in which we hear that truth is something that happens to an idea
OK, gang, I have something I want you to listen to. This is president Franklin D. Roosevelt, addressing the nation, in his first "Fireside Address." The date is March 8, 1933, and the Great Depression is at its absolute nadir. The nation has a new president, and it's far from clear that he's up to the task of saving the country from disaster. So here he is:
I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking -- to talk with the comparatively few who understand the mechanics of banking, but more particularly with the overwhelming majority of you who use banks for the making of deposits and the drawing of checks ....
What are you hearing? I'm not simply asking about what he's saying. I'm wondering, how does this sound to you?
—He sounds reassuring.
—Like a father.
—He sounds kinda flat to me. After all I've heard about the guy, I thought he'd sound a little more inspirational.
—The point is, he's trying to reassure people. He's trying to explain the situation to ordinary people, who don't necessarily understand banking stuff.
—Well OK. But doesn't mean he can't, like, uplift them, does it?
—It's a crisis. People need calm.
Well it is true that it was an especially scary moment. That long stretch of uncertainty from November of 1932, when FDR was elected, to March of 1933, when he took office, created a lot of uncertainty. The winter of '33 is probably when the nation's economy touched bottom. In part, that was not just unease about a transition, but also unease within the financial community about FDR himself. Was he really up to the job?
—The thing that bothers me a little is that I have this sense that he's talking down to people. It's a little condescending.
—Well, yeah, but you're not really the target audience.
—I know. But if what Mr. Cullen just said is true, and the bankers are the ones he needs to convince, is this really the right way to do it?
—No, it isn't. But he wants to get the rest of the country on his side. He can talk to the bankers in other ways.
You're right, Adam. But Samantha's reaction is one that some people did have at the time. Rich people in particular were appalled by Roosevelt. They called him "a traitor to his class," because just like his illustrious cousin Theodore Roosevelt, he came from old money and championed the poor. And they felt he was dishonest."
—How is this dishonest? He's explaining what happens when you put money in a bank!
Actually, Sadie, Roosevelt could be quite devious. And, in a way, he's being a little devious right at this very moment. Even as he was speaking, he had dozens of advisers—many of them holdovers from the Hoover administration, which he attacked relentlessly when running for president—working frantically behind the scenes to sort out good banks, bad banks, and ones that could possibly survive. But in order to that, he had to talk them up a bit. He had to make things sound better than they actually were. I wouldn't say Roosevelt lied, exactly, but let's just say he was doing a little of what politicians today call 'spin control.
—But he had to do that. Sometimes you can't tell the whole truth.
You speaking from experience there, Sadie?
—Mr. K.! Are you suggesting that Susan has ever been anything other than totally truthful?
Well, in a way, yes. I reply.
—Mr. K.!
Here I'm reminded of my favorite American philosopher, William James, who once said, "Truth happens to an idea." By telling people things were going to turn out fine, and acting as if things were fine, they ended up becoming so. That's one of the reasons why FDR was so powerful. You look at a picture of the guy and you see this rich man, this still good-looking man, this guy who whipped polio and you think: He's not going to fail. And he doesn't. I mean, people still debate whether the policies actually worked in the long term. But that's kind of beside the point.
And so it is that I will say that I know all of you are going to do just fine when I test you on the various legislative programs of the New Deal in the final exam next month.
—Yeah, right.
"Yeah right is right. I've got faith in you, Jonah. I know this last exam is going to be real breakthrough for you.
In Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government, James T. Sparrow brings to life a lost world of liberalism (and its lingering discontent)
The following review was posted recently on theBooks page of the History News Network site (and is currently its home page for the 8/29 edition).
In the lifetime of most contemporary Americans -- in the lifetimes of most Americans, period -- the prevailing opinion has been that when it comes to federal government intervention in the lives of ordinary citizens, less is more. Those of us with an even passing familiarity with U.S. history are aware that this has not always been so, and think of the middle third of the twentieth century in particular as a time when Big Government did not simply prevail, but was the prevailing common sense. And that this common sense took root during Franklin Delano's Roosevelt's New Deal of the 1930s.
In this important new book, however, University of Chicago professor James T. Sparrow corrects that perception in a significant way. It was not FDR's New Deal that really transformed Americans' relationship with their government, he says. It was FDR's Second World War. In the words of the title, what we think of as the welfare state was really a warfare state. Sparrow is not the first person to make such a case; scholars like Michael S. Sherry (In the Shadow of War, 1995) and Robert Westbrook, Why We Fought, 2004), have explored similar terrain. But Sparrow traverses it with a touch that is at once deft, informed, and imaginative. Rarely is so comprehensive an argument delivered in so concise a manner (about 260 pages).
The facts of the case are relatively straightforward. When it comes to things the scale of government spending, the breadth of federal taxation, and the role of bureaucracies in reaching shaping realms that ranged from advertising to surveillance, World War II dwarfs any previous moment in American history. One of the great ironies of this development, as Sparrow makes clear, is that it occurred at the very moment the New Deal was headed for political eclipse. Even more ironic, as he also makes clear, is that this assertion of state power was made by people who simultaneously affirmed liberal values of individual aspiration and political rights and who plausibly contrasted themselves with totalitarian powers whose hold on their citizenry was absolute.
But Sparrow's case is more subtle still. In a mode of analysis that harkens back to insights of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, he's interested in the complex interaction between a national state that seeks to mold opinion and a public which resists and adapts, as well as accepts, the logic of a ruling elite. The U.S. government made demands on people -- by drafting them, regulating what they could be paid, and rationing what they ate. But to a remarkable degree, it enforced assent to such policies by relying on a combination of volunteerism, peer pressure, and propaganda.
At the same time, however, the the government and its people were involved in a complex negotiation over the price of such assent. That price could be understandable, even laudable, when it took the form of expectations that war veterans would be well cared for, literally and figuratively, when they came home. It could also be much less laudable, as when the government condoned racism against African Americans in the South or Asians in the West by avoiding fights over such issues in the name of Getting the Job Done.
Sparrow illustrates his argument with approaches that combine political, economic, and, especially, cultural history. He does a nice job with a 1943 Kate Smith broadcast, explaining why the singer was uniquely positioned, by virtue of her experience and persona, to persuade millions of Americans to defer gratification by buying war bonds. There's a particularly good chapter on how racial and ethnic humor gave those who indulged in it a way to criticize the government that might otherwise be considered unfair or even unpatriotic ("You kiss the niggers / and I'll kiss the Jews / and we'll stay in the White House / as long as we choose," went one piece of anti-FDR doggerel). He also does a lot with the House of Labor, tracing the way workers aligned themselves as extensions of soldiers at the front, even as they parried criticism at home -- and from many of those soldiers abroad -- that they were overpaid, greedy, or both.
Sparrow concludes the book by asserting that while the end of the war also meant the end of some of the most expansive dimensions of government intervention in the economy and U.S. society, its legacy would prove profound in shaping the collective persona of mid-twentieth century Americans, particularly a strong sense of institutional commitment that would be the touchstone of Baby Boomer as well as Neoconservative rebellions later in the century.
There are aspects of Warfare State with which one could quibble. Actually, Sparrow's argument is so nuanced that there are times he seems to flirt with capsizing it -- one could use much of the same evidence to show the limits of adherence to the federal government rather than emphasizing the degree to which it took root. (This, in effect, is the argument Barry Karl made in his 1983 book The Uneasy State.) It might have also been helpful if he did just a bit more with a comparative dimension -- how, for example, affirmations of war workers in the United States were similar to or different than virtually simultaneous Stakhanovite celebrations of labor in the Soviet Union, for example. But one finishes Warfare State with an appreciation of how beautifully wrought a piece of scholarship it is -- meticulously researched, gracefully written, and politically resonant. Notwithstanding the drawbacks of the era Sparrow chronicles with scrupulous attention, it is nevertheless hard not be be moved, if not nostalgic, about a moment of national purpose and hope whose absence has been replaced with one defined by a worrisome, and worsening ache.
In Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, Jefferson Cowie evokes a lost world in all its vitality
The following review was posted earlier this week on theBooks page of the History News Network site.
The decade of the seventies has become a historiographic cottage industry. For a long time, about the only study out there was Peter Carroll's It Seemed Like Nothing Happened; first published in 1982, it has held up surprisingly well. The consensus on the standard treatment now seems to be Boston University historian Bruce Schulman's 2001 book The Seventies; David Frum gave the decade a puckish -- and pointedly neocon -- reading in How We Got Here in 2000. More recent treatments have tended to focus on aspects of the period, like the Ford and Carter presidencies. In 1973 Nervous Breakdown (2006) Andreas Killen made a compelling case for that year as a synechdoche for the seventies as a whole. And Natasha Zaretsky rendered a compelling gender reading of the period in No Direction Home: The American Family and Fear of National Decline.
Labor historian Jefferson Cowie, who teaches at the school of Industrial Labor Relations at Cornell, follows the recent tendency to render portraits of the decade through a particular lens. In Stayin' Alive, that lens is both specific and yet capacious: that of the American working class. Working-class culture figures prominently in all the above-mentioned works, but Cowie's focus on it gives his book an energy and coherence that will likely make it among the more useful and durable treatments of the period.
Cowie's take on the seventies is tragic: He posits a decade which opened with sense of possibility, only to end in a sense of division and evisceration in which "working people would possess less place and meaningful identity within civic life than any time since the industrial revolution." To build his case, he constructs a framework of notable symmetry and sturdiness, in eight chapters divided into two parts. In the first four, he develops a line of thinking he first unveiled in an essay for Beth Bailey's anthology America in the Seventies, in which sometimes perplexing cross-currents led people like Dewey Burton, the much-interviewed Everyman of the time, to ricochet between George Wallace and George McGovern before finally settling on Ronald Reagan a decade later. Cowie asserts that the Democratic Party of 1968 was essentially a labor party, albeit a divided one. He offers analyses of events like the 1972 strike at the General Motors plant in Lordstown, which was a much a labor action about deadening work conditions as it was pay, and depicts the literally deadly internecine warfare among the United Mine Workers of America as a struggle for the soul of the labor movement.
In political terms, many observers have noted the obsessively Machiavellian tenor of Richard Nixon's presidency in its attempt to co-opt the Wallace vote. But Cowie traces, with quality research and rich detail, both that administration's difficulties in dealing with labor leaders like George Meany, even as the Nixonites captured, with surgical skill, the language and symbolism of the working class without ever actually addressing its material concerns. In the second half of the book, Cowie argues that new institutions like the Business Roundtable did address such material concerns -- by attacking them directly. They were aided by the indifference and hostility of politicians like Jimmy Carter, who while nominally sympathetic to labor as a Democrat, in effect functioned as the first post-New Deal president.
Cowie shows at least as much facility with cultural history as he does labor and political history. He offers nuanced readings of figures like Merle Haggard, whose background and musical complexities were obscured by the success of truculent anthems such as "Okie from Muskcogee," and suggests that there was less richness than is sometimes supposed in the work of widely hailed independent films like Taxi Driver. Perhaps not surprisingly, country rockers like Crosby Stills Nash and Young are exposed as elitists, even as other figures of their ilk, like Jackson Browne, get surprisingly positive appraisals. Bruce Springsteen, of course, looms large here, though Cowie compellingly suggests how cramped his portrait of working-class life has tended to be, more an ordeal to be endured rather than a vibrant culture it own right. At the same time, Cowie traces the emergence of demographic transformations of the working class that would lead to new subcultures like those of disco, feminist manifestos like 9 to 5, and punk rock (there's a wonderfully nuanced analysis of the Akron-based band Devo).
There is, perhaps, a forgivably romantic air about Stayin' Alive. Although Cowie scrupulously careful in noting the limits of the McGovern campaign, for example, the gestalt of the book seems to suggest that it had more possibilities than it probably did. Similarly, while Cowie rightly notes a sense of ferment in the racial and gender dimensions of the labor movement, and duly notes the growth of unionization in the public sector, he tends to stint the tectonic plates of the international economy. We do hear a lot about oil shocks; we hear less about the rise of Japan and the tremendous cost pressures it exerted on the auto industry. Such developments cannot single-handedly explain labor's demise, of course; nations like Germany responded to such challenges without dismantling the welfare state. But then Germany never really had a Jacksonian political culture in which a libertarian strain was bred even into the working class. It might have skipped a generation or two after FDR, but it was always there, ready to emerge when the environment was right.
Regardless of what one thinks about the character of the seventies working class, or whether its "end" was inevitable, Cowie foregrounds, with laudable care and clarity, a set of people who too quickly recede in critiques of the New Class, accounts of the rise "Atari Democrats" like Gary Hart, or the emergence of feminism, developments which pointed toward the future more than the past. As Cowie well knows, class struggle did not end circa 1979. But a particular kind of class struggle did, and its contours are worth noting and remembering so that its successes and failures may yet furnish object examples in the battles still to come.
In which we see Ms. Bradstreet offer instruction on the art of gratitude
The Maria Chronicles, #48
"So there you have it, kids," Maria says to the class, unconsciously fingering one of the crutches beside her desk. "The New Deal in a nutshell. It begins with a surge of activity in Hundred Days of 1933, gets a second wind in the 'Second New Deal' of 1935, and has largely run out of steam after FDR's fiasco with the Supreme Court and the economic downturn of 1937." Maria turns her torso and puts the "red" virtual marker down in its slot in the Smart Board before facing the class again. "This is information I'd like you to make some effort to master. So there will be a quiz on Friday on the various New Deal agencies and legislation we reviewed today. My notes will be available on the Moodle site. See you tomorrow."
Maria hates to let them go: It feels good to be back in the saddle six weeks after the fall that resulted in a serious concussion and a broken foot. The logistics of getting here were torturous -- manageable but painfully slow. And she didn't know what was worse: the feeling of semi-fraudulence of returning to a job that may soon be lost in the budget shell game, or the embarrassing rounds of applause she had to endure from each of the four classes she teaches. It was such a relief to finally be back in the classroom, actually performing the heart of her craft. Maria has tried to maintain a sense of proportion about her work: family and friends have always been central to her life, and she's never had grand ambitions to be anything else but a good history teacher. But more than ever, her work matters. She remembers something her mother used to say. In your thirties, it's all about realizing your ambitions. In your forties, it's about realizing you're not going to realize them. In your fifties, it's about realizing you're going to lose what you have. Maria's fiftieth birthday is still a few weeks away. I've always been a bit precocious, she thinks grimly.
"Good to have you back, Ms. Bradstreet," Wilhelmina says as she exits.
"Great to be back, Willie."
"Yeah,"
-->José says. "It was really tough having the principal as your substitute history teacher. Ms. Bernstein is a serious hard-ass."
"
-->José!" Mia says. "You can't say that!"
"It's alright, Mia. I'm not offended, unless perhaps José is implying that I'm not working you all hard enough."
"Oh, no!" José. "You're just right, Ms. Bradstreet."
Maria smiles. "Just checking." Maria sees there are a few kids left, among them Derek, who, since he sits in the back, is always among the last to leave. "Derek, can I see you for a second?"
Derek says nothing, but comes up to Maria's desk, expressionless. She waits for the last of the students to leave and then sits down, reaching below her desk and bringing up a large package wrapped in brown paper that she asked Tommy, a member of the maintenance crew, to bring here this morning. "This is for you, Derek," she says, gesturing for him to take it.
"Me?" He looks a little pained, like he's been offered a huge piece of chocolate cake after a filling meal.
"It's an architectural drafting kit," Maria explains. "I talked to Artie Hinklebaum last week when I was home recovering, and he helped me order it through the art supply store he uses for the school. He said it's what you need if you want to take the next step in your work."
"Wow. I don't know what to say." He looks uncomfortable.
"It's just a little something to thank you for what you did."
"Wasn't much, really."
"Well, I beg to differ on that one, Derek. You may well have saved my life."
"Nah. You probably would have started breathing again on your own. Besides, there were a lot of other people around. Like that math sub, Mr. Casey. And the school nurse, what's her name, Mrs. Cano, was there in like ten seconds. She would have gotten you going again."
"Impossible to know, Derek. All I do know is that you were there and you gave me CPR, and now I'm here. That's enough to be thankful for."
Derek says nothing for a moment. "Mr. Casey lined up a summer job for me at an architectural firm downtown," he says. He half-smiles and points at the kit. "I guess you kinda knew that."
Maria smiles too, but he's still not looking at her. "Yeah, I kinda knew."
"Look, I appreciate this, Ms. Bradstreet, I really do," he says looking up her briefly and using her name for the first time she can ever recall. "But I just feel like this is all a bit much. I'm thinking I should turn down the job with Mr. Casey. I mean it was just something I did. Doesn't have to be a big thing. Shouldn't be a big thing. To be honest with you, it kinda makes me feel like a fake."
There's a long pause as Maria considers if she should say what the thinks. And then she does.
"It kinda makes you feel like a fake because you think everything is a fake." Derek looks up startled: another first. Funny: Maria feels like a boxer who's landed a direct hit.
"That's your problem Derek," she continues. "You're too hard on yourself, and as a result you're too hard on other people. Listen: this kit, this job, is nothing. As you probably guessed, Jack Casey is in fact a fairly powerful man. He hands out favors like lifesavers. Helps him feel good about himself, because he's got things that have him feeling bad about himself, just like everybody else. And I've got my own ulterior motives, even if there are no strings attached. I think of you as a classic underachiever, Derek. You show these flashes of brilliance that you hide because you're afraid showing them will cost you something, probably a sense of limits that somehow matter more to you than the possibilities. I've seen that movie many, many times. But I haven't seen many kids who have the talent of the kind you showed in that exhibit a couple months back, and frankly, I'm using the cover of a thank-you gift to make an investment in your future. But again, this is all beside the point. The only person who should really be thanking you, the only person who really matters here, is you."
Derek's expression changes from irritation to puzzlement. "I should be thanking myself?"
"Yup."
Derek shakes his head. "Can't figure that one."
"Then let me explain it to you. We've all got our doubts about ourselves, our fears about whether we're really good enough. They're always there, and they never fully go away. But you, Derek, get to live the rest of your life knowing that in a moment of crisis, you went and did what had to be done. You did it instinctively, without having to think about it. And because you did it before, you can have earned confidence that you'll do it again. That's a gift you can thank yourself for."
Maria sighs and looks away. "All right, that's enough preachy teacher talk," she says. "You're late for class. And I have some work to do. Now get this damn kit I've been lugging around outta here before I throw it out the window."
Derek looks at her, smiles and nods. He picks up the gift and heads for the door. "Thanks, Ms. Bradstreet," he says, his face obscured by the package.
"Remember, Derek, quiz on Friday." Maria grunts as she hoists herself up on her crutches.
Two new books on the Reagan era suggest a lively range of opinion
The following omnibus review was published this week on the History New's Network's books page. Twenty years after he left office, five years after his death, and a year after what is widely regarded as a watershed election that rejected some of it core tenets, the life and times of Ronald Reagan are poised on the cusp of a transition from memory to history. As with Andrew Jackson, with whom he had much in common, one can speak of an "Age of Reagan" that extended beyond his presidency. As with Jackson too, much perception of Reagan among intellectual elites was strongly negative when in power. Both were viewed as willful, but unintelligent, executives who delegated political operations to fierce partisans. Those partisans in turn reputedly manufactured a faux populism embraced by a gullible public even as they set the nation on a potentially ruinous course.
But for Reagan, like Jackson, a revisionist school has emerged. Two new books illustrate the ongoing range of opinion about Reagan -- and the new consensus, recently articulated by journalist Richard Reeves (Ronald Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination, 2005) and Princeton professor Sean Wilentz (The Age of Reagan, 2008) that this was a man to be reckoned with as a statesman and policy maker no less than in the realm of masterful communication.
In a sense, Gil Troy, who writes regularly for the History News Network, seems ill-suited to write a book with the title "The Reagan Revolution." Troy has carved out a space for himself as a latter-day Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in books like Leading from the Center: Why Moderates Make the Best Presidents. And in fact, the argument of his new book belies its title: according to Troy, there was no Reagan revolution. This is not to say Reagan was an inconsequential president: Troy portrays him as a man who changed the nation's political climate even if he never changed its topography. And one can elaborate on this sentence with a half-dozen like it: Reagan cut taxes, though he never quite managed to rein in spending. He was perceived as hostile to Civil Rights, even as he maintained affirmative action and the nation underwent a demographic transformation. He rattled a saber with the Soviets yet ushered in a post-Cold War world. And so on.
Troy's mastery of his material and ability to condense it elegantly reflect both deep immersion in his subject and an ability to see forest through trees. But its underlying logic engenders a little restlessness. Reagan succeeded because he was at heart a centrist. As Troy makes clear in Leading from the Center, so was FDR. And Abraham Lincoln. And George Washington. One begins to suspect that for Troy, a successful, non-moderate Reagan would be a contradiction in terms. Yet he was more of an ideologue than any of these leaders. (One again thinks of Andrew Jackson and suspects Troy would tame him as well.)
The Reagan Revolution is a new entry in Oxford University Press's marvelous "Very Short Introduction" series, now over 200 (pocket-sized) volumes strong. Like other books in the series, it does not try to provide an unbroken narrative line. Instead, Troy segments its 130 pages into eight chapters, each of which are titled with questions -- "Was Reagan a Dummy?"; "Did the Democrats Fiddle as the Reaganauts conquered Washington?"; "Did the Reagan Revolution Succeed or Fail?" -- and sequenced into an overlapping, but loosely chronological, discussion. This intelligent strategy makes the book very useful for the casual reader as well as highly flexible for classroom use. It's hard to imagine another book serving such a function any better than this.
As it happens, Gil Troy, who teaches at McGill University, is also the editor, along with Vincent J. Cannato of UMass Boston, of Living in the Eighties, an anthology in another Oxford University Press series, "Viewpoints on American Culture." As one might expect, this is a collection notable for the quality of its scholarship and sturdiness of its prose. But the hallmark of the anthology, perhaps not surprisingly, is balance, not only in terms of opinion, but also generations and even professions. On the Right, former Attorney General Edwin Meese makes a cogent brief for Reagan's presidency as an almost unalloyed triumph, while Peter Schweizer of the Hoover Institution decisively credits Reagan for ending the Cold War. On the Left, heavyweight historians Sara Evans and Bruce Shulman decry the evisceration of feminism and the decline of public space respectively.
In terms of actually advancing the historiography of the Reagan era, the most important essays are a pair of pieces by Joseph Crespino and Kim Phillips-Fein, both of whom gave papers in a notably lively session at the Organization of American Historians Conference in Seattle earlier this year. In that session and these pieces, Crespino and Phillips-Fein and their generational cohort seek to move beyond the argument, crystallized most succinctly in Thomas and Mary Edsall's 1992 book Chain Reaction, that converging resentments of race, rights and taxes explain the success of the neoconservative movement. Crespino suggests the neocon synthesis in the South is much deeper and broader than such a formulation suggests; Phillips-Fein implicitly challenges Troy (who here zeroes in on Reagan's first hundred days to suggest they were the high-water mark of his "revolution") in emphasizing the scope and depth of Reagan's long-term success in shifting the nation's political discourse.
Perhaps the most satisfying pieces in the collection, however, are those that function as tightly focused case studies. Editor Cannato does a nice job in looking at New York mayoral politics and the ambiguous career of Ed Koch. Mark Brilliant of the University of California at Berkeley uses his own institution as a point of departure for tracing subtle shifts in the evolution of multiculturalism in academic life. Music executive and record producer Steve Greenberg's precise yet resonant analysis of racial -- and racist -- currents in the transition from the seventies to the eighties in popular music is rock criticism of the highest order. David Greenberg performs comparable service in tracing currents within liberalism in the eighties, as does Lauren Winner in her analysis of evangelical religion in the years between the Carter and Reagan administrations.
The field of what might be termed "Reagan Studies" is already well established, and there are no doubt graduate students across the country right now struggling to master a large and growing body of work. But these two works together comprise a remarkable sampler of a discourse in motion. It's morning in RR scholarship.
The following is the text of Jim Cullen's plenary address prepared for "Glory Days: A Bruce Springsteen Symposium," 2009 Eatontown, New Jersey, September 25, 2009
It is also the third in a trilogy of Springsteen posts. Click here for the first and second.
I’m a historian, so I tend to think about lives in time, in contexts. I imagine a lot of other people do, too, but I also think people come to something like the music of Bruce Springsteen from a variety of other perspectives as well. A Springsteen fan who happens to be a musician, for example, is likely to think about his work a little differently than I do. So would a psychologist. Or a nurse.
Anyway, as I said, I tend to think about lives in time, and when I do I sometimes find myself thinking with surprise about two people who are contemporaries in a society but who might as well be on different planets. Back when I was in graduate school for example, I thought it weird to think that Andrew Jackson and Ralph Waldo Emerson were household names for millions of Americans at the same time. Emerson, a Harvard-educated intellectual, toured the world giving talks and writing celebrated essays and poems. Jackson was a soldier and politician and president of the United States who once joked he could never respect a man who only knew one way to spell a word. Or, to take an example closer to home, consider Miles Davis and Elvis Presley. Last month marked the 50th anniversary of Davis’s landmark album, Kind of Blue. The #1 single in the country at the time was Presley’s “Big Hunk o’ Love.” Put them in the same room and I’d guess there’d be a fair amount of mutual incomprehension.
But of course it’s often the case that when you reflect such lives you can discern distinctive patterns that mark people as sharing a cultural moment – different sides of the same coin, but the same currency nonetheless. Emerson and Jackson disagreed on a great many issue in American life, and yet they were both embodiments of a widely noted, and celebrated, individualism that fore-grounded self-reliance and a new emphasis on freedom in the generational turnover following the American Revolution. In many respects, Davis and Presley had antithetical musical goals – one sought to challenge his audience, while the other sought as broad a one as possible, to cite one example – and yet both men were shaped by a social revolution in race relations that they were able to tap in the formulation of distinctive as well as exciting art. As often as not it’s the questions, or even oppositions, which define a time as much as similar outcomes.
I bring up these examples as a prelude to a more relevant odd couple I know we’re all familiar with: Ronald Reagan and Bruce Springsteen.In many respects, it’s hard to imagine two people with less in common. Reagan, born almost forty years before Springsteen, was a Conservative Republican politician who looked upon the counterculture of the 1960s with contempt, and indeed rose to prominence in voicing his opposition toward it. Springsteen, by contrast, was a largely apolitical product of that counterculture and indeed rose to prominence by building on its legacy. Reagan spent the sixties and early seventies hobnobbing with the wealthy of Orange County California in the Governor’s mansion; Springsteen spent that period as a vagrant on the Jersey shore fraternizing with a bunch of scruffy but hopeful musicians. Both men had ties to California, yes, but they were very different Californias.Springsteen’s parents moved to the Bay area to start their lives anew in 1969, when Reagan was governor, and Springsteen would occasionally visit. Reagan used southern California as the power base from which he would launch a successful bid for the presidency that would land him in the White House.
That the two mens’ lives would briefly intersect twenty five years ago this week was the product of a coincidence we can now recognize in retrospect: their professional careers happened to crest at precisely the same moment.In the summer of 1984, Springsteen’s Born in the USA was dominating the airwaves, and the second single from the album, “Cover Me,” was working its way up the Billboard pop chart as he toured the country in what would become a landmark concert tour. Reagan, for his part, had just been re-nominated for president by a united Republican Party, and would soon go on to win one of the most crushing electoral victories in American history. Both men were at the apex of their fame and influence.
In a way, it’s silly to make too much in the way of contrast or comparison. Even the most dedicated Springsteen fan will recognize that Reagan had a more decisive impact on American society, if only to lament that fact. Springsteen may have changed the nation’s tune, but Reagan changed the nation. He did so by embodying a series of ideas, values, and policies we have come to know as neo-conservatism. Like many important collective concepts, neo-conservatism would come to mean a series of different, and at times contradictory, things, and even a figure as plastic at Reagan could not single-handedly represent all of them. Still, when people thought of Reagan, they associated him with a cluster of concepts – capitalism, a rededication to patriotism, and traditional religious values, to cite three prominent examples – that were dominant in the 1970s, 80s, 90s, and even into the current decade. It’s for this reason that at least two historians have published books with titles “The Age of Reagan.”[1]
The key to Reagan’s success, and the reason he of all people became the voice of the Conservative movement, were his exceptional gifts in conveying his message in an appealing and vital way (Springsteen, of course, could do the same in a very different way). There was an element of contradiction in this, just as there was in the crippled FDR managing to convey tremendous personal vitality during the Great Depression that Herbert Hoover never could. Reagan was the oldest man ever elected president, and there were signs, even before as the failed assassination attempt he weathered in 1981, that he was not always fully engaged with reality. But he nevertheless projected a vibrant optimism that even his critics had difficulty resisting. Part of his success in this regard was a gifted staff, notably Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver, who managed Reagan’s public image.It was Deaver, following up on a glowing column on Springsteen by conservative columnist George Will, who believed that Reagan could cement his appeal with young voters by having Springsteen appear with Reagan at a campaign rally in New Jersey in September of 1984.[2] As we all know, that was never going to happen. But as we also all know, Reagan ended up invoking Springsteen in Hammonton on September 19thAmerica’s future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts; it rests in the message of hope in songs so many young Americans admire: New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about.”[3] anyway in an episode that is now part of our collective Springsteen mythology. “
Now I’m guessing that everybody in this room knows to a great degree knows this story to a greater or lesser degree. They may remember George Will’s syndicated column, in which he wrote, “If all Americans – in labor or management, who make steel or cars or shoes or textiles – made their products with as much energy and confidence as Springsteen and his merry band make music, there would be no need for Congress to be thinking about protectionism.”[4] They may remember the media coverage of Reagan’s appearance in Hammonton, Democratic challenger Walter Mondale’s witty riposte (“Bruce Springsteen may have been born to run, but he wasn’t born yesterday”[5]), and they may remember that Springsteen referred to the incident a few days later when he wondered what Reagan’s favorite Springsteen album was before springing into a pointed rendition of “Johnny 99.” The dominant reaction at the time – certainly the way I felt, and the way I perceived others did – that Reagan’s invocation of Springsteen was a glib travesty, at best crudely uninformed, and at worst a cynical inversion of everything Springsteen stood for.
This is certainly the dominant chord in what has to be considered the dominant interpretation of this episode by Dave Marsh in Glory Days in 1987 (later incorporated into Two Hearts in 2004).[6] Distinct in the annals of Springsteen chronicles as an amalgam of shoe-leather reporting and cultural analysis, bolstered by his unique degree access to Springsteen himself, Marsh portrayed Springsteen as the victim of cultural theft, albeit as a victim who maintained his dignity and learned from the experience. Interestingly, Marsh observed that a Reagan/Springsteen juxtaposition had actually been made almost a decade earlier by Boston Globe writer Marty Nolan, who called Reagan “the Bruce Springsteen of politics,” adding “Bruce Springsteen may be the Ronald Reagan of rock.” But while Marsh recognized a vein of logic in a Springsteen-Reagan connection, there is never any doubt in his justly influential reading of the event that such an interpretation is finally misleading.
That said, my own reading of the affair partially demurred from it. In a 1992 article for a small scholarly journal, I noted what I called an “ambiguous” strain in Springsteen’s musical politics, arguing that Springsteen’s portrayal of working class passivity left him open to the kind of opportunistic, though finally shrewd, reading of the Right-wing political apparatus represented by Will, Deaver, and Springsteen.[7] Five years later, in my book Born in the USA, I tweaked that view by making a distinction between a “good” conservative like Springsteen, who had respect for the egalitarian values of what I called “the American tradition” and, implicitly, “bad” conservatives like Reagan who denied that tradition and uncritically upheld free-market capitalism as the only valid basis of American life.[8]
But from the perspective of 25 years since that event, five years since Reagan’s death, and a year since a watershed election that many of us consider the final repudiation of Reaganism, I feel a lot less inclined to mince words or nuance concepts. Although I didn’t want to admit it then, I think I should make the assertion straightforwardly now: Bruce Springsteen’s success in the 1980s is a function of him being at heart a conservative artist. Period. It is no accident that the Age of Reagan corresponds to the Age of Springsteen, and I’ll even go so far as to say that in some important respects Springsteen has been a more thoroughgoing conservative than Reagan ever was.
Now, we could argue about just what it is that people such as Reagan and Springsteen wanted to conserve, and could reasonably conclude that the content of conservation matters more than the temperament to conserve. Certainly that’s true in a political sense. We can talk about that, and I hope we will. But for the moment, at least, I’d like to advance my proposition that conservatism in the 1980s was always more than political conservatism, and that Springsteen, at least as much if not more than Reagan, was captured the spirit of his time in important ways. In the time we have I can only begin to suggest some reasons with a few examples that I hope will serve as a point of departure for further discussion . I don’t feel I’ve worked out my thinking on this to my own satisfaction, and hope this session will both help me and serve as a satisfying venue for intellectual exploration.
1. Springsteen as a musical conservative.We all know that rock & roll music began as an expression of youthful rebellion. (We also know that it derived from the age-old musical idiom of the blues, and that the blues was as much a music of accommodation as it was protest, but we’ll leave that matter aside for now.) But Springsteen, born in 1949, was an heir, not a founder, of rock & roll. More specifically, he was a rock grandchild. The Founders, embodied by Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and the girl groups, blazed a new path. The second, represented by Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and the Woodstock generally, took the promethean energies of the first generation and added an element of self-conscious artistry. Literally and figuratively, Presley’s first records were something new under the Sun. Blonde on Blonde, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Are You Experienced?: these were artists who were trying to remake the world. (So, in a different but at least as significant way, were the presumably more conventional performers at Motown.)
Bruce Springsteen absorbed these influences, as well as others like the sounds of Stax, the one-hit wonders of the early sixties, Van Morrison, and others. By the early 1970s, he had forged them into a recognizably personal style that defined Greetings from Asbury Park and The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. Crucially, however, that’s as modern as Springsteen ever got. From that point on, his music was more about revivifying the old rather than creating the new. Two good examples that come to mind from Born to Runare the allusions to Roy Orbison in “Thunder Road." and the Bo Diddley nod of “She’s the One.” Reading accounts of Springsteen’s fabled shows at the Bottom Line in 1975, as I have in Louis Masur’s fine new book on the making of Born to Run, and you get a palpable sense that part of the thrill of those shows was the way in which Springsteen integrated rock’s history into the present moment, typified by his decision to perform songs like the Crystals’ “Then He Kissed Me” or Gary U.S. Bonds’s “Quarter to Three.”[9] “Born to Run,” is nothing if not neoclassic, a quality that Springsteen would achieve, in somewhat different form, in many of the songs on “The River,” ranging from “Sherry Darling” to “Ramrod.”
It’s true that Born in the USA did not sound dated. But it’s striking to juxtapose the choices of Springsteen’s peers of the same moment who made a self-conscious effort to strike out in new musical directions in the years before and after its release. Prince’s Purple Rain, for instance, was the other monster album of 1984, notable for its unmistakable freshness (was there anything on the radio that had ever sounded like “When Doves Cry”?) Moreover, while Prince never quite seemed comfortable with hip-hop, he made a game effort in the years that followed. Or consider the Talking Heads and the ground they covered in the 1980s. Or even, in her own way, Madonna, whose frame of reference in the eighties stretched from disco to the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers to techno.
Springsteen has not been static, of course. But musically speaking, his moves have been backward rather than forward. Perhaps the first hint was the Roy Acuff flavored “Wreck on the Highway.” Another was the decision to add Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” in his live shows. The most cohesive powerful statement in this regard was Nebraska. The passage of time has only seemed to lead him further back, from the thirties of Tom Joad to the Seeger sessions, where he zooms back to Stephen Foster. The choices he’s made are not so much of a man who seeks to embody his time as to incorporate himself into the broader musical flow of history. If this isn’t conservatism in the most elemental sense of the term, I don’t know what is.
2. Springsteen as an exponent of entrepreneurial capitalism..
We’re all familiar with Bruce Springsteen as the sometimes fierce critic of capitalism. No need to explain the ravages of unemployment as depicted in the song “Born in the USA” to this crowd. Whether in the humorous vein of “You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch” and “57 Channels” or the caustic outrage of “Roulette” and “Seeds,” Springsteen has consistently depicted the excesses of corporate greed and championed egalitarian values we’ve long associated with the left.
All that said, it seems fair to say that Springsteen is a critic of capitalism’s excesses more than he is of capitalism itself. No one who’s paying attention would ever mistake Darkness on the Edge of Town with Give ’Em Enough Rope, to cite a Leninesque Clash album from the same year. Moreover, Springsteen’s representation of the working class has tended to be more nostalgic than realistic: the dockworkers of “Out in the Street” had largely vanished from New York, at least, by the time he released the song in 1980. And who in 2009 swings a hammer for a living the way the protagonist does in “Working on a Dream?” I will say that Springsteen’s vision of work has generally taken on a more stark clarity in recent years, as in the drug-manufacturing brothers of “Sinaloa Cowboys” or even waitress of “I’ll Work for Your Love.” But none of these characters, much less Springsteen himself, consider it particularly realistic to articulate a class critique of the system.
It is seems worth remembering here that Bruce Springsteen himself is a capitalist extraordinaire. We tend to regard the moniker of “The Boss” as an affectionate metaphor, but he got the nickname almost forty years ago as a description of reality, and it’s been true ever since. (Ronald Reagan, for his part, was a salaried employee for most of his professional life, and more specifically a government employee in the pivotal years of his life.) I’m not a financial journalist, and know relatively little about his financial affairs. But it takes no great leap of speculation or exaggeration to describe Springsteen’s business empire as a billion dollar enterprise. According to an article about ticket prices in last month’s New Yorker, the Magic tour alone grossed over $200 million.[10][11] This was not a terribly enlightening read (the lessons include things like “Keep it Fresh” and “Experience Matters”) but one gets a much more concrete picture of Springsteen’s management style in “Springsteen Inc.,” a 2006 Business Management Daily ran a story this spring entitled, “What Leaders Can Learn from Springsteen.”piece in Pittsburgh Quarterly, written by Sanford Neiman, former attorney for Clarence Clemons. There are no scandalous revelations to be had here; only a portrait respectful of The Boss as what Sanford calls the Chairman of the Board in a company in which Jon Landau is CEO. Neiman seemed to understand and accept the 1986 ultimatum Springsteen gave Clemons when Clemons was about to do a Diet Coke commercial, which Springsteen said would result in his expulsion from the E Street Band.[12]
So let’s not be under any illusions here about who runs the show. Springsteen has never given us any indication that getting rich wasn’t part of his plans, and that staying rich doesn’t remain part of them. And you probably can’t succeed the way he has without an executive mentality. A visionary and extraordinarily generous executive mentality, but an executive mentality nonetheless. American tax policy under Ronald Reagan and his successors has been very, very good to The Boss. No need to find offshore havens a la U2.
3. Springsteen as the voice of religious orthodoxy. I’ve had a lot to say about Springsteen’s religious vision, which I will not rehearse in any detail here. I can sum it up by saying that Springsteen is a classic example of the maxim that while you can take the boy out of Catholicism, you can’t take Catholicism out of the boy. The very first song Springsteen performed at his audition for Columbia Records in 1972 was “If I Was the Priest,” a scandalously profane satire of Catholicism that led John Hammond to conclude “I knew he could only be Catholic.” Springsteen took a number of swipes at the Church on his early records, which tended to recede over time. In songs like “My Father’s House” and “Reason to Believe,” from Nebraska, he seemed to point toward a new engagement with religious questions. But all intents and purposes, Born in the USA is a strongly secular record.
As we know, the late 1970s and early 1980s are notable as a time of evangelical revival in the United States. We also know that Ronald Reagan’s ascent to power was to a great degree premised on his support from evangelicals. This of course is a curious fact, given that the man Reagan defeated, Jimmy Carter, was a bona fide evangelical Christian, and that Reagan, a non-churchgoing divorcee from Hollywood, hardly seems like a poster child for traditional family values. But politics, as we know, makes for strange bedfellows.
There are two facts that I want to call to your attention for the sake of this discussion. The first is that the evangelical revival of the 1970s and 80s, which crested in this decade, is by no means a unique event in American history. Evangelical fervor is something that has been waxing and waning at least since the First Great Awakening of the 1730s.
One of the signal characteristics of all these revivals has been their challenge to dominant organized churches of their day. In modern times, notably since the rise of fundamentalism in the 1890s, this has meant mainline Protestant churches, widely perceived by their critics to have become too accommodating to the conventions of liberal secular society. In the minds of their supporters, Evangelical churches, are, in effect, renegade churches. Though secular humanists may see them as at best nostalgic and at worst authoritarian, they see themselves as embattled rebels. They do not hew closely to traditional theological or denominational traditions, and are highly adaptive to the cultural landscape at their disposal, whether in storefront churches or the megachurches of people like Joel Osteen. In some important respects, they buck tradition, not embrace it.
The second fact that’s notable here is that Springsteen has not surrendered his Catholic identity. Actually, it’s an identity he has been increasingly explicit about claiming in art and life since the time of Tunnel of Love. Religious metaphors and religious concerns have become increasingly important, and while they were once a source of satire or irony, they are now embraced with a high degree of spiritual intensity (my favorite recent example is “Jesus Was an Only Son” – an assertion which is, by the way, a specifically Catholic interpretation of the New Testament, as Protestant doctrine holds he was not an only child). Springsteen has also apparently resumed going to his mass periodically with his family.
I don’t want to go too far down this road, either in claiming with any certainty that I know just what Springsteen’s degree of religious fidelity is, or in believing he has much interest in knowing, much less hewing to, a Roman Catholic doctrinal line that many Catholics, myself among them, have difficulty taking seriously as regards the role of women in the church, for example. My real point is that in the context of the late twentieth century of Reagan’s America, Springsteen’s spiritual orthodoxy is a form of conservatism.
For most of American history, Catholics, as well as Jews, were socially marginal in what has been, and culturally remains, a Protestant nation. One of the unique characteristics of modern evangelicalism is its newfound alliance with conservative Jews and charismatic Catholics. But Springsteen’s life and work have shown little affinity for this. Politically speaking, he may be liberal Catholic. But culturally speaking, he’s a traditionalist Catholic.
So: music, economics, religion. These are all ways in which one can speak of Springsteen as a conservative, in a period in American history where conservatism, political as well as other kinds, has been dominant. As we know, Springsteen has been understood as a liberal in the political realm, and I don’t really contest that, except to say that liberalism has traditionally been a matter of advocating managed change, a more pragmatic form of conservatism. But in many other ways, ways that are likely to matter in the long run in our view of the man, Springsteen has been a conservative. He was born again when he was baptized, the old-fashioned way.
Many of the points I’ve made here today have been made by others, notably Robert Christgau, who recognized Springsteen’s conservatism early on (and, I think, has struggled to make his peace with it).[13]Marsh has also noted that he and others have recognized Springsteen’s bedrock conservatism, as has Springsteen himself (“I’m pretty conservative in some ways,” Marsh has him saying in an unattributed quote that I’m guessing came from a personal interview in the eighties. “I don’t really have a desire to experiment for the sake of experimentation”). I believe that we don’t tend to focus on this truth, because the feelings of many Springsteen fans toward Reagan have led us to displace, if not ignore them. My hope is that by trying to achieve some clarity on candor on this point, we might be able to see Springsteen in a more realistic and fruitful way. Whether that’s true is something I may be able to find out very quickly. Thanks for your attention; I look forward to hearing what you have to say.
[1] Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008 (New York: Harpercollns, 2008). The avowedly partisan Steven F. Hayward is the author of a two-volume work also entitled The Age of Reagan: the first volume, Fall of the Liberal Order, 1964-1980 was published by Prima Lifestyles and reissued by Three Rivers in 2009. The second volume, The Conservative Counterrevolution,1980-1989, was published by Crown Forum in 2009.
[2] My treatment of this event comes from a variety of sources, among them my own memory, but the principal account is that of Dave Marsh in Glory Days: Bruce Springsteen in the 1980s (New York: Pantheon, 1987), pp. 254-266.
[3] Francis X. Clines, “President Heaps Praise on Voters n the Northeast,” The New York Times, September 20, 1984, B20.
[4] One easy way to access this column is at http://groups.google.com/group/rec.music.artists.springsteen/msg/d3be9b9a249f1695?hl=en
[6] Dave Marsh, Bruce Springsteen/Two Hearts: The Definitive Biography, 1972-2003 (New York: Routledge, 2004). The passage in question occurs pp. 479-489.
[7] Jim Cullen, “Bruce Springsteen’s Ambiguous Musical Politics in the Reagan Era,” Popular Music and Society 16:2 (Summer 1992): 1-22.
[8] Jim Cullen, Born in the USA: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), Chapter One. The book was reissued in a second edition by Wesleyan University Press in 2005.
[9]Louis P. Masur, Runaway Dream: Born to Run and Bruce Springsteen’s American Vision (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009), 9-14.
[10] John Seabrook, “The Price of the Ticket,” The New Yorker, August 10/17 2009, p. 35.
[13] I base this assertion on my own reading of Christgau’s work over the years and Masur’s references to him in Runaway Dream (126, 142-147). For one specimen of his ambivalence, see his treatment of the 30th anniversary release of Born to Run at www.robertchristgau.com/xg/cdrev/springsteen-ble.php
