Harvard University Press Blog

National Epidemics, Then and Now

Our current COVID-19 crisis isn’t the first time this nation has faced an epidemic. Lindsay M. Chervinsky, author of  The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution, tells about the yellow fever outbreak that our country faced in its capital during its early years–and how our first president responded.

American responses to the 1793 outbreak of yellow fever in Philadelphia and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic illuminate how the country has remained the same since its founding, as well as the striking evolution in our society and government.

First, some important context. As you may know, yellow fever is spread by mosquitoes (yet another reason to hate them). It cannot be spread person-to-person, but if a mosquito bites an infected person and then bites a healthy person, it can transmit the disease. Because mosquitoes lay their eggs in standing water, they tend to thrive in hot, humid climates. Today, there is a vaccine that provides lifelong protection, but even in the twenty-first century there isn’t really a cure, other than hydration as much as possible.

In the eighteenth century, places like New Orleans, South America, Haiti, and large regions of Africa (places that never really have a hard freeze) suffered constant, lingering cases of yellow fever. Childhood cases of the disease are apparently milder and produce immunity, so in places prone to heavy mosquito density the community tends to build up immunity over time. As a result, there weren’t as many large outbreaks, but rather chronic cases.

Places like Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York do have hard freezes and didn’t have the year-round plague of mosquitos. When those cities had particularly wet and humid summers, however, the mosquito population would spike and residents would be at higher risk if a person infected with yellow fever arrived in the city. These populations were especially prone to outbreaks because there was so little community immunization present.

That’s exactly what happened in Philadelphia in 1793. After a few hot, humid months, there was a deadly outbreak of yellow fever in the late summer and early fall. Between August 1 and November 9, around 5,000 people died—or about 10% of the city’s population. The state and federal government (which was currently residing in Philadelphia) fled, along with most wealthy families that could take shelter in their country homes. The outbreak tapered off with the arrival of cold weather, and although there were several other outbreaks over the next few decades, the 1793 epidemic was one of the most severe in U.S. history.

So how does 1793 compare to today? Well, eighteenth-century Americans had little understanding of modern medicine and had no clue where the disease originated. They blamed “miasmas,” our tainted air, for spreading the disease. They were close; the standing water in which mosquitoes bred did tend to smell, but it wasn’t the odors or the air itself. The solution to the miasmas was hotly contested. Many Federalists, like Alexander Hamilton, thought immigrants and refugees from Haiti and France were bringing in the deadly miasmas on their ships. Republicans, like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Rush, blamed the unhealthy atmosphere in the city and wanted to undertake improvement projects, especially along the wharf where trash and refuse muddied the waters.

They were both right. At some point, someone (or a mosquito) infected with yellow fever had to have arrived in the city in order for mosquitoes to spread the disease. It’s unclear, however, whether that person came from a southern city, like Charleston or New Orleans, or came from Haiti or France. Once the infection arrived, the epidemic was exacerbated by the standing water and gross conditions in Philadelphia, which offered a playground of sorts for mosquitoes.

Congress was out of session, so most congressmen had returned to their homes for their regular summer visit. Many of the remaining state and federal officials fled the city, although Alexander Hamilton, Henry Knox, Thomas Jefferson, and Edmund Randolph lingered through September to dispatch matters in their departments. They all gathered again in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in early November to regroup and finalize Washington’s annual address to Congress.

In the absence of government officials, healthcare for the sick was left to private citizens and volunteer organizations. Doctors, nurses, and laborers heroically tended to the sick and buried the dead. Free and enslaved African Americans played a particularly crucial role. Eighteenth-century doctors had observed that enslaved populations in South Carolina seemed immune to yellow fever, so they encouraged local black populations to volunteer their services. Unfortunately, many of the enslaved individuals in South Carolina had been forcibly brought over from Africa and carried immunity with them—the black community in Philadelphia was mostly American-born and without the same immunities. As a result, this population was particularly hard-hit.

Unlike in the twenty-first century, few contemporaries called for federal action. Frankly, they were mostly focused on trying to survive and care for their families. After the epidemic relented, Federalists and Republicans argued about how best to prevent future outbreaks. Federalists called for restrictions on immigration, which would have been a more national solution, while Republicans favored city improvements, which was obviously a state solution.

While Washington and his cabinet supported an expansive view of executive authority, no one encouraged the president to take action, except for perhaps a day of fasting or prayer. Everyone agreed that disease was more of a local issue (based on my readings anyway).

How then do 1793 and 2020 compare? Both then and now, political parties appear divided over the causes and solutions to the epidemics. The biggest difference between the two cases is the perspective on executive power. Today, disease prevention and public health are managed by executive agencies that report to the president. The heads of the departments sit on the National Security Council to ensure that global pandemics don’t threaten the nation’s security. The founders couldn’t have envisioned the current pandemic we face, but they understood that certain crises called for federal action. While they weren’t prepared to call for that action in 1793, we can today.

Core Values of American History

In his new book, The Will of the People: The Revolutionary Birth of America, prize-winning historian T. H. Breen provides the missing piece in the story of America’s founding, introducing us to the ordinary men and women who turned a faltering rebellion against colonial rule into an unexpectedly potent and enduring revolution. Here, he discusses the 400th anniversary of slaves being brought to America and how some people are trying to excuse this dark side of American history by using the claim of historical context.

Commemoration of the 1619 arrival of the first African slaves in Virginia has sparked passionate controversy over how to weave slavery and racism into our shared history. The major objection about giving human bondage a central role in the American story seems to be that it involves presentism. Critics claim that while white settlers once enslaved black people, contemporary Americans condemn such practices, and therefore, it is a partisan misreading of the past to project our values on earlier generations who viewed human property from a different perspective. We are advised to pay attention to the specific contexts in which whites justified slavery. We know that many Founders owned slaves—Thomas Jefferson, for example—but there is no reason to condemn them since they did not regard their behavior as morally wrong. The lesson here is that if we insist on rehearsing the failures of the past we shall inevitably discount how the nation’s leaders defended noble principles such as liberty and freedom.

The problem with this interpretative strategy is that it discounts a historical narrative that suffers not in the least from presentism. Appeals for greater sensitivity to context is, in fact, an evasive move that serves to privilege the interests of the masters over those of the slaves. After all, from their initial sale in Virginia, Africans in America have adopted a consistent view of slavery. Context makes not the slightest difference. It was wrong in the seventeenth century; it was wrong at the time of the American Revolution; and it is wrong now. No slave saw bondage as preferable to freedom. On that point there can be no doubt. From their first landing in 1619, slaves resisted their status, running away, breaking laws that aimed at controlling them, and when offered the opportunity to gain freedom through a process known as “self-purchase,” they toiled hard for liberty.  

The earliest records of colonial Virginia reveal that blacks aspired to the same goals as did their white neighbors. In a deposition taken in 1645 Edwyn Conway, the clerk of the Northampton County court reported that two men—“Anthony the negro” and Captain Philip Taylor—had viewed a parcel of land which they had purchased together. The partnership apparently had not gone well. When they returned from the field, Conway asked Anthony what had transpired. The former slave responded, “Mr. Taylor and I have devided our Corne And I am very glad of it [for] now I know my owne, hee finds fault with mee that I doe not worke, but now I know myne owne ground and I will worke when I please and play when I please.” Anthony spoke the language of other Virginia settlers. He had labored hard to obtain his “owne ground,” knowing that economic self-determination was the key to personal liberty.

Anthony gained freedom. By the end of the seventeenth century that achievement became more difficult. Slave codes tightened the grip of bondage. As more and more Africans arrived in the colony, some Virginia planters comforted themselves in the belief that the newcomers could never rebel. They spoke too many different languages, making communication among conspirators impossible. Governor Alexander Spotswood warned them against foolish complacency. He reminded them “freedom Wears a Cap which can without a Tongue, Call Together all Those who long to Shake off the fetters of Slavery.”

The siren of liberty inspired slaves during the American Revolution. In 1774, Caesar Sarter, a black man living in Essex County, Massachusetts, drafted a petition for the freedom of the colony’s slaves. He observed “this is a time of great anxiety and distress among you [the whites], on account of the infringement, not only of your Charter rights, but of the natural rights and privileges of freeborn men.” Could they not understand that slaves had the same goals? “Why,” Sarter asked, “will you not pity and relieve the poor distressed, enslaved Africans?—Who, though they are entitled to the same natural rights of mankind, that you are, [are] nevertheless groaning in bondage.” In June 1773, a group of blacks appealed to the governor of Massachusetts, “Your Petitioners apprehend that they have in common with other men a naturel right to be free and without molestation to injoy such property as they may acquire by their industry, or by any other means not detrimental to their fellow men.”

The archives contain many declarations of this sort. The point is black Americans countered racism and slavery in the same language of freedom and liberty that white Americans have so long celebrated. There is no need to argue that the context of slavery changed over time. From the earliest moments of settlement in Virginia, slaves appealed for liberty and freedom—for the right to determine the character of their own lives. To observe that they have given voice to the same principles that their white neighbors hold dear is not presentism. It is a fundamental truth of American history.

Going Downtown

As a child in Chicago, Emily Remus was enchanted by the sights and sounds of its downtown. Here she tells how those early experiences influenced her in writing A Shoppers’ Paradise, a book about how women in turn-of-the-century Chicago used their consumer power to challenge male domination of public spaces and stake their own claim to downtown.

“Downtown,” Petula Clark’s 1964 hit single about the vibrancy of the city center, entranced me long before I began studying urban life. In the early 1990s, nearly three decades after the song’s release, I replayed it endlessly on a plastic phonograph in my bedroom in suburban Chicago. Clark’s crooning insistence that “everything’s waiting for you” downtown seemed patently true to me as a young girl. Downtown—in my case, Chicago’s Loop—was the site of my greatest adventures, a font of novelty and excitement. The lights were “much brighter there,” I thought. You could “forget all your troubles, forget all your cares.”

The commercial landscape of the downtown was especially captivating to my youthful imagination. On every trip with my parents and sisters, I would marvel at the grand hotels, elegant theaters, and lively restaurants. Even more enticing were the glittering store fronts of State Street, especially during the holidays. The mix of color, light, and glass seemed to transform the retail district into a bustling winter wonderland. Nowhere was this effect more pronounced than at Marshall Field & Co., Chicago’s most beloved department store (later acquired by Macy’s). After surveying Field’s elaborate annual window displays, we would, like countless other families, retreat to the store’s seventh floor to sip hot cocoa beneath the twinkling glow of the Walnut Room’s famous Christmas tree. 

Even as a child, I wondered how and by whom the downtown had been created. I could not then have appreciated that the Loop was a product of innumerable policy decisions, commercial choices, cultural priorities, social inequalities, and political exigencies. Nor could I have grasped that its contours had been shaped not only by government officials, business leaders, and reformers but by historical actors not very different from my mother, sisters, and me—by women shoppers.      

This history began, slowly, to come into focus when I entered graduate school at the University of Chicago to study gender and capitalism. Inspired by historians such as Lizabeth Cohen and William Cronon, whose landmark works illuminated the imprint of industrial capitalism on Chicago’s material and cultural landscape, I began to investigate how the expansion of consumer capitalism influenced the urban environment. I probed the early growth of the State Street retail district, tracing the rise of new commercial spaces that catered primarily to female customers—department stores, theaters, grand hotels, restaurants, and soda fountains. These businesses, which proliferated in the 1880s and 1890s, drew an unprecedented number of moneyed white women into the downtown.

As I dug into my research, I expected to find a seamless incorporation, even a warm embrace, of these women into the commercial life of the Loop. After all, their consuming practices helped to fuel Chicago’s remarkable economic development in the late nineteenth century. To my astonishment, I instead uncovered heated conflict and resistance. Far from welcoming female consumers, many Chicago industrialists, city officials, religious leaders, and ordinary citizens challenged the growing presence and pursuits of moneyed women in the city center. Their conspicuously feminine clothing, street etiquette, dining and drinking preferences, entertainment choices, and very manner of walking distinguished them from traditional male occupants of the Loop and provoked intense opposition. The battles ranged from efforts to deny women shoppers access to downtown sidewalks during evening rush hour to the enactment of new laws banning voluminous hoopskirts and large hats to crusades against alcohol consumption in ladies’ cafés and tearooms.

A Shoppers’ Paradise probes these tensions and their consequences. As the book reveals, incorporating women into a downtown dominated by men—and creating an atmosphere favorable to female consumption—was not easy or automatic. In negotiating the terms of women’s public presence, Chicagoans clashed over the appropriate use of downtown space, the rights of women, and the moral legitimacy of new forms of consumption. This conflict, I argue, shaped the creation of a built environment and cultural norms that upheld moneyed white women’s new consuming habits and sustained the growth of American consumer capitalism. Indeed, it produced the class-bounded, racially-homogenous consumer playground that my sisters and I would unthinkingly enjoy a century later. 

I can no longer visit State Street without reflecting on its fraught history, on the opportunities and disparities produced by its development. I am also keenly aware that its landscape is still evolving. Many of the spaces I visited as a girl have since shuttered. State Street, like countless other urban retail districts across the country, has been struggling for decades to attract customers and retain businesses. These problems have only intensified as more and more commerce shifts to the digital realm. A century ago, Chicago civic and business leaders debated how—and whether—to accommodate the growing stream of downtown shoppers. Now, the concern is that this stream may someday dry up. Each moment conjures the same important question—what is a downtown for?

I pose this question not only in A Shoppers’ Paradise but on annual field trips to Chicago for my course on the history of consumer culture at the University of Notre Dame. After touring the Marshall Field building, I prompt my students to wander up and down State Street surveying the architecture and infrastructure. Our goal is to encounter the urban environment as a primary source, a clue to the past. The landscape opens up for my students new vistas for understanding power, inequality, and capitalist transformation. Standing with thirty undergraduates on a crowded street corner discussing the purpose, meaning, and uncertain future of America’s downtowns, I am reminded of the sheer dynamism of these spaces and, at least for a moment, can still find some truth in Petula Clark’s claim that there is “no finer place for sure.” 

Stop Blaming Feminists: The Feminist Movement We Should Remember

In Feminism’s Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family, a spirited defense of feminism, Kirsten Swinth argues that the lack of support for working mothers is less a failure of second-wave feminism than a rejection by reactionaries of the sweeping changes they campaigned for. Here, she dispels some common myths that plague the history of the feminist movement.

Feminism is cool in the age of Donald Trump. The movement is surging. #MeToo, women in Congress, and massive women’s marches are all signs of a new feminist moment. One would think we would be looking to feminist foremothers for inspiration. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Instead, pervasive, sometimes pernicious myths about the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s keep rearing their head.

For the feminist movement we need in the Trump era, these myths must be banished. Bad history blocks urgently needed gains. Today’s distorting myths systematically blame feminist foremothers, rather than their opponents or media misrepresentations, for the predicaments we face today. The facts tell a different story: of a diverse, progressive women’s movement, brimming with visionary solutions for the inequality women faced in workplaces as well as in intimate relationships. If we are to make progress on these issues, we need to hear their voices and take up the mantle of their struggles once again.

So let’s get the facts straight.

Fact #1: Feminists were horrified at the media invention of the liberated woman “having it all” by dint of efficient life management. In reality, feminists fought for changes in family and workplaces to make sure that having a family and having a job could be an option for every woman, just as it had been for men. They believed that society had to change the rules of the game in both workplace and family life in order for equality to truly exist. They demanded a national system of childcare and guaranteed incomes for mothers (especially poor mothers) to care for their children. They fought for equal childcare and housework with men, even writing “marriage contracts” to pin recalcitrant men down to their promises to share the load. Their vision was broad and deep—requiring society and systems to change as much as individuals.

Fact #2: Feminists of all stripes and backgrounds made universal, 24-hour, community-controlled childcare a rallying cry of the movement. The absence of a national childcare system today is often chalked up to feminists’ lack of interest in the issue. This is simply not true. In coalition with civil rights and labor groups, feminists nearly achieved a national childcare system in 1971, until conservatives persuaded Richard Nixon to veto legislation approved by Congress. Even then, that did not stop feminists. A grassroots do-it-yourself ethos spread across the country as feminists passed around tattered manuals on how to start your own daycare center, complete with designs for tot-sized furniture. Childcare centers grew by almost a third nationally between 1970 and 1976.

Fact #3: Feminists of color were leaders, indeed among the vanguard, on many feminist issues. African American feminists in the welfare-rights movement fought for a universal basic income so mothers could care for their children without being forced to work. Domestic workers, largely African American, led a feminist fight to recognize the value of household labor by demanding the minimum wage for nannies, house cleaners, and other household employees. Women of color were leaders in major national organizations like the National Organization for Women and the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC), as well as of the National Black Feminist Organization and the Third World Women’s Alliance. Shirley Chisholm and LaDonna Harris were, for example, among the founders of the NWPC which pledged to fight “sexism, racism, institutional violence and poverty” at its founding in 1971. Well-justified frustrations at the insensitivity of many white feminists to the needs of women of color should not erase the leadership and critical contributions of feminists of color to a rich, varied movement.

Fact #4: Feminist activists of the 1960s and 1970s led creative, vibrant campaigns to value housework and caring for children. Feminists saw firsthand the vulnerability of homemakers all around them, particularly with skyrocketing divorce rates in the 1970s. Anti-feminists like Phyllis Schlafly attacked them for being anti-family and hating housewives, but her charge was unfounded. Women’s rights activists proposed steps still touted today as essential. They calculated the value of household labor and argued that it should count in the gross national product. Feminist legislators and lawyers fought to ensure homemakers had basic rights, like the security of an independent social security account for retirement and a fair share of family property at divorce. The National Organization for Women issued a Homemakers Bill of Rights.

Fact #5: Feminists did not fail and leave us in the pickle we live with today. They were defeated. What they dreamed of achieving was visionary, and ahead of its time. Their opponents found the changes women’s rights activists proposed threatening. If enacted, family relationships and workplace hierarchies would all be upended. These opponents therefore mobilized and successfully countered many feminist proposals. Yet when we look at what feminists really fought for, we see a road map for our own time—a comprehensive vision for changing home and workplace, for involving society in supporting childcare and guaranteeing parental time with children, while accommodating workers with family responsibilities (that is, all of us).

We have foremothers to turn to for inspiration. Edith Barksdale Sloan led domestic workers in their fight for higher wages and better working conditions. Members of the New York Wages for Housework Committee taught us that housework has economic value. Ida Phillips of Florida took her case all the way to the Supreme Court to win the right for mothers not to be denied a job simply because they had children.

By promoting pernicious myths about feminism that have no basis in fact, we do conservatives’ work for them. It’s time to stop blaming feminists and instead to pick up where they left off.

Conceived in Freedom, Dedicated to Women’s History: An Appreciation of Anne Firor Scott

Historian and activist Anne Firor Scott, who helped pioneer and advance the field of women’s history, passed away on February 5. Susan Ware, whose forthcoming book Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote is dedicated to Anne, honors her dear friend and colleague and the impact her scholarship and activism had on the historical profession.

When historian Anne Firor Scott turned eighty in 2001, the Schlesinger Library held a symposium to celebrate the event and asked me to introduce our honored guest. When I was searching for a way to convey her remarkable career and accomplishments to assembled scholars and friends who were already well aware of them, I did some simple math and realized that Anne had been born nine months after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, thus providing the theme of my remarks. Alas, my math was a bit too simple, as Eva Moseley, the library’s meticulous curator of manuscripts pointed out afterwards. The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified on August 26, 1920, and Anne was born on April 21, 1921. That’s eight months, not nine. But I still loved the juxtaposition of the milestone in American women’s history with the birth of a historian whose work fundamentally shaped the field.

When I decided to dedicate Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote to Anne, I used that historical coincidence to frame the wording: “To Anne Firor Scott, born eight months after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment and an inspiration to women’s historians ever since.” The dedication acknowledges our long friendship, Anne’s pioneering role in the field of women’s history, and her place in suffrage history. I readily admit that the math doesn’t quite work out, but I still fancy the idea she might have been conceived on the very night that the Nineteenth Amendment formally became part of the U.S. Constitution.

Last summer I reached out to Anne through her children to tell her of my idea for the dedication. By now I so associated her life with the upcoming suffrage centennial that it seemed she might live until 2020, even though she had been in declining health for several years. It was not to be. On February 5, 2019, she died peacefully at the age of ninety-seven.

Like so many other good things in my life, my friendship with Anne Firor Scott was intimately connected with the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe. I can’t remember when I first met her, but I am certain it was through Barbara Miller Solomon, one of my mentors at Harvard (Frank Friedel was the other) who helped me navigate the often chilly reception that my chosen field of women’s history received in the Harvard history department of the 1970s. Anne, who had received her Ph.D. from Radcliffe in 1958, was a longtime member of the advisory board of the Schlesinger Library and would journey to Cambridge for its twice-yearly meetings, where she always stayed in what she called Barbara’s Brattle Street “attic.” When Barbara died, I inherited her houseguest. Anne happened to be in town the night of November 7, 2000, and always keenly engaged in current affairs, stayed up late watching the Bush–Gore election returns. When we convened at breakfast, there was still no winner. Little did we know that it would be five weeks before the election was decided.

Book dedications are often personal and quirky, as they should be. In my case, I feel especially privileged to acknowledge a scholar who not only was a dear friend but who also had such a key impact on the field of women’s history generally, and suffrage history particularly. Even before there was a field of Southern women’s history, Anne Firor Scott embarked on the research that became her first book, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 (1970). While later scholarship has deepened and complicated the story, The Southern Lady remains a foundational text.

By the time the field of women’s history picked up momentum, Anne was already happily ensconced at Duke University, which was her professional home for practically her entire career. I can’t decide if she would have been tickled or embarrassed to hear that flags were flown at half-staff on the Duke campus when the news of her passing was announced. Probably a bit of both.

Anne Firor Scott never published a book with Harvard University Press, although her daughter Rebecca Scott has. But I still consider her an HUP author for her role in the three-volume biographical dictionary Notable American Women, which was originally sponsored by Radcliffe College in the 1950s and published by Harvard University Press in 1971, 1980, and 2004. I served as the editor of the final volume, which covered 483 women who died between January 1, 1976, and December 31, 1999. Anne contributed the essay on League of Women Voters president Anna Lord Strauss, which gave her the distinction of being the only author to write entries for all three volumes, a matter of great pride to us both.

When I contemplate the upcoming suffrage centennial and the question of why suffrage mattered, I think of an observation Anne Scott once made about how winning the vote was part of larger changes in women’s lives: “Suffrage was a tributary flowing into the rich and turbulent river of American social development. That river is enriched by the waters of each tributary, but with the passage of time it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish the special contribution of any one of the tributaries.” I can’t point to specific pages in Why They Marched where the impact of Anne’s scholarship is visible but it is clearly there. So, too, is the personal encouragement she gave me over our decades of friendship. With my dedication I am honored to acknowledge that debt.

Who's Afraid of Lady Liberty?

On October 28, 1886, President Grover Cleveland dedicated the Statue of Liberty as a gift from the people of France.  The 151-foot statue, designated as a national monument in 1924 and, for most people, it serves as a universal symbol of freedom and democracy.  Francesca Lidia Viano, author of Sentinel: The Unlikely Origins of the Statue of Liberty, explores a darker side of Lady Liberty.    

It is, by now, well known that the Statue of Liberty speaks differently to different people. For some, she is the protector of immigrants; for others, the symbol of minorities’ struggle for equality. More generally, it has been argued that the Statue is a guardian of the nation’s most cherished ideals: liberty and democracy. But some people believe that Lady Liberty also harbors deep, even conspiratorial, mysteries. Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the Statue’s Alsatian architect, and his collaborators are sometimes said to be members of a secret society, the Illuminati, clandestinely working to undermine the pillars of order (property, national states, religion). Equally groundless variants of this story locate the Statue’s origins in secret Jewish cabals, and, with overt appeals to anti-Semitism, conflate her meaning with Zionism and international finance.

Americans started fearing the Statue even before she arrived in New York, in 1885, as a gift from the French. Many were puzzled or even upset that foreigners insisted on putting such a cumbersome gift in their harbor. But where did the fear of the Statue’s supposedly malign power come from?

One source certainly is the Statue’s appearance. Upon first arriving in New York harbor, Karl Rossmann, the immigrant protagonist of Franz Kafka’s Amerika, thinks he sees a sword rather than a torch in her upstretched hand. More recently, in the dystopian Man in the High Castle, the Statue, wearing a red sash with a swastika, raises her arm in a Nazi salute. Why is it so tempting to portray the Statue as aggressive? Though we seldom remember the circumstances, she was, in effect, born of hatred and vengeance. A year before sailing to New York, Bartholdi had fought in the Franco-Prussian war, in the Vosges, where Giuseppe Garibaldi had taken command of a troop of volunteers. They lost the war; Bartholdi’s hometown, Colmar, and all of Alsace fell into German hands. Bartholdi sailed to America to advertise his colossal statue of liberty (then of the Republic, as he called it), but not even this journey distracted him from his sorrows. While busy marketing the statue in New York and Philadelphia, Bartholdi drew sketches of a vindictive female embodiment of Alsace, bent over a wounded figure and raising her hand to curse the Germans (in a gesture reminiscent of the Statue of Liberty), her face green and contorted. At about the same time, Bartholdi added spikes to the simple diadem the Statue wore in all of his earlier models. Why?

The common explanation is that Bartholdi wanted the starry crown to represent the rising sun of the American republic. But what if Bartholdi picked up a symbol that was equally suitable to America and Alsace (or, more broadly, France)? Like many artists, he signed his monuments with coded references to his personal story. The star on the Statue’s head could be read as a rising sun (or, more problematically, a setting one). But it could also be a comet, a Christian symbol of disaster and apocalypse, which appeared in Colmar’s coat of arms. Colmar’s comet also represents the city’s weapon of choice, the Morgenstern, or “morning star,” a spiked club used in medieval combat. With her pointy star on her head, the Statue was one of numerous artworks Bartholdi imbued with military themes in those years, many of which explicitly embodied violent and revanchist sentiments. In short, the reason the Statue of Liberty continues to be seen as bellicose may simply be that she originally was intended as such.

Along with her symbolic weapon, the Morgenstern, the Statue carries a real one as well, which – paradoxically – is her only real link with the United States. With no eagle or stars and stripes, the Statue of Liberty’s only truly American emblem is the Declaration of Independence clasped in her left arm. As symbols go, it would be difficult to find one more ambiguous in the context of the time. Originally meant as a declaration of intents against Britain, the Declaration also acknowledges the equality of rights among individuals. And yet, when the Statue arrived in New York, women could not vote in most state and federal elections, Chinese immigrants had been banned from the country by the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, and Native Americans had been dispossessed of their lands. Minorities were immediately struck by the hypocrisy of the situation. In the middle of the inaugural celebrations, feminists boarded a ship and followed the men to Bedloe’s Island (now Liberty Island) to protest against discrimination; Chinese immigrants wrote to newspapers to complain against their exclusion. Was the Statue meant to encourage minorities to persevere in their struggles? Probably not. Bartholdi and his collaborators looked to the Declaration as a document of national emancipation and a guarantee of individual liberty and property. As it turns out, however, works of art have a life of their own; they absorb meaning from their viewers, not only from their builders. Whatever Bartholdi and his friends said (and whatever is said today), the Statue continues to rally gender, sexual, and racial minorities whenever politics and laws neglect to defend their rights proclaimed in the Declaration. Frederick Douglass once said that the Declaration was “the very ring-bolt in the chain of your yet undeveloped destiny.” The same can be said of our Statue.

On other occasions, the Statue has been perceived as too exotic, too un-American, to be at home in the United States. A newspaper once warned Bartholdi that “nude figures suggest great discomfort” in New York harbor. And, indeed, the Statue was made for warmer climates. This part of the story begins in 1855, when a 21-year-old Bartholdi sailed up the Nile with a group of painters. Dressed in local garb, he visited tombs and markets, unrolled mummies, and took pictures of farmers and young girls. Then, he left his friends behind and attempted to reach the mythical realm of Saba. From this experience, and a second journey to Egypt in 1867, Bartholdi produced the prototype of what would later become the Statue of Liberty: a veiled “Oriental” woman raising an enormous lantern with her right hand and wearing the traditional tunic of local women farmers or fellahs. The message of the prototype, titled Egypt Enlightening the Orient, was clear: to be placed at the Red Sea entrance to the Suez Canal, she was meant to celebrate Egyptian progress and the French investments that had made the construction of the Canal possible.

When Bartholdi presented his project in Egypt, the pasha was unenthusiastic. Bartholdi tried to change the fellah according to the pasha’s suggestions, until it became clear that the Egyptians would never finance the enterprise. One is usually told that Bartholdi abandoned the project after the pasha’s rejection and started working on an old idea from his friend Édouard René de Laboulaye, an eccentric professor of law, who had once proposed that France give a statue of liberty and Franco-American friendship to America. Evidence, however, shows that Bartholdi continued working on his fellahs long after the pasha’s rejection, until the eve of his American journey, and that his veiled fellahs (now on display at the Bartholdi Museum of Colmar) became increasingly similar to the figure that we today associate with our Statue of Liberty: her lantern became a torch or a burner, and a piece of broken vase (a symbol of liberty) appeared in her free hand. There is no doubt that Bartholdi modeled the fellahs while thinking of the Egyptian and American scenes simultaneously. Indeed, Bartholdi confessed to his mother that “the same principles” could be applicable to “two hemispheres,” the East and the West. He did not say more, but it is clear that he thought the New World as uncivilized as the colonial Orient, both struggling to rid themselves of slavery and both competing for European money. Bartholdi’s journey to America would confirm his prejudice that the country was beautiful and ill-mannered and reinforce his idea of using the Egyptian statue as a blueprint for an American one.

In the end, the Statue of Liberty kept very little of her Egyptian attire: her Arab tunic is gone, as is her sensuous pose. But the Statue’s crown (from which spikes now protrude) is still present along with the torch and the symbol of liberty (the chains resting at the statue’s feet). Yet what, one may ask, is the use of a crown in a republic? To answer this question, one should return to the Statue’s other creator, Laboulaye, an academic, a Catholic Freemason, and a businessman descended from royal bureaucrats and international merchants. Laboulaye was nostalgic. He mourned not only the beheading of Louis XVI, which his grandfather had witnessed, but also France’s loss of its empire in America to the British in the Seven Years’ War. To the Statue’s sponsors, Laboulaye once said that the French were like the Jews, who had been “kept in the desert before entering into this happy place;” contrary to the Jews, however, the French could “only hope … [to] get there.” But where? According to the London Times, it was a tasteless way to say that America was France’s promised land and that the Statue was meant to signal the future resurrection of French colonial power in America (not unlike how her Egyptian sibling was meant to celebrate France’s colonial power in Egypt). Sure enough, Laboulaye wanted to impress on the American and French publics that the future colossus would carry with her fond memories of the French monarchy and the empire it had once built in America. Indeed, he warned the Statue’s sponsors that their commitment to the building of the colossus was “not a matter of party,” because it was meant to celebrate “the old and new France”: the France of Louis XVI and of the newly established Republic of 1875. One could think that the Statue represented France’s dying monarchy at sunset, when – in Laboulaye’s words – the sun “cast a last ray of gold and crimson in a milder sky,” and America’s rising star of a Republic at sunrise. But what if the French really did intend the Statue to represent the sunset of the French monarchy and the dawn of France’s republican resurrection in America? In his 1863 book Paris in America, Laboulaye told the fable of a medium magically sending him and the whole city of Paris to Massachusetts, to live in a sort of exemplary republic signaled by a “luminous point which pierces the horizon.” Is the Statue that luminous point, the promise that the French made to themselves to return to their lost colonies?

Although many of the Statue’s supposed secrets are projections and fabrications, the complex story of her origins still holds some genuine surprises. Aggressive, armed, and monarchical, she was originally envisioned as a champion of European colonial influence and privilege. Yet, her association with the Declaration of Independence, the instinctive bond she established with minorities, her pledge of vengeful resistance, and her foreign origins make it difficult to label her a monument to white supremacy. She is rather the perfect portrait of the Eastern divinities that fascinated Bartholdi during his Egyptian journeys: like the ancient fertility goddesses, who created life through terrible pain, who were the first mothers but also the first destroyers, the Statue is at once ugly and beautiful, a warrior and a mother, aggressive and tender, good and evil. Her multifarious reception reflects the complexity of her origins. People are right to observe that Lady Liberty holds fearsome secrets, but those that people project onto her today are far from those that haunted her original architects.

 

 

Why Gerrymandering Matters

As with many issues working their way through American courts, legal challenges to political gerrymandering have had their calculus upended by the retirement of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. Indeed, one expert offered that the odds of seeing the Court identify a standard for determining whether a political map has become unacceptably partisan “plummeted” with Kennedy’s announcement. But as long as American political representation appears not to reflect the politics of Americans, the movement to reform the drawing of districts will continue to find support.

Such reform is just one of many deemed necessary by Allan J. Lichtman in The Embattled Vote in America: From the Founding to the Present, forthcoming this September. To Lichtman, the failure to include a guaranteed right to vote in the American Constitution was an error that’s plagued the nation since its inception, and along with a rule combining anti-gerrymandering and the establishment of independent redistricting commissions, he identifies the elimination of felon disenfranchisement, expanded voter registration, and a move away from holding national elections on regular workdays as reforms that would transform voting in the United States. In the following excerpt from The Embattled Vote in America, Lichtman outlines some of the spiraling ramifications of the prevailing practice of politically-drawn districts.

-----

In America’s hard-fought and closely contested presidential election of 2016, only 59 percent of voting-age citizens cast a ballot, equaling about 86 million lost votes. Donald Trump won the presidential election of 2016 with 63 million votes, just 28 percent of America’s voting-age citizens. In the 2014 midterm elections, only 38 percent of American citizens participated, equaling about 140 million lost votes. In closely contested U.S. Senate races across the nation in 2014, candidates typically won seats with votes equal to about one-fifth of the state’s citizens of voting age. Turnout is yet lower in local elections. A 2014 study by two University of Wisconsin researchers found that turnout in 144 mayoral elections across the nation averaged only 25.6 percent of the citizen voting-age population. Thus, candidates could win mayoral elections with support from just over 10 percent of their citizen voting-age constituents.

Turnout is similarly bleak in primary elections that set the choices for voters in the general elections. In 2016, when both parties had spirited contests for their presidential nominations, about 28 percent of voting-age citizens participated in the Republican and Democratic presidential primaries combined. In states holding caucuses, turnout averaged merely 7 percent. Only about 8 percent of American citizens chose Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee and only about 6 percent chose Donald Trump as the Republican nominee. In midterm elections, primary turnout is yet lower. In 2014, just 28.4 million voters participated in the primary elections in forty-five states that had at least one contested statewide primary for both parties, equaling about 15 percent of the citizen voting-age population in those states.

In 1900, the United States led the democratic world in the voting participation of its citizens. Now roles have reversed and America trails most comparable democracies in voter turnout. According to a 2017 Pew Research Center study of thirty-five nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States ranked twenty-eighth in voter turnout.

On Civility

Recent days have seen concern for civility in American public discourse rise to the fore. Some call for its preservation, casting civility as a critical norm, the erosion of which would portend even greater conflict. Others suggest that the time for civility has passed, or cast it as only ever a tool for silencing dissent. Many recognize that we’ve been through these debates before.

Below, we turn to political theorist Teresa Bejan for insight. Her 2017 work Mere Civility, from which the following is adapted, draws on historical texts and contexts in order to bring sorely needed critical perspective to the perennial crises of civility that afflict modern liberal democracies. For Bejan, the advantage of consulting the past lies in opening ourselves to the ways in which it challenges our own commitments and assumptions about what it means to be “civil” today.

-----

Modern calls for civility, whether in politics or religion, reflect concerns about the corrosive effects of uncivil disagreement on social bonds and tender consciences very similar to those in the seventeenth century. These appeals suggest that if only we could get the manner right, the very practice of disagreement itself might work to harmonize our fundamental differences, thus making it possible for us to regard one another across those differences not as enemies, but friends.

In The Harm in Hate Speech, Jeremy Waldron puts the question thus: “Is a tolerant society just a society free from…persecution, or is it a society in which people cohabit and deal with one another, in spite of their…differences, in an atmosphere of civility and respect?” For Waldron, the answer is clear. Some speech about others and their fundamental identities and commitments is simply so uncivil, so intolerant, degrading, and disrespectful that it constitutes a form of persecution against which a tolerant society can and should act. Yet in liberal democracies like the United States the question is not so simple. This is because, as a regime, liberal democracy is distinguished by its dedication to two-fold toleration: (1) of diversity in its members’ fundamental identities and commitments (especially in politics and religion) and (2) of the disagreements those differences inspire. Indeed, the self-conception of liberal societies as “tolerant” hinges on the fact that members are not compelled to confine their differences to a private sphere of individual skulls or intimate familiars, but are permitted, even encouraged, to express them freely in public and to compete for adherents.

Accordingly, in complaining about a “crisis” many commentators present civility as the essential virtue for liberal democracies that promise to protect diversity while allowing for active, often heated disagreement in the public sphere. In the United States, especially, we pride ourselves on our First Amendment freedoms not only to differ but to disagree, and our recent crisis of civility feels so critical because it brings these defining commitments into conflict. Controversies about whether to tame uncivil disagreements through legislation—whether through campaign finance reform, hate speech laws, or college speech codes—are thus usually presented as a conflict between free speech, on the one hand, and the demands of diversity and inclusion, on the other. Yet the early modern toleration debates to which we’ll turn, in which concerns about persecution of the tongue and proposals to ban it could be heard on all sides, suggest a different interpretation—namely, that underlying these controversies is a more fundamental conflict between competing conceptions of civility, understood as a virtuous standard of conversation and conduct that should govern the members of a tolerant society as such. This is clear especially in the case of campus speech codes, which attempt to articulate the standard of civility appropriate to universities as tolerant societies par excellence.

Even so, these efforts to impose and enforce civility legislatively are controversial in the United States in a way they are not in other “tolerant” liberal democracies. Waldron and others have traced America’s peculiar permissiveness toward uncivil speech—exemplified in its unwillingness to adopt the hate speech and religious insult statutes embraced elsewhere—to a peculiar “First Amendment Faith” in which religious toleration and free speech go hand in hand. Few societies protect speech as insistently as we do, and few societies expect that allowing people to insult one another, along with their most cherished commitments or beliefs, will make them more tolerant, not less. Still, even if they cannot see eye to eye on whether a tolerant society should tolerate incivility, commentators in the United States and other Western liberal democracies generally agree that uncivil speech is a threat to the tenuous balance between diversity and disagreement on which ostensibly tolerant—and civil—societies depend. Wars of words are thus both a symptom and a cause of deeper ills, a sign that once the war of swords has ended the real work of tolerance has only just begun.

Ira Berlin (1941-2018)

Towering American historian Ira Berlin passed away yesterday at the age of 77. A preeminent scholar of slavery and African American social history, Berlin was the author of numerous field-shaping works, and founding editor of the pioneering Freedmen and Southern Society Project. We at HUP have had the great good fortune of working with Berlin for decades, and the honor of publishing his magisterial Many Thousands Gone, winner of the Bancroft and Frederick Douglass Prizes; Generations of Captivity, which demonstrated the dramatic making and remaking of slavery across the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries; and, most recently, The Long Emancipation, a slim volume that drew on his lifetime of thinking about slavery to present the story of its long demise.

As evidenced by the outpouring of tribute and affection across social media today, Berlin was beloved by generations of historians not just for his scholarship but also for his generosity, guidance, and friendship. Joyce Seltzer, his longtime editor here at HUP, echoes that widespread appreciation for Berlin as a profoundly influential scholar who touched a great many lives:

Ira was special—wise, warm, funny, true to himself. He was a dear friend as well as an author. And, above all, a great historian. Reading Many Thousands Gone truly transformed my understanding of the slave experience over the first two centuries in North America—the shifting meanings of being black and white over time and what that history continues to mean today. Our loss is immense.

Berlin began The Long Emancipation with the following passage:

History is not about the past; it is about arguments we have about the past. And because it is about arguments that we have, it is about us. In the study of American history, few arguments have been as impassioned and persistent as the seemingly endless debates about the nature and causes of slavery’s demise. Who did it, how, and
why—and ultimately, what was its meaning? The tenacious nature of this argument speaks to the centrality of freedom in American life, which, in turn, is embedded in the very meaning of American citizenship as stated in the nation’s founding charters and in its connection to the nation’s most critical contemporary social problem: racism. For the American people, the struggle to abolish slavery, secured by constitutional amendment almost 150 years ago, remains very much alive among us and about us.

No one did more to help us understand that struggle than Berlin. No one did more to help us understand ourselves.

The American Tradition of Torture

As expected, at this week’s Senate Intelligence Committee confirmation hearings for Gina Haspel, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Central Intelligence Agency, the C.I.A.’s post-9/11 “interrogation program” and Haspel’s own role in the program and its aftermath took center stage. Haspel sought to cast the program and its brutal techniques—many of which have since been outlawed—as an aberrant episode in the agency’s history, and vowed that under her leadership “C.I.A. will not restart such a detention and interrogation program.” Just as Haspel aimed to position that use of torture as an outlier in the history of the C.I.A., so too did the hearings propagate an understanding of the brutality of those years as a brief deviation from the long history of moral leadership demonstrated by the United States. Indeed, the majority of Americans would likely share such sentiment: we do not torture.

And yet.

In Civilizing Torture: An American Tradition, forthcoming this fall, decorated American historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage shows that alongside the long American lineage of denouncing torture there’s an equally enduring culture of both embracing and excusing barbarism. Brundage revisits a series of moments and practices—from the initial contact of Europeans with North America, to the early American republic, to slavery, to the American imperial project, to local law enforcement’s embrace of “the third degree,” through the Cold War, and up to the present—to demonstrate that behavior considered to have been torturous in its own time has been far more prevalent in U.S. history than we acknowledge. By threading this past into a cohesive story of debate and dismissal, Brundage reveals the ways in which the mythos of American exceptionalism has underwritten the narrative so evident this week on Capitol Hill.

The passages below come from the introduction to Civilizing Torture.

-----

In April 1858 Harper’s Weekly, one of the most popular American magazines of the day, published a gruesome article entitled “Torture and Homicide in an American State Prison.” Accompanied by graphic illustrations, the article dwelled on the so-called “water cure,” a punishment during which an inmate was stripped and seated in a stall with his feet and arms fastened in stocks and his head extended up into a tank that fit snugly around his neck. The prisoner’s head was drenched with freezing cold water that cascaded down from a height of a foot or more for several minutes at a time. The tank that encircled the prisoner’s neck emptied slowly, inducing a sensation of drowning while the prisoner struggled to keep his mouth and nose above the pool of draining water.

Thirty years later an investigation of practices at Elmira Reformatory, the most acclaimed American penal institution of the day, revealed that staff there continued to douse prisoners with cold water, in addition to confining them in darkened cells for weeks on end, shackling and hoisting them until their toes barely touched the floor, and “paddling” them with specially made boards. In 1899 American soldiers occupying the Philippines after the Spanish-American War sent home letters boasting of their routine application of a variant of the “water cure” to coerce information from Filipino guerrillas. To apply the “cure,” soldiers pinned their victim to the ground by his legs and arms and partially raised his head “so as to make pouring in the water an easier matter.” If he refused to keep his mouth open, his tormentors pinched his nose closed and used a rifle barrel or bamboo stick to pry his jaws apart. Then they poured water into his overextended mouth until he looked like “a pregnant woman.” According to witnesses, a few applications of the “water cure” usually elicited a flood of information.

A century later, the outlines of the “enhanced interrogation” methods adopted by the Central Intelligence Agency and military interrogators during the “War on Terror” became public. Americans learned that between 2003 and 2006 at least eighty-nine Middle Eastern detainees in CIA custody had been slapped, slammed against walls, deprived of sleep, stuffed into coffins, and threatened with violent death. The most severe method was “waterboarding,” a modern-day variant of the technique applied a century and a half earlier in American prisons. Waterboarding entailed pouring water over a cloth covering the face and breathing passages of an immobilized detainee, which produced an acute sensation of drowning. One detainee endured more than 180 waterboarding sessions.