TrueBlue

On Lincoln’s birthday, it’s time to think about the man called by the historian Sydney Mead “the spiritual center of American history.” Why was Lincoln at the center? Because it was on his watch that the nation confronted—in bloody ways—its failure to deal with African-American slavery either at its founding or in the 85 years that passed before the Civil War.

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Even though baseball is the most historically conscious of all American sports, most of us check our thinking selves at the ballpark turnstiles. I first started writing about baseball history some 25 years ago, and I’ve been struck ever since by the emotions governing most fans’ relationship to the game, emotions born and nurtured in childhood that make fans resist the adult, business-dominated world of professional sports.

I don’t think performance-enhancing drugs are a good thing. I just don’t see how, if we want to root for winners above all else, we can ever expect players to spurn anything that can give them the extra edge. Here’s a piece I wrote about Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, drugs, and the Hall of Fame, published January 16 in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
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There is very little I enjoy as much as teaching or writing about Martin Luther King, Jr.–for three reasons, I think. First, students don’t know much about him other than the “I Have a Dream” speech, which they’ve rarely read all the way through. Second, I nearly always learn more from him by spending even a few minutes reading a speech or a sermon. Finally, it’s a privilege to show people the tough-minded, sharp-tongued, prophetic Martin Luther King before he became sanctified and domesticated into a less interesting icon.

Here’s a piece I published in the Hartford Courant yesterday, with some added links. Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day!

King’s Vision Forged Out Of Ugly Realities

By WARREN GOLDSTEIN

January 14 2007

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is an American icon. That an Atlanta-born, African American Baptist preacher could rise to the pantheon of national heroes, that rarified realm populated mostly by presidents and generals, witnesses to the best American traditions: We can change; we can make democracy live up to its ideals.

Like heroic statues, however, icons get disconnected from their times. Teddy Roosevelt’s imperial warmongering, for example, and his pleas that white women have more babies lest their race be overwhelmed by more fertile black and brown folks, do not appear at Mount Rushmore.

Similarly, in the flood of Martin Luther King Jr. events, you hear much about his dream of equality - motherhood and apple pie, anyone? - but little of his anger, his biting criticism, his occasional confusion or of his anguish over the war in Vietnam.

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Last weekend I went to Atlanta for the yearly meeting of the American Historical Association: nearly 5,000 historians, graduate students (many interviewing for jobs), and publishers.

The really good news is that winds—ok, breezes—of change were wafting through the historical profession, as more and more panels talked about historians communicating to a broader public, helping to train our students to be history teachers, and working with public school teachers. More of us seem to be recognizing that while Americans hunger for history, professional historians have been serving up unappetizing scholarship written entirely for ourselves—and that ought to change.

We (well, Historians Against the War) tried to put our association on record against the war in Iraq, on the grounds that denying entry visas to foreign scholars, suspending habeas corpus, making declassified documents secret again, torturing prisoners, “condemning as ‘revisionism’ the search for truth about pre-war intelligence”—all of which the Administration uses to conduct the war—violate the principles on which we base our teaching, research and writing. There was a good bit of debate, as some folks argued that we shouldn’t spend our “moral capital” as professionals on something we ought to do as citizens.

I argued that we should not have to check basic values about a civilized society at the door of our professional association. We passed the resolution, and the Executive Council of the organization agreed as well, but they decided to send the resolution out to the entire membership, since only about 100 people voted at the meeting. Here’s an article about the session as well as some video clips of the debate. TrueBlue appears in the next to last clip. One moving moment in the debate came when Staughton Lynd, who had offered an (unsuccessful) anti-Vietnam War resolution at the AHA meeting in 1969 (!) spoke in favor of this resolution—you can see him in a video clip as well. Thanks to History News Network for the article and the clip!

And finally, there was a wonderful session devoted to Yale University (my alma mater) in the 1950s and 1960s, and its firing of Staughton Lynd and Jesse Lemisch, two of the finest young early American historians in the country at the time. Here is a terrific, funny, provocative article about Yale at the time by Professor Lemisch, now retired from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York.

Welcome to TrueBlue, a new blog dedicated to a historian’s reflections on liberal politics, liberal religion, and the liberal arts. Here I want to spark lively, democratic conversation among liberals about these subjects in the hopes of reinvigorating blue culture in America.

For too long liberals have been apologizing for our very existence. We allowed the word “liberal” to be turned into an epithet, the “L-word.” It’s time to take back the word, wear the label, and see what we can learn from each other.

Politics. The real national nightmare that’s over today is the undisputed dominance of the Right in national politics. For the first time in years, what liberals think actually matters in Congress and the White House. On TrueBlue we’ll have some fun (and some misery, of course) talking about blue Washington, and how we might elect a blue President in 2008.

Religion. Since Ronald Reagan got elected in 1980 with Christian Right support, “religion” in the public eye has meant conservative evangelical or fundamentalist Protestantism or conservative Catholicism. Even Jews, once reliably blue on most issues, have produced a distressing number of hacks and ideologues for right-wing politics. Too many of us forget (and some don’t know) that there’s been a lot more liberal religion in the past century than we’re getting credit for. On TrueBlue I’ll talk about what I mean by blue religion, and why it’s making a comeback.

Liberal Arts. History and literature, languages, philosophy, and art, used to be the foundation of all higher education because more than any other subjects, they teach students to read and reason—to think critically about the world, past and present. In the past 25 years, as the Right has run the country, the liberal arts have taken it on the chin. Business accounts for nearly 25% of all college degrees, high schools teach to multiple- choice tests, and right-wing politicians love it. They know an uneducated citizenry can’t defend itself from its own government—which is why they got away with the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act. On TrueBlue, I’ll invite conversation about how the liberal arts sustain blue culture, blue religion, and blue politics.

My bet in starting this blog is that there’s an interest in this sort of conversation, and that as we get more practiced at it we’ll find better ways of talking about politics, religion, and culture.

I hope you’ll join the conversation, or subscribe, or both. See you soon.

TrueBlue