When accusations were first heard from women who accused Herman Cain of sexual harassment, it was possible to pass them off as cultural misunderstandings, perhaps between northern and southern ways of interacting. Because the women were anonymous, one didn’t know anything about their appearance, race or class background.
Then, Sharon Bialek spoke out.
Cain was right. It wasn’t sexual harassment. It was worse. It was abuse of power.
She reported his response to her protests at being groped was “You want a job, right?”
Abuse of power isn’t something most politicians and journalists recognize as a problem. In fact, most don’t recognize it at all. They continued to believe he was a viable candidate for president.
Finally, Ginger White became so disgusted with the way Bialek and others were being treated, she announced she’d had an affair with Cain that lasted for years.
Again, Cain claimed sex wasn’t involved. And, again he was right.
He went on to tell the New Hampshire Union Leader that “She was out of work and had trouble paying her bills, and I had known her as a friend” so he gave her money because "I'm a soft-hearted person when it comes to that stuff.”
He revealed himself to be a predator of an entirely different order, one who feeds off women with financial problems whom he may also suspect are defenseless.
Before he suspended his campaign, rumors were still burbling about other women. Many, if they ever surface, may turn out to be what we first expected, the consequences of a flirtatious nature that occasionally errs from a failure to recognize others don’t see things as he does.
They are not what made people uneasy. It was the nature of the cases that came to light that revealed something more dangerous than sexual harassment was involved.
The media and politicians may tolerate lustful men, but even they get a bit uneasy with more vicious predators.
Notes:
Henderson, Nia-Malika. “ Sharon Bialek Accuses Herman Cain of Sexual Harassment as She Sought Help Getting a Job,” Washington Post, 7 November 2011.
Knickerbocker, Brad. “Herman Cain Admits Payments to Ginger White, Edges Toward Quitting,” Christian Science Monitor, 1 December 2011.
Showing posts with label Cultural Values. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cultural Values. Show all posts
Sunday, December 04, 2011
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Black Friday
The holidays of fall have changed since I was a child.
Halloween used to be the time children were allowed to explore their neighborhood and master its intricacies guided by more knowledgeable older kids, accompanied with a frisson of fright from confronting the unknown under the cloak of darkness. Thanksgiving was the time to visit relatives and overeat.
Halloween has been transformed into a dramatization of running from the challenges of community. Parents go with their children in gestures of preemptive defense against potential threats from their neighbors. Teenagers are punished if they go trick or treating. All the sinews that bound together micro-generations and exogamous groups have been broken.
In their place we have the day after Thanksgiving, perhaps rightly called Black Friday. It’s become the day adults can demonstrate their competence in a world that tends to grind them down the rest of the year. It’s the one time they get the best of the merchants and corporations. It’s the one time they successfully plot a strategy to be first in line, to develop an edge that works.
The excesses of pepper spray and tasers, fist fights and shoving matches are less feared, more predictable, than razors in apples or drugs in brownies. Also, the acquisition of goods through competition and survival of the fittest is more important in our society than acquiring them by ritualized begging.
Halloween used to be the time children were allowed to explore their neighborhood and master its intricacies guided by more knowledgeable older kids, accompanied with a frisson of fright from confronting the unknown under the cloak of darkness. Thanksgiving was the time to visit relatives and overeat.
Halloween has been transformed into a dramatization of running from the challenges of community. Parents go with their children in gestures of preemptive defense against potential threats from their neighbors. Teenagers are punished if they go trick or treating. All the sinews that bound together micro-generations and exogamous groups have been broken.
In their place we have the day after Thanksgiving, perhaps rightly called Black Friday. It’s become the day adults can demonstrate their competence in a world that tends to grind them down the rest of the year. It’s the one time they get the best of the merchants and corporations. It’s the one time they successfully plot a strategy to be first in line, to develop an edge that works.
The excesses of pepper spray and tasers, fist fights and shoving matches are less feared, more predictable, than razors in apples or drugs in brownies. Also, the acquisition of goods through competition and survival of the fittest is more important in our society than acquiring them by ritualized begging.
Sunday, July 03, 2011
The Fire That Didn't Happen
What the forest service lost Thursday, June 30, when fire spread through lands of the Santa Clara pueblo, wasn’t a battle with fire. I’d learned from their own local website that all fire fighters can do with big fires is try to direct the flames away from human targets. It's always the hurricane fed monsoons that actually extinguish them.
What they lost was the trust people like me had developed last summer when their website gave honest reports on a fire in rough country in the Jemez to the north. That credibility had increased with their reports on the Wallow fire in Arizona and the Pacheco fire near Tesuque.
I wasn’t angry at any particular person, but at the display of cultural values that have been evolving in the decades since Ronald Reagan until they threaten to overwhelm any alternatives.
There was first the suspicion that the forest service was undermanned for a catastrophic fire season. Modern managers have learned to detest labor intensive enterprises and replace them with better managers of machines. Government doesn’t have to hire businessmen or business school graduates to get this attitude in their employees: it’s what the young absorb growing up.
A Congress willing to barter funds to help people whose towns were destroyed by tornados is only a culmination in a trend of budget cutting.
At its height the Wallow fire had something like 4,000 people fighting it. There were less than 800 with the Las Conchas fire Wednesday, before reinforcements arrived. That same day, there were still 1,320 people fighting the 538,049 acre Wallow fire, 530 assigned to the 10,116 acre Pacheco fire, and 326 fighting the 72,650 acre Donaldson fire started by lightening Tuesday in Lincoln county. And these weren’t the only fires burning in Arizona and New Mexico this week.
Realistically, there are only so many people the government can keep trained and ready for what is seasonal work. In the past, the National Guard would have been used as a highly disciplined additional resource. That stopped when George Bush the elder converted the National Guard into the regular army in Kuwait.
We learned the consequences of they’re not being available when hurricanes hit New Orleans in 2005, but we’ve only responded by deploying even more men overseas.
Our Tea Party supported governor has been willing to call them out, but either she or their commander can visualize no role for them greater than standing guard. That’s all they did for the first few days they were utilized when we had no power last winter. With this fire, their primary purpose seems to have been aiding the evacuation of Los Alamos. It was the sheriff and the state Livestock Board who helped move animals from dangerous juniper grasslands in Lincoln County.
The perception of modern business and modern warfare is that people can be replaced with machines, especially in situations were aereal support is more effective. The problem is various types of planes cost money to buy, require skilled crews to use and expend fuels that are sensitive to inflation.
The most recent incident reports indicate Las Conchas has18 helicopters, Donaldson has 5 helicopters and 3 air tankers, and Wallow has 2 helicopters and air tankers available if needed. The last update for Pacheco on June 28 indicated they had 9 helicopters.
It wasn’t simply the problems with not having enough resources to fight the fire that made me angry It was the outside managers who appeared to be more interested in protecting their careers than in fighting the fire, something that may have been necessary given the level of politicians and power involved when the lab feels itself in danger.
The local fire information website stopped being informative. Indeed, for a few days, we were directed to another website altogether, the national Incident Information System. At the bottom of each entry there’s a form with standard categories like Basic Information, Current Situation and Outlook. The second item includes Fire Behavior. Whoever has been updating the information has been including Fire Behavior for the Wallow, Pacheco and Donaldson fires, but not for Las Conchas.
Each day the fire fighters have been issuing maps of the fire based on the nightly infrared reconnaissance flights. One June 27 they issued both a PDF and a Jpeg (picture) version of the map. On June 28 the map was a Jpeg, on June 30 and July 1 they were PDF’s that were not readable by older versions of Adobe, and on July 2 they returned to Jpegs.
On Tuesday the 27th, the map showed the fire edge, location of previous fires, and points of intense heat where the fire was the most active and points of isolated heat where it may have been preparing to spread. Since the fire had not spread north of Los Alamos, no territory to the north was shown.
On Wednesday, the map still showed the areas of intense and isolated heat, but no longer showed the previous fire scars. At the time, the fire was active to the west of Los Alamos and so nothing to the north was included.
A later map of Wednesday added a third day’s spread and showed the boundaries of Santa Clara pueblo lands for the first time.
The map for Thursday when the fire spread north did show the footprint of the Cerro Grande fire, but gave no place names. Instead of the daily growth, it showed only the perimeter of the fire. The only way you could tell the general location of the pueblo was with the county line.
On Friday the map again showed only the fire perimeter, but this time it included the spatial organization of the fire fighters. The legend didn’t explain all the symbols used, but Santa Clara appeared to be divided between two groups by the county line.
On Sunday, the map returned to its original format, showing the growth by day with a clear indication of what was destroyed when it entered Santa Clara land. It’s useful to finally have information I can use to know what it is I’m seeing and smelling, but it appeared two days after it was needed.
Those changes in format, those omissions or delays in information suggest some blunder was made in predicting the behavior of the fire, and that ever since men have been denying an error that could easily have been made in allocating scarce resources to fight a fire growing in all directions.
At 8:30 Thursday morning the Incident Information System reported
“Firefighters are monitoring long-range spotting, which have been seen as far north as the Santa Clara Pueblo. Firefighters will also be dealing with unfavorable winds which may result in extreme fire behavior and continue to push the fire to the north. Firefighters will continue scouting for potential fire line and burnout opportunities to prevent the fire from spreading.”
At the same the local Wordpress blog said “As of Thursday morning, fire crews reported the northern finger of the blaze is extending northward toward the Santa Clara Pueblo.”
Later that same day the Santa Clara suggested that that “long-rage spotting” or “northern finger” had “exploded across the western third of the reservation” producing the smoke visible from my back porch.
That night, the fire fighters described that as short runs with “spotting less than 1 mile occurred on the north head of fire” and then said it had crossed “moved northeast past NM Hwy 144 and spread into parts of the Cerro Grande burn area.” 144 in fact is a forest road west of Los Alamos and may represent the western side of the fire’s movements, but it does not appear on the maps they publish or on many other state maps.
Once the Santa Clara issued their press release, they have not been mentioned in the daily reports, except by obscure references to forest road 144 and the Cerro Grande scar.
Indeed, once the pueblo said they had “attended briefings and given recommendations and data to the Incident Command” and “repeatedly asked that adequate resources be devoted to the north end of the fire” another cultural game began: the one that says how dare a minority claim to be a victim.
Right after they issued their press release, the lab issued one in which the lab director discussed all the real victims of the fire, those who worked for the lab and lost their homes. They still had their lives and their way of life, but the loss of a tangible private asset made them the greater victims. He even listed the communities involved. In order they were: “Cochiti, the Jemez mountains, Santa Clara and San Ildefonso Pueblos and communities to the North.”
Then, like Princess Di, the lab director stopped in at “the Santa Claran Event Center in Española and the Cities of Gold Casino in Pojoaque” to personally meet with refugees from Los Alamos. He noted “one of the messages I heard loud and clear from evacuees was that many of them are isolated from information sources and they do not have a good understanding of what is happening at the Laboratory.”
The forest service also held community meetings in Jemez Springs, Cochiti Pueblo and at Santa Clara. They said local residents “received updated information on the fire and had their questions answered.”
On Friday they also began adding that “archeologists work with our dozers, graders and hand crews to minimize damage to sensitive areas.” They now also report “All firefighting crews receive a daily briefing on sensitive historical and cultural sites within the fire area.”
However, when they list the sites that are closed they don’t mention Puye Cliffs. It was damaged by the Cerro Grande fire and only reopened in May of 2009. The nearby recreation area is still closed. When I drove by Saturday there was check point indicating only authorized people could go beyond the gas station.
I suspect the basic problem, apart from not having enough resources, managers who are under extreme political pressure from a narcissistic lab, and directives that use economic criteria to define priorities, is that many do not understand the difference between the forest as a recreational alternative to urban life and its existence as an extension of an agricultural life rooted in a migratory past.
Economic impacts are easy to define. Los Alamos has more than 12,000 people and the lab employs many more from places like the Española valley. The Pueblo is less than 1,000. Measuring the comparative social and psychological impacts is impossible.
The real shortage hasn’t simply been firefighters, money, or time to respond. The real problem is there’s been no rain, was almost no snow, and the storms we’ve had so far have been better at starting new fires and taking out power than quenching flames.
Notes: Daily postings at nmfireinfo.wordpress.com and its link to the Incident Information System. Information is updated often, even in an existing report, and old postings are discarded.
Los Alamos National Laboratory. “”LANL Director Expresses Concern for Communities Across the Region,” 30 June 2011 press release.
____. “LANL Director Visits Los Alamos Evacuees,” 1 July 2011 press release.
Santa Clara Pueblo. “”Las Conchas Fire Burns More Than 6,000 acres of Santa Clara Pueblo Land,” 30 June 2011 press release.
Pictures Taken the Day after an Unrecorded Event
1. Looking towards Los Alamos, 1 July 2011 about 7:03pm.
2. Driving into the afternoon void on highway 84/285 somewhere between Tesuque and Camel Rock, 1 July 2011 about 6:03pm.
3. The air turned brown from smoke coming down from Los Alamos as the road entered Pojoque; taken at La Puebla exit, 1 July 2011 about 6:17pm.
4. Looking west towards Santa Clara lands, 1 July 2011 about 7:36pm.
5. Looking north towards Española, 1 July 2011 about 7:37pm.
6. Sun coming in the car window between Tesuque and Camel Rock, 1 July 2011 about 6:03pm.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Pneumonia
The Affordable Health Care for America Act won’t kill the elderly, as some allege, but misrepresentations about the law and medicine in general absolutely do kill.
Recently a friend of my boss died from pneumonia. He was an uninsured alcoholic who had been sober for 15 years, ate well and spent time in the gym. He delayed going to his doctor until his temperature was rising quickly, then refused to go to the hospital. He apparently believed the antibiotics and his strong body were enough.
In the night his fever increased. His landlady saw him out in the snow, she thinks, trying to bring down his body temperature. She found him dead the following morning. As near as anyone knows, when he lay down he fell asleep and his lungs continued to fill until he couldn’t breathe.
The week before, the mother of a friend died from pneumonia in a nursing home after her father had refused treatment for her. It was bacterial in origin, possibly caused by a piece of food that had become stuck. The woman suffered from dementia and either didn’t notice the irritation or couldn’t explain it. She died less than a day after my friend heard she was sick.
Bacterial pneumonia is treatable with antibiotics. Patients with the viral form usually survive when they’re given intravenous fluids and monitored during the crisis.
As near as the daughter and my boss know, both people weren’t treated because men believed they couldn’t afford the treatment. The eighty-five-year-old woman was covered by Medicare. An emergency room would have had to treat the fifty-something man, regardless of his income or insurance status.
I don’t know if the man was uninsured because, as my boss believes, he was one of the many who have the money, but believe they’re too healthy to need insurance, or if he’d tried in the past and been refused. Perhaps being a recovering alcoholic, for Alcoholics Anonymous says you are never an ex-drinker, is itself a disqualifying pre-existing condition. The new law, with its demand for universal coverage, phases out such hurdles to medical treatment, though it can do nothing about the bitterness created by rejection.
False perceptions arise from the health care debate that emphasizes the high cost of treatment and the plight of the uninsured. We’re constantly told emergency rooms are overwhelmed as a result. The subtexts are that treatment might have become substandard and that people who use them are parasites. We certainly are told the costs are greater.
What people don’t hear is that there are new alternatives to emergency rooms, the urgent care centers. If the man had gone to one, instead of waiting to see his doctor, he would have been diagnosed faster and they probably would have begun treating him immediately because they had the necessary resources on site.
When people hear about the cost of treating the elderly who will never recover all their capacities, they don’t hear there’s a difference between treating a disease like cancer, which may kill anyway, and treating a temporary infection.
The ignorance about the dangers of out of control infections also comes from the same media sources, the ones who deny climate change and evolution. In making their arguments, they treat scientists and science with contempt. That attitude, in turn, reinforces people’s natural fear of disease and distrust of doctors who can’t treat the common cold. It makes some people less likely to listen to the medical programs that do appear on television that try to educate about diseases like pneumonia.
The media would deny its responsibility, in the same way it denied there was any relationship between its words and the actions of Jared Loughner who shot Gabrielle Gifford in Tucson on July 8. They would say they are not responsible for the individual actions of a one-time drunk or a man tired of a marriage. They would say individual actions are just that, individual, and not part of a social pattern.
They might also suggest the solution was eliminating malpractice laws. Regulations and contracts may have dictated what an institution or physician could have done in these situations.
However, I do wonder what ethics can condone a nursing home that doesn’t begin treating a treatable infection immediately or a doctor who doesn’t call the ambulance or send a nurse with a man obviously in need of treatment. I wonder what is their moral obligation to seriously inform people of their choices when they can see the people there are talking to are laboring under serious misunderstandings of medical situations.
Ideas, diffused through an atmosphere of misrepresentations and paranoia that feeds of people’s instinctive fears of the unknown or uncontrollable, indeed can kill as swiftly as the infections they abet.
Recently a friend of my boss died from pneumonia. He was an uninsured alcoholic who had been sober for 15 years, ate well and spent time in the gym. He delayed going to his doctor until his temperature was rising quickly, then refused to go to the hospital. He apparently believed the antibiotics and his strong body were enough.
In the night his fever increased. His landlady saw him out in the snow, she thinks, trying to bring down his body temperature. She found him dead the following morning. As near as anyone knows, when he lay down he fell asleep and his lungs continued to fill until he couldn’t breathe.
The week before, the mother of a friend died from pneumonia in a nursing home after her father had refused treatment for her. It was bacterial in origin, possibly caused by a piece of food that had become stuck. The woman suffered from dementia and either didn’t notice the irritation or couldn’t explain it. She died less than a day after my friend heard she was sick.
Bacterial pneumonia is treatable with antibiotics. Patients with the viral form usually survive when they’re given intravenous fluids and monitored during the crisis.
As near as the daughter and my boss know, both people weren’t treated because men believed they couldn’t afford the treatment. The eighty-five-year-old woman was covered by Medicare. An emergency room would have had to treat the fifty-something man, regardless of his income or insurance status.
I don’t know if the man was uninsured because, as my boss believes, he was one of the many who have the money, but believe they’re too healthy to need insurance, or if he’d tried in the past and been refused. Perhaps being a recovering alcoholic, for Alcoholics Anonymous says you are never an ex-drinker, is itself a disqualifying pre-existing condition. The new law, with its demand for universal coverage, phases out such hurdles to medical treatment, though it can do nothing about the bitterness created by rejection.
False perceptions arise from the health care debate that emphasizes the high cost of treatment and the plight of the uninsured. We’re constantly told emergency rooms are overwhelmed as a result. The subtexts are that treatment might have become substandard and that people who use them are parasites. We certainly are told the costs are greater.
What people don’t hear is that there are new alternatives to emergency rooms, the urgent care centers. If the man had gone to one, instead of waiting to see his doctor, he would have been diagnosed faster and they probably would have begun treating him immediately because they had the necessary resources on site.
When people hear about the cost of treating the elderly who will never recover all their capacities, they don’t hear there’s a difference between treating a disease like cancer, which may kill anyway, and treating a temporary infection.
The ignorance about the dangers of out of control infections also comes from the same media sources, the ones who deny climate change and evolution. In making their arguments, they treat scientists and science with contempt. That attitude, in turn, reinforces people’s natural fear of disease and distrust of doctors who can’t treat the common cold. It makes some people less likely to listen to the medical programs that do appear on television that try to educate about diseases like pneumonia.
The media would deny its responsibility, in the same way it denied there was any relationship between its words and the actions of Jared Loughner who shot Gabrielle Gifford in Tucson on July 8. They would say they are not responsible for the individual actions of a one-time drunk or a man tired of a marriage. They would say individual actions are just that, individual, and not part of a social pattern.
They might also suggest the solution was eliminating malpractice laws. Regulations and contracts may have dictated what an institution or physician could have done in these situations.
However, I do wonder what ethics can condone a nursing home that doesn’t begin treating a treatable infection immediately or a doctor who doesn’t call the ambulance or send a nurse with a man obviously in need of treatment. I wonder what is their moral obligation to seriously inform people of their choices when they can see the people there are talking to are laboring under serious misunderstandings of medical situations.
Ideas, diffused through an atmosphere of misrepresentations and paranoia that feeds of people’s instinctive fears of the unknown or uncontrollable, indeed can kill as swiftly as the infections they abet.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Fire and Ice
Here in the Española valley of northern New Mexico, we’ve now experienced serious displacements cause by fire and ice. Our reactions to each were very different.
More than a decade ago, when the Cerro Grande forest fire threatened Los Alamos, and the employment of people in the valley, people came together. The evacuated either moved to shelters or in with friends. The people responsible, the US Forest Service, held daily news conferences on the progress of putting out the fire. The individual tragedies, the lost homes, were part of a greater story, the threat to a national laboratory that contained radioactive materials.
The loss of natural gas for five or six days when morning temperatures hovered around zero isolated people. No matter how drafty the houses, people had to stay in them. There were no public areas to visit, no restaurants selling warm meals: they were all closed to conserve electricity and few employees would have come to work if they’d tried to open.
One man in Española couldn’t visit his wife in the hospital. His house varied between 30 and 35 degrees. He was trapped by the need to stay home to protect what he could from the threat of broken pipes, so his wife would have a place to return to. We all were trapped by our plumbing, and even the rich discovered they weren’t immune from poor architectural design.
The people responsible, New Mexico Gas Company, cancelled press conferences. The local media, headquartered a hundred miles to the south in Albuquerque, didn’t begin to cover the story until after the Super Bowl, and then only after people in Taos, angry the gas promised for Sunday hadn’t materialized, had begun to rebel and created something to be televised. Pictures of frozen water simply weren’t as compelling to the national media as those of a raging fire.
The greater story had no overriding national interest - the national laboratory has a different source for its natural gas. It was simply one of the compounded consequence of individual attempts to stay warm, a variation of what we now call irrational exuberance.
When cold hit Texas the week before the Super Bowl, furnaces worked longer. The utilities responded to the stress in places like Dallas by instituting rolling brown outs in the more remote areas, especially the western part of the state that produced the natural gas shipped into New Mexico.
When outside temperatures fell way below zero, as low as -18 by the Santa Fe airport on February 3rd, furnaces worked harder, and the natural gas company responded by cutting off service to more remote areas to keep urban centers warm.
Everyone felt they were the victim of someone else, and most responded by denying the reality of the problem. Instead of keeping one part of a house habitable and keeping the rest just warm enough to stop pipes from breaking, people insisted on keeping their entire houses the usual temperature and continuing their usual lives. They were upset they couldn’t have their daily hot showers.
While some people responded to the calls for conservation, my boss’s mother told me she didn’t turn down her heat because she didn’t want to get sick. Her son told me he had turned up his heat because the house had began to cool between furnace cycles.
The economy began to define the seriousness of the disaster, not nature. When the gas went out the day before a normal payday, some people in Taos bought 20 space heaters each, while one of our employees in Española didn’t have enough spare cash left to buy one while they were in stock.
The people in the gas company operations center had no awareness of the difficulty of bringing the gas back in rural areas where poverty dominates; they were only concerned with protecting the physical plant from a complete breakdown. The governor, Susana Martinez, had only been in office for a few weeks and had no staff to respond.
It’s too simple to dismiss her feeble response as that of a Tea Partier who doesn’t believe in government. When things become extreme, human responses tend to overrule ideology. During the Cerro Grande fire, a libertarian, Gary Johnson, was governor. One interview I remember was one in which he lamented his powerless to do anything about a raging wild fire - picking up a shovel and tossing some dirt simply wasn’t enough.
But things were different. It wasn’t just the differences between fire and ice, spring and deep winter. There was also a difference in our expectations.
In the intervening decade, many had become more and more isolated in media created bubbles that mediated their responses to reality. An unexpected disaster that challenged the security of that bubble was more than a discomfort, it was a threat to a whole set of cultural values, and they responded, as people often do with severe threats, with denial, with an attempt to maintain normality.
The media, who created the bubble, especially those who broadcast the more demagogic commentators, were enamored of the power of social media in Egypt. Some began to show people how to turn on their own meters after the utility company had turned them off before relighting each appliance that was safe. Meantime, other stations were showing the number of substandard furnaces the technicians couldn’t legitimately relight.
The genuine risk of an explosion or fire wasn’t part of a world that operated like a Hollywood script where real poverty doesn’t exist. My next door neighbor’s gas had no pressure. He’s a middle class engineer, but I was still thankful he was at work when the gas company arrived and wasn’t the one to troubleshoot the problem. The federal regulation on orderly relighting after a mass outage suddenly made sense, even if it didn’t fit the current political world view.
Since the gas has been restored and morning temperatures are above zero, people with money and enough education to understand the physics of heat and cold, aren’t talking about what to do to prevent another disaster. They know they can’t do anything about Texas or out-of-state utilities. They’re wondering how to protect themselves, how many space heaters to buy, if a generator is necessary, what to do to protect the pipes.
More than likely, they also live in houses and have mortgages, which means they have insurance which will pay for some of the damages and repairs.
Those living in trailers are worse off. If they have insurance, it’s probably so low the payments won’t begin to cover the damages. If they bought something used or live in an old house, there’s probably no insurance. In the next disaster, they will be dismissed as constant victims by those living in the bubble because they didn’t have the minimum assets to respond.
Between fire and ice, the sense of helplessness is different. In both cases, we were the victim of human decisions, in one case a single individual who OK’d the controlled the burn, in the other the compounded consequence of individuals responding to unprecedented cold. Only in the second was the failure of the response also seen as the deliberate failure of humans with no possibility of redemption because we now have a governor who doesn’t believe anything can or should be done and has spent her time since the heat returned placing blame on everyone else.
Notes:
Albuquerque Journal. "Frozen Out," 4 February 2011, on the purchase of space heaters in Taos.
Associated Press. "Fear of System Failure Forced Brutal Choices," 7 February 2011, on the gas company operations center.
KRQE. "Relights Start Slowly in Espanola," 7 February 11, station website, on the man in Española with the sick wife.
More than a decade ago, when the Cerro Grande forest fire threatened Los Alamos, and the employment of people in the valley, people came together. The evacuated either moved to shelters or in with friends. The people responsible, the US Forest Service, held daily news conferences on the progress of putting out the fire. The individual tragedies, the lost homes, were part of a greater story, the threat to a national laboratory that contained radioactive materials.
The loss of natural gas for five or six days when morning temperatures hovered around zero isolated people. No matter how drafty the houses, people had to stay in them. There were no public areas to visit, no restaurants selling warm meals: they were all closed to conserve electricity and few employees would have come to work if they’d tried to open.
One man in Española couldn’t visit his wife in the hospital. His house varied between 30 and 35 degrees. He was trapped by the need to stay home to protect what he could from the threat of broken pipes, so his wife would have a place to return to. We all were trapped by our plumbing, and even the rich discovered they weren’t immune from poor architectural design.
The people responsible, New Mexico Gas Company, cancelled press conferences. The local media, headquartered a hundred miles to the south in Albuquerque, didn’t begin to cover the story until after the Super Bowl, and then only after people in Taos, angry the gas promised for Sunday hadn’t materialized, had begun to rebel and created something to be televised. Pictures of frozen water simply weren’t as compelling to the national media as those of a raging fire.
The greater story had no overriding national interest - the national laboratory has a different source for its natural gas. It was simply one of the compounded consequence of individual attempts to stay warm, a variation of what we now call irrational exuberance.
When cold hit Texas the week before the Super Bowl, furnaces worked longer. The utilities responded to the stress in places like Dallas by instituting rolling brown outs in the more remote areas, especially the western part of the state that produced the natural gas shipped into New Mexico.
When outside temperatures fell way below zero, as low as -18 by the Santa Fe airport on February 3rd, furnaces worked harder, and the natural gas company responded by cutting off service to more remote areas to keep urban centers warm.
Everyone felt they were the victim of someone else, and most responded by denying the reality of the problem. Instead of keeping one part of a house habitable and keeping the rest just warm enough to stop pipes from breaking, people insisted on keeping their entire houses the usual temperature and continuing their usual lives. They were upset they couldn’t have their daily hot showers.
While some people responded to the calls for conservation, my boss’s mother told me she didn’t turn down her heat because she didn’t want to get sick. Her son told me he had turned up his heat because the house had began to cool between furnace cycles.
The economy began to define the seriousness of the disaster, not nature. When the gas went out the day before a normal payday, some people in Taos bought 20 space heaters each, while one of our employees in Española didn’t have enough spare cash left to buy one while they were in stock.
The people in the gas company operations center had no awareness of the difficulty of bringing the gas back in rural areas where poverty dominates; they were only concerned with protecting the physical plant from a complete breakdown. The governor, Susana Martinez, had only been in office for a few weeks and had no staff to respond.
It’s too simple to dismiss her feeble response as that of a Tea Partier who doesn’t believe in government. When things become extreme, human responses tend to overrule ideology. During the Cerro Grande fire, a libertarian, Gary Johnson, was governor. One interview I remember was one in which he lamented his powerless to do anything about a raging wild fire - picking up a shovel and tossing some dirt simply wasn’t enough.
But things were different. It wasn’t just the differences between fire and ice, spring and deep winter. There was also a difference in our expectations.
In the intervening decade, many had become more and more isolated in media created bubbles that mediated their responses to reality. An unexpected disaster that challenged the security of that bubble was more than a discomfort, it was a threat to a whole set of cultural values, and they responded, as people often do with severe threats, with denial, with an attempt to maintain normality.
The media, who created the bubble, especially those who broadcast the more demagogic commentators, were enamored of the power of social media in Egypt. Some began to show people how to turn on their own meters after the utility company had turned them off before relighting each appliance that was safe. Meantime, other stations were showing the number of substandard furnaces the technicians couldn’t legitimately relight.
The genuine risk of an explosion or fire wasn’t part of a world that operated like a Hollywood script where real poverty doesn’t exist. My next door neighbor’s gas had no pressure. He’s a middle class engineer, but I was still thankful he was at work when the gas company arrived and wasn’t the one to troubleshoot the problem. The federal regulation on orderly relighting after a mass outage suddenly made sense, even if it didn’t fit the current political world view.
Since the gas has been restored and morning temperatures are above zero, people with money and enough education to understand the physics of heat and cold, aren’t talking about what to do to prevent another disaster. They know they can’t do anything about Texas or out-of-state utilities. They’re wondering how to protect themselves, how many space heaters to buy, if a generator is necessary, what to do to protect the pipes.
More than likely, they also live in houses and have mortgages, which means they have insurance which will pay for some of the damages and repairs.
Those living in trailers are worse off. If they have insurance, it’s probably so low the payments won’t begin to cover the damages. If they bought something used or live in an old house, there’s probably no insurance. In the next disaster, they will be dismissed as constant victims by those living in the bubble because they didn’t have the minimum assets to respond.
Between fire and ice, the sense of helplessness is different. In both cases, we were the victim of human decisions, in one case a single individual who OK’d the controlled the burn, in the other the compounded consequence of individuals responding to unprecedented cold. Only in the second was the failure of the response also seen as the deliberate failure of humans with no possibility of redemption because we now have a governor who doesn’t believe anything can or should be done and has spent her time since the heat returned placing blame on everyone else.
Notes:
Albuquerque Journal. "Frozen Out," 4 February 2011, on the purchase of space heaters in Taos.
Associated Press. "Fear of System Failure Forced Brutal Choices," 7 February 2011, on the gas company operations center.
KRQE. "Relights Start Slowly in Espanola," 7 February 11, station website, on the man in Española with the sick wife.
Sunday, February 06, 2011
Third World New Mexico
Paranoia flourishes where government and institutions fail.
We are living through the coldest period anyone remembers, and our heat supply was cut off on Thursday morning, soon after temperatures reached -12 here. We won’t be up until after the Super Bowl in Dallas.
The gas company has done a particularly poor job of communicating, at least through its emergency website. It blames the lowered power supply in Texas which has lowered pressure in the gas lines. The websites of the local TV stations are no better; they simply redirect you the utility company site.
There’s some news somewhere. One hears particular areas like Taos are down because of equipment or line failures. We suspect the priorities of Texas suppliers eager to leave a good impression on the wealthy visitors and provide extra power to the media crews converging in Dallas Sunday.
We look at the pattern and see outages in remote areas around Albuquerque, nothing in Santa Fe County, and then here. The pueblos, whose lines come from here, went down three hours later than we did. The utility website indicated they had separate, probably more demanding, agreements with the company.
When I walked into the post office I was asked why did I think we were singled out.
Of course I had a ready answer. We won’t squawk like the wealthy in Santa Fe. I didn’t say the obvious, because this area is poor, Hispanic, and has a long tradition of crony politics where regulations are non-existent or not respected because they were written to help family and friends.
I know some lines are good and gas exists. Every time they do a test my furnace turns on, sometimes in the middle of the night. I’m at the end of a line, several miles from the city.
A couple years ago, the local utility spun off the natural gas business to New Mexico Gas, and both suddenly used Denver addresses for their bill payments. When companies are no longer local, they don’t respond to local interests. When companies are owned by investors, they tend to out source maintenance, rather than maintain their own crews.
The thing that makes us all angry is the utility company has decided it needs to bring in crews of relighters to go house to house to turn on our appliances for us. They’ve recruited people from Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Colorado. We wonder about the quality of tradesmen who aren’t employed in those states fixing local problems caused by the cold.
As the postman said, give me my gas and I’ll handle the relighting.
The utility and the governor actually have responded to that particular distrust. They now list the utilities who are providing the technicians. Elsewhere, the police are accompanying the crews who have to test everything for safety before they put meters back in service.
In this area, they’re using the National Guard. I don’t know if that’s because there aren’t enough police, or if they’re no different than the rest of us, staying home keeping an eye on the water pipes, or if they’re so distrusted someone else needs to be used. The costs of a dysfunctional police force are hidden and high.
No one’s saying yet why we lost our gas service, or why we’re the last ones to have it restored. All we know is we will endure four days without heat when morning temperatures are between 4 and 10 degrees, and the areas that vote Republican are getting service before those that traditionally vote for Democrats.
Some, of course, don’t have problems. They live in areas where they still use propane. We only got gas here about 10 years ago. At least some of my neighbors still have wood stoves, although I’ve seen little smoke coming from their chimneys. Perhaps they exhausted their wood supplies in January.
I’m lucky. I have some decent space heaters and can keep the bedroom at about 68. The rest of the house is drafty and in the low 40's at night. I keep water tricking through the hot and cold water pipes in the farthest bathroom and don’t flush the toilet in the night. Even so, it got down to 39 inside last night and the fittings on the toilet are leaking.
The biggest problem is the lack of hot water. I’ve abandoned dishes for paper plates, and now dip my cooking utensils in the large pot I keep boiling when I’m in the kitchen. I can’t go to work again until I can take a shower.
A man I work with lives in a trailer with four children. He can’t afford a space heater, if any are still available after the cold at New Year’s. Friday his wife took two kids to the emergency room because they were already sick.
There won’t be any questions asked in the state capital. The governor not only supports the Tea Party philosophy, but is widely seen to be a daughter of the Texas gas and oil interests. There’s more likely to be investigations of poor construction techniques: many multi-million dollar homes in Las Campanas have broken water pipes despite having heat. Bottled water was sold out in my Santa Fe grocery Friday afternoon.
We are living through the coldest period anyone remembers, and our heat supply was cut off on Thursday morning, soon after temperatures reached -12 here. We won’t be up until after the Super Bowl in Dallas.
The gas company has done a particularly poor job of communicating, at least through its emergency website. It blames the lowered power supply in Texas which has lowered pressure in the gas lines. The websites of the local TV stations are no better; they simply redirect you the utility company site.
There’s some news somewhere. One hears particular areas like Taos are down because of equipment or line failures. We suspect the priorities of Texas suppliers eager to leave a good impression on the wealthy visitors and provide extra power to the media crews converging in Dallas Sunday.
We look at the pattern and see outages in remote areas around Albuquerque, nothing in Santa Fe County, and then here. The pueblos, whose lines come from here, went down three hours later than we did. The utility website indicated they had separate, probably more demanding, agreements with the company.
When I walked into the post office I was asked why did I think we were singled out.
Of course I had a ready answer. We won’t squawk like the wealthy in Santa Fe. I didn’t say the obvious, because this area is poor, Hispanic, and has a long tradition of crony politics where regulations are non-existent or not respected because they were written to help family and friends.
I know some lines are good and gas exists. Every time they do a test my furnace turns on, sometimes in the middle of the night. I’m at the end of a line, several miles from the city.
A couple years ago, the local utility spun off the natural gas business to New Mexico Gas, and both suddenly used Denver addresses for their bill payments. When companies are no longer local, they don’t respond to local interests. When companies are owned by investors, they tend to out source maintenance, rather than maintain their own crews.
The thing that makes us all angry is the utility company has decided it needs to bring in crews of relighters to go house to house to turn on our appliances for us. They’ve recruited people from Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Colorado. We wonder about the quality of tradesmen who aren’t employed in those states fixing local problems caused by the cold.
As the postman said, give me my gas and I’ll handle the relighting.
The utility and the governor actually have responded to that particular distrust. They now list the utilities who are providing the technicians. Elsewhere, the police are accompanying the crews who have to test everything for safety before they put meters back in service.
In this area, they’re using the National Guard. I don’t know if that’s because there aren’t enough police, or if they’re no different than the rest of us, staying home keeping an eye on the water pipes, or if they’re so distrusted someone else needs to be used. The costs of a dysfunctional police force are hidden and high.
No one’s saying yet why we lost our gas service, or why we’re the last ones to have it restored. All we know is we will endure four days without heat when morning temperatures are between 4 and 10 degrees, and the areas that vote Republican are getting service before those that traditionally vote for Democrats.
Some, of course, don’t have problems. They live in areas where they still use propane. We only got gas here about 10 years ago. At least some of my neighbors still have wood stoves, although I’ve seen little smoke coming from their chimneys. Perhaps they exhausted their wood supplies in January.
I’m lucky. I have some decent space heaters and can keep the bedroom at about 68. The rest of the house is drafty and in the low 40's at night. I keep water tricking through the hot and cold water pipes in the farthest bathroom and don’t flush the toilet in the night. Even so, it got down to 39 inside last night and the fittings on the toilet are leaking.
The biggest problem is the lack of hot water. I’ve abandoned dishes for paper plates, and now dip my cooking utensils in the large pot I keep boiling when I’m in the kitchen. I can’t go to work again until I can take a shower.
A man I work with lives in a trailer with four children. He can’t afford a space heater, if any are still available after the cold at New Year’s. Friday his wife took two kids to the emergency room because they were already sick.
There won’t be any questions asked in the state capital. The governor not only supports the Tea Party philosophy, but is widely seen to be a daughter of the Texas gas and oil interests. There’s more likely to be investigations of poor construction techniques: many multi-million dollar homes in Las Campanas have broken water pipes despite having heat. Bottled water was sold out in my Santa Fe grocery Friday afternoon.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
South Carolina - Roses and Rice Redux
I began by wondering how Englishmen not known for any proclivity for hard work or innovation could have made their fortunes growing exotic plants like sugar cane and rice. I ended with no simple answer, but a combination of the usual factors: necessity, unusual individuals looking to solve critical problems, unique situations.
Hezekiah Maham and John Champneys are probably as representative as any of the middling classes in South Carolina, and their fates are as symptomatic. Unlike men like Henry Laurens and John Joshua Ward, who have come to represent an idealized south of slave traders and rice planters, they have simply faded away.
In 1916, James Wood Johnson, of Johnson and Johnson, bought Mepkin, the plantation that had once been owned by Laurens, the slave trader who had criticized Champneys’ business practices. Unlike lowland planters who wanted land that was productive and the right size to be worked by a single slave crew, Johnson bought adjacent plantations to leave his daughter, Helen Rutgers, 10,000 contiguous acres in 1932. She sold to Henry Luce, and his wife Clare Booth Luce in 1936.
The playwright hired landscape architects to covert the once productive land into acres of gardens. They gave a large portion of the estate to the Trappist Order's Gethsemani Abbey in 1949. The grounds were opened to tourists in 2007.
The land where Ward once selected Carolina Gold from his great-uncle Maham’s rice has similarly been agglomerated with Plowden Weston’s Laurel Hill and other plantations once owned by the Allstons into Brookgreen Gardens by Archer Milton Huntington and his wife, Anna Hyatt Huntington, to display her sculpture. Today, visitors can examine their sculpture collection in a natural setting.
In contrast, the area where Maham lived, including the homes of Francis Marion and the Palmers, was flooded in 1941 by the Santee Cooper Hydroelectric and Navigation Project to create Lake Moultrie and provide power to local rural residents. Maham’s land survived but is owned by someone who "is not interested in the history of this area, and as a result is allowing the cemetery and monument [erected by Ward] to be destroyed by overgrowth of briars, brush, and trees."
Champneys’ two plantations similarly disappeared as Charleston expanded; neither is mentioned in the South Carolina list of plantations. In 1995, people in Ravenel planted blueberries at the end of Rose Drive, off Champneys Drive, and in 2003 opened Champneys Blueberries to let the public bring their children to pick where the noisette rose was born.
On Postell Drive, the next road off the Savannah Highway, people built McMansions in Champneys Gardens in the 1990's. In the best Charleston tradition, a $425,000 "exquisite Mediterranean style home" featuring "old English brick," marble foyer and gourmet kitchen is awaiting foreclosure.
If Champneys’ plantations have been transformed into a brand name, so too has Ward’s rice. In 1999 Merle Shepard began crossing Carolina Gold with other varieties to introduce modern disease resistence, greater yields and better wind resistence. With help from Gurdev Khush and Anna McClug, he took the most promising hybrid with an indica basmati and put it through the rigorous selection process now used to establish hybrid purity. The USDA released Charleston Gold for "restaurants using historically authentic ingredients," a market created by Richard Schultz and Glen Roberts.
The desire to recover the past that was stimulated by the Bicentennial also affected rose growers, who were interested in saving older varieties. Noisettes had nearly disappeared because they couldn’t withstand the climate of much of this country. In the late 1970's, Léonie Bell and Doug Seidel began searching for Champneys Pink Cluster, based on herbarium samples preserved in Bermuda. Eventually, Carl Cato and Peggy Cornett discovered surviving bushes in Virginia. Bell sent cuttings from Cato’s find to Joseph Schraven’s Pickering Nursuries in Ontario, to propagate for public sale.
The reason Champneys’ rose could be restored and Maham’s rice needed to be recreated is partly the result of nature, and partly changing values. A woody perennial like a rose can be cloned by cuttings so that the original is reproduced over and over. Seeds for an annual like rice must be planted every year. No matter how careful the grower, variation will persist in hybrids that haven’t been stabilized and a special variety will disappear when it’s not grown and no viable seed survives.
A perennial can come to represent the enduring values of a society like the gentility and beauty of Charleston promoted by the Luces and Huntingtons. An annual, by necessity, is dependent on the perpetuation of those cultural values, year by year, generation after generation, by planters and slaves toiling in the mosquito infested swampy low country. The one can survive abandonment to be rediscovered as a relic; the other cannot endure without effort except in memory.
Notes: Information of plantations from South Carolina Plantations website, maintained by SCIWAY.com, LLC.
Hezekiah Maham and John Champneys are probably as representative as any of the middling classes in South Carolina, and their fates are as symptomatic. Unlike men like Henry Laurens and John Joshua Ward, who have come to represent an idealized south of slave traders and rice planters, they have simply faded away.
In 1916, James Wood Johnson, of Johnson and Johnson, bought Mepkin, the plantation that had once been owned by Laurens, the slave trader who had criticized Champneys’ business practices. Unlike lowland planters who wanted land that was productive and the right size to be worked by a single slave crew, Johnson bought adjacent plantations to leave his daughter, Helen Rutgers, 10,000 contiguous acres in 1932. She sold to Henry Luce, and his wife Clare Booth Luce in 1936.
The playwright hired landscape architects to covert the once productive land into acres of gardens. They gave a large portion of the estate to the Trappist Order's Gethsemani Abbey in 1949. The grounds were opened to tourists in 2007.
The land where Ward once selected Carolina Gold from his great-uncle Maham’s rice has similarly been agglomerated with Plowden Weston’s Laurel Hill and other plantations once owned by the Allstons into Brookgreen Gardens by Archer Milton Huntington and his wife, Anna Hyatt Huntington, to display her sculpture. Today, visitors can examine their sculpture collection in a natural setting.
In contrast, the area where Maham lived, including the homes of Francis Marion and the Palmers, was flooded in 1941 by the Santee Cooper Hydroelectric and Navigation Project to create Lake Moultrie and provide power to local rural residents. Maham’s land survived but is owned by someone who "is not interested in the history of this area, and as a result is allowing the cemetery and monument [erected by Ward] to be destroyed by overgrowth of briars, brush, and trees."
Champneys’ two plantations similarly disappeared as Charleston expanded; neither is mentioned in the South Carolina list of plantations. In 1995, people in Ravenel planted blueberries at the end of Rose Drive, off Champneys Drive, and in 2003 opened Champneys Blueberries to let the public bring their children to pick where the noisette rose was born.
On Postell Drive, the next road off the Savannah Highway, people built McMansions in Champneys Gardens in the 1990's. In the best Charleston tradition, a $425,000 "exquisite Mediterranean style home" featuring "old English brick," marble foyer and gourmet kitchen is awaiting foreclosure.
If Champneys’ plantations have been transformed into a brand name, so too has Ward’s rice. In 1999 Merle Shepard began crossing Carolina Gold with other varieties to introduce modern disease resistence, greater yields and better wind resistence. With help from Gurdev Khush and Anna McClug, he took the most promising hybrid with an indica basmati and put it through the rigorous selection process now used to establish hybrid purity. The USDA released Charleston Gold for "restaurants using historically authentic ingredients," a market created by Richard Schultz and Glen Roberts.
The desire to recover the past that was stimulated by the Bicentennial also affected rose growers, who were interested in saving older varieties. Noisettes had nearly disappeared because they couldn’t withstand the climate of much of this country. In the late 1970's, Léonie Bell and Doug Seidel began searching for Champneys Pink Cluster, based on herbarium samples preserved in Bermuda. Eventually, Carl Cato and Peggy Cornett discovered surviving bushes in Virginia. Bell sent cuttings from Cato’s find to Joseph Schraven’s Pickering Nursuries in Ontario, to propagate for public sale.
The reason Champneys’ rose could be restored and Maham’s rice needed to be recreated is partly the result of nature, and partly changing values. A woody perennial like a rose can be cloned by cuttings so that the original is reproduced over and over. Seeds for an annual like rice must be planted every year. No matter how careful the grower, variation will persist in hybrids that haven’t been stabilized and a special variety will disappear when it’s not grown and no viable seed survives.
A perennial can come to represent the enduring values of a society like the gentility and beauty of Charleston promoted by the Luces and Huntingtons. An annual, by necessity, is dependent on the perpetuation of those cultural values, year by year, generation after generation, by planters and slaves toiling in the mosquito infested swampy low country. The one can survive abandonment to be rediscovered as a relic; the other cannot endure without effort except in memory.
Notes: Information of plantations from South Carolina Plantations website, maintained by SCIWAY.com, LLC.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
South Carolina - Entrepreneurial Spirit
Capitalism, by definition, exists when people can make money from their efforts, and therefore assumes a monetary economy. The right for inventors to "the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" was included in the constitution.
That expectation has been resisted by those who are expected to pay. Back in Barbados, one complaint against James Drax was that, when he had found a way to process his sugar cane, he hadn’t shared his knowledge with his neighbors, who were his competitors in the market.
One suspects one reason the slaves of Jonathan Lucas were investigated in the Denmark Vesey scare of 1823 is that Lucas not only had built mills, but opened a mill where he charged planters to process their rice. In 1810, his father’s first customer, John Bowman, still owed them $1,500.
Today Eliza Lucas is held as the ideal alternative, a woman who gave away her seed, possibly under the influence of her new husband, Charles Pinckney. Her gifts were probably less charitable than calculated. She had begun experimenting with crops on her grandfather’s plantation on the Wappo, because it was heavily mortgaged and they needed to raise money to save it. She was told she couldn’t get a bounty for her indigo until "you can in some measure supply the British Demand." The best way to reach that threshold was to give "small quantities to a great number of people," not a lot to a few who could influence the price.
The tension between innovators, who expect to profit from their labors, and public benefactors, who give away the fruit of their efforts, has increased from colonial times when men lived under the protection of Lords Proprietors and kings. In the oldest versions of rice’s origin tales described in earlier posts, the word "give" was used to indicate rice was transferred from the possession of one person to another. In the first, published in 1731, Frayer Hall simply said "It was soon dispensed over the Province."
The transformation of "give" to "gift" occurred during the American revolution which began, in part, when New England merchants protested the Mercantilist policies of Britain which hampered their ability to make money. In 1779, a tory, Alexander Hewatt, said the royal governor, Thomas Smith divided his present of rice between "Stephen Bull, Joseph Woodward, and some other friends."
David Ramsay amplified the role of Smith in 1809 when he said Smith first proved the rice would grow, then distributed his "little crop" "among his planter friends." Despite his view of what a good governor should do, Ramsay himself petitioned the first session of the House of Representatives for rights to his writings, an effort that stimulated Congress to pass the first patent law in 1790.
The same sort of transformation for indigo occurred in the years leading to the civil war. James Glen didn’t mention Eliza Lucas when he wrote about indigo in South Carolina in 1861. However, a few years earlier William Gilmore Simms had constantly referred to her son, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, in his novel Woodcraft, as a rich benefactor who, one character tells his hero, "must save you from McKewn if possible. He can do so, if anybody can."
Pinckney had just died in 1825 when Simms returned to Charleston from whence his family had fled when his father failed as a merchant. His first attempt to attract the attention of the city’s elite was a poem dedicated to a man who, in a better world, might have saved his family from bankruptcy. Hezekiah Maham, on the other hand, always turned to his favorite commander, Francis Marion, for advice and help.
More recent writers emphasize the charitable motives for the gift. For instance, popular historian Rod Gragg says that Woodward "knowing the huge profits rice produced as an export to England, ... shared his discovery with his fellow colonists."
The same emphasis on giving away one’s labor characterizes some writing about John Champneys and his hybrid rose. Peggy Cornett, director of the Center for Historic Plants at Montecello, simply wanted to connect known facts when she said "Champneys shared rooted cuttings of his seedling with friends, including William Prince, Jr.," from whom he may have purchased the Parson’s Pink rose that contributed to his seedling, and that Champneys "shared another batch from his seedling with his neighbor, a Frenchman, named Philippe Noisette."
A Charleston website that promotes a romantic view of the city for tourists converts the words necessary to indicate the transfer of a plant into a act of cultural magnificence when it says Noisette gave "a local rice farmer" the China rose, and "as was the custom in the South among gardeners at the time, Champneys then presented seedlings of Champneys' pink cluster back to his friend, Philippe Noisette."
Rosarian Peter Harkness took the step from describing a gift to ascribing a motive when he wrote "The farmer was proud to own such a special rose and passed on cuttings to his friends, including Philippe Noisette."
Champneys was many things, but simple rice farmer he was not. Such a characterization is probably the result of a number of factors, not the least creative writing courses that warn would be writers to avoid the passive voice and use action words when possible. When there are no facts, or descriptions are conflicting and vague, they’re told to visualize how people would have acted in the past.
In addition to suggesting how people are taught to write, the eleemosynary versions also suggest a strong distrust of the motives of innovators, entrepreneurs and capitalists. Many prefer the John Rockefeller who gave away dimes and established a foundation to avoid taxes to the man who organized the Standard Oil cartel.
The transformation in our perceptions of innovators occurred in stages. The only first hand accounts we have are those of Eliza Lucas and Joshua John Ward. Both describe deliberate efforts over several years to develop viable plants and persistence in the face of failure, some caused by the malicious actions of others. For the gardener, both also provide insights into the ways of nature and how man has selected traits to improve it.
Their works were not commonly known in the past. Instead, writers like Hall and Cornett were forced to write narratives based on few facts. The older one left the introduction of rice to the impersonal passive voice, while the other tried to imagine human intervention in the spread of noisette roses.
Such neutral accounts were rejected in times of crises, like the revolution and the years before the civil war. Then royalists like Hewatt and federalists like Ramsey and Simms replaced traditional figures like pirates and the Swamp Fox with conservative heroes like Thomas Smith and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. More recently, slaves and a mulatto’s husband have been given the role of critical interveners in history.
Today’s writers, generally ignorant of the background of their sources, simply rewrite them to fit our current values. Gragg and Harkness describe men as unrealistic in their behavior as an earlier generations’s Lord Fauntleroy and Pollyanna. However, their popular audience is less interested in realistic tales of effort and perseverance, than in suggestions of an alternative to modern reality.
The new world colonies were founded to make money, and that’s what Drax and Eliza and Jonathan Lucas and Champneys wanted to do. That others also made fortunes imitating them may follow the logic of capitalism, but was not the primary motive for those who helped introduce sugar, indigo, rice and noisette roses.
Notes:
Campbell, Levin H. The Patent System of the United States So Far as it Relates to the Granting of Patents: A History, 1891.
Cornett, Peggy. "Champneys' Pink Cluster Comes to Monticello," Twinleaf Journal, January 1999.
Discover Charleston. "Secret Gardens: Charleston's Blooming Treasures," DiscoverCharleston website.
Glen, James. "A Description of South Carolina," 1761, reprinted 1951 as Colonial South Carolina: Two Contemporary Descriptions by Governor James Glen and Doctor George Milligen-Johnston, edited by Chapman J. Milling.
Gragg, Rod. Planters, Pirates, & Patriots: Historical Tales from South Carolina, 2006.
Harkness, Peter. The Rose: an Illustrated History, 2003.
Lucas, William Dollard. "Notes for Jonathon Lucas Sr.: A Lucas Memorandum," posted on-line, on the 1810 debt.
Pinckney, Eliza Lucas. The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, edited 1997 by Elise Pinckney with research support from Marvin R. Zahniser.
Salley, A. S. Jr "The Introduction of Rice Culture into South Carolina," Historical Commission of South Carolina Bulletin 6, 1919, on Hall, Hewatt and Ramsay.
Simms, William Gilmore. Woodcraft, 1852, republished 1961 with an introduction by Richmond Croom Beatty.
Ward, Joshua John. Letter to Robert Allston, 16 November 1843, incorporated in later editions by Allston and reprinted by the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, The Rice Paper, November 2009.
That expectation has been resisted by those who are expected to pay. Back in Barbados, one complaint against James Drax was that, when he had found a way to process his sugar cane, he hadn’t shared his knowledge with his neighbors, who were his competitors in the market.
One suspects one reason the slaves of Jonathan Lucas were investigated in the Denmark Vesey scare of 1823 is that Lucas not only had built mills, but opened a mill where he charged planters to process their rice. In 1810, his father’s first customer, John Bowman, still owed them $1,500.
Today Eliza Lucas is held as the ideal alternative, a woman who gave away her seed, possibly under the influence of her new husband, Charles Pinckney. Her gifts were probably less charitable than calculated. She had begun experimenting with crops on her grandfather’s plantation on the Wappo, because it was heavily mortgaged and they needed to raise money to save it. She was told she couldn’t get a bounty for her indigo until "you can in some measure supply the British Demand." The best way to reach that threshold was to give "small quantities to a great number of people," not a lot to a few who could influence the price.
The tension between innovators, who expect to profit from their labors, and public benefactors, who give away the fruit of their efforts, has increased from colonial times when men lived under the protection of Lords Proprietors and kings. In the oldest versions of rice’s origin tales described in earlier posts, the word "give" was used to indicate rice was transferred from the possession of one person to another. In the first, published in 1731, Frayer Hall simply said "It was soon dispensed over the Province."
The transformation of "give" to "gift" occurred during the American revolution which began, in part, when New England merchants protested the Mercantilist policies of Britain which hampered their ability to make money. In 1779, a tory, Alexander Hewatt, said the royal governor, Thomas Smith divided his present of rice between "Stephen Bull, Joseph Woodward, and some other friends."
David Ramsay amplified the role of Smith in 1809 when he said Smith first proved the rice would grow, then distributed his "little crop" "among his planter friends." Despite his view of what a good governor should do, Ramsay himself petitioned the first session of the House of Representatives for rights to his writings, an effort that stimulated Congress to pass the first patent law in 1790.
The same sort of transformation for indigo occurred in the years leading to the civil war. James Glen didn’t mention Eliza Lucas when he wrote about indigo in South Carolina in 1861. However, a few years earlier William Gilmore Simms had constantly referred to her son, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, in his novel Woodcraft, as a rich benefactor who, one character tells his hero, "must save you from McKewn if possible. He can do so, if anybody can."
Pinckney had just died in 1825 when Simms returned to Charleston from whence his family had fled when his father failed as a merchant. His first attempt to attract the attention of the city’s elite was a poem dedicated to a man who, in a better world, might have saved his family from bankruptcy. Hezekiah Maham, on the other hand, always turned to his favorite commander, Francis Marion, for advice and help.
More recent writers emphasize the charitable motives for the gift. For instance, popular historian Rod Gragg says that Woodward "knowing the huge profits rice produced as an export to England, ... shared his discovery with his fellow colonists."
The same emphasis on giving away one’s labor characterizes some writing about John Champneys and his hybrid rose. Peggy Cornett, director of the Center for Historic Plants at Montecello, simply wanted to connect known facts when she said "Champneys shared rooted cuttings of his seedling with friends, including William Prince, Jr.," from whom he may have purchased the Parson’s Pink rose that contributed to his seedling, and that Champneys "shared another batch from his seedling with his neighbor, a Frenchman, named Philippe Noisette."
A Charleston website that promotes a romantic view of the city for tourists converts the words necessary to indicate the transfer of a plant into a act of cultural magnificence when it says Noisette gave "a local rice farmer" the China rose, and "as was the custom in the South among gardeners at the time, Champneys then presented seedlings of Champneys' pink cluster back to his friend, Philippe Noisette."
Rosarian Peter Harkness took the step from describing a gift to ascribing a motive when he wrote "The farmer was proud to own such a special rose and passed on cuttings to his friends, including Philippe Noisette."
Champneys was many things, but simple rice farmer he was not. Such a characterization is probably the result of a number of factors, not the least creative writing courses that warn would be writers to avoid the passive voice and use action words when possible. When there are no facts, or descriptions are conflicting and vague, they’re told to visualize how people would have acted in the past.
In addition to suggesting how people are taught to write, the eleemosynary versions also suggest a strong distrust of the motives of innovators, entrepreneurs and capitalists. Many prefer the John Rockefeller who gave away dimes and established a foundation to avoid taxes to the man who organized the Standard Oil cartel.
The transformation in our perceptions of innovators occurred in stages. The only first hand accounts we have are those of Eliza Lucas and Joshua John Ward. Both describe deliberate efforts over several years to develop viable plants and persistence in the face of failure, some caused by the malicious actions of others. For the gardener, both also provide insights into the ways of nature and how man has selected traits to improve it.
Their works were not commonly known in the past. Instead, writers like Hall and Cornett were forced to write narratives based on few facts. The older one left the introduction of rice to the impersonal passive voice, while the other tried to imagine human intervention in the spread of noisette roses.
Such neutral accounts were rejected in times of crises, like the revolution and the years before the civil war. Then royalists like Hewatt and federalists like Ramsey and Simms replaced traditional figures like pirates and the Swamp Fox with conservative heroes like Thomas Smith and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. More recently, slaves and a mulatto’s husband have been given the role of critical interveners in history.
Today’s writers, generally ignorant of the background of their sources, simply rewrite them to fit our current values. Gragg and Harkness describe men as unrealistic in their behavior as an earlier generations’s Lord Fauntleroy and Pollyanna. However, their popular audience is less interested in realistic tales of effort and perseverance, than in suggestions of an alternative to modern reality.
The new world colonies were founded to make money, and that’s what Drax and Eliza and Jonathan Lucas and Champneys wanted to do. That others also made fortunes imitating them may follow the logic of capitalism, but was not the primary motive for those who helped introduce sugar, indigo, rice and noisette roses.
Notes:
Campbell, Levin H. The Patent System of the United States So Far as it Relates to the Granting of Patents: A History, 1891.
Cornett, Peggy. "Champneys' Pink Cluster Comes to Monticello," Twinleaf Journal, January 1999.
Discover Charleston. "Secret Gardens: Charleston's Blooming Treasures," DiscoverCharleston website.
Glen, James. "A Description of South Carolina," 1761, reprinted 1951 as Colonial South Carolina: Two Contemporary Descriptions by Governor James Glen and Doctor George Milligen-Johnston, edited by Chapman J. Milling.
Gragg, Rod. Planters, Pirates, & Patriots: Historical Tales from South Carolina, 2006.
Harkness, Peter. The Rose: an Illustrated History, 2003.
Lucas, William Dollard. "Notes for Jonathon Lucas Sr.: A Lucas Memorandum," posted on-line, on the 1810 debt.
Pinckney, Eliza Lucas. The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, edited 1997 by Elise Pinckney with research support from Marvin R. Zahniser.
Salley, A. S. Jr "The Introduction of Rice Culture into South Carolina," Historical Commission of South Carolina Bulletin 6, 1919, on Hall, Hewatt and Ramsay.
Simms, William Gilmore. Woodcraft, 1852, republished 1961 with an introduction by Richmond Croom Beatty.
Ward, Joshua John. Letter to Robert Allston, 16 November 1843, incorporated in later editions by Allston and reprinted by the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, The Rice Paper, November 2009.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Attacks on the Rational
Sometimes I think the defense of slavery has been as pernicious as slavery itself, if for no other reason than it discourages logical thinking.
Charleston in the years after the revolution included plantation owners willing to experiment with new technology. By the time of the nullification crisis around 1830 innovators still existed, but they weren’t respected for their efforts. Slaves, not machines, were the only answer for economic challenges.
Scientific thinking posits the sanctity of facts, and assumes scientists will change their theories when those theories no longer can explain observed reality. Thomas Kuhn showed men don’t always live up to that ideal, that when they’re confronted with anomalies they propose more and more absurd solutions to sustain their basic beliefs. However, he also showed that over time, the value of experience does alter theory, the underlying value holds.
One cannot support scientific thinking if one is so wedded to a practice like slavery that no contrary facts can be admitted. Once facts cannot be recognized, then they must be explained away, turned into something that supports the overarching theory. Bending reality becomes acceptable.
Today, we have people who deny the observed realities of climate change because the proposed explanation threatens some part of their world view. For some, it’s the idea that nature isn’t as rigid as suggested by Genesis. For others, it’s the concept of human responsibility and the consequences for accountability for one’s actions that’s troubling. And, of course, there are those who see an economic threat.
The result is an attack on science itself.
Recently, Mary Beard reviewed a book by Donald Kagan which she saw as attacking Thucydides for praising the behavior of Pericles in the Peloponnesian war which Kagan thinks is like that of those who wouldn’t put more resources into winning the war in Viet Nam. Since Kagan believes those actions led to unnecessary defeat, so Pericles must be redefined as leading his country to disaster.
The result is an attack on the academy itself which tries to sift evidence to develop explanations. When certain conclusions are forbidden, reality must be subverted.
Since the protests against the Vietnam war, discrimination against Blacks and abortion in the late 1960's, we have seen a growing number of people who cannot accept the validity of criticism of any kind. If schools needed to change to fit social ideals, then education must be rejected. And so, a generation developed who rejected the very tools they needed to survive in the changing economy.
Now the economy is in crisis and those who’ve been left behind are the most vehement in protesting any policy that might prevent further or repeated problems, simply because the people who propose those solutions are associated with other ideas that are unacceptable. The basic thinking seems to be, if you have the wrong idea about abortion, then you can’t be trusted with the money supply.
The final result has been an attack on the constitution itself, which distributes power among groups in the population. Since those left behind cannot change, then the constitution must be reinterpreted. The tools that come to hand are those developed by men in the south who defended slavery - nullification and the primacy of minority rights.
Elections are no longer legitimate if the wrong man wins.
Notes:
Beard, Mary. "Which Thucydides Can You Trust?," The New York Review of Books, 30 September 2010, on Donald Kagan’s Thucydides: The Reinvention of History.
Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962.
Charleston in the years after the revolution included plantation owners willing to experiment with new technology. By the time of the nullification crisis around 1830 innovators still existed, but they weren’t respected for their efforts. Slaves, not machines, were the only answer for economic challenges.
Scientific thinking posits the sanctity of facts, and assumes scientists will change their theories when those theories no longer can explain observed reality. Thomas Kuhn showed men don’t always live up to that ideal, that when they’re confronted with anomalies they propose more and more absurd solutions to sustain their basic beliefs. However, he also showed that over time, the value of experience does alter theory, the underlying value holds.
One cannot support scientific thinking if one is so wedded to a practice like slavery that no contrary facts can be admitted. Once facts cannot be recognized, then they must be explained away, turned into something that supports the overarching theory. Bending reality becomes acceptable.
Today, we have people who deny the observed realities of climate change because the proposed explanation threatens some part of their world view. For some, it’s the idea that nature isn’t as rigid as suggested by Genesis. For others, it’s the concept of human responsibility and the consequences for accountability for one’s actions that’s troubling. And, of course, there are those who see an economic threat.
The result is an attack on science itself.
Recently, Mary Beard reviewed a book by Donald Kagan which she saw as attacking Thucydides for praising the behavior of Pericles in the Peloponnesian war which Kagan thinks is like that of those who wouldn’t put more resources into winning the war in Viet Nam. Since Kagan believes those actions led to unnecessary defeat, so Pericles must be redefined as leading his country to disaster.
The result is an attack on the academy itself which tries to sift evidence to develop explanations. When certain conclusions are forbidden, reality must be subverted.
Since the protests against the Vietnam war, discrimination against Blacks and abortion in the late 1960's, we have seen a growing number of people who cannot accept the validity of criticism of any kind. If schools needed to change to fit social ideals, then education must be rejected. And so, a generation developed who rejected the very tools they needed to survive in the changing economy.
Now the economy is in crisis and those who’ve been left behind are the most vehement in protesting any policy that might prevent further or repeated problems, simply because the people who propose those solutions are associated with other ideas that are unacceptable. The basic thinking seems to be, if you have the wrong idea about abortion, then you can’t be trusted with the money supply.
The final result has been an attack on the constitution itself, which distributes power among groups in the population. Since those left behind cannot change, then the constitution must be reinterpreted. The tools that come to hand are those developed by men in the south who defended slavery - nullification and the primacy of minority rights.
Elections are no longer legitimate if the wrong man wins.
Notes:
Beard, Mary. "Which Thucydides Can You Trust?," The New York Review of Books, 30 September 2010, on Donald Kagan’s Thucydides: The Reinvention of History.
Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962.
Sunday, December 05, 2010
Food Stamps - Part 4
The biggest requirements for living on $39 a month for food are resourcefulness and a willingness to think in non-traditional ways.
My boss’s former tenant’s first thought was the familiar pinto beans. Mine was lentils and rice. I’ve seen people in the local store filling their cart when eggs were on sale for $.68 a dozen and discussed the problems of keeping peanut butter from spoiling with an older woman.
To do well, one has to go beyond what one knows, without the benefit of the internet or books or even friends.
I don’t like pinto beans, but, if forced to eat them, I would probably spend time trying to find out how to make them taste better, not with fancy spices, but by figuring out the best ratio of water to beans. I would do this because I know it took me some time to learn to cook rice, and I remember both what I did and that I succeeded.
However, I would need a clock or timer, which might be a luxury.
One would have to be willing to look at items on sale or at low prices and consider them. That was what brought my attention to the citrus punch, a pile of cartons in the aisle with an advertised special low price. When I looked at the ingredients, I realized it wasn’t the best, but might work in a tight situation.
I remember how horrified people were years ago when they heard the elderly sometimes ate dog food. I went to the pet aisle to see if the seniors might have been right. The cheapest can of dog food is $.69 and lists more nutrients than the Spam substitute that costs $2.00, the potted meat that costs $.59 and the Vienna sausages that also cost $.59.
Likewise cat food isn’t a bad choice, if you mask the smell, taste and texture. Three small cans with tuna flavoring cost a dollar and list more nutrients than a can of tuna that costs $.89. After all it has to keep an animal alive, while the tuna is only considered part of a human’s diet.
Resourcefulness isn’t the monopoly of any social class. When I asked friends how they would solve this dietary puzzle, they essentially dismissed it out of hand as impossible. They wouldn’t even speculate.
I was too polite to ask them how they think they would have survived rationing in World War II or the destruction of Sarajevo, events that touched the middle classes as much as the poor. Modern life may have removed most of us from the threat of famine that existed before modern agriculture, but natural disasters and wars always threaten to return us to that fragile world where 800 calories of dried food is a luxury.
Our renter is more resourceful than they because she’s already spending her time scouring second hand sources within walking distance. They would have to overcome their cultural pride first, then learn where to shop.
Food stamps may not signify any freedom to live without constantly thinking about one’s stomach, but they may engender more freedom to think creatively about survival. I suspect many, however, would prefer the freedom to have an extra serving without thinking about the end of the month.
Freedom from want is not the same as freedom from wanting.
My boss’s former tenant’s first thought was the familiar pinto beans. Mine was lentils and rice. I’ve seen people in the local store filling their cart when eggs were on sale for $.68 a dozen and discussed the problems of keeping peanut butter from spoiling with an older woman.
To do well, one has to go beyond what one knows, without the benefit of the internet or books or even friends.
I don’t like pinto beans, but, if forced to eat them, I would probably spend time trying to find out how to make them taste better, not with fancy spices, but by figuring out the best ratio of water to beans. I would do this because I know it took me some time to learn to cook rice, and I remember both what I did and that I succeeded.
However, I would need a clock or timer, which might be a luxury.
One would have to be willing to look at items on sale or at low prices and consider them. That was what brought my attention to the citrus punch, a pile of cartons in the aisle with an advertised special low price. When I looked at the ingredients, I realized it wasn’t the best, but might work in a tight situation.
I remember how horrified people were years ago when they heard the elderly sometimes ate dog food. I went to the pet aisle to see if the seniors might have been right. The cheapest can of dog food is $.69 and lists more nutrients than the Spam substitute that costs $2.00, the potted meat that costs $.59 and the Vienna sausages that also cost $.59.
Likewise cat food isn’t a bad choice, if you mask the smell, taste and texture. Three small cans with tuna flavoring cost a dollar and list more nutrients than a can of tuna that costs $.89. After all it has to keep an animal alive, while the tuna is only considered part of a human’s diet.
Resourcefulness isn’t the monopoly of any social class. When I asked friends how they would solve this dietary puzzle, they essentially dismissed it out of hand as impossible. They wouldn’t even speculate.
I was too polite to ask them how they think they would have survived rationing in World War II or the destruction of Sarajevo, events that touched the middle classes as much as the poor. Modern life may have removed most of us from the threat of famine that existed before modern agriculture, but natural disasters and wars always threaten to return us to that fragile world where 800 calories of dried food is a luxury.
Our renter is more resourceful than they because she’s already spending her time scouring second hand sources within walking distance. They would have to overcome their cultural pride first, then learn where to shop.
Food stamps may not signify any freedom to live without constantly thinking about one’s stomach, but they may engender more freedom to think creatively about survival. I suspect many, however, would prefer the freedom to have an extra serving without thinking about the end of the month.
Freedom from want is not the same as freedom from wanting.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Middle Class
Too many people are claiming the government isn’t helping middle class people like them, when I have no idea what they mean by the term "middle class."
In the early republic, people divided society into three groups - the poor who they thought were failures, the rich who they distrusted as parasites, and the middling like themselves.
When I was growing up, after the Lynds had described Middletown, we had a more nuanced view. If pushed, we would have said middle class meant a set of values about the virtue of hard work and preparing for the future. If we used any one criteria to distinguish between our neighbors, it was their expectations for their children. There were people who weren’t poor who didn’t expect their kids to go to college, and there were the well-to-do, many of them salesmen, whose teenagers were undisciplined - we knew neither was middle class.
By this criteria, Barak Obama and Joe Biden are middle class, while Sarah Palin and John McCain are not.
However, even when I was a child, advertisers were promoting a different definition. Middle class was the possession of certain items like a home and car. Where I was a child in the 1950's, many middle class people still preferred to rent a house rather than take on the debt of a mortgage, but that changed by the 1960's.
Unfortunately, when advertisers define middle class, one never quite achieves the goal. Life becomes an eternal adolescence when one must prove one self by one’s goods.
By this standard, all the candidates for president and vice-president in the last election were middle class, and Palin and McCain were more successful than their rivals.
Statisticians and the economists who interpret their numbers have reduced middle class to set income levels or averages or percentiles. Values don’t matter. A mobster is as middle class as a preacher if he reports the same numbers to the IRS.
Now the economy is in crisis, and people shift from one definition to another.
I read about one family in Memphis that was using the food kitchen where the wife had volunteered before she lost her job as a shift manager at a fast-food outlet.
Only when I read about them, my childhood definitions said, "no, you’re not middle class." Several years before, she and her truck driver husband had gotten so far into debt they declared bankruptcy, and now, here they were again, in trouble.
I sympathized with her reaction when her employer told her they were eliminating her position, but she was welcome to continue doing the same work for half the pay. I would have walked too. But, I wouldn’t have stayed home. I would have gone out and accepted the same job, at the lower wage, from some one else. My pride would have limits when I had a family to feed.
She said her teen-age son had just gotten a part-time job, but they didn’t expect him to contribute to the household expenses. She told the reporter "she'd rather he learn how to manage his own finances."
No, not middle class, even if her husband’s income qualified and they had a car and a mortgage on their house.
They were the reason food stamps were created: they were facing a temporary crises and needed help. However, their definition of helping the middle class meant preventing them from needing the food kitchen. Saving for a potential crisis was never part of their view of the world.
More recently, The New York Times and CBS News surveyed people who supported the Tea Party Movement and found they were better off than the ones who appeared at rallies. If they’re anything like the ones who send my employer their newsletters, they are the ones who benefited from the Bush tax cuts and the inflated housing and financial markets and now have problems.
They consider themselves middle class, because they haven’t achieved their goals of wealth, and now see them snatched away. When I was a child, we would have put them in that hazy group of the well-to-do who lived too recklessly, the ones who attracted Jay Gatsby.
The de-inflation of housing and stock values, no matter how slow, is still a loss. People don’t care that the decline is being managed by the government to prevent wide-scale disaster. They only know, they personally are losing status, and the government isn’t preventing that.
It can’t. Managed loss and crisis intervention are what the government can offer right now, and neither can soften the psychological effects for people who strayed from my childhood view of middle class from losing their image of themselves as making it.
When the definition of middle class becomes "not as well off as I want to be," then no one is ever satisfied unless government leaders, like Alan Greenspan, provide an illusion. When the economy crashes, our leaders have to deal in the realities that destroy illusions.
But those who live in the material view of middle class still have adolescent demands for immediate satisfaction, not utilitarian help.
They don’t want to hear that facing the consequences of decades of industrial policy that eliminated working class jobs in this country is a different problem, with a solution that requires policies and political will that will take time to take effect.
They want it now, and if it can’t happen, then the government isn’t doing enough to help them, the middle class.
Notes:
Bengali, Shashank. "Amid Recession, Memphis Becomes America's Hunger Capital," McClatchy Newspapers, 26 March 2010.
Zernike, Kate and Megan Thee-Brenan. "Poll Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated," The New York Times 14 April 2010.
In the early republic, people divided society into three groups - the poor who they thought were failures, the rich who they distrusted as parasites, and the middling like themselves.
When I was growing up, after the Lynds had described Middletown, we had a more nuanced view. If pushed, we would have said middle class meant a set of values about the virtue of hard work and preparing for the future. If we used any one criteria to distinguish between our neighbors, it was their expectations for their children. There were people who weren’t poor who didn’t expect their kids to go to college, and there were the well-to-do, many of them salesmen, whose teenagers were undisciplined - we knew neither was middle class.
By this criteria, Barak Obama and Joe Biden are middle class, while Sarah Palin and John McCain are not.
However, even when I was a child, advertisers were promoting a different definition. Middle class was the possession of certain items like a home and car. Where I was a child in the 1950's, many middle class people still preferred to rent a house rather than take on the debt of a mortgage, but that changed by the 1960's.
Unfortunately, when advertisers define middle class, one never quite achieves the goal. Life becomes an eternal adolescence when one must prove one self by one’s goods.
By this standard, all the candidates for president and vice-president in the last election were middle class, and Palin and McCain were more successful than their rivals.
Statisticians and the economists who interpret their numbers have reduced middle class to set income levels or averages or percentiles. Values don’t matter. A mobster is as middle class as a preacher if he reports the same numbers to the IRS.
Now the economy is in crisis, and people shift from one definition to another.
I read about one family in Memphis that was using the food kitchen where the wife had volunteered before she lost her job as a shift manager at a fast-food outlet.
Only when I read about them, my childhood definitions said, "no, you’re not middle class." Several years before, she and her truck driver husband had gotten so far into debt they declared bankruptcy, and now, here they were again, in trouble.
I sympathized with her reaction when her employer told her they were eliminating her position, but she was welcome to continue doing the same work for half the pay. I would have walked too. But, I wouldn’t have stayed home. I would have gone out and accepted the same job, at the lower wage, from some one else. My pride would have limits when I had a family to feed.
She said her teen-age son had just gotten a part-time job, but they didn’t expect him to contribute to the household expenses. She told the reporter "she'd rather he learn how to manage his own finances."
No, not middle class, even if her husband’s income qualified and they had a car and a mortgage on their house.
They were the reason food stamps were created: they were facing a temporary crises and needed help. However, their definition of helping the middle class meant preventing them from needing the food kitchen. Saving for a potential crisis was never part of their view of the world.
More recently, The New York Times and CBS News surveyed people who supported the Tea Party Movement and found they were better off than the ones who appeared at rallies. If they’re anything like the ones who send my employer their newsletters, they are the ones who benefited from the Bush tax cuts and the inflated housing and financial markets and now have problems.
They consider themselves middle class, because they haven’t achieved their goals of wealth, and now see them snatched away. When I was a child, we would have put them in that hazy group of the well-to-do who lived too recklessly, the ones who attracted Jay Gatsby.
The de-inflation of housing and stock values, no matter how slow, is still a loss. People don’t care that the decline is being managed by the government to prevent wide-scale disaster. They only know, they personally are losing status, and the government isn’t preventing that.
It can’t. Managed loss and crisis intervention are what the government can offer right now, and neither can soften the psychological effects for people who strayed from my childhood view of middle class from losing their image of themselves as making it.
When the definition of middle class becomes "not as well off as I want to be," then no one is ever satisfied unless government leaders, like Alan Greenspan, provide an illusion. When the economy crashes, our leaders have to deal in the realities that destroy illusions.
But those who live in the material view of middle class still have adolescent demands for immediate satisfaction, not utilitarian help.
They don’t want to hear that facing the consequences of decades of industrial policy that eliminated working class jobs in this country is a different problem, with a solution that requires policies and political will that will take time to take effect.
They want it now, and if it can’t happen, then the government isn’t doing enough to help them, the middle class.
Notes:
Bengali, Shashank. "Amid Recession, Memphis Becomes America's Hunger Capital," McClatchy Newspapers, 26 March 2010.
Zernike, Kate and Megan Thee-Brenan. "Poll Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated," The New York Times 14 April 2010.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Waiting for Godot
Despite all evidence to the contrary, we’re still an achieving society.
Since each house of congress passed a health care bill and we’ve been waiting for our elected officials to find a way to create a joint bill, the media has been engaged in an increasing frenetic search for some distraction, a holiday, a scandal, a staged event, anything to avert our gaze from paralysis in the face of deliberate obstruction.
The events that have gotten the most exposure turn out to be those that celebrate achievement. The longest lasting was the winter Olympics. The media could find no celebrity to promote and looked for some way to prove we’re still the best. They settled on medal count, but at least some who watched the broadcasts were looking for stylized achievement, not instant bloopers.
The Academy Awards came next, which gave the media an abundance of glamour to inflate. While it’s hard to separate natural gifts from achievement with actors and easy to disparage peoples’ clothes, there’s never any question that honest effort is rewarded in technical areas like special effects.
We’re now left with amateur events, the basketball tournaments and American Idol, but we’re still looking for some alternative to our political impasse - some evidence that someone, somewhere can demand our attention through their ritualized demonstrations of skill.
As an alternative, we’ve been offered dramatic displays of self-destruction: a man who flies a plane into an IRS building, a man who opens fire on guards at the pentagon, young men who commit suicide. The media has kept them in the news as long as they could, but most viewers weren’t willing to romanticize such attacks on society as a substitute for positive political action.
Our longing for people to finally solve some problem may have lead many to expect too much from Obama. It will keep us watching and hoping, and increasingly nervous until something positive does happens. It the meantime, the distractions of circuses will continue to offer some reminder of what’s possible.
Since each house of congress passed a health care bill and we’ve been waiting for our elected officials to find a way to create a joint bill, the media has been engaged in an increasing frenetic search for some distraction, a holiday, a scandal, a staged event, anything to avert our gaze from paralysis in the face of deliberate obstruction.
The events that have gotten the most exposure turn out to be those that celebrate achievement. The longest lasting was the winter Olympics. The media could find no celebrity to promote and looked for some way to prove we’re still the best. They settled on medal count, but at least some who watched the broadcasts were looking for stylized achievement, not instant bloopers.
The Academy Awards came next, which gave the media an abundance of glamour to inflate. While it’s hard to separate natural gifts from achievement with actors and easy to disparage peoples’ clothes, there’s never any question that honest effort is rewarded in technical areas like special effects.
We’re now left with amateur events, the basketball tournaments and American Idol, but we’re still looking for some alternative to our political impasse - some evidence that someone, somewhere can demand our attention through their ritualized demonstrations of skill.
As an alternative, we’ve been offered dramatic displays of self-destruction: a man who flies a plane into an IRS building, a man who opens fire on guards at the pentagon, young men who commit suicide. The media has kept them in the news as long as they could, but most viewers weren’t willing to romanticize such attacks on society as a substitute for positive political action.
Our longing for people to finally solve some problem may have lead many to expect too much from Obama. It will keep us watching and hoping, and increasingly nervous until something positive does happens. It the meantime, the distractions of circuses will continue to offer some reminder of what’s possible.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Mark Sanford
Every now and them something happens that exposes cultural fractures we don’t even suspect exist.
In 1989, Marc Lépine opened fire on female engineering students at the École Polytechnique in Montréal. This was the first of the mass student shootings, years before Columbine and Virginia Tech. His suicide letter claimed his life had been ruined by feminists.
Men were able to distance themselves from his actions by suggesting Lépine, in fact, was not a typical man. Instead, psychologists reassured them Lépine was a disturbed Catholic, or the son of a foreigner who had left him to be raised by his mother, or an abused a child who had failed at previous attempts to learn engineering.
Women could not ignore the 28 dead or injured young women. No matter how rational the psychologists’ explanations, they were frightened for themselves and their daughters.
When couples, even those married for decades, responded differently they couldn’t ignore the fundamental differences that existed between themselves and in society. The shock of the assault could not be excised.
The recent travails of South Carolina’s Republican governor, Mark Sanford, threatened to develop into a similar rift. When he first appeared before the press to confess he had actually fallen in love with another woman, a number of male reporters, including Salon’s Gary Kamiya, were sympathetic. Women, like the Times’ Gail Collins and Maureen Dowd, were more cynical, but noted it was a nice change that he didn’t humiliate his wife by forcing her to be present and didn’t treat the other woman as an object.
We’ve all suffered enough watching the forbearance of Silda Spitzer and Hilary Clinton. We’re tired of Elizabeth Edward’s passive aggression, and may have been just a bit suspicious of Jenny Sanford’s bitter comments during the time her husband was incommunicado.
Then, Sanford spoke to the press again.
Women’s views didn’t change much, but men, especially conservatives, found the personal nature of his comments disturbing. The Republican party has become a pragmatic coalition of religious conservatives and men bent on holding wealth or power who tacitly agreed neither would reveal their abiding interests.
Mark Sanford seemed their perfect spokesman, an educated Episcopalian married to woman who left Lazard Frères for her husband and four sons. But then his refusal to accept stimulus money, invoking South Carolina’s nullification crises, led some to think his lust for power was blinding him to the necessary political compromises. Now his refusal to follow the accepted method for dealing with moral transgression suggested someone who failed to understand his world.
His fellow Republicans in South Carolina, who are primarily concerned with their own reelections and pursuing their agendas in the legislature, began suggesting he was temporarily insane. Larry Grooms said "he is coming unhinged." Larry Martin. believed he’d heard "the ramblings of a troubled man" and "that man needs help."
The deeper problem is a cultural expectation that one not become too serious about anything, that passion is the mark of the unstable. If genuine excitement should arise, it should be channeled into following a sports team. When that wasn’t sufficient in the past century, it could lead to anonymous mob violence. In this century, we’re supposed to have progressed beyond that. Respectable southerners especially do not want to be reminded that cultural outlets may fail.
Many Canadians marriages are not the same after Marc Lépine, and neither will Sanford’s political life. Genuine shocks always do isolate people, no matter how unruffled the surface remains, and only a few outsiders are willing to learn from them. Resorting to using psychologists as gatekeepers of the damned only limits the utility of our tools for coping with crisis.
Notes:
Wikipedia article on the École Polytechnique Massacre provides a good summary.
Barr, Andy and Jonathan Martin. "South Carolina GOP: Mark Sanford Must Go," Politico 1 July 2009, interviews Grooms and Martin.
Collins, Gail. "An Affair to Remember," The New York Times, 1 July 2009.
Dowd, Maureen. "Rules of the Wronged," The New York Times, 30 June 2009.
Kamiya, Gary. "The Strange Nakedness of Mark Sanford," Salon, 25 June 2009.
In 1989, Marc Lépine opened fire on female engineering students at the École Polytechnique in Montréal. This was the first of the mass student shootings, years before Columbine and Virginia Tech. His suicide letter claimed his life had been ruined by feminists.
Men were able to distance themselves from his actions by suggesting Lépine, in fact, was not a typical man. Instead, psychologists reassured them Lépine was a disturbed Catholic, or the son of a foreigner who had left him to be raised by his mother, or an abused a child who had failed at previous attempts to learn engineering.
Women could not ignore the 28 dead or injured young women. No matter how rational the psychologists’ explanations, they were frightened for themselves and their daughters.
When couples, even those married for decades, responded differently they couldn’t ignore the fundamental differences that existed between themselves and in society. The shock of the assault could not be excised.
The recent travails of South Carolina’s Republican governor, Mark Sanford, threatened to develop into a similar rift. When he first appeared before the press to confess he had actually fallen in love with another woman, a number of male reporters, including Salon’s Gary Kamiya, were sympathetic. Women, like the Times’ Gail Collins and Maureen Dowd, were more cynical, but noted it was a nice change that he didn’t humiliate his wife by forcing her to be present and didn’t treat the other woman as an object.
We’ve all suffered enough watching the forbearance of Silda Spitzer and Hilary Clinton. We’re tired of Elizabeth Edward’s passive aggression, and may have been just a bit suspicious of Jenny Sanford’s bitter comments during the time her husband was incommunicado.
Then, Sanford spoke to the press again.
Women’s views didn’t change much, but men, especially conservatives, found the personal nature of his comments disturbing. The Republican party has become a pragmatic coalition of religious conservatives and men bent on holding wealth or power who tacitly agreed neither would reveal their abiding interests.
Mark Sanford seemed their perfect spokesman, an educated Episcopalian married to woman who left Lazard Frères for her husband and four sons. But then his refusal to accept stimulus money, invoking South Carolina’s nullification crises, led some to think his lust for power was blinding him to the necessary political compromises. Now his refusal to follow the accepted method for dealing with moral transgression suggested someone who failed to understand his world.
His fellow Republicans in South Carolina, who are primarily concerned with their own reelections and pursuing their agendas in the legislature, began suggesting he was temporarily insane. Larry Grooms said "he is coming unhinged." Larry Martin. believed he’d heard "the ramblings of a troubled man" and "that man needs help."
The deeper problem is a cultural expectation that one not become too serious about anything, that passion is the mark of the unstable. If genuine excitement should arise, it should be channeled into following a sports team. When that wasn’t sufficient in the past century, it could lead to anonymous mob violence. In this century, we’re supposed to have progressed beyond that. Respectable southerners especially do not want to be reminded that cultural outlets may fail.
Many Canadians marriages are not the same after Marc Lépine, and neither will Sanford’s political life. Genuine shocks always do isolate people, no matter how unruffled the surface remains, and only a few outsiders are willing to learn from them. Resorting to using psychologists as gatekeepers of the damned only limits the utility of our tools for coping with crisis.
Notes:
Wikipedia article on the École Polytechnique Massacre provides a good summary.
Barr, Andy and Jonathan Martin. "South Carolina GOP: Mark Sanford Must Go," Politico 1 July 2009, interviews Grooms and Martin.
Collins, Gail. "An Affair to Remember," The New York Times, 1 July 2009.
Dowd, Maureen. "Rules of the Wronged," The New York Times, 30 June 2009.
Kamiya, Gary. "The Strange Nakedness of Mark Sanford," Salon, 25 June 2009.
Sunday, March 07, 2010
South Carolina - Doubt
Historians are attracted to comparative history because it provides the more scientifically minded a way to look at their subject from an outsider’s point of view. The hope is that comparisons will reveal the universals of the human condition and show the points of uniqueness that our cultural blinders prevent us from seeing.
When one looks at the investigations in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822 into a possible slave insurrection, the ones in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 into acts of witchcraft, and the ones described by Carlo Ginzburg in Friuli.between 1575 and 1644 one sees a similar pattern: progression from doubt to belief.
When churchmen in Friuli interviewed the first man with special powers, there was such a disjunct between the questions and answers that they dropped the case because "he told other tall tales which I did not believe, and so I did not question him further." It was only when another individual, one more knowledgeable about witchcraft, became probing that the Holy Inquisition believed it had uncovered witchcraft.
Similarly in Charleston, when James Hamilton, Jr., first interviewed Peter Poyas and Mingo Harth, their treatment of the questions with disbelief led him to think the possibility of a plot only lies. It was only when a second man, John Lyde Wilson, reported similar comments from a second slave that the Charleston city council acted.
In both cases, events moved from doubt to certainty, and once that change in attitude had occurred, there were never more questions about the existence of either the witches or the slave conspiracy.
In Salem, there appears to have been little initial doubt about the truthfulness of the early accusers: they weren’t peasants or slaves, but the daughter and niece of a respected churchman, Samuel Parris, and their accusations came after physical fits observed by several witnesses. The magistrates took protestations of innocence as proof of guilt, and meted milder sentences to those who confessed. It took the refusal of Giles Corey to go to trial to shake their confidence that they were dealing with real acts of witchcraft.
Historians have taken the final judgements to be the true ones, to question the events in Salem, but not in Charleston or Friuli. And so, we wonder what were the social, economic and psychological factors that precipitated Salem, but accept the reality of a slave mutiny and so don’t ask why Charleston in 1822, why not 1812 or 1832.
The acceptance of doubt took different forms in Charleston and Salem. The second was still a Puritan society, even if it had moderated its beliefs since 1620. People still believed in predestination, that God decided before individuals were born if they were saved, and nothing individuals could do would change their state of grace. At best, they could look for evidence of proof, as the magistrates had looked for evidence of witchcraft. However, they could never absolutely know if they were saved.
Jacobus Arminius disagreed with Puritan theology and argued God had granted man free will with which to accept or reject God. It was individuals’ decision that determined if they were saved, and if they made that decision there was no doubt about their state of grace. His beliefs informed the great Methodist revival that swept the country in the 1740's, and would influence the revivals that were to come in the next decade in the south.
Roman Catholics and Episcopalian Charlestonians, of course, would never have considered the question. They were saved by virtue of following the practices of the church. Doubt was not a concept, only certainty.
And so, the event that occurred in an environment where people lived with doubt, is treated with doubt today, and the ones that occurred where people saw doubt as proof of their failure to believe are the ones that are accepted as fact today. It may be no coincidence that the historian who felt the need to use comparative history to escape the bubble of culture, Frank Tannenbaum, was investigating the institution of slavery.
Notes:
Ginzburg, Carlo. I Bendandatti. 1966, translated as The Night Battles by John and Anne Tedeschi, 1983.
Tannenbaum, Frank. Slave and Citizen, 1947.
When one looks at the investigations in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822 into a possible slave insurrection, the ones in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 into acts of witchcraft, and the ones described by Carlo Ginzburg in Friuli.between 1575 and 1644 one sees a similar pattern: progression from doubt to belief.
When churchmen in Friuli interviewed the first man with special powers, there was such a disjunct between the questions and answers that they dropped the case because "he told other tall tales which I did not believe, and so I did not question him further." It was only when another individual, one more knowledgeable about witchcraft, became probing that the Holy Inquisition believed it had uncovered witchcraft.
Similarly in Charleston, when James Hamilton, Jr., first interviewed Peter Poyas and Mingo Harth, their treatment of the questions with disbelief led him to think the possibility of a plot only lies. It was only when a second man, John Lyde Wilson, reported similar comments from a second slave that the Charleston city council acted.
In both cases, events moved from doubt to certainty, and once that change in attitude had occurred, there were never more questions about the existence of either the witches or the slave conspiracy.
In Salem, there appears to have been little initial doubt about the truthfulness of the early accusers: they weren’t peasants or slaves, but the daughter and niece of a respected churchman, Samuel Parris, and their accusations came after physical fits observed by several witnesses. The magistrates took protestations of innocence as proof of guilt, and meted milder sentences to those who confessed. It took the refusal of Giles Corey to go to trial to shake their confidence that they were dealing with real acts of witchcraft.
Historians have taken the final judgements to be the true ones, to question the events in Salem, but not in Charleston or Friuli. And so, we wonder what were the social, economic and psychological factors that precipitated Salem, but accept the reality of a slave mutiny and so don’t ask why Charleston in 1822, why not 1812 or 1832.
The acceptance of doubt took different forms in Charleston and Salem. The second was still a Puritan society, even if it had moderated its beliefs since 1620. People still believed in predestination, that God decided before individuals were born if they were saved, and nothing individuals could do would change their state of grace. At best, they could look for evidence of proof, as the magistrates had looked for evidence of witchcraft. However, they could never absolutely know if they were saved.
Jacobus Arminius disagreed with Puritan theology and argued God had granted man free will with which to accept or reject God. It was individuals’ decision that determined if they were saved, and if they made that decision there was no doubt about their state of grace. His beliefs informed the great Methodist revival that swept the country in the 1740's, and would influence the revivals that were to come in the next decade in the south.
Roman Catholics and Episcopalian Charlestonians, of course, would never have considered the question. They were saved by virtue of following the practices of the church. Doubt was not a concept, only certainty.
And so, the event that occurred in an environment where people lived with doubt, is treated with doubt today, and the ones that occurred where people saw doubt as proof of their failure to believe are the ones that are accepted as fact today. It may be no coincidence that the historian who felt the need to use comparative history to escape the bubble of culture, Frank Tannenbaum, was investigating the institution of slavery.
Notes:
Ginzburg, Carlo. I Bendandatti. 1966, translated as The Night Battles by John and Anne Tedeschi, 1983.
Tannenbaum, Frank. Slave and Citizen, 1947.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
South Carolina - Evidence
In his review of books about the Denmark Vesey conspiracy in Charleston in 1822, Michael Johnson was critical of scholars who failed their craft by relying on secondary, rather than primary, sources.
Scholars are dependent on the work of others. Each individual does original work in some area, but is expected to lecture and write on subjects beyond that research specialty. He or she has no choice but to trust the work of others that’s been vetted by peer review. To read some work lacks due diligence is as distressing as hearing bank auditors don’t question account entries.
Johnson notes the five man special tribunal appointed to investigate a potential slave uprising issued an Official Report in 1822 which is used by most historians. He notes there are also two
manuscript versions of its interviews that look "similar, suggesting that they were written by the same clerk. The unambiguously legible and perfectly horizontal handwriting stretching line after line indicates that neither manuscript represents rough notes scribbled hurriedly during court sessions. Both must have been written later, at least one of them presumably based on notes that no longer survive. Neither document, then, preserves the court transcript as we think of such things today: verbatim records of what witnesses said."
Internal evidence of the kind every historian is supposed to be trained to evaluate suggests that one "is the earliest extant record of the court proceedings," and the other a later copy. Johnson examined the three documents to detect differences between them to argue that the Official Report created a narrative that was not supported by its own work.
As I read his critique, I thought about the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. They bear some similarities with both the investigation in Charleston and the work of the Holy Inquisition in Friuli described by Carlo Ginzburg. All three sets of interrogators used torture or its threat to elicit cooperation. The hysteria in Salem stopped when Giles Corey chose to be crushed to death rather than stand trial.
Second, all follow the pattern of early diversity in reports that’s replaced by uniformity as witnesses learn what their questioners expect to hear. Indeed, Mary Beth Norton observed that 14-year-old Abigail Hobbs, one of the first to confess in Salem, described the witches the way she would the Wampanoag and Abenaki who were menacing the area. Later witnesses gave ritualized descriptions of pinching, pricking, choking fits and signing books.
The thing that’s different is the cultural response to the events. It’s this response that has hindered the work of historians, and made some what Johnson calls "unwitting co-conspirators."
People in Massachusetts were shocked by Corey’s death, and since have treated the trials as an embarrassment, but a very public one. If one wants to learn more, the University of Virginia has a web site where it’s publishing transcriptions of every document related to the trial. One does not need to take Norton’s word for what Hobbs said. One can read it for oneself.
In contrast, Charleston believed at the time, and still believes, that its secret methods saved it from a catastrophe. As Johnson notes, others who want to believe slaves were not passive victims have made Vesey into the heroic reverse of the Charleston ogre, "a bold insurrectionist determined to free his people or die trying."
In the age of the internet, when amateurs everywhere can verify the accuracy of scholarship by discovering obscure original documents, some university or research center needs to make all the Charleston documents available and leave it to the public domain to evaluate what was once secret evidence. Some no doubt will still conclude the plot was very real, while others will still see proof that slaves weren’t passive. The rest of us can ponder the environment that created the need for the secret tribunal in the place, and consider the best ways to meet threats that are sensed but not overt.
Notes: All quotes from Johnson.
Ginzburg, Carlo. I Bendandatti, 1966, translated as The Night Battles by John and Anne Tedeschi, 1983.
Johnson, Michael P. "Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators," The William and Mary Quarterly 58:915-976:2001.
Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil's Snare, 2002, reviewed by Jill Lepore in The New York Times Book Review, 3 November 2002.
Scholars are dependent on the work of others. Each individual does original work in some area, but is expected to lecture and write on subjects beyond that research specialty. He or she has no choice but to trust the work of others that’s been vetted by peer review. To read some work lacks due diligence is as distressing as hearing bank auditors don’t question account entries.
Johnson notes the five man special tribunal appointed to investigate a potential slave uprising issued an Official Report in 1822 which is used by most historians. He notes there are also two
manuscript versions of its interviews that look "similar, suggesting that they were written by the same clerk. The unambiguously legible and perfectly horizontal handwriting stretching line after line indicates that neither manuscript represents rough notes scribbled hurriedly during court sessions. Both must have been written later, at least one of them presumably based on notes that no longer survive. Neither document, then, preserves the court transcript as we think of such things today: verbatim records of what witnesses said."
Internal evidence of the kind every historian is supposed to be trained to evaluate suggests that one "is the earliest extant record of the court proceedings," and the other a later copy. Johnson examined the three documents to detect differences between them to argue that the Official Report created a narrative that was not supported by its own work.
As I read his critique, I thought about the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. They bear some similarities with both the investigation in Charleston and the work of the Holy Inquisition in Friuli described by Carlo Ginzburg. All three sets of interrogators used torture or its threat to elicit cooperation. The hysteria in Salem stopped when Giles Corey chose to be crushed to death rather than stand trial.
Second, all follow the pattern of early diversity in reports that’s replaced by uniformity as witnesses learn what their questioners expect to hear. Indeed, Mary Beth Norton observed that 14-year-old Abigail Hobbs, one of the first to confess in Salem, described the witches the way she would the Wampanoag and Abenaki who were menacing the area. Later witnesses gave ritualized descriptions of pinching, pricking, choking fits and signing books.
The thing that’s different is the cultural response to the events. It’s this response that has hindered the work of historians, and made some what Johnson calls "unwitting co-conspirators."
People in Massachusetts were shocked by Corey’s death, and since have treated the trials as an embarrassment, but a very public one. If one wants to learn more, the University of Virginia has a web site where it’s publishing transcriptions of every document related to the trial. One does not need to take Norton’s word for what Hobbs said. One can read it for oneself.
In contrast, Charleston believed at the time, and still believes, that its secret methods saved it from a catastrophe. As Johnson notes, others who want to believe slaves were not passive victims have made Vesey into the heroic reverse of the Charleston ogre, "a bold insurrectionist determined to free his people or die trying."
In the age of the internet, when amateurs everywhere can verify the accuracy of scholarship by discovering obscure original documents, some university or research center needs to make all the Charleston documents available and leave it to the public domain to evaluate what was once secret evidence. Some no doubt will still conclude the plot was very real, while others will still see proof that slaves weren’t passive. The rest of us can ponder the environment that created the need for the secret tribunal in the place, and consider the best ways to meet threats that are sensed but not overt.
Notes: All quotes from Johnson.
Ginzburg, Carlo. I Bendandatti, 1966, translated as The Night Battles by John and Anne Tedeschi, 1983.
Johnson, Michael P. "Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators," The William and Mary Quarterly 58:915-976:2001.
Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil's Snare, 2002, reviewed by Jill Lepore in The New York Times Book Review, 3 November 2002.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
South Carolina - V. O. Key
When V. O. Key was writing about South Carolina politics in 1949, he described it as a one party state with no continuing sense of interest group and no obvious center of power. Concepts like region or class simply didn’t survive serious scrutiny. Each election began with at least four candidates and the winner was the one with the most friends and neighbors. Only the realization that a second party would necessarily need to appeal to a new group of voters like Negroes kept the Democrats unified.
While Key attributes the personal style, importance of race baiting and legislative government to post-Reconstruction institutional features, the Denmark Vesey controversy suggests the political contours of the state are much older. In 1822 Charleston, party differences were beginning to emerge, but the nascent political identifications would not have predicted who would be allies.
Most were shades of republicans. William Johnson, Jr., was appointed to the Supreme Court by Thomas Jefferson while John Lyde Wilson was closely connected to Aaron Burr, who’d been defeated for president by Jefferson in 1800, but then supported him against Alexander Hamilton. Wilson’s wife’s great uncle, Samuel Ashe, was an anti-federalist governor of North Carolina during John Adams administration who supported Jefferson.
Only James Hamilton, Jr, was raised in a federalist environment, that of slave transporting Newport, Rhode Island. However, by the time he was intendant of Charleston he was a Republican poised to became a supporter of Andrew Jackson. The tariffs and Missouri compromise made them realize a central government was a potential threat to their control over their slaves.
As Key suggested, kinship connections, and the cultures they signify, would have been a better indicator of alliances. Johnson and Bennett were related through Bennett’s sister Sarah. Wilson and Hamilton shared ties with the Alston family through William Allston and Esther LaBrosse De Marlbeouf. Hamilton’s mother’s father’s first wife, Elizabeth, was their daughter, while Wilson’s wife, Charlotte, was their granddaughter.
More important than either party or personal networks may have been the underlying attitudes towards the importance of a centralized government that separated the federalists from the Jeffersonians, and the rule of law that separated some Carolinians from both. Indeed, these differences may be no more than a continuation of attitudes towards the emerging nation state that had separated men into three groups under the Stuarts. [See posting for 27 December 2009]
Duels and lynchings are perhaps the greatest symbolic acts that place individual definitions of justice above those of the state and the law. When Wilson was elected to the state senate in 1826, Thomas Grimké wanted him impeached for fiscal impropriety as governor. Wilson’s response was to challenge him to a duel. In 1838 he wrote The Code of Honor to establish standards for such confrontations.
When John Bowman, the uncle of James Hamilton, accused his sister-in-law’s husband of fathering an illegitimate child in the north, the senior Hamilton lost the lower part of a leg when Bowman bested him in a duel that left the younger Hamilton to devise an explanation for his father’s accident.
Walter Edgar indicates Hamilton’s reputation was greatly enhanced by stories he fought 14 duels, although Robert Tinkler believes the only time he actually took up a pistol was against a young man in New York, William Gracie, who, he believed, threatened his intended marriage to an heiress, Elizabeth Heyward.
The execution of Denmark Vesey and five other slaves was a very public lynching preceded by a cart taking the six men through King Street to vacant land north of the city. The activated militia gave a sense of legitimacy to what, in fact, was the administration of a sentence arrived at in secret by a group of men using procedures the governor, Thomas Bennett, claimed "violated the ‘rules which universally obtain among civilized nations, in the judicial investigation of crime.’"
Key comments on the recurring pattern that men from the up country parts of South Carolina who ran of populist platforms like Ben Tillman, Cole Blease and Olin Johnston gradually moderated their views to expand their support beyond their regions and substituted persecution of Negroes for their former class appeals. He believed they not only had to build political coalitions in the conventional sense, but gain support through politicians committed to decentralized institutions.
He predicted Strom Thurmond would abandon his moderation to oppose civil rights. If Key had looked to the pre-Civil War years, he would have noted John Calhoun had forsworn his neutrality on nullification; if he were alive today, he would see pressures to conform being exerted on Lindsey Graham and Mark Sanford by the General Assembly.
Such hegemony is not accidental. Slaves and freedmen who watched the execution of a carpenter who purchased his freedom with a lottery prize, a slave free to hire himself out, and a ship’s carpenter understood the rituals of supremacy that were usually diffused and veiled. The state had already taken away the rights of owners like Joseph Vesey to free their slaves, and soon would stop men like Thomas Blackwood from allowing their chattel the freedom to work for themselves. The state was ready to defy international law by imprisoning any freedmen who appeared as sailors in the port, lest they mingle with slaves like Peter Poyas on the wharves.
Whites like Thomas Bennett were reminded of the power of secret groups to punish those who rebuff their hints when the other three hanged men were the governor’s property.
Notes:
Bennett, Thomas. Quoted by Michael P. Johnson, "Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators," The William and Mary Quarterly 58:915-976:2001.
Edgar, Walter. South Carolina: A History, 1998.
Egerton, Douglas R. He Shall Go out Free: the Lives of Denmark Vesey, 2004, for description of execution. This is one of the books criticized by Johnson.
Key, V. O., Junior. Southern Politics in State and Nation, 1949.
While Key attributes the personal style, importance of race baiting and legislative government to post-Reconstruction institutional features, the Denmark Vesey controversy suggests the political contours of the state are much older. In 1822 Charleston, party differences were beginning to emerge, but the nascent political identifications would not have predicted who would be allies.
Most were shades of republicans. William Johnson, Jr., was appointed to the Supreme Court by Thomas Jefferson while John Lyde Wilson was closely connected to Aaron Burr, who’d been defeated for president by Jefferson in 1800, but then supported him against Alexander Hamilton. Wilson’s wife’s great uncle, Samuel Ashe, was an anti-federalist governor of North Carolina during John Adams administration who supported Jefferson.
Only James Hamilton, Jr, was raised in a federalist environment, that of slave transporting Newport, Rhode Island. However, by the time he was intendant of Charleston he was a Republican poised to became a supporter of Andrew Jackson. The tariffs and Missouri compromise made them realize a central government was a potential threat to their control over their slaves.
As Key suggested, kinship connections, and the cultures they signify, would have been a better indicator of alliances. Johnson and Bennett were related through Bennett’s sister Sarah. Wilson and Hamilton shared ties with the Alston family through William Allston and Esther LaBrosse De Marlbeouf. Hamilton’s mother’s father’s first wife, Elizabeth, was their daughter, while Wilson’s wife, Charlotte, was their granddaughter.
More important than either party or personal networks may have been the underlying attitudes towards the importance of a centralized government that separated the federalists from the Jeffersonians, and the rule of law that separated some Carolinians from both. Indeed, these differences may be no more than a continuation of attitudes towards the emerging nation state that had separated men into three groups under the Stuarts. [See posting for 27 December 2009]
Duels and lynchings are perhaps the greatest symbolic acts that place individual definitions of justice above those of the state and the law. When Wilson was elected to the state senate in 1826, Thomas Grimké wanted him impeached for fiscal impropriety as governor. Wilson’s response was to challenge him to a duel. In 1838 he wrote The Code of Honor to establish standards for such confrontations.
When John Bowman, the uncle of James Hamilton, accused his sister-in-law’s husband of fathering an illegitimate child in the north, the senior Hamilton lost the lower part of a leg when Bowman bested him in a duel that left the younger Hamilton to devise an explanation for his father’s accident.
Walter Edgar indicates Hamilton’s reputation was greatly enhanced by stories he fought 14 duels, although Robert Tinkler believes the only time he actually took up a pistol was against a young man in New York, William Gracie, who, he believed, threatened his intended marriage to an heiress, Elizabeth Heyward.
The execution of Denmark Vesey and five other slaves was a very public lynching preceded by a cart taking the six men through King Street to vacant land north of the city. The activated militia gave a sense of legitimacy to what, in fact, was the administration of a sentence arrived at in secret by a group of men using procedures the governor, Thomas Bennett, claimed "violated the ‘rules which universally obtain among civilized nations, in the judicial investigation of crime.’"
Key comments on the recurring pattern that men from the up country parts of South Carolina who ran of populist platforms like Ben Tillman, Cole Blease and Olin Johnston gradually moderated their views to expand their support beyond their regions and substituted persecution of Negroes for their former class appeals. He believed they not only had to build political coalitions in the conventional sense, but gain support through politicians committed to decentralized institutions.
He predicted Strom Thurmond would abandon his moderation to oppose civil rights. If Key had looked to the pre-Civil War years, he would have noted John Calhoun had forsworn his neutrality on nullification; if he were alive today, he would see pressures to conform being exerted on Lindsey Graham and Mark Sanford by the General Assembly.
Such hegemony is not accidental. Slaves and freedmen who watched the execution of a carpenter who purchased his freedom with a lottery prize, a slave free to hire himself out, and a ship’s carpenter understood the rituals of supremacy that were usually diffused and veiled. The state had already taken away the rights of owners like Joseph Vesey to free their slaves, and soon would stop men like Thomas Blackwood from allowing their chattel the freedom to work for themselves. The state was ready to defy international law by imprisoning any freedmen who appeared as sailors in the port, lest they mingle with slaves like Peter Poyas on the wharves.
Whites like Thomas Bennett were reminded of the power of secret groups to punish those who rebuff their hints when the other three hanged men were the governor’s property.
Notes:
Bennett, Thomas. Quoted by Michael P. Johnson, "Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators," The William and Mary Quarterly 58:915-976:2001.
Edgar, Walter. South Carolina: A History, 1998.
Egerton, Douglas R. He Shall Go out Free: the Lives of Denmark Vesey, 2004, for description of execution. This is one of the books criticized by Johnson.
Key, V. O., Junior. Southern Politics in State and Nation, 1949.
Sunday, February 07, 2010
South Carolina - James Hamilton’s Culture
James Hamilton’s reliance on comrades for his success may be one of the South Carolina cultural values inherited from Barbados where early deaths and institutional anarchy forced men to rely on one another.
Alison Games found in the early years of Barbados both planters and liberated indentured servants created "extended networks of friends and endowed these networks with familial significance." She found one important relationship was that of godfather, and that men who had had no opportunity to marry often named their godchildren and the children of friends as heirs.
By the time Hamilton was born, families were very much a part of Charleston life. However, the persistence of diseases like yellow fever perpetuated the concern of men for the children of their friends. Hamilton himself became the guardian of the orphans of his cousin through his maternal grandmother, John Middleton, while one of his rivals in Charleston, Thomas Bennett, adopted Christopher Gustavus Memminger, after his widowed mother died of yellow fever, and raised two orphans from Santa Domingo.
The fear of early death haunted both Barbados and Charleston, but the responses of the two places were different. Richard Dunn found absentee owners rarely prospered in Barbados, and so people who wanted to succeed stayed on their land, despite the dangers. Nineteenth century wealthy families from the Carolina low country fled to places like Newport, leaving their plantations in the hands of underlings. While it kept people alive, such trips did little to prepare men like Hamilton for overseeing their plantations or gangs of slaves.
Games also found that individuals in Barbados, who did not have enough collateral to borrow money from an English or Dutch merchant to start a plantation, entered partnerships with their peers, and might, indeed, be members of more than one partnership. Many large Carolina landowners were perpetually in debt to their factors, and so, if they needed money, had no choice but to ask friends to sign their notes.
Hamilton knew from the bankruptcies of his father, his maternal step-grandfather, William Moultrie, and his step-father-in-law, Nicholas Cruger, the dangers of such agreements, but he and his friends also knew their necessity. It was this willingness to work with friends that enabled him to get so deeply in debt, and forced him to take more desperate measures to raise money to maintain those ties.
Much like Richard Lignon who bought a share of a plantation in Barbados with Thomas Modyford, Hamilton bought a plantation in Alabama with lawyer James Petigru and others through the Oswichee Company and bought land in Texas with Albert Burnley. He and Albert Jackson had owned land in South Carolina before developing the Retrieve plantation in Texas with Henry R. W. Hill, a New Orleans factor.
When Edward Banfield observed a poor south Italian town, he realized many of its problems arose from a distrust of outsiders that led people to only work with those they trusted, and that nothing would change their economic condition so long as those affiliation values reigned. For many reasons, men in Barbados developed a similar reliance on comrades and aversions to institutions that once formed, were perpetuated when men migrated to the Carolinas.
In the beginning, similar conditions between Barbados and frontier Carolina encouraged a transfer of a culture based on social networks. Once in place, the culture perpetuated itself like it did in Italy, and influenced the ability of men like Hamilton, exposed to no other values as youth, to respond to changing possibilities. In the end, he was its victim, as much as Denmark Vesey and everyone who was willing to be charmed by him in the hopes of personal gain.
Notes:
Banfield, Edward C. The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, 1958.
Dunn, Richard S. Sugar and Slaves, 1972.
Games, Alison. Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, 1999.
Tinkler, Robert. James Hamilton of South Carolina, 2004.
Alison Games found in the early years of Barbados both planters and liberated indentured servants created "extended networks of friends and endowed these networks with familial significance." She found one important relationship was that of godfather, and that men who had had no opportunity to marry often named their godchildren and the children of friends as heirs.
By the time Hamilton was born, families were very much a part of Charleston life. However, the persistence of diseases like yellow fever perpetuated the concern of men for the children of their friends. Hamilton himself became the guardian of the orphans of his cousin through his maternal grandmother, John Middleton, while one of his rivals in Charleston, Thomas Bennett, adopted Christopher Gustavus Memminger, after his widowed mother died of yellow fever, and raised two orphans from Santa Domingo.
The fear of early death haunted both Barbados and Charleston, but the responses of the two places were different. Richard Dunn found absentee owners rarely prospered in Barbados, and so people who wanted to succeed stayed on their land, despite the dangers. Nineteenth century wealthy families from the Carolina low country fled to places like Newport, leaving their plantations in the hands of underlings. While it kept people alive, such trips did little to prepare men like Hamilton for overseeing their plantations or gangs of slaves.
Games also found that individuals in Barbados, who did not have enough collateral to borrow money from an English or Dutch merchant to start a plantation, entered partnerships with their peers, and might, indeed, be members of more than one partnership. Many large Carolina landowners were perpetually in debt to their factors, and so, if they needed money, had no choice but to ask friends to sign their notes.
Hamilton knew from the bankruptcies of his father, his maternal step-grandfather, William Moultrie, and his step-father-in-law, Nicholas Cruger, the dangers of such agreements, but he and his friends also knew their necessity. It was this willingness to work with friends that enabled him to get so deeply in debt, and forced him to take more desperate measures to raise money to maintain those ties.
Much like Richard Lignon who bought a share of a plantation in Barbados with Thomas Modyford, Hamilton bought a plantation in Alabama with lawyer James Petigru and others through the Oswichee Company and bought land in Texas with Albert Burnley. He and Albert Jackson had owned land in South Carolina before developing the Retrieve plantation in Texas with Henry R. W. Hill, a New Orleans factor.
When Edward Banfield observed a poor south Italian town, he realized many of its problems arose from a distrust of outsiders that led people to only work with those they trusted, and that nothing would change their economic condition so long as those affiliation values reigned. For many reasons, men in Barbados developed a similar reliance on comrades and aversions to institutions that once formed, were perpetuated when men migrated to the Carolinas.
In the beginning, similar conditions between Barbados and frontier Carolina encouraged a transfer of a culture based on social networks. Once in place, the culture perpetuated itself like it did in Italy, and influenced the ability of men like Hamilton, exposed to no other values as youth, to respond to changing possibilities. In the end, he was its victim, as much as Denmark Vesey and everyone who was willing to be charmed by him in the hopes of personal gain.
Notes:
Banfield, Edward C. The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, 1958.
Dunn, Richard S. Sugar and Slaves, 1972.
Games, Alison. Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, 1999.
Tinkler, Robert. James Hamilton of South Carolina, 2004.
Thursday, February 04, 2010
Polish Puzzle
I recently decided perhaps I should work on a jigsaw puzzle when I wake in the night. In the past I would have read some mystery novel, but the publishing industry no longer satisfies my needs and has left me in a vacuum filled by nibbling and cruising the net at three in the morning.
I’ve discovered solving puzzles is really not much different from reading a novel by a new author. When I take the pieces out of the sealed plastic bag, an innovation since I was a child, I get a sense of the manufacturer. Are the pieces too thin or too thick, are they too small or too large, are they regular or irregular? Are the colors clear or blurred, are they cut to obscure or reveal the more obvious features?
My mother taught me to always begin by doing the border. When I separate out the pieces with flat sides I learn to trust or distrust the puzzle maker. As I try to create the border, I learn if the picture on the box is reliable. If pieces are interchangeable or too many cannot be identified, I take a dislike to the puzzle. Some may enjoy puzzles that emulate the randomness of daily life, much as readers like hard boiled detectives. In this recreation, I prefer some boundaries, perhaps for the same reason I prefer Agatha Christie.
A puzzle made in Poland was the oddest experience. The pieces were square cut, with no curves, except the tabs. The only variation was within those tabs, some of which were diagonally cut. They brought to mind life in a totalitarian regime where everything must conform externally, and you learn to differentiate individuality within that straitened context.
Luckily, the picture of the Iguazu Falls in Argentina had enough variations, so it was easy to separate the pieces into three piles - the sky, the plants, the rest. Within the color groups, each essentially a different puzzle, the process became mechanical. There was only one puzzle shape, the standard two end tabs and two center cuts. So I separated the pieces again into those that were obviously horizontal and those that were vertical.
Then, it was often a process of trying every possible piece in a location to build the identity of the next piece which again could only be identified by trial and error. Strangely, this was not as boring as it sounds, because it was possible to use the picture on the box to narrow the choices for particular sections.
But still when all was done, there was one more Soviet surprise waiting. There were two pieces missing, one from the center, and one from near the center.
Notes: Castorland puzzle #B-51380.
I’ve discovered solving puzzles is really not much different from reading a novel by a new author. When I take the pieces out of the sealed plastic bag, an innovation since I was a child, I get a sense of the manufacturer. Are the pieces too thin or too thick, are they too small or too large, are they regular or irregular? Are the colors clear or blurred, are they cut to obscure or reveal the more obvious features?
My mother taught me to always begin by doing the border. When I separate out the pieces with flat sides I learn to trust or distrust the puzzle maker. As I try to create the border, I learn if the picture on the box is reliable. If pieces are interchangeable or too many cannot be identified, I take a dislike to the puzzle. Some may enjoy puzzles that emulate the randomness of daily life, much as readers like hard boiled detectives. In this recreation, I prefer some boundaries, perhaps for the same reason I prefer Agatha Christie.
A puzzle made in Poland was the oddest experience. The pieces were square cut, with no curves, except the tabs. The only variation was within those tabs, some of which were diagonally cut. They brought to mind life in a totalitarian regime where everything must conform externally, and you learn to differentiate individuality within that straitened context.
Luckily, the picture of the Iguazu Falls in Argentina had enough variations, so it was easy to separate the pieces into three piles - the sky, the plants, the rest. Within the color groups, each essentially a different puzzle, the process became mechanical. There was only one puzzle shape, the standard two end tabs and two center cuts. So I separated the pieces again into those that were obviously horizontal and those that were vertical.
Then, it was often a process of trying every possible piece in a location to build the identity of the next piece which again could only be identified by trial and error. Strangely, this was not as boring as it sounds, because it was possible to use the picture on the box to narrow the choices for particular sections.
But still when all was done, there was one more Soviet surprise waiting. There were two pieces missing, one from the center, and one from near the center.
Notes: Castorland puzzle #B-51380.
Sunday, January 03, 2010
Subsidized Prices
Agriculture and industry have been at odds as long as both have been strong enough to influence politics. In the nineteenth century, Congressmen argued over tariffs because high import tariffs helped industry and hurt agriculture. They argued about internal improvements because canals helped farmers in the north get food across the Appalachians to feed to growing numbers of cotton mill workers on the coast, but southern farmers could get by sending cotton to New England with rivers that drained into the Caribbean and Atlantic.
The ancient conflict took a different turn when Paul Volcker decided the primary cause of inflation was the constant increase in wages which pushed up the cost of goods. By chance the prices of oil and meat increased while he was promoting policies to keep wages down. The government’s answer then was not to improve wages, but to subsidize prices.
That the idea seeped into our political discourse through ranchers is probably not accidental. Since the depression, the government had been trying to ameliorate the boom-bust cycles of agriculture by restricting production, then by subsidizing prices. It was impossible not to extend the idea from one group of raw food producers to another.
Ever since, the only solution to economic problems both political parties would agree to support is subsidized prices. When college tuition got too high for the middle classes, the answer wasn’t to explore why costs were rising, but simply to argue who should benefit from the subsidy (loan) program and how onerous it should be.
Similarly, when health care costs began increasing faster than other commodities, few politicians were willing to upset their corporate contributors by investigating how costs are set. Instead, the argument became limited to how to subsidize the price, for whom and under what conditions. The higher prices rose, the larger the number of people who needed support.
Few recognized the reality that there no longer was any connection between wages and prices, and that prices continued to rise when the cost of labor was falling. Economics courses didn’t change to reflect new experiences about the hesitancy of prices to fall, when increased prices became the measure of our economic well-being. Annual increases in GDP ultimately required increased profits, which increasingly came from high prices for real estate and increased compensation for managers.
The only answer was to find more creative ways to cut the cost of labor, and so congressmen manipulated the tax code to encourage the transfer of work to cheaper countries. The gap between wages and prices increased for workers, but not managers who exploited the changes.
When contractors built more houses than there were available customers, the answer was to manipulate the price of owning a home by changing the rules of mortgages. More recently, congressmen added tax credits as a solution to the wage-price gap. Their primary concern was to stimulate housing by not allowing inflated prices to fall.
When more women had to work to supplement household incomes and the use of older children as babysitters was frowned upon and neighbors or older relatives were unavailable, the question wasn’t why are wages so low that two people must work to produce the same income as one had in the past. Instead, the answer was to manipulate the tax code to subsidize the price of childcare.
When better off families needed servants so couples could each pursue careers that demanded long hours while maintaining their physical presence in the community they found they couldn’t find affordable low-cost labor. Similarly, when those contractors needed increasingly cheaper skilled tradesmen to improve their profits or those meat producers needed inexpensive labor, they found no surplus of cheap, unemployed workers.
They did what people have done in this country since the nineteenth century; they turned to immigrants. The fact that Congress had been passing laws since World War I to restrict that labor pool was simply inconvenient. A variety of government policies and inactions that permitted illegal immigration had the effect of subsidizing the price of labor for the wealthy, contractors, and meat producers.
When many people could no longer afford to buy cars, the question wasn’t why have car prices continued to increase when fewer people work to make them and their wages have been dropping. Instead, car companies began manipulating prices with buyer incentives. When those no longer worked, the government had to step in and further subsidize the price.
Now people are beginning to ask why there are no jobs in a recession. There is no recognition that when those jobs were sent overseas, the machine tool industry also moved. You can’t restart a factory stripped of its machinery, or restart mothballed equipment when no machinists apprentices were trained to replace the people who understood machinery when they reached retirement age.
The resources are gone, and any government program, analogous to those of Alexander Hamilton, to bring them back will take time and cost money. At the time Hamilton was bitterly opposed by one political party, because he essentially advocated policies that subsidized infant industries with higher prices for imported goods. No one can begin manufacturing anything in this country without the same kinds of subsidies. Any such program would face the same opposition that met Hamilton.
The only political will is for subsidies that maintain the illusion people can afford increasing prices, while complaining about the consequences of those policies on people’s sense of initiative and responsibility. No one is quite willing to admit that perpetual subsidy is no more stable than the life on credit that marked the farmers whose problems the government first tried to solve two or three generations ago.
The ancient conflict took a different turn when Paul Volcker decided the primary cause of inflation was the constant increase in wages which pushed up the cost of goods. By chance the prices of oil and meat increased while he was promoting policies to keep wages down. The government’s answer then was not to improve wages, but to subsidize prices.
That the idea seeped into our political discourse through ranchers is probably not accidental. Since the depression, the government had been trying to ameliorate the boom-bust cycles of agriculture by restricting production, then by subsidizing prices. It was impossible not to extend the idea from one group of raw food producers to another.
Ever since, the only solution to economic problems both political parties would agree to support is subsidized prices. When college tuition got too high for the middle classes, the answer wasn’t to explore why costs were rising, but simply to argue who should benefit from the subsidy (loan) program and how onerous it should be.
Similarly, when health care costs began increasing faster than other commodities, few politicians were willing to upset their corporate contributors by investigating how costs are set. Instead, the argument became limited to how to subsidize the price, for whom and under what conditions. The higher prices rose, the larger the number of people who needed support.
Few recognized the reality that there no longer was any connection between wages and prices, and that prices continued to rise when the cost of labor was falling. Economics courses didn’t change to reflect new experiences about the hesitancy of prices to fall, when increased prices became the measure of our economic well-being. Annual increases in GDP ultimately required increased profits, which increasingly came from high prices for real estate and increased compensation for managers.
The only answer was to find more creative ways to cut the cost of labor, and so congressmen manipulated the tax code to encourage the transfer of work to cheaper countries. The gap between wages and prices increased for workers, but not managers who exploited the changes.
When contractors built more houses than there were available customers, the answer was to manipulate the price of owning a home by changing the rules of mortgages. More recently, congressmen added tax credits as a solution to the wage-price gap. Their primary concern was to stimulate housing by not allowing inflated prices to fall.
When more women had to work to supplement household incomes and the use of older children as babysitters was frowned upon and neighbors or older relatives were unavailable, the question wasn’t why are wages so low that two people must work to produce the same income as one had in the past. Instead, the answer was to manipulate the tax code to subsidize the price of childcare.
When better off families needed servants so couples could each pursue careers that demanded long hours while maintaining their physical presence in the community they found they couldn’t find affordable low-cost labor. Similarly, when those contractors needed increasingly cheaper skilled tradesmen to improve their profits or those meat producers needed inexpensive labor, they found no surplus of cheap, unemployed workers.
They did what people have done in this country since the nineteenth century; they turned to immigrants. The fact that Congress had been passing laws since World War I to restrict that labor pool was simply inconvenient. A variety of government policies and inactions that permitted illegal immigration had the effect of subsidizing the price of labor for the wealthy, contractors, and meat producers.
When many people could no longer afford to buy cars, the question wasn’t why have car prices continued to increase when fewer people work to make them and their wages have been dropping. Instead, car companies began manipulating prices with buyer incentives. When those no longer worked, the government had to step in and further subsidize the price.
Now people are beginning to ask why there are no jobs in a recession. There is no recognition that when those jobs were sent overseas, the machine tool industry also moved. You can’t restart a factory stripped of its machinery, or restart mothballed equipment when no machinists apprentices were trained to replace the people who understood machinery when they reached retirement age.
The resources are gone, and any government program, analogous to those of Alexander Hamilton, to bring them back will take time and cost money. At the time Hamilton was bitterly opposed by one political party, because he essentially advocated policies that subsidized infant industries with higher prices for imported goods. No one can begin manufacturing anything in this country without the same kinds of subsidies. Any such program would face the same opposition that met Hamilton.
The only political will is for subsidies that maintain the illusion people can afford increasing prices, while complaining about the consequences of those policies on people’s sense of initiative and responsibility. No one is quite willing to admit that perpetual subsidy is no more stable than the life on credit that marked the farmers whose problems the government first tried to solve two or three generations ago.
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