Author: daelnorwood

The Past is a Foreign...Something

The Romance of the Tapirs

daelnorwood

Also, A Blog Jubilee

Tapir

To celebrate the fiftieth post on this here blog* I thought I might share a sweet little story I found today. Who’s day isn’t improved when theorists of organic American nationalism, tapirs, and romance are in the mix?

Here’s the context: Francis Lieber, famed German-American jurist and political economist is writing to his BFF** Samuel B. Ruggles to tell him that he’s safely returned home from his visit to NYC. After spending most of his letter begging Ruggles to help find him a job at Columbia College because (ironically) he hates life in Columbia, South Carolina, he lightens the tone by recounting a “ludicrous scene” he saw on the train ride home.

To wit:

… My journey was plain, hum-drum, as most [railroad] journeys are. One ludicrous scene I witnessed. You may remember that the platforms in the depot at Baltimore run a long way on both sides of the rail, and are on a level with the cars, when they come in. I was in the first and stepped out; an elderly gentleman was standing near me, waiting for some one. When the next car came in, I saw a woman looking anxiously out of one of the windows; the gentleman reached toward her, and, she protruding her lips, he tried by an equally elongated mouth to catch the proffered kiss, but the cars moved on, so did the woman and consequently her lips, which she stretched longer and longer; the elderly man ran astride on the platform and as the horses moved faster than he, his mouth in turn stretched farther and farther, as one might imagine an India rubber tube would do, if it could be attracted by some magnet.

My fancy could not help imagining some enamored tapirs, stretching their trunks farther and farther toward one another, to catch the token of love, yet without success. On this whole scene moved, car, woman, man, trunks and all until they passed me and I thought I felt the old man’s funnel, formed of his mouth, brush my occiput, while the woman’s swept my nose in front. The scene was abundantly ludicrous and yet deeply touching to me, who was hastening to his wife and children. And altogether, is not that which is touching of itself, the more so for being manifested in some thing ludicrous? Is not this the secret of many of the most moving, nay harrowing scenes of Dickens’s, e.g. all those dreadful scences at Squeer’s school?? The contrast heightens the effect, as also the part that the people not caring for the ludicrous exposure show only the depth and earnestness of their feelings. …

~Francis Lieber to Samuel B. Ruggles, October 10, 1842, Francis Lieber Papers, 1830-1872, Library of Congress

Lieber, in addition for his gift for political philosophy, had, at times, a certain way with imagery. (Remind me to show you his ode to the idea of a Panamanian Canal sometime).

And before you ask: yes, the first rail cars were indeed powered by horseflesh, not steam engines. The cars even looked like stagecoaches (sorry I don’t have a pic, but use your imagination).

I’m not sure if in this case horses were just used to maneuver individual train cars around the station, or if they were actually pulling train the whole way. I suspect the latter, as Baltimore was early in railroad development. In any case, a good reminder that one of the key innovations of railroads was the lower coefficient of friction (μ) on land –- not just the application of steam power.

* 153 days old, more or less, today. Who knew? Don’t worry, I won’t mark every anniversary like a hyperactive moonstruck tween couple.

** No but really; their correspondence is quite touching.

Image cite: guppiecat, “Malayan Tapir (Tapirus indicus),” Flickr, CC License

Uncategorized

A Plethoric Cyclopedia of Links

daelnorwood

Or, Why Not Blog and Be Sick at the Same Time

Everyone_loves_kites

Your devoted correspondent has of late been sidetracked by a nasty bout of bilious fever (never eat a salad at Chipotle!), preventing trips to both the Archives and the Intertubes. However, because I do not wish you, my kind and gentle readers, to be deprived of my avatarial presence for too long, please enjoy the following random links in lieu of more developed musings:

  • Sterling Fluharty, at Cliopatria, asked a really good question the other day: “Who Reads History Books?” His proposed method of finding out, using Amazon and a method poached from social scientists, strikes me as a good start. Anyone with the expertise that could help a fellow historian? Also, his post reminds me of how terrible the commenting mechanism over at Cliopatria is (so terrible). MoveableType anyone? WordPress? please? Goodness.
  • If you love Kate Beaton (and I know you do), allow me to recommend the lovely work of Sydney Padua who’s in the midst of doing a great alt-history series on Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage.The comics are longer-form, and the drawing a bit more detailed, and so actually a bit more in the style of someone like Dylan Meconis more than Beaton; but in any case, who can resist a story that name checks Martin Van Buren, the panic of 1837, and the Duke of Wellington and his horse? Not I; and neither you. You may want to start with the origin story. (h/t)
  • Sean Safford has a fascinating post, over at OrgTheory, about the possible consequences of Penske’s purchase of Saturn. Safford argues that the shift that Penske could be initiating is from a “producer-driven” commodity chain to a “buyer-driven” one — basically shifting the auto industry into the same sort of model that governs most other industries now (think: computers, sneakers, etc). This is the clearest statement about this deal that I’ve heard, and should be of interest to all students of American capitalism (of which this blog hopes/purports to be, in part). It might mean that the M-form corporation is finally, and completely, dead. That could have consequences…
  • This is a bit of old(ish) news, but Caleb Crain, Lingua Franca alum, generally great reviewer and correspondent of many a tony publication, and proprietor of the excellent blog Steamboats are Ruining Everything, has recently (self) published a dead-tree version of his best posts, titled The Wreck of the Henry Clay. He also had an interesting talk about the process of turning a blog into a book over at the New Yorker. The book is on my to-read list, and I’ll let you know how it goes.
  • Finally, on a note that at least touches on the steampunk vibe that partly animates this establishment: there is robot unemployment in Japan.

Image cite: Balakov, “Everyone loves kites,” Flickr, CC License

Adams Family

JQA, the Universe, And Everything

daelnorwood

Or, For He’s A Quite Dour Fellow, Which Nobody Can Deny

the bouncing birthday boy
the bouncing birthday boy

This blog would be terribly remiss if it failed to note that today, the eleventh day of July, is John Quincy Adams’s birthday. So let’s pour one out for Old Man Eloquent.

Though as Jeremy Dibble over at the MHS blog, The Beehive, demonstrated today, JQA has a certain … knack … for deflating even the happiest of occasions.

Via Jeremy, here’s JQA’s diary entry on the most important birthday of them all, the forty-second, (in 1809; good lord that man lived for ever). Adams, as you’d expect, was his usual lighthearted self :

The year of my life now expiring has been marked by a continuance of that persecution which the combined personal enemies of my father and myself, had unrelentingly pursued the year before. It has appeared in various forms, some of them singular enough; but its effect has been to impel me into more general notice and estimation throughout the country. … I pray for clearness of intellectual vision to see the right path – for the necessary courage to pursue it; and for the Fortitude and the Temperance to bear with equanimity the vicissitudes of its Fortunes, whether adverse or propitious. Grant, O God, that I may do good to my Country and to Mankind! And deal with me, and mine, if it be they gracious will, in Mercy.

Yeah, you can totally see why he rocks that party hat so hard. And that it’s probably no coincidence he shares a birthday week with one Jean Cauvin …

In any case, between celebratory toasts of madeira and guilt, you should check out the wonderful things that Jeremy, and the rest of the folks at MHS, are doing with their blog and twitter feed.

History and Historians, Ten Things I Hate About You

Declining Declension

daelnorwood

Or, “There are plenty of ruined buildings in the world but no ruined stones.”

Egg Suicide

These are not quite post-July 4th musings, but I think on a holiday where we look back on our national past with a split vision — simultaneously measuring how short we’ve fallen from the founders’ gilded example, but also how far we’ve taken their ideas — it might be appropriate to think a little about declension narratives, and why they are, by and large, such useless tools with which to think.

(I should note that this is a complaint of many, many, many historians; so my ranting is less about how others in my hoped-for-profession and more about how history is used in arguments in other settings).

What got me thinking about this was not anything about stars, spangles, or banners. It was a short piece on the precise characteristics of a decline we’re right in the middle of — that of the newspapers industry, or, if you prefer, journalism. It was published in Slate by Jack Shafer. Shafer puts journalism’s overwrought swan song in a medium-term (20th-century) historical context, noting that veteran journalists have been complaining that their profession’s institutional bases have been shrinking, with sure-to-be-dire results, for decades. By putting current hand-wringing about the “death” of newspapers into this context, Shafer manages a nice bit of anti-declension programming, and a highly effective one at that.

Happy libertarian that he is, Shafer argues that we shouldn’t worry, because:

journalism has generally benefited by increases in the number of competitors, the entry of new and once-marginalized players, and the creation of new approaches to cracking stories. Just because the journalism business is going to hell and it may no longer make economic sense to maintain mega-news bureaus at the center of war zones doesn’t mean that journalism isn’t thriving.

So the future looks bright, if not lucrative.

I think Shafer’s got the right line here, even if I am a bit less sanguine about the near future than he is (to be fair, I’m a bit less sanguine about the virtues of the past and the present, too). By puncturing the common wisdom’s declension narrative — even by a little bit — he’s illustrated one of the problems with all declension narratives, whether they’re about the vibrancy of the American press, or teen pregnancy rates, or the relative sinfulness of the world. They are almost always rooted in a shallow, ill-informed nostalgia.

In this case, the common wisdom’s point of view only makes sense if large news organizations were necessary for Watergate-like investigations to be the norm, which, since they aren’t, just doesn’t hold up. The big organizations, now anyway, seem to be blowing even the easy calls. Just think about the last few weeks, where a major uprising in Iran didn’t get reported until it was half-over. Or, see the last few of weeks of sad corruption stories coming out of the Washington Post.

I think there’s enough evidence that at least some of the current institutions representing the pinnacle of journalism do not deserve to be regarded with any sort of reverence (even aside from the need to regard all powerful institutions in a democracy with a irreverent sensibility). I would submit that the NYT Style and Week in Review sections, or anything starring Wolf Blitzer, may serve as exhibits C thru Z.

But this is not a recent development: think about how Pultizer made his money.

In fact, this deep concern for the purity of a form of journalism based on monopoly rents is particularly laughable for anyone who reads early 19th-century newspapers, as then the loud voices in the early American press — the important political voices — were predominately those of highly partisan editors, most of them scrambling to make a buck. Distortions, rumors, and outright lies were not a bug; they were a key feature. Somehow the republic survived; and if you think our public officials now — or then — were more virtuous, then I’d like you to review the biographies of the past and present governors of South Carolina very carefully.

Moreover, I think the problem with the “the decline of journalism we’re seeing now means the end of the world!” meme is a peculiar illustration of one of the other common problems iwth declension narratives. As a smarter historian than I noted:

Although the oversimplication of the past is something to be concerned about, the declensionist pull does the most damage in its tendency to push the past further away thus rendering it more difficult to identify with.  After all, if there was indeed a fall from grace the people who lived long ago must be of a different kind altogether.  As a result, our response tends to be veneration rather than understanding and this is where, as I see it, the “collateral damage” sets in. 

In this case, I think the veneration of the never-extant heroic past of journalism gives a sheen to organizations — and individuals — who most certainly do not deserve it, thus retarding the actual purpose of good journalism. The past gets in the way of the present, and the future, even mid-decline. No real thinking gets done, just genuflecting.

This is all not to recommend a relentless philoneism, or to say that changes shouldn’t be weighed for their relative values of good and bad. And I share the worry of many that the new system of production for information — in all formats and areas — is not quite yet up to meeting the responsibilities of the old. But realizing that change is (and always has been, and always will be) persistently bemoaned and decried in exactly the same ways as a decline in standards/threat to the republic/et al. should temper the despair.

Image cite: Erica Marshall of muddyboots.org, “Egg Suicide,” Flickr, CC License

Power At Play, The Past is a Foreign...Something

Boisterous Despotism

daelnorwood

Or, which organ do you thump and twang on?

Passion flower

Since Thomas Jefferson has recently graced the august web pages of the New York Times I thought it might be of interest to share some thinking I’ve been doing on of his more famous predictions.

In The Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson at one point ponders what the American system of slavery means for the ideals of the Revolution, and the formation of individuals reared as masters. Though he ends on a hopeful note, the passage is not a cheerful one:

“There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. … The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.
….
And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? … Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever… I think a change already perceptible, since the origin of the present revolution. The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust…the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation, and that this is disposed, in the order of events, to be with the consent of the masters, rather than by their extirpation.

~Thomas Jefferson, “Query XVIII: Manners,” in Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library.

Jefferson wrote that in 1781, towards the end of the critical days of the Revolution; it was first published in English in 1787. The key point, I think, is that he highlights the dangers to political liberty that flow from American slavery. Those raised to be masters become passionate, wrathful despots; and despots can’t long maintain republican liberty.

This ambivalence on the fate of liberty in a nation supported by slavery came to mind, in a more personal dimension, as I was paging through two diaries the other day, one by a northerner, George Templeton Strong, and one by a southerner, James Henry Hammond. (1)

In many ways these men, though contemporaries and elites, could not be more different. What really struck me, though, in paging through each of these diaries, was how much happier Strong seemed to be, at least compared to Hammond.

You can see the difference even in the way they each begin their diaries. Strong hit the ground running, with a minimal amount of introspection, detailing how he registered for his sophomore year at Columbia. Hammond, on the other hand, left us a pathetic confession:

Columbia, S.C. 6 Feb. 1841
I begin this diary from almost purely selfish motives – Alas how few things do any of us do from better ones. “I want a friend.” Circumstances…have combined to prevent me from having a friend to whose sympathetic bosom I could confide anything. …

Strong populates his pages with notes about his day’s work, his observations of his friends and family, and lots of humor:

February 29, [1836] MONDAY. I have taken up my pen again after an interval of two months, caused partly by my ardor for laziness and partly by my ardor for science, exemplified in blowing up my hand. Memorandum. Never to pound chlorate of potassium and sulphur together again without thick gloves and never to pound them at all when I can help it. …

He took special delight in nerding out on, and playing, the new pipe organ he had commissioned, which, because it took up his entire parlor, he nicknamed “Goliath”:

December 16 [1840] … Post and I thumped and twanged on Goliath to our hearts’ content. I’m pleased with it on the whole. The dulcinia and hautboy are unsurpassable, and the diapasons and flute are very good, quite good enough for me…

Hammond, on the other hand, manages to record even public celebrations with a mixture of hypochondria and condescension:

[Columbia] 28 June [1842]
This is the day of the celebration of the opening of the R[ail] Road. It is to be a much larger affair than I expected. … I am very sick of it and wish I was at Silver Bluff [his plantation]. I have a dull pain in my right side. It is my liver thumping my ribs. … I expect to take no part but must be there. I hate a crowd. …

Partly, this difference in tone – continued, I might add, throughout the entirety of each of their diaries – might be attributed to Strong’s youth; in the 1840s, Strong was in his 20s, still a young man on the make; Hammond, on the other hand, was in his 30s and 40s, and with personal and public responsibilities – and ambitions – that weighed heavily upon him.

But I think the difference runs deeper, and actually has to do with the social and political environment in which each lived. Strong was a young Whig lawyer living in the bustling (and highly flammable, in his account) metropolis of New York. Hammond was one of the richest men in South Carolina, a plantation owner and major politician. Strong defined himself by his refined taste, his wit, and his work ethic. Hammond defined himself by his mastery and power.

That Hammond’s role as master defined him is clear from his diary, and clear to his biographers.(2) By all accounts – including his own – he was the narcissistic, passionately wrathful despot that Jefferson feared slavery would create. One of his biographers calls him, with justice, “a tough-minded son of a bitch,” elaborating further that:

By his own testimony we can judge him flawed. He owned hundreds of slaves, who died off at a great rate. Almost alone among the planter aristocracy, he clearly documents his proclivity for sexually exploiting his female slaves. In addition he debauched the young, the very young daughters of a fellow planter, his brother-in-law, a despicable practice then as now and certainly very dangerous then, when the code duello was still in fashion.
~The Secret and Sacred, viii, xvi

Aside from all the damage that Hammond inflicted on others – not a short list – slavery rotted him from the inside, even as he regarded slavery (and famously so) as a natural and organic part of a just society. He could never be carefree and happy like Strong; his power would not allow it.

This is not a perfect illustration, of course. These are but two individuals, and rare ones at that, for their intensive detailing of their daily lives. But from all my other reading in the archives of urban Northern capitalists and Southern planters, I think it is a pattern that repeats widely in this era.

I think it gets at a larger truth, the truth Jefferson knew, but never could bring himself to act on: liberty and slavery cannot coexist without consequences, even for those that benefit most from the coerced labor of others.

Image Cite: Nganguyen, “Passion fruit flower,” Flickr, CC License

(1) Allan Nevins and Milton H. Thomas, ed. The Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 1: Young Man in New York, 1835-1849 (New York: Macmillan, 1952)

Carol Bleser, ed. Secret and Sacred: The Diaries of James Henry Hammond, a Southern Slaveholder (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)

(2) One of the best works on Hammond is the work of Harvard’s current current president: Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, 1982)