisely to the needs and interests of its users, based on how long people spend reading particular posts. For people who demonstrate a preference for video, more video will appear near the top of their news feed. The more time people spend on Facebook, the more data they will generate about themselves, and the better the company will get at the task.
Javier E

The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (Ian Buruma) - 0 views

DIIGO_FILE_HOME/7ui9/e8c30608a7379054d18fe4e9e2b1c397

Japan history revisionist memory remembrance WWII interwar germany DDR

shared by Javier E on 12 Aug 19 - No Cached
  • the main reason why Germans were more trusted by their neighbors was that they were learning, slowly and painfully, and not always fully, to trust themselves.
  • elders, in government and the mass media, still voice opinions about the Japanese war that are unsettling, to say the least. Conservative politicians still pay their annual respects at a shrine where war criminals are officially remembered. Justifications and denials of war crimes are still heard. Too many Japanese in conspicuous places, including the prime minister’s office itself, have clearly not “coped” with the war.
  • unlike Nazi Germany, Japan had no systematic program to destroy the life of every man, woman, and child of a people that, for ideological reasons, was deemed to have no right to exist.
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  • “We never knew,” a common reaction in the 1950s, had worn shamefully thin in the eyes of a younger generation by the 1960s. The extraordinary criminality of a deliberate genocide was so obvious that it left no room for argument.
  • Right-wing nationalists like to cite the absence of a Japanese Holocaust as proof that Japanese have no reason to feel remorse about their war at all. It was, in their eyes, a war like any other; brutal, yes, just as wars fought by all great nations in history have been brutal. In fact, since the Pacific War was fought against Western imperialists, it was a justified—even noble—war of Asian liberation.
  • in the late 1940s or 1950s, a time when most Germans were still trying hard not to remember. It is in fact extraordinary how honestly Japanese novelists and filmmakers dealt with the horrors of militarism in those early postwar years. Such honesty is much less evident now.
  • Popular comic books, aimed at the young, extol the heroics of Japanese soldiers and kamikaze pilots, while the Chinese and their Western allies are depicted as treacherous and belligerent. In 2008, the chief of staff of the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force stated that Japan had been “tricked” into the war by China and the US. In 2013, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo publicly doubted whether Japan’s military aggression in China could even be called an invasion.
  • The fact is that Japan is still haunted by historical issues that should have been settled decades ago. The reasons are political rather than cultural, and have to do with the pacifist constitution—written by American jurists in 1946—and with the imperial institution, absolved of war guilt by General Douglas MacArthur after the war for the sake of expediency.
  • Japan, even under Allied occupation, continued to be governed by much the same bureaucratic and political elite, albeit under a new, more democratic constitution,
  • a number of conservatives felt humiliated by what they rightly saw as an infringement of their national sovereignty. Henceforth, to them, everything from the Allied Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal to the denunciations of Japan’s war record by left-wing teachers and intellectuals would be seen in this light.
  • The more “progressive” Japanese used the history of wartime atrocities as a warning against turning away from pacifism, the more defensive right-wing politicians and commentators became about the Japanese war.
  • Views of history, in other words, were politicized—and polarized—from the beginning.
  • To take the sting out of this confrontation between constitutional pacifists and revisionists, which had led to much political turmoil in the 1950s, mainstream conservatives made a deliberate attempt to distract people’s attention from war and politics by concentrating on economic growth.
  • For several decades, the chauvinistic right wing, with its reactionary views on everything from high school education to the emperor’s status, was kept in check by the sometimes equally dogmatic Japanese left. Marxism was the prevailing ideology of the teachers union and academics.
  • the influence of Marxism waned after the collapse of the Soviet empire in the early 1990s, and the brutal records of Chairman Mao and Pol Pot became widely known.
  • Marginalized in the de facto one-party LDP state and discredited by its own dogmatism, the Japanese left did not just wane, it collapsed. This gave a great boost to the war-justifying right-wing nationalists,
  • Japanese young, perhaps out of boredom with nothing but materialistic goals, perhaps out of frustration with being made to feel guilty, perhaps out of sheer ignorance, or most probably out of a combination of all three, are not unreceptive to these patriotic blandishments.
  • Anxiety about the rise of China, whose rulers have a habit of using Japan’s historical crimes as a form of political blackmail, has boosted a prickly national pride, even at the expense of facing the truth about the past.
  • By 1996, the LDP was back in power, the constitutional issue had not been resolved, and historical debates continue to be loaded with political ideology. In fact, they are not really debates at all, but exercises in propaganda, tilted toward the reactionary side.
  • My instinct—call it a prejudice, if you prefer—before embarking on this venture was that people from distinct cultures still react quite similarly to similar circumstances.
  • The Japanese and the Germans, on the whole, did not behave in the same ways—but then the circumstances, both wartime and postwar, were quite different in the two Germanies and Japan. They still are.
  • Our comic-book prejudices turned into an attitude of moral outrage. This made life easier in a way. It was comforting to know that a border divided us from a nation that personified evil. They were bad, so we must be good. To grow up after the war in a country that had suffered German occupation was to know that one was on the side of the angels.
  • The question that obsessed us was not how we would have acquitted ourselves in uniform, going over the top, running into machine-gun fire or mustard gas, but whether we would have joined the resistance, whether we would have cracked under torture, whether we would have hidden Jews and risked deportation ourselves. Our particular shadow was not war, but occupation.
  • the frightened man who betrayed to save his life, who looked the other way, who grasped the wrong horn of a hideous moral dilemma, interested me more than the hero. This is no doubt partly because I fear I would be much like that frightened man myself. And partly because, to me, failure is more typical of the human condition than heroism.
  • I was curious to learn how Japanese saw the war, how they remembered it, what they imagined it to have been like, how they saw themselves in view of their past. What I heard and read was often surprising to a European:
  • this led me to the related subject of modern Japanese nationalism. I became fascinated by the writings of various emperor worshippers, historical revisionists, and romantic seekers after the unique essence of Japaneseness.
  • Bataan, the sacking of Manila, the massacres in Singapore, these were barely mentioned. But the suffering of the Japanese, in China, Manchuria, the Philippines, and especially in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was remembered vividly, as was the imprisonment of Japanese soldiers in Siberia after the war. The Japanese have two days of remembrance: August 6, when Hiroshima was bombed, and August 15, the date of the Japanese surrender.
  • The curious thing was that much of what attracted Japanese to Germany before the war—Prussian authoritarianism, romantic nationalism, pseudo-scientific racialism—had lingered in Japan while becoming distinctly unfashionable in Germany. Why?
  • the two peoples saw their own purported virtues reflected in each other: the warrior spirit, racial purity, self-sacrifice, discipline, and so on. After the war, West Germans tried hard to discard this image of themselves. This was less true of the Japanese.
  • Which meant that any residual feelings of nostalgia for the old partnership in Japan were likely to be met with embarrassment in Germany.
  • I have concentrated on the war against the Jews in the case of Germany, since it was that parallel war, rather than, say, the U-boat battles in the Atlantic, or even the battle of Stalingrad, that left the most sensitive scar on the collective memory of (West) Germany.
  • I have emphasized the war in China and the bombing of Hiroshima, for these episodes, more than others, have lodged themselves, often in highly symbolic ways, in Japanese public life.
  • Do Germans perhaps have more reason to mourn? Is it because Japan has an Asian “shame culture,” to quote Ruth Benedict’s phrase, and Germany a Christian “guilt culture”?
  • why the collective German memory should appear to be so different from the Japanese. Is it cultural? Is it political? Is the explanation to be found in postwar history, or in the history of the war itself?
  • the two peoples still have anything in common after the war, it is a residual distrust of themselves.
  • when Michael sees thousands of German peace demonstrators, he does not see thousands of gentle people who have learned their lesson from the past; he sees “100 percent German Protestant rigorism, aggressive, intolerant, hard.”
  • To be betroffen implies a sense of guilt, a sense of shame, or even embarrassment. To be betroffen is to be speechless. But it also implies an idea of moral purity. To be betroffen is one way to “master the past,” to show contriteness, to confess, and to be absolved and purified.
  • In their famous book, written in the sixties, entitled The Inability to Mourn, Alexander and Margarethe Mitscherlich analyzed the moral anesthesia that afflicted postwar Germans who would not face their past. They were numbed by defeat; their memories appeared to be blocked. They would or could not do their labor, and confess. They appeared to have completely forgotten that they had glorified a leader who caused the death of millions.
  • There is something religious about the act of being betroffen, something close to Pietism,
  • heart of Pietism was the moral renovation of the individual, achieved by passing through the anguish of contrition into the overwhelming realization of the assurance of God’s grace.” Pietism served as an antidote to the secular and rational ideas of the French Enlightenment.
  • It began in the seventeenth century with the works of Philipp Jakob Spener. He wanted to reform the Church and bring the Gospel into daily life, as it were, by stressing good works and individual spiritual labor.
  • German television is rich in earnest discussion programs where people sit at round tables and debate the issues of the day. The audience sits at smaller tables, sipping drinks as the featured guests hold forth. The tone is generally serious, but sometimes the arguments get heated. It is easy to laugh at the solemnity of these programs, but there is much to admire about them. It is partly through these talk shows that a large number of Germans have become accustomed to political debate.
  • There was a real dilemma: at least two generations had been educated to renounce war and never again to send German soldiers to the front, educated, in other words, to want Germany to be a larger version of Switzerland. But they had also been taught to feel responsible for the fate of Israel, and to be citizens of a Western nation, firmly embedded in a family of allied Western nations. The question was whether they really could be both.
  • the Gulf War showed that German pacifism could not be dismissed simply as anti-Americanism or a rebellion against Adenauer’s West.
  • the West German mistrust of East Germans—the East Germans whose soldiers still marched in goose step, whose petit bourgeois style smacked of the thirties, whose system of government, though built on a pedestal of antifascism, contained so many disturbing remnants of the Nazi past; the East Germans, in short, who had been living in “Asia.”
  • Michael, the Israeli, compared the encounter of Westerners (“Wessies”) with Easterners (“Ossies”) with the unveiling of the portrait of Dorian Gray: the Wessies saw their own image and they didn’t like what they saw.
  • he added: “I also happen to think Japanese and Germans are racists.”
  • Germany for its Nazi inheritance and its sellout to the United States. But now that Germany had been reunified, with its specters of “Auschwitz” and its additional hordes of narrow-minded Ossies, Adenauer was deemed to have been right after
  • The picture was of Kiel in 1945, a city in ruins. He saw me looking at it and said: “It’s true that whoever is being bombed is entitled to some sympathy from us.”
  • “My personal political philosophy and maybe even my political ambition has to do with an element of distrust for the people I represent, people whose parents and grandparents made Hitler and the persecution of the Jews possible.”
  • in the seventies he had tried to nullify verdicts given in Nazi courts—without success until well into the eighties. One of the problems was that the Nazi judiciary itself was never purged. This continuity was broken only by time.
  • To bury Germany in the bosom of its Western allies, such as NATO and the EC, was to bury the distrust of Germans. Or so it was hoped. As Europeans they could feel normal, Western, civilized. Germany; the old “land in the middle,” the Central European colossus, the power that fretted over its identity and was haunted by its past, had become a Western nation.
  • It is a miracle, really, how quickly the Germans in the Federal Republic became civilized. We are truly part of the West now. We have internalized democracy. But the Germans of the former GDR, they are still stuck in a premodern age. They are the ugly Germans, very much like the West Germans after the war, the people I grew up with. They are not yet civilized.”
  • “I like the Germans very much, but I think they are a dangerous people. I don’t know why—perhaps it is race, or culture, or history. Whatever. But we Japanese are the same: we swing from one extreme to the other. As peoples, we Japanese, like the Germans, have strong collective discipline. When our energies are channeled in the right direction, this is fine, but when they are misused, terrible things happen.”
  • to be put in the same category as the Japanese—even to be compared—bothered many Germans. (Again, unlike the Japanese, who made the comparison often.) Germans I met often stressed how different they were from the Japanese,
  • To some West Germans, now so “civilized,” so free, so individualistic, so, well, Western, the Japanese, with their group discipline, their deference to authority, their military attitude toward work, might appear too close for comfort to a self-image only just, and perhaps only barely, overcome.
  • To what extent the behavior of nations, like that of individual people, is determined by history, culture, or character is a question that exercises many Japanese, almost obsessively.
  • not much sign of betroffenheit on Japanese television during the Gulf War. Nor did one see retired generals explain tactics and strategy. Instead, there were experts from journalism and academe talking in a detached manner about a faraway war which was often presented as a cultural or religious conflict between West and Middle East. The history of Muslim-Christian-Jewish animosity was much discussed. And the American character was analyzed at length to understand the behavior of George Bush and General Schwarzkopf.
  • In the words of one Albrecht Fürst von Urach, a Nazi propagandist, Japanese emperor worship was “the most unique fusion in the world of state form, state consciousness, and religious fanaticism.” Fanaticism was, of course, a positive word in the Nazi lexicon.
  • the identity question nags in almost any discussion about Japan and the outside world. It
  • It was a respectable view, but also one founded on a national myth of betrayal. Japan, according to the myth, had become the unique moral nation of peace, betrayed by the victors who had sat in judgment of Japan’s war crimes; betrayed in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, in Nicaragua; betrayed by the arms race, betrayed by the Cold War; Japan had been victimized not only by the “gratuitous,” perhaps even “racist,” nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but by all subsequent military actions taken by the superpowers,
  • When the Prime Minister of Japan, Shidehara Kijuro, protested in 1946 to General MacArthur that it was all very well saying that Japan should assume moral leadership in renouncing war, but that in the real world no country would follow this example, MacArthur replied: “Even if no country follows you, Japan will lose nothing. It is those who do not support this who are in the wrong.” For a long time most Japanese continued to take this view.
  • What is so convenient in the cases of Germany and Japan is that pacifism happens to be a high-minded way to dull the pain of historical guilt. Or, conversely, if one wallows in it, pacifism turns national guilt into a virtue, almost a mark of superiority, when compared to the complacency of other nations.
  • The denial of historical discrimination is not just a way to evade guilt. It is intrinsic to pacifism. To even try to distinguish between wars, to accept that some wars are justified, is already an immoral position.
  • That Kamei discussed this common paranoia in such odd, Volkish terms could mean several things: that some of the worst European myths got stuck in Japan, that the history of the Holocaust had no impact, or that Japan is in some respects a deeply provincial place. I think all three explanations apply.
  • “the problem with the U.S.-Japan relationship is difficult. A racial problem, really. Yankees are friendly people, frank people. But, you know, it’s hard. You see, we have to be friendly …”
  • Like Oda, indeed like many people of the left, Kamei thought in racial terms. He used the word jinshu, literally race. He did not even use the more usual minzoku, which corresponds, in the parlance of Japanese right-wingers, to Volk, or the more neutral kokumin, meaning the citizens of a state.
  • many Germans in the liberal democratic West have tried to deal honestly with their nation’s terrible past, the Japanese, being different, have been unable to do so. It is true that the Japanese, compared with the West Germans, have paid less attention to the suffering they inflicted on others, and shown a greater inclination to shift the blame. And liberal democracy, whatever it may look like on paper, has not been the success in Japan that it was in the German Federal Republic. Cultural differences might account for this. But one can look at these matters in a different, more political way. In his book The War Against the West, published in London in 1938, the Hungarian scholar Aurel Kolnai followed the Greeks in his definition of the West: “For the ancient Greeks ‘the West’ (or ‘Europe’) meant society with a free constitution and self-government under recognized rules, where ‘law is king,’ whereas the ‘East’ (or ‘Asia’) signified theocratic societies under godlike rulers whom their subjects serve ‘like slaves.’
  • According to this definition, both Hitler’s Germany and prewar Japan were of the East.
  • There was a great irony here: in their zeal to make Japan part of the West, General MacArthur and his advisers made it impossible for Japan to do so in spirit. For a forced, impotent accomplice is not really an accomplice at all.
  • In recent years, Japan has often been called an economic giant and a political dwarf. But this has less to do with a traditional Japanese mentality—isolationism, pacifism, shyness with foreigners, or whatnot—than with the particular political circumstances after the war that the United States helped to create.
  • when the Cold War prompted the Americans to make the Japanese subvert their constitution by creating an army which was not supposed to exist, the worst of all worlds appeared: sovereignty was not restored, distrust remained, and resentment mounted.
  • Kamei’s hawks are angry with the Americans for emasculating Japan; Oda’s doves hate the Americans for emasculating the “peace constitution.” Both sides dislike being forced accomplices, and both feel victimized, which is one reason Japanese have a harder time than Germans in coming to terms with their wartime past.
  • As far as the war against the Jews is concerned, one might go back to 1933, when Hitler came to power. Or at the latest to 1935, when the race laws were promulgated in Nuremberg. Or perhaps those photographs of burning synagogues on the night of November 9, 1938, truly marked the first stage of the Holocaust.
  • There is the famous picture of German soldiers lifting the barrier on the Polish border in 1939, but was that really the beginning? Or did it actually start with the advance into the Rhineland in 1936, or was it the annexation of the Sudetenland, or Austria, or Czechoslovakia?
  • IT IS DIFFICULT TO SAY when the war actually began for the Germans and the Japanese. I cannot think of a single image that fixed the beginning of either war in the public mind.
  • Possibly to avoid these confusions, many Germans prefer to talk about the Hitlerzeit (Hitler era) instead of “the war.”
  • only Japanese of a liberal disposition call World War II the Pacific War. People who stick to the idea that Japan was fighting a war to liberate Asia from Bolshevism and white colonialism call it the Great East Asian War (Daitowa Senso), as in the Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.
  • The German equivalent, I suppose, would be the picture of Soviet soldiers raising their flag on the roof of the gutted Reichstag in Berlin.
  • People of this opinion separate the world war of 1941–45 from the war in China, which they still insist on calling the China Incident.
  • Liberals and leftists, on the other hand, tend to splice these wars together and call them the Fifteen-Year War (1931–45).
  • images marking the end are more obvious.
  • argued that the struggle against Western imperialism actually began in 1853, with the arrival in Japan of Commodore Perry’s ships, and spoke of the Hundred-Year War.
  • These are among the great clichés of postwar Japan: shorthand for national defeat, suffering, and humiliation.
  • The Germans called it Zusammenbruch (the collapse) or Stunde Null (Zero Hour): everything seemed to have come to an end, everything had to start all over. The Japanese called it haisen (defeat) or shusen (termination of the war).
  • kokka (nation, state) and minzoku (race, people) are not quite of the same order as Sonderbehandlung (special treatment) or Einsatzgruppe (special action squad). The jargon of Japanese imperialism was racist and overblown, but it did not carry the stench of death camps.
  • The German people are spiritually starved, Adenauer told him. “The imagination has to be provided for.” This was no simple matter, especially in the German language, which had been so thoroughly infected by the jargon of mass murder.
  • All they had been told to believe in, the Germans and the Japanese, everything from the Führerprinzip to the emperor cult, from the samurai spirit to the Herrenvolk, from Lebensraum to the whole world under one (Japanese) roof, all that lay in ruins
  • How to purge this language from what a famous German philologist called the Lingua Tertii Imperii? “… the language is no longer lived,” wrote George Steiner in 1958, “it is merely spoken.”
  • out of defeat and ruin a new school of literature (and cinema) did arise. It is known in Germany as Trümmerliteratur (literature of the ruins). Japanese writers who came of age among the ruins called themselves the yakeato seidai (burnt-out generation). Much literature of the late forties and fifties was darkened by nihilism and despair.
  • It was as though Germany—Sonderweg or no Sonderweg—needed only to be purged of Nazism, while Japan’s entire cultural tradition had to be overhauled.
  • In Germany there was a tradition to fall back on. In the Soviet sector, the left-wing culture of the Weimar Republic was actively revived. In the Western sectors, writers escaped the rats and the ruins by dreaming of Goethe. His name was often invoked to prove that Germany, too, belonged to the humanist, enlightened strain of European civilization.
  • the Americans (and many Japanese leftists) distrusted anything associated with “feudalism,” which they took to include much of Japan’s premodern past. Feudalism was the enemy of democracy. So not only did the American censors, in their effort to teach the Japanese democracy, forbid sword-fight films and samurai dramas, but at one point ninety-eight Kabuki plays were banned too.
  • yet, what is remarkable about much of the literature of the period, or more precisely, of the literature about that time, since much of it was written later, is the deep strain of romanticism, even nostalgia. This colors personal memories of people who grew up just after the war as well.
  • If the mushroom cloud and the imperial radio speech are the clichés of defeat, the scene of an American soldier (usually black) raping a Japanese girl (always young, always innocent), usually in a pristine rice field (innocent, pastoral Japan), is a stock image in postwar movies about the occupation.
  • To Ango, then, as to other writers, the ruins offered hope. At last the Japanese, without “the fake kimono” of traditions and ideals, were reduced to basic human needs; at last they could feel real love, real pain; at last they would be honest. There was no room, among the ruins, for hypocrisy.
  • Böll was able to be precise about the end of the Zusammenbruch and the beginning of bourgeois hypocrisy and moral amnesia. It came on June 20, 1948, the day of the currency reform, the day that Ludwig Erhard, picked by the Americans as Economics Director in the U.S.-British occupation zone, gave birth to the Deutsche Mark. The DM, from then on, would be the new symbol of West German national pride;
  • the amnesia, and definitely the identification with the West, was helped further along by the Cold War. West Germany now found itself on the same side as the Western allies. Their common enemy was the “Asiatic” Soviet empire. Fewer questions needed to be asked.
  • Indeed, to some people the Cold War simply confirmed what they had known all along: Germany always had been on the right side, if only our American friends had realized it earlier.
  • The process of willed forgetfulness culminated in the manic effort of reconstruction, in the great rush to prosperity.
  • “Prosperity for All” was probably the best that could have happened to the Germans of the Federal Republic. It took the seed of resentment (and thus future extremism) out of defeat. And the integration of West Germany into a Western alliance was a good thing too.
  • The “inability to mourn,” the German disassociation from the piles of corpses strewn all over Central and Eastern Europe, so that the Third Reich, as the Mitscherlichs put it, “faded like a dream,” made it easier to identify with the Americans, the victors, the West.
  • Yet the disgust felt by Böll and others for a people getting fat (“flabby” is the usual term, denoting sloth and decadence) and forgetting about its murderous past was understandable.
  • The Brückners were the price Germany had to pay for the revival of its fortunes. Indeed, they were often instrumental in it. They were the apparatchik who functioned in any system, the small, efficient fish who voted for Christian conservatives in the West and became Communists in the East.
  • Staudte was clearly troubled by this, as were many Germans, but he offered no easy answers. Perhaps it was better this way: flabby democrats do less harm than vengeful old Nazis.
  • the forgetful, prosperous, capitalist Federal Republic of Germany was in many more or less hidden ways a continuation of Hitler’s Reich. This perfectly suited the propagandists of the GDR, who would produce from time to time lists of names of former Nazis who were prospering in the West. These lists were often surprisingly accurate.
  • In a famous film, half fiction, half documentary, made by a number of German writers and filmmakers (including Böll) in 1977, the continuity was made explicit. The film, called Germany in Autumn (Deutschland in Herbst),
  • Rainer Werner Fassbinder was one of the participants in this film. A year later he made The Marriage of Maria Braun.
  • To lifelong “antifascists” who had always believed that the Federal Republic was the heir to Nazi Germany, unification seemed—so they said—almost like a restoration of 1933. The irony was that many Wessies saw their new Eastern compatriots as embarrassing reminders of the same unfortunate past.
  • Rarely was the word “Auschwitz” heard more often than during the time of unification, partly as an always salutary reminder that Germans must not forget, but partly as an expression of pique that the illusion of a better, antifascist, anticapitalist, idealistic Germany, born in the ruins of 1945, and continued catastrophically for forty years in the East, had now been dashed forever.
  • Ludwig Erhard’s almost exact counterpart in Japan was Ikeda Hayato, Minister of Finance from 1949 and Prime Minister from 1960 to 1964. His version of Erhard’s “Prosperity for AH” was the Double Your Incomes policy, which promised to make the Japanese twice as rich in ten years. Japan had an average growth rate of 11 percent during the 1960s.
  • It explains, at any rate, why the unification of the two Germanys was considered a defeat by antifascists on both sides of the former border.
  • Very few wartime bureaucrats had been purged. Most ministries remained intact. Instead it was the Communists, who had welcomed the Americans as liberators, who were purged after 1949, the year China was “lost.”
  • so the time of ruins was seen by people on the left as a time of missed chances and betrayal. Far from achieving a pacifist utopia of popular solidarity, they ended up with a country driven by materialism, conservatism, and selective historical amnesia.
  • the “red purges” of 1949 and 1950 and the return to power of men whose democratic credentials were not much better helped to turn many potential Japanese friends of the United States into enemies. For the Americans were seen as promoters of the right-wing revival and the crackdown on the left.
  • For exactly twelve years Germany was in the hands of a criminal regime, a bunch of political gangsters who had started a movement. Removing this regime was half the battle.
  • It is easier to change political institutions and hope that habits and prejudices will follow. This, however, was more easily done in Germany than in Japan.
  • There had not been a cultural break either in Japan. There were no exiled writers and artists who could return to haunt the consciences of those who had stayed.
  • There was no Japanese Thomas Mann or Alfred Döblin. In Japan, everyone had stayed.
  • In Japan there was never a clear break between a fascist and a prefascist past. In fact, Japan was never really a fascist state at all. There was no fascist or National Socialist ruling party, and no Führer either. The closest thing to it would have been the emperor, and whatever else he may have been, he was not a fascist dictator.
  • whereas after the war Germany lost its Nazi leaders, Japan lost only its admirals and generals.
  • Japan was effectively occupied only by the Americans. West Germany was part of NATO and the European Community, and the GDR was in the Soviet empire. Japan’s only formal alliance is with the United States, through a security treaty that many Japanese have opposed.
  • But the systematic subservience of Japan meant that the country never really grew up. There is a Japanese fixation on America, an obsession which goes deeper, I believe, than German anti-Americanism,
  • Yet nothing had stayed entirely the same in Japan. The trouble was that virtually all the changes were made on American orders. This was, of course, the victor’s prerogative, and many changes were beneficial.
  • like in fiction. American Hijiki, a novella by Nosaka Akiyuki, is, to my mind, a masterpiece in the short history of Japanese Trümmerliteratur.
  • Older Japanese do, however, remember the occupation, the first foreign army occupation in their national history. But it was, for the Japanese, a very unusual army. Whereas the Japanese armies in Asia had brought little but death, rape, and destruction, this one came with Glenn Miller music, chewing gum, and lessons in democracy. These blessings left a legacy of gratitude, rivalry, and shame.
  • did these films teach the Japanese democracy? Oshima thinks not. Instead, he believes, Japan learned the values of “progress” and “development.” Japan wanted to be just as rich as America—no, even richer:
  • think it is a romantic assumption, based less on history than on myth; a religious notion, expressed less through scholarship than through monuments, memorials, and historical sites turned into sacred grounds.
  • The past, wrote the West German historian Christian Meier, is in our bones. “For a nation to appropriate its history,” he argued, “is to look at it through the eyes of identity.” What we have “internalized,” he concluded, is Auschwitz.
  • Auschwitz is such a place, a sacred symbol of identity for Jews, Poles, and perhaps even Germans. The question is what or whom Germans are supposed to identify with.
  • The idea that visiting the relics of history brings the past closer is usually an illusion. The opposite is more often true.
  • To visit the site of suffering, any description of which cannot adequately express the horror, is upsetting, not because one gets closer to knowing what it was actually like to be a victim, but because such visits stir up emotions one cannot trust. It is tempting to take on the warm moral glow of identification—so easily done and so presumptuous—with the victims:
  • Were the crimes of Auschwitz, then, part of the German “identity”? Was genocide a product of some ghastly flaw in German culture, the key to which might be found in the sentimental proverbs, the cruel fairy tales, the tight leather shorts?
  • yet the imagination is the only way to identify with the past. Only in the imagination—not through statistics, documents, or even photographs—do people come alive as individuals, do stories emerge, instead of History.
  • nature. It is all right to let the witnesses speak, in the courtroom, in the museums, on videotape (Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah has been shown many times on German television), but it is not all right for German artists to use their imagination.
  • the reluctance in German fiction to look Auschwitz in the face, the almost universal refusal to deal with the Final Solution outside the shrine, the museum, or the schoolroom, suggests a fear of committing sacrilege.
  • beneath the fear of bad taste or sacrilege may lie a deeper problem. To imagine people in the past as people of flesh and blood, not as hammy devils in silk capes, is to humanize them. To humanize is not necessarily to excuse or to sympathize, but it does demolish the barriers of abstraction between us and them. We could, under certain circumstances, have been them.
  • the flight into religious abstraction was to be all too common among Germans of the Nazi generation, as well as their children; not, as is so often the case with Jews, to lend mystique to a new identity, as a patriotic Zionist, but on the contrary to escape from being the heir to a peculiarly German crime, to get away from having to “internalize” Auschwitz, or indeed from being German at all.
  • a Hollywood soap opera, a work of skillful pop, which penetrated the German imagination in a way nothing had before. Holocaust was first shown in Germany in January 1979. It was seen by 20 million people, about half the adult population of the Federal Republic; 58 percent wanted it to be repeated; 12,000 letters, telegrams, and postcards were sent to the broadcasting stations; 5,200 called the stations by telephone after the first showing; 72.5 percent were positive, 7.3 percent negative.
  • “After Holocaust,” wrote a West German woman to her local television station, “I feel deep contempt for those beasts of the Third Reich. I am twenty-nine years old and a mother of three children. When I think of the many mothers and children sent to the gas chambers, I have to cry. (Even today the Jews are not left in peace. We Germans have the duty to work every day for peace in Israel.) I bow to the victims of the Nazis, and I am ashamed to be a German.”
  • Auschwitz was a German crime, to be sure. “Death is a master from Germany.” But it was a different Germany. To insist on viewing history through the “eyes of identity,” to repeat the historian Christian Meier’s phrase, is to resist the idea of change.
  • Is there no alternative to these opposing views? I believe there is.
  • The novelist Martin Walser, who was a child during the war, believes, like Meier, that Auschwitz binds the German people, as does the language of Goethe. When a Frenchman or an American sees pictures of Auschwitz, “he doesn’t have to think: We human beings! He can think: Those Germans! Can we think: Those Nazis! I for one cannot …”
  • Adorno, a German Jew who wished to save high German culture, on whose legacy the Nazis left their bloody finger marks, resisted the idea that Auschwitz was a German crime. To him it was a matter of modern pathology, the sickness of the “authoritarian personality,” of the dehumanized SS guards, those inhumane cogs in a vast industrial wheel.
  • To the majority of Japanese, Hiroshima is the supreme symbol of the Pacific War. All the suffering of the Japanese people is encapsulated in that almost sacred word: Hiroshima. But it is more than a symbol of national martyrdom; Hiroshima is a symbol of absolute evil, often compared to Auschwitz.
  • has the atmosphere of a religious center. It has martyrs, but no single god. It has prayers, and it has a ready-made myth about the fall of man. Hiroshima, says a booklet entitled Hiroshima Peace Reader, published by the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation, “is no longer merely a Japanese city. It has become recognized throughout the world as a Mecca of world peace.”
  • They were not enshrined in the Japanese park, and later attempts by local Koreans to have the monument moved into Peace Park failed. There could only be one cenotaph, said the Hiroshima municipal authorities. And the cenotaph did not include Koreans.
  • What is interesting about Hiroshima—the Mecca rather than the modern Japanese city, which is prosperous and rather dull—is the tension between its universal aspirations and its status as the exclusive site of Japanese victimhood.
  • it is an opinion widely held by Japanese nationalists. The right always has been concerned with the debilitating effects on the Japanese identity of war guilt imposed by American propaganda.
  • The Japanese, in contrast, were duped by the Americans into believing that the traces of Japanese suffering should be swept away by the immediate reconstruction of Hiroshima. As a result, the postwar Japanese lack an identity and their racial virility has been sapped by American propaganda about Japanese war guilt.
  • Hiroshima, Uno wrote, should have been left as it was, in ruins, just as Auschwitz, so he claims, was deliberately preserved by the Jews. By reminding the world of their martyrdom, he said, the Jews have kept their racial identity intact and restored their virility.
  • But the idea that the bomb was a racist experiment is less plausible, since the bomb was developed for use against Nazi Germany.
  • There is another view, however, held by leftists and liberals, who would not dream of defending the “Fifteen-Year War.” In this view, the A-bomb was a kind of divine punishment for Japanese militarism. And having learned their lesson through this unique suffering, having been purified through hellfire and purgatory, so to speak, the Japanese people have earned the right, indeed have the sacred duty, to sit in judgment of others, specifically the United States, whenever they show signs of sinning against the “Hiroshima spirit.”
  • The left has its own variation of Japanese martyrdom, in which Hiroshima plays a central role. It is widely believed, for instance, that countless Japanese civilians fell victim to either a wicked military experiment or to the first strike in the Cold War, or both.
  • However, right-wing nationalists care less about Hiroshima than about the idée fixe that the “Great East Asian War” was to a large extent justified.
  • This is at the heart of what is known as Peace Education, which has been much encouraged by the leftist Japan Teachers’ Union and has been regarded with suspicion by the conservative government. Peace Education has traditionally meant pacifism, anti-Americanism, and a strong sympathy for Communist states, especially China.
  • The A-bomb, in this version, was dropped to scare the Soviets away from invading Japan. This at least is an arguable position.
  • left-wing pacifism in Japan has something in common with the romantic nationalism usually associated with the right: it shares the right’s resentment about being robbed by the Americans of what might be called a collective memory.
  • The romantic pacifists believe that the United States, to hide its own guilt and to rekindle Japanese militarism in aid of the Cold War, tried to wipe out the memory of Hiroshima.
  • few events in World War II have been described, analyzed, lamented, reenacted, re-created, depicted, and exhibited so much and so often as the bombing of Hiroshima
  • The problem with Nagasaki was not just that Hiroshima came first but also that Nagasaki had more military targets than Hiroshima. The Mitsubishi factories in Nagasaki produced the bulk of Japanese armaments. There was also something else, which is not often mentioned: the Nagasaki bomb exploded right over the area where outcasts and Christians lived. And unlike in Hiroshima, much of the rest of the city was spared the worst.
  • yet, despite these diatribes, the myth of Hiroshima and its pacifist cult is based less on American wickedness than on the image of martyred innocence and visions of the apocalypse.
  • The comparison between Hiroshima and Auschwitz is based on this notion; the idea, namely, that Hiroshima, like the Holocaust, was not part of the war, not even connected with it, but “something that occurs at the end of the world
  • still I wonder whether it is really so different from the position of many Germans who wish to “internalize” Auschwitz, who see Auschwitz “through the eyes of identity.”
  • the Japanese to take two routes at once, a national one, as unique victims of the A-bomb, and a universal one, as the apostles of the Hiroshima spirit. This, then, is how Japanese pacifists, engaged in Peace Education, define the Japanese identity.
  • the case for Hiroshima is at least open to debate. The A-bomb might have saved lives; it might have shortened the war. But such arguments are incompatible with the Hiroshima spirit.
  • In either case, nationality has come to be based less on citizenship than on history, morality, and a religious spirit.
  • The problem with this quasi-religious view of history is that it makes it hard to discuss past events in anything but nonsecular terms. Visions of absolute evil are unique, and they are beyond human explanation or even comprehension. To explain is hubristic and amoral.
  • in the history of Japan’s foreign wars, the city of Hiroshima is far from innocent. When Japan went to war with China in 1894, the troops set off for the battlefronts from Hiroshima, and the Meiji emperor moved his headquarters there. The city grew wealthy as a result. It grew even wealthier when Japan went to war with Russia eleven years later, and Hiroshima once again became the center of military operations. As the Hiroshima Peace Reader puts it with admirable conciseness, “Hiroshima, secure in its position as a military city, became more populous and prosperous as wars and incidents occurred throughout the Meiji and Taisho periods.” At the time of the bombing, Hiroshima was the base of the Second General Headquarters of the Imperial Army (the First was in Tokyo). In short, the city was swarming with soldiers. One of the few literary masterpieces to emerge
  • when a local group of peace activists petitioned the city of Hiroshima in 1987 to incorporate the history of Japanese aggression into the Peace Memorial Museum, the request was turned down. The petition for an “Aggressors’ Corner” was prompted by junior high school students from Osaka, who had embarrassed Peace Museum officials by asking for an explanation about Japanese responsibility for the war.
  • Yukoku Ishinkai (Society for Lament and National Restoration), thought the bombing had saved Japan from total destruction. But he insisted that Japan could not be held solely responsible for the war. The war, he said, had simply been part of the “flow of history.”
  • They also demanded an official recognition of the fact that some of the Korean victims of the bomb had been slave laborers. (Osaka, like Kyoto and Hiroshima, still has a large Korean population.) Both requests were denied. So a group called Peace Link was formed, from local people, many of whom were Christians, antinuclear activists, or involved with discriminated-against minorities.
  • The history of the war, or indeed any history, is indeed not what the Hiroshima spirit is about. This is why Auschwitz is the only comparison that is officially condoned. Anything else is too controversial, too much part of the “flow of history.”
  • “You see, this museum was not really intended to be a museum. It was built by survivors as a place of prayer for the victims and for world peace. Mankind must build a better world. That is why Hiroshima must persist. We must go back to the basic roots. We must think of human solidarity and world peace. Otherwise we just end up arguing about history.”
  • Only when a young Japanese history professor named Yoshimi Yoshiaki dug up a report in American archives in the 1980s did it become known that the Japanese had stored 15,000 tons of chemical weapons on and near the island and that a 200-kilogram container of mustard gas was buried under Hiroshima.
  • what was the largest toxic gas factory in the Japanese Empire. More than 5,000 people worked there during the war, many of them women and schoolchildren. About 1,600 died of exposure to hydrocyanic acid gas, nausea gas, and lewisite. Some were damaged for life. Official Chinese sources claim that more than 80,000 Chinese fell victim to gases produced at the factory. The army was so secretive about the place that the island simply disappeared from Japanese maps.
  • in 1988, through the efforts of survivors, the small museum was built, “to pass on,” in the words of the museum guide, “the historical truth to future generations.”
  • Surviving workers from the factory, many of whom suffered from chronic lung diseases, asked for official recognition of their plight in the 1950s. But the government turned them down. If the government had compensated the workers, it would have been an official admission that the Japanese Army had engaged in an illegal enterprise. When a brief mention of chemical warfare crept into Japanese school textbooks, the Ministry of Education swiftly took it out.
  • I asked him about the purpose of the museum. He said: “Before shouting ‘no more war,’ I want people to see what it was really like. To simply look at the past from the point of view of the victim is to encourage hatred.”
  • “Look,” he said, “when you fight another man, and hit him and kick him, he will hit and kick back. One side will win. How will this be remembered? Do we recall that we were kicked, or that we started the kicking ourselves? Without considering this question, we cannot have peace.”
  • The fact that Japanese had buried poison gas under Hiroshima did not lessen the horror of the A-bomb. But it put Peace Park, with all its shrines, in a more historical perspective. It took the past away from God and put it in the fallible hands of man.
  • What did he think of the Peace Museum in Hiroshima? “At the Hiroshima museum it is easy to feel victimized,” he said. “But we must realize that we were aggressors too. We were educated to fight for our country. We made toxic gas for our country. We lived to fight the war. To win the war was our only goal.”
  • Nanking, as the capital of the Nationalist government, was the greatest prize in the attempted conquest of China. Its fall was greeted in Japan with banner headlines and nationwide celebration. For six weeks Japanese Army officers allowed their men to run amok. The figures are imprecise, but tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands (the Chinese say 300,000) of Chinese soldiers and civilians, many of them refugees from other towns, were killed. And thousands of women between the ages of about nine and seventy-five were raped, mutilated, and often murdered.
  • Was it a deliberate policy to terrorize the Chinese into submission? The complicity of the officers suggests there was something to this. But it might also have been a kind of payoff to the Japanese troops for slogging through China in the freezing winter without decent pay or rations. Or was it largely a matter of a peasant army running out of control? Or just the inevitable consequence of war, as many Japanese maintain?
  • inevitable cruelty of war. An atrocity is a willful act of criminal brutality, an act that violates the law as well as any code of human decency. It isn’t that the Japanese lack such codes or are morally incapable of grasping the concept. But “atrocity,” like “human rights,” is part of a modern terminology which came from the West, along with “feminism,” say, or “war crimes.” To right-wing nationalists it has a leftist ring, something subversive, something almost anti-Japanese.
  • During the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, Nanking had the same resonance as Auschwitz had in Nuremberg. And being a symbol, the Nanking Massacre is as vulnerable to mythology and manipulation as Auschwitz and Hiroshima.
  • Mori’s attitude also raises doubts about Ruth Benedict’s distinction between Christian “guilt culture” and Confucian “shame culture.”
  • In her opinion, a “society that inculcates absolute standards of morality and relies on man’s developing a conscience is a guilt culture by definition …” But in “a culture where shame is a major sanction, people are chagrined about acts which we expect people to feel guilty about.” However, this “chagrin cannot be relieved, as guilt can be, by confession and atonement …”
  • memory was admitted at all, the Mitscherlichs wrote about Germans in the 1950s, “it was only in order to balance one’s own guilt against that of others. Many horrors had been unavoidable, it was claimed, because they had been dictated by crimes committed by the adversary.” This was precisely what many Japanese claimed, and still do claim. And it is why Mori insists on making his pupils view the past from the perspective of the aggressors.
  • Two young Japanese officers, Lieutenant N. and Lieutenant M., were on their way to Nanking and decided to test their swordsmanship: the first to cut off one hundred Chinese heads would be the winner. And thus they slashed their way through Chinese ranks, taking scalps in true samurai style. Lieutenant M. got 106, and Lieutenant N. bagged 105.
  • The story made a snappy headline in a major Tokyo newspaper: “Who Will Get There First! Two Lieutenants Already Claimed 80.” In the Nanking museum is a newspaper photograph of the two friends, glowing with youthful high spirits. Lieutenant N. boasted in the report that he had cut the necks off 56 men without even denting the blade of his ancestral sword.
  • I was told by a Japanese veteran who had fought in Nanking that such stories were commonly made up or at least exaggerated by Japanese reporters, who were ordered to entertain the home front with tales of heroism.
  • Honda Katsuichi, a famous Asahi Shimbun reporter, was told the story in Nanking. He wrote it up in a series of articles, later collected in a book entitled A Journey to China, published in 1981.
  • the whole thing developed into the Nankin Ronso, or Nanking Debate. In 1984, an anti-Honda book came out, by Tanaka Masaaki, entitled The Fabrication of the “Nanking Massacre.”
  • back in Japan, Lieutenant M. began to revise his story. Speaking at his old high school, he said that in fact he had beheaded only four or five men in actual combat. As for the rest … “After we occupied the city, I stood facing a ditch, and told the Chinese prisoners to step forward. Since Chinese soldiers are stupid, they shuffled over to the ditch, one by one, and I cleanly cut off their heads.”
  • The nationalist intellectuals are called goyo gakusha by their critics. It is a difficult term to translate, but the implied meaning is “official scholars,” who do the government’s bidding.
  • the debate on the Japanese war is conducted almost entirely outside Japanese universities, by journalists, amateur historians, political columnists, civil rights activists, and so forth. This means that the zanier theories of the likes of Tanaka…
  • The other reason was that modern history was not considered academically respectable. It was too fluid, too political, too controversial. Until 1955, there was not one modern historian on the staff of Tokyo University. History stopped around the middle of the nineteenth century. And even now, modern…
  • In any case, so the argument invariably ends, Hiroshima, having been planned in cold blood, was a far worse crime. “Unlike in Europe or China,” writes Tanaka, “you won’t find one instance of planned, systematic murder in the entire history of Japan.” This is because the Japanese…
  • One reason is that there are very few modern historians in Japan. Until the end of the war, it would have been dangerously subversive, even blasphemous, for a critical scholar to write about modern…
  • they have considerable influence on public opinion, as television commentators, lecturers, and contributors to popular magazines. Virtually none of them are professional historians.
  • Tanaka and others have pointed out that it is physically impossible for one man to cut off a hundred heads with one blade, and that for the same reason Japanese troops could never have…
  • Besides, wrote Tanaka, none of the Japanese newspapers reported any massacre at the time, so why did it suddenly come up…
  • He admits that a few innocent people got killed in the cross fire, but these deaths were incidental. Some soldiers were doubtless a bit rough, but…
  • even he defends an argument that all the apologists make too: “On the battlefield men face the ultimate extremes of human existence, life or death. Extreme conduct, although still ethically…
  • atrocities carried out far from the battlefield dangers and imperatives and according to a rational plan were acts of evil barbarism. The Auschwitz gas chambers of our ‘ally’ Germany and the atomic bombing of our…
  • The point that it was not systematic was made by leftist opponents of the official scholars too. The historian Ienaga Saburo, for example, wrote that the Nanking Massacre, whose scale and horror he does not deny, “may have been a reaction to the fierce Chinese resistance after the Shanghai fighting.” Ienaga’s…
  • The nationalist right takes the opposite view. To restore the true identity of Japan, the emperor must be reinstated as a religious head of state, and Article Nine must be revised to make Japan a legitimate military power again. For this reason, the Nanking Massacre, or any other example of extreme Japanese aggression, has to be ignored, softened, or denied.
  • the question remains whether the raping and killing of thousands of women, and the massacre of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of other unarmed people, in the course of six weeks, can still be called extreme conduct in the heat of battle. The question is pertinent, particularly when such extreme violence is justified by an ideology which teaches the aggressors that killing an inferior race is in accordance with the will of their divine emperor.
  • The politics behind the symbol are so divided and so deeply entrenched that it hinders a rational historical debate about what actually happened in 1937. The more one side insists on Japanese guilt, the more the other insists on denying it.
  • The Nanking Massacre, for leftists and many liberals too, is the main symbol of Japanese militarism, supported by the imperial (and imperialist) cult. Which is why it is a keystone of postwar pacifism. Article Nine of the constitution is necessary to avoid another Nanking Massacre.
  • The Japanese, he said, should see their history through their own eyes, for “if we rely on the information of aliens and alien countries, who use history for the sake of propaganda, then we are in danger of losing the sense of our own history.” Yet another variation of seeing history through the eyes of identity.
  • their emotions were often quite at odds with the idea of “shame culture” versus “guilt culture.” Even where the word for shame, hazukashii, was used, its meaning was impossible to distinguish from the Western notion of guilt.
  • wasn’t so bad in itself. But then they killed them. You see, rape was against military regulations, so we had to destroy the evidence. While the women were fucked, they were considered human, but when we killed them, they were just pigs. We felt no shame about it, no guilt. If we had, we couldn’t have done it.
  • “Whenever we would enter a village, the first thing we’d do was steal food, then we’d take the women and rape them, and finally we’d kill all the men, women, and children to make sure they couldn’t slip away and tell the Chinese troops where we were. Otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to sleep at night.”
  • Clearly, then, the Nanking Massacre had been the culmination of countless massacres on a smaller scale. But it had been mass murder without a genocidal ideology. It was barbaric, but to Azuma and his comrades, barbarism was part of war.
  • “Sexual desire is human,” he said. “Since I suffered from a venereal disease, I never actually did it with Chinese women. But I did peep at their private parts. We’d always order them to drop their trousers. They never wore any underwear, you know. But the others did it with any woman that crossed our path.
  • He did have friends, however, who took part in the killings. One of them, Masuda Rokusuke, killed five hundred men by the Yangtze River with his machine gun. Azuma visited his friend in the hospital just before he died in the late 1980s. Masuda was worried about going to hell. Azuma tried to reassure him that he was only following orders. But Masuda remained convinced that he was going to hell.
  • “One of the worst moments I can remember was the killing of an old man and his grandson. The child was bayoneted and the grandfather started to suck the boy’s blood, as though to conserve his grandson’s life a bit longer. We watched a while and then killed both. Again, I felt no guilt, but I was bothered by this kind of thing. I felt confused. So I decided to keep a diary. I thought it might help me think straight.”
  • What about his old comrades? I asked. How did they discuss the war? “Oh,” said Azuma, “we wouldn’t talk about it much. When we did, it was to justify it. The Chinese resisted us, so we had to do what we did, and so on. None of us felt any remorse. And I include myself.”
  • got more and more agitated. “They turned the emperor into a living god, a false idol, like the Ayatollah in Iran or like Kim II Sung. Because we believed in the divine emperor, we were prepared to do anything, anything at all, kill, rape, anything. But I know he fucked his wife every night, just like we do …” He paused and lowered his voice. “But you know we cannot say this in Japan, even today. It is impossible in this country to tell the truth.”
  • My first instinct was to applaud West German education. Things had come a long way since 1968. There had been no school classes at Nuremberg, or even at the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt from 1963 till 1965. Good for the teacher, I thought. Let them hear what was done. But I began to have doubts.
  • Just as belief belongs in church, surely history education belongs in school. When the court of law is used for history lessons, then the risk of show trials cannot be far off. It may be that show trials can be good politics—though I have my doubts about this too. But good politics don’t necessarily serve the truth.
  • There is a story about the young Richard when he was in Nuremberg at the time of the war crimes trials. He is said to have turned to a friend and to have remarked, in his best Wehrmacht officer style, that they should storm the court and release the prisoners. The friend, rather astonished, asked why on earth they should do such a thing. “So that we can try them ourselves” was Weiszäcker’s alleged response.
  • There was also concern that international law might not apply to many of the alleged crimes. If revenge was the point, why drag the law into it? Why not take a political decision to punish? This was what Becker, in his office, called the Italian solution: “You kill as many people as you can in the first six weeks, and then you forget about it: not very legal, but for the purposes of purification, well …”
  • Becker was not against holding trials as such. But he believed that existing German laws should have been applied, instead of retroactive laws about crimes against peace (preparing, planning, or waging an aggressive war).
  • It was to avoid a travesty of the legal process that the British had been in favor of simply executing the Nazi leaders without a trial. The British were afraid that a long trial might change public opinion. The trial, in the words of one British diplomat, might be seen as a “put-up job.”
  • The question is how to achieve justice without distorting the law, and how to stage a trial by victors over the vanquished without distorting history. A possibility would have been to make victors’ justice explicit, by letting military courts try the former enemies.
  • This would have avoided much hypocrisy and done less damage to the due process of law in civilian life. But if the intention was to teach Germans a history lesson, a military court would have run into the same problems as a civilian one.
  • Due process or revenge. This problem had preoccupied the ancient Greek tragedians. To break the cycle of vendetta, Orestes had to be tried by the Athens court for the murder of his mother. Without a formal trial, the vengeful Furies would continue to haunt the living.
  • The aspect of revenge might have been avoided had the trial been held by German judges. There was a precedent for this, but it was not a happy one. German courts had been allowed to try alleged war criminals after World War I. Despite strong evidence against them, virtually all were acquitted, and the foreign delegates were abused by local mobs. Besides, Wetzka was right: German judges had collaborated with the Nazi regime; they could hardly be expected to be impartial. So it was left to the victors to see that justice was done.
  • When the American chief prosecutor in Nuremberg, Robert H. Jackson, was asked by the British judge, Lord Justice Lawrence, what he thought the purpose of the trials should be, Jackson answered that they were to prove to the world that the German conduct of the war had been unjustified and illegal, and to demonstrate to the German people that this conduct deserved severe punishment and to prepare them for
  • What becomes clear from this kind of language is that law, politics, and religion became confused: Nuremberg became a morality play, in which Göring, Kaltenbrunner, Keitel, and the others were cast in the leading roles. It was a play that claimed to deliver justice, truth, and the defeat of evil.
  • The Nuremberg trials were to be a history lesson, then, as well as a symbolic punishment of the German people—a moral history lesson cloaked in all the ceremonial trappings of due legal process. They were the closest that man, or at least the men belonging to the victorious powers, could come to dispensing divine justice. This was certainly the way some German writers felt about it. Some welcomed it
  • We now have this law on our books, the prosecutor said: “It will be used against the German aggressor this time. But the four powers, who are conducting this trial in the name of twenty-three nations, know this law and declare: Tomorrow we shall be judged before history by the same yardstick by which we judge these defendants today.”
  • “We had seen through the amorality of the Nazis, and wanted to rid ourselves of it. It was from the moral seriousness of the American prosecution that we wished to learn sensible political thinking. “And we did learn. “And we allowed ourselves to apply this thinking to the present time. For example, we will use it now to take quite literally the morality of those American prosecutors. Oradour and Lidice—today they are cities in South Vietnam” (Italics in the original text.)
  • The play ends with a statement by the American prosecutor on crimes against peace
  • (It was decided in 1979, after the shock of the Holocaust TV series, to abolish the statute of limitations for crimes against humanity.)
  • after Nuremberg, most Germans were tired of war crimes. And until the mid-1950s German courts were permitted to deal only with crimes committed by Germans against other Germans. It took the bracing example of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem to jolt German complacency—that, and the fact that crimes committed before 1946 would no longer be subject to prosecution after 1965.
  • Trying the vanquished for conventional war crimes was never convincing, since the victors could be accused of the same. Tu quoque could be invoked, in private if not in the Nuremberg court, when memories of Dresden and Soviet atrocities were still fresh. But Auschwitz had no equivalent. That was part of another war, or, better, it was not really a war at all; it was mass murder pure and simple, not for reasons of strategy or tactics, but of ideology alone.
  • Whether you are a conservative who wants Germany to be a “normal” nation or a liberal/leftist engaging in the “labor of mourning,” the key event of World War II is Auschwitz, not the Blitzkrieg, not Dresden, not even the war on the eastern front. This was the one history lesson of Nuremberg that stuck. As Hellmut Becker said, despite his skepticism about Nuremberg: “It was most important that the German population realized that crimes against humanity had taken place and that during the trials it became clear how they had taken place.”
  • In his famous essay on German guilt, Die Schuldfrage (The Question of German Guilt), written in 1946, Karl Jaspers distinguished four categories of guilt: criminal guilt, for breaking the law; political guilt, for being part of a criminal political system; moral guilt, for personal acts of criminal behavior; and metaphysical guilt, for failing in one’s responsibility to maintain the standards of civilized humanity. Obviously these categories overlap.
  • The great advantage, in his view, of a war crimes trial was its limitation. By allowing the accused to defend themselves with arguments, by laying down the rules of due process, the victors limited their own powers.
  • In any event, the trial distanced the German people even further from their former leaders. It was a comfortable distance, and few people had any desire to bridge it. This might be why the Nazi leaders are hardly ever featured in German plays, films, or novels.
  • And: “For us Germans this trial has the advantage that it distinguishes between the particular crimes of the leaders and that it does not condemn the Germans collectively.”
  • Serious conservative intellectuals, such as Hermann Lübbe, argued that too many accusations would have blocked West Germany’s way to becoming a stable, prosperous society. Not that Lübbe was an apologist for the Third Reich. Far from it: the legitimacy of the Federal Republic, in his opinion, lay in its complete rejection of the Nazi state.
  • their reaction was often one of indignation. “Why me?” they would say. “I just did my duty. I just followed orders like every decent German. Why must I be punished?”
  • “that these criminals were so like all of us at any point between 1918 and 1945 that we were interchangeable, and that particular circumstances caused them to take a different course, which resulted in this trial, these matters could not be properly discussed in the courtroom.” The terrible acts of individuals are lifted from their historical context. History is reduced to criminal pathology and legal argument.
  • they will not do as history lessons, nor do they bring us closer to that elusive thing that Walser seeks, a German identity.
  • The GDR had its own ways of using courts of law to deal with the Nazi past. They were in many respects the opposite of West German ways. The targets tended to be the very people that West German justice had ignored.
  • Thorough purges took place in the judiciary, the bureaucracy, and industry. About 200,000 people—four-fifths of the Nazi judges and prosecutors—lost their jobs. War crimes trials were held too; until 1947 by the Soviets, after that in German courts.
  • There were two more before 1957, and none after that. All in all, about 30,000 people had been tried and 500 executed. In the Federal Republic the number was about 91,000, and none were executed, as the death penalty was abolished by the 1949 constitution.
  • East German methods were both ruthless and expedient, and the official conclusion to the process was that the GDR no longer had to bear the burden of guilt. As state propaganda ceaselessly pointed out, the guilty were all in the West. There the fascists still sat as judges and ran the industries that produced the economic boom, the Wirtschaftswunder.
  • society. Although some of his critics, mostly on the old left, in both former Germanys, called him a grand inquisitor, few doubted the pastor’s good intentions. His arguments for trials were moral, judicial, and historical. He set out his views in a book entitled The Stasi Documents. Echoes of an earlier past rang through almost every page. “We can
  • Germany of the guilty, the people who felt betroffen by their own “inability to mourn,” the nation that staged the Auschwitz and Majdanek trials, that Germany was now said to stand in judgment over the other Germany—the Germany of the old antifascists, the Germany that had suffered under two dictatorships, the Germany of uniformed marches, goose-stepping drills, and a secret police network, vast beyond even the Gestapo’s dreams.
  • It is almost a form of subversion to defend a person who stands accused in court. So the idea of holding political and military leaders legally accountable for their actions was even stranger in Japan than it was in Germany. And yet, the shadows thrown by the Tokyo trial have been longer and darker in Japan than those of the Nuremberg trial in Germany.
  • never was—unlike, say, the railway station or the government ministry—a central institution of the modern Japanese state. The law was not a means to protect the people from arbitrary rule; it was, rather, a way for the state to exercise more control over the people. Even today, there are relatively few lawyers in Japan.
  • Japanese school textbooks are the product of so many compromises that they hardly reflect any opinion at all. As with all controversial matters in Japan, the more painful, the less said. In a standard history textbook for middle school students, published in the 1980s, mention of the Tokyo trial takes up less than half a page. All it says is that the trial…
  • As long as the British and the Americans continued to be oppressors in Asia, wrote a revisionist historian named Hasegawa Michiko, who was born in 1945, “confrontation with Japan was inevitable. We did not fight for Japan alone. Our aim was to fight a Greater East Asia War. For this reason the war between Japan and China and Japan’s oppression of…
  • West German textbooks describe the Nuremberg trial in far more detail. And they make a clear distinction between the retroactive law on crimes against peace and the…
  • Nationalist revisionists talk about “the Tokyo Trial View of History,” as though the conclusions of the tribunal had been nothing but rabid anti-Japanese propaganda. The tribunal has been called a lynch mob, and Japanese leftists are blamed for undermining the morale of generations of Japanese by passing on the Tokyo Trial View of History in school textbooks and liberal publications. The Tokyo Trial…
  • When Hellmut Becker said that few Germans wished to criticize the procedures of the Nuremberg trial because the criminality of the defendants was so plain to see, he was talking about crimes against humanity—more precisely, about the Holocaust. And it was…
  • The knowledge compiled by the doctors of Unit 731—of freezing experiments, injection of deadly diseases, vivisections, among other things—was considered so valuable by the Americans in 1945 that the doctors…
  • those aspects of the war that were most revolting and furthest removed from actual combat, such as the medical experiments on human guinea pigs (known as “logs”) carried out by Unit 731 in…
  • There never were any Japanese war crimes trials, nor is there a Japanese Ludwigsburg. This is partly because there was no exact equivalent of the Holocaust. Even though the behavior of Japanese troops was often barbarous, and the psychological consequences of State Shinto and emperor worship were frequently as hysterical as Nazism, Japanese atrocities were part of a…
  • This difference between (West) German and Japanese textbooks is not just a matter of detail; it shows a gap in perception. To the Japanese, crimes against humanity are not associated with an equivalent to the…
  • on what grounds would Japanese courts have prosecuted their own former leaders? Hata’s answer: “For starting a war which they knew they would lose.” Hata used the example of General Galtieri and his colleagues in Argentina after losing the Falklands War. In short, they would have been tried for losing the war, and the intense suffering they inflicted on their own people. This is as though German courts in 1918 had put General Hindenburg or General Ludendorff on trial.
  • it shows yet again the fundamental difference between the Japanese war, in memory and, I should say, in fact, and the German experience. The Germans fought a war too, but the one for which they tried their own people, the Bogers and the Schwammbergers, was a war they could not lose, unless defeat meant that some of the enemies survived.
  • Just as German leftists did in the case of Nuremberg, Kobayashi used the trial to turn the tables against the judges. But not necessarily to mitigate Japanese guilt. Rather, it was his intention to show how the victors had betrayed the pacifism they themselves had imposed on Japan.
  • the Japanese left has a different view of the Tokyo trial than the revisionist right. It is comparable to the way the German left looks upon Nuremberg. This was perfectly, if somewhat long-windedly, expressed in Kobayashi Masaki’s documentary film Tokyo Trial, released in 1983. Kobayashi is anything but an apologist for the Japanese war. His most famous film, The Human Condition, released in 1959, took a highly critical view of the war.
  • Yoshimoto’s memory was both fair and devastating, for it pointed straight at the reason for the trial’s failure. The rigging of a political trial—the “absurd ritual”—undermined the value of that European idea of law.
  • Yoshimoto went on to say something no revisionist would ever mention: “I also remember my fresh sense of wonder at this first encounter with the European idea of law, which was so different from the summary justice in our Asiatic courts. Instead of getting your head chopped off without a proper trial, the accused were able to defend themselves, and the careful judgment appeared to follow a public procedure.”
  • Yoshimoto Takaaki, philosopher of the 1960s New Left. Yet he wrote in 1986 that “from our point of view as contemporaries and witnesses, the trial was partly plotted from the very start. It was an absurd ritual before slaughtering the sacrificial lamb.”
  • This, from all accounts, was the way it looked to most Japanese, even if they had little sympathy for most of the “lambs.” In 1948, after three years of American occupation censorship and boosterism, people listened to the radio broadcast of the verdicts with a sad but fatalist shrug: this is what you can expect when you lose the war.
  • Some of the information even surprised the defendants. General Itagaki Seishiro, a particularly ruthless figure, who was in command of prison camps in Southeast Asia and whose troops had massacred countless Chinese civilians, wrote in his diary: “I am learning of matters I had not known and recalling things I had forgotten.”
  • hindsight, one can only conclude that instead of helping the Japanese to understand and accept their past, the trial left them with an attitude of cynicism and resentment.
  • After it was over, the Nippon Times pointed out the flaws of the trial, but added that “the Japanese people must ponder over why it is that there has been such a discrepancy between what they thought and what the rest of the world accepted almost as common knowledge. This is at the root of the tragedy which Japan brought upon herself.”
  • Political trials produce politicized histories. This is what the revisionists mean when they talk about the Tokyo Trial View of History. And they are right, even if their own conclusions are not.
  • Frederick Mignone, one of the prosecutors, said a trifle histrionically that “in Japan and in the Orient in general, the trial is one of the most important phases of the occupation. It has received wide coverage in the Japanese press and revealed for the first time to millions of Japanese the scheming, duplicity, and insatiable desire for power of her entrenched militaristic leaders, writing a much-needed history of events which otherwise would not have been written.” It was indeed much-needed, since so little was known.
  • The president of the Tokyo tribunal, Sir William Webb, thought “the crimes of the German accused were far more heinous, varied and extensive than those of the Japanese accused.” Put in another way, nearly all the defendants at Nuremberg, convicted of crimes against peace, were also found guilty of crimes against humanity. But half the Japanese defendants received life sentences for political crimes only.
  • the question of responsibility is always a tricky affair in Japan, where formal responsibility is easier to identify than actual guilt. Not only were there many men, such as the hero of Kinoshita’s play, who took the blame for what their superiors had done—a common practice in Japan, in criminal gangs as well as in politics or business corporations—but the men at the top were often not at all in control of their unscrupulous subordinates.
  • “These men were not the hoodlums who were the powerful part of the group which stood before the tribunal at Nuremberg, dregs of a criminal environment, thoroughly schooled in the ways of crime and knowing no other methods but those of crime. These men were supposed to be the elite of the nation, the honest and trusted leaders to whom the fate of the nation had been confidently entrusted
  • many people were wrongly accused of the wrong things for the wrong reasons. This is why there was such sympathy in Japan for the men branded by foreigners as war criminals, particularly the so-called Class B and Class C criminals, the men who followed orders, or gave them at a lower level: field commanders, camp guards, and so on.
  • “The Japanese people are of the opinion that the actual goal of the war crimes tribunals was never realized, since the judgments were reached by the victors alone and had the character of revenge. The [Japanese] war criminal is not conscious of having committed a crime, for he regards his deeds as acts of war, committed out of patriotism.”
  • Yamashita Tomoyuki. Terrible atrocities were committed under his command in the Philippines. The sacking of Manila in 1945 was about as brutal as the Nanking Massacre. So to depict him in the movie as a peaceful gentleman, while portraying the American prosecutor in Manila as one of the main villains, might seem an odd way to view the past.
  • The Shrine ranks highest. It is the supreme symbol of authority, shouldered (like a shrine on festival days) by the Officials.
  • The political theorist Maruyama Masao called the prewar Japanese government a “system of irresponsibilities.” He identified three types of political personalities: the portable Shrine, the Official, and the Outlaw.
  • those who carry it, the Officials, are the ones with actual power. But the Officials—bureaucrats, politicians, admirals and generals—are often manipulated by the lowest-ranking Outlaws, the military mavericks, the hotheaded officers in the field, the mad nationalists, and other agents of violence.
  • But it was not entirely wrong, for the trial was rigged. Yamashita had no doubt been a tough soldier, but in this case he had been so far removed from the troops who ran amok in Manila that he could hardly have known what was going on. Yet the American prosecutor openly talked about his desire to hang “Japs.”
  • When the system spins out of control, as it did during the 1930s, events are forced by violent Outlaws, reacted to by nervous Officials, and justified by the sacred status of the Shrines.
  • Here we come to the nub of the problem, which the Tokyo trial refused to deal with, the role of the Shrine in whose name every single war crime was committed, Emperor Hirohito,
  • The historian Ienaga Saburo tells a story about a Japanese schoolchild in the 1930s who was squeamish about having to dissect a live frog. The teacher rapped him hard on the head with his knuckles and said: “Why are you crying about one lousy frog? When you grow up you’ll have to kill a hundred, two hundred Chinks.”
  • the lethal consequences of the emperor-worshipping system of irresponsibilities did emerge during the Tokyo trial. The savagery of Japanese troops was legitimized, if not driven, by an ideology that did not include a Final Solution but was as racialist as Hitler’s National Socialism. The Japanese were the Asian Herrenvolk, descended from the gods.
  • A veteran of the war in China said in a television interview that he was able to kill Chinese without qualms only because he didn’t regard them as human.
  • For to keep the emperor in place (he could at least have been made to resign), Hirohito’s past had to be freed from any blemish; the symbol had to be, so to speak, cleansed from what had been done in its name.
  • The same was true of the Japanese imperial institution, no matter who sat on the throne, a ruthless war criminal or a gentle marine biologist.
  • the chaplain at Sugamo prison, questioned Japanese camp commandants about their reasons for mistreating POWs. This is how he summed up their answers: “They had a belief that any enemy of the emperor could not be right, so the more brutally they treated their prisoners, the more loyal to their emperor they were being.”
  • The Mitscherlichs described Hitler as “an object on which Germans depended, to which they transferred responsibility, and he was thus an internal object. As such, he represented and revived the ideas of omnipotence that we all cherish about ourselves from infancy.
  • The fear after 1945 was that without the emperor Japan would be impossible to govern. In fact, MacArthur behaved like a traditional Japanese strongman (and was admired for doing so by many Japanese), using the imperial symbol to enhance his own power. As a result, he hurt the chances of a working Japanese democracy and seriously distorted history.
  • Aristides George Lazarus, the defense counsel of one of the generals on trial, was asked to arrange that “the military defendants, and their witnesses, would go out of their way during their testimony to include the fact that Hirohito was only a benign presence when military actions or programs were discussed at meetings that, by protocol, he had to attend.” No doubt the other counsel were given similar instructions. Only once during the trial
Javier E

How policy decisions spawned today's hyperpolarized media - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ed-todays-hyperpolarized-media

media fairness bias partisan polarization culture politics industry tv

shared by Javier E on 18 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • it’s worth stepping back to remember that this is a recent development, and that the polarization of the media stems in large part from public policy decisions. Such polarization was not inevitable or in any way natural.
  • In the decades that followed World War II, the big three television networks dominated the news. Together with a few major metropolitan newspapers, they set the tone for the national conversation.
  • on virtually all these programs, journalists steered clear of a partisan perspective.
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  • Much of this approach was shaped by the Fairness Doctrine. A policy of the Federal Communications Commission beginning in 1949, the doctrine was based on the notion that the television networks were “public trustees.” Licensed by the federal government, they ought to serve the entire nation, the argument went, by airing competing perspectives on controversial issues. While the policy had been intended to foster a full and fair debate, in practice it led networks to avoid employing anchors or reporters with obvious biases and to play most issues down the middle.
  • Almost overnight, the media landscape was transformed. The driving force was talk radio. In 1960, there were only two all-talk radio stations in America; by 1995, there were 1,130. While television news on the old networks and the cable upstart CNN still adhered to the standard of objectivity, radio emerged as a wide-open landscape
  • In the 1980s, all of this changed. President Ronald Reagan believed the marketplace, not the government, was the best arbiter for competing viewpoints (and for much else).
  • Reagan’s FCC promptly killed it. The Democratic Congress tried to restore the doctrine, but Reagan vetoed the bill.
  • In the landmark Red Lion Broadcasting Co. Inc. v. FCC in 1969, the court ruled that the Fairness Doctrine was constitutional. Free speech, the justices held, was “the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters.” Therefore, the networks had to provide “ample play for the free and fair competition of opposing views.”
  • By 1995, conservatives accounted for roughly 70 percent of all talk-radio listeners
  • By 1994, he had an audience of 20 million Americans tuning in on some 650 stations. “What Rush realizes, and what a lot of listeners don’t,” an Atlanta station manager explained, “is that talk-radio programming is entertainment, it is not journalism.”
  • President George H.W. Bush courted the radio giant in the hope of winning over his right-wing listeners. In June 1992, the president invited Limbaugh to the White House for an overnight stay in the Lincoln Bedroom. In a telling detail, Bush insisted on carrying Limbaugh’s bag into the White House himself. In exchange for such self-abasement, Limbaugh threw his full support behind the president.
  • For conservatives, the success of their ideology on talk radio proved that their suspicions about the Fairness Doctrine had been right. Conservative voices had long been ignored in the mainstream media, they claimed, but now that the free market had been unchained, it was clear what the people wanted.
  • Rush Limbaugh emerged as a national conservative celebrity. With regular attacks on “commie-libs,” “feminazis” and “environmentalist wackos,” Limbaugh quickly cultivated a loyal audience of self-styled “Dittoheads.” Others in the industry took their cues from him. “I’m not sure where the business is going,” Bill O’Reilly told a friend in 1993. “But my gut says it’s going in the direction of Rush, and, man, I’m going to be there.”
  • The end of the Fairness Doctrine had drastically changed the standards of news.
  • cable television entrepreneurs realized that they, too, could thrive by providing the news from a partisan perspective. In 1996, Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News,
  • “Talk-radio shows started to go crazy” with coverage of Clinton’s misdeeds, NBC network president Bob Wright remembered. “We were not paying much attention to it at NBC News. And MSNBC wasn’t. CNN wasn’t. And what Fox did was say, ‘Gee, this is a way for us to distinguish ourselves. We’re going to grab this pent-up anger — shouting — that we’re seeing on talk radio and put it onto television.' ”
  • After 9/11, the network flourished as a full-throated supporter of the war on terrorism. In contrast to its rival CNN, which consciously framed its coverage for a diverse international audience, Fox News increasingly played to conservative viewers at home with nationalistic and populist themes.
  • “Am I slanted and biased?” Fox anchor Neil Cavuto once said in response to critics. “You damn well bet. … You say I wear my biases on my sleeve. Well, better that than pretend you have none, but show them clearly in your work."
  • nder Trump, the merger of the media giant and modern conservatism has been completed. Several of its hosts serve as informal advisers to the president, while some Fox-affiliated figures, such as former network executive Bill Shine and on-air host Heather Nauert, have taken formal roles in the Trump administration.
  • Liberals have had their news outlets, too, of course. Late in the Bush presidency, MSNBC became a left-leaning operation, and the liberal “blogosphere” flourished online
  • But liberals never replicated in scale or scope anything like Fox News or Limbaugh. In the end, none of the liberal outlets formed as cohesive a loyal alliance with the Democratic Party as conservative broadcasters did with the GOP.
  • And that fracturing and polarization can be traced, in large part, to the end of the Fairness Doctrine
  • Though some now seek to revive it, the doctrine is a relic of the past. Today’s communication landscape — including cable, social media and both traditional and satellite TV — is far too unruly for federal officials to regulate. Nor should they try.
  • Polls reveal that the public dislikes the form our media have taken and might be receptive to new models that push back against the partisan tide. If the public demands new models of information, including some that reflect the evenhandedness that ruled during the heyday of the Fairness Doctrine, we may yet see another media revolution.
Javier E

Trump thinks everyone breaks the rules. No wonder he does it, too. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-97e0-94d2e46e759b_story.html

trump rules cynicism values nihilism history crisis culture politics

shared by Javier E on 30 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • These appearances breached the boundary between the process of government and partisan politics, which past presidents seeking reelection have traditionally observed. They may also have broken the law. But, the White House made clear, that wasn’t a concern. “Nobody outside of the Beltway really cares,” Chief of Staff Mark Meadows told Politico.
  • The manic egregiousness of the convention was the natural expression of Trump’s attitude toward governance — an attitude that might be best summed up by the question, Who’s going to stop me? But on another level, it also insists, You’d do the same if you were me.
  • Trump’s political project, and the project of the 2020 Republican convention, lies not only in corroding norms but also in insisting that those norms never existed, that corruption and misbehavior have always been the way of things — and that anyone who says otherwise is, like Trump, a liar.
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  • Four years into Trump’s presidency, it’s impossible to catalogue a full list of all the norms and laws he has gleefully broken. But he has argued, again and again, that he’s not the only person to disregard these guardrails
  • This rhetoric is effective in getting Trump off the hook for his wrongdoing, at least insofar as it helps his allies justify their support. But it is also a manifestation of his inability to empathize, to understand that other people might hold different values — or any values at all. It is literally inconceivable to him that Obama and Holder might really have taken law enforcement independence seriously
  • This failure to fully conceptualize the existence of other minds may be a fundamentally Trumpian trait. But the resulting insistence on the ubiquity of corruption has also been fueled by a right-wing media ecosystem that focuses outsize attention on supposed violations of norms by those in the Democratic Party.
  • The same dynamic is at play in the obsession of Trump, and the right-wing media, with Hillary Clinton’s use of an unsecured private email server — which, for them, became such an iconic example of supposed corruption and impunity that it functioned as an effective rebuttal to more or less anything Trump did during the 2016 campaign.
  • s far as Trump is concerned, these scandals are evidence that everyone else is as corrupt as he is — so his own corruption and misbehavior are no big deal. 
  • And so Meadows insisted to Politico that the blurring of lines between government and campaign at the Republican National Convention was fine, because people “outside of the Beltway . . . expect that Donald Trump is going to promote Republican values and they would expect that Barack Obama, when he was in office, that he would do the same for Democrats.”
  • The Republican National Convention was a natural place to display this gleeful cynicism. It was a television spectacle, and television, as the novelist David Foster Wallace once argued, is a cynical medium. As Wallace explained, the television screen is a perfect canvas for displaying “sights that undercut what’s said”: Consider, for example, the spectacle of former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi speaking at the convention about the evils of nepotism, while the chyron below announced speeches that evening by Trump’s wife and two of his children. Yet, in Wallace’s view, the cynicism and irony of television tend to overpower any criticism.
  • This has always been Trump’s real skill: pulling everyone around him down into the current of his cynicism. To paraphrase Meadows, Trump’s 2020 campaign slogan might as well be, “Nobody cares.”
lilyrashkind

6 Everyday Inventions That Debuted at World's Fairs - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...worlds-fairs-inventions

inventions world history us

shared by lilyrashkind on 14 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • Emerging from the medieval tradition of agricultural and trade fairs, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, held in London in 1851, was the first international gathering of this kind, and widely considered the first World’s Fair.
  • Throughout the rest of the 19th century, countries and companies used World’s Fairs as opportunities to make fairgoers from rapidly industrializing nations more comfortable with and confident in manufactured goods. In some cases, companies even built fully functional small-scale versions of their factories as part of their exhibition.
  • But the highlight and most eagerly anticipated part of these World’s Fairs was the introduction of new technologies and inventions. This provided fairgoers the chance to see the latest products and developments ahead of the rest of the public, and gave countries, industrialists and inventors an international stage from which to showcase their achievements. And while many of these inventions never caught on (it turns out, there’s not much demand for cigarette-smoking robots), there are others that continue to be used on a daily basis. Here are six examples of everyday inventions that debuted at World’s Fairs.
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  • It’s easy to take the zipper for granted today, but before it was invented, getting (and staying) dressed involved securing clothing with ropes, ties, buttons or other fasteners.
  • After years of attempts, Bell achieved his goal of transmitting sound over a wire, and on March 7, 1876, obtained his first U.S. Patent for a device he labeled as “Improvement on Telegraphy”—now better known as the telephone.
  • The first World’s Fair to take place in the United States was held in Philadelphia in 1876, and also celebrated the 100th anniversary of the country’s founding.
  • Then, in 1893, inventor Whitcomb L. Judson received a patent for his “clasp locker” shoe fastener, and immediately partnered with businessman Colonel Lewis Walker to launch the Universal Fastener Company and manufacture his invention
  • Along with the zipper, the Garis-Cochran Dishwashing Machine was also first introduced to the public at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, in a display drawing crowds curious about the contraption capable of thoroughly washing and drying 240 dishes in two minutes. The crowd-pleasing exhibit was more than a decade in the making. In 1883, Ohio entrepreneur Josephine Garis Cochran grew frustrated with the amount of time it took to clean up after dinner parties, reportedly saying, “If nobody else is going to invent a dishwashing machine, I’ll do it myself.” And she did.
  • One of the biggest challenges that arose during the early days of electricity was getting it from the power source to an individual device. By the 1880s, entire houses were being wired for electricity, but electrical appliances had to be connected to the home’s main power source directly, posing serious safety risks to members of the household.
  • April 30, 1939, New York City: This is the scene viewed on the television receivers in the metropolitan area, as the National Broadcasting Company inaugurated the first regular television service to the American public telecasting the ceremonies marking the opening of the New York World's Fair. Bettmann via Getty Images
  • May 1, 1939 saw another television milestone: the launch of a regular television broadcast schedule on the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), which was owned by RCA.
  • Fairgoers could take what was advertised as “America’s first television tour” (presented by NBC), where they would learn about the history of the medium, as well as the science and engineering that made its broadcast possible.
  • In the age of smartphones, it’s easy to identify the touchscreen demonstration at the World’s Fair as a significant technological turning point, but according to Jack Neely, executive director of the Knoxville History Project and crowd controller at the World’s Fair, that wasn’t apparent at the time. “It was...one of those things you had to look fast to notice,” Neely told the University of Tennessee Daily Beacon in a 2017 interview.
rachelramirez

TV Critics Predicted the Rise of Donald Trump in 1960 - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...501230

donald trump politics US history

shared by rachelramirez on 23 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump Is a 1960s Technology Critic’s Worst Nightmare
  • “American Presidential campaigning will never be the same again.” This was the Milwaukee Journal’s response, in 1960, to an event that has since become the stuff of political legend.
  • Rarely are worst-case-scenario fears about emerging technologies realized. The written word certainly diminished the oral tradition, for example, but it didn’t dull human intellect as Socrates feared.
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  • . In one sprawling 1960 essay, published in the Times the day before Nixon and Kennedy took the stage, the writer and former White House aide Emmet John Hughes imagined two starkly different futures—one in which television would help democracy flourish and the other in which television would severely debase the nation’s political culture.
  • Optimists saw the potential for a visual banquet that would bring real intimacy between candidates and voters
  • Pessimists saw a future in which the substance of political discourse would be cheapened dramatically, and a world in which TV would displace more substantive forms of political communication
  • Broadcast media as a legitimizing force might, for instance, create the illusion that a candidate is more qualified than he really is.
  • “It invites, even demands, appeal to emotion rather than intellect. It commercializes, savagely hammering political discourses into capsule banalities to fit one-minute, thirty-second, ten-second ‘spots.’”
  • Just as technology critics feared it would, television helped corporatize American politics. It transformed the conventions into broadcast spectacles. It drove up the cost of campaigning and created the need for a new roster of advisors for candidates—bookers, handlers, media experts, and image consultants who then doubled as additional buffers between the candidate and the public.
  • By several measures, the quality of political discourse—as it plays out on Twitter and Facebook, for example—may be seen as worse than ever, another notch along a continuum of degradation that TV helped promote.
  • Many more will simultaneously track reaction, in real time, on social media—or opt to “watch” reaction by itself, without watching the debate at all. For half a century now, the American voter has turned to screens—televisions and now smartphones—to form political opinions.
Javier E

The Reconciliation Must Be Televised - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-moment-racism-tv.html

reconciliation BLM response

shared by Javier E on 30 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • This Moment of historic holding to account, of looking inward, deserves a commensurate, totalizing event that explains what is being reckoned with, demanded and hoped for, an experience that rubs between its fingers the earth upon which all those toppled monuments had so brazenly stood. The Moment warrants a depth of conversation the United States has never had. It demands truth and reconciliation.
  • In 1968, in the wake of the racial conflagrations roiling American cities during the mid- to late 1960s, Gov. Otto Kerner Jr. of Illinois presented the findings of his so-called riot commission, whose politically moderate and racially uniform makeup (two of its members were Black; there was one woman) was strategically cast for ho-hum results. What it delivered to President Lyndon B. Johnson was, instead, shockingly, comprehensively grim. The United States, the commission concluded, is a hopelessly divided nation that has locked its Black citizens in impoverishment and swallowed the key, that good white folks were out-to-lunch and therefore as culpable as the white supremacists were malignant.
  • When it was published as a book early in ’68, the report became a best seller. But it ought to have been part of a one-two punch. Part two should have been a televised, multipart presentation of the commission’s intensive effort: its conclusions, considerable field work and still-bracing historical contextualizing put before the public, alongside the disgruntled, despondent, enraged, hurt Black Americans whose circumstances swell the report. The country watched the cities burn but never met the human beings who lived in them.
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  • A truth and reconciliation event in 2020 would help make up for 150 years of missed opportunities. It should be broadcast live and streamed the way impeachments and inaugurations are; the way certain trials are. That would require more than just ABC’s audacity, however backhanded. It would need CBS’s, NBC’s and Fox’s; CNN’s, BET’s and the Weather Channel’s. It would demand the platforms of Netflix, HBO, Disney+, Hulu and Amazon. There would be no escaping this thing, since there is no escape in the daily lives of many Americans.
  • The production, however, is merely the second hurdle to clear. The first would be convincing executives that it’s worth doing in the first place. Here’s what to say about that: The entertainment industry itself has more than a century of harm to atone for and ameliorate. Any company that believes the solution to “systemic racism” is “The Help” shouldn’t mind a surrender of its airwaves.
  • Slavery, however, wouldn’t be the subject of this televised reckoning. Racism would. A crucial chunk of a truth and reconciliation broadcast would use the work of scholars and thinkers like Matthew Desmond, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Isabel Wilkerson and Richard Rothstein to enumerate the means by which the country has prospered from the theft of land and the strategic denial of housing.
  • This Moment didn’t come cheaply. It should not be squandered. It should be nationally witnessed and absorbed. Truth and reconciliation is a death and a birth, accordingly arduous, tense, procedural, affirming, painful. The outcome feels secondary to the process. The ritual is the benefit. The Moment demands that we summon the courage to put ourselves through it. At last.
Javier E

Xi Jinping's Favorite Television Shows - The Bulwark - 0 views

www.thebulwark.com/ings-favorite-television-shows

china propaganda TV culture politics history

shared by Javier E on 04 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • After several decades of getting it “right,” why does China now seem to insist on getting it “wrong?”
  • a single-party system meets with widespread, almost universal, scorn in the United States and elsewhere. And so, from the Western point of view, because it lacks legitimacy it must be kept in power via nationalist cheerleading, government media control, and a massive repressive apparatus.
  • Print
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  • What if a segment of the population actually supported, or at least tolerated, the CCP? And even if that segment involved both myth and fact, it behooves the CCP to keep the myth alive.
  • How does the CCP garner popular support in an information era? How does a dictatorship explain to its population that its unchallenged rule is wise, just, and socially beneficial?
  • All of this takes place against a backdrop of family and social developments in which we can explore household dynamics, dating habits, and professional aspirations—all within social norms for those honest party members and seemingly violated by those who are not so honest.
  • watch the television series Renmin de Mingyi (“In the Name of the People”), publicly available with English subtitles.
  • In the Name of the People is a primetime drama about a local prosecutor’s efforts to root out corruption in a modern-day, though fictional, Chinese city. Beyond the anti-corruption narrative, the series also goes into local CCP politics as some of the leaders are (you guessed it) corrupt and others are simply bureaucratic time-servers, guarding their own privileges and status without actually helping the people they purport to serve.
  • the series boasts one of Xi’s other main themes, “common prosperity,” a somewhat elastic term that usually means the benefits of prosperity should be shared throughout all segments of society.
  • The historical tools used to generate support such as mass rallies and large-scale hectoring no longer work with a more educated and communications-oriented citizenry.
  • the central themes are quite clear: The party has brought historical prosperity to the community and there are a few bad apples who are unfairly trying to benefit from this wealth. There are also various sluggards and mediocrities who have no capacity for improvement or sense of public responsibilities.
  • So we see government officials pondering if they can ever find a date (being the workaholics that they are), or discussing housework with their spouses, or sharing kitchen duties, or reviewing school work with their child.
  • The show makes clear that the vast majority of party members and government officials are dedicated souls who work to improve peoples’ lives. And in the end, virtue triumphs, the party triumphs, China triumphs, and most (not all) of the personal issues are resolved as well.
  • The show’s version of the CCP eagerly and uncynically supports Chinese culture: The same union leader from the wildcat strike also writes and publishes poetry. Calligraphy is as prized as specialty teas. And all of this is told in a lively style, similar to the Hollywood fare Americans might watch.
  • n the Name of the People was first broadcast in 2017 as a lead-up to the last Communist Party Congress, China’s most important decision-making gathering, held every five years. The show’s launch was a huge hit, achieving the highest broadcast ratings of any show in a decade.
  • Within a month, the first episode had been seen over 350 million times and just one of the streaming platforms, iQIYI, reported a total of 5.9 billion views for the show’s 55 episodes.
  • All of this must come as good news for the prosecutors featured so favorably in the series—for their real-life parent government body, the Supreme People’s Protectorate, commissioned and provided financing for the show.
  • At a minimum, these shows illustrate a stronger self-awareness in the CCP and considerable improvement in communication strategy.
  • Most important, it provides direction to current party members. Indeed, in some cities viewing was made obligatory and the basis for “study sessions” for party cadres
  • Second, the enormous public success of the series and acknowledging deficiencies of the party allows the party to control the criticism without ever addressing the fundamental question of whether a one-party system is intrinsically susceptible to corruption or poor performance.
  • As communication specialists like to say, There is already a conversation taking place about your brand—the only question is whether you will lead the conversation. The CCP is leading in its communications strategy and making it as easy as possible for Chinese citizens to support Xi.
  • it is not difficult to see that in this area, as in many others, China is breaking with tactics from the past and is playing its cards increasingly well. Whether the CCP can renew itself, reestablish that social contract, and live up to its television image is another question.
Javier E

A Handful of Accounts Create Most of What We See on Social Media - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...e-see-on-social-media-bdafa8f3

social media TV model media concentration

shared by Javier E on 18 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Social media is turning into old-fashioned network television.
  • A handful of accounts create most of the content that we see. Everyone else? They play the role of the audience, which is there to mostly amplify and applaud
  • The personal tidbits that people used to share on social media have been relegated to private group chats and their equivalent.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • The transformation of social media into mass media is largely because the rise of TikTok has demonstrated to every social-media company on the planet that people still really like things that can re-create the experience of TV
  • Advertisers also like things that function like TV, of course—after all, people are never more suggestible than when lulled into a sort of anesthetized mindlessness.
  • In this future, people who are good at making content with high production values will thrive, as audiences and tech company algorithms gravitate toward more professional content.
  • On these formerly-social platforms, whether content is coming from creators with better equipment and more skills, or Hollywood studios testing the waters, hardly matters. In the end, it will all look remarkably similar to the consumer.
  • It will look
  • like flipping through cable channels does, only our thumb on the remote has been replaced by our thumb on the screen of our phone, swiping from one TikTok, YouTube Short, or Instagram Reel to the next.
  • A telling indicator is the rise of a new kind of entertainment professional—the “creator.”
  • A creator is anyone who records or makes something that can go viral on the internet
  • TikTok is now more popular than Netflix among consumers younger than 35,
  • While YouTube and TikTok have always been about video, just about every other social-media platform that wants to keep people engaged is emphasizing it more than ever, so that’s what creators have to make,
  • His agency gets involved with creators and musicians at the earliest stages of their careers, helping them plan content, update their style, understand what the algorithms of different platforms demand, and connecting them with potentially lucrative brand deals
  • . Even more telling: In first place is YouTube, the original online TV analog.
  • Where attention flows, money—and content—must also. In 2023 brands will spend an estimated $6 billion on marketing through influencers—a subspecies of creators
  • Globally, the total addressable market for this kind of marketing is currently $250 billion
  • Then there is a new generation of shows that are going straight to TikTok, bypassing even streaming services
  • In the wake of the success of YouTube and TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and even LinkedIn are all pushing more and more content made by professionals into our feeds,
  • In order to quantify how TikTok has mastered the art of discerning our interests and feeding us the most compelling possible content, Faltesek, of Oregon State University, conducted a two-year project to study exactly what kind of content TikTok pushes
  • With a team of students, he created dozens of fresh TikTok user accounts that didn’t like or interact with content in any way—they just let the algorithm play one video after another.
  • At the end of this exhaustive process of gathering data on TikTok’s algorithm, the conclusion became obvious, says Faltesek. “TikTok is television. It flips channels like TV, it provides a flow like TV.”
  • By this logic, Instagram’s move to copy TikTok, which is in turn encroaching on the turf of YouTube by allowing longer videos, and the increasing dominance of professional content on all three, means they’re all turning into TV. Even Threads, the new offering from Facebook parent company Meta, is fast becoming a broadcast medium for news, as Twitter was before it.
  • In every case, the structure of social networks has become one in which a handful of accounts create most of the content that others see, and the role of everyone else on the network is, primarily, to amplify and consume that content,
  • Some, like Magana, believe we’ll eventually see an ever more complete blending of what were once “social” platforms with the traditional television networks and even film studios.  
  • aren’t convinced they’ll eat the rest of the entertainment industry. “It’s hard to say this kind of short-form video will be the only kind of TV,” she reflects. “A long time ago, the internet became the new thing, but we still have the other forms on television, and scripted streaming shows. It’s almost like this is just another avenue for that—of watching shows and movies on your phone.”
Javier E

How Netflix Is Deepening Our Cultural Echo Chambers - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ur-cultural-echo-chambers.html

echo chamber culture TV history

shared by Javier E on 11 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • The shows are separated by 40 years of technological advances — a progression from the over-the-air broadcast era in which Mr. Lear made it big, to the cable age of MTV and CNN and HBO, to, finally, the modern era of streaming services like Netflix. Each new technology allowed a leap forward in choice, flexibility and quality; the “Golden Age of TV” offers so much choice that some critics wonder if it’s become overwhelming.
  • It’s not just TV, either. Across the entertainment business, from music to movies to video games, technology has flooded us with a profusion of cultural choice.
  • offers a chance to reflect on what we have lost in embracing tech-abetted abundance. Last year’s presidential election and its aftermath were dominated by discussions of echo chambers and polarization; as I’ve argued before, we’re all splitting into our own self-constructed bubbles of reality.
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  • What’s less discussed is the polarization of culture, and the new echo chambers within which we hear about and experience today’s cultural hits
  • There’s just about nothing as popular today as old sitcoms were; the only bits of shared culture that come close are periodic sporting events, viral videos, memes and occasional paroxysms of political outrage (see Meryl Streep’s Golden Globes speech and the aftermath).
  • we’re returning to the cultural era that predated radio and TV, an era in which entertainment was fragmented and bespoke, and satisfying a niche was a greater economic imperative than entertaining the mainstream.
  • “We’re back to normal, in a way, because before there was broadcasting, there wasn’t much of a shared culture,
  • “For most of the history of civilization, there was nothing like TV. It was a really odd moment in history to have so many people watching the same thing at the same time.”
  • Because it featured little choice, TV offered something else: the raw material for a shared culture. Television was the thing just about everyone else was watching at the same time as you. In its enforced similitude, it became a kind of social glue, stitching together a new national identity across a vast, growing and otherwise diverse nation.
  • As the broadcast era morphed into one of cable and then streaming, TV was transformed from a wasteland into a bubbling sea of creativity. But it has become a sea in which everyone swims in smaller schools.
  • Only around 12 percent of television households, or about 14 million to 15 million people, regularly tuned into “NCIS” and “The Big Bang Theory,” the two most popular network shows of the 2015-16 season, according to Nielsen. Before 2000, those ratings would not even have qualified them as Top 10 shows
  • HBO’s “Game of Thrones” is the biggest prestige drama on cable, but its record-breaking finale drew only around nine million viewers
  • Netflix’s biggest original drama last year, “Stranger Things,” was seen by about 14 million adults in the month after it first aired. “Fuller House,” Netflix’s reboot of the broadcast sitcom “Full House,” attracted an audience of nearly 16 million. (These numbers are for the entire season, not for single episodes.)
  • For perspective, during much of the 1980s, a broadcast show that attracted 14 million to 16 million would have been in danger of cancellation.
  • As people pull back from broadcast and cable TV and jump deeper into streaming, we’re bound to see more shows with smaller audiences.
  • It’s possible we’re not at the end of the story. Some youngsters might argue that the internet has produced its own kind of culture, one that will become a fount of shared references for years to come. What if “Chewbacca Mom” and the blue and black/white and gold dress that broke the internet one day become part of our library of globally recognized references
Javier E

Excerpt: 'Shame' by Shelby Steele - ABC News - 0 views

abcnews.go.com/...excerpt-shame-by-shelby-steele

politics culture racism political correctness discourse liberalism culture war

shared by Javier E on 26 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • cable
  • since the 1960s, “liberal” and “conservative” have come to function almost like national identities in their own right. To be one or the other is not merely to lean left or right—toward “labor” or toward “business”— within a common national identity; it is to belong to a different vision of America altogether, a vision that seeks to supersede the opposing vision and to establish itself as the nation’s common identity. Today the Left and the Right don’t work within a shared understanding of the national purpose; nor do they seek such an understanding. Rather, each seeks to win out over the other and to define the nation by its own terms.
  • t was all the turmoil of the 1960s—the civil rights and women’s movements, Vietnam, the sexual revolution, and so on—that triggered this change by making it clear that America could not go back to being the country it had been before. It would have to reinvent itself. It would have to become a better country. Thus, the reinvention of America as a country shorn of its past sins became an unspoken, though extremely powerful, mandate in our national politics
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  • Liberals and conservatives could no longer think of themselves simply as political rivals competing within a common and settled American identity. That identity was no longer settled—or even legitimate—because it was stigmatized in the 1960s as racist, sexist, and imperialistic
  • It was no longer enough for the proponents of these perspectives merely to vie over the issues of the day. Both worldviews would now have to evolve into full-blown ideologies capable of projecting a new political and cultural vision of America.
  • This is how the mandate of the 1960s to reinvent America launched the infamous “culture war” between liberalism and conservatis
  • When we argue over health care or immigration or Middle East policy, it is as if two distinct Americas were arguing, each with a different idea of what it means to be an American. And these arguments are intense and often uncivil, because each side feels that its American identity is at risk from the other side. So the conflict is very much a culture war, with each side longing for “victory” over the other, and each side seeing itself as America’s last and best hope.
  • Since the 1960s, this war has divided up our culture into what might be called “identity territories.”
  • America’s universities are now almost exclusively left-leaning; most public-policy think tanks are right-leaning. Talk radio is conservative; National Public Radio and the major television networks are liberal. On cable television, almost every news and commentary channel is a recognizable identity territory—Fox/ right; MSNBC/left; CNN/left. In the print media our two great national newspapers are the liberal New York Times and the conservative Wall Street Journal (especially in the editorial pages). The Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur Grants are left; the Bradley Prize is right. The blogosphere is notoriously divided by political stripe. And then there are “red” and “blue” states, cities, towns, and even neighborhoods. At election time, Americans can see on television a graphic of their culture war: those blue and red electoral maps that give us a virtual topography of political identity.
  • cable
  • In the America envisioned by both ideologies, there is no racism or sexism or imperialism to be embarrassed by. After all, ideologies project idealized images of the near-perfect America that they promise to deliver. Thus, in one’s ideological identity, one can find the innocence that is no longer possible—since the 1960s—in America’s defamed national identity.
  • To announce oneself as a liberal or a conservative is like announcing oneself as a Frenchman or a Brit. It is virtually an announcement of tribal identity, and it means something much larger than ideology
  • Nationalism—the nationalist impulse—is passion itself; it is atavistic, beyond the reach of reason, a secular sacredness. The nationalist is expected to be intolerant of all opposition to his nation’s sovereignty, and is most often willing to defend that sovereignty with his life.
  • when we let nationalism shape the form of our liberal or conservative identities—when we practice our ideological leaning as if it were a divine right, an atavism to be defended at all cost—then we put ourselves on a warlike footing. We feel an impunity toward our opposition, and we grant ourselves a scorched-earth license to fight back.
  • yes, like my young nemesis, I could experience my ideology as a nationalism. But unlike him I wanted to discipline that impulse, to subject my ideology—and all the policies it fostered—to every sort of test of truth and effectiveness. And I was ready to modify accordingly, to disabuse myself of even long-held beliefs that didn’t pan out in reality
  • these disparities— and many others—most certainly had their genesis in centuries of racial oppression. But post-1960s liberalism conflates the past with the present: it argues that today’s racial disparities are caused by precisely the same white racism that caused them in the past—thus the poetic truth that blacks today remain stymied and victimized by white racism.
  • I had stated a hard fact: that since the 1960s, white racism had lost so much of its authority, power, and legitimacy that it was no longer, in itself, a prohibitive barrier to black advancement. Blacks have now risen to every level of American society, including the presidency. If you are black and you want to be a poet, or a doctor, or a corporate executive, or a movie star, there will surely be barriers to overcome, but white racism will be among the least of them. You will be far more likely to receive racial preferences than to suffer racial discrimination.
  • But past oppression cannot be conflated into present-day oppression. It is likely, for example, that today’s racial disparities are due more to dysfunctions within the black community, and—I would argue—to liberal social policies that have encouraged us to trade more on our past victimization than to overcome the damage done by that victimization through dint of our own pride and will
  • The young man at Aspen demanded to speak so that he could corral people back into a prescribed correctness and away from a more open-minded approach to the complex problems that our racial history has left us to deal with—problems that the former victims of this history will certainly bear the greatest responsibility for overcoming
  • there also comes a time when he must stop thinking of himself as a victim by acknowledging that—existentially—his fate is always in his own hands. One of the more pernicious cor- ruptions of post-1960s liberalism is that it undermined the spirit of self-help and individual responsibility in precisely the people it sought to uplif
  • he truth—that  blacks had now achieved a level of freedom comparable to that of all others
  • what was not true—that racism was still the greatest barrier to black advancement
  • Poetic truth—this assertion of a broad characteristic “truth” that invalidates actual truth—is contemporary liberalism’s greatest source of power. It is also liberalism’s most fundamental corruption.
  • the great trick of modern liberalism is to link its poetic truths (false as they may be) with innocence from all the great sins of America’s past—racism, sexism, imperial- ism, capitalist greed
  • if you want to be politically correct, if you want to be seen as someone who is cleansed of America’s past ugliness, you will go along with the poetic truth that racism is still a great barrier for blacks.
  • A distinction must be made. During and immediately after the 1960s, racism and sexism were still more literal truth than poetic truth. As we moved through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, America morally evolved so that these old American evils became more “poetic” than literal
  • Yet redeeming America from these evils has become liberalism’s rationale for demanding real power in the real world—the political and cultural power to create social programs, to socially engineer on a national scale, to expand welfare, to entrench group preferences in American institutions, and so on
  • what happens to liberal power when America actually earns considerable redemption—when there are more women than men in the nation’s medical schools, when a black can serve as the president, when public accommodations are open to anyone with the price of the ticket?
  • My young antagonist in Aspen was not agitated by some racial injustice. He would have only relished a bit of good old-fashioned racial injustice, since it would have justified his entire political identit
  • a divide like this suggests that America has in fact become two Americas, two political cultures forever locked in a “cold war” within a single society. This implies a spiritual schism within America itself, and, following from that, the prospect of perpetual and hopeless debate—the kind of ego-driven debate in which both sides want the other side to “think like us.
  • Today, liberal and conservative Americans are often contemptuous of each other with a passion that would more logically be reserved for foreign enemies.
  • Our national debate over foreign and domestic issues has come to be framed as much by poetic truths as by dispassionate assessments of the realities we face
  • the poetic truth that blacks are still held back from full equality by ongoing “structural” racism carries more authority than the objective truth: that today racism is not remotely the barrier to black advancement in American life that it once was.
  • In foreign affairs, the poetic truth that we Americans are essentially imperialistic cowboys bent on exploiting the world has more credibility than the obvious truth, which is that our wealth and power (accumulated over centuries of unprecedented innovation in a context of freedom) has often drawn us into the unwanted role of policing a turbulent world—and, it must be added, to the world’s immense benefit.
  • Today the actual facts fail to support the notion that racial victimization is a prevailing truth of American life. So today, a poetic truth, like “black victimization,” or the ongoing “repression of women,” or the systematic “abuse of the environment,” must be imposed on society not by fact and reason but by some regime of political correctness
  • Poetic license occurs when poets take a certain liberty with the conventional rules of grammar and syntax in order to achieve an effect. They break the rules in order to create a more beautiful or more powerful effect than would otherwise be possible. Adapting this idea of license and rule breaking to the realm of ideology, we might say that “poetic truth” disregards the actual truth in order to assert a larger essential truth that supports one’s ideological position
  • He could subscribe to “diversity,” “inclusiveness,” and “social justice” and think himself solidly on the side of the good. The problem is that these prescriptions only throw fuzzy and unattainable idealisms at profound problems
  • What is “diversity” beyond a vague apologia, an amorphous expression of goodwill that offers no objective assessment whatsoever of the actual problems that minority groups face?
  • The danger here is that the nation’s innocence— its redemption from past sins—becomes linked to a kind of know-nothingism
  • We can’t afford to know, for example, that America’s military might—a vulgarity in the minds of many—has stabilized vast stretches of Asia and Europe since World War II, so that nations under the umbrella of our power have become prosperous trading partners today
  • Today’s great divide comes from a shallowness of understanding. We don’t altogether know what to do with our history
  • many of our institutions are being held in thrall to the idea of moral intimidation as power. Try to get a job today as an unapologetic conservative in the average American university, or in the State Department, or on public radio.
  • We all know, to the point of cliché, what the solutions are: mutual respect, empathy, flexibility, compromise
  • We can’t admit today that the lives of minorities are no longer stunted by either prejudice or “white privilege.
  • hose who doubt this will always point to today’s long litany of racial disparities. Blacks are still behind virtually all other groups by the most important measures of social and economic well-being: educational achievement, home ownership, employment levels, academic test scores, marriage rates, household net worth, and so on. The fact that seven out of ten black women are single, along with the fact that 70 percent of first black marriages fail (47 percent for whites), means that black women are married at roughly half the rate of white women and divorced at twice the rate. Thus it is not surprising that nearly three-quarters of all black children are born out of wedlock. In 2008, black college students were three times more likely than whites to graduate with a grade point average below a meager 2.5—this on top of a graduation rate for blacks of only 42 percent, according to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. Consequently, blacks in general have the highest college dropout rate and the lowest grade point average of any student group in America
Javier E

The Content Cycle: Tucker Carlson and Rudolph the Reindeer - 0 views

nymag.com/...-and-rudolph-the-reindeer.html

content media social media social network cycle culture publishing

shared by Javier E on 01 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • The Content Cycle, a phrase I did not just come up with right now, describes how content arises from the internet, is absorbed into cable television, and then gets redistributed back into the internet for the cycle to begin anew.
  • Like the water cycle, the Content Cycle provides sustenance and habitation to a multitude of organisms, and in many ways it exists independently of human thought
  • Stage One: Raw Content. The content cycle almost always begins with content that is freely distributed on a large social network.
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  • Stage Two: Aggregation, the joking tweets were gathered by HuffPost for a post in its comedy section, whose different and possibly larger audience allowed the content to remain fresh as it progressed through the cycle.
  • Stage Three: Amplification.
  • In the amplification stage, the raw content (having been processed and decontextualized into a frictionless and shareable content unit in the aggregation stage) is presented to yet another, generally even larger audience — or several audiences — by an influencer or two
  • Stage Four: Cable News. This is where Tucker Carlson comes in. Having been alerted to the presence of usable content — now four stages removed from the original audience, context, and intent of the raw content — by influencers, cable producers can craft a segment for their audiences, which will most likely not have been exposed to this content at any prior stage in the cycle.
  • But an appearance on cable, while in some ways the climax of the content cycle, is not its end. It’s a cycle, after all! And what makes it more efficient than a simple teleological progression is that television is not an endpoint, but a way station, a place to generate and process content anew. This is Stage Five: Reabsorption, in which the content returns to social media.
  • Some people might complain that the Content Cycle is corrosive and demeaning — that it’s cynical and even fraudulent to strip minor joking tweets of any context and to present them to audiences for the sole intent of generating outsized emotional reactions. But you can begin to see from this description how vital the cycle is to our natural media environment. It sustains not just major cable hosts like Carlson, but also HuffPost bloggers; not just aggregation-happy media conglomerates like Verizon Media Group, but also vast social networks like Twitter
  • People like to discuss the ill effects of social media on misinformation, but the Content Cycle demonstrates the deep, almost biological connection between the megaplatforms of the internet and legacy media like television, in a complex ecosystem of aggregation, outrage, performance, and attention.
brookegoodman

The presidential race isn't on hold -- it's playing out right before us - CNNPolitics - 0 views

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

us politics crisis

shared by brookegoodman on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Washington (CNN)The campaign rallies are a distant memory. The final chapter of the primary calendar is awash in uncertainty. The summer political conventions are in doubt.
  • "It's hard not to be happy with the job we're doing, that I can tell you," Trump said Wednesday in the White House briefing room, where he stands before dinnertime most every night to deliver a rosy assessment of the crisis that seldom mentions the rising US death toll, overwhelmed hospitals and cries for help from doctors, nurses and local leaders.
  • It's an open question whether those early reviews represent more of a rallying effect, which presidents often experience during times of national emergency, or if the support will endure after the true scope of the deadly outbreak is fully known.
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  • Speaking from his home in Delaware, where aides built a basement television studio, Biden took pains not to overtly politicize the coronavirus spread. He even said he would welcome a strong approval rating for Trump, if it pushed the White House to provide needed assistance to cities and states.
  • His aides have rushed to adapt to the rapidly-changing environment, installing the television studio, launching a podcast and increasing his visibility -- all from his Delaware basement as he, like much of America, is working from home.
  • "People see 2016 as this crazy fluke, which it was in many ways," Mook said. "But that's missing the bigger point that Trump has a way of owning what we're talking about and grinding in a set of doubts about his opponent. He projects his greatest weaknesses on his opponent -- and I see that happening again."
  • "This is why it's so difficult to beat an incumbent president. Never underestimate the reach, the power and the strength of a Rose Garden strategy," said Rhoades, who also worked on President George W. Bush's reelection campaign in 2004. "I'd rather own the problem and be in charge and take action to fix it than be the person on the sidelines screaming fire."
  • The events of the coming weeks could shape the race for months to come, several Democratic strategists say, arguing the party cannot afford to cede this moment to Trump or allow Republicans to derisively define Biden while he is striving to put the crisis above politics.
  • A campaign once thought to be waged over the future of health care, economic fairness and America's place in the world is now revolving around something else: The administration's response to coronavirus and the economic collapse. How the nation recovers by November will be a key metric for voters.
  • While presidential campaigns often do not end on the same issues in which they began -- in 2008, for example, a campaign driven by opposition to the Iraq war ended on the economic crash -- it's almost certain the coronavirus outbreak will be a central issue in the 2020 race.
  • One of the biggest unknown factors, he said, is whether traditional campaigning will resume by summer or fall or if the candidates will turn to alternatives. A century ago, a handful of presidents relied on "front-porch campaigns," where they declined to do big rallies and won by simply staying close to the White House.
  • For now, the campaign is not playing out in critical battleground states across the country, but rather with Trump at his post in the White House briefing room and Biden settling into his television studio in the basement of his home, about 120 miles away in Delaware.
Javier E

How Trump?s attempts to win the daily news cycle feed a chaotic coronavirus response - ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-87da-77a8136c1a6d_story.html

daily trump cycle response pandemic

shared by Javier E on 04 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • But in Trump’s White House, certain symptoms remain: a president who governs as if producing and starring in a reality television show, with each day a new episode and each news cycle his own creation, a successive installment to be conquered.
  • Facing a global pandemic, Trump still seems to lurch from moment to moment, with his methods and messages each day disconnected from — and in some cases contradictory to — the ones just prior.
  • Trump has focused on his self-image — claiming credit wherever he believes it is owed, attempting to project strength and decisiveness, settling scores with critics, boasting about the ratings of his televised news conferences and striving to win the cable news and social media wars.
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  • Lapan added that it is important for the president to address the public about a topic as serious as the pandemic but said Trump should quickly “turn it over to the experts and leave, and not turn it into this stream of consciousness of every topic he wants to talk about and the adoration that seems to be required from everybody else who participates.”
  • “Trump is a sales guy, and it’s all about point of sale,” said Stuart Stevens, a longtime Republican operative and frequent Trump critic. “It’s not about repeat customers and follow-ups. He wants to get the sale — that’s it — he wants to sell you the undercoating for your car, and it’s not his problem if the car breaks driving off of the lot.”
  • Trump’s mind at times was elsewhere. A few hours before his news conference, he took to Twitter to brag about the high television ratings of his coronavirus updates, noting that they were on par with the season finale of “The Bachelor,” an ABC reality hit.
  • At day’s end, when Trump strode into the White House press briefing room to deliver a coronavirus update, he turned over the presidential lectern to an array of business executives, who alternately praised him and pitched their products.
  • The potpourri quality of Trump’s message to a nation in crisis that day was a stark contrast to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who as president during the Great Depression and World War II offered his reassurances in a series of fireside chats broadcast nationally — and he limited them to have maximum impact.
  • “He only delivered these fireside chats every couple of months, when there was an essential moment for the president to speak,”
  • “Someone said to him, ‘Why don’t you go on the radio every night? Your speeches are so effective.’ He said, ‘If my speeches become routine they will lose their effectiveness.’ And he said, ‘It takes me three or four days to work on a fireside chat — and I have to run the country, too.”
  • By Tuesday, Trump had finally come to acknowledge the sheer magnitude of the crisis.
  • the president and his medical experts offered a somber and grim projection: In a best-case scenario, and with strict abidance by social distancing, between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans would die of the coronavirus.
  • The worst-case scenario was even more horrifying: Without community mitigation measures, the models presented by the White House predict 1.5 million to 2.2 million Americans could die.
  • Lockhart said that Tuesday’s news conference was a concerted effort by the administration to “rewrite history,” after two months of Trump playing down the threat of the virus. He added that there appeared to be a political calculation as well: By revealing specific projected fatalities, Trump laid the groundwork to be able to claim victory ahead of November’s election if the death toll is substantially less than predicted.
  • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had developed new guidance to mitigate the coronavirus, recommending all Americans wear face masks, and as with many announcements by the federal government, Trump chose to unveil it himself.
  • But he risked diluting the effectiveness of the measure — designed to prevent asymptomatic carriers of the virus from spreading to others — by stressing it was voluntary and musing at Friday’s news conference that he wouldn’t be seen wearing a mask himself.
  • his vanity, it seemed, could not abide wearing a mask.Asked why he opposed covering his nose and mouth as the CDC recommends, Trump struggled to articulate his hesitation.“Somehow sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful Resolute Desk — the great Resolute Desk — I think wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens, I don’t know. Somehow, I don’t see it for myself.”
Javier E

America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny -- NYMag - 1 views

nymag.com/...rica-tyranny-donald-trump.html

democracy plato demagogue trump politics crisis fascism

shared by Javier E on 07 May 16 - No Cached
  • my mind keeps being tugged by a passage in Plato’s Republic.
  • Socrates seemed pretty clear on one sobering point: that “tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy.” What did Plato mean by that? Democracy, for him, I discovered, was a political system of maximal freedom and equality, where every lifestyle is allowed and public offices are filled by a lottery. And the longer a democracy lasted, Plato argued, the more democratic it would become.
  • Its freedoms would multiply; its equality spread. Deference to any sort of authority would wither; tolerance of any kind of inequality would come under intense threat; and multiculturalism and sexual freedom would create a city or a country like “a many-colored cloak decorated in all hues.”
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  • This rainbow-flag polity, Plato argues, is, for many people, the fairest of regimes. The freedom in that democracy has to be experienced to be believed — with shame and privilege in particular emerging over time as anathema. But it is inherently unstable. As the authority of elites fades, as Establishment values cede to popular ones, views and identities can become so magnificently diverse as to be mutually uncomprehendin
  • when all the barriers to equality, formal and informal, have been removed; when everyone is equal; when elites are despised and full license is established to do “whatever one wants,” you arrive at what might be called late-stage democracy
  • The very rich come under attack, as inequality becomes increasingly intolerable. Patriarchy is also dismantled: “We almost forgot to mention the extent of the law of equality and of freedom in the relations of women with men and men with women.” Family hierarchies are inverted: “A father habituates himself to be like his child and fear his sons, and a son habituates himself to be like his father and to have no shame before or fear of his parents.” In classrooms, “as the teacher ... is frightened of the pupils and fawns on them, so the students make light of their teachers.” Animals are regarded as equal to humans; the rich mingle freely with the poor in the streets and try to blend in. The foreigner is equal to the citizen.
  • when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment.
  • He is usually of the elite but has a nature in tune with the time — given over to random pleasures and whims, feasting on plenty of food and sex, and reveling in the nonjudgment that is democracy’s civil religion. He makes his move by “taking over a particularly obedient mob” and attacking his wealthy peers as corrupt
  • If not stopped quickly, his appetite for attacking the rich on behalf of the people swells further. He is a traitor to his class — and soon, his elite enemies, shorn of popular legitimacy, find a way to appease him or are forced to flee
  • Eventually, he stands alone, promising to cut through the paralysis of democratic incoherence. It’s as if he were offering the addled, distracted, and self-indulgent citizens a kind of relief from democracy’s endless choices and insecurities
  • He rides a backlash to excess—“too much freedom seems to change into nothing but too much slavery” — and offers himself as the personified answer to the internal conflicts of the democratic mess. He pledges, above all, to take on the increasingly despised elites. And as the people thrill to him as a kind of solution, a democracy willingly, even impetuously, repeals itself.
  • Part of American democracy’s stability is owed to the fact that the Founding Fathers had read their Plato. To guard our democracy from the tyranny of the majority and the passions of the mob, they constructed large, hefty barriers between the popular will and the exercise of power.
  • Over the centuries, however, many of these undemocratic rules have been weakened or abolished
  • The franchise has been extended far beyond propertied white men. The presidency is now effectively elected through popular vote, with the Electoral College almost always reflecting the national democratic will. And these formal democratic advances were accompanied by informal ones
  • Direct democracy didn’t just elect Congress and the president anymore; it expanded the notion of who might be qualified for public office. Once, candidates built a career through experience in elected or Cabinet positions or as military commanders; they were effectively selected by peer review. That elitist sorting mechanism has slowly imploded
  • further widening of our democracy — our increased openness to being led by anyone; indeed, our accelerating preference for outsiders — is now almost complete.
  • “It is usually those whose poverty is relatively recent, the ‘new poor,’ who throb with the ferment of frustration,”
  • Many contend, of course, that American democracy is actually in retreat, close to being destroyed by the vastly more unequal economy of the last quarter-century and the ability of the very rich to purchase political influence. This is Bernie Sanders’s core critique. But the past few presidential elections have demonstrated that, in fact, money from the ultrarich has been mostly a dud.
  • it is precisely because of the great accomplishments of our democracy that we should be vigilant about its specific, unique vulnerability: its susceptibility, in stressful times, to the appeal of a shameless demagogue.
  • What the 21st century added to this picture, it’s now blindingly obvious, was media democracy — in a truly revolutionary form. If late-stage political democracy has taken two centuries to ripen, the media equivalent took around two decades, swiftly erasing almost any elite moderation or control of our democratic discourse
  • The rise of the internet — an event so swift and pervasive its political effect is only now beginning to be understood — further democratized every source of information, dramatically expanded each outlet’s readership, and gave everyone a platform. All the old barriers to entry — the cost of print and paper and distribution — crumbled.
  • Political organizing — calling a meeting, fomenting a rally to advance a cause — used to be extremely laborious. Now you could bring together a virtual mass movement with a single webpage. It would take you a few seconds.
  • The web was also uniquely capable of absorbing other forms of media, conflating genres and categories in ways never seen before. The distinction between politics and entertainment became fuzzier; election coverage became even more modeled on sportscasting
  • The web’s algorithms all but removed any editorial judgment, and the effect soon had cable news abandoning even the pretense of asking “Is this relevant?” or “Do we really need to cover this live?” in the rush toward ratings bonanzas. In the end, all these categories were reduced to one thing: traffic, measured far more accurately than any other medium had ever done before
  • what mainly fuels this is precisely what the Founders feared about democratic culture: feeling, emotion, and narcissism, rather than reason, empiricism, and public-spiritedness
  • Online debates become personal, emotional, and irresolvable almost as soon as they begin
  • Godwin’s Law — it’s only a matter of time before a comments section brings up Hitler — is a reflection of the collapse of the reasoned deliberation the Founders saw as indispensable to a functioning republic.
  • Yes, occasional rational points still fly back and forth, but there are dramatically fewer elite arbiters to establish which of those points is actually true or valid or relevant. We have lost authoritative sources for even a common set of facts. And without such common empirical ground, the emotional component of politics becomes inflamed and reason retreats even further. The more emotive the candidate, the more supporters he or she will get.
  • The climate Obama thrived in, however, was also ripe for far less restrained opportunists. In 2008, Sarah Palin emerged as proof that an ardent Republican, branded as an outsider, tailor-made for reality TV, proud of her own ignorance about the world, and reaching an audience directly through online media, could also triumph in this new era. She was, it turned out, a John the Baptist for the true messiah of conservative populism, waiting patiently and strategically for his time to come.
  • Trump assiduously cultivated this image and took to reality television as a natural. Each week, for 14 seasons of The Apprentice, he would look someone in the eye and tell them, “You’re fired!” The conversation most humane bosses fear to have with an employee was something Trump clearly relished, and the cruelty became entertainment. In retrospect, it is clear he was training — both himself and his viewers. If you want to understand why a figure so widely disliked nonetheless powers toward the election as if he were approaching a reality-TV-show finale, look no further. His television tactics, as applied to presidential debates, wiped out rivals used to a different game. And all our reality-TV training has conditioned us to hope he’ll win — or at least stay in the game till the final round. In such a shame-free media environment, the assholes often win. In the end, you support them because they’re assholes.
  • The deeper, long-term reasons for today’s rage are not hard to find, although many of us elites have shamefully found ourselves able to ignore them. The jobs available to the working class no longer contain the kind of craftsmanship or satisfaction or meaning that can take the sting out of their low and stagnant wages. The once-familiar avenues for socialization — the church, the union hall, the VFW — have become less vibrant and social isolation more common. Global economic forces have pummeled blue-collar workers more relentlessly than almost any other segment of society, forcing them to compete against hundreds of millions of equally skilled workers throughout the planet. No one asked them in the 1990s if this was the future they wanted. And the impact has been more brutal than many economists predicted. No wonder suicide and mortality rates among the white working poor are spiking dramatically.
  • The barriers to the popular will, especially when it comes to choosing our president, are now almost nonexisten
  • Fundamentalist religion long provided some emotional support for those left behind (for one thing, it invites practitioners to defy the elites as unholy), but its influence has waned as modernity has penetrated almost everything and the great culture wars of the 1990s and 2000s have ended in a rout. The result has been a more diverse mainstream culture — but also, simultaneously, a subculture that is even more alienated and despised, and ever more infuriated and bloody-minded
  • It’s a period in which we have become far more aware of the historic injustices that still haunt African-Americans and yet we treat the desperate plight of today’s white working ­class as an afterthought. And so late-stage capitalism is creating a righteous, revolutionary anger that late-stage democracy has precious little ability to moderate or constrain — and has actually helped exacerbate.
  • For the white working class, having had their morals roundly mocked, their religion deemed primitive, and their economic prospects decimated, now find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk about reality, described as a kind of problem for the nation to overcome
  • Much of the newly energized left has come to see the white working class not as allies but primarily as bigots, misogynists, racists, and homophobes, thereby condemning those often at the near-bottom rung of the economy to the bottom rung of the culture as well.
  • Mass movements, Hoffer argues, are distinguished by a “facility for make-believe … credulity, a readiness to attempt the impossible.” What, one wonders, could be more impossible than suddenly vetting every single visitor to the U.S. for traces of Islamic belief? What could be more make-believe than a big, beautiful wall stretching across the entire Mexican border, paid for by the Mexican government? What could be more credulous than arguing that we could pay off our national debt through a global trade war?
  • In a conventional political party, and in a rational political discourse, such ideas would be laughed out of contention, their self-evident impossibility disqualifying them from serious consideration. In the emotional fervor of a democratic mass movement, however, these impossibilities become icons of hope, symbols of a new way of conducting politics. Their very impossibility is their appeal.
  • But the most powerful engine for such a movement — the thing that gets it off the ground, shapes and solidifies and entrenches it — is always the evocation of hatred. It is, as Hoffer put it, “the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying elements.”
  • what makes Trump uniquely dangerous in the history of American politics — with far broader national appeal than, say, Huey Long or George Wallace — is his response to all three enemies. It’s the threat of blunt coercion and dominance.
  • Fascism had, in some measure, an ideology and occasional coherence that Trump utterly lacks. But his movement is clearly fascistic in its demonization of foreigners, its hyping of a threat by a domestic minority (Muslims and Mexicans are the new Jews), its focus on a single supreme leader of what can only be called a cult, and its deep belief in violence and coercion in a democracy that has heretofore relied on debate and persuasion
  • what’s notable about Trump’s supporters is precisely what one would expect from members of a mass movement: their intense loyalty. Trump is their man, however inarticulate they are when explaining why. He’s tough, he’s real, and they’ve got his back, especially when he is attacked by all the people they have come to despise: liberal Democrats and traditional Republicans
  • Trump tells the crowd he’d like to punch a protester in the face or have him carried out on a stretcher. No modern politician who has come this close to the presidency has championed violence in this way. It would be disqualifying if our hyper­democracy hadn’t already abolished disqualifications.
  • Trump celebrates torture — the one true love of tyrants everywhere — not because it allegedly produces intelligence but because it has a demonstration effect.
  • Fuck political correctness. As one of his supporters told an obtuse reporter at a rally when asked if he supported Trump: “Hell yeah! He’s no-bullshit. All balls. Fuck you all balls. That’s what I’m about.” And therein lies the appeal of tyrants from the beginning of time. Fuck you all balls. Irrationality with muscle.
  • The racial aspect of this is also unmissable. When the enemy within is Mexican or Muslim, and your ranks are extremely white, you set up a rubric for a racial conflict. And what’s truly terrifying about Trump is that he does not seem to shrink from such a prospect; he relishes it.
  • “I’ve got to keep remembering … that Windrip is only the lightest cork on the whirlpool. He didn’t plot all this thing. With all the justified discontent there is against the smart politicians and the Plush Horses of Plutocracy — oh, if it hadn’t been one Windrip, it’d been another … We had it coming, we Respectables.”
  • Those who believe that Trump’s ugly, thuggish populism has no chance of ever making it to the White House seem to me to be missing this dynamic. Neo-fascist movements do not advance gradually by persuasion; they first transform the terms of the debate, create a new movement based on untrammeled emotion, take over existing institutions, and then ruthlessly exploit events.
  • I have no doubt, for example, that Trump is sincere in his desire to “cut the head off” ISIS, whatever that can possibly mean. But it remains a fact that the interests of ISIS and the Trump campaign are now perfectly aligned. Fear is always the would-be tyrant’s greatest ally.
  • His proposition is a simple one. Remember James Carville’s core question in the 1992 election: Change versus more of the same? That sentiment once elected Clinton’s husband; it could also elect her opponent this fall. If you like America as it is, vote Clinton
  • the more she campaigns, the higher her unfavorables go (including in her own party). She has a Gore problem. The idea of welcoming her into your living room for the next four years can seem, at times, positively masochistic
  • All Trump needs is a sliver of minority votes inspired by the new energy of his campaign and the alleged dominance of the Obama coalition could crac
  • like all tyrants, he is utterly lacking in self-control. Sleeping a handful of hours a night, impulsively tweeting in the early hours, improvising madly on subjects he knows nothing about, Trump rants and raves as he surfs an entirely reactive media landscape
  • And, 81 years later, many of us did. An American elite that has presided over massive and increasing public debt, that failed to prevent 9/11, that chose a disastrous war in the Middle East, that allowed financial markets to nearly destroy the global economy, and that is now so bitterly divided the Congress is effectively moot in a constitutional democracy: “We Respectables” deserve a comeuppance
  • The vital and valid lesson of the Trump phenomenon is that if the elites cannot govern by compromise, someone outside will eventually try to govern by popular passion and brute force.
  • But elites still matter in a democracy. They matter not because they are democracy’s enemy but because they provide the critical ingredient to save democracy from itself.
  • Democrats who are gleefully predicting a Clinton landslide in November need to both check their complacency and understand that the Trump question really isn’t a cause for partisan Schadenfreude anymore. It’s much more dangerous than that.
  • Those still backing the demagogue of the left, Bernie Sanders, might want to reflect that their critique of Clinton’s experience and expertise — and their facile conflation of that with corruption — is only playing into Trump’s hands
  • Republicans desperately trying to use the long-standing rules of their own nominating process to thwart this monster deserve our passionate suppor
  • e. They should resist any temptation to loyally back the nominee or to sit this election out. They must take the fight to Trump at every opportunity, unite with Democrats and Independents against him, and be prepared to sacrifice one election in order to save their party and their country.
  • Trump is not just a wacky politician of the far right, or a riveting television spectacle, or a Twitter phenom and bizarre working-class hero. He is not just another candidate to be parsed and analyzed by TV pundits in the same breath as all the others. In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order, Trump is an extinction-level event. It’s long past time we started treating him as such.
Javier E

Why Students Should Care About the Wars America Fights - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...545351

war history education wars military

shared by Javier E on 12 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • The more I asked my students about their thoughts on the Middle East, the more I realized that it was not simply a matter of disinterest (although that is certainly a factor among some), but rather that the subject only existed to them in an abstract manner.
  • My high-school experience was shaped by 9/11, and I enlisted in the Marine Corps shortly after the towers fell. It wasn’t until after I returned from deployment to Iraq and entering college that I began to think more about what this war meant and how it has fundamentally changed American society. But for my students, this was a war that had existed for almost their entire lives: In fact, from the moment many of them were born, the U.S. has been engaged in conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is not to mention the indelible mark that terrorism has left on Europe in recent years, or the very visible specter of ISIS operating within the Middle East and Africa today. How could there be no questions?
  • I wanted students to actively seek understanding of the region and the war that shaped a new generation of vets, including myself. I wanted to know that this history would not be lost, that a war costly in blood and treasure would not be forgotten; student detachment now would mean their detachment as they entered college and, ultimately, the “real world.” The consequences of a disinterested society are severe when considering the inevitability of future American military mobilization.
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  • I began to wonder if the disconnect is generational, whether today’s children are uniquely disconnected from the war that has shaped their lives
  • Consider the Vietnam War: The number of U.S. households owning a television increased by 75 percent between 1950 and 1960. By the time the Tet Offensive took place in 1968—a major turning point in the war—nearly 95 percent of households owned a TV. Images of the war were directly broadcast into the homes of millions of Americans via the big three networks
  • the fact that it was America’s first truly televised war speaks to its magnitude as a media event. Personal connections also rendered teenagers hyper-exposed to the war. Even though a minority of those who served in Vietnam were conscripted, the draft was still a salient aspect of the war, one of which families were all too aware
  • By contrast, in 2010, when the war in Iraq reached its seven-year mark, just 1 percent of news coverage was dedicated to the conflict. And currently, the proportion of Americans having served in the U.S.’s longest-running wars in Iraq and Afghanistan stands at less than 1 percent
  • With no relatives or family friends having served in Iraq or Afghanistan, and with such little media exposure to the conflicts, many young people do not have any reference point for understanding the impact of war.
  • Fewer families maintain connections to the military today than in previous eras, and this fact is especially pronounced among younger Americans; the younger you are, the less likely you are to know anyone who served in the armed forces.
  • Experts argue history education—let alone nuanced history education that encourages critical thinking—is a low priority for America’s public schools, and if that’s the case this flaw only exacerbates the problem. As does the reality, according to some critics, that many modern-day textbooks teach a highly biased account of the “War on Terror.”
  • What does this mean? America’s youth aren’t apathetic—rather, they’ve grown up during a war obscured by modern American culture. If one doesn’t care to look at the war, then he doesn’t have to
  • . It’s not indifference per se, but instead lack of context.
  • If education is truly an investment in the future, then that education must involve addressing consequences of prolonged war.
  • It is today’s students who will foot the bill for Iraq and Afghanistan when they become taxpayers. It is today’s students who are now—and will continue to be—exposed to an entirely new set of policies and institutions have been developed in the name of the “War on Terror.” Today’s students, for instance, will continue to grow up in an era of both ever-increasing electronic surveillance and reduction of privacy.
  • Students’ silence speaks to the need for American schools to address a growing divide between the military and the American public—to include as a core part of the curriculum lessons on this ill-defined war that has left societies in ruin and changed American politics. At some point, students must learn that it is their civic responsibility to understand and assess violence being waged in their name.
Javier E

Tucker Carlson Is Doing Something Extraordinary - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...533586

foreign policy politics US neoconservatism trump

shared by Javier E on 14 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • In his vicious and ad hominem way, Carlson is doing something extraordinary: He’s challenging the Republican Party’s hawkish orthodoxy in ways anti-war progressives have been begging cable hosts to do for years. For more than a decade, liberals have rightly grumbled that hawks can go on television espousing new wars without being held to account for the last ones. Not on Carlson’s show.
  • Carlson responded that Boot had been so “consistently wrong in the most flagrant and flamboyant way for over a decade” in his support for wars in the Middle East that “maybe you should choose another profession, selling insurance, house painting, something you’re good at.”
  • On Iran, Carlson made an argument that was considered too dovish for even mainstream Democrats to raise during the debate over the nuclear deal: He questioned whether Tehran actually endangers the United States
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  • Most importantly, Carlson is saying something pundits, especially conservative ones, rarely say on television: that America must prioritize.
  • Since the George W. Bush years, conservative politicians and pundits have demanded that the United States become more aggressive everywhere. They’ve insisted that America confront China, Russia, Iran, Syria, North Korea, the Taliban, ISIS, and al-Qaeda, all at the same time. Strategically, that’s absurd.
  • “How many wars can we fight at once?” he asked Peters. “How many people can we be in opposition to at once?” He told Boot that, “In a world full of threats, you create a hierarchy of them. You decide which is the worst and you go down the list.”
  • Carlson is offering a glimpse into what Fox News would look like as an intellectually interesting network
  • For over a century, conservative interventionists and conservative anti-interventionists have taken turns at the helm of the American right.
  • While conservatives in the 1930s had generally attacked Franklin Roosevelt as too interventionist, conservatives from the 1950s through the 1980s generally attacked Democrats as not interventionist enough.
  • When the Cold War ended, the pendulum swung again. Pat Buchanan led a revival of conservative anti-interventionism. The biggest foreign policy complaint of Republican politicians during the 1990s was that Bill Clinton’s humanitarian interventions were threatening American sovereignty by too deeply entangling the United States with the UN.
  • Then came September 11, which like Pearl Harbor and the onset of the Cold War, led the right to embrace foreign wars. Now Donald Trump, exploiting grassroots conservative disillusionment with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, has revived the anti-interventionist tradition of Coolidge, Harding, and Buchanan. And Carlson is championing it on television
ethanshilling

N.F.L. Signs Media Deals Worth Over $100 Billion - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nfl-tv-contracts.html

pandemic nfl

shared by ethanshilling on 18 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The N.F.L. signed new media rights agreements with CBS, NBC, Fox, ESPN and Amazon collectively worth about $110 billion over 11 years, nearly doubling the value of its previous contracts.
  • The contracts, which will take effect in 2023 and run through the 2033 season, will cement the N.F.L.’s status as the country’s most lucrative sports league.
  • “Along with our recently completed labor agreement with the N.F.L.P.A., these distribution agreements bring an unprecedented era of stability to the League and will permit us to continue to grow and improve our game,” Commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement.
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  • Each of the broadcasters’ deals include agreements for their respective streaming platforms, while Amazon will show Thursday night games on its Amazon Prime Video service.
  • The jump in revenue will not initially change the fortunes of players, who are locked into a 10-year collective bargaining agreement narrowly ratified in March 2020
  • It will be the first major expansion to the N.F.L. season in more than four decades, when teams began playing 16 games, up from 14, in 1978
  • The league was able to fully complete its 2020 season on schedule in part because it worked hand-in-hand with the N.F.L. Players Association to hammer out Covid-19 protocols and a raft of other rules.
  • Before the coronavirus pandemic, many television and digital media executives said the N.F.L. had the upper hand in negotiating major increases in rights fees because the league had a long-term labor deal in place and because its programming took less of a ratings hit than other broadcasts of U.S.-based sports during the pandemic.
  • N.F.L. games are also the most watched programming on television by far, making up 76 of the 100 most watched television programs in 2020.
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