Nitpicking an Advertisement's History

There is a new ad celebrating magazines (you can see the text and accompanying picture of Michael Phelps here, though I cannot find a version that replicates the version I have seen in several magazines) and I generally like it. I love magazines, subscribe to a ridiculous amount that I cannot possibly keep up with, and believe that it is the print medium other than books that I hope weathers the storm. And one of the main points of the ad is that magazines are flourishing even as newspapers, say, are going belly up.

But one of the assertions has been grinding my gears. It is as follows:

What it proves, once again, is that a new medium doesn’t necessarily displace an existing one. Just as movies didn’t kill radio. Just as TV didn’t kill movies. An established medium can continue to flourish so long as it continues to offer a unique experience. And, as reader loyalty and growth demonstrate, magazines do.

The larger point stands. But I have a historical quibble: Why would movies have killed radio? They antedated radio. Radio did not become a mass consumer diversion until the 1920s. Movies were already a well established form of mass entertainment. Birth of a Nation, after all, was released to wide acclaim in 1915 and is known to have transformed the medium, meaning that there was already a movie industry. Yes, there was crude technology for radio as far back as the 19th century, but the first public broadcasts did not occur until right around 1920.

Am I nitpicking? Sure. But someone got paid an awful lot of money to place this ad in some of the most prestigious magazines in America. Is it really asking all that much to ask them to get facts right that are at the foundation of their argument?

Not to Quibble . . .

This Jeffrey Rosen op-ed in The New York Times seems to work from a false premise, which is that Earl Warren has a bad historical reputation. He might have a bad reputation among some conservatives. But on the whole, Earl Warren not only does not have a bad reputation among historians and legal scholars, he is considered one of the great justices in American history. That sort of undermines Rosen's larger point.

Reviewing Books I Have Not Read

Other than an excerpt of the first chapter I have not yet read Fred Kaplan's new book, 1959: The Year Everything Changed, which does not mean that I do not have some early (and obviously tentative, at least in terms of the book itself) opinions about it. Journalists, and occasionally historians, love the conceit of focusing on a year and declaring it a turning point. 1959 is not customarily one of those years (is there room in the post-WWII pantheon of years after the dominance of 1968?) but Kaplan tries to make the case that it is. It's no wonder these sorts of books are popular among authors and readers. The writer gets to flex his or her muscles writing about politics and historical events but also about popular culture and sports and any quirky but (supposedly) telling little tidbit they discover in the microfilm reels. I am contemplating a comparable sort of project tied to a specific day in which three huge and only partially connected events took place at least in part as a way to break into that elusive world of agents, trade presses, and the sort of quasi-fame that such projects sometimes bring.

But the problem, of course, is that so often the conceit is wrong. Maybe reading the book in full will change my mind. But I doubt it. If you're a hammer all the world appears to be a nail, and if you're an author writing a thesis-driven history, all the world conforms to your thesis. Every year had its array of events and incidents and momentous events and pop culture moments that seemed to fuel the zeitgeist and those quirky but telling anecdotes that may have been quirky but whose value in tellingness is usually more clear to the author than to the historiography.

Picking 1959 as one such year in which "everything turned" is silly because in 1959 everything did not, in fact turn in or on 1959 any more than it did in 1958 or 1960. Historians are aware that breaking decades into neat little chunks has its utility, but they are also aware that decades are largely meaningless things. And so 1959 as a precursor to the 1960s is only useful inasmuch as you actually believe that "The 1960s" in the way that we think about it historically somehow began magically at midnight on January 1, 1960 (and ended at 11:59:59 on December 31, 1969). Most historians would reject this straitened way of thinking because, well, it is a silly way to think.

Consider this paragraph from the first chapter:

1959 was the year when the shockwaves of the new ripped the seams of daily life, when humanity stepped into the cosmos and also commandeered the conception of human life, when the world shrank but the knowledge needed to thrive in it expanded exponentially, when outsiders became insiders, when categories were crossed and taboos were trampled, when everything was changing and everyone knew it-when the world as we now know it began to take form.

Substanceless and vague, yes. But also mildly insane, or at least ahistorical. The allure of the turning-point year book is obvious. And books about a specific year or day or week or month are not in and of themselves illegitimate. But arguments that a given year marked a clear turning point in human history tend to be wrong precisely because the concept is so seductive.

Again, I have not read Kaplan's book (Kaplan has a PhD in political science but has spent most of the past few years working in journalism writing about international affairs, but by his own admission, mostly about pop culture. And pop culture clearly drives his understanding of 1959). But a problematic thesis is a problematic thesis. I will read the book. And it might be something worth using in a class (anything to get them to read is one of the mantras I have developed in this profession over the years). Or it might change my mind about books of this sort. But I'm being driven by my own thesis, which I can sum up in three words: I doubt it.

It's Ok To Be Both Best and Bright

This Banjamin Wallace-Wells article in The New Republic argues that we have learned the wrong lessons from David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest. To put it in simple terms, the lesson is not that getting the most talented and smartest people is somehow a bad thing but rather that during the Kennedy and Johnson era the "best and brightest" were brilliant generalists and not specialists. Despite the seeming condemnation of the New Frontier whiz kids, the problem with American Vietnam policy was still a lack of expertise, not its excess.

Debunking New Deal Revisionism

In the latest New Republic Jonathan Chait puts the smack down on Amity Shlaes, the current darling among the conservative let's-selectively-(and badly)-invoke-history-for-our-own-ideological-purposes set. As an added bonus, he uses a new book by the incomparable William Leuchtenburg, to help reveal Shlaes' book on the New Deal for what it is.

Knocking Down Down Goldberg

Some of you may enjoy this takedown of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism by Michael Tomasky in The New Republic and this one from Austin Bramwell in The American Conservative. I did. I'm hoping for my opportunity to write about this truly bad book and awful use of history (yes, I've read enough to be able to assert as much categorically), but I am not certain what the odds are that it will happen.

The Unbearable Lightness of Jonah Goldberg

It's almost impossible to state just how fatuous, intellectually irresponsible and dishonest Jonah Goldberg's new book, Liberal Fascism looks like it is going to be. I've written about this book before and had quite the contre temps with Goldberg via email, who chided me for judging a book I had not read, even though my objection was with the title, which I had read, with the publisher's press materials, which I had read, and with the picture on the cover, which depicted the iconic liberal smiley-face with a Hitler moustache, which even a fucking retard could quite clearly read. (He also tried to get all historical on me, snidely mentioning that much of his intellectual foundation came from a book that in his snide words I "really ought to read," Alonzo Hamby's For the Survival of Democracy. One: Hamby's book does not even vaguely provide intellectual cover for him. Two: I was Hamby's research assistant on that book for more than two years. My name features in the acknowledgments and everything. So maybe, Jonah, you "really ought to read" Hmaby's book as well. Had you actually done so you might not have descended quite so far down the slippery slope of fucktardery.)

Well, Goldberg's book, which was supposed to appear a year-and-a-half ago, might be on its way. It seems that he has not tempered his argument all that much despite the delay. Here is the excerpt from his book jacket that has gotten a lot of attention in the blogosphere:

The quintessential liberal fascist isn’t an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade-school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.

Now I have my issues with education majors and the very idea of most education departments teaching anything but early childhood ed. But this is so offensively, muddle-headedly, noxiously, stupidly insane that it boggles the imagination. Goldberg is of a type with lots of guys who have climbed the ranks of America's intellectual journals, right and left: He's smart but nowhere near as smart as he has come to conclude that he is. He's been given a lot but believes that those gifts are nothing more than a function of merit. And he is so used to a culture of shouting that in a situation where he is supposed simply to speak -- I'm speaking metaphorically about the responsibility serious people take when writing a book -- that he screams incoherently. I've long been unimpressed with Goldberg is my point.

If you want to see a sample of what other blogging critics have said about Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, I'd recommend starting with Andrew Sullivan and Matthew Yglesias, where you can get a sample of the screen captures of the dust jacket ( and see that not only female -- I've no idea why it is just female -- education majors, but also the Democratic Party, The New York Times, and Ivy League professors all fit into his "friendly fascist" category) and a link to more captures from Sadly, No. TNR's Jason Zengerle weighs in at The Plank here, citing Kieren at Crooked Timber, who helpfully points out that one cannot receive an education degree from Swarthmore. Jonah Goldberg sloppy with facts? now I've seen everything! I cannot wait to see who crawls up to defend Goldberg, who in this case really is beyond defense.