History for the Future

Maurice Isserman on Michael Harrington, “The Other American”

Kevin — Tue, 01 May 2012 01:43:41 +0000

HFTF celebrates the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Other America: Poverty in the United States, by Michael Harrington, with an interview with Harrington’s biographer, Maurice Isserman. After publishing The Other America and before his untimely death in 1989, Michael Harrington was the U.S.’s leading democratic socialist and served as a political and social conscience to the country during the turbulent years of the 1970s and 1980s. Isserman is a professor of American history at Hamilton College and author of The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington. On the show he discusses Michael Harrington’s “discovery” of poverty in the early 1960s, the legacy of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, and the enduring significance of The Other America. He concludes by answering the question, “What would Michael Harrington say if he were alive today?”

Be sure to check out Isserman’s recent article in Dissent magazine, titled “50 Years later: Poverty and The Other America.” Also, Maurice recently participated in a great conference at the College of the Holy Cross (which Michael Harrington attended) on the “The Other America, Then and Now.” Many of the lectures, including Maurice’s and one by William Julius Wilson, can be streamed on the conference’s website.

Essay: McGovern, Watergate, and “The Importance of Being a Landslide Loser”

Kevin — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 22:52:36 +0000

George McGovern on the campaign trail, June 1972

If you enter the ground floor of the University of Pittsburgh’s Hillman Library and locate the microform room (in the back left corner), you can find buried deep in the stacks a 35 mm reel labeled, “Washington Post – Aug. 8-15, 1973.” After loading it onto a ScanPro2000 microfilm reader you will also find, wedged in between depressing reports on inflating food prices and the Vietnam War, an op-ed penned by George S. McGovern, then a U.S. Senator from South Dakota. The article is titled, “The Importance of Being a Landslide Loser.”

Nine months earlier, in November 1972, as the Democratic Party presidential nominee, McGovern had indeed proven himself a “landslide loser” – getting drubbed at the polls by a margin over twenty percentage points on election day by incumbent president Richard Nixon.

Projecting on microfilm McGovern’s humble and largely forgotten words gives us a glimpse not only of George McGovern himself – Robert F. Kennedy once said he was “the only decent man in the Senate” – but also the hope he held for American democracy during one of its darker hours: Watergate. To McGovern, the “Importance of Being a Landslide Loser” lay in the reforms that would surely follow from the fallout of a sitting president’s involvement in illegal activity on a stunning scale.

McGovern suggested that without Nixon’s victory in 1972 – and McGovern’s own loss – this collective revelation would not be possible. He “concluded that the shattering Nixon landslide, and the even more shattering experience of the corruption that surrounded him, have done more than I could have done in victory to awaken the nation to … the ‘degradation of the democratic dogma.’”

Unfortunately, neatly packaged celluloid reels lined up in the same stacks where McGovern’s op-ed rests also contain film of newspapers published since 1973. And it is the information in those reels – the accumulated daily record of American life up to our present – which suggest that McGovern, ever the optimist, was dead wrong about what awaited the American people in the decades following Watergate.

***

Richard Nixon, official portait

What began in June 1972 – now almost forty years ago – with a group of burglars caught photographing documents and bugging the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C., had by the summer of 1973 snowballed (thanks in large part to Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s coverage in the Washington Post) into a massive congressional investigation and television spectacle that connected the White House to that burglary. In a succession of escalating reveals, Americans learned of the systemic corruption and abuse of power that defined Nixon administration, disclosures that went beyond one late-spring night at the Watergate.

McGovern recounted the expanding scope of the Nixon administration’s misdeeds in his Post op-ed:

“burglarizing the private files of an opponent, … perverting the FBI, wiretapping telephones, secretly taping the words of everyone who speaks to the President in person or by phone, hiring obnoxious phony demonstrators to pose as supporters of the other side, repeatedly and flagrantly violating the campaign finance laws, … disrupting and discrediting citizens who seek honest political debate – and so on, ad nauseam, as each week adds new shame to a list of abuses so shocking that nothing new seems to shock anymore.”

In this context, McGovern looked to the future. He believed that Watergate would force “the country to reexamine the reality of our electoral process.” Campaigns especially would be run differently in the post-Watergate world. He wrote: “the prospects for further restrictions on private campaign financing, full disclosure of the personal finances of candidates, and public finance of all federal campaigns seem to me better than ever.” He also foresaw future limits on the prerogatives of “executive secrecy,” the establishment of “full and open debate between the candidates,” and “no-holds-barred press conferences” with candidates and elected officials.

McGovern thought that the shock of Watergate while the “king … [was] still on the throne” would also redirect the focus of the media and the public away from “what is irrelevant, peripheral or secondary in importance” during campaigns and legislative sessions, and push press coverage towards the substantive issues facing the country. He contrasted the press treatment of his own campaign missteps during 1972 (selecting a running mate with a history of nervous breakdowns and who had received electroshock therapy, for example), with Nixon’s seemingly easy evasion of tough questions on the war in Vietnam, the economy, and Watergate itself. McGovern conceded that though “we made too many mistakes in the fall [campaign of 1972] … few people will contend anymore that they were more critical to the country than the issues we tried to discuss, with so little success, and without a real response from the other side.”

***

"Impeach Nixon" protesters, fall 1973

I don’t want to beat up on George McGovern (who is, by the way, still writing and publishing at the age of 89). Congress did, in fact, pass campaign finance and financial disclosure laws in the wake of Watergate, and the scandal certainly generated anti-incumbent sentiment among voters in the 1974 and 1976 congressional elections. Still, it hardly seems necessary to point out that McGovern’s tripartite hope for the rebirth of democracy through honest debate, the curtailment of money in electoral politics, and a critical issues-oriented press has not been fulfilled since Watergate.

Writing now, in April 2012, it is clear that decades of “infotainment” and horse-race television coverage of the presidential campaigns, the dramatic enlargement of private campaign financing (only accentuated further by the 2010 Citizens United U.S. Supreme Court decision), and a decimated press system have further conscribed democracy in the United States, to say nothing of the effects of increased income inequality that have marked the years since the 1970s.

Over the coming weeks and months, as the fortieth anniversary of the Watergate break-in approaches, we are likely to be confronted in the media with tales of redemption and left with the impression that Watergate was this one time when American politics almost went over the edge. But if we think about what George McGovern anticipated would come in the wake of Watergate then it becomes difficult to keep the scandal in the past and even harder to be sanguine about our present.

The structural problems that led to Watergate – especially executive overreach, private campaign dollars, and a subservient press – continue to degrade our democracy, if not always in as spectacularly obvious ways. Until we tackle them head on, though, George McGovern’s dream that “democracy may once again become a conviction we keep and not just a description we apply to ourselves” will remain unfulfilled. And as a nation we will continue to endure as our own kind of “landslide losers.”

— Kevin Brown, for History for the Future, April 28, 2012

Vivian Price on the Bracero Program

Kevin — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 14:11:46 +0000

This week on HFTF, Vivian Price discusses the history of the Bracero Program in the United States. Between 1942 and 1964, this guest worker program put Mexican peasants to work on large factory farms across the country, employing at its peak some 500,000 workers a year. The trials faced by these migrant workers is the subject of a new documentary by Price, Gilbert Gonzalez, and Adrian Salinas, called, Harvest of Loneliness: The Bracero Program. In this episode, Price discusses the origins and operations of the Bracero program, describes how it renewed migration to the U.S. even after the program was cancelled, and calls into question the wisdom of a new, expanded guest worker system. It was a great discussion; give it a listen!

Public Transit: Commuters, Communities, and Costs

Kevin — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 14:48:32 +0000

In part 2 of our series on the public transit funding crisis in Pittsburgh, we answer these questions: How might these cuts affect people with disabilities? And are other cities going through similar cuts, too? How are they handling it?

During the program, we speak with Lucy Spruill at United Cerebral Palsy, Holly Dick at ACCESS, college student Cathy Mikolay, and residents at the Allegheny Independence House in Wilmerding. We also talk to Dianne Williams from Metro St. Louis.

This work is a collaboration between I Wonder… and History for the Future, public affairs programs on WRCT-Pittsburgh 88.3FM, and is produced by Ellis Robinson, Daniel Tkacik, and Kevin Brown.

Lucy Morgan Edwards on “The Afghan Solution”

Kevin — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 12:25:29 +0000

This week on HFTF, journalist Lucy Morgan Edwards discusses her new book, The Afghan Solution: The Inside Story of Abdul Haq, The CIA and How Western Hubris Lost Afghanistan. Based on time spent in Afghanistan not only as a reporter, but also as a UN election observer, and a political adviser to the EU Ambassador to Kabul, Edwards’ book describes how the U.S. and U.K. have empowered warlords and strong man at the sake of moderates and ordinary Afghans since 2001. Central to Edwards’ analysis is the figure of Abdul Haq, a mujaheddin commander during the Soviet War in the 1980s given the name “The Lion of Kabul,” and who sought to build an internal revolution against the Taliban before the Americans began bombing in 2001. It was a great discussion; give it a listen!

You can find out more about Lucy Morgan Edwards at lucymorganedwards.com.

History for the Future

Maurice Isserman on Michael Harrington, “The Other American”

Essay: McGovern, Watergate, and “The Importance of Being a Landslide Loser”

Vivian Price on the Bracero Program

Public Transit: Commuters, Communities, and Costs

Lucy Morgan Edwards on “The Afghan Solution”

Public Transit: Past, Present, and Future…

Nico Slate on “Colored Cosmopolitanism”

Robert W. McChesney on Media, Politics, and Protest

Neil Maher on “Nature’s New Deal”

Anthony DiMaggio on “The Rise of the Tea Party”

Dave Zirin on Sports and Politics

James Fleming on the History of Climate Control and Geoengineering

Lloyd Gardner on “The Road to Tahrir Square”

David Kinkela on “DDT and the American Century”

Scott Nelson on “Occupy Chicago, 1894″

Sophia Rosenfeld on the History of Common Sense

Fred Magdoff on Capitalism and the Environment

Michael Hudson on the Subprime Lending Industry

Zack Furness on Bicycles, Cars, and Cities

Bethany Moreton on Wal-Mart and Christian Free Enterprise

Lawrence Culver on Leisure and the Environment in California

John Marsh on Inequality and the Limits of Education

Ernest Drucker on the “Plague” of Mass Incarceration in America

Edward Girardet on the Long History of the War in Afghanistan

Judith Stein on the 1970s and the Origins of the “Age of Inequality”

Ernest Freeberg on Eugene Debs and the Right to Dissent

James Loewen on Textbooks, Historical Memory, and Teaching American History

Lara Putnam on Migration and Race in the Caribbean

Peter Moskos on Policing, Prison and Flogging

Victor Pickard on the Crisis of Journalism

Richard Wolff on the Continuing Economic Crisis

Website/Podcast problems resolved

Roger Rouse on Pirates of the Caribbean

Paul Eiss on El Pueblo, Politics, and the Drug War in Yucatán

Gene Dattel on Cotton, Slavery, and Race in American History

Les Leopold on the Economic Crisis, Labor, and the Left in the U.S.

Susan Reverby on the U.S. Public Health Service in Guatemala and Tuskegee

Peter Richardson on Ramparts Magazine and the 1960s

Nell Irvin Painter on the History of White People

Sonali Pahwa on the Egyptian Revolution

Joseph McCartin on Public Sector Unions and Worker Rights in Wisconsin

Keith Wailoo on “How Cancer Crossed the Color Line”

Howard Campbell on the Drug War Zone

Shaun Harkin on Ireland and the European Economic Crisis

Robert Vanderlan on Intellectuals and the Commerical Media in mid-20th Century America

Steven Hahn on Slavery and the Civil Rights Movement in U.S. History

Jay Aronson on Science and Criminal Justice in the United States

Anna McCarthy on Television and Citizenship in the 1950s

Jeff Biggers on Coal in the Heartland

Rhonda Williams on Public Housing in Baltimore