I'm a little behind in my reading, but I wanted to pass along a link to another interesting article by Franklin Foer (one of whose pieces I previously discussed here). In"The Joy of Federalism," Foer traces the historical development of a"liberal federalism" as a bulwark against the growth of the federal government under the Bush administration. As Foer puts it:

Like many of his predecessors, [Bush] entered office promising to rescue the states from federal pummeling. Yet his administration has greatly expanded federal power, and some conservatives have been complaining. Writing in National Review two years ago, Romesh Ponnuru observed that"more people are working for the federal government than at any point since the end of the cold war." State governments have their own version of this complaint. They say the Bush administration has imposed new demands—federal education standards, homeland security tasks—without also providing sufficient cash to get these jobs done. The Republican senator Lamar Alexander recently told The Times,"The principle of federalism has gotten lost in the weeds by a Republican Congress that was elected to uphold it in 1994."

The whole essay is worth a good read.

During the 1940s, he became increasingly disillusioned with socialism and New Deal domestic and foreign policy. He was a backer of the America First Committee and was a consistent critic of the internment of Japanese-Americans. In 1945, he penned a devastatingly critical eulogy of Franklin D. Roosevelt who he accused of hypocrisy and manipulation. By the end of the 1940s, Schuyler had drifted into a hard-line conservatism. In 1966, he wrote about his odyssey in Black and Conservative.

Philippa Schuyler was an important figure in her own right. An accomplished concert pianist, she was also active in conservative causes as an author and lecturer. When it came to discrimination, however, her conservatism had a more radical, non-conformist edge. She was far less willing than her father, for example, to turn a blind eye to when she experienced racism.

She touted the cause of African independence leader, Moise Tshombe, a popular icon among many young libertarians and conservatives during the early 1960s and predicted (accurately) that Africa would become increasingly dominated by dictators. At the time of her untimely death in 1967 at age thirty-six, she was covering the Vietnam War for William Loeb’s Manchester Union Leader.

This could be a fascinating film if done properly. A child prodigy, Philippa Schuyler had many adventurous, romantic, and tragic experiences in locations as diverse as the Congo, Vietnam, and France. As the daughter of interracial couple, she often found it difficult to win acceptance from the white majority.

Hopefully, the film’s producers will be fair to her political ideas as well as those of her father. For more about her, see Kathryn Taladay, Composition in Black and White: The Life of Philippa Schuyler.

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Murder of Emmett Till and the Struggle for Civil Rights, Stillman College, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, September 15-17, 2005

The murder of Emmett Till and the trial of his accused killers were turning points in the history of the civil rights movement. These events have fascinated historians as well as filmmakers, journalists, literary critics, song writers, and novelists. Most recently, the federal government has reopened the case.

This conference will be held at Stillman College, a historical black college founded in 1876. It will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the murder, investigation, and trial and will also explore their broader effects on American society. The last day of the conference will feature an optional guided tour of key sites in Mississippi including Money (where Till was kidnapped), Sumner (where the accused killers were tried), and Mound Bayou (where Till's family members and the black media stayed during the trial).

Invited speakers include journalist Juan Williams; Stanley Nelson, producer of the film"The Murder of Emmett Till"; Charles Payne, author of I've Got the Light of Freedom; Christopher Benson, co-author (with Mamie Till-Mobley) of The Death of Innocence: The Hate Crime that Changed America; and Christopher Metress, author of The Lynching of Emmett Till.

Possible topics for papers and panels include some aspect of the murder, trial, and investigation as well as their impact on the civil rights movement, literature, film, journalism, and criminal justice. The conference organizers welcome submissions from academics, public historians, journalists, students, filmmakers, and creative artists.

Each paper or panel proposal should include a summary of the topic and the vita of each participant. Please submit three (3) copies of your proposal, postmarked by March 31, 2005, to

Linda Royster Beito, Chair, Social Sciences, Stillman College, Tuscaloosa, AL 35401, Email: lbeito_at_stillman.edu, Phone: 205-366-8984

Accepted papers and panels will be notified by May 15, 2005.

Blogs are perfectly exclusive spaces in which writers may express any opinion with no prior censorship. By processes we can define as exogenous, some bloggers will have audiences approaching or exceeding medium-sized newspapers or radio stations. Aside from the remote legal sanctions that can be applied to the exercise of free speech (especially loose in the United States), what, if any, ethical obligations do bloggers have to the wider public (defining ethical obligations as self-imposed restrictions on content)? I argue that there are some few ethical obligations, that enforcement will be extremely difficult given the self-selecting nature of blog audiences and the incentive structure governing the behavior of agents in the game, and that many constraints we may think of as 'ethical' in the first consideration are actually credibility-building measures.

So what happens to the civilising influence of blogs in this regard? I am afraid that I must end on a pessimistic note. Since bloggers' utility from participation in the life of this virtual community comes from such different sources, and because there is no clearly viable and immediately obvious standard that we can use to measure the value of blogging, we are left with a situation in which the civilising effects of a market society are almost nonexistent. There are few incentives to be polite to your 'opponents' if unremitting hostility and disdain win you more readers and more links.

There couldn’t be a better model of an improvisatory, anti-authoritarian intelligence, whose whole creed rests on individual acts and case-by-case considerations. He believed in the English model of trade and toleration, not the Jacobin model of ideology and intemperance... Voltaire’s spirit was one of tolerant cosmopolitanism, even though he didn’t have the insight to see that one challenge for the cosmopolitan spirit would be how well it tolerated those who had no wish to be cosmopolitan.