Kent State 40 years ago, and making up facts to fit today’s world view.

Few things frustrate me in my teaching than my students ignorance of history that predates their adolescence.

Last week, on the 40th anniversary of the Kent State shootings, I wrote about both their impact on me then, and the frightening disconnect I see between current political rhetoric that compares President Obama’s policies to “fascism” and the very different reality of 40 years ago, when National Guard troops really did engage in activity that might genuinely be equated to fascism. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that I was attacked for thinking that calling President Obama a “fascist” seems silly to someone who remembers students being shot dead for protesting the invasion of Cambodia in 1970.

But I genuinely was surprised when in the comments to the post criticizing me another blogger stated that in discussing the Kent State shootings I “neglected” to mention that “the National Guard were shot at first” and that the host of the site in response to that comment wrote: ” Thank you very much for the historical accuracy you add to this issue. You are correct. Mr. Friedman has selective memory.”

The problem, of course, is that this purported “historical accuracy” is pure fantasy. There never has been any evidence that the students at Kent State were armed, much less that they shot at the National Guard. As the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports today, [t]wo trials and a presidential commission’s investigation could not determine what initiated the gunfire, although the presidential commission concluded that ‘the indiscriminate firing of rifles into a crowd of students and the deaths that followed were unnecessary, unwarranted and inexcusable.’” Why is this news now? Because the Plain Dealer reported the following 2 days ago:

The Ohio National Guardsmen who fired on students and antiwar protesters at Kent State University on May 4, 1970 were given an order to prepare to shoot, according to a new analysis of a 40-year-old audio tape of the event.

“Guard!” says a male voice on the recording, which two forensic audio experts enhanced and evaluated at the request of The Plain Dealer. Several seconds pass. Then, “All right, prepare to fire!”

“Get down!” someone shouts urgently, presumably in the crowd. Finally, “Guard! . . . ” followed two seconds later by a long, booming volley of gunshots. The entire spoken sequence lasts 17 seconds.

The previously undetected command could begin to explain the central mystery of the Kent State tragedy – why 28 Guardsmen pivoted in unison atop Blanket Hill, raised their rifles and pistols and fired 67 times, killing four students and wounding nine others in an act that galvanized sentiment against the Vietnam War.

People should know that before they begin spouting off about the policies of an American President they perhaps ought to know a little about history. And they certainly should know better than simply to make up facts that fit their world view.

ADDENDUM:

KENT STATE (trailer) from Mark Mori on Vimeo.

A tribute to Justice Souter, and his recent speech on civics education

Justice Souter was woefully underestimated. He was reviled by the right because he turned out to be a moderate — someone who, especially given the rightward drift of the Court in the since Reagan was elected, seemed to the right an outright leftist. That he had been appointed by George H.W. Bush, a Republican, made Souter seem to the Right not merely a leftist, but also a traitor. Nor did the Left particularly appreciate him except, perhaps, as a man they recognized as independent in his thought.

But perhaps Souter’s biggest failure as a public figure was that his style did not fit his time. Souter did what I learned judges are to do: strive hard to do justice in each individual case. His opinions reflected his strenuous effort to make sure the law was interpreted to ensure that the parties to the lawsuits he was judging were treated justly.

Unfortunately, however, he served during a time when overreaching ideologies became the fashionable way to judge problems, especially legal problems. Law and Economics, a legal movement that interprets law entirely through the lens of a purported judgment as to its ability to efficiently allocate economic resources, has grown during my professional career from one approach among many to, arguably, the most dominant mode of legal thought in those circles that are concerned with delineating theoretical approaches to law. Since Ronald Reagan was elected, we’ve raised an entire generation that accepts without any consideration of the realities that anything government does it does incompetently and that labor unions are corrupt institutions that entrench incompetence. You’d never know that the era of the greatest American affluence (an affluence shared far, far widely than the wealth the U.S. has today) followed thirty years of big government and the rise of labor unions to the apex of their power. You’d never know that my father, the son of immigrants who grew up in poverty (which he didn’t even dream of as poverty) in the Depression, served in WWII, and was a POW in Germany, attributes his success (which, of course, is entirely resonsible for mine) to the fact the goverment paid entirely for his higher education by way of the G.I. Bill (imagine: investing in your country’s future!). He attributes his remarkable good health at 85 to health care he receives from the Veterans’ Administration, which he says is as good as better as the health care anyone he knows receives.

So when Justice Souter told the attendees at the American Bar Association’s annual meeting earlier this month that we need better civics education in our schools, he spoke the truth. We also need far, far better history instruction.

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Don’t let history disappear, redux.

Last week one of my most engaged students came to me and said, “The New Deal didn’t help the recovery from the Depression.  It was entirely World War II.”  I sighed.  The reason he might believe what he said is true is because he’s a Republican and he has been listening to the arguments for their near unanimous congressional opposition to the Obama administration’s efforts to help the economy.  As the New York Times reports today:

For more than half a century, America’s political leaders – Republican and Democrat – have sought to wrap themselves in the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the man credited with replacing fear with hope and ending the Great Depression. But in recent years some writers and economists have been telling a version of this story that is quite different from the one generally taught in school or seen on the History Channel.

In this interpretation Roosevelt is a well-meaning but misguided dupe who not only prolonged the Depression but also exacerbated it. For many people, it’s like hearing that Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother and not the wolf is the rapacious killer.

Since the financial crash this fall, the revisionist look at the Great Depression has attracted new attention . . . . But more than that, it has become an intellectual banner for Republican opponents of the Obama administration’s ambitious bailout and stimulus proposals.

Amity Shlaes, a syndicated columnist who works at the Council on Foreign Relations, helped ignite this latest revisionist spurt with her 2007 book, “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression.”

“The deepest problem was the intervention, the lack of faith in the marketplace,” she wrote, lumping Herbert Hoover and Roosevelt together as overzealous government meddlers.

The current financial crisis, as well as continuing praise from conservatives, helped propel the book back onto the Times best-seller list in November. Jonathan Alter, an editor at Newsweek and the author of “The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope” – which has also benefited from the renewed fascination with the 1930s – calls Ms. Shlaes’s book a “taste badge,” flaunted by Republicans looking for a way to oppose the administration.

Today’s article didn’t do much but explain there is this revisionist view and that it is the intellectual basis of the Republicans’ current political positioning.  Intead, it more or less gave a “he said, she said” account of the “competing theories about the Depression and the New Deal” as they were articulated  “at a conference at the Council on Foreign Relations’ New York headquarters, co-hosted by the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University, and partly organized by Ms. Shlaes.”

There are plenty of good critiques of Ms. Schlaes, including Eric Rauchway’s in Slate, and, on a regular basis, Paul Krugman (here, for example). Even political allies, like Megan McArdle, find the fashionable right wing view Shlaes popularized and the Republican party has adopted as its own to be gross caricature:

The problem is that Shlaes way, way, way overstates her case.  There is an academic argument that the National Recovery Administration prolonged the Great Depression . . . . But the Great Depression is complicated, and it’s hard to make the case that government intervention was the main problem with the economy.  As economic history, the book is interesting if one sided.  But as an argument, it leaves a lot to be desired.

But reading political rhetoric is a poor substitute for an immersion in history.  I am lucky that my father at 85 is as sharp, energetic, and passionate as ever, and his memories of growing up poor in the Thirties and the profound differences FDR made are vivid.  Reading books rather than mere opinion pieces is important too.  I recommend strongly David Kennedy’s Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (Oxford History of the United States).

Maybe it’s that we’re a “sound bite” culture.  I don’t know.  But in my adulthood, which more or less began with Ronald Reagan’s flip dismissal of all governmental action as the problem, not the solution, I’ve continually been shocked at the frequency with which people are ready to accept without question that premise and its counterpart — that unregulated markets are wiser than any human institutions can ever be and always are the best solution.

Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913

I just discovered The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913, a fully searchable edition of the documents from the 197,745 criminal trials held in London’s central criminal court during that period.

According to John Langbein, the Proceedings are “probably the best accounts we shall ever have of what transpired in ordinary English criminal courts before the later eighteenth century”. Although initially aimed at a popular rather than a legal audience, the material reported was neither invented nor significantly distorted. The Old Bailey Courthouse was a public place, with numerous spectators, and the reputation of the Proceedings would have quickly suffered if the accounts had been unreliable. Their authenticity was one of their strongest selling points, and a comparison of the text of the Proceedings with other manuscript and published accounts of the same trials confirms that what they did report was for the most part reported accurately.

The database is a treasure trove for historians and the curious.  A random search for a topic of some interest to me, stock fraud, undearthed the case of “Richard Slocombe the younger, who was indicted for feloniously and deceitfully impersonating” his father, thereby securing for himself £50 of the £450 worth of “South Sea Annuities” owned by his father.  The records include transcripts and summaries of some of the trial testimony.  Here is the report of Mr. Slocombe’s testimony in his defense and the testimony on his behalf by his uncle.

Prisoner’s defence:

From what I had conceived and collected from discourse between my father and mother, this was mine upon my coming to age; my father is at these years reduced to a degree of insanity, he cannot recollect one half hour what he spoke the last; I am fully persuaded if my mother and sister were here, they would coincide perfectly in what I advance in every respect; as to the transfer, I signed nothing but my own name; if I had been conscious I was doing wrong, I should have made but one transfer, and took all the money at once; I did not act with any view of defrauding, therefore I most humbly hope you will take it in the most favourable consideration and construction; I am not particularly desirous of calling my father.

To his [Slocombe's] character:

John Pierce . I am the prisoner’s uncle; I never knew but that he always bore a good character, he was always very dutiful.

Richard Slocombe the younger was found guilty and was executed.

How do we explain human beings?

Annette Gordon-Reed, the author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, is a lawyer as well as a historian. The two avocations mesh well, especially in trying to give coherence to seemingly incoherent ideas. As pointed out in Newsweek, for example, people have floundered in the face of the seemingly inexplicable, including “the idea that Jefferson, a lifelong proponent of emancipation, could own slaves and sustain an intimate relationship with a woman who was not only his property but his dead wife’s half-sister.” Gordon-Reed’s training as a lawyer is the ideal preparation for developing persuasive explanations for what seems “crazy” because when it gets down to it we’re all a bit crazy:

“‘The first thing you learn in law school is people are crazy,’ says [Gordon-Reed], who also teaches history at Rutgers and law at New York Law School. ‘They’ll come into your office and explain their motivation, and it will be totally a lie. They don’t even understand themselves what their motivations are. It’s not all going to fit.’ Historians may think that because their subjects are dead, ‘you don’t have to deal with the consequences of their shattered lives if you’re not for real.’ Lawyers don’t have this luxury. ‘We’re training people to deal with people’s lives. Somebody’s going to go to jail, somebody’s going to lose a child. You have to be for real.’ Which may be how Gordon-Reed takes the stuff of Sally Hemings’s life-the quotidian and the epic-and makes it indelibly real.”