Robert Perkinson's "Texas Tough"

Robert Perkinson is currently a professor at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. He was awarded a Soros Justice Fellowship in 2006.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Texas Tough: The Rise of America's Prison Empire, and reported the following:

Page 99 spotlights the most abusive—and profitable—regime of criminal punishment in American history: convict leasing. After the abolition of slavery, some four million people suddenly entered the legal system not as property but as people. Yet they weren’t treated equally. Rather, law enforcement and the judiciary, which remained under the control of dispossessed slave holders, swiftly turned many freedpeople into felons, convicting them overwhelmingly of trifling offensive like stealing a pair of shoes or refusing to sign a labor contract. These felons were then hired off, or leased, to the highest bidder—mostly railroads, mining companies, and planters.

Because the lessees of convicts widened their profit margins by wresting maximum toil from their judicially bonded laborers while spending as little as possible on their upkeep, the practice produced unspeakable suffering: hundreds of thousands of prisoners over the course of four decades—the lion’s share of them black—were housed in filthy barracks by night and driven to exhaustion by day, often without adequate food or proper clothing. Tens of thousands of them perished and were then exchanged for fresh convicts, as promised by their contracts. As one lessee glibly remarked, “Before the war, we owned the Negroes…But these convicts, we don’t own ‘em. One dies, get another.”

Page 99 points out that the system wasn’t a “barbarous relic,” as historians have maintained. Rather, like slavery before it, convict leasing “played a vital role in assembling the infrastructure of what boosters would call ‘the New South.’” This was especially true in Texas, where leasing achieved unrivaled scale. In the 1880s, impressed convicts revitalized the sugar industry, which had collapsed after emancipation, and helped Texas become the nation’s leader in railroad construction. In addition, lease payments provided a major source of state revenue, “more than $300,000 a year by the 1880s.” The grandest beneficiary was Edward Cunningham, a former slaveholder and ruthless businessman who used this new form of unfree labor to build a gigantic and hugely profitable sugarcane enterprise outside of Houston that became Imperial Sugar Company, which in the late twentieth century made the Fortune 500 list. The system of convict leasing, then, not only reinforced white supremacy and victimized African Americans; perversely, it was an engine of economic growth.

Later in the book, it becomes clear that this regime of racial subjugation and labor exploitation didn’t fade away with the abolition of convict leasing. Rather, when Texas and other southern states resumed management of their penal systems during the Progressive Era, they often took over lessees’ plantations and maintained their personnel and praxis, thus transporting the lifeways of slavery deep into the twentieth century. In the North, a rehabilitative model of criminal justice dominated, but in the South, retribution, racism, and labor exploitation always held sway. A central argument of Texas Tough is that this harsher model of southern justice became a template for the nation during the conservative resurgence of the post civil rights era. The result is that America’s penal system, the largest in the world, is largely a southern penal system.

Read an excerpt from Texas Tough, and learn more about the book and author at the Texas Tough website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marion Blute's "Darwinian Sociocultural Evolution"

Marion Blute is Professor Emerita of Sociology, University of Toronto at Mississauga.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Darwinian Sociocultural Evolution: Solutions to Dilemmas in Cultural and Social Theory, and reported the following:

But to turn to oogamety and more familiar gender differences, what if the consumption and production functions of one gender, say females, are more costly than those of males so that the naturally selected equilibrium is with females/eggs at a lower frequency than males/sperm “packets” (the number of sperm required for a single egg to be fertilized; Noë and Hammerstein 1994, 1995)?

Page 99 is not representative of the book because the book is about sociocultural evolution. However, this section delves into evolutionary biological theories of gender differences and relations as part of a general discussion of the relationship among competition, conflict and cooperation in evolutionary processes. It includes a (minor?) mistake which I will correct here. Surprisingly to non-biologists, the most widely accepted evolutionary biological theory of gender differences implies that males/sperm are parasites which cannot explain why females do not revert to cloning, to mating with other females, or to choosing males who contribute equally and do not exploit them. In this section of the book I proposed a different theory - that there are ecological differences between genders (e.g. that proto-males eat more/produce more potential offspring while proto-females digest more and produce more potential grand-offspring) so that sex primordially is a form of cooperation, specialization and trade engaged in for mutual benefit (they probably trade to reduce risk).

What one gender does ecologically is likely to be more beneficial (or less costly) than what the other does (e.g. eating/producing more would be more beneficial under uncrowded circumstances relative to resources while digesting/re-producing more would be more beneficial under crowded circumstances) resulting in a biased “sex allocation” i.e. numbers times the amount spent on each of the one kind relative to the other. Additionally, competition would also ensue on both sides for the most/best of what the other side has to offer - called “sexual” as opposed to “natural” competition and selection since Darwin’s time. Moreover, sexual competition would be more intense among the proto-gender with the higher rather than the lower naturally-selected sex allocation and would therefore be a “contest” (involving contact and aggression) among the former as opposed to a “scramble” among the latter - all other things being equal, re-balancing the scales to an equal sex allocation.

The mistake I made on p. 99 was to imply that sexual competition and selection takes place among the latter because it takes place among the former - not so, it just would, although less intensely. Note that sexual competition and selection in either gender is antagonistic to the other which would ‘prefer’ that time and energy of partners/potential partners be spent on satisfying their needs instead, and is generally damaging to the population as a whole as well. Interestingly, this theory combines a conservative and a radical view of gender differences and relations.

Read an excerpt from Darwinian Sociocultural Evolution, and learn more about the book and author at the Cambridge University Press website as well as Marion Blute's faculty webpage and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Laskin's "The Long Way Home"

David Laskin has written books and articles on a wide range of subjects, including history, weather, travel, gardens, and the natural world. His The Children’s Blizzard won the Washington State Book Award and the Midwest Booksellers’ Choice Award for Nonfiction. His other titles include Braving the Elements: The Stormy History of American Weather, Partisans: Marriage, Politics and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals; A Common Life: Four Generations of American Literary Friendship and Influence; and Artists in their Gardens (coauthored with Valerie Easton).

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Long Way Home: An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War, and reported the following:

I love the idea of the Page 99 Test and it just happens that my new book The Long Way Home passes with flying, or at least vivid, colors. The book unfolds the immigrant experience in the First World War by following 12 men born in Europe who emigrated to America and returned across the Atlantic in uniform to fight with U.S. armed forces – and page 99 just happens to zero in on two of the guys at the moment their lives intersected with the sinking of the Lusitania on May 7, 1915.

In one of those narrative coincidences that make authors’ eyes twinkle, one of my guys, a Russian-Jewish plumber by the name of Meyer Epstein, actually emigrated on the Lusitania (in steerage) in 1913. How amazing that two years later the torpedoing of the fabled steamer by a German U-boat should bring Meyer’s adopted country to the brink of war.

Page break. I pick up with Andrew Christofferson, my one Norwegian immigrant, a slim, good-natured young fisherman who emigrated in 1911 in the hopes of homesteading in Nebraska. After an ecstatic Christian conversion at a Midwestern camp meeting, Andrew eventually found free land to homestead in the harsh short-grass prairie of eastern Montana – and that’s where he was when the Cunard liner flagship went down. Andrew’s daughter told me her father got all his news, a few days late, from a Norwegian-language paper called the Decorah-Posten. So I dug up the relevant issue and found someone to translate the account that Andrew read on May 11, 1915: “When the ship had vanished, the sea was filled with hundreds of persons struggling to stay afloat, and the air was filled with their cries for help and their calls to loved ones, bidding them farewell.”

Page 99 ends with a nod at how the German-American press covered the sinking: they blamed the tragedy on England and its American sympathizers, the idea being that if you were stupid enough to cross the Atlantic on an English steamer when the ocean was seething with German U-boats, well, you pretty much had it coming.

All in all, a pretty good snap shot of my book – and of the high-tension atmosphere that gripped the nation when the world’s fastest ocean-liner was torn asunder by a torpedo on a spring afternoon in 1915.

Read an excerpt from The Long Way Home, and learn more about the book and author at the official The Long Way Home website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Roger E. A. Farmer's "How the Economy Works"

Roger E. A. Farmer is Professor and Chair of the Economics Department at UCLA. The author of numerous books and journal articles, he is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and of the Centre for Economic Policy Research. He is a contributor to the Financial Times Economists' Forum and, in 2000, received the University of Helsinki medal in recognition of his work.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, How the Economy Works: Confidence, Crashes and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies, and reported the following:

I had two major goals in writing How the Economy Works: Confidence, Crashes and Self-fulfilling Prophecies. The first was to provide a jargon-free, concise and understandable history of economic thought from 1776 to the present day that would stand the test of time as a reference guide both for the general reader and those with a specialist knowledge of economics. The second was to provide a new theory and policy, that if widely adopted, could prevent future financial crises and the accompanying human misery of mass unemployment from reoccurring in the future. The technical details of my theory are explained in a companion book, Expectations, Employment and Prices.

Economic literacy is as important to citizenship as literacy in mathematics and the physical sciences. It is more important than ever that the public understands how economists’ beliefs influence the government policies that are now having such an profound impact on their everyday lives.

Why is there so much disagreement over the causes of recessions? What went wrong in 2008, and how can we fix it? Who was Keynes, and why are his ideas relevant today? What is the role of the Federal Reserve and other central banks around the world and how do they affect your life? Does it really make sense for governments to spend hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ money that they don’t have? I answer all of these questions and I illustrate the answers with examples.

Page 99 drops the reader right in the middle of a chapter that describes how economists explain the persistence of unemployment. This is the most challenging chapter in the book for the general reader to comprehend but is central to my argument about unemployment and economic theory. I have made the book as easy to read as possible but I have not been patronizing with the reader by trivializing hard ideas. Page 99 is a good example of this approach.

One of my favorite pieces of scientific literature is the book QED by Richard Feynman. In it, he explains the theory of quantum electrodynamics to the layman in simple English. In How the Economy Works: Confidence, Crashes and Self-fulfilling Prophecies, I have tried to do for modern macroeconomics what Feynman did for modern physics. You, the general reader, must be the judge of whether or not I have succeeded.

Learn more about How the Economy Works at the Oxford University Press website and at Roger E. A. Farmer's website, where you will find five video trailers of the author's description of the book's contents.

--Marshal Zeringue

J. Donovan's "Juries and the Transformation of Criminal Justice in France in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries"

James Donovan is associate professor of history at Pennsylvania State University at Mont Alto.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Juries and the Transformation of Criminal Justice in France in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, and reported the following:

On page 99 of the book there is a table showing that in nineteenth century France the conviction rate for recidivists tried for felonies was much higher than the conviction rate for first-time offenders. This was evidently because, as stated on the page, in “nineteenth-century France, as in eighteenth century England, the character of the accused person had a significant influence on the jury verdict…” In this sense, page 99 is representative of the book, which shows how in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries juries (introduced in 1791) influenced the transformation of the French criminal justice system from one which tried the crime to one which tried the criminal, or toward an individualization of punishment. The panels exhibited much independence from the judicial and political authorities. Sometimes juries nullified the law in cases where social norms conflicted with its letter. More often, the panels acquitted accused persons or convicted them on reduced charges because jurors found the punishments too harsh.

The book uses evidence derived from Ministry of Justice reports and statistics and the writings of many contemporary jurists to show how juries played an essential role in bringing about penal reforms in France. Legislators responded to juror resistance to the harsh and inflexible punishments in the Napoleonic Penal Code by gradually enacting laws lowering penalties for certain crimes or giving jurors legal means to reduce them. But the ultimate outcome was paradoxical. Because of persistently high acquittal rates, governments eventually found means to reduce the powers of juries by removing many cases from jury trial and finally by destroying the independence of the panels in 1941.

Learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul D. Halliday's "Habeas Corpus"

Paul D. Halliday is Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire, and reported the following:

Margaret Symonds laughed in church. So local leaders jailed her. But in 1629, anyone who thought herself wrongly jailed might use a writ of habeas corpus to have her case reviewed. And so it was that England’s greatest court freed Margaret Symonds.

Margaret’s story, found on page 99, opens the chapter concerned with how judges made judgments using habeas corpus. She was just one of thousands who used the writ from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth to ask whether they had been confined contrary to law. Using the writ effectively required a powerful judge, one who could compel obedience from all who might detain others, whether a jailer, a military officer, or a violent husband, and whether in England, or ultimately, across the English king’s many imperial dominions. But at its core, the writ’s history contains a paradox: the making of empire would spread habeas corpus across the globe, and the making of empire would generate the anxieties that would constrain the writ and the judge who made it work. Legislation, including that produced by quasi-representative legislatures in Britain, her colonies and former colonies, and the U.S., would do as much as anything else to shut down the judge who made the writ great.

No book’s possibilities can be fully revealed in the words of one page, any more than the whole of any aspect of past human experience—for instance, the use of a revered legal device—can be found in one story. But by reading Margaret’s tale along with thousands of others, we can consider anew how our law has and has not helped us accomplish our collective moral aspirations. We can explore how law has worked, and how it has not, when political crises and social dislocations have generated anxieties that have prompted us to lock up those who scare us most—sometimes with good cause, sometimes without. At its best, habeas corpus has helped us to see the difference. Margaret Symonds learned that in 1629.

Read an excerpt from Habeas Corpus, and learn more about the book at the Harvard University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susan Douglas's "Enlightened Sexism"

Susan J. Douglas is the author of Where the Girls Are, The Mommy Myth, and other works of cultural history and criticism. She is the Catherine Neafie Kellogg Professor of Communication Studies and chair of the department at the University of Michigan, where she has taught since 1996. Her work has appeared in The Nation, The Progressive, Ms., The Village Voice, and In These Times.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message that Feminism's Work Is Done, and reported the following:

I lucked out on this assignment—which, like many of the other authors, I was wary about, given the randomness of the page number—because when you open Enlightened Sexism to page 99, you find yourself at the end of the chapter titled “Warrior Women in Thongs,” and so there are concluding paragraphs that summarize the book’s themes. Enlightened Sexism provides a somewhat irreverent tour through the changing media images of girls and women from the 1990s to the present, and lays out what I found to be a striking irony. With of all those super heroines, high-powered female attorneys, surgeons, judges, and police chiefs in prime time, not to mention prominent news anchors, reporters and pundits, much of the media have come to overrepresent women as having made it—completely—in the professions, and having achieved a level of financial success and comfort enjoyed primarily by the Tiffany’s-encrusted doyennes of Laguna Beach. So there is a rather large gap between how the vast majority of girls and women live their lives and what they see—and don’t see—in the media.

What the media have been giving us then, are fantasies of power. They assure girls and women that women’s liberation is a fait accompli, and that we are stronger, more successful, more sexually in control, more fearless, and more held in awe than we actually are. Because full equality allegedly has been achieved, it’s now acceptable to resurrect sexist stereotypes of girls and women because supposedly they can’t undermine us anymore. Thus, what has emerged is a new, subtle, sneaky form of sexism that seems to accept—even celebrate—female achievements on the surface, but is really about repudiating feminism and keeping women, especially young women, in their place. Girls and women are torn between impossibly contradictory images of the importance of femininity on the one hand and empowerment on the other. Lurking in most of this media fare is the message that feminist politics is no longer necessary, is even dangerous to women, when a host of issues from pay inequity, poverty and violence still affect millions of us.

“Warrior Women in Thongs” is about the rise in the 1990s of the sexy, mouthy, butt-kicking heroine—think Buffy, Xena, Lara Croft, et al. at the height of the “girl power” movement. Here’s an excerpt from p. 99 (with a few sentences from the bottom of p. 98 so it makes sense).

The warrior women in thongs insisted that females could, and should, combine force and aggression with femininity and sexual display. On the one hand, this was welcome, given how often our culture emphasizes that female sexuality is dangerous and shameful. On the other hand, they also reaffirmed the sexual objectification of women and girls, and suggested that women could be as strong as any man as long as they were poreless, stacked, and a size two. No matter how strong we got, it was more important to be slim and beautiful and to know how to deploy femininity as a weapon. And for most of the warrior women, their sexuality got them into trouble with the wrong men and even endangered those closest to them.

Finally, and obviously, these female heroes could only be kick-butt strong in fantastical other worlds either in some mythic past, in a place over a Hellmouth, or in a nether world or parallel universe of spying. In the real world, there’s the question of whether it’s all that great for girls to feel empowered primarily through the use of physical violence against others. But it was precisely because the settings of warrior women fare were mythological that they provided ideal metaphorical realms for exploring the increased fluidity and uncertainty of gender roles in the 1990s and beyond.

Warrior women were both transgressive and conformist. They fought like Jackie Chan but cried over romantic betrayal or injury done to others; they were physically dominating yet caring. While they suggested, on the one hand, that with enough Tae Kwon Do lessons women could reduce the differences between the sexes even further, their form-fitting, skin-baring outfits made clear that gender differences were here to stay. In addressing, however campily, our culture’s anxieties about changing gender scripts at the turn of the century, the warrior women in thongs asserted that to exert power, women had to be a lot more like men (hardly the feminist hope of the 1970s) and, at the same time, true to their socialized female selves that were not like men at all. They insisted that women were and could be comprised of a complicated, daunting bundle of roles, skills and emotions that drew from both sides of the old gender divide. In particular, increased physical strength matched by a defiant rhetorical toughness might be necessary now for women, but the traditional male emotional repertoires of aloofness and insensitivity were not. This was a very different and more complicated and ambiguous kind of female persona from those on Dallas, thirtysomething, or Touched by an Angel.

Learn more about the book and author at Susan Douglas's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Khalil Gibran Muhammad's "The Condemnation of Blackness"

Khalil Gibran Muhammad is Assistant Professor of History, Indiana University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, and reported the following:

The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and Modern Urban America brings to life one of the most transformative periods in U.S. history. The book tracks the racial limits of liberalism during the Progressive era in search of an historical explanation for the enduring notion of African Americans as a distinctive criminal population outside of the South.

One of the least explored areas of the period that gave birth to modern American liberalism is how ideas about crime shaped new patterns of racial segregation in the urban North. Although European immigrants were targets of anti-immigrant hysteria and nativist violence, they were not criminalized in the same way or with the same intensity as African Americans in Chicago, New York, or Philadelphia. Indeed for northern progressives, immigrant crime was treated as a symptom of class oppression whereas northern black crime was treated as a symptom of black pathology, as a legacy of slavery.

Southern chain gangs and lynch mobs were unmatched in terms of racist criminal justice practices, to be sure. But the story told here is far more revealing of where we are today in our post-Civil Rights, “color-blind” crime rhetoric than the Jim Crow, Bull Connor story of the Deep South.

In my opinion page 99 passes the test. It captures in microcosm how black culture then as now legitimized separate liberal understandings and treatments of blacks as “criminals.” It reveals why influential progressives chose not to chart a path of crime prevention, social reform, and antipoverty activism for African Americans that might have steered the nation away from a course leading to discriminatory mass incarceration policies today.

Page 99:

Like Frances Kellor’s publications, Franz Boas’s 1905 article would signal a new “scientific presumption” that “the Negro has the inherent capacity for progress, for civilization.”

With Boas’s rejection of biological determinism, a fresh set of perspectives on black criminality and new arguments for racial advancement entered the race-relations discourse. Boas’s interest in attacking biological racism was motivated in part by his primary concern with nativism in the urban North and related policy debates on restricting immigration. The assimilation of southern and eastern European immigrants was ultimately his central focus, as it was for the vast majority of Progressive era reformers. Yet his 1911 treatise, The Mind of Primitive Man, undoubtedly opened the door for blacks to be accepted as full participants in America. Along with some of the most influential and outspoken northern progressives, Boas argued that black inferiority was not innate but was a temporary state perpetuated by whites’ “social neglect.” The Mind of Primitive Man thus marked a crucial transition moment for new cultural explanations of black criminality.

As white racial liberals, Boas and those he influenced made great strides toward justifying racial equality in the urban North. In contrast to white racial Darwinists, including southern sociologists (or apologists), they constructed an alternative stage on which crime among blacks could be seen as a social problem rather than a biological one, as something temporary and reformable rather than innate and fixed. In light of modern capitalism’s contradictory forces of expanded economic opportunities and social freedoms as well as new forms of misery and blight, these northern liberals brought blacks closer to their pro-immigrant structural critiques. For example, they recast black juvenile delinquency and prostitution partly as social dramas shaped by white racism and white privilege.

Still, they stopped short of where they went for white immigrants. They used culture as both a salve and a sieve, to mediate the line between racial oppression based on hereditarian theories of black inferiority and unambiguous color-blind appeals for social, economic, and political reform. Facing institutional racism and intensifying segregation and discrimination by the public at large, many racial liberals ultimately capitulated.

Learn more about The Condemnation of Blackness at the Harvard University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Japonica Brown-Saracino's "A Neighborhood That Never Changes"

Japonica Brown-Saracino is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Loyola University Chicago. In August she will join the faculty of Boston University. She is the author of articles on gentrification, culture, and ethnography and is the editor of a forthcoming book, The Gentrification Debates (Routledge 2010).

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A Neighborhood That Never Changes: Gentrification, Social Preservation, and the Search for Authenticity, and reported the following:

Ten years ago I began a comparative study of urban and rural gentrification. I conducted ethnographies of two Chicago neighborhoods – Argyle, or “Little Saigon,” and once-Swedish Andersonville, which was experiencing an influx of lesbian and other middle class professionals – and two small New England towns: Portuguese fishing enclave turned gay resort of Provincetown, Massachusetts and Dresden, Maine, a farming village to which professionals and retirees were moving.

A pattern unrelated to the original research question immediately emerged. Namely, all sites contained gentrifiers who spoke and behaved in ways previous work did not predict. Scholarship suggested that all gentrifiers, with the exception of those at risk of displacement, are indifferent toward long-timers and supportive of gentrification. Yet more than half the gentrifiers I interviewed worried about the consequences of their presence, specifically that changes they fueled would lead to long-timers’ displacement. Furthermore, they articulated anxiety that displacement would strip their neighborhood or town of “authenticity” they valued – an authenticity deeply connected to the sustained presence of certain long-timers. Many engaged in practices aimed at preventing displacement or thwarting gentrification.

My book, A Neighborhood That Never Changes: Gentrification, Social Preservation and the Search for Authenticity, pursues this unexpected finding, revealing a range of orientations and practices among gentrifiers. As page 99 reveals, the book primarily attends to those I term social preservationists: gentrifiers who move to live near long-timers with whom they associate “authentic” community, and who work to preserve the local social ecology. For social preservationists, who like most gentrifiers tend to be affluent, a place’s value is contingent on the presence of certain long-timers, such as Provincetown’s Portuguese fishermen, Andersonville’s Swedes, Argyle’s Vietnamese merchants, and Dresden’s farmers. Thus, they deploy political, symbolic, and private strategies to prevent displacement.

Page 99 [inset, click to enlarge] details preservationists’ criticism of their own participation in gentrification and affluence – a central claim of the book. This self-criticism borrows from longstanding and widespread concern about the threat affluent people pose to “authentic” people and places as well as from heightened public awareness of gentrification’s consequences.

Beyond page 99 the book explores long-timers’ reactions to social preservation and why preservationists work to preserve some – but not all – long-timers. It reveals the daily lives of four very different places and details how diverse groups negotiate local change. Cumulatively, A Neighborhood That Never Changes demonstrates how distinct ways of thinking about place and change play out in gentrifying neighborhoods and towns.

Learn more about A Neighborhood That Never Changes at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Timothy Stanley's "Kennedy vs. Carter"

Timothy Stanley is Leverhulme Research Fellow, Royal Holloway College, University of London, and coauthor of The End of Politics: Triangulation, Realignment and the Battle for the Centre Ground.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Kennedy vs. Carter: The 1980 Battle for the Democratic Party’s Soul, and reported the following:

Kennedy vs. Carter offers a re-evaluation of the career of Edward Kennedy and the liberalism he espoused. It argues that he was a serious contender for the presidency in 1980, and was regarded as a shoe-in as late as November 1979. What doomed his candidacy, and prevented him taking the nomination from incumbent president Jimmy Carter, was a series of historical accidents. The hostage crisis in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan revived Carter’s administration and gave him some early crucial primary victories. But as the contest dragged on, Kennedy forged a unique coalition of angry whites and dispossessed minorities to win states as diverse as New York, California, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Arizona. I argue that the Kennedy coalition is a model for Democratic strategists, while Carter’s shoddy treatment of core liberal constituencies is an example of what not to do in office. Arguably, Obama is repeating many of the Georgian’s mistakes - failing to set an agenda, reneging on promises made and playing by political rules set by the right.

Page 99 discusses Kennedy’s ability to pull together bits of the old Democratic electoral coalition. “This was linked to the Senator’s unique personality and the glamour of his name. But it was also an expression of the healing potential of ‘universalist’ ideas.” Universalist goals that offered full employment or comprehensive health insurance to all - goals that Kennedy defended boldly and without equivocation - helped reunite a Democratic base that had been divided by cultural issues like abortion, race and sexuality. In that narrow sense, page 99 gets to the heart of the argument - liberalism, well sold, has something to offer everybody.

But this page has wider relevance too. It talks about Jerry Brown, then governor of California, who also ran in 1980. Back then Brown was on the “no-growth” right of the Democratic Party and offered himself as a fiscally conservative alternative to Kennedy. He was “right-on” on social issues and enjoyed the support of celebrity beatniks Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden. But he called the 1970s an “age of limits” and argued - with soaring deficits, taxes and inflation - that the poor would have to suffer as much as the rich if America were to recover. Brown is running again for office right now. This time round his message is purposefully vague - but Brown has always been a ruthless Dominican at heart: charitable, yes, but frugal and quick to judge too. I hope that the voters of California realise what they’re in for.

Learn more about Kennedy vs. Carter at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue