2020 "NORMALCY!"

By Edwin Cooney

Exactly one hundred years ago, an articulate and handsome Republican United States Senator from Ohio, Warren Gamaliel Harding, ran for president promising to lead a war weary nation back to what he called "normalcy." Former President Thomas Woodrow Wilson, who promised to keep us out of war during his 1916 re-election campaign, regretfully found it necessary to ask the Congress for a declaration of war just 29 days following his second inauguration on March 4th, 1917. It was estimated that 116,000 plus Americans lost their lives in that war to "make the world safe for democracy" and "the war to end all wars." What with the economic social unrest Americans experienced including the "Spanish flu,” times were simply not normal. Hence, it was time to return to candidate Harding's "normalcy!"

Now it is 2020, another presidential election year, and this time, thanks to a coronavirus which originated in "Communist China" (to many Americans a nation as foreign as any nation could possibly be), the siren call to return to "normalcy" wails with an urgency unknown to the most politicly astute and optimistic GOP leaders of the Roaring Twenties. Now, forty-one days have passed since President Trump and many state governors (led by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo) have closed both public and private places of learning and business and the bottom has — at least temporarily — dropped out of the president's version of prosperity. The question, therefore, is how soon should we throw away our fears and "reopen society" to the workplace and, of course, the marketplace. Every side of a really hot topic consists of legitimate elements. However, the prevailing side of any hot topic reflects the very heart of the matter at issue. As of this writing, seventy percent of Americans fear more for their safety than they fear for their prosperity.

Recently, I received a message from a reader I'll call “Becky” who, noticing a large gathering in a neighborhood yard, called the police. Subsequently, Becky proceeded to tell some online companions of her deed. One member of the group not only expressed her outrage at what Becky had done, but her level of outrage was downright vitriolic. Thus, while Becky understands and even sympathizes with "Madam Angry’s" outrage (my designation, not Becky’s), she finds the level of this individual's outrage stunning.

I've written to Becky congratulating her for her daring courage. To me, she's an amazing lady, thoughtful, conscientious and, as I see it, patriotic! 

Almost but not quite too many years ago to possibly imagine, when I was in the third grade, my teacher Mrs. Peruzzin labeled me "the little darer" because all you had to do was "dare me" and your wish was my command. Of course, to dare for the sake of daring is exceedingly juvenile and I grew out of it. However, the history of humankind  amply demonstrates that knowledge is to a high degree dependent on the willingness of intelligent and creative people to "dare to do." All vibrant societies are bedecked with third graders like little me who dare to dare. Societies possess brave soldiers, police and fire people, inventors, fliers, questioners, and challengers. They have crossed oceans to build free societies, populated two continents, dared to win and lose wars.  They save, they heal and they even prevent. They've even been to the moon. However, although most of them can't imagine it, they can occasionally endanger others unintentionally.

Becky's call to the police wasn't a call to arrest or place any person's freedom or reputation at risk. It was a community's call for caution. People often call the police to quell loud parties or to report someone's car blocking a driveway. Unfortunately, history is full of instances of panic during uncertain times.

Just as those who lived in 1920, almost all of us in 2020 are more than anxious to get back to normalcy. America resisted the new responsibility that our participation in both war and peacemaking thrust upon it. Thus, in 1920, normalcy prevailed, but the scourge of war, which was the "normal" way to settle international disputes, returned in 1939. It cost upward of sixty million people worldwide their freedom, then their safety, and finally their lives. By resisting that new responsibility and returning to "normalcy," we failed to take the advice of one of history's greatest historians, Edward Gibbon, the author of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” who suggested that he who asks for freedom from responsibility is not free!

Becky has no monopoly on courage, conscientiousness, or patriotism nor does she claim to. Since it's unlikely that she (as is the case with me) has only read observations by and quotes from Gibbon, she probably until this very day only instinctively knows the truth of Gibbon's wisdom. However, she's demonstrated to this observer a degree of courage, temperament, and intellect that more and more of us ought to emulate! She gets it that a twenty-first century return to “normalcy” may well be as deadly as it was a century ago!

As for that little darer of long, long ago, these days he mostly presumes!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY 

LET'S TALK ABOUT NATIONAL UNITY!

By Edwin Cooney

So what does this pandemic mean for our future — chaos or unity?

Last week, I asserted that we were united during the Revolutionary War era because we were determined to control our own destiny rather than be controlled by Britain. A new reader whom I'll call “Mr. Albany" points out that since there were elements of personal loyalty to Great Britain throughout the colonies, my assertion isn't so. I insist, however, that since all thirteen colonies signed the Declaration of Independence and had the wherewithal to form a federal union out of the chaos of the Articles of Confederation, I will stick to my conclusion that we were pretty well united. However, Mr. Albany's point is well taken since it causes me to be more specific with my conclusions at a time like this.

My original point was that following the attack on Pearl Harbor, both isolationists and interventionists united behind the Roosevelt administration’s war goals and efforts despite serious issue differences during the war. These issues covered everything from concentration camps for Japanese Americans, to the fate of Jews, to a coal miners' strike during the spring of 1943.

There is a difference between conflict and disunity. The threat of disunion has occurred more than once in our history. Everyone knows about the Civil War, but during the War of 1812, New England states, which had been suffering economically since the 1807 Jeffersonian trade embargo against both England and France, had had enough by 1814. That fall, as John Quincy Adams was negotiating the Treaty of Ghent in Belgium that would end the war, Federalists held a region-wide meeting in Hartford, Connecticut to pressure the Madison Administration to end the war. Historians disagree as to whether the Hartford conference meant to bring about a separation of New England from the Union, but there is general agreement that Thomas Jefferson's endorsement of the 1798 Kentucky-Virginia resolutions asserting that states had the right to leave the Union was the spirit of that conference. (Note that Jefferson was Vice President of the United States under John Adams when he endorsed that resolution.) 

Hence, there have been numerous occasions when states have threatened to leave the Union. Even today, Texas threatens to leave the Union. Texas has a clause within its original constitution that allows it to become a republic.

There has been an ongoing movement in Texas to separate from the Union as far back as the Clinton presidency in 1997. Daniel Miller is the current president of the Texas Nationalist Movement. According to Graham Wood in an article in the December 2019 Atlantic, Miller's movement is strictly nonviolent. Miller says "If the Catalonians, Scots and the Kurds....can demand independence, why can't Texans?”

However, as everyone knows, Texas has been in the Union long enough to elect two vice presidents (John Nance Garner and Lyndon Johnson) as well as give birth to two presidents, LBJ and Dwight D. Eisenhower. (Neither President Bush was born in Texas. George W. H. Bush was born in Milton, Massachusetts and George W. Bush was born in New Haven, Connecticut.)

It's my guess that despite political and social clashes over everything from when the economy should be reopened to whether the president or the states have the power to do so, most Americans are anxious to start functioning again even with their fear of possible consequences

There is a distinction between rebellion and change. Although I'm convinced that we're in for some radical changes, those changes will be for the strict purpose of insuring our comfort and, insofar as possible, our convenience, rather than for whatever grievances we may have with the president, his administration, or with Congress.

Who may deserve the blame for this pandemic will without doubt be reflected throughout the coming presidential campaign. As serious as is our panic and ultimate anger over this threat to our lives and some of the lives we love the best, that panic and even resentment isn't yet strong enough to interrupt those core beliefs most Americans share in representative government, the high purposes of most of our past and present policies toward humanity, or the values behind those genuinely good intentions.

Back in the late 1960s, in the wake of the Vietnam conflict and the ultimate election of Richard Nixon, there was widespread violence on college campuses that resulted in property damage, the temporary hostage-taking of college officials, and even deaths on campuses such as Jackson State and Kent State. At the same time, militant civil rights groups such as the Black Panthers and thugs like Charles Manson as well as the Weather Underground, the militant antiwar group, were terrorizing white middle class America. By 1972, the brunt of these threats to national security was spent. Hence, by 1974, commentators were calling the student rebels who had promised revolution until school was over "sunshine revolutionists,” which real revolutionaries —be they named Washington or Mao Tse Tung — would never recognize.

Yes, indeed, mighty changes are likely in the offing. Currently, we’re passing through a time of chaos or, if you prefer, disunity, but our “states of America united” will live long beyond you and me! 

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

THE ELEPHANT AMONG US!

By Edwin Cooney

In my pre 1941 column message last week, I wrote that once we were attacked by Japan, even the isolationists united behind Franklin Roosevelt throughout the war effort. It wasn't that everyone was happy with every priority or act of the Roosevelt administration — in fact, there were a number of very serious controversies during the war —  but over all, there was substantial unity compared to future crises. Then I asked if such a unity could happen in today's crisis. Next I said I'd leave it to you to decide for yourself. However, the topic is too delicious to leave alone. So, although I'll hold off from expressing my conclusion, I'll give you some ammunition to consider in reaching your own.

One of the biggest sins we students of history are guilty of when assessing our national history is that we judge our past using today's mores. Although this tendency is not only understandable and perhaps, to a degree, even necessary, it can distort the reality of the conditions of the past in which our ancestors lived. The fact of the matter is, however sad that may be, the world each generation lives through is new to them.

Painful as this may be to even consider let alone contemplate and even though we're still officially the United States of America, some will conclude that we are way less united than we once were. Okay, fair enough, but the next question is: what elements in a nation's body politic are the strongest unifiers?

Between 1776 and 1781, the Revolutionary War era, the country as a whole was united around the idea that it was time to get control of its own destiny rather than being controlled by Great Britain. (When I was in school, my teachers called Great Britain or England “the mother country.")  Just five years following independence, civic leaders from all former thirteen colonies came to realize that the continent was in danger of becoming like Europe if the separate states continued competing with one another. Britain, France, and Spain still had areas of heavy influence in such places as Canada, New England, Florida, and the Louisiana territories. Even after the nation was united under the federal union, Texas was largely developed by nearby Mexico and might have remained separate from us had the Catholic Church in Mexico not started banning slavery. (Note that slave owners had to remain free to enslave blacks, didn't they? Likewise, Indian fighters also had to be free to slaughter Indians!) Thus, the right to govern themselves (what Jefferson called "the disease of liberty”) ultimately united America. In order to do that, national and state leaders had to begin to make room for regional differences and create a governing body that could best allow for regional preferences. Invariably the “us" as opposed to “them” (that is, America compared to the rest of the world) tightened that national bond of unity.

The crisis through which we are passing could become either a great uniter or a permanent divider. There's evidence supporting both sets of possibilities. Before addressing some of the forces that may affect both positive and negative possibilities, here is just a word about what things were like in 1941 and throughout the rest of "World War Twice" as one comedian once called it.

Back in 1941, although comparatively few Americans had a college degree, their president was a graduate of Harvard and had a law degree from Columbia. Besides that, his cousin Teddy had also been president. Americans, for the most part, were as awed by the presidency as they were by teachers, preachers, policeman, doctors, singers, actors, sports stars, and practically everyone of achievement. In 1941, Americans were comparatively unsophisticated for the most part and even innocent in comparison to today's average citizen. FDR and almost every other would-be president was more privileged, better financed and educated than that day’s average citizen. Even more, America has experienced through a growing media what leadership is all about. The struggle over civil rights and Vietnam, Communism, Watergate, the savings and loan-gate, Bubba-gate, Iran and Iraq-gate, and a black man's presidency have all  altered the outlook of a much more independent-minded and suspicious national constituency.

Another factor, as I see it, is that we're constantly being pandered to not only as political constituencies, but as "valued customers" of manufacturers, service providers, and auto and insurance companies.  All these entities pander to our pride, our prejudices, our health and our hopes for the future. 

We expect to be taken care of more than those who were members of Tom Brokaw’s "greatest generation." Nor is it a question of government protection. Both liberals and conservatives expect their food to be inspected and thereby eatable and their homes to be prevented from burning by local taxpayer-funded government. Many of them also depend on Social Security payments. People expect these days to be protected from other people's loudness, crudeness and rudeness, religious prejudice, secondhand smoke, and even people's sexism and general insensitivity in the workplace.

As for politics, America is vastly different from what it was back on Sunday, December 7th, 1941. We used to elect presidents we thought would do something to improve our economic and social lives. Now, we'll settle for a president who simply identifies with our fears and resentments. All of this, of course, is conditional on our physical, psychological, and spiritual safety and sense of security which is dependent on how much control we believe we have over our lives. The rich usually feel more secure than the poor because money, at least on the surface, serves unconditionally — provided, of course, that money is both sound and reasonably managed. The less money you have, the more you need to depend on the good fortune and generosity of society. The crisis we are passing through is, without a doubt, going to bring about a massive attitudinal adjustment. Some of that will be more constructive than we can currently imagine while other aspects of that adjustments may well be negative for a generation or two.

Consider the following: will social distancing become a habit? If it does, what will that do to our restaurant, hotel, and travel businesses? How will that alter sports and recreation? Will the need for a national healthcare system become more or less apparent? If the virus ravages through the states that have resisted social distancing, might that alter people's expectations about government? Is this crisis more likely to bind us together or separate us? Are Americans likely to become more or less insular, more or less arrogant in comparison to the rest of the world?

The next question is, what causes a people to unite as opposed to divide? How might we become a more united people than we currently are?

Well, there is our empathy for the pain and loneliness of others. There's certainly a large market for the medicines or the treatments that may keep us from getting so sick again! Due largely to technology, there is the possibility of us once again becoming a nation of shopkeepers as "merry old England" once was before industrialization! Every shift in society has its growing pains. Before industrialization, no one ever thought of Marxism or even socialism.

In our lifetimes, we have lived reasonably content, reasonably prosperous, and reasonably happy in the United States of America. Most of us have studied American history, the story of our founding fathers, pioneers, civil war soldiers and citizens, current day husbands, wives, laborers, bankers, and merchants all under a constitution most of us have never bothered to read, let alone understand. Hence, now that we're undoubtedly in a national crisis, the question rears its ugly head: "What is it that unites us?"

If you're a conservative, there are too many liberals. If you're a liberal, it’s the other way around. If you're poor or black, there are too many rich whites! If you're a solid citizen, there are too many immigrants anxious to eat your tax money and crowd your schools, highways and city — to say nothing about your neighborhood! If there's too much of the world in America, can America reasonably escape the rest of the world?

Is it wise, or even right, that America united eighty years ago in the last really frightening crisis? Or was it merely inevitable? Was that unity a surface unity or a genuine one?

Can Humpty Dumpty be put back together again? Should it be put back together again just as it once was or should it be put together substantially differently than it was up until founder James Madison's 149th birthday on Monday, March 16th, 2020?

What say you?

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY

1941: THE YEAR THE IDEAL AND THE REAL GRIPPED THE WORLD!

By Edwin Cooney

On Monday, January 6th, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt stood before Congress and gave his seventh State of the Union Address. It was to be a unique address in several ways. First, its deliverer was President-elect for the third time. Second, the president laid out his Lend-Lease proposal empowering the president to lend or lease needed materials to governments in their struggle with Fascism and Nazism. It was a proposal which a year or two before might have become an article for his impeachment had powerful isolationist Republicans and Democrats had their way. Finally, FDR enunciated his "Four Freedoms” concept that all people everywhere in the world were entitled to freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. These four freedoms would be part of the Atlantic Charter issued that August by FDR and British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill.

Two Mondays later on January 20th, FDR and Vice President-elect Henry Agard Wallace were inaugurated — Wallace for his first and only time, Franklin Delano Roosevelt for his third term and with Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes presiding for his third and last time over a presidential inauguration ceremony. On Tuesday, March 11th, Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act with a large number of Republicans abandoning their almost traditional isolationism to meet the emergencies in both Europe and Asia.

If early 1941 political philosophy and foreign policy were formed around the ideal, baseball statistics and the men who performed them were real. On Friday, May 15th, 1941, both Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams began their torrid hitting adventures. DiMaggio's 56 game hitting streak started in Chicago when he went 1 for 4 off the White Sox's Edgar (Eddie) Smith. Between May 15th and July 17th, Joe DiMaggio hit safely in 56 consecutive games with a .408 average. The streak ended on Thursday, July 17th in Cleveland when the Indians' infielders Ken Keltner and Lou Boudreau made three sparkling plays off DiMaggio.  During that time, Williams would bat as high as .488. Ted Williams would not only finish the season with a .406 batting average, he had hit a dramatic home run in the Tuesday, July 6th All Star Game to give the American League a 6 to 5 victory in the bottom of the ninth inning in Detroit. Additionally, 1941 would be the final year for two great pitchers, Dizzy Dean, and Lefty Grove. Even sadder, Monday, June 2nd would see the passing of Lou Gehrig ending his two year battle against amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. (Perhaps the most moving part of Lou Gehrig's funeral at Christ Episcopal Church in Riverdale, New York was when Reverend Gerald V. Barry explained to the mourners why there was no eulogy saying "we don't need one because we all knew him!” Perhaps Lou Gehrig offered his own best eulogy when he asserted on Tuesday July 4th, 1939: "Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth!")

   .  

On Saturday, May 10th, Rudolf Hess, Hitler's second in command, parachuted into Scotland on a "peace mission” that infuriated Hitler and puzzled everyone else. On Saturday, May 24th, the German battleship Bismarck sunk the HMS Hood. On Monday, the 26th of May, the HMS Ark Royal crippled the Bismarck's steering system and the following day the ship was finally sunk.

On Tuesday, June 24th, FDR promised Lend-Lease assistance as had Winston Churchill two days after Germany invaded the USSR, despite both men's violent dislike of Communism.

On Friday, July 25th, FDR froze all Japanese assets in the United States and suspended all trade with Japan in retaliation for Japan's invasion of French Indochina the previous day. This action by the president would largely be the cause for Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor later in the year. 

Between Saturday, August 9th and Tuesday, August 12th, President Roosevelt met with Prime Minister Winston Churchill aboard the USS Augusta and the HMS Prince of Wales off the grand banks of Newfoundland in Canada. The result was the largely symbolic Atlantic Charter which established the principles for the grounds for which the coming war and post war institutions (such as the United Nations) would be promulgated.

People born in 1941 include singer Joan Baez on Thursday, January 9th, former Vice President Richard Bruce Cheney on Thursday, January 30th, Ed Bradley of Sixty Minutes who was born on Sunday, June 22nd, and Senator Bernie Sanders who was born on Monday, September 8th, 1941. Perhaps the most culturally significant “birth” occurred on Thursday, May 1st when General Mills began selling CheeriOats, later to be renamed Cheerios! 

Not far behind was the Tuesday, July 1st birth of commercial television. The first commercial over WNBT Channel 1 occurred during a Dodgers Phillies game. The commercial was for Bulova watches. It was a ten second commercial showing a Bulova watch superimposed over a map of the U.S. with a voiceover saying "America runs on Bulova time!”  

It was on Thursday, September 11th, in a stern national radio broadcast, that FDR responded to an increasing number of German attacks on naval and merchant shipping, stating that the Navy would "shoot on sight" any Axis vessel found within the zone that the president had designated back on Friday, April 11th as being vital to U.S. interests.

The 1941 World Series was the only national lighthearted event left in the year. The Brooklyn Dodgers, under fiery manager Leo Durocher, was about to tie the mighty Yankees in the fourth game of the series on Sunday, October 5th at Ebbets Field. The "Bums" had a 4 to 3 lead when pitcher Hugh Casey struck out the Yankees' Tommy Henrich — except that catcher Mickey Owen failed to catch Casey's sharp breaking curve. Henrich was safe at first when suddenly "the wheels" came off Brooklyn pitching. The Yankees scored four runs to win the game 7 to 4. The Monday, October 6th game, also at Ebbets Field, was the end for the Dodgers despite a respectable performance by Whitlow Wyatt. Wyatt, following a Tommy Henrich fifth inning homer, decked Joe DiMaggio who, after flying out, went after Wyatt. It was all short-lived though. The Yankees won the game and the series 3 to 1. It was the Yankees' 32nd World Series game out of the previous 36 World Series contests.

On Monday, November 3rd, Joseph Grew, the American Ambassador to Japan, warned Secretary of State Cordell Hull that Japan might launch a surprise attack on United States military positions. This information was passed on to FDR during the Friday, November 7th cabinet meeting.

On Monday, November 17th, Japanese Ambassador Kichisaburo Nomura was joined in Washington by special envoy Saburo Kurusu for a series of intense negotiations which ultimately would fail. (Post war documents reveal that neither man was aware of the Japanese government’s intention to attack Pearl Harbor.)

On the morning of December 7th, 1941, President Roosevelt was relaxing on the second floor of the White House with his stamp collection. Shortly after 1 pm. he received a phone message informing him that at 12:55 eastern time, Japanese air squadrons had attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Nineteen ships, including six battleships, were sunk or damaged. In addition, 2,403 soldiers, sailors and civilians were killed. One thousand one hundred additional personnel were wounded.

FDR would ask Congress for a Declaration of War in a five minute address on Monday, December 8th shortly after noon, eastern time. On Thursday, December 11th, Germany and Italy would declare war on the United States.

The year would end with Winston Churchill visiting the White House, addressing a Christmas tree decorating ceremony on Wednesday, December 24th, and addressing a public session of Congress on Friday, December 26th.

Yes, indeed, 1941 began with the ideal but closed with the starkly real!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY