Matthew Smalarz

As the summer rapidly approaches, Americans of every class, race, and creed gravitate to the one game that defies social and economic boundaries: Baseball. Baseball’s storied past and presence in American culture necessitates that ordinary Americans evaluate and determine what role the national pastime has played in molding their American cultural identities. Nostalgic feelings overwhelm Baby Boomers as they vividly recall instances of attending ball games at storied baseball palaces that once graced ethnic neighborhoods and working-class enclaves. On the other hand, ESPN, MLB Network and other prominent sports’ channels fuel the modern sports’ imaginations and fantasy league aspirations of twenty and thirty-somethings, who consume and digest Sabermetrics’ reports and bloggers’ opinions with as much ease as professional statisticians and noted baseball columnists. The advent of new technological forms has dramatically shifted our cultural orientation toward the national pastime and has forced baseball lovers everywhere to reconsider their psychological and physical relationships with the game. Although these issues could easily apply to any sport or sociopolitical issue, baseball possesses an unparalleled degree of cultural meaning in our nation unlike other major professional sports. What does it now mean to watch the “ballgame?” How have the Internet and Cable TV redefined baseball fans’ understanding of how the game is played? Can modern broadcasting techniques and methods influence baseball fans’ relationships with and knowledge of certain teams and players? How has the blogosphere transformed fans’ perceptions about team loyalty and local identity?

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Philly is both a place and a state of mind. For those of you fortunate enough to grow up in the Delaware Valley, you know exactly what I’m referring to. Although our hometown is known for its historical and cultural treasures, blue-collar mentality, and sports’ fanaticism, we ultimately adore the city in which we grew up because of the small town atmosphere it perpetually fosters. To live in a metropolitan region of this size doesn’t diminish the degree of social camaraderie among its inhabitants. Our ancestors settled here because they embraced William Penn’s ideal of creating a “Green Country Towne” that exemplified the virtues of Brotherly Love. You can still see that philosophical concept at work today in the city’s neighborhoods, businesses, and social organizations. 

My Polish ancestors arrived in the United States in 1906 at Ellis Island (If the records are accurate), and decided upon Philadelphia as their eventual destination. My grandmother and father spoke Polish and Ukrainian, and experienced America through their ethnic associations and church related activities and gatherings. Growing up in Manayunk during the Great Depression, my grandmother’s family, seven in all, huddled together in a tiny, one bedroom apartment that lacked running water and electricity. She worked in a munitions factory during the Second World War, and always recalled her contributions to the war effort. My grandmother, who lost her first husband during the Battle of the Bulge, and grandfather married soon after the war, and started a family in the Olney section of Philadelphia. My grandfather played soccer for local Polish clubs in the 1930s, attended Bingo functions with his friends, and worked as a truck driver for nearly 44 years. Even though my grandparents have both passed on, I’m still reminded of the lives they led and how their experiences reflected the cultural and social atmosphere of Philadelphia in the 1950s and 60s. In many ways, my grandparents’ experiences still define the way I approach my life as a Philadelphian. 

Philadelphians cherish the idea of community because its rooted in our cultural identity. Our ancestors developed their Philadelphia identity on front porches and stoops, on secondary streets, and on city ball fields and courts. While suburbanization and deindustrialization have taken enormous tolls on the city and region in the last fifty years, it’s important to remember that present-day Philadelphians view their social and cultural circumstances in much the same way as their forefathers. Times and people may change, but the Philadelphia way of life still carries on.

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Peter Gottlieb and James Grossman both analyze how Southern migrants, escaping from their status as servile sharecroppers on Southern plantations, trekked to Pittsburgh and Chicago respectively to seek economic opportunities and social equality.  In doing so, they both contend that the process of migration transformed black migrants into an “Afro-Ameican industrial working-class.” (Grossman, 5) They perceive black migrants as conscientious and active participants in the process of migration and focus on how their southern experiences assisted them in the northern, industrial milieu of the early twentieth century.  They employ oral histories, manuscript records, and governmental census data, however, in methodologically similar and dissimilar ways.  

Gottlieb states that migrants frequently sought employment in various iron and turpentine mills and industries throughout the South and developed migratory and work habits that would eventually assist them in adjusting and adapting to the industrial North.  He notes that “these (Southern) facets of black life” served “as the beginnings of the trails that thousands eventually followed to Pittsburgh and other northern industrial cities.” (Gottlieb, 13) Whereas Gottlieb solely focuses on migration dynamics, industiral milieus, kinship affiliations, and black class divisions, Grossman expands on Gottlieb’s treatment of black urban migration by incorporating migrants’ racial perspectives on their social environment and by demonstrating “how sensibilities shaped by their perspectives as black people in a racially structured Southern society contributed to most decisions that migrants made at all stages in the process of migration and settlement. (Grossman, 5) Moreover, Grossman finds that African-Americans sought to redefine themselves in American society, finding that racial and class matters required new decisions that could only be “understood within the context of what the migrants had learned in the past, what they perceived at the time, and what they hoped for and expected in the future.” (Grossman, 7) Contrary to Gottlieb’s portrayal, Grossman points out that migrants gravitated toward black institutions and entities that sustained social worldviews which they had known intimately in the South.  Gottlieb and Grossman therefore concur on the importance of migration dynamics and the migrants’ personal agency in shaping and responding to the structural constraints of the industrial North, but diverge in their treatment of and emphasis on racially constructed ideas about black institutions and leaders.

Peter Gottlieb dissects the dynamics of black migratory patterns in the South, and notes the profound impact they had in shaping black migratory experiences to the industrial north during and after the First World War.   In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, black farm hands and sharecroppers often sought additional employment opportunities in Southern industries, such as steel and turpentine mills, to increase their income.  Taking advantage of the labor shortage in northern industries during World War I, black migrants boarded trains heading north after reading of possible employment opportunities awaiting them in the Steel City and destinations in between.  Deeming these decisions as crucial in the “process of self-transformation,” Gottlieb contends that blacks successfully employed their Southern work experiences and widening kin and communal connections to mold new spatial and labor patterns and mitigate potential racial animosities in Pittsburgh. Souther, black work culture also played a significant role in determining the labor and cultural encounters of black migrants in Pittsburgh. (7)  In seeking economic independence and social mobility, black migrants frequently moved from one job to another and openly defied employers’ efforts to “mold them into an elastic body of common labor that would expand and contract quickly with industries’ needs.” (134) Refusing to labor in dangerous industrial conditions, some migrants utilized their previous Southern, labor experiences and migratory hardships as ways of asserting their newfound rights in the industrial north. Gilbret M., for instance, declined to work in a wire mill because he feared employer wage manipulation.  Although such habits remained an integral part of black migrant culture, Gottlieb points out that the black labor force in Pittsburgh also underwent significant alterations in its composition and incurred innumerable racial and intra-racial, class constraints.  

As black migrants poured into the city after 1916, they primarily received employment in hazardous, industrial positions and domestic work, forcing Pittsburgh’s iron and construction, black labor forces to suffer severe declines in overall numbers.  Gottlieb states that migrants “suffered deeply suffered from the consequences of confinement to common labor: hard work, low wages, and frequent periods of unemployment.” (94) Labor unions, such as the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Tin and Steel Workers, enacted harsh, discriminatory statutes that barred blacks’ admission and harshly condemned black strikebreakers as company “scabs.”  Likewise, the established, black elite, such as the Pittsburgh Urban League, denigrated the backward, work habits and behavioral traits of Southern migrants.  Black migrants, however, actively asserted themselves in this hostile, industrial milieu, joining southern, migrant church congregations, such as Second Baptist, relying on migrant associations and networks from the South, and defying the exclusionary policies of labor unions by acting as strikebreakers in the 1919 Steel Strike. 

Gottlieb thus highlights the importance of Southern, work and migratory patterns in assisting black migrants in their adjustment and adaptation to Pittsburgh’s industrial conditions.  He emphasizes the critical, comparative dimensions between black employment and migratory experiences in the United States and analogous, international labor developments.  Moreover, he heavily promotes the degree of personal and collective agency displayed by black migrants as they navigated through the structural constraints, such as housing segregation, of industrial and manufacturing life in Pittsburgh.  His utilization of migrant oral accounts further enhances the bottom up perspective of black migratory patterns, suggesting the significant social reasons surrounding migrants’ individual and collective decisions to migrate.  He successfully demonstrates that black females consciously determined to which cities they would move, actively communicated their impressions of Pittsburgh to relatives contemplating migration, and lodged relatives who could not find adequate, housing accommodations.  Even though Gottlieb offers some insightful analyses about discriminatory practices among labor unions, he largely de-emphasizes the role of racial discrimination as a factor in black, migratory decisions and their substandard treatment in industrial capacities.  He only briefly looks at racial discriminatory practices on the shop floor, neglecting how unskilled and skilled, black workers lacked occupational advantages because of their immediate superiors racial attitudes and predilections.  

Blacks, moreover, also displayed characteristics that unified as well as divided them along class and intra-racial lines.  Gottlieb seemingly oversimplifies the class divisions that arose between Pittsburgh blacks, finding that “Pittsburgh’s resident black population reacted with deep ambivalences to the new black workers’ impact on their way of life, and black professionals began a campaign to make the migrants over in the image of the urban middle class.” (7-8) He categorically overlooks the degree to which common racial ties between migrants and old settlers played an essential part in combatting racial discrimination and in constructing a racially centered perspective of the urban North.  Race, therefore, is unequivocally downplayed in his treatment of black migration, almost to a point where black migrants are simply asserting their economic and social independence without acknowledging the racial impediments standing in their way.  He similarly dismisses the variegated, geographic origins of black migrants and misses a valuable opportunity to illustrate why black, Southern communities relocated to specific, urban centers in the north.

In a slightly similar vein, James Grossman’s Land of Hope assesses how migrants proactively asserted themselves during the migration process and the social processes by which they adapted to the industrial north.  Placing greater emphasis than Gottlieb on the structural challenges of racial violence, intimidation and discrimination confronting southern migrants, he notes that they migrated to Chicago because of its many war-related employment opportunities and its political and socially democratic environment, defying Southern, white employers who accused northern, labor agents of stealing their labor.  Constructing an elaborate, information network, Grossman, like Gottlieb, points out that black migrants, forming migration clubs, also relied on black Pullman porters and the Chicago Defender to supply reliable reports about industrial positions and material advantages in Chicago.  Given the established economic and social presence of black “Old Settlers” in Chicago, Grossman establishes, just as Gottlieb, that they denigrated the social and moral backwardness of Southern migrants, instructed migrants about social propriety in the north and worried about the black community’s loss of respectability among white, business and political benefactors.  Reconfiguring the parameters of their southern, black heritage and their new milieu, migrants sometimes reacted to such rhetoric by retaining their traditional, worshipping practices, such as the call and response, and preserving their distinct, regional dialects.  Unlike Gottlieb, however, he finds that “the established community and the migrants shared one things which set them all off from the rest of Chicago - race.” (160)

  The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 unequivocally exemplified mounting white concerns about increased labor, housing and educational competition from blacks as they gradually themselves in their arenas.  Grossman critically points out that “they (blacks) sought to share equally in the privileges of citizenship and to have access to all institutions open to whites, including workplaces, political institutions, public services, and schools.” (180)  Although he concurs with Gottlieb that the migrants’ application of southern, work habits in the industrial north symbolized their freedom from Southern oppression, he also finds that black institutions, such as the Chicago Urban League, and specific race leaders, such as Robert Abbott, successfully persuaded migrants to adopt industrial habits of efficiency and organization.  Migrants, in some instances, rejected Southern, work culture and embraced factory jobs as the first steps to greater economic and social opportunities, helping the race to acquire a better work reputation in an environment where Chicago employers often curtailed black promotion.  Unlike Gottlieb, Grossman explores how black, migrant schoolchildren faced constant racial harassment from white, school teachers in integrated facilities and substandard educational standards.  Emphasizing the students’ southern racial perspective on school segregation, he notes that “migrants found their advancement stymied by barriers defined by ideas about race and its ramifications.” (258) 

In placing enormous importance on the migratory dynamics and personal agency of black migrants, Grossman, like Gottlieb, successfully unravels how their experiences as black Southerners and their migratory decisions shaped and adapted to the industrial environments to which they had journeyed.  They diverge, however, in their emphasis on the racial experiences of Southern blacks as a pivotal factor in their migration to the north.  Grossman provides a much more detailed examination of the racial and economic inequalities looming over blacks in the South immediately prior to the Great Migration.   He provides a comprehensive assessment of white reactions to the Great Migration, informatively contextualizing the many discriminatory policies and white, racial attitudes spurring black, migratory decisions and patterns. Gottlieb, on the other hand, only examines the Great Migration within the economic and migratory context of the postbellum South, arguing that long-term, agricultural work habits and previous physical relocations and movements throughout the South influenced migrants’ collective decisions in the industrial north. Both men, however, clearly demonstrate that black migrants actively asserted themselves throughout the migration process and negotiated labor and social terms that benefitted them within the rigid, racial and economic constraints of the industrial north.  Like Gottlieb, Grossman similarly utilizes oral histories as a means of reconstructing the personal and collective memories of black migrants as they witnessed racial strife, migrated from rural to urban enclaves, adjusted to city life, and navigated the difficult racial terrain of Chicago.  Whereas Gottlieb neglects the geographic dimensions of migratory patterns, Grossman makes far better use of maps and diagrams to illustrate the regions from which southern migration to Chicago most frequently occurred and the distributive impact of the Chicago Defender in assisting black migrants’ decisions about trekking north.  Unlike Gottlieb, who appropriately addresses the subtle, cultural and class divergences between and among church denominations in Pittsburgh, Grossman devotes only a few pags to churches, consigning an important component of black institutional development, identity, and discord to the periphery.  

Although Gottlieb and Grossman undoubtedly agree that blacks received the worst and most degrading forms of industrial employment and find that labor unions enacted discriminatory policies that decidedly disadvantaged migrants’ economic and workplace interests, they clearly hold different interpretations of how migrants perceived race and racism in the larger public discourse between whites and blacks in the urban north.  Whereas Gottlieb overlooks the southern, racial perspective of migrants, Grossman astutely points out that black workers “had a different history and different sense of their place in society.  Because of that consciousness, blacks trusted their own institutions and shared with those institutions and race leaders a set of priorities and assumptions unlike those of white workers.” (245) Race, as Grossman convincingly establishes, formed a constant backdrop to the social and economic situations facing black migrants in their adjustment to the industrial north and reinforced the larger racial bonds binding traditional institutions of black power, such as the Urban League, and southern migrants.  

Both Grossman and Gottlieb, however, inadequately address the emergence and development of important black political structures and politicians, such as Oscar DePriest, within the larger context of Chicago and Pittsburgh city politics.  Had they done so, they could have sufficiently established how black political leaders fashioned political agendas that directly focused on the concerns of their black constituents and served as pathways into the urban, political machinery of both cities.  

Neither book, moreover, offers an adequate explanation as to how black folkloric and cultural traditions functioned as cultural weapons against prevailing racial attitudes and policies in northern, industrial environments.  Trickster tales remained central to migrants, cultural experience in urban milieus, as they appropriated northern, industrial stories and racial incidents to fit the parameters of traditional, black ballads, songs, and tales.  

While both men successfully demonstrate that migratory experiences, southern work culture, and black agency played consequential roles in black migrants’ adjustment to the industrial world of the urban north, they nevertheless diverge in their treatment of Southern blacks’ ideas about intra-racial institutional development and identity.

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In the late 1890s, W. E. B. Du Bois briefly taught at the University of Pennsylvania as he wrote his now classic, The Philadelphia Negro. Although Du Bois would go on to earn international acclaim and notoriety for his future political and scholarly work, he nevertheless confronted the bitter realities of racism in the academy during the 1890s, failing to receive a tenure track position in the History Department at Penn because of his skin tone. In the 1940s, William Fontaine underwent similar challenges in the Philosophy Department at Penn, after he received a tenured professorship in 1947. Sadly, Fontaine’s work has largely gone unrecognized, while Du Bois has remained one of the standards bearers in African-American intellectual history.

Please read Carlin Romano’s Book Essay on Bruce Kuklick’s biography of William Fontaine: http://www.philly.com/inquirer/columnists/carlin_romano

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In “Beyond Jack Tar,” Daniel Vickers contends that maritime historians should focus equal attention on mariners’ and merchants’ transoceanic experiences and their portside origins, social evolution, and occupational opportunities.  Although prominent maritime historians, such as Marcus Rediker and Jesse Lemisch, have written notable studies and pieces on sailors’ social relations in the age of sail, he notes that they have neglected the methodological difficulties of tracing seamen’s lives on shore and have overlooked how sailors’ landward experiences significantly defined their maritime work roles and social encounters.  He unequivocally finds that Jack Tar “as a conceptual type is a simplistic and ineffective tool for exploring the social relations that structured maritime life in the early modern period.” (Vicker, 424) 

In Young Men and the Sea, Vickers further broadens the definition of maritime history by exploring how sailors’ transoceanic and landward experiences in Salem, Massachusetts shaped them as maritime people. Given the popular and scholarly preoccupation with sailors’ shipboard experiences and adventures, he describes how both audiences have unduly stressed the exceptional characteristics of seafarers’ lives and have neglected the challenges in exploring sailors’ landed origins and the importance of communal relationships in their portside communities.  He convincingly finds that “what defined these men as maritime people was less the distances they traveled than the time they spent upon the water.” (Vickers, 3) Hailing primarily from seaside communities, mariners developed a love affair with the ocean from an early age and embraced the many maritime meanings, terms, and references coursing through their portside enclaves.  Vickers informs us that young men frequently pursued different lines of work on shore and at sea.  He refutes the notion that a hegemonic maritime culture defined the cultural identities of seafarers, and contends that “these sources of identity were rooted as much in the cultural habits and folkways of home as they were in the regimen of life afloat.” (Vickers, 4) In utilizing Salem, Massachusetts as the basis of his study of seafarers, he also illustrates how age and seniority, for instance, influenced their decisions to move from one occupational guise to another.  He points out that Salem, given its small size and its abundance of historical documentation, affords researchers the opportunity to trace the lives of ordinary seamen and the various shipping ventures and trades they pursued.  

Although Salem never attained the same commercial heights of London and New York, Vicker chronicles Salem’s myriad maritime activities, such as cod fishing, whale chasing, and international trading, and illustrates how sailors, both locally and nationally, sought work on its vessels and in its many maritime-related industries.  In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, young men from Salem and its surrounding countryside comprised the majority of its seafarers and worked in both landward and seaside occupational capacities.  Living within the confines of the master-servant relationship of the early modern period, most seafarers fulfilled their maritime duties and obligations and mastered certain trades to secure leadership positions, such as chief mate, on local ships.  Even though mariners possessed a separate occupational culture, Vickers nevertheless finds that “this culture did not mark them as a breed apart whose mode of life distinguished them fundamentally from their neighbors on land.” (Vickers, 249)

In the nineteenth century, however, the revenues generated from Salem’s maritime economy were redirected to and formed the basis of America’s burgeoning industrial and agricultural economic sectors.  As people gradually accepted industrial routines and work habits, seafaring’s erratic work structure and disciplinary ethos increasingly appeared anachronistic and inhumane.  Given the many changes in seafaring, Vickers notes that it became an exceptional occupational venture for men living in the vicinity of local ports, for they increasingly chose the physical and economic security of agricultural development over maritime exploration and livelihoods.  As the transatlantic shipping industry expanded and proliferated in new regions of the globe, Vickers finds that seafaring lost its romantic connotations and became an onerous burden for the few men who still pursued it as a lifestyle, noting that “voyages grew longer and riskier, promotion became tougher, seamen were more likely strangers to town and spent most of their lives before the mast.”  (Vickers, 250) As class divisions manifested themselves both on shore and on board ships, officers also implemented stricter labor management methods, reduced wages, and employed harsher disciplinary measures on their subordinates.  

Besides advocating coastal and transoceanic historical perspectives, Vickers persuasively contends that maritime historians should address the methodological quandaries of tracing seafarers’ movements and the importance of landward history in the development of maritime culture.  In moving away from sensationalized depictions of the sea, Vickers unequivocally demonstrates how sailors’ transoceanic activities and their landward experiences molded them as a maritime people. Connecting the master-servant relationship of the sea to landward social activities, Ashley Bowen’s Autobiography elucidates the importance of landward and seaside connections in defining the maritime identities of seafarers. He notes how his master vehemently opposed his intention to receive baptism at a Salem church, as he was “directed . .. to take the book and carry it to Parson Webb’s with his compliments and said I was his apprentice and I should not be christened in his time.” (Bowen, 40)  Vickers, moreover, carefully compiles databases that trace the social, familial, and economic circumstances in which Salem mariners lived. Utilizing Salem as a way of understanding the changes and continuities within seafaring culture, he vividly details how Salem shifted away from a pre-industrial maritime economy to a variegated industrial economy that depended less on seafaring to survive economically.

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Atlantic historians, as Alison Games astutely notes in “What is Atlantic History?,” have established the broad methodological and conceptual parameters within which diverse peoples, such as Europeans migrants and traders, participated in the cultural, economic, and social transformations of and exchanges among Atlantic societies.  Moreover, they have explored how social transformations and  cultural episodes, such as virulent diseases and valuable commodities, in one geographic location directly affected social, political, and economic conditions throughout the Atlantic World. 

Relying on quantitative analysis in his discussion of transatlantic migration, Davis’s Eltis’s “Free and Coerced Transatlantic Migrations (1983),” echoes Games’s description of Atlantic history. He abandons the traditional historical template of isolating free and coerced immigrant patterns and adopts a comparative approach in his assessment of the similar and dissimilar New World and migratory experiences of African slaves and European immigrants.  He details, for instance, how pre-industrial Africans and Europeans both aspired to own land, but indicates that Africans were “severely circumscribed by slavery and later by discrimination.” (Eltis, 267) Given the prominence of cliometrics in historical studies during the 1980s, Eltis neglects, however, African and European personal testimonials in his analysis and overlooks how ordinary Europeans and Africans perceived migratory and New World encounters.   

Moving beyond Eltis’s earlier quantitative assessment of the Atlantic realm, Bernard Bailyn’s The Peopling of British North America (1986) broadly examines how the “peopling” processes, referring to the recruitment, emigration, and immigration of people, between Europe and North America shaped the foundations of British North America.  He describes the economic and religious motivations and desires surrounding English and European migrants’ mobility patterns and argues that the transatlantic migration “was an extension outward and an expansion in scale of domestic mobility in the lands of the immigratns’ origins.” (Bailyn, 20) He contends that varied settlement and development processes, such as Philadelphia’s migrant warehousing capacity, significantly determined migrants’ physical movements, social opportunities, and economic fortunes.  Just as Eltis points out the relationship between labor imperatives and migratory patterns, Bailyn further notes that labor demands and land speculation in America further fueled the recruitment and settlement of people from Africa and Europe, but “drew on different socio-economic groups and and involved different modes of integration into the society.” (Bailyn, 60) Utilizing a hypothetical colonial “Domesday Book” as a prism through which to understand the emerging local characteristics in colonial America, Bailyn, employing journal and diary accounts, effectively demonstrates the innumerable ways Europeans perceived American culture as a western borderland, where primitive and advanced cultural ideas intersected to form the crux of early American life.

Building on Eltis’s quantitative analysis of migratory patterns and Bailyn’s characterization of the Atlantic World through a largely British lens, David Armitage’s “Three Concepts of Atlantic History” (2002) proposes a tripartite assessment of Atlantic history: Trans-Atlantic history, which promotes comparative and international analyses of Atlantic history; Circum-Atlantic history, which analyzes the history of the ocean and its relationship to the shores surrounding it; and Cis-Atlantic history, which assesses regional or national historical encounters within an Atlantic framework.  Like Games, he convincingly argues that Atlantic history resists parochial historical analyses and “pushes historians towards methodological pluralities and expanded horizons.” (Armitage, 27) 

In other words, the above historians demonstrate the immense importance of connections and interactions in the making, shaping, and development of the Atlantic world.  Although the field’s fluidity is subject to scrutiny from historians who prefer more clearly defined historical practices and methods, it nevertheless forces historians to reevaluate national explanations about migration, cultural development, and commercial exchange within an Atlantic framework.  The authors have also illustrated how Atlantic history can broaden the methodological interpretations and geographic parameters of regionalized studies and specific specialties, such as colonial American history.  Janet Schaw’s A Lady of Quality captures the importance of transatlantic interactions and experiences in the personal transformation of a Scottish woman’s cultural outlook.  After making the rough passage across the Atlantic, she describes Antigua through Cir-Cum Altantic terms, finding that “the beauty of the Island rises every moment as we advance towards the bay. We had the Island on both sides of us, yet its beauties were different, the one with hills, dales and groves, and not a tree, plant or shrub I had ever seen before.” (Schaw, 74)

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Should our local political organizations and election boards accommodate the needs of the civically lazy and inept? Is it safer to live in a “politically disconnected” nation or a “politically interconnected” one? 

On November 4, most Americans will head to their local polling stations to cast their vote for John McCain or Barack Obama.  Many states, however, have instituted early voting procedures that seemingly subvert traditional ideas about American participatory democracy and civic duty.   Although some states contend that early voting is an economically efficient way of conducting national, state, and local elections, George Will fears that our political officials and leaders are undermining the veritable integrity of American civic gatherings and celebrations.   Cable news networks, political blogs, and strategically positioned political ads have replaced traditional forms of civic engagement and participation, such as canvassing and local political entities, as “viable” sources of political information and knowledge.  When ordinary Americans stay at home on election day, they are essentially saying: “It doesn’t matter if so-and-so wins, because it won’t personally affect me.” Our collective indifference to all things political only encourages lobbyists and career Congressmen and women to manipulate the political system to suit their most immediate and long term agendas.  With only a few days remaining before the window to register in the November election closes, I encourage all Americans, regardless of your party affiliation, to fulfill your civic obligation on November 4.  It’s one of the few things which unites our politically divided country. 

For further information about our downtrodden political culture, please read George Will’s article about the demise of American participatory democracy: http://www.newsweek.com/id/161202

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Why has the Democratic party lost seven of the last ten national elections?  Why do we live in a centre-right country? Why is the presidential race so close?   Does anyone remember Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Walter Mondale, or Michael Dukakis?   The answer is: 1968. 

No one denies that 1968 was a critical watershed moment in modern American history.  In Chicago, New York, Washington, and Berkeley, student protesters denounced Lyndon Johnson’s decision to escalate American military operations in Vietnam and staged violent demonstrations against university officials who received government contracts to test and produce new military weaponry.  Martin Luther King’s assassination in April further stoked the flames of race hatred in the urban north, as working-class African-Americans confronted the myriad racial injustices and imbalances in the post-industrial political, social and economic institutions of Detroit and Newark.  Hubert Humphrey pledged to stand by Bobby Kennedy’s social ideals and political vision for America, only to find that the Democratic party was coming apart at the seams at the National Democratic Convention in Chicago.   Class and racial antagonisms, moreover, still plagued the Democratic party, just as it proudly claimed to be the true defender of social progressivism and liberalism.  

Amid the turmoil ravaging the country, Republican and conservative leaders launched an assault against countercultural phenomena, urban unrest, and Democratic machine politics.  Tapping into the fears and aspirations of mainstream American voters, Richard Nixon politically appealed to the “Silent Majority” and invoked the now timeless sociopolitical phrase of “Law and Order” as a way of reassuring working and middle-class, white Americans that social and political order would be restored with a Republican administration. George Wallace, the presidential nominee of the American Independent Party, forged a coalition of disaffected Southern and Midwestern conservative, white voters who had grown weary of progressive social legislation and racial dissension. One of the most critical aspects of the 1968 election that has been overlooked is the impact of the Military Industrial Complex on American national politics.  College trained engineers and scientists relocated to the south and west in pursuit of jobs in the military and technology industries, further depopulating the once vaunted industrial metropolises of the urban north and midwest.    The Backlash had begun.  

We still live with the ghosts and demons of that tumultuous year in our collective political memory.   They will, in fact, define our political choices as we head to the polls in November.

Posted under American Race Relations, American Social and Cultural History, Politics

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John Rossi, Professor Emeritus in the History Department at La Salle University, provides a detailed and lucid account of the Philadelphia Phillies’ collapse from first place in the waning days of summer 1964. In the 1950s and 60s, Philadelphia, like most urban, metropolitan regions in the north and midwest, faced considerable post-war strains on its industrial and manufacturing sectors, incurred countless political scandals, and underwent seismic shifts in its demographic and racial compositions. Amid the turmoil ravaging the City of Brotherly Love, the 1964 Philadelphia Phillies experienced their most successful campaign since the 1950 pennant season and momentarily alleviated the economic, racial, and political crises that were consuming the once-mighty manufacturing and industrial metropolis. In the end, the Philadelphia Phillies’ calamitous fall from the apex of the baseball world ominously mirrored the city’s racial, economic, and political misfortunes.

Posted under American Race Relations, American Sports Culture, Baseball in American Life, Post-Industrialism in the American Urban North

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In the early 1990s, Francis Fukuyama predicted that economic liberalization and “soft” power would reshape future geopolitical relationships around the world and create nascent, liberal democracies in former Communist and authoritarian regimes. In 2008, however, it is increasingly apparent that Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilization model seems more appropriate in today’s geopolitical atmosphere. Autocratic capitalism challenges Fukuyama’s vision, forcing the United States to become, yet again, the true defender of liberal democracy.   Please read Robert Kagan’s piece, “The End of History,” for further information about the future trajectory of American foreign policy as it relates to authoritarian capitalism in a Post-Cold War world.

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