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Oh, I'm sorry -- I don't accept homework assignments. You've got a better story and a better source? Post away! (That's your job, you see.)
So you'd be "happy to see my documentation," but can't be bothered to look up the writers I recommend? Really, in the end we all educate -- or don't educate -- ourselves. I looked into your Claude Bowers enough to determine that he isn't a particularly valid source of information or opinion. If you don't want to do the same with Current or Stampp, that's your problem. Notice, I don't say "that's your job." I'm neither your boss, nor your parent, nor your master. I simply say that you're missing out if you don't consider and investigate opinions that go counter to your own. Simply to ignore or villify anyone who's held a position at a major university over the last 30 or 40 years is a good way to bind oneself to unexamined prejudices and foregone conclusions forever.
It's not surprising that Mark Neely points out that Civil War studies are still a living field with plenty of opportunities for investigation. That doesn't mean that he, or we, should expect such investigations to prove various conspiracy theories or validate century-old theories of Yankee perfidy. There's a lot that we don't know about the Second World War. Pointing that out doesn't mean that the revisionist theories are right.
No one questions that views of history change and will change over time, but your Woods and Adams hardly count as serious scholars or students of American history. Adams is preoccupied with taxes to the exclusion of everything else, and doesn't seem to have published much actual history, and Woods's Guide is a comic book version of American history, that doesn't seriously consider opposing arguments or examine evidence that conflicts with its theses. Hummel's work was more substantive, but still wrong headed, relying on speculation and ideology to carry a questionable argument. The usual Rockheads don't count for much either. If you want to write off everything that's come from writers affiliated with Claremont, there's still plenty of writing opposed to your views. Exclude the self-promoting, intellectually third-rate (at least when it comes to history) Rockwell/Mises cult and that's a large chunk of those who support your sort of arguments in print that can even claim to be taken half-way seriously.
What you've latched onto looks a lot like the wave of the past -- the ideas in circulation about a century ago that were quite conciliatory towards the secessionist South, highly critical of the abolitionists, relatively unconcerned about ideas of racial equality, and convinced that Jim Crow was a good "solution" to the "racial problem." Arguing and rethinking will go on forever, but one would have to have missed much of recent American history to embrace the older ways of looking at the Civil War and Reconstruction (older ways that were quite revisionist when introduced, and not always to the liking of those who had actually fought the war).
What we've learned about the agrarian vs. industrial argument is not to view things as naively and neatly divided as some in past generations did. We see now how Jeffersonians, Jacksonians and others on the agrarian side of the line were perfectly willing to use the federal government to achieve their ends. And we can see how tied in with the world economy and the factory system cotton planters were. They were anything but self-sufficient yeomen.
We can't naively take the Confederacy as representative of small government and the Republican-Unionists as big government men after we learn how much control the Confederate government really had over industry and commerce. Granted those were war measures, but so were many of the things done in the North that have been objected to.
And we can't naively take the old Democrat party simply as the party of farmers and limited government, because we know too much of the workings of parties and government to accept such self-definitions. When the time came to expand government and create a welfare state, the Democrats were on the scene doing the heavy lifting, and that needs some explanation. Nor of course was segregation ever a matter of "limited government."
Democrats like Horatio Seymour and Samuel Tilden weren't all about good government and tariff reform. They brandished noble slogans like "This is a White Man's Government" and had a clear racial agenda. Nor were antebellum Democrats like Polk entirely absorbed with decreasing the size of government. Territorial expansion, and securing a future for plantation slavery were also important concerns for them. You can slam Whigs and Republicans for their own faults, but nobody's who knows his or her history is going to take the noble Democrats vs. evil Whigs/Republicans melodrama seriously.
From the days of Madison implementing a large part of Hamilton's program to the times when Lyndon Johnson, Richard Russell and other Southern Democrats formed close business-government alliances, agrarians and industrialists, states righters and centralizers in America have been irredimiably mixed together. I'm not going to say that the Whigs or Republicans or Federalists were good and right about everything either. That's the sort of thing we've gotten away from.
Two or three generations ago a lot of people argued as you do about the Civil War and Reconstruction. That's become a lot harder in recent years with the changes in attitude. Your friends try to help but don't. They pay homage to contemporary sentiments and try to twist the history to make it look like today's attitudes and the Confederacy somehow go together. People eventually see that they don't. So between them distorting the record and you clinging to the old rhetoric that's now no longer accepted or acceptable there's not much left of the argument, even if I wanted to agree with you. You and your pals point in different directions, but for most thinking people today, both your roads are dead-ends.
BTW, I hope you do realize that your star witness, Kimberly Smith views the abolitionists in a far more positive light than you do. I haven't read her book, but here's what her publisher says:
Smith shows that alternatives to reasoned deliberation--like protest, resistance, and storytelling--have a place in politics. Such alternatives underscore the positive role that interest, passion, compassion, and even violence might play in the political life of America. Her book, therefore, is a cautionary analysis of how rationality came to dominate our thinking about politics and why its hegemony should concern us. Ultimately Smith reminds the reader that democracy and reasoned public debate are not synonymous and that the linkage is not necessarily a good thing.
You can agree or disagree with that, but it does add up to a more sympathetic view of the abolitionists than you have been peddling. She apparently thinks the abolitionists were wholly justified in using the arguments they did, and I doubt she'd really cast things in the terms that you do. From what I can gather she distrusts the cold-blooded rationalism of some forms of discussion on the grounds that they exclude the passions which do have a place in life and politics.
In fact, I think you do agree with her that emotionalism has a place in politics -- you just want to deny to your opponents the emotionalism that you indulge in to your own heart's content. That's only human. If one really believes in something, one keeps coming up with evidence to support it. Others may say that it's anecdotal or sentimental, but one keeps at it -- along with presenting other arguments -- in hope that it will make the same impression on others as it does on one's self. That is what you do. It's what the abolitionists did. And it's probably more or less what we all do, myself included. I doubt citing her book adds anything to your argument. She doesn't believe in restricting political discourse to a coldly rational Enlightement mode, and I doubt you really do either. You might appreciate her book on agrarianism, though.
I notice that you still haven't answered whether you would have built the Liberty Place monument to the White Leagues and whether you would have kept it up. It would put an end to much speculation if you did.
So you'd be "happy to see my documentation," but can't be bothered to look up the writers I recommend?
Well, like I said, your end of the discussion is your end. I'm not going to sit here like a sucker while you wave your arms grandly and run us around a tour d'horizon of some unlinked, unreferenced Left-wing resource catalog of American history. You want to make a point, post up.
I looked into your Claude Bowers enough to determine that he isn't a particularly valid source of information or opinion.
Yeah? Who was your filter? I noticed you posted comments from a Columbia University publication -- Eric Foner's stomping grounds, and a Communist hellhole since the 1930's. Fine, but why are you posting like a Democrat?
Are you a Democrat? Some other kind of liberal? You post like one -- von Mises is "third rate"? Hmmm.
I simply say that you're missing out if you don't consider and investigate opinions that go counter to your own.
Take your own advice. You filtered Bowers on the basis of what someone else said about him. I quoted Nicolay.
What you've latched onto looks a lot like the wave of the past
Yeah, well, your car is old and has body rust -- which proves you were stupid to buy a Ford in the first place, right?
</fallacy>
-- the ideas in circulation about a century ag....
The ideas of Pythagoras were in circulation twenty-three centuries ago.
......that were quite conciliatory towards the secessionist South, highly critical of the abolitionists, relatively unconcerned about ideas of racial equality, and convinced that Jim Crow was a good "solution" to the "racial problem."
Ever hear of "allowing for differences"? You're filtering. You don't want to talk to anyone who isn't a liberal Democrat. That's what you're doing -- you're editing the book list, and throwing out all the non-PC authors! I knew you were doing that -- jeez, what a NewThinker!
What in the hell has the civil rights movement got to do with Civil War history? Do you mean to tell me that you're giving black-studies departments a veto over your reading list? That you're tossing anyone who gets a knock in some PC article about DWM historiography? That's it, isn't it? You don't want to get caught dead, reading someone on the PC Hate List!
Look, I'll read anything you care to put up. I'm not going to go wandering through a Columbia University reading-list, barfing and choking on Marxist spew from Foner and McPherson because I've got better things to do; but if you want to quote them to support a point, fine, I'll read anything you care to put up, either in direct quotes or in paraphrase. But I'm not going to let you cop a point by pretending to stand over me like a schoolmaster and hand me a reading list. You've read your books, and I've read mine. I've no obligation to accept your syllabus as canonical, even if you adduce reasons why you think it is, and I'm certainly not going to fall for a line of patter about who's hot and who's not in American historiography, because I know as well as you do, that trends and flavors of the month are just as prevalent in history departments as they are anywhere else, even if writing about economic history is coming along as you indicate. I'm not going to fall for your representation that your favorite groupthink is the last word in up-to-date Professionalism for People Who Think Seriously. That's a hustle, and you know it. And I'm perfectly willing to let other posters decide which of us is right about that.
So go patronize somebody else, I'm not having it.
And we can't naively take the old Democrat party simply as the party of farmers and limited government, because we know too much of the workings of parties and government to accept such self-definitions. When the time came to expand government and create a welfare state, the Democrats were on the scene doing the heavy lifting, and that needs some explanation.
As a well-read person who pretends to give me homework, you ought to know, and your remarks to reflect, that the Democratic Party changed hands in 1928, passing from the hands of the rural populists, the Klan, and the Grange into those of the urban ethnic progressives who nominated Al Smith, and then Franklin Roosevelt, and who staffed the alphabet-soup socialist agencies that Roosevelt created.
Granted that Wilson's Administration saw an earlier period of bureaucratic empire-building and regulation, nevertheless those were war measures, and the public turned away from them to return to "normalcy". Roosevelt made them part of the Superstate, and it was the urban Democrats like Tommy "the Cork" Corcoran and Bernard Baruch who helped him build that edifice.
And of course the Democratic Party eventually flew apart, with Southern blacks replacing Southern whites as its southern wing.
Nor of course was segregation ever a matter of "limited government."
It was mostly an accommodation of the Southern wing of the Democratic Party. Some segregationist measures crept in under Grover Cleveland, IIRC, but it was Woodrow Wilson whose administration fostered it more in federal offices. FDR's replies to black complaints in the 1940's, as he worked to keep his coalition together, sounded a lot like Gov. Paul Johnson's of Mississippi, 20 years later, when he kept asking for delays and "understanding".
Nor were antebellum Democrats like Polk entirely absorbed with decreasing the size of government. Territorial expansion, and securing a future for plantation slavery were also important concerns for them. You can slam Whigs and Republicans for their own faults, but nobody's who knows his or her history is going to take the noble Democrats vs. evil Whigs/Republicans melodrama seriously.
Territorial expansion was not the same thing as expansion of the federal government. "Manifest Destiny" wasn't a planters' plot or an agricultural Teapot Dome.
We see now how Jeffersonians, Jacksonians and others on the agrarian side of the line were perfectly willing to use the federal government to achieve their ends. And we can see how tied in with the world economy and the factory system cotton planters were. They were anything but self-sufficient yeomen.
I don't think you can argue that Democrats stiffed Northern interests the way Northern Whigs and Republicans stiffed the South -- the Warehouse Act of 1848 hugely benefited New York City, as we've discussed before, and that was passed during the Polk Administration -- since you've called his name. Jefferson likewise went outside his own construction of the federal role, in order to purchase Louisiana -- and don't tell me he wasn't thinking of the whole country's interests when he did that. There may have been examples of Democrats' use of political power to reward their allies, but you'll have to cite a few. Just bloviating that "well, the Democrats did it too" when what you are talking about is the vast, programmatic expansions of government and infrastructure attempted by Henry Clay and the backers of the 1828 Tariff and the Morrill Tariff, isn't going to get it as moral equivalence.
All of which is tiddlywinks, by the way, in comparison to the railroads. And that was a Republican pork chop -- hell, it was most of the pig!
I'm not going to say that the Whigs or Republicans or Federalists were good and right about everything either. That's the sort of thing we've gotten away from.
Oh, please! McPherson, Foner, Bright, Linenthal, and the other Confederate-flag-folding, PC-revisionist historians go around "contextualizing" Civil War-era National Battlefields and Monuments with modern civil-rights propaganda about "it was ALL about slavery!!" (want links?), and it's very, very evident that "some of us" have absolutely not "gotten away from" broad characterization of competing factions in American history. They are acutely interested in inculpating Southerners and the Confederacy as part of Bill Clinton's jury-pool-polluting, Democratic Party-building propaganda.
I'm sorry, but you are just naked on that one. Grab a towel or something, will you?
I'm just not buying your "you-guys-are-so-yesterday" patter. Salesmen sell used cars, and some of them sell history. Your "all thinking people agree with me" might sound good to you when you say it, but it ain't flying out there in the audience, sorry, not when you come up with howlers like the one above.
You quote Kimberly Smith's publisher on The Dominion of Voice, I quoted another reviewer. But just because you and she approve, for political reasons perhaps, of what happened to public discourse in the 19th century, doesn't mean you and she are right that it was a good thing in the longer run. You quote the publisher's blurb:
"Her readings support the conclusions that the value of rational argument itself was contested, that the emergent Enlightenment rationalism may have helped to sterilize political debate, and that storytelling or testimony posed an important challenge to the norm of political rationality."[Emphasis added.]
Quoting the other reviewer, I made the same point in a different way. The Abolitionists in particular (and others later) replaced light with heat in making their political argument, in order to drive change.
Applying reductio ad absurdum, which is a valid way of looking for a weakness in an argument, would you feel as optimistic about this or that "change" if I were to come over to your house with a gun and settle your hash directly?
The weakness in the argument is that what Kimberly Smith is talking about is incitement to violence. It wasn't the rhetoric or the mode of argument that produced the change -- it was two million bayonets, used by one part of the country against another. It was violence. Where you go wrong is in falling in love with the outcome (teleology) and assuming that future violent outcomes driven by your (or your friends') rhetoric will also be congenial to you. This is a way of making political violence seem benign; and yet it is the thing whose outbreak the Framers worked hardest against.
From what I can gather she distrusts the cold-blooded rationalism of some forms of discussion on the grounds that they exclude the passions which do have a place in life and politics.
Your front yard, five minutes, bring your gun. Yeah, right.
In fact, I think you do agree with her that emotionalism has a place in politics -- you just want to deny to your opponents the emotionalism that you indulge in to your own heart's content.....She doesn't believe in restricting political discourse to a coldly rational Enlightement mode, and I doubt you really do either.
You keep confusing style with substance. I don't argue ad hominem and ad plebem or indulge in teleological gloating -- and yet your side of the argument does this constantly. Wlat was really bad about it, but you've invoked teleology or appeal to force once or twice. My point is, I argue against these appeals regularly, even naggingly, and try regularly to carry the discussion back to constitutional arguments, whereas you are content to float on great tides of dialectic materialism, seemingly indifferent to the American Experiment and contemptuous of attempts to preserve American Exceptionalism. You'd be just as happy, I think sometimes, if we subsided into Orwell's Oceania, if only smart guys who know some history could continue to be included in the Big Picture. (You took a shot at me, here's one back.)
Inasmuch as I argue for rational discourse, as opposed to putting up those comic-books some of your fellow-travelers are posting (at great cost in bandwidth), I think your statement is stood on its head, and no, your moral equivalency or mirroring argument ad hominem isn't valid.
Perhaps it's having read Ronald Syme on the end of the Roman Republic that makes me so allergic to these forms of public discourse over which you and Smith become nearly lyrical in your admiration and praise of Frederick Douglass. Nevertheless, your argument points toward violence and Caesarism in the American political future, and with Hillary already well in view, I think your and Smith's phlegmaticism about propaganda and violence in public discourse is dangerous.
Hmmm...
No one questions that views of history change and will change over time, but your Woods and Adams Jaffa hardly counts as serious scholars or students of American history. Adams Jaffa is preoccupied with taxes slavery to the exclusion of everything else
EDITOR'S NOTE: Jaffa's name here may be used interchangably with McPherson, Foner, any staffer at the Claremont Institute, and the majority of liberal historians at any major university today.
No one questions that views of history change and will change over time, but your Woods and Adams hardly count as serious scholars or students of American history. Adams is preoccupied with taxes to the exclusion of everything else...blah blah blah...
Hmmm...
No one questions that views of history change and will change over time, but your Woods and Adams Jaffa hardly counts as a serious s or students of American history. Adams Jaffa is preoccupied with taxes slavery to the exclusion of everything else
EDITOR'S NOTE: Jaffa's name here may be used interchangably with McPherson, Foner, any staffer at the Claremont Institute, and the majority of liberal historians at any major university today.