Andy Horowitz

What to Look for in Sandy's Aftermath

2012-11-01T17:48:39-04:00

I am teaching a course at Yale this semester on the history of disasters, and Hurricane Sandy has made landfall on the syllabus right between a class on terrorism as disaster, and a class on the 1927 Mississippi River Flood. As Sandy unfolds, I have been reminded of the pioneering sociologist of disaster Charles Fritz, who sounded a little disappointed in 1960 when he wrote, "The social scientist, unlike the engineer, cannot produce destructive experiments at will." While I wouldn't wish a big storm on anybody (neither would Fritz, surely), for me and my students, watching the storm and its aftermath has offered a special opportunity to test our disaster knowledge.

Based on our understanding of past hurricanes, floods, fires, earthquakes, and other calamitous events in American history, we are developing a list of what we'll be watching for in Sandy's aftermath. I'll include my first thoughts here, and invite readers to check out watchingsandyatyale.blogspot.com for updates from me and my students.

Will people come together or fall apart?

In the popular imagination, disasters give rise to disorder -- looting, pillaging, society unraveled. But in In A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, Rebecca Solnit argues that crisis situations often give rise to something like utopian cooperation. What will happen on the Jersey Shore?

Who will be responsible for disaster relief?

Hurricane Sandy has dredged up comments Mitt Romney made in 2011 about the Federal Emergency Management Agency: "Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that's the right direction. And if you can go even further, and send it back to the private sector, that's even better." Romney's been dodging the question now, but a debate is stirring over who is responsible for help.

What sort of disaster relief are citizens entitled to?

Disaster relief can take many forms -- grants, loans, temporary housing, emergency cash, flood insurance -- and each offers different kinds of solutions to different kinds of problems.

Who will blame the victims, and for what?

When hurricanes come to Louisiana, observers sometimes criticize citizens there for choosing to live in harm's way. Will similar accusations be levied at New Yorkers? And once disaster aid comes, how will victims be treated? Iowa Representative Steve King has already raised the specter of people using relief checks to buy Gucci bags.

Is Sandy an act of god, or the work of man?

The historian Ted Steinberg has written about how describing events as "acts of god" is often a way of obscuring the human decisions that have put people in danger in the first place. (After a West Virginia dam broke in 1972, killing over 100 people, a representative of the coal company that built the dam said it was "incapable of holding the water that god poured into it.")

Why Sarah Palin Thinks Barack Obama Wants to Undo the Civil War

2012-03-13T16:40:50-04:00

Believe it or not, on Fox News Friday Sarah Palin accused Barack Obama of wanting to return America to the days before the Civil War. There is a video going around of a young Obama, in his days as a Harvard Law School student, voicing his support for Derrick Bell, a professor there who had put himself on unpaid leave as a protest because the law school had no black women on its tenured faculty. The video prompted Palin to tell Sean Hannity:

"What we can glean from this is an understanding of why we are on the road that we are on. Again, it's based on what went into his thinking, being surrounded by radicals. You could hearken back to the days before the Civil War, when too many Americans believed that not all men were created equal. It was the Civil War that began the codification of the truth that here in America, yes, we are equal and we all have equal opportunities, not based on the color of our skin. You have equal opportunity to work hard and to succeed and to embrace the opportunities, the God-given opportunities, to develop resources and work extremely hard and as I say, to succeed. Now, it has taken all these years for many Americans to understand that the gravity, that mistake that took place before the Civil War and why the Civil War had to really start changing America. What Barack Obama seems to want to do is go back before those days when we were in different classes based on income, based on color of skin. Why are we allowing our country to move backwards instead of moving forward with the understanding that as our charters of liberty spell out for us, we are all created equally?"

It doesn't take too much historical insight to come up with reasons that America's first black president would not want to bring back the days of slavery -- only in the world of minstrel songs do blacks yearn for a return to the plantation -- so it's worth considering the reasons why Palin might make such a bizarre statement.

First of all, it's curious to hear a Republican commenter accusing Democrats of wanting to turn back the clock, when it is the Republican presidential candidates who seem to miss nineteenth-century America. Rick Santorum has called for a return to our pre-industrial educational system. Newt Gingrich has praised Andrew Jackson's foreign policy. Ron Paul has made a career advocating for an antebellum view of "states' rights." (Paul, by the way, is one of many conservatives who believes the Civil War was fought over states' rights, not slavery, so it's interesting to note the split Palin makes here by acknowledging the war was about race.)

But there is an underlying insinuation in Palin's comments that is more nefarious: Palin seems to suggest that America solved "the race problem" at Appomattox in 1865. That's why she is so aghast to see African-Americans making race-based claims in the 1990s. Palin's version dusts off an old American myth, with roots in Abraham Lincoln's rhetoric, of a trial on the battlefields of Gettysburg and Antietam that washed America in the blood of martyred soldiers and purged us of our original sin of slavery. Since then, Palin suggests, there's been an even playing field -- "we all have equal opportunities," she says. In Palin's construction, Barack Obama just didn't get the memo: since 1865, America has been color-blind.

The Civil War did end slavery, but Palin's remarks suggest that she needs to be reminded that emancipation brought, in the words of influential historians Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch, only "one kind of freedom." Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar David Oshinsky called his book on post-emancipation African-American history Worse than Slavery. The structures of racism continued to violate the spirit of freedom and equality in America long after the Civil War. When W.E.B. DuBois wrote that the problem of the century was the "problem of the color-line," he was writing, perceptively, about the twentieth century.

That's why Barack Obama and his classmates at Harvard were still fighting for inclusion in 1991, why his election in 2008 was a milestone and why it is still important to talk about race today. In that video, Obama was not talking about the historical vestiges of slavery and a response that some call "reparations." Rather, that in 1991 Harvard Law School had no tenured black women was just one comparatively-benign example of how racism is a contingent force, frequently refined and reinvented, that continues to foreclose possibilities in American life, denying our fellow citizens of their chance to thrive today.

One way of reading the darkest insinuations in Sarah Palin's comments would be to see the implication that Barack Obama wants to put white Americans in slavery. Of course that's not what the president wants, and more broadly, few African-Americans have ever called for limits on white opportunity. Affirmative action, for instance -- which is not what Obama was discussing in 1991 -- is not about creating black advantage, it's about trying to find ways to account for African-American structural disadvantage. The long African-American civil rights movement has been a struggle to gain the same respect and privileges and opportunities some whites have long enjoyed -- a constellation of good things we call "the American Dream."

Palin's bad historical punditry tries to foreclose certain kinds of conversations: conversations that are among the most pressing in American society today. To talk about class is not, as Mitt Romney would have it, to wage class warfare, and to talk about race is not, as Sarah Palin suggests, to long for a return to racial apartheid. If we can't find ways to talk about class and race in America, we're doomed.

Historic Whoppers at the Republican Debate

2012-02-24T12:48:40-05:00

Hyperbole is no stranger to political campaigns, and Wednesday night's Republican debate saw some historical (if not historic) whoppers. Here are a few that I noticed:

Mitt Romney:

"I don't think we've seen in the history of this country the kind of attack on religious conscience, religious freedom, religious tolerance that we've seen under Barack Obama."

Romney was talking about President Obama's plan for health insurers to cover birth control pills, and a compromise that was regarded as a good-faith step by the Catholic Health Association, Catholic Charities, and other large mainstream organizations. "Unbelievable!" Romney said. What is truly unbelievable is that Romney would so blithely mischaracterize the president's attempts to make health care affordable for all as a religious attack.

As a former lay leader in the Mormon Church, Romney should know too well what a real attack on religious conscience, freedom, and tolerance looks like. In 1838, Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs issued what has come to be known as the "Extermination Order," asserting "the Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the state."

Or just one other historical case that the Republican candidate might keep in mind: the 1856 Republican party platform referred to polygamy, then considered a defining feature of Mormon religious practice, as a "twin relic of barbarism" alongside slavery.
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Newt Gingrich:

"You go back and look at the founding fathers, they'd have very clear messages. Hamilton would have said you have to have jobs and economic growth to get back to a balanced budget."

No one would argue with the idea that economic growth can help balance the budget, but it's particularly odd to name-check Alexander Hamilton there. As Thomas Jefferson's Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton created the First Bank of America and the national debt. The debt, he said "will be to us a national blessing" (he did clarify, "if it is not excessive.") Elsewhere, Hamilton presciently explained, "to extinguish a debt which exists and to avoid contracting more are ideas almost always favored by public feeling and opinion; but to pay taxes for the one or the other purpose, which are the only means of avoiding the evil, is always more or less unpopular." In other words, he supported the debt and revenues to pay for it -- tax and spend.
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And Gingrich again:

"All of us are more at risk today, men and women, boys and girls, than at any time in the history of this country." And, "I believe this is the most dangerous president on national security grounds in American history."

Surely other times and presidents vie for that dishonor. During the War of 1812, the British burned the White House and posed an existential threat to the new nation, then under the leadership of President James Madison. James Buchanan let the country plunge towards disunion, and Abraham Lincoln presided over a civil war in which well over 600,000 Americans died. Over 2,400 Americans died at Pearl Harbor during Franklin Roosevelt's third term. During John F. Kennedy's tenure as president, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the nation to the brink of nuclear war. And then there were the terrible Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks which occurred on George W. Bush's watch.

An Andrew Jackson History Lesson for Newt Gingrich

2012-01-20T12:29:00-05:00

As the presidential candidate with a doctorate in history, Newt Gingrich might help the American public understand how history shapes today's complicated political debates. But Gingrich, evidently, is not up to the job. Judging by his gaffe at Monday night's Republican debate, one wonders if he was really worth the hundreds of thousands of dollars Freddie Mac paid him for his advice, he claims, as a historian. I refer not to his tortured appropriation of black history and politics on Martin Luther King Day, evidenced by his tangle with moderator Juan Williams, but to his awkward confusion of two important Jacksons in American history.

Asked by moderator Brett Baier if he would support a unilateral military operation against a Taliban leader inside of Pakistan, at the cost of severing all U.S.-Pakistani diplomatic relations, Gingrich responded:

We're in South Carolina. South Carolina in the Revolutionary War had a young 13-year-old named Andrew Jackson. He was sabred by a British officer and wore a scar his whole life. Andrew Jackson had a pretty clear-cut idea about America's enemies: kill them.

Gingrich was right about the scar, but my search through the collected speeches and writings of President Andrew Jackson turns up no statement similar to the one Gingrich evoked. There is, however, a widely repeated story that fits the bill -- about Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson, Confederate General during the Civil War.

There are several versions, but the most popular one is related in the Thesaurus of Anecdotes and Incidents in the Life of Stonewall Jackson, a 1920 compendium by Elihu Samuel Riley:

Jackson had just closed a tender interview with the wounded and dying Gregg, one of his generals. As he and Dr. McGuire reached the Confederate headquarters, and were closing a conversation in which General Jackson was lamenting the death of such a man as his dying general and the frightful sacrifices the South was making, the doctor asked him what was the best mode of meeting the overwhelming numbers of the Federals. General Jackson replied: 'Kill them, sir! kill every man!

Realizing that the "kill them" quotation comes from Stonewall -- not Andrew -- Jackson gives it a profoundly different valence. Of the many things to say about Stonewall Jackson (in his Civil War documentary, Ken Burns calls him a "pious, blue-eyed killer") here's one: he was a traitor. His "kill them" sentiment was directed towards American soldiers.

Gingrich's mistake is probably no worse than when Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann accidentally invoked the spirit of John Wayne Gacy, the serial killer, rather than John Wayne, the movie star, in the former's birthplace of Waterloo, Iowa this summer. Both incidents point to the general problem of trying to airlift historical comparisons, without context or full information, to try to score a contemporary political point. But even if we forgive Speaker Gingrich his slip, it is not at all obvious that we want to be taking our cues, today, from Andrew Jackson.

Years after that British officer cut young Andy Jackson, he grew up to become a war hero, leading America to victory at the Battle of New Orleans the winter of 1814-1815 -- fought, by the way, some days after the war was settled by the Treaty of Ghent (the news was slow to travel then.) After that war, he overreached his Congressional orders in the late 1810s with an unauthorized invasion of Florida, then controlled by Spain, to fight the Seminole Indians. As president, among Jackson's most profound legacies is the policy of Indian Removal. The only major piece of legislation Jackson championed in Congress, the Indian Removal Act of 1830, enshrined a policy that culminated in 1838 with the military-enforced dispossession of the Cherokees, in what is remembered with regret as the "Trail of Tears." On the original question Speaker Gingrich was asked, having to do with diplomatic relations, Andrew Jackson would not be my go-to guy.

A survey of Andrew Jackson's career offers a host of other decisions worth considering, decisions that don't put him nicely in sync with contemporary Republicans or Democrats. Jackson stood forcefully against Senator John C. Calhoun's theories of nullification and secession, the roots of today's conservative arguments about "states rights." Jackson marshaled unprecedented power in the presidency, and used his veto more than any previous president. He opposed Senator Henry Clay's "American System" of internal improvements, which we might link to stimulus spending today. He dispensed patronage to members of his own party with such abandon that his methods became known as the "spoils system." He stood for a strict separation of church and state, and against the abolition of slavery.

Jackson was a fierce champion of the common man -- meaning white man. The rise of widespread political involvement during the first-half of the nineteenth century is known as "Jacksonian Democracy." His economic policy was laissez-faire, because he thought most forms of intervention served only the powerful. He opposed corporations as a tool of monied interests. He famously engaged in a "Bank War" against rechartering the Second National Bank of the United States. Jackson's message when he vetoed the bank's renewal sounds more like Occupy Wall Street than any of today's presidential candidates might dare, but it also endorses a more benevolent view of the role of government:

It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist... but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society -- the farmers, mechanics, and laborers -- who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government. There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing.

These are all just snippets of complicated policies, set in a context nearly two centuries removed. But we live with the legacies still. Despite the fact that I, as a Ph.D. candidate in history, believe that more historians should get paid more often for their advice, we must remember that bad history is worse than no history at all.

A Natural Disasters History Lesson for Ron Paul

2011-08-30T15:54:33-04:00

As Hurricane Irene pummeled the East Coast this weekend, flooding homes and businesses, knocking out power, and killing at least ten people, Texas Congressman and Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul asserted that the federal government should not help with disaster recovery. Americans, Paul said, need to "transition out of the dependency on the federal government." He implied that federal disaster assistance was something new. "We should be like 1900," he said. "We should be like 1940, 1950, 1960." Without a doubt, the role of the federal government grew tremendously over the course of the twentieth century. But Paul's imagination of a mythic American past of individual self-reliance is bad history. A brief review of major storms shows that these events have long involved federal help and, in fact, have been catalysts for a more active government.

Let's use Congressman Paul's timeline, which starts in 1900. That was the year a major storm decimated Galveston, in Paul's home state. Because of the failure of existing structures to deal adequately with rebuilding, the hurricane prompted citizens to centralize power in the hands of municipal managers and experts. They wanted to make government more active and useful in times of crisis. The so-called "commission form" of government was a key innovation of the Progressive Era, a period conservatives today look back to as the beginning of the end for local self-sufficiency. Texans at the time, though, celebrated their new sea wall and other improvements they achieved through their newly empowered government.

Paul's next benchmark is 1940, two years after the Great New England Hurricane of 1938 caused the deaths of over 700 people and caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. Coming after six years of federal innovation with the New Deal, and as Americans looked nervously to the possibility of a second world war, response to the storm appeared to be an important test case for American power and efficiency. President Franklin Roosevelt mobilized New Deal stimulus programs like the Works Progress Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the National Youth Administration to help with local recovery efforts. "Private community effort is not contradictory in principle to government effort," Roosevelt told the nation, "whether local, state or national. All of these are needed to make up the partnership upon which our Nation is founded."

In 1950, Congress passed the Disaster Relief Act, allowing the President to authorize federal agencies to offer direct assistance to state and local governments. In the same year, Congress passed the Federal Civil Defense Act, creating a national system of first responders for disasters. Both of those mechanisms helped when Hurricane Audrey struck the Gulf Coast in 1957. Almost the entirety of Louisiana's Cameron Parish, on the Texas border, was washed away by a tidal wave. Hundreds died. Experts came to study the damage as a proxy for nuclear war. But the amazing thing is that with the hard work and tenacity of local people -- and the efficient coordination of local, state, and federal resources -- the Parish rebuilt in under a year. In the 1950s, when the federal government was engaged in massive infrastructure programs (think of the Eisenhower Interstate Highway Act, or urban renewal), rebuilding was considered a federal prerogative.

By 1965, when Hurricane Betsy became the first American hurricane to cause over a billion dollars' worth of damage, even intransigent southern politicians, who for decades had fought against federal involvement in their states because they rejected federal civil rights initiatives, had come to see the importance of the federal role in disaster relief. Louisiana Governor John McKeithen testified before a Congressional subcommittee that his state had seriously weighed its chances with seceding a second time after civil rights legislation passed, opting not to only because the federal government had the atomic bomb. But the active federal response to Betsy gave him and his fellow Louisianians a more liberal perspective:

Americanism in our State... has... been reawakened and revitalized because here, when we got in trouble, no fault or no suggestion was made, 'well, you people have been talking down there about States rights: you can take care of your own problems, go on and do it.'

Paul's predecessors representing the Gulf Coast in Congress lobbied for Small Business Administration loans and then federal forgiveness for those loans. They lobbied for millions of dollars in flood protection, and a national flood insurance program. They jumped for all kinds of federal largess, and in the midst of the Great Society impulse, the nation obliged. Gov. McKeithen said, "it reminds me of a large family where they squabble among themselves; then one member of the family gets in trouble, well, they all just get together just like that." Louisiana, the Governor said, "shall never forget it." A half century later, Congressman Paul has.

Federal disaster relief programs have their faults. The National Flood Insurance Program, originally designed to force homeowners to take financial responsibility for living in flood plains, has encouraged development in unsafe areas. So too have federal levee and flood control programs. Mounting reams of regulations and bureaucracy have slowed federal help and brought many undesirable outcomes. Six years after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, nobody on the Gulf Coast or beyond would look back at the government response to those events with satisfaction. Though the federal government has spent unprecedented amounts of money, citizens continue to struggle to rebuild. FEMA, needless to say again, did not do a heck of job. But even those flawed programs helped millions of people.

As a democracy, it is essential that we keep vigilant watch to make sure the balance of individual and collective responsibility stays in order. Congressman Paul is right that the federal government has grown, and not always in ways that are helpful. He is also right to look to history for a better way. But he needs some better history. Rather than being moments of self-reliance, disasters are times when Americans have looked to each other, and to their national community, for support. Unlike Ron Paul, most Americans historically have seen storms as times to widen our capacity for national cooperation. These events have broadened the popular understanding of the basic tenets of citizenship. They remind us what government is, or might be, for.