Polygon, the Dancing Bear

Occasional notes on politics, history, technology, architecture,
and the life of a county clerk

2002:
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2003:
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2004:
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April / May / June / July
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2005:
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2007:
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2008:
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Current entries

Monday, December 29, 2003, 10:48 pm

Apologia for Buchanan. Back in August, Greg Hlatky of A Dog's Life, my politically conservative mentor in blogging, compiled a list of the 20 worst Americans ever. One of the names on his list was President James Buchanan.

I don't believe Mr. Buchanan deserves that dubious distinction. He certainly wasn't one of our most successful presidents, but he deserves better than to be placed among the very worst Americans of all time.

On Buchanan, Greg writes: "The Log Cabin Democrats ought to have him as their icon. Did exactly nothing as the United States slid toward the Civil War."

Those views are popular nowadays. Buchanan is often blamed for the Civil War. The speculation that Buchanan was a homosexual (most recently retailed in a book by James Loewen) has risen almost to the level of conventional wisdom. But neither assertion is well founded.

My source for a more nuanced view of Buchanan is Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918), a staunch antislavery Republican who knew and opposed Buchanan. A. D. White was a professor at the University of Michigan, the first president of Cornell University, a New York state senator, and a diplomat. He detailed all of these experiences in a fascinating two-volume autobiography published in 1905. I bought a copy in a used book shop, years ago, but I just discovered that the text is now online: Volume One; Volume Two.

White was generally a very sensible guy; in many ways, he was ahead of his time. Even from a 2003 perspective, he is right about the politics of his time much more often than he is wrong.

In the 1850s, White was not an "abolitionist" — that was a radical position taken by very few before the Civil War. Rather, he was opposed to the pro-slavery policies of the federal government at that time, and what he saw as Northern "doughface" politicians who constantly yielded to the demands of the Southern slaveowners.

After college, White had gone overseas to work as a diplomatic attaché and met Buchanan, of whom he wrote: "he was one of the most attractive men in converstion I have ever met, and that is saying much."

In the 1856 presidential election, White was a supporter of John C. Frémont, the first nominee of the new Republican party, against James Buchanan, the nominee of the then-pro-slavery Democrats. He writes:

Mr. Buchanan, though personal acquaintance had taught me to like him as a man, and the reading of his despatches in the archives of our legation in St. Petersburg had forced me to respect him as a statesman, represented to me the encroachments and domination of American slavery, while Frémont represented resistance to such encroachments, and the perpetuity of freedom upon the American Continent.

At the polls, young A. D. White (a first-time voter) turned away advocates for other candidates, saying, "No. The question of all questions to me is whether slavery or freedom is to rule this Republic," and cast his vote for Frémont, who was defeated by Buchanan.

Writing nearly fifty years after the 1856 election, White is glad his candidate didn't prevail:

Certainly Providence was kind to the United States in that contest. For Frémont was not elected. Looking back over the history of the United States I see, thus far, no instant when everything we hold dear was so much in peril as on that election day.

We of the Republican party were fearfully mistaken, and among many evidences in history that there is "a Power in the universe, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness," I think that the non-election of Frémont is one of the most convincing.

His election would have precipitated the contest brought on four years later by the election of Lincoln. But the Northern States had in 1856 no such preponderance as they had four years later. No series of events had then occurred to arouse and consolidate anti-slavery feeling like those between 1856 and 1860.

Moreover, of all candidates for the Presidency ever formally nominated by either of the great parties up to that time, Frémont was probably the most unfit. He had gained credit for his expedition across the plains to California, and deservedly.... But his earlier career, when closely examined, and, even more than that, his later career, during the Civil War, showed doubtful fitness for any duties demanding clear purpose, consecutive thought, adhesion to a broad policy, wisdom in counsel, or steadiness in action.

Had he been elected in 1856 one of two things would undoubtedly have followed: either the Union would have been permanently dissolved, or it would have been re-established by anchoring slavery forever in the Constitution. Never was there a greater escape.

Though bitter at the time about Buchanan's victory, White went to Washington in March, 1857, to witness his inauguration. He writes:

Having taken the oath, Mr. Buchanan delivered the inaugural address, and it made a deep impression upon me. I began to suspect then, and I fully believe now, that he was sincere, as, indeed, were most of those whom men of my way of thinking in those days attacked as pro-slavery tools and ridiculed as "doughfaces." We who had lived remote from the scene of action, and apart from pressing responsibility, had not realized the danger of civil war and disunion. Mr. Buchanan, and men like him, in Congress, constantly associating with Southern men, realized both these dangers. They honestly and patriotically shrank from this horrible prospect; and so, had we realized what was to come, would most of us have done. I did not see this then, but looking back across the abyss of years I distinctly see it now. The leaders on both sides were honest and patriotic, and, as I firmly believe, instruments of that "Power in the universe, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness."

There was in Mr. Buchanan's inaugural address a tone of deep earnestness. He declared that all his efforts should be given to restore the Union, and to re-establish it upon permanent foundations; besought his fellow-citizens throughout the Union to second him in this effort, and promised that under no circumstances would he be a candidate for re-election. My anti-slavery feelings remained as deep as ever, but, hearing this speech, there came into my mind an inkling of the truth: "Hinter dem Berge sind auch Leute." ["Behind the mountains there are people to be found."]

As tensions grew during his years in office — culminating in the outbreak of fighting over Kansas and Nebraska, and John Brown's attempt at violent revolution — President Buchanan constantly attempted to reassure and placate the South. In terms later made familiar by figures like Neville Chamberlain, Buchanan was an appeaser.

But what else could he have done? The Southern States had threatened secession before; events and rhetoric beyond the president's control were driving them to carry it out this time. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Buchanan accurately foresaw the bloody consequences. He tried to forestall the catastrophe, using the only tools that were available to him.

Almost a century and a half later, with the assurance of hindsight, we can say that the Civil War was a necessary ordeal, and that Buchanan's efforts to prevent it represented morally wrong appeasement. But I suspect most of the people who lived through those events would not have agreed.

Update: In the comments to this posting, historian and former ambassador Peter Bridges has this to add:

I agree with you that James Buchanan was not one of the twenty worst Americans. But he was not a good President--and before that, although he had already served as Secretary of State, he was not a very good Minister to England, as I have brought out in some detail in my Pen of Fire: John Moncure Daniel (Kent State Univ. Press, 2002). Daniel, who became our Minister to the Kingdom of Sardinia in Turin when Buchanan was in London, caught Buchanan out in a passport fraud. More importantly, Buchanan imprudently attended a dinner in 1854 given by his Consul, George Sanders, where the guests were leading Europe revolutioniaries--Garibaldi, Mazzini, Herzen, Kossuth and others. Europe then badly needed democratic reform, but if governments had learned about this dinner they might well have cooled if not broken relations with the United States, which I do not think President Pierce or Secretary of State Marcy would have thought in our overall interest.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Saturday, December 27, 2003, 10:07 am

Reading the tea leaves. The Washington Post/ABC News poll came out a few days ago — probably the last significant poll of 2003. The headlines reinforce the conventional wisdom all around, i.e., Howard Dean will get the Democratic nomination, but will lose to GWB in November. The details are more interesting, though.

For the nomination, the new poll shows Dean leading all the other candidates by a wide margin: Dean 31%, Lieberman 9%, Gephardt 9%, Kerry 8%, Clark 7%. Edwards 6%. More remarkably, Dean's lead is pretty even across regions and demographic groups.

Though Dean does better among college graduates than among those with less than high school (39% vs. 24%), that differential is much steeper for Kerry (12% vs. 5%) and Clark (11% vs. 6%). This would seem to disconfirm the notion that Dean is exclusively the candidate of a highly educated Net-aware minority.

Nor is Dean's support concentrated among young people, as is widely believed: he gets 26% of the 18-30 age group, 30% of 31-44, 34% of 45-60, and 31% of 61-plus. By region, he gets 32% in the Northeast, 32% in the Midwest, 30% in the South, and 29% in the West.

I'm still a neutral among the Democratic candidates, but those numbers are pretty compelling. The caucus and primary schedule is more brutally front-loaded than ever — it will be all over in just a few weeks. I can't see how anybody else could break out so quickly.

Meanwhile, the November horse race question shows Bush 55%, Dean 37%. As I keep pointing out, the end-of-the-previous-year conventional wisdom is usually wrong, but numbers like these are certainly enough to put us contrarians on the defensive.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Tuesday, December 9, 2003, 10:07 pm

Street Naming Idea. Ann Arbor is the sort of place which is always full of visitors and newcomers trying to find their way around. Further, Ann Arbor is big enough that even longtime residents aren't familiar with every neighborhood. Perhaps the city might want to consider changing a couple of street names which are almost pathologically confusing to the uninitiated.

I refer to Fourth and Fifth Avenues downtown.

What's now downtown Ann Arbor was originally laid out with numbered streets. First Street is the only one of the original set which wasn't changed. Second Street is now Ashley Street, Third Street is now Main Street, Fourth Street is now Fourth Avenue, Fifth Street is now Fifth Avenue, Sixth Street is now Division Street, and so on.

To ramp up the confusion level, the tract west of First Street also, later, was developed with numbered streets, starting with that selfsame First Street, and continuing to Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Streets. Those streets now make up the Old West Side neighborhood.

At some point, to cope with the confusion of having two Fourth Streets and two Fifth Streets, the ones east of Main Street were renamed Fourth Avenue and Fifth Avenue.

That may have worked in another century, or in a place like New York City where there are plentiful numbered streets and/or a universally understood distinction between Streets and Avenues. Ann Arbor simply doesn't have the right orientation for this.

Hence, it is commonplace to hear Fourth and Fifth Avenues referred to as simply Fourth or Fifth, or worse yet, as Fourth Street and Fifth Street.

Pity the poor visitor who is trying to find the corner of 4th and Liberty — there are two of them. Or 5th and Jefferson. Or 4th and William. Or four other "duplicated" intersections.

What to do? Normally when a city has duplicated street names, the less important street gets a new name. Fourth and Fifth Streets on the Old West Side are lightly-trafficked residential streets. But they're part of a system of numbered streets, right between 3rd and 6th, and near the well-known 7th. Fourth and Fifth Streets are right where they belong.

It is Fourth and Fifth Avenues which need to change. And indeed, this would complete the work, started in the 19th century, of giving names to all the numbered streets from Ashley east.

I propose that Fourth Avenue be renamed Wheeler Avenue. There are several reasons for this. Fourth Avenue was the "black Main Street" of Ann Arbor; it would be appropriate to name it for Al Wheeler, the city's only African-American mayor. Moreover, Wheeler Park is on Fourth Avenue. This underused park would benefit from being better known and easier to find — on Wheeler Avenue.

Fifth Avenue's new name is less obvious. The library is its main landmark, but Library Avenue would be confused with Liberty Street. The library site was donated by the Beal family, but there already is a Beal Avenue.

Hence, I propose that Fifth Avenue be renamed Wallenberg Avenue, for international hero Raoul Wallenberg, who lived just off Fifth Avenue when he was an architecture student at U-M in the 1930s. Wallenberg, as a Swedish diplomat, saved about 100,000 people from the Nazis in Hungary during World War II, only to be arrested by the Soviets at the end of the war; his ultimate fate is unknown.

The downside, as always with street name changes, is that people and businesses living along the renamed streets would have to update their addresses.

Among the advantages:

Fourteen Ann Arbor intersections, now with confusingly duplicate names (Fourth and Liberty, William, and Madison; Fifth and Liberty, William, Madison, and Jefferson) would become unique locations.
Visitors, newcomers, dispatchers, delivery people, etc., would all gain from the reduction in confusion.
Ann Arbor City Hall and the Ann Arbor Public Library would gain addresses on Wallenberg Avenue, rather than 5th Avenue.
The alliteration between Fourth and Fifth would be maintained in the alliteration between Wheeler and Wallenberg.
The "Avenue" designation which the two streets have had for decades would be maintained.
The street names would commemorate aspects of Ann Arbor's history, including Ann Arbor's connection to world history.

During the upcoming election year, I probably will have little time to attend a lot of city council and DDA meetings to advocate renaming streets. But if somebody wants to take the lead on this, I'd be happy to help.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Sunday, December 7, 2003, 10:16 am

It's Dean. Josh Marshall, a Democrat but not a fan of Howard Dean, relates the following:

I had lunch today with someone who is not a politician but a fairly prominent Washington Democrat — certainly not someone from the party's liberal wing. And in the course of answering a question, I said "If it [i.e. the nominee] ends up being Dean ..." At which point, with the rest of my sentence still on deck down in my throat, my friend shot back : "It's Dean."

It was effortless. He wasn't happy or sad about it. He wasn't trying to convince me — more like letting me in on something I apparently wasn't aware of yet.

The Democratic presidential nomination process used to be a months-long slog from caucus to primary to caucus, from state to random state to another random state across the country, culminating in California's primary in June. Each state's turn was a legitimate news event, testing the candidates in a different cauldron of issues and interests, against the responses of real voters casting ballots.

No more. The process has been utterly transformed as individual states have each decided that earlier is better. The whole thing is now so brutally "front-loaded" (with candidate selection events rescheduled earlier and earlier in the year) that it is practically a national primary.

Now, the process that matters happens in the national media during the previous year. The chemistry of the moment in late 2003 (which strongly favors Howard Dean) is unlikely to be overriden by the events of a few weeks in very early 2004. There just isn't time.

That being said, I think Dean probably would have been the nominee in any event.

American presidential campaigns, especially primaries, so often seem to resolve into contests between Exciters (edgy, charismatic, usually iconoclastic candidates who stir up genuine fervor both pro and con) and Calmers (comparatively dull, cautious, experienced politicians with close ties to the party establishment).

Examples of Exciters include John McCain, Jesse Jackson, George McGovern, Gary Hart, Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, John B. Anderson, Ross Perot, Barry Goldwater, John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, and Jerry Brown.

Calmers include Bob Dole, Walter Mondale, Ed Muskie, George H. W. Bush, Al Gore, Richard Nixon, Michael Dukakis, Gerald Ford, and Hubert Humphrey.

Exciters defy conventional wisdom and status quo politics. Exciter supporters, often new to politics, dismiss skeptics who tell them their candidate can't win; sometimes they prove the skeptics wrong.

The Calmers are safe bets who behave in predictable ways. They position themselves as the obvious choice, choose mainstream issues, recruit tried-and-true staff and consultants, carefully assemble establishment support, and win party nominations. But the Calmers in the current Democratic race (Gephardt, Lieberman, Kerry) have failed at this, maybe because there are three of them.

And so we have Wesley Clark, a kind of nonpolitician Calmer. But the standard Calmer strategy isn't available to him: he started late and has to run against three other Calmers. So, he's being cast as an establishment Exciter, an oxymoron. Almost all of the Clark supporters I know are party insiders who favor Clark as having the best chance to beat Bush. The hoped-for wave of excitement for Clark-the-man among non-insiders has just not materialized.

If indeed Dean has already prevailed, this will be the first time since 1980 that I didn't take part in the Democratic presidential melee by backing a candidate.

In any case, the conventional wisdom about 2004 now seems to have jelled: The economy is resurgent; Dean is too far to the left; hence Bush wins in November. But the conventional wisdom this far out has been wrong about the outcome of every presidential election since at least 1980.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Saturday, December 6, 2003, 12:56 am

Worth Reading. If you're a geek, or socialize with geeks, you'll want to take a look at Five Geek Social Fallacies.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

Friday, December 5, 2003, 1:33 am

Downbeat. Steve Cherry has nominated John Prine's "Sam Stone" as "The Most God Damned Depressing Song Ever Written". The chorus opens with the famous line "There's a hole in Daddy's arm where all the money goes."

Some of the commenters on that thread mentioned other Prine songs, including "Paradise" ("Mr. Peabody's coal train has hauled it away") and "Christmas in Prison". One wrote: "Until now I never noticed how depressing so much of the Prine catalog is." Amen to that!

Back in the day, Prine was an outcast among country musicians because he opposed the war in Vietnam, and he was an outcast among antiwar folks because he was a country musician. I'd be pretty irritable too, in his shoes.

When I was in law school in Detroit, I also got to know Tom Waits' music, which certainly has a lot of depressing material. But Waits isn't angry like Prine; his characters usually figure that what's happening to them is their own damn fault.

Another more recent song which I find pretty heart-rending is Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car", where hope is pathetically unrealistic: "I know things will get better ... We'll move out of the shelter/Buy a big house and live in the suburbs...."

And then there's the most chilling passage in all of popular music, from Pink Floyd's "Us and Them":

Listen son, said the man with the gun
There's room for you inside.

I have always understood this as a reference to the Holocaust. The death camp guard ("man with the gun") is ushering a group of Jews into the gas chamber, which isn't quite full yet ("there's room for you inside"). The special edge of horror is the way the guard gently addresses a young boy ("listen, son"), in a way that implicitly recognizes their common humanity, and the innocence of a child on his way to be murdered.

But, on consideration, no song quite gets to me like Woody Guthrie's "Deportee".

My father's own father, he waded that river
They took all the money he made in his life
My brothers and sisters came working the fruit trees
They rode on that truck 'til they laid down and died.

Some of us are illegal, and others not wanted,
Our work contract's out and we have to move on;
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.

And of course, the story doesn't get any happier from there.

....Posted by Lawrence Kestenbaum Comments

2002:
May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December

2003:
January / February / March
April / May / June / July
August / September / October
November / December