Thomas Wolfe took note in Bonfire of the Vanities of the donkey-like stubbornness innate to the New York Irish; he described it perfectly as “no matter what type of stupid fix you got yourself into, you never back off.” (1) For a purer exhibit of the type, one needs look no further than Brooklyn’s own John Kennedy O’Hara.

Mr. O’Hara is a rare legal specimen, doubtless the only person you will ever meet convicted (in 1997) of the felonious crime “not voting from his principal address”. Having two addresses in the same voting district – one his, one his girlfriend’s – left him vulnerable to the charge of “filing a false registration” and “illegal voting”. While in the past all such cases in New York State have been bought into civil, not criminal, court and all have found for the defendant, such was not the case for Mr. O’Hara, who upon conviction not only faced jail time but also had his license to practice law revoked.
Why the special treatment for John Kennedy O’Hara?
It seems Mr. O’Hara, a life-long political junkie, had a foolish habit of running for office without first securing the pre-approval of his district’s Democratic political machine. Plus he was – and still is – an ardent “reformer”, openly expressing his idea on how to fix Brooklyn’s notoriously corrupt municipal, in his words “blow it up, burn it to the ground. Real reform means the system as it stands has to be annihilated”. (2)
He earned for himself a lifetime of hatred in local political circles, as he managed to get himself onto the ballot year after year despite New York State election laws specifically designed to prevent it. In the meat grinder that is New York City politics, Mr. O’Hara was bound to morph into a target: the citizen who became a little too civic-minded – and he did.
Now I grant, John O’Hara falls into the category of lunatic, as who in God’s name would wish to associate with the likes of Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes & Pals, the vile denizens of Brooklyn political upper crust? Is there something wrong with Mr. O’Hara?
In his defense, while my Mom always imparted the wisdom of “show me your friends, show me yourself”, John O’Hara is most certainly not considered a friend in the type of circles Brooklyn’s powerful tend to muck about with, so that is a plus for him.
In addition, Mr. O’Hara freely admits his attraction to hanging about in the vicinity of such bottom feeders is a mental disease: “they haven’t found the medication for a guy like me” he relates, and I can doubtless second that motion, but here he is. And here we are.
As the State of New York Committee on Character and Fitness noted, “Mr. O’Hara, accurately it appears, claims the machine went gunning for him.” (3) Mr. O’Hara aroused such enmity from the machine as to have sent Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes onto a now 12 year long extra-legal jihad against him (battling through three trials and nine appeals) at a cost to the New York taxpayers of millions.
Upon review of the facts that committee unanimously agreed to fully reinstate Mr. O’Hara – still a convicted felon – as a practicing attorney and in addition, in a move as rare as a successful Mets baseball season, proclaimed Mr. O’Hara shouldn’t have been prosecuted in the first place.
Mr. O’Hara falls into that category of victim that may accurately be branded with the tag “there but for the grace of God go I”. If Mr. O’Hara can be prosecuted under such an idiotic, vague law then we all may be. He is far more than a victim – he’s a symbol, the embodiment of a worthy cause, that of an ordinary everyday man unfairly targeted by the rich and powerful for the crime of rocking a political boat.
When I queried him on my stated policy that entire classes of voters (government employees) should be forbidden to vote, he responded in a very libertarian manner that made me re-think my position, that we “shouldn’t excluded entire classes of people like that”. Mr. O’Hara seems to actually think about matters such as these, and maybe we should encourage such people to try for political office.
He makes a very convincing argument to a nihilist such as myself that politics is “too important for everyone to just walk away” and that to gain office is “the most important profession there is”. There is a good deal of truth in what he says and, more importantly, I would far prefer to live under a New York City with a John O’Hara as mayor than a Michael Bloomberg.
A spokesman for DA Hynes’s office replied to all the recent developments (such as an entire body of state lawyers going over to Mr. O’Hara’s side) with a curt reminder that Mr. O’Hara is still “a felon”. (4) While that is certainly correct it begs the question: justly so? An entire organization of Mr. Hynes’s peers has answered in the negative.
On October 6th, the Appellate Division of New York State’s Supreme Court directed the Clerk of the Court “to restore the name of John Kennedy O’Hara to the roll of attorneys and counselors-at-law.” (5) An excellent beginning, yet there is one final step to take so justice may be done; and with the federal Supreme Court refusing to hear an appeal it is a step that only New York Governor Paterson can perform, spurred on by readers such as you.
I ask a small favor from you, reader, to please click that link and sign the petition on Mr. O’Hara’s behalf. If Mr. O’Hara can be tried and convicted under such an arcane, vaguely written law, we all can be. It is high time for the governor to pardon Mr. O’Hara, to remove the stain of this undeserved felony conviction, to see that finally, twelve long years after the fact, John Kennedy O’Hara’s stubborn fight for justice finally bears fruit – for all of us.


(1) Wolfe, Thomas, The Bonfire of the Vanities, (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1987) p.360

(2) Harper’s Magazine, Meet The New Boss: Man Versus Machine Politics in Brooklyn, By Christopher Ketcham December 2004

(3) Supreme Court of the State of New York, Appellate Division – 2nd Department, Committee on Character and Fitness: In the Matter of John Kennedy O’Hara, May, 21, 2009: p.2

(4) The Brooklyn Paper, Finally! O’Hara Beats Hynes! By Will Yakowicz, October 16, 2009

(5) Supreme Court of the State of New York, Appellate Division: Second Judicial Department: In the Matter of John Kennedy O’Hara, a disbarred attorney, October 6, 2009: p.2

C.J. Maloney lives and works in New York City. His first book (on Arthurdale, West Virginia during the New Deal) is to be released by John Wiley and Sons in February 2011.

“Higgs is just a pessimist” — how often I’ve come across expressions of that sentiment during the past twenty-five years! In certain circles, I have become the butt of jokes – some good-natured, some not – by virtue of my alleged pessimism.

Okay, maybe I am somewhat pessimistic. My wife, who is confident that she knows more about me than I know about myself, says so, and I am certainly not going to take issue with someone who possesses superior knowledge. But my reputation as a pessimist stems not from the kind of knowledge that my wife possesses in special measure, but from my writings over the years about the growth of government and related matters.

In this context, I have been rather puzzled by many of the accusations of pessimism, because whereas I have always tried to rest my expectations on my knowledge of what happened in the past and my understanding of why those events occurred, those who dismiss or depreciate my prognostications seem to me to be lapsing into wishful thinking – groundless optimism, if you will.

When my book Crisis and Leviathan was published in 1987, several reviewers took issue with it on the grounds that my forecast – which occupies less than one page at the end of the book – was unduly pessimistic, especially in view of the great transformation that some of them imagined had been wrought by the “Reagan Revolution.” What provoked this bizarre focus on three paragraphs in a book of 372 pages? After disavowing any pretense of knowing the future, I wrote that if human society survives (which is always iffy, given the combination of technological power and moral infirmity), we do know one thing:

We know that other great crises will come. Whether they will be occasioned by foreign wars, economic collapse, or rampant terrorism, no one can predict with assurance. Yet in one form of another, great crises will surely come again, as they have from time to time throughout all human history. When they do, governments almost certainly will gain new powers over economic and social affairs. Everything I have argued and documented in the preceding chapters points toward this conclusion.

For years afterward, I would tell those skeptical of my thesis – people who were convinced that Big Government was gradually being diminished – that the gains in freedom (which, even at the time, I considered to be more than offset by contemporaneous losses) would be swept away overnight at the onset of the next great crisis. When 9/11 occurred, I had occasion to put my views to the test. Was I wrong then? When the current recession came to a head in the financial debacle of September and October 2008, I had another occasion to put my views to the test. Was I wrong then?

I’m not gloating. It’s possible that my views are altogether cockamamey and that the huge spurts of government growth after 9/11 and again after the financial debacle have occurred for reasons that simply appear to validate my views. I don’t think so, however: too many of the details fit my scheme. But consider again the matter I raised at the beginning of this essay: was I right (or apparently right) about these events only because these are bad developments, and such developments always seem to confirm the expectations of ex ante pessimists?

In my years as a basketball player, we used to say after a bad shot fell through the hoop that it’s better to be lucky than good. Have my well-confirmed expectations about the post-crisis events of the past decade been simply lucky, rather than soundly based?

In my work on the growth of government over the past three decades, I have always rested my conclusions on a combination of facts and theory. I may be wrong about the facts, although those who have disputed my views have not so much claimed that I got the facts wrong as that I misinterpreted them or that I committed sins of omission. I may also be wrong about the theory, but my theoretical views have seemingly proved their mettle in a variety of applications, in their details and their broad contours, and in one historical episode after another in the modern (post-Progressive) ideological era. In sum, I don’t believe that my views on the evolution of the U.S. politico-economic order ever did, or now do, simply express my psychological tendency toward pessimism.

So, it has always irritated me when my arguments were dismissed or depreciated on the grounds that “Higgs is just a pessimist.” Such a reaction strikes me as a sort of ad hominem fallacy. You might as well say that Higgs is wrong about the growth of government because he’s a jackass (a trait I am neither confirming nor denying).

This past week, however, we have seen President Barack Obama awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, and seen him use the occasion to present the same-old-same-old pseudo-justifications for enlarging the foolish war in Afghanistan and for perpetuating global U.S. hegemony. As if that shameful travesty were not more than enough insult added to our injuries, we have seen Ben Bernanke named Time magazine’s person of the year, in the wake of the Fed’s having placed the U.S. economy in the kind of jeopardy that it has not suffered since World War II. If you wanted to invent news items to illustrate the black absurdity of our political and ideological situation, you could not have come up with nastier ones.

These sorts of events rarely come as a surprise to me, however: they fit nicely into the analytical narratives I’ve been writing for decades about where the country is heading and why. But, as always, I may be wrong. So, to keep up your spirits, I recommend that you ask some well-established experts what they think. Chances are that they will reassure you. After all, as everybody knows, Higgs is just a pessimist.

I was reluctant to read Black Maverick, the biography by David and Linda Beito of T.R.M. Howard, an early civil rights figure in the Mississippi Delta. There were several reasons for my resistance. First, Howard was unknown to me (and as a teen-ager, I spent the"Freedom Summer" of 1964 as a civil rights worker in Clarksdale, Mississippi, so I thought I knew a fair bit). Second, Howard carries some emotional baggage—he ended his career as a well-paid but controversial abortionist in Chicago (after years of being an illegal abortionist there and in Mississippi). That struck me as somewhat less than heroic. And there were other things—philandering, driving the latest Cadillac, and his late-in-life avocation as a big-game hunter. Not my cup of tea.

But the Beitos’ book changed my views enormously—softened them, one might say. The Beitos do a terrific job of making this larger-than-life figure believable and placing him in the context of mid-century Mississippi. Yes, he was heroic! While they are objective in their analysis, they convey an image of Howard as a restless individual who refused to be confined by racism in the South or legalistic restraint in the North. He was, the Beitos write, “fearless in waging war against inequality and disenfranchisement, but he was not a man to tilt at windmills.”

Howard, a physician, journalist (in his early days in California), and businessman, did indeed have a major role in founding the civil rights movement in the Mississippi Delta. Historians should not ignore him. Thanks to the Beitos' solid research, they do not have to anymore.

After writing Race and Liberty in America: The Essential Reader (2009), I’ve bumped into a few articles that come to the same unorthodox conclusions about individuals I profile in my “race reader.” One such “unorthodox” column appeared in the Wall Street Journal on 25 November 2009. In "Not-So-Silent Cal Wrote with Eloquence,” Ryan Cole lauds Coolidge’s Autobiography as an example of his eloquence. Cole concludes that “Barack Obama isn’t the first man of letters in the White House.”

I have been told–but not verified–that Coolidge was the last president to write his own speeches. After reading Coolidge’s writings, published while he was president, I am not surprised in the least. “Silent Cal” could be a man of few words but when he had something to say, he did it like a master; and when delivering speeches, he knew that the audience was as important as the speaker. After all, the Ku Klux Klan was at high tide and he refused their offer to speak and chose instead group forums that represented the very minorities attacked by the Klan!

Race and Liberty in America: The Essential Reader includes two documents by Coolidge. I note that his record was mixed on race (and other issues) from a classical liberal perspective. Most significantly, he signed the immigration restriction act of 1924 which slammed the door shut on virtually all immigration from outside the Western hemisphere.

Nevertheless, he invoked the Constitution and classical liberal principles to defend blacks and white ethnics (Catholics, Jews) under assault by the KKK. While Coolidge was not a “perfect” president, one can appreciate him all the more because he did not have such an enlarged view of the presidency or of himself. Après Coolidge, presidential humility went out the window, with some presidents more egotistical than others.

Below readers will find some of my commentary followed by an excerpt from one of the documents in Race and Liberty in America (footnotes omitted):

“Coolidge Denounces White Racism” (1924)

Historians often compare “Silent Cal” Coolidge (1872–1933) unfavorably with the activist presidents of the Progressive Era. A survey of academic historians conducted in 1983 found that they rated ­Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as “near great,” with Coolidge among the “ten worst.” Th­e Ku Klux Klan was the hot civil rights issue of the 1924 election: it was a national organization directing its hatred not only at blacks, but especially at Catholics and others deemed less than “100% American.” Historians fault Coolidge for not denouncing the KKK by name during the campaign. Th­ey fail to note that the Democratic candidate—segregationist John W. Davis—called upon Coolidge to speak when the president’s son was dying from an infection—a two-month ordeal that devastated Coolidge. (Consider the irony: Davis is best known for defending segregation in the Brown v. Board case). Soon after his son’s death, Coolidge spoke eloquently of religious and racial toleration before a parade of one hundred thousand Catholics honoring the Holy Name Society. Klan leaders grumbled when the president refused to show up for their parade.

Also compare Coolidge’s strong denunciation of lynching with that of “progressive” presidents ­Theodore Roosevelt and William H. Taft. In a 1906 address, Roosevelt stated “the greatest existing cause of lynching is the perpetration, especially by black men, of the hideous crime of rape—the most abominable in all the category of crimes—even worse than murder.” In a 1909 message, Taft blamed lynching on “delays in trials, judgments, and the executions thereof by our courts.” By contrast, Coolidge made no excuses and urged Congress to punish the “hideous crime of lynching.”

In the following document, President Calvin Coolidge responds to a man who desired a lily-white government. ­The Chicago Defender, a leading black newspaper, praised Coolidge’s rebuke with the front-page headline, “Cal Coolidge Tells Kluxer When to Stop.” Coolidge reprinted this letter in a collection of his presidential addresses.

My dear Sir:

Your letter is received, accompanied by a newspaper clipping which discusses the possibility that a colored man may be the Republican nominee for Congress from one of the New York districts. Referring to this newspaper statement, you say:

“It is of some concern whether a Negro is allowed to run for Congress anywhere, at any time, in any party, in this, a white man’s country. Repeated ignoring of the growing race problem does not excuse us for allowing encroachments. Temporizing with the Negro whether he will or will not vote either a Democratic or a Republican ticket, as evidenced by the recent turnover in Oklahoma, is contemptible.”

Leaving out of consideration the manifest impropriety of the President intruding himself in a local contest for nomination, I was amazed to receive such a letter. During the war 500,000 colored men and boys were called up under the draft, not one of whom sought to evade it. ­They took their places wherever assigned in defense of the nation of which they are just as truly citizens as are any others. Th­e suggestion of denying any measure of their full political rights to such a great group of our population as the colored people is one which, however it might be received in some other quarters, could not possibly be permitted by one who feels a responsibility for living up to the traditions and maintaining the principles of the Republican Party. Our Constitution guarantees equal rights to all our citizens, without discrimination on account of race or color, I have taken my oath to support that Constitution. It is the source of your rights and my rights. I propose to regard it, and administer it, as the source of the rights of all the people, whatever their belief or race. A colored man is precisely as much entitled to submit his candidacy in a party primary, as is any other citizen. ­The decision must be made by the constituents to whom he offers himself, and by nobody else. . . .

Santa Claus is barred from giving gifts to children at detainee centre.

And Henry Porter has something to say.

Follow FDR, a man who had about as much economic sense as the fools he surrounded himself with. For one such example, we see Obama channeling his idol , while Krugman cheers him on from the sidelines. Outside of his undoubtedly silken tongue, I'm beginning to harbor doubt that Obama is much more than a Chicago ward boss who hit the political Lotto.

An important deadline for students who value liberty is fast approaching. The Institute for Humane Studies, a classical liberal organization which is dear to my heart, is offering Humane Studies Fellowships to graduate students and undergraduates. According to IHS, applicants should show an"interest exploring the principles, practices and institutions necessary for a free society."

A little birdie told me that qualified applicants will have an especially good chance this year.

For more information, see here.

Obama's favorite word in the English language is clearly I. Here is the latest sample:

“Perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of a nation in the midst of two wars.....One of these wars is winding down. The other is a conflict that America did not seek; one in which we are joined by forty three other countries — including Norway — in an effort to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks.”

“Still, we are at war and I am responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land. Some will kill. Some will be killed. And so I come here with an acute sense of the cost of armed conflict.

Freeman authors David Levine and Michele Boldrin call for an end to patents in thisChristian Science Monitor article. A taste:

[I]ntellectual property does not increase innovation and creation. Extending IP rights may modestly boost the incentive for innovation, but this positive effect is wiped away by the negative effect of creating monopolies. There is simply no evidence that strengthening patent regimes increases innovation or economic productivity. In fact, some evidence shows that increased protection even decreases innovation. The main finding is that making it easier to get patents increases … patenting!