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Roundup: Historian's Take

  Follow Roundup: Historian's Take on RSS and Twitter

This is where we place excerpts by historians writing about the news. On occasion this page also includes political scientists, economists, and law professors who write about history. We may from time to time even include English profs.

Ginger Strand: Hitchhiking’s Time Has Come Again

SOURCE: NYT (11-11-12)

Ginger Strand is the author of “Killer on the Road: Violence and the American Interstate.”

ONE of the more dramatic measures to keep New Yorkers moving after Hurricane Sandy’s transit meltdown was mandatory car-pooling on bridges into Manhattan. Commuters griped about gridlock at checkpoints, and drivers were shocked by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s suggestion that they pick up strangers. Potential passengers, too, were reluctant to get in cars with people they didn’t know. Some drivers were scrambling to find riders to meet the quota. Everyone was relieved when the car-pooling “nightmare” came to an end.

But casual car-pooling should be the norm. Part of the problem is that we have become pathologically averse to anything resembling hitchhiking. Once I picked up a man who was thumbing near a broken-down car in a snowstorm on Christmas Eve. My mother is still dismayed. She’d be even more upset to learn that I recently tried to hitchhike across Oakland, Calif. (Don’t call Mom; no one stopped.) She raised me to believe, as most people do, that hitchhiking was something dangerous that hippies did back in the day. It was reckless, and it’s now — rightly — dead.

But hitching didn’t die a natural death — it was murdered. And there’s little evidence that it was as dangerous as we think. Our fear of thumbing a ride stems not from the facts but from a carefully calculated publicity campaign begun by the F.B.I. and continued by law enforcement agencies across the nation. The end result is that we have largely turned our backs on the obvious efficiencies — for our wallets as well as the planet — of ride-sharing. And we have lost a way to humanize the landscape of the road....
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Beverly Gage: How Close Was This Election? Very Close.

SOURCE: Slate (11-9-12)

Beverly Gage, a Yale history professor, is the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded.

There seems to be some confusion about whether or not the United States just witnessed a close election. Perhaps some historical perspective can help: Yes, this was a close election.

Here’s why:  

If we include Florida, Obama appears to have won 332 electoral votes to Romney’s 206. In the popular vote, the latest numbers suggest an Obama victory of 50.4 percent to Romney’s 48.1. This is not recount territory. Measured by the standards of the 20th century, though, it reflects a genuinely tight race....

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Nancy F. Koehn: For Obama, Where has Lincoln Gone?

SOURCE: WaPo (11-9-12)

Nancy F. Koehn is a historian at the Harvard Business School and author of The Story of American Business: From the Pages of the New York Times.

The 2012 presidential race was not only the most expensive in history, it was also one of the most closely contested elections the country has known. President Barack Obama inherits the very serious challenge of trying to reunite a divided nation in which political paralysis has seemingly become the frustrating and often destructive new normal. It’s a tall order, but history tells us this problem is not insurmountable.

The challenge is, for all the talk about his interest in history, Obama has so far failed to draw on the most salient leadership lessons of his predecessors.

When Obama was elected in 2008, comparisons to Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy were often invoked. Yet if the problem ahead of him is indeed to be surmounted, it will be because he finally truly looks back to these tight presidential races of the past and what the victors did after taking office as he prepares for his second term.

The elections of 1860 and 1960 were both close, divisive contests. And the winners, Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, each took the Oath of Office amid collective discord and anxiety, much like today. Also like today, Lincoln and Kennedy both won the Electoral College with room to spare, though not one of the three presidents claimed a strong majority of the popular vote....

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Heather Cox Richardson: When Republicans Deliberately Sowed a Financial Crisis

SOURCE: Bloomberg News (11-9-12)

Heather Cox Richardson is a professor of history at Boston College and the president of the Historical Society.

This week, President Barack Obama won re-election in a victory that so surprised many of his ideological opponents that they have spent the hours since wailing that the country is going to wrack and ruin.

With a divided and polarized government, and a battle looming over a “fiscal cliff” of more than $600 billion in tax increases and spending cuts scheduled for next year, Obama faces a rocky term ahead -- even assuming his Republican opponents negotiate in good faith.

But good faith fiscal negotiation isn’t something a president can always count on. In 1892, a dramatic Democratic victory prompted Republicans to sabotage the economy in order to ruin the incoming administration.

Then, as now, Republican insiders couldn’t believe that misguided voters had bucked the wise business leaders who backed the Republican incumbent. At the annual meeting of the New York Chamber of Commerce, held at the fancy Delmonico’s restaurant shortly after the election, members commiserated over vintage wine and an expensive dinner. Republican railroad baron Chauncey Depew snarled to his comrades about the Democrats who had just taken over Congress and the White House for the first time since the Civil War. “Business interests” were dangerous, he warned, and the Democrats had better be careful....
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Gil Troy: Bibi and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

SOURCE: The Daily Beast (11-7-12)

Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University and a Shalom Hartman Intstitute Engaging Israel Research Fellow in Jerusalem. His next book, “Moynihan’s Moment: America's Fight against Zionism as Racism,” will be published by Oxford University Press this fall.

The Ynet/Yediot Achranot main web page says it all. Underneath a picture of an exuberant Michelle Obama, a beaming Barack Obama, a delighted Joe Biden and a happily waving Jill Biden, comes the sobering headline: “Netanyahu Belachatz: Darash MeHasarim V’HaCh’Kim Lo Ledaber Al Obama,” which translates as “Netanyahu Stressed: Ordered His Ministers and MKs Not to Talk About Obama.”

Once again illustrating the problem of having a too-candid Cabinet member whom you cannot fire—or at least whom you believe you cannot fire—Netanyahu’s blunt Interior Minister from Shas, Eli Yishai, confessed: “This is probably not a very good morning for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.” And to make matters worse, Israel’s wily, passive-aggressive, smug yet eloquent, elegant and popular elder statesman, President Shimon Peres, spoke in a simple code easily deciphered when he responded to a question about the wisdom of interfering in America’s elections by saying: “There are many wise people in Israel and there are many people who think differently. I prefer to belong to the righteous minority not the erring majority.”

Ouch. While camera crews all over the world captured cheers in England and Australia, in Japan and Kenya, echoing the Democratic cheers when the networks projected an Obama victory, many Israelis were scared and brooding....

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James Grossman: Obama and His Historians: A Suggestion

SOURCE: AHA Today (11-8-12)

James Grossman is executive director of the American Historical Association.

As a historian, not to mention as the executive director of the AHA, I was pleased to read in the New York Times yesterday that President Obama listens to historians and discusses history but is “no history buff.” He appears to be serious in thinking about the past and how he can learn from it, rather than being merely satisfied with a handful of anecdotes. Moreover, he certainly included distinguished and thoughtful scholars in the sessions described in this article.

But I offer a suggestion that might help him even more. President Obama hopes that a group of eight presidential biographers will help him think not only about “what he could learn from the men they had studied,” but also what he might learn about the American people. I humbly suggest that the group be diversified a bit, with the addition of a few social, cultural, and intellectual historians. None of us knows everything—not even the most distinguished presidential biographers. A president who “admitted he was having trouble communicating his vision to the country” might benefit from insights into what it was about 1930s America that enabled Franklin Roosevelt to communicate so effectively (i.e. not just what it was about Roosevelt). Likewise, a president “struggling to understand the Tea Party and a level of opposition he said was ‘not normal’ by historical standards” would have benefitted from the insights of scholars who have studied social movements and political culture “from the bottom up.”...

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David M. Kennedy: Obama’s Second Chance to Be Historic

SOURCE: Bloomberg News (11-7-12)

David M. Kennedy, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in history, is the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History Emeritus and director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University.

Barack Obama made history in 2008. It may now be his fate merely to mark time.

Obama’s election as the first black president closed a chapter -- though surely not the book -- in America’s long, vexed racial history, just as John F. Kennedy’s election as the first Roman Catholic president in 1960 amounted to a major cadence in the nation’s turbulent religious history. Kennedy proved to be both the first and last Catholic president, in the sense that Catholicism has never since defined political identities the way it did for most of the Republic’s first two centuries (think Al Smith’s crushing defeat in 1928).

And as predicted in this space four years ago, Obama has already proved to be both the first black president and the last black president. He has shattered a historic barrier that can’t be put back together again.

To be clear: There will undoubtedly be black presidential candidates in the future, but their racial identity won’t principally determine their political destinies, just as Obama’s race played no material role in the campaign just concluded. Nor, importantly, did Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith. The absence of both racial and religious politicking in this election cycle -- not to mention voter approval of same-sex marriage in three states -- testifies powerfully to the American people’s expanding sense of tolerance and inclusion....

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Jon Wiener: The Bad News About White People: Romney Won the White Vote Almost Everywhere

SOURCE: The Nation (11-7-12)

Jon Wiener teaches US history at UC Irvine. His most recent book is How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey across America.

If only white people had voted on Tuesday, Mitt Romney would have carried every state except for Massachusetts, Iowa, Connecticut and New Hampshire, according to the news media’s exit polls. Nationally, Romney won 59 percent of the white vote, a towering twenty-point margin over Obama. (Exit polls were canceled in nineteen states by the consortium of news media that run them.)

The pattern is not limited to the South, with its history of racism and segregation. Even in the deepest blue states, white voters went for Romney: 53 percent in California, 52 percent in New York, 55 percent in Pennsylvania....

Could it be that they resent their loss of power in a country that is becoming more racially diverse every minute?  The rest of America wants to know.

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Jeffrey Wasserstrom: U.S. Election Day in China Offers a Chance to Participate, Vicariously

SOURCE: Asia Society (11-7-12)

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is author of China in the 21st Century (2010) and co-editor of Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land (2012). He is an Asia Society Associate Fellow.

I was in Shanghai, eating lunch with friends at a wonderful alleyway restaurant called Mi Xiang Yuan, when I got the welcome news of Obama's re-election. One member of our party, a local food writer who had earlier told me of doing her bit to help the President stay in office by casting an absentee ballot for him, had kept checking her phone for updates from the time we began our meal. She figured — correctly, as it turned out — that the election was likely to be called a little after noon Chinese time November 7, which was late night November 6 in the United State. I let out a sigh of relief when her face lit up and she told all of us at the table that she'd just started getting texts from people she knew saying CNN had called the race for the incumbent.

Our table was the only one with foreigners at it, but looking around I realized that we weren't the only ones in Mi Xiang Yuan who were interested in what was happening across the Pacific. Right next to us, for example, were two young Chinese men following election news on a smart phone they held between them, and I could tell from overhearing snatches of their conversation that they were intensely interested in the reports that were just coming in about Obama's victory. I couldn't tell for sure if they were pleased or displeased by the results, but there was no mistaking their fascination with the process. And it is worth noting something I never heard either of them mention: the upcoming 18th Party Congress. This was scheduled to start the next day in Beijing, and during its course, as they doubtless knew, a formal announcement would be made about who would hold the top positions of power in their country for years to come. One might imagine that, for young people with politics on their minds, this might get a word or two in their conversation over lunch. If either of them said a word about it, though, I must have missed it. I doubt I did....

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Tim Stanley: Nate Silver was Right About 2012

SOURCE: Telegraph (UK) (11-8-12)

Dr. Tim Stanley is a historian of the United States. His biography of Pat Buchanan is out now. His personal website is www.timothystanley.co.uk and you can follow him on Twitter @timothy_stanley.

The two worst sins in the Christian canon are pride and despair. Let me shoot down pride, first.

I'm getting a lot of (quite rude) emails and texts saying that I called the 2012 election wrong. Actually, I was never Mitt Romney's biggest fan. Before the debates, I was very critical of his candidacy and his chances of winning (and, for my efforts, got a series of deranged emails accusing me of having a man crush on the President). I did predict that Romney would walk the first debate – based on his performances in the primaries – and when the polls suddenly narrowed for him I came on a lot more strongly in his favour. In the last few weeks I never said that Mitt Romney absolutely definitely would win and I never offered a projected result. But I thought the race was "back on" thanks to the debates.

I was convinced that Romney could win because the Republican Party had a hidden advantage. That advantage was an unemployment rate of 7.9 per cent – a figure that no president has been re-elected with since 1936. Like many conservative-minded commentators, I projected the circumstances of this election back into the past and concluded that Obama faced an uphill struggle. So when things got closer after the debates (and, hey, Rasmussen and Gallup were close), I thought that historical logic was finally kicking in. I had the audacity to hope....

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Timothy Garton Ash: China's Next Hurdle

SOURCE: LA Times (11-8-12)

Timothy Garton Ash, a contributing writer to Opinion, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and professor of European studies at Oxford University. He is the author, most recently, of "Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name."

In the same week it is revealed to us who will be the next leaders of both superpowers: Barack Obama and Xi Jinping. The only difference is that we didn't know it would be Obama until after Tuesday's vote. By contrast, we knew it would be Xi long before the process that begins in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Nov. 8, from which he will emerge as Communist Party leader, becoming president next spring.

The coincidence prompts two questions: Which superpower is getting stronger? And which faces the deeper crisis of its economic and political system? Though this may sound contradictory, the answers are: China and China....

..[China] has the more profound systemic problems that, if not addressed, may both slow its rise and make it an unstable, unpredictable and even aggressive state. Over the last five years, the United States has gone through a great time of troubles. I predict that China will face its own time of troubles over the next five....
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Michael Lind: The Final Defeat of Backlash Politics

SOURCE: Salon (11-7-12)

Michael Lind is the author of Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States and co-founder of the New America Foundation.

Despite its reinforcement of the status quo and the lack of debate about large issues during the campaign, the election of 2012 will go down in history as the end of the backlash against mid-20th century liberalism.  A new, increasingly liberal electorate has ratified the results of the New Deal and the Civil Rights Revolution.  Republican conservatives will still be able to win victories, but their hopes of overturning the outcomes of the 1930s and the 1960s have been doomed by cultural and demographic change.

From the 1970s to the present, American politics has been driven by the backlash against the two liberal revolutions of the mid-20th century — the New Deal economic revolution and the Civil Rights Revolution and the attendant wave of cultural liberalization.  In 1968, Alabama Gov. George Wallace led many working-class whites upset with racial integration and the ’60s cultural revolution out of the Democratic Party.  From the 1970s until recently, these working-class white “Reagan Democrats” — socially conservative, pro-military and suspicious of government in the abstract, while fond of government benefits — were the swing voters in national elections for whom Reagan Republicans and Clintonian New Democrats competed....

...There will still be a right and a left in the United States of 2050.  But the right will be calling for a VAT on marijuana of 15 percent instead of 18 percent.  And the conservatives of tomorrow will insist, against progressive champions of polyamory, that the law should recognize only marriage between two individuals, not among three or more.

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Ron Radosh: Why Obama Won — and What Conservatives Must Do

SOURCE: PJ Media (11-7-12)

Ron Radosh is a PJ Media columnist and Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute.

There are no ways to get around the facts. For Republicans and conservatives and independents who wanted a new direction for our country, the victory of President Obama is sad — and for many of us, unexpected. Those conservatives who assured us with statistics, theories, and arguments about Romney winning the White House, even in a landslide, should be eating their hats.

In the past week, conservatives who usually disagree with each other about many things, including Fred Barnes, Peggy Noonan, Dick Morris, my PJM colleague Roger Kimball, George F. Will,  Karl Rove, and Michael Barone, among others, provided analysis and arguments, all of which led to predictions of an inevitable Romney victory. Instead of the outcome they all looked forward to and assumed would be inevitable given Obama’s failures and the state of the economy, they found that their theories collapsed as the returns poured in. Instead of a long night, by 11:30 p.m. even Fox News had called the election for the president. Yes, Karl Rove thought their statistics desk called it too early, but 15 minutes later he too agreed that Ohio had gone for the president.

So what happened? I had been trying to warn my optimistic friends in recent days that I thought Obama would win, and was regularly greeted with a slew of polls meant to prove I was wrong. So here are some of my thoughts and reactions, written before I can be influenced by the pundits who will be writing in tomorrow morning’s newspapers and appearing on TV talk shows....

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Victor Davis Hanson: Groundhog Day in America

SOURCE: National Review (11-8-12)

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The End of Sparta. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.

Barack Obama won a moderately close victory over Mitt Romney on Tuesday. But oddly, nothing much has changed. The country is still split nearly 50/50. There is still a Democratic president, and an almost identically Democratic Senate at war with an almost identically Republican House, in a Groundhog Day America.

Obama’s win did not really reflect affirmation of his first term, given that the president made only halfhearted efforts to defend Obamacare, the stimulus, huge Keynesian deficits, and his attempts to implement cap-and-trade. So if there is a second-term agenda, even Obama supporters don’t quite know what it will be.

Unlike the hope-and-change campaign of 2008, Obama’s theme this time around was that George W. Bush had been awful and Mitt Romney would be far worse. The Obama campaign spent almost $1 billion to brand the latter as a veritable felon who callously let people suffer without health insurance....

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Vincent J. Cannato: Two Visions of the Electorate

SOURCE: National Review (11-8-12)

Vincent J. Cannato is a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and the author of The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York.

What happened with this election? Many conservatives predicted that Romney would win the election, with some even predicting a landslide. Many liberals were equally confident that Obama would win, even if they thought the results would be relatively close. 

This election was more than just a race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, more than just a battle between liberalism and conservatism. It was a race between two different visions of what the American electorate looks like. Democrats saw the race through the lens of the “emerging Democratic majority.” Rising numbers of minority voters — and a corresponding declining white vote — meant that Democrats were playing with the wind at their backs. Add to that young voters, upscale professionals, and single women, and you have a pretty durable coalition that could push President Obama across the finish line despite the stagnant economy.

On the other hand, Republicans saw this as a “Silent Majority” election. They were trying to refight the 1980s, putting together the political coalition that gave the country the Reagan Revolution: evangelicals, working-class white Catholic “Reagan Democrats,” small businessmen, and rural voters. Conservative pundits kept saying that polls were wrong because they oversampled Democrats and ignored Republican enthusiasm. They seemed to argue that the polls were missing potential GOP voters who would show up on Election Day and oust Obama....

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Jonathan Zimmerman: As a Region Battered by Sandy Braces for the Nor'easter, I Think of Grandma

SOURCE: CS Monitor (11-7-12)

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory” (Yale University Press).

What’s going to happen to Grandma?

That was my first worry, when I heard that hurricane Sandy was coming. Then I remembered: Grandma’s not here anymore. It’s easy to forget, because she was with us for so long; she passed last December at the age of 104. And I stayed at her Greenwich Village apartment two nights a week for 16 years, while commuting from my Philadelphia home to my job in New York.

So when the rains began, and the lights went out, I found myself lying in the dark and remembering Grandma – and the New York we had shared.

From the studio apartment that I now rent, just one floor above Grandma’s place, I made my way through a pitch-black hallway and down the stairs, guided only by the weak light of my cellphone. And I thought of 9/11.

On September 11, from the street outside my office, I had watched one of the Twin Towers crumble into dust. Then I went to Grandma’s apartment and we watched both buildings fall, over and over again, on her old television set....
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Kevin M. Kruse: The Real Loser: Truth

SOURCE: NYT (11-5-12)

Kevin M. Kruse, a professor of history at Princeton, is the co-editor, most recently, of “Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement.”

THE director Steven Spielberg, whose “Lincoln” biopic opens Friday, recently said he hoped the film would have a “soothing or even healing effect” on a nation exhausted after yet another bitter and polarizing election.

But there’s one line attributed to Lincoln that Daniel Day-Lewis, who plays the president, doesn’t utter in the film: “You may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all the time.”

The omission makes sense. Not only is the line probably apocryphal, but also, this Election Day just might demonstrate that you really can fool all of the people — or at least enough of them — in the time it takes to win the White House....

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Mary L. Dudziak: How War Disappeared from American Campaign Rhetoric

SOURCE: Foreign Policy (11-6-12)

Mary L. Dudziak is the Asa Griggs Candler professor of law at the Emory University School of Law. She is the author of War · Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences.

The 2012 election has certainly not felt like a contest carried out in a nation at war. Though 68,000 U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan and the 2,000th American was recently killed in the decade-long conflict, President Barack Obama has largely relegated his promises of winding down the war to an afterthought in his stump speech. His rival, Mitt Romney, barely mentions the war at all. The U.S military pulled out of Iraq at the end of 2011, but that has gotten far less play in the campaign than the killing of Osama bin Laden. And neither candidate discusses how or when the open-ended U.S. war on terror might finally come to an end.

Americans traditionally vote with their pocketbooks, but the extent to which war has been relegated to the political backburner is still striking. It's possible that, in an era when war is carried out by a dwindling percentage of Americans -- increasingly by remote control -- in an undefined territory and without a clear end, Americans have simply accepted a permanent state of low-level war. Obama likes to talk about how he wants to do "nation-building at home, but perhaps the very idea of a peacetime presidency is a thing in the past....
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Jonathan Zimmerman: Why I'm Not Voting Today

SOURCE: Philadelphia Inquirer (11-6-12)

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University and lives in Narberth. He is the author of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory" (Yale University Press).

That's because I voted several weeks ago. So have millions of other Americans, via absentee ballot and early voting. They're turning a formerly public act into a private one, which should worry all of us, no matter where we vote.

Across the United States, absentee ballots now account for almost 20 percent of votes. Two states, Oregon and Washington, conduct their elections entirely by mail. And in seven others, more than half the votes in the last presidential election were cast before Election Day.

Why is that a problem? One reason is the potential for fraud. Despite the recent spate of voter-ID laws in Pennsylvania and other states, a recent Carnegie-Knight study found just 10 purported cases of voter impersonation at the polls nationwide since 2000; by contrast, there were nearly 500 allegations of absentee-ballot fraud. Here in Philadelphia, a federal judge overturned the results of a 1993 state Senate election because of forged absentee ballots....
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Aaron B. O’Connell: The Permanent Militarization of America

SOURCE: NYT (11-5-12)

Aaron B. O’Connell, an assistant professor of history at the United States Naval Academy and a Marine reserve officer, is the author of “Underdogs: The Making of the Modern Marine Corps.”

IN 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower left office warning of the growing power of the military-industrial complex in American life. Most people know the term the president popularized, but few remember his argument.

In his farewell address, Eisenhower called for a better equilibrium between military and domestic affairs in our economy, politics and culture. He worried that the defense industry’s search for profits would warp foreign policy and, conversely, that too much state control of the private sector would cause economic stagnation. He warned that unending preparations for war were incongruous with the nation’s history. He cautioned that war and warmaking took up too large a proportion of national life, with grave ramifications for our spiritual health.

The military-industrial complex has not emerged in quite the way Eisenhower envisioned. The United States spends an enormous sum on defense — over $700 billion last year, about half of all military spending in the world — but in terms of our total economy, it has steadily declined to less than 5 percent of gross domestic product from 14 percent in 1953. Defense-related research has not produced an ossified garrison state; in fact, it has yielded a host of beneficial technologies, from the Internet to civilian nuclear power to GPS navigation. The United States has an enormous armaments industry, but it has not hampered employment and economic growth. In fact, Congress’s favorite argument against reducing defense spending is the job loss such cuts would entail....
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