BILL MOYERS: Populism grew up in America. During the first gilded age - back at the turn of the 19th century huge discrepancies in income and power separated a minority of very rich people who ran the country and everyone else. Then the disparities led to strikes, riots, labor unions, and government regulation of big business.

And today -- Well, that's what I want to put to Nell painter, one of our country's distinguished historians. Her grassroots history of the populist and progressive era in American life - STANDING AT ARMAGEDDON -- will soon be out in a second edition. It's a sweeping account of America's shift from a rural and agrarian society to an urban and industrial one, when regular people had to fight for their place in the new order. Nell Painter has retired from Princeton University where she was long one of the most popular teachers, but she's active on many fronts, and serves as President of the Organization of American Historians.

Welcome to THE JOURNAL.

NELL PAINTER: Thank you.

BILL MOYERS: Everybody's throwing around the word populism. Do you think they know what they're talking about?

NELL PAINTER: It sounds as if people who are throwing it around are throwing it around as a dirty word. And if it is a dirty word, they don't know what they're talking about.

BILL MOYERS: Why do they think it's a dirty word?

NELL PAINTER: I think they think it's a dirty word, because it pits Americans against each other, as if we would all be hand in hand if it weren't for populist agitators.

BILL MOYERS: What are Hillary Clinton and Obama saying that makes people invoke the word populism?

NELL PAINTER: They're probably talking in very veiled terms about class issues. Class is the dirty little secret in the United States. We're so much happier talking about race. Black people are this. And white people are that. The unspoken is that white people are middle class and black people are poor. So, black people are kind of the proxy for poor people in much of our dialogue. So, when politicians get past that, and they talk about what's interesting or needed for working people, or heaven for bid, poor people even, remember working people, or heaven forbid, poor people are probably about three-quarters of our population, at least. But when you talk about that group of Americans as having interest that are different from the people who have a lot of money, then for many who are critics of populism, that's a bad thing to point out.

BILL MOYERS: Actually, you know, when John Edwards was still in the race, he was using talk that also calls the money class, the financial interest would describe him as a populist--

NELL PAINTER: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: --and his message is populism--

NELL PAINTER: Yes. And they--

BILL MOYERS: --and they kept--

NELL PAINTER: --they said he was so angry.

BILL MOYERS: Yes. Why?

NELL PAINTER: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: How do you explain that?

NELL PAINTER: I thought that his line was right on target. However I keep thinking back to the late 19th century when, in slightly different terms, the political rhetoric pitted identity of interest, in which all Americans found their place in an order, and some smart, rich people decided what to do and the rest of people went along with it, the workers and so forth.

That was one way of talking about the American polity, the American citizenry. But another way which came out of the People's Party, out of the Farmers' Alliances and the Grange and the Green-backers, all of these groups were saying, "Our interests are not the same. And the money power-- money power or later in the early 20th century, the plutocracy; that those people were acting in their own interests, not in ours."

And you see it even in what topics are considered interesting and important. So, on one side at the current moment, we have discussions of war, and terrorism and security. That is America's place in the world. And on the other side, you have discussions of hard times, of expenses, of getting from day to day, of putting food on the table and so forth. Those are much more domestic issues. And in a very general way, those ideas, those strands, those issues go back 100 years.

BILL MOYERS: You quote in the forward of the new edition of your book from William Jennings Bryan, who said, I may not get it exactly right, he said, in 1899-- "America can be a democracy-

NELL PAINTER: "A democracy-- --or an--

NELL PAINTER: --an empire." Yes.

BILL MOYERS: And he didn't quite answer that. How would you answer it today?

NELL PAINTER: Well, we have become an empire. That came in the 20th century. What's between us and the populist is the 20th century: the Spanish-American War, the First World War, the Second World War, the Vietnam War and the two Iraq wars, to name a few. Those are all the wars that made us an empire in various, different ways.

But along with that, we still had what people face day to day. And what people face day to day, except for when they have a child, or a husband, or a spouse, or a mother and father actually in the war zone, what they face day to day is a different set of issues that have to do with health care, that have to do with wages, that have to do with that kind of issues. Which is much closer to life.

BILL MOYERS: So, what do you think we should know about the original populist, the movement that grew up in the 1890's, 1880's and 1890's? What should we know today that's relevant about them for us?

NELL PAINTER: How much time do you have?

BILL MOYERS: This is television.

NELL PAINTER: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: It's like a classroom.

NELL PAINTER: Okay--

BILL MOYERS: You know? You have a fixed time--

NELL PAINTER: One thing-- one thing I would definitely like us to remember is that the ideas that the populists put forward in the 1890's were considered harebrained.

BILL MOYERS: Harebrained?

NELL PAINTER: Harebrained. Crank ideas. But by the early 20th century, they were the ideas that came into, even our U.S. Constitution. Because we had to have amendments to make it possible to have an income tax, or the direct election of senators. The whole regulatory state of the mid-20th century grows out of roots in the 90's with populism.

BILL MOYERS: They wanted--

NELL PAINTER: --are.

BILL MOYERS: --they-- they wanted the monopoly's control, right? They wanted government to step in and balance the power of the industrial giants--

NELL PAINTER: That's the very fundamental point that in a moment of what we call laissez-faire, that is to say that the government was not very involved, and certainly was not involved with every day people, that the populists were saying, "People control the government. And people should have the benefit of the power of the government." All of those were populist ideas saying that the power of the people through the government should serve the people, not just the corporations or the very wealthy.

BILL MOYERS: What do you see happening to ordinary people today?

People are waking up to what has happened to our country, not just in the last eight years, but probably almost since the end of the Cold War, maybe even before. That our interest as a security state, and as an empire are not necessarily our interest as citizens. We have become what my colleague Elizabeth Cohen calls, "A consumer republic." The populists talked about a producers republic. And our interest as consumers and our interest as citizens may be different. So I live in New Jersey, where the state of our infrastructure is very much in the forefront of our politics. Are we going to pay for infrastructure?

Pay for bridges, pay for roads and for intellectual infrastructure, pay for education, pay for colleges. These are not the kinds of things that Americans are going to go buy as consumers. But we need them as citizens of a polity. So many of the people who make the decisions, and finally, so many of us who vote those people in or out of office, so many of the people who are making the decisions don't need those services in the way many of us ordinary people need them. We need political leadership. And we voters need to vote for people who will provide that leadership. What I'm saying is that we need the engagement of citizens, of voters of ordinary people to push; to push back against the tremendous amount of money that goes into electing our representatives. It's not an accident that there's so much money in politics. And that politics tend to serves the needs of those who can pay....

[Mark N. Katz, Professor of Government and Politics, George Mason University. He has written extensively on Moscow’s foreign policy toward the Middle East.]

Re: Foxbats over Dimona: The Soviets’ Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War, by Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez.

Ginor and Remez argue in this book that the Soviet Union played a much larger role in the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War than has been recognized previously. Far from seeking to avoid the outbreak of this war or being surprised by its occurrence, Ginor and Remez claim that Moscow deliberately provoked an Israeli attack on Egypt. Further, it did so in the expectation that Egyptian forces would be able to resist this Israeli attack and then (along with Syrian and Jordanian forces) launch an attack of their own that would either lead to a protracted conflict or overwhelm Israel. With the United States already bogged down in Vietnam, the Soviets calculated that Washington would do little to help an Israel that struck first — or to prevent Soviet forces from destroying Israeli nuclear facilities in and around Dimona (thus preventing Israel from acquiring nuclear weapons) and otherwise becoming directly involved in the conflict.

I was highly skeptical about these bold claims when I began reading this book. “Moscow made us do it” seemed to be too neat an explanation for Israel’s actions in 1967. Long before reaching the book’s end, though, I became convinced that Ginor and Remez have gotten it right. Their argument is based on, among other sources, a careful study of Soviet documents — many of which have only recently come to light — as well as interviews with former Soviet officials and servicemen who participated in the June 1967 events. Since the book’s publication in June 2007, many of these individuals have confirmed in the Russian press what they told Ginor and Remez....

[Dr Dejan Djokic is a lecturer in history at Goldsmiths, University of London; author of Elusive Compromise: A History of Interwar Yugoslavia; and editor of Yugoslavism: Histories of a Failed Idea 1918-1992]

agree with Noel Malcolm's rebuttal of Serb demonstrators' slogans stating that "Kosovo is Serbia" (Is Kosovo Serbia? We ask a historian, G2, February 26). However, I must also express reservations regarding some of his arguments. Malcolm does not explain that Kosovo has only existed as a political entity in its present-day borders since 1946, when it became an autonomous region within Serbia in the new, communist-governed Yugoslavia.

Prior to 1946, Kosovo had been a geographic area with no clear borders. In fact, the 1946 autonomous region was created by a merger of two geographic areas: Kosovo and Metohija (the original name for the autonomous region, later province, during the socialist period, and the name the Serbian government still insists upon).

An Ottoman vilayet (province) called Kosovo did exist in the 19th century, but it was an entirely different creation with different borders; there is even less connection between that Kosovo and present-day Kosovo than between medieval and modern Serbia, or the Byzantine empire and modern Greece, to use Dr Malcolm's analogies. So, to claim that Serbs "ruled Kosovo for about 250 years" in the middle ages "until the final Ottoman takeover" is disingenuous.

Although Malcolm is right in arguing that present-day Kosovo was not where the first Serbian states emerged, he should explain that it was a central part of medieval Serbia for most of its existence: eg Serbia's capital was in Prizren for a while, the Serbian patriarchate (seat of the church) was founded in Pec, and Serbia's major mining centre was in Novo Brdo - all three in present-day Kosovo.

Malcolm's argument that Kosovo did not become part of Serbia in 1912, but "remained occupied territory until some time after 1918", is again problematic: international peace treaties of London and Bucharest, which ended the first and second Balkan wars in May and July 1913, confirmed Serbia's new borders, which included the present-day Kosovo. This territory would indeed be occupied during the first world war, but by Serbia's enemies.

Malcolm is only partially right in claiming that Kosovo enjoyed a "dual status" in socialist Yugoslavia - as both a federal unit of Yugoslavia and as a highly autonomous province within Serbia. Kosovo was defined, both in the Yugoslav and the Serbian constitution, as one of two autonomous provinces of the Republic of Serbia (together with Vojvodina). The main difference between the status of provinces and republics - such as Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia - was precisely in the fact that the provinces had no right to secession. Kosovo Albanians revolted against this constitutional arrangement in 1981, a year after President Tito died and five years before Slobodan Milosevic emerged as the leader of the Serbian communists.

All this is not to disagree with Malcolm's rejection of Serb nationalist myths, but to point out that not all historians would agree with him either.

Illinois State Historian Thomas Schwartz says almost all 19th century first ladies lived in the shadows.
But Mary Todd Lincoln was the first lady of controversy.

In looking at Mrs. Lincoln, "people will see many similarities with things we take for granted today as being general characteristics of a modern woman," Schwartz said. "But at the time, they weren't accepted and provoked quite a bit of discussion and comment in private letters, in conversation and in the public media."

Schwartz recently offered a re-evaluation of Mary Todd Lincoln at a Lincoln Symposium in Pittsfield.

What Mary Todd Lincoln offered to her husband and the country during his presidency long has been a polarizing topic for historians.

"I don't think one needs to ignore her bad behavior at times, she could be a very good hater but it shouldn't blind us to those things she did to help advance her husband's career," Schwartz said. "There are many things about Lincoln that we give him credit for that we need to give her credit for, including the push to become president. She probably wanted it more than he did, not that he didn't have an inclination and an ambition himself."

It's much easier to talk about the Lincolns individually, but as a couple they went to Washington in 1860 where she found a White House in dire need of refurbishing that "reinforced all the negative attitudes the Europeans had about Americans and American democracy," Schwartz said.

She spent nearly $28,000 $8,000 more than the White House maintenance budget for Lincoln's first term on carpets, draperies, wallpaper, china and other items.

She wasn't shy about offering an opinion, writing to cabinet members to urge them to consider someone for a job or telling her husband when she thought his cabinet members were out of line.

"Historians in the past have always seen Mary as this embarrassment to avoid, so she's left out of the narrative. Only now are they beginning to realize she perhaps wielded more influence than others have been willing to give her," Schwartz said....

The Muslim Weekly, a London-based publication, issued an apology today to Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, concerning a defamatory article it published in February 2007.

That article repeated a false allegation made by Tariq Ramadan that Daniel Pipes had lied to a conference hosted by London mayor Ken Livingstone in January 2007. (For details of what did occur, see the article by Mr. Pipes,"Is Tariq Ramadan Lying [about Magdi Allam]?")

Upon receipt of a libel complaint from Mr. Pipes, the Muslim Weekly accepted that Mr. Pipes spoke accurately at the conference and that he did not lie. The Muslim Weekly apologized to Mr. Pipes for the distress caused by the article. The Muslim Weekly's retraction, published both in print and online in the Feb. 29, 2008 issue, reads in full as follows:

On February 9, 2007, the Muslim Weekly published an article,"World civilisation conference: Professor Tariq Ramadan on Islamic Threat," under the byline of Dr. Mozammel Haque, concerning a speech given by Professor Ramadan on 20 January 2007. We reported that he accused Professor Daniel Pipes, an American specialist on the Middle East, of lying in his speech to the same conference about the religion of an Egyptian Muslim. We now understand that Professor Pipes spoke accurately and that he did not lie. We retract what we wrote about him and apologise to Professor Pipes for any distress caused by our article.

Reacting to this apology, Mr. Pipes said:"I am delighted that Muslim Weekly recognizes there is no truth whatsoever in Tariq Ramadan's allegations concerning my statement at the World Civilization Conference, and that it has forthrightly set the record straight."