Steve Goddard's History Wire

Historians, Legal Experts Debate Supreme Court's Reliance On "Original Meaning"

The Los Angeles Times:

"Washington -- In 1985, President Reagan's attorney general, Edwin Meese III, criticized the Supreme Court's decisions and called on the justices to decide cases based on the 'original intent' of the Constitution. The justices were wrong to rely on contemporary views of liberty and equality, Meese said; instead, they should rely on the understanding of those concepts in the late 18th century, when the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were written.

"This year the Supreme Court relied more than ever on history and the original meaning of the Constitution in deciding its major cases. In doing so, however, the court has drawn criticism from some historians and legal experts who say the justices' readings of history were less than scholarly. And the justices sometimes disagreed sharply on the historical record, demonstrating that divining the original meaning of the Constitution is no small matter."

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Book Alert / Robert F. Kennedy and the 1968 Indiana Primary

Robert F. Kennedy and the 1968 Indiana Primary by Ray E. Boomhower, Indiana UP '08, $21.95, 173 pages, ISBN #0253350891. Index, bibliography, source notes, grouping of b&w glossy images.

For those who lived through the horrific year of 1968 and remember the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, one indelible memory of that brutal Apr. 4 evening is video footage taken in Indianapolis, when Sen. Robert F. Kennedy -- newly arrived in Indiana to campaign for his party's presidential nomination -- broke the news of King's death to a largely-black audience and appealed for calm.

The night before, King had foreshadowed his death by declaring to an assemblage, "I may not get there (to the promised land) with you." While Kennedy's brief speech was off-the-cuff, it was one of his best. To those who would call his appeal for restraint presumptuous because of his race, he reminded them that his brother and Dr. King were each killed by white men.

"What we need in the United States is not division;" Kennedy said, "what we need in the  United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawfulness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a  feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black." His words were greeted with applause and cheers.

Indiana historian Ray  E. Boomhower's book relates the saga of Robert F. Kennedy's Indiana  primary campaign during that fateful spring, as RFK and Sen. Eugene McCarthy battled for the Democratic campaign. While JFK had fallen to an assassin's bullet, no one even thought to suggest that the same fate might await his brother.

Book Alert / The Senator and the Sharecropper

The Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland & Fannie Lou Hamer by Chris Myers Asch, The New Press '08, $27.95, 368 pages, ISBN #1595583327. Index, source notes, no bibliography, grouping of b&w images.

Soon after he began teaching in Sunflower County, MS, Chris Myers Asch and his black students were playing catch on the front lawn of his rented house when "a petite, silver-haired white woman with a syrupy drawl" drew up in her Mercedes. The woman, who was also the town mayor, told Asch, "You know they're not supposed to be here. You're going to catch a lot of flak." His house, Asch soon found out, was on the "white folks part" of town, and by an unwritten rule, blacks were forbidden there unless they worked for a white family."

Within minutes, three men arrived on Asch's lawn, "screaming racial epithets as they charged at my students." The largest among them, who turned out to be the mayor's husband, growled, "I don't care  if they're good kids. I send my kids to Indianola Academy (an all-white private school nearby) to get away from those sons of bitches."

One might think Asch's anecdote was from the 1950s, when some of the most virulent racism in our history took place in Mississippi. In fact, it happened in 1994, long after the freedom marches, school sit-ins, voter registration projects, Supreme Court rulings and Congressional civil rights acts had supposedly paved the way for a race-blind society.

That Sunflower County remains segregated in many ways today is a theme of Asch's new book, in which he uses the lives of two iconic Mississippians -- Fannie Lou Hamer and Sen. James O. Eastland -- to describe how the state came to be as it is and the effect of governmental edicts and globalization upon its lifestyle and troubled economy. Hamer, who sprang from a dirt-poor childhood, became the spiritual leader of the Mississippi freedom struggle, while Eastland as a senator was one of the most resistant to social change.

Book Alert / Tortilla Chronicles

Tortilla Chronicles -- Growing Up in Santa Fe by Marie Romero Cash, UNew Mexico '08, 181 pages, ISBN #0826339123.

Folk artist Marie Romero Cash has written not only a love letter to her warm, embracing family but to Santa Fe, the New Mexico city of her birth and, she forecasts, of her death as well. Readers with children far away from the place of their birth can learn a lesson from Marie's mother, who used to send her daughter "care packages -- a dozen tortillas, a couple of jars of red chile, and a box of biscochitos," all the makings for enchiladas and a reminder of the richness that awaits back home.

Cash skillfullly limns life in Santa Fee itself -- its streets, shops, plaza and surrounding hills and arroyos. "The ancestry and rituals of family life, the culture and religion of northern New Mexico, and the growth of a neighborhood and its children are all part of the recipe."

Book Alert / Isherwood on Writing

Isherwood on Writing by Christopher Isherwood, edited by James J. Berg, foreward by Claude J. Summers, Minnesota UP '07, $25.95, 274 pages, ISBN #0816646937. Index, editor's notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

Every writer, it could be said, reflects his or her times. But some perhaps more than others. Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) began as a novelist but changed his focus in midlife by helping usher the memoir into the modern era. Add to this that Isherwood was a gay man courageous enough to write on gay themes during the conservative and repressive 1950s.

In the 1960s, he gave a series of lectures at California universities, entitled broadly, "A Writer and His World." Isherwood's breadth of interest is illustrated by his lecture topics: "Why Write At All?," "What Is the Nerve of Interest in the Novel?," "A Writer and the Theater," "A Writer and the Films," and "What is a Novel?"

Asked why he writes at all, Isherwood said, "I suppose that I write in order to find out what my life means and who I am, to find out if there's meaning in the external world, and then, I suppose, if I decide that there isn't, to impose a meaning of my own."

Isherwood would disagree strongly with my premise that there's no such thing as writer's block. "One has to accept the reality of its presence, to realize that it will never, never yield, that it will return to the attack again and again all through your life, completely unconquered, and that therefore instead of wondering exactly what it is or making moan over it, one has to develop techniques for fighting it, or rather, getting around it."

Editor James J. Berg is dean of social sciences and art at the College of the Desert in Palm  Springs, CA. Claude J. Summers, who wrote the foreward, is professor emeritus of English at the University of Michigan, Dearborn.

Met Chooses Top 13 Masters From Photography's 1st Century: Is Your Choice Included?

The New Yorker:

"You might want to argue with the Metropolitan Museum’s choice of the thirteen 'masters' who represent the high points of photography’s first hundred years (1840 to 1940) in 'Framing a Century,' if only because the premise of this trim, instructive survey has all the excitement of an intro-level art-history course.

"But step into the galleries and look around: every picture is astonishing,and the curator Malcolm Daniel’s choices are sure and sophisticated. Combining famous and little-known images, each carefully annotated grouping doesn’t attempt to sum up a career; rather, it suggests the broader scope of the artist’s range. The exhibition sets choice pieces from the Gilman Collection, acquired by the Met in 2005, alongside other works to emphasize the rarity, quality, and sheer beauty of the museum’s holdings.

"What sounds like an exclusionary exercise ends up as a pleasure trip—from Roger Fenton’s image of sunlight suffusing the mist above a rushing stream in 1854 to Brassaï’s shot of street lights glowing through the Paris fog in 1932."

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Whistler's Velvet Revolution: The Art of Painting Softly

Slate.com:

One hundred years after Whistler died, Daniel Kunitz took a moment to remember "America's first international artist." Christopher Benfey reviewed The Poe Shadow, a pulpy true-crime book that claimed to have solved the mystery of Edgar Allen Poe's death. Christopher Beam put neurasthenia in its proper historical context. Robert Knafo dubbed the Clark Art Institute's 2001 French Impressionism show a "landmark exhibition."

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Book Alert / America Between the Wars From 11/9 to 9/11

America Between the Wars from 11/9 to 9/11 -- The Misunderstood Years Between the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Start of the War on Terror by Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier. Public Affairs '08, $27.95, 432 pages, ISBN #1586484966. Index, bibliography, source notes, unillustrated.

Reading the book's title sent a mild chill through me as I watch the head of our moving life panorama morph from current events into a historical era. Some historians argue that it takes a generation or so before events recede into perspective and can be properly judged as history.

That doesn't make the authors' analysis any less intriguing, as they trace the events from the Nov. 9, 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall to the destruction of the World Trade Towers on Sept. 11, 2001. In fact, the interval was best known as a "holiday from history," one in which the kind of turmoil present in the rest of the 20th century was strangely lacking. "Democracy and  free markets had prevailed and the United States emerged as the world's superpower," they write. "The finger-on-the-button tension that had defined a generation was over, and it seemed that peace was at hand."

Yet the debates and discussions taking place between those events, they argue, "shaped the events, arguments and the politics of the world we live in today."

Derek Chollet is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington. James Goldgeier teaches political science and international affairs at George Washington University and a senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations.

Book Alert / One Man's America

One Man's America -- The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation by George F. Will, Crown Forum '08, $26.95, 384 pages, ISBN #0307407861.

Writing multiple weekly columns has a way of yielding abundant fodder for essay collections, several of which have preceded George Will's latest. Such a treasury allows a writer to engage his audience by separating it into cohorts, offering sections on People, Paths to the Present, Governing, Sensibilities and Sensitivities, Learning, Games, The Game, Wondering, and Matters of Life and Death.

Wills's essays about the likes of John Kenneth Galbraith, Bill Buckley, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and John F. Kennedy seek to capture the essence of the man and meld it into the backdrop of his times. But man isn't born with an essence -- that evolves in our journey from the womb towards the tomb.

Take George F. Will, for example. For all the trenchant observations he makes about those who've come across his path, he reveals little of himself. One Google hit will tell you he graduated from Hartford's Trinity College. Surprised? Of course you are. His mien is that of an Ivy Leaguer; one suspects he's planned it that way.

I'm certainly no expert on the life of George Will. But as a young Hartford newspaperman, I habituated the College View Tavern, a watering hole "behind the rocks" from Trinity. During the '60s and early '70s, owner Phil Ciarcia, a short, intense man with a pencil-thin mustache, clad in a spotless white t-shirt with a pack of Camels rolled up in the right sleeve, would tell anyone who listened that the second booth from the rear was where George Will, the columnist, hung out during his days at Trinity.

Phil looked deep into your eyes as he spoke; if he liked what he saw, he might make you a plate of his (beyond belief) garlic bread to accompany your draft beer. If he didn't, you were out of luck at any price.

Seems Will, that bastion of Buckley/Reagan conservatism, was quite a liberal at Trinity, having formed the North End Community Action Project (NECAP), to do good works in Hartford's Negro (not yet "black" or "African-American") neighborhoods. Will's candlepower cum charisma made him a magnet for younger undergraduates. But time moved on, Will forded the pond for a master's at Oxford and, reportedly disillusioned by Prime Minister Harold Wilson's brand of liberalism, transformed himself into a political conservative. Perhaps his final book will reveal the story of this fascinating chrysalis.

Book Alert / Art Power

Art Power by Boris Groys, MIT Press '08, 187 pages, ISBN #0262072920. Sources, notes, no index or illustrations.

Art, writes Boris Groys, "is produced and brought before the public in two ways -- as a commodity and as a tool of political propaganda." However, in the milieu of contemporary art appreciation, politically-inspired art stands outside, its face pressed against the glass. This, the German acadamecian, who also teaches at New York University, should not be allowed to happen.

In his new work, Groys considers art produced under totalitarianism, Socialism and post-Communism, then argues that contemporary art "demonstrates its power by appropriating the iconoclastic gestures directed against itself -- by positioning itself simultaneously as an image and as a critique of the image."