Song Lyric of the Day (Bruce Hornsby, on ‘The Way It Is’—and Shouldn’t Be)

“That's just the way it is

Some things will never change

That's just the way it is

But don't you believe them.”—Bruce Hornsby, “The Way It Is,” performed by Bruce Hornsby and the Range from their album, The Way It Is (1986)

Several summers ago, I was lucky enough to attend one of the most deeply satisfying concerts of my life at the Chautauqua Institution, given  by Bruce Hornsby. The singer-songwriter especially delighted by taking unexpected paths into seemingly familiar songs like one he co-wrote with Don Henley, "The End of the Innocence."

Hornsby took an even more unexpected path 30 years ago this week, when “The Way It Is” reached #1 on Billboard’s “Adult Contemporary” and “Hot 100” charts. It wasn’t just his shimmering jazz piano solos that set it aside from the rest of the pop field, but its lyrics, referring to welfare, racial segregation, and the persistence of class and racial divides two decades after the passage of landmark civil rights legislation.

The socially conscious tune was a far cry from what bookended it on those Billboard charts at the end of that year. The titles say it all: "Love Will Conquer All" by Lionel Richie, "The Next Time I Fall" by Peter Cetera and Amy Grant, “"Love Is Forever" by Billy Ocean, and "Walk Like an Egyptian" by The Bangles.

“The Way It Is” was all the more remarkable for appearing amid a decided conservative swing in the electorate, at the exact midpoint of 12-year Republican occupancy of the White House under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. In contrast, it offered a restrained but pointed rejoinder to defeatism and resignation to “the way it is.” It did not have to be that way, Hornsby argued.

This year, America turned its back on progressive politics, in a manner perhaps even more frightening than the reactionary politics that ensued after the Civil Rights laws mentioned in “The Way It Is” (or, for that matter, the earlier Jim Crow era that represented the twilight of Reconstruction).  The length of this period of retrenchment is unknown. For that reason, Hornsby’s urging toward continuing resolution in the face of quiescence is worth listening to again.

Quote of the Day (Theodore Roosevelt, on Why A Great Democracy Has to be Progressive)

“A great democracy has got to be progressive, or it will soon cease to be either great or a democracy.” — Theodore Roosevelt, “The Nation and the States,” speech before the Colorado Legislature, August 29, 1910, in The New Nationalism (1910)

Song Lyric of the Day (George Harrison, on ‘The Taxman’)

“Let me tell you how it will be

There's one for you, nineteen for me

'Cause I'm the taxman, yeah, I'm the taxman.”—George Harrison, “Taxman,” from the Beatles’ Revolver LP (1966)

This post represents a holy grail for a blogger—a twofer! "Taxman" was not George Harrison’s best song, nor even his first recorded one (that would be “Don’t Bother Me,” which, come to think of it, might have served as an equally good title for this one). But it did serve notice that the “quiet one” of the Beatles had a sly sense of humor. 

The Beatles’ great lead guitarist—and, as fans (and even principal songsmiths John and Paul) learned, their secret songwriting talent—and the youngest of the Fab Four would have turned 70 today.

(One irony of this song: While George wrote the song, Paul played the lead-guitar solo. An interesting change of roles, no?)

Okay, here’s the second part of the twofer I just referred to: it’s also the centennial of the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—one of four passed during the Progressive Era, with this one instituting a federal tax on incomes. It was pushed originally as a matter of social equity by farmers and others who had suffered disproportionately from the federal government’s principal means of raising revenues to that time: the tariff. As Jay Starkman noted in a Wall Street Journal piece a few weeks ago, only one-third of the U.S. population earned enough to be subject to the income tax before WWII. Matters have changed utterly since then, of course, with seven out of 10 Americans now subject to the tax—and the long shadow of the IRS.

The situation was even worse in the U.K. when the Beatles shot to fame. As Harrison recalled it nearly three decades later for the Beatles’ Anthology retrospective: “In those days we paid 19 shillings and sixpence [96p] out of every pound, and with supertax and surtax and tax-tax it was ridiculous - a heavy penalty to pay for making money. That was a big turn-off for Britain. Anybody who ever made any money moved to America or somewhere else.”

Somebody should replay Harrison’s comments—and his song—for the benefit of The New York Times, which published James B. Stewart’s “The Myth of the Rich Who Flee From Taxes.” I’m as populist as the next guy, but the experience of Harrison, the Rolling Stones, Gerard Depardieu, and Phil Mickelson (and a whole swath of the PGA, who’ve moved en masse to tax-friendly Florida) constitutes far more than “anecdotal evidence” in support of the “myth.”

(The photo accompanying this post is a cropped version of a UPI image of Harrison, as the Beatles arrived in New York in 1964.)

This Day in Presidential History (TR, Wilson Become Rivals)

August 7, 1912—For 16 years, Theodore Roosevelt and WoodrowWilson (pictured, as Princeton University president) ad expressed admiration, publicly and privately, for each other’s character and policies. But as they accepted the nominations of their parties, the two were set on a course that would make them bitter rivals to the end of their lives, affect the direction of their parties, and determine the conduct of American foreign policy for the American Century.

Even this capsule description doesn’t do justice to just how pivotal—and convulsive—the election of 1912 was. It was a four-way race, featuring an ex-, current (William Howard Taft) and future President, along with a fourth candidate, the Socialist Eugene V. Debs, who ended up gaining 6% of the popular vote—the highest percentage by a left-wing candidate in the nation’s history.

TR was doing nothing less than trying to regain the White House from his chosen successor, Taft. Because he had served out most of the second term of the assassinated President William McKinley, he was also regarded by many as breaking a pledge not to pursue a third Presidential term.

The relevance of the campaign hasn’t abated even a century later. It isn’t only because the third party that ended up nominating Roosevelt, the Progressives, called in their platform for limits on campaign spending (something the Supreme Court still has a problem with). Nor is it even that Roosevelt, an advocate of military preparedness and unilateral U.S. action in foreign policy, has been denounced in recent years by Glenn Beck as a “weird progressive.”

No, a recent George F. Will column extolled Taft for staying in the race to deny TR a chance at a third term, citing the ex-President’s support of recall against judges—a measure that would have undermined the independence of the judiciary. The GOP might have lost, Will writes, but it "kept its commitment to the Constitution," and now, with the electoral good fortunes of the likes of Ted Cruz in Texas, the party exhibits a positively "Madisonian flair."

But the real beef that Will might have with TR and the Progressives is this sentence from the party platform: “In accordance with the needs of each generation the people must use their sovereign powers to establish and maintain equal opportunity and industrial justice, to secure which this Government was founded and without which no republic can endure.”

The fight between Roosevelt and Wilson (Taft, most observers correctly realized, could only play a spoiler’s role) amounted to who would be better equipped to fight against social injustice in this age of wrenching dislocation for the American worker. And “fight” might have been the one thing the two men had in common, above all else—at least in how they came to this point in their races for the Oval Office.

Roosevelt, in a mixture of his own disappointment in being out of the White House and genuine disagreement with Taft’s stance on conservation, had rallied Progressives who were disappointed with the incumbent by announcing that his hat was “in the ring.” Despite overwhelming success in the subsequent primary season (he even whipped Taft in his home state, Ohio), Roosevelt was denied nomination at the GOP convention by the Taft forces, which awarded TR a paltry 19 out of 254 disputed convention votes. 

On the eve of the Chicago confab, knowing the outcome, he broke precedent for candidates by appearing in person at the convention, urging his followers not to vote at what was turning out to be rigged proceedings, climaxing with evangelical fervor: “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord!”

In contrast, New Jersey Governor Wilson accepted the Democratic nomination from his summer residence in Sea Bright, N.J. He won the Democratic nomination in Baltimore only after 46 ballots and all kinds of furious back-and-forth among his advisers and rival candidates and ex-candidates (such as William Jennings Bryan, who would go on to become his first Secretary of State). Like TR, Wilson saw his convention struggle as a battle with the forces of inaction and conservatism within his party (though unlike Roosevelt, he had lost a string of primaries, to Speaker of the House Champ Clark).

In September, the debate between Roosevelt and Wilson revolved around the issue of trusts, a form of corporate combination that threatened small businesses and consumers alike. After two terms in which he had earned a heroic reputation as a “trust-buster,” Roosevelt had concluded that a) they were ineffectual, and b) did not really distinguish adequately between “good” and “bad” trusts. He proposed now that, instead of trusts being busted, they should be regulated, by a government large enough to confront a business leviathan. His program came to be known as the “New Nationalism.”

Wilson, heavily influenced by adviser (and eventual Supreme Court Justice) Louis Brandeis, countered with his own program, the “New Freedom.” He argued that trusts indeed did have to be busted, as government bodies formed to regulate business entities ran the risk of becoming their creatures in the end.

In November 1912, as many expected, TR—sidelined for nearly all of the last crucial month of campaigning as he recuperated from an assassination attempt, without a long-term party apparatus, dogged by accusations that his breaking of the third-term tradition proved he was power-hungry—only had the satisfaction of being Taft. Wilson, while only taking 42% of the popular vote, won a decisive, 40-state victory in the Electoral College because the GOP vote was split.

With his hopes to build the Progressives as a new party damaged in the midterm election of 1914, Roosevelt tried to mend fences with the GOP establishment. But they were not so forgiving of his apostasy, anointing another moderately progressive former New York governor, Charles Evans Hughes, as their Presidential candidate in 1916. (Even with a united party behind him, he, too, went down to defeat to Wilson.)

TR never got over the election of 1912—and neither, in a sense, did the Republican Party. The assassination attempt was one of a series of health scares that led to Roosevelt's death in 1919, at only age 60. His hatred for Wilson, which had flared into being as their ambitions clashed, expanded as the Democrat first attempted to preserve American neutrality in WWI, then, when war was eventually declared, declined to allow the aging Spanish-American War hero to lead troops overseas. When TR received the news that his youngest son, Quentin, had been killed overseas, he wrote French Premier George Clemenceau with ill-concealed bitterness toward Wilson: “It is a very sad thing to see the young die when the old who are doing nothing, as I am doing nothing, are left alive. Therefore it is very bitter to me that I was not allowed to face the danger with my sons.”

TR was campaigning against Wilson’s League of Nations—and hoping, with more certainty than before, that the GOP would nominate him again—at the time of his death.

George F. Will’s column on the Ted Cruz and the election of 1912 tells only part of the story of the tumultuous events of a century ago. It does not convey what a contact sport politics was back then. (Literally so—during a GOP meeting in Michigan, a Taft supporter threw a body block at a Roosevelt speaker.) Moreover, while concentrating on the threat to judicial independence posed by Progressives frustrated with ideologically hidebound judges, it ignores the range of positions in the party platform that were genuinely foresighted, as enumerated by CNN contributor John Avlon: “giving women the right to vote, the abolition of child labor, minimum wages, social security, public health standards, wildlife conservation, workman's compensation, insurance against sickness and unemployment, lobbying reform, campaign finance reform and election reform.

In addition, as Avlon notes, the GOP “still contains competing establishment and reform factions.” Full-scale fights would break out between these factions in 1940, 1952, 1964, and 2000.

The battle between Roosevelt and Wilson was waged with the same ideological and intellectual fervor as that between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson in the 1790s. In one sense, their mutual contempt was so much greater than the two early American patriots that it led them not to resort to tactics commonly tried in the years since: whispering campaigns.

A rumor (with at least some element of truth) began to circulate during the two candidates’ cross-country stumping that Wilson had carried on an extramarital affair. TR would have none of it: Not only would he not stoop to spread the tale, but he found it downright unbelievable and impossible to prove: “No evidence could ever make the American people believe that a man like Woodrow Wilson, cast so perfectly as the apothecary’s clerk, could ever play Romeo.”

Flashback, April 1906: TR Lashes Out at “Muckrakers”

In what normally makes for a dry, ceremonial occasion, President Theodore Roosevelt blasted the investigative journalism that lent fuel to the Progressive movement he headed--and, in the process, demonstrated anew his talent for phrasemaking--by lashing out at purveyors of negativity that the public, taking his lead, quickly labeled “muckrakers.”

Those fascinated by language--the late William Safire and his ilk--have long known about TR’s neologism. But looking at both the content and context of his speech makes for a fascinating glimpse at how America’s leaders once tried to channel political discourse, why the public responded to TR’s particular appeal, and what impact his words made.

The occasion for the President’s address was the dedication for the House of Representatives office building on April 14, 1906. For more than two decades, since his days in the New York state legislature, Roosevelt had battled the forces of corruption that had found a happy hunting ground in the Gilded Age. In the years since, 10 magazines with a combined circulation of 3,000,000--including Everybody's, McClure's Magazine, and the American Magazine--had alerted ordinary Americans to the depredations of robber barons such as John D. Rockefeller, Charles Yerkes, Andrew Carnegie, and others.

The groundswell generated by the resulting anger had enabled T.R., Robert M. LaFollette, Charles Evans Hughes, and other Progressives to pass legislation related to trusts, food and drug safety and municipal corruption.

But two months before the address, whatever goodwill the President felt toward such revelations began to dissipate. The cause was a magazine series called “The Treason of the Senate,” written by reporter/novelist David Graham Phillips.

The Senate was, indeed, a mega-scandal waiting to happen: Because its members were still at that time voted in by state legislatures, they became almost nakedly beholden to corporate interests. Quite simply, the Senators’ votes--their very offices--were for sale.

The President, known to resort to intemperate rhetoric and even name-calling on occasion (when predecessor William McKinley hesitated about going to war with Spain, TR said the President had “no more backbone than a chocolate éclair”), was unnervingly sensitive to its use by others. He became further aroused in this case upon discovering that one object of Phillips’ charges was Roosevelt’s own mentor, the affable junior senator from New York, Chauncey Depew.

TR was annoyed enough that Phillips had gone after his ally and friend by writing of Depew that the New York Central Railroad, operated by Cornelius and William Vanderbilt, “owned him completely.” The President saw the attack as a product of innuendo and exaggeration.

But Roosevelt also saw another force behind the scenes: William Randolph Hearst, who in the past decade had not only become a media mogul but a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives. (Hard to believe, in light of his late-life reputation as a reactionary, but at this point he was selling himself as the people’s tribune.) It was Hearst’s publication Cosmopolitan that ran the Phillips series.

If anyone had an ulterior motive for his actions, TR believed, it was Hearst rather than Depew: By tearing one politician off his pedestal, the publisher-politician was ensuring that he would mount one himself. Ultimately, even Roosevelt’s administration was being undermined by this, he felt, when an ardent supporter such as Depew was being impugned.

Roosevelt did not hit out immediately at Phillips. Instead, he tried out his criticism privately, writing to friends, to see how they would react to his line of argument. Then he vented his frustrations with “hysterical sensationalism” publicly, in the address at the laying of the corner of the House of Representatives Building.

Several points should be mentioned about the speech:

* The literary allusion, “The Man with the Muck-Rake,” that TR transformed into a new term, “muckraker,” derived from John Bunyan’s 17th-century allegory, Pilgrim’s Progress. Virtually every college graduate of the time--and a much wider swath of Protestant America--would have recognized instantly the source. A century later, in a time not only more secular but less likely to install this book as part of the literary canon, that no longer would be true.

* Though later generations seized on the muckraking image as the most notable part of the speech, the media highlighted another aspect of it at the time: TR’s embrace of the progressive income tax. It was TR’s way of signifying that, though he might have resisted the knee-jerk negativity of the muckrakers, he agreed with them that the divide between rich and poor was a menace to the republic and the robber barons of the time needed to be restrained. (That call for a new tax--and one on the rich--would be verboten in the GOP of John Boehner and Paul Ryan, of course.)

* TR’s criticism of investigative journalism was of a piece with his overwhelming distinctions between “good” and “bad.” Jackson Lears’ New Republic review of Edmund Morris’ Colonel Roosevelt is hyperbolic in labeling TR “drunk on his own self-regard,“ but he does have one point: The President lived in a binary universe of moral absolutes. In much the same way that he distinguished between “good” and “bad” trusts, the President drew a distinction between “good” journalism--”absolutely truthful” reports on “every evil man, whether politician or business man, [and] every evil practice, whether in politics, business, or social life”--and “bad” journalism, which, in its “epidemic of indiscriminate assault upon character,” ran the risk of undermining faith in democratic institutions.

* Muckrakers did not take kindly to TR’s criticisms. The day after the speech, Lincoln Steffens, a pioneer of investigative journalism with his “Shame of the Cities” series, told the President: “Well, you have put an end to all these journalistic investigations that have made you." Though some publications carried on the practice, others began to cool on the idea, as admitted by John O'Hara Cosgrave, editor of Everybody's: "The subject was not exhausted but the public interest therein seemed to be at an end, and inevitably the editors turned to other sources of copy to fill their pages."

Quote of the Day (Herbert Croly, on America’s System)

“The American economic, political, and social organization has given to its citizens the benefits of material prosperity, political liberty, and a wholesome natural equality; and this achievement is a gain, not only to Americans, but to the world and to civilization.”—Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (1909)

Croly, the creator of the political concept of the “The New Nationalism” (subsequently adopted by Theodore Roosevelt), was born on this date in 1869. The magazine he founded in 1914, The New Republic, still endures.

Equally important, after influencing TR, Woodrow Wilson, and Progressivism in general, Croly's prescription for liberalism—combining the big-government form of Alexander Hamilton with the egalitarian ends of Thomas Jefferson—looks like it’s about to make a comeback in Barack Obama’s Washington.

The centennial of the publication of The Promise of American Life is one that libertarians, such asVirginia Postrel, will certainly rue. But if you want to understand a century of American political thought, his manifesto is a good place to start.

Quote of the Day (Albert Beveridge, on Imperialism)

“Therefore, in this campaign, the question is larger than a party question. It is an American question. It is a world question. Shall the American people continue their march toward the commercial supremacy of the world? Shall free institutions broaden their blessed reign as the children of liberty wax in strength, until the empire of our principles is established over the hearts of all mankind?”—American historian and U.S. Senator Albert Beveridge (1862-1927), “The March of the Flag,” delivered at Tomlinson Hall, Indianapolis, September 16, 1898

Yesterday’s Quote of the Day from Martin Luther King Jr. eulogy for the victims of the Birmingham Church bombing retains its incandescent magic and prophetic power 45 years after it was delivered. In his day, Albert Beveridge—who went on to win his subsequent Senate election, and then serve out two terms representing Indiana—also had a reputation for eloquence, even though this particular speech grates on our sensibilities more than King’s.

Nevertheless, Beveridge’s speech warrants analysis as a turning point in American history, for the young (36-year-old) Senate hopeful offered here one of the most systematic defenses of America’s need to adopt the models of imperialism then being practiced by Great Britain, France, and Germany. Just how important it was at the time can be seen in this fact: the address became the GOP campaign document for Indiana, Iowa and other states.

Just weeks before this speech was delivered, hostilities in the Spanish-American War had, for all intents and purposes, ceased, leaving the U .S. in possession of territories once held by Spain. In this address, Beveridge urged his listeners to spread the blessings of liberty abroad—and, at the same time, ensure that America had access to the goods and services these overseas possessions ensured.

A long speech such as this required more space than I can devote to it now, but I’d like to focus on just two aspects:

1) The invocation of race—or, to put it in Beveridge’s terms, “a people sprung from the most masterful blood of history; a people perpetually revitalized by the virile, man-producing working-folk of all the earth.” The language is not unlike that found in Theodore Roosevelt’s history The Winning of the West—and in fact Beveridge was such a steadfast supporter of T.R. that he nominated him for President on the Progressive ticket.

2) The inversion of geography to justify empire—At the beginning of the 19th century, Thomas Jefferson had pointed to ocean barriers as a reason for seeing America as the foundation for his “empire of liberty.” Now, Beveridge was suggesting that borders didn’t matter in this new empire. Naval power could transcend this--a view held not only by Commander Alfred Mahan and Beveridge but also by Theodore Roosevelt.

Beveridge was by no means a bad man, for his time or even ours. He was a Progressive, remember, backing Theodore Roosevelt’s call for the Pure Food and Drug Act and curtailing the power of Big Business. All the sadder, then, that he did not see clearly enough the deeper moral issues that might have made him question imperialism.