Let me tell you a story about the history of America. About drunken physicists, the atom bomb and the greatest cheeseburger in the world.
At 5:30 a.m., July the 16th, 1945, the United States detonated the world’s first implosion-design plutonium bomb. Wise or not, it did this thing in the middle of a desolate, dry and beautiful stretch of hell outside of Socorro, New Mexico, called the Jornada del Muerto — the Route of the Dead Man.
There were 240 people who knew about the first test; 239 of them were scientists or military personnel, high-ranking political figures, generals, and the President of the United States. One of them was grocer and a cook: J.E. Miera, the only civilian to see the flash, the boom, the tremulous mushroom cloud rising against the dawn sky, and know it for what it was. He stood at the crossroads of Second Street and old U.S. Highway 85 — the only two roads of note in the flyspeck town of San Antonio, New Mexico — and alongside some of those soldiers, some of those scientists, he watched history being born under the umbrella of light.
When that was done, he went inside. At some point, he and his son, Frank J. Chavez — owner of the Owl Bar, which sat in the lot beside Miera’s small grocery store and row of cabins — started popping beers and making cheeseburgers.
Find me out at the bar some evening — propping up the long oak with a head full of Irish brain lubricant and a glass of dry rocks in front of me. Sit down on the next stool with a full wallet and some time to kill, and this is the story I’ll tell you. It’s my hands-down favorite food story ever. The one that has gotten me more free drinks than any other I know.
Miera had been running his store and renting out his cabins in San Antonio since 1939, in competition with the only other business of note in town: the A.H. Hilton Mercantile and Hotel — the first business venture of the family that would someday be known mostly for the unfortunate production of Paris Hilton.
But it was a fight that Miera was winning, because his place? It had the only phone in town. The only gas pumps, too. And when A.H.’s place burned to the ground in 1940, Miera ended up with something else as well: Hilton’s wooden bar, which he’d rescued from the wreckage and hung onto, thinking that, someday, he might need it.
Come 1945, he did. Or rather, his son did. Because in 1945, Miera was playing host to a bunch of “prospectors” who were renting out all his cabins, buying up all his gas and tying up his phone at all hours. These men claimed that they were rock hounds — mineral enthusiasts who spent their days out in the middle of nowhere, and their nights in San Antonio because San Antonio was just to the left of the middle of nowhere.
Of course, those prospectors? They weren’t really prospectors. They were Robert Oppenheimer’s atomic cowboys, the sunburned physics geeks and Wild West Poindexters of the Manhattan Project who would shortly be giving birth to their own small, hot high desert sun. When Frank Chavez came back from the war, the scientists were already in San Antonio. Looking at his father’s inn, he realized they had a phone. They had gas for their jeeps. They had a roof over their heads. What Frank figured they needed now was beer.
So he built his roadhouse and called it the Owl. At the center of it, he installed Hilton’s bar, put the beers on ice and started serving. Shortly after that, what he figured his best, most dependable customers needed were cheeseburgers. Green chile cheeseburgers. Lots and lots of green chile cheeseburgers.
Actually, it seems more likely that Frank was asked to start making cheeseburgers. The story goes a few different ways: That it was Frank’s idea alone, that it was a request from one of the MP’s who’d begun to filter into town — a man late of California where both the cheeseburger and the green chile were already close friends — or that it was an order, coming down direct from someone at Los Alamos, where the Manhattan Project was headquartered. It’s the third version that carries weight with me. The notion of Uncle Sam, Harry Truman and Robert Oppenheimer demanding cheeseburgers to fuel the midnight genius of these odd and sunburned nerds just moves me. And it makes sense, too. It had to occur to someone, somewhere, that having the best brains in America getting all liquored up and tear-assing across the desert in the middle of the night looking for tacos was just a phenomenally bad idea. Eventually, one of these guys was doubtless going to wrap himself around a cactus at 60 miles an hour. And it’d be a shame, too, because there just weren’t any tacos to be had anyway.
Frank installed a grill and started making cheeseburgers topped with roasted and chopped green chiles from Hatch and Socorro and Magdalena. And every night at the Owl’s bar, some of the smartest men in the world sat through the huge New Mexico nights, drinking cold beer and eating burgers, burning their tongues on sweet-hot New World chiles while talking about implosion triggers, explosive lensing and, among themselves, laying bets on what would happen when “The Gadget” was finally detonated. There were pools, with results ranging from a complete dud, to destruction of the state of New Mexico, to ignition of the earth’s atmosphere and the subsequent death of every single living thing in a fireball like the bright bloom of a match head.
“Like a match head,” I would say, snapping my fingers. “Like a wooden match. No one really thought this was likely, but it was a possibility, you understand? These guys, they thought that there was a chance — remote, but still. A chance that their toy would destroy the planet. Did it stop ‘em? No, it did not.”
This is how my story goes — spinning out easy over drinks, which, at this point, you are buying. I’ll sip mine, tap my knuckles on the bar, continue. “The betting pools, they were going on at the Owl — at Frank’s bar, at the tables, out in front of J.E.’s cabins with the stars clear as ice chips overhead. Guy who won it was I.I. Rabi, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. He picked 18 kilotons, but he did it by default: It was one of the only options left; he picked late. He was around Los Alamos and San Antonio during the last days before the test. The Army brought him in because he was a friend of Oppenheimer’s and they thought that Oppenheimer needed a friend to keep him from losing his mind.”
July came and things in the Jornada del Muerto were getting weird. Locals, ranchers, desert rats — they were telling stories about a big tower being built out in the sands, about bunkers and blockhouses of poured cement sprouting like string warts on the land.
On the night of July 15th, a couple of MP’s were hanging around Miera’s property. These were probably guys that he knew — customers at his grocery, regulars at Frank’s bar. At some point, they took J.E. aside and whispered in his ear — telling him that if he wanted to see something pretty goddamn cool, he ought to haul himself out of bed real early in the morning, about 5:30 a.m. Go stand in the street, they would’ve told him. Look out toward the horizon. Just wait.
And J.E. did. He didn’t tell his family about it. He didn’t tell anyone. But he stood there — him and a handful of soldiers and scientists who didn’t have anywhere else to be — and they all looked out across the twenty-odd unobstructed miles between the Owl Bar’s front door and the Trinity site. At 5:29:45, the bomb went off. The cloud rose to almost eight miles. The explosion was felt a hundred miles away.
“My grandma, she thought it was the end of the world,” Rowena Baca told me a half century later, laughing about it. She is Frank’s daughter, granddaughter of J.E. Miera. She was a child in 1945. (“Little,” she tells me. “You don’t ask a woman her age.”) And today, along with her husband, Adolph, she runs the Owl Bar & Café like her father did before her.
“I’ll never forget that. Everything shook. She shoved us under the bed because that’s what you used to do, right? No one knew any better. And then the whole world just turned red.”
That was the way the world ended. That was the way it began again — all on a July morning in 1945. Frank would continue popping the tops on long necks and grilling cheeseburgers long after Oppenheimer and his prospectors vacated the region, serving the locals now, the farmers and the ranchers. And the story would end there — a strange historical curiosity of atomic bombs and cheeseburgers — if not for one thing. The Owl Bar made the best cheeseburgers in the world.
Made then, makes now. Hands-down. There are a lot of people out there who will tell you that the best cheeseburger in the world is made somewhere else, but they are all wrong. The Owl Bar makes not only the most important cheeseburgers in history (and makes them under Rowena’s ownership in exactly the way it did under Frank’s), but also the best you will ever have.
If you go — when you go, to sit among the sun-dried locals, bikers, families and atomic-age tourists melting in the white heat, to look around and see the history climbing the walls in yellowed newspaper clippings and black-and-white photos of skinny gringos packing slide rules and plotting terrible things — order the green chile cheeseburger. It’s a thin patty, hand-formed from fresh ground beef, topped with cheese, chopped lettuce and roasted, chopped Hatch and Luna County green chiles. Smoky-hot, sweet, tender and messy all at the same time, it’s a burger worth lingering over; that has been perfected across the decades by a kitchen that doesn’t do much else.
The Owl is an easy place to find. Just go to the absolute middle of nowhere and turn left. You can’t miss it. And when you come back — wild-eyed, altered, changed, inevitably, by the chiles and the huge, unforgiving sky that once felt the heat of two rising suns — you can tell me whether or not it was worth the price of the couple drinks you bought me, the hour of your time.
I’ll be at the bar, waiting.
Perhaps you were shocked this month when you read that years ago, thanks to its association with international workers and the anarchist movement, May Day was officially named Loyalty Day by the federal government to avoid the appearance of condoning dissent. It’s creepy and Orwellian, but it’s not that unusual.
In fact, naming in general in the post-9/11 era, as in the Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security and more has reached particular heights of absurdity. And now, in post-corporate personhood America, we also have the grand pleasure of watching everything, from stadiums to streets, get new names after the same companies that try to woo our dollars and influence policy.
But this isn’t a new American tradition. A simple search of other official national and state holidays shows that region by region, we have some pretty appalling holidays on the books. Here are just a few.
Loyalty Day: May 1, the anniversary of the Haymarket Massacre, was originally commemorated as Labor Day or International Workers day. Later the American government tried to counterbalance this with an Americanization day that later, under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, morphed into “Loyalty Day,” — “a special day for the reaffirmation of loyalty to the United States and for the recognition of the heritage of American freedom.” On Loyalty Day, flags are supposed to be flown and celebrations of America held. But not this year, when May Day celebrations came back and took the streets.
Patriot Day: Not to be confused with Patriot’s day, the New England holiday that commemorates the battles of Lexington and Concord (and the Boston Marathon and Fenway home games), Patriot Day is the official designation for the anniversary of September 11th, 2001. As a born and bred New Yorker, I certainly will never let that anniversary go by without remembering–and I don’t object to its being a recognized observance — but it’s another Orwellian name, one that prioritizes duty to country over memory of a loss. To me, 9/11 is not really about honoring national borders, but the opposite.
Robert E. Lee’s birthday and other Confederate commemoration fetes: Several states, including Arkansas, Alabama, Florida, Georgia and Mississippi, don’t let Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday be celebrated without tacking on this commemoration of the Confederate general who led armies into the field to defend the genocidal institution of slavery. This is the first of a few official holidays in the former states of the confederacy that are a little bit sketchy.
So along with Robert E. Lee’s birthday we have Confederate Memorial day, officially celebrated in nine states at various times, mostly in the spring. In fact, Texas has two holidays:Confederate Memorial Day and Confederate Heroes day. And then there’s Jefferson Davis’ birthday, also officially celebrated in a handful of states.
Not all the residents of these states are even aware of this passel of holidays, as this blogger at “Left in Alabama” wrote:
I have obviously lived under a rock until lately. I had NO idea that Confederate Memorial Day and Jefferson Davis’ birthday were state holidays. I did know that for some reason my kids’ school lists Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as the King/Lee holiday. That doesn’t sit well with me.
This underscores the point. Weird holidays aren’t about culture (I could only find a handful of actual “Loyalty Day” celebrations on the Internet but about law: Southerners of all persuasions should be able to celebrate their region without having to commemorate one of America’s darkest hours.
Speaking of America’s other darkest hours, Berkeley, California, led the way in officially changing Columbus Day to Indigenous People’s Day, now celebrated by various tribal governments. Others, sensing the problem with having a long weekend dedicated to the father of a genocide, have renamed the day “Italian Heritage Day” or stopped celebrating it at all. I say: keep the long weekend, mandate that it be used to honor those whose stolen land we stand on.
The new issue of Newsweek features a cover photo of President Obama topped by a rainbow-colored halo and captioned “The First Gay President.” The halo and caption strike me as cheap sensationalism. I realize airport travelers look at a magazine for 2.2 seconds before moving on to the next one. I grant that this cover will probably get Newsweek a 4.4 second glance. I also understand that Newsweek is desperate for sales. Nevertheless, I doubt that the Newsweek of old, before it was sold for a dollar, would have pandered as shallowly.
The caption is a superficial way to characterize an important development of thought that the president — along with the country — has been making over recent years. It is also entirely wrong. Like the mini-furor a couple of months back about the claim that Richard Nixon was our first gay president, the story simply ignores that the U.S. already had a gay president more than a century ago.
There can be no doubt that James Buchanan was gay, before, during and after his four years in the White House. Moreover, the nation knew it, too — he was not far into the closet.
Today, I know no historian who has studied the matter and thinks Buchanan was heterosexual. Fifteen years ago, historian John Howard, author of “Men Like That,” a pioneering study of queer culture in Mississippi, shared with me the key documents, including Buchanan’s May 13, 1844, letter to a Mrs. Roosevelt. Describing his deteriorating social life after his great love, William Rufus King, senator from Alabama, had moved to Paris to become our ambassador to France, Buchanan wrote:
I am now “solitary and alone,” having no companion in the house with me. I have gone a wooing to several gentlemen, but have not succeeded with any one of them. I feel that it is not good for man to be alone; and should not be astonished to find myself married to some old maid who can nurse me when I am sick, provide good dinners for me when I am well, and not expect from me any very ardent or romantic affection.
Despite such evidence, one reason why Americans find it hard to believe Buchanan could have been gay is that we have a touching belief in progress. Our high school history textbooks’ overall story line is, “We started out great and have been getting better ever since,” more or less automatically. Thus we must be more tolerant now than we were way back in the middle of the 19th century! Buchanan could not have been gay then, else we would not seem more tolerant now.
This ideology of progress amounts to a chronological form of ethnocentrism. Thus chronological ethnocentrism is the belief that we now live in a better society, compared to past societies. Of course, ethnocentrism is the anthropological term for the attitude that our society is better than any other society now existing, and theirs are OK to the degree that they are like ours.
Chronological ethnocentrism plays a helpful role for history textbook authors: it lets them sequester bad things, from racism to the robber barons, in the distant past. Unfortunately for students, it also makes history impossibly dull, because we all “know” everything turned out for the best. It also makes history irrelevant, because it separates what we might learn about, say, racism or the robber barons in the past from issues of the here and now. Unfortunately for us all, just as ethnocentrism makes us less able to learn from other societies, chronological ethnocentrism makes us less able to learn from our past. It makes us stupider.
To think even for a moment about aspects of personal presentation other than sexual orientation forces us to realize that we today are not necessarily more tolerant. Consider facial hair. In 1864, with a beard, Abraham Lincoln won reelection. Could that happen nowadays? Is it mere chance that no candidate with facial hair has won the presidency since William Howard Taft — and he wore only a mustache? Indeed, since Thomas Dewey in 1948 no major party candidate with facial hair has even run for president, and Dewey wore only the smallest of mustaches.
Perhaps the presidency is too small a sample. Let’s add in the Supreme Court. Since 1930, 34 different men have served on the Supreme Court. All save Thurgood Marshall have been clean-shaven. (Lest readers think that Marshall’s tiny mustache might topple this argument, let me point out that during most of the last 82 years, 70 percent of adult black males have had some facial hair, yet the only three African-Americans to have served on the Supreme Court or as president have had almost none.) The chance that a random sample of 33 white males would have had no facial hair is something like (.9)33 or about .03, not very likely.
“Even” today, many institutions, from investment banking firms to Brigham Young University, flatly prohibit beards on white males. Brigham Young falsifies its past to make this rule seem “natural.” Its chief founder, John Maeser, usually wore a full beard and mustache. In front of the building bearing his name stands his bronze statue complete with full beard and mustache. In about 1960, however, perhaps earlier, BYU banned beards. Then in 1986, the university commissioned artist Ron Bell to paint a portrait of Maeser. Working from an old photograph, Bell did; of course, Maeser wound up bearded. So the administration asked him to remove the beard. “They didn’t want today’s students to believe they could follow suit,” in the artist’s words. He complied.
If this example seems too religious, consider the huge secular company Walt Disney Enterprises. The last time I visited Disney World, it still banned facial hair, although it quietly made exceptions for African-Americans with well-trimmed beards or mustaches.
In themselves, beards may not be signs of progress, although mine has subtly improved my thinking. Nevertheless, we reached an arresting state of intolerance when the Disney organization, founded by a man with a mustache, would not allow one even on a janitor. Moreover, before we trivialize these examples by thinking they apply only to facial hair, consider that Lincoln was also our last president who was not a member of a Christian denomination when taking office. Could a non-Christian like Jefferson or Lincoln be president today? It’s not clear.
All that said, President Obama’s change of heart about gay marriage remains significant. It does show increasing tolerance compared to our recent past. During the nadir of race relations, that terrible period between 1890 and about 1940 when white America went more racist in its thinking than at any other time, the U.S. also clamped down on beards, liquor (briefly) and, yes, homosexuals. As Jackie Robinson was not the first black player in Major League Baseball, but rather the first after the nadir, so President Obama is not our “first gay” president (Forgive me: I cannot seem to retype Newsweek’s silly headline without putting quotation marks around the words), but only our “first” since the nadir.
Remembering that James Buchanan was homosexual complexifies our national narrative, to be sure, but it is a complexity that we need. It prompts us to remember that terrible era, the nadir, when we all moved backward, not just the South. Not just organized baseball but also the Kentucky Derby, the NFL and even previously “black” jobs like railroad foremen got redefined “white only.” Communities across the North became sundown towns, barring African-Americans formally or informally. Even North Dakota outlawed interracial marriage.
Forgetting Buchanan’s sexual orientation helps us forget all the other national secrets we have packed into that closet with him. Ultimately, it prompts us to succumb to chronological ethnocentrism. If, however, we can rid ourselves of the fantasy that we are always getting better, then maybe we can create a nation that actually becomes more tolerant. Then we might — again — elect a real gay president. After all, just three months ago, Disney started letting white male employees grow beards.
“[T]he United States cannot afford another decline like that which has characterized the past decade and a half….[O]nly self-delusion can keep us from admitting our decline to ourselves.”
– Henry A. Kissinger, 1961
In these words, one of America’s most distinguished strategic thinkers and policy makers expresses alarm at America’s condition and the perils it faces. The warning seems timely, yet it was written more than half a century ago as an assessment of the Soviet threat, problems with allies and the developing world, and in frustration with what the author saw as dangerously inadequate policy and strategic choices. Henry Kissinger was by no means alone. He cited George Kennan’s lament about our domestic failings with race, the cities, the education and environment of our young people, and the gap between expert knowledge and popular understanding, even while criticizing Kennan’s focus on those problems to the exclusion of military and diplomatic threats.
Since World War II, the United States has been the preeminent actor in world affairs. Its status at the end of that conflict, its role in creating postwar international institutions, its leadership in the reconstruction of Europe and Japan, and its dominant status within the Western alliance during the Cold War are well known and beyond dispute. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, America emerged as the lone superpower. Yet some two decades later, its position of both absolute and relative power appears to have deteriorated. Many scholars and strategists point to economic, structural, political, and even military vulnerabilities, and contend that the United States is in serious decline. Meanwhile, the rise of important regional actors, especially Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (the BRICSs), as well as others such as Indonesia, Turkey, Iran, and the increasingly prosperous and dynamic countries of East and Southeast Asia, is said to be seriously diminishing U.S. primacy in world affairs.
These depictions are pervasive on the Internet and in the press. A quick Google search for the term “American decline” yields 117 million “hits” in 0.13 seconds. A columnist for The New York Times writes that, “Wherever you choose to look . . . you’ll see a country in sad shape.” A leading German news magazine headlines, “A Superpower in Decline.” And from the realm of pop culture, the comic book action hero Superman renounces his U.S. citizenship. But are such assessments accurate?
Two propositions are widely asserted by those who see the ebbing of American predominance: first, that America itself as a society, an economy, and a political power is in decline; and second, that its international primacy is eroding as a result of the rise of other countries.
On the domestic front, the effects of a severe financial and economic crisis, an unprecedented national debt and deficit, a yawning balance of trade and payments deficits, and an aging and overloaded infrastructure lead a prominent financial journalist to foresee “the beginning of the end not just of an illusory ‘unipolar moment’ for the US, but of western supremacy in general and of Anglo-American power, in particular.” Fareed Zakaria, a widely quoted public intellectual, warns that America has become an “enfeebled” superpower and embellishes his case by observing that the world’s tallest Ferris wheel is now in Singapore and the largest casino is in Macao. For good measure he adds: “America’s success has made it sclerotic.”
Without a doubt, the United States now confronts serious problems at home and abroad. Nonetheless, recent declinist arguments carry an unmistakable echo of the past. Antecedents of these views were apparent in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and on occasion were even phrased in identical language. Indeed, declinist proclamations have appeared on and off since the late eighteenth century.
For the United States, historical as well as relatively recent comparisons provide evidence for its robustness and adaptability as a society and as a leading power. Time and again, America has faced daunting challenges and made mistakes, yet it has possessed the inventiveness and societal flexibility to adjust and respond successfully. In this regard, neither the rise of the BRICS and other regional powrs, nor competition in a globalized world economy, nor “imperial overstretch,” nor domestic weakness are by themselves bound to have the transformative effects that have been so often suggested. Despite major changes and severe challenges, these domestic and international constraints do not in themselves predetermine the end of America’s international predominance. All the same, just because America has previously overcome adversity and retained both its strength and international primacy does not guarantee that it will do so now.
Debate about America’s world role is nothing new. One notable version of it took place in the late 1980s. Paul Kennedy’s 1987 best seller, “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,” became one of the most widely cited books of that era. Kennedy cautioned that the United States ran the risk of “imperial overstretch,” which he defined not just in terms of military commitments, but in regard to the balance between resources and obligations. In a 1990 response, Joseph Nye was less pessimistic, arguing that the issue was not one of resources per se, but of policy and choice – that is, that to the extent the United States faced a problem, it was because it “lacks the will, not the wallet.”
The problem of “wallet” has since become more pressing. Even before the financial crisis that began in 2008, the historian Niall Ferguson cited the shift in America’s balance of payments and the change in its net international investment position – the difference between American-owned assets abroad and foreign-owned American assets – as a sign of deterioration. In doing so, he invoked comparisons with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire nearly two millennia ago. The comparison is tempting, but as with the parallels to the British experience of the past century, its relevance is tenuous at best.
Certainly the domestic situation is more difficult now than two decades ago. Yet while these problems should not be minimized, they should not be overstated either. Contrary to what many observers would assume, the United States has managed to hold its own in globalized economic competition and its strengths remain broad and deep. For the past several decades, its share of global output has been relatively constant at between one-quarter and one-fifth of world output. According to data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in 1980, the United States accounted for 26.0 percent of world GDP, and in 2011, 21.5 percent. These figures are based on GDP in national currency. Alternative calculations using purchasing power parities are somewhat less favorable, but still show the United States with 19.1 percent in 2011, as contrasted with 24.6 percent in 1980.
Moreover, America benefits from a growing population and one that is aging more slowly than all its possible competitors except India. And despite a dysfunctional immigration system, it continues to be a magnet for talented and ambitious immigrants. It is a world leader in science and in its system of research universities and higher education, and it has the advantage of continental scale and resources. In short, the United States remains the one country in the world that is both big and rich.
In addition, the American military remains unmatched and, despite intense stress from a decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, it has not suffered the disarray that afflicted it in Vietnam. This is evident in terms of indicators such as successful recruitment and performance of the volunteer force, the ongoing quality of the officer corps, and broad public support for the military as well as casualty tolerance. Moreover, in its capabilities, technology, capacity to project power, and command of the global commons, the United States has actually increased its military margin as compared with others, although with the important and challenging exception of China.
Beyond material strengths, the society itself benefits from a durable political system, rule of law, vigorous free press and information media, and a competitive and adaptable economy, as well as strong traditions of entrepreneurship and innovation, leadership and critical mass in new technology, and a history of resilience and flexibility in overcoming adversity.
The declinist proposition that America’s international primacy is collapsing as a result of the rise of other countries should also be regarded with caution. On the one hand, the United States does face a more competitive world, regional challenges, and some attrition of its relative degree of primacy. This process, or diffusion of power, is not exclusive to the post–Cold War era, but began at least four decades ago with the recovery of Europe and Japan from World War II, the rise of the Soviet Union to superpower status, and the emergence of regional powers in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. Still, in contrast to other great powers that have experienced decline, the United States has held a substantially more dominant position. For example, Britain at the start of the twentieth century was already falling behind Germany and the United States, although it did manage to continue for half a century as head of a vast empire and commonwealth.
Because of the enormous margin of power the United States possessed after the end of the Cold War, it should be able to withstand erosion in its relative strength for some time to come without losing its predominant status. While it is true that the weight of important regional powers has increased, many of these are allied or friendly. Those that are not (Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Venezuela) do not by themselves constitute serious balancing against the United States and its allies. Russia occupies an intermediate position, at times acting as a spoiler, but not an outright adversary. China presents a potentially more formidable challenge, notably through its growing economic might and the rapid expansion of its military capacity, but it has not yet become a true peer competitor. In any case, and despite the burden of a decade of war in the Middle East, America continues to possess significant advantages in economic breadth and depth, science, technology, competitiveness, demography, force size, power projection, military technology, and even in learning how to carry out effective counterinsurgency, and thus retains the capacity to meet key objectives.
In sum, although the United States predominates by lesser margins, it still remains a long way from being overtaken by peer competitors. However, given profound disagreements about policy, intense partisan rancor among political elites, growing social-class division, distrust of government, and deep disagreement about foreign commitments, nonmaterial factors could prove to be a greater impediment to staying power than more commonly cited indicators of economic problems and military overstretch. The United States retains the power and capacity to play a leading world role. The ultimate questions about America’s future are likely to be those of policy and will.
Power and Willpower in the American Future: Why the United States Is Not Destined to Decline, by Robert J. Lieber Copyright © 2012 Robert J. Lieber. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
“The only security of all is in a free press.” Thomas Jefferson wrote these words to the Marquis de Lafayette at the age of 80. The reason Jefferson lauded a free press was that he wished, in tense political times, for the U.S. to function as a deliberative democracy, in which an increasingly better-educated citizenry monitored the policy decisions of its elected representatives and judged whether or not they deserved to remain in office.
A better-educated citizenry. That was Jefferson’s mantra, and it should be ours, too. Republicans in Congress have claimed Jefferson as their man, time and again quoting him as a champion of small government. One of their favorites lines is, “If it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution,” it would be “taking from the Federal Government the power of borrowing.” The Jefferson they do not pay attention to is the one whose lifelong dream was a well-funded public education system — the Jefferson who spent his post-presidential retirement years creating a beautiful public university in Charlottesville, Virginia. Jefferson asked no less a figure than U.S. Attorney General William Wirt, notably the son of a Maryland tavern-keeper, to be its president. He understand that personal growth and national strength were best served by lifting up ordinary folks.
This week, the Senate debated student loan rates, which are now at a comfortable 3.4 percent and are set to double on July 1, if nothing is done. In his most recent college tour, President Obama focused on the endangered interest rate, fully aware that Republicans would have to support the Democratic initiative, if only to avoid embarrassment. Their sleight of hand was in proposing to come up with the $6 billion by removing money from preventive healthcare programs. That, then, is how the House Republican majority voted a week earlier to pass a one-year extension of the 3.4 percent rate. Democrats had urged cutting subsidies to oil and gas companies instead of raiding health care funds. When that wouldn’t fly, the alternative became an increase in the Social Security payroll taxes of the already wealthy. The White House vowed a veto after the House measure passed. It’s now the Senate’s turn. Congress will have to reach some sort of compromise, because neither party wishes to be seen as anti-student in an election year.
So, what about educational opportunity in America? Is it, or is it not, a priority? We all recognize that there is wasteful spending in the budget, but Republicans in Congress routinely recommend slashing funds for education, as though the fiscal crisis can be solved by cutting social programs first. (This past week, claiming that the Democratic plan was counterproductive, Senator Mitch McConnell, R-KY, relied on the fiction that government should not be “raising taxes on the very businesses we’re counting on to hire these young people.” He apparently views college graduates as dependents on government rather than future job creators.) Nothing could be more self-defeating, or hurtful to more people. Literacy programs? National writing projects? High school graduation initiatives?
They can talk all they want about Jeffersonian small government, but Thomas Jefferson stood for opportunity for young people, not a further consolidation of power among big business combinations. For millions of low- and middle-income students with admirable ambitions, a college education is the American dream. President Obama’s revelation that he and the first lady were only able to pay off their student loans eight years ago – they were in their forties – cannot but resonate with younger voters. On the campaign trail, Michelle Obama says that her husband was “the son of a single mother who struggled to put her son through school.” It’s a good narrative when you’re running against a candidate who was pretty much slotted for Harvard at birth.
Jefferson made himself quite clear. His definition of republicanism projected greater civic involvement and an expansion of the electorate, opening minds rather than opening the wallets of the privileged few to preserve their political sinecures. The Jefferson quote about a free press comes from a letter of November 4, 1823, addressed to his old friend Lafayette, the last surviving general to have commanded Continental Army troops in the American Revolution. Jefferson invoked his small government philosophy in the line that directly preceded his call for a free press: “A rigid economy of the public contributions, and absolute interdiction of all useless expences, will go far towards keeping the government honest and unoppressive.” And then, he assured, “the only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. We are, for example, in agitation even in our peaceful country. For in peace as well as war the mind must be kept in motion.”
And how is the mind to be kept in motion? In a letter he addressed to a state legislator seven years before, as he proceeded with his design of the University of Virginia, Jefferson proposed that legislatures vote “a perpetual tax” to maintain a system of schools and a university “where might be taught, in its highest degree, every branch of science useful in our time and country.” Because, as he most eloquently put it, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” Yes, small-government champion Thomas Jefferson did not wish to tax citizens – except when the money was being used for public education.
Those of our time who would sacrifice opportunity for the young and shortchange students of all ages ought to heed the thought Jefferson expressed next. Taken out of context, or left to stand alone, it is a rallying cry for those who fear federal encroachment: “There is no safe deposit [for liberty] but with the people themselves,” he proclaimed. But the rest of his comment expresses the best Jefferson we know, the education champion. Liberty is never safe, he said, unless people possessed knowledge to make informed political choices; for, “where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.”
Conservatives will certainly not appreciate one theory Jefferson put forward in the letter to Lafayette. He claimed that partisan ideologies were fixed in nature. Those of his day whom he labeled “Tory” or “aristocrat,” who wished to restrain the democratic rabble and keep the wealthy in charge, were, for Jefferson, “sickly, weakly, timid men” whose nerves could not withstand social change. Those who subscribed to his own, relatively liberal and open-minded belief in the educability of all (white) men were, he wrote, a “healthy, strong and bold” political interest.
Jefferson’s first priority was the intellectual elevation of those who were to succeed the founding generation — those who would sustain the values of the Revolution. He opposed all profligate spending, but he championed education spending. And he embraced the free press as the republic’s clearinghouse of ideas and the instrument through which political and ethical progress was insured.
This article originally appeared on
AlterNet.
American general strikes—or rather, American calls for general strikes, like the one Occupy Los Angeles issued last December that has been endorsed by over 150 general assemblies—are tinged with nostalgia.
The last real general strike in this country, which is to say, the last general strike that shut down a city, was in Oakland, Calif. in 1946—though journalist John Nichols has suggested that what we saw in Madison, Wisconsin last year was a sort of general strike. When we call a general strike, or talk of one, we refer not to a current mode of organizing; we refer back, implicitly or explicitly, to some of the most militant moments in American working-class history. People posting on the Occupy strike blog How I Strike have suggested that next week’s May Day is highly symbolic. As we think about and develop new ways of “general striking,” we also reconnect with a past we’ve mostly forgotten.
So it makes sense that this year’s call for an Occupy general strike—whatever ends up happening on Tuesday—falls on May 1. May Day is a beautifully American holiday, one created by American workers, crushed by the American government incubated abroad, and returned to the United States by immigrant workers.
The history of May 1 as a workers’ holiday is intimately tied to the generations-long movement for the eight-hour day, to immigrant workers, to police brutality and repression of the labor movement, and to the long tradition of American anarchism.
Perhaps the first nation-wide labor movement in the United States started in 1864, when workers began to agitate for an eight-hour day. This was, in their understanding, a natural outgrowth of the abolition of slavery; a limited work day allowed workers to spend more time with their families, to pursue education, and to enjoy leisure time. In other words, a shorter work day meant freedom. It was not for nothing that in 1866, workers celebrated the Fourth of July by singing “John Brown’s Body” with new lyrics demanding an eight-hour day. Agitating for shorter hours became a broad-based mass movement, and skilled and unskilled workers organized together. The movement would allow no racial, national or even religious divisions. Workers built specific organizations—Eight Hour Leagues—but they also used that momentum to establish new unions and strengthen old ones. That year, the Eight Hour Movement gained its first legislative victory when Illinois passed a law limiting work hours.
The demand for an eight-hour day was about leisure, self-improvement and freedom, but it was also about power. When Eight Hour Leagues agitated for legislation requiring short hours, they were demanding what had never before happened: that the government regulate industry for the advantage of workers. And when workers sought to enforce the eight-hour day without the government—through declaring for themselves, through their unions, under what conditions they would work—they sought something still more radical: control over their own workplaces. It is telling that employers would often counter a demand for shorter hours with an offer of a wage increase. Wage increases could be given (and taken away) by employers without giving up their power; agreeing to shorter hours was, employers knew, the beginning of losing their arbitrary power over their workers.
The Illinois eight-hour law was to go into effect May 1, 1867. That day, tens of thousands of Chicago’s workers celebrated in what a newspaper called “the largest procession ever seen on the streets of Chicago.” But the day after, employers, en masse, ignored the law, ordering their workers to stay the customary 10 or 11 hours. The city erupted in a general strike–workers struck, and those who didn’t leave work were forced to by gangs of their colleagues roaming through the streets, armed with sticks, dragging out scabs. After several days of the strike, the state militia arrived and occupied working-class neighborhoods. By May 8, employers and the state they controlled had won, and workers went back to work with their long hours. The loss of the eight-hour-day movement led also to a massive decline in unions, and the labor movement would not pick up in such numbers for almost two decades.
The Illinois law and its defeat, however, were not forgotten. By the 1880s, a new labor movement had grown up in Chicago. This one was more radical and was dominated by immigrant workers from Germany. They remembered 1877, when a strike by railroad workers spread around the country. For a brief moment, as strikers took control of St. Louis and Pittsburgh, staring down the national guard and local police, nobody knew what would happen. But President Rutherford B. Hayes called out the army and brutally repressed the strike. They also remembered the state was rarely if ever on the side of the worker. Yet they also remembered the brief shining moment when it appeared that there might be an eight-hour day.
So in 1886, the Chicago Central Labor Union again demanded an eight-hour day. Led largely by anarchists like August Spies and Albert Parsons, this renewed movement demanded “eight for 10”–that is, eight hours’ work for 10 hours’ pay. Throughout the winter of 1886, they successfully organized and won a series of small victories, largely in German butchers’ shops, breweries and bakeries, where owners agreed to recognize unions and grant shorter hours. Then they issued a new demand: that again on May 1, Chicago would go on a general strike and not return to work unless employers agreed to an eight-hour workday.
The demands of the militant Chicago anarchists coincided with a massive upswing in other militant movements. Workers and Texas farmers were rebelling against a monopolistic railroad system. The Knights of Labor were rapidly organizing and spreading their vision of a cooperative, rather than capitalistic, society. “What happened on May 1, 1886,” writes James Green, the most recent and most accessible historian to have written about it, “was more than a general strike; it was a ‘populist moment’ when working people believed they could destroy plutocracy, redeem democracy and then create a new ‘cooperative commonwealth.’”
Four days later, it all came crashing down. On May 3, police had shot to death six strikers at the McCormick Works, where a long-standing labor dispute had turned the factory into an armed camp, and beaten dozens more. On May 4, anarchists held an outdoor indignation meeting at a square called the Haymarket to protest the police murders. Anarchist leader Samuel Fielden was wrapping up his speech when the police, led by the same inspector who had led the charge at McCormick the night before, moved in to disperse the crowd. “But we are peaceable!” Fielden cried, and just then somebody wasn’t. Somebody threw a bomb at the police, the police open fire, and the course of American history changed.
To this day we do not know, nor will we likely ever know, who threw the bomb. Some say it was an agent provocateur. Some say it was an anarchist. If it wasn’t an anarchist, it surely could have been, since there were indeed anarchists who made bombs and would have thrown one given the opportunity. But we also know that many of those who died that night, including police, were felled by the police bullets.
We also know that the effect of the Haymarket bombing was far greater on the labor movement than it was on the police. Eight anarchist leaders were rounded up and put on trial for the murder of a police officer. No evidence was ever given that any of them threw the bomb, and only the flimsiest evidence was presented that any of them were remotely involved. All eight were convicted, and seven were sentenced to hang. Two of these had their sentences commuted, and a third—Louis Lingg, undoubtedly the most radical and militant of them—cheated the hangman by chewing a detonator cap and blowing off his jaw. The remaining four—August Spies, Albert Parsons, Samuel Fischer, and George Engel—were hanged on November 11, 1887. They went to their deaths singing the Marseillaise, then an anthem of the international revolutionary movement, and before he died, Spies shouted out his famous last words: “The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.”
Before that happened, the state ensured more silence. The strike collapsed. Police around the country raided radicals’ homes and newspapers. The Knights of Labor never recovered. In the place of the radical industrial labor movement of the mid-1880s rose the American Federation of Labor, the much more exclusive and conservative organization that would dominate the labor movement until the 1930s. Meanwhile, it would take until the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to finally enshrine the eight-hour day into federal law.
May 1 would live on, mostly abroad. In 1889, French syndicalist Raymond Lavigne proposed to the Second International—the international and internationalist coalition of socialist parties—that May 1 be celebrated internationally the next year to honor the Haymarket Martyrs and demand the eight-hour day, and the year after that the International adopted the day as an international workers’ holiday. In countries with strong socialist and communist traditions, May 1 became the primary day to celebrate work, workers and their organizations, often with direct and explicit reference to the Haymarket Martyrs. May Day remains an official holiday in countries ranging from Argentina to India to Malaysia to Croatia—and dozens of countries in between.
Yet in the United States, with some exception, the workers’ tradition of May 1 died out. Partially this was because the Knights of Labor had already established a labor day in September. Opportunistic politicians, most notably Grover Cleveland, glommed onto the Knights’ holiday in order to diminish the symbolic power of May 1. In 1921, May Day was declared “Americanization Day,” and later “Loyalty Day” in a deliberately ironic attempt to co-opt the holiday. Even that was not enough, though, and in 1958 Dwight Eisenhower added “Law Day” to the mix, presumably a deliberate jibe at the Haymarket anarchists who declared, “All law is slavery.” Today, few if any Americans celebrate Loyalty Day or Law Day—although both are on the books—but the origins of May Day are largely forgotten. Like International Women’s Day (March 8), which also originated in the U.S., International Workers’ Day became a holiday the rest of the world celebrates while Americans look on in confusion, if they notice at all.
Yet May 1 lives on, and indeed has been rejuvenated in the United States in the past few years. In 2006, immigrant activists organized “a day without an immigrant,” a nationwide strike of immigrant workers and rallies. It was perhaps the largest demonstration of workers in United States history. These immigrants, mostly from Latin America, had brought May 1 back to its birthplace, and in so doing they resurrected its history as a day specifically for immigrant workers.
It is appropriate that when the Occupy L. A. first issued its call for a general strike this May 1, it said the strike was “for migrant rights, jobs for all, a moratorium on foreclosures, and peace.” The order was significant, for migrants in the United States have been the ones who have made sure that the voices the state strangled that November day have remained so powerful. And regardless of what happens on Tuesday—and of course an actual general strike, in which cities grind to a halt and workers control what activities occur, is unlikely—we can, through a national day of action for the working class, work toward a new cooperative commonweath. We have a opportunity now to create and renew the labor movement, through new tactics, but ones that pay homage to the generations that preceded us.
Group photo of E. O. Lawrence, A. H. Compton, V. Bush, J. B. Conant, K. Compton, and A. Loomis in March 1940 at UC Berkeley meeting (Credit: Wikipedia) 
(Credit: PhotosbyAndy via Shutterstock) 
(Credit: Wikipedia/Salon) 
Thomas Jefferson (Credit: White House Historical Association) 
This 1886 engraving depicts the Haymarket affair. (Credit: Wikipedia) 
