KEEP IT IN PERSPECTIVE

Probably at the top of the list of what is currently disturbing has to be the hideous actions of what we call ISIS.  I must say that I never thought I would live to see the day that beheadings and putting people to death by dousing them with gasoline and lighting them up would be out there for me to see.  I have not seen the videos of these acts, but I believe the media when they tell me they are readily available for anyone to see.  How should we approach this topic in the classroom?  Do we bring it up and condemn it or do we avoid mentioning it?  Do we show the videos and run the risk that besides causing some nightmares, they might be alluring to some?  I haven’t heard one way or the other, but I suppose school districts are thinking about whether they should have some sort of policy to police this; if not, they should be.

But beyond these more potentially troubling concerns, how should we discuss ISIS, assuming a teacher is willing to take on the subject?  I think the first thing is to get some perspective.  Because something is outrageous, it does not mean that it threatens our existence or that it is beyond our ability to fix it.  ISIS is an entity that numbers fewer than 100,000 armed insurgents, localized in parts of Iraq.  Apparently, according to some accounts, the departed tyrant Saddam Hussein’s officers are higher ups in this force.  They are a group with big plans, setting up a caliphate and all; they have access to oil reserves and they are in the abduction business, raking in thousands of dollars in ransoms they are able to extract from the victims’ families.  Oh, they access to the Internet and social media that serves to broadcast their propaganda to a worldwide audience.  But all of that does not make them a potent force that can threaten the states around them, much less the US or European nations.  Yes, they apparently can spur some individuals to conduct ghastly attacks such as the one on the office of Charlie Hebdo in Paris.  But this does not rise to a national crisis; it is a crime and developed countries have the wherewithal to address it.  ISIS has no air force, no navy, no allies.  As a matter of fact, if they continue on the same course, they will antagonize enough leaders and regular folks that the victims’ anger will lead to action – as it has already done in terms of Jordan’s response – and cause the eventual demise of ISIS.  I do not see a healthy future for ISIS.

And this leads me to think of the work of a scholar I have written about in this blog:  Francis Fukuyama.  He, back in 1989, proposed that we have witnessed the “end of history.”  The fall of Communism occasioned his pronouncement.  And what he was specifically saying was that with the fall of Communism, liberal-capitalism survived as the default ideology.  Let me quote the April 18, 2014, posting, Grading the End:  “… his claim was based on a Hegelian notion of history marching by the drum of ideological conflicts (thesis vs. antithesis:  old organizing idea vs. new organizing idea).  He saw that, with the fall of communism, our collective experience on the planet was at the point that such an advancement had come to an end.”  The argument is involved and a bit complicated, but for our purposes here it is sufficient to say that because of this development, there is a lack of competing ideas that serve to inspire war between nations.  And sure enough, since the fall of Communism there has been a steep decline in the number of armed conflicts between nations, particularly developed nations.  What we have had are civil disturbances and insurgencies motivated by religious ideologies.  But even here, we are talking about limited numbers, even in the case of ISIS.  Actually, Fukuyama’s argument is holding up quite well.  My only concern today in terms of this argument is our current conflict with Putin over Ukrainian separatists.  But even there, sanctions might do the trick; we will see.  So, if I were teaching about terrorism and ISIS and all those violent images our media is full of – and rightly so – I think I would be well advised to keep all of it in perspective.  ISIS is not a mortal danger to the US and my biggest concern is that any of my students be attracted to the romantic notions of an ideology that glorifies martyrdom.

A FIFTIES SORT OF CHANGE

The years following World War II are important in developing an understanding of our current political outlooks.  It was during that time when the nation shifted in its prevailing view of government and politics.  Most of that shift seemed to be mostly at a subconscious level, the results not manifesting themselves more consciously until the 1960s and ‘70s.  There are many factors responsible, but one of them was truly hidden from Americans of the time.  Not until years later have we been able to get a clear enough picture to be able to make some sense of what transpired.  The narrative describing the shift makes for good drama and some of it has been the subject of histories, novels, and movies.  Unfortunately, in real life, the consequences of some of the changes caused many casualties, including fatalities, in the hundreds of thousands.  In large measure, these developments changed not only how Americans see government and politics, but also how they feel about them.  Ironically, the policy-makers responsible for some of the worst consequences attained what they wanted, not through successful attainment of their aims, but through their failures.  After all, they came from very conservative stock and their goals revolved around a diminished role of government in the lives of Americans.

Of whom do I write?  Well, they were mostly from the mid-West, a cadre of bureaucrats and politicians who originated from isolationist and religiously inspired folk.  They were the descendants of those who fought against American involvement with European, much less any other part of the globe, political entanglements.  This same reluctance, though, did not extend to trade.  They, mostly representing the growing agricultural interests of their region, were keen on expanding markets for their products.  This included not only harvested crops, but also mechanical equipment that was emanating from their newly minted factories.  And let us not forget the steel their foundries were producing.  So, entanglement was inevitable even if they did not see it.  And surely, such avoidance did not prevent our eventual entrance into two world wars.

After World War II, the folly of this ostrich type of behavior was beyond obvious.  Just about everyone, because of Pearl Harbor, became internationalists.  But being internationalists had to be an approach that mirrored the same prejudices that preceded the turn.  It would have to be one that reflected a Calvinistic orientation in which good and evil is easily defined.

No man represented this outlook more than John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state in the Eisenhower administration.  He, in turn, was supported by his brother, Allen Dulles.  Allen was put in charge of a new bureaucratic entity that grew in importance and beyond the initial idea for its creation, the CIA.  These two men played crucial roles in this shift in the perspective of how the US was to act on the international stage. 

Let me share with you an extended quote that I believe captures this shift and I will follow it with my take on its importance as to the overall effect it represents on our collective views of government and politics.

Because [in the Cold War] the enemy was cruel and totalitarian, we were justified in responding in kind.  Our survival demanded it.  There were no restraints on the other side; therefore, there should be no restraints on us.

The men who were the driving forces of this new philosophy, the Dulles brothers, Beetle Smith, and their various deputies, as well as the President himself, were from a generation profoundly affected by the vulnerability of an isolationist America to attack by foreign powers – as Pearl Harbor had proved.  They worried endlessly that the very nature of democracy, the need for the consent of the governed, made this nation vulnerable to a totalitarian adversary.  Therefore, in order to combat the enemy, the leaders of the democracies would have to sacrifice some of their nation’s freedoms and emulate their adversary.  The national security apparatus in Washington was, in effect, created so America could compete with the Communist world and do so without the unwanted clumsy scrutiny of the Congress and the press.

Given the nature of the Cold War and domestic political anxieties, the national security apparatus gradually grew richer and more powerful, operating under a separate set of laws (on occasion, it would become clear, under no laws at all).  In any crisis, if there was an element of doubt about legality, it was best to press ahead because that was what the other side would do.  The laws for the secret regime were being set by our own sworn adversaries, who, we were sure, followed no laws at all.

The key men of this world, the real insiders from the CIA and the other semicovert parts of the government, soon developed their own culture and customs … [1]

And to bolster this sense of entitlement were two early successes in which the CIA was responsible for two illegal coups:  one in Iran and one in Guatemala – two nations in which the ousted leadership had supposed ties to Communist leadership in Moscow (ties that have never been verified).  What they might have threatened were commercial interests in the United States.  In short, the stated purposes for our aggressive acts seem, in hindsight, to be highly questionable.

But perhaps more damaging to our more traditional views of governance, the posture, assumptions, and activities of these covert agents were to undermine our sense of republican governance, of citizenry oversight and participation.  The acts led to a view of government, not as an extension of ourselves, but one of agency apart from ourselves:  a consumer mentality that is highly non-federal in its orientation.  This whole development became one important force in undermining our traditional views of politics and governance; a rotting effect to our democratic ethos.

Historically, the above events paved the way to oversimplified estimations of global developments.  It led to overstretching in Vietnam, where we could not distinguish between Communism as a monolithic threat and the nationalistic strain in an enemy willing to sacrifice all for the integrity of its homeland.  In that conflict, our costs were over 58,000 US dead and a total count of over a million, not to mention the wounded.  But we won the Cold War and, compared with the world wars, at a fraction of the number of deaths.  And, as I alluded to above, the conservatives’ goal of diminishing Americans’ trust in government, as revelations of what went on keep becoming public, has diminished the trust beyond their wildest hopes.  From a federalist perspective, one can view those years following the Second World War as crucial to understanding what happened to our old assumptions of what our government stood for and could be counted on to be and to do.

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[1] Halberstam, D.  (1993).  The Fifties.  New York, NY:  Fawcett Columbine, p. 372.

CONSIDERING WHAT IS MORAL

This blog has promoted a mental construct that reintroduces, in a serious and thought-out way, the whole subject of morality to civics instruction.  If the call is at all successful, this would call for teachers to be at least familiar with the psychological standing of moral thinking.  What do we know about moral thinking; what is its function; how innate or enculturated is moral thinking and a person’s concern for it?  Are we all wired to think morally or is it totally learned?  Is it a product of rational thought or is it a reflection of our emotions?  These are questions a teacher who is about to engage in lessons where student beliefs and feelings will be engaged, should know about and accommodate so as to have any chance at success.

Jonathan Haidt[1] has reported, both his and others’ research and theorizing, on these very questions.  He points out that the lineage of this research has gone through an evolution.  Tracing this history reveals what probably constitutes our intuitive notions about moral thinking.  To begin, is morality and our concern over it something we are born with, a nature thing, or is it something we learn, a nurture thing?  The first is known as a nativist notion and the latter is an empiricist notion.  He dismisses either one of these choices as being a “false choice” between them.  Since the 1980s, the field of psychology that studies this has favored a third option:  rationalism.  Rationalism grows from the developmental work of Jean Piaget.  This line of research and theorizing was later picked up by Lawrence Kohlberg and later still by Elliot Turiel.  Simplified, the explanation is that moral thinking is the product of individuals figuring out moral situations as they grow through childhood and then into their post puberty years.  Apparently, according to this view, a person’s ability and need to develop a moral understanding are highly dependent on the person’s level of abstract thinking.  Kohlberg offered, and I was taught in my teacher preparation training, a model of moral development.  The three scholars are known as developmental psychologists, and the Kohlberg model traces a person’s march through stages of moral thinking.  There are six individual steps, through three stages, of moral commitments.  Not everyone goes through all six; actually most people get “stuck” at stage three or four.  In general, the stages have a person committing moral allegiance to ever larger levels of moral fidelity to larger and even abstract populations:  from self to immediate groups (family) to large abstract groups (nation) to abstract ideals (equality of human kind).  Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King were given as examples of individuals who went all the way to the sixth stage.  Whether you agree with this designation or not, they were two individuals who gave up their lives for “the cause.”  The fact that all of us are prone to this development, at all, suggests a level of nature having a role in our moral development.  But given that this process is not at all automatic in terms of how far a given individual develops, indicates that nurture also has a role.

Haidt reports that he was not satisfied with this model; that it did not, for him, answer all aspects of moral thinking.  He cites the work of psychological anthropologists.  In order to understand Haidt’s concern, we have to keep in mind that the developmentalists put large stock in individuals “figuring out” what is moral based on the universal disdain for hurting others.  The reasoned basis for such disdain is the simple fact that a person doesn’t want to be hurt and so the likelihood of being hurt is greatly diminished by not hurting others, in that there is universal agreement based on simple human relations.  But that simple notion does not explain the variations that exist among societies over what is moral and what is not.  And here the study becomes more complicated:  there are developed and lesser-developed societies; there are traditional and modern societies; there are literate and non-literate societies.  And sure enough, there are patterns one can detect among societies that fall on either side of each of these divides.  Not only that, but within each society, there are divides among classifications such as class and age.  So there seems to be more going on than stages of development or the ability to think abstractly.

Haidt, using the research of Richard Shweder, began testing the opposing models of moral thinking against that of the developmentalists.  Borrowing Turiel’s and Shweder’s research techniques, giving subjects short moral “stories” and asking subjects from different societal, class, and age designations what they thought was moral or immoral, Haidt was able to make distinctions between what was considered immoral or just offensive behavior that transgressed social conventions.  For example:

While walking, a man saw a dog sleeping on the road.  He walked up to it and kicked it. …

A young married woman went alone to see a movie without informing her husband.  When she returned home her husband said, “If you do it again, I will beat you black and blue.”  She did it again; he beat her black and blue.  (Judge the husband.) …

In a family, a twenty-five-year-old son addressed his father by his first name.[2]

Haidt found that in the first story, both Americans and members of traditional, non-Western, society saw kicking the dog as immoral.  The Americans found beating the wife as immoral, but not so among the traditional subjects.  And the traditional subjects saw as immoral the familiarity expressed by the son toward his father, but Americans did not.  Here were cases (the first and the third case) that harm was not inflicted to another human, but immorality was deemed to characterize all three situations by at least some of the subjects and a distinction arose over conventional views regarding respect and conventional roles.  Along with questions of respect, there are also, the research shows, concerns over what is considered disgusting.  What the research seems to indicate is that there are cultural factors at work, most notably differences between societies that are individualistic – such as Western countries in the more extreme levels – where the interests of the individual most likely will trump the interests of the group/society and sociocentric societies – such as traditional societies – where the interests of the group trump the interests of the individual.  In general, groups lacking in Western educational backgrounds tend to make clear distinctions between conventional concerns and moral ones; that among the social factors that contribute to this first distinction is class; and, very important, these distinctions held up when researchers controlled for perceptions of what caused harm – that is, when compared, members of lower classes seemed more readily to conflate conventional taboos with moral dictums even when the situations clearly did not cause anyone harm.

So, in summary, culture does have a role in determining morality.  At times, people have gut feelings about what is disgusting or disrespectful and this, in turn, will affect what is seen as immoral, and while self-construction of what is moral has a role, it doesn’t explain all of what is seen as moral or immoral.  And with that complex cauldron, I still want teachers to delve into what is moral and immoral when teaching civics and government!

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[1] Haidt, J.  (2012).  The righteous mind:  Why good people are divided by politics and religion.  New York, NY:  Pantheon Books.

[2] Ibid., p. 16.

2016

Ready?  Here comes our next presidential election cycle.  Oh, you’ve been hearing about it.  Is Hillary going to run?  Is Jeb?  On and on.  How should a civics or government teacher be addressing the buzz?  How about setting the parameters?  Within what set of issues and policy considerations will the election revolve?

Chances are, those whom you hear are considering a run – or “haven’t decided yet” – are going to run.  That’s why when Mitt Romney announced he wasn’t, it was a bit of shock.  But all the rest – Bush, Paul, Cruz, Christie, etc. – you can count on them running.  And surely, that includes Hillary Clinton.  With all these personalities, it is easy to see why the press gravitates to the personalities and gives little attention to the substance or policy proposals being contended.  These latter elements provide more of a background setting.

So here is what a teacher can focus on.  First, and I feel this verges on an obligation, a teacher can set out the range of policy choices in which these positions will be stated.  The Democratic candidate must advance several principles:  raising the minimum wage, protecting labor union rights, attacking the infrastructure deterioration, closing tax loopholes that corporations enjoy, proactivity on environmental protection – especially hitting the dangers of climate change – and cutting middle class taxes (this is a bit new to the lexicon).  On the other hand, Republicans will speak about high taxes – which means high taxes on business and businessmen/women – overregulation, diminishing labor union rights, free trade, liberty, anti-abortion policies, anti-illegal immigrant policies, a strong military posture, and the deterioration of family values – which can be translated to mean anti-gay rights. 

An important part of the landscape and one that students don’t usually understand is that a campaign is not so much about convincing people to agree with what you believe in.  Yes, there is a bit of that, but people already believe what they are going to believe.  There is only about five percent of the electorate who will be swayed by what the campaigns bring forth in terms of polices.  And these folks tend to be the least educated or caring about politics and will make up their minds over trivial or incidental factors – oftentimes unpredictable events that spring up in the weeks before the elections.  Overall, if the economy is good or improving, favor the incumbent party and candidates; if not, favor the challengers.  In presidential elections, you have a significant number of voters who vote only once every four years – the presidential elections being so prominent in the media there is an “I want to be part of history” thing going on.  Add to that the chance to vote for the first, if successful, African-American president or the first woman president, and you will get higher than usual numbers going to the polls.  So who will most likely vote regardless of the times or conditions of the country?  Ideologues and angry people, that’s who.  And the first of these are set on who they will vote for and the latter are probably leaning heavily one way or the other.  The aim of a political campaign therefore, is to encourage your supporters to vote and, if possible, make it difficult – better yet, impossible – for those who will not vote for you to vote.  Oh, you can whip up anger too.  There have been awful tricks to manufacture those unpredictable events that will hurt your opponent.  More than once, a car with the opponent’s stickers all over it has stalled on a heavily used bridge, creating instant, exploitable anger.

So that is an overview of what can be covered in a classroom.  A teacher should not lose sight of the basic function of an election:  so that citizens can express their positions in the policy decisions that will arise in the upcoming years.  It is a way to re-freshen the system, to take a new course or voice support for what is going on.  The economy will take center stage, but there are enormous issues out there that should receive more attention than they will probably get: privacy concerns, domestic violence, education (what really works and how do you know?), poverty and malnutrition in significant numbers, care for needy war veterans, and how we meet our climate-changing challenge.  The other issue that will get some attention, I suppose, is terrorism.  Rightly so.  Do we rely on military force or do we honestly address the conditions that lead so many to take up arms and want to engage in these barbarous acts we hear and see going on?

As always, the upcoming election cycle will determine very important policy directions.  Hopefully, the election will give us a government that can function.  If not, perhaps we are due to revisit our constitutional make-up.  Hopefully, this is not the case.

THE PIEDS-A-TERRE* FACTOR

Federalist unions are formed by consenting individuals and/or groups coming together to create a union.  The act of federating has a set of purposes and those who join are committing themselves to the union by swearing allegiance to the provisions of a covenant or a compact.  In turn, this commitment is binding irrespective of what others in the union do, whether they abide by the provisions or not.  We who are born in the United States are automatically included in this union of “We the People” and are to abide by the provisions of the US Constitution, our national compact, their main purpose being to set up the United States government and spell out our rights under this arrangement.  The mental construct that provides the philosophical founding for this whole view is called federalism.  Let me point out that the term, federalism, is often misused in that its meaning is ascribed to the prerogatives of the states, also members of our national federation.  While this latter concern is a legitimate one under the parameters of federalism, it is not its sole concern.  Individuals and/or groups who form the union are to be equal and do have rights, but no single or group of members has inordinate or exclusive rights or powers in determining what the federated group does or forms as policy.  Therefore, to singularly use terms such as states’ rights to indicate the totality of what federalism or federalist arrangements entail is a misuse of the term.  One can equally claim that the civil rights claims of individuals or oppressed groups are equally a federalist concern.

This blog has gone over these descriptions before and one of its aims is to point out evidence of this relationship.  I have argued that the view of federalism that prevailed up to the post World War II period, I have designated as traditional federalism.  This view of governance and politics served as the background perspective of what was viewed as legitimate or illegitimate in terms of public policy. 

This posting offers another bit of evidence.  The evidence comes to us indirectly.  The New York Times reports[1] on the prevalence of “shell” companies that have sprung up and are busy buying real estate in New York and other cities.  The Times reports that these companies are a way for nefarious individuals to invest ill-gotten funds to the tune of tens of millions of dollars and, by doing so, launder that money and keep it hidden from government officials.  In its report, the paper claims that this is egregious on several fronts, and included is the fact that this is an affront to a long held federalist bias.  Let me quote the paper:

Public records, dating back to at least the 1800s in New York, set real estate apart as more transparent than bank accounts or stock portfolios.  “There is a whole Jeffersonian rhetoric about land ownership,” said Hendrik Hartog, a professor of the history of American law at Princeton.  “There was a goal to make land transparent, and it was justified by civic values and a whole range of moral judgments like not hiding ownership.”[2]

Why this exception for real estate?  In those days, real estate overwhelmingly consisted of a home and a farm.  It determined, more than any other asset, in which federated arrangement a person belonged.  In order to function as a federation, each member needed to know who his/her confederates were.  Transparency was a must.  But as the natural rights construct has taken over as the main guide in determining our beliefs over governance and politics, this has changed many of our views concerning public policy.

Included have been our requirements concerning transparency in real estate ownership.  As I have pointed out, this more current view of governance and politics has put a premium on choice – individual choice.  The currency of choice is, naturally, money.  As such, policy has become more and more guided by an exclusionary concern for generating money streams for communities as well as individuals.  In true natural rights thinking, the former mayor of New York, Michael R. Bloomberg, pronounced on his weekly radio program – in the waning days of his tenure – “If we could get every billionaire around the world to move here, it would be a godsend.”  Of course, not every billionaire has acquired his/her funds engaging in activities that promote the general welfare, the common good.  And so, policy in New York – actually in the US – has made it possible for any shell company, be it a front for a legitimate business interest, an unsavory interest, a foreign corrupt politician, or a criminal, to park his/her money in a luxury condominium that might be priced at or above $25 million.

The details of how this happens and a list of examples is provided in this lengthy article.  Let me just share a host of problems this practice has caused:  one, it has become harder, if not impossible, to recoup illegally obtained monies here in the US that are so hidden from authorities; two, law authorities are hampered in investigating crimes as it becomes very difficult to “follow the money;” three, because US laws are so lax in this field, other countries use that fact to justify their inaction to tighten their laws; and four, in addition to US officials and other interests being unable to recover monies here, foreign countries have similar problems in acquiring funds they are due from individuals who have committed crimes or are evading taxes in their countries.

Bloomberg argued that lax laws, both federal and local ones, were good for New York because the more billionaires that make their way to his city, the more of their spending will make its way down to regular folks – the trickle-down effect.  It turns out that these folks spend very little time in New York and their anonymity makes it difficult to tax them to pay for the upkeep of the city.  The city is considering establishing a new property tax to be levied on the upper end properties.  One proposal would generate $665 million a year.  Given that these individuals, the ones who are hidden and come from other countries, don’t vote, perhaps such a plan might get instituted.  But that is beyond my purposes here.

Here, I want to point out evidence that more federated-based views existed in the past and that those views have been under challenge as we have moved past such biases.  Unfortunately, as is often the case, changes in human arrangements have unforeseen consequences, especially when structurally we are still constituted under the assumptions of the previous views.

* An apartment used for temporary residence or other than primary residency.

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[1] Story, L. and Saul, S.  (2015).  Hidden wealth flows to elite New York condos.  The New York Times, February, 8, pp. 1 and 14-16 (Front Page section).

[2] Ibid., p. 14.

“STELLA”?

This blog has offered a narrative.  It is the story of how our political culture has evolved.  The story depicts a series of changes, but overall the projection has been from what I have termed a traditional federalist construct to a natural rights construct.  The changes have affected all of our major institutions including our politics, our economy, even our family relationships.  Life today is quite different from what it was back in 1949.  The changes toward a natural rights view can be traced back to the time of our independence and the writing of our current constitution.  But the rate of change has gone into overdrive since the beginning of the ‘50s.  Such a construct shift affects many of our beliefs, many of our assumptions.  The changes seep deeply into our conscious and even our subconscious.  The old dies hard, if at all.  We can consciously believe one thing and subconsciously hold on to something else.  In no realm of life is this more true than in our sexual beliefs and emotions – sex is a strong force; it is what I call the “joker in the deck.”

Under traditional federalism, the belief was that matters of personal life are subject to external regulation, but that since this is personal, the source of regulation should be locally controlled.  We have a “right” to be comfortable with the prevailing costumes and mores.  Blue laws were well established in our country, as well as marriage laws (governing divorce, for example) and other more intimate concerns.  But entering the twentieth century, technological change was to dramatically alter this assumed domain.  The movies, for example, undermined the local province in matters of sex, family, and other moral areas.  The powers to be, seeing that a national medium undercut parochial proclivities, set up boards and commissions to regulate the content of movies.  The Catholic Church, for example, established the League of Decency and rated movies.  Their decisions determined what “good” Catholics would see.  Even more powerful was the Breen Commission that governed what was allowed to be produced.  All and all, the attempt was to save morally bent people, those influenced by Puritanical standards of decency, from being exposed to unwanted material.  It also attempted to assure that young people not be shown material that would undermine these good people’s efforts to properly socialize their children to their moral view.  Since these standards varied widely across the country, decisions were made in favor of the most restrictive.  This, in turn, restricted the options of film producers.

Of course, all of this was not accepted so willingly.  Motivated by artistic aims and by making more money, the film industry fought this system to varying degrees of stridency.  The owners of studios such as Warner Brothers and MGM were more willing to go along as long as all of the studios were equally affected.  It was more the producers, directors, and actors who objected most since this interfered with what they wanted to accomplish on screen.  No more emblematic to this drama was the story associated with producing A Streetcar Named Desire.  In his book, David Halberstam[1] gives a short, insightful overview of that story.  One bit of context; the story line of the film had already been the subject of a Broadway play.  As today, Broadway was mostly patronized by more urbane audiences, not the more rural clientele with which the regulatory boards were so concerned.  Here is the urbane people’s reaction:

A Streetcar Named Desire was not just a play – it was an event.  Its frank treatment of sophisticated sexual themes marked it as part of a powerful new current in American society and cultural life.  Even the plot seemed emblematic – the brutal assault on Blanche’s prim, Victorian pretensions by Stanley’s primal sexuality.  Every night on Broadway the audience would leave the theater visibly shaken – not only in response to Blanche’s breakdown, but also in some small way, perhaps, because they had gotten a glimpse of the violent changes just beginning to transform their own culture and lives.[2]

And now the story was going national on the big screen.  Of course, the plot did not make it to the screen untouched.  Halberstam gives an interesting account of that transition.  But enough of the story survived to make it a classic and helped propel its leading man to stardom.  He, Marlon Brando, would be one of those cultural figures who would personify what that transformation would be.

My take on this upheaval is that it was needed.  Traditional federalism had become over-restrictive for a world we had created with films, radio, and now the Internet.  One can view this from an absolute sense:  people should have the right to express themselves, period.  Or one can view this in more relative terms:  rights are based on the social values that prevail in a given time.  What, to me, seems timeless is our need to conduct our affairs in social contexts and that in order to be functional, we must take into account what can be handled at a given time.  Yes, there are certain rights that transcend any social setting.  Slavery is immoral in any setting, for example, regardless of what one might find in any holy text or what had been accepted practice in the past.  Societies that engaged in it paid a price.  But liberty is a social construct, and its very definition has changed through the centuries.  The Puritan’s view of it is vastly different from what prevails today.  The question we, including secondary students, should ask is:  does our view of liberty enhance the ability of our society to survive and does it enhance our ability to achieve our established goals and aims?  Asking these questions does not determine an exact definition of liberty, but they do provide a functional approach to determining what liberty should mean.

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[1] Halberstam, D.  (1993).  The fifties.  New York, NY:  Fawcett Columbine.

[2] Ibid. p. 256.

WHAT TO DO?

What’s a rich person to do?  When it comes to politics or life in general, rich people tend to prefer solo efforts.  That is, they tend to want to “do it themselves.”  They want and can afford to garner control and that means they prefer to shy away from entanglements with others.  Of course, reality is such that that is often not possible, so instead of totally dismissing the assets others can bring to the table, they form compromised accommodations.  This is opposed to lesser endowed actors who know quite well that they do not have such luxuries and are highly dependent on the help of others.  They in turn form alliances.  If one projects this to national politics, we can say the political party that suffers more from division is the party that more closely represents the rich, the Republican Party.  That party has been more of a constellation of interests as opposed to an alliance of interests.  Of course, as with most things, this is more a tendency than a hard and fast rule, but one useful to keep in mind when studying political campaigns.[1]

And no political campaign demonstrates this more than the presidential campaign of 1800.  Spoiler alert:  Thomas Jefferson won that election.  He won it with a man from the opposing party as his vice president, Aaron Burr (yes, that Burr who did in Alexander Hamilton).  The details of why that happened is beyond my purposes here, but makes for an interesting story you might want to look up.  No, actually, it does have something to do with my purposes here, because one reason that Jefferson won was due to the actions of Hamilton.  More below.

You see, the 1800 election marks the first time in our history when the party in power lost and the opposing party won and took over the reins of power.  For a nation not well established within its institutions, this could easily have been an iffy thing, but it was pulled off without much disruption.  The reason is central to what I am conveying.  I have written how the predominant political construct of the time was traditional federalism: a view of politics that at its core believes a polity is made up of members of a community coming together to form it.  This is done under the auspices of a binding compact.  The question I have not addressed too clearly has been who makes up that community.  Are all included?  One of the defining developmental themes of American politics has been how the definition of a political community has been determined.  Initially, the real political community was defined as all families who own property, represented by the patriarch of that family.  Hence, the vote was limited to males who owned some minimal amount of property.  This was the case in 1800.  With that as context, we have the first meaningful challenge by the agrarian portion of that population to the more moneyed portion.

Under the auspices of President George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, instituted our first financial system.  The policy called for paying off the national debt and providing subsidies for those who were willing to invest in the American economy, specifically benefiting those who invested in manufacturing, finances, and public securities.  And all this was being paid for by taxes which fell most heavily on planters and farmers – the agrarians.  To the rescue came Thomas Jefferson and his followers known as the Republicans.  They fought the Federalists, Hamilton’s party, in the 1800 election and they won.

Did that mean the dismantling of the Hamiltonian system?  Nope, it did not.  As Richard Hofstadter[2] quite clearly informs us, Jefferson understood that a system that had already become institutionalized – the system had been in effect for twelve years – would be too disruptive to change, much less eliminate.  An attempt to do so could cause such upheaval that a depression could result and hurt the very planters and farmers Jefferson championed.  So, with some few exceptions – the excise tax was eliminated and the national bank expired – the provisions of Hamilton’s system were maintained.

My point here is to encourage history teachers to not be so engrossed with the individual actors, such as Jefferson and Hamilton, but to give more attention to the groups and organizational climate of a given time in order to see what the real politics of that time were.  While Jefferson can truly be considered the spokesperson for the interests of the agrarian faction, he by no means let ideology dictate his policies.  Instead, he took, as president, a posture that respected the landscape of the political realities with which he dealt.  A way to begin asking the telling questions about a particular time is to see the American polity as a federal arrangement.  The first question becomes:  who makes up the federated polity during the time being studied?

As for the role Hamilton played in the 1800 election, when the decision was thrown into the House of Representatives, controlled by Federalists, Hamilton lobbied for Jefferson.  This was a decidedly antagonistic act against his fellow New Yorker, Aaron Burr.  In a letter to one House member, Hamilton predicted that Jefferson, as president, would not be a radical, but an accommodator.  This accurate prediction might not have secured Jefferson’s victory, but it surely did not hurt.

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[1] For an interesting description of this trend see Schattschneider, E. E.  (1960).  The semi-sovereign people:  A realist’s view of democracy in America.  New York:  Holt, Rinehart and Winston.  This general tendency should not be interpreted as saying that the Republican Party is more in disarray or undisciplined.  Perhaps due to the herd character of their constituency, the Party, as compared to the Democrats, is much more disciplined generally.  It is said that in the Republican Party, presidential nominees are chosen more as a process of determining whose turn it is.  Lately, though, with the rise of the Tea Party faction and that of the evangelicals, the Party is not as disciplined as it once was.

[2] The factual information concerning the 1800 election and its aftermath are based on Hofstadter, R.  (1948).  The American political tradition.  New York, NY:  Vintage Books.