monk222 | Entries tagged with american history

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But Thanksgiving (excepting the premature and somewhat undernourished Canadian version) is unique to America. "What's it about?" an Irish visitor asked me a couple of years back. "Everyone sits around giving thanks all day? Thanks for what? George bloody Bush?"

Well, Americans have a lot to be thankful for.

-- Mark Steyn for The Orange County Register

It's pretty rah! rah! and I tend to feel sort of stateless myself, but American exceptionalism does continue to be a living if fading force, and Steyn gives us a well-expressed sentiment worth keeping.

( Steyn )

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When Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 prepared to ask Americans for a stronger defense against the danger of Adolf Hitler, his handlers reminded him that the country was isolationist and such boldness would jeopardize his third-term campaign. Roosevelt overrode that advice. He presided over American history's first peacetime draft call—a week before the 1940 election. His isolationist ambassador to London, Joseph Kennedy, bluntly told him, "You will go down either as the greatest in history—greater than Washington or Lincoln—or the greatest horse's ass." FDR replied that there was "a third alternative": if he didn't strengthen America's defenses, Roosevelt said, Hitler could rule the world and "I may go down as the president of an unimportant country."

-- Michael Beschloss for Newsweek

I'm sleepy and it's nappy time and I only skimmed this four-page article, and I'm mainly getting this down to have in the archives, but I thought I'd share this little historical nugget. The piece is about presidential courage. I'm not sure that Bush wouldn't feel that he was engaging in an exercise of great political courage by bucking all the voices to cut our losses in Iraq, though I suspect that that is not what Beschloss would have intended. Bush would have to win to be proven right, and that would seem to require a genuine miracle at this point.

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Not since the medieval church baptized, as it were, Aristotle as some sort of early — very early — church father has there been an intellectual hijacking as audacious as the attempt to present America’s principal founders as devout Christians. Such an attempt is now in high gear among people who argue that the founders were kindred spirits with today’s evangelicals, and that they founded a “Christian nation.”

-- George F. Will for The NY Times

George Will writing for the New York Times?! I kinda like the feel of that. And I would have missed it if it were not for Andrew Sullivan's posting this.

Mr. Will is reviewing a book that is tackling this evangelizing of the founding fathers. Will holds that Ms. Brooke Allen, the authoress, overdoes it, maintaining that there was more respect for the popular feelings of religion than Ms. Allen supposedly allows for, but in the main, he does agree with the project, believing that, while respecting religion and the freedom of religion, the founders tended to have a healthy skepticisim. With respect to contemporary Americans, Will optimistically concludes:

Allen and others who fret about a possibly theocratic future can take comfort from the fact that America’s public piety is more frequently avowed than constraining.

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Current Mood: satisfied

Allen and others who fret about a possibly theocratic future can take comfort from the fact that America’s public piety is more frequently avowed than constraining.

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Current Mood: satisfied

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A lot of good discussion and despair has been expressed over legislation allowing coercive interrogation, also known as torture, and the suspension of habeas corpus when it comes to terrorism suspects, not to mention the broader issues of the Iraq War. More people are losing faith in America's direction. In one debate, Monk offered this:

We are uncertain about a serious threat. Americans react aggressively. I'm reading about the Red Scare of the 40s and 50s, and in the face of the communist threat, the government also reacted intrusively and questionably. But as we rebounded from that, so are we likely to better modulate our response here when we feel more secure about what we are facing and what to do about it.

When it came to the Red scare with all the political hearings, such as those of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and the marginalizing of people suspected of communist sympathy, George Kennan, a leading diplomat and foreign-policy analyst at the time, lost his political faith, as quoted form Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974:

What the phenomenon of McCarthyism did... was to implant in my consciousness a lasting doubt as to the adequacy of our political system... a political system and a public opinion, it seemed to me, that could be so easily disoriented by this sort of challenge in one epoch would be no less vulnerable to similar ones in another. I could never recapture, after these experiences of the 1940s and 1950s, quite the same faith in the American system of government and in traditional American outlook that I had had, despite all the discouragements of official life, before that time.

A lot of people seem to be feeling that way now. In the face of an existential threat, Americans seem to give way to the most reactionary and toughest voices. And, of course, in even earlier epochs in American history, we have shown our weaker and base instincts. Who can forget the internment of the Japanese during World War II? And even Abraham Lincoln controversially suspended habeas corpus in prosecuting the Civil War.

Hindsight has shown that these controversial measures were perhaps not needed, but one supposes that you can never be too sure at the time. When it comes to security issues when under threat, more tends to sound better then less. The grand hope is that America will continue to show its resiliency in moderating its reactionary responses.

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Current Mood: philosophical

We are uncertain about a serious threat. Americans react aggressively. I'm reading about the Red Scare of the 40s and 50s, and in the face of the communist threat, the government also reacted intrusively and questionably. But as we rebounded from that, so are we likely to better modulate our response here when we feel more secure about what we are facing and what to do about it.

What the phenomenon of McCarthyism did... was to implant in my consciousness a lasting doubt as to the adequacy of our political system... a political system and a public opinion, it seemed to me, that could be so easily disoriented by this sort of challenge in one epoch would be no less vulnerable to similar ones in another. I could never recapture, after these experiences of the 1940s and 1950s, quite the same faith in the American system of government and in traditional American outlook that I had had, despite all the discouragements of official life, before that time.

Current Mood: philosophical

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"My title, Grand Expectations, tries to capture the main theme of this book, that the majority of the American people during the twenty-five or so years following the end of World War II developed ever-greater expectations about the capacity of the United States to create a better world abroad and a happier society at home. This optimism was not altogether new: most Americans living in a land of opportunity, have always had great hopes for the future. But high expectations, rooted in vibrant economic growth, ascended as never before in the 1950s and peaked in the 1960s, an extraordinary turbulent decade during which faith in the wealth of the United States - and in the capacity of the federal government to promote progress - aroused unprecedented rights-consciousness on the home front. America's political leaders, meanwhile, managed to stimulate enormous expectations about the nation's ability to direct world affairs. More than ever before - or since - Americans came to believe that they could shape the international scene in their own image as well as fashion a more classless, equal opportunity society."

-- James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974

Ah, and that's just the first paragraph of the preface. It is particularly striking that this was written before 9/11, as we see a renewal of the tension between our grand expectations and the grim reality, with our wildly optimistic attempt to democratically transform the Muslim Middle East bringing back the humility of the Vietnam War. But maybe we just need more time. As the editor of this volume put it in his own introduction:

The three decades following the Second World War were prolific breeders of myth. The two great military victories on opposite sides of the globe, followed by unparalleled prosperity at home and world leadership abroad, bred a national euphoria, even hubris in some, capable of the boast that America could do anything: “The impossible takes a little longer.”

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Current Mood: good

Current Mood: good

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“If a man continually blusters, if he lacks civility, a big stick will not save him from trouble but neither will speaking softly avail, if back of the softness there does not lie strength, power.”

-- President Theodore Roosevelt

So, that is where the statement, "speak softly, carry a big stick," came from. That is just one of the juicy tidbits in Michael McMenamin's article, “Teddy Roosevelt's Hidden Legacy: How an 'imperialist' president’s record makes the case for military restraint.” For all of Roosevelt's famed forcefulness, we see a master diplomatist pulling gently but effectively on the strings of personality.

In discussing the Roosevelt and Wilson legacies, Mr. McMenamin raises some fascinating and personal stories. I did not know that President Wilson may have given Clinton a good run for who was more driven for the ladies, for example. The article is a little lengthy but worth the read, especially for anyone with some interest in American history. Besides the sexual background, the account is spiced with a lot of fascinating speculations - the 'what might have beens.'

It is noted that President Bush has been looking to Theodore Roosevelt as a model, but perhaps for some mistaken reasons. Along with McMenamin, we are left only more wistful over the difference and how we could use another Teddy about now.

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