Thursday, December 20, 2018

Santa's Elves: Slaves or Indentured Servants

My AP US History students took their semester finals this week (well, one class takes it here in about an hour). One of my goals is to get them to think through historical concepts without them knowing that's what they're doing - sort of tricking them into learning (and writing for clarity, making an argument, assessing bias, etc.). On their final they had an LEQ (Long Essay Question) in which the prompt was:

Assess whether Santa's Elves are slaves, or indentured servants. 

The following is my response.
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Santa Claus, beloved by many and known around the world as a force of good in a dark and twisted world, bringing joy to millions of children, is not what he seems. Santa Claus (aka Father Christmas aka St. Nicholas) has a veritable plantation at the North Pole in which he forces his elves to work year round as slaves. The evidence is clear: (a) There is no definitive ending point to the elves' term of employment, (b) their enslaved condition is hereditary, and (c) the isolation of the elves indicates that leaving is simply not an option. It is time we called out Santa Claus for who he is: a slave-driver profiting off the backs of an enslaved workforce.

Santa's Elves cannot be considered indentured servants because they are not serving for a definitive term, nor are they paying off a debt to Santa Claus. It can be argued that Santa Claus occupies the North Pole courtesy of a form of the Headright System, in which he was granted land in exchange for bringing indentured servants with him. Regardless of how Santa and the elves arrived at the North Pole, it is clear that Santa's Elves are tied to him for the duration of their life or else there would be reports of elves buying houses and land and reintegrating into society after the customary seven-year period of indentured servitude.

Santa's Elves are not indentured servants because their children automatically join Santa's workforce. As with the uniquely American system of chattel slavery in which the enslaved are treated as property and their condition is hereditary, the offspring of Santa's Elves simply stay at the North Pole and work in Santa's Workshop. They are not sent to a boarding school, they do not have a choice with what to do with their lives. It is expected that they will enter Santa's Workshop and continue to make toys. This is slavery, plain and simple. 

Consider the North Pole. It is isolated, cut off from the rest of the world. In 1739 a number of the enslaved in South Carolina rose up against their white oppressors in what became known as the Stono Rebellion. As a result, sweeping anti-literacy laws such as the Negro Act of 1740 were passed by fearful legislatures. Within 100 years nearly every Southern state would make it illegal for the enslaved to learn to read or write, as education was power. It is no coincidence that Santa's Elves are kept at the North Pole, out of contact from the rest of the world. Even if the Elves could escape on the Underground Railroad (similar goal: Canada), they would not be able to survive the journey. This is by design. Santa has successfully isolated the Elves from outside society in an effort to keep them subjugated. 

Traditionally, we sing the popular holiday song "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" in a joyful manner. Perhaps a remix is necessary to highlight the dark warnings held within the song:

O! You better watch out
You better not cry
You better not pout
I'm telling you why:
Santa Claus is coming to town!

He's making a list
He's checking it twice
He's gonna find out
Who's naughty and nice

He sees you when you're sleeping
He knows when you're awake
He knows if you've been bad or good
So be good, for goodness' sake!



This is a pattern of fear and intimidation. If this is how we are told to fear Santa Claus' inescapable power, how must his Elves feel? Santa's Elves are not indentured servants, as there is no time period after which their servitude ends. Santa Claus has violated the rights of his Elves by keeping them on his plantation for the duration of their - and their children's - lives. He has isolated the Elves and limited their educational opportunities in an effort to preserve his own way of life: a hero who gets all the credit for someone else's work. 

Sunday, November 11, 2018

In Memory of Henry Gunther

Today is a federal holiday in honor of Armistice Day, now Veterans Day. At 11am on November 11, 1918 the Armistice took place to end The War That Ended All Wars. It was called that because it was so God-awful that everyone thought no one would ever want to go to war again. And they were right! For about 20 years no one wanted to go to war, mainly Neville Chamberlain, whose appeasement of Hitler was a direct extension of trying to avoid a Second World War.

Anyway, at precisely 11am on November 11, 1918 the guns that had roared for four years were silenced. And it was a dramatic silence. Regard:
Some, though, were trying to get a last chance at valor. Enter Henry Nicholas John Gunther. If you can't trust a man with two first names, how are you supposed to react to a man with four first names? That's neither here nor there.

Henry Gunther was born to children of German immigrants on June 6, 1895 in Baltimore. He was raised in Highlandtown, a predominantly Catholic German neighborhood east of the city in existence since 1866.

Because he was of German descent, Gunther did not immediately enlist in the Army when Wilson declared war in April 1917. He was a bank bookkeeper and had recently gotten engaged. Growing anti-German sentiment impacted Gunther's family. Henry Gunther's great-nephew, Joseph Long, described a whisper campaign:
We were told growing up that the local pharmacist accused my grandmother of being a German spy. The police took her in, but she was later released. It was a pretty tense time. 

Five months later Gunther was drafted into the 313th Infantry Regiment, part of the 79th Infantry Division which saw major action in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive where the division earned the name of the "Cross of Lorraine" in honor of their defense of France in the latter stages of 1918.

Gunther wasn't enjoying himself. He wrote in a letter to his mother just how bad the conditions were on the front. As if that wasn't a terrible enough crime, Gunther also advised a friend to do anything he could to avoid getting drafted. Two penalties on one play - tough one.

See, at the outset of WW1 (for the Americans, the rest of Europe had been at war since 1914), Wilson said in the War Message to Congress that "war would require a redefinition of national loyalty." Wilson further explained that there were "millions of men and women of German birth and native sympathy who live amongst us. If there should be disloyalty, it will be dealt with a firm hand of repression."

Congress passed the Espionage (1917) and Sedition (1918) Acts.

The Espionage Act allowed postal officials to ban newspapers and magazines and to go through letters searching for dissenting opinions. The Sedition Act made it a federal offense to use "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the government, military, or the flag.

Bad time for Henry Gunther, precisely the type of person Wilson singled out in his War Address, to write his letter. He got demoted from sergeant to private.

Fast forward to November 11, 1918. The ceasefire was signed at 5:10am and scheduled to take effect at 11am. In the almost-six hours between the signing of the ceasefire and the actual ceasefire, historian Joseph Persico estimates that more than 10,000 casualties as the military leadership tried to get their last swipes in at the enemy.

Gunther's regiment, stationed at Ville-devant-Chaumont, between Verdun and Damvillers, was made aware of the ceasefire at 10:30am. They were held in place by a German machine gun nest. Knowing the war was but minutes away from ending, Gunther decided to try and get his rank back.

Henry Gunther picked up his rifle and charged the machine gun nest through thick fog. His fellow troops yelled for him to stop. The German machine gunners tried to wave him away. Gunther kept running with a fixed bayonet. Why?

The Baltimore Sun's James Cain talked to Gunther's buddies:
According to his comrades, Gunther brooded a great deal over his reduction in rank, and became obsessed with a determination to make good before his officers and fellow soldiers. Particularly he was worried because he thought himself suspected of being a German sympathizer. The regiment went into action a few days after he was reduced (demoted) and from the start he displayed the most unusual willingness to expose himself to all sorts of risks.

Cain:
Gunther still must have been fired by a desire to demonstrate, even at the last minute, that he was courageous and all-American. When the Germans saw him coming they waved at him and called out, in such broken English as they could, to go back, that the war was over. He paid no heed to them, however, and kept on firing a shot or two...After several vain efforts to make him turn back, the Germans turned their machine gun on him. 

Henry Gunther's time of death: November 11, 1918. 10:59am. One minute before the ceasefire.

But Gunther's plan worked. He was posthumously returned to the rank of Sergeant. He was awarded a Divisional Citation for Gallantry in Action as well as the Distinguished Service Cross. VFW Post 1858 in East Baltimore (which no longer exists) was named after Henry Gunther. But was it necessary? Is it better to die in a literal last-minute charge to save your integrity, or survive and face scrutiny upon your return?

More Americans were killed on the morning of Armistice Day than were killed on D-Day. Baltimore Sun reporter Dan Rodricks has the great question:
Today, looking back through the lens of history, we might see Gunther's death differently - as foolish, unnecessary, ironic, like the 'Great War' itself. 


Wednesday, June 13, 2018

Reed Smoot, Willis Hawley, Retaliatory Tariffs, and 1930

It is generally regarded as fact that there were four MAIN causes of World War I. Handily, they spell out "main:"

Militarism
Alliances
Imperialism
Nationalism

As the world escaped the War To End All Wars (for about 20 years), the United States grew to be one of the more dominant - if not the world's most dominant - economies of the world. Post-War giddiness gave way to the Roaring '20s, a stretch of unbridled economic advancement that, in a lot of ways, was fake. More and more Americans were investing in the stock market, which just kept going up. Regard, the Dow Jones as of September of the respective year:

1921: 1017.65
1922: 1465.83
1923: 1281.46
1924: 1511.50
1925: 2203.23 (October value - September 1925 wasn't available for some reason)
1926: 2264.81
1927: 2616.73 (again, October)
1928: 3437.74
1929: 4973.84

With the exception of a minor blip in 1923 the Dow Jones increased from September-to-September of every year. As Herbert Hoover accepted the Republican nomination for the presidency during the campaign in August 1928, he famously (and short-sightedly) declared:
Unemployment in the sense of distress is widely disappearing...We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poor-house is vanishing from among us. We have not yet reached the goal, but given a change to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, and we shall soon with the help of God be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.

Cool prediction, Herb. Hoover's election over New York Governor Al Smith (who suffered politically from being Catholic, being anti-Prohibition, and his connections to Tammany Hall) in 1928 accelerated the growth of the stock market.

As more of the United States plugged in, a new Industrial Revolution occurred. But things weren't all aces. As this history professor describes, the October 1929 stock market crash and the resulting Great Depression was a perfect storm of economic calamities. Among them:

-The Immigration Act of 1924 put a quota on the number of immigrants allowed into the United States. The unintended result was that immigrants tend to need a place to live once they arrive, and once that market slowed to a trickle, it created a housing bubble. That bubble burst in Florida in 1925 with the Florida Land Boom, foreshadowing a growing economic crisis. Construction slowed in 1928.
-Goods were too durable. You didn't need to buy a radio every year if the radio never broke. Same with your car, vacuum cleaner, iron, etc. This slowed down purchasing in America.
-Wages for workers rose, but not as quickly as productivity, so the demand wasn't meeting the output of the goods.
-What goods most Americans did buy was on credit. Installment plans, which had been around for almost 100 years by that point, were decidedly becoming A Thing. This included investment in the stock market, a process known as buying on margin.

Buying on margin meant that Americans were buying stock with borrowed money. As long as the price of the stock increased (and it had for much of the previous decade heading into that fateful October 1929), then you could sell and cover your loan. But if the bottom dropped out of the stock market, not only did you lose your investment but you also had to pay the money you no longer had back to the bank. And then that's exactly what happened. The price of the stock wasn't equal to the actual value of the stock - their P/E (price-to-earnings) ratio was out of whack. And we haven't even gotten into what happens when the stock is manipulated - buy enough stock to raise the price, short it, and then buy it back after it falls in order to make money at every stage of the manipulation.

But that's not why we're here. We're here to talk about tariffs, which are simply taxes on imported goods. A protective tariff is one in which you drive up the price of foreign goods, which generally makes the buyer go with the cheaper, home-made option. Why by an avocado from Mexico for $1.25 when you can buy one from California for $1? This is where there is overlap.

Whenever there's some sort of economic downturn, the rallying cry is to Buy American! Spend money on American goods and it will help the American economy. Everybody wins, right? Enter Reed Smoot (R-Utah) and Willis Hawley (R-Oregon).

Reed Smoot had an interesting political history, winning Utah's senate seat in 1903. However, given that Smoot was an Apostle in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Utah's history with Mormonism and the condition that the Mormon Church renounce the practice of polygamy as a criteria for Utah's admittance to the Union. The result was the 1890 Manifesto, a document that officially "advised against" Mormons practicing polygamy. Utah was admitted as the 45th state in the Union. Smoot was not the first Mormon to be elected to Congress - that distinction belongs to B.H. Roberts, elected to the House of Representatives in 1898. The House of Representatives refused to seat Roberts on account of his three wives. Smoot had only one wife, but that didn't stop the Senate from debating - for four years - Smoot's viability. The Salt Lake Tribune reported that Mormon leaders (one of which Smoot certainly was) secretly approved of polygamy following the adoption of the 1890 Manifesto. Senators opposed to Smoot's seating argued that Smoot could not take the oath of office if he subscribed to a religion that approved of breaking the law. Finally, in 1907, Smoot prevailed. Though the majority of the investigative committee recommended that Smoot be expelled, there weren't enough of the 2/3 majority required to actually get rid of Smoot. Re-elected in 1908, Smoot stayed in the Senate he was defeated in the 1932 election, when a Democratic wave rebelled against the Republicans - whom the public felt hadn't done enough to stop, or at least slow, the Great Depression.

Willis Hawley had a much less dramatic political history than his partner in legislative history. He was born in Oregon in 1864 and was the president of Willamette University from 1891-1902 and was a professor of history and economics from 1891-1907, a position he resigned when he was elected to the House of Representatives. Hawley was elected every two years until the Democratic wave got him, too.

Anyhow, Smoot became Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee in 1923. Hawley was the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee from 1927-1931. Together they would come up with a plan that almost nobody who knew anything about politics approved of, yet was passed anyway.

A drought hit the Plains in the late 1920s (which would peak in the Dust Bowl). In an effort to cover their losses, farmers over-extended themselves to plant more crops, which meant buying equipment to plant them. There had been a robust worldwide market for American wheat, particularly in European countries which had been jacked up during World War I. By the end of the 1920s those countries started to get back on their feet, decreasing the demand for American crops. Still they planted, trying to cover their losses. This was of course made worse by the stock market crash, in which bank runs led to bank closures. Even if you hadn't invested a penny in the stock market, you could get wiped out.

In the late 1910s/early 1920s the "Protectionists" (Republicans who wanted to, well, protect the American economy at all costs) argued that the United States' economy had grown because Europe wasn't exporting anything and had to import all their goods from...somewhere, and it just happened to be the United States. With the War over, exports would increase and imports would naturally decrease. Thus, the Protectionists argued, Congress - because Congress could make this call back then - should raise the tariffs on imported goods. Protectionism worked hand-in-hand with Isolationism as the Republicans voted against joining the League of Nations.

Democrats were against a protective tariff. That little recession in the early 1920s? Protectionists argued that it would end with higher tariffs by protecting American factories and workers. Thus the Fordney-McCumber Tariff was passed in 1923, which raised the average tariff on taxable imports to 38.5%. That tariff really marked the end of prosperity for the American farmer. As a result, foreign nations issued their own retaliatory tariffs, placing higher duties on American exports. The League of Nations got involved in an effort to draw a truce between the United States (who was not a member of the League of Nations) and the rest of the world, but no agreement could be achieved. Both domestic and international economies were weakened.

Despite campaigning through 1928 to revise the tariff, President Herbert Hoover kept on keeping on. Smoot and Hawley went to work. Hawley's version in the House raised tariff rates on 845 imported goods and cut the rates on 82. By the time Smoot got done with it in the Senate, it had increased tariff rates on an additional 177 and cut rates on 254. The final bill from the Senate, after compromising with the House, raised tariff rates on 890 dutiable imports. It was deeply unpopular.

Senator Robert LaFollette (R-Wisconsin) was a weird guy. He was a Republican isolationist who supported FDR's New Deal and formed the new Progressive Party advocating for workers' rights and would be a co-founder of the America First Committee. Still, the isolationist LaFollette railed against the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, calling it:
The product of a series of deals, conceived in secret, but executed in public with a brazen effrontery that is without parallel in the annals of the Senate. 

Plot twist: It wasn't unparalleled in the annals of the Senate (see: Abominations, Tariff of) but that's neither here nor there.

Check the New York Times from May 1930:


1,028 economists from across the country signed a petition asking Hoover to veto the bill, which had only passed 44-42 in the Senate, nowhere near the votes needed to override Hoover's veto. Thomas Lamont, a partner at J.P. Morgan, related that he "almost went down on my knees to beg Herbert Hoover to veto the asinine Hawley-Smoot Tariff. That Act intensified nationalism all over the world." Henry Ford told Hoover that the tariff was "an economic stupidity." About sixty nations sent formal protests to Hoover and the government begging him not to sign it.

Hoover signed it anyway, though in private he called it "vicious, extortionate, and obnoxious." Immediately the New York Stock Exchange lost $1 billion in value - the second crash in eight months. By making it more difficult for foreign nations (mainly Europe) to sell their goods to the United States, it made it harder for them, specifically Germany, to repay their war reparations. Pretty much everyone in American government was betting on the punished countries remaining passive. They didn't.

Spain enacted the Wais Tariff a month after the Smoot-Hawley Tariff was signed, which raised the tariff on American automobiles in Spain. Three months after Hoover signed the Tariff, Canada - long an extensive trading partner with the United States - raised tariffs on textiles, agricultural tools, electrical apparatuses, meat, gasoline, shoes, jewelry, and fertilizer. In 1932 Great Britain signed the Ottawa Agreements which placed high tariffs on American goods.

These retaliatory tariffs were part of a tactic known as the Beggar-Thy-Neighbor policy, in which countries attempt to address its own economic problems by worsening the economic issues in other countries. U.S. exports in 1929 stood at about $7 billion. By the end of 1932 U.S. exports were about $2.4 billion. With the U.S. engaging aggressively in protectionist and isolationist economic policies, the rest of the world followed suit, deepening the economic crisis. World trade fell by about two-thirds from 1929 to 1934.

Economists generally agree that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff did not cause the Great Depression - that was undertaken by the aforementioned perfect storm of factors, of which the Fordney-McCumber Tariff was one. But I think we can safely assume that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff did not prop up American industry or agriculture and, by extension, worsened European economies, which were already in bad shape.

Germany's exports (which they would use to repay their WW1 debt) fell by 20% from 1930 to 1931. So in 1933, after years of depression and hyper-inflation that saw Germany's currency become "utterly worthless,"

To be fair, it's not like the Smoot-Hawley Tariff created Germany's economic problems. It just deepened them and pushed Germany to a breaking point. Germany's unemployment in the early 1930s was 30%. Economic uncertainty - of which there was plenty in Germany in the early 1930s - meant that there wasn't a majority party in the Reichstag. The National Socialist German Workers' Party used the crisis to their advantage and allied with other right-leaning parties to build a coalition that eventually led President Paul von Hindenburg to name Adolf Hitler chancellor in an effort to keep the Communists out of power. When the Reichstag burned down, Hitler blamed the Communists and used that to consolidate his power over Germany. Again, is the Smoot-Hawley Tariff responsible? Not directly, but it did help create an economic climate that led to Hitler's ascension to power. Like Thomas Lamont said, the Tariff intensified nationalism around the world.

So when President Trump says that "Trade wars aren't so bad," he might want to ask a historian or an economist. Already we're seeing reaction to the (since suspended) rise in tariffs on aluminum and steel on Canada, Mexico, and Europe. China has announced tariff increases on American pork, wine, and nuts. Mexico has delivered the most pointed tariff rates against the Trump Administration, raising tariffs on goods exported from Republican leaders' home bases - steel from Indiana (VP Mike Pence) and bourbon from Kentucky (Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell). Speaker of the House of Representatives Paul Ryan's home state of Wisconsin exports 90% of its cheese outside of the United States, exports which have recently been targeted for tariff increases by Canada and Mexico, and by tariff increases on Harley-Davidson motorcycles, also headquartered in Wisconsin.

A Tariff War which leads to retaliation against the United States, could have broader consequences than the economic impact of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. Back in 1920, exports accounted for 5% of the U.S.'s Gross Domestic Product. Today's exports account for about 13% of our GDP. Again, was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff responsible for the Great Depression and World War II? Not directly. There were plenty of reasons that had to come together for both to occur. Still, we currently see this administration embracing protectionism and isolationism, when most economists explain that it doesn't really work. Ultimately the Smoot-Hawley Tariff was an unnecessary flame, the match that over a thousand economists begged not be struck, near the tinderbox of a rough generation in world history.

Tuesday, May 29, 2018

The origins of "America First"

In between shouts of "But her emails!" and "Lock her up!" the Republican nominee for president in the 2016 election often used a term - "America First" -  to highlight his goal of "Making America Great Again."

It appears as though his first reference to the not-apparently-isolationist stance was to the New York Times in March 2016:
I'm not isolationist, but I am 'America First.' So I like the expression. I'm 'America First.'

Or in a tweet (there's always a tweet):
In his inaugural address, President Trump:
We assembled here today are issuing a new decree to be heard in every city, in every foreign capital, and in every hall of power. From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it's going to be only America first, America first.

By December 2017 "America First" became Trump's national security strategy, described by a "senior administration official" as having four main pillars:

a) Protecting the homeland and way of life
b) Promoting American prosperity
c) Demonstrating peace through strength (the subject of a future post on this here web site)
d) Advancing American influence in an ever-competitive world.

The official said the "principled realism takes a clear-eyed view of the threats we face," and that "the strategy promotes a world that is free, with sovereign nations and diverse cultures with their own aspirations, respecting the rights of those nations to do so but also finding ways to promote American values."

I'm not here to debate the validity of such a strategy or any underlying motives. I am here, however, to highlight the choice of the name of the strategy "America First."

You can look back to a congressional hearing in 1921, in which an "Imperial Proclamation" was submitted as evidence regarding the Ku Klux Klan:
[The Klan] stands for America first - first in thought, first in affections, and first in the galaxy of nations. The Stars and Stripes forever above all other and every kind of government in the whole world.

That said, Woodrow Wilson used the slogan as he was running for re-election in 1916, noting that by putting "America first" he had kept the United States out of World War I - a promise which would last less than a year.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and World War II had a complicated early history, as the war erupted as the United States was still in the midst of the Great Depression. As Spain experienced a civil war starting in 1936, the United States pursued a policy of neutrality, even as fascism rose across Europe. Still, FDR and Congress passed the Neutrality Act of 1937, but that included a concession to FDR that became known as Cash-and-Carry. Great Britain and France could buy war materials from the United States provided they (a) paid cash up front and (b) brought their own ships to transport them back to their respective countries. It was set to expire in 1939.

Germany occupied Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. Still, unemployment in 1939 was 17%. The U.S.' GDP shrunk by 3.3% in 1938. It wasn't a great time, financially, to go to war. Especially a war that, at the time, didn't really impact the United States.

The America First Committee has its origins on September 4, 1940 - one year and three days after Hitler invaded Poland - founded at Yale University by R. Douglas Stuart. His grandfather was the founder of Quaker Oats. Stuart was a 1937 Princeton graduate (majoring in politics) and was enrolled at Yale Law School when he founded the committee, which was opposed to American intervention in World War II.

At its peak, membership in the America First Committee numbered 800,000. Prominent members included Gerald Ford, Sargeant Shriver (husband of Eunice Kennedy Shriver - yeah, those Kennedys), future Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart, and Sears, Roebuck, & Co. chairman Robert E. Wood. Members of the right and the left joined. Counted in their numbers were also author Sinclair Lewis, poet e.e. cummings, Walt Disney, Frank Lloyd Wright, socialist Norman Thomas, New York Daily News publisher Joseph Medill Patterson and his cousin, conservative Robert R. McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune. 

They asked aviation icon Charles Lindbergh, the first man to complete a trans-Atlantic solo flight, in 1927, to be their spokesman. Lindbergh was problematic. At a September 1941 rally, Lindbergh said:
No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution the Jewish race suffered in Germany...the Jews are one of the principle forces attempting to lead the U.S. into the war. The Jews' greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.

When people of course raised their eyebrows at the language Lindbergh utilized, he clarified:
I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war. 

Well. Lindbergh had spent 1937 in Germany evaluating German aircraft. In 1938 Lindbergh was presented with the Commander Cross of the Order of the German Eagle by Herman Goring, commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe and the creator of the Gestapo. Weeks after the dinner, in Germany, Kristallnacht happened. When Lindbergh was pressured to return the honor, he wrote:
It seems to me that the returning of decorations, which were given in times of peace and as a gesture of friendship, can have no constructive effect. If I were to return the German medal, it seems to me that it would be an unnecessary insult. Even if war develops between us, I can see no gain in indulging in a spitting contest before that war begins.

He wasn't giving that German medal back.

Lucky Lindy gave speeches, filled to capacity, in New York's Madison Square Garden and Chicago's Soldier Field. Hey look at this picture from Madison Square Garden in 1939 (to clarify, this isn't an America First rally. It's just a gathering of American Nazis in New York City):


To be fair, America First did kick out Henry Ford (you're up soon here, Ford) and Father Charles Coughlin (yep, you too) for anti-Semitism. Avery Brundage, who was the former U.S. Olympic Committee chairman and prevented two Jewish runners from competing in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, got booted, as well. But why even ask Lindbergh to be your spokesman?

The New York Herald-Tribune's Dorothy Thompson wrote of Lindbergh:
I am absolutely certain Lindbergh is pro-Nazi. I am absolutely certain that Lindbergh foresees a new party along Nazi lines.

Cash-and-Carry was replaced by the Lend-Lease Act in October 1941, which allowed FDR to lend or, wait for it, lease war materials to Great Britain and France, rather than forcing them to pay cash up front. Lindbergh went before Congress to oppose it, and instead suggested negotiating a neutrality agreement with Germany, which led FDR to label Lindbergh as a "defeatist and appeaser" (New York Times, April 29, 1941). Lindbergh resigned his U.S. Army commission in response.

In "Aviation, Geography, and Race" Lindbergh wrote:
Our civilization depends on peace among Western nations, and therefore on united strength, for Peace is a virgin who dare not show her face without Strength, her father, for protection. We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races.

The America First Committee voted to dissolve a few days after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, but the America First slogan continued to live on - particularly in 1992 when Pat Buchanan used the slogan in the first of his three presidential campaigns. Buchanan spoke of the America First Committee to NPR after President Trump was elected:
To me, it is an honorable group of American patriots who wanted to keep us out of the insane World War II where the British and German - all of them were killing one another - as we had mistakenly gotten into World War I and gotten all those Americans killed so that the European empires could expand. 

My question, I guess, is, given the historical context of the term, why use "America First" at all?

Tuesday, May 8, 2018

John Peter Zenger and being guilty but not responsible

Wanna hear about the origins of part of the 1st Amendment: freedom of the press? Let's start in 1710 Germany. Because why not?

John Peter Zenger was born in Impflingen, a small town (pop. 890) in southwestern Germany about 70 miles northeast of Stuttgart. The Zengers immigrated to New York in 1710.

The winter of 1708-1709 was brutal. The Rhine froze solid for five weeks. Not only did the grapevines die, but cattle froze, as well. Firewood wouldn't burn in open air, birds froze in mid-air, your spit would freeze before it hit the ground. That would do it for me, too.

Drawn by the (ultimately false) rumors that Queen Anne would give them free passage overseas and land in America, thousands of Germans went to London. Initial attempts to resettle the "Poor Palatines" ("poor" because of how terrible they looked and "Palatines" because they came from an area controlled by Elector Palatine) failed, due to the sheer number of these refugees and the cost of putting them up.

In an effort to clear the refugee camps, the Poor Palatines got sent mainly to New York, where many settled along the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers (note Palatine Bridge, NY, off of I-90, across the Mohawk River from Canajoharie - a town which gave me considerable problems in pronunciation when we lived up that way). They had to work off the expense of their passage.

The governor of New York - Robert Hunter - agreed to provide apprenticeships to all Poor Palatine children. John Peter Zenger got himself bound to William Bradford, the first printer in New York. Bradford published the first book in New York's history but had a history of causing problems with the upper class in his newspaper. Bradford's "Appeal to the People" in 1691 caused such an uproar with "flagrantly libelous and seditious" tracts that his printing press, type, and all publications were confiscated. He was jailed and placed on trial, but the jury couldn't come to an agreement on the verdict and Bradford was freed. Zenger spent eight years with Bradford.

He married his first wife in Philadelphia in 1719, but she passed away soon after. On August 24, 1722 he married Anna Catharina Maul in Manhattan. Anna had come to New York as part of the same migration group as Zenger. She's important to the story. After a brief partnership with Bradford in 1725, Zenger opened his own printing business in New York which in 1730 had a total colonial population of less than 50,000. Zenger mainly printed books in Dutch until 1732, when William Cosby became New York's new governor.

Cosby was a jerk who ruled his colony as a tyrant. His goal as governor was self-enrichmentIn a salary dispute with his interim predecessor Rip Van Dam, Cosby took Van Dam to court and demanded the case proceed through "equity jurisdiction," which meant that there wouldn't be a jury. Colonists hated these trials, because the British could carry out justice without the colonial legislature's consent. It was tyranny, said the colonists.

Cosby won his case against Van Dam, but Chief Justice Lewis Morris dissented and wrote the minority opinion in Cosby vs. Van Dam. Van Dam was represented by William Smith and Lewis Alexander. Cosby demanded Morris' written opinion and Morris obliged, but not before having it published with a letter which, in part, read:

If judges are to be intimidates so as not to dare to give any opinion, but what is pleasing to the Governor, and agreeable to his private views, the people of this province who are very much concerned both with respect to their lives and fortunes in the freedom and independency of those who are to judge them, may possible not think themselves so secure in either of them as the laws of his Majesty intended they should be.

It was an 18th century mic drop.

Cosby removed Morris from office, dismissed Van Dam, and disbarred lawyer William Smith.

The only newspaper in New York was the New York Gazette, and it was a Cosby newspaper published by - wait for it - William Bradford, Zenger's mentor and former partner, for however brief a time. On November 5, 1733 Lewis Morris, William Smith, and Lewis Alexander founded the New-York Weekly Journal - America's first independent political newspaper - with Alexander handling most of the editorials which, wouldn't you know, were critical of Cosby. Zenger was the publisher.

The articles were written anonymously. Cosby let it go for a couple of months until James DeLancey, the man who replaced Lewis Morris as Chief Justice, convened a 19-member Grand Jury to accuse the Weekly Journal of breaking the law of seditious libel in New York. They declined to indict. He tried again nine months later, to the same result. Cosby was furious. Three weeks after the second attempt at an indictment failed, Cosby ordered the public hangman to ceremonially burn copies of the newspaper and offered a 50-pound reward for the names of the authors. The hangman, who was elected by the Colonists, refused. Zenger wasn't naming names, and no one came forward to identify the authors.

Cosby had Zenger arrested for printing seditious libels on November 17, 1734. Cosby was able to do so without a Grand Jury indictment by proceeding against Zenger by "an information," a highly unpopular legal procedure among the Colonists. The Supreme Court of Judicature - headed by Cosby crony DeLancey - issued a warrant for Zenger's arrest and took him to jail, in the Old City Hall's attic. In the bench warrant it was alleged that Zenger should be tried

For printing and publishing several seditious libels dispersed throughout his journals or newspapers...as having in them many things tending to raise factions and tumults among the people of this Province, inflaming their minds with contempt of His Majesty's government, and greatly disturbing the peace thereof.

With Zenger in jail, Alexander continued to write articles. Zenger's wife, Anna, continued to print the Weekly Journal - the first female newspaper publisher in American history. The Weekly Journal only missed one regular issue while Zenger was in jail. This actually helped build support for Zenger's case.

Zenger was represented by Alexander and Smith. DeLancey set bail at £400 - a bail that far outweighed the "crime," and was far richer than Zenger could afford. Zenger sat in jail until his trial. At Zenger's arraignment, Lewis and Alexander argued that the entire tribunal was invalid, since Lewis' removal as Chief Justice was improper and, as such, DeLancey's appointment was invalid. The court, obviously, refused to acknowledge this. DeLancey exclaimed, "You have brought it to that point that either we must go from the bench or you from the bar!"

Lewis and Alexander refused to withdraw their argument and on April 16, 1735 were barred from arguing before the Supreme Court of Judicature. Zenger had no legal representation. He asked the court to appoint an attorney for him and a young Cosby fan, John Chambers, was assigned by the Court. It went better for Zenger than you would expect.

The court was adjourned until August 1735 to let Chambers get to work, and it bought time for Lewis and Alexander to get better representation. Chambers entered a "Not Guilty" plea on grounds that, if what Zenger was printing was libel, then the Attorney General Richard Bradley must prove that it was libel, and that the Attorney General would not be able to do so. Basically, Zenger didn't have to prove that the Weekly Journal *wasn't* libelous. The Attorney General had to prove that the Weekly Journal *was* libelous.

Chambers' work in challenging the jury pool greatly helped Zenger. Because when Andrew Hamilton - NOT to be confused with Alexander Hamilton the bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman - rose on Zenger's behalf, he immediately confirmed Attorney General Bradley's case against Zenger by straight up admitting that Zenger was, in fact, the publisher of the Weekly Journal.

BUT!

Hamilton followed that argument up by saying that, basically, it can't be libel if the accusations are true.

Hamilton:
The question before the Court and you, Gentlemen of the jury, is not of small or private concern. It is not the cause of one poor printer, nor of New York alone, which you are now trying. No! It may in its consequence affect every free man that lives under a British government on the main of America. It is the best cause. It is the cause of liberty. 

DeLancey immediately told the jury to focus: the Weekly Journal was just dripping with libel. That makes Zenger guilty of libel.

The jury didn't buy it. After a "brief deliberation," - one source says it took less than ten minutes - the jury found Zenger "Not Guilty." Well  of course, he was guilty of publishing attacks on Cosby but, because, those attacks were true, he's not technically guilty.

A dinner was thrown at the Black Horse Tavern in New York City in honor of Andrew Hamilton. He left to return to Philadelphia to a salute of cannons and was given the Freedom of the City.

As The Historical Society of the New York Courts noted the Zenger case didn't establish legal precedent in the freedom of the press. But it did influence "how people thought about these subjects and led, many decades later, to the protections embodied in the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Sedition Act of 1798."

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John Chambers went on to enjoy an esteemed and lucrative career in the law. He married into the powerful and wealthy Van Cortlandt family and was the uncle and godfather of the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Jay.

Lewis Morris would later become governor of New Jersey. He was the grandfather of signer of the Declaration of Independence Lewis Morris, New York Chief Justice Richard Morris, New Jersey Chief Justice Robert Morris, and Founding Father and Senator Gouverneur Morris.

John Peter Zenger was released from jail the day after his Not Guilty verdict, where he published the Weekly Journal until his death in 1746 - he was 49 years old. Anna continued the publishing until Zenger's oldest son, John, took over in December 1748. The Weekly Journal ceased publication in 1751.

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Interesting source:

The Narrative of the Case and Tryal of John Peter Zenger, Printer of the New-York Weekly Journal.

Tuesday, May 1, 2018

A not-terribly-short history of the Lodges and the Kennedys


I’ve read my fair share (and other people’s fair shares, as well) of John Grisham novels. When I was in middle school/high school I wanted to be a writer…of some sort. Novels, sports, non-fiction. I have 500 pages of notes on a book about Andrew Jackson’s 1833 tour of New England that at some point I’ll get around to writing. But one novel I read that stood out to me was The Pelican Brief. It was a book about a young legal assistant who wrote a theory about who was behind the assassination of two Supreme Court justices and ended up being right and getting targeted by killers. Denzel came to help her. The book is way better than the movie, as most John Grisham novels and most books, to be honest, are.

What follows is a simple theory based on some reading I did for my AP US History class on JFK’s assassination and the Conspiracy Day we had last week in which my students were presented with six different theories as to who killed JFK. They had to evaluate the evidence presented for what supported the theory, and what undermined it. It was great fun. There was one theory that was not presented in the evidence, which I would like to present now. Again (are you listening, CIA?) this is simply a thought exercise and please don’t kill me.
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We need to start in 1919.

When Democratic president Woodrow Wilson went to Paris to negotiate the Treaty of Versailles, the Pause button between The War To End All Wars and World War II, he did not take anyone with him. This was a slap in the face to his own party and to the Republican Party, who expected a bone to be thrown their way in a matter of such worldwide importance.

Chief among those upset was Henry Cabot Lodge, the heir to a shipping fortune, descendant of two Boston institutions: the Cabots and the Lodges.

Wait. When I say “institutions,” we need to back up. Way up. There’s context, I promise.

The Cabots were a Massachusetts institution and, as such, were an American institution. Joseph Cabot was born in Salem in 1720 and ran opium, rum, and slaves, becoming exceedingly wealthy through shipping, as most prominent Massachusetts families did. His son, George (born in 1752), attended Harvard for two years before dropping out to go to sea. George was the captain of his own ship by age 21. The Cabots soon became synonymous with American politics. George, the Harvard dropout, was a member of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress in 1775 at Age 23. Two years later he was a delegate to the state constitutional convention. In 1787 he was a delegate to the state convention that ratified the Constitution. He was a senator from Massachusetts from 1791 to 1796, supported Alexander Hamilton and became a director of Hamilton’s 1st Bank of the United States.

In a rare political misstep, Cabot – an opponent of the Democratic-Republican Jefferson and Madison administrations – was the president of the Hartford Convention, an 1814 meeting of Federalists that didn’t like how the War of 1812 was going and openly discussed reforming the Constitution but stopped just short of suggesting that New England secede from the Union. During the convention Andrew Jackson led a group of rednecks, slaves, and Native Americans into a stunning upset of Great Britain at New Orleans. England pursued peace and the Hartford Convention looked like a bunch of traitors. It essentially ended the Federalist Party.

The Lodges were a Boston Brahmin family, a first family of Boston: Harvard-educated with a Beacon Hill address. According to Boston Brahmin code, you should only be mentioned in the newspaper when you’re born, married, and dead. To qualify as a First Family, according to Oliver Wendell Holmes, you needed “four or more generations of gentlemen and gentlewomen; among them a member of his Majesty’s Council for the Provinces, a Governor or so, one of two Doctors of Divinity, or a member of Congress not later than the time of long boots with tassels.” Both the Cabots and the Lodges fit the criteria.

At a 1910 alumni dinner at Holy Cross, a toast was given:

Here’s to dear old Boston/
The home of the bean and the cod/
Where Lowells speak only to Cabots/
And Cabots speak only to God

Here comes Henry Cabot Lodge, the son of John Ellerton Lodge and Anna Cabot and 1871 graduate of Harvard – the same year he married Anna Cabot Mills Davis, 14 years his junior and a union of two of Boston’s most illustrious families. He earned Harvard’s first Ph.D. degree in political science in 1876, edited the North American Review with Henry Adams, and joined the faculty at Harvard. Lodge served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1880-1881 and the United States House of Representatives from 1887-1893. In 1893 Lodge won the election to become one of Massachusetts’ senators, a position he would hold until his death in 1924.

As WGBH described him, Lodge was a hardcore Republican who supported “the gold standard, high protective tariffs, an aggressive approach to global politics, and a Navy large enough to back it up.”
Lodge didn’t like immigrants, especially the Irish. The Immigration Restriction League was founded by Brahmins in 1894 at the height of the Nativism trend in the United States. Lodge sponsored a bill in Congress that would require immigrants to pass a literacy test before gaining entry to the United States. Lodge showed his hand when (bear with me) thanks to a storm that bought the colonists enough time to reinforce their positions, the British voluntarily evacuated Boston on March 17, 1776. Of course this is the day St. Patrick died and many Bostonians didn’t see this as a coincidence. Lodge – not exactly anxious to honor an Irishman – helped rebrand March 17 as Evacuation Day.

Theodore Roosevelt’s best friend and chief political adviser was Henry Cabot Lodge. They had met Harvard’s Porcellian Club – the oldest, founded in 1791, and most prestigious “final club.” That the Porcellian Club refused admission to Franklin Delano Roosevelt caused FDR to later declare the rejection as “the greatest disappointment” of his life. A former member said of the Porcellian Club, “If you don’t make your first million by 30, they give it to you.” Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss – the Facebook twins – were members. Lodge, who had won a Massachusetts Senate seat in 1891, worked to get Teddy Roosevelt a job in the government after William McKinley won the election of 1896. Lodge got Teddy a post as assistant secretary of the navy in 1897. They were both imperialists, agitating for intervention in Cuba prior to the Spanish-American War.

Henry Cabot Lodge was appointed an overseer of Harvard University from 1911 until his death in 1924. His son-in-law Augustus Peabody Gardner was the nephew of Jack Gardner II and Isabella Stewart Gardner, founder of the world-renowned museum that bears her name.

Woodrow Wilson won the 1912 presidential election, mainly thanks to Lodge’s BFF Roosevelt running as a (very successful) third-party candidate, representing the Bull Moose party – a reference to an “incident” in Milwaukee when John Flammang Schrank shot Roosevelt in the chest before a campaign speech. Roosevelt explained that he had just been shot, begged his supporters’ pardon, pulled the bloody manuscript of his speech out of his pocket, said “it takes more than that to kill a bull moose,” gave an hour-long speech and then went to the hospital. Roosevelt split the Republican vote with incumbent William Howard Taft. Wilson dominated the 1912 electoral vote 435 to 88, but was actually outgained in the popular vote by Roosevelt and Taft.

In 1916 Wilson was re-elected in 1916 under the slogan “He kept us out of war,” maintaining U.S. isolationism in the early stages of World War I. That same election season saw a major threat to the Lodge dynasty. John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald made a serious legitimate run at Lodge’s seat.
Honey Fitz was born to poor Irish immigrants in the North End of Boston in 1863, the middle of the Civil War. But he rose to attend Harvard Medical School for a year until his father died in 1885. Honey Fitz worked his way to the House of Representatives in 1894 and sponsored legislation that funded the T and the Cape Cod Canal, and also tried to overcome the predominant anti-immigrant stance. He convinced President Grover Cleveland to veto an anti-immigration bill introduced by Henry Cabot Lodge. Honey Fitz threw out the inaugural first pitch at the new Fenway Park. According to Gerard O’Neill’s “Rogues and Redeemers: When Politics was King in Irish Boston,” 


Lodge (to Honey Fitz): You are an impudent young man. Do you think the Jews and Italians have any right in this country?

Honey Fitz (to Lodge): As much as your father or mine. It was only a difference of a few ships.

Honey Fitz – it’s just such a wonderful nickname – took on Henry Cabot Lodge’s Senate seat in 1916. Honey Fitz won just one county: Suffolk County, whose seat is Boston. Lodge won the popular vote by about 33,000 votes, 51-45.

John F. Fitzgerald married his second cousin Mary Josephine Hannon. Their oldest child, Rose, would marry Joseph P. Kennedy. Honey Fitz was upset that their firstborn son, Joe Kennedy, Jr., wasn’t named after him. Yet, according to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, Honey Fitz told the press that his grandson would become the first Irish-Catholic president of the United States. Fitzgerald won a tight 1918 election for the House of Representatives but an investigation uncovered voter fraud – a Kennedy tradition – by Honey Fitz’s allies and overturned the election.

Wilson’s isolationism didn’t last. Wilson asked for, and received, a congressional declaration of war in 1917. In 1918 he went before Congress and gave the famous Fourteen Points speech, the last of which would establish “a general association of nations…affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.” The League of Nations was proposed, and it won Wilson the Nobel Prize for Peace.

Arguably already famous, Lodge is taught in US History/AP US History courses as the guy who defeated the League of Nations. Lodge – a war hawk – wanted Germany crushed by the Treaty of Versailles (as did France and Great Britain). There were three camps who reacted to the Treaty of Versailles: those who were all in favor, those who were 100% opposed, known as the Irreconcilables; and then there were the Reservationists, led by Lodge, who were opposed unless certain reservations they had were addressed. Lodge felt like the U.S. would give up too much power under the League of Nations, so Lodge wrote fourteen reservations to match Wilson’s fourteen points.

While Wilson was campaigning across the country to win approval for the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, he had a severe stroke. It paralyzed his left side and “caused significant brain damage.” He refused to resign and it “likely contributed to Wilson’s uncharacteristic failure to reach a compromise” with the Reservationists and Irreconcilables.

Peace treaties have to be approved by the Senate with a two-thirds majority. In 1919 this meant 56 of 84 senators had to be in favor. Lodge was not only the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he was the Senate Majority Leader. Wilson needed Lodge. The first version of the Treaty upon which the Senate voted included the 14 Lodge reservations. Wilson ordered his supporters to vote against it. Of course the Irreconcilables voted against it, too, and it failed by one vote. A second vote without Lodge’s reservations fell short by three votes because the “Cabot Republicans” and the Irreconcilables voted against it. A third version was voted upon in 1920 and included some of the Lodge Reservations. It, too, failed. That was it.

The Treaty of Versailles was not ratified by the United States and it took the Knox-Porter Resolution in 1921 to formally end World War I. Mississippi Representative Ross Collins said that “with the exception of the United States of America, all the nations that were at war with the Central Powers are now at peace with them. This country alone remains in a state of war…the people in all parts of our Nation are hungry for actual peace.”

Wilson died in Washington, D.C. in February 1924. Henry Cabot Lodge died of a stroke – the same culprit that got Wilson –  in Cambridge, Massachusetts nine months later.

Which brings us, finally, to the subject of the theory. Ten and a half months after the end of the Spanish-American War, Henry Cabot Lodge II was born to George Cabot – Henry Cabot Lodge’s son – and Mathilda Elizabeth Frelinghuysen (granddaughter of Senator Frederick T. Frelinghuysen).

Where Henry Cabot Lodge was a member of the Porcellian Club at Harvard, Lodge II – or “Cabot” or “Cab,” to distinguish himself from his titan grandfather - was a member of the Hasty Pudding and the Fox Club. Cab’s father George died of heart failure at 35 years old, when Cab was seven years old. George also served in the Spanish-American War and was also close to Teddy Roosevelt, who wrote a nice little introduction to George’s posthumous collection Poems and Dramas of George Cabot Lodge, published in 1911. That year Henry Adams – who worked with Henry Cabot Lodge on the North American Reviewpublished George’s biography. Cab’s grandfather, The Henry Cabot Lodge, raised him and oversaw Cab’s education. Cab graduated in just three years Cum Laude from Harvard in 1924.

Having written for the Boston Transcript and the New York Herald Tribune for the previous seven years, Cab published “The Cult of Weakness” in 1932, a collection of essays that echoed the tenets of Social Darwinism and called for “a return of government principles which will recognize the rights and welfare of the strong against the weak.” He was opposed to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and, despite this, won Massachusetts’ Senate seat over the extremely popular Democratic governor James M. Curley. He was the only Republican in the United States to steal a Democratic seat in 1936. The new junior senator was escorted down the aisle to take the oath of office by the senior senator, David I. Walsh, “the most successful Irish Catholic politician” in Massachusetts, who hated Curley. Cab was the seventh Lodge to serve in the Senate.

Re-elected in 1942, Cab became the first senator to resign his seat in order to go on active duty in the military since the Civil War after Eisenhower told Congress to choose between Congress and the war. He served in the Mediterranean and Europe, eventually becoming a Lieutenant Colonel before regaining his Senate seat over Walsh, whose “appeal had been diminished” when he was named as the senator who had frequented a male brothel in New York City which also happened to be a meeting-spot for German spies.” Cab won the election to become the junior senator from Massachusetts, since he had resigned his seat during World War II.

That was cool and all, but Cab gained national attention for the first time when he helped convince Dwight D. Eisenhower to run for the Republican nomination in 1952. Eisenhower would be tough on communism, having been the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force and having overseen the D-Day invasion. Eisenhower muscled out Robert A. Taft, eldest son of William Howard Taft (former rival of family friend Teddy Roosevelt), for the Republican nomination. Cab neglected his own re-election campaign to focus on Eisenhower’s presidential bid.

His opponent in the 1952 Massachusetts Senate race? John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Joe Kennedy, JFK’s father, “loaned” the Boston Post, a prominent Republican-leaning newspaper, $500,000 during the campaign. The newspaper endorsed JFK though publisher John Fox said the endorsement came before the loan. “[Fitzgerald] was very much concerned about young John being a candidate for public office,” said John F. Cahill, chair of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, in a 1967 interview.
Lodge was Massachusetts through and through, a personality that was described as cold and aloof. Lodge’s campaign aide in 1952, James Sullivan, said of Lodge, “He had a gracious manner, a certain remoteness…He wouldn’t put his arm around you and say, ‘Let’s go out for a beer,’ or something like that. No way.” Kennedy, however, “had that marvelous quality of making you feel that you were his special friend.”

Fletcher Knebel observed, “The Kennedys might be of Boston society; The Lodges were Boston society.”

There was at least one instance in which the campaign got personal, and it revolved around future Speaker of the House of Representatives Tip O’Neill. The way O’Neill told it in his book (and excerpted in the Chicago Tribune), the Kennedys had asked O’Neill – then running for national office for the first time himself – to deliver a speech that the Kennedy campaign had written. The speech showed up so late that Cab offered to switch places and speak first, then stayed to hear O’Neill. The speech “kicked the living hell out of Henry Cabot Lodge. I didn’t have time to edit it or make any changes…I was humiliated.” Lodge left halfway through the speech and told O’Neill’s wife, “You know, the Kennedys would never give a speech like that for him. And I would never say the things about Jack Kennedy that he’s saying about me.”

When the election results came in, JFK had won by less than 71,000 votes out of over 2.3 million cast.

Suddenly out of a job, Eisenhower appointed Cab as the head of his transition team and then as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, securing Cab a spot in Eisenhower’s cabinet. While Ambassador to the U.N., Cab maintained a high profile. He worked behind (and in front of) the scenes during the Suez Canal crisis, and the revolt in Hungary in 1956. Lodge was Nikita Khruschev’s escort during his 1959 tour of the United States.

In March 1960, eight months before the presidential election, the U.S. government made a formal decision (in secret) to overthrow Castro. Preparations were underway for an invasion of Cuba at Castro’s favorite fishing spot – the Bay of Pigs. Castro had appealed to the United Nations for help, providing detailed evidence to the U.N. Security Council of pilots. Ambassador Lodge assured Castro and the Security Council “the United States has no aggressive purpose against Cuba.”

Eisenhower’s national security policy focused on building the American economy to support the Cold War, relying on nuclear weapons to deter communist aggression (supported by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’ “Brinksmanship” policy of showing that you’re just wheels-off enough to take your nukes out for a spin in an effort to get the other side to back down), and carrying out secret/covert operations against governments who made eyes at the Soviet Union. Lodge would have been privy to all of this and, given his relationship with Eisenhower, tacitly approved.

Nixon chose Cab as his vice presidential candidate for a few reasons: His foreign policy experience in working under Eisenhower would be well-received, and that Nixon thought the Lodge name could check Kennedy’s popularity in New England. Cab made a Republican misstep, telling a Harlem crowd that a Nixon Presidency would name an African-American to its Cabinet. Plot twist: he walked it back. It probably lost Nixon the South. The Nixon/Lodge ticket lost the popular vote to the Kennedy/Johnson ticket by 113,000 votes out of 68 million cast. There were likely Shenanigans.
President Kennedy needed bipartisan support. As a liberal Northern Democrat, Kennedy had to face not only the Republicans but the Southern Democrats, who didn’t like anybody, and certainly didn’t support Kennedy’s progressive agenda which built on Eisenhower’s actions and the Warren Court of the mid-1950s.

Lodge’s promise that the United States had no aggressive purpose against Cuba, as the disaster of the Bay of Pigs “invasion” – three months after JFK’s inauguration – showed. And, hold on a second, JFK was seeking to normalize relations with Cuba and Castro? Reporter Jean Daniel was in Cuba with Fidel Castro when JFK was assassinated. Castro had told reporter Daniel, regarding Kennedy, that he (Castro) was not afraid of getting assassinated, and that assassination at the hands of the United States would only raise his own standing in Latin America. But Castro understood that Kennedy was in a unique position to make everything okay in the Western Hemisphere. As he told Jean Daniel on November 19, 1963, three days before Kennedy’s assassination:

Kennedy could still be this man. He still has the possibility of becoming, in the eyes of history, the greatest President of the United States, the leaders who may at last understand that there can be coexistence between capitalists and socialists, even in the Americas. He would then be an even greater President than Lincoln. I know, for example, that for Khrushchev, Kennedy is a man you can talk with.

Well, that would have flown in the face of everything Lodge stood for, politically.  

A quick aside: JFK had resigned his Senate seat to run for president in 1960. His brother, Ted, wanted the Senate seat to match the accomplishments of his brothers (Robert was John’s Attorney General), but he wouldn’t be the required 30 years old until 1962. JFK asked Massachusetts Governor Foster Furcolo to name Ben Smith – a friend of the Kennedy family – as the interim senator to serve out JFK’s term, keeping the Senate seat open for Ted. He faced George Cabot Lodge, Cab’s son, in the 1962 election. Ted Kennedy beat George Cabot Lodge by just under 300,000 votes. It was the third time the Lodges and Kennedys had squared off in an election. Kennedys were up 2-1.

Kennedy asked Cab to become the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam. He accepted, and arrived in August 1963, ostensibly to corral Ngo Dinh Diem, who was living The Life thanks to American money, and squashing opposition. Notably, Diem had authorized raids on Buddhist pagodas where upwards of hundreds of Buddhists were killed by Diem’s forces, orchestrated by Diem’s brother Ngo Dinh Nhu. Cable 243 authorized Cab to pressure Diem to remove Nhu. If he didn’t, the United States would look for other leadership in South Vietnam. Lodge interpreted it as an opportunity to send the Army of the Republic of Vietnam to remove Diem if he didn’t take his brother out. Diem was assassinated, along with his brother, on November 2, 1963, the day after Diem’s government was overthrown by the South Vietnamese military. Kennedy, according to historian Arthur Schlesinger, “accepted the coup but did not order or contemplate the assassination of Diem.” Cable 243 is seen as a turning point in the Vietnam War, as the U.S. became more heavily involved in Vietnam in an effort to stabilize the country. Kennedy blamed himself for not handling Lodge more appropriately. Less than three weeks later, Kennedy was dead.

By now it’s generally accepted that JFK was planning on withdrawing troops from Vietnam. One thousand troops were slated to return to the United States by the end of 1963. Maxwell Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff wrote a memo on October 4, 1963 explaining that JFK had already approved recommendations for a full withdrawal of “special assistance units and personnel by the end of 1965.” This decision was decidedly not the stance of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr, who ardently believed in the Domino Theory that if Vietnam fell to communism, other Southeast Asian countries would soon follow. Feel free to draw your own psychological conclusions that Cab was such a strident internationalist given the hardline isolationist stance taken by his grandfather, the man who raised him.

Roger Stone, who is problematic in a variety of ways, wrote a best-selling book called “The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ,” in which he recalls a 1979 conversation with Connecticut Governor John Davis Lodge – Cab’s brother:

I knew that JFK had planned to fire ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge upon his return from Texas on November 24, 1963. I also know that Lodge knew why he had been summoned to see the President. I couldn’t resist asking John Lodge about his brother.

“Did you ever ask your brother who really killed Kennedy?”

His lips spread into a tight grin. “Cabot said it was the Agency boys, some Mafiosi.” He looked me in the eye. “And Lyndon.”

“Did your brother know in advance?” I asked.

Lodge took a sip of his Manhattan. “He knew Kennedy wouldn’t be around to fire him. LBJ kept him at his post so he could serve his country.”

In James Douglass’ book “JFK and the Unspeakable,” Robert Kennedy is on record:

“The individual who forced out position at the time of Vietnam was Henry Cabot Lodge. In fact, Henry Cabot Lodge was being brought back – and the President discussed with me in detail how he could be fired – because he wouldn’t communicate in any way with us…The President would send out messages, and he would never really answer them…[Lodge] wouldn’t communicate….We were trying to figure out how to get rid of Henry Cabot Lodge.”

There’s an excerpt in Phillip F. Nelson’s book “LBJ: Mastermind of the JFK Assassination” referencing an article from the Honolulu Star Bulletin:

“In Hawaii on November 21, 1963…shortly after lunch Honolulu time, U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge made a long distance call from the lobby of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel…This distinguished diplomat had access to phones in privacy from his room or the military circuits at no cost…yet he was seen, according to the Star Bulletin, with a stack of quarters in his hand putting coin after coin into a pay phone…Lodge as the only person of the seven member policy-making body to stay at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel…the others stayed in the military quarters.”

JFK wouldn’t hold that meeting with Lodge on November 24. LBJ would.

In the wake of JFK’s assassination, Republicans were assessing their chances of defeating LBJ in the 1964 election. Eisenhower called Cab to see if he would return from Vietnam to run for the Republican nomination. Cab declined.

Cab and Robert McNamara, JFK and LBJ’s Secretary of Defense, went on a tour of South Vietnam. McNamara recommended to LBJ to “furnish assistance and support to South Vietnam for as long as it takes to bring the insurgency under control.” The next day National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, on LBJ’s behalf, enacted McNamara’s recommendations in NSA Memorandum 288. The Vietnam War was escalating.

President Lyndon B. Johnson re-appointed Cab as the Ambassador to South Vietnam, a post he held from 1965-1967 – the years following the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which was LBJ’s excuse to escalate military involvement in Vietnam. In the July 29, 1967 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, Cab wrote a letter explaining that the U.S. was winning in Vietnam. Six months later the Tet Offensive began.

Two Boston political families: the Kennedys – who were of Boston society, and the Lodges – who were Boston society. Two political dynasties intersecting as they each fell and rose, respectively. Anti-immigrant (and, thus, anti-Catholic) Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., who almost single-handedly kept the United States out of the League of Nations, a titan of American politics, kept the Lodge dynasty alive, besting a Kennedy in the process. The Kennedys seemingly derailed the Lodge political dynasty with the 1952 election, but was kept alive by Eisenhower and later by JFK himself. If JFK was undermining Lodge’s foreign policy goals, and embarrassing him in the process, of what could Lodge be capable?