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I only just learned that Grover Cleveland was a rapist. I knew about the sex scandal and the child, but I didn't know it was flat-out rape.
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Feb 20, 2018 00:07
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Also, gently caress Teddy Roosevelt, the original racist white weeaboo.
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Feb 20, 2018 00:28
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And a lot of Grant bashing is questionable, because a lot of racists hated him because he was willing to use federal force to crack down on southern nationalism and the klan. His reputation only went down a lot around the same time all those Confederate memorials went up.
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Mar 21, 2018 19:20
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axeil posted:I'm so happy that lady with the purple heart bandaid is dead.
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Mar 29, 2018 20:15
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axeil posted:http://obits.dallasnews.com/obituaries/dallasmorningnews/obituary.aspx?n=patricia-crawford-peale&pid=186549283&fhid=17462
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Mar 29, 2018 21:07
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Not that I find this particularly mind-blowing, but I frequently come back to this paragraph from this textbook I read in college when talking about Nixon's partial rehabilitation. I also use this as some context for Dubya's charm offensive with liberals/moderates since Trump took office.
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Apr 1, 2018 02:24
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Azhais posted:And a minute by minute recount of Garfield's presidency
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Apr 4, 2018 20:05
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Well the "What if?" book mentioned how close we were to Henry Wallace being POTUS. Like, what if he stayed on the '44 ticket? I don't remember what the essay's author said about that hypothetical, but I found him to be one of the more interesting VPs who served. He described himself as socialist, but his politics were a bit all over the place later in life.
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Apr 8, 2018 13:56
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Grouchio posted:I spend a good amount of time contributing to alternate history timelines with other writers on another forum - like if 1980s Britain was magically transported back to 1730.
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Apr 8, 2018 21:50
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I'm still more mad about the 2004 election than I am about 2016. It was the first election that made me profoundly angry about the nation's deep divides, culture war fault lines, and the lousy media. gently caress Bush. gently caress Cheney. gently caress the Swift Boat vets. gently caress the 24 hour news cycle.
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Apr 12, 2018 17:38
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Eh. I wasn't too big on Dean. Young me was a bit suspicious of how the media was coronating his nomination, and Kucinich and Sharpton were the crazy catharsis guys who said a lot of things that I wished weren't considered fringe. (Yeah I know there aren't that many D&D defenders for them these days.) Unsure how much of the party maneuvering to block Dean from the nom foreshadowed the party blocking Bernie twelve years later. I kind of felt like Dean's campaign lacked some fundamentals that Bernie had in 2016, despite how the former had front runner status and respectable endorsements. And I thought Kerry got a worse rap from liberals (not even counting the leftist critics here) than he deserved. I thought his life story was compelling by conventional liberal standards. And his biggest mistake wasn't that apparent at the time; picking Edwards. The thing that really pissed me off about 2004 was that many Bush voters weren't voting for Bush or against Kerry. They were voting against the people who were supporting Kerry. It wasn't the first successful campaign driven by petty tribalism obviously, but it was the first election when that was quite apparent for me. Echo Chamber fucked around with this message at 19:05 on Apr 12, 2018 |
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Apr 12, 2018 18:12
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Scooter's pardoned. Where does the Plame Affair fall in this Bush II review? Edit beaten Edit 2: I remember the story of this billboard popping up after the '04 election. 
Echo Chamber fucked around with this message at 18:38 on Apr 13, 2018 |
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Apr 13, 2018 18:32
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Nader was an independent in 2004. David Cobb, Jill Stein's future campaign manager, was the Green nominee.
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Apr 13, 2018 23:46
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I was behind the curve back in March 2003. Like, I knew at that point the evidence of WMDs was bogus, but high school me still rationalized it by thinking "why shouldn't we take out the bad guys anyway?" Somehow, my transformation by 2004 was rapid and substantial. While I was still maintaining a lot of respectability politics in regards to the flag and the troops, I knew the war was unjustified and that Bush had to be voted out of office. I'm not sure if it was Jon Stewart or Michael Moore or John Kerry or someone else that got through to me, but I'm glad I made that journey. I couldn't eat for a day or two after Bush won re-election.
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Apr 14, 2018 01:05
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There was also a moment in one of the Carter vs. Ford debates when the sound stopped working and both guys just stood there for several awkward minutes. Edit: Apparently it lasted 27 minutes. Echo Chamber fucked around with this message at 03:42 on Apr 19, 2018 |
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Apr 19, 2018 03:38
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What do people think of the whole idea of Carter being a disjunctive president and the comparisons to Trump in terms of being a potential last leader of a regime? Corey Robin pitched this idea shortly before Trump was sworn in. Stephen Skowronek himself saw the parallels between Trump and Carter. A few months into the Trump presidency, Corey Robin says Trump's weakness might ironically spare him from Carter's fate. I just find the whole idea of presidential regimes fascinating, because it makes more sense of Clinton and Nixon's presidencies. I never read Skowronek's book.
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Apr 21, 2018 23:19
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The Chinese Exclusion Act was kind of a big deal. Arthur vetoed the first version sent to his desk, but reluctantly signed a slightly less terrible, but still terrible version later.
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Apr 27, 2018 13:36
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Alter Ego posted:poo poo, I missed this...if you want to do a quick writeup, though, that'd be cool. In the mean time... I want to bring up something unrelated about the 21st president.  Chester A. Arthur's Home in New York City Even though NYC is obviously a major city in the United States, it's surprisingly far the center of gravity when it comes to the presidency. Yes, Washington took the first oath of office at Wall Street near where his statue now stands. Grant's tomb is in NYC. Teddy Roosevelt was born there and has a big statue in front of the Natural History Museum. A few presidents went to school there. And obviously 45 grew up in Jamaica Estates before building a skyscraper in Manhattan without sprinklers in the top floors. A few other presidents have origins and ties with New York state like FDR, Cleveland, and Van Buren, but not the titular City. So NYC overall didn't brush too much with the life stories of the POTUS as often as one might think. But Arthur, a creature of one of the political machines, is only one of three presidents who can easily be described as from New York City, if I'm not mistaken. So... if you're curious with retracing his steps... is there much to see about him in New York today? The answer is no.  There's that statue of him in Madison Square Park, erected shortly after his death. I'm sure most of the city's residents who walk pass by it on their way to work barely notice it. So what about the place where Arthur lived and took his Oath of Office? Well, as you can tell from the modern picture above... it's a rather unremarkable apartment building with a food store on the front. The only clue that a POTUS lived there is one plaque hidden from general public view. William Randolph Hearst also lived there. The house isn't a stop in Pokemon Go. "http://mentalfloss.com/article/48895/chester-arthurs-new-york-apartment-turned-indian-grocery-store posted:The plaque, unveiled in 1981 by the now-defunct Native New Yorkers Historical Association, recognizes Arthur’s time spent in the building before and after his presidency. I personally never visited that address. But the next time I'm in the city, I might take a quick pic for Instagram. Just as a dumb piece of historical trivia. Echo Chamber fucked around with this message at 18:47 on Apr 27, 2018 |
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Apr 27, 2018 18:44
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I haven't forgotten about writing about Arthur's role in the Chinese Exclusion Act. I just haven't had the chance yet, and I want it to be more than a blurb. It's very much mostly tangentially related to the POTUS. I figure I'll need a few paragraphs at least to do it justice. But if you want the short version, I pretty much covered it. It's mostly "Arthur reluctantly capitulated the nation's Sinophobia."
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May 4, 2018 02:07
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tigersklaw posted:Lincoln would have spent his time on Twitter trolling the poo poo out of Jeff Davis and we would all have been better for it He would have fully embraced selfies and Instagram.
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May 7, 2018 13:49
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I thought i knew the 19th century pretty well. But I don't know who DuBois is referring to with Browning, one of the five masters of the 19th century.
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May 11, 2018 03:56
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Lincoln's assassination inadvertently started the trend of large, if not gaudy, tombs for US presidents that lasted until Harding, with some exceptions. wikipedia list
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May 15, 2018 18:26
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As promised, a write-up about the Chinese Exclusion Act. Four years before the United States dedicated the Statue of Liberty, perhaps the crowning symbol of America's mythology as a Nation of Immigrants, President Arthur signed what's become one of the country's most notorious xenophobic laws in its history. Now, I'm in general agreement with the thread's hivemind on Chester Arthur; that he was one of the better presidents in that period of relatively unremarkable chiefs. But Chinese Exclusion is perhaps the big black mark on Arthur's legacy for those who bother having an opinion of him. Background The tea dumped into the Boston Harbor was Chinese tea. Some Chinese Americans might probably mention that bit of trivia; that contact and trade between the China and the British colonies was significant enough that one of China's exports became a prop in the American Revolution's famous flashpoint. But the first major migration of Chinese was triggered by the California Gold Rush of 1848-1855. Many Chinese were also fleeing the Qing Empire during the massive trainwreck that was the Taiping Rebellion, lasting from 1850-1864 (which was started by Jesus' brother... a story for another thread). Also, from 1861 to 1865, the United States had an insane internal drama as well, perhaps you might have heard of it. In addition to providing some answers to the outstanding questions of slavery and seccession, a lot of historians chose to understand the ideological shift in the American Civil War within the context of other nationalist movements around the globe. As the cliche goes, people started saying "The United States is..." rather than "The United States are". (It didn't happen right after Lee's surrender; it took a few decades.) Empowering the newly freed African Americans perhaps embodied the more benign, aspirational aspects of nationalism; that white and black Americans could march under one banner with a shared purpose despite their supposed differences. But then, there's the other side of the coin when it comes to national identity - the more exclusive brand of nationalism. But before we talk about how public Sinophobia got Congress to act, we should talk a little bit about the US's history with China. The Qing Dynasty and the United States didn't exactly start off on the right foot together. While the British were the obvious aggressors, US businesses also benefited from the unequal international treaties with the emperor. But relations thawed starting with Lincoln. Wanting to further expand American business interests in Asia, William Seward and US Ambassodor Anson Burlingame negotiated a treaty that included measures respecting China's soveriegnty, and more interesting for us, provided more privileges for citizens of each nation to residing in the other. This Burlingame Treaty, ultimately ratified in 1868, omits naturalization as one of these privileges. Well anyway, the Chinese started their mass migration of immigrants to California. And the populations were substantial and concentrated enough that the US starts seeing its first Chinatowns. In addition to hard labor jobs like mining in the gold rush, they took many low-wage labor jobs, including restaurant and laundry work. (A legacy that lives on to this day in lazy, racist jokes.) And then the grumblings of "THEY TOOK OUR JOBS"  emerged.Perhaps the biggest surviving symbol anti-Chinese racism at this time is the lack of recognition in the famous 1869 photo taken after driving the last spike into the Transcontinental Railroad.  As you well know, the Chinese laborers played a huge role in the construction of the First Transcontinental Railroad. But when the time came to take a group photo of the people who helped make this historic moment happen, they told the Chinese to GTFO. The racism and scapegoating of Chinese Americans got California to pass a law in 1858 banning Chinese and Mongolians from entering the state, though the state Supreme Court struck in down in 1862. On October 24th, 1871, a mob of 500 white and Mestizo men in Los Angeles entered Chinatown and lynched at least 17 Chinese residents. "It's actually about treaties" Ultimately, anti-Chinese racism wasn't just a California problem. There was enough pressure across the entire country to get a Chinese Exclusion Bill passed in Congress in 1878. Rutherford "I undid Grant's good work in the South" Hayes somehow initially did not cave to public pressure. He vetoed the bill, citing that it violated the Burlingame Treaty from ten years earlier. Notice that his reasoning was not because racism was wrong. In 1880 Hayes sent dimplomat James Angell to China to negotiate what would be known as the Angell Treaty, which allowed the US to restrict immigration from China. So you can't say "Well at least Hayes did one thing right!" The text of the new treaty still fell short of permitting the US to outright ban all Chinese from entering the country. But it didn't stop Congress from trying. In 1882, a twenty year ban was passed by Congress.  Representive Ezra B. Taylor, who was elected to James Garfield's seat, was perhaps one of the most fierce opponents of Chinese Exclusion in Congress. He said passing such a bill would ruin the United States' standing in the world, and would fundamentally alter the character of the nation for worse, going so far to comparing its passage to the South winning the civil war. "We know not when the next wall will be erected." But even he clarified that his opposition was not motivated by sympathy for the Chinese already living in America. "I hope my remarks have not been understood as favoring a further immigration of the Chinese. I deplore their presence here as much as any man. I have not been addressing myself to that branch of the subject. I want no more of them." What a profile in courage.  Representative George D. Wise of Virginia argued that that Chinese Exclusion was necessary not just for economic protection, but because the Chinese were a threat to "our free institutions, to Christian civilization, and to social order." Another thing worth noting, the rhetoric for Chinese Exclusion also featured a trope that's still familiar to this day: Racist white people trying to pit black people against asian people. George Wise insists that "The intelligent representatives of the Negro race are as much opposed to [the Chinese] as are the whites." I should also mention that George Wise was a Captain in the Confederate Army in the Civil War. Chester Arthur vetoed the bill. In his veto statement, Arthur said the bill violated the 1868 and 1880 treaties. So like Hayes before him, his main concern was obeying treaties with a foreign power as obligated by the US Constition. Arthur also suggested that if the intention of the bill was to protect the livelihoods of Americans, a bill should have only limited to regulating Chinese laborers, not all Chinese. Arthur agreed with the racist argument that it may be important to protect American labor from "Asiatic competition", but argued for a shorter, experimental phase. (I am unsure if the initial bill he vetoed explicitly cited the rationale of protecting American labor. I can't find the exact texts to compare. But I believe both versions do.) Despite overwelming support in Congress, the bill fell short of a needed supermajority to override Arthur's veto. So Congress changed the ban from twenty to ten years. The Law Arthur then reluctantly signed the Chinese Exclusion Act on May 6th, 1882. https://twitter.com/AmExperiencePBS/status/993236583896829952 I guess Arthur convinced himself that a twenty year ban went against the treaty, but a ten year ban did not. Right. As earlier posts noted, Arthur ultimately did not seriously consider seeking reelection. And his party ended up getting swamped in the midterms anyway. Perhaps he could have kept opposing the bill and let a future president cave to racist public opinion. It would have at least spared his presidency from this legacy.  So what's in the bill? This was the first time a federal law prohibited a specific ethnic group from entering the country. Non-laborers were spared, but required papers from the Chinese government to prove they were qualified to be in the country. Realistically this exception didn't mean poo poo. The Chinese in America were excluded from becoming naturalized citizens. Men were not able to bring their wives from China into the country. And it made it hard for them to start new families in the US. More presidents (and the Supreme Court) join in the fun of loving the Chinese over Grover Cleveland signed the Scott Act in 1888, which forbade the Chinese residents from returning to the US if they were to leave the country, like to visit family back in China. When the Chinese Exclusion Act was set to expire in 1892, Benjamin Harrison signed the Geary Act, which renewed the ban for another ten years. And it added a requirement that Chinese residents must carry papers at all times proving that they are legally in the country, or risk being deported or punished. Chinese can't bear witness in court. And they can't receive bail in habeas corpus proceedings. This was upheld in the 1893 SCOTUS decision in Fong Yue Ting v. United States. The act was made permanent in 1902. Teddy Roosevelt was president. Make Exclusion Great Again Finally, during World War II, the nation decided they could trust its Chinese allies while locking up the Japanese in camps and passed the Magnuson Act, which allowed a little bit of Chinese immigration again. But the Chinese still couldn't own land or businesses. A whopping 105 Chinese were allowed in per year. So the ban realistically didn't end until the Immigration and Nationality Acts of 1952 and 1965. The legacy of anti-Chinese and anti-Asian racism is apparent decades after exclusion ended. Vincent Chin was murdered in 1982 in a case that was tied to white anxiety over globalization. And a current fuckerhead in the White House found it frequently helpful to blame the Chinese for the working class' economic woes, while seeking to ban a different group of people from entering the country. My family immigrated to the US in the 1970s. A part of me wonders how the Chinese American, if not Asian American, experience would have been different if there were simply more Chinese in America. Would AAPIs been a more potent political force? Those years the Chinese were banned from entering the US weren't exactly great times, with the collapse of Qing dynasty. They couldn't (with some exceptions) seek life or safety in the so-called nation of immigrants. This is still a very short history of the hardships Chinese face, with emphasis on the POTUS and the initial CEA. So I'm leaving out the colorful history of Chinese Americans who resisted. (Also, I'm kind of lazy and don't want to do more research.) Echo Chamber fucked around with this message at 16:55 on May 17, 2018 |
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May 17, 2018 08:35
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Instant Sunrise posted:This was a great write up, you mind if I quote it in the immigration policy thread? As a general overview, I feel like it's still incomplete because I didn't talk about how the CEA was enforced and resisted.
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May 18, 2018 03:11
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For those who found my brief write-up about the Chinese Exclusion Act interesting, the PBS American Experience documentary just aired and can now be streamed from their website, at least in the US. I'm watching it now. I only talked about its passage under Arthur. This film seems to be going into all the stuff I didn't cover.
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May 30, 2018 21:59
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I don't have a strong position on Hiroshima/Nagasaki. People who lived in occupied China, Taiwan, and Korea usually take the position that Japan had to surrender (and withdraw) ASAP. My late grandmother who lived through that didn't doubt the necessity of the nuclear attacks the one time I've asked her about it. Many people in Asia to this day find the current controversy within the US over this act in 1945 to be quite strange.
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May 31, 2018 16:39
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One Washington anecdote that really disturbs me: He might have used the teeth of the people he enslaved for his dentures.
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May 31, 2018 18:26
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I liked Mike Duncan's description of the Committee of Five; something like "Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Guy #4, and Guy #5". And the delegation sent to the Staten Island Peace Conference was "Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and another guy".
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Jun 9, 2018 17:07
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Bill Clinton. I found documentaries like the American Experience piece from 2012 fairly comprehensive, but already not quite up to date on his declining popularity as a former POTUS despite his popularity as POTUS. And it'd be interesting to know more of the context of Bill's actions that the Left now find more controversial than ever. And also, a take on him in the #metoo era. And I think Bill's role in paving the way for Dubya's Iraq debacle has been understated and could also be looked into. If anything, Bill Clinton could just be framing device for talking about the weird period of the 90s, when America, democracy, and capitalism apparently won and most Americans thought things were going to be fine forever despite all the warning signs.
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Jun 11, 2018 17:31
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Ze Pollack posted:you would think that having your signature on the Big D would make you a political power! someone who your countrymen would look up to and respect! and yet, bizzarely, only two did: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. the answer as to why this is was covered, briefly.
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Jun 13, 2018 02:33
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Gen. Ripper posted:As I've said multiple times before, Trump stands a serious chance of ending up the Republican Carter. The Democratic Reagan? I mentioned this earlier; Corey Robin flirted with that idea of comparing 39 with 45, but later grew skeptical.
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Jul 8, 2018 06:09
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Wesley Clark sucked. There was also a hilarious Draft Petraeus effort before the affair and the leaking.
Echo Chamber fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Aug 22, 2018 |
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Aug 22, 2018 19:04
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Clark was the symptomatic of the Democrats' obsession with trying to look strong on terror and national security. To be fair, it was a little bit more understandable in 2004 than today. They made a big deal about his late entry into the 2004 primaries, and he quickly turned out to be an empty suit that inspired virtually nobody.
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Aug 22, 2018 20:58
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Daniel Day-Lewis
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Sep 26, 2018 01:06
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L I N C O L N ! ! !
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Sep 27, 2018 05:02
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Common knowledge that Europe's old elite preferred the South during the war. But I always like pointing out that one of Europe's biggest voices evangelizing the Union's cause was Karl Marx.
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Oct 23, 2018 23:15
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axeil posted:I liked alternate history author Harry Turtledove's take from his book where the South wins Antietam that Lincoln would've become the premier American socialist had he lived. I always thought it was cool that Lincoln was the first POTUS to formally recognize Haiti, which kind of ties the narratives of Emancipation in the US and Haiti together. But looking into it further, Haiti played a significant role in Lincoln's colonization efforts, which were opposed by staunch abolitionists like Frederick Douglass. I'm unsure how much Lincoln's colonization efforts played a role in US starting diplomatic ties with Haiti in the first place.
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Oct 24, 2018 00:44
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https://youtu.be/uhznecRHGKg
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Dec 26, 2018 02:55
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No mention of Juanita Broaddrick? Or you saving that for later for the full dive into his sexual misconduct? Also, another unflattering detail: The museum that the Clintons went to for their first date was closed because of a labor dispute. As some critics later suggest, they technically crossed a picket line. On its own, quite innocuous; but considering what the couple later did to the Democratic Party, a bit symbolic for their detractors on the Left for how their partnership started. Random anecdote: Two of Bill and Hillary's classmates at Yale Law were Robert Reich and Clarence Thomas. In Frontline's The Choice 2016, Reich claims (against Bill and Hillary's recollection) that he introduced the two together. Echo Chamber fucked around with this message at 16:36 on Jan 31, 2019 |
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Jan 31, 2019 16:21
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Just letting you know I mostly abandoned D&D but you still have my attention if you want to keep talking about presidents.
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Apr 9, 2019 15:00
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