The recent right-wing temper tantrum over health care reform bears an interesting resemblance to this 1961 recording, Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine:
The LP was part of Operation Coffee Cup, an early 1960s campaign developed by public relations consultants for the American Medical Association in opposition to the creation of Medicare for seniors. On the LP, Reagan engages in gloom and doom rhetoric, warning his listeners that if they fail stop the creation of Medicare "you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free." Reagan not only warns that the government will command doctors where they can practice medicine, but that in the future, children will have their professions chosen for them by government schools.
Needless to say, Reagan's alarmist predictions turned out to have zero validity. In fact, Medicare has been so unobtrusively integrated into the fabric of American life that health care reform opponents are now engaged in widespread denial that Medicare is a government program. The same reactionary elements who cried socialism in opposition to Medicare in the early 1960s are now wailing against socialism while simultaneously claiming to be defending Medicare. The hypocrisy is galling, of course, but then again, I can see no better illustration of how conservatism consistently fails to accept when its premises have been disproven.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Monday, August 10, 2009
Lou Dobbs and Horse Show Hypocrisy
This weekend my wife, my mother, and I went to the New Jersey State Fair. While I was there, I learned that fair included a horse show. According to my farm show brochure, one of the horse show events with the biggest prizes is the $10,000 Lou Dobbs Tonight Show Jumping Hall of Fame Amateur-Owner Classic, named after CNN commentator Lou Dobbs. Now what gets me is that Lou Dobbs claims to be this populist tribune of the middle class, but he obviously has lots of money to throw around on the economically elite hobby of amateur horse raising. According to this gossip column in the Philadelphia Daily News, Lou's daughter Hillary Dobbs won several awards at the Devon Horse Show shortly after finishing her finals at Harvard. Ironically, Hillary won those awards while riding a German pony paid with money that her father earns by bashing immigrants for stealing American jobs! (What happened, Mr. Buy American? American ponies not good enough for your daughter, Lou?)
Lou Dobbs went from being a pioneer of financial journalism on cable news to turning into an anti-immigrant blowhard and bully. Yet, as he gets richer jumping on the anti-immigrant bandwagon, he still funds a subculture of rich amateur horse enthusiasts who rely on illegal immigrant labor. According to Vicky Moon's book, A Sunday Horse: Inside the Grand Prix Show Jumping Circuit, "This melting pot of international equine aficionados does not include the countless numbers of illegal Spanish-speaking immigrants who shovel the 40 tons of poop a day." Yet no matter how much poop those show horses produce, it still doesn't stink as much as the hypocrisy of Lou Dobbs calling for the mass deportation of immigrants who have made his daughter's opulent lifestyle possible.
Lou Dobbs went from being a pioneer of financial journalism on cable news to turning into an anti-immigrant blowhard and bully. Yet, as he gets richer jumping on the anti-immigrant bandwagon, he still funds a subculture of rich amateur horse enthusiasts who rely on illegal immigrant labor. According to Vicky Moon's book, A Sunday Horse: Inside the Grand Prix Show Jumping Circuit, "This melting pot of international equine aficionados does not include the countless numbers of illegal Spanish-speaking immigrants who shovel the 40 tons of poop a day." Yet no matter how much poop those show horses produce, it still doesn't stink as much as the hypocrisy of Lou Dobbs calling for the mass deportation of immigrants who have made his daughter's opulent lifestyle possible.
Monday, August 3, 2009
American Axis: Henry Ford's Nazi Connection
I don't have much to add to this newspaper clipping, other than to mention that it was taken from page 4 of the December 28, 1922 issue of the Fort-Wayne News Sentinel. Evidently, rumors of Henry Ford's financing of Hitler were active as early as the 1920s, when there was simultaneously speculation about Henry Ford running as a candidate for president.
More Vintage Walter Cronkite
Here's another United Press story from Walter Cronkite's days as a correspondent with that wire service. It's dated March 11, 1941, from the Evansville Intelligencer. According to the story, the Czech figure skater Vera Hruba received 2600 marriage proposals after she was temporarily threatened with deportation from the United States. According to Miss Hruba, "I got a letter from a convict in Texas who said he had 14 more days to serve on a 10-year sentence for killing somebody, and that he'd be glad to marry me. Another said that he was 32, good-natured and handsome, but that he thought it was only fair to tell me that he was drunk all the time." For his own part, Cronkite describes Hruba as a "beautiful and shapely girl with a pronounced accent," a description you would most definitely not find most newspapers these days. Cronkite does not provide context about why Hruba fled Czechoslovakia to go the United States, but her Wikipedia entry states that Hitler asked her at the 1936 Olympics to "skate for the swastika." Miss Hruba then told Hitler that she would rather "skate on the swastika." Later on, after becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen, Hruba adopted the name Vera Ralston and had a brief movie career that lasted from the 1940s to the early 1950s.
Why No USS Bill Clinton?
The blog Lawyers, Guns, & Money has a great post about the politics of naming military warships. It turns out, no big surprise, that most of the military hardware is named after Republicans. Most of the Democrats who have ships named after them were Southern Democrats, typically of the segregationist variety, who are thankfully no longer part of the Democratic coalition. As one of the commenters noted, there isn't even a single warship named after a supporter of the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. Before even considering naming an aircraft carrier after Barry Goldwater, we should commission the USS Lyndon Baines Johnson or the USS Bill Clinton first.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
America's Oldest Surviving Slave
Lately, I've been thinking lately about how the process of collective memory works. The older generation creates history. The next generation remembers that history. Then, as the older generation dies off, the history they created slowly fades away until nobody has any living memory of it.
I bring this up, because I find it amazing how close we are historically to the pre-Civil War era of slavery. In fact, the old age and death of most of the survivors of the antebellum slavery era may have been a necessary condition before the civil rights movement finally achieved its major victories in the 1960s.
One way to demonstrate how close we are historically to the institution of slavery is to examine the question of who was the last living African-American who was born a slave. The question may never have a truly definitive answer, because most slaves never had proper birth records. In practice, this meant that there were multiple candidates who claimed to be the last living American slave, but some candidates were more credible than others.
When Charlie Smith of Bartow, Florida died in 1979, he still claimed he was born in Liberia in 1862, then lured into slavery by an illegal slave ship. According to a thesis I found on the Internet, African American Longevity Advantage: Myth or Reality?, however, Mr. Smith's real age at death was closer to 100 or 105, according to marriage and census records. Since Mr. Smith's age would have placed his date of birth approximately sometime between 1874 and 1879, his claim to being a slave fell apart under the scrutiny.
The more plausible claimants to being the oldest slave in the United States were more likely to approach 110 years of age than to claim they were over 130 years old, as Charlie Smith did. In a 1951 issue of a North Carolina newspaper, I found a reference to Alfred Blackburn, who died at the age of 109, as the oldest surviving slave in the state of North Carolina, although not the United States as a whole.
In addition, I found a second story from 1966 about a women named Mary Walker from Chattanooga, Tennessee who was certified as "America's oldest student" when she learned to read at the age of approximately 116 years old. According to the article, she outlived a son who died in his nineties, so her claim is definitely the most credible I've seen. Even if she was "merely" 110 years old at the time, it's possible that she would still be the most credible claimant to being the world's oldest slave. In fact, according to this article from a Chattanooga paper that I found on an African-American genealogical bulletin board, Mary Walker even had a family Bible where she recorded the births of her children, which could verify her story.
The last claimant I could find came from an ad I found on Amazon.com for a very rare commemorative booklet that was given out at the 1963 March on Washington where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. Unfortunately, the booklet is no longer for sale, but the old listing states that there was a collage dedicated to Josephus, a man whom the march organizers designated as the "last living slave" in the United States (although Mary Walker was still alive in 1963 as well).
In the final analysis, it may not matter that we don't have a definitive answer about the last surviving slave in the United States. What matters is that there are centenarians who have not only endured centuries of discrimination, but thrived. Perhaps what matters is not who was the oldest surviving slave, but that the oldest slave long outlive the oldest slavemaster.
I bring this up, because I find it amazing how close we are historically to the pre-Civil War era of slavery. In fact, the old age and death of most of the survivors of the antebellum slavery era may have been a necessary condition before the civil rights movement finally achieved its major victories in the 1960s.
One way to demonstrate how close we are historically to the institution of slavery is to examine the question of who was the last living African-American who was born a slave. The question may never have a truly definitive answer, because most slaves never had proper birth records. In practice, this meant that there were multiple candidates who claimed to be the last living American slave, but some candidates were more credible than others.
When Charlie Smith of Bartow, Florida died in 1979, he still claimed he was born in Liberia in 1862, then lured into slavery by an illegal slave ship. According to a thesis I found on the Internet, African American Longevity Advantage: Myth or Reality?, however, Mr. Smith's real age at death was closer to 100 or 105, according to marriage and census records. Since Mr. Smith's age would have placed his date of birth approximately sometime between 1874 and 1879, his claim to being a slave fell apart under the scrutiny.
The more plausible claimants to being the oldest slave in the United States were more likely to approach 110 years of age than to claim they were over 130 years old, as Charlie Smith did. In a 1951 issue of a North Carolina newspaper, I found a reference to Alfred Blackburn, who died at the age of 109, as the oldest surviving slave in the state of North Carolina, although not the United States as a whole.
In addition, I found a second story from 1966 about a women named Mary Walker from Chattanooga, Tennessee who was certified as "America's oldest student" when she learned to read at the age of approximately 116 years old. According to the article, she outlived a son who died in his nineties, so her claim is definitely the most credible I've seen. Even if she was "merely" 110 years old at the time, it's possible that she would still be the most credible claimant to being the world's oldest slave. In fact, according to this article from a Chattanooga paper that I found on an African-American genealogical bulletin board, Mary Walker even had a family Bible where she recorded the births of her children, which could verify her story.
The last claimant I could find came from an ad I found on Amazon.com for a very rare commemorative booklet that was given out at the 1963 March on Washington where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. Unfortunately, the booklet is no longer for sale, but the old listing states that there was a collage dedicated to Josephus, a man whom the march organizers designated as the "last living slave" in the United States (although Mary Walker was still alive in 1963 as well).
In the final analysis, it may not matter that we don't have a definitive answer about the last surviving slave in the United States. What matters is that there are centenarians who have not only endured centuries of discrimination, but thrived. Perhaps what matters is not who was the oldest surviving slave, but that the oldest slave long outlive the oldest slavemaster.
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