Past & Present

It is a conservative who asks in his article about Rick Perlstein’s history book Nixonland: “Are you experiencing cognitive dissonance?”

The conservative is J. Patrick Coolican, and the article is posted on a popular conservative blog called Politico.com. I repeat “conservative” so much here as an ironic illustration that the likes of Coolican put too much emphasis on that.

To a pundit, that label is all important. Like the real one, the political pundit’s bible begins with “In the beginning was the Word”.  But in their creation story the genesis of a brain begins with either the word “conservative” or “liberal”. All else in their worldview unfolds from either the one label or the other.

 Coolican’s point — the article’s “hook”, as reporters call it — about Perlstein and the new book on President Richard Nixon (1969-74) is that the author and the book are liked by conservatives even though Perlstein is a liberal. And the headline for the review is “Historian Bridges Left-Right Divide”.

My own point is that I disagree with this review’s starting assumption: that it is remarkable that a history book about a conservative movement can be both written by a liberal and be worth reading by conservatives. 

In fact, it is sad and laughable that anyone would find that remarkable. It is a symptom in part of punditry’s harmful influence, but it is even more so a sign that this idea of ”a divide” is overdone.  As I said above, Coolican puts too much emphasis on the labels.

I’m still trying to get my hands on the book without buying it in hardback. (I’m not so poor or miserly that I refuse to buy any hardback history books, and I, unlike some historians who would never stoop to such a level —  do read journalistic, popular histories. But such histories are usually good for only one read, except if they cover what I teach and have the good anecdotes that transfer well to the classroom. But I don’t teach U.S. history per se.) But I gather the book is thinner on theory, historiography or archival work (despite what Coolican’s review says) than , say, works on Nixon by Stanley Kutler, a University of Wisconsin–Madison professor whom I have met. And Perlstein has a blog and is out there as a public figure.

So I gather Nixonland is a book meant to be popular, meant to be tossed around in the talk among political types. Perlstein means to argue — based on the articles about it and not my reading of the book itself — that the roots of conservativism today that are found in the 1960s are illuminating but largely forgotten. That’s valuable work to make that point, and interesting to contrast with how visible is the role of the roots of today’s liberalism within the 1960s. To attack today’s liberals, the 1960s have been overblown into ready-to-use cliches of dirty hippies who spit on veterans or militant blacks in Oakland scowling and armed to the teeth.

I’m glad Perlstein’s book is out there, because it seems more serious and beneficial than the books that contain history from the well-heeled conservative pundit establishment (some have called it vast and a conspiracy). Books such as Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism come to mind, or one by Ann Coulter that tried to resurrect Senator Joseph McCarthy’s reputation.

Those two books are examples of things written by and for conservatives for the sake of conservatism, of which there are many more examples that do not even try to use history to make their “points”. And self-described liberals such as Michael Moore or Al Franken churn out the same genre from their foxhole on their side of the spectrum.

It’s from this ideological battleground that Coolican comes when he is seemingly surprised by Perlstein’s book on Nixon. How can it be that a conservative would find value in reading a book by a liberal?

In Coolican’s brain this fact produces cognitive dissonance. I pity that brain.

With the 60-year anniversary of the creation of Israel upon us, I expect lots of attention on this messy history. And that’s good. I also predict zealots on both sides will mangle the facts, and strangle the parts that stain their side.  

Newly opened documents flesh out the problems that Britain faced trying to manage Palestine just after World War II. Yes, the British’s interest in ruling the former Ottoman territory after World War I flowed in part from the oil of the Mideast. There were also Brits who led them into the snake pit with earnest concern for both Arabs (T.E. Lawrence) and Jews (Alfred Balfour). But it is one of those episodes that from hindsight looks so obviously to have been a predictable quagmire. What were they thinking?

Zionists, especially, were so understandably militant due to the  holocaust that no patience was possible toward British aims to balance the population in Palestine between Arabs and Jews. I remember reading Golda Meir’s autobiography and her conviction at the time that no one in the world cared for these European refugees except the yishuv of Palestine.

The new documents show Britain officials agonizing as much about their own image as about the plight of the victimized Jews of Europe when a renegade ship called the Exodus, overloaded with those European Jews, tried to break through with this cargo of huddled masses the British embargo on any additional immigrants to Palestine.

The Exodus’ ordeal focused world attention on the British blockade of Palestine and the plight of Jews fleeing Europe after World War II.

The documents show that diplomats and military officers knew that sending Jews back to Germany and putting them in camps so soon after the Holocaust would set off protests.

Although the British worried about effects of these acts on worldwide p.r., I wonder instead what role these episodes played in propelling militant zionists such as the Irgun who would embrace terrorist tactics and kill Brits and Arabs in Palestine until the British left on May 14, 1948.

Does the Torah, like the Old Testament, also contain that passage about sowing the wind?

The New York Times features a slide show of the exhibitions concerning the Pre-Columbian and Early Colonial past of Latin America, one at the Field Museum in Chicago and the other at the Library of Congress in Washington.

Some Guy had a birthday today

It’s a song about history, and it transports you back to the mid-80s.

The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman had other points to make in a recent piece, but I wanted to use his first, preliminary idea here because it’s about the presence in the present of our past. He puts it well:

Historical narratives matter. That’s why conservatives are still writing books denouncing F.D.R. and the New Deal; they understand that the way Americans perceive bygone eras, ever as from the seemingly distant past, affects politics today. 

And it’s also why the furor over Barack Obama’s praise for Ronald Reagan is not, as some think, overblown. The fact is that how we talk about the Reagan era still matters immensely for American politics.

Along with Neville Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement of 1938 or the homecoming reception of veterans during the Vietnam era, Ronald Reagan’s presidency is about the most used and abused piece of our past that you see in action these days.  

Republican promoters have intensified the use of the Reagan strategy during this campaign season because Republicans calculate that evoking thought of more recent Republicans such as George W. Bush would not help matters, at all.

Given the intensity of battles that never moved, that lots of explosives are still being unearthed from World War I.

Mary Benich-McCleary of Morgan City, Louisiana, died June 29 of a stroke at the age of 9. She was a toddler when militia arrived at the striking miners’ camp near Trinidad, Colorado and opened fire in 1914. Ten strikers were killed in the gun battle as well as a striker’s child. After the militia set fire to the camp, ten children and a woman died.

Though largely forgotten, Woody Guthrie tried to honor the memory of the victims.