Progressivism

In the same way a tamed Labor Day celebration of unions stole the thunder of socialist May Day, a political movement arose in the United States to attempt to prevent revolutionary change by offering mild reforms.

Marx and early socialists were concerned with Europe, not the United States and their ideas were mostly imported through immigration from Central Europe and Italy, at a time when industrialization was demanding an ever greater number of workers for new and expanding factories. Up to the 1890s, when the American Frontier was effectively declared closed, the existence of what to some were vast "vacant" lands (not how Indians or Mexicans viewed them), had been a kind of social and economic safety valve. If you didn’t like being on the bottom of the pecking order, you just went West.

Once the Frontiers closed or became crowded, however, the urgent problems of capitalism began to take on urgency. Because capitalism encouraged speculative investment, the entire economic system was chained to a recurring cycle of booms and busts that left millions of workers out of work. This happened again and again and again, every 5 to 15 years. The Great Depression of the 1930s was the deepest and longest bust, but it was by far not the only one. The cycle has continued happening through the Great Recession of 2007-2009.

One answer, from well-meaning but essentially capitalist quarters, were the reformist "Progressives." In the presidential election of 1912 all three major candidates — Teddy Roosevelt for the "Bull Moose" Progressive Party (a split from the Republicans), Republican William Howard Taft and Democrat Woodrow Wilson — claimed to be "progressive" at one point or another.

U.S. Progressivism of the 1880s to the 1920s was a decidedly centrist, reformist effort to ameliorate the ill effects of capitalism, regulating it rather than getting rid of it; its principal and last policy achievements in the USA were the Federal Reserve, the Food and Drug Administration (which ended the actual "snake oil" salesmen) and the federal income tax. Less effective was anti-trust legislation, which did not stop corporations' unfettered growth in power.

Labor Unions

Elsewhere during this period there emerged labor unions, which the Chartists in England organized on a trade basis along the lines of the collapsed medieval guilds. Other labor organizers argued that workers should organize themselves by broader industries rather than trade.

Originally, all unionizing was illegal in the United States as a form of “conspiracy” of workers to raise their wages by trying to bargain as a group. This changed with the 1842 landmark case of Commonwealth v. Hunt, in which the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that “labor combinations” (or workers offering labor as a group) were legal provided that they has a legal purpose and used legal means to achieve their goals.

The National Labor Union, founded in 1866, was the first U.S. national labor federation, but it dissolved in 1872. Around that time also, the regional Order of the Knights of St. Crispin was founded in the northeast in 1867 and had 50,000 members by 1870. The Knights of Labor, focused on the railways, organized in 1869. The Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, eventually called the American Federation of Labor, began in 1881 under the leadership of Samuel Gompers. The Western Federation of Miners was established in 1893.

Many unions leaders in the 19th century were socialists, some were anarchists, or anarcho-syndicalists (unions were sometimes called syndicates). In the 20th century, there occurred a shift, as we shall see.

Reform or Revolution?

The popular American view of socialism today is of a monolithic Communism led by what was once the Soviet Union ― continued today by rump periphery states such as Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam ― in which the seizure and retention of power by a guiding party was violent and undemocratic. This is a false Cold War myth.

Actually, the bulk of the socialist movement is and has been democratic. However, beginning in the 1880s there began to be a fissure between two kinds of socialists over tactics.

In one corner, were those willing to gain ascendancy gradually, legally, with a practical socioeconomic agenda and very little pretense of presenting a dogmatic philosophy rather than a view subject to scientific criticism. In the other, were those impatient with injustices, willing to jump past the legalities and niceties and seize power by the force of arms and hold onto it through terror.

In admittedly oversimplified terms, this is the crucial socialist debate in the late 19th century, after both the 1848 revolutions and 1870 commune failed. Socialists agreed in broad terms on the ultimate outcome ― socialization of the means of production ― but they came to disagree quite bitterly about how to get there.

The advocates of reform were exemplified by the renown Eduard Bernstein, a German social-democratic political theorist and politician, a member of the Social Democratic Party (the socialist party German workers identified with their interests, inspiring the Nazis to fly the false flag of “socialist” for their party’s name). Bernstein wrote a work called Evolutionary Socialism and became the standard leader of socialists who espoused social democracy, reformism and an electoral path to socialism.

He had known Marx and Engels well, but he regarded Marxist philosophical thinking, in particular the theory of historical materialism, as “immature.” (Contrary to all Cold War propaganda, pro or con, Marx himself made explicit in comments concerning a program of the early German socialists that atheism and related ideas, were his personal opinions, not socialism.) Bernstein helped develop the Second International (1889–1916), the precursor of modern and moderate western European socialism, which brought together socialist parties of 20 countries in a unified effort.

Against the reformist socialists stood firebrands such as Rosa Luxembourg, a German-Polish Marxist theorist, philosopher, economist, anti-war activist and revolutionary socialist of Polish origin. She founded the Spartacus League in 1915 (Spartacus was a Roman slave who led an uprising) and ultimately joined the Communist Party of Germany. A radical, she wrote a scathing response to Bernstein's book, an 1899 pamphlet titled Social Reform or Revolution?

Anarchism

After the 1848 rebellion mentioned earlier, which was a series of political upheavals throughout a year; it involved workers from France and Spain to as far as Hungary, who went on general strikes, set up provisional governments in some cities and generally shook the continent. It remains the most widespread was of revolutions in European history and occurred all more or less at the same time, with no coordination.

At that point workers began to understand themselves as a socioeconomic class: those who possessed nothing (neither land nor factories) and had to sell their time at work. The 19th century word favored by Marx was "the proletariat." Proletarian is a Latin term used in Imperial Rome to refer to people so poor and uneducated that their principal contribution to Rome was to have children (prole, in Latin) who would then go into the Legions. Socialists argued that the land and factories should be controlled by workers, who were the ones who made these things productive, presumably through a government dedicated to serving workers.

Anarchists went a step further: they argued that the institution of government (along with the concept of property and all religion) was in itself evil and that instead workers should form voluntary associations to organize common ownership of the means of production. The French politician and writer Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is deemed the "father" of Anarchism, although he abandoned it, but the classic Anarchists are Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin, Leon Tolstoy and others.

The most notable act of Anarchists in the 19th century was a short-lived rebellion known as the Paris Commune, a revolt during the Franco-Prussian War that led to the collapse of the French Second Empire under Napoleon III (aka Louis Napoleon, a nephew of the original) in September 1870. As Prussia besieged Paris, which was a hotbed of working-class radicalism, workers refused to fight to defend the capitalist-industrialist elite and seized the city from within, proclaimed a "Commune of Paris" led by Anarchists. They were ruthlessly suppressed by the French Army in what was later called "The Bloody Week," beginning May 21, 1871.

However, the ideas of the Commune — voluntarism, no property or religion and even free love — had enormous influence on Marx, who described the event as an example of his fateful phrase, "dictatorship of the proletariat" in his famous work, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.

Early Socialists

Socialism existed before Marx. American Founding Father Thomas Paine had proposed a plan to tax property owners to pay for the needs of the poor through something very similar to the Universal Basic Income being talked about today — but he was not consciously socialist.

In Europe, the first movements to become conscious of themselves as socialists were the Owenites, Chartists and Saint-Simonians, among others.

Robert Owen was an eccentric Welsh mill owner in Scotland who developed utopian ideas and in 1824, Owen traveled to the United States to invest the bulk of his fortune in an experimental 1,000-member colony on the banks of Indiana's Wabash River, called New Harmony. Owen originated the idea of an eight-hour work day in 1810!!!

Owenites overlapped with a number of other working-class movements, most notably the Chartists (so called for their People's Charter of 1838, which called for universal suffrage for all male adults); in England, as in the USA, voting was limited to property owners. The Chartists, like the Owenites called for a more equitable distribution of income and better living conditions for the working classes — which were, in truth, abominable.

Count Henri de Saint-Simon was the first person to actually use the term "socialism." He was fascinated by science and technology its potential to eliminate hard work; he advocated a socialist society that would eliminate the disorderly aspects of capitalism — such as booms and busts — through administrative efficiency and science as the path to a rationally organized and planned economy.

Socialism

While Americans argued over slavery, Europe had begun to divide over what began to be called “wage slavery.” Just as the liberalism of Locke and Mill and capitalism of Smith had become the pillars of the social and economic order, an English economist named David Ricardo observed that the value of traded things — commodities — is determined by the quantity of labor needed to produce them, which industrialization made variable, rather than the material from which it comes, which remained more or less fixed.

This idea caught fire in the mind of Karl Marx, a German intellectual exiled in England who was then observing the new industrial economy. Marx concluded that capitalists — people with money beyond that needed for well-being, also known as capital invested in productive ventures — make profits from the difference between the costs of production (the labor and raw materials they pay for) and the market price they obtain. A key advantage in the process lies in the difference between what it costs for workers to stay alive and the ultimate price of the goods they make, which Marx called “surplus value”; this is what, Marx argued, capitalists take from workers.

Marx did not blame capitalists, whom he saw as trapped within the rules; instead, he viewed the economic system and capital itself as the cause of the surplus value theft. No real change would occur, he proposed, until control of production and markets was in the hands of all society, especially the workers.

The idea first appeared in a document called the Communist Manifesto, which Marx wrote with fellow exile Friedrich Engels in 1848. It was a fast and furious summary of complex ideas, written just as worker revolts broke out in the most widespread revolutionary wave in European history, from France to as far as Hungary. This was the dawn of what would be called the socialist movement, its ideas later developed in detail in many books, especially the three-volume Capital. Their key and simplest concept would prove maddeningly difficult to bring about.

To understand what was to happen in the United States, we need to review the emergence of socialism in Europe, which occurred in four steps: 1) the proto-socialism that built up to Marx and the First International; 2) Anarchism; 3) labor unions and 4) a broad-based debate within socialism between reform and revolution. All of this took place between from about the 1820s to the 1880s and a little beyond.

Slavery

The United States simmered to a boil over what South Carolinian lawmaker John Calhoun called the “peculiar institution” in the American South. At odds were two regions:

• a Southern agrarian society organized as a caste system supported by unpaid laborers brought from Africa sold as chattel; 
• in the North a new kind of social order based on capital and industry, which fed on immigrants recruited to work for bare survival wages in the North’s Blakean “Satanic mills.”

Americans did not think of the problems in the terms of social sciences that were then very new, but rather in terms of the national Messianism developed by the first Protestant English dissenters in Massachusetts. In a 1630 sermon delivered at sea, Puritan leader John Winthrop told his little community that they would be building “a city upon a hill” (Matthew 5:14) watched by the world and urged them to set an example of communal charity, affection and unity; if they failed, he warned, “we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world” of God’s judgment.

Slavery supporters pointed to the St. Paul’s Letter to Philemon, which addressed a Christian slave owner; the letter was carried by Onesimus, a runaway slave baptized by Paul and persuaded to return to his master. Christians of the Confederacy saw this as biblical writ for slavery; however, U.S. slavery was vastly unlike the slave system of antiquity St. Paul knew, particularly in the degree of dehumanization imposed on kidnapped Africans, including lifelong hereditary servitude.

Abolitionists could also point to Paul’s urging Philemon to treat the runaway no longer as a slave but as a brother in the faith, which he apparently did, to the point that Onesimus eventually became a bishop of the Church at Ephesus. In the wake of Protestant movements such as the Great Awakening and Pietism, both of which stressed personal transformation through spiritual rebirth and renewal, as well as individual devotion and piety, many Christians in the North supported Abraham Lincoln’s distinctly biblical oratory on the subject; they were supporters of escaped slaves’ “Underground Railroad” and embraced the fiery anti-slavery militancy of the renown insurgent John Brown.

Liberty

The American foundational framework of ideas around which the budding conflicts would be resolved were not American. In the Declaration of Independence, for example, Thomas Jefferson borrowed quite liberally from John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, from which also are derived many ideas in the Constitution, including separation of church and state.

In this groundbreaking work, the 17th-century Enlightenment philosopher, also deemed the father of English and U.S. liberalism, proposed the notion of the social contract. In his words: “That which begins and actually constitutes any political society is nothing but the consent of any number of freemen capable of a majority to unite and incorporate into such a society. And this is that, and that only, which did or could give beginning to any lawful government in the world.”

In an age of absolute monarchy, in which a French king boasted that “L’etat c’est moi” (I am the State) and English kings still claimed power over Parliament, this was a revolutionary idea. It was extended by a 19th century thinker, John Stuart Mill, who conceived of liberty as the absence of restraint from government or others to develop one’s own unique abilities and capacities. In On Liberty, penned in 1859, he stated “the only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way.”

Seeds of Conflict

It seems proper in a time of strife to recall early signs that in the young American republic all was not right nor yet perfected.

In the 1791–1794 Whisky Rebellion, more or less independent Pennsylvania family farmers rose up against a tax on distilled spirits they produced. The levy was enacted by Congress and President Washington to pay the rich interest on the bonds floated to finance the war of independence.

There were also 14 widespread major slave revolts between 1794 and 1859 — students usually only learn of Nat Turner’s. Besides that, there were enough escapes to justify legislation on their return and to spur the “Underground Railroad” to freedom.

Beginning with Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), there was a movement to gain property rights, access to education and later voting rights for women. With typical generosity of spirit, its leaders campaigned for the abolition of slavery and temperance before championing women’s rights.

Finally, although four signers of the Constitution were Irish (mostly Anglo-Irish), when a million and a half people fled the Emerald Isle’s Great Hunger of 1845-1852, these newly arrived white Europeans began to experience discrimination and mistreatment. This would repeat itself with every successive later immigration wave from Europe, with Germans, Poles, Italians, Russian Jews and others, who quickly formed self-defense organizations and rallied around the political leadership of the only immigrants who were native English speakers, the Irish.

Capitalism

Political conservatives today celebrate capitalism as if their predecessors wisely invented it. Actually, “capitalist system” was first used in Karl Marx’s criticism of the mid-19th century economy.

The thought basis of capitalism was laid down by Adam Smith, some 75 years earlier, arguing that the best route to national wealth was open markets, free trade and laissez-faire (French for “let [it or them] do”) policies. He wrote that as little government restraint or taxation as possible should be imposed on wealthy investors, bankers, merchants and captains of industry.

Smith was a rebelling, on behalf of the industrial revolution, against the taxes and controls by kings and lords. He also fought against mercantilism, in Britain exemplified by Oliver Cromwell’s establishment of a merchant marine. That was a policy enhancing the trade position of one’s own nation at the expense of all others (yes, you guessed, Trump is unconsciously a mercantilist), originally in what turned out to be the 16th- to 18th-century ruinous pursuit of gold and silver reserves.

Smith placed his trust instead on what he described as the market’s “invisible hand” to provide “the necessaries of life.”

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This continues the We Hold These Truths series, into which we inserted a Labor Day entry that broke the scheme a bit, simply for timeliness.

Why U.S. Labor Day is in September and not May 1st

The U.S. Department of Labor website omits the ideological and antisocialist origins of the date chosen for the federal holiday that is celebrated the first Monday of September under the name of Labor Day. That's today.

In Europe and South America it is held on May 1st,  to recall the Haymarket Massacre, which occurred on May 4, 1886, in Chicago. The incident leading to the deadly events occurred during a peaceful demonstration convened at a Chicago park called Haymarket; its purpose was to demand the eight-hour workday, now an almost universal practice. The workers were mostly immigrants from Germany and the Kingdom of Bohemia (now the Czech Republic).

A stranger — believed to be a provocateur hired to give police the excuse to crack down on the demonstrators — threw a dynamite bomb at the police, which responded predictably and dispersed the gathering. So much for the right to assembly. Seven police officers and at least four civilians were killed and dozens injured.

Lest you think these were rebels without a cause, consider that for their work they were paid $1.50 per day. Adjusted to 2017 dollars, it would be $38.63 a day, or $12,043.20 annually, just below the federal poverty level for a single person and half the level for a family of four. Plus, the work week, which then included Saturday, consisted of 60 hours of work.

In general, they protested the work of 10 hours a day for sums that did not yield enough to support a family, then or now. The Haymarket rally was also in response to the killing of several workers by police the day before.

The protests were not isolated incidents.

In October 1884, the Federation of Organized Workers and Unions unanimously fixed May 1st, 1886, as the target date for the adoption of the eight-hour working day. As the chosen date approached without action by the government to require an eight-hour day, the unions prepared a general strike.

On the appointed day, Saturday, May 1, 1886, which would then have been a workday, thousands of workers went on strike in major cities such as New York and Detroit, and crowds estimated between 300,000 and half a million chanted, "Eight-hour day, with no cut in pay."

After the riot in Chicago three days later, in Congress many lawmakers began to recognize the need to celebrate Labor Day. Most of the labor organizations, many affiliated to the First International, preferred May 1st, to commemorate the general strike that had led to the Haymarket Massacre.

President Grover Cleveland believed that such a holiday on May 1st would invite disorder and further strengthen the socialist movement. The chubby Cleveland belonged to the industrialists' wing of the Democratic Party, then known as the "Bourbon Democrats."

The alternative date used today has its origin in a parade celebrated Sept. 5, 1882, in New York by the Knights of Labor, an anti-socialist union of Catholic inspiration. The parade was repeated in 1884 and the Knights of Labor continued to hold it annually the first Monday of September. In 1887 Cleveland gave his support to the Knights' date as a national holiday.

All of this had at least two consequences.

First, popular pressure for the eight-hour day continued. At the 1888 convention of the American Federation of Labor, the same union that had protested in 1886, it was decided to launch another campaign and on May 1, 1890, was the date set set for another general strike.

The International Association of Workers (or Second International), meeting in Paris in 1889, endorsed the date for international demonstrations, thus beginning the international tradition of May Day.

But the struggle was long.

The eight-hour day in the United States was first won by the miners' union in 1898. Construction workers in San Francisco obtained it in 1900, typographers in 1905 and in 1914 the Ford Company doubled its current pay to $5 per day and reduced the workday from nine to eight hours.

However, it was not until 1916 that the federal government established the eight-hour day as a national standard.

Second, after the massacre eight anarchist workers were accused of conspiring to incite violence at the Haymarket demonstration. Five were sentenced to death (one committed suicide before being executed) and three were sentenced to prison terms.

The workers' movement called the accused the Martyrs of Chicago. The trial, which lasted until 1893, was universally viewed as illegitimate and deliberately malicious.

The new governor of Illinois, John Peter Altgeld, pardoned the defendants and joined in the criticism of the courts. Altgeld, one of the founders of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, could have been a candidate for president if he had not been born in Germany, as were many of the immigrants who fought for their rights as workers in Haymarket.

Hurricane Metes Out Poetic Justice on Houston

What does Houston stand for if not the oil industry? Houston benefited from its nefarious alliance with the Motor City, Detroit, to marginalize U.S. environmentalism, destroy public transit and subjugate every oil producing nation by bribing their sheikhs and dictators to sell out their citizenry.

We already saw one kind of retribution in 9/11. Now Mother Nature has joined the cause.

Just as the auto industry's Detroit — the one place in which Martin Luther King, Jr., felt unfettered hate — was allowed to decline and die after the city's African-American poor exploded against inequality in 1967, Houston is now feeling the effect of climate change among the anti-Mexican Texas kickers.

Auto and oil industries, allied sectors and a few of their most suborned politicians conspired to destroy public transit (see the 1947 conviction of General Motors for conspiracy to destroy electric tramway systems) and prevent environmental measure that, in the 1970s might have stopped and reversed climate change. Even a Republican, the notorious Richard Nixon, recognized the need for environmental action by establishing the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.


Now it's too late. Climate change is irreversible, we can only soften the blows. The electric streetcar is gone. The Arab world is seeing the worst passions inflamed by deep and justified resentment at the exploitation, and now endless war, wrought on their countries by the West.



That is why Houston is flooded.

Created Equal?

So we're in the late 18th century and early 19th. We have a tripartite government (with executive, legislative and judicial branches). Supposedly, the principles that led to the start of the new nation, the supposedly united former colonies called states, were that all people were "created equal" to pursue life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

But wait. Women could not vote. Nor could slaves nor Indians. Nor could even all white men. Those who were serfs, or "indentured," did not have a vote. Even among free men, only those who had property, meaning assets such as land or a business, could vote. So the USA began essentially as an agrarian oligarchy, which literally means, in its Greek roots, "rule of the few."

In the year 1776, a Scotsman named Adam Smith wrote a book titled The Wealth of Nations. Smith was a moral philosopher engaged in the then-new field of study called economics (which means literally the study of the management of a household). Applied to entire societies, Smith was interested in political economy, which he viewed as "a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator [with the twofold objectives of providing] a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people ... [and] to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue for the publick services."

This is one way to examine society. In short, I will be touching on the later development of sociology and psychology. In this way we can ask, how have Americans worked to secure their survival at each stage? How did they organize their society? What have they been like as people? How have who they were, what they did for a living, the institutions they favored and the personal way of living make them into what we try to understand today as one nation?

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This is the second in a series of entries on the development of ideas that made the United States and the economic, social and political issues Americans debate, posted under the label WeHoldTheseTruths.

We Hold These Truths

A cyberfriend on Facebook nudged me into starting a brief series of entries on the development of ideas that made the United States and the economic, social and political issues Americans debate. I have decided to share my posts on her "wall" with the greater cyberspace under the label WeHoldTheseTruths.

What ideas brought us to the binary electoral choice of two basically similar political parties serving whomever pays the piper? Are there alternatives for running our society, making our economy fairer for all and, if so, what are they?

To look at the beginnings, I suppose we have to look at truth. Up to 1517, when one Martin Luther rebelled, truth in Europe was said to be divinely inspired and taught by the successors of the apostles of one Yeshua bar Yosif (aka Jesus the Christ). Then came Luther and said, more or less, "no, truth is revealed to my soul directly by God when I read the Bible."

Then, a few centuries later, people such as Francis Bacon, René Descartes, John Locke, Baruch Spinoza, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant, proposed that the truth properly had to be reached by human reason and that all reasonable people, presented certain evidence, would agree.

That is the quintessence of the original American philosophy and the underlying idea behind the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

You can see at least three layers of thinking that informed the framers of our nation's foundations: the idea of theological and absolute truth (Judeo-Christian religion), the notion of intuitively revealed truth through faith and, finally, empirical or factual reasoning. Today, many people question all three, not usually at the same time; but this is the source from which all our talk about principles and society and fairness, and so forth, springs forth.

Blogging Christianity

Yesterday I reached the end of the trail of what became a Sunday blog about the history of the Christian faith. I had started it for a friend preparing for confirmation as an adult; she wanted to hear the outline of the Christian story in order, so she could grasp how Christian beliefs, morals and rituals developed.

The result was my blog Let Mountains Hear, its title drawn from Micah 6:2. It originally was just a tag in a blog about faith, generally and haphazardly, as ideas came. Then the history came to dominate, then it became a weekly blog, one post every Sunday.

Yesterday was the final, 140th post since April 2013.

Anyone interested in reading it through, from beginning to end (and correcting, corrections are always welcome), may

(a) start at the beginning Story of the Christian Faith and click on the Newer Post link at the very bottom of each entry; or

(b) use the menu at the top, which organizes the posts by era, starting with Abrahamic Faith, then Bethlehem through Chalcedon, Middle Ages, Renaissance & Reformation, Modernity, Our Time.

It grew like Topsy, with some posts longer than others, a few topics spread over posts — all guided by the inexorable march of historical time, with some attention to complexity.

Describing the setting and themes of the Nicene Creed took five weekly entries. The Protestant Reformation and various reactions took about 20. Looking back, I see I did not cover every possible detail, but I would argue that all the major developments that help define modern Christianity are there.

The idea was to write something by an ordinary person — I am neither a professional theologian nor historian —for ordinary people. My biases are my biases, I wear them on my sleeve, but I tried in general to be fair as I am fair in my professional work, journalism.

So, it is done.

Why the pseudo-religious website Patheos should be really called Atheos

The Tldr (too long, didn't read): truth in advertising. Patheos (dubbed in its header as "hosting the conversation about faith") promotes itself as "the premier online destination to engage in the global dialogue about religion and spirituality," when in reality it is all about promoting atheism and anti-religious bias.

Atheos uses three tools of intellectual dishonesty to accomplish this:

1. Postings attempt to present U.S. Protestant Evangelicals as mainstream Christianity instead of a minuscule set of U.S. sectoids made up of undereducated people who confuse memorizing Bible verses with knowledge and Christian faith. Yes, Evangelicals are a wet dream for people who like to wield straw-man arguments against Christianity; but they're not widely representative.
   
   
2. Atheos prefers its bloggers to be either fringe people who are marginal even in their own tiny denominations, non-denominational, Unitarian (not Christian) and occasionally rabbis (to whom Christianity is, understandably, apostasy). Their pieces, time and time again, reflect a bias in favor of anything that makes adherents of Christian religion, specifically a Bible-belt caricature of Christianity, look like lunatic haters.
   
   
3. The message is always that, if you strip the layers of (alleged or Evangelical) Christian belief, you come up empty. The truth always lies elsewhere. Some of the remembered fragments of Christianity from childhood may be comfort food for the soul — but never anything approximating truth.

You think I'm kidding. I'm not and I can show you this is what Atheos is really all about.

In fact, in an online discussion I challenged my good friend Peter Kirkwood, who thought I was being a little too harsh on the website, to come up with "an article in Atheos that has a positive faith-inspiring piece, that is not about how so-and-so (absurdly unknown evangelical pastoroid) hates gays, sex and secularism."

He came up with 7 examples. I put the links and my response to each one immediately after.

• What I Learned in Seminary: Doubt is Overrated. Here is a minister of a marginal Protestant church (the Church of Christ has about 2 million members) admitting he doesn't have any answers and his faith does not speak to the concerns of people. Not great advertising for his church, his ministry or his faith; nor inspiring.
  
  
• The Church Is Political, But How?. An evangelical admits that all [evangelical] "voter guides" are pro-Republican. Stop the presses! The evangelicals are a collection of miniscule churchlets (the biggest of which is the two or three Baptist groups, which are about 13 million) that have no common policy and have, by their own admission, a very narrow point of view. This is not Christianity, this is Evangelical World, an amusement park where some preachers get very rich selling "Bahbles."
  
  
• The Strange Task of Preaching: Isaiah 55:10-13. This  can be summarized as "God is dead." However, let's pretend otherwise and keep on praying anyway so the author, a professor of preaching, can keep his day job. You don't believe, say so; don't hide behind Charlie Brown's favorite verses.
  
  
• Rosenzweig and Weil Are Dead. At last, Diogenes, we have an honest man: a rabbi. Franz Rosenzweig and Simone Weil were two 20th century Jews who dabbled in Christianity. R became every Hillel club's the poster boy for why youthful modern Jews should not convert to Christianity; W became the poster girl who couldn't bring herself to convert for a number of neurotic reasons. (I happen to like both R and W and have read a fair share of their writings, but they are not exactly on anyone's road to Damascus.) Again, Atheos posts models of not becoming Christian.
  
  
• Wonder Woman and Pinchas: The Persistent Appeal of Zealotry Here another rabbi, a convert from Christianity, effectively equates faith with "zealotry." He whimsically, but ineffectively in my view, taps Wonder Woman (no doubt to appeal to hipsters), then copies Richard Dawkins' argument (see my post Going to the Atheist Church) about violence in the Hebrew Bible (aka Old Testament). Thank you, Atheos, for the propaganda from someone who left Christianity (a fact omitted on the site, of course).
  
  
• A Timeless Winning Trifecta for Every Age. I was willing to give this one a few points, but its Methodist author spends most of his time talking about being old. Eventually he wends his way to St. Paul and love, hope and faith, concluding they are worth it even for new generations (even though Boomers have it all wrong). What? Come again? Half a point for not saying anything overtly hostile to the faith; but Atheos gets subtle here: when it is a believer, make sure it is someone too distracted with himself to stay on topic.
  
  
• Christian: You Are Upset About the Wrong Things. In the final example of uplifting faith-inspiring propaganda from Atheos, we get a Baptist, but one who left ministry to make money, citing pseudo-sociology to remind us — stop the presses, again! — that Evangelicals care more about the evils of saying "shit" than 30,000 children dying. Cleverly, the author says "Christian," not "bigots who like to think the 'Bahble' makes them right."
  
  

Peter's examples did make me aware of one thing. Atheos is really an anti-evangelical site. Of course, Evangelicals' religious illiteracy (aside from their memorized Bible verses) make them very much like the kid who walks around high school unaware that someone has taped a sign that reads "kick me" on the back of his shirt.

They are supremely mockable pseudo-Christians, whose faith derives from an originally well-intentioned movement (see from my other blog the post Awakenings). Admittedly, so are almost all of us who believe in Jesus the Christ, hope for improving and try, often failing miserably, to love.

The subtlety and disingenuous approach of Atheos, however, demonstrates malicious and malevolent intent. They should change their name and let their atheist colors fly.

Happy Real Independence Day

Cecilieaux is off for the holiday, but he left behind his now-traditional Independence Day blog post. Happy 2nd!

Today, July 2nd, rather than July 4th, is the actual day that independence of the territories that were to become the United States from Britain was first approved. This came in the form of a resolution that attorney Richard Henry Lee, a Virginian, proposed to the Second Continental Congress.

The brief document read:

    Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.
    That it is expedient forthwith to take the most effectual measures for forming foreign Alliances.
    That a plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective Colonies for their consideration and approbation.

The motion was approved by 12 of the 13 colonies. Indeed, John Adams, of Massachusetts, who seconded Lee's proposal, was so certain that a great step had been taken that he wrote to his wife Abigail:

    The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.

Now, 241 years later, the festival is held on the 4th, when the delegates approved the wordier, some would say grander, announcement of the decision by Thomas Jefferson, who composed it in the absence of Lee, who had rushed back to Virginia due to his wife's illness.

In honor of someone born on this great day, however, let us fire off an imaginary firecracker.

Clinton and the Nineties (1992-2000)

There were really three Nineties decades (and I mean the 1990s, not 1890s) in the United States, from my perspective. In this final installment of my series* on the U.S. zeitgeist of 1950 through 2000, I will address those three partially overlapping periods.

Transition

The first Nineties were a continuation of the 1980s until 1992, a presidential election year. Also in 1992, a recession that began almost on the dime of when I expected it, in midsummer, was at the time was thought of as a structural event that augured a catastrophe for the country; it was not.

Few people today seem to remember how it felt at that time. I remember that on an outing with our kids to a baseball game, I told a friend that the downturn was coming and he was upset. My friend is a conservative Republican and Catholic; he was also a building contractor and construction is always very sensitive to economic fluctuations; he did not want his son to worry. I did not say it to crow over the moment out of ideology or boast of my economic independence (I had been promoted to manager of the company that I ended up buying), but because it seemed to be the economic reality.

The recession ended as quickly as it started. The economic music stopped a hot June week and boomed again in December, after Clinton beat Bush (Sr.).

However, the recession shook the confidence of the heartland states between the Appalachians and the Rocky Mountain ranges. After morning in Reagan's America came a grayish sunset that gave people nightmares. That's why the motto for Clinton's campaign staff was "it's the economy, stupid"; a reminder that people vote with their pockets more than anything else.

Clinton won a traditional Democratic victory against Republican incompetence, characterized by a laissez faire attitude in the face of an economic recession. It was almost the same as Franklin Roosevelt's 1932 victory over Hoover's apathy toward the Great Depression. The 1992 recession was a mild recession but it frightened the mostly uninformed Americans who supported Reagan.

When the first cracks appeared in the Reaganite sieve, the American Dream honey syrup that Reagan had sold the public soured. Suddenly, people began to see negative changes that had been covered up.

It began, for example, with "the homeless," people who began to appear as street beggars in every major city for the first time since the Great Depression. (In part, it was a phenomenon produced by the closing, under Reagan's budgets, of transitional housing for low-functioning people who did not suffer aggressive mental disorders.)

Another pattern at the time was the awareness jobs losses to factories abroad, in general the movement of manufacturing to countries with lower labor costs due to the absence of unions (Mexico and Malaysia were very popular among the executives of transnational corporations). Goodbye "Made in U.S.A."!

Finally, the transformation of farmland from family-run farms, lost in the 1980s Reagan recession, into an industry run by companies that owned lands and employed people to farm and care for livestock; what ended up being called agribusiness. The family farm was for much of a century, from the 1880s to 1980s, a prop of the American Dream myth.

Both phenomena created a large share of the white middle class to fall abruptly from one socioeconomic level to another below. Industrial workers whose wages had allowed them home ownership and a paid university education for their children went to near-permanent jobless or underemployment paid well below what their skills warranted. More or less self-reliant farm owners whose grandparents claimed land during the expansion West became mere urban employees.

All that resentful mass had been carefully seduced by neoconservative Republicans, who nurtured racism, fanatical capitalist Calvinism (in which being poor is essentially viewed as the result of laziness, therefore sinful) and all the "cultural war" between conservatives and liberals concerning social mores (abortion, divorce, sexuality, etc.). All so they could vote against the economic interests.

Boom

The second 1990s came with Clinton, who presided over an economic boom unparalleled in U.S. history. Clinton, a centrist Democrat, talked about leading the country toward shared wealth. U.S. presidents do not have the power to control the national economy, but they have at hand levers to redistribute wealth, either upward (Reagan and Republicans) or downward (Clinton and Democrats).

Even ordinary people in this period came to have more money than they knew how to handle. The overall value of holdings in the stock market, according to the best well-known index, the Dow-Jones Industrial Average, rose from 3,000 to 10,000 in the 1990s (now it is around 21,000).

The generation that was cradled in the 80's and went through adolescence in the 90's, now called Millennials, recall those golden years in which well-being was felt everywhere. Inflation fell to 2% annually and unemployment to 4%, both very low levels and almost the lowest levels possible in a growing economy. In part because of this, Millenials are a generous and self-confident generation, unlike their older brothers, Generation X (1965-1980), deemed as a little lost for being born amid much social unrest and the beginning of stagnation for the middle class.

Politically, the country split into "reds" and "blues," colors that came from a convention adopted in the 1980s for voter maps on television. When a Republican candidate's victory was projected television changed the color of the state from white to red, if the Democrat won the white state was colored blue.

That bitter partisanship that persists to this day. The Red, or conservative and Republican states, are in the South and Center South and the Southwest). Nothing to do with the nineteenth-century use of red by socialists and communists. Blue USA, or variously progressive and Democratic, covers both coasts (excluding the southern coastal states), New England and the northern industrial states.

Popularly, the gap is a matter of social place and culture, rather than ideology. Americans are not concerned with ideological much. A typology of the strata of American society would require a whole different set of posts (a future series?).

World Wide Web

The third 1990s began with the widespread emergence of technology that had been carefully developed for universities and government (but not public use) since the 1960s, the Internet.

The network was based on Unix, an operating system produced by the old AT&T Bell Labs, also the cradle of the programming language C. It was conceived as a decentralized system for military reasons, with the idea of ensuring the survival of the computer communications medium after a nuclear war. Once marketed in the 90's when the telephone monopoly was undone by judicial order, the Internet began the revolution we all know today.

Internet and computer technology maximized productivity to unthinkable levels only years earlier and led to a global boom that prolonged the U.S. recovery into the longest economic expansion in U.S. history. Many Americans in the late 1990s came to believe that the fall of Soviet Communism and the rise of the Internet proved that all problems could be solved in a global capitalist world. That, at least was the idea proclaim in the era's bestseller The End of History by Francis Fukuyama.

This was only the inevitable delusion of a decade in which unparalleled wealth and a geopolitical uni-polar world run with high-tech seemed capable of organizing globally and curing all ills. The U.S. government at last had fiscal surpluses projected as far as the horizon. Wall Street was roaring (it is said that even members of the last Soviet politburo applauded at the finale of their secret screening of the film "Wall Street"). Europe was unified with a single currency. Even China made its opening to capitalism. A new technology was unifying the human race forever.

Of course, there were omens that this was not going to last.

When welfare reform was approved in 1996, reducing benefits to a lifetime maximum of five years, there was an indication of a lack of sensitivity toward economic losers that one day would effectively generate a permanent underclass.

Similarly, the Clinton scandals with Monica Lewinsky yielded a national soap opera. However, although I didn't realize for a decade, it was a vast smokescreen to hide the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the law that since the 1930s had separated banking, brokerage and insurance companies into watertight and separate compartments. (The repeal's eventual result was seen in 2008.)

As if that were not enough, the electoral fraud that defeated Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore, who won the majority of votes but lost the electoral college, proved that the country's socioeconomic and political Darth Vaders were alive and well.

The 1990s did not end in the year 2000 (or 1999 as some thought). The era ended a sunny, late-summer, on September 11, 2001, when two passenger planes crashed into the twin towers of the so-called World Trade Center in New York.

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*This ends my short series attempting to sketch the contemporary cultural and social history of the United States, how 50 years felt. All this comes from an exchange with a French correspondent, which provoked thoughts that could be of interest to my Spanish-speaking readers in another blog and now my English-speaking readers.

Reagan's Dawn (1981-1992)

The ascendancy of the broad civil rights, peace and sexual openness movement of the 1960s and 1970s came to a screeching halt some time around the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 in a manner as sudden and surprising as the election of Margaret Thatcher's Tories in 1979, an election I witnessed while living in London.

Just as Thatcher shook the Labour Party, Reagan was an unexpected blow to the U.S. liberals, who espoused centrist or center-left views. When the Republicans nominated Reagan candidate, I was convinced Carter's reelection was assured.

U.S. presidents are usually reelected and serve a term of eight years. Until Carter, only nine of the 37 previous presidents had been in power for a single four-year term or less. One of them was Carter's predecessor, Gerald Ford, who was appointed by Nixon and never elected. Before Ford, there was Herbert Hoover, who failed to be reelected in 1932 at the outset of the Great Depression, for which his party was blamed, arguably with some justification.

Nothing remotely resembling the Depression had happened under Carter. Why did the electorate end up denying him a second term and handing over the White House to a mediocre actor whose governorship of California had little to show for itself?

In part, Reagan's victory can be attributed to something Lyndon Johnson predicted to his intimates when he signed the Civil Rights Act. "We've given the South to the Republicans," Johnson said. The Republicans adopted the famous "southern strategy," the stoking Southern white resentment at the advancement of African-Americans. Indeed, Reagan's 1980 campaign was launched in Philadelphia, Miss., site of the slaying of three civil rights workers -- in effect, a dog whistle.

The campaign could also be called Goldwater's revenge. This became evident to me years later when I studied the resumes of key but lesser known Reagan people. These were folks of more or less my generation whose political awakening had come with the electoral beating of Barry Goldwater in 1964. These Republican political operatives had quietly established a neoconservative network financed by executives and millionaires (today we would say billionaires), all essentially dedicated to reversing every social and economic reform since 1932.

Republican neoconservatives were split from the outset into two significant wings.

Some wanted to mandate the reversal of social changes in sexual morality (legalization of abortion, for example), women's relatively broader life choices and, laterally without explicitly saying anything out loud about it, racial integration. These were the social conservatives.

Others wanted to revert civil society to what it was more or less around 1928, before the stock market Crash of 1929, to a country in which there was no public financial assistance, few workers were in unions, taxes were very low and the stock market and banking sector operated essentially free of legal constraints. These were the economic conservatives.

The social neoconservatives courted Christian fundamentalists disenchanted with Carter. They also wooed conservative Catholics who saw as "heresies" in both the "spirit" of the Second Vatican Council and the massive rejection of the papal prohibition of the contraceptive pill and aspired to a return to the social "orthodoxy" of the 1950s. (These folks forgot about the era's discrimination against Catholics.)

There were voters coming from military families who, despite the military tradition of absolute partisan neutrality, felt betrayed by Democratic politicians during and after Vietnam. To these add male, white industrial workers and "ethnics" (non-Anglo-Saxon whites), resentful of losing labor and economic pre-eminence to African-Americans and women.

All of these were the people Spiro Agnew had called "the silent majority," whom a relatively obscure preacher from Virginia now called "the Moral Majority," a base clamoring for what was then called the Reagan Revolution, which was actually akin to the French Revolution's Thermidorian reaction, a counter-revolution.

Reagan supporters were very effective propagandists. They spoke of a modest electoral victory (Reagan won 50.8% of the popular vote) as a "landslide" merely because Reagan managed to get the majority of electors in 44 states. They also managed to cast an old man who would soon be doddering but remained a capable script reader as "the great communicator."

The Reagan Administration tried, and in many cases succeeded, in reversing the socioeconomic policies of at least the previous 20 years thanks to its propagandists.

Some things could not be overtly reversed. Legal and institutional racial segregation was not coming back. However, Reagan managed to erode the power of unions, minorities and women; and he launched a vast redistribution of resources that favored the richest through tax cuts and public debt that paid handsome interest.

In order to bring down inflation, which hurts those who possess disposable wealth the most, Reagan triggered an recession that led to a 10 percent unemployment rate in 1982, the highest since the Depression. The downturn accelerated the decline of the middle class and in this way imposed wage and labor discipline. All these fireworks for the plutocrats, involving dull numbers noticed primarily by economists and stockbrokers, were hidden behind a clever smokescreen of social propaganda.

The counter-revolution turned neoconservative slogans into accepted social values. Overnight the entrepreneur became a hero, greed a virtue and the nuclear family a sacred institution that served as a safeguard against the ills of feminism, homosexuality and free love. God and calling oneself a believer was in fashion again. Washingtonian magazine, a bland regional glossy, expressed the Reagan zeitgeist in the nation's capital with an issue of those years whose cover proclaimed, "God is Back!"

Of course, God had never been gone -- at least beyond the U.S. Northeast and West Coast -- and neither had traditional values, the so-called Protestant ethic (hard work, frugality, family integrity and at least the appearance of sexual restraint). During the 1960s and 1970s, the era's youth and intellectuals had only made it seem that way.

More significant was the social and cultural behavior of those whom Agnew had called "silent" and were now empowered.

The N-word returned. It was used by Randy Newman, for example, in a satirical song about "rednecks." Although Newman did not intend this as an insult (quite the contrary: he was mocking those who still used that term), was a sign of change that this kind of joke could be played on the radio without causing riots.

I heard the word one morning in the fall of 1988, used by a white, upper-middle-class man standing in his bathrobe at the door of his elegant suburban Bethesda house. He spoke angrily to an African-American woman, a mail carrier who, as I witnessed it, had accidentally let her bundle of mail drop to the man's feet, instead of delivering it in his hand. It was dreadful to hear and I still remember the scene exactly, even the location: Bradley Lane.

Something similar happened with "girl" instead of "woman" or "young woman". It was one of many terms (mailman had become mail carrier) that feminism had managed to establish as a less unconsciously prejudiced vocabulary.

Hippies were ridiculed, as was sexual debauchery (which declined with the onset of AIDS) and recreational drugs. Curiously, in the world of finance cocaine spread, as a stimulant whose frenzy effect meshes well with the Protestant work ethic; a cocaine-fueled broker is very, very, very attentive ... at least until the effect fades.

The ideas spread that government was inefficient by nature, unions a bunch of goons and every modern education strategy was a fanciful but mistaken concoction of African-American novelists and lesbian poets. Once again people spoke with awe of the traditional Eurocentric literary and intellectual canons (also called "dead white men").

All this was captured in an Orwellian showpiece: a 1984 Reagan reelection television commercial that began with the memorable words, "It's morning again, in America." The commercial shows white faces, middle-class suburbs, a stationwagon and a wedding. In the world of that commercial it's as if the hippies, the anti-Vietnam War movement and the struggle of African-Americans and women for their human rights had never happened.

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This is the sixth in a short series of posts that attempt to sketch contemporary U.S.cultural and social history, dwelling on how the time and place felt from a personal perspective, with the history whose first draft appeared in the newspapers in the background.

The Disco Era (1974-81)

The Seventies in the United States began after the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973. Notably, it was an anticlimactic end to a turbulent decade.

When U.S. prisoners were released and they asked about the war's outcome, they were given the Pentagon-approved statement "they did not win and we did not lose." Similarly, Nixon's resignation in August 1974 was only one sentence long. Thus ended the two remaining causes of 60's era unrest.

Anti-discrimination laws began to bring about a quiet and slow integration in both the worlds of work and higher education, insofar as color was concerned.

Women began to graduate from universities in numbers never seen before and by 1979 they would become a permanent functional part of the workforce. However, it was only briefly in the past decade, as a result of massive layoffs of men following the Great Recession, that women were for short periods a majority of the workforce, as they are of the overall population.

Gays and lesbians came out of the closet and a popular band called The Village People provided the theme songs to the new egalitarian messages on sexual orientation.

In addition, Baby Boomers began adulthood, leaving adolescence and early youth behind to take on marriage, making money. Former hippies (or wannabes) changed into young urban professionals, or yuppies, whose emblematic wine and condos replaced joints and communes. Thus began a frivolous time accompanied by a musical rhythm called Disco and the turn towards the widespread use of cocaine.

This drug, unlike the recreational hallucinogenic and largely distracting substances of the 60s, induces a a sense of extreme mental acuity leading to frantic mental activity. It was the drug that fit perfectly with the new materialistic zeal and adult indulgences of 70s Boomers.

The quintessential Seventies image is of yuppies sniffing cocaine powder from $100 bills used as funnels to their nostrils. At least, that would be the cinematic scene. I, personally, did not witness it, although I heard of people who engaged in this.

However, life is not Hollywood and many other Boomers, once married and with children, faced the problem of passing on their values, which meant a revival of traditional religion. This was also the spirit of the Jimmy Carter era.

The essential feature of this exceptionally honest politician who came to the White House in 1977 was his authentic religious faith. Carter was a "born again" Protestant, a Baptist who took seriously the call in  John 3: 3, that unless one is born anew, one cannot see the kingdom of heaven.

At that time there were some 70 million Protestants affiliated to one church or another; 13 million were Baptist, making their denomination the second largest in the United States, after Catholics, who then totaled around 48 million people. After Richard (Tricky Dick) Nixon, Americans wanted a leader they could believe in and trust.

Another undercurrent that was invisible at the time (except during a brief oil shortage) was the decline of U.S. economic pre-eminence compared with Europe and Japan.

Today it is a commonplace among economists to note that improvement in the U.S. standard of living more or less halted in 1973, when the median household income stagnated, and later even declined, after having doubled in real terms from 1945 to 1965. Now the whole world parrots Thomas Piketty, who in my view largely parroted Emmanuel Saez, in his pronouncements on economic inequality; but this is now, not then. No one noticed much at the time.

The only evidence of a phenomenon pointing to change that was visible at the time to most Americans was the remarkable appearance of Japanese and European cars and a basket of imported goods never before available to the common consumer. Before the 1970s, everything had been "Made in U.S.A." Japanese goods, as famously noted in the 1985 film Back to the Future, were widely regarded as "crappy" imitations. The Japanese learned to imitate better very quickly.

Economist Robert Reich has offered perhaps the best, most ironic and, once I read it, obvious, explanation of the massive entry of Japanese cars into the American market. According to him, it was an unintended consequence of the foreign policy that produced the Vietnam War.

A side-effect of the conflict was introduction of trans-Pacific cargo shipping in volumes never seen before, a now well-understood staple of American military movements. For the Normandy invasion in World War II, for example, the U.S. military built floating piers to avoid the harrowing effort of having to capture Cherbourg. ("No port? We'll take one with us.")

Here's what happened with Vietnam. Cargo ships went from California to Southeast Asia bearing weaponry and supplies, soon enough shippers realized that they faced an enormous fuel expense of sending back empty cargo ships.  Shipping companies started looking for cargo in the Philippines and Japan to fill the ships and make money on the return trip.

That's when Japanese automakers took advantage of the offer and specifically built the smallest cars possible so they could ship and sell the largest number of units in the United States. Thus, the small foreign car market was born in the USA. Today, in Washington, I drive my Mercedes in a sea of ​​German and Japanese cars; hardly any cars are from Detroit.

Trade competition, which took place in a variety of other industries (textile production, hitherto highly unionized, was destroyed by cheaper Asian imports), also stimulated the export of U.S. jobs and factories abroad.

This had two kinds of huge consequences. At first, this enriched shareholders and executives thanks to savings in labor costs. In the long run, however, it led to the progressive destruction of a whole layer of the broad middle class: the industrial worker who by then could dream of sending children to college.

An important part of the American social fabric began to fray and few became aware of it until someone pointed it out, as we shall see.

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* This is the fifth in a short series of posts that attempt to sketch contemporary U.S.cultural and social history, dwelling on how the time and place felt from a personal perspective, with the history whose first draft appeared in the newspapers in the background.

Revolution (1963-74)

The countries of the New World prospered after World War II because they were never attacked on the continent. In this entry* we shall see how the United States began to feel a grassroots new cultural, social and political current brought about by the first postwar generation.

The decade that in the United States is still remembered as simply "the Sixties" began with three symbolic starting points.

In late August 1963, an African-American civil rights march on Washington was led by Martin Luther King, Jr. President Kennedy was assassinated in November. Then in February 1964, on the very widely watched Ed Sullivan Show, a group of long-haired English musicians called The Beatles played their electric guitars amid deafening cheering from teenage girls.

John F. Kennedy, for a time regarded as almost an informal saint and martyr (until his rampant sexuality became known), was said to have advocated reforms the "liberal" wing (in the U.S. and non-European sense) of the Democratic Party sought to carry. To "honor Kennedy's memory," Lyndon Johnson, a Southern political genius, succeeded getting a broad range of socio-economic legislation approved.

The first triumph was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which remains the basis of all protections and guarantees of equal rights for minorities and women. As for women, conservative Southerners proposed adding "sex" as a joke, to the prohibition of discrimination by "color, creed or national origin"; the liberals took them at their word, knowing that their adversaries had made a tactical error. (U.S. liberals are not the European liberals who advocate a hands-free market and laissez faire policies, but reformers favoring substantial government intervention in the economy, albeit less so than the European left.)

Johnson also launched, the following year, when he won by a really overwhelming margin never seen again, the "War on Poverty. In less than 10 years, poverty was reduced from 19% to 11% (today it is 15%, to be explained later). LBJ also bequeathed a very broad socio-economic legislation, such as federal health insurance for the elderly and the poor, assistance for families and children in need, expansion of access to food stamps, subsidies for housing, etc.

The disadvantage for liberals, one from which the Democratic Party does has yet to recover, is that the South became Republican when the Democrats ended racial segregation. Nixon in 1968 called it "the southern strategy" to reverse the geographical alignment of the two parties.**

In economic terms, it was a moment of enormous prosperity. The average salary doubled between 1945 and 1965. African-Americans entered  supervisory and professional occupations. By the end of 1970 women would join them (and soon surpass them).

There was also new music, a Dionysian sound of rock-and-roll that broke with the apolitical restraint of earlier popular music. To rock was added the rediscovery of British and Irish folk music, and its traditional forms of popular protest. Popular music stopped being so much about romantic love as Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Peter, Paul and Mary, among others, sang about rights, peace, humanity and, as Che Guevara put it, a deeper love of people.

The important topic of the era was freedom. Why more freedom? Looking back half a century later, I would say that prosperity made society more expansive and tolerant. There were protests (and I say this in the broad sense of the Latin protestare, which is "witnessing") of love, racial integration and peace. It all came from the conviction that the time had come to share prosperity, well-being, and happiness (often expressed as sexuality) as widely as possible. It began with the March in Washington singing "We Shall Overcome" reached its climax in Woodstock with the song of Country Joe & the Fish against the Vietnam war.

I left the United States in 1961 and returned in 1970. I left a country that thought itself essentially white, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon and orderly, whose average people showed little interest in the rest of the world. I returned to a country where people drank French wine with their meals, had been in Europe or planned to do so even if it was backpacking, had experimented with some recreational drug, was open (in theory at least) to sexual variety and racial integration, and talked about breaking with conventions an awful lot.

That was my generation, embedded in "the movement," which was a fuzzy mixture that had a hint of hippie, a bit of leftism and stylized anarchism, a general tendency to accept radical changes towards a new country where the important thing was to love a great love for all.

We launched a cultural revolution that expanded job opportunity for African-Americans and other minority groups, such as Hispanics, and the oppressed majority, women. It was done through changes in the way of thinking, dressing and talking; and without violence.

This was especially evident in what is now called the "second wave" of feminism, which began with the publication in 1970 of an anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement, the emergence of Ms. magazine and the song I Am Woman in 1973. Two words suddenly disappeared from everyday vocabulary: "boy" for black workers vanished overnight after the 1964, 1967 and 1968 riots, as did "girl," somewhat more slowly and reluctantly, for a woman.

Finally, there is the question of attire and the length of men's hair. The consensus of all with whom I have talked about it is that until about 1968 the Beatles haircut was only for the musicians and a few adventurers who were the real hippies of 1967. However, by 1971 or 1972, even adults, like presidential candidate George McGovern, had at least sideburns and no male under the age of 30 had hair that did not reach at least the bottom of the neck.

Adults, corporations and the de facto powers, that is, all those who felt threatened, opposed this amorphous movement.

Unlike the worker-student coalitions in Europe, working-class whites resisted the changes, resentful of new competition in employment and housing from blacks, whom some of these workers still hated; for the white worker, racial prejudice was like coming home and kicking the dog in lieu of kicking the unassailable boss. There was a long history on the part of the wealthy of skillfully using ethnic hatreds to divide workers. Yet it takes taking a good look at those who opposed the youthful rebellion carefully to understand.

Americans of the generation that had gone to fight in World War II and Korea, were shocked that their children chanted against going to Vietnam "Hell no, we will not go!" and even burned the stars and stripes. Those who married in church, had children and formed families now saw their offspring join in free love, which was possible first thanks to contraceptives then abortion, legalized in 1970. Older women felt mocked for being mere housewives without paid jobs or preofessions.

That generation felt ridiculed for being "squares" and "useful idiots" of the "system." As a political force, all these people who longed for the United States from "before" ( the black and white of the 1950s) became invisible after Barry Goldwater's wipeout defeat in the 1964 presidential election, and were briefly appeased by Nixon's Vice-President Spiro Agnew, who coined the phrase "the silent majority," a mass that resurfaced politically for revenge in 1980.

Notably, just as this era began with the unfinished presidency of Kennedy, it ended with another truncated presidency, Nixon's, which ended with his resignation in 1974 because of the Watergate scandal.

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* This is the third in a short series of posts that attempt to sketch contemporary U.S.cultural and social history. I intend to present how the time and place felt from a personal perspective, and only in the background, the history whose first draft appeared in the newspapers. All this comes from an exchange with a French correspondent that I thought might be of interest to readers of my Spanish blog.

** The Democratic Party was founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1792, while the Republican Party was launched in 1854 by Abraham Lincoln. U.S. political parties do not represent distinct ideologies, but interests and opinions, rather than theories. Since the Civil War, Republicans represented industrial anti-slave interests (it's cheaper to pay a wage and let the worker figure out how to provide for himself with it, than to assume life-long responsibility for a slave's housing, food and clothing, however meager). The South became staunchly Democrat because it was unpalatable for whites to vote for "Lincoln's party" (former slaves in the South were effectively denied the vote until the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which conservatives are currently trying to undo). In the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was a personalist leader much like Argentina's Juan Perón or Brazil's Getulio Vargas, forged a unique coalition that comprised unions, white ethnics (meaning not of English origin) Blacks, liberals (including the tiny left and intellectuals) and Southerners for the historical reasons cited. This is how FDR became the only president elected four times (which led to a constitutional amendment, proposed by Republicans, to limit the presidency to two terms). That coalition was mortally wounded in the 1960s, as became clear in the 1970s and 1980s.

Two Men Who Opened Doors (1960-63)

Until November 1960, a Catholic had never been elected president of the United States. Al Smith, a Catholic of Irish origin, had tried it in 1928 and lost due to the anti-Catholic prejudice of the white Protestant majority. To the meaning of this reversion I dedicate this part of the series.*

The separation of church and state, written into the U.S. Constitution 200 years ago by Protestants who feared Rome as much as one another, had been the excuse for not having diplomatic relations with the Vatican State (relations that were established recently In 1983, under President Reagan, a Presbyterian who had been baptized Catholic).

You must have lived it to understand it.

The American Catholic world in 1960 was essentially a social castle, with walls of social protection for the 24% of U.S. inhabitants who professed the faith. It was an enclosed parallel society, governed by clerics (most of whom were of Irish origin and had their own fierce ethnic prejudices).

That small country within a country, which had been carved from the 1840s when the Irish came massively fleeing the potato famine, had seen the addition of waves of later European Catholic immigrants: Poles, Italians, Germans, Czechs and several Slavs.

A 1960s U.S. Catholic was seriously a Catholic. He went to Mass every Sunday, did not eat meat on Fridays and was part of huge families. He went to a Catholic school, whether parochial or private. If he was a worker, he joined a union in which his fellow Catholics were members with the active support of the clergy during strikes. The "lace curtain" Irish (except for the Kennedys), went to Catholic universities and from there entered Catholic law firms or Catholic brokers.

Our typical U.S. Catholic man married a Catholic woman and had 6 to 12 children. He bought insurance from a Catholic agent and went to Catholic bankers. He never joined a number of associations because they were Protestant and neither he nor his wife ever considered sending their children to a public school. Catholics paid taxes for public schools and also supported a network of parochial schools that did not receive a cent from the government.

On vacation they went to beaches where Catholics were welcome (often because hoteliers were Catholics). Oh, and since the Irishmen of New York and Chicago had built powerful local political machineries, being Catholic meant voting for pro-Catholic unions and the Democratic Party, not the Protestant, Republican, elite party.

The vast majority of Catholics had been poor and working class until the GI Bill, which subsidized the university for the soldiers who served in World War II (thus generating the broad post-war professional middle class).

The Irish came out of poverty by entering police work, then intelligence (there is even an inside joke in the CIA that the agency's abbreviation stands for "Catholics In Action"), local politics, trade unions, or the priesthood. Because they were the only natively English-speaking Catholic immigrants, the Irish became the ring leaders of all Catholic immigrants.

The Italians (some of them) formed the Mafia, which originally was a set of independent self-protection groups (as they had been in Italy, when the Sicilians fought Italian annexation). The Poles were at the bottom of the social ladder, and were the target of prejudiced humor. There was for a time, from the 1880s at the end of World War I, a vibrant German Catholic community that supported its own bilingual German-English schools; this was destroyed by (a) the Irish clergy and (b) the war, when being of German origin was something that one hid.

Most non-Catholics do not know this part of our history and therefore do not realize how enormous it was for Catholics to see one of their own nominated and elected president. To the Protestant majority, Kennedy was just an appealing young man (and how young man he seems to me now!) in a hurry to get things done.

Listening President Kennedy's speeches once again after so many years, it is surprising to note how often he used the word "revolution" to describe nearly every proposal and challenge he posed. Yet, if one takes off his glasses of nostalgia, there is no doubt that he was a relatively conservative president.

In fact, what was revolutionary about Kennedy and the other John of his time, Popr John XXIII, was the role they assumed just as social culture was shifting. They were both catalysts of a social and cultural revolution that seemed to start in the United States and, through the U.S. megaphone of Hollywood and popular music, in the world.


For Catholics, Kennedy's election meant that the gilded doors of the famed American Dream had finally opened at all levels. In the 1960s, Americans of Irish descent rose in socioeconomic terms to the upper middle class. (In the United States the idea persists that we are all middle class, but we aren't.) Before 1960, Catholics were mostly non-professional, industrial and manual workers; after that, a very large proportion of Catholics became white collar workers and affluent.
How brief a shining moment it was! One moment, as I recall, even the nuns at school seemed to be walking on a happy cloud in November of 1960; the next moment, they were crying, on another November, three years later.

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* This is the second in a short series of posts that attempt to sketch contemporary U.S.cultural and social history. I intend to present how the time and place felt from a personal perspective, and only in the background, the history whose first draft appeared in the newspapers.

Color Arrives (1958-60)

Although we are accustomed to think of our time in terms of decades, in terms of social consciousness decades don't match the decimal figure. The Sixties actually began in late 1963. Between 1958 and 1963 there was a "twist" of social consciousness, and in this entry in the series* I concentrate on 1958-60.

The significant cosmetic touch of the time was the introduction of color television and Technicolor (somebody's trademark). The first televised presidential debate took place. Then came cars with extravagant fins and the beginnings of rock and roll.

Color of another kind also came into prominence. The country was still largely segregated by the color of the skin. (It was called "race," but as we all know today, race is a social construct of prejudice and not a biological fact.)

In some states the separation was carried out legally and ubiquitously. But in 1954, the Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of the schools; the armed forces, it should be noted, had desegregated by President Truman's order in 1946. There was a Civil Rights Act passed in 1958 that made some minor changes, but segregation continued.

What did it mean, in practical terms, to separate people by the color of their skin? There were separate facilities everywhere: white bathrooms and black bathrooms; restaurants for one and another color; separate seats on buses and trams.

This was not so obvious to me in New York, where that sort of segregation was just impractical and, after all, we were in the North. In New York, segregation was largely socioeconomic. African Americans were kept poor through discrimination in education and employment, in addition to housing.

I saw apartheid-type segregation when we moved to Washington, which is south of the Mason-Dixon line, the cultural and legal divide that had once separated slave states and free states. In Washington, as in New York, there was socioeconomic separation. Whites lived in the best neighborhoods, with the best schools and got the best positions.

In addition, I saw in the parks that there were water fountains marked "white" and next to them, other fountains, generally smaller and less well kept, for "colored" (as a child the word struck me as odd: white is a color and, strictly speaking, no one was really white). There were separate seats on the buses (but, interestingly, not on the streetcars).

Taxi drivers, waiters and, in general, service staff, were black. The police were white, as were the bus drivers.

I went to private Catholic schools (and to the French school a year), so I did not see black children in school. There was an amusement park, Glen Echo, to which I loved to go; only years later, when I returned from a long absence abroad, I learned that it had closed because it was segregated: it was a shock to realize I had never noticed there were no black children.

I also saw another type of segregation. At a time when African nations were becoming independent and began to send their first diplomatic delegations to Washington, a hotel we initially stayed in denied them lodging.

The Windsor Park Hotel which is now located in the Kalorama area is the annex building that the original hotel; it was quickly acquired to accommodate African diplomats. The main building eventually became the Chinese embassy and only this year was it demolished.

Despite these problems, the civil rights movement began to pick up momentum in those years and there was a sense that the United States was willing to become a country with a bigger heart. At that moment came a young politician who symbolized breaking another kind of prejudice, John F. Kennedy.

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* This is the second of a short series of deliveries that attempt to sketch the contemporary U.S.cultural and social history. I intend to present how the time and place was felt from a personal perspective, and only in the background, the history whose first draft appeared in the newspapers.

We lived in black and white (1950-57)

I see the 1950s in the United States in black and white, like television back then.

The 1950s of the last century, already half a century away, form a time of cars with rounded chassis and adults wearing clothes that often seemed too large. Clothes that had few colors, or no more color than the average floral wallpaper.

Insofar as I knew, men worked in offices. They wore hats, put on shirt and tie suits, some wore bow ties. They smoked. A pack of Parliament cigarettes evokes my father perfectly.

Women stayed home taking care of the house and the children (me and my companions). American women did not make-up. But all the moms, American or foreign (like mine), made sure we believed that the world was made for children.

We did not know it, but we were part of the U.S. baby boom generation, born between 1946 and 1964. Johnnies returned from war, got married, got scholarships to go to college, moved to the suburbs and, whatever else they did in their bedrooms, they scattered children everywhere. We, the boomers, were made to think that everything was possible.

Among the artifacts I preserved from that time is my favorite childhood book for years, The Golden History of the World by Jane Werner Watson and Cornelius De Witt (published in 1955), subtitled "A Children's Introduction to Ancient and Modern Times". Golden was a children's books brand.

The last chapter "Our World Today, 1950 -" begins as follows:

"This is a fascinating world to grow in. In our time the magic of fairy tales has come true, we can fly through the air the most comfortably seated house we can turn the world in the time it took in another time to go Paris to London or Boston to New York.You can shop in India, South Africa or Japan and pay for goods by signing our name on a piece of paper we have brought.And in the shops of our own towns goods are brought For us from all countries of the world."

It is definitely a world in which the child reader (I read it hundreds of times) could think that if there were pharaohs and Napoleons, and wars and miseries and everything in the past ... from here on, with me, a new story full of wonders begins.

In that clean and orderly New York, the New York of John Cheever's early short stories, it was possible to think like this even as an adult. Or so I understood.

It was a happy time for a president, Eisenhower, who had a baby face. He did not inspire much, but did not offend either.

There was dissent, of course.

There were the beat poets, such as Allen Ginsburg, whom my father said he met in a Bohemian bar in Greenwich Village. They were bearded people who said strange things, as incomprehensible to a child as to most ordinary people.

There were also the forerunners of the 1960s music revolution. Elvis then, like the original rockers, Chuck Berry, Bill Haley and the Comets, and so forth. I only knew the classical music that both my parents listened to. Or the popular variety show music, Frank Sinatra, Dinah Shore and Perry Como.

I also think of those times as the Cold War era. There was nothing more frightening than a Communist. Once, in kindergarten, on a day devoted to talking about the various jobs there were, the nun asked us "What do your Daddies do?"

When I replied "Communist," the school called my mother, who after asking me what I was talking about realized I was confusing the Reds with what my father did. I had meant "economist".

There were many other things in that childlike period in the United States, but I did not notice them.

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This is the first of a brief series of deliveries attempting to sketch the contemporary cultural and social history of the United States in my lifetime. It arises from an exchange with a correspondent in France, later a blog for my Spanish-speaking readers. I intend to present how time and place felt; the history whose first draft appeared in the newspapers will only appear in the background, as small details in a panorama shot, somewhere near the horizon.

How the United States evolved, from 1950 to 2000

Upon turning 65, I am giving a backward look at U.S. sociocultural developments, or the "feel" of the times that I lived, which are now history.

Not long ago, in my Spanish blog I wrote a series of entries on the U.S. in this period for my friends who are less familiar with what it's been like to be here. The next few entries will provide not merely a translation but an adaptation for the North American reader.

Stay tuned.

Apocalypse

Three things point to apocalypse in the near future.

First, there is the world of my occupation, journalism (distinct from blogging). I have been reeling ever since May 31, when I heard that the New York Times Will Offer Employee Buyouts and Eliminate Public Editor Role. In my own less august journalism world, things have not been going according to plan either.

This is the kind of gutting of the invisible people who make a well-written, well-researched news medium possible. It happened to The Washington Post several years ago and only the calamity of Trump was temporarily stayed the executioner. The Post was never the Times, but it could be a reliable source of information, sometimes written decently. I explained it in The Information-free Society.

Second, my eye caught a business story in the Post, Why Apple is struggling to become an artificial-intelligence powerhouse, that made the Newtonian apple hit my head. AI explains the socioeconomic future!

Put simply, it is this: the elites, the unknown "they" who have their hands at the levers of society and the economy like the Oz wizard, behind the curtain of government, have decided to decimate the population. There are too many people, they fight too much, they want wages and rights and all sorts of things humans want but can't all have. Solution: starve 80 percent of humanity and leave a thin layer of highly educated people who can live off the goods and services produced by AI. (I would hope that me and mine are among the privileged 20 percent, but I can't be sure.)

Third, there's climate change. No further explanation is needed.

This may reflect the realization of my own personal apocalypse, as I approach my 65th birthday, but I honestly just don't see a better future.

The Dead are not heroes, they're victims

Once again we come to Memorial Day and its orgy of militarism and the propaganda schmaltz. What else do you call "honoring" the dead, essentially people ordered to go get killed for the profits of the war making machine?


Make no mistake about it. They didn't die for our relative "freedoms" (we are no notably freer than Britain or France or Sweden). No soldier dead since World War II gained us any. They died for Boeing and Grumman and Lockheed.

Still, they keep sending Johnny marching off to kill and be killed. It's time to stop.

Here are some of my posts from other occasions on this subject:

A Greatful Nation

Dulce et Decorum Est

War is the fault of all the soldiers who wage it

Let's not forget: Osama had a point

Defying militarism

Let's stop, please. Let's honor people by staying out of war and stop bombing countries with which we are not at war.

Rot In Hell: Roger Ailes

I hereby resurrect the Rot In Hell Awards I started in 2006 for rapscallions who die, lest others attempt the rehabilitation of their reputations.

In the case of Ailes, his life is so filled with travesty that the challenge is to find something mildly neutral to say about him. Even The New York Times can't do better than republish a statement from his wife about him being a "living husband" (ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!).

Strike 1: he was rich.

Strike 2: he was a conservative propagandist of the most loathesome kind, a facilitator of faux news (the news part of the Fox network) before even someone like Donald Trump gave a name to it.

Strike 3: he abused women who worked for him.

Y'er out!

What Trump Is Probably Hiding

Donald J. Trump is probably not a billionaire if you subtract his debts from his assets, that is why he is hiding his tax return. He has a smaller wallet than he would like everyone to think; almost certainly he didn't add to what he inherited.

He probably coasted, at best, on what used to be called "gentleman's Cs" in the fancy schools he attended. He got in mostly because his father had money.

He has enough money that he could buy sex anywhere, hence his claim to have better sex than anyone else. But I bet he's not a particularly good performer in bed. Why brag about it otherwise?

As for business, he has been in the easiest, least productive sector of the economy that there is: real estate. Let's face it, land just sits there. It contributes nothing to a society to put one more ugly chrome and glass structure on it. It doesn't help the average consumer do anything.

He doesn't have to hide that he is rude, crude, dishonest and basically selfish. That is perfectly in evidence. As is that he has never opened the Bible for more than appearance's sake -- such as at the inauguration.

Which reminds me, he probably hides most of all that he is not interested in the job of president, at least not as the official described in the Constitution. He would like to be CEO of the United States, but CEOs are neither elected nor particularly accountable to anyone; it's not what the Constitution prescribes.