Roman Polanski

Something worries me about the Roman Polanski case- and it is not his arrest, it is the reaction to it. As far as I can see, Polanski admitted to comitting a crime thirty years ago, he then fled before he could be punished- now at last justice has caught up with him. You may think that there should be a statute of limitations as in Italy and that is a fair view but it is not a view to be argued about right now because of the emotiveness of this case. There seems to be no doubt that there is no miscarriage of justice involved here: simply put a fugitive from justice has been arrested and placed in a cell prior to extradition to the jurisdiction which originally condemned him. It is for the courts to decide what punishment to administer.

And yet apparantly petitions are being drafted, the French society of film actors is talking about freedom of speech and Whoopi Goldberg about rape rape as opposed to rape. I find this rather strange. There is no freedom of speech issue here: Mr Polanski's crime was to have sex with an unwilling teenage girl- rape is not as far as I can remember freedom of speech and nor is it included in any meaningful definition of this film. Secondly the petition: again what injustice are they petitioning about- if Mr Polanski were not guilty of the crime or if he were being prosecuted for something that should not be a crime I could understand it, but the petition is being drafted apparantly because he is Mr Polanski. He is a child rapist full stop- you either believe that child rapists should face punishment and therefore that Mr Polanski should or you do not, can we take it that anyone who signs this petition- Mr Scorsese, Mr Allen, Miss Argento and others- beleive that child rape is acceptable? I do not think they do, but their actions are worrying.

I do like some of Mr Polanski's films- Chinatown is a masterpiece- and I believe that Mr Polanski has hard a harsh life, with a spell in a concentration camp and the murder of his wife to contend with, but he committed a crime. It is for the courts not for me to weigh up his circumstances against his crime and apply the law. I do not believe that American justice would be partial in this regard: the Great Republic may have flaws but it does with errors also have many virtues and judicial independence is one of them. The signatories to the petition would not sign the document were this not Mr Polanski- they seem to make the argument that travelling to a film festival gives one diplomatic immunity, I do not see how any account of ethics or common sense makes that plausible. This is a pathetic argument and special pleading. They too suggest that there is a free speech issue- something chilling in the air- as though prosecuting a 'moral case' about rape would lead inevitably to film makers being unable to make political or other films, again this is arrant nonsense.

The truth is that there should be equality between all citizens before the law. Mr Polanski committed a crime- it may be a long time ago but he committed it and unless a statute of limitations is brought in for all (even those say who murdered his wife) he should face trial and committal and resume a term in prison. To argue otherwise is either arrant hypocrisy based on artistic arrogance or intellectual flimsiness of the first degree.

Liberal Fascism?

Keith Flett reviews Jonah Goldberg's 'history' of liberal fascism here. The review is ultimately fair minded- it calls attention to the main flaw and virtue of Goldberg's text. Goldberg is seeking to argue that there is a genetic link between fascism and American liberalism. There are two main problems with such an argument. The first is, as Flett points out, Goldberg is not much of a historian- he is a journalist and an ideologue but not a historian. He is not atuned to nuance, leaves the parts of the past that complicate his theory out of his account and does not really make sense of what happened in Germany and Italy (or even ask whether there is such a thing as fascism). The second that Flett does not draw out is that Goldberg's argument repeats a fallacy: that the genetics of ideas imply influence- the same two people can see what seems to be the same truth at different points in time and not be influencing each other at all. Liberalism may share features with fascism (a strong state) but so does conservatism (a strong nation) and both have shared features with it (a state that can take coercive action in wartime). The two points mean that Goldberg's argument is useless to anyone seeking to establish the historical context of fascism and the historical relationship between LIberalism and Fascism.

But Flett is right to say that Goldberg's book is good political polemic- it is knock about stuff like Goldberg's columns which are fun to agree with or to be outraged by. There is a point that Goldberg does not make but Flett does, that at its best this book defends conservatives from the accusation that they are fascists. Fascists afterall were a lot of things conservatives are not (disrespectful to tradition and religion, to law and the free market)- though they shared certain dispositions (towards the nation, towards the ruling class, against communism). The point that Hillary Clinton is a fascist is laughable if ingenious. Goldberg's position in interviews has emerged as slightly more subtle- implicating all of us in the fascist enterprise rather than in allying his liberal opponents with a boo word. But Flett gets something that Goldberg does not in the book but Goldberg's argument implies- boo words may not be that useful in politics. The book liberal fascism may destroy the argument that liberals or conservatives are 'fascists'- hardly surprising when liberals and conservatives are really 'liberals' or 'conservatives'.

Lastly there is an area in which Goldberg's analysis is dangerous in a European context and an American- and that has to do with the real fascists, people like the BNP who deride a 'liberal elite' made up of both conservatives and liberals. Making the word 'fascist' in any sense a 'liberal' word ends up by empowering the extremes of European politics who would like nothing better than to separate themselves from their pasts. We should have a moratorium on calling people fascists unless their name is Gianfranco Fini, Nick Griffin or Ugo Voigt. Fascism is not a purely idle word: it describes a genocidal reality that exists outside of the boundaries of normal politics- a type of politics that if we do not guard against it, risks plunging us back in some of the worst excesses and crimes of the twentieth century.

Abraham Kuyper Neglected Titan

In these posts and particularly this one I have sought to show just how crucial Abraham Kuyper one time Prime Minister of the Netherlands, founder of the Anti-Revolutionary Party was to the development of Dutch Politics in the early 20th century. Among other things he founded it's first mass political party, pioneered popular politics founded the religious coalition that dominated Dutch politics for decades, split traditionalist Protestants, converted many of them to a more plural model of politics and massively weakened aristocrats within their ranks, introduced the modern Dutch school system and coalesced the entire system of "pillarisation” that dominated the Netherlands for many decades and still matters today. Indeed even the current Prime Minister of the Netherlands has talked about him very favourably as his political inspiration and stated he is a "Kuyperian heart and soul" - a rare feat for a political eighty years dead- I imagine for example Barack Obamaa and George Bush would be delilighted to get such an epitah from any head of government in a century.

It should be noted this only covers part of Kyper’s importance- he was hugely important outside domestic politics (to which he gave many other contributions I lack space to list- and many others I’m sure I’m ignorant of). For example in Foreign Policy he played a significant role strengthening the natural Dutch tendency to side with the Boers in the Boer War and lean (as a neutral) to Germany in World War 1. Theologically he was hugely important- his failed attempt to purge liberals who would not subscribe wholeheartedly to the Reformed confessions led him to lead a significant breakaway form the Dutch Reformed church and he latter organised a merger with latter sececessions to form the Reformed Churches of the Netherlands- a third force in the Dutch theological world. In a (very narrow and in the light of subsequent history slightly ironic) sense this may have been the first significant "fundamentalist" secession denomination. He led the first major secession break in protest at the modernism of the late 19th century on the grounds it was incompatible with the Reformed Faith and was supreme among clergymen in the creation of a new denomination formed of groups that papered over their huge differnces out of a common hostility to protestant liberalism

Kuyper was also a huge influence on Princeton Theological Seminary which ended up being crucial to the first significant American Fundamentalist (so defined) denomination the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. To this day he is a big influence on some of the more intellectual sections of American Evangelicalism including (but not confined to)the "religious right". At the same some of his views such as Presumptive regeneration and his rejection of a sharp notion of "infelicity" of scripture laid the foundations for some more liberal types of Christianity!

Nor did this exhaust Kuyper's titanic contributions. He was also one of the foremost writers of his age- even being on a committee concerning the Dutch language! He founded (as part of his religious work essentially ) the Free University of Amsterdam as an alternative to secularising universities - to this day it is one of the Netherlands a leading university. In its early days it was the subject of strong persecution and attempts to exclude it’s graduates from government jobs-but he grew so mighty that he was able to overturn and overule this.

So in politics, in theology in the Dutch language even in the history of academia he was a true Titan who played a transformative and giant activity In British terms he was like a combination of William Gladstone, Robert Cecil (3rd Marquis of Salisbury) Thomas Chalmers, John Stuart Mill, John Henry Newman, Ashley Cooper 7th Marquis of Shaftesbury, and Bishop John C Ryle all rolled into one!

And yet my suspicion is that even the extremely well educated average reader of this blog would never have heard of him- and as I said it's incredibly difficult to find good works in English on him or his activists. Why is this -and what does this illustrate about the nature of current Historiography?

I thick by far the most important reason is that he was after all Dutch. This is partly a strong (and in a sense) justified bias against small countries- though the Netherlands dwarfs Ireland Demographically. More problematically I think this is due to the linguistic barrier. Dutch is a language very few Dutch people know partly because of its small demographic base and partly due to the proflicany y of the Dutch in foreign languages in part due to the excellent education system Kuyper did so much to shape. . If Kyper had been Prime Minister of Canada- a less historically significant country at least in that era I suspect he'd been much better known to Anglo-Saxon historians.

But I don't think that bad reason is the only one. Partly this is due to neglect of or contempt of religion's importance for history in general -and particularly late 19th and 20th century politic. This is the dead hand of the "secularisation thesis"- that society naturally follows a development where organised religions and traditional orthodox ideas gradually dimities in their hold. Kuyper is an enormous embarrassment for such theories and so like many such is politely ignored.

One should add that the changes of the Netherlands over the last few decades in the direction of secularisation and sexual liberalism (both generally exaggerated by outsiders but still very real) add to amnesia about it's interesting past.

Another is increasingly specialisation in the type of history people do. Kyper's contributions cross an incredible number of fields including electoral politics, political ideology, theological history, diplomatic history and educational. To sum up his contributions would require incredible breadth in terms of our modern historical discipline - a Gibbon is rare indeed among modern historians.

Still in however small a way I hope I have shown the enormous importance and achievements of this now obscure figure. Like or loathes his achievements he did “great things” in the true sense of the term.

New England exceptionalism-the odd one out in the early Republic

Who was the true "speical" or "unamerican" region in the history of the early American republic? Southern exceptoinalism in early US history as we have seen while real was limited. That is it consisted mostly of direct and indirectly of slavery .However an alternative candidate a very credible one was New England- the Six States Vermont, Massachusetts Rhode Island, Connecticut Maine and New Hampshire-at the north east corner of the United States then as now.

They were historically perhaps the most distinctive part of the United States at that point. Most American states were crown colonies or states essentially formed out of them (this was even true of somewhat Quaker Pennsylvania and somewhat Catholic Maryland-they were closely tied to royal patronage).. The earlier Massachusetts colonies were the product of religious dissenters-people who disapproved of early 17th century England as too Catholic and insufficiently "godly". This took the form of the closest thing to a protestant theocracy (one of the very few Christian commonwealths to have the death penalty for adultery-and one of the few to punish female sexual behaviour more than male) In what became the core of Massachusetts On the other hand Rhode Island (rather less topically) led to probably the nearest thing to freedom of religion and no church establishment the modern Christian world had seen. These roots were fundamental for understanding early New England-even as the religion of New England evolved massively.

Also very important Anglicans were consequently marginal Anglicans after 1660 Congregationalists and to some degree Baptists were the British equivalent of the bulk of New England. Thus when the "war of independence" (which most historians prefer to call the Revolutionary War) began new England was probably the most united region behind the revolution. This meant more of the pre revolutionary establishment survived in New England (particularly the older parts-Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island). Indeed this often included the old established churches- so protestant dissenters stated established (into the 1810'; and beyond) long after the Anglican establishments of the South which are perhaps better remembered today had crumbled into dust. Congregationalists proved more vigorous and in a sense more reactionary than the Anglicans of the South-who swiftly moved to quietiism in the wake of the Revolution.

This is turn helped shape the politics of New England. For a start the supporters of the establishment and its opponents (Baptists, Methodists even Anglicans now renamed "Episcopalians" to wash out the British taint) tended to struggle. Rhode Island was the last state to keep a clearly restricted franchise for white men (Virginia and North Carolina were the nearest rivals)-indeed so long it erupted into the Dorr War of 1841-1842. This was in large measure because Rhode Island had religious toleration. In the other states near universal white manhood suffrage was achieved in alliances with members of the existing electorate who opposed the church establishments-that is wanted to remove taxes for the payment of Congregationalist churches and lifting the restrictions on political office on non Establishment men. But the struggles went on for decades-as already mentioned the Whigs and Democrats in the 1840's were often divided along those old lines- with the result for example that Methodists were probably much less Democratic than they were in most of the rest of the United States.

AT the same time it remained militantly protestant-even if not necessarily Orthodox in Christology. When Catholics arrived in massive numbers in the 1840's and 50's the backlash was most intense in Massachusetts- where the “American" party managed to win in one election every congressional seat. Piety even if not always orthodox was strong- anti New England polemics of the early republic cast them as religious fanatics threatening a secular or pluralist nation. The United Evangelical Front was stronger in New England than anywhere else in the United States-helped by the fact even many Unitarians (an "unorthodox" denomination even then) would support its policies if not its basis. When it rallied fully rather than half heatedly behind the New Republican party the old divisions between the established and the excluded were thrown aside and it became the heartland of the new party.

Similarly New England was very different in a large number of economic and cultural ways. It combined badsoil-indeed almost uniquely bad with a strong mercantile and from the 1810's industrial tradition-it was very much a mercantile area of the United States. At the same time and linked with the piety it was an extremely literature area of the country. AS already mentioned the South allowing for literacy was typical of the United States-New England it was much higher.

Similarly its racial attitudes as the 19th century wore on were very distinctive- often blacks had equal voting rights and something resembling equal civil rights were in New England a far cry from elsewhere in the US- it should be pointed ut the black population was very low in New England. Indeed this was the case even in New Hampshire a Democratic stronghold. Indeed Massachusetts abolished it's segregated schools in the 1850's! As late as the 1860 the one area where referendums of white men led to votes in that state was t. ideologically as opposed to institutionally it was arguably New England which was odd on race-not the South.

Another moderately distinguishing factor was the lack of a frontier from very early -there was not a natural extension of it the way there was for the South (with mini Georgas springing up in Alabama, Mississippi and even Texas). Even the vague central region of New York/ New Jersey had clearer migration routes after the Revolution. Michigan was the nearest thing in the early republic to a New England migration state and behaved rather like one. The "presbygentionist" (segregationists who'd moved west under the so called" Act of Union" forming an alliance between presbyterians and congregationists ) sought to hijack its politics in the Whig party -created a huge backlash and Democratic dominance more or less uninterrupted till the mid 1850's. Then anti-Catholicism and anti-slavery smashed Democratic domination and Michigan was a republican stronghold for almost eighty years.

Most New Englanders thus migrated to areas filled with other settlers- New Englanders emerged as a distinctive force in Ohio and New York for example. They had a reputation for religious zealotry, moralistic authoritarianism, education, arrogance and commercial skill bordering on greed-none of these stereotypes being without basis. They were also clannish-John Quincy Adams the only New Englander to be president en 1796 and 1852-won enough of those states and the white House due to absurdly high support in the New Englander "Yankee" areas-the "burnt over district" and the Western Reserve.


This was linked to another aspect of the distinctive nature of New England -its political distinctiveness. Again and again in the early republic the rest of the United States united against New England-it's true the south did more so but it stuck out less. Once (in 1796) a clear majority of New England twice defeated a majority of the South. By contrast the South again and again prevailed over New England in a clear choice whether in 1800 or 1812 or 1828-and it did so because again and again the rest of the country preferred the South's chosen paladiains to the mercantile moralists of New England. The "federalists"-seen by many historians as the only party to defend the classes against the masses explicitly were rapidly reduced to an (overwhelmingly) New England stronghold-and it was there they made their best stand. The National Republicans (who included many federalists and many old Republicans) ended up suffering form the same problem.

These distinctions of religion, politics, ideology behaviour and economic interest can be seen most distinctively in 1812. 1812 saw probably the worst defiance of the federal government until the civil war-much worst than anything that happened in the South (including South Carolina's rather marginalised stand). America was in a struggle-seen as a struggle for survival with the United Kingdom. The British burnt down the White House. Meanwhile New England states were nearly all mobilized by federalists against the war -motivated by ideological (they were the most opposed t the French Revolution) , religious ( the establishments mobilized against "infidel" Jeffersonians and Madisonians) and most of all perhaps commercial-the British were their trading partners and the American government . Nor was this a "patriotic" opposition. They refused to send militia-while lending and supplying the British. Indeed British soldiers just back form the war was lionized in Connecticut high society at one point! The exception oddly was Vermont-on the border with Canada and a war zone- perhaps the Whigs were so strong latter there because they lacked the taint of federalists "traitors"

The extreme example of this was the "Hertford convention" -a convention called in protest at the war. It included elements who wanted to talk of secession. It should be added they were then marginalised-the then federalist and latter leading Whig Daniel Webster gave a great speech opposing secession and the. Nonetheless I hope I have shown the previous actions suggest New England was taking civil disobedience to near treasonable levels. Indeed We have a record of the writing of a girl who was taught at school (a very New England institution) and at Salem that most arch typically New England of towns- the richest town in the US through trade in the 18th century)

"Abagail Jane is my name, Salem is my dwelling place
Christ is my salvation and New England is my nation"

New England note-not the Union or the United States.

So why has New England's distinctness been so downplayed compared to South in so much of what is written and imagined about the early republic. I think the biggest single problem is the weight of subsequent history-a very common one in historiography. New England was very different once Catholics poured in and it was dominated by Catholic Protestant rivalries. Now New England is overwhelmingly Catholic and the New England that existed before the 1840's is even harder to imagine and reconstruct than the South of that era- in a sense the Yankee culture has deceased. Most of the entire South's bloody rebellion overshadowed the history between the Revolution and the civil War. Also after the war as this excellent work suggests the values of the Yankee culture in so many ways became the values of late 19th century America. In a sense the New Englanders were victims of their own success in the 1860's and after. They overcome their growing demographic irrelevance by making Yankee values whether an obsession with education or a pro forma belief in racial equality "American values". The fact the term Yankee became a term for northerner-and ultimately for citizens of the US as a whole is perhaps the surest proof of this. When you call an American a "Yankee" you are registering the long ago triumph of what was once had been America's most ignored , "aristocratic" and irrelevant region.

What's in a Name-The American Whigs

We have now considered the politics of the mid nineteenth century United States and why the "Democrats" the party that still exists today chosethat name initially. But what about their less successful rivals-the Whigs? What was the basis for their name? It took a long time for them to settle on this nominator -which only came into common usage in the mid/ late 1830's.

The immediate historical resonance of the name would have been the "Whigs" in the sense of "Patriots"- that is those who had opposed George III's (in American eyes) arbitrary personal rule and stood up for the rights of the colonial legislatures. They in turn had intended were seeking to bring a resonance with the British Whigs of the late 17th and early 18th century-who at least in American popular memory had opposed the arbitrary powers of kings and stood up for the rights of the legislature. It should be noted if had next to nothing directly to do with the "Whigs" of early 19Th century Britain-whose connection to the earlier Whig party was extremely tenuous.

The Whigs started off as a coalition of those opposed to Andrew Jackson-and in particularly his supposedly arbitrary and personal rule. Many southerners in the Whigs professed admiration for Jackson but were clearly uncomfortable with his latter policies on banking for example. Many argued that his use of the veto was an example of this. The US President in a legacy of the British monarchy can veto legislation. This is used fairly routinely today but in the early republic there was a widespread consensus that it should be used sparingly and only when the president believed the legislation unconstitutional. Jackson was the first president to use it when he just disliked a policy.

Even his constitutional veto's were more common (he vetoed more bills than all previous five presidents put together) and more controversial The Whigs generally took a more "loose" view of the Constitution-simply the "general welfare" power of Congress included the bank so congress could authorize it. The Democrats took a stricter one pointing to the lack of any specific banking power and the 10th amendment's limitation on the powers of the federal government.

Together these veto's were seen as a revival of monarchical power in the eyes of Jack sons' critics reminiscent of George III in its dangers. A new Whigs were needed to counteract this dangerous threat. Indeed the Whigs were to make a fetish of objecting to the Veto. Whig presidential candidates would make opposition to it a major part of their platform-it was a frequent Harrison pledge for example.

The economic agenda of the (or rather most) Whigs as outlined here fit in well with this view of the presidents function. The structure of congress was such as to provide at least an element of the Whigs' programme naturally. In particular congressmen would "log roll" internal improvements . Moreover at least earlier in Jackson's tenure congress was fairly supportive of the bank and even opponents of the bank were often sympathetic to a bank.For example one in the District of Columbia(not a sovereign state of the Union) rather than one that hind ed state rights by being in a state Pennsylvania and immune from Pennsylvanian states taxes. This proposal many Southerners who supported Jackson in 1832 were keen on. Thus the veto was the most obvious obstacle to so much of the Whig programme.

Similarly the Whig Programme had prospered in the era of "no party" often dubiously called "the era of good feelings"-where the Republicans were so dominant the distinctions had cracked down. A new bank had been rechartered and a programme of internal improvements and the like had flourished. It was Jackson's party or the "democrats" who seemed to provide an effective obstacle to this. Inspired by Van Buren they embraced a party in principle-as an obstacle to big government and "aristocracy". The earlier Whigs (though they soon forget this) tended to see themselves as a machine with a temporary function to break this party-to end "tyrannical" and "monarchical" rule and then return to this lost golden age. This was another reason to take this name it emphasised their temporary nature-at least at first. The very fact that the earlier "Whigs" had died after the American revolution/ War of Independence had succeeded was the very model the latter Whigs wanted to take. Jackson and Van Buren were the wicked Tories of the day seeking to promote arbitrary government and forging a party to threaten republicanism.

However it was another action of Jackson which for Whigs was pro bally the most outrageous. This was the removal of the deposits. In this Jackson withdrew the deposits from the Bank of the United States before its charter was up . This sent it it into bankruptcy and in the short term causing a massive contraction of credit partly deliberately encouraged by the banks management in a counterproductive effort to cause public outrage against Jackson. But for Whigs (including many who were Jackson men in 1832) this was simply an abuse of power- Congress had chartered the bank to hold government deposits. Jackson was behaving like George III-and down this route lay the prospect of a new George III-a tyranny crushing free born Americans under foot. Like Charles I Jackson had removed subordinates who refused to go along with his wishes. Ironically subsequent scholars have provided convincing reasons why Jack sons actions may well have been constitutional. Nonetheless the Whigs outrage was sincere. Indeed a majority of the Senate (including former supporters censured Jackson-only for the Democratic Party to regain control and then obedient to Jackson to the last expunge the censure's very record. This in turn further fed Whig fear and paranoia that the days of monarchy were returning.

This concern about the arbitrary nature of Jack sons actions there could appeal to politicians and voters who did not share the normal Whig economic programme. The same was even more true of outrage over another Jackson act-his opposition to the attempts by South Carolina to ignore federal custom duties and to refuse to pay them. Jackson supposedly threatened to "hang them higher than Haman" if resistance was given to federal officials. The great leader of dissent on this was John C Calhoun who helped found the Whigs even though his views on most issues were in agreements with the extreme end of the Southern Democratic party -very pro slavery and more relevantly very hostile to most activities of the federal government(tariffs for example)-indeed Calhoun helped give the Whigs initial control of Congress and censure Jackson over the deposit removal. Though he left them shortly afterwards some sympathisers remained in the Whig party. One of them John Tyler was the successful Whig candidate for vice president in 1840 ( a decision made very casually). Then President Harrison died and Tyler ended up using the veto to frustrate the large majority of the Whig economic platform-and then by annexing Texas beginning the Territorial expansion that the Whigs were to make a major cause of opposing. This life is full of ironies and the Tyler presidency is a useful reminder of this fact. Jackson created a coalition of opponents whose own divisions were huge and explosive.

This picture shows Jackson as the Whigs saw him as wittingly or unwittingly a King threatening tyranny to the United States.

What's in a name -the American Democrats of the mid 19th century

One factor that readers of the previous two posts may wonder is why did these parties have these names in early 19Th century America? Why was the party of Elites, racially inclusive ,evangelical pro government intervention in the economy called the Whigs and the party of popular8st , "whites only" , non evangelical front, sceptical of government funding for development called the "democrats"-these are odd names to our ears.

In particular the early to mid 19th Century Democratic Party is oddly named particularly in line to it's general hostility to black suffrage. Indeed it was also probably more hostile than the Whigs to women's suffrage though that was not really a serious policy idea in the period). It should be pointed out the Democrats were more supportive of White suffrage than the Whigs (particularly when they got more ideologically coherent in the 1840'. Nonetheless the explanation is to be found in the different meaning of the terms- and the historical associations they had to the politic ans and voters of the 1830's and 1840's . This can be seen by looking at the Democratic party.

Indeed if one was flippant one could say the Democratic party was not called that-the near universal colloquial title for them was the Democracy (the Democrats were the members of that party).

It is no coincidence was a common name for "Mr Jefferson's Party" that is the Jeffersonian Republicans/Democracy that had won the presidency and congress in 1800 and held both till 1824 when the party split with the most electoral college voters going to Andrew Jackson-the founder of the "new" Democratic party. In their decision to use this name when they stopped simply being "Jackson" men-the Democrats were making a clear-and shrewd decision to claim to be the continuation of that party.Indeed many of the Democratic party's formal party dinners both nationally and state are "Jefferson-Jackson" to this day.

This claim has been enough to confuse historians who often saw the Democrats as being the party founded by Jefferson. They saw Jefferson's supposedly reactionary "federalist" opponents as being continued by the Whigs. This was a major line of Democratic propaganda. That does not make it true. What is true is that in New England from the late 1830's the strongholds of the Whig's tended to be those in which the federalists had been relatively strong.But the Whig Patty's National Republican predecessor had won landslide victories in New England-including in the Old Jeffersonian stronghold. And the Whig Party was competitive in the South-where the federalists had been dead since the 1800's. The foremost leader of the Whig party Henry Clay was a veteran Jeffersonian.AT the same time there were only two federalists who after the death of that party became president. The first John Quincy Adams had left them despite his father having been a federalist president to become an enthusiastic Jeffersonian and was a National Republican/Whig. The second Buchanan was a Democrat- and indeed one of Jackson's first supporters!

Secondly the name Democratic had a meaning in the politics of the time. It was this meaning which filled European elites with such horror at the term. It's the sense De Tocqueville generally uses it- a society in which all men are equal in that distinctions in the eyes of the government between them on the basis of status have been abolished.In other words it's the opposite of aristocracy- it did mean giving all men the vote on the same terms-but also opposition to other forms of distinction between men.

Thus it provided an attractive title for the Democratic party platform- eliminating government intervention to promote the economy or "purify" society. Whether it was government activity in banking or education taxes- a distinction was being made and it was that which in principle the Democrats opposed. Partly because of the relative radicalism of this view of equality Democrats tended to make tight distinction between white men who were entitled to it and Blacks (and women to some degree) who were not.The Whigs could fudge these issues more easily partly because of their less egalitarian worldview.

On the other hand only the most extreme fringes of the Democratic party extended this hostility to legal distinctions as far as private property- indeed because they opposed distinctions between people they could oppose redistribution of property (in the form of school or roads taxes say) on the same "Democratic" ground.

It is in this ideological sense opposed to their very dubious institutional argument that their best claim to being the true heirs to Jefferson.Though Jefferson did not like Jackson calling him a "dangerous man" their ideologues had a very large number of similarities.

Thus the term "Democratic" made perfect sense for the party it described but not really for reasons we'd identify with. It included it's main claims to be the true heir to Jefferson, to be the true party of the people and to oppose a new "aristocracy" of Whig government intervention and elitism. In the context of the time it was almost an obvious label.

The Cartoon is of President Andrew Jackson-the true founder of the Democratic Party and probably the most successful American politician of the age. It shows him defeating the Bank of the United States the quasi central bank of the era-for many Democrats his greatest legacy. In the words of one of his supporters. "Only General Jackson would have dared veto the bank of the United States. And only General Jackson could have triumphed o'er that most vile and perfidious American aristocracy."

Whigs and Democrats Development and Salvation-their coalitions of support

In this previous post I talked about the Whigs and Democrats policy stances in the early 19th century. I showed that these two parties differed on a wide range of issues. Now I hope to describe their coalitions of support and show how they were linked to the policy views. In other words who supported which party in the all male and overwhelmingly white electorate of the day?

The Whigs were the party that supported government subsidy for economic development- the agricultural industrial revolutions if you will. Thus those who benefited most from them were much more likely to support Whigs. Those who were wary and even hostile to them supported Democrats. What this translated to on the ground was that areas and people dependent on commercial agriculture (i.e. farming done to sell on the market) supported the Whigs. . Similarly urban areas based on commerce tended to be strongly Whig. Subsistence farmers by contrast voted much more Democratic. Moreover there is a lot of evidence these divisions were created by the clashes on economic policy. The Jacksonian and anti-Jacksonian predecessors to the two parties had had much less of such economic based divisions. As economic policy divisions became clearer and clearer in the late 1830’s so did the divisions in the electorate.

This may help explain incidentally the difficulty historians have had in understanding these divisions. The superficial similarity of the party system (one of these parties still exists after all) has confused them. For after all rural backwaters are fairly politically marginal today! But in the rural society of the 1840’s they provided the basis for a winning electoral coalition.

There was also a class division again based on attitudes to economic development. Within cities the better off were much more Whig. In the cities more marginal workers for whom the industrial revolution was less of an unadulterated blessing were less likely to vote Whig..For most of this period for example in urban Boston the Whigs won ever ward- but they did worst in the poorest ward and best in the richest. The Closer and keener you were on development the more likely you were to be a Whig-so the urban were more Whig than the rural.

One should not consider the electorate of the era idiots for adopting these attitudes. The direct beneficiaries of national banking legislation were bankers and those who borrowed of them. For Subsistence farmers’ credit was a potential trap as in the third world today. Similarly when it came to economic development roads and railways were overwhelmingly used by those seeking to take goods to market. Tariffs benefited overwhelmingly urban based constituencies- while raising the prices of the few goods subsistence farmers bought. Above all in the early republic there was a pervasive wariness of the government making distinctions (“aristocracy” it was often called) between different people- as is implied in the government backing loans, building roads in one place but not anther and to some degree even in setting tariffs. Those who saw themselves as beneficiaries of such measures could swallow such scepticism and even see them as an “American System” tying them together. Those who did not would not and rose in opposition to such measures.

One can prefer on principled grounds the Whig or Democratic programmes of the day or elements of both. But the voting behaviour of the electorate was perfectly rational-they were not fools.

At the same time ethnic factors mattered a great deal in the North. African Americans for reasons already given voted Whigs- but so did most people of English descent. The big differences were generally ethnic and religious. Native Americans (that is people born in the United States it had a very different implication from the modern!) tined to be more Whig immigrants were consistently more Democratic. Indeed greater support among immigrants is one of the consistencies in the Democratic Party’s complex history. . People of English descent were more likely to be Whigs –other ethnic groups including Ulster Protestants were more Democratic.

However one of the biggest differences of all was religious. Several of the largest denomination was part of what was widely seen as a “benevolent” empire what historians often call the “united evangelical front”. This was true most of all of the Congregationalists but also of at least large parts of every large Protestant denomination. There were for example pan Evangelical rallies, revival meetings, bible societies and the like. Though there might be minor denominational differences the greater concerns were a sense of Christian salvation through grace and religious revivals and working to transform the world in the light of their sense of Christian conscience. The members of these groups were more Whig- and were probably close to half the US population.

On the other there were large groups that stood outside this front. The fastest growing (swelled by immigration) were Catholics. Certain Protestant groups though such as “Old line” (strict) Presbyterians or “high confessional” Lutherans also placed a much greater emphasis on the particular teachings of their denomination. Similarly free thinkers had problems with evangelical teaching for more obvious reasons. All these groups were much more Democratic.

Again this flowed out of the State differences described previously. Issues such as restricting alcohol, increasing educational levels, expanding knowledge of the (Protestant King James) bible according to a necessarily broadly Protestant rather than “sectarian”, fighting slavery aroused the enthusiasm of the members of the united evangelical front. It aroused either indifference. Even the Whigs economic programme could be seen as an attempt to renew American society and arouse the Front’s enthusiasm and its opponent’s hostility.

The degree to which this was policy rather than theology is well shown by the few exceptions to this rule of the prestigious and the orthodox voting Whig. . African Americans unsurprinsgly voted for the Whigs- the exception that proved the rule in a sense since part of moralise was their protection and opposition to slavery. However there were also certain groups which bought into all or most of the Front’s cultural and behavioural ideas whilst virulently rejecting Trinitarian Christianity-most notably Unitarians and Reform Jews. These two groups also tended to the Whigs. In Louisiana and Maryland where Catholics were the more established and "respectable" group and where many of the social issues initially mattered less at the state level they tended to be Whigs.

The Whigs were very vulnerable to “social” issues (one reason why they often tried to downplay them in favour of economics with mixed electoral success). On the one hand every new wave of immigrants shrank their share of the Vote. On the other their party contained an explosive mixture of urban elites and religious crusaders, slave owners and anti slavery zealots. These problems were to bring the Whigs down.

However ever even the Whig Democratic Party divisions are enough to confuse the contemporary reader on the one side stood the party of active government, Protestantism, “Law and Order” and “black rights”. On the other the party of limited government, religious pluralism, violent protest and “white rights”. One party stood for the urban, the evangelical the rich, the Anglo Saxon and the Black. Another for the rural, the Catholic, the secular, the poor the Irish and the White. The divisions were very real-and made as I hope I have shown coherent sense. But they were very different from our own.

This picture is of the 1852 election-the last election the Whigs were one of the two largest parties. The Whig cndidate was Winifield Scott america's greatest living war hero, the Democratic candidate the New Hampshire Political boss and former Senator Franklin Pierece. The Whigs manged to get 44% or so of vote but were crushed by new immigrants voting in the North and the fear they were insufficiently pro slavery in the South.

red state blue state review-part two

I wish to continue my reviews of this excellent work. I hope my previous review has shown how very valuable and interesting this work is. Here I want to focus on a few issues where I think their conclusions need nuancing-and more than they give it as well as one objection raised I think is invalid.

It strikes me a lot of their comparisons/ the implications of their comparisons are diluted by the importance of the African American Vote in the United States. This is around 10% and more of the American Vote. Indeed in one survey I read African American were more likely to vote democratic in the South than Affluent, Gun owning self described members of the religious right were to Vote Republican! African Americans vote overwhelmingly Democratic with only fairly minor differences on the basis of whether they are born again or not, rich or poor go to church or not etc. They are also of course disproportionately poor and churchgoing. Thus the effect of their vote-will is to increase the class cleavage and reduce the religious cleavage in American life. It will also make poor voters look like they vote less on religious lines than rich voters- even white rich voters do. Gelman and co make some reference to this -but not enough. In other words the apparent (comparative) weakness of churchgoing and income in the US could be a function of race.

And indeed if you look at white voters the big differences on income are for those earning in the bottom 8% of Americans and the top 3%. This makes a lot of sense since the differences between the two parties on income policies (whether the Earned Income Tax credit or high rate income tax) are concentrated at that level. This is discussed by Byron Caplan in this blog post..

I'm quite certain that lies behind Mississippi having the most republican non-churchgoers of any state (Mississippi has the highest % of African Americans. Similarly as they also acknowledge a lot of the reasons why the income gap is higher in red states is that in the South African Americans are a very high % of the poorest voters (in the other republican presidential stronghold of the rocky mountains the gap is much less apparent)-again they do acknowledge this is part of the explanation.


On international compressions it strikes me there is insufficient attention to the role of "dead" cleavages-and this they don’t really address. That is if a factor (such as religion) or class had a large effect on a generation's parents voting it is likely to correlate with their own voting-because both class, religious affiliation . A fictional example (that is perhaps not that far from some countries actual electoral history) should help.

Say Country X has a rightwing and a leftwing party 80% of churchgoers vote for the right and 80% for the left (let's say for the sake of argument it's a new democracy) .Let's say in the Next generation churchgoing stops having any direct effect on voting patterns. However Say churchgoers/ non churchgoers) are 80% likely to have churchgoing /non-churchgoing children-and right-wingers are 80% likely to have rightwing children. A huge correlation will remain between churchgoing and voting for the right even if it has no independent effect (over 60%).

A classic case of this happening was in post war Canada. In the early and mid 20th Century the Conservatives (latter Progressive Conservatives) were above all the party that sought to build up Canadian life according to a pro British, anti American protestant and centralized model. The basis of their support was Protestant Canadians. Catholics voted overwhelmingly for the liberals. A survey in the 1980's (when the issue environment had changed so much it was unrecognisable) found whether one was Catholic or Protestant was still the best predictor of voting Conservative- a better predication than economic class or religiosity. However this was just because the Catholic Liberal voting’s of the early 20th century had had both disproportionally Liberal and Catholic Children. The best proof of this was that converts to Catholicism who were went to church regularly (i.e. those with whom one can see the effect of Catholicism operating independent of historical tendencies) were actually extremely likely to vote conservative.

It may be the weakness of the churchgoing cleavage in America relative to western Europe is very heavily this effect- the lack of pious/ secular religious cleavages in America in the 1950's and the strength of it in so many western European countries.

I also feel I should defend them from some criticism Gelman that they themselves seem weak in answering”How could it be when here religion is out of the political campaigns and discourse and there is no question whatsoever about the faith of candidates?” For a start the latter claim strikes me as dubious and exaggerated (note how every major French rightwing candidate in the last twenty years has been a practising catholic with no leftwing one being so). . In any cases in America talk of faith by candidates tends to be highly generic –at most generically Christian often frankly generically theistic (in a way that could included theists)-crucially it tends to bi-partisan there is not an obvious difference in the way different parties national candidates talk about Faith. (And its difference rather than level of piety that explains how much people vote on religious lines-I imagine people’s religious views had little impact on their voting in the fifteenth century England!)

. AT the same time the differences between left or right or religiously issues can often be sharper. So for example in Italy (whose overwhelmingly catholic nature means such issues are likely to be more a proxy for religiosity than in the united States the right when last in power restricted IVF and embryo research earlier this decade, the left government then sought to bring in "civil unions" (failing partly due to internal divisions) and the right has now sought more restrictive and tight “euthanasia laws” Even in the United Kingdom there weree huge party parliamentary differences for example on the abortion laws shown in very recent votes. it’s no wonder in such circumstances there’s a correlation between churchgoing and voting. It’s not just a legacy of the past.

Red-State Blue State Rich State Poor State Why Americans Vote the Way They do-Part One Summary

This is a fantastic and powerful work of political science edited Andrew Gelman (with many contributors but I will refer to "Gelman" for convenience rather than to slight his colleagues) Gelman has also (with some of these colleagues) set up an excellent blog that deals with many of the same issues.

.This book I think it's fair to say is both a work designed to expose myths commonly held about US politics by laymen and a collection of a great deal of their own political science work.

This is obviously useful for experts in the field. I also think it or a similar work is essential to have a well thought out view on the US electorate in general. I should add it was written before the 2008 election though most of its conclusions will remain solid. Though having said that Obama seems to have actually won among voters earning more than $200,0000 unlike those earing $100,000-$200,000 (though frankly this may partly be due to sampling)-which cuts against quite a lot of their comments on US voting . I'd like to briefly point out some of the stuff they show so you can see why it's so valuable

Even though poorer states vote more republican ( a fairly well known fact) , at least till this election richer voters in every state voted more Republican (though often narrowly)

Religiosity (in the sense of churchgoing) makes more of a difference t for better off voters-n - i.e. the gap in how they vote, between rich people who go to church and don't is much bigger than those who don't. This tends to be true in western democracies though not universally-including states as different from each as Sweden, France and Israel (obviously Israel it's synagogue going-but I’m using it generically as place of religious worship)

Linked to this and it should to the amazement of authors despite them being experts, when one cross references income and state-the big difference between "Red" and "Blue" states is between rich people in poor states vs. rich states. So in 2004 in Mississippi and Connecticut (the richest and poorest states) the people with the lowest income voted similarly. By contrast the gap among the best off in the two states state was colossal around 40% or so- The result was Bush easily won "poor" (by American standards adjusting for PPP it's income is probably around the same as the United Kingdom) Mississippi and easily lost rich Connecticut (as did Mccain)

Linked to this in poor states the better off you are the more likely you are to attend church in the. IN rich states the opposite is true- the poor are more pious. This makes a lot of sense of the above-It suggests essentially in states in the rural or South "moral" issues if anything increase the divided in voting created by economics while the opposite is true in the North East and Western Coast. So in State's like Connecticut poor people voting Democratic for higher benefits and rich people voting Democratic for legal abortion have the effect of almost cancelling each other out- that is a caricature but one with some truth.

It should be noted that the degree to which religion effects voting is different from which party it benefits more. I personally believe this has tended to help the Republicans more but this book doesn't really comment on that.

They also quote powerful evidence that church attendance actually is a better predictor of voting for the right in a large number of political systems than in the United States. E.g. Sweden, Germany .It's also worth noting that in every state they (briefly) examine, religious attendance is either essentially not a predictor at all or is correlated more right-wing voting behaviour. In contrast in a few countries such as Israel and Ireland being richer actually means you’re less likely to vote for the right.

Another interesting point -clashing with a forest of journalistic articles, America is actually a state where income is a better predictor of voting than most-in France and Germany for example it barely predicts at all.

In the United States. Among religious types in the United States overall Mormons are massively Republican, evangelical Christians fairly Republican (it's important to remember a very large % of evangelicals in the US are black so this is despite that), non-evangelical protestants very close to even. Catholics fairly Democratic and Jews as massively Democratic as Mormons are republican.

. All these groups are more likely to support Republicans if they go to church normally as opposed to virtually never. However the difference in effect is huge. For mainstream Protestants it makes next to no difference while for Catholics the effect is slight though significant (my understanding is it's much bigger for Hispanic Catholics. The effect is however huge for evangelicals- and even larger for Mormons and interestingly Jews.

While Jews vote about 7-2 for Democrats Jews who attend Synagogues every week is about evenly split. To look at it another way while among non attendees non evangelical Protestants are about 5 times as likely to vote republican as Jews there is virtually no difference between Jews and non-evangelical Protestants who go to church every week. This incidentally would seem to suggest problems for explanations of the left-wing behaviour of American Jews that root it in the influence of the old Jewish tradition.

I hope I have shown just a few of the ways this book is valuable. Anyone who has any real interest in the politics of the most powerful nation on earth should find it useful and informative. I will post some more on this invaluable book-including some of my problems with some of their conclusions but it really is a great work.

Dixie Looks Abroad Part 5- the Myth of a Martial Tradition?

One last thing Fry is highly sceptical of is the notion of a southern Marital tradition. Building on a growing and powerful secondary literature he shows that in fact at certain times the south has actually been underrepresented (for example in the military post war and with World War 1 Volunteers ) and of course his complex and well thought out account helps show many alternative explanations of Southern Foreign Policy.

However I do think he goes a bit too far. The exceptions of lack of marital zeal can be explained- was the military any less southern than other national institutions after the Civil war-and this was the military that was both over staffed and had crushed the white south in battle? There are genuine sociological characteristics whether a greater ante-bellum zeal for dualing or their greater enthusiasm for the death penalty today that are not simple or uni-dimensional but would seem to have implications for the use of punitive force. Finally when every major War in US history (except arguably the Civil War-truly the exception that proves the rule) has received disproportionate support in the south whether the War of 1812, the various Indian wars, the American-Mexican War, probably the Spanish-American War, World War 1 , World War 2, the Korean War, The Vietnam War and the Iraq war-it's very hard not to believe there is a general pattern.

Again I must repeat Dixie Looks Abroad is truly outstanding. My criticisms are a reflection of its richness not it's weakness. I strongly recommend anyone who wants a historical perspective on southerners and Foreign Policy to read it . Frankly the book would be worth it just for the footnotes-but it is so much more.

Dixie Looks Abroad 4- Internationalism abandoned ?

Another area where I disagree with Fry is his notion that somehow the South's internationalism was not sincere, that the support for the Wilsonian project reflected partisanship and southern pride more than it reflected any sincere conviction of "internationalism".

Again as with the previous points Fry is not without powerful arguments. He is at his most persuasive when it comes to foreign aid - support already dropping a bit under Truman crashed under the Republican Eisenhower. This arguably reflects though a change in the nature of aid. Aid under Roosevelt served a fairly obvious military

purpose. Even under Truman it was sold heavily as stopping an imminent communist takeover (and allowing resources for western particularly British militarise). By the 1950's there is the beginning of aid as development model (which of course had roots in the Marshall Plan-but that was sold in the US in an urgent anti-communist way) with the anti-communist effects being much vaguer and much more long term. It's worth noting this drying up of aid support continued under Democrats (though of course changes in domestic policy arguably meant Kennedy and Johnson-ironically the first Democrat to be an unambiguous southerner since the 1840's were no longer the South's Democrats in a way even Truman was) -though in fact neither % of the southern vote was much different from Truman's in 1948.

I do think his broader point fails- or rather it in a sense Misses the point. It seems to be based on the notion that buying into the Grand Alliance/ existence United Nations/ NATO/ Marshall Plan necessarily implies the internationalism of the 1950's and 1960's with its large permanent foreign aid budgets, treaties about internal treatment of ethnic groups, agreed international limitations on arms and so forth. It just strikes me the former does not really imply the latter as a logical proposition.

And in fact for example the UN as a body as it was operating in the 1950's received a great deal of scepticism of Dean Acheson perhaps the most important architect of the system If any major foreign policy initiative of the post 40's era was like the earlier form of internationalism it was support for aid and US troops in South Vietnam (which again is not to say one could not logically support the earlier moves and oppose Vietnam-or indeed with more of a stretch vice-versa)-and there the south remained the most "internationalist" part of the United States . It's at least as ridiculous to deny opponents of the Genocide Convention the title of "internationalist" as opponents of the Vietnam War.

Again it strikes me it's perhaps best to think of the 1940's as an era where whether the US was to be integrated into the international state system and binding alliances or not was being decided- with by the early 1950's a huge consensus ( even the likes of Robert Taft accepting this) that it was. The South was a leading light for all these measures . McCarthy's personal appeal can in a sense be seen as a reflection of these debates and the Confederacy again was rather resistant to it (every confederate Senator voted to condemn McCarthy-the only Democrat who managed to absent himself was John F Kennedy of Massachusetts-whose Democrats as well as JFK's dad had been very dubious about aid for Britain).

From the early 1950's onwards the debates have been very different-and in my opinion internationalist is the wrong way to discuss them very few US politicians -there is the odd exception are opposed to the internationalist paradigm I've outlined above. The differences have come down very broadly down to two types. Firstly whether to support the use of military force where the South has remained about the most enthusiastic region in the United States (with the odd exception ) . Examples would include the Vietnam War, The first Gulf War and the second Gulf War. Secondly whether the US should agree to treaties or agreements that limit it's actions and/or internal behaviour / and or requite the US to give some resource. Examples of this would include the Panama Canal Treaty, the various test ban treaties,the genocide convention and Detente with the Soviets.

Here the South has been a lot more sceptical even hostile(and after all as already suggested it's opposition to agreements that effect internal policies e..g the genocide convention can be linked to it's anti-imperialism of the early 20th century) . It's perhaps notable that those wars the south has been most relatively sceptical of (for example Kosovo) have been those that have been sold most in strictly humanitarian ways-and in the US obeying an international system (however ridiculous you may feel that is as a representation of the reality of these wars).

All these debates have happened in a context where the international system set up in the 40's has been a given . The rare deviations have been fairly fringe (the most notable being George McGovern the Democratic presidential candidate's desires to withdraw many troops from NATO) and partial-McGovern was a big fan of the UN and foreign aid , while most Right wing Republicans who support withdrawal from the UN are big fans of NATO. This commitment could be seen as early as the early 1950's where the South was even more opposed to General MacArthur's firing than the rest of the United States.

Indeed looking at realignment over foreign policy in the United States-one could say that what has happened (in small part- domestic politics has a ton to do with this) has been the hawkish South has allied with the north more anti commitment form of nationalist sentiment (a major force in "isolationism) into a new "conservative" school of internationalist politics. Whatever this is it is not isolationism-but rather one of the heirs to the interventionist of the 1940's.

Dixie Looks Abroad Part 3 - the 20th century the south with Wilson and Roosevelt partisan or principled?

I'd now like to examine some ways I disagree with Professor Fry on in terms of the era of the two World Wars. In this era the South has generally been seen as a stronghold of internationalism Fry brings powerful ammunition to bear on this concept-but i think takes it too far.

Firstly he see's the switch during World War I to a more "interventionist" / internationalist stance as being very heavily driven by partisanship. I should emphasise he does not take this to a ridiculous level-he certainly quotes other factors. He also provides some powerful evidence. In the 1920's when Republican presidents suggested their own "internationalist "proposals they got huge opposition from Southern Democrats (which is to say southern congressmen) who tended to actively oppose foreign aid and showed much higher levels of opposition to the World Court than they had to the (more radical) League of Nations. Similarly in World War 2 the fact Roosevelt was a Democrat who had won again and again overwhelmingly victory in the South clearly helped support - republican congressmen in the United States were much less likely to support aid to Britain before entry to the war despite having been if anything the slightly more Teutonophobic party historically. So there is a great deal of truth in this analysis.

I think however he takes it too far. In Several of his examples I think he gives to much weight to partisanship . For example he says partisan motivation (including a love for Wilson as the "southern president") is shown by the reluctance of southern senators to pass the Versailles treaty with amendments to the League of Nations ( the League of Nations and the Versailles Treaty was killed in part by hard-line league supporters the "battalion of death" who combined with opponents of any League to vote down a modified league). However this can equally be seen as a hard-line interventionist position- often measures fail in part because they are seen as too moderate by some people who'd prefer them to the status quo. Similarly he fails to give sufficient weight to the fact that while foreign aid southerners might have voted against in a partisan way they gave much more support to the likes of the World Court (and many of their reasons given for opposition were discontent that it was an alternative to full league membership). And by the late 1930's Southern Senators were happily opposing their party's changes on race- and even siding with Republicans on Some Labour issues- why the likes of Senator Walter George of Georgia who had clashed so bitterly with Roosevelt would back him out of strict partisanship I do not know.

An alternative way of looking at it (which works well for the Wilson administration) is that from the Civil War til the 1930's the south was the Democratic party's core-and with the odd rare exception (1928 presidential election comes to mind) defined their stance-in other words up to a point Wilsonian anti-imperial nationalism and internationalism was the product of the southern political consensus (and much else about Wilson's politics-it was he who killed the anti racism part of the League of Nations Covenant).

And there are many ways it can be tied together. After all Wilson was the one who emphasised self determination famously as a principle in the post war settlement and influenced large parts of the settlement with this principle. He also significantly modified and to an under appreciated degree achieved serious reductions in the harshness of the peace terms for Germany. There is incidentally a reasonable case this was very destructive in the post war era. These themes of self-determination and reconciliation after war (particularly the emphasis on keeping military occupation to a minimum) powerful evoke Southerners of his generation's understanding of key lessons from the Civil War and Reconstruction ( the era after). So Wilson offered a nationalism distinctively different at least in principle from that of a Theodore Roosevelt-an anti imperialist nationalism

At the same time this principle like such fairly vague foreign policy principles can lead to a very partisan spin on particulars. For was foreign aid for Latin America imperialist or internationalist in motive ? This same problem can be seen in the use of partisan cues by Labour mps or Democratic members of congress in determining whether the Iraq or Kosovo wars were "humanitarian" or not - in mattes of judgement the strictest of ideologues can easily end up taking a partisan position. Of course many would argue such distinctions are an absurd one to this day-but that does not rebut the sincerity of such beliefs or the difficulty in operating on the basis of them.

I think this legacy of this ideology can be seen in the speed with which the South backed intervention for Roosevelt (the South supported most aid to Britain by factors of over 8-1 , other regions rarely went over 2-1 in support)-a war which could more easily than World 2 be seen as a simple case of resisting imperialist aggression by Germany. Moreover there was an obvious ethnic factor. White southerners are heavily English in background- by contrast the Midwest the most German-American region was an isolationist stronghold. This helps explain why Southern Democrats were actually more solid than northern in support-and thus the south as a whole massively more supportive of aid for Britain (this of course also feeds to the enthusiasm for the South in World War 1).

Or to put it another way Fry argues against seeing the south as internationalist but with slavery dead and buried there is a strong case that it was naturally inclined to a pro British but anti-imperialist "internationalism"-and this fits well with the record of the South in the early 20th century.

In a latter post I hope to talk about some of the ways this era has implications for Fry's views on the post World War 2 era.

Dixe Looks Abroad Part 2 - the Confederacy and beyond

I am now going to take several of Fry's positions where I disagree with him or at least his emphasis. I would like to point out firstly that his obviously unlike me a major expert ,so my disagreements are of course meant to be respectful, secondly that I should add I agree with virtually all his analytical conclusions- including the emphasis he gives to race and his emphasis on the variability of the South. However if we agreed life would be boring so I am going to mark up some points of disagreement. I should add that virtually all our areas of disagreement are ones where Fry follows a pre-existing consensus rather than breaking from it.
Firstly he see's the failure of the Confederacy in the Civil War as sparking from problems in Diplomacy. One certainly should not ignore the copious examples of Confederate diplomatic failure he gives including a diplomat to France who was open in his contempt to the French and the fundamental strategic failure of believing that dependence on slave grown southern cotton would compel Anglo intervention of itself- and that an "informal" embargo was the best way of achieving this! However it strikes me that as with most explanations given for the defeat of the Confederacy confederate incompetence or division as opposed to weakness is given far too much emphasis. As his own account makes clear in fact the South did not receive recognition because Britain and France only wanted to extend recognition when they were certain that independence would stick. Secondly useless as they may have been the confederacy made no diplomatic faux pas on the level of Seward (the Secretary of State of the time for the US) who nearly s started a war with Britain over kidnapping Confederate diplomats from a British Ship- and at a time when key supplies for the Union war's efforts guns were being prepared in a British port! (Fry convincingly shows this was union incompetence not shrewd confederate manipulation). Thirdly it strikes me he gives far too much emphasis to recognition-unless backed by military aid (an unlikely occurrence) or union stupidity in launching a war Anglo-Franco recognition would only have marginally have aided the Confederacy. This incidentally strikes me as similar to Israel's declaration of independence and subsequent war-where far too much attention is given to US recognition and not enough attention to Soviet/Czech military assistance.
Secondly he see's the South late 19th century opposition and problems with overseas intervention as being caused (in the late 19th and early 20th) century in part by a hostility to government intervention and a supposed commitment to "state's rights”. In this he reflects a weak domestic historgraphy.In fact statism at home where it was seen as being in favour of the South-or even against Northern interests (e.g. an income tax or regulation of railroads) was more popular the White South than the rest of the United States in this period. What strikes me as much more important is their opposition to the tariff (which disproportionally hurt the South as it had virtually no industrial goods to be "protected") which was the primary form of federal tax in the absence of an income tax. Furthermore hostility to the military and military expenditure is easily explained when it was overwhelmingly non southern white and was key to holding down the South (this Fry does state firmly). Finally I think he dismisses too readily the meaningfulness of Southern Anti-Imperialism. The parallels between Southern Whites defence of their "autonomy" over African Americans and resistance to imperial intervention are rather closer than much modern discussion would indicate. But in any case the key point is not the validity of such comparison but the sincerity-and Fry does not really provide any evidence of the lack of sincerity of such. In fact rather than being contradicted by the new southern loathing of multi racialism (now slavery the former system of social control ) there is every reason to believe the too were complementary- the greatest ideological racists of the South like Colin Blasé of South Carolina were also often the most fervent anti-imperialism. Imperialism in the 19th century meant a mullet-racial state after all. It strikes me as much more significant than it does for Professor Fry than when the South embraced international intervention in the First World War under Woodrow Wilson it was done under a non even anti-imperialist aegis of liberating people-rather than the neo-imperialist rhetoric of a Theodore Roosevelt- as a liberation of people from external oppression (oppression White Southern saw themselves as suffering after the civil war however wrongly they may have been) rather than the imposition of external uplift.
There are some other disagreements I may write more on -but I would just like to thank Professor Fry again for such an engaging, broad and interesting work

Henry Wallace's Chickens

Apologies for not posting much this week- a combination of illness, tiredness and being back at work led me to neglect the blog a little and tonight's article will not be a model of intellectual rigour. As I surfed the internet this evening, I found a rather interesting article on American Vice-Presidents- the job, turned down by many of the most notable citizens of the Republic, has been occupied sometimes by men whose conduct has excited disgust rather than respect. Most famously of all Aaron Burr left the Vice Presidency, fought a duel with Alexander Hamilton and was eventually prosecuted for treason. But there are ways of doing better after the Vice Presidency, succeeding more than Burr: one such success post Vice Presidency was Henry Wallace. Wallace was Roosevelt's second Vice President (1940-4) and a socialist: having failed to gain the Presidency for himself in 1948 and served a term as Secretary of Commerce, Wallace retired from politics and became an agricultural expert. He eventually bred a new type of chicken- a type that eventually became dominant in the agricultural chicken market.

Wallace's success in this new career prompts two thoughts. One is that Wallace was a uniquely American type of politician- he was the son of a former Cabinet member but before his first appointment to Roosevelt's cabinet (as Secretary of Agriculture in 1932) he was an innovative and successful farmer. Like Condi Rice, Colin Powell, Steven Chu or Alexander Haig, Wallace was a success outside as well as inside politics. As for example one would expect Rice to return to Stanford and continue her academic career, as Haig returned to command NATO and Chu will return to science, Wallace returned to agriculture. Perhaps as well though what Wallace's career demonstrates is that though Enoch Powell was right- that every political career ends in failure (and one might add that every career ends in retirement!)- that is not the end of people's productive and important lives. Wallace's subsequent career suggests to me the fallacy of assuming that anyone has one vocation or one career: that image is a falsehood. Wallace went through several transitions- he may have ended a socialist but he began a liberal Republican. We often assume consistency about people's lives by looking backwards through their lives- if we look forwards I think we see in Wallace an able man from outside politics coming into it for fifteen years and then leaving it and continuing to use his other talents, furthermore we see a person whose career was not exactly predictable- liberal Republican turns to Democrat and becomes too leftwing for Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Truman.

Wallace's career reminds one of how unpredictable careers are and how unpredictable history is. Henry Wallace deserves remembering in history not merely for his fairly successful political career- but for his amazing career as a chicken breeder.

America the Immigrant

This is a quick thought. Rereading Olivier Roy's classic on Islamic fundamentalism, Roy has a really interesting point that I don't think we think about enough. He suggests something about the nature of fundamentalism- the return to the 'fundamentals' of faith- which is incredibly interesting and makes a lot of sense. Roy argues that religion normally combines a belief with the workings of a society- religion is ultimately social, woven into the fabric of a country. Much of what we think of as traditional Christianity- the mitre of a bishop or the structure of a cathedral- is actually historically embedded within near Eastern and European culture for example. Roy argues though that the way that religious people identify with their faith changes with their conditions. Imagine for instance that you are thrust outside your local world, made to change your ideas about the way that people dress etc, you then go off and search for the fundamentals of your belief- and can be propelled in a variety of directions- amongst which fundamentalism is one attractive prospect, another is liberalism, a third is mysticism.

Lets leave aside the complexities of the situation for a moment; I think there is something interesting and basically true about Roy's observation and the way that he applies it to thinking about contemporary politics and the way that social change intersects with religious instability. But it is also an interesting thesis in another context. The difference between European and American societies at their base is quite a simple one- one that can be quickly caricatured. Europe is the land of the sedentary- life here has been the same for the last two thousand years and basically most of the people are the same as those who lived here thousands of years ago. America is the land of movement- the icons of American culture are the cowboys moving across the plains, the immigrants in their ships coming across the sea, the colonial architecture of the south and the buffalo praires of the north. Now that is a caricature which contains a lot of falsehood- but there is a certain truth to it. Americans start with a narrative of immigration- the Pilgrim Fathers for example- Europeans with a narrative of ancient history- Rome. One lives, to reverse Robert Kagan's argument, beyond history: the other is imbedded within it.

So far so conventional. But there is something else here which I think is more interesting than ruminations on European 'Greekness' and American 'Romanitas' and that is the nature of religion in the United States. We often forget that the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand were born in upheaval. Whatever comforting notions we have of immigration from 19th Century novelists like Dickens, immigration was a profoundly upsetting and disturbing experience. And that is true whether that immigration was from York to New York or New York to Utah. In the days before good communications, going meant never coming back, going meant never having contact again. In a sense what Roy describes as the impulse behind some Islamic fundamentalism today, provides us with an interesting analytical method to work out another great distinction in the modern world. Perhaps one of the reasons that America is prone to religious revival and also to fundamentalist movements, is that it is a society on the move. Few people in America live in their traditional communities and furthermore fewer even are not challenged by wider society. The process by which immigration and social disturbance forces you back upon 'pure' religion is an interesting one- and there is no reason to believe that it is more true of boys from Pakistan than of those from Peckham. American susceptibility to religious fervour might therefore in part derive from America's status as a nation of immigrants.

Of course I am going to hedge that- and I don't want anyone to believe that I mean any of these things absolutely- Americans and Europeans come in all shapes and sizes. But the two vague facts- that America is an immigrant community and that it is more religious than Europe- I don't think are unrelated. We should connect them more when we try and understand the two continents and when the two continents try and understand each other.