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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of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation (2019) that in 1832 the South Carolina legislature said that, if not repealed, a federal tariff was null and void and a ground for secession.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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First Sentences

“There is a perennial temptation to read the greatness of distinguished men backward into their youth; to imagine that, if one just knows where to look, their early lives will provide evidence that the fully formed person was there in microcosm all along.” Troy Senik, A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland.

“Á filthy boy stood on the doorstep.” Zadie Smith, The Fraud.

“If you were searching for world-famous deep-sea monsters, a stately building at the top of a hill in Upsala, Sweden, is not the first place you’d look.” Susan Casey, The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean.

“This early, the East River takes on a thin layer of translucence, a bright steely skin that appears to float over the river itself as the water turns from its nocturnal black to the opaque deep green of the approaching day.” Michael Cunninghan, Day.

“A young woman sprinted ahead of the fleeing soldiers on the forest path, her long red hair streaming on the wind as if it were a banner urging them onward to escape their own destruction.” Peter Stark, Gallop Toward the Sun: Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison’s Struggle for the Destiny of a Nation.

“Needless to say, when Julia Prentice began to cast her huge, hazy eyes in the direction of my husband, I should have snapped to immediate attention. But at the moment I was too distracted thinking about her breasts.” Lindsay Maracotta, The Dead Hollywood Moms Society.

“European Wars would bookend Rudolf Diesel’s life.” Douglas Brunt, The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel: Genuis, Power, and Deception on the Eve of World War I.

“The night I watch Athena Liu die, we’re celebrating her TV deal with Netflix.” R.F. Kung, Yellowface.

“‘Please throw down the box.’” John Boessenecker, Gentleman Bandit: The True Story of Black Bart, the Old West’s Most Infamous Stagecoach Robber.

“Possum Creek trickles out of a swampy waste a little south of Raleigh.” Margaret Maron, Bootlegger’s Daughter: A Deborah Knott Mystery.

“Jim Wedick yanked at his collar as he walked across the parking lot toward the Thunderbird Motel, a sprawling Native American-themed lodge in suburban Minneapolis.” David Howard, Chasing Phil: The Adventures of Two Undercover Agents with the World’s Most Charming Con Man.

“In the drowsy heat of the summer afternoon the Red House was taking its siesta.” A.A. Milne, The Red House Mystery,

“Since first setting foot on the Te-Chag-U ranch, Gil Bonifácio Carvalho Neto had felt a growing sense of dread—but it was only after uncovering a hidden clearing in the jungle that he began to truly fear for his life.” Heriberto Araujo, Masters of the Lost Land: The Untold Story of the Amazon and the Violent Fight for the World’s Last Frontier.