More of the same kind of discrimination.

This “No on Prop 8″ (the California anti-gay marriage initiative) commercial is a history teacher’s dream:

Can you think of another commercial that explicitly uses history so well to make a current political point? I can’t.

The new Tug McGraw.

Via Phillies Nation:

The last time the Phillies won the World Series, I was 14. This shot is just as good as Tug McGraw jumping, if not better because I’ve been waiting longer for it.

They don’t call it “The Progressive Era” for nothing.

Although I’m not a flat taxer, I think Andrew Sullivan makes a very good point here:

I’m a flat taxer, because I don’t believe the government has any business punishing people for getting richer. But I don’t think that people who support the kind of punitive taxation that Obama does or Cameron does in Britain or Reagan did in 1986 is a “socialist.” Is it now the McCain campaign’s assertion that anyone who isn’t for a flat tax is socialist? I should add that if Obama is a socialist, Richard Nixon must have been a commie.

But why stop at Nixon?  The people behind the first federal income tax supported a progressive system.  Everybody knows that, but I admit I had to look up just how progressive it was.  This is from the U.S. Treasury’s Fact Sheet on Taxes:

By 1913, 36 States had ratified the 16th Amendment to the Constitution. In October, Congress passed a new income tax law with rates beginning at 1 percent and rising to 7 percent for taxpayers with income in excess of $500,000. Less than 1 percent of the population paid income tax at the time.

Horrors!  That sounds awfully redistributive, doesn’t it?

America:  Proud socialist state since 1913.

“Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

I have been looking for a good Ronald Reagan clip for ages, and they weren’t there.  Thanks to Ari at the Edge of the American West for finding a new clip (at least to YouTube) of a classic Reaganism:

The Kitchen Debate (newsreel).

I saw an edited version of this famous exchange on YouTube, but I like this one better because it includes the context of the conversation:

Henry Ford: Socialist.

In discussing the McCain campaign’s bizarre fascination with socialism, this week’s New Yorker takes us down a path that labor historians trod often:

There is a whole shelf of books on the question of why socialism never became a real mass movement here. For decades, the word served mainly as a cudgel with which conservative Republicans beat liberal Democrats about the head. When Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan accused John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson of socialism for advocating guaranteed health care for the aged and the poor, the implication was that Medicare and Medicaid would presage a Soviet America. Now that Communism has been defunct for nearly twenty years, though, the cry of socialism no longer packs its old punch.

Say what you will, at least Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan understood what the word “socialism” means: government ownership of a firm that competes with business in the private sector. Presumably, government-run health care would make the survival of private companies harder. Those of us who advocate for such a program do so because we care more about assuring every American coverage than we do about the profits of HMOs.

Progressive taxation, on the other hand, has nothing to do with socialism no matter what Sarah Palin tells you:

“See, under a big government, more tax agenda, what you thought was yours would really start belonging to somebody else, to everybody else. If you thought your income, your property, your inventory, your investments were, were yours, they would really collectively belong to everybody. Obama, Barack Obama has an ideological commitment to higher taxes, and I say this based on his record… Higher taxes, more government, misusing the power to tax leads to government moving into the role of some believing that government then has to take care of us. And government kind of moving into the role as the other half of our family, making decisions for us. Now, they do this in other countries where the people are not free. Let us fight for what is right. John McCain and I, we will put our trust in you.”

It’s taken me 24 hours to figure out what that quote reminds of and it’s Henry Ford’s $5 day. This is the 1914 Ford press release from that momentous announcement as quoted in David L. Lewis’ book on Henry Ford’s public image:

In order that the young man from 18 to 22 years of age may be entitled to a share in the profits he must show himself sober, saving, steady, industrious and must satisfy the superintendent and staff that his money will not be wasted on riotous living.

Lewis goes on to quote a French intellectual I’ve never heard of:

“Let me speak plainly: I consider that what Henry Ford accomplished [in] 1914 contributed far more to the emancipation of workers than the October Revolution of 1917.“

Let’s recap: when government takes care of us it’s a nightmare. When employers take care of us it’s standard operating procedure. Scratch that: A big part of the problem today is that employers don’t take care of their workers any more. In a democracy, we can actually control how government treats us through the ballot box. In Henry Ford’s day, all the workers could do is quit and starve. Now all most workers can do is keep working and eventually starve anyway.

No wonder nobody’s afraid of socialism any more.

“Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

The whole Joe McCarthy/Joseph Welch exchange cut down to seven minutes and sixteen seconds, perfect for classroom use:

My guess would be “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion.”

Chris Hayes’s blog at the Nation:

One thing occurred to me: The Right’s attacks on Obama over the last year have been like a tour of the Greatest Hits of the Culture War in roughly reverse chronological order. First there were the rumors of him being a secret radical Muslim, which is, of course, the most au courant culture-war wedge. Then, when that didn’t work they went with the Hollywood celebrity angle, which has a long pedigree, but also figured prominently in 2004. After that they went with the “sex education”angle, which, in the 1980s and 1990s particularly was a hardy perennial (even in liberal New York where I grew up). Next they turned the clock back even further to the 1960s, in belaboring the Bill Ayers/Weather Underground connection, and now they’re all the way back in the Cold War with accusations of socialism! I’m trying to predict what’s next. Obama supports the free coinage of silver? Obama was soft on Spanish atrocities in Cuba? Obama is a secret Jacobin sympathizer?

If nothing else, I think this election is useful for high school history teachers who want to give their students a condensed, synthesized look at the right-wing attack politics.

I’m sure this stuff makes sense to Joe the Plumber, but to those of us who aren’t steeped in right-wing talk radio the McCain campaign is just one stupid diversion after another.

Too much fun for labor historians…

I’ve been spending an awful lot of time searching Google Books lately looking for the kinds of stuff I used to pull off the shelves of the great libraries they had where I went to graduate school (Go Badgers!). This one is too much fun not to share: Workers of the Nation: An Encyclopedia of the Occupations of the American People and a Record of Business, Professional and Industrial Achievement at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century.

There’s a Wisconsin Death Trip flickr? I had no idea.

And they say reading blogs is just a waste of time.  Vance at the Edge of the American West points me too a flickr set up by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin full of pictures from one of my favorite books, Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy.  Vance’s description is accurate, but it makes the book sound dull:

The book consists largely of clippings from the Badger State Banner, of Black River Falls, Jackson County, WI, and images by Charles Van Schaick, a local commercial photographer.

I prefer Griel Marcus’s description from the NYT in 1999:

Mr. Lesy noticed Van Schaick’s many pictures of dead infants and children, dressed in their christening gowns, now placed in tiny coffins. As he looked for the story behind these photos, he found a tale of plagues: of murder, suicide, farm and business failures, madness, addiction, tramp armies, and the ruin of childhood and the desolation of families by epidemics of diptheria, typhoid, smallpox and flu.

Mr. Lesy made a montage, using items from the local paper, contemporaneous regional fiction and poetry, asylum records and the photographs left by Van Schaick, who in Mr. Lesy’s pages emerges as Arbus’s unknown ancestor. In words, the story was almost too much to take in, the accumulation of awful facts nearly mute in their cacophony. But the pictures spoke. From Van Schaick’s archive Mr. Lesy made a tableau of disassociation, terror and insanity passing for everyday life. It was all in the blank eyes, the frozen mouths in family portraits: those were the ghosts James Marsh saw.

Indeed, it’s the juxtaposition of the strange clips and strange photographs that gives the book its power (and likewise explains why the movie is unwatchable – but that’s a subject for a whole different post).

Vance gets caught up arguing with Lesy’s thesis about Black River Falls being a particularly difficult place to live in the 1890s.  I don’t disagree, but to me making that argument is pointless.  It’s like suggesting that Dr. Johnson wasn’t all that different from the typical 18th Century Briton.  When you find a good cache of evidence, you run with it.

To me the book is a symbol of how death pervaded everything and everywhere in nineteenth century America.  I got the same feeling when I read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals and just about everybody close to all the politicians she profiles died before they did.  [The big exception, of course, was Mary Todd Lincoln.  She just lost her mind.]

Now I can show the same impact with pictures.  I’ve never been so happy to learn that I can make other people so sad.