Mark Byron

MLK Musings

I think my The Dream Lives On post of 2003 is still valid for a good King Day read. There hasn't been that much change in race relations in two years. We have made some strides in the recent past, but they're incremental. There seemed to be a bit less racial vitriol in the last election than in 2000.

There was a little bit of flap when Herb Winningham got axed at Notre Dame, but we've progressed to a point where we don't subject a black person to the Peter Principal because we're afraid to fire them when they're not quite doing the job. Winningham landed on his feet at Washington. Yes, blacks are still underrepresented in college coaching, where ADs may well be partly afraid to make their biggest promotional and fundraising face to a black guy. However, good black folks will advance.

Politically, we've reintegrated the Senate, and with a guy with enough character gravitas to make a difference, as opposed to the gal who held the seat a cycle ago, who was a debit to her race with various low-grade corruptions. Yes, to make the bashing bipartisan, we saw Armstrong Williams become a debit to his race and party. Another blessing is that we're switching black Secretaries of State.

It's a good day to remember the struggles we went through to get to a point where I can seriously talk about Alabama electing a black senator. While I was driving north this morning, I was hearing about a civil-rights fundraiser concert circa 1963 in Alabama with Johnny Mathis, Ray Charles and other black music stars that needed severe police protection from Klan threats; everyone was spooked when the stage collapsed by accident. We're still not quite where Dr. King envisioned back in '63, but we're a long way along that road.

AC/DC in the BC

Some Greeks are upset that the current biopic Alexander has the Great One cast as a bisexual and are threatening to sue. I'm not going to agree with Oliver Stone too often, but the Greeks of that era were rather omnisexual, with same-sex incounters being not uncommon. Hence the work Paul had to do breaking the Greeks of that habit a few centuries down the road.

The idea of a suit left Jeffrey Collins scratching his head.

Putting aside, for the moment, that I can't for the life of me think of what grounds there might be for such a suit, to say nothing of the difficulty of finding someone with standing to bring it, these Greek lawyers may be forgetting something: Alexander wasn't Greek.  He was Macedonian.

True, but the Greeks sort of claim Macedonia as their own; there's a Macedonian area northern Greece as well as the country of Macedonia that splintered off from Yugoslavia; the Greeks are worried that the nouveau-Macedonians will try and lay claim to Grecian Macedonia. Hence, the Greeks were/are up in arms with the idea of an independent Macedonia called Macedonia to their north. Check out the stink they made early this month when the US officially started calling Macedonia by that name

Adolph and Lech

I'm not sure how much coverage this will get, but this is the 65th anniversary of the "start" of WWII. 9-1-1939 was when the Germans rolled into Poland from the west, soon to be followed by the Russians rolling in from the east (we forget that those two were buddies for a time). Here's a Canadian piece on the remembrances in Poland.

I was remembering my history of the era; one of the trigger points was the city of Danzig, which gave Poland a sea outlet and cut off parts of Germany from direct access, much as BC and the Yukon separate Alaska from the lower 48 (No, Bene, we have no plans for northwestern lebensraum).

What we sometimes miss is once the dust cleared after WWII and Poland got back Danzig is that they renamed it Gdansk. It was there at the Lenin Shipyards that the Solidarity movement got started. Has it been 24 years already since Walesa and friends got things rolling? Given that it's been a decade and a half that the Cold War ended, we take those successes for granted.

I got a very pleasant chill up my spine when I did a "Gdansk Lech" google to double-check stuff; they've renamed the Gdansk airport Lech Walesa Airport. For someone who watched Solidarity's struggles through the 80s, seeing that has a weird sense of watching a sci-fi piece of (T+50 years) where they have airports and buildings named after current politicians and heroes. Well, we're now at T+24.

Crash versus Crash

I'll be back to my Reagan-Roosevelt comparison shortly, but another historical comparison came up at dinner Saturday night: what has had the bigger impact on history, the stock market crash of 1929 or the crash of the planes into the WTC on 9/11? At first pass, you'd be tempted to say 9/11, for it had lasting geopolitical implication with the ensuing regime changes in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention a more pro-US Pakistan.

However, if you take a look at the long-term fallout of the stock-market crash, it had a larger economic and geopolitical impact. Yes, purists will point to lousy Fed policies and a Smoot-Hawley Act that were causes of the crash, but the result was a world-wide depression. On this side of the pond, it led to FDR and the New Deal, while over in Germany, the bad economy made people desperate enough to vote Hitler into power. In comparison, the economic disruptions from 9/11 were minimal.

What sayest thou?

RWR versus FDR-Part I-The New Deal

I'd like to take a second look at what I jotted down yesterday on Reagan-

The quick-and-dirty version; he was arguably the best president of the 20th Century for winning the Cold War (yes, other presidents helped, but he was on the mound when we went into the lead to stay, thus he gets the win) and getting the malaise economy turned around. He's in a photo-finish with FDR for the title, and your political shadings will dictate the order of finish. Yes, he also presided over some big deficits and Iran-Contra, but we'd have been in a far worse place with a second Carter term and a first Mondale term, and I voted for both of those guys in my less-savvy youth.

Chris Burgwald votes for the Gipper-

He was, undoubtedly, one of our greatest presidents, probably the greatest of the twentieth century (yes, better than FDR).

He reinvigurated the American spirit, and after Pope John Paul II, is the person most responsible for the (in the minds of many, early) collapse of communism in Europe.

while Peter Sean Bradley signs on with FDR-

Mark Byron writes that Reagan was "arguably the greatest President of the 20th Century." Was he? I think FDR has to get the nod as the greatest President of the 20th Century. In my opinion, Reagan rates as second. But who else is even close? TR? Wilson?

Last night, the following comparison came to mind

	Economics	Geopolitcs	Side-effect
FDR	Got us out of Great Depression	Won WWII	Socialized economy
Reagan	Got us out of malaise economy	Won Cold War	Big deficits

A common critique of FDR from the right was that WWII really was what got us out of the depression and that the New Deal did more to slow the economy in the long term than it helped in the 30s. That might be true, but I can make a decent case that Roosevelt gave the US economy a socialist innoculation. By setting up the welfare capitalist system with the introduction of things like Social Security, welfare, and the CCC as well as key regulatory agencies like the FDIC and SEC, he kept a socialist movement from forming in the US. Were Roosevelt not on the scene, a more leftist leader like Huey Long might have come to the fore, or a European-style socialist movement might have supplanted the Democratic party as the party of the left.

In addition, a certain amount of government intervention to help the poor is good for society as a whole. Few modern conservatives would want to go back to where we were in the 1920s on a policy basis. What conservatives dislike isn't so much the programs that Roosevelt passed but the precident of government intervention in the economy, allowing for more intrusions in the future and the gutting of key constitutional provisions like a proper reading of the Interstate Commerce clause.

On ballance, the New Deal seems to have been a net good for the country and the world. That's not an easy stand for a dynamist to take, but it might be like the conservative case for the Medicare prescription bill; had we not passed that, something worse would have happened. They both also had the fringe benefit of helping a lot of people in tought times, and the charitable side of our soul should cheer that.

Yes, y'all on the right side of the Peanut Gallery, that means you. That sarcastic "hip, hip, hooray" doesn't quite cut it.

Microhistory and Macrohistory

Paul Musgrave, pinchblogging at Josh Claybourns, has an interesting piece on historiography

Language is a powerful tool.

At the same time, it's a tremendously dangerous and misleading guide. Consider this paragraph:

Bankers’ cups of joy did not runneth over in the small towns of the 1920s. Their troubles stemmed from the unprecedented low prices for farmers’ produce, which persisted throughout the decade. Farm prices had fallen forty percent in 1920-1921; they never climbed back to wartime heights. With falling prices, loans taken out to expand production by buying new land, new tractors, and new barns and silos grew ever more onerous. The exceptionally stable prices of the 1920s made mortgages worth more in real terms; that is, even as mortgage payments remained the same in dollar terms, what farmers paid could buy a larger “basket” of goods and services. Trapped between high debt and low prices, many farmers went under. As they fell, the balance sheets of many rural banks began to look shaky, and the number of bank failures skyrocketed.

I can't begin to describe to you what the author of that paragraph left out. But I can hint at what he skipped over: the hard look that creeps into a man's eye when he realizes he can't feed his family, the crying softness of a mother returning a son's presents bought on credit, the worried nights of children staring at the ceiling and wondering if they'll be living on the farm they've known all their lives tomorrow, and the way the words "foreclosure," "mortgage," and "gone under" cut at people who daily watch the life their families have known for decades be torn apart by men with green eyeshades and little ledger books.

All that, and more, repeated a million times over--that's an agricultural depression. An agricultural depression isn't just a coldly economic calculation of price indices and returns on investments; it's life, and death, and hunger, and submission and revolution all wrapped into one. But the author of that paragraph about deflation and balance sheets didn't share any of that with his readers.

Part of the problem with writing history is that it's traditionally written from a macro perspective-presidents, senators, generals, business leaders, wars and grand geopolitical and economic themes. Part of the movement of the last few decades is to make history look at the micro level as well. Such social history will look at how those grand themes played out on the small scale of everyday life. Such histories also bring women and minorities into the loop, for much of macrohistory (for lack of a better term) was mostly a white male thing until recently.

Microhistory also tends to better focus on the humanity of the situation, and thus will often paint a more pessimistic view of things that macrohistory would. Military macrohistory looks better than military microhistory, for the strategic picture of campaigns and maneuvers are more appealing than the down-and-dirty life of the soldier on the front lines. Thus a good military microhistory piece can frequently be described as "anti-war" for it shows the personal carnage that war creates better than the view from division HQ.

Likewise, civilian microhistory will look at the hard realities of lives in different eras, much as Musgrave alludes to above. Many liberal-leaning historians will gravitate towards that microhistory, both to earnestly give a more complete view of history than our standard macrohistory and to use the look at the lives of the commoners of the past to cast doubts about the modern socioeconomic order.

Thus, this scuffle between classic macrohistory and modern microhistory/social history has merits on both sides. Macrohistory hides a lot of the social and economic pathologies behind cold statistics. Microhistory, if done with the wrong spin, wallows in those pathologies to make an ideological point. Both views are useful, just as macroeconomics and microeconomics are useful. However, both should be done accurately and try not to let the writer twist history in his ideological direction.

Picking up the Lincoln Gauntlet

Kevin wants me to pick apart Lew Rockwell.com's (an over-the-top, kick-the-cat make-Samizdata-look-statist libertarian, if I'm reading Jonah's columns right) Thomas J. DiLorenzo and his take on Lincoln. With Google at the ready, here I go.

(1) "Lincoln was not an abolitionist." William Lloyd Garrison-Lincoln "had not a drop of anti-slavery blood in his veins."

He wasn't a fan of slavery and opposed it's expansion. The 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act allowed the two territories to vote on slavery, with "Bloody Kansas" voting for slavery. Lincoln actively opposed the KNA and campaigned for fellow "Free-Soilers". In his 1858 debates with Steven Douglas, he uttered this zinger-

A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the house to fall - but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all the one thing or the other

This seems to be a statement that, given his other statements, slavery in the south would have to go in the long term.

Garrison was an abolitionist zealot, and zealots look at the lukewarm as part of the enemy. Lincoln would be to slavery what Bob Dole is to abortion, not a fan of it but not their A-issue, either. That might not make Lincoln an "abolitionist", but he was modestly on their side. Lincoln was modestly bigoted and favored separation of the races.

(2) Lincoln the big-government Whig-here's DiLorenzos take

When Lincoln first entered state politics in 1832 he announced that he was doing so for three reasons: To help enact the Whig Party agenda of protectionist tariffs, corporate welfare subsidies for railroad and canal-building corporations ("internal improvements"), and a government monopolization of the nation’s money supply. "My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance," he declared: "I am in favor of a national bank . . . the internal improvements system, and a high protective tariff." He was a devoted mercantilist, and remained so for his entire political life. He was single-mindedly devoted to Henry Clay and his political agenda (mentioned above), which Clay called "The American System."

The Whigs did support canal and road infrastructure ("Corporate Welfare Subsidies" in Lewspeak) to speed up Western development. The development of the American frontier would have slowed without the programs, thus creating more of a peasant class in the East and a more fertile ground for socialism had it not been done. The government expenditures for this infrastructure was a net plus for American freedom; DiLorenzo would find the Democratic world less pleasant.

Whig patron saint Henry Clay was a protectionist. Northern and western industries wanted protection from British imports, while the agricultural South wanted more free trade to sell their cotton overseas. This was another, less mentioned, friction that helped bring about the Civil War. Drop back five yards and remember that the US was a developing country at the time; many of the "infant industry" arguments that developing countries use today to support protectionist policies are at play. The protectionism allowed a manufacturing base to develop, giving the US its military punch. As much as backing a protectionist policy runs counter to me as a free-trader, this policy looks to have made sense with two centuries of hindsight. Commodity exporting countries live and die by the market for the commodity, whereas a manufacturing economy is more insulated from swings in world markets. A weaker, commodity-driven US would have multiple detrimental effects to world history if we reran history with Rockwellian policies.

A central money supply was superior to the chaotic system of bank notes that replaced it. That borders on a no-brainer.

(3) The Civil War was illegitimate.

Moreover, Lincoln destroyed the most important principle of the Declaration – the principle that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Southerners no longer consented to being governed by Washington, D.C. in 1860, and Lincoln put an end to that idea by having his armies slaughter 300,000 of them, including one out of every four white males between 20 and 40.

The "consent of the governed?"-only free males got to vote at the time, thus a majority of the governed couldn't even vote. Would succession have passed if a plebiscite of all adults were done? The Civil War was bloody, but continued slavery and a precedent of succession would have been worse.

Another Lincoln myth was that he "saved the Constitution." But this claim is an outrage considering that Lincoln acted like a dictator for the duration of his administration and showed nothing but bitter contempt for the Constitution

The Dictator Lincoln invaded the South without the consent of Congress, as called for in the Constitution; declared martial law; blockaded Southern ports without a declaration of war, as required by the Constitution; illegally suspended the writ of habeas corpus; imprisoned without trial thousands of Northern anti-war protesters, including hundreds of newspaper editors and owners; censored all newspaper and telegraph communication; nationalized the railroads; created three new states without the consent of the citizens of those states in order to artificially inflate the Republican Party’s electoral vote; ordered Federal troops to interfere with Northern elections to assure Republican Party victories; deported Ohio Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham for opposing his domestic policies (especially protectionist tariffs and income taxation) on the floor of the House of Representatives; confiscated private property, including firearms, in violation of the Second Amendment; and effectively gutted the Tenth and Ninth Amendments as well.

Declaring war assumes the Confederacy was legitimate, otherwise the president is commander-in-chief and can put down an insurrection.Lincoln did suspend Habeas Corpus during the war; "Imprisoned without trial" is what happens when habeas corpus is removed. Vallandigham was arrested for opposing the war effort after being voted out of the House, and later shipped off to the Confederacy. Kansas, Nevada and West Virginia were made states during the war, but the motives can be questioned. Newspapers and telegraph were under censorship rules.

True, Lincoln wouldn't be a card-carrying ACLU member, but most of the items listed, when presented without spin, are honest efforts to win the war. The war effort was rough, and things such as Sherman's March would get one hauled to The Hague these days.

(4) Lincoln's legacy of big goverment.

Henry Clay’s American System had been vetoed as unconstitutional by virtually every president beginning with James Madison. But as soon as Lincoln took office, with the Southern Democrats absent from Congress, it was finally put into place, literally at gunpoint. In 1857 the average tariff rate was 15 percent, according to Frank Taussig’s classic, A Tariff History of the United States. The Morrill Tariff more than tripled that rate to 47 percent and it remained at that level for decades.

The National Currency Acts nationalized the banking system, finally, and lavish subsidies to railroad-building corporations generated the corruption and scandals of the Grant administrations, just as Southern statesmen had predicted for decades. Income taxation was introduced for the first time, along with an internal revenue bureaucracy that has never diminished in size. All of these policies put a great centralizing force into motion and were the genesis of the centralized, despotic state that Americans labor under today.

Granted, the post-civil war railroad financing was not well done. DiLorenzo makes the mistake of taking his pro-southern, libertarian and free-trade biases and inelegantly places them on the 1800s. The centralized banking system and tariffs that DiLorenzo rails about helped create today's economy. A Rockwellian world would have us looking more like Brazil than Britain.