History

Newt and other conservatives are obsessed with tying Obama to Saul Alinsky. Here's where their hatred comes from

By Thomas J Sugrue

Barack Obama and Saul Alinsky (Credit: AP)

“I am for the Declaration of Independence,” declared Newt Gingrich at a recent campaign appearance, but President Barack Obama “is for the writing of Saul Alinsky. I am for the Constitution; he is for European socialism.” Gingrich is not alone in his demonization of Alinsky, widely viewed as the founding father of community organizing. The right’s attempt to associate Obama with Alinsky began in earnest during the 2008 campaign, though he was eclipsed for the moment by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. and Obama’s supposed “pal,” ’60s radical Bill Ayers. Glenn Beck gave Alinsky prominent billing on his flowchart of conspiracy, drawing arrows connecting him with Obama and the now-defunct ACORN. Rush Limbaugh has labeled both Obama and Alinsky as representative of an elite class of “genuine America-hating radicals.” The Alinsky connection took on even greater salience as right-wing bloggers and pundits sought to delegitimate Obama’s healthcare program as socialistic and his proposed tax reforms as class warfare.

Guilt by association has been a time-honored tactic in American electioneering since the first decade of the Republic, when opponents of Thomas Jefferson tarred him as a bloodthirsty Jacobin, America’s own Robespierre. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt railed against the “economic royalists” and the “moneyed interests” during his 1936 campaign, his critics on the right saw a Bolshevik conspiracy at work. And for Gingrich and Obama’s critics, Alinsky fills the bill: a self-professed radical with a foreign-sounding name posthumously setting the agenda for an ostensibly radical president.

As with all conspiracy theories, the Alinsky-Obama link rests on a kernel of truth. For three years in the mid-1980s, Obama worked for the Developing Communities Project (DCP) of the Calumet Community Religious Conference (CCRC), a group on Chicago’s South Side whose tactics — meeting with displaced steelworkers and marginalized public housing residents — were inspired by Alinsky. Obama read Alinsky and contributed an essay to a collection of essays on community organizing in Alinsky’s memory published in 1988.

By his own admission, Obama had a rough time being a community organizer. “Sometimes I called a meeting, and nobody showed up,” he recalled. “Sometimes preachers said, ‘Why should I listen to you?’ Sometimes we tried to hold politicians accountable, and they didn’t show up. I couldn’t tell whether I got more out of it than this neighborhood.” By the time he left Chicago for Harvard Law School, Obama was moving down a path that would take him far away from Alinsky-style movement building: He became a civil rights lawyer and law professor and, by the mid-1990s, launched a political career. It is telling that Obama did not mention Alinsky in his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” or in his bestseller, “The Audacity of Hope,” though anti-Obama conspiracy theorists would, no doubt, find that silence as evidence of his crypto-Alinskyism.

For his part, Alinsky, who died in 1972, never had much patience for elected officials: Change would not come from top-down leadership, but rather from pressure from below. In his view, politicians took the path of least resistance. Among his targets were the Obamas of his day, from alderman to mayors to senators, for as he wrote in his 1971 bestseller, “Rules for Radicals”: “No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough.” It’s easy to imagine Alinsky as an advocate for “change we can believe in,” directing the unemployed and the victims of mortgage foreclosures to put pressure on the erstwhile community organizer now in the White House.

Whatever his influence on Obama, Alinsky had a complicated relationship to the political left. In the 1930s, Alinsky had little patience for the bona fide socialists and card-carrying Communists who were prominent advocates of labor and civil rights. He repudiated Marxism then. By the 1960s — his moment of greatest influence — Alinsky was even harsher in his criticism of the New Left. He viewed activists in Students for a Democratic Society as naive and impractical and denounced the tactics of their erstwhile comrades on the militant fringe, like the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground as doomed to failure for their violent tactics and unwillingness to compromise. Alinsky loathed dogmatism of all varieties.

But Alinsky also had little patience for mainstream liberals and European social democrats. He argued that the technocratic style of government by experts and bureaucrats was out of touch with “the people.” Before it became fashionable, he argued for citizen participation in politics and the devolution of power downward, away from Washington and into the hands of ordinary citizens. Though he was a secular Jew, Alinsky forged his closest alliance with Catholic advocates of social justice, whose views at the time could not be described in the easy binary of left versus right. If any political view appealed to Alinsky, it was the Catholic doctrine of “subsidiarity,” namely leaving governance to the smallest possible unit: the community. Alinsky counted among his closest friends the Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain (whose doctrine of personalism was one of the strongest influences on the young Polish cleric Karol Wojtyla, later Pope John Paul II).

Through it all, Alinsky called himself a radical. And he was. Alinsky drew from a deep current of indigenous radicalism in American politics, one that ran from Tom Paine (who was Alinsky’s favorite founding father), through the incipient labor movement (early in his career, Alinsky worked with the Congress of Industrial Organizations), and the civil rights struggle in the 1960s.

In the truest sense of the term, Alinsky was a populist, who sided with those whom he called “the Have-Nots, and the Have-a-Little, Want Mores.” Alinsky’s small-d democracy shaped his strategy. He argued that leaders had to start by listening to ordinary people, not directing them from the top down. In Chicago, Alinsky launched organizing efforts among the ethnic workers in Chicago’s meatpacking plants, whose plight had been made infamous by Upton Sinclair’s “Jungle.” In the early 1960s, he launched a campaign to improve the quality of life for the black residents of Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood whose housing stock had been gutted by absentee landlords and whose jobs had disappeared because of the corporate search for cheap labor and high profits. And just before his death, he called for a campaign to tap the disaffected lower middle class and turn their anger away from minorities and toward “specific issues — taxes, jobs, consumer problems, pollution — and from there move on to the larger issues: pollution in the Pentagon and the Congress and the board rooms of the megacorporations.”

Alinsky believed that the key to organizing success was citizen participation, letting the people set the agenda, not setting it for them. Alinsky’s goal was nothing short of unleashing the power of the people to “create mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people; to realize the democratic dream of equality, justice, peace, cooperation, equal and full opportunities for education, full and useful employment, health, and the creation of those circumstances in which men have the chance to live by the values that give meaning to life.”

It is Alinsky’s populism that is most threatening to Gingrich and the right—even if it is a far cry from Obama’s own political agenda. As political scientist Corey Robin has argued, “[c]onservatism is the theoretical voice of this animus against the agency of the subordinate classes. It provides the most consistent and profound argument for why the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, to govern themselves or the polity. Submission is their first duty; agency, the prerogative of elites’ hierarchy.”

Here is the root of the right’s suspicion of Alinsky. His goal was giving the dispossessed agency—empowering them to “fight privilege and power, whether it be inherited or acquired.” In Gingrich’s view, by contrast, the “have nots” are fundamentally incapable, responsible for their own fate because of their immorality, indolence and inertia. They will only be uplifted through the discipline of the market. Put poor elementary school children to work to instill in them a work ethic; cut welfare to promote “personal responsibility,” take away food stamps and reduce unemployment benefits so that the jobless are forced to work. The flip side is a call to augment the power of “job creators” by keeping their capital gains and estate taxes low. In this vision, change comes from above, not from below, and wealth whether inherited or acquired is a social good. Gingrich versus Alinsky is not a battle over ideas; it’s about power, who should have it and who should not. That’s why 40 years after his death, the Chicago radical remains on the right’s enemies list.

Thomas J. Sugrue is author of Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race. He is David Boies Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Inside the new hate

Right-wing rhetoric seems to have reached new heights of xenophobia. But is that true? An expert explains

By Katie Ryder

Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul (Credit: AP/Reuters)

Topics:History, Editor's Picks

It’s easy to interpret the verbal bile of recent American politics as a new height in prejudiced and conspiracist thinking: a new hate. In the last few years, Sarah Palin has created the concept of Obama’s “death panels,” Glenn Beck has argued that George Soros was a collaborator with the Nazis during WWII — even though Soros is Jewish — and Donald Trump staked his presidential campaign on the idea that our president, black as he is and Muslim as his name seems to be, had not sufficiently proven his rights to citizenship in our country. More recently, Newt has taken to calling Obama the “food stamp president,” a title that is as racially charged as it is inaccurate.

But Arthur Goldwag, author of the new book “The New Hate: A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right,” argues that the racist and conspiracist approach of today’s far-right pundits is largely the same as it was 50 years ago. Their language and theories are taken (sometimes verbatim) from right-wing populist vitriol at early times in American and European history, dealing in tropes well-worn by pre-WWII American Nazis, Joe McCarthy and fanatical anti-Catholic and anti-Masonic Protestant preachers of the 19th century.

Salon spoke with Goldwag — who has worked at Random House and the New York Review of Books and is the author, previously, of “Cults, Conspiracies and Secret Societies” — over the phone about today’s hate, the persistence and remarkable uniformity of American prejudice, and our potential for change.

Why is this resurgence of the “old hate” happening now?

We’re going through a historic shift in this country. We were on an incredible run of prosperity in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, thanks to the New Deal social compact, thanks to big unions, thanks to very strong regulation – thanks to all the things that Glenn Beck’s followers think are the most evil things in the world. Fairly unskilled, uneducated people were able to earn a good living, and send their children to college. And that’s changed. Income inequality is growing. If you look at American history, the bottom has dropped out of rural people’s lives every five years, but there used to also be a manufacturing class that made a decent living. There used to be a route for people that weren’t well educated to make a decent living. There isn’t anymore. There’s a lot of anxiety about our individual positions in our society, and our country’s position in the world. If you’re not educated to be able to understand it, and you’re trapped in a disadvantaged life, you might become really, really angry.

So these resurgences of hatred, and conspiratorial narratives, are related to a basic type of class-consciousness – a stripped-down awareness of unfairness.

Yes. It’s an old stereotype (it’s also a true stereotype) that rich Southerners drove wedges between poor whites and poor blacks so that they wouldn’t see that they were all in the same place. That’s very connected to the anger people have today. One of the most infuriating things about Obama to people is that he walks into the White House like he belongs there. But their anger is not really about him. It’s about them: their place in the world. Because he does belong there. But their kids will never go there, because they’re poor and feel they’re without open avenues.

What can we learn from the idea that the new hate is largely the same as the old? Is there a lesson there that can help political discourse move forward with more tolerance and rationality, or is this an endless cycle depending on where the political pendulum is? Or, is it a reminder not to panic, we’ve seen this before?

I’m going to say all of the above. I think it is reassuring to recognize that the scary fringe people that are cropping on the margins of the Internet now really aren’t that much more horrible than people that were cropping up in the past. It was harder to read them before, but they were there. A propaganda novel called “The Turner Diaries“ was written by a white supremacist named William Luther Pierce in 1978. It was self-published, he broadcast his speeches over a short-wave radio, and the book was passed from hand to hand. People at Christian identity compounds read it to each other, and it had a kind of talismanic quality. Now you can just download it on the Internet. And you can see pictures of him and you can watch him giving speeches on YouTube. One of the tricky things about the new hate is that you have access to all of the historic material at once. You can see Robert Welch giving a speech, then you can see Louis Farrakhan giving a speech, then you can see Hitler giving a speech. It’s all instantly available and reinforces each other.

But the types of people who espouse hatred on a broad scale have always been there, and won’t be going away. I look at that like psychology. You’re never going to cure a neurotic. But if you get the neurotic to recognize that some of the things that scare them and agitate them are things that they construct themselves, then maybe they can move forward.

In this case, that means calling out hatred for what it is, and not allowing it to “hide in plain sight,” as you say in the book.

Yes. A useful example is that Ron Paul was a figure in the John Birch Society. It’s no secret. He was a local leader, and he had real associations with white nationalists and very marginal people 20 years ago. But he’s been exposed for that past behavior, and now he can’t rely on it as a type of base appeal – he can’t go too near racism because it’s too dangerous for him. The New Republic brought it to light four years ago, and it became a third rail for him. And that’s a very salutary thing. Once you’ve shown a light on these types of things, they can’t be used anymore. As long as somebody’s pretending that their appeal isn’t racist, they can keep saying, “I’m just terribly concerned because I think you need to be a natural-born citizen to be the president of the United States.” But that’s bullshit and it’s racism and xenophobia and nativism. And once you name it, you can’t go there anymore and still be in the mainstream. If you’re David Duke, you can’t pretend to not be David Duke.

You also say in the book that mainstream discussion has moved farther toward the radical right, and that the new hate is in some ways more accepted than the old. So there seems to be a sweet spot where people in the public eye can avoid the really unacceptable activities – like membership in the John Birch Society – and can still make appeals to racist impulses in their base. But how is it that racist conspiratorial thinking could be more mainstream now than it was at time periods when we, as a country, were more xenophobic and more nativist, as a whole?

Well, I’m not sure that it is. But Ryan Lizza, the other week in the New Yorker, wrote about a study showing that in recent years the mainstream right has moved much farther to the right than the left has moved to the left. You have mainstream people pandering to the base by picking up some of these memes and some of these archetypes from 40 years ago – and much older. It was really horrifying when it first seemed like anti-Islamic sentiment was becoming mainstream.

As far as the snarky racist things that mainstream pundits are able to say about Obama – using the word “ghetto” and so on – that’s just pandering to the lowest common denominator. There’s crappy racism in American society, but every year there is a little bit less of it. Political correctness creates a burden, and coded messages and dog whistles become more of the main operating mode.

But sometimes open discrimination works. Pamela Geller had a tremendous amount of traction in 2010 when she led the charge against the Islamic community center near ground zero. She had the New York Post covering her, and even Harry Reid got scared about the “ground zero mosque.” Newt Gingrich jumped right in and talked about banning Shariah. Anti-Islamic sentiment is so vile. And as a Jewish person, I find it appalling that there are Jewish activists and politicians who don’t see that it is exactly the same thing that was said against us. If you’re Jewish, you know what it is to be completely demonized. It was appalling when the Anti-Defamation League didn’t condemn the attacks on the community center.

How does it work for a publication like Newsweek to take seriously a question like “Is Obama the Antichrist?” as they did? How are they able to do that without being shamed by all serious publications?

Some of it is that they don’t even realize how real that question is to some people. They think, “Oh, this is a funny little item, and we’ll talk to Matt Staver,” the guy they interviewed with that question. Well, Matt Staver’s a real, intense religious fanatic. But people in the mainstream don’t know a lot about that world. The worst thing that most people hear is a few seconds of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh when they’re in a taxicab. But if you spend time at Media Matters or the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Hate Watch” blog, and so on, or, if, God help you, you go to a white nationalist conference as I did in Washington in September, you know that these ideas have real currency.

My worry isn’t that Newsweek would approach some right-wing guy and get a quote from him, but that they would do it without knowing just how right-wing he is.

Paranoid and fear-based politics tend to rise up at times of national uncertainty – economic distress, political turmoil, and changing social norms all seem to contribute. You pointed out that there are striking similarities between the type of irrational anger faced by John F. Kennedy and the type now faced by Barack Obama. But you say that today, this hatred is “hiding in plain sight.”

Yes, it’s the obvious elephant in the room. For example, the “birther” issue. I couldn’t have imagined it before it began. There’s a judge in Georgia right now who’s demanded that Obama come and explain why he should be in the Democratic primary. A Republican judge said, “I want the president of the United States to come here and make a case for himself.” This is so intensely racist.

One of the most interesting parts of reading your book was learning how anti-communism, anti-Masonry, anti-Catholicism and raced-based discrimination are all tied together, and almost always have been linked to anti-Semitism. The existence or successes of other minority groups were blamed on Jewish people, or these groups were called out as Jews – even the Jesuits. It seems like the only group associated with evil conspiracies to take over the world and not linked to Judaism is Muslims. Is that true?

It’s true, and it’s weird. God knows most Jews were not bankers, and God knows most Jews were not rich. Jews were really poor people. But there were enough rich Jews to make the stereotypes stick, and rich Jews, like others, used the power of finance. You can find writings in the ancient world about the horrors of usury. As many people understand it, usury is a terrible form of magic: you’re making something out of nothing. The Templars were bankers, and all of the things that were said about Jews were said about them too, and they were also associated with the devil. There are mysteries that are just as profound as theological mysteries. People actually get through their lives without being personally affected by the mystery of the trinity, but if you buy a house for the first time and you discover that this $300,000 house is going to cost you $1.5 million, that’s pretty startling, and people think, “How is the bank making so much money out of money?” It makes sense to me that a rural populace in the mid-18thcentury would have latched onto anti-banker, anti-Semitic ideas. They were told to hate Jews anyway, for purely religious reasons. What’s crazy is that 100 years later, these ideas have the same power.

You point out cases in which prejudiced public figures on the left and the right meet at the point of their hatred or paranoia, as with neo-Nazis and Louis Farrakhan. Are there notable newer examples of this today?

Well, you can find that with 9/11 Truthers, and also if you hang around with Ron Paul people. I went to a John Birch Society meeting a month ago, and the people there were surprising. They were all people living off the grid, and they were pot smokers and Ron Paul people. I don’t even know that they would have identified themselves as conservatives. The John Birch Society recruiter there clearly had a lot of experience doing outreach to these types of people.

It seems that people may not even really understand where they are in that case. They may not know what the JBS is in a historical sense – they just know that it’s “alternative.”

I think that’s true. Extremely ideological organizations rely on the fact that you don’t know the whole story. They feed you political talking points and emotional talking points, and you don’t know the rest. I think that’s part of the Ron Paul phenomenon.

It seems there can be a tendency to latch onto a politician whose identity is “alternative” rather than one whose identity is more politically clear.

I think that’s true, and I think that’s a product of resentment and anxiety. It’s a way of individuating yourself. It’s also a not very successful way of escaping from cant that you know is cant. “Oh, the Democrats promised this, the Republicans promised that, but this guy’s a real outsider.” People say they are the true insurgent, and they turn out not to be much of an insurgent, or their insurgency has little to do with what you want from them.

In the book you discuss how right-wing populism has historically demonized academic scholars, and also how it has used selective “scholarship” – misappropriating information and repeating widely discredited ideas. This is, of course, something we can see clearly in characters like Glenn Beck who performed whole episodes of his show writing on a chalkboard and has developed his own recommended canon. How does it work to disparage “experts” and the “elite,” but also rely on this type of pseudo-academia?

Richard Hofstadter discusses this in “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” There is a whole world of alternative scholarship, and for fanatics it functions like a fantasy world where they can only be right. That’s a psychological phenomenon rather than a political phenomenon to me. People do this in other parts of their lives as well. It’s called denial. You create an alternative reality where you don’t have to believe what you don’t want to. But we can believe Glenn Beck because he has footnotes! They always have footnotes. And Beck’s footnotes refer to Eustace Mullins. Eustace Mullins is one of the most vile, racist writers that you can imagine. I think Hitler would have been ashamed of a lot of what he wrote, but Glenn Beck’s “scholarship” relies on him.

Why doesn’t it matter that radical right-wing sources have been discredited over and over again? As you point out, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” – a known forgery – still informs endless right-wing conspiracies – including Beck’s infamous episodes on George Soros. Maybe this information is just too far removed from the original source. But what about Sarah Palin’s creation of Obama’s “death panels”? The correct information was available, but many people didn’t care. Is it all willful ignorance?

Yes. There is a quote from a New York Times Magazine article [“Faith, Certainty, and the Presidency of George W. Bush”] quoting an aid to the president who said that writers were in the “reality-based community,” but that the world didn’t run on reality anymore. There are people who believe they can push through “facts.”

And in surprising ways, that seems to work. If I want to say that person X is wrong, and there is a base of people that will come along with me on whatever trip I have to take to get there, then I’ll do that.

Because that person isn’t just wrong; they’re evil, they’re satanic. Take Newt Gingrich, for example. I truly don’t know what his agenda is, other than that it’s about bringing power to Newt Gingrich. And in order to get power, he will demonize whoever is against him.

Running in the back current of your book, is the distinction between genuine populist interests – improving the lives of working people – and hateful, populist rhetoric.

Yes. As Richard Hofstadter made clear, there is a difference between moral politics and ends-based politics. He said that positivist historians – those who assume that people are voting their economic interests – miss out on something. It’s a fallacy to say that people think economically all the time. Human behavior is not based on maxima. People are superstitious, and people are moral. And sometimes when you feel that your values are not being followed, you get angry.

Another interesting difference between the old hate and the new is that today’s right-wing racists make apologies for language that is too overt. A great example of this that you cite is from the man who runs a website called Jewwatch.com. He said, “It has never been my intent to defame the Jews” – a wild thing for him to say. Why do openly anti-Semitic or racist groups talk this way now? How does this work with their base supporters?

White supremacists repeatedly use a tactic where they claim that they are really just conservative, white-loving, white people. They say: “I don’t hate black people, I love my own kind. What’s wrong with loving your own?” And one of the things that comes with loving your own is obsessing over dark races moving into America and the low white birthrate. It’s about “blood and soil.” Millions and millions of people died because of “blood and soil”.

Another thing that these groups go out of their way to say is that it would be “absolutely wrong” to say terrible things about people that weren’t true. But, if I say that Jewish people are greedy and criminal and are trying to destroy the world, and if it’s true, then there’s nothing anti-Semitic about it. Beyond that, people really have a hard time being mean to people’s faces. If you meet one of these people, or they’re publicly confronted, they sometimes bend over backward to be polite to you. It’s really terribly inconsistent and weird.

What people “really” believe in is an implicit and explicit theme of the book. At the end, you say that leaders of these various hate and conspiracy movements did not really believe the theories they put forth. With entertainer-type pundits – Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter – this seems to make most sense. They profit regardless of their true beliefs. But what about their followers, who don’t necessarily stand to gain anything?

In some cases, people know that something isn’t true, but they “know” that it’s morally true. They may know there aren’t really going to be death panels, but socialism is evil and it will kill people, and so there might as well be death panels. I really don’t think that people believe most of these theories. It’s a type of pornography. There is a sadomasochistic element to the level of hatred found with many of these groups and on their websites. In the book I write about the story of Maria Monk, who claimed to have escaped from a sex den in a Catholic monastery. Her story was false, but at the time it was a real turn-on for people. In “Mein Kampf,” Hitler writes about the Jew waiting to rape the Aryan maiden. People don’t believe these things, but the ideas are so upsetting that they are appealing, and they also have a level of spiritual truth.

You discuss the connection between hateful language and real violence – whether it be JFK’s assassination in 1963 or the Tucson/Gabrielle Giffords shooting of 2011. Do you believe politicians have a responsibility to speak out against rhetoric that can encourage violence?

I think it’s demagoguery to blame the politicians when some crazy person shoots somebody, but politicians are culpable. And no, it’s not nice when some lunatic shoots some nice Jewish congresswoman in Arizona and all of the sudden you’re up in Alaska and you’re being blamed for it. It feels terrible. But, if you’re a politician don’t be a demagogue, encouraging hatred. If you’re Glenn Beck then it’s your job, and you’ve got to tough it out when someone gets killed. You can’t pretend you didn’t say this awful stuff. There was just a politician in Kansas who quoted a Psalm in relation to Obama saying “and may his wife be a widow.” When he was called out on it, he said that he only meant, “may his term be short.” That’s so disingenuous and it’s so wrong, and we shouldn’t be doing it. If you say, “Gee, I wish that person would die,” and they die, you should feel guilty.

Do you think there is a possibility to move away from this type of language? You say at one point that hatred is a Pavlovian response – implying that it comes about as a result of training, and that perhaps we can be trained out of it. It seems that on the mainstream level, maybe we have been trained away from hatred.

I was born in 1957, and I lived in Virginia, and there were colored-only water fountains. I can barely imagine that, but I saw them with my own eyes. If we move away from race and consider gay rights, it’s all happening very fast. Gay marriage is almost mainstream. There will be people who go to their graves screaming about it, but it’s a fact. We can change. People who learn in church that it’s wrong will change when a relative or friend comes out to them, because it’s very hard to hate people you know. The cure for racism is exactly what the Southerners were so terrified of 50 years ago: race mixing. When our families are multiracial – or mixed in religion, or include gay people – the same type of hatred can’t go on.

But there will always be haters, and there will always be fanatics, and it’s the role of the press and the role of writers and the role of thoughtful people to call it out. It’s our job to remind people that even though you’re angry and somebody’s appealing to your worst instincts, you do have better instincts too. You can be better than that. That’s my hope anyway.

: Katie Ryder is an editorial fellow at Salon. More Katie Ryder

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“Da Vinci’s Ghost”: Secrets of the world’s most famous drawing

How Leonardo da Vinci captured the glory of the Renaissance in a single image

By Laura Miller

Topics:What to Read, Books, History, Leonardo da Vinci, Art, Editor's Picks

“Man,” wrote Leonardo da Vinci in the 1480s, “is the model of the world,” and the drawing we take to be the embodiment of that idea is called the Vitruvian Man, a name likely to be as unfamiliar to most people as the image itself is instantly recognizable. The Vitruvian Man, thought to be set down on paper by da Vinci around 1490 (before he accomplished most of his major works), is “the world’s most famous drawing,” according to Toby Lester’s new book, “Da Vinci’s Ghost: Genius, Obsession, and How Leonardo Created the World in His Own Image.” The book is an account of “the rich swirl of people, texts, images and ideas that may have prompted Leonardo to draw his picture.”

By Lester’s own admission, “Da Vinci’s Ghost” is fairly speculative. What we know of the master’s inner (and external) life comes largely from his notebooks, around 30,000 manuscript pages containing many sketches and observations, but also constituting, in large part, the most impossibly ambitious to-do list of all time. Da Vinci embarked upon a comprehensive study of human anatomy (among several dozen other disciplines) in the late 1400s, and part of that project consisted of obsessive comparative measurements of various parts of the body. The text accompanying the Vitruvian Man mostly lists his findings for the “ideal” body, including such stipulations as “from the hairline to the bottom of the chin is one-tenth of the height of a man,” and so on.

The transcendent meaning of the drawing is implicit (and perhaps occasionally imagined). Lester eloquently proposes the Vitruvian Man “as a study of human proportion; as an overview of the human anatomy; as an exploration of an architectural idea; as an illustration of an ancient text, updated for modern times; as a vision of empire; as a cosmography of the lesser world; as a celebration of the power of art; as a metaphysical proposition.” “Da Vinci’s Ghost” teases out the threads of these ideas from the centuries of Western culture that preceded the moment when Leonardo set pen to paper. The result is a short but dense book that dips into mysticism, military engineering, the reign of the Roman emperor Augustus, the theory of sacred geometry, Medieval medical education, the construction of Gothic cathedrals, and more. Although Leonardo may not have acknowledged them, according to Lester, all of these cultural forces and legacies came to bear on the creation of the Vitruvian Man.

He gets his name, by the way, from Vitruvius, a Roman engineer and the author of a text titled “Ten Books on Architecture.” Vitruvius maintained that the proportions of a building should be derived from and based on the proportions of a “well-shaped” man. Such buildings in turn make up the body of an empire, in a classical version of the Medieval and Renaissance conception of universe as a multilayered reiteration of a single divine pattern. The idea that “the human body was a scaled-down version of the world and the cosmos as a whole” is, as Lester notes, “an age-old philosophical conceit,” but with the Vitruvian Man it appears before us as the most beautiful and triumphant expression of the school of thought known as humanism.

Like last year’s “Swerve: How the World Became Modern,” by Stephen Greenblatt, “Da Vinci’s Ghost” celebrates the emergence of humanism in 15th-century Italy. Both books are predisposed to the popular narrative in which the Renaissance is depicted as a revolution against Medieval thinking rather than an evolution from it, and this is regrettable, but Lester is a lot less guilty of it than Greenblatt.

Lester draws into his story such figures as the 12th-century mystic Hildegard of Bingen. Under the influence of what are now thought to be severe migraines, Hildegard saw visions, including the recurring image of a human figure in the middle of a “wheel of marvelous appearance,” with its head touching the top of the circle and its feet touching the bottom. This, Lester suspects, shows the influence of Vitruvius’ book (preserved in monasteries like the one Hildegard presided over), which maintained that the ideal human form, when placed in such a circle, would fit perfectly, with its navel at the center. A similar symmetry can be found by placing the same figure within a square.

For Hildegard and Medieval thinkers, the body at the center of this geometry was Christ, the intersection of the human and the divine. Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, however, is decidedly human, if magnificently so, with square and circle superimposed. “The figure,” Lester writes, “captures a hinge moment in the history of ideas: the intoxicating, ephemeral moment when art, science and philosophy all seemed to be merging, and when it seemed possible that, with their help, the individual human mind might actually be able to comprehend and depict the nature of … everything.”

Leonardo, that consummate polymath, has become yet another symbol of this humanist aspiration, while illustrating, at times, its downside: “He set himself to learn many things,” wrote Georgio Vasari, his 16th-century biographer, “only to abandon them almost immediately.” (Still, for all his frustrations, he did pretty well for himself in the end.) We can’t know what the master was thinking when he drew the Vitruvian Man, but Lester, who is forced by the thinness of the historical record to guess at many things, seems least speculative of all when he looks into the Man’s intensely concentrated features and sees a resemblance to his creator. Reaching for the edges of the cosmos, seeming to fly and stand firmly planted on the ground at the same time, he’s a creature whose limitations are their own form of glory.

: Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller

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The thrill of blaming others

We've always loved scapegoats, in politics and our own lives. Now science offers a new glimpse into its appeal

By Charlie Campbell

Topics:Psychology, History, Editor's Picks

This article is an adapted excerpt from the upcoming book "Scapegoat: A History of Blaming Other People," available Feb. 2 from Duckworth Overlook.

The ritual of the scapegoat goes back right to the beginning of mankind. Every early culture had ceremonies in which they removed sin from the community. These varied greatly, but one thing was constant – the idea that sin was a definite entity that could be transferred from being to being, or object, and that wrongdoing could be washed away. As a species, we’re obsessed by purity. All belief systems are not just devices we use to make sense of the world, they allow us to hope that we can return to a state of innocence. The ancients believed that spirits surrounded us, residing in plants, rocks and animals. The Romans had their sacred groves, while the Arabs thought the desert to be populated by the jinn. A widespread confusion between the physical and the mental led to a firm belief in the transmission of evil. In “The Golden Bough” Sir James Frazer describes many examples of this from all over the world.

In the East Indian Islands, the inhabitants thought a malign spirit could be channeled into leaves which were held against the patient, then thrown away. In China, kites were used to spirit sickness away; in the Aleutian Islands it was weeds. In Indonesia, villagers built little boats to carry away their demons. In India they buried their sins in a jar, which any unwary passer-by could stumble upon, like an unwitting Pandora (there was little concern with what subsequently happened to the expelled evil). In the Himalayas dogs were stoned to death to expiate sin; Iroquois Indians painted and decorated their oldest friends; in Scotland the dogs merely got chased. In India and Egypt cows were the animal of choice. And so on. All of this is a logical step towards transferring evil to another human.

Human scapegoats came to be used more frequently in time. The animals that were sacrificed as scapegoats were usually of high value, but their human counterparts tended to be society’s marginal figures – criminals or the disabled. Sometimes they could be priests, whose holy status protected them from this contact with evil. Or they could be actors who were paid for their duties and the risks they took on. These scapegoats were used either as part of a regular ceremony or in the aftermath of disaster. Some cultures had ceremonies in which the scapegoat was dressed in fine robes and led through the crowds as they cast their sins upon him. He would then be driven out of the village and stoned, or thrown into a river or off a cliff, thus carrying away all the people’s ills.

This method of removing sin has evolved over the centuries. What was once an ancient expiatory ritual, aimed at deflecting the wrath of the gods and cleansing a society, has mutated into a method by which rulers can channel the anger of their subjects away from themselves and onto some poor unfortunate. Over time the term “scapegoat” has come to refer to any group or individual on whom falls the outpouring of anger and blame following disaster. There are essentially two types of modern or post-ritual scapegoats: those created unconsciously, as an expression of our rage and incomprehension, in whose guilt everyone believes; and those created as a conscious act, by those seeking to deflect blame away from themselves. The unconscious ones came first, and existed the moment disaster struck. But in time it became a conscious process – as conscious as the ancient rituals, but lacking the sense of theatre and the acknowledgement that the victim was just that, a victim.

Scapegoating is suddenly no longer a ritual act, but a behavioural pattern; no longer a way of safeguarding a community, but instead one that protects one or two people. Every time there is a catastrophic event the majority finds a minority to blame. Sometimes it happens almost organically, at others the mob is steered towards its victim by the king.

In the twenty-first century, we are faced with more choice than ever before – in what we believe, in what we eat, in everything we do. Similarly we have a greater range of things to blame when things go wrong. Whereas our ancestors had to content themselves with the perennial scapegoats – namely women, Jews and certain animals – we are able to apportion blame in ever more imaginative ways for the aspects of our lives and ourselves that disappoint us. The one thing we will not do under any circumstances is accept ourselves as we are. We prefer to find an explanation for why things are not perfect, and these rarely stand up to close scrutiny.

For the wider malaise that affects us all, there are dozens and dozens of conspiracy theories, all rooted in the idea that some shadowy force is to blame – whether it be the Freemasons, the Illuminati or giant lizards; Communists, Jews or Catholics. For our individual problems, we have endless possible explanations; whole industries have sprung up to provide more authoritative ones. Blame has gradually become a product, to be bought and sold like any other. And those who trade in it have tended to become extraordinarily successful.

The relationship between the blamer and the blamed is a complex one. Really, the opposite of the prince is not the pauper, it is the scapegoat. As we will see later, the ruler creates the scapegoat so he doesn’t share his fate. We like to have our hate figures, just as we like to have leaders (though we tend to loathe them both equally). They are inextricably linked, reverse sides of a coin, one the shadow of the other – much in the way God and the Devil are in Christianity. The basic rule is as follows: the more a leader promises, the more he or she will subsequently have to apportion blame. Once we thought our kings were divine and therefore infallible, that disaster had to be the fault of another. These days we elect our leaders on the back of unrealistic promises which we choose to believe. They fail in these and we replace our leaders rather than overhaul the system, which resists change. And so the cycle of promise and blame begins all over again.

But in today’s political culture of spin, modern leaders are less ready than ever to admit fallibility. The phrase ‘mistakes were made …’ has entered the political lexicon, as the most passive and detached way of acknowledging error, rather than responsibility. It has been a particular favourite of twentieth-century American politicians, from Nixon and Kissinger to Reagan and Clinton. These three words were used repeatedly by Republicans in the aftermath of the Iraq war.

This brings us to the most dangerous use of scapegoats – the blaming of certain individuals to give governments the freedom to act in certain ways. This is an age-old strategy, and, most recently, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi were all similarly demonized. The latter was used to prove a non-existent link between the first two, giving the American public the sense of a greater threat against them than in fact existed, and justifying the use of military force in Iraq. As one can see, the urge to blame is sometimes incited in us, and this form of demonization has been employed for centuries.

In 2007, the world entered the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It had been caused by the bursting of the American housing bubble, leading to the spectacular collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. The fallout was global, and saw plenty of scapegoats targeted – from rich bankers and their bonuses, to short-selling hedge fund managers thought to have profited from the downturn, and chief executives whose self-interested, rash decisions led to this calamity. How much easier it is to attribute responsibility to them, rather than face the truth of our own involvement. The notion of collective responsibility is one that we prefer not to engage with. Only those who were financially very prudent can exempt themselves from blame. The rest of us were happy to run up more debt than could be sustained for long by a banking system that depends, like so much of institutional life and commerce, on public confidence. This debt was parceled up and reshaped in a way that, for a while, concealed its origins. But ultimately it choked the system. And we shrieked at the likes of Fred Goodwin, chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland, blaming him for what we had lost. He was criticized for excessive spending and labelled ‘the world’s worst banker’ after RBS posted an annual loss of £24.1bn, the largest in UK corporate history. As details of his pension emerged, his house was vandalized, as the public sought redress.

There are many theories as to why we have this urge to blame, and all we can be certain about it is that it is an intrinsic part of our being. We used to scapegoat out of fear of divine retribution; now for the most part we do it to live with ourselves. As individuals, we create a narrative of our lives that makes sense to us, and that fits in with our concept of ourselves. Often we shape our memories accordingly. Certainly we keep some and subconsciously discard those that do not fit, demonstrating what psychologists call confirmation bias. We can find ourselves using our brains more to construct explanations and excuses once we’ve done what our emotions dictated, so we can pretend to ourselves that we are rational beings. But we aren’t wholly rational beings, as a succession of thinkers and experiments have showed.

We possess a strong self-serving bias that makes us feel special. Through this we can account for our failures and protect our sense of worth. We overrate our abilities in all sorts of ways, from intelligence to honesty. Research has shown that we all think ourselves better drivers than the norm. Likewise, we are inclined to think that we are more sensitive, loyal and in possession of a better sense of humour than others. This is particularly prevalent among men, who see themselves as 5 IQ points cleverer than they are, according to psychologist Adrian Furnham.

Australians suffer from the same misplaced confidence – 86 per cent of them rate themselves as above average in their performance at work. But we cannot all be excellent drivers, or else there would be no accidents. We can’t all be above average like in Garrison Keillor’s fictional Lake Wobegon community; the laws of maths and nature ensure that some of us are below average. But we are inclined to believe that we are all special, that we’re somehow different and ‘it won’t happen to us’, leading us to take risks. With this capacity for self-delusion it shouldn’t be that much of a surprise that we seek to blame others. The idea of Attribution Theory states that we have an urgent need to find reasons for an event, and this leads us to leap to conclusions and hold others responsible. A bad situation couldn’t possibly be our fault, after all. When we fail at things it is because of others; those who are below average bring us down. Whereas when we succeed it is due to our innate abilities (and when others succeed, we often put it down to luck).

We develop this ability to blame very early on in life. Just as children naturally express their unhappiness through tears and sobbing – designed to tell adults swiftly that something is wrong – so they, faced with the possibility of adult sanction for their actions, are quick to pass responsibility onto someone else, and quickly learn to use language to achieve this. ‘He started it’ is a familiar refrain in domestic life. As we move towards adulthood we should shed this defence mechanism, but really we only start to use it more.

On an everyday level we blame others to reduce cognitive dissonance – this is the state of tension that arises when we hold two contradictory ideas simultaneously (according to Plato, when desire conflicts with reason there is a disease of the soul, which is not so different from the concept of cognitive dissonance). Most of us have an innate sense of ourselves as decent people, and every bit of evidence to the contrary causes us pain and discomfort. We mitigate these feelings in a variety of ways. If we admit to having behaved badly, we might excuse this behaviour by saying ‘it was the drink’. We might say ‘I wasn’t myself’. Or we could straightforwardly blame another. In a failing relationship, couples often find themselves blaming each other for their unhappiness. With infidelity, the wronged person often finds her/himself blaming the other woman/man for their partner’s betrayal, allowing them to preserve their relationship – on the surface at least.

We like to personify our pain, to find one person to embody it. And so we can convince ourselves that everything would be much better if they were in our lives (as with unrequited love) or out of our lives (as with a scapegoat). But in reality it’s a lot more complex than that. Ultimately, we make scapegoats out of those we have come to believe are incapable of suffering – we dehumanize them, making them easier to hate. We create the idea that these other people are inferior to us. That develops into the idea that they therefore deserve their treatment. We deny them the same capacities for thought, emotion and values as us, and treat them accordingly. We can do this consciously or unconsciously, but the results are the same.

To see how innate this instinct is to us we can refer to Jungian psychology. Jung may not be widely followed these days but his ideas are interesting and relevant to the concept of the scapegoat. He believed that we all share the archetype of the shadow – the innate psychic structure that personifies everything we will not acknowledge about ourselves. It is the archetype of the enemy and is with us from birth; as infants we will greet our mothers with joy, while we recoil from strangers with fear and caution. We deny the existence of the shadow, and instead project its characteristics onto others, allowing us to preserve our own sense of goodness. Jung believed that there are several layers to the shadow, the top ones being unique to the individual, qualities that he or she repressed. But the bottom layer is a collective one. And it is that that has been successfully exploited in instances of mass scapegoating. By recognizing our own shadow, we make it less likely that we will project it onto others.

Reprinted with permission from Duckworth Overlook © Charlie Campbell, “Scapegoat: A History of Blaming Other People.”

: Charlie Campbell is a graduate of University College London and was previously Deputy Editor of the Literary Review, where he ran the Bad Sex in Fiction Prize among other things. He was born in London, grew up in Paris and now lives in London again. He is currently at work on his next book. More Charlie Campbell

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The invention of the heterosexual

The history of straightness is much shorter than you'd think. An expert explains its origins

By Thomas Rogers

A detail from the cover of "Straight"

Topics:LGBT, History, Sex

If you met Hanne Blank and her partner on the street, you might have a lot of trouble classifying them. While Blank looks like a feminine woman, her partner is extremely androgynous, with little to no facial hair and a fine smooth complexion. Hanne’s partner is neither fully male, nor fully female; he was born with an unconventional set of chromosomes, XXY, that provide him with both male genitalia and feminine characteristics. As a result, Blank’s partner has been mistaken for a gay woman, a straight man, a transman — and their relationship has been classified as gay, straight and everything in between.

Blank mentions her personal story at the beginning of her provocative new history of heterosexuality, “Straight,” as a way of illustrating just how artificial our notions of “straightness” really are. In her book, Blank, a writer and historian who has written extensively about sexuality and culture, looks at the ways in which social trends and the rise of psychiatry conspired to create this new category in the late 19th and early 20th century. Along the way, she examines the changing definition of marriage, which evolved from a businesslike agreement into a romantic union centered around love, and how social Darwinist ideas shaped the divisions between gay and straight. With her eye-opening book, Blank tactfully deconstructs a facet of modern sexuality that most of us take for granted.

Salon spoke to Blank over the phone about the origins of heterosexuality, the evolution of marriage and why the rise of the “bromance” is a very good thing.

Men and woman have been having sex for as long as there have been humans. So how can we talk about there being a “history” of heterosexuality?

We can talk about there being a history of heterosexuality in the same way that we can talk about there being a history of religions. People have been praying to God for a really long time too, and yet the ways people relate to the divine have specific histories. They come from particular places, they take particular trajectories, there are particular texts, and individuals that are important in them. There are events, names, places, dates. It’s really very similar.

So where does the term “heterosexual” come from?

“Heterosexual” was actually coined in a letter at the same time as the word “homosexual,” [in the mid-19thcentury], by an Austro-Hungarian journalist named Károly Mária Kertbeny. He created these words as part of his response to a piece of Prussian legislation that made same-sex erotic behavior illegal, even in cases where the identical act performed by a man and a woman would be considered legal. And he was one of a couple of people who did a lot of writing and campaigning and pamphleteering to try to change legal opinion on that matter. He coined the words “heterosexual” and “homosexual” in a really very clever bid to try to equalize same-sex and different-sex. His intent was to suggest that there are these two categories in which human beings could be sexual, that they were not part of a hierarchy, that they were just two different flavors of the same thing.

But the term took quite a while to catch on. How did it spread?

Thanks to psychiatrists in the 1880s and 1890s — a part of the medical profession that was deeply unscientific at that time. It meant that somebody with a medical degree and all of the authority it brings could stand up and start making value judgments using specialized medical vocabulary and pass it off as authoritative, and basically unquestionable.

Psychiatry is responsible for creating the heterosexual in largely the same way that it is responsible for creating the various categories of sexual deviance that we are familiar with and recognize and define ourselves in opposition to. The period lasting from the late Victorian era to the first 20 or 30 years of the 20th century was a time of tremendous socioeconomic change, and people desperately wanted to give themselves a valid identity in this new world order. One of the ways people did that was establish themselves as sexually normative. And it wasn’t the people who were running around thinking, “Oh, I’m a man and I like to sleep with other men, that makes me different,” who were creating this groundswell of change; it was the other people, the men who were running around going, “I’m not a degenerate, I don’t want to sleep with other men, I am this thing over here that is normative and acceptable and good and not pathological and right, that’s what I am. That’s what I need people to understand about me, because I need people to understand that I am a valid person and I need to be taken seriously.”

This also has to do with the popularity of social Darwinism at the time.

Social Darwinism comes into play in a big way. It became important to prove that you were part of the solution and not part of the problem in this pell-mell, hurly-burly, crazy new social order [of the late 1800s and early 20th century].

So how did this change in terminology play itself out in the real world?

I actually talked to my grandmother about this. My grandmother is 88 and she came to consciousness in a world that didn’t have heterosexuals in it, where nobody knew that word, and certainly nobody used it to refer to themselves. And she associates this change with Freud, whom she’s never read but whom she’s heard a lot about. So there was this sort of culture-wide game of telephone, if you will, in which these authoritative medicalized ideas coming from very rarefied circles trickled down into the larger culture. I think that for people of my grandmother’s generation particularly, heterosexual simply became a synecdoche for normal. And that’s certainly the way Freud talks about it, that you know, you attain heterosexuality. There’s this process of attaining normality. When you manage to develop yourself, or to become developed, in the proper way, in an appropriate way, in the way that Freud says you’re supposed to, what you end up with is a heterosexual.

In his book “Gay New York,” George Chauncey writes about the flip side of this, how previous to the invention of “homosexuality,” men’s sexualities were much more fluid. Do you think that’s the case?

Oh, absolutely. When you start operating on the principle that you indeed can divide people into sheep and goats, then there’s also the idea that you must divide people into sheep and goats and there are certain boundaries that cannot be crossed without reclassifying.

As you point out in the book, for much of human history, marriage had absolutely nothing to do with sexuality or sex.

It’s more that marriage didn’t have a lot to do with desire. Marriage has always had to do with sex, and the ability to have marital sex and preferably procreate has always been central to marriage. But what was not so important was whether or not you necessarily wanted to have sex with that person. It was your duty, it was paying the marriage debt, and you were gonna do it, by golly, but this was a co-worker, this a partner in business enterprise — not a person you chose to satisfy your own personal whims and desires with. If you happen to also like them and think that they were swell or pretty or handsome then that’s great. But that’s not what you were in it for.

And now everything has changed, because we now prioritize attraction, desire, love, romance, over the strictly economic and community-building aspects of marriage. We live in a culture now where we find it very odd when women don’t support themselves, if somebody chooses to be a stay-at-home mother. That is a huge change, and that’s a huge change just in my lifetime. I’m in my early 40s and I know that when I was a very small child those discussions were not happening in the same way. The economic and legal enfranchisement of women has gone hand-in-hand with both women’s and men’s ability to choose marriage partners based on their own desire, desires for sex, love, companionship, all of those things, and to put that first.

How do the successes of the women’s movement impact our concept of heterosexuality?

I think that referring to it as the success of the women’s movement is a little bit of a misnomer because there’ve been multiple women’s movements, and also because it’s not entirely to be credited to or blamed on organized feminism. There’s been a lot of other enfranchisement of women that’s gone on as well that has actually been not identifiably feminist, but definitely comes out of a very 18thcentury spirit of egalitarianism. But in general I think that equal rights egalitarianism has had an enormous amount to do with changing heterosexuality. Simply because once you give women and men equal or nearly equal rights to their own economic autonomy, political autonomy, social autonomy, you change the playing field, you change the dependency relationship.

Over the last decade, there’s been a lot of science arguing that there are physical differences between gay people and straight people, in their brains and even the direction of their hair whirls. You’re skeptical of this research. Why?

I question their validity primarily because nobody has established or in fact attempted to establish that there is a canonical straight body. And if you don’t have characterized control, you can bet your bottom dollar I am not going to believe your hypothesis. It’s really that simple.

All of this research that is purporting to look for physiological material differences between gay bodies and straight bodies: What are they comparing it to? Their assumption that they know magically what a heterosexual body is? When no one has actually established what that is. That’s bad science.

OK. Then do you think it’s possible to establish what a heterosexual body looks like?

Well, you know, if you’re going to stipulate that it’s possible to establish what a non-heterosexual body is, it better damn well be possible to find out what a heterosexual body is. And if one of those things is not possible, then, chances are, the other is not either.

I’m quite attached to my identity as a gay man — and, to be honest, I would feel a little troubled having my category taken away from me.

See, that’s the thing, no one is going to take that away from you. No one can take that away from you. The only thing they can take away from you is the illusion that this is not something that is constructed. And that’s very, very different. Just because something is constructed as a social category, doesn’t mean that it’s not enormously meaningful. It doesn’t mean that we haven’t built a whole damn civilization on it. Doesn’t mean that we don’t live our daily lives on it, doesn’t mean that we don’t use it all the time every time we’re walking down the street. This is real. It’s stuff that has physical manifestations in the real world. But that does not mean that it is organic.

Or innate.

Or inevitable.

But these categories have also been very practical. Gay rights wouldn’t be imaginable without them.

Well, you know, minority politics has been a lot easier to sell than to just say, “Being human ought to get you human dignity,” full stop. If you can pin down the difference, if you can make the difference the salient issue, it somehow makes it easier for people to stomach the fact that they can’t go out and just beat people over the head. I don’t know why that is. I find it intensely frustrating.

Do you think the success of the gay rights movement is helping broaden our ideas of sexuality?

I think that it is having an interesting effect of making the boundaries of the categories more permeable. Simply because we now have this doxa [omnipresent acknowledgement] of gayness in our culture where we believe that gayness is a thing, we believe that it exists, we believe that we know what it looks like, we believe that we know what it acts like, and therefore, when we see it, we’re actually very likely to say, “Hey, that over there, that looks really gay,” regardless of whether or not that person may be, in fact, gay.

Those boundaries are becoming more porous. The term “bromance” cracks me up, but it is also promising. For the past hundred years or so, a lot of men have found it very difficult to express affection and love for other men without having it assumed that that love is necessarily sexual. And now we’re actually coming around to a place where at least some people, some of the time, are able to avail themselves of a category in which they can say, “Oh, OK, here’s a way that men can be affectionate toward each other and one another and love one another and we don’t have to assume that we know more about it than that.” I think that that adds something to the conversation.

Women, in particular, seem to be eschewing the traditional between binaries of gay and straight these days, at least in pop culture. The same thing doesn’t seem to be true of men.

There’s a reason for that. Every queer woman I know — and I’m a queer woman — understands intuitively that a lot of people don’t consider what two women do together sexually as sex. It’s a whole lot easier to fly under the radar when what you’re doing is not something that a lot of people are even going to consider as sex.

But men, for various other cultural reasons also seem to be more attached to categories. It functions partly as a sort of safety mechanism.

I think there is a lot of safety in categories. And there’s a hell of a lot of safety in a binary. When you can just say, you know, anything that is not this is automatically that. You know, it frees up a lot of spare time.

I have a number of friends who are negotiating the reverse of this, in that they for a long time identified as lesbians and have now started dating transmen and now have to negotiate the awkwardness of being in what ostensibly looks like a heterosexual relationship. I’ve been around several friends who, when they mention their boyfriend in a queer setting, reflexively say, “Oh, but he’s trans.”

And I think that really points as well to the fact that these are constructed categories. This is about your subjectivity, it’s about your allegiance, it’s about where your social networks are, it’s about the kinds of cultural priorities that you embrace and that you endorse. This is not just what gets you hard or what gets you wet. This is not just about what kinds of sex you have, or the congenital configurations of the people you have sex with. It’s very much about what cultures you participate in. What cultures you ally yourself with, you know, whose flag you fly.

It’s interesting that transgender men and women could marry their partners long before gay people could get married, even though they are probably far more despised by conservatives in this country, simply because they fit into this heterosexual idea of marriage.

Although, that’s not uniformly true and there have been cases, like Littleton v. Prange in Texas — which still to this day breaks my heart — where jurisdictions refused to uphold the legality of marriage or partnerships involving a trans person, because they basically take the stance that you can’t change genetics and this is person was never a whatever. And therefore the marriage is not valid. So it does cut both ways. I do think that the issue of gay marriage is a very interesting one to look at in the context of the history of sexuality, because what I think it testifies to is not so much the tendency that non-heterosexuality has to destabilize heterosexual culture, but the incredible depth of the investment that our culture and our government have in regulating the kinds of relationships that people have in their lives.

: Thomas Rogers is Salon's deputy arts editor. More Thomas Rogers

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The evolution of American debt

Over the last century, over-borrowing has gone from shameful to commonly accepted. An expert explains what changed

By Hannah Tepper

(Credit: Lightspring via Shutterstock)

Topics:Debt, Economics, American History, History

In the US today, debt is ubiquitous. Whether it’s paying back thousands of dollars in student loans, using your Visa card for a pack of gum when you’re out of cash, or taking out a mortgage on a first home, it’s been woven into our financial system so tightly, that even when we suffer the sometimes cruel and unusual detriments of borrowing, we have little to no realistic impetus to stop. But it wasn’t always this way. In fact before the 20^th century, debt was a taboo, feared, shameful, and kept in the shadows. So what events and institutions brought debt from its meager beginnings to its central role in American life?

In his new book, “Borrow: The American Way of Debt,” Cornell professor Louis Hyman writes, in essence, a biography of American debt. He traces debt through American history: from the late 19^th century, when unpaid dues meant public ignominy, to the 1920s, when the auto industry changed the face of borrowing to the mortgage fallouts that led the Great Depression to the invention of the credit card as we now know it, all the way to the current shambles of our national economic livelihood. Along the way we meet characters like the Henry Ford, the xenophobic inventor of the Model T whose scorn for the liberal age of borrowing got the best him, and Lower East Side grocery clerk Joseph Miraglia, whose miraculous $10,000 spending spree in 1965 made history as one of America’s heftiest credit cart blunders.

Salon got a chance to speak with Hyman last week about America’s long road into debt, the problem with applying morality to economics and, of course, that scene in “Pretty Woman” where Julia Roberts goes on a shopping spree.

Your background is in history and mathematics. How did you become interested in debt?

When I was in graduate school I was fishing around for a history topic that hadn’t been done or worked on before. This was in 2003, before financial history became fashionable again and before people knew there was going to be a crisis.

Little did you know… or maybe you did know, what would happen with the recession?

Unfortunately, as a historian of labor and business, I noticed that a lot of working people were struggling with debt. I thought it was a good topic to get some perspective on. As I got into the topic it was something that lent itself well to the kinds of questions I that interested me. Historians are look at how things actually are, rather than economists who are interested in how things ought to be. My work is in people’s choices, and how our choices are constrained by institutions. It lends itself to a more readable history than just a history of charts and graphs.

In the first chapter of the book you discuss how debt was extremely stigmatized in the 1920s. What was society’s moral view on borrowing then as compared to now?

People approach their checkbook not from a math point of view, but from a moral point of view. I think that’s really a key to understanding all of this. It is shocking how commonplace debt is today, but another difference between then and now is the financial infrastructure of debt. We are told that our grandparents didn’t borrow. That’s not true. People borrowed in the 19^th century, they just did it surreptitiously, illegally, or at the margins. It was always stigmatized. That stigmatization arose out of the belief that a mortgage or a debt could easily bankrupt you, or the economy would change, and you would lose everything. In the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s the atmosphere around debt changed: New federal programs and financial institutions, from the FHA to department stores, enabled people to borrow more safely. So that fear that everything could be lost went away in the middle of the 20^th century. In the last 30 years that changed again. Those institutions born in this era of growth have persisted into our era of stagnation.

Is debt being re-stigmatized because of our most recent financial crisis?

Absolutely. In the 70s and 80s, it was like in the movie “Pretty Woman”; how glorious it was for Julia Roberts character to use a credit card. That was because most people in the ’80s didn’t have credit cards. In the ’90s, credit card use started to take on a different cast; it started to be seen as somewhat irresponsible. Mortgages maintained that shine of responsible adulthood until the financial crisis. Now people are questioning whether it’s good to go into debt for houses in a way that they certainly haven’t for 70 years.

In the book, you talk about the balloon mortgage and mortgage-backed securities, which had a big part in the economic collapse in the housing market during the Great Depression.

What’s shocking is that the balloon mortgage and the mortgage-backed security are things that we imagine were invented in the last ten years. At least I did before I started this research. But actually, they were commonplace in the 1920s. Banks would issue bonds to local investors who would use that money to lend interest-only mortgages (or balloon mortgages) to consumers. They were called balloon mortgages because they swelled up so that you’d only pay the interest for 3-5 years and at the end of the 3-5 year period you would just refinance it. The thought then was, you’d try to get the biggest house possible and make some money off of it a few years down the line. Banks had access to all this money to lend because they were selling “mortgage bonds” or “participation certificates.” But the bonds weren’t trade-able, they weren’t like mortgage backed securities are today. They couldn’t be resold. As the markets begin to go south after the crash people stopped buying the bonds, there were foreclosures, people started to withdraw their investments, and others were unable to refinance their mortgages.

And then Fannie Mae was created to help the government fund mortgage lending?

New Deal policy makers set up the FHA, the Federal Housing Administration, which created a set of guidelines to ensure that houses would maintain value over time. They set up an insurance system so that lenders would be repaid in the case of a default, to prevent foreclosures. New Deal policy makers created Fannie Mae, originally called the Federal National Mortgage Association, to buy mortgages from local banks and mortgage companies and sell them to insurance companies and other investors. This way there was no longer a need for bonds.

In the book you give some fascinating historical information on how department stores, and later discount stores, changed the way Americans shopped and changed their intuitions about credit.

What’s interesting about department stores is that they are an amalgamation of a bunch of different kinds of stores, clothing stores, appliances, etc. Credit in the department store in the early 20^th century was a service, like delivery. The store didn’t make any money on it at all. That’s the most important thing to realize; that it was not a profit setter. It was something you did because it kept your customers happy. After the war, though, department stores begin to offer what they called “permanent budget accounts.” It allowed people to pay back purchases over many months, and the store was able to charge them interest. By the late 1950s, department stores had more money invested in consumer debt than in their own inventory, so they began to raise the interest rate on credit to 18 percent. It became profitable and they could resell that debt to finance companies. The subcontracting of debt enabled a whole system in which Americans got used to buying on credit and paying interest. Once debt could be resold, discount stores like Wal-mart and Kmart could sell for lower prices and offer the same services as department stores.

You also mention in the book that banks had an essentially trial-by-error process in learning how to profit from credit cards in the ’60s and ’70s. What were some of the regulatory and infrastructural changes that put banks at the forefront of the lending industry?

It’s important to realize that banks were not driving this shift in the ’70s. Banks didn’t come into the credit card industry until 1978 with the Marquette decision, which held that you could charge customers the legal interest rate of whichever state the bank was located in. So banks in states like South Dakota, where you could charge very high interest rates, could lend to people in Nebraska or New York City. That’s when Citibank moved its operation from Long Island to South Dakota, and charged very high interest rates across the country. This shift in the regulatory environment is key as well as the rise of interest rates more generally in the economy during the inflation of the late 1970s.

Why did consumers accept these high interest rates on credit cards?

If you are paying the customary 18 percent a year, it actually isn’t that much as long as you pay off most of your debts every month. And most of the credit cards that were lent in the ’70s and ’80s were to the well-to-do, who could handle the payments.

Nowadays almost anyone can get a credit card, not just the well off. When did that change?

It happened in the early ’90s. Banks continued to get more efficient at lending and their credit models, they believed, got better and better at differentiating between a good credit risk and a bad credit risk. It also became cheaper to borrow so that during the early ’90s from 1991 to 1996, during a five year period, nearly all the expansion in credit card debt was through securitization, when banks resell debt as credit card backed securities, just the way mortgages can be sold again as securities. Because it became cheaper to lend, banks could lend to poorer and poorer people with more vulnerable employment statuses because if these people defaulted, it wasn’t as big of a deal. Statistically, they expected default, and they just thought they could manage those defaults through clever math.

What about the mortgage market in the ’90s? In the book you talk about how an influx of securities into the mortgage market made it ridiculously easy for people to mortgage new homes. How did this lead us into a speculative bubble?

People believed that house prices would go up and that they were good investments. Friends at work, at church, at the gym were telling each other how much money they had made on their houses over the last generation. By 2005 a lot of people bought secondary houses as investments. The speculative bubble happened for many reasons. The most important reason, we think, is that most Americans weren’t making as much money. Median wages stagnated. People couldn’t borrow to invest in the stock market, but they could borrow money from a bank very easily to buy a house. People thought investing in the housing market gave them leverage to make money quickly. You see the collision of a stagnating wage market with a rising house market during a moment of low interest rates. Wages hadn’t gone up for 30 years but wealth had gone up and concentrated at the top, amongst the wealthiest. That money had to be invested somewhere and it looked like housing was a safe, easy way to invest. This money went into houses rather than into business. It went into things that produced nothing rather than things that were economically productive.

You make a really important point comparing the housing market to a Giffen good. A Giffen good is a term, in economics, that refers to something for which demand will increase as its price increases, which works against our typical understanding of the relationship between price and demand.

In economic textbooks, Giffen Goods are described as an anomaly, like a mythical beast or a unicorn that could exist intellectually but never in the real world. But it’s exactly what happened with the housing market: when the price went up, demand went up. The key is that it was not just about borrowers but about lenders. Because there was this ready supply of capital to invest and these lenders were willing to fund all of these mortgages, the housing prices went through the roof. The market wasn’t self-correcting, and there was no equilibrium until there was a crisis.

If it were left up to you, how would you change the way capital is invested in this country? What needs to change?

I think it’s important to realize that we need to use our policies for productive investments. We’ve made it too easy to invest in consumer debt. We can use the same policies to steer money into productive investments. Businesses produce value, they produce jobs, they produce growth, and in our economy, it’s very hard to do that these days. You can get venture capital for fancy high-tech companies, but you can’t get loans for mom and pop operations. I think business investment is something that’s very moderate in a lot of ways from the left and the right. From my perspective it helps us think about how we can actually intervene in the economy rather than just scold people for borrowing too much or being predatory lenders. One of the most important points of this book is to get past moral arguments. We can acknowledge the importance of culture, but I think it’s important to see ways we can actually intervene and make things better.