Don’t say [list too long to include]
Princeton historian Tera W. Hunter in The Nation:
When I was growing up, my Florida high school required me to endure a course called “Americanism vs. Communism.” I was hardly alone. Between 1962 and 1991, Florida mandated the class for all high school juniors or seniors in public schools. Each lesson had the same takeaway: “Americanism” was all good and “Communism” all bad.
No doubt an offspring of the House Unamerican Activities Committee. You’d think activities should be evaluated on their merits, right, not their location? It’s just dumb to label activities un-Swedish or un-Egyptian or un-Chinese or un-American. America has lots of activities, most of which it shares with other countries or land-masses – speaking of which, by Un-American activities do they mean un-United States activities on Un-American Continent activities? Either way there are lots of activities, and the same goes for all the other countries (let alone continents) on the planet.
“Americanism” v Communism is a jumble. Communism is a political and economic ideology, while “Americanism” is…what? Whatever US conservatives currently approve of, basically.
The concept of “Americanism” dates to the colonial era. It’s meant to identify the nation’s distinctive historical origins and democratic political idioms. Individuals and groups across the political spectrum have marshaled it for varying purposes, including an inclusive vision of citizenship, but also racist anti-immigrant campaigns during the 1920s . Its capaciousness shrank considerably during the Cold War as political conservatives used it to buttress exclusive ends. The rise of the Soviet Union and the fear of totalitarianism it provoked was an existential crisis that could only be neutered, they believed, with a contrast nationalist creed: Americanism.
Of course, Soviet communism was all mixed up with nationalism too, so waving the “Americanism” flag was perhaps not a total change of subject.
Concerned that high school students were vulnerable to a Soviet plot to control the world, the state of Florida designed the course to ensure no teenager be tempted by communism. It defined Americanism as: “the recognition of the truth that the inherent and fundamental rights of man are derived from God and not from governments, societies, dictators, kings or majorities.”
Uh…wrong. Not from god either. It’s true that the point of human rights is that they don’t [can’t, mustn’t] depend on government or majorities and the like – that the first step in protecting them is framing them as inherent in human beings rather than dependent on outside forces and thus vulnerable. They’re vulnerable anyway, but the idea of the inherent nature of them is a necessary starting point. “God” is just human beliefs dressed up in robes and a crown, no better than your local corrupt mayor driving a Lamborghini.
An all-white, mostly male advisory committee consisting of educators, legislators, and private citizens representing the Florida Bar Committee, Florida Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the American Legion designed the course starting in fall 1961.
What could possibly go wrong?
Reports from the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover’s, Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in American and How to Fight it (1958), were prominently featured. Hoover also famously provided consultation and endorsed the course.
Awesome. From frying pan to fire in a single jump.
The Florida legislature formed a committee in the 1950s like the one Senator Joseph McCarthy led in Congress to annihilate “un-American” activities it labeled as communist. The Johns Committee, as it was known, first attacked Black Americans for supporting civil rights and then moved on to target lesbian and gay faculty in the early 1960s at the University of Florida, University of South Florida, and Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (a historically Black college), which led to firings and forced resignations. If DeSantis is confused about the relevance of Queer theory to African American studies, this is a case book example of the Lavender Scare and the Red Scare intersecting to destroy presumed enemies of the state.
That’s interesting.
DeSantis is openly flaunting the resuscitation of a decades-old playbook. His “stop woke” indoctrination of school children and his attacks on the free speech and academic freedom of teachers and college professors are sustained through a bevy of restrictive policies. The governor signed a law last year that requires teachers instruct students about the “Victims of Communism,” which echoes the objectives of the course that I had to take. He supported the state’s designation of a new civics and government curriculum falsely claiming that the founding fathers did not believe in a strict separation of church and state.
So it’s not about the actual “Founding Fathers” but the imaginary ones who would have been DeSantis if only they’d known how.
I think most people have an idealized version of the ‘Founding Fathers’; thing is, they don’t all match and they frequently contradict each other. It’s better not to think our founders were anything other than human, flawed, and putting together an experiment that it is up to us to modify and continue (without slavery, without enshrining the property owners, and ideally, but impossibly I suspect, without the Second Amendment).
Before gun owners jump all over me, let me explain: without the second amendment, we could have an opportunity to establish a sound, responsible gun policy that didn’t rely on either extreme of banning them altogether vs. allowing everyone to have any gun they want as long as they can scrape together enough dollars to buy it.
The thing is that there is such a thing as “woke indoctrination” in public schools. I don’t have a side to root for in this conflict. It’s one set of heavy-handed indoctrination vs another. I want them both to lose.
iknklast,
I think it’s really helpful to read accounts of the Constitutional convention and the ratification process. It really ought to disabuse anyone of the notion that the Constitution was some perfect document handed down by wise founders whose wisdom must be taken as gospel centuries later.
It was a product of a large committee that had to balance all sorts of competing interests: slave states vs. free, large states vs. small, strong central government vs. weak, etc. And like most attempts to forge a compromise among large numbers of people and factions, it’s a bit of a kludge at times. They punted some of the most important stuff (“oh, we’ll pass a Bill of Rights later.”)
The system for electing the president and vice president was so flawed that they had to amend it pretty damn quickly, and that was based on the rather naive notion that America wouldn’t have political parties because parties were bad and therefore they wouldn’t arise because…?
And the Constitution itself was the founders’ second attempt at forming a national government, after the Articles of Confederation proved unworkable. They didn’t even bother to go through the exercise of amending the Articles, just scrapped the whole thing and started over.
I mean, by the standards of written constitutions, America did pretty well. But there’s a reason why countries adopting new constitutions stopped looking to the U.S. model a long time ago.
Yes, I cherish my first degree in Political Science (though I stopped at the BA and decided not to go to law school). I have asked people to actually read the damn document, but no one I say that to will. They just keep on proclaiming what it “really” says, which always seems to agree with them.
If everything people tell me is in the Constitution was really there, it would be as long as the Oklahoma State Constitution, which is long and unworkable in many places because of things they included that don’t fit in the twenty-first century world (or even more than about half of the twentieth century).
I think the movie 1776 does a pretty good job of showing just how committee, just how compromise, just how flawed the process was. That’s one source for people who refuse to read books; I actually still read a lot on the topic even though I left PoliSci behind in 1986.
I was also in high school in Florida during that time (1963-66 for me) and had that unit in our social studies curriculum. With that awful J Edgar Hoover book!
The unit was particularly unpleasant for me because my parents (and grandfather and an uncle) had been actual Communist Party USA members, in the late forties and early fifties.
As always, The Onion said it well.
iknklast @#4: My late father was told by a friend of his who happened to be a Justice of the Supreme Court of NSW, that there was a Victorian-era law, never repealed (and probably still there on the books) that permitted the driver of ‘a vehicle’ (horse-drawn, naturally; what other kind was there?) to ‘relieve himself” (urinate) on the offside front wheel of said vehicle. Thus, while relieving, he could hang onto the reins. Female drivers were not catered for, but I suppose had an incentive there to switch over to become transwhatever.
The Judge said that he had always wanted to test that law, but for some reason had never got round to it.
Omar, they once had a law in Oklahoma that you couldn’t catch whales in Oklahoma waters. I actually don’t imagine anyone ever violated that one! Apparently they pulled our law code over from another state, which I believe was North Carolina.
Ever since learning that, I always wanted to catch a whale in Oklahoma waters, but never had any success. In the latter decades of the last century, they repealed some of their ridiculous laws. I don’t know if that one was one of them.
To give an example of what Screechy Monkey is talking (screeching?) about, in Madison’s original draft both the House and the Senate were meant to be proportional to the states’ populations. That did not go over well with the smaller states, and so they had to compromise by giving each state two senators (and Madison was not happy). And that wasn’t a slave state vs. free state thing–Connecticut was a leader of the small states protesting Madison’s plans, while Virginia (natch) was the leading proponent of proportional representation.
iknklast #8
In “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” Heinlein had one of his characters propose that if there was to be a two chamber legislature, the 2nd chamber should devote its time to looking over existing laws for laws that should be repealed.