Getting Intimate With The Roosevelts

Ken Burns’s multipart documentary, The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, premiered last night. Damon Root reviews it:

[W]hile the film is clearly pro-Roosevelt in its leanings, it does make room for certain contrarian views. Among The Roosevelts‘ stable of talking heads, for example, is none other than conservative writer George Will, who pops up from time to time to remind viewers that the family’s impact was not always a benevolent one. “Building on the work of the first Roosevelt, the second Roosevelt gave us the idea, the shimmering, glittering idea of the heroic presidency. And with it the hope that complex problems would yield to charisma. This,” Will declares during one episode, “sets the country up for perpetual disappointment.”

But The Roosevelts is by no means a flawless film. For one thing, it sometimes fails to present an accurate picture of the family’s political opponents. Indeed, the film leaves the distinct impression that only reactionaries and fringe loonies ever dissented from the New Deal.

Harvey J. Kaye lodges other criticisms:

[Filmmaker Ken Burns and historian Geoffrey C. Ward] ignore the ways in which working people and the labor movement shaped their “heroes’” thinking and propelled their action. They note TR’s presidential intervention in the 1902 coal strike, but fail to speak of labor’s role in the Socialist and Progressive parties’ prewar battles against Gilded Age capital (labor unionist and Socialist leader and presidential candidate Eugene Debs is never named).

They emphasize Eleanor’s involvement with the League of Women Voters in the ’20s and her relationship with independent reform-minded women of the day, but barely mention her work with the Women’s Trade Union League. As a consequence, they ignore how her encounters and friendships with East European Jewish women labor organizers of Manhattan’s Lower East Side not only led her to shed the anti-Semitism and racism of her youth (attitudes that are never discussed), but also enabled her to educate FDR to the needs of working families and the politics of industrial and social democracy by bringing those women to Hyde Park to spend time with him.

James Wolcott anticipates later installments:

Compelling as the Teddy Roosevelt saga is, it is for me the set-up, the prolonged prologue, to the true heart of this series, the improbable life and transformative reign of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I will write about the FDR and Eleanor installments as they approach airdate–though I will advise for now that the episode four, “The Storm,” devoted to his crippling attack of polio and his founding of Warm Springs, is the one you should circle most urgently on your calendar–but let me make a prejudice plain: for me, FDR is the greatest man of the twentieth century. Our twin savior, along with Lincoln. You may respectfully or disrespectfully disagree with that. That’s fine. You’re wrong.

And I feel even more convinced, having spent time reading Nigel Hamilton’s The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, 1941-1942 and David Kaiser’s No End Save Victory: How FDR Led the Nation into War, both of which I recommend as fireside reading, even if you lack a fireplace and have to make do with the theatrical illusion of a fan blowing some red strips of paper.

Jeremy Berlin interviews Burns:

[Q.] You call this film “an intimate history,” and it does seem more personal than your previous works. It also gets at a number of still-relevant issues—some of which you alluded to earlier—in an implicit way. Was it hard to reconcile the tone with the topic, or the scale with the scope?

[A.] Not at all. This is the first time we’ve done a long-form, major-length series about individuals, not about things like baseball or jazz or the Civil War. It’s sort of like a Russian novel—taking one family and understanding their interrelationships.

But this isn’t psychobabble or tabloid history. Nor does it neglect the outer events—the Gilded Age, the World War I era, the Roaring Twenties, the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War.

They’re all there. But you see them from a less familiar, more interesting perspective than you’re used to.

John Dickerson also speaks with Burns:

Burns is in a great hurry to get people to slow down. He would like them to watch 14-hour documentaries, of course, but also to understand the complexity and tensions at the heart of history. It makes for more meaningful lives, he believes, and a better understanding of events, including the ones unfolding before us in the present.

“We are in a media culture where we are buried in information but we know nothing,” said Burns. “Because of that superficiality, we expect heroes to be perfect, but they’re not. They are a strange combination of strengths and weaknesses.” He points to two of his main characters as examples. “Franklin and Theodore couldn’t get out of the Iowa caucuses [today]. Franklin is too infirm. CNN and Fox would be vying for the worst images of him unlocking the braces, the sweat pouring off his brow, the obvious pain and that kind of pity that it would engender would be political poison. And Theodore is just too hot for the new medium of television. There would be 10 ‘Howard Dean’ moments a day.”

Alyssa Rosenberg agrees that the Roosevelts likely wouldn’t survive modern-day politics:

It is one thing to decry a newly invasive media culture, or the fact that we still demand female politicians meet standards of attractiveness that have nothing to do with the functioning their jobs. But “The Roosevelts” ought to encourage us to think more broadly about what we deny ourselves when we narrow the path that can lead people to public office at any level.

Her bottom line:

In refusing to let politicians be human, we have denied ourselves the opportunity to be seen and to be treated the same way.

The Art Of The Personal Essay

Richard Rodriguez names the writers who influenced his approach to the form:

There was Joan Didion—the Didion of those glorious California essays of the sixties. Because she was from Sacramento and writing about the Central Valley when I first read her, it was she who taught me to imagine my own Sacramento as a literary landscape. About that same time, there was William Saroyan. There were voices in Saroyan, particularly the wondering boy in Fresno and the hungry writer’s voice in San Francisco, I have never forgotten. For all of the passion and energy in Saroyan, however, there was something sexless about him—the son of a Presbyterian minister.

He adds two more:

James Baldwin, the great Jimmy Baldwin. I began with Nobody Knows My Name and I never let go of him—through the years of the Negro Civil Rights movement on our small black-and-white TV, then the many decades after. What impressed me about Baldwin was his literary elegance, despite all. He was never more resolutely in control than when he was describing Jim Crow America. The hideousness of anti-black racism could not undermine the clean line of his prose. And Orwell! I learned from George Orwell that narrative was compatible with the essay, that it was possible to write what I call the “biography of an idea”—and trace the way an idea makes its way through a life. Beginning with my first book and in all the books after, I employed the fictional devices of the short-story writer in writing my essays. My best essays, I think, are unafraid to be stories. That’s Orwell’s influence.

Fear And Loathing In Lebanon

Sulome Anderson checks in from Tripoli, the northern Lebanese town that has become a microcosm of the Syrian civil war and which today “seems to lie in ISIS’s shadow”:

Although the extremist and ultraviolent Sunni group has few open supporters here, the appearance of pro-ISIS paraphernalia and graffiti, the clash last month in the Bekaa, and the fact that Tripoli’s Sunni-majority population has a historical tendency toward radicalism, have raised worries that the group might gain a foothold here and send the city into a spiral of deepening violence.

Local tensions in Tripoli follow essentially the same ethnic lines as those in Syria’s war:

Sunni citizens largely support the increasingly fundamentalist Syrian opposition — ISIS being the most notoriously brutal of the groups fighting Syrian president Bashar al-Assad; meanwhile, the Alawites of the Jabal Mohsen neighborhood are overwhelmingly sympathetic to Assad’s regime (the Syrian leader is Alawite) and its Hezbollah allies. There are frequent and bloody gunfights between Jabal Mohsen and the Sunni district of Bab el-Tabbeneh, which border each other. Fearing violence would engulf Tripoli and potentially spread to other regions in Lebanon, the army moved in, establishing a security zone within the city limits last year. That hasn’t stopped the bloodshed, though, and the situation in Arsal triggered fresh clashes at the end of August, in which an 8-year-old girl was killed.

Also, the local Christian community is feeling threatened in a way it never has before:

Tripoli’s Christian population has been a bit skittish lately. Several churches were vandalized at the beginning of September, their walls spray-painted with ominous threats including “The Islamic State is coming” and “We come to slaughter you, you worshippers of the cross.” Crosses were allegedly burned in retaliation for the #BurnISISFlag social media movement, Lebanon’s version of the Ice Bucket Challenge, in which people have been posting videos and pictures of themselves setting fire to the group’s banner.

Father Samir Hajjar sits in the priest’s quarters of the city’s Syriac Orthodox Church, one of the buildings that was vandalized. He is measured about the incident, but admits it was worrying. “At first, we thought this could just be ordinary vandals, or the work of children,” he says. “I’ve been here 17 years, and no one bothers us. We respect our neighbors and they respect us. But this graffiti on the walls of all the churches, that’s not children’s work. They used stencils. It’s a serious matter.”

Can America “Destroy” ISIS?

Tomasky wishes Obama would treat Americans like grownups and admit that we can’t eradicate the evil embedded in ISIS:

We’ve been trying to destroy Al Qaeda for 13 years now. We have not. We will not. And we will not destroy ISIS. We can’t destroy these outfits. They’re too nimble and slippery and amorphous, and everybody knows it. So why say it? Why not say what we hopefully can do and what we should do: contain it. We have contained Al Qaeda. Some of the methods have been morally problematic (drone strikes that sometimes kill innocents, etc.), but the methods have worked. Al Qaeda, say the experts, is now probably not in a position to pull off a 9/11. Containment is fine. It does the job. But no, I guess a president can’t say that. A president has to sound like John Wayne. It’s depressing and appalling.

Steve Chapman explains why, in his view, the war against ISIS is unlikely to succeed:

The United States is not incapable of fighting reasonably successful wars. It did so in the 1991 Iraq war, the 1999 Kosovo war and the 1989 invasion of Panama. In each case, we had a well-defined adversary in the form of a government, a limited goal and a clear path to the exit. We generally fail, though, when we undertake open-ended efforts to stamp out radical insurgents in societies alien to ours. We lack the knowledge, the resources, the compelling interest and the staying power to vanquish those groups.

The Islamic State is vulnerable to its local enemies—which include nearly every country in the region. But that doesn’t mean it can be destroyed by us. In fact, it stands to benefit from one thing at which both Obama and Bush have proved adept: creating enemies faster than we can kill them. We don’t know how to conduct a successful war against the Islamic State. So chances are we’ll have to settle for the other kind.

In fact, Ishaan Tharoor notes, the one time we managed to “destroy” a major terrorist outfit, it came back … as ISIS:

The closest the United States has come to destroying a terrorist organization like the Islamic State was when it subdued the al-Qaeda insurgency that led to its rise. A U.S. counteroffensive in 2008, aided by a coalition of Sunni tribal militias, beat back al-Qaeda in Iraq; Baghdad, for a brief moment, seemed to be showing the political will to better accommodate Iraq’s Sunni majority regions. But those gains didn’t hold and, in the chaos of Syria’s civil war, units that once belonged to al-Qaeda in Iraq reemerged as the Islamic State.

The irony is unwelcome for a raft of reasons: The Islamic State is far more powerful than its predecessor, boasting as many as 31,500 fighters, according to new estimates from the CIA. That includes an influx of radicalized European nationals, as well as opportunistic defectors from other Syrian rebel groups. The United States does not have the boots on the ground as it did during its occupation in Iraq; nor is it certain that the Obama administration or the Iraqi government can call on the same Sunni militias that helped first push back al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Face Of The Day

Morsi jailbreak trial adjourned to September 21

Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed El-Beltagy flashes rabia sign during a trial of the Wadi el-Natrun prison case at Cairo Police Academy in Egypt on September 15, 2014. Cairo Criminal Court adjourned the trial of Mohamed Morsi and 130 others to 21 September. By Ahmed Ramadan/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.

Paternity Pays, Ctd

Kay Hymowitz responds to Claire Cain Miller:

The jumping off point of [Miller’s] piece will be familiar to anyone who has kept a casual eye on gender gap research. Mothers earn less than fathers with similar credentials and laboring in similar occupations.  Citing research by sociologist Michelle Budig, Miller notes that “childless, unmarried women earn 96 cents for every dollar a man earns, while married mothers earn 76 cents.” Men, on the other hand, get a parenthood bonus.  Their earnings go up when they become fathers.

Now, there are two plausible reasons for the motherhood penalty and fatherhood bonus.

One is that women behave differently than men when they deal with the inevitable tradeoffs between jobs and children.  That position is certainly consistent with Budig’s finding that men increase their work hours after becoming a parent while women reduce theirs—not to mention mother’s oft-repeated preference for part time over full time employment. Miller, however, seizes on the gender gap literature’s preferred explanation: The gap is caused by discrimination against women, or in this case, “old fashioned notions of parenthood.” Employers remain suspicious of working mothers, she believes, while they are forever patting working dads on the back with raises and promotions.

Megan McArdle also sees some inherent divisions in family roles:

The fundamental unfairness of reproduction carries over into the partnerships we form to assist it. The ideal of an egalitarian partnership in which both partners work outside the home and inside the home in equal measure isn’t achieved even in those Nordic paradises where everyone gets scads of fully paid parental leave and subsidized day care — and women are even less likely to end up in a private-sector job or management than they are in the heartless U.S.

Instead of talking about how unfair it all is, it’s probably more useful to talk about what we want to achieve. Do we want to encourage the formation of marriages in which one spouse charges harder outside the home and the other spouse assumes more domestic duties? Or should we penalize spouses who made the mistake of counting on their partner to provide the lion’s share of the earning power? That was the argument of many feminists in the 1970s; they didn’t want women to have the choice of becoming housewives.

A reader chimes in:

My husband benefited from the Family Man trope. I didn’t benefit so much. We made compromises – I made compromises – all through our marriage to help him meet the requirements of his job. That meant that my career got derailed and we moved to places where we had no support network and I had problems finding work. So his career flourished and I went along with it, because the more I compromised the less of a career I had. Critics of “wage gap” calculations will no doubt point out that I undermined my own earnings, so I have no right to complain about the wage gap, but in retrospect if I’d been paid more for comparable work when I started out, my job would have been a more powerful bargaining chip when we made joint decisions.

When my husband died unexpectedly from a rare and previously undiagnosed cancer before age 60 and I was a widow in my late 50s, I found out widow’s benefits don’t go far and sometimes aren’t even available until later. Pensions are reduced for widows and cut further when the pension holder dies before retirement age. Social Security isn’t much help for younger widows who earn a disproportionately smaller share of the family income. Even though he had life insurance (I insisted), and we had retirement funds, I am facing a rocky retirement that began earlier than expected after my dead-end job laid me off just after I turned 60.

I have good friends who made the same compromises, but their husbands are alive and the wives are working part-time or not at all, traveling, and facing a much different old age – because so far, their husbands are still earning money and clocking time on pension actuarial tables and contributing to Social Security (and they’re lucky because as far as I can tell, they have less insurance and retirement savings than we had, although a couple of the men have larger pensions than my husband did). It takes a lot of capital to produce the high cash flow that a living, successful spouse brings in.

While my problems may sound like the problems of privilege to single moms, I find there isn’t much awareness about how early death pretty much burns up all the financial advantages of having a Family Man who earns most of the family income. It’s very hard for a couple to calculate how career decisions will play out financially 30 or 40 years in the future. These days, I don’t recommend the Family Man model.

Zoolander Award Nominee

https://twitter.com/HuffPostBiz/status/511515488388521985

The Zoolander Award for fashion absurdity has introduced Dish readers to everything from erotic Mickey Mouse ears to Holocaust-evoking children’s-wear. Abby Ohlheiser spots a new contender:

“Get it or regret it!” read the description for a “vintage,” one-of-a-kind Kent State sweatshirt that Urban Outfitters briefly offered for just $129. However, the fact that there was just one available for purchase is far from the most regrettable part of the item: the shirt was decorated with a blood spatter-like pattern, reminiscent of the 1970 “Kent State Massacre” that left four people dead. …

As outrage spread, Urban Outfitters issued an apology for the product on Monday morning, claiming that the product was “was purchased as part of our sun-faded vintage collection.” The company added that the bright red stains and holes, which certainly seemed to suggest blood, were simply “discoloration from the original shade of the shirt and the holes are from natural wear and fray.” The statement added: “We deeply regret that this item was perceived negatively.”

Update from a reader:

I was disheartened to see you jumping onto this pathetic bandwagon. The fact that this became a story, with each outlet attempting to out-outrage the others, shows just how lazy we’ve all gotten. This shirt was a single vintage item that had naturally faded and aged into the (admittedly, very unfortunate) finish shown in the photos. It’s “SOLD OUT” because there was only one of them. That’s how vintage clothing works. This key bit of information was completely missed by nearly everyone who covered this non-story. The Daily Beast went so far as to demand – DEMAND! – that Urban Outfitters tell them “who designed” this item. The answer, of course is: “A few decades of runs through the average American washer and dryer.”

Quote For The Day

“The economic arguments against independence seem not to be working — and may even be backfiring. I think I know why. Telling a Scot, ‘You can’t do this — if you do, terrible things will happen to you,’ has been a losing negotiating strategy since time immemorial. If you went into a Glasgow pub tonight and said to the average Glaswegian, ‘If you down that beer, you’ll get your head kicked in,’ he would react by draining his glass to the dregs and telling the barman, ‘Same again,'” – Niall Ferguson, who knows whereof he speaks.