This post will not live up to its title.

This space has been set to “sporadic” whilst I work out some issues with my nonline writing, but here is something that came almost directly across our very own transom.  The invaluable John Fea alerted us to a minor controversy over Our Founders’ thoughts on government-run healthcare that raged last week – those guys thought of everything. It flared up first at Forbes.com, got mentioned at Media Matters and the Washington Post site, and was eventually linked back, shockingly, to the Common-Place Politics issue that Ed Gray and I put together in late 2008. Specifically, Greg Sargent of the WaPo cited Gautham Rao’s essay on the early republic’s marine hospitals, a publicly funded healthcare system for merchant sailors, paid for through a withholding tax on sailors’ wages.  Not a household word, the marine hospitals, but we can always hope.

Probably the most notable aspect of this issue as far the Founders are concerned is that big names said little or nothing about it (at least as far I know without digging all the way through Gautham’s bibliography). Though public anything on Our Founders’ watch is a moral impossibility as currently popular views would have it, the marine hospitals were not even controversial to the actually existing Founders. The merchant marine was a national resource that needed to be kept supplied with workers, so the Founder-managed government did something that needed to be done: make a low-paying, dangerous but necessary occupation a bit less frightening. As Greg Sargent and the Forbes blogger, Rick Ungar, point out, the marine hospital system was created under John Adams by the same Federalist Congress who brought you the Alien and Sedition Acts, but it also enjoyed the support of Adams’s successor, Thomas Jefferson.  More than supported, in fact: Rao shows that the marine hospitals moved west and south with the frontier, eagerly requested even by good Jeffersonians and future Rand Paul constituents of Paducah, Kentucky.

Admittedly, I myself do not think it should matter that much what the statesmen of two+ centuries ago would think about issues they never had to confront.  The Founders lived in a world where massive intentional bleeding was an advanced medical treatment and basic, ubiquitous modern economic institutions such as corporations, banks and insurance were still rare and controversial in their very existence. If Michele Bachmann could go back and ask Jefferson or Adams what they think about “Obamacare,” assuming they did not flee into the woods at the sight of her, their most likely response would be, “Why are you asking us?”

Still, it was nice to see that the C-P Politics issue was of use to somebody. That was not so clear at the time.

In New York City yesterday, there was a meeting for a newish political group calling itself No Labels. Headed up by center-right Democrats and center-right Republicans and self-proclaimed independents, their stated goal is to find common ground on issues they see consumed by hyper-partisanship. They want things to happpen! Now!

We’ve heard this before. And I fear that – even in my own work – it’s possible that historians of our era stress the top-down hand-wringing about partisanship at the expense of a bottom-up explanation for their utility.

Of course political parties are controversial development in the early republic. They’re apparently controversial today. But it’s apparent in the 1780s that state legislatures, as institutions, found it difficult to function without organized coalitions, as did Congress in the 1790s. A key difference between Britain and the U.S. was that in the latter, out-of-doors partisan organizing followed from wider (white male) voter eligibility rules. Politics could become more democratic since partisans could recruit and support lesser-known candidates to stand for elections, letting representation drift away from the established brand names of a handful of prominent families. That’s why we see startlingly high turnover in the House of Representatives and stunning vulgarity among the rough yeomanry who populate legislative chambers.

Because many historians, I suspect, value their political independence and would rather focus on specific policy issues relating to preservation or education or civil rights, partisan commitments don’t necessarily come naturally. And they defy deep context – using a shorthand to link a constellation of issues and views to one party’s label. Sometimes these can be just wrong; other times, the distinctions among parties can’t be exaggerated.

I think this a moment when historians should speak up to defend partisanship. It’s tempting to listen to established politicians (and people who can’t win a primary) rail against the nastiness of political campaigns, but I confess I don’t understand the recent vitriol directed at people who passionately care about certain issues or who are committed to advancing them through party discipline. I, for one, care a lot more about particular issues than I do the fate of a party. That’s why I’m a professor and not party official.

But if I was a candidate, I’d want very much to be able to rely on a network of voters who shared my priorities, who knew something about organizing and electioneering and fundraising, and could make it easier for me to run for office without having to first be rich or famous. And I wish – very much – that there was a price to be paid by people like newly-elected West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, who’s decided that his legislative mission is to protect “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” even though he can’t quite explain why he supports it, and doesn’t seem to even understand the issue itself.

The ‘No Labels’ campaign seems misguided and ahistorical to me. One of their stated goals is to “establish a Political Action Committee that can operate in the 2012 primary races of members who get challenged by the ideological extremes of either party.” In this case, partisanship itself is something they want to see eliminated. No wonder Manchin, along with Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh, were headliners at yesterday’s event.

What is their alternative? A pluralism that isn’t too pluralistic? A set of leaders who think they’re above building broad governing coalitions? Or that understanding and coherently explaining their contrarian positions would be beneath them?

Unclear.

What we are told, in the most condescending terms, is that people unwilling to compromise longstanding political commitments aren’t welcome at the table. Or their issues aren’t welcome. So we can’t talk about repealing DADT because it’s too controversial.

It reminds me of the Gag Rule. Which worked oh so well. Because if we can’t agree about it, it must not be worth discussing.

And it’s a reminder that legislators who call themselves “independent” don’t just mean that they’re independent of party leaders – they want to be independent from voters too.

Think about it this way: Joe Lieberman, darling of the ‘No Labels’ crowd, was the Democratic nominee for vice-president ten years ago. Then he endorsed the policies of a Republican winner* and consequently lost his party’s primary. Lieberman then worked against Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, and was even dressed down on the Senate floor by Obama himself after Lieberman – repeatedly – left Jewish audiences with the impression that Obama was a Muslim.

Yet for all this, Lieberman continues to enjoy privileges of committee leadership that are denied to more loyal – and reliable – members of the Senate’s majority party. And today, a thousand people got an earful of Joe Lieberman (CT-Lieberman) recalling his narrative of victimhood and the nastiness of partisanship.

It seems to me that this is a moment when the grassroots of a political organization clearly have reprimanded a member of their team for bad behavior – by booting him from the team. If they had continued to support him, what would that eventually mean for a legislative caucus? Think of how disruptive it would be to have freelancers peacocking around the floor of the Senate, with no shorthand to figure out who might be more likely to support things like a national bank, the American System, or a bill to aid 9/11 first responders?

It makes me wish Gordon Wood had been invited to talk to them about the differences between the U.S. Senate and the House of Lords.

P.S. Also funny: apparently the group’s logo – a zoological abomination – was ripped off from a lesser-known graphic artist. Probably because intellectual property is the exclusive purview of extremists.

On the way to the SHEAR conference in Rochester this summer (if you missed it, they apparently have local ordinances prohibiting hotels from having lobbies!), I had the chance to see the Erie Canal up close. I’d seen it from a plane before, but at ground level you really appreciate the magnitude of the project.

But even more impressive than the physical structure, I think, is the fact that it was built at all. I can’t imagine that happening today. Building new bridges and public transportation systems seems like a thing of the past, made impossible by legions of nitpickers, privatization evangelists, politicians afraid of being blamed for added expenses, and people who have somehow decided that our governments are supposed to function like our households.

The project cost the state of New York $7 million in 1817, which was about 1% of the nation’s GNP at the time. In a smaller and agricultural economy, this figure looms even larger. Plus, the 363-mile-long route crosses an upstate New York region that was – and still is – fairly empty, to reach Lake Erie and a thinly settled territory toward the west.

Just think about the scope! The percentage of the federal budget that today goes toward transportation and infrastructure projects is 3% – a fraction many in Congress want to cut. Yet even that federal figure is smaller than the relative expense of the state-funded canal. If we invested 1% of our GNP in a single project today, that would be a $140 billion piece of work.

That’s just less than the inflation-adjusted cost of the entire Apollo moon program.

No wonder they named so many things after DeWitt Clinton! But he of course didn’t act alone – the sums speak volumes about the under-appreciated state legislatures of the early republic, where we find frequent bi- and multi-partisan consensus in favor of infrastructure projects, and a high tolerance for debt-financed economic development.

Compare that with the country’s current inability – and unwillingness – to address $2 trillion in infrastructure needs that result in the occasional bridge collapse, blackout, and routine, epic traffic jams.

This legacy casts an even more unflattering light on politicians like N.J. Gov. Chris Christie, who recently killed a Hudson River rail tunnel that would have been the first built in the New York City area in more than a century. The N.Y.-N.J. Port Authority and the federal government each were kicking in $3 billion for the $8.7 billion project, and N.J. was responsible for the remaining $2.7 billion. Basing his decision in estimates of potential – yet not probable – cost overruns, Christie trashed the project’s sponsors and the unions who were already at work on the site, and announced his intention to keep the federal money. Instead, he has to give it back, with interest, and may have put his state on the hook for $600 million already spent the groundbreaking.

What’s baffling about these decisions is that the country’s population isn’t getting smaller. At peak hours, the existing Hudson River tunnel has a train passing through every few seconds. It is already at capacity. Expanded rail access would not only serve the region’s growing population by reducing commuting times and expanding transit access; it would also raise property values – one study pegged the boost at an average of $19,000 per home for a total of more than $18 billion. If you captured that gain in real estate taxes, it would pay for the debt service on the tunnel’s bonds. This project would pay for itself in one of the densest populated corridors in the developed world, and the money could be borrowed during a period of record-low interest rates and paid back over 35 years.

When New Yorkers planned the Erie Canal, they hoped for federal support. When they didn’t receive any, they built it anyway, borrowing the funds at 6% per year. They didn’t spend their time searching for reasons to abandon the project, and unlike Christie and his ilk, they didn’t see a popular project as some kind of albatross.

We have an unemployment rate of almost 10% and more than $2 trillion in needed projects. We have students who have invested heavily in their own educations entering the weakest labor market since the Great Depression. And we have international competitors boldly investing in their futures – drawing provocative comparisons to the 19th century U.S.

What a contrast to 2010, when 75% of our national budget is promised to the military and retirees, and when we see firsthand how financial downturns can turn politically regressive. There was a time, until fairly recently, when politicians competed to outdo each other in support of public infrastructure projects. Most of the Interstate Highway Act, believe it or not, passed the Congress on a voice vote.

Compare that to the buzzworthy announcement that the northeastern United States will have high-speed rail by…. (wait for it) 2040.

Well, hello there.

I’ve been meaning to start doing some light blogging at Common-place since Jeff invited me many moons ago, but work and life intervened to make time a scarce resource.

I’m not sure how much traffic my posts will draw, since I’ll be thinking out loud about page-turning subjects like political economy while trying to bridge the gap between my life as a professional historian and the world I inhabit as an observant citizen and newshound.

I think historians’ appreciation for deep context is what sets us apart from other disciplines, and it sometimes frustrates me (but doesn’t surprise me) that our work so often seems cloistered from a public sphere that’s decided context is irrelevant, or biased. Jeff’s posts at this blog have tried to bridge this divide and reach out colleagues and the public alike, and I hope to add to that effort.

For the most part, I’ll try to stick to what I know. However, I’ll surely be tempted to post some half-baked notions. But, hey, this is a blog after all.

And because it’s a blog, and not my full-time job, I have decided to keep myself anonymous, dear reader. Why? I think the reasons are fairly obvious. Our colleagues are often competitors, our promotion and hiring processes are opaque, and our so-called job ‘market’ is oversupplied, all of which amplify unequal distributions of power in the academy. This discourages junior faculty and adjuncts from doing and saying all kinds of things their senior colleagues can take for granted. So, if my pseudonymity bugs you, I’m sorry, but you should be far more upset with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for claiming the mantle of Madison, Hamilton, and Jay than an amateur blogger.

But enough of this palaver… let’s get this show on the road!

I need to read it on the computer that’s actually large enough to see properly, but this site “Government is Good” seems to collect some very necessary information. The stable middle- class suburban world most Americans live in was made possible by government. Full stop. Where would any of it be without land laws, highways, schools, sewers, police and fire protection, etc.? ( I know I’m forgetting a bunch of others.) The actual rugged individualists of the American past understood that you wanted the government around. In places like Missouri and Kansas, they murdered each other over who got to have the county seat.

The problem is that Americans insist on thinking of government as something separate from themselves, even though, corrupt and annoying as it may be some,times, it is still a democratic government by for and of themselves

The view from the dental chair last week:

Possibly there is a good Lockean idea in there somewhere, but this bit of modern School of Education dogma — learning only occurs through games or craft projects — did not sound like Ben Franklin to me.  He was all about learning by reading about things, as well doing them.  He started one of the world’s great libraries, the old-fashioned kind full of papery things! (The phraseology did not very 18th-century either, like having Franklin mention his learning curve.)  The speedy search feature of the online Franklin Papers revealed nothing close, and apparently even fans of this quotation have some doubts about whether anyone historical actually wrote it. They think maybe it is ancient Chinese proverb, no fooling. Like “Stay thirsty, my friend!” But perhaps I sell the proverbists short.

As a non-New Yorker, I do not have a very well-formed opinion of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, but his recent speech defending the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” contains one of least impeachable arguments I have seen a public figure make in favor of church-state separation under the U.S. Constitution. Rather than positing a general founding secularism that is just inaccurate enough to give Christianists a foothold for their mythologizing, Bloomberg grounded the mosque’ s right to exist firmly on individual rights, especially private property rights:

The simple fact is, this building is private property, and the owners have a right to use the building as a house of worship, and the government has no right whatsoever to deny that right. And if it were tried, the courts would almost certainly strike it down as a violation of the U.S. Constitution.

Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question: Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here.

This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions or favor one over another. The World Trade Center site will forever hold a special place in our city, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in lower Manhattan.

It is hard to see how anyone with real conservative principles could take much issue with that private property argument. Not that I assume most of the criticism has come from principle — fear and fear-mongering are easier on the brain, and get a lot more attention.

Of course, Bloomberg’s speech was not free of historical mythology, especially about New York as the birthplace of religious toleration. (His cited basis for this claim is the locally semi-famous “Flushing Remonstrance” of 1657, in which officials in the titular Queens village begged Director General Peter Stuyvesant to permit a Quaker meeting. In response, Stuyvesant jailed the officials and abolished the town government, so it was not really a big win for religious freedom.) This site’s esteemed co-founder painted early New York as something completely other than an island of peaceful pluralism, and even Bloomberg himself covers the fact that New York did not in fact have religious toleration until after the Revolution: the Catholic Church was not allowed to open its doors until the 1780s.

All of which points up the problem with most claims that the United States was “founded on” any particular modern idea we might choose to advocate. There were multiple moments of founding, and all of those were the product of political processes that participants could and did ascribe many different meanings to. One does not have spend much time reading the founding generation’s constitutional debates and newspaper essays to realize that they never fully agreed themselves what the nation they were founding was being “founded on.”

As a for instance: the principle Bloomberg cites is certainly present in Jefferson’s Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom (1786) and Madison’s first amendment to the Constitution, but many of the Founders (especially those who identified with the Federalist party) continued to believe that government needed to embrace and employ Protestant Christianity. It also seems safe to say that at least some founding lids would have flipped if someone had tried to open a mosque next door to Federal Hall in 1789.  On the other hand, some might not have. The early presidents were all aware that the U.S. would be contact with cultures around the globe, and took occasion to single out Muslims as a group that Americans were not set against, at least in theory. Either way, it is not clear that the Founders and their colonial forebears really have much guidance to offer us. We in this century have to make these decisions for ourselves.

[This is me experimenting with the WordPress app on my new phone.] From before the beginning, this has been the most and least progressive country on the planet. America kept up the witch-hunting after western Europe gave it up but also created the first national republic, launched a revolution and wrote new constitutions because the British Constitution was not ancient enough for them, and so on. Driving home on I-70 (a.k.a. the National Road) today, we saw some good examples of the way these contradictions continue to develop. Here are a couple of illustrations from the exit town of Effingham, Illinois, where one finds both what is probably the country’s most stylish, progressive roadside restaurant and the World’s Largest Cross, constructed oh-so-majestically out of giant sheets of corrugated metal:

I am a sucker for old school public art where they try to express some local civic value by putting up a sort of giant greeting card. Anyone recognize this one?

Outbreaks of popular resistance against expert medical advice are a long Anglo-American tradition, and preventative measures like inoculation and vaccination have been recurring targets for us freemen. It will always be a little counter-intuitive to expose a healthy person to potentially harmful substances to keep them from getting a disease they don’t seem to have. It seemed even worse in the case of early inoculation, which involved giving someone a disease like smallpox on purpose in hopes they would get it in a less virulent form and develop some immunity.  Sometimes the patient  just got sick and died of the “cure.”

One of the most famous populist crusades against the modern medicine of its time was in 1721 when young Ben Franklin and his older brother James went after the smallpox inoculation policy favored by colonial Boston’s ministerial elite. The Massachusetts Historical Society has an excellent online presentation about the controversy, including images of Ben’s pseudonymous essays from the New England Courant. (Historians help me with some less well-known examples).

But historical context only goes so far, and just because some Founder did it, does not necessarily make it right in every case. So quite likely Dr. Andrew Wakefield really did need to be drummed out of the medical profession [original link to AP story no longer works]:

LONDON — The doctor whose research linking autism and the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella influenced millions of parents to refuse the shot for their children was banned Monday from practicing medicine in his native Britain.

Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 study was discredited — but vaccination rates have never fully recovered and he continues to enjoy a vocal following, helped in the U.S. by endorsements from celebrities like Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy

Wakefield was the first researcher to publish a peer-reviewed study suggesting a connection between autism and the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella. Legions of parents abandoned the vaccine, leading to a resurgence of measles in Western countries where it had been mostly stamped out. There are outbreaks across Europe every year and sporadic outbreaks in the U.S.

“That is Andrew Wakefield’s legacy,” said Paul Offit, chief of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “The hospitalizations and deaths of children from measles who could have easily avoided the disease.”

Wakefield’s discredited theories had a tremendous impact in the U.S., Offit said, adding: “He gave heft to the notion that vaccines in general cause autism.”

In Britain, Wakefield’s research led to a huge decline in the number of children receiving the MMR vaccine: from 95 percent in 1995 — enough to prevent measles outbreaks — to 50 percent in parts of London in the early 2000s. Rates have begun to recover, though not enough to prevent outbreaks. In 2006, a 13-year-old boy became the first person to die from measles in Britain in 14 years.

“The false suggestion of a link between autism and the MMR vaccine has done untold damage to the UK vaccination program,” said Terence Stephenson, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. “Overwhelming scientific evidence shows that it is safe.”

Unfortunately, even when the British totally discredit you, there is always Texas, as Brian Deer of the London Times explains.