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Snippets (Tariffs and Other Stuff)

Tariffs were controversial before the Civil War. Their benefits and detriments were not equal throughout the country. Brenda Wineapple reports in The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation (2019) that in 1832 the South Carolina legislature said that, if not repealed, a federal tariff was null and void and a ground for secession.

Tariffs were also controversial after the Civil War. They were the chief source of federal revenues until the early twentieth century. The issue was not whether tariffs should be applied but at what rate. As Troy Senik wrote in A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland (2023), tariffs had conflicting goals. Should they only be high enough to fund government or go further to protect American industry from ruinous foreign competition? Industry was best protected when tariffs were so high that almost no foreign goods were imported, but then little revenue was collected. On the other hand, tariffs set best for funding the government did not protect industry as much as higher taxes.

Troy Senik also says that Grover Cleveland correctly saw another conflict in tariffs: They helped to raise wages in protected industries, but this gain was offset by higher prices workers had to pay for goods

Friends talk about fleeing to Canada. But what is the point if Canada becomes the 51st state?

No friend talks about fleeing to Greenland. Perhaps that will be different when Trump builds Mar-a-Lago Northeast there.

Deputy Attorney Genereal Todd Blanche said recently that the Justice Department is opening a criminal investigation into a leak of “inaccurate, but nevertheless classified” intelligence about the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. It comes as a shock that anyone in the Trump administration wants to keep false information secret.

Present policies show that the Republican party has abandoned much of what Ronald Reagan stood for. Nicole Hemmer in Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s states that Reagan, fueled by anticommunism, had “a preference for more open borders and higher immigration levels, for fewer tariffs[,] a stingier social net, [as well as] a more aggressive posture toward the Soviet Union.”

Under Reagan, the federal workforce grew by 200,000.

Because of tariffs, the United States has intervened militarily and politically in foreign countries. Sean Mirski in We May Dominate the World: Ambition, Anxiety, and Rise of the American Colossus (2023) maintains that our interventions in Latin America at the turn of 20th century and beyond were not primarily to protect American business interests but rather to keep European governments outside the hemisphere. Some Latin American countries borrowed profligately from Europe and often could not pay the money back. Under international law, the lender countries were entitled to use force to service the debts. This was often a simple procedure: Seize the customhouse and collect the tariffs. The United States was concerned about this potential European presence in the Americas and feared further that the Latin American countries would grant the Europeans concessions that would disfavor the United States. Consequently, the United States thought it was better to intervene in the debtor nations and use the customs revenues to pay the Europeans. Frequently, this was good for the invaded country since the Americans did not skim from the tariffs, or at least not as much as before, and the Latin American country often saw its revenues increase. Moreover, Europe learned that interventions in the Western Hemisphere were expensive. The European powers then often blustered about intervening to get America to do the expensive work. America soon recognized that the problems would recur unless the debtor countries became stable and lived within their means. As a result, the United States became more and more involved in the internal affairs of Latin American countries.

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Snippets

I told Lisa the librarian that I thought that all librarians should be named Marian. To my surprise, she did not know the reference.

Steve Bannon on his podcast said: “A lot of MAGAs on Medicaid. . . . Medicaid is going to be a complicated one. Just can’t take a meat ax to it, although I would love to.” How revealing. Bannon, and no doubt many like him, are not concerned about our healthcare system generally, and certainly not about healthcare for those in the country’s bottom economic quarter. (Almost 25% of Americans get assistance from Medicaid.) He is only concerned because many Trump supporters get Medicaid. (If they weren’t MAGA, would he describe them as on the government dole?) Otherwise, he would only want to destroy Medicaid.

Congressman Rich McCormick, a Republican from Georgia, said that the GOP could do a better job of showing “compassion.” Is there a compassion switch? Can you “show compassion” if you don’t have it in the first place?

“All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.” John Arbuthnot.

The fired government workers do get compassion from many, as they should. Most government employees, like most Americans, live paycheck to paycheck, and the sudden loss of a job for them and their families is a tragedy many of us can immediately comprehend. What we don’t see is the harm down the road. What are the consequences if weather forecasts become worse, or if waiting times at VA hospitals are longer? How do you measure what is foregone from lost medical research or the increase in waste, fraud, and corruption that results from fired IRS workers?

We may not know precisely what is lost from the firings, but we know that foreseeable losses will come. On the other hand, there are always unintended consequences that are not foreseen. I was reminded of that from Troy Senik’s biography, A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland. Senik writes that the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 sought to eliminate patronage for appointment to government jobs. Under the patronage system, those who got employment were assessed a portion of their salaries to kick back to the political parties who secured the positions. Senik says that it was estimated that up to 75% of party funding came from such assessments. With that spigot turned off, parties turned to wealthy individuals and interest groups to fund electoral politics. Thus, job appointments based on merit had the unintended consequence of providing more power to the rich.

V13: Chronicle of a Trial, a magnificent book by Emmanuel Carrère (translated from the French by John Lambert), contains compassion, but also horror, inhumanity, humanity, bewilderment, and much more. On November 13, 2015, jihadists launched attacks in Paris. Luckily, if there was anything like luck that day, suicide bombers arrived late to a packed football game and could not get in. They blew themselves up outside where the crowds were thin. Others allied with them shot randomly at restaurant terraces and cafes killing more, but the major carnage was at the Bataclan theatre, a concert venue of 1,500 hosting apparently a mediocre American rock group, Eagles of Death Metal. Nearly a hundred people were slaughtered in the hall. Six years later a trial started, which took on the name V13, for Friday (Vendredi) the Thirteenth, the day of the attack. Carrère reported on the nine-month trial for a French magazine, and those columns form the basis of the book. At times extremely hard to read (“confetti of human flesh”) but always compelling, V13 is remarkable. Reading it now, I could not help but think about October 7 and its aftermath. One of those on trial in Paris (the defendants were all second stringers since all those who did the actual killing were dead) maintained that the massacres were in response to the loss of innocent lives in Syria from French bombings and said, “Everything you say about us jihadists is like reading the last page of a book. What you should do is read the book from the start.”

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A Day for Presidents

Ulysses S. Grant liked to say that he knew two songs. One was “Yankee Doodle” and the other was not.

John Ganz in When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s (2024) says that George H.W. “Bush was the representative of a class bred to govern, not to lead.”

Grover Cleveland vetoed more bills in his first term than all previous presidents combined. (Many, however, were private pension bills.)Troy Senik, A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland.

Lincoln said about General Phil Sheridan, who had a distinctive body, that he was a “chunky little chap, with a long body, short legs, not enough neck to hang him, and such long arms that if his ankles itch, he can scratch them without stooping.”Scott W. Berg, The Burning of the World: The Great Chicago Fire and the War for a City’s Soul (2023).

Warren Harding, when President, privately said that his vote for World War I was a mistake. Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis (2022).

Nicole Hemmer in Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s summarizes President Ronald Reagan as being fueled by anticommunism, which gave him “a preference for more-open borders and higher immigration levels, for fewer tariffs and a stingier social net. Anticommunism mattered more to him than democracy or small government. He wanted a sharp increase in military spending, a more aggressive posture toward the Soviet Union, and more extensive aid to right-wing illiberal regimes in place in South and Central America and Southern Africa.”

Hemmer also reports that Reagan’s 1980 presidential race was the first with a partisan gender gap.

Jill Lepore in These Truths: A History of the United States (2018) reminded me that Reagan, in response to Black Panthers, said there is no reason why anyone should carry a loaded gun on the streets.

Joshua L. Powell writes in Inside the NRA: A Tell-All Account of Corruption, Greed, and Paranoia within the Most Powerful Political Group in America (2020) that gun owners voted for George W. Bush by 25 points over Al Gore.

Al Gore is younger than Donald Trump.

Ted Widmer in Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington (2020) refers to a historian who said that to discuss Millard Fillmore was to overrate him.

One modern president who was religious believed strongly in the separation of church and state. Jonathan Alter writes in His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life (2020) that when he was the Georgia governor, Carter canceled a weekly worship service for government employees because it violated separation of church and state. President Carter did not allow religious sermons in the White House because of separation of church and state.

Jill Lepore states in These Truths: A History of the United States (2018) that Lyndon Johnson had broad support among evangelicals in 1964.

Something that would not happen today: Doris Kearns Goodwin reports in An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s that she thought that she would lose her position as a White House Fellow in 1967 because she had co-authored a piece in The New Republic titled “How to Remove LBJ in 1968.”

Jonathan Alter maintains that Jimmy Carter had a photographic memory for names, which reminded me of a story a former colleague told me. Ed grew up in a small Arkansas town where his parents had a modest, but successful, business. When Bill Clinton ran for state attorney general, Ed’s parents attended a fundraiser in their hometown for the candidate. Eight years later, when Clinton was out of office between his non-consecutive gubernatorial terms, Ed’s parents were in Washington, D.C. They spotted Clinton on the opposite sidewalk. They debated whether they should go up to him because of their one meeting. Before they had made a decision, Clinton strode across the Georgetown street, stuck out his hand, and greeted Ed’s parents by their first and last names.

This is not the first time we have had an administration with strange opinions about vaccinations. Jill Lepore in These Truths: A History of the United States (2018) states that Dwight Eisenhower and his Health Secretary said that the free distribution of the polio vaccine was socialized medicine.

According to Timothy Snyder in The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018), Trump in 2016 did best in counties with a public health crisis, especially where the suicide rate and opioid use was high.

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Tommy Orange and Richard Henry Pratt

Tommy Orange places Richard Henry Pratt in the backstory to his novel Wandering Stars, a sequel to his award-winning There There about American Indians in Oakland, California.

The nonfictional Pratt had been a soldier who fought for the North in the Civil War and then served in the West pursuing, fighting, and negotiating with Indians. He was the primary force behind the famous Carlisle Indian school, whose philosophy influenced many other Indian schools established by the federal government. Pratt believed that Indians were deserving of a place in American society and that racial differences were not innate but the product of environmental factors. He believed that Indians could–and should–integrate into mainstream white society, but here was the catch: He thought this was possible only if the Indians abandoned their tribal communities and culture.

Pratt’s theories required a school away from the native lands. The Carlisle Barracks were an old twenty-seven-acre army installation. They had been damaged in the Civil War and then abandoned. Pratt talked the Army into allowing him to set up the school in the sixteen buildings that needed renovations. Almost immediately, Pratt constructed a seven-foot fence around the property as both a screen against sightseers—the townsfolk were curious about the young Indians—and to control the students.

The school separated both boy and girl students from their language. They were to speak only English. Uttering a native language was punished, and students from the same tribes were scattered among separate dormitories to break up tribal culture.

The students were also separated from their names, partly because the white teachers could not pronounce Indian names, but also to remove another aspect of their Indianness. As Sally Jenkins put it in The Real All Americans: The Team that Changed a Game, a People, a Nation (2007), when they had new, Americanized names, another “piece of their Indian selves had been taken away.”

The males were separated from their hair and that, too, separated them from their heritage. Jenkins reports that braids were a symbol of maturity for Lakotas, who only cut their hair when in deep mourning.

And they were separated from their traditional clothing, often colorful and distinctive. Instead, they all had to dress in drab uniforms, and the students became “an indistinguishable gray mass with no discernible outward differences.”

The very nature of the school itself, however, separated the students from a fundamental aspect of their heritage. Indian tribes had varied cultural differences, Jacqueline Fear-Segal reports in White Man’s Club: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation (2007), but in no Indian community was education a discrete endeavor conducted in a separate institution or by “teachers.” Education was woven into everyday patterns of living and took place informally in daily interactions.

The school took an undeniable personal toll on students: it erased their personal histories, sundered families, and obliterated their languages, faiths, and traditions. The goal was not to kill a people, but even so, the goal was to wipe out the Native Americans and replace them with something else.

 The school taught subjects whose successful completion was supposed to be equal to an eighth-grade education, but the students were also taught trades and agriculture. To further this training, the Carlisle school had an “outing” program where students were sent to work and board with local families. Students were thus to be introduced to American society and taught to be wage earners. As with much at the Carlisle Indian school, the outing program had mixed consequences. Many of the white families treated the students well, and lifelong bonds were often formed. Other families, however, merely saw a source of low-wage labor.

The influence of the Carlisle school began to wane in the early twentieth century for two reasons. First, sentiment against off-reservation schools began to build. Moreover, Richard Henry Pratt, who apparently found it difficult to act diplomatically with his superiors in Washington, was removed as head of the school in 1904. He was followed by administrators with little ability. The school was finally shuttered in August 1918 and converted to a hospital for wounded soldiers returning from World War I.

The school’s legacy is mixed. Many who passed through its gates praised it; many condemned it. Although the students were encouraged to remain in the East after leaving the school, the vast majority returned to the reservations, many of whom went back “to the blanket.” Jenkins suggests that as an educational school, Carlisle was not a success. Of the 8500 students who passed through Carlisle, only 741 received degrees. However, many others also went on to graduate from public school, which Pratt counted as successes. From its inception, Pratt thought that the school should only be temporary and wanted Indians integrated into white society and enrolled in public schools. Jenkins, however, also concludes that the Carlisle Indian Industrial School was successful as a training institution: “[T]he federal Indian agencies were full of Carlisle graduates working as teachers, clerks, interpreters, police, lawyers, blacksmiths, farmers, bakers, and tailors.”

Overall, however, the Indian school movement has increasingly been seen as a well-meant mistake. Jenkins says,  “Like so many other federal experiments regarding the Indians, what in 1879 was seen as a creative solution had come to seem wrongheaded. Humanitarians argued that removing children from their homes was cruel and counterproductive. Still others believed that Carlisle created false expectations and that it ill-equipped students for the grim realities of life back home. The school took an undeniable personal toll on students: it razed their personal histories, sundered families, and obliterated their languages, faiths, and traditions.”

The obliteration of language, clothing, hair styles, and other cultural hallmarks may have made sense when the goal was to integrate American Indians into the economy and culture of European-Americans, but the policies went beyond that goal. Not just Pratt, but European descendants more generally, seemed almost personally and morally offended by communal practices of indigenous peoples who believed that land could not be owned by individuals. For them, the land was shared by all. European-Americans, however, believed that freedom and a sound economy depended on private property. Thus, Troy Senik writes in A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland that Cleveland did not seek to eliminate Indians. He believed in assimilation by which he meant education and speaking. But most important, Cleveland felt, the collective ownership of land by Indians must end.

This antipathy to shared or non-ownership of the land was not simply a product of America’s post-Civil War Gilded Age. Peter Stark in Gallop Toward the Sun: Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison’s Struggle for the Destiny of a Nation says that a chief goal of Harrison’s dealings with Indians on what was then the Illinois frontier was to end collective land ownership. When Pratt taught his students that they must give up communal lands, he was only teaching what government officials had been trying to accomplish for a century and were implementing across the continent. Shared lands on western reservations were broken up into parcels of private ownership. Jenkins notes that the U.S. government did not believe in sharing or communalism; it believed in private property. An Indian needed to be taught out West and at Carlisle “so that he will say ‘I’ instead of ‘We’ and ‘This is mine’ instead of ‘This is ours.’”

Why did the European-Americans have such antipathy to communalism? I don’t know, but I believe it is a thread that runs through much of American history and is not limited to relationships to American Indians. Perhaps someone can point me to good studies on the subject. But I do wonder if our world might not be better if we thought more about this earth in terms of “we” and “ours” instead of “I” and “mine.”

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Snippets

I get e-books from the New York Public Library. If the book is not immediately available, it is reserved and I get a message indicating, not very accurately, what the wait will be. Right now I have a reservation for A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland by Troy Senit. The library notice tells me that the biography will be “available for checkout in less that 23 days.” From my grade school grammar, I was taught that less is wrong here and should be replaced with fewer. But this comes from the New York Public Library. Surely they know better than I (not me.) Do I not remember my grammar, or has it changed? I was struck by this question when I heard an NFL ad that was a warning about betting. It said that about 25% of pro football games are decided “by three points or fewer.”

A wise observer said, “I feel that progress is being made when people agree with my ideas.”

I just finished reading The Red House Mystery. It was written by A.A. Milne. Yes, that A.A. Milne. (Is there another?) And yes, it is a mystery. Who knew?

I was in the hardware store buying a mousetrap because even though the neighborhood has become more upscale, every so often the little furry creatures get in the house. As the store clerk put my purchase in a bag, he told me to bait the trap with peanut butter. I replied that sometimes I use chocolate peanut butter. He exclaimed, “No, no, no! For Fort Greene mice you now have to use organic peanut butter.”

Another sage observation: “We like to have people come right out and say what they think, when they agree with us.”

You attend a classical concert. You know that an acquaintance has also gone to that performance, but you don’t see each other exiting. It is always interesting to see the reaction of that person when you meet again by saying, “What? You stayed for the Debussy after that Mahler?”

What is Beethoven doing now? Decomposing.

Although the spouse and I had partaken of a few finger foods at the reception after the dance performance, we were still hungry. We walked into an Italian restaurant around the corner from the Mark Morris Dance Center, but it was too noisy for our liking. We passed a Mexican place and entered a Haitian restaurant—I think its name is the same as its address, 33 Lafayette—and were quickly seated by a gracious host. We later learned that he was a co-owner. I thought that a couple of appetizers would suffice and ordered coconut shrimp, which were divine, and smoked herring in plantain cups. I associate herring with northern climes, and the menu said that the fish were from Canada. I told the host that I was surprised to find a Haitian restaurant offering herring. He replied that Haitians regularly eat herring and have it even with spaghetti and pizza. He said it might have entered Haiti’s cuisine when Haiti opened its doors to European Jews before World War II. Who knew? But I later learned that you can find many Haitian herring recipes online. I don’t plan to try them.

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Lew’s Judah (concluded)

Civil War general and author Lew Wallace left the governorship of the New Mexico territory in 1881, but not to retire to domesticity. President James Garfield had read Wallace’s Ben-Hur shortly after its 1880 publication and became convinced that the author had a deep understanding of the eastern Mediterranean. Garfield appointed the author to be U.S. Minister to the Ottoman Empire in Constantinople.

The story goes that after his formal introduction to the Turkish Sultan, Wallace extended his hand to shake. The courtiers were aghast; no one touched the Sultan, much less a Christian. The Sultan, however, when he understood Wallace’s gesture, took his hand, and the two developed a close relationship.

Besides his diplomatic duties, Wallace toured the Holy Land. He had described it in Ben-Hur only from research, but he felt that his representations stood up to the first-hand observations and changed nothing in subsequent editions of the book. He toured parts of the Ottoman empire and drew upon these travels for his book The Prince of India; or Why Constantinople Fell, which he published in 1893 and thought his best novel.

The election of Grover Cleveland ended Wallace’s diplomatic career in 1885. The Sultan supposedly wished for Wallace to work for the Ottoman empire, but Wallace, still in his fifties, returned to Crawfordsville where he lived for the rest of his life.

He constructed a study outside his Indiana home. At first it was surrounded by a moat, which was stocked so that he could fish from it. He later filled it in because he thought it endangered children. It still stands now as the Lew Wallace Study and Museum, where his painting of the Lincoln conspirators is hung.

The remarkable man continued to write, publishing several more books, but he also displayed another talent later in his life — that of inventor. He obtained eight patents, including one for a travel fishing rod and reel. He died in 1905 working on his autobiography, which his wife finished after his death.

And now I have finally read his most noted accomplishment, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Well, not every word of it. Wallace’s research shows itself in the novel through many lengthy descriptions of such things as galley ships, stadiums, customs, and geography. These sometimes go on for pages and pages. I confess that I skimmed many of those as well as the long descriptive paragraphs that introduced each character. (Wallace certainly did not believe the advice given by the successful writer to the fledgling one in Who Is Maud Dixon? by Alexandra Andrews: “You only need to give one or two details about a character’s physical appearance. It’s all the reader needs to build an image in her mind. Anything more is a distraction.)

The subtitle may indicate that Jesus is a central figure in the book, but that is not so. We read of his birth (in a cave, and he is not laid in a manger) that draws on the Bible, and we encounter him as a youth, but he then disappears until he emerges again near the end of the lengthy book. Mostly, the book reads like a typical nineteenth century adventure story, although it is better written than others I have read.

The plot in brief: The princely, Jewish Judah Ben-Hur is sent off as a slave to galley ships after he almost kills a Roman governor accidentally. His family estate is confiscated. His mother and sister are imprisoned and catch leprosy. Ben-Hur miraculously escapes from a galley ship during a battle. He saves a rich Roman, who adopts him. He trains to be a warrior and charioteer. He cripples a hated Roman in the famous chariot scene. Perhaps this book is ultimately about love and forgiveness, but if so, only after Ben-Hur exacts revenge on those who wrecked his and his family’s lives. Of course, there are two beautiful women, one of whom the readers know is not a good person — not the right one for Judah — while, of course, the other beauty is.

Eventually, Judah begins to follow Jesus as Jesus begins his public ministry. Judah at first believes Jesus will become a king who will overthrow the hated Romans. Gradually, however, Ben-Hur realizes that Jesus is offering a paradise not of this earth. We can breathe a sigh of relief that Judah ends up with beautiful, virtuous Esther and that with his riches, because of his new faith, he does good works.

Although it sounds like something planted by a modern public relations flack to sell books, it is said that Lew Wallace found his faith in writing the book. It did not have the same effect on me. However, while most of the book seemed a cut above ordinary, the description of the crucifixion, which follows the Bible closely, was both moving and powerful.

So…Lew Wallace, writer, illustrator, general, governor, diplomat, and inventor. A full life and a legacy that lives on in Ben-Hur.