Archive for the 'Wholesome Book Chat' Category

“Perhaps the most representative document of [the right-wing's] McCarthyist phase was a long indictment of Secretary of State George C. Marshall, delivered in the Senate on June 14, 1951, by Senator McCarthy… McCarthy pictured Marshall as the focal figure in a betrayal of American interests stretching in time form the strategic plans for the Second World War to the formulation of the Marshall Plan… ‘His decisions maintained with great stubbornness and skill, always and invariably serv[ed] the world policy of the Kremlin.’ …And, above all, the sharp decline in America’s relative strength from 1945 to 1951 did not ‘just happen,’ it was ‘brought about, step by step, by will and intention,’ the consequence not of mistakes but of a treasonous conspiracy, ‘a consipracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.’

“Today the mantle of McCarthy has fallen on the retired candy manufacturer Robert H. Welch, Jr, who is less strategically placed but whose well-organized following in the John Birch Society has a strong influence. A few years ago Welch proclaimed that ‘Communist influences are now in almost complete control of our Federal Government.’ …As for [Dwight] Eisenhower himself, Welch characterized him… as ‘a dedicated conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.’”

–Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, 1964.

“From the Republican side the strongest attack on McCarthy came from Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, who in June of 1950 stood up in the Senate to denounce McCarthy and to plead with her fellow Republicans to refrain from joining the McCarthy bandwagon just for the purpose of wresting power from the Democrats. ‘The nation sorely needs a Republican victory,’ she told them, ‘but I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to victory on the Four Horses of Calumny–Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.’”

–J. Ronald Oakley, God’s Country: America in the Fifties, 1986.

I’m always picking up books out of my crazy library. Usually I find something of resonance. Two items, one frivolous, one not:

From Theodore Sturgeon’s short story, “The Other Celia”:

Now, at various times, in various places, Slim had found strange things in other people’s rooms… A man on the second floor secretly guarded his desirables with the unloaded .25 automatic in his top bureau drawer, for which he had a half-box of .38 cartridges.

…Just sounded like the McCain campaign to me, like the old line about a guy bringing a knife to a gunfight. In this case, it’s also a butter knife. More seriously, the following is from the second volume of Edmund Morris’s projected three-volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt, “Theodore Rex.” I quote this in relation to my earlier post about the moral responsibility of the government to act in time of crisis, even in the absence of a clearly defined role. The context here is that in October, 1902, anthracite coal miners were on strike, the struggle between the United Mine Workers and their bosses quickly descending into violence. That was bad enough, but with winter coming on and the nation’s main heating industry frozen, a lot of people were going to freeze their asses off come winter. The President was quite ill at the time, having been involved in a violent trolley collision that killed one of his bodyguards and hurled him through the air, causing a leg injury that required multiple surgeries to put right. At this time he was wheelchair-bound and in a lot of pain. Nonetheless, he called the parties to the dispute to Washington to meet with him, and said:

“I wish to call your attention to the fact that there are three parties affected by the situation in the anthracite trade–the operaters, the miners, and the general public. I speak for neither the operators nor the miners, but for the general public.”

…Roosevelt admitted he had no “right or duty to intervene in this way upon legal grounds.” He was bound, however, to use what influence he could to end an “intolerable” situation. His guests must consider the consequences of further disagreement.

“We are upon the threshold of winter, with an already existing coal famine, the future terrors of which we can hardly yet appreciate. The evil possibilities are so far-reaching, so appalling, that it seems to me that you [are] required to… meet upon the common plane of the necessities of the public. With all the earnestness there is in me I ask that there be an immediate resumption of operations… as well without a day’s unnecessary delay meet the crying needs of the people.”

In other words, you don’t just let a situation hang in an emergency. You use that “bully pulpit” that TR was always talking about.

Parenthetically, for TR, “bully” was just an adjective, the same way many of us might use a certain gerund that connotes, um, reproductive activity as an adjective. Whenever you hear some presidential candidate refer to the “bully pulpit,” please feel free to translate this in your mind to, “The [bleeping] pulpit,” because that’s more or less what it means.

I was going to add something about Bush’s leadership of the White House conference on Thursday and that he clearly was neither as effective nor as eloquent as Roosevelt, but then I remembered that on this occasion the immediate result was actually the same: the mine owners told Roosevelt to take his bleeping pulpit and shove it.