"To Quantify the Unquantifiable"

"But Lindsay Rogers might have had a more fundamental critique than that: The idea of political polling was broken to start with. It was a falsely scientific way to put numbers on a concept that can't be measured in the first place, and which changes shape every time you try. And indeed, it is the very elusiveness of political opinion—its resistance to being pinned down—that makes democracy necessary. When we measure mass or distance, we know we can do so accurately. But our values, attitudes and opinions are not concrete but fluid. They change with time—in the days and weeks before an election, as well as in the years in between them. Which is precisely why democracy requires that every few years, we vote anew."

David Greenberg at Politico recalls "The Political Scientist Who Warned Us About Polls."

And at Vox, Dylan Matthews interviews David Shor about contemporary polling problems.

"The Only Decision Truman Made Was Not to Alter the Plan"

"On the first two questions, declassified archival documents are pretty clear: There never was a decision to drop either bomb. Instead, there was a decision to build an atom bomb. Once it was ready, it was used; once the second bomb was ready, it too was used. From the outset, this was the plan—an automatic sequence from building the bomb to testing it to dropping it on the enemy."

Fred Kaplan at Slate argues that "decision to bomb Hiroshima wasn't a decision at all."

And a 2016 Atomic Heritage Foundation article recalls the debate over the Smithsonian's 1995 exhibit.

"Provides Copious Evidence That the United States Sought Russian Entry Up To and Even After the Bombs Were Dropped"

"In the first edition of his path breaking volume, Giangreco demolished the revisionist myth that Truman's depiction of an invasion as a looming catastrophe was a gross exaggeration, a 'postwar creation' designed to cover up the real reasons for using the bombs.  Citing a variety of hitherto untapped sources (including documentation on the production of 500,000 Purple Heart medals for the invasion's dead and wounded), Giangreco showed that Truman's vision was amply borne out by the projected casualty figures military and civilian planners routinely used.  
Now, in the expanded edition of Hell to Pay, his research again involves areas that have received little or no attention."

Robert James Maddox at History News Network reviews D. M. Giangreco's Hell to Pay: Operation Downfall and the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947.

Fair Dealing

"Still, next time someone complains that Democrats have no clear platform or leader, they might counter with the 1948 platform and the example set by Harry Truman. Even in the absence of Democratic Party unity (there were competing presidential candidacies from ex-Democrats on the left and the right), that election year did, after all, produce the most audacious upset in modern American politics until you-know-who and you-know-what."

Ed Kilgore at New York writes that there is "more symmetry between the domestic policy views and concerns of Democrats 70 years ago and today than one might imagine."

Vital Centrists

"It was one thing to defend the American Nazi Party's right to march in Skokie, Ill. in 1977, when the liberal establishment and mainstream media were still intact and American Nazi Party was a marginal fringe group. The group was offensive, but neither its actions nor its ideas posed a threat to the political or social order, which was stable. The situation is different today, with an erratic President Trump in the White House, elites in disarray and white nationalism on the rise. In this situation, and against this foe, it may be worth remembering that our constitutional rights are not unchanging abstract principles, but, as Hook and Schlesinger argued, always evaluated in terms of their consequences for society at any given historical moment.
"At the same time, however, colleges and universities need to recognize that their liberal critics of, say, diversity policies or Title IX excesses are not political foes and should not be subject to censorship or censure. One reason the right has been able to so effectively exploit 'free speech' is because campuses have become places where the free exchange of ideas has been curbed by peer pressure, self-policing and a self-righteous call-out culture, as described by Jonathan Haidt, Jonathan Chait and Mark Lilla. Until university presidents offer real leadership in reconciling the liberal critique of 'identity politics' with a new generation of diverse students, faculty and staff for whom such politics represent progress, they will be unable to protect their institutions from conservative attacks."

Jennifer Delton at The Washington Post looks to liberal anticommunists of the 1940s as models for combatting reactionary conservatives today.

"This Is the Type of Speech and Exhortation to Bridge Divides"

"'We must continue to hold out to them the invitation to work with us for the common good,' he said, in contrast to Trumps rambling tale of cocktail parties, yachts and the evils of Obamacare and the media.
"'I hope that you young men in the Boy Scout movement, in this country and other countries, will take home from this Jamboree a clearer understanding of the meaning of human brotherhood. I hope that you will work for freedom and peace with the same burning faith that inspired the men of George Washington’s army here at Valley Forge,' Truman concluded in his 1950 speech."

The Bangor Daily News compares Donald Trump's speech to the Boy Scouts to Harry Truman's speech in sixty-seven years ago.

"The 'Authentic' Politician Is a Myth"

"This taste for the apparently uncoached and unscripted goes way back; more than a century ago, the rise of image management was already sowing skepticism about campaign-trail stagecraft and stimulating a hunger for unvarnished candidates. Yet despite its deep roots, our disdain for artifice is itself somewhat superficial. In reality, we're quite happy to tolerate some image-making when it produces a leader with political traits we find congenial."

David Greenberg in the Los Angeles Times looks back at presidential image-making since the early twentieth century.

"The Indispensable Man"?

"Mostly, the Ungers' vision of Marshall is persuasive. Praise for the general has soared so high over the years that the reality is bound to lie closer to the ground. The book also offers a useful reminder that glorification of the World War II era may tell us more about the disappointments of our own times than about an increasingly remote past when—no ­surprise—American leaders stumbled and were sometimes saved from their errors by the scale of the American war machine and the endurance of their ­allies."


Mark Atwood Lawrence in The New York Times reviews George Marshall: A Biography, by Debi and Irwin Unger with Stanley Hirshson.

Unlearned

"Although the book by Stone and Kuznick is heavily footnoted, the sourcing, as the example of Wallace’s 1952 article suggests, recalls nothing so much as Dick Cheney’s cherry-picking of intelligence, particularly about the origins and early years of the cold war. The authors also devote many thousands of words to criticism of such destructive American policies as Ronald Reagan’s in Central America and George W. Bush’s in Iraq, but much of this will be familiar to readers of these pages, as will their objections to Barack Obama’s use of predator drones. This book is less a work of history than a skewed political document, restating and updating a view of the world that the independent radical Dwight Macdonald once likened to a fog, 'caused by the warm winds of the liberal Gulf Stream coming in contact with the Soviet glacier'—but now more than twenty years after the dissolution of the Soviet empire."

Sean Wilentz in The New York Review of Books reviews Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick's The Untold History of the United States.

"This Shadow World"

"Truman won his unexpected victory, Lingeman argues, not just because of red-baiting Wallace, but because he succeeded in rallying the party’s base: the AFL-CIO supported him because he vetoed the Taft-Hartley Act; liberals supported him because he argued for a national health insurance program; blacks supported him because he ended segregation in the military; and veterans supported him because of the GI Bill. And Wallace’s candidacy insulated Truman from charges that he was soft on communism."

Jon Wiener in the Los Angeles Review of Books reviews Richard Lingeman’s The Noir Forties: The American People from Victory to Cold War.

"The First People to Make Politics a Business"

"Political consulting is often thought of as an offshoot of the advertising industry, but closer to the truth is that the advertising industry began as a form of political consulting. As the political scientist Stanley Kelley once explained, when modern advertising began, the big clients were just as interested in advancing a political agenda as a commercial one. Monopolies like Standard Oil and DuPont looked bad: they looked greedy and ruthless and, in the case of DuPont, which made munitions, sinister. They therefore hired advertising firms to sell the public on the idea of the large corporation, and, not incidentally, to advance pro-business legislation. It’s this kind of thing that Sinclair was talking about when he said that American history was a battle between business and democracy, and, 'So far,' he wrote, 'Big Business has won every skirmish.'"

Jill Lepore in The New Yorker discusses Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter, the first professional campaign consultants.

"Dreaming Different Dreams than the French but Walking in the Same Footsteps"

"Eisenhower has long been admired for his refusal to go to war in Vietnam. But Logevall makes clear that he was far from a peacekeeper. He did not want to send American troops into Vietnam, but he was also determined not to allow South Vietnam to fall. For a time, Diem seemed a powerful and successful leader, able to stop any efforts by the Viet Minh to conquer the South. And for a time, Diem was a hero to Americans—revered by leaders in Washington and by much of the American public. But the more success he had, the more resolved Ho was to undermine him. By 1959, Viet Minh soldiers were infiltrating the South and escalating the violence in South Vietnam. When Eisenhower left office, there were about 1,000 American 'advisers' (almost all of them military men), with many more to come."

Alan Brinkley in The New York Times reviews Fredrik Logevall's Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam.

"Better to Surrender to Washington than to Moscow"

"President Truman’s decision to go nuclear has long been a source of controversy. Many, of course, have argued that attacking civilians can never be justified. Then, in the 1960s, a 'revisionist school' of historians suggested that Japan was in fact close to surrendering before Hiroshima--that the bombing was not necessary, and that Truman gave the go-ahead primarily to intimidate the Soviet Union with our new power.
"Hasegawa--who was born in Japan and has taught in the United States since 1990, and who reads English, Japanese, and Russian--rejects both the traditional and revisionist positions. According to his close examination of the evidence, Japan was not poised to surrender before Hiroshima, as the revisionists argued, nor was it ready to give in immediately after the atomic bomb, as traditionalists have always seen it. Instead, it took the Soviet declaration of war on Japan, several days after Hiroshima, to bring the capitulation."

Gareth Cook in The Boston Globe discusses historical debates over why Japan surrendered in August 1945.

Give 'Em Hell, Barry?

"Richard Hofstadter pointed out years ago that a 'paranoid style' and populism march hand in hand. Hence, the outlandish charges of 'socialism' and 'death panels' from today's populist right. Take, for example, one of Palin's more famous remarks about Obama: 'I'm not going to call him a socialist. But as Joe the Plumber has suggested, in fact he came right out and said it, it sounds like socialism to him. And he speaks for so many Americans who are quite concerned now after hearing finally what Barack Obama's true intentions are with his tax and economic plan.'
"Translation: The people, yes, and damn the facts."

Kevin Mattson in The American Prospect warns against liberals embracing populism.

And he inspires a wave of responses.

The Money Lord

"The issue came to a head at the beginning of the presidential election year of 1948 when Marriner Eccles came up for reappointment as Fed chairman. Giannini wrote Snyder,

Rumors seem to point to the reappointment of a certain man who has
consistently iolated his Oath of office when acting on many of the matters
pertaining to certain Interests. I'm wondering if, at the moment, there isn't
any one readily available as successor...

"On January 27, 1948, Wall Street was puzzled by the news that President Truman had 'demoted' Eccles to Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve, appointing another chairman in his stead. One liberal Democratic Senator demanded to know 'who went to the President' to engineer Eccles' ouster. Truman said publicly that it was his own idea."

Richard H. Smith in The Huffington Post presents unearthed letters from Bank of America founder A. P. Giannini attempting to depose the Federal Reserve chairman sixty-two years ago.

"These Bolshevik Balladeers"

"We did not know that the folk boom was a reverberation of an earlier boomlet, a foray into American music roots, many of whose movers and shakers were as Red as a bowl of cherries. Who on our suburban street knew that Woody Guthrie, the hero of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan, had been a columnist for the Daily Worker? Or that the man from whom we heard rollicking sea chanteys, a Briton named Ewan MacColl, was at one point kept from entering the United States as an undesirable alien? Then there was the cuddly-looking guy with the slightly pedantic six-record set and companion volume, Burl Ives Presents America’s Musical Heritage. If my parents or any of the neighbors were aware that Ives had been summoned, in 1952, to testify before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and had identified Pete Seeger as a communist, they kept the details to themselves."

Lauren Weiner in First Things traces the political underpinnings of the 1950s folk revival.

There Is No Definition of Victory

"While history came to look well on the president's decision as brave and correct, the episode nonetheless left a lasting current of popular sentiment that in matters of war and peace, the military really knows best. At odds with the American tradition of the primacy of civilian rule, this attitude—call it MacArthurism—has continued sporadically to haunt American politics."

David Greenberg in Slate discusses the legacy of the Truman-MacArthur showdown during the Korean War.

"I’ll Spend the Goddamn Money"

"But even if Obama fails, the authors offer one large consolation. There is an art to losing, too — in a way that can tee up the issue for future presidents. Truman lost but nonetheless redefined the terms of debate, setting the stage for Medicare (which is why Johnson honored Truman when he signed it into law). Compare him with Clinton, who walked away from the wreckage of his health care plan and rarely mentioned the subject again. According to the authors, this allowed opponents to gain control over the spin and history, so that the Democrats’ signature cause slipped out of political sight for a decade."

Robert B. Reich in The New York Times reviews David Blumenthal and James A. Morone's The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office.

"Something Deep in the DNA"

"But there is another rendition of the story of modern conservatism, one that doesn't begin with Goldwater and doesn't celebrate his libertarian orientation. It is a less heroic story, and one that may go a much longer way toward really explaining the Republican Party's past electoral fortunes and its future."

Neal Gabler in the Los Angeles Times argues that the true father of current conservativism is Joseph McCarthy.

Framing the Guilty

"Mr. Sobell also concurred in what has become a consensus among historians: that Ethel Rosenberg, who was executed with her husband, was aware of Julius’s espionage, but did not actively participate."

Sam Roberts in The New York Times reports that Morton Sobell, an associate of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, has admitted to spying for the Soviet Union.