Historical Image of the Day + Bonus Meta-Senate Talk

George Norris, senator from Nebraska between 1913 and 1943.

Norris was a champion of progressive causes of all stripes. Although a Republican for most of his career (in 1936 he left that party and became an independent), he fought hard on the side of working people. He strongly believed that an activist government could solve many of the nation's intractable problems. He was largely responsible for the Norris-LaGuardia Act in 1932, outlawing yellow-dog contracts (agreeing to not join a union as a condition of employment). But Norris' great passion was public power. He was the single most passionate architect of Tennessee Valley Authority style programs to lift entire regions out of poverty. In fact, he once helped nix a Henry Ford program to build dams in the Tennesee Valley because he knew it was government's place, not private investors', to develop the country. When Franklin Roosevelt took the presidency, Norris' dreams were realized. The creation of TVA in 1933 owes a great deal to Norris' vision. Among the first dams built was Norris Dam, named after the great senator. Fittingly, TVA also created an experimental planned community near the dam for its workers and other locals, providing decent housing, tree-lined streets, schools, and other amenities virtually unknown in the deeply impoverished Tennesee Valley.

Actually, I am a huge critic of TVA and other high modernist dam projects. They have proven environmental disasters of the highest orders. They rarely provided the benefits promised to people and they often ran roughshod over local opposition. However, such ideas were completely unknown to political and intellectual communities in the 1930s. Dams seemed like a savior and political division over them revolved around whether they should be public or private. Norris and New Dealers at large believed public power would raise the standard of living for millions of Americans. Even if they were arguably wrong on the role of dams, they certainly were correct about activist government in general.

On a related note, Sandy Levinson examines the whole idea of great senators and pretty much agrees with me (or I with the much more famous Levinson) on what constitutes a "great" senator. He criticizes Robert Caro, Lyndon Johnson's biographer, for romanticizing so-called "great" senators irregardless of their actual beliefs and the effect of their actions.

So that brings us to Calhoun, a thoroughly brilliant man who devoted his considerable talents, for most of his career, to nurturing and defending chattel slavery. It's really as simple as that. The United States would have been better off had Calhoun been thrown from a horse and killed in, say, 1827. Caro, whose books on Johnson and both great and flawed by a tendency to demonize at times a remarkably complex man, has an untenably romantic view of "great senators."

It is, indeed, like those say that both Churchill and Hitler were "great leaders" because, along some totally amoral metric, they were able to move their audiences to do remarkable things. Well, yes, but anyone who stops there is a moral idiot.

Precisely. That's why John C. Calhoun deserves our scorn as a moral scoundrel and a horrible man who did more than any single other person to justify and glorify slavery as a "positive good." Any discussion of Calhoun as a great senator comes from a person who doesn't believe morality matters in politics.

The Official Greatest Senator List

In 2000, the Senate named their own Seven Greatest Senators. It's a weird list:

John C. Calhoun

Henry Clay

Robert LaFollette

Robert Taft

Arthur Vandenberg

Robert Wagner

Daniel Webster

OK, Clay, Webster, Wagner, and LaFollette I agree with. John C. Calhoun is certainly one of the most important senators ever. Calhoun's case depends on how you define greatness. If you define it as simply chamber shaping and driving American political life, then there's no way to keep Calhoun off the list. While those are necessary components to qualify, I have to argue for a moral side as well. The policies pushed by that senator cannot be loathsome. In particular, the single most important architect in the push to commit treason in defense of slavery cannot be on my list.

As for Vandenberg and Taft, what? They are both important senators for sure. But I feel like Senate Republicans were going to be good and damn sure that they got their favorite progenitors on that list. It seems that Taft's entire case rests upon the Taft-Hartley Act, which even if it wasn't evil, isn't enough to qualify him. I'd like to think it takes more than union busting to make a great senator. Vandenberg was a very important senator when it comes to foreign policy, but it seems that the list overstates that importance. I'm more comfortable with Vandenberg than Taft, but I'd probably argue for another 10 senators before he came into the picture.

21st Century vs. 19th Century

Ed Kilgore has an excellent piece on the rise of states rights rhetoric in the South. Kilgore notes how progressives laughed at Texas Governor Rick Perry when he suggested that Texas could secede from the union, but like myself, Kilgore takes this seriously. He also notes that a resurgence in nullification is rising across the South. Oklahoma Governor Brad Henry recently vetoed a states rights statement that passed his state's legislature. South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford is said to be moving toward this position. Naturally, Sarah Palin is as well. At least one serious candidate for the governor of Georgia has already endorsed nullification.

Rick Perry:

"I believe that our federal government has become oppressive in its size, its intrusion into the lives of our citizens, and its interference with the affairs of our state. That is why I am here today to express my unwavering support for efforts all across our country to reaffirm states' rights affirmed by the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. I believe that returning to the letter and spirit of the U.S. Constitution and its essential 10th Amendment will free our state from undue regulations, and ultimately strengthen our Union."

Nullification based upon a perverse reading of the 10th amendment reached its apogee under John C. Calhoun and South Carolina in the 1820s. But it began with the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. While Thomas Jefferson and James Madison claimed that nullifying the Alien and Sedition Acts was constitutional, they were wrong. As horrid as those laws were, the federal government clearly had the constitutional right to preempt the states. And if that wasn't clear in 1798, the many decisions of the Marshall court should have made it that way.

Modern-day nullifiers and secessionists are able to gain significant traction from their connections to Jefferson and Madison. To me, this shows that we need to reexamine how appropriate it is to base modern-day decisions on what people were thinking over 200 years ago. Moreover, if Jefferson and Madison thought one thing on this issue, Washington, Hamilton, and Adams thought quite differently. Nonetheless, when political movements can make connections to the Founding Fathers, it gains them real political capital.

Andrew Jackson put the smackdown on Calhoun during nullification. First, he threatened to hang him. But from a legalistic perspective, Jackson said that nullification was "incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed."

In Kilgore's comments, a reader also offered John Harlan Stone's opinion on the 10th amendment, given in United States v. Darby, 1941. This puts the lie to the idea to nullifiers ideas about the amendment and provides clear precedent for the federal government's right to see its laws enforced.

"Our conclusion is unaffected by the Tenth Amendment which provides: 'The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people'. The amendment states but a truism that all is retained which has not been surrendered. There is nothing in the history of its adoption to suggest that it was more than declaratory of the relationship between the national and state governments as it had been established by the Constitution before the amendment or that its purpose was other than to allay fears that the new national government might seek to exercise powers not granted, and that the states might not be able to exercise fully their reserved powers.

From the beginning and for many years the amendment has been construed as not depriving the national government of authority to resort to all means for the exercise of a granted power which are appropriate and plainly adapted to the permitted end."

Taney

Mark Sanger makes an excellent argument for allowing the Roger B. Taney statue in Baltimore to remain standing. For those of you who don't remember, Taney was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court during the 1850s and was wrote the majority opinion in the Dred Scott case.

Sanger writes:

"Tearing down all monuments to Roger Taney encourages the historically false belief that slavery existed in the United States largely because Taney and a few other leaders made evil decisions. The monuments to Taney and other champions of slavery that exist in Frederick, in Maryland, and throughout the United States better serve as important reminders that human bondage existed in this state and country because Americans in the early 19th century believed in memorializing those political leaders who preferred slavery to liberty."

Absolutely right. It is vitally important for the people of this country to understand how central slavery was to pre-Civil War America. Roger Taney, John C. Calhoun, and Robert Rhett did not by themselves create and maintain slavery. It was southern planters, northern merchants, ship owners, the US government, and virtually every other major institution in the antebellum United States.

Tearing down statues of Taney and Calhoun undermines the responsibility average Americans had for the slave system. Moreover, it also downplays the role of race in American society today. Americans after the Civil War, both northerners and southerners, consciously lionized men like Taney while placing African-Americans into second-class citizenship. Whites still benefit from this today.

Rather than tear down the Taney statue, let's understand why it is there in the first place.