Reason Magazine - Staff

Chewing the Fat

g-fine@northwestern.edu (Gary Alan Fine) — Thu, 01 Nov 2001 00:00:00 EST

Hail to the Crook?

g-fine@northwestern.edu (Gary Alan Fine) — Fri, 01 Nov 1996 00:00:00 EST

Voters this year have been presented with a presidential choice based largely on character: This is the season of the politics of reputation. For evidence, one need only examine the summer's best-seller lists: Riding high was Unlimited Access, the book by former FBI agent Gary Aldrich that tells, among other tales, the poorly sourced story that the president sneaks out for midnight trysts with sexy celebrities. Other summer books, such as Roger Morris's Partners in Power , appeared to deepen the moral indictment of the first family; yet more thick character examinations are due out before the election.

Such front-page furors as the FBI files case, coupled with the issues of Whitewater, Travelgate, and the rest of the Clinton crew's notorious repertory, indicate the role that personality plays in this election. It seems that at the least the Republicans will keep it part of the campaign's atmospherics: They see Bill Clinton's reputation as vulnerable to attack. People do not believe Clinton, claims the GOP; Bob Dole goes so far as to say they would not trust him as their children's babysitter. With 63 percent of respondents to a summer Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll saying they were "not confident" of "Bill Clinton's honesty and truthfulness," Republicans have room for attack.

In politics, reputation is the coin of the realm. Even more than the proponent of a set of policies, a politician is a public figure: a man or woman with whom the public develops a meaningful, if mediated, relationship; what sociologists term parasocial interaction. Americans feel that they "know" Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, or Jimmy Carter. When Michael Dukakis's running mate, Lloyd Bentsen, skewered Dan Quayle by saying that he was no Jack Kennedy--a comparison Quayle had himself invited--the remark was powerful because his audience appreciated the differences in reputation between Kennedy and Quayle.

American politics is structured as a competitive game, so there will always be those who will look for an opening to make their side look good, or to besmirch the opposition. This is so taken for granted that we label it "politics as usual." A president's reputation is at the mercy of both critics and supporters: The two parties jockey with each other in building and destroying reputations.

In time political leaders develop--or accrue--reputations to which both friend and foe have contributed. Bob Dole, for example, is seen as the elderly, disabled, Washington player; the consummate insider who lacks both vision and oratorical power. The president is known as an ethically challenged baby boomer, a gregarious, "compassionate" pol whose policy concerns are grounded in calculations of self-interest. We filter the policy pronouncements of our leaders by what we know of their character.

Yet political reputations, as George Bush can tell us with chagrin, can fluctuate rapidly. While a politician is active, his reputation can be burnished by his actions and the attentions of his friends, or can be smeared by the activities of his cronies. The reputations of Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon both attest to the fact that even after the sunset of one's political career, virtuous deeds coupled with active public relations can change the public's view--at least in some measure. While professional Nixon haters will never alter their opinion, by the time of his death the formerly disgraced ex-president was given an honorable send-off. Eventually, after politicians, their agents, and their enemies have left the scene, historians take their turn in solidifying presidential reputations, writing the textbooks that teach students which leaders deserve honor. Historians have great weight in shaping our collective memory. Thus, while President Woodrow Wilson was roundly disliked by the American public at the end of his presidency (the Democrats wanted no part of a third term for Wilson), historians, sympathetic to Wilson's background as an academic historian and his quixotic quest for world peace through the League of Nations, have elevated him into the pantheon of the near-great presidents.

Historians have their biases--most describe themselves as liberals and Democrats-- leading Republicans and conservatives to suggest that the judgment of history is stacked against them. Indeed, since the realignment of the parties in 1856, Democratic presidents have fared better with historians than Republicans. Of the Republican presidents only Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower are rated above average in polls of historians. No elected Democrat since the Civil War is rated below average; even Jimmy Carter attains an "average" rating in such polls.

To understand the power of reputations, consider the president perceived to be America's worst leader. That president, judged by the evaluations of the public and historians, is Warren Gamaliel Harding. Those who savor presidential reputations admire what historian Eric Goldman refers to as the "grandeur" of "the contempt in which his memory is held." Why is Harding thought of so poorly, and what might this say about our collective memory of the former Arkansas governor currently in the White House? How have reputational entrepreneurs transformed Harding into an abject failure?

The standard reading of Warren Harding is that he was an unintelligent man, too trusting of his cronies, too weak as a leader, uncaring about corruption, and too passive for a nation that needed leadership in the years after World War I. Yet this reading, widely accepted today, contrasts mightily with how contemporaries viewed Harding.

At his sudden death in August 1923, Harding was an exceptionally popular chief executive, considered likely to be re-elected. He had achieved a string of real accomplishments: creating an open, accessible administration, establishing the Bureau of the Budget, negotiating the first international reduction of armaments at the Washington Naval Conference, sponsoring tax cuts that spurred the economic expansion of the 1920s, supporting the end of economic and political (though not social) racial discrimination, and pressuring the steel industry to end the 12-hour day. Despite the reputation of the administration as scandal-ridden, Harding himself was honest.

But Warren Harding had the misfortune to die at the wrong moment--immediately prior to the exposure of the Teapot Dome scandal--and thus was unable to defend himself against a mob of debunkers. Teapot Dome provides a stark contrast with recent major scandals, such as Irangate or Watergate, or even Filegate. The scandal involved the selling of federal oil leases in the desolate Teapot Dome area of Wyoming without competitive bidding.

Former Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall subsequently was convicted of accepting bribes from oilmen--he was the only government official implicated in the scandal--and Harding was unaware of his malfeasance. A few other scandals followed, including discovery of Harding's illegitimate daughter and his White House trysts.

When the scandal broke in the months after Harding's death, things looked bleak for the Republican Party. Democrats rode the scandal hard, and believed that they would have an easy time in the elections of 1924. However, they had not counted on President Calvin Coolidge's shrewdness. Rather than defending Harding and his associates, Coolidge distanced himself from the controversial figures of the Harding administration. While Harding had the reputation as a clubby politician (part of the "Ohio Gang"), encouraging the public image of a scandal-riddled administration, this charge was implausible when applied to the starchy, upright Coolidge.

None of this helped poor Harding. His erstwhile supporters melted away in the political heat, or were sent packing by Coolidge. Silent Cal himself refused to dedicate the Harding mausoleum in Marion, Ohio, well after the 1924 elections. Harding was at the mercy of those politicians, journalists, and eventually historians, both scholarly and popular, who wished him ill, attempting to use his failure to denigrate the conservative/libertarian policies of the Harding/Coolidge administrations. Even the release of Harding's papers in the 1960s, which led some serious historians to attempt a revision of Harding as a solid leader, has not helped Harding: His reputation remains mired in melodrama and malfeasance. Indeed, many contemporary libertarians and conservatives remain unaware of the achievements of those administrations that more than any others of the 20th century attempted to limit the growth of government, preserving a vigorous private sector and economic growth.

The fragility of Warren Harding's reputation speaks to the dilemmas of William Jefferson Clinton. The parallels between the two are, if imperfect, nevertheless striking. Harding belonged to a regional political machine outside of the national orbit; Clinton, too, was an outsider. Harding was bedeviled by his home-state cronies, facing suicides, scandals, and a general sense of sleaze; that is the Clinton administration in a nutshell. Harding was a glad-hander who liked men and loved women; that is the Clinton persona. Harding's wife was disliked by many and reviled as imperious (if you think Hillary has it bad, read what historians--to say nothing of historically minded gossips--say about Florence Harding); that is the first lady. Harding couldn't stop talking (or, to use Harding's own term, "bloviating"); neither can Clinton. Harding was personally honest, but unable to judge the character of those around him; Clinton's judgment awaits the verdict of historians.

Republican operatives are doing their best to ensure that the public remembers all the ethical challenges that the first family has failed. Faced with an opponent who has co-opted many issues traditionally associated with the GOP, they turn to "character." But the balance of Clinton's strengths and faults has yet to be taken; it may be that, for some, even his failings are appealing.

Clinton does have advantages that Harding lacked: the continued, if anxious, loyalty of his party, the sharp pens of partisan journalists, and links with those academics who will eventually write history. Furthermore, short of being felled by a Big Mac attack, Clinton will be able to defend himself for decades to come, leading the charge to recover and bolster his own reputation (with the help of millions of post-White House federal dollars). Has the public taken Clinton's somewhat sleazy reputation into account? Will voters be willing to re-elect him despite--or even because of--the entertainment value of the scandals that seem to blossom in Clinton's Rose Garden? Clinton is not quite the "Teflon" president that Ronald Reagan was; sleaze sticks to him. But Clinton has shown a talent for changing the political subject from his own problems to some other issue, and he is presiding at a time of economic prosperity.

He may yet be given a pass because he has charm. Some may even find his character to be endearing: that of a cheery rogue, not an evil crook; and we give our rogues considerable leeway. Faced with a frequently dour Bob Dole, our presidential Tom Sawyer has evident powers of seduction. Future historians will find in him a rich subject, debating whether citizens of a society where excuses were readily available for any malfeasance found it comforting to have a president who had so much in common with many of those he led.

Twenties-Something

g-fine@northwestern.edu (Gary Alan Fine) — Sat, 01 Jul 1995 00:00:00 EDT

Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s, by Ann Douglas, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 606 pages, $25.00

Growing up in New York City in the 1950s and '60s, I had no doubt that my home town was simultaneously a part of and apart from the rest of the country: Manhattan represented both a distillation of American culture and a challenge to that culture. It was a site of diversity, a tough town, and, most of all, a place of promise.

Ann Douglas, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University (ground zero of New York literary culture) is smitten with the lure and danger of Manhattan--not the Gotham of a dilapidated present, but the city in a decade of possibilities. In Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s, Douglas examines the decade she believes presents the American psyche in its most revealing moment, the period when America gained cultural and economic leadership of the West. With America's emancipation from foreign influences, celebration of its multiracial heritage, and overthrowing of matriarchy, the '20s represented a sea-change in American self-identity.

The Roaring '20s--particularly in New York, Douglas's focus--represent the end of Victorian gentility, the conclusion of the 19th-century feminization of American culture (the topic of her previous research). In the place of "feminized" culture, she argues, came a rough, individualistic masculinity that focused on a quest for excitement: an era of masculine figures, such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Hart Crane, and independent and resourceful women such as Dorothy Parker and Zora Neale Hurston.

Douglas, borrowing the words of Raymond Chandler, labels the 1920s an age of "terrible honesty." American writers, artists, and thinkers were determined to shatter the preconceptions of a stable social order through their embrace of the primitive, the wild, the sexual, and the violent. If, as Hemingway believed, American culture had been excessively feminine, they were having none of it. They called for the overthrowing of the "Titaness," Douglas's image of the Victorian matriarchal figures who served as cultural monitors.

Douglas's masculinist cultural model is impressive and illuminating, but it sorely lacks a political dimension. The '20s were a political as well as a cultural watershed. Although the decade today is largely forgotten or derided, it represented the possibilities of a powerful, modern nation embracing an ideology of small government--a dramatic interlude of individualism after the interventionism of Woodrow Wilson and the progressivism of Theodore Roosevelt.

While the reputations of Presidents Warren Harding and "Silent" Calvin Coolidge have taken a beating from historians and the media over the years, they serve as exemplars of a commitment to a limited state that rejects both economic and moral intrusion. Harding's widely known flouting of Prohibition laws in the White House might be particularly cheering, were it not for the fact that he had supported the Volstead Act while in the Senate (albeit for political reasons and not enthusiastically). One can hardly imagine Clinton inhaling as openly as Harding imbibed.

The general public cynicism toward and evasion of Prohibition laws, enacted under the prim glower of Woodrow Wilson, proved to be the first open taste of popular rebellion against the belief that government knows best how citizens should run their private lives. Were it not for the crisis of the Depression and the resultant election of the expansive Franklin Roosevelt, modest expectations of government might be the rule, not the exception.

A society that embraces the idea of individualism, after all, has little need or love for a government that protects citizens from real or imagined risks. Both Harding and Coolidge are politicians whose personas are tied to masculine images: the clubby, hale fellow and the silent, unemotional male--dramatic contrasts with the softer, more cerebral Wilson (and his wife, who had enormous control over government operations in the aftermath of his stroke).

Additionally, to understand fully the '20s, we must recognize that dramatic changes in media profoundly affected American culture. Two innovations at the start of the decade (one entrepreneurial, one technological) fundamentally changed the ways that Americans came to share each others' lives and to understand each other. The invention of the tabloid newspaper--starting with the New York Daily News in 1919--created a jazzier manner of reportage that appealed to a broader spectrum of the citizenry. Such a medium expanded the knowledgeable public, allowing for a wider collective focus and popular discourse.

Along with the creation of the tabloid newspaper came the development and expansion of commercial radio broadcasting--another mass medium largely outside government control. As the decade progressed, radio quickly spread across the nation, knitting the American citizenry into a public community. For the first time, people were able to hear events in "real time," as part of a single audience--listeners who shared attention.

These were significant achievements in the process of edging toward a nation that could be shaped by events that were created or directed by a national media. The '20s were an age of sensation, a time of crazes. To think of the 1920s is to recall the series of "Trials of the Century" that shook and fascinated the republic: the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Leopold and Loeb case, and, of course, the Scopes "Monkey" trial. One cannot think of a set of trials from previous decades that so transfixed the American public and entered into our cultural history. From the '20s forward, however, public attention could be and is swayed by sensational cases--such as the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, the Rosenberg spy trial, the Manson family murders, and today's O.J. Simpson trial--that resonate with the public mood, feeding a cultural logic of spectacle.

The impact of the Teapot Dome "scandal" on American political life, leading to what Will Rogers termed "the Great Morality Panic of 1924," similarly reveals a sensationalist streak that still reverberates in contemporary political discourse. Add to this the enshrinement of national cultural heroes: Babe Ruth, Bill Tilden, Red Grange, and, not least, Charles Lindbergh, and one recognizes a nation increasingly becoming self-conscious. Because of the new media, America has become a culture of heroes and villains, but perhaps more significantly a culture of familiar strangers, public figures whom we know without ever having met. These relationships simultaneously connect us to our culture and allow us to feel we have the right and privilege to intrude into their privacy.

A word of caution: Cultural segments do not change in parallel sequence without resistance. In Terrible Honesty, Douglas wavers between telling a story of New York and a story of America, a story of literature and a story of politics. Ostensibly, her topic is the literary culture in New York, but in desiring to construct a narrative about dramatic national transformations, she slips into a review of American life. Once she crosses the Hudson, however, she loses the descriptive detail that would prove (or disprove) the case for the country as a whole. While Douglas's masculinizing model is a plausible explanation for much of what was going on during the '20s, care is warranted in extending that analysis to the country as a whole. Broad brushes can make messy painting.

Indeed, to a greater extent than Douglas has attempted, understanding the 1920s involves coming to terms with the battles over Prohibition and over women's suffrage as focuses of the struggle for gender dominance. Simultaneously, women became fully incorporated into the body politic and the government took on the role of deciding which beverages free men and women should ingest. The two constitutional amendments that began the decade are plainly victories for the matriarchal political ideology that Douglas suggests is soon to be routed.

It seems clear that the ultimately successful effort against Prohibition supports the idea of a turn in America toward a masculinist culture. And yet the rapid passage of the 18th Amendment, the struggles over its enforcement, and the continued presence of prohibitionary impulses regarding other substances surely indicate that the victory was incomplete. Similarly, bringing women into the polity "masculinizes" them in the sense of giving them a distinct stake in the political process. But it also provides the ideology of gentility with a political base, presaging today's political gender gap: a point not to be lost on the primarily masculine libertarian movement.

Had Douglas showed a fuller recognition of the scene outside of New York (and urban areas in general), she might have exercised more interpretive prudence. What is happening in New York, important though it is for the growth of American culture, does not always map onto movements throughout the land. Douglas claims an American exceptionalism--a unique quality to American life, essentially a national character. Yet, to make this claim is to ignore the gaps between Southern religious revivalism, the spread of the Ku Klux Klan in the industrial heartland, the battles over Hollywood and its scandals in the Pacific West, and the remnants of progressivism and populism on the plains.

Certainly, New York is in part a microcosm of the rest of the nation, but it is also a distinctly different world: a world in which race, religion, and gender politics played themselves out in ways that much of the rest of the nation would find repugnant. To focus on Manhattan culture hardly explains the nationwide Republican ascendancy throughout the decade: To ignore the economic structure of the society downplays the effects of the remarkable years of prosperity: an economic record as significant--if less dramatic--as the crisis of confidence provoked by the Depression that followed. Good news always bows to bad.

Perhaps the greatest lesson of the '20s is in the possibilities of freedom. This lesson is drawn most dramatically in Douglas's description of the flowering of Harlem's African-American culture but is equally apparent in downtown literary cultures, and in laissez-faire politics. For a time, most Americans felt that freedom was theirs, without the burdens of a communal culture or intrusive government. It is a lesson with which we struggle every few decades, always to be reined in by those forces that suggest that others know best. Honesty can be terrible to the guardians of morality.