George Mason University's
History News Network

Roundup: Media's Take


This is where we excerpt articles from the media that take a historical approach to events in the news.

SOURCE: NYT (5-20-13)

George Packer, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is the author, most recently, of “The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.”

THE Roaring ’20s was the decade when modern celebrity was invented in America. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby” is full of magazine spreads of tennis players and socialites, popular song lyrics, movie stars, paparazzi, gangsters and sports scandals — machine-made by technology, advertising and public relations. Gatsby, a mysterious bootlegger who makes a meteoric ascent from Midwestern obscurity to the palatial splendor of West Egg, exemplifies one part of the celebrity code: it’s inherently illicit. Fitzgerald intuited that, with the old restraining deities of the 19th century dead and his generation’s faith in man shaken by World War I, celebrities were the new household gods.

What are celebrities, after all? They dominate the landscape, like giant monuments to aspiration, fulfillment and overreach. They are as intimate as they are grand, and they offer themselves for worship by ordinary people searching for a suitable object of devotion. But in times of widespread opportunity, the distance between gods and mortals closes, the monuments shrink closer to human size and the centrality of celebrities in the culture recedes. They loom larger in times like now, when inequality is soaring and trust in institutions — governments, corporations, schools, the press — is falling.

The Depression that ended Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age yielded to a new order that might be called the Roosevelt Republic. In the quarter-century after World War II, the country established collective structures, not individual monuments, that channeled the aspirations of ordinary people: state universities, progressive taxation, interstate highways, collective bargaining, health insurance for the elderly, credible news organizations....


Tuesday, May 21, 2013 - 18:48

SOURCE: NYT (5-20-13)

Masha Gessen is a journalist in Moscow and the author of “The Man Without a Face,” a biography of Vladimir Putin.

MOSCOW — Just saying that a Jew should have been made into a lampshade does not make you an anti-Semite, or so a prominent columnist asserted recently. And just because both Nazism and Soviet Communism were totalitarian regimes does not mean they are comparable. Such arguments, counterarguments and variations of them have dominated Russian blogs, social networks and some of the traditional media for the last week.

The debate began when the liberal Leonid Gozman wrote a blog entry equating Smersh, the Stalin-era counterintelligence agencies — the name is an acronym for “death to spies” — with the Nazi S.S. The occasion was a television mini-series about Smersh, released on the anniversary of the end of World War II. Gozman asked readers to imagine a miniseries that portrayed S.S. officers as “honest soldiers who show themselves to be capable of outstanding bravery and self-sacrifice.” A show like that is unthinkable, he wrote, in Russia or in Germany, because “Germans born years after that nightmare are still ashamed of the S.S. uniform.” Yet the officers of Smersh, wrote Gozman, were as criminal as the S.S.: “They did not have handsome uniforms, but that is their only significant distinction from the S.S.”...


Tuesday, May 21, 2013 - 18:38

SOURCE: Conscience of a Liberal (5-19-13)

Paul Krugman is a Princeton economist and an op-ed columnist for the New York Times.

Matt O’Brien is probably right to suggest that Michael Kinsley’s problems — and those of quite a few other people, some of whom have real influence on policy — is that they’re still living in the 1970s. I do, however, resent that thing about 60-year-old men …

But it’s actually even worse than Matt says. For the 1970s such people remember as a cautionary tale bears little resemblance to the 1970s that actually happened.

In elite mythology, the origins of the crisis of the 70s, like the supposed origins of our current crisis, lay in excess: too much debt, too much coddling of those slovenly proles via a strong welfare state. The suffering of 1979-82 was necessary payback.

None of that is remotely true.

There was no deficit problem: government debt was low and stable or falling as a share of GDP during the 70s. Rising welfare rolls may have been a big political problem, but a runaway welfare state more broadly just wasn’t an issue — hey, these days right-wingers complaining about a nation of takers tend to use the low-dependency 70s as a baseline.

What we did have was a wage-price spiral: workers demanding large wage increases (those were the days when workers actually could make demands) because they expected lots of inflation, firms raising prices because of rising costs, all exacerbated by big oil shocks. It was mainly a case of self-fulfilling expectations, and the problem was to break the cycle.

So why did we need a terrible recession? Not to pay for our past sins, but simply as a way to cool the action. Someone — I’m pretty sure it was Martin Baily — described the inflation problem as being like what happens when everyone at a football game stands up to see the action better, and the result is that everyone is uncomfortable but nobody actually gets a better view. And the recession was, in effect, stopping the game until everyone was seated again.

The difference, of course, was that this timeout destroyed millions of jobs and wasted trillions of dollars.

Was there a better way? Ideally, we should have been able to get all the relevant parties in a room and say, look, this inflation has to stop; you workers, reduce your wage demands, you businesses, cancel your price increases, and for our part, we agree to stop printing money so the whole thing is over. That way, you’d get price stability without the recession. And in some small, cohesive countries that is more or less what happened. (Check out the Israeli stabilization of 1985).

But America wasn’t like that, and the decision was made to do it the hard, brutal way. This was not a policy triumph! It was, in a way, a confession of despair.

It worked on the inflation front, although some of the other myths about all that are just as false as the myths about the 1970s. No, America didn’t return to vigorous productivity growth — that didn’t happen until the mid-1990s. 60-year-old men should remember that a decade after the Volcker disinflation we were still very much in a national funk; remember the old joke that the Cold War was over, and Japan won?

So it would be bad enough if we were basing policy today on lessons from the 70s. It’s even worse that we’re basing policy today on a mythical 70s that never was.


Monday, May 20, 2013 - 12:47

SOURCE: The New Republic (5-16-13)

Jeffrey Rosen (@rosenjeffrey) is The New Republic's legal affairs editor.

...Obama’s rediscovery of the 1917 Espionage Act is grimly appropriate, since the president whose behavior on civil liberties he is most directly channeling isn’t, in fact, Richard Nixon or George W. Bush. It’s Woodrow Wilson. An enthusiastic supporter of Espionage Act prosecutions, the progressive, detached, technocratic Wilson was so convinced of his own virtue that he was willing to jail the Socialist candidate for president, Eugene V. Debs, for his mild criticism of the war, even as he championed progressive reforms such as the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission, both of them designed with the help of his economic advisor, Louis Brandeis.

Wilson had a sorry record on civil liberties, and once Brandeis was on the Supreme Court, he eloquently criticized the Wilson administration for its betrayal of progressive values such as free speech and transparency, declaring that “sunlight is the best disinfectant,” and unforgettably extolling the necessity of protecting political dissent.

Let’s hope today’s progressives teach the Wilsonian Obama a similar lesson.


Thursday, May 16, 2013 - 21:08

SOURCE: Atlantic Cities (5-9-13)

With 150,000 or so old print maps to his name, David Rumsey has earned his reputed place among the world's "finest private collectors." But the 69-year-old San Francisco collector doesn't have any intention of resting on his cartographic laurels. He continues to expand his personal trove as well as the digitized sub-collection he makes open to the public online — some 38,000 strong, and growing.

"I'm pretty old for a geek map guy," he says. "But I stay young by embracing new technologies all the time."

Rumsey, a native New Yorker, began his career teaching and practicing art — specifically, its intersections with technology — before getting involved in a charity on the West Coast. After starting his map collection Rumsey used that early art-tech interest to stay ahead of the digitization push. He's created a series of interactive maps that layer old prints onto the Google Earth and Google Maps platforms, and this summer he plans to launch a geo-referencing tool (similar to one recently introduced by the British Library) that lets users get involved in the digital mapping process themselves....


Friday, May 10, 2013 - 11:02

SOURCE: Foreign Policy (5-7-13)

Christian Caryl, the editor of Democracy Lab, is a senior fellow at the Legatum Institute and a contributing editor at Foreign Policy. He is also the author of a new book, Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century, to be published in May.

It is inevitable, perhaps, that we tend to focus on leaders when we examine grand political and economic transitions. But they are not the only actors in these dramas. Deng Xiaoping and his colleagues triumphed precisely because they unleashed the creativity and the entrepreneurial urges of millions of Chinese. Many of them -- shocking though it might be to think -- were not even members of the Chinese Communist Party.

In January 1979, around the time that Deng was preparing for his trip to the United States, a young man named Rong Zhiren returned to his hometown of Guangzhou, historically known as Canton, the largest city in Guangdong province, up the river from Hong Kong. Rong had just turned 30, but he had relatively little in the way of concrete achievements to show for someone of his age. The reason was the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. A central part of the Cultural Revolution was Mao Zedong's campaign against intellectualism, book learning, and the "Four Olds" (old habits, old ideas, old customs, and old culture). In 1966, he had ordered the closure of China's institutions of higher education. Over the ensuing years, 17 million students were dispatched to the countryside to learn the virtues of the simple life from the peasantry. University entrance examinations did not resume in China until autumn 1977. By early 1979, only 7 million students had made it back to the cities.

As the Cultural Revolution played out, the overwhelming majority of students stayed where they were assigned, which usually meant wasting their best years tilling the land in remote agricultural communes. Rong did not. Sent out to the countryside in 1969, he snuck away as soon as he had the chance. He spent the next decade dodging the police and living from odd jobs, such as drawing and tutoring. He lived with friends, moving from place to place. In December 1978, back in Guangzhou but still on the run, he heard a radio broadcast publicizing the results of the historic Third Plenum in Beijing, the meeting that sealed the triumph of Deng's pragmatic course of economic reform. Like millions of other Chinese, Rong understood that something fundamentally transformative was under way -- and that included an opening for entrepreneurship. "I knew this policy would last because Chinese people would want to get rich," as he later put it. In January 1979, he decided that he would be one of the first to take a chance. He applied for a business license. The bureaucratic obstacles sounded daunting: One of the requirements was a complete physical checkup to ensure that he had no infectious diseases. But it turned out to be a cinch. Rong sailed through the procedure in just a few days. (Nowadays it takes nearly three weeks.) The Guangdong government, eager to get things going, was already trying to encourage business creation....


Thursday, May 9, 2013 - 10:55

SOURCE: WaPo (5-6-13)

Al Kamen writes for the Washington Post.

Important segments of President Obama’s base have been hammering him for not appointing enough Latinos and African Americans — and no gays — to his second-term Cabinet.

Thirty-two years ago, when Ronald Reagan’s first-term team was coming together, the Cabinet included one woman, U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, and one African American, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Samuel Pierce.

But the number of women and minorities increased later in Reagan’s term, and he named the first Hispanic Cabinet member.

Quick Loop Quiz! Who was that person?

Ah, you guessed it: Education Secretary Lauro Cavazos....


Tuesday, May 7, 2013 - 10:50

SOURCE: WaPo (4-25-13)

Jonathan Bernstein is a columnist for the Washington Post.

George W. Bush is not remembered with any enthusiasm currently. That’s not likely to change.

Whatever way it’s measured, he’s not doing too well. Gallup has his retrospective approval at 47 percent; that’s third-lowest in the polling era, better than only Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson (Harry Enten has more on placing post-presidential approval in context). As far as historians and other students of the presidency, it’s even worse; Bush falls in the bottom quarter of the ratings surveys in which he’s been included.

In terms of popular appeal in the short term, Bush will likely be hurt because there’s no campaign underway to improve his reputation — either by himself, as was the case with Nixon and is still the case with Jimmy Carter, or on his behalf, as with John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. We don’t really have a way of measuring the effects of those campaigns, and Nixon’s hasn’t worked, but it certainly seems likely to help to some extent. Bush’s best hope as far as popularity is probably for his brother, nephew or some other family member to become president and excel, which somehow rubs off on him. That’s not much of a hope....


Thursday, April 25, 2013 - 15:41

SOURCE: The Nation (4-22-13)

Richard Parker,a Nation editorial board member, is an Oxford-trained economist who teaches at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He serves as an adviser to Prime Minister Papandreou. He is the biographer of John Kenneth Galbraith.

...My parents lived through the Depression and Second World War; they’d been children in the First World War; and they’d taught us in the Cold War fifties and sixties not to be fearful but to be brave—and quiet about our bravery. When President Kennedy was assassinated, we all wept—but I don’t remember Walter Cronkite offering therapeutic advice to viewers or Lyndon Johnson keening on about “our” suffering and fears.

After the murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, there was no maudlin outpouring of “understanding,” no calls for us to hug our children or for our parents to hug us. The Secret Service agents who threw themselves over Kennedy’s slumped body and raced his open limousine to Parkland Hospital, the colleagues of King who cradled him in his last moments on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel or the people who grabbed Sirhan Sirhan and disarmed him in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel weren’t hailed for their “unbelievable courage as first responders,” or held up as icons for veneration. Instead they were respected—quietly respected—for doing what was expected. They had been brave—they knew it, we knew it. That was enough.

Almost everything about the press’s and officialdom’s reactions has struck one false note after another this past week. What happened in Boston was horrific? Really? Hiroshima was horrific; Dresden was horrific; Dachau and Auschwitz, they were horrific.

What happened at the finish line of the Boston Marathon was truly terrible, deeply saddening and a loss we all should mourn—three people, undeserving of their fate, were murdered, and 170 more were injured, mangled in some cases like my son’s schoolmate. Yet the death count was one-tenth of 1 percent of the World Trade Center’s on 9/11—or for that matter, at Pearl Harbor on December 7....


Tuesday, April 23, 2013 - 14:28

SOURCE: The Daily Beast (4-22-13)

Peter Pomerantsev is a television producer and nonfiction writer. He lives in London.

...The 1970s and 1980s, the period when the current Russian elite matured and which is the focus of Bullough’s book, are largely ignored inside Russia. Few novels and fewer films focus on the era. The most notable movie about the period is German, the Oscar-winning The Lives of Others, which focuses on the battle between dissidents and the Stasi in 1980s East Berlin and captures the sense of slow-baked fear, granite depression, and moral corruption. When The Lives of Others was released in Russia in 2007, local media acted as if the film had nothing to do with them. Whereas in the countries of Eastern Europe unbroken Soviet-era dissidents have become heroes, Russian dissidents are often ignored or censured as traitors: while Václav Havel became president of the Czech Republic, Russia chose a KGB man, Vladimir Putin, as its leader. The mechanics of Putin’s rule are a 21st-century spin on how Dudko was broken in 1980: oligarchs are allowed to keep their money as long as they publicly go down on one knee to the Kremlin; journalists can have all the fun they want as long as they compose Putin hagiographies. The aim is not to simply oppress (how banal!), but to make you part of the system.

When the Kremlin pushed through the recent Dima Yakovlev bill, which banned Russian orphans from being adopted by U.S. parents, many Duma deputies and senators were privately appalled, but were so terrified, they signed anyway: “It’s a way to make us all guilty,” a Duma deputy (one of the very few who didn’t sign) told me afterward, “the old KGB trick.” Seen from this perspective, the loud Russian debates between choosing a “European” or “Oriental” path, between “patriotism” and “modernity,” are all distractions from the great drama between brokenness and self-respect that no one wants to talk about. The new generation of dissidents, such as Pussy Riot, who have taken to Moscow’s streets over the past two years invoke their 1970s predecessors: the protest movement is not just about standing up to Putin, but a way to finally deal with the unresolved conformism of the 1970s. The new dissidents have resurrected the vocabulary of their predecessors: dostojnstvo (dignity), which in the language of the dissidents means not betraying your beliefs; poryadochnost (decency), which means you don’t snitch on your friends; ne pachkatsa (not to get dirty by cooperating with the state). But the new dissidents remain a disliked minority, accused by state media of being Western stooges who are “doing it for money”: in a culture of conformism everyone has to be seen to be a cynic....


Tuesday, April 23, 2013 - 14:24

SOURCE: The Root (4-22-13)

Keli Goff is The Root's political correspondent. Follow her on Twitter.

(The Root) -- Largely overlooked amid the wall-to-wall coverage of the Boston terror attacks was some intriguing and potentially important political news. Former President George W. Bush weighed in on speculation regarding his brother former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush's presidential prospects, saying that he hopes his sibling runs for the nation's highest office in 2016.

If Bush runs, it is unlikely that he will be the only familiar name on the ballot. It is widely believed that former first lady-turned-Senator-turned-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will also run. This means that regardless of political party, the White House could soon be occupied by a familiar name and family. 2016 might just end up feeling a bit like a flashback from A Christmas Carol -- except, instead of all of us taking a stroll down memory lane to revisit Christmases past, we'll be visiting elections past.

Here's a question for American voters: Are political dynasties actually good for America? 

One of the core principles that are supposed to distinguish America from monarchy-ruled countries in Europe is that in America, political power is supposed to be earned, not inherited. Yet from the earliest days of our country's existence, political power has been concentrated among already powerful families. The earliest example is the Adams family. John Adams served as the country's first vice president and second president, while his son John Quincy Adams served as the country's sixth president....


Tuesday, April 23, 2013 - 14:15

SOURCE: The Root (4-22-13)

Joseph Harker is assistant comment editor at the Guardian newspaper and a former editor of Black Briton newspaper. Follow him on Twitter.

(The Root) -- Exactly 20 years ago today, Stephen Lawrence woke up like a typical 18-year-old student. Studying technology and physics, he was hoping to go to college later that year to realize his dream of becoming an architect.

By the end of the day he was dead, stabbed to death by a gang of white racists as he waited by a bus stop near his home in southeast London. But his story lives on: His tragic killing on April 22, 1993, and its aftermath, captured the attention of the nation and had a huge impact on policing, race relations and the country's biggest institutions and corporations.

Stephen's parents, Neville and Doreen, like any grieving family, wanted justice. The police, it seemed, were ambivalent. They treated Stephen's friend Duwayne Brooks -- who had fled for his life and managed to escape the gang -- as a suspect. And though, in the following hours and days, many local people pointed fingers toward the same group of five people, officers took no meaningful action....


Tuesday, April 23, 2013 - 14:03

SOURCE: WaPo (4-17-13)

Walter Pincus is a national security journalist for The Washington Post.

How provocative has the United States been to North Korea?

For almost two months, the United States and South Korea have had more than 200,000 ground troops, tanks, helicopters, fighter-bombers, strategic bombers, submarines and destroyers exercising close to the demilitarized zone (DMZ) and the disputed sector of the Yellow Sea on the border between the two Koreas.

...[T]ry, for a moment, to put yourself in the shoes of 30-year-old Kim. He succeeded his father in late December 2011 and for the past five months has been maneuvering to consolidate his authority over the Korean Workers’ Party and Korean People’s Army. Early on he replaced three older generals who had been close to his father and talked of getting closer to the people.

He appeared with his young wife, went to a theme park, and talked of solving the food shortage. He got the party last month to adopt a policy of economic development but balanced it with a plan to increase nuclear forces. Last November, he made Kim Kyok Sik defense minister, choosing a hard-line general who was accused of the shelling of a South Korean border island in 2010. He also chose a reformer, Pak Pong Ju, as prime minister to replace Vice Marshal Kim Jong Gak, a member of the military....


Thursday, April 18, 2013 - 19:59

SOURCE: WaPo (4-17-13)

Ezra Klein is a columnist at the Washington Post, as well as a contributor to MSNBC

The season premiere of “Mad Men” ended with Don Draper staring at the front page of the New York Times from Jan. 1, 1968. “World Bids Adieu to a Violent Year,” reads the headline. (The Times story, by Murray Schumach, is real; you can read it here.)

As in “Mad Men,” a sense of dread pervades the article. “Nations said farewell to a year of violence, tension, and economic uncertainty,” it reminds readers, who will soon discover that the new year brings even more lurid violence than the one just past. The accompanying photograph shows two people, backs to the camera, umbrellas open against a snowstorm, walking through a deserted Central Park. It’s bleak.

That was America, 1968. By comparison, the America of 2013 is downright quiescent. “No one is burning down cities,” says author Rick Perlstein, whose “Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America” is a history of the political convulsions of the earlier time. “The national guard isn’t shooting anyone. You don’t have thousands of people on college campuses pledging themselves to sedition against the United States. You don’t have civil rights activists being murdered or churches being bombed. You don’t have draft resistance. You don’t have a string of political assassinations. In that sense, what’s happening now doesn’t compare to the 1960s.”

In fact, the 1960s marked a low point of congressional polarization; as the country was coming apart, Washington was working overtime to pull it together. When today’s Beltway graybeards long for the comity of the “Mad Men” era, they are recalling a political system in which polarization flowed into Washington, was more or less homogenized by the establishment, and then flowed back out as consensus. What we have today might be called the “Mad Congress” era: Relative calm flows into the capital, angry polarization flows out....


Thursday, April 18, 2013 - 19:44

SOURCE: TomDispatch (4-18-13)

Erika Eichelberger is a senior editorial fellow at Mother Jones where she writes regularly for the website. She is also director of social media for TomDispatch. She has written for the Nation, the Brooklyn Rail, and Alternet.

Since the Newtown massacre, visions of unfathomable crazy mass killers and armed strangers in the night have colonized the American mind. Proposed laws have been drawn up that would keep potential mass murderers from getting their hands on assault weapons and high-capacity clips, or that would stop hardened criminals from buying guns. But the danger out there is both more mundane and more terrible:you're more likely to be hurt or killed by someone you know or love. And you'll probably be at home when it happens.

Between 2005 and 2010, 60% of all violent injuries in this countrywere inflicted by loved ones or acquaintances. And 60% of the time those victimizations happened in the home. In 2011, 79% of murders reported to the FBI (in which the victim-offender relationship was known) were committed by friends, loved ones, or acquaintances. Of the 3.5 million assaults and murders against family members between 1998 and 2002 (the last time such a study was done), almost half were crimes against spouses. Eleven percent were against children. But the majority of violent deaths are self-imposed. Suicide is the leading cause of violent death in the U.S., and most of those self-killings happen at home.

Violence Against Women

Vanette has plastic, rose-tinted glasses on and cowrie shells weaved into her braids. Her nails are long and thick and painted purple-brown. She has ample gaps in her teeth, and she's sitting at the communal dining table at a “transitional home” in Washington, D.C., telling me about the time her boyfriend broke her knee.

Vanette doesn't really think of that as domestic violence, though. "When I think of physical violence, I think of punchin' and smackin'," she says. The fat silver chain bracelets on her wrists jangle against the table as she talks. Besides, she says, she was the one who started the fight. Her boyfriend had polyps in his lungs and was supposed to carry around an oxygen tank, flush his lungs twice a week with a machine, and not smoke. One night in 2010, when Vanette got home, there he was, smoking weed in the living room with friends. "I was like, yeah, well, whatever, you're gonna kill yourself anyway." And then he shoved her over the back of the couch.

Domestic violence is the number one cause of injury to women. The incidents add up to more than all the rapes, muggings, and car accidents women experience each year. One out of every four women in the U.S. will be physically injured by a lover in her lifetime. That translates into a woman being assaulted every nine seconds in America. Immigrant women are beaten at higher rates than U.S. citizens, and African-American women are subjected to the most severe forms of violence. Not surprisingly, a shaky economy just makes these numbers worse.

And then there are the rapes. Over a lifetime, one out of every six American women is raped. For Native Americans, that number is one in three. For Native Alaskans, it can be up to 12 times the national rate.

And don’t forget the killings. Sixty-four percent of the women killed every year are murdered by family members or lovers. There are more than 1,000 homicides of that kind annually, or approximately three a day. If there’s a gun in a home where domestic abuse is a common thing, a woman is eight times more likely to be killed.

Faced with this grim pile of data, the American home begins to look less like a “castle” and more like a slaughterhouse.

At the same time, these numbers actually represent a vast improvement in domestic violence rates compared with a decade and a half ago.  Since 1994, the rate of violence against women in the home is down 64%.

That percentage isn't quite as dramatic as it looks, because it coincides with a parallel decline in overall violence during the same period, and excludes the homeless, up to 40% of whom report going to the streets or someone’s couch because of violence in the home. Still, the drop is significant and is likely due to, among other things, a public coming to terms with the reality of domestic violence, relatively recent federal laws meant to protect victims in the home, and the training of police and prosecutors to treat such violence as a crime, not a private affair.

For much of American history, the legal system didn't recognize most domestic violence, or date rape, or acquaintance rape, or marital rape as crimes. For a century, American men had the explicit right to beat their wives. They lost that right by the late 1870s, but long after that, the police would often respond to reports of wife-beatings by telling the husband to “walk around the block” and cool off. Public aversion to acknowledging violence in the home was so intense for so long that the anti-animal cruelty movement preceded the anti-domestic violence movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Even today, a residual urge to respect the supposed sanctity of the home and marriage helps shield men from laws now on the books.

In 1994, Congress passed the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). It was a landmark in bringing domestic violence out of the house and into the public space. Among other things, it provided money for the legal representation of victims of domestic violence, and for police training on the subject, and it helped enforce judicial restraining orders. The law also funded states to adopt mandatory arrest policies, which require that police arrest suspects in cases in which there is probable cause to believe domestic violence has taken place. Such laws now exist in 22 states and the District of Columbia.

Nationwide, however, arrest rates for domestic violence remain low. Only about half of reported domestic violence incidents result in arrest.

Even when states do have mandatory arrest laws, they don’t always play out so well. If an arrest results in the elimination of the breadwinner in a household, it can leave an already battered woman broke as well. And the threat of certain punishment for a husband or boyfriend can actually make women reluctant to report abuse, which means they remain in violent homes. Immigrant and minority victims are even less inclined to call 911, since they have a stronger distrust of the police. Which means that sometimes mandatory arrest laws can backfire, resulting in fewer arrests, continued violence, and more deaths. A 2007 Harvard study found that the murder rate among domestic partners was 60% greater in states with mandatory arrest laws.

Once Vanette had landed on the floor behind the couch with one leg crumpled under her, it was her boyfriend who called 911. He was scared to death. When the ambulance came and the EMTs questioned her, she claimed it had been an accident. (Washington, D.C. has a mandatory arrest law). They kept her in the hospital for two days. And then she was on a cane. And out of a job. And shuttling between homeless shelters for months because her girlfriends told her she had to get out of that house.

Violence Against Children

Deon, who is now 27, doesn't cry. Ever. And he doesn’t get angry. His eyes are wide apart and impassive. He talks matter-of-factly about how, when he was 14, his mother tried to kill him. She said it was because he hadn’t done his homework. One day too many. She lashed him with an extension cord and threw a glass at him. She screamed that she'd call the police and then came at him with a knife. But she missed -- deliberately or accidentally -- and stabbed the wall instead. He says she meant to hit that wall. His little niece, his two sisters, and his mother’s boyfriend were all in the apartment. His older sister kept pleading, “Mummy, that’s enough." But no one ever reported the incident.

Child Protective Services may not have gotten a call about Deon, but it does respond to millions of reports of alleged abuse: 3.4 million in 2011. There were 681,000 unique victims that year. Seventy-nine percent of those kids suffered from neglect at home. Eighteen percent were physically abused, and 9% were sexually abused. Babies under age one were assaulted most often; 1,570 of those children died from abuse and neglect that year. Eighty-two percent of child victims in 2011 were younger than four.

While the rate of assault on children (as with women) has dropped over the past two decades, a recent Yale School of Medicine study found that serious child abuse -- the kind that results in fractures, head injuries, burns, open wounds, or abdominal injuries -- is actually up.

Being poor is a good way to increase your chances of being hurt by your parents. The same Yale study of severe abuse found that over the past 12 years, parental punching, thrashing, or burning of children has jumped by 15% for kids on Medicaid, the government health insurance program for families in poverty, but by 5% for the general population. Another recent Yale study suggested that child Medicaid recipients were six times more likely to be victims of abuse than those not on Medicaid.

Kids in violent homes have sleeping, eating, and attention problems. They are generally more withdrawn, anxious, and depressed than children with parents who don't abuse them. A 2012 Harvard study of the brain scans of 200 people found that childhood abuse can be associated with damage to the brain's hippocampus, which plays a major role in short- and long-term memory. Such kids are also more vulnerable to chronic illnesses like heart disease and diabetes, leading some to call child abuse the tobacco industry of mental health. One National Institute of Justice study of 1,500 kids found that abused children were also more likely to become violent criminals.

Child abuse first received national attention in 1874, due to the case of Mary Ellen McCormack, a 10-year-old orphan in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen who was abused by an adoptive mother. No laws then existed to keep parents from beating their children, so the case was brought to court by, yes, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. “I have now on my head two black-and-blue marks which were made by Mamma with the whip," McCormack testified, "and a cut on the left side of my forehead which was made by a pair of scissors in Mamma’s hand; she struck me with the scissors and cut me.”

The McCormack case spurred a reformers' crusade. In 1912, the U.S. Children's Bureau was created to research and publicize the issue of violence against children. After World War II, more research led to the system of child-abuse reporting we have now, in which various professionals -- doctors, teachers, daycare workers -- are required to report suspicions of abuse. Child Protective Services does screenings and investigations and has the power to remove a child from a home, if necessary.

Deon didn't have his day in court, but even if he had, research shows that, again and again, courts return abused children to parents with a history of violence. A 2005 study by the New England Research Institutes found that, even in states with laws that tilt against custody for an abusive parent, 40% of adjudicated wife-beaters got joint custody of children. The American Judges Association says that about 70% of wife-abusers are able to convince a court that the mother is unfit for sole custody. Nationwide, some 58,000 children a year are put back into the unsupervised care of alleged abusers after a divorce.

Deon left his mother’s apartment in Brooklyn at 18 and moved in with a coworker in Harlem. He visits his mother maybe once a year. Her place is windowless, wall-to-wall carpeted, and tight with too much furniture. He and his mother don't ever talk about what happened with the homework and the knife and the wall. When he stops by, he'll hover in her apartment for 20 minutes or so.  And then he has to leave.

Self-Violence

Mark was 25, handsome, rich, and smart. He had a trust fund and spent $10,000 of it a month. He was really popular -- there must have been 400 people at his funeral.

When Mark was a kid, his father once made him cry for not finishing a sandwich in a restaurant. He also showed him just how to treat his mother and younger brother, so that Mark would grow up to be a good bully, too. When he graduated from college, his dad insisted that he also go to law school. But he couldn't get in.

Mark started binge drinking at age 13. He had a history of getting into trouble (at school, with the law), but his dad was usually able to get him out of it -- until the bar fight that landed a guy in the hospital. A couple of weeks after that, Mark was drunk at his apartment and fighting with his girlfriend. His dad had given him a .38 revolver because he thought the upscale neighborhood Mark lived in was dangerous. He pulled out the gun and shot himself. In his eulogy, his dad told the congregation that Mark was trying to live up to him and couldn't do it.

Of the approximately 55,000 people each year who die a violent death in the United States, most -- like Mark -- take their own lives: about 38,000 annually. Suicide is the 10th leading cause of American death, behind cancer and heart attacks but ahead of car accidents. There is a suicide every 13.7 minutes. And 77% of the time, as in Mark's case, it happens at home. In 2010, the highest suicide rate was among 45- to 64-year-olds. Men kill themselves four times more often than women, whites more often than other races.

There are known contributors. Ninety percent of those who kill themselves have mental disorders. Many have physical pain. Being unemployed is associated with as much as a three-fold increased risk of death by suicide. Having a means of suicide in the home, like a gun, also makes it more likely to happen. In that sense, Mark killed himself in the most common way.

Often enough, suicides fail. Nearly one million people attempt suicide every year. In 2010, 464,995 people visited a hospital for injuries due to suicidal behavior. Even though men succeed in killing themselves more often, women attempt suicide three times as often as men. According to researchers, that’s because a woman is more likely to use the act as a cry for help, rather than to end her life.

Suicide is not a pretty thing to talk about. That's one reason why federal policy on suicide prevention is still in its infancy. A movement organized by the families and friends of victims began to build throughout the 1990s, however, and eventually got the attention of Surgeon General David Satcher. In 2001, he laid out the first national strategy for suicide prevention. But 12 years later, advocates say federal funding for suicide prevention and research is still insufficient.

Oddly enough, since the federal government instituted its response, suicide rates have been climbing. The national suicide rate had been on the decline for decades: between 1990 and 2000, it dropped from 12.5 to 10.4 deaths per 100,000. In the next decade, it started to rise again and stood at 12.1 per 100,000 in 2010.

Suicide is up. Severe child abuse is on the rise. Domestic violence is still the number one injurer of women. The classic notion of the home as a refuge, not an abattoir, seems more and more like a joke.

Feel free to cut through that dark alley on your way home. Or maybe just don't go home.


Thursday, April 18, 2013 - 15:44

SOURCE: The New Republic (4-17-13)

Adam Winkler teaches law at UCLA

The day after the horrific mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, Barack Obama fought back tears. “We’ve endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years,” he said. “The majority of those who died today were children, beautiful little kids between the ages of five and ten. They had their entire lives ahead of them, birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own.” When the president said Americans were “going to have to come together to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics,” it looked as if new federal gun laws were inevitable. Polls showed significant majorities in support of universal background checks and restrictions on military-style rifles, and many in Washington were beginning to question the power of the NRA after the gun rights group’s favored candidates fared poorly in the November elections.

Today, just four months later, the Senate all but dashed any hope for meaningful reform from Congress. What happened? Where did the president, who was at the height of his political influence after his reelection in November, go wrong?

After Newtown, it was clear to everyone on the gun control side that speed was of the essence. The longer it took to move a bill to the floor for a vote, the harder it would be to win. In recognition of this, President Obama appeared to act quickly. He appointed a special commission headed up by Joe Biden to come up with proposals, then gave the commission a tight deadline of mid-January to make its recommendations....


Thursday, April 18, 2013 - 12:23

SOURCE: Foreign Policy (4-16-13)

Aaron David Miller is vice president for new initiatives and a distinguished scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. His forthcoming book is titled Can America Have Another Great President?. "Reality Check," his column for ForeignPolicy.com, runs weekly.

Do Americans have a worldview? And is there a central organizing principle that explains it? To frame the question in Tolkienesque terms: Might there be one explanation that rules them all?

I think there is.

Sigmund Freud argued that in the human enterprise, anatomy is destiny. In the affairs of nations, geography -- what it wills, demands, and bestows -- is destiny too.

It can't explain everything, to be sure. Britain and Japan are both island nations. That might explain their reliance on naval power and even their imperial aspirations. But what accounts for their fundamentally different histories? Other factors are clearly at play, including culture, religion, and what nature bestows or denies in resources. Fortune, along with the random circumstances it brings, pushes them in different directions.

Still, if I had to identify that one thing that -- more than any other -- helps explain the way Americans see the world, it would be America's physical location. It's kind of like in the real estate business: It's all about location, location, location....


Wednesday, April 17, 2013 - 13:49

SOURCE: NYT (4-8-13)

Juliet Lapidos is a staff editor with the NYT editorial board.

Margaret Thatcher, who died Monday morning at 87, was American conservatives’ favorite foreigner.

When Sarah Palin traveled to London she requested a meeting with the former prime minister. (That Mrs. Thatcher declined, reportedly because her aides found the prospect of such an encounter “belittling,” is another matter.) In advance of the Republican primaries, Newt Gingrich showed his deep respect for Mrs. Thatcher by comparing himself to her. “Because I am much like Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, I’m such an unconventional political figure.”

Her status as a right-wing icon, a hero of modern conservatism almost on par with Reagan, shows no sign of declining with her death. Republican House Speaker John Boehner said earlier today that she was the “greatest peacetime prime minister in British history.” And Representative Steve Stockman, Republican of Texas, released a statement praising Mrs. Thatcher for taking “a sledgehammer to the machinery of liberalism.”...


Wednesday, April 17, 2013 - 13:19

SOURCE: NYT (4-14-13)

Joseph E. Stiglitz is an economist and professor at Columbia University.

LEONA HELMSLEY, the hotel chain executive who was convicted of federal tax evasion in 1989, was notorious for, among other things, reportedly having said that “only the little people pay taxes.”

As a statement of principle, the quotation may well have earned Mrs. Helmsley, who died in 2007, the title Queen of Mean. But as a prediction about the fairness of American tax policy, Mrs. Helmsley’s remark might actually have been prescient.

Today, the deadline for filing individual income-tax returns, is a day when Americans would do well to pause and reflect on our tax system and the society it creates. No one enjoys paying taxes, and yet all but the extreme libertarians agree, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, that taxes are the price we pay for civilized society. But in recent decades, the burden for paying that price has been distributed in increasingly unfair ways....

What should shock and outrage us is that as the top 1 percent has grown extremely rich, the effective tax rates they pay have markedly decreased. Our tax system is much less progressive than it was for much of the 20th century. The top marginal income tax rate peaked at 94 percent during World War II and remained at 70 percent through the 1960s and 1970s; it is now 39.6 percent. Tax fairness has gotten much worse in the 30 years since the Reagan “revolution” of the 1980s....


Wednesday, April 17, 2013 - 13:15

SOURCE: The Daily Beast (4-2-13)

John Avlon is senior columnist for Newsweek and The Daily Beast, and the anchor of Beast TV. A CNN contributor, he won the National Society of Newspaper Columnists’ award for best online column in 2012.

I thought it was an April Fools’ joke.

There in my inbox on the morning of April 1 was an email from something called Ray McBerry Enterprises announcing the official start of “Confederate Heritage and History Month” in Georgia.

Apparently, former Georgia governor Sonny Perdue signed the annual celebration into law in 2009, joining six other Southern states in official monthlong “celebrations.” My folks live next door in South Carolina, and I’m a bit of a Civil War nerd, so there’s no inherent shock in the impulse to recognize local history, however painful the legacy.

But what did shock me was this quote from the press release: “So much is portrayed by Hollywood today that Georgia and the South were evil; when, in reality, the South was the most peaceful, rural, and Christian part of America before war and Reconstruction destroyed the pastoral way of life here.”

The South under slavery: “peaceful, rural, and Christian.” This isn’t heritage, this is wholesale historic revisionism. And it is ugly stuff....


Tuesday, April 2, 2013 - 15:14