"The Idea of the Caucasian Race as a 'Haunting'"

"When Lewis traveled to the Caucasus in 2019, hardly anyone she met knew that 'Caucasian' could be a synonym for 'racially white.' Only the handful of Caucasians she met who had traveled to the United States understood their unintended recruitment into whiteness, and they learned of their status almost accidentally—filling out an immigration form, or in a chance encounter with a white supremacist who treated the visiting Caucasian 'like a god.' Lewis sees the idea of the Caucasian race as a 'haunting' that still manages to convince some Americans that there is some scientific validity to the idea of a unified white race. Her book aims to put that idea finally to rest."

Erin L. Thompson at The Nation reviews Sarah Lewis's The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America.

"We Presume We Understand It as Long as We're Not Asked to Explain It, but It Becomes Inexplicable as Soon as We're Put to the Test"

"As with climate change, however, the only thing more difficult than such an effort would be trying to live with the alternative. Whiteness may seem inevitable and implacable, and Toni Morrison surely had it right when she said that the world 'will not become unracialised by assertion'. (To wake up tomorrow and decide I am no longer white would help no one.) Even so, after 350 years, it remains the case, as Nell Irvin Painter argues, that whiteness 'is an idea, not a fact'. Not alone, and not without much work to repair the damage done in its name, it still must be possible to change our minds."

In a 2021 Guardian article, Robert P. Baird explores the "invention of whiteness."

"He Showed the Way to the Modern World"

"Wilson championed—and came to symbolize—progressive reform at home and liberal internationalism abroad. So long as those causes commanded wide support, Wilson's name resonated with the greats of American history. In our time, however, the American left has subordinated the causes of reform and internationalism to the politics of identity, while the American right has rejected reform and internationalism altogether. Wilson's standing has been crushed in between."

David Frum at The Atlantic calls to "Uncancel Woodrow Wilson."

"The Challenge Was to Appeal to Both Wings of the California Republicans"

"Johnson, who had a 'Yosemite Sam' temperament, refused all such entreaties, stating in a telegram to Hughes' campaign manager that 'the men surrounding Mr. Hughes in California and who have been in charge of his tour, are much more interested in my defeat than in Mr. Hughes' election.' As far as Johnson was concerned, Hughes had thrown in his lot with the conservatives; there would be no rapprochement. And that meant Johnson and his California progressives would not lift a finger to help Hughes carry the state in November."

In Politico, Jeff Greenfield looks back to the 1916 presidential election.

"I Would Vastly Prefer a Limited Career with the Consciousness of Having Done the Right Thing"

"Finally, as the new postwar president, 'I thought the spirit of clemency was quite in harmony with the things we were trying to do in Washington; that Debs had never been guilty of any overt act; that he never countenanced destruction of government by force, and probably I could persuade him to become a factor in contributing to tranquility throughout the land.'"

Ron Radosh at The Bulwark tells the story of when President Warren Harding freed Eugene Debs from federal prison.

"Less a Contradiction Than an Example of the Unintended Effects of American Foreign Policy Rhetoric"

"Wilson was undoubtedly a racist—even by the standards of his time. His administration resegregated several federal agencies; he wrote sympathetically about the Ku Klux Klan; and he described Southern Black people as an 'ignorant and inferior race' who couldn't be trusted with political power.
"At the same time, his advocacy of 'self-determination' unintentionally inspired people fighting colonialism and European imperialism around the world."

At Slate, Joshua Keating calls Woodrow Wilson the "Accidental Anti-Imperialist."

"Formation Marked the Arrival of the United States as a Global Power Capable of Leading the World During Crisis"

"The United States has long possessed the natural resources and workforce to create great wealth; what it discovered in World War I was the ability to coordinate its industry to address not just national but global emergencies. Expecting the federal government to assume command of and direct industry in how to produce and distribute urgently needed goods does not amount to a radical usurpation of the functions of the private sector. It is, rather, a century-old American practice that amounts, as Bernard Baruch knew, to government leaders acting, as they are supposed to in dire moments, in the public interest."

David Greenberg at Politico tells the story of Woodrow Wilson and the War Industries Board during World War I.

"Anyone Who Expects a Restoration of the Status Quo Ante 2017 May Be in for a Rude Awakening"

"Take, for example, three cherished institutions—White House press briefings, independent courts, respect for nonpartisan law enforcement agencies and a nonpartisan civil service. Their foundations are more young and shaky than you might think, and once altered, they may not be easily restored. Future presidents may regard newer precedents as more binding. A once-sturdy nonpartisan civil service and equally assured nonpartisan courts may be too weakened to enforce a return to prior norms. A public once conditioned to expect certain things of its presidents may have lost a critical amount of muscle memory."

Joshua Zeitz at Politico discusses more damage Donald Trump has done.

"Draw Their Lineage From Distinct Political Traditions"

"The short answer is that political figures and thinkers are more than the sum of their assorted policy positions. They have distinct, historically grounded worldviews that, once revealed, can both give us a better handle on their core beliefs and predict how they might act in shifting circumstances."

At Jacobin, Shawn Gude compares Elizabeth Warren to Louis Brandeis and Bernie Sanders to Eugene Debs.

And Win McCormick at The New Republic contrasts Brandeis and Herbert Croly.

"Debates Surrounding Our National Value System"

"'The American Dream' has always been about the prospect of success, but 100 years ago, the phrase meant the opposite of what it does now. The original 'American Dream' was not a dream of individual wealth; it was a dream of equality, justice and democracy for the nation. The phrase was repurposed by each generation, until the Cold War, when it became an argument for a consumer capitalist version of democracy. Our ideas about the 'American Dream' froze in the 1950s. Today, it doesn't occur to anybody that it could mean anything else.

Anna Diamond at Smithsonian interviews Sarah Churchwell, author of Behold, America: The Entangled History of "America First" and "the American Dream."

"Three Miles of Filth"

"However, as Richard Schickel noted in his biography of the director, 'D.W. Griffith: An American Life,' some regarded the film as slandering black Americans. Under the headline 'Capitalizing Race Hatred,' the New York Globe wrote: 'To make a few dirty dollars men are willing to pander to depraved tastes and to foment a race antipathy that is the most sinister and dangerous feature of American life.'"

Jeffrey Fleishman in the Los Angeles Times discusses the legacy of The Birth of a Nation.

"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.

"We Would Be Wrong to See This as a Mere Policy Change"

"Over a long career, he rose through the ranks from laborer to a position in midlevel management. He supervised an office in which many of his employees were white men. He had a farm in Virginia and a home in Washington. By 1908, he was earning the considerable salary—for an African-American—of $1,400 per year.

"But only months after Woodrow Wilson was sworn in as president in 1913, my grandfather was demoted. He was shuttled from department to department in various menial jobs, and eventually became a messenger in the War Department, where he made only $720 a year.

"By April 1914, the family farm was auctioned off. John Davis, a self-made black man of achievement and stature in his community at the turn of the 20th century, was, by the end of Wilson’s first term, a broken man."

 

Gordon J. Davis in The New York Times writes about how Woodrow Wilson's policy of re-segregating the federal government affected Davis's grandfather.

"Jeffersonian Socialists"

"Finally, the leading representatives of American socialism may have been too American for their own good. The Jeffersonian elements Ross prizes were most appealing to middle-class Midwestern Protestants. As Lipset and Marks have pointed out, anti-statist themes were less exciting to a working class composed of new immigrants, particularly Catholics. They responded to Father Coughlin, not Norman Thomas.

"It is possible that better luck and more skillful tactics could have overcome these obstacles. But it is not clear how much that would have mattered in the end. Despite their antimilitarist beginnings, socialist parties in most of Europe supported both World Wars and then embraced much the same blend of social welfare, economic corporatism, and militarized internationalism that has defined the Democratic Party at least since FDR.

"Perhaps America is not exceptional after all."

Samuel Goldman in The American Conservative reviews Jack Ross's The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History.

"The Professions Are Collapsing"

"Elite professionals have long been associated with a distinct kind of technocratic progressivism—believing in research-informed nonpartisan problem-solving, carried out by administrators or judges shielded from politics and invested with considerable discretion.  It is no accident that the ideal public servant of this kind of progressivism—the highly educated, apolitical expert—is a kind of idealized self-image of the professional."


Michael Lind in Salon predicts a decline of professionals and the rise of populists among liberal politicians

"The Waterloo of the Far-Right in California"

"Lawsuits kept it from ever being fully implemented, and a federal judge finally ruled it unconstitutional in 1999. It energized a Latino electorate–yes, John Boehner, there are plenty of legal Latino immigrant and Latinos born here–that came out in larger and larger numbers in subsequent elections, overwhelmingly voting Democrat and leading to de facto one-party rule California for the past decade. (The election of Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2002 was an anomaly that American can blame on all my cousins who loved him in Terminator 2: Judgment Day.)
"The proposition also galvanized a generation of Latino politicians with long memories, who have effectively created a sanctuary state in California in subsequent years–offering driver's licenses to folks without papers, providing in-state tuition for undocumented college students, officially telling la migra to butt out of state affairs–as penance for the sins of their predecessors. It's these same legislators who crafted the bill that finally, fully repealed Prop 187, portions of which were still officially on the books up despite being unenforceable."


Gustavo Arellano in The Guardian observes the legacy of Proposition 187.

"So the Purpose–the Fundamental Purpose–of Our First Federal Anti-Monopoly Law Was Precisely to Avoid Inequality"

"Well, legally what happened was that in the early days of the Reagan Administration, one of their very first actions was to say, hey, these anti-monopoly laws and antitrust laws that you use to make markets, and create competition, and spread out opportunity, and insure industrial liberty, and, protect our democratic institutions—all these many laws that make up our competition policy, wouldn’t it be better if we take all of these laws and simplify them, so we aim at one outcome only, efficiency? Because if we are able to make our economy more efficient, we'd be able to produce more stuff for you, the consumer. Won't that be a swell world to live in, with more stuff for you, the consumer?"


Thomas Frank in Salon talks with Barry Lynn about the reemergence of monopoly.

"The First Liberal Democratic President Took Office Exactly 100 Years Ago This Spring"

"Yet Wilson, together with his allies on Capitol Hill, also laid the foundation for the 20^th century liberal state. He signed bills that created the Federal Reserve and progressive income tax rates, secured humane working conditions for merchant seamen and railroad workers, restricted child labor and curbed the power of large corporations. After the U.S. entered the war in Europe, his administration began operating the railroads, lifting the hopes of leftists who had long advocated public ownership of what was then a rich and vital industry.
"In 1916, Wilson accepted renomination with a speech that defined political conflict in terms that remain surprisingly fresh. Our programs, he told his fellow Democrats were 'resisted at every step by the interests which the Republican Party … catered to and fostered at the expense of the country, and these same interests are now earnestly praying for a reaction which will save their privileges, for the restoration of their sworn friends to power before it is too late to recover what they have lost.'"

Michael Kazin in The New Republic calls Woodrow Wilson "The Forgotten President."

"Diverted Them from the Life of the Mind"

"Only in recent years did colleges start to resemble country clubs, with a few classrooms thrown in. Competing for students, universities also competed to see who could build the nicest dorms, gyms and stadiums. The expenses were passed on to students, of course, who met rising tuition costs by taking out more loans. Student debt has doubled in the last decade, topping $1 trillion, which is more than the total amount that Americans owe on their credit cards."

Jonathan Zimmerman in the Los Angeles Times criticizes lavish university amenities.

"More than a Few of Our Fellow Citizens Are Loathing Themselves Blind over Barack Obama"

"Once upon a time there was a radical president who tried to remake American society through government action. In his first term he created a vast network of federal grants to state and local governments for social programs that cost billions. He set up an imposing agency to regulate air and water emissions, and another to regulate workers’ health and safety. Had Congress not stood in his way he would have gone much further. He tried to establish a guaranteed minimum income for all working families and, to top it off, proposed a national health plan that would have provided government insurance for low-income families, required employers to cover all their workers and set standards for private insurance. Thankfully for the country, his second term was cut short and his collectivist dreams were never realized.
"His name was Richard Nixon."

Mark Lilla in The New York Times reviews Charles R. Kesler's I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism.