The Power That Was, 1927-2006

The Los Angeles Times runs the obituary for its former publisher, Otis Chandler, the last of the family to oversee the paper.

Harold Meyerson adds an analysis in The American Prospect.

A month later, the Los Angeles Times includes an overview, including a bibliography, on the rise and fall of the Chandlers.

In June the Los Angeles Times reports on divisions within the family.

All the Presidents' Scribes

"Many in the book world agree that commercial publishers like presidential biographies largely because they personalize history for readers who might otherwise find it abstruse.
"'Publishers are constantly looking for ways to hold "big ideas" hostage to narratives that can drive those stories,' said literary agent Steve Wasserman, former editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. 'It's not dissimilar to the way Hollywood proceeds.'
"Yet it is precisely the tendency to accentuate the personal that ignites controversy among historians. Newspaper book review sections and scholarly journals alike feature debates on whether the new generation of popular biographers illuminates or distorts the role of presidents in U.S. history."

The Los Angeles Times explores the popularity of presidential biographies.

Seeing the Promised Land

"Editorial choices perhaps explain the short shrift given the black power period. More than half of Branch's nearly 800-page text deals with 1965. Of course, 1965 was a momentous year, and the centennial of Lee's surrender at Appomattox witnessed the Selma campaign, the Voting Rights Act, the first commitment of large numbers of American servicemen to Southeast Asia and the Watts riots. Yet the following years were important as well, and one wonders if the decision to avoid more substantive discussions of the final two years of King's life implies that, by 1967, Americans were no longer living 'in the King years.'"

Historian Daniel Widener of the University of California, San Diego, reviews Taylor Branch's At Canaan's Edge in The San Diego Union-Tribune.

The Progressive Era

"But the left is not just missing Murrow and neglecting Stevenson’s legions (who had a more transformative effect on our politics than Stevenson himself). For the ‘50s was also the decade in which a quietly militant working class created the first and greatest mass prosperity in the history of humankind. Today, that prosperity is so threatened that it may just be time for the left to look back at the world of the 1950s, and the unions of in particular, with new appreciation."

Harold Meyerson in The American Prospect reexamines the 1950s due to George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck.

Jane Says

"Another thing to take into account is Fonda’s public image. It’s easy to lose sight now of the time when she was seen as all apple-cheeked patriotism and plain-spoken idealism--almost like Henry Fonda himself. There was a pattern: the first anti-war figure to become the object of excessive government attention was Dr Spock, whose massively popular child-rearing manual was read and trusted by millions of American mothers. American GIs associated Jane Fonda with their first blush of innocent adolescent sexuality--think of those Barbarella posters. It was through figures like them, not through mad bombers of the far left, that ordinary Americans might come to the dangerous conviction that their government was not innocent. They were the ones that had to go."

Rick Perlstein reviews Jane Fonda’s War by Mary Hershberger in the November 2005 London Review of Books.

Friedan, 1921-2006, and King, 1927-2006

The Los Angeles Times runs obituaries for Betty Friedan, who died on February 4, and Coretta Scott King, who died on January 31. (And for Al Lewis, "Grandpa" on The Munsters, who died on February 3. They always go in threes...)

Addendum: Rebecca Solnit in The Nation connects Friedan with other authors of influential books from the early 1960s, Jane Jacobs and Rachel Carson.

Let Us Face the Future

"Two historic changes, however, did unarguably occur. India did become, even if partitioned and amputated, independent. And the National Health Service (NHS) made it possible for anybody in Britain to see a physician. The minister who oversaw the implementation of this program was Bevan. Again, his concept of socialism and solidarity was essentially moral. He cared less about the economics of provision than about the simple notion that people should not live in fear of becoming ill."

Christopher Hichens in The Weekly Standard reviews a biography of Labour MP Aneurin Bevan.

The Importance of Being Idle

"In 1883 Karl Marx's son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, was idling in a relatively luxurious political prison near the Latin Quarter of Paris. A Cuban-French socialist, he whiled away the days taking long lunches and discussing the evils of capitalism with his comrade and collaborator Jules Guesde, who happened to be staying in the next room. Lafargue's other prison pastimes included relaxing in the bathtub that had been delivered to his quarters (at Friedrich Engels's expense), practicing his German and, like any good nineteenth-century intellectual, revising his treatise--a pamphlet titled The Right to Be Lazy. Like most of his contemporary activists, he condemned the twelve-to-fourteen-hour factory workday, but unlike his father-in-law, he didn't just critique the conditions of labor--he went after labor itself. 'In capitalist society,' he wrote, 'work is the cause of all intellectual degeneracy, of all organic deformity.' Lafargue dismissed the 'right to work' that other socialists demanded. He asked, instead, for the right to lie around on the daybed, the right to read and to nap, the right to feast and to make love. He declared the right to endless leisure."

In The Nation, Austin Kelley reviews Tom Hodgkinson's How to Be Idle and Corinne Maier's Bonjour Laziness.

Clean and Dirty

The Los Angeles Times runs obits for former Senator and 1968 presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy, 1916-2005, and comedian Richard Pryor, 1940-2005.

Privacy Please

"If the Republicans can propose a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, why can't the Democrats propose a right to privacy amendment? Making this implicit right explicit would forever end the debate about whether there is a right to privacy. And the debate over the bill would force Republicans who opposed it to explain why they don't think Americans deserve a right to privacy--which would alienate not only moderates, but also those libertarian, small-government conservatives who survive only in isolated pockets on the Eastern Seaboard and the American West."

In The New York Times, Dan Savage proposes enshrining privacy rights in the Constitution.

Rosa Parks, 1913-2005

The New York Times runs an obituary for Rosa Parks, civil rights icon.

Flip Your Whig

"In the era Wilentz describes, far more Americans than today remained outside democracy's boundaries. Yet in some ways, that democratic system was more robust than our own. Voter participation was far greater, popular involvement with political parties and leaders far more intense. Questions then thought to be subject to democratic control--currency and banking policy, public regulation of the economy, how to combat economic inequality--are now off the agenda. Today, only half the eligible population bothers to vote, no one is sure if his or her ballot will be accurately counted and the people's representatives are widely held in disrepute. As in the nineteenth century, we still grapple with the question of what kind of democracy America is and ought to be."

Eric Foner reviews Sean Wilentz's The Rise of American Democracy in The Nation, and Wilentz compares current conservatism with the antebellum Whig Party in The New York Times Magazine.

Taney, Fortas, Miers?

"From Andrew Jackson to Lyndon Johnson, many presidents have put their confidantes on the bench. But the White House claim omits a key fact. The practice of naming presidential pals began to wane decades ago, and, as John Roberts might say, the wisdom of avoiding cronyism is now a settled matter. The question is whether the Miers choice represents a one-time relapse or a harbinger of things to come."

In Slate, David Greenberg discusses the Supreme Court spoils system.

A Change Is Gonna Come

"Guralnick doesn't add much to Wolff's thesis. Both argue that though the soul singer who predated soul music made many records that fell short of his artistic potential, he was nevertheless a heroic figure, topping a voice that for those who loved it was liquid magic--cool, relaxed, infinitely inviting--with a questing intelligence and cultural ambition startling in a teen idol whose most important compositions included 'You Send Me' and 'Twistin' the Night Away.' As Cooke strove for pop success, he funded one of the most resolutely black labels the record business has known. He supported the civil rights movement in word and deed. He studied black history. At the time of his death in December 1964, he really was a hero, cut down in his prime at 33, and Guralnick's sense of this man, and of the lesser men and women who surrounded him, is vastly more complex and vivid than his predecessor's."

In The Nation, Robert Christgau reviews Peter Guralnick's new biography of Sam Cooke.

This Is Hard!

Saturday Night Live peered into the present back on November 4, 2000 with Will Ferrell as George W. Bush in "A Glimpse of Our Possible Future."

Look, Listen, Vibrate...

"Smile, an album that became a pop music myth largely because it was never released, is finally finished. Its completion validates the album's complex history, and convincingly reaffirms Wilson's originality and musical genius."

Scott Staton evaluates Beach Boy Brian Wilson in The New York Review of Books.

Addition: The Los Angeles Times runs an obit for Eugene Landy, Wilson's one-time therapist who died on March 22, 2006.

Teaching Both Sides

"The anniversary of the 'Monkey Trial' provides an occasion to remember that it didn't really settle what we assume it settled. Popular memory of the trial, reinforced by the 1960 movie Inherit the Wind, made it seem that evolution was triumphant and fundamentalism vanquished, but in fact the result was much more ambiguous. Anti-Darwinism didn't die in Dayton, Tenn., in July 1925—it just retreated temporarily from the national scene, to which it has now returned."

Via Ghost in the Machine, historian David Greenberg in Slate reevaluates the inheritance of the Scopes Trial.

John and Charles

"The 18th and early 19th centuries, according to received wisdom and introductory intellectual history courses, were characterized by increasing secularity: oppressive religious superstitions and institutions gave way to scientific understandings of the world; industrialization and empire spread; markets and trade grew. Under this schema, the US Constitution, with its separation of Church and State, stands as a high point in the advance of modern, secular civilization. Yet as Empire of the Spirit repeatedly demonstrates, evangelical Christianity thrived in this so-called secular environment. The unprecedented growth, spread, and consolidation of early Methodism was inextricably linked to the growth of the British Empire and that of the soon-to-be United States. And while Methodism and similar Free Church traditions have witnessed an equally rapid decline among their membership over the past fifty years, their shrinking numbers are by no means indicative of the weakness of evangelical Christianity—today, sects like the Pentecostals are growing as fast as Methodism did during the 1790s and 1810s. Instead, the decline of Methodism may be paradoxical proof of the sheer pervasiveness of its ideology: aspects of Methodism have become so absorbed into our cultural mindset as to have been rendered invisible."

Jennifer Snead in n+1 reviews Methodism: Empire of the Spirit by David Hempton.

The Great Exception

"During the 1920s McWilliams, like so many other unknown young writers in the West and South, had benefited from the editorial patronage and friendship of H.L. Mencken and his American Mercury; now he returned the favor, becoming the champion of such fresh talents as Ralph Nader, Dan Wakefield, Howard Zinn, Richard Cloward, Frances Piven and a broke and desperate soul named Hunter S. Thompson, to whom McWilliams fatefully pitched the idea of a report on California motorcycle gangs."

In The Nation, Mike Davis recalls the singularity of muckraker Carey McWilliams.

African or American?

"What the Maryland professor unearthed among public British documents -- including a 1759 parish baptismal record and a 1773 ship's muster, both of which list Equiano's place of birth as South Carolina -- came as a shock. 'I was surprised. I was resistant, in fact,' Mr. Carretta says. 'The naval record was the real problem to me, because at that point he's free, he's an adult. The pursers went and simply asked, "What's your name? Where are you from?"'"

Jennifer Howard in The Chronicle of Higher Education explains the dispute over Olaudah Equiano's birthplace.