I followed a link from TPM to a Vanity Fair article on Sarah Palin that did not turn out to be quite as awesome as promised. To me, everything one needs to know about the reasons that woman should be kept out of high office is conveyed by any given 10-minute film clip of her, including the convention speech that set off her initial media stardom. The particulars may be more Alaskan and trashier than your typical right-wing suburban beauty queen, but Sarah Barracuda’s basic approach seems pretty familiar if you come from the sort of background that breeds lots of Republicans. I do! But more Palin-tology was not my reason for writing tonight.

In a passing remark at the end of the piece, VF reporter Todd Purdum tosses off a bit of faux-erudition in the course of trashing the mental powers of Palin’s GOP fanbase. I bolded the key sentence:

Palin has disappointed many of those who once had the highest hopes for her. She has stumbled over innumerable details. But as she said to Andrew Halcro years ago, “Does any of this really matter?” Palin has shown herself to have remarkable gut instincts about raw politics, and she has seen openings where others did not. And she has the good fortune to have traction within a political party that is bereft of strong leadership, and whose rank and file often demands qualities other than knowledge, experience, and an understanding that facts are, as John Adams said, stubborn things. It is, at the moment, a party in which the loudest and most singular voices, not burdened by responsibility, wield disproportionate power.

John Adams did use that proverb, apparently, and perhaps David McCullough or the HBO series put it in his mouth, but he did not originate it. [See Ben's explanation in the comments.] The fact is, “facts are stubborn things” was one of the most common catch-phrases in the newspapers of the Early Republic. Readex/Newsbank’s “America’s Historical Newspapers” database reports 1,403 occurrences, and that is probably low. I feel as though I have seen about 1,000 instances of it personally in the course of my research. The phrase was often used as a headline or recurring motif in essays exposing official malfeasance or contradicting another writer’s position based on everyday experience and the “common understanding of mankind.” The quoted line comes from, you guessed it, “Facts are Stubborn Things,” Number VII of Boston politician and merchant Benjamin Austin, Jr.’s 1786 essay series condemning the legal profession, written over the pen name “Honestus” in the Boston Independent Chronicle and published in book form as Observations on the Pernicious Practice of the Law.  Austin’s book probably popularized the phrase among early American printers, quite a few of whom harbored the feeling that the facts were probably against the existence of lawyers.

For me, “facts are stubborn things” encapsulates a certain Enlightenment attitude that was especially common on the political left of that time (and possibly all times), assuming that incontrovertible empirical data could be found on any question and that such facts would irresistibly lead public opinion in an enlightened direction by dispelling the mystifications and superstitions of earlier, barbarous ages. What’s interesting to me is that the phrase seemed to resonate just as much on the right of the Early Republic, where it would be directed against the allegedly dangerous speculations and innovations of Jacobin-Jeffersonian “philosophy.”  Hence around 1803 you could find itinerant Democratic-Republican editor John B. Colvin singing the Jefferson administration’s praises with the stubborn facts and Connecticut Federalist satirist David Daggett campaigning against Jefferson’s local supporters under the same title.

According to Bartlett’s Quotations and other sources on Google Books, supplemented by my actually looking up the originals (or trying), the proverb’s earliest publications occurred in the late 1740s, separately and in rather opposite meanings. The “liberal” usage of the phrase as an appeal to reason and information began with Connecticut clergyman and agricultural reformer Jared Eliot’s 1749 Continuation of the essay upon field-husbandry, as it is or may be ordered in New England. “Facts are stubborn Things, which will not bow nor break,” the Rev. Mr. Eliot writes, appropriately enough in a footnote:

Right around the same time, English poet and translator Tobias Smollett satirized the phrase by giving it as dialogue to a character called Dr. Sangrado, a benighted Spanish physician who decries new-fangled medical theories such as the idea that blood was necessary for life. (Possibly he was one of those global warming skeptics we hear about, as well.) In Smollett’s formulation, the stubborn “facts” were the ones that the ignorant and inflexible refused to give up despite counterevidence. Here comes a Google Books science experiment, presenting the actual passage that Bartlett and the others seem to be referencing:

Ah, the “dangerous allurements of chemistry”! So we come back to to the modern conservative political mind after all, which may be breaking a little bit but certainly won’t bow. And the very stones also may have a few things to cry aloud about Sarah if her political career goes any further.
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Now playing: Barracudas - His Last Summer
via FoxyTunes

The blogger Atrios likes to highlight articles about the incongruities between urban life (with its walkability and density) and automobile culture (which demands curb cuts, parking spaces, fast-moving highways, and suburban developments). He’s especially giddy when drivers are driven mad by cities–because suburbanites perceive them to be unsuitable as places to live, yet they still want to visit urban attractions (or work their urban jobs).  So when they can’t find a place to park, their frustration is palpable (particularly on internet comment boards).  For an urban planner, the only solutions seem to be: a) destroy your city, or b) resist the suburbanites’ car-centric frustration, possibly by coming up with transportation alternatives.

Atrios highlighted an article on the parking shortage in Newport, RI, particularly this quote:

Though a modern streetcar system may seem out-of-place with the city’s colonial appeal, officials say it could actually be a throwback to the early 20th century, when trolleys operated in the city. Plus, Bronk said, there’s nothing quaint about the city’s traffic.

“Does four lanes of automobile congestion, is that in keeping with the colonial period? It’s not,” he said. “Is a highway downtown in keeping with the colonial era? It’s not.”

Of all the cities I discussed in Rebels Rising, Newport is the best place to discern a surviving colonial landscape and surviving colonial buildings.  After that, I’d rank them as follows, from best to worst: Charleston (SC), Philadelphia (where Atrios lives), Boston, and New York City.  (Obviously there were other cities at the time, but those are the five that got the most attention in my book.)  Of those five, Newport has grown the least, economically and demographically, over the years, so it’s not so surprising that more of its colonial landscape survives.  The other cities have also struggled with transportation access in a lot of ways, and I’m sure visitors to all these cities (and to all cities, really) can call to mind the highways that lead into these cities, the neighborhoods that have been blighted by modern highway construction, and the public transportation alternatives that exist (or don’t exist) in these places.

All this is making me very grateful that my fellow fellow at the John Carter Brown Library used to offer me a parking space at his father’s office whenever I was driving down to Newport for dissertation research.

UPDATE: Why preserve historic buildings?  Because sometimes the findings are really cool.

Summer is the slow time around here, mostly because summer “vacation” is when I get to work through my pile of history-writing projects that are supposed to lead to the production and consumption of paper products. You know the ones. As with most subjects, I wax hot and cold as to whether light blogging complements or interferes with other types of writing. Clearly the dial this June has been set to “interferes.” While we are on the subject of waxing hot, I can definitely report that our faltering HVAC system’s efforts to recreate the productivity of the summer of 1993, when I wrote 400 pages of dissertation in a stifling hot 4th-floor Boston apartment, did not work.

I have also found the public occurrences of recent weeks to be more of the wait-and-see Obama type than the call-forth-the-thunder Bush-era kind.  Mostly this is a good thing. The two most recent foreign political crises, in Iran and Honduras, are the sorts of situations that might or might not strongly affect the U.S. but that our government cannot really Do Something About without obvious interference that would amount to taking ownership of another country’s fate without being able to fully predict or control what that fate would be. Washington chin-waggers always suggest Something should be done — it’s easier and safer to maunder about Freedom somewhere else than take a constructive position on this country’s problems — and presidents have tended to fall into the trap of following the chinwaggers’ advice, often with the Something being “send in the military.”  Barack Obama may yet take that fall, but it has been refreshing so far to have a president whose characteristic response to a foreign crisis is to say some decent things about another people’s struggles, but otherwise stick to his job of managing the United States without trying to be World Emperor on top of it.T-Bone Burnett - House of Mirrors
via FoxyTunes

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Now playing:

Perhaps this is a bit Founderesque, but Common-place readers are always in search of new ways of conveying history, and so you may appreciate this op-art essay in the New York Times online by Maria Kalman called “Time Wastes Too Fast.”  Using documents, photographs, archaeology, primary sources, and her own illustrations (many based on contemporary portraits), Kalman spins a travelogue, history and biography, and a life lesson from a trip to Monticello.  Perhaps the essay will inspire you to redeem more of your summertime, or perhaps it will send you spinning into an envious funk.  Or maybe you’ll just be inspired to go for a walk.

Some may be aware that one of St. Louis’s nicknames is “Mound City.” This moniker developed because of the many Indian mounds of different shapes and sizes that were found in the area when the Usonians started moving in approximately 200 years ago. Many of these were quite sizable, though none were as impressive as the Monk’s Mound over at Cahokia on the Illinois side of the river. (Now it is an archaeological site. Not that long before the French and Spanish hit the Mississippi Valley, Cahokia had the been the great metropolis of northern North America, such as it was.)

The early U.S. arrivals had lots of fanciful theories about the mysterious cultures that created the mounds, but that did not stop them from becoming popular spots on which to build your farm, home, or “entertainment complex.” Then, as the city grew, it became even more popular to flatten the mounds and use the dirt for other purposes. Today there are barely any hills at all in most of St. Louis, much less anything that would justify the appellation “Mound City.” Slightly-Raised-Above-the-Riverbed City would be more like it. (A few miles inland, there is The Hill, the Little Italy of St. Louis where Joe Garagiola, Yogi Berra, and Early Republic historian Rosemarie Zagarri were all raised. The singular article form of the name is a significant clue to the local topography.)

The ex-mounds of Mound City are in the news today because what is thought to be the last remaining St. Louis Indian mound, or the remaining half of it, is up for sale. Located in south St. Louis along the Mississippi, it is locally known as Sugar Loaf Mound and features an elderly couple’s house right on top. Supposedly the house has a nice view of the river, and it must have awesome freeway access — part of the mound was used as fill for I-55 next door. The Budweiser brewery and downtown STL are just minutes away.  Get your bid in now, because the Osage Nation is looking at buying the property to preserve it. The Osage would be buttressing what I gather is a somewhat disputed ancestral link between the historical Osage people and the Mississippian mound builders.
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Now playing: Ramsay Midwood - Mohawk River

I need to finish up the Ozark travelogue soon, but first thought I would share another instance of political fantasy in real life, from a news article in our local Sunday paper. It seems that Barack Obama’s rise to power has coincided with a boom in weapons and ammunition sales (and applications to go packin’ in public) that continues to the present day. This has all developed, I might add, without the slightest hint or tell from the president or his official supporters that any kind of crackdown on gun owners is in the offing. I rather think Obama has his hands full enough leading the country through economic crises and major policy changes and a Supremes nomination without opening any new culture war fronts. Then again, you get the sense that some of the people mentioned in this story are expecting other kinds of wars entirely:

For whatever reason, guns and all things gun-related are a hot commodity these days.

Local law enforcement agencies are seeing an increase in the number of applications from residents wanting to carry concealable firearms, a continuation of a trend that started last year. At the same time, ammunition prices are up because of increased demand coinciding with more gun sales.

The Boone County Sheriff’s Department has received more than 250 new applications this year from residents wanting to carry concealable firearms after accepting 449 applications in all of 2008, sheriff’s Maj. Tom Reddin said. The sheriff’s department received only 116 applications in 2007, Reddin said.

[snip]

“I think a part of it is crime,” he said. “I think a part of it is politics and the national administration. I think a part of it is the hysteria.”

Another Columbia firearms trainer, Tim Oliver, said demand for his beginning firearms course has increased since last summer. He offered two courses a month last year but has increased that to nine courses a month. “All of my classes have been booked to capacity since October,” he said, attributing the increase to both crime and fear of stricter gun control.

Ammunition also has become a precious commodity.

“A lot of people are kind of grabbing up and hoarding ammo,” said Barry McKenzie, manager of Target Masters firing range and gun store in north Columbia.

McKenzie said a lot of dealers have placed limits on how much ammunition customers can buy in an effort to decrease demand, but his store has not.

“People are afraid” of increased federal regulations, McKenzie said “There’s just a lot of rumors out there right now.”

And then there was this additional testimony from the news story’s online comments section:

SickSigma says…

I worked for a shooting and reloading company before and after the election. Believe me, the election has a lot to do with what is going on. The call volume increased to staggering proportions immediately after the elections. People were grabbing everything they could, and that still has not subsided. Now prices are incredibly high becasue every dealer is out of stock. I am one of the lucky ones who stockpiled before prices skyrocketed. I have enough guns and ammo to form a small militia. [Let's hope it's a well-regulated militia.--JLP]

This jibes with what I was told last fall by a student who was working at what I imagine is the same business. An outfit called Midway USA has a rather unmarked facility west of Columbia. From what I have seen, there are few better places to experience Middle American cyber-aggression in action than the comments section of newspaper guns n’ crime stories.

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Now playing: Close Lobsters - Got Apprehension
via FoxyTunes

Isaac loves road trips to anywhere, so I agreed to do a little more driving than necessary after his last day of school earlier this week. Our primary purpose was attending a banquet and ceremony celebrating the accession of my father (and a bunch of distinguished gentlemen) to Golden Alumni status at what is now being called Missouri University of Science and Technology. It was formerly known as University of Missouri-Rolla, but in 1959 it was still called Missouri School of Mines.  It’s a nice, rather venerable little school despite the name changes, which make it seem as if they’re trying to keep anyone from finding out about the place, though I know the opposite is true. The preferred abbreviation is neither MO Tech (my favorite), nor MUST (Isaac’s), but instead Missouri S&T. I know this for certain because S&T (the preferred abbreviated abbreviation) has the most insanely detailed and sternly worded “brand identity” web site I have ever seen for an academic institution. (Not that I have seen that many.) There are official color palettes, fonts, and even PowerPoint templates. “Consistency is the key,” the main page lectures, going on to scold its own URL for employing the forbidden abbreviation MST. S&T also seems to have subtly youthified its scruffy old prospector mascot, “Joe Miner” (click the image to see the new one). He does still carry his slide rule, pick-axe, and gun, so there’s that.

While the school seems fine, I could not recommend its location, Rolla, MO, the Town That Couldn’t Spell Strait, as a vacation spot. Rolla is a homely little railroad real estate speculation in the Ozark foothills. This is the kind of place where instead of looking around the sleepy old downtown and thinking what a happening mini-metropolis this was once upon a time, as you do in many another small Missouri city, your dominant impression is, “Nothing ever happened here, did it?” One story is that they named the town after Raleigh, North Carolina, but the phonetic Rolla was easier for the hardscrabble locals to spell.  As an historian, I am not sure I quite accept that story, but the highway sign on the edge of town pointing the way to Cabool (named after the Afghan capital) would tend to corroborate it.

The entertainment at the banquet we attended was what I now know to call an “Elvis Tribute Artist,” a personable fellow named Rich Vickers who was keen to distinguish himself from his “deranged” competition on the ETA circuit. “Some of those guys really think they are Elvis,” Rich quipped. There was no danger of such excessive verisimilitude on this occasion, considering that Rich’s instrumental accompaniment was a laptop (awkwardly hooked up to PA system) that appeared to be running ITunes in karaoke mode. I do wish I had taken a picture of The King fiddling with his laptop on “stage” (a.ka. the side of the Rolla Comfort Suites function room). My mom and Isaac loved ETA Vickers, though Ike did take some umbrage when his request, “Viva Las Vegas,” was turned into a goof on those Viagra ads we know all too well from the Cardinals TV broadcasts.

You get the idea that entertainment has long been scarce in Rolla. A highlight of the Miner Class of 1959’s college years turned to be the time some drunken engineering students built a cement wall across a downtown street one Friday night. I don’t know about the rest of you, but heavy construction sure happens to me every time I have a few too many. Also, I guess there was not a lot of traffic in 1950s Rolla.

Since I see this post is now going out on the 6th of June, I guess I should also mention something else we learned in Rolla: my dad had forgotten to tell us all these years that his alma mater has a dorm named after a family member. This would be Holtman Hall, dedicated to his uncle Orvid Holtman, a Navy engineer who was one of the first men ashore on D-Day, and like a great many men in his position, did not live to tell anybody about it. He left behind a young wife I never met, and they had not had any children by the time he shipped out. I have never been much on nominating any generation as intrinsically greater than any other, but I do feel that the living generations in this country need to work a little harder sometimes on living up to the sacrifice — for democratic values — that thousands of young guys like Orvid made.
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Now playing: Mojo Nixon - Elvis is Everywhere
via FoxyTunes

Not that I claim to be a great mind. Too much TV as a kid. (I owe my scintillating vocabulary all to Stan Lee and Marvel Comics.) At any rate, I wanted to highlight a couple of items sent in by readers:

1. Down in the previous post’s comments, Josh Brown reveals that the Republicans are invoking much BIGGER terror fears than even I previously suspected. Go look at the full-sized version. It’s much funnier than my post.

2. At the very respectable U.S. Intellectual History blog, they are discussing the politics of the new Star Trek reboot, even providing a sort of review of the scholarly literature on the young, vigorous [as in, roughly the same age as your host] science fiction franchise. It seems that the popular culture studies universe only recently got the memo about the original series being a tissue of American Cold War self-regard wrapped in the brightly colored synthetic fabric of liberal internationalism.  Did they miss the Kennedy-esque opening credit narration about how “we must be bold” to go “on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked?”

Now me, I am pretty sure the first time I actually heard JFK’s “New Frontier” speech or cracked a book on the Liberal Consensus, I was thinking, “That was just what Capt. Kirk would have said.” The discussion on the Intellectual History site has turned on whether New Kirk/Spock or the Avenging Romulan Mining Ship Captain represented George W. Bush throwing away his ancestral values in the name of revenge. Not sure about that myself — J.J. Abrams seems pretty eager to avoid any discernible political subtext or social commentary. The Federation’s quiet, if still largely white-guy-led, multiculturalism was present but updated nicely; Uhura and Spock got to make out more than Kirk, and not under mind control or reality alteration of any kind.

The new Star Trek also features a subtle subversion of the currently most prevalent form of cinematic racism, the typecasting of presumed Muslim actors as terrorists. The noble, steely captain of the first ship we saw destroyed, who sacrifices his life trying to save his crew, was played by Faran Tahir, a Pakistani-American actor that American audiences would probably instantly pick out as a terrorist if he showed up in any other action movie.  (In fact, he played the main terrorist villain in last year’s early summer hit Iron Man.) I’m not familiar enough with latter-day Trek lore to know whether that was Star Fleet’s first Muslim captain, but it was a nice touch in any case.

Just in time for a planned follow-up post to the one last week on fantasy-based politics, we have the spasm of fictionally-inspired idiocy over the Gitmo closure. Check that, according to the keyboard waggers at the New York Times, idiocy is now called a “singular political opportunity” for the Republicans.

Gitmo prisoner as envisioned by John McCain and friends

“Where are we going to send them?” Mr. McCain said in an interview on Fox News, just days after the inauguration. “That decision I would have made before I’d announced the closure.” Referring to the not-in-my-back-yard uproar over the proposed nuclear waste site in Nevada, he added: “You think Yucca Mountain is a Nimby problem? Wait until you see this one.”

. . . The conflagration has been fanned by the determined focus of Republican leaders, fed by the alarms of talk-show populists and aided by the miscalculation of a new president who set a date for a closing without announcing a detailed plan for the inmates. The debate now threatens to make it much harder for Mr. Obama to keep his campaign promise.

Armed with polling data that show a narrow majority of support for keeping the prison open and deep fear about the detainees, Republicans in Congress started laying plans even before the inauguration to make the debate over Guantánamo Bay a question of local community safety instead of one about national character and principles.

Talk radio and cable news hosts warned viewers that dangerous terrorists might end up in a neighborhood jail, with Sean Hannity of Fox News even broadcasting an online video from House Republican leaders that juxtaposed the security of the detainee camps with images of the twin towers in flames. And from California and Virginia to the small town of Hardin, Mont., Democratic lawmakers began fending off questions about whether they would admit terrorism suspects into their own communities.

Since presumably not even “talk-show populists” are claiming that Obama is going to place the “detainees” as 3rd-grade teachers in those local communities, the ever-so-deep fears in question would seem to turn almost wholly on the action movie and comic books trope of the superhuman killer that no prison can hold: through some combination of manipulation, luck, and mad skills, the mad dog will get loose and continue his criminal career, wiping out all his path. (Perhaps some sort of radiation-based powers will be involved, as McCain seems to suggest. Radioactive Man from the Iron Man comics [see image] was a Chinese Communist, which is pretty much the same thing, or plays the same function, in the GOP POV.)

More likely the scenario the Republicans want to suggest is some kind of Islamist version of Con Air. Unless you assume inevitable escape, it is hard to see a mechanism by which the Gitmo prisoners would threaten any American communities where they happen to be imprisoned. By this logic small-town Americans should be horrified at the idea of building any prisons in their communities, because that would amount to bringing rapists, murderers, and child molesters to live right there in River City or “the small town of Hardin, Mont.” On the contrary, small towns all over the country have competed to get prisons built to replace lost factory jobs.

In the real-life United States, escapes by well-known criminals or mass murderers from maximum-security prisons are incredibly rare, and long-term getaways almost unknown since Dillinger. Yet in fictional melodramas spectacular escapes have become almost the norm. Melodramas are usually only as good as their villains, and good villains are very difficult to create, so they tend to get reused. The trend probably started with comic-book supervillains who constantly came back for more. Where was Batman without the Joker every six months or so? Where was Spider-Man without the Green Goblin? (Actually, recurring villains probably goes back even further than that, to adventure comic strips in newspapers and the pulp novels that inspired them.)

The jailbreak habit was picked up in the 80s by a sequel-addicted Hollywood, and since then villains (and jeopardized heroes temporarily challenged by jail time) have been escaping as a regular, expected thing, even in non-sequels and non-serials. We in the audience know that any emphasis placed on the rigorousness of the prison’s security procedures is only setting us up to be more impressed with the character who inevitably breaks out. We’re just waiting to see how they do it. One of the most indelible and influential escape scenes ever filmed came in the period I am thinking of, involving one of filmdom’s most popular supervillains. That would be Dr. Hannibal Lecter in 1991’s Silence of the Lambs:

Now that I think about it, the trope of the escaping villain goes right along with the modern conservative drive to diminish everything government does, even if it is something they agree with, like punishing criminals. According to decades of conservative propaganda, reinforced by popular culture, the constitutional protections of the American legal system only serve to let clever criminals thwart justice. The elaborate prison cells that the Hannibal Lecters of fiction escape so easily serve as a semi-conscious metaphor for a democratic government’s supposed powerlessness against evil.

Next time I come back to this political fantasy theme, I promise to have an early American history angle. Certainly the problem goes all the way back, even if Jefferson and Jackson did not get their political fantasies from the movies.

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Now playing: The Exploding Hearts - Boulevard Trash

Facebook is constantly hectoring me about people’s birthdays, including that of my esteemed co-blogger, Professor Carp. Ben would probably not want me to festoon the site with clowns and balloons just for him, so I wondered, were there any famous early Americans (as opposed to early American-ists) born on May 20?  As turns out, none other than the lovely and talented  Stephen Girard, the Early Republic’s richest man and also the original limousine liberal — or to put it in period terms, its original carriage-and-six Democratic-Republican. With most merchants and financiers in the Federalist camp, Girard was a handy guy to have around when Republicans wanted to whip up an anti-Jay Treaty procession with the expected giant transparent cartoons lining the route. Those did not paint themselves, after all. His money was also helpful if you needed to a fight a second war with Great Britain after you let the national bank expire.

Here’s what Girard did in the latter case, in an excerpt from the very thorough site linked above:

After many attempts to shore up the finances of the Treasury Department, all of them failing, it became obvious to all government officials and Stephen Girard, that the United States would lose the war with the British unless a large infusion of money was made to the U.S. Treasury. In early 1813, the fears became fact: the U. S. Treasury had run out of money. Stephen Girard was the only one with the necessary cash to make the Treasury solvent once more. John Jacob Astor and a few other lesser financiers had committed to a part of the sum needed to help the Treasury, but their commitment fell far short of the sum needed to finance the war.

Without demanding the concessions from the government, concessions that he could readily have obtained, Girard displayed the courage and the patriotism that few others could or would. He risked his entire fortune in granting a loan to the Treasury in excess of eight million dollars. When his country was down and out, Girard came to the rescue.

Anyway, here’s a birthday salute to Stephen Girard’s millions, and Ben, of course, whose looks are holding up better than Girard’s.

P.S. It’s also the lovely and talented Dolley Madison’s birthday, as Ben points out, and Cher’s, whatever adjectives you want to use for her.

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Now playing: The Welcome Wagon - Sold! To the Nice Rich Man