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In Defense of My Movie, Gods and Generals

by Ronald F. Maxwell

Debate about the Civil War movie Gods and Generals had largely subsided when George Ewert, director of the Museum of Mobile, weighed in recently with a scathing review published by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The review nearly cost him his job, as we reported in HNN last week. Members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, alrea

How I Define Patriotism

by Peter Kirstein

The following is excerpted from a talk Mr. Kirstein gave on October 13, 2003. The talk was sponsored by the Center for Educational Practice. I would like to honor four religious women. Sister Ardeth Platte (41 months in prison), Sister Carol Gilbert (33 months in prison), Sister Jackie Marie Hudson (30 months in prison). They were incarcerated for crossing the line at a Minuteman III nuclear-missile field and drawing crosses with their blood on an ICBM sil

Liberal Dissenters Are Patriots, too

by Jonathan M. Hansen

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the United States experienced a spontaneous and nearly universal groundswell of patriotism. For many liberals the feeling of solidarity with the nation as a whole came as a surprise. Having ceded patriotism to conservatives since the Vietnam War, liberals had little sympathy for patriotism's emotional force and no sense of its potential usefulness. But on 9/11 the nation was attacked by an enemy that did not discriminate on the basis of gender, class

The 50th Anniversary of the Case of Milo Radulovich, Victim of McCarthyism

by Kendall Wingrove

The First Amendment can always use another ally. Some if its best friends put themselves at risk a half century ago this month when an Air Force lieutenant battled desperately to clear his name.While the name Milo Radulovich may not be immediately familiar the controversy surrounding him was a turning point in American history, says Michigan author Mike Ranville, who describes the remarkable events in his book To Strike at a King.

Rod Paige's Misguided Comparison of Schools and the Ford Assembly Line

by Jonathan Rees

In the September 15th issue of the New Yorker magazine, Malcolm Gladwell criticizes President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act for its "Fordist vision of the classroom as a brightly lit assembly line." In a letter to the magazine published in the October 6th issue, Bush's Secretary of Education, Rod Paige, responds. Rather than contest Gladwell's assertion, Paige embraces Ford's "production principles." "Henry Ford created a world-c

Outing Plame Is More Damaging than All Other American Scandals

by Andrew M. Schocket

This summer, apparently out of political motives, high Bush administration officials exposed the name of a CIA agent to columnist Robert Novak. For more than two months, the president did nothing to investigate or even denounce this serious breach of national security. In the long list of presidential misdeeds and scandals, this one stands out. It's the first time a president has possibly connived at what was essentially an act of treason. Not that there's been a shortage of past Oval

Do Last-Minute Charges Before an Election Work?

by Robert Rupp

What do American presidents James Polk, James Garfield, George W. Bush share with the Arnold Schwarzenegger? All were subjected to last minute attacks that threatened to derail their successful campaigns. The accusation each candidate faced ranged from: branding of slaves (Polk in 1844), endorsing Chinese labor (Garfield in 1880), hiding a two decade old D.U.I. (Bush in 2000), engaging in a three decade pattern of sexual harassment (Schwarzenegger in 2003).Evidence a

The Anniversary the Media--and President Bush--Ignored

by Lawrence Wittner

On September 24, 1963, the U.S. Senate ratified the Partial Test Ban Treaty. The fortieth anniversary of this event should have been a cause for celebration, as this treaty was the first internationally-negotiated nuclear arms control agreement. But, on September 24, 2003, there were no celebrations in the Bush administration, which has shown no interest in nuclear arms control. Indeed, in line w

Why the Democrats Need to Embrace Blue Collar Populism

by David Greenberg

Democratic activists worry that their party is marching toward a McGovernite debacle. By staking out the most anti-Bush stands and courting the highly educated, antiwar voters who have rallied to Howard Dean, the Democratic presidential candidates risk affirming the worst stereotypes of their party as out of touch with ordinary Americans. Unless they shake their highbrow image, the Democrats could revive the losing strategy that guided them 

Why Bush's Resort to Military Tribunals Rests on a Bad Precedent

by Louis Fisher

After 9/11, President George W. Bush authorized the creation of military tribunals to try individuals who provided assistance for the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. In an op-ed piece with Andrew G. McBride, former Attorney General William P. Barr referred to the Nazi saboteur case of Ex parte Quirin (1942) as the "most apt precedent." Vice President Dick Cheney argued that terrorists, because they are not lawful combatants, "don't deserve

Why Blue Collar Populism Works for the Republicans

by Arlie Hochschild

George W. Bush is sinking in the polls, but a few beats on the war drum could reverse that trend and re-elect him in 2004. Ironically, the sector of American society now poised to keep him in the White House is the one which stands to lose the most from virtually all of his policies -- blue-collar men. A full 49% of them and 38% percent of blue-collar women told a January 2003 Roper poll they would vote for Bush in 2004. (1) In fact, blue-collar workers were more pro-Bush than pro

Was the War Really Necessary: Reflections on World War I

by James Lachlan MacLeod

Several weeks ago I visited with my family the Soldiers' Memorial Museum in the heart of downtown St Louis. It is a huge and deeply impressive building, dedicated in 1936 by President Franklin D Roosevelt as a memorial to the 1075 men of St Louis who died in the First World War. The memorial is painfully beautiful, all mosaics and marble, with terrazzo floors and Bedford stone sculptures. It is dominated by the vast black granite cenotaph in its center, covered with the hundreds of d

Why Bush's $87 Billion Speech Flopped

by Rick Shenkman

Mea culpa. After Bush's big speech announcing the high cost of the occupation in Iraq I told a television audience on MSNBC that the speech likely would give the president a slight bump in the polls. I was mistaken. Instead, of going up, he went down, dropping from 59 to 52 percent in the Gallup Poll conducted immediately afterwards. I also predicted that despite the bump Bush's poll numbers would inevit

Clark's Chances

by Gil Troy

Almost overnight, General Wesley Clark has emerged as the Democratic front-runner. In our age of insta-polls and quicksilver political judgments, Clark is the flavor of the month. Telegenic and articulate, he could be, and has been, an effective television commentator, a Walter Cronkite for the twenty-first century. Calm and courageous, he could be, and has been, a war hero, positioning him as a new age Dwight Eisenhower. In our media-obsessed, and terrorized times, who could a

Lessons from Past Wars for Journalists Covering the War on Terrorism Today

by Stephen Hess and Marvin Kalb

What follows is an excerpt from The Media and the War on Terrorism, edited by Mr. Hess and Mr. Kalb.MARVIN KALB We are going to be talking about what lessons journalists learned from wars past. How can those lessons be applied to the current struggle against global terrorism? I would like Dan Schorr to think back to World War II

When Have Recalls Succeeded in California?

by Joshua Spivak

In the 100 years since the recall was reintroduced to American politics, there have been thousands of recalls directed against local officials, ranging from mayors of Los Angeles to local school board members. In that time, there has been only a handful directed at state officials, nearly all against state legislators. Different reasons have been suggested for this discrepancy. One California commission cited the fact that local officials are more likely to have an immediate ef

The Supreme Court's History of Indifference to the Opinions of Other Countries' Courts

by Mary L. Dudziak

Last spring, in the landmark gay rights case Lawrence v. Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court referred to an opinion by the European Court of Human Rights finding a law that criminalized consensual homosexual conduct to violate the European Convention on Human Rights, a departure from the Court's nearly unbroken record of ignoring non-U.S. law.(1) Justice Antonin Scalia decried this development. American constitutional rights do not emerge

Is the Catholic Church in America Losing Its Privileged Status?

by Jonathan Dresner

The Catholic Church sex abuse scandal has raised many issues about the nature of the Catholic Church and its role in modern society. The crux of the problem -- the Catholic Church's decision to shield abusive priests from secular authorities -- is rooted in centuries of history in which the Roman Catholic Church was literally above the law. For a long time the Church was special, but in North America, at least, it is becoming a very normal institution, particularly under the pressures

Is General Clark Presidential Material?

by David Greenberg

Gen. Wesley K. Clark's entry into the Democratic presidential contest has delighted voters opposed to the administration's war policies and hungry for a candidate with national security bona fides. A four-star general who led the war in Kosovo, Clark has also been an outspoken critic of President Bush's foreign policies. Clark's detractors, however, offer this warning to his Democratic fans: most Americans have supported Bush's post-9/11 adventurism. Clark's epaul

The Conservatives' Misguided Plan to Force Balance in Colorado's College Classrooms

by Jonathan Rees

According to the Rocky Mountain News, the Colorado Commission on Higher Education and top Republican state legislators are preparing to introduce new legislation next term to counter the liberal bias of faculty and administrators at schools like mine. While the bill has not been finished yet, the paper reports that it "would require Colorado colleges and universities to seek mor