More Political/Historical Thoughts

-One of the books I read last month for my on-going discussions with an American History prof here was on America in WWI called "America's Great War" by Robert Zieger. It covered political, military, and social history as comprehensively as any non-textbook I have read, so I would recommend it. Naturally, one of the themes was Woodrow Wilson's involvement and leadership. After reading it, I decided that if I had been Wilson, I would have made a stronger bid for both economic and naval neturality.

Despite its avowed neutrality in the beginning of the war, American banks basically financed the Allied war effort for the first several years. Greater pressure on Wall Street to adhere to a genuine policy of neutrality would have helped the US stay out of the conflict in 1918 by eliminating much of the economic incentive to try and see that the Allies didn't default on their loans. So much of the rhetoric of democracy and moral righteousness that Wilson used in justifying the war to Congress and the American people was just rationalization for his administration's failures to maintain that originally sacred neurtrality. By continuing to allow Americans on ships going inside the "war zone" that Germany had defined around Great Britain and that they enforced regularly, Wilson ignored the significant changes in what it meant to be navally neutral that were occuring.

Would taking a harder line on economic and naval neutrality have cost him the 1916 election? Good chance. The Wall Street elite that funded so much of the Democratic party's activity might have even prevented him from being re-nominated. But for him to place political success over such dearly held and widely-supported values as non-intervention in European military conflicts and the role of America as arbiter and peace-seeker is a heinous example of goal displacement. William Jennings Bryan recognized this and resigned as Secetary of State as soon as he saw that the adopted position towards Germany's naval policies would lead to conflict (more on him in a moment). And in a historical sense, look at how much was at stake for America in its decision about entering the war: the military industrial complex can trace its roots to the factories and housing units that were hastily erected and funded in 1917 and 1918 and the aforementioned role of America as the city-on-a-hill neutral was sacrificed as well. Ultimately, Wilson was probably fighting a losing battle anyways, but if he had fought it with the humility, diplomacy and sagacity of Abraham Lincoln, he would have given himself a much better opportunity to succeed. Lincoln was only narrowly renominated to run for his second term, in large part because he stood up for unpopular practices that he believed in and bravely continued to make the case for his point of view. When the time came for Wilson to do so, he allowed himself to be led down a path towards military intervention, and eventually was forced to rationalize the country's involvement because he had left himself no other choice.

-Bryan surfaced again in a much less favorable light in Edward Larson's "Summer for the Gods" about the Scopes Trial in 1925. By that time, his status as a populist leader had led him to the majoritarian cause of supporting fundamentalist evangelicals in their quest to pass laws against the teaching of evolution in public schools. In accounts of the trial and its lead-up, both Bryan and Clarence Darrow come off as aggressive ideologues. One of the most damning points levelled at both of them is the fact they allowed their social views to affect their ideas about scientific matters. Bryan was so strongly anti-authoritarian that he convinced himself populists had a duty to oppose the teachings of the cadre of scientific elites they saw as controlling public discourse on evolution. Darrow was no less biased in his view of the populists, and believed in evolution based more on that social alignment than informed study of the biological sciences. These tendencies came back to hurt both of them at different points in the legal process; though Darrow succeeded in humiliating Bryan on the stand when he called him as an expert witness, that treatment of a man who was a national hero to many people won him few followers (especially since Bryan died a few days later). Bryan actually tried to precent the prosecutions situation from the first by encouraging authors of Tennessee's antievoltuion law to not include a punishment, knowing it would be more effective for his cause to have teachers operating in public defiance of the law without a concrete mechanism for challenging it in court. However, the law was written with a fine as the penalty, and the rest is history. The lesson, as always: don't humiliate a hero because he might die on you, and don't be a jerk if you want people to agree with your point of view.

--I didn't know there was such a thing as fundamentalist secularism, but that's what we are seeing in Turkey. Instead of taking the literal words of a religious text as the basis for a conservative movement, it is the legacy of Ataturk that is being invoked. Legal proceedings began this month which would ban the AKP (Justice and Development Party), head of the current ruling coalition due to its having garnered 47% of the vote in last year's parliamentary elections. Unfortunately, banned parties are not uncommon in Turkey, with 26 of them having gone before the AKP. Of course, this is a large set-back for any remaining aspirations the country may have of joining the EU. The attempt to ban the AKP is largely due to the party's efforts to legalize the wearing of headscarves in universities. Many Turks see that as a violation of the legacy of secularism associated with President Ataturk. However, Ataturk was primarily a modernist, and his was from this point of view that his secularism sprung, not vice-versa. Therefore, the reactionary response of banning an entire political party with pluralistic support over the headscarf issue may be supported by some of Ataturk's words, but not by their overall spirit.