Struggling for a title -- and a theme -- I snatched the one above from the spy-thriller, Moscow Rules by Daniel Silva, the eighth in his series recounting the exploits of the invincible, resolute art-restorer-turned-Israeli-agent, Gabriel Allon. It refers not to Allon, however, but to his adversary, a ruthless Russian arms trader engaged in the nasty business of selling anti-aircraft weapons to terrorists and whose lack of any redeeming personality trait renders the epithet wholly misleading, a tiny blemish in an otherwise perfect read.
I beg my readers' indulgence for drawing a rhetorical analogy between the novel's villain and the subject of this posting, my paternal grandfather, Ben Schewel. For while he was "a man of contradictions," certainly his "angelic" qualities -- reflecting our hero's proper name, "Gabriel" -- far outweighed any devilish ones. Incidentally, he would have enjoyed Moscow Rules, as tasty a treat as the other nuggets of pulp fiction he voraciously consumed in the last sedentary years of his life.
The unlikely convergence of three serendipitous events has prompted my meditation on this legendary figure from my past, whose strangely placid visage -- bearing a striking resemblance to the debonair 1930's and 40's movie star, Adolphe Menjou -- scrutinizes my activities every day from the tinted photograph decorating the wall behind my desk.
First, my milestone birthday, five months ago, catapulted me to the same age, sixty, that he would have been when I, a four-year-old, probably became conscious of him. But there the similarity ends. Because, not only am I not a grandfather -- each of my five children (including two inherited from my wife), ranging in age from thirty-three to twenty-four, having witnessed a spate of divorces in their immediate families, is choosing to wade carefully into the blissful waters of holy matrimony -- I don't feel like one either. While I imagine Ben Schewel felt no differently, in my mind's eye he surely was -- and looked -- old. Whether that pejorative applies to me, others will have to judge.
If age is reputedly a state of mind, it is, more accurately, I believe, a state of one's health. A chronic, debilitating, or terminal illness surely ages one more rapidly than artificial notations on the calendar. And -- at least up to now -- I have been blessed with good health, which I try to maintain through regular exercise--running, swimming, and (light) weight-lifting -- and a sensible diet, in which the absence of fatty meat, chicken, and processed sugar hopefully more than compensates for occasional binges on Nabisco Wheat Thins, Kroger Tortilla Chips, and Cabernet Sauvignon.
I know only a little of what Ben Schewel liked to eat: potato soup with ketchup and $1.95 plate lunches -- like corned beef and cabbage, baked chicken with mashed potatoes and turnip greens, and thin-sliced roast beef with gravy -- at Johnny Hudson's Sport Shoppe on Main Street one block from Schewels, where he used to take me every morning at 11:00 AM when I was working there as a teenager. At that barbaric hour, I had hardly digested breakfast, before this second meal of the day was whisked from the noisy kitchen to our snug red vinyl booth and inhaled in a matter of minutes, presumably so Ben (and I) could get back to the store.
When I was six and learned to swim, some quirky competitive itch drove Ben to the YMCA for his own lessons, but I doubt that he ever became proficient or that he exercised in any formal way. (Admittedly, his opportunities were limited; one didn't see many joggers on the Avenue back in the fifties -- and he lacked the patience and coordination for golf, tennis, or pick-up basketball, if he even knew the rules for any of them.) Instead, he speed-walked the four expansive floors of his furniture store -- looking for customers, making sales, checking price tags, barking orders, changing the displays, all at a dazzling non-stop pace that left those trailing in his wake breathless.
He may have seemed old to me because of his notorious hearing difficulties, which some family members, including his wife, contended were bogus and an excellent excuse to ignore her idle chatter. Nevertheless, he experimented with an endless assortment of dime-store hearing aids, including his piece de resistance, one with an adjustable dial attached to the earpiece of his eyeglasses that could be turned up or down like the volume control on a radio -- all to little avail.
Although he had a receding hairline and eventually lost most of his hair, it never turned gray like mine has -- a stark refutation of my more youthful sixtyish self-image. Maybe it was his thin immaculately-trimmed mustache, which he wore at least as far back as my parents' wedding pictures, or his luminous silk suits which aged him prematurely. Certainly it wasn't his oversized, round black-framed eyeglasses; they were the style then, and eerily similar to the ones showing up in gawky pictures of me from the same period.
He didn't always have that mustache, or those eyeglasses, as I discovered a week ago, when, in the process of having the master bedroom repainted -- which requires the temporary dislocation of every piece of furniture and knick-knack blanketing every exposed surface, including, but not limited to, jewelry, photographs, decorative containers, CD's, DVD's, books, magazines, clocks, and useless Jefferson Cups -- I unearthed a buried treasure.
It was indeed a photograph, in grainy black-and-white, 7 1/2 by 9 1/2, and it portrays eight adults and one child, all dressed up for a Sunday outing in a primitive automobile. The child -- six or seven years old, sporting a fancy sailor's suit, his left hand reaching out to rest upon the car's rear door -- could be my father, but I doubt it, even though his forearm is firmly grasped in the muscular grip of a lithe, leathery Ben Schewel, who, sans mustache and eyeglasses, is looking far younger than the thirty-five years of age he would have been when his son was six. He exudes a handsome, casual elegance, modeling a striped shirt, wing collar, half-length necktie, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, his unruly black hair crowning his broad forehead, prominent nose, slightly protruding ears, and tight-lipped grin.
Seated in the back seat, peeking between two heavy-set men, is Rae Nachman Schewel, my twenty-something grandmother, a blond bombshell, pert, petite, plucky, precocious, orphaned as a child and farmed out to an aunt and uncle, in whose crowded, Portsmouth, Virginia, household she chaperoned five younger cousins.
Their six anonymous companions -- two men, four women, friends, relatives, perhaps a sister of Ben and his brother-in-law -- remain as shrouded in mystery as the site of the three-story wood-frame building rising in the background, although two good guesses would be either the Daniel's Hill neighborhood, since Ben Schewel and his eight siblings grew up on Harrison Street, or lower Rivermont Avenue, where, according to my mother, Ben and Rae rented an apartment in the early years of their marriage.
In 1922, one year after my father was born, and sometime after this picture was taken, when Ben was thirty and Rae twenty-nine, they apparently accumulated enough capital (or credit) to purchase a piece of property and build a house at 2247 Rivermont Avenue, thus joining the burgeoning ranks of the nouveau riche migrating to the suburbs.
A large Spanish stucco two-story duplex on the corner of Columbia Avenue across from Garland-Rodes School, it was symbolic of my grandmother's shrewd frugality, since one-half of it -- when rented out to some secret sharers -- was a lucrative source of income. Growing up, I saw it not as a dual residence but merely one with dual columned porticoes, and never imagined that its shadowy interior boasted an identical twin.
I visited there frequently, but all I remember of that old house -- even though I pass by it twice a day going to and from my office -- are its hardwood floors, maroon carpeting, a gas range tucked away in the first floor kitchen where my grandmother perfected her renowned culinary skills, and an upstairs family room that overlooked the railroad trestle from which my father reportedly tossed a cat into the path of an oncoming train. It was also in that room that, at the age of nine or ten, I played my own dastardly practical joke, abruptly jerking a chair out from under my grandmother just as she was sitting down -- one of those thoughtless acts one regrets as soon as it is done, and not just because of the impending punishment, but because one realizes it was just terribly wrong.
By 1922, in spite of his youth and his humble origins, Ben Schewel had not only achieved remarkable success; he had also established himself as a philanthropist of note. Coincident with my birthday musings and my discovery of that ancient photograph was an inquiry I received from a journalist who was doing some research on the Virginia Colony for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic. In the Colony's 1917 Annual Report appears an acknowledgment: To Mr. Ben Schewel, on behalf of the Jewish Sunday School of Lynchburg, Christmas gifts for patients. In 1917, Ben Schewel was only twenty-five; yet he was already sending gifts to the "Colony" -- later the Lynchburg Training School and Hospital in Madison Heights -- a practice he was to continue for almost fifty years.
Legend has it that Ben Schewel never graduated from high school, that he left Lynchburg as a teenager and moved to Chicago, where he may have reunited with an older brother Jake, whose own associates, it was whispered, were not of the most reputable character in a city known for its organized criminal element. Ben, steering clear of these nefarious influences, found employment in a furniture or a department store, probably as a salesman -- he was always a good salesman -- and earned a speedy promotion when he picked up a stray piece of trash just as the boss was passing by.
Something drew him back east, however -- perhaps the young beauty in the photograph, or a summons from his brothers, Abe and Ike, who had recently purchased a nascent furniture business from their father, enabling him to retire comfortably at the ripe old age of fifty. My perception of the fledgling Schewel Furniture Company as a struggling enterprise -- it wasn't incorporated until 1917 -- is obviously erroneous; by that year, Ben Schewel was a man of means and had made a name for himself.
One wonders what spark kindled the flame of philanthropy in his youthful soul. While I learned the importance of giving from my father (and, from a distance, my grandfather), Ben Schewel's father was no comparable role model; by most accounts, he was harsh, unforgiving, and tyrannical. Ben's generous heart sprang from a different source: his rocky turn-of-the-century childhood as the son of a Jewish immigrant in a household of eleven, or a helping hand extended to him in some troubling situation, or the sobering revelation that too many lacked what came to him so naturally -- the brainpower, the fortitude, and the motivation to claw their way to prosperity.
And why did he target the "Colony" residents as particular recipients of his benevolence -- although I am sure there were many others? Ninety years ago there hardly existed the spate of organizations that dot the social service landscape today; perhaps the "Colony" was merely the most visible, and its patients, because of their deficiencies, the most needy.
But Ben Schewel didn't just send gifts to the "Colony." He took them himself, made regular visitations, and gave parties. Many people, including me, find it very unpleasant to be in the company of the mentally retarded and physically deformed. We find it difficult to engage and communicate with these individuals. Ben Schewel was as comfortable with the residents of the "Colony" as he was with Lynchburg's most elite citizens -- perhaps moreso -- and I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that it was because, in some mysterious way, he loved them all.
I remember a short, doughy, moon-faced man from the "Colony" named Joe Berlin, whom Ben befriended in mid-life. He used to take Joe for glorious Sunday drives and transport him to and from the synagogue on Friday nights and holidays. When Ben suffered a stroke in the early 1970's, Joe, having lost his best friend, was the saddest man on earth.
I have already recorded ("Scrooge," December 23rd) how Ben, having been raised in an environment where toys were a rarity, pledged that, if it were up to him, no child would be similarly deprived and consequently established Schewels Toyland in the basement of the Schewel store on Eleventh and Main in Downtown Lynchburg. He didn't exactly give away toys, but he did offer cash-strapped customers the opportunity to puchase them on credit and thus to stuff Christmas stockings which might otherwise go empty.
A few years ago I received a letter from a woman who was writing stories for her grandchildren. She enclosed the following one about Ben Schewel:
"Around the time my mother died, Mr. Ben had a serious stroke and did not know about my mother. One day Inez and I were walking by Schewels and saw Mr. Ben sitting in a chair near the front door. We went in. He could hardly talk, and could not get up, but we knew he was happy to see us. He finally got out the words, 'How is Effie?' We told him she had died. You could see the sadness in his face. He motioned a clerk over and told him what to do. When the clerk returned, he had a check with the request that we buy something for the church in my mother's memory. We bought a number of new hymnals with the money.
"I knew a high school girl with cancer who had no hope of recovery. Mr. Ben sent that family everything he could think of to make that child happy for the short time she had left: a hospital bed, a record player, a radio, and I don't know what else. Yes, Mr. Ben was quite a man."
But there was another, darker side to Ben Schewel. The same man who showered gifts on perfect strangers, who radiated charm like heat from a fireplace, whose soothing words flowed like honey from his lips, would suddenly and inexplicably explode like a thundercloud into paroxysms of rage. These wrathful torrents would be directed at employees, his son, his wife, manufacturer's representatives -- but never, of course, at customers, in whose presence he would pirouette as gracefully as a ballet dancer.
His outbursts were, of course, fearful and intimidating, but I wouldn't characterize them as vulgar; although expostulated with numbing frequency, his most baneful expletive was a relatively mild "Got dammit." After a time, I believe, most of his victims accepted his behavior as a necessary evil, having witnessed, or been told of, a kinder, gentler Ben lurking beneath that gruff exterior.
According to my mother, Ben ramped up his anger during the Jewish High Holy Days -- probably because of the inevitable family gatherings that ensued, or because he was required to close his furniture store for two business days at the behest of his partners.
He had five business partners -- two brothers, two nephews, and a son -- a sure-fire formula for dissension for a man with a short temper and a mercurial personality. One brother and nephew were bought out by the other family members in the late 1950's after a dispute which I do not believe he was involved in. But of the remaining three, he barely tolerated his brother and nephew and rarely interacted with them. When that brother Abe -- who had served as President of the Agudath Sholom Synagogue intermittently for twenty years -- was honored at a testimonial dinner and presented with a citation, Ben Schewel was the only member of the Congregation who refused to sign it, compelling my father to forge his signature.
His relationship with my father, who was no less temperamental, was punctuated by a series of petty business disputes, the most memorable of which was Ben's vociferous opposition to an "off-premises" sale my father organized at the City Armory. So incensed was Ben that he planned his own sale at the Main Street store in to compete with my father's. Alas, the mighty duel was foiled when a freakish snowstorm blanketed the city and ignominiously smothered both promotions.
I'm not sure if Ben was a happily married man. Besides the embarrassing shouting matches I witnessed between him and Rae (and I was just a child), I can recall numerous occasions when each would bitterly disparage the other in his or her absence. When I was ten years old, they took me to Virginia Beach for a week; all I remember of that trip (besides the old Gay Vacationer Motel -- a name thankfully consigned to history) are the barbs and insults that flew back and forth like wicked tennis serves during the course of ten hours in the car.
There was a plethora of other evidence. From a third party I heard the tale told by my father about a buying trip he and Ben took to the Chicago Furniture Market, where Ben insisted they stay in separate rooms. Ben went his own way for dinner -- and my father was rudely surprised the next morning when a furniture salesman accosted him and announced how pleased he was to have met his very attractive mother the previous evening -- who, of course, was one thousand miles away in Lynchburg. Perhaps Ben may be forgiven for indiscretions committed on his former stomping ground.
My mother has her own revealing story about Ben's wandering eye. "He and I were sitting in the den alone one afternoon when he looked at me with deep sincerity and said, 'My wife Rae just doesn't understand me'" -- hardly the type of remark a young wife would expect to hear from her father-in-law, except in the most salacious soap opera.
Ben's preferred vacation destination was Mexico, to which he made an annual pilgrimmage -- usually alone, which hardly registered on my radar, since he always returned deeply tanned and bearing all sorts of toys and trinkets for grandchildren and friends and outlandish photographs of himself all decked out in native regalia. No one ever questioned his Lindberghian adventures.
My earliest memory of him is a variation of "patty-cake" which he used to play with me; its mischievous blend of tenderness and violence expressed the contradictory elements of his character. I would sit on a chair or on his lap facing him; he would grasp my tiny wrists (which are not much bigger now) and clap them together, slowly at first, and then faster, exclaiming with each clap the unspellable sound "Pachy." As the claps got faster, he would move my hands first to his cheeks and then to mine. I never knew when I was going to end up slapping my own cheeks, and, when it finally happened, if it wasn't too hard, I would burst out laughing.
After I outgrew such childish games, he would take me -- just me, no obtrusive sister to compete for his attention and no grandmother to spoil the comraderie -- to the airport to watch the planes -- Piedmont DC-3's, no doubt -- take off and land, and later to the "picture show." Our favorite was one that deserves resurgent popularity in light of recent events: "The Buccaneer," starring Yul Brynner as Jean Lafitte, the pirate who helped Andrew Jackson (Charlton Heston) defeat the British in the Battle of New Orleans.
Not only was Ben Schewel an astute retailer -- the driving force, he believed, rightly or wrongly, behind the growth of his furniture business, which further fueled his resentment of his partners -- he was a savvy investor, and managed to accumulate a modest estate at the time of his death. He shunned real estate -- an aversion he passed on to his son, my father -- but was quite perspicacious about the stock market. Sitting at his desk near the front of the store one day, weakened by a stroke, hardly able to walk or talk, reading the newspaper, he pointed to a stock (Union Pacific, maybe) which had reached a new high and informed me that it was time to sell. Which I am sure he did just before it fell off a cliff.
Other than his custom suits, a diamond-encrusted ring, those mysterious vacations, and doing what was necessary to pacify his wife -- including, at the age of sixty-five, building a dreamy ranch house for her at 4002 Peakland Place, the most notable feature of which was its two grandiose master bedroooms, one for each of them -- Ben was never really interested in what his money could buy. For many years he drove a stodgy Chevrolet Bel Air -- and not very well, by most reports. He kept the column shift in one gear, thereby anticipating by decades the invention of the automatic transmission. He demonstrated the unique ability to locate the only other vehicle in the parking lot behind the Schewel store on Main Street -- by backing into it -- a feat which prompted perpetual jocularity among those who knew him and which was fated to be replicated by his grandson years later.
Sports, television, alcohol -- none of these had any allure for him. His only avocation was playing cards -- small stakes poker, I assume. He took great pleasure in teaching me -- and then defeating me at -- "Casino," a fast-paced game in which he could flaunt his mathematical dexterity.
His real passion was selling -- and he didn't waste much time on details. He remembered people's names; he asked about their children; his interest was genuine because he cared. He loved to make deals -- to give a discount or a lamp or picture with the purchase of a new living room suite. Families were proud to have had their homes furnished by Mr. Ben.
Unlike the executives of today (including this one), he personally investigated customer complaints, and I remember accompanying him to a house in Madison Heights. Instinctively, he realized how much it meant to that customer -- and how much easier it was to resolve the problem -- if Ben Schewel himself was inspecting the furniture. In fact, he was on his way to a customer's home when tragedy struck him down.
None of us knows how our days will end. The choices are equally unsettling: instantaneous death through a massive heart attack; a terminal cancer diagnosis, followed by palliative treatments, a brief period of relative comfort, and a precipitous deterioration; or a long, slow, painful decline, the result of the onset of an insidious disease like Alzheimer's, congestive heart failure, emphysema, or a stroke. My grandfather suffered the latter and lingered for several years a changed man.
It is impossible to imagine the state of mind of an active, confident, energetic, and productive individual who without warning is reduced to a shell of his former self -- immobile, weak, dependent. What other alternative is there but to retreat from the society in which he had played such a dominant role?
Pulp fiction became Ben Schewel's escape from a world he could no longer confront on his own terms. A Schewel employee would bring him a fresh supply of mysteries and thrillers from the library every two or three days, which he would pluck and devour like grapes on a vine, every so often throwing back a sour one with a disgusted expression that said, "I've read that one."
As a cerebral child who never had enough time for all the books he wanted to read, I never envisioned my vigorous grandfather -- who never sat still long enough to absorb a newspaper or magazine -- frantically pouring through volume after volume of Erle Stanley Gardner, Ross MacDonald, Mickey Spillane and whomever else topped the 1960's best seller lists. For a man of contradictions, this final one, borne of necessity, serves as a fitting, if mournful, epitaph.
Monday, December 1, 2008
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
The Final Solution
I have never thought that much about anti-Semitism. It's like the fallout shelter my father built in the early 1960's in the basement of the house where I live now -- when nuclear obliteration was a stark possibility and massive retaliation the illogical strategy for preserving civilization -- the vestige of a shrouded past, the symbol of a shadowy evil that oscillates in my mind between fantasy and reality.
The difference, of course, is that I lived through the Cold War and remember the fearful uncertainties of superpower confrontation, while growing up mostly oblivious to any manifestations of anti-Semitism.
I have no recollection of any ethnic slur, derogatory remark, or prejudicial act ever directed at me because I was Jewish. Most of my juvenile contemporaries would probably have agreed with the conclusion drawn by one of them as he expressed it to me years later: he assumed that the synagogue was just another denominational church, where its own particular brand of religion (or Christianity) was practiced. After all, like him, that's where I could be found every Sunday morning, on the Christian Sabbath, although I was there for religious education, not for worship. Some of my Gentile friends were naturally envious of my Judaism when they discovered that it entitled me to Hanukkah gifts on eight consecutive nights, these in addition to the sackful bestowed upon me every Christmas morning by a beneficent Santa Claus, the belief in whom my ecumenical-minded, indulgent parents were loathe to shatter.
Later in life, when, for a thankfully brief period, I was required to sell on the floor at Schewel Furniture Company, I occasionally encountered a customer eager to "Jew me down," an infelicitous turn-of-phrase he expostulated as casually as "no way," to which I initially took silent umbrage but soon learned to turn a professional tin ear, chalking up his insensitivity to improper breeding and rustic naivete. Other than my elder son coming home one day and reporting that a fellow bus rider had called him a "kike" -- echoing the "dirty Jew" accusation hurled at my mother, she says, fifty years prior to that -- a term neither the giver nor the receiver probably knew the meaning of -- anti-Semitism has been refreshingly absent from my universe.
Certainly -- as my mother could bear witness -- it was prevalent, though by no means rampant, in an earlier generation. Even in Lynchburg, which I have found to be remarkably free of any anti-Jewish sentiment -- excepting an occasional Falwell malapropism -- I have heard whispers from my elders of a time when Jews were excluded from elite neighborhoods and country clubs, barriers which collapsed long before I sought entry into either. My mother maintains to this day that a clandestine quota system denied me acceptance to an Ivy League college, while I attribute my rejections to a dearth of extra-curricular activities.
Even a stint on the State Advisory Board of the Anti-Defamation League -- an international organization which researches, investigates, and responds to acts of anti-Semitism -- could not convince me that these scattered incidents posed any serious threat to the well-being of American Jewry. At the time of my involvement, the two most troubling issues were anti-Semitism on college campuses and Holocaust denial, which often went hand-in-hand. Entering the proverbial lion's den, at the behest of the state director, I examined both topics in an address to a gathering of students and faculty at Virginia Tech.
As anti-Semitism has receded in the rear view window of American attitudes and behavior in my lifetime, awareness of its parallel phenomenon, the Holocaust, has grown proportionately. The destruction of European Jewry has come to be identified as the sole legacy of the Third Reich, the ideological foundation of its territorial ambitions, and the signature event of the war it launched in pursuit of those goals. "Unique and fundamentally different from the many other atrocities committed by the Nazis . . . it has found expression in several forms of remembrance and commemoration," including memorials dedicated to the millions who perished, museums portraying their way of life, and solemn observances, both religious and secular. It has become the subject of serious scholarly study and research in a growing number of colleges and universities and part of the history curriculum in many high schools. (Hamerow, pp. 463-464)
It is impossible to speak about the Holocaust without minimizing it. It pricks the psyche on isolated occasions in the same way the name of a long-forgotten acquaintance -- whom one briefly knew or encountered in a life span of sixty years -- makes one sit up and take notice when it appears on the obituary page. Remembering that person with poignant fondness, one is overcome momentarily with the same emotions evoked by the Holocaust: sorrow, emptiness, resignation, profound loss. And then he turns the page -- and moves on with the business of the day.
Most Jews, I think, other than survivors or their children, view the Holocaust with no less detachment than Gentiles. Of course we are shocked, saddened, sickened by the words and pictures that expose so nakedly man's cruelty and depravity -- and yet, other than a fleeting guilty acknowledgement that these poor creatures are co-religionists (with whom I, an unobservant Jew, really have little in common) and that we share some ancient ethnic bloodlines, I regard them as no more than the victims of some otherworldly historical tragedy.
One thought only transforms me from a sympathetic bystander into an empathetic participant. Alan Dershowitz wrote it in his memoir of Jewish self-analysis, Chutzpah, upon visiting the site of a concentration camp: There, but for the grace of God, go I. If our forebears had not had the courage, foresight, and energy to flee Russian persecution one-hundred-twenty years ago, some strange generational iteration of ourselves or our parents would most certainly have died at the hands of the Nazis. Or even more mind-bending, we might never have been born.
It is difficult enough to contemplate the number of Jews who perished during the course of World War II, 5,978,000, 38 per cent of the worldwide Jewish population of 15,748,000, 60 per cent of the European Jewish population. (Hamerow, p. 453) But also lost were millions of future lives -- a teeming multitude of scholars, teachers, writers, artists, musicians, inventors, entrepreneurs, engineers, scientists, parents, children, friends, lovers, leaders, ad infinitum. And with those lives, born and unborn, disappeared a one-thousand-year-old civilization, which, until 1939, had survived isolation, oppression, dispersion, discrimination, denigration, and marginalization, while gifting to the world its unique language, music, art, literature, food, theater, dance, religion, and philosophy -- all reduced to bones and ashes in the blink of an eye, in five years of unrelenting horror.
This unthinkable course of events assumes an aura of dispassionate inevitability in Theodore Hamerow's 2008 sobering study: Why We Watched: Europe, America, and the Holocaust. Hamerow makes a persuasive case that varying degrees of anti-Semitism in Europe and America effectively foreclosed the prewar rescue of European Jewry and sealed its fate once the war started.
While the emancipation of European Jewry in the middle years of the nineteenth century released tens of thousands from the ghetto and offered them the promise of equal rights and equal opportunities, it signaled the evolution of a religious-based anti-Judaism -- in which Jews had been scorned and denounced for their refusal to accept Christianity -- into a more insidious, secularized anti-Semitism. Now Jews were condemned not only for their adherence to a false doctrine but also for their greed, materialism, and clannishness; their heresy was identified as moral and cultural, not merely theological. (Hamerow, pp. 16-25 )
All of a sudden, as Jews were gaining acceptance in traditional social circles, acquiring influence in national and international affairs, and displaying a talent for enhancing their wealth and power -- often at the expense of non-Jews -- they were also arousing uneasiness, resentment, and hostility. The secret designs of World Jewry for complete control over state and society -- whether by means of capitalism or socialism -- became a theme of the new anti-Semitism. (Hamerow, pp. 23,25)
The German philosopher Eugen Duhring prophetically elucidated "The Jewish Question." He wrote: "The most pernicious qualities in the Jewish character were not the result of religious or historical experiences or cultural tradition; they were hereditary, rooted in the genetic composition of the Jews, reflecting an unchangeable racial character. They could not be overcome or modified by adaptation or acculturation or assimilation." Because "in their inner being Jews would always remain inalterably and incorrigibly alien . . . sooner or later Germans were bound to realize how irreconciliable with their best interest is the infusion of the Jewish race into their national environment." (Hamerow, p. 29)
That sentiment was not limited to Germans. Anti-Semitism was persistent and pervasive throughout Europe and America in the prewar years.
In the succession states of Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, hunger and suffering brought on by the Great Depression and the rise of right-wing authoritarian governments resulted in the Jews being singled out as targets for blame and reprisal. Jews were accused of being too clannish, ambitious, covetous, and radical; of becoming too influential in political and economic life; of seeking to rule the native populations through the power of money and the promotion of Communism; and of trying to dominate the professions of business, law, and medicine. Laws were promulgated restricting membership in these occupations. Outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence were frequent and intense. (Hamerow, pp.47-63)
Even a moderate statesman like Jozef Retinger, personal secretary to the Polish government in exile in London, believed that "there were too many Jews in his country and that most of them were and would always be unassimilable, and that their role in economic life was excessive and detrimental." In the minds of other succession state officials, Jews were an alien and disruptive element in their national communities. According to Retinger, "The only solution to this burning question is emigration."(Hamerow, p. 59)
Each of these countries instituted measures to limit the immigration of Jews and began to explore ways to expel or resettle their indigenous populations. But when their policies of civic exclusion and deprivation proved to have a minimal effect and the international powers, especially Britain, showed little interest in providing areas for resettlement and colonization, the Jewish question loomed larger than ever.
In France, a debate raged between those who, motivated by compassion and benevolence, felt a moral duty to help Jewish victims of cruelty and injustice and those who argued that these immigrants would compete with Frenchmen facing the hardships of the Great Depression.
The well-known playwright, novelist, and essayist, Jean Giraudoux, complained that "the hundreds of thousands of Ashkenazis" who had escaped from "the Polish and Romanian ghettos" were now forcing "our compatriots" out of various artisan occupations and undermining the time-honored customs and traditions of those occupations. (Hamerow, p. 75) "Many tradesmen and shopkeepers felt threatened by foreigners who were competing, often successfully, with native-born workers . . . In the last years preceding the second World War . . . there were growing protests, demonstrations, marches, and sometimes riots directed against Jews, especially Eastern Europeans." (Hamerow, p. 77)
These were refugees who would not and could not be assimilated. They would always be alien, different in culture, language, spirit, and collective character. Even the assimilated Jew, wrote one patrician Frenchman, despite his "impeccable appearance, his elegant manner, and his refined tone, would remain unalterably foreign, because of his genetic make-up, his essential nature." (Hamerow, pp 64-89)
The spokesmen for this highbrow variety of anti-Semitism targeted Jewish academics, journalists, musicians, writers, and film producers, whom they saw as competitors in fields traditionally dominated by non-Jews. (Hamerow pp. 78-79) They claimed that the French national character was being corrupted by Jewish greed and aggressiveness. (Hamerow, p. 81)
Furthermore, the qualities that made the Jew a threat to the country "were inherent and therefore ineradicable. They could not be overcome by gradual assimilation and acculturation. They were incorrigible because they were biological in nature; they were racial." (Hamerow, p. 82)
At a meeting at the Quai d'Orsay on November 24, 1938, Georges Bonnet, the French minister for foreign affairs, explained his government's position on the matter of Jewish refugees. With 40,000 already in the country, "France could not stand a Jewish immigration on a large scale." The country was "saturated" with foreigners within its borders. The limit to what it could do -- and would do, in the next two years -- had now been reached. (Hamerow, pp. 87-89)
Because of Great Britain's long-standing commitment to the ideals of religious tolerance and ethnic inclusivity, its Jewish population enjoyed a generally unqualified acceptance into the country's economic, political, and social life. There seemed to be little overt hostility toward Jews -- no reports of mass demonstrations or street riots, no vandalized stores, no broken windows, no assaults against shopkeepers or tradesmen.
Yet an undercurrent of anti-Semitism flowed beneath "the placid surface of public conduct." Its blunt spokesperson was the celebrated author, H. G. Wells. He wrote that the Jews' tradition -- Biblical, Talmudic, economic -- held them together. "It is a tradition that stresses acquisitiveness." (Hamerow, p. 98)
"The Jew's rapacity, according to Wells, reflected his profound estrangement from the society that had provided him with asylum and opportunity: 'He is not a good citizen . . . He does not give his allegiance to the institutions, conventions, and collective interests and movements of the community in which he finds himself . . . He is an alien with an alien mentality.' " (Hamerow, p. 98)
"What Wells found objectionable in Jews was not their race or religion or conduct or appearance. It was their Jewishness . . . The ultimate source of his criticism was that they refused to identify with non-Jews; they insisted on following a path different from that of the rest of mankind." (Hamerow, p. 100)
To the French economic, xenophobic, and cultural arguments against Jewish immigration, the British attached three more. First, it would intensify anti-Semitism in the United Kingdom. "It would stir up the elements that batten on anti-Semitic propaganda," wrote the Daily Express. Sir Samuel Hoare, secretary of state for the Home Office, noting the difficulty "for many of our fellow countrymen to make a livelihood at all and keep their industries and businesses going," warned that "an unchecked flow of impoverished immigrants into Great Britain" -- who would compete with the native population for jobs and opportunities -- "would inevitably lead to the growth of an anti-Jewish movement which we all wish to see suppressed." (Hamerow, p. 108)
In 1938 Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain told his French counterpart, Edouard Deladier, that the current admission of five hundred Jewish refugees a week into Great Britain was fraught with "the serious danger of arousing anti-Semitic prejudice." (Hamerow, p.112)
Secondly, postulated the Daily Express, these asylum-seekers were very likely the authors of their own misfortune, having aroused ethnic hostility by their anti-social mentality and conduct, by becoming too prosperous. (Hamerow, p. 104) A third concern was the fear that an open door policy would only encourage the states of Central and Eastern Europe -- Poland, Romania, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania -- to pressure more Jews to leave, dumping millions of refugees in England's lap, a frightening possibility. (Hamerow, p. 114)
One possible solution to such a mass exodus was overseas settlement. A substantial influx of Jewish refugees might prove of benefit to the underpopulated (at least by whites), underdeveloped, and entrepreneurially deficient British colonies and dependencies. But most Jewish emigrants were reluctant to leave Europe -- even Germany or Poland -- for Kenya, Guiana, Australia, or New Zealand. Nor were the members of the British Commonwealth eager to receive them. (Hamerow, pp. 116-117)
Lord Bledisloe, the governor-general of New Zealand, feared their detrimental impact during a "period of acute economic depression," and their Communist and revolutionary sympathies. The Kenya Settlement Committee stated that "it would be impossible for any considerable number of artisans, clerks,and professional people to be absorbed into the economic life of the country without seriously jeopardizing the interests of existing residents." The Australians violently objected. Palestine was "out of the question," in view of "the failure of the British Mandate to attain some modus operandi between Jews and Arabs." (Hamerow, pp 117-118)
During the course of the war Britain accepted many refugees from allied countries occupied by the Third Reich -- Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Greeks -- but was reluctant to admit large numbers of Jews. The reason was that while the former could be expected to return home once victory was achieved, the Jews had no wish to go back to the communities where they had been regarded as aliens, parasites, and subversives. The likelihood that they would stay in Great Britain, in a more tolerant social environment, was alarming to the British authorities. (Hamerow, p. 193)
Across the Atlantic, prejudice against Jews was dying a slow death. On the one hand, "Jews were playing an increasingly important role in American society; on the other, they were still excluded from prestigious social clubs, banned from many hotels, and subject to unwritten quotas at private and public universities." (Hamerow, pp. 135-136)
Those wishing to restrict Jewish immigration added four new rationalizations to an already intimidating list. Skeptical of accounts of persecution, they raised the red flag of Jewish alarmism. They asked, "Weren't Jews always complaining about discrimination, oppression, bigotry, and injustice? Accusations against the Third Reich had to be carefully studied and evaluated. They might prove to be exaggerated, greatly exaggerated" -- like the reports about the atrocities committed by Kaiser Germany during World War I which had turned out to be mostly propaganda. (Hamerow, p. 140)
Reluctant to challenge or provoke Nazi Germany, they accused American Jews of intriguing to drag their country into a "ruinous military conflict" in which it had no serious stake, subordinating national interests to ethnic solidarity, and willing to risk war to help their co-religionists. (Hamerow, p. 140)
Third, they feared "that any substantial influx of Jews from abroad would strengthen their role in government, business, and the professions, and increase their influence in national life" -- an undesirable outcome and a tangible threat to other Americans. (Hamerow, p. 144)
And finally, in a curious contradiction that had plagued Jews since the turn of the century, they asserted that these foreigners would become either traitorous communists preaching a subversive ideology or successful capitalists accumulating disproportionate riches.
Not all opponents of liberalizing immigration policies were conservatives or nativists. Henry Pratt Fairchild had been described as "socialistic"or "Marxist" in his political leanings, and was a proponent of closer relations between the United states and the Soviet Union. To the common refrain that admitting too many persecuted Jews would ignite "the powerful undercurrent of anti-Semitism that smoldered beneath the surface of openly expressed public opinion," he added this bizarre postscript: by its readiness to accept the victims of European prejudice, the United States might unintentionally increase the extent and intensity of that prejudice, since countries as a result would accelerate their efforts to force them out. (Hamerow, pp. 227-228)
"Some exclusionists were motivated by anti-Semitism pure and simple. To them the inherent character or collective mentality of the Jews made them a threat to any non-Jewish community willing to accept them. The difference between Jew and Gentile was so deep-rooted, so fundamental, that no amount of tolerance on one side or assimilation on the other would overcome them. They were ineradicable." (Hamerow, p. 232)
In Canada, xenophobia, ethnic prejudice, and anti-Semitism were more widespread and intense than in the United States -- and all were compounded by the Great Depression. Jews were regarded as fundamentally different from non-Jews in character, outlook, and conduct. (Hamerow, p. 160)
"Jewish quotas were the rule in universities, the professions, and many industries. Jews were barred from acquiring property in certain neighborhoods, from vacationing in certain resorts, and from joining certain private clubs. They were excluded from the governing boards of many charitable, financial, and commercial organizations. There were even occasional street fights in large cities like Toronto and Winnipeg between Jews and militant anti-Semites." (Hamerow, p. 159)
In 1939, in a petition submitted to the House of Commons, 127,000 Canadians protested vigorously "against all immigration whatsoever, and especially against Jewish immigration," and insisted that the nation maintain its rigorous policy against the admission of foreigners. (Hamerow, pp. 157-158)
Nor would Latin American countries offer much of a haven, where barriers were imposing, and made more insuperable by a world conflict that disrupted their economies, shrinking both their traditional export markets and their importation of essential goods from abroad. Restrictionists preached a familiar sermon, warning that a sudden flood of immigrants might aggravate class tensions and even produce mass riots, that newcomers, once established in the host country, would become successful businessmen, financiers, professionals, or publicists -- at the expense of the native population -- and lead to the spread of anti-Semitism. (Hamerow, p. 378)
As Hitler's insatiable appetite for lebensraum pushed Europe to the brink of war, Americans began to view Nazi totalitarianism as a threat to their national security. "Yet growing U.S. opposition to Nazi Germany did not translate into growing sympathy for those whom its policies endangered the most." (Hamerow, p. 201) Eighty-three per cent of those surveyed in an April 1939 Fortune magazine poll said they would be opposed to a bill increasing current immigration quotas. (Hamerow, p. 208)
While a modicum of central European Jews found asylum in Western Europe and North America in the prewar years, the outbreak of World War II and the rapid territorial expansion of the Third Reich turned the slow-burning refugee problem into a raging firestorm.
On January 20, 1942, at the Wannsee Conference, the Third Reich gave official approval to the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. "Since the danger to Aryan society that the Jews represented was essentially racial -- that is, inherent in their collective genetic character -- it could not be overcome by education or assimilation or acculturation. The only answer was extermination." (Hamerow, p. 294)
Hamerow contends that the Third Reich's prosecution of total war and the resultant gradual shift in its military fortunes were what transformed its violent anti-Semitic prejudice into institutional genocide. Its single-minded adherents blamed world Jewry -- especially influential Jews in the United States and the Soviet Union -- for ceaselessly plotting against them and for continued foreign resistance to their government's policies and goals. (Hamerow, p. 293)
Despite learning about German atrocities early on, authorities in London and Washington were slow to publicize them. They feared that the Jewish community and like-minded humanitarian organizations would pressure them to do something to stop the slaughter -- like destroy railroad tracks leading to the death camps, or bomb German cities, or warn those responsible that they would be tried as criminals. But, they argued, no country engaged in a struggle for survival could afford to divert scarce resources from military to humanitarian efforts. (Hamerow, p. 305)
Furthermore, wouldn't acceding to those demands spark a complaint from the exiled leaders of other endangered ethnic communities -- Poles, Czechs, Serbs, and Greeks -- that the Jews were receiving preferential treatment? And wouldn't the knowledge that Christian lives were being jeopardized to save a small but influential minority of non-Christians reinforce the notion that this war was being fought at the instigation of the Jews? (Hamerow, p.307) Perversely, they shuddered at the thought that rescue efforts might prove so successful that the Nazis would lift their floodgates and expel a deluge of refugees. (Hamerow, p. 309)
Sadly, revelations about the Holocaust had little effect on prevailing attitudes about the refugee problem and the "Jewish question." While persecution and potential genocide on a large scale aroused a great deal of sympathy, as would-be immigrants, the victims were still seen as outsiders, competing with the native populations for food and shelter, aggravating the hardships caused by war. (Hamerow, p. 310)
During the early war years, American officials, including the President, were reluctant to display too much sympathy for Holocaust victims. They wished to avoid doing "anything that might divert public attention from the war effort and impair the nation's collective resolve to keep fighting until victory had been achieved." (Hamerow, p. 355) Roosevelt, ever the astute, experienced politician, recognized that paying special attention to persecuted Jews might reinforce long-standing complaints that he was too much under the influence of his Jewish aides and advisers. (Hamerow, p. 363)
"As it became increasingly clear that the Allies were likely to win, statements of support became more frequent and explicit." (Hamerow, p. 358) Unfortunately, they were too little and came too late.
Military action to save Jewish lives faced such formidable obstacles that it was rarely proposed. The realization that even the most heroic efforts could save only a small fraction of the victims -- one to two per cent -- discouraged all but a few minor initiatives. A general skepticism about reports of mass murder persisted; many people found a planned, systematic genocide hard to believe. Military operations to rescue Jews risked undermining the official position that the war was being waged in defense of all persecuted national and ethnic communities. They might prove detrimental to the total war effort -- by diverting resources, endangering American lives, and fostering domestic dissension. The best way to save the remnants of European Jewry, it was argued, was to defeat Nazi Germany as quickly as possible. (Hamerow, pp. 391-406)
Hamerow doubts that armed force would have been effective. He writes: "The available evidence strongly suggests that the obsessive anti-Semitism of the Third Reich . . . was too strong to be overcome by aerial bombardments or paratrooper raids. Even after the concentration camps were liberated by the Soviet Union, the Nazi genocide continued in the form of starvation, disease, exhausting labor, death marches, brutal beatings, and mass executions. Paradoxically, those who maintained that only victory on the battlefield could save the Jews were in essence right. The tragedy was that by the time victory came, so few were left to be saved." (Hamerow, p. 418)
Anti-Semitism did not disappear with the unprecedented massacre of 62 per cent of prewar European Jewry. Gentiles were as hostile as ever to returning Jews, fearful they would demand the restoration of their homes and businesses, their savings accounts and investments, the positions they had held in journalism, education, and the arts. To the East, where the Soviet Union was imposing satellite regimes, Jews were suspected of being Communist agents and of supporting and engineering the shift to the far left. (Hamerow p. 425)
Nor did the decimation of the Jewish community in Europe end with Germany's defeat. It continued for at least another decade, as 500,000 survivors -- one-quarter of the remaining population -- reluctant to return to the sites of past hardships and suffering, fled West and South. Between 1938 and 1955, a flood of immigrants swelled the population of Israel from 400,000 to 1,600,000. During the same period, about 600,000 Jewish refugees entered the United States (80 per cent after the war), increasing its Jewish population from 4.7 million to 5.2 million. Despite this growth, the Jewish percentage of the overall American population fell from a high of 3.6 in 1927 to 3.1 in 1955 and to 2.5 in 1986. (Hamerow, p. 449)
Accompanying this decline in proportionality was a diminishing of the notion that the national character of the United States would be stained or corrupted by an unending flow of Jews from Eastern Europe. Jews found it easier to assimilate, to achieve "Americanization." The social and cultural barriers that had confronted them before the war began to shrink and disappear.
"There were no longer serious restrictions on the admission of Jews to higher education, either as students or teachers. They became eligible for membership in almost all social clubs and organizations, even the most exclusive ones . . . In growing numbers they were becoming congressmen, senators, and cabinet members." (Hamerow, pp. 449-450) Overt -- and even latent -- anti-Semitism seemed an anachronism.
This development was confirmed by any number of polls. Whereas in 1940, 21% of respondents thought Jews had too much control of "business, property, and finance," by 1959 that number had dropped to 6%. Those who thought Jews had too much power in the U. S. dropped from 56% in 1945 to 17% in 1962. Before the war, 63% of respondents thought Jews had "objectionable qualities"; two decades later the per cent was 22. In 1940, 43% of respondents indicated they would prefer not to have a Jewish employee or coworker; in 1962 only 6% objected to sharing the workplace with Jews. (Hamerow, pp. 456-459)
This is the environment I grew up in.
This process would not mature until 1960, the same time that the Nazi Genocide emerged from the shadows of memory, planted solid roots in the public consciousness, and was transformed into the Holocaust. This was not a coincidence, says Hamerow. It took that long for the Gentile world to realize that the Jewish question -- a source of concern and controversy in Western society for one thousand years -- had finally been answered and that it was now safe, proper, and even necessary to mourn and memorialize the dead.
The problem of "what to do about an ethnic minority which had remained stubbornly different, unwilling to accept the faith and tradition of the national community it was part of, and yet able to play an important role in the economy, culture, and politics of that community . . . had ceased to be an issue. It had at last been resolved -- or rather eliminated." (Hamerow, p. 469)
What the old monarchial order had tried -- and failed -- to attain by isolation, segregation, and discrimination, and the democratic system by toleration, emancipation, and assimilation, Nazi totalitarianism had accomplished by mass murder. (Hamerow, p. 469)
Large numbers of European Jews had been killed, and for those who remained or who found themselves anywhere in harm's way, the state of Israel beckoned. The pitiful remnant of world Jewry no longer represented a threat. "The rabid horde of hungry, impoverished, desperate victims of persecution . . . pounding on the gates of the prosperous democratic countries on both sides of the Atlantic" had either expired in the fires of the crematories, sought refuge in the newly-established national homeland, or been gracefully assimilated into the majority culture. (Hamerow, p. 473)
In its singular, horrific denoument, the Final Solution had forever silenced the Jewish Question and indeed all those carefully calibrated rationalizations as to why more had not been done to prevent its execution.
REFERENCES
Hamerow, Theodore S. Why We Watched: Europe, America, and the Holocaust. New York: W. W. and Norton & Company, 2008.
The difference, of course, is that I lived through the Cold War and remember the fearful uncertainties of superpower confrontation, while growing up mostly oblivious to any manifestations of anti-Semitism.
I have no recollection of any ethnic slur, derogatory remark, or prejudicial act ever directed at me because I was Jewish. Most of my juvenile contemporaries would probably have agreed with the conclusion drawn by one of them as he expressed it to me years later: he assumed that the synagogue was just another denominational church, where its own particular brand of religion (or Christianity) was practiced. After all, like him, that's where I could be found every Sunday morning, on the Christian Sabbath, although I was there for religious education, not for worship. Some of my Gentile friends were naturally envious of my Judaism when they discovered that it entitled me to Hanukkah gifts on eight consecutive nights, these in addition to the sackful bestowed upon me every Christmas morning by a beneficent Santa Claus, the belief in whom my ecumenical-minded, indulgent parents were loathe to shatter.
Later in life, when, for a thankfully brief period, I was required to sell on the floor at Schewel Furniture Company, I occasionally encountered a customer eager to "Jew me down," an infelicitous turn-of-phrase he expostulated as casually as "no way," to which I initially took silent umbrage but soon learned to turn a professional tin ear, chalking up his insensitivity to improper breeding and rustic naivete. Other than my elder son coming home one day and reporting that a fellow bus rider had called him a "kike" -- echoing the "dirty Jew" accusation hurled at my mother, she says, fifty years prior to that -- a term neither the giver nor the receiver probably knew the meaning of -- anti-Semitism has been refreshingly absent from my universe.
Certainly -- as my mother could bear witness -- it was prevalent, though by no means rampant, in an earlier generation. Even in Lynchburg, which I have found to be remarkably free of any anti-Jewish sentiment -- excepting an occasional Falwell malapropism -- I have heard whispers from my elders of a time when Jews were excluded from elite neighborhoods and country clubs, barriers which collapsed long before I sought entry into either. My mother maintains to this day that a clandestine quota system denied me acceptance to an Ivy League college, while I attribute my rejections to a dearth of extra-curricular activities.
Even a stint on the State Advisory Board of the Anti-Defamation League -- an international organization which researches, investigates, and responds to acts of anti-Semitism -- could not convince me that these scattered incidents posed any serious threat to the well-being of American Jewry. At the time of my involvement, the two most troubling issues were anti-Semitism on college campuses and Holocaust denial, which often went hand-in-hand. Entering the proverbial lion's den, at the behest of the state director, I examined both topics in an address to a gathering of students and faculty at Virginia Tech.
As anti-Semitism has receded in the rear view window of American attitudes and behavior in my lifetime, awareness of its parallel phenomenon, the Holocaust, has grown proportionately. The destruction of European Jewry has come to be identified as the sole legacy of the Third Reich, the ideological foundation of its territorial ambitions, and the signature event of the war it launched in pursuit of those goals. "Unique and fundamentally different from the many other atrocities committed by the Nazis . . . it has found expression in several forms of remembrance and commemoration," including memorials dedicated to the millions who perished, museums portraying their way of life, and solemn observances, both religious and secular. It has become the subject of serious scholarly study and research in a growing number of colleges and universities and part of the history curriculum in many high schools. (Hamerow, pp. 463-464)
It is impossible to speak about the Holocaust without minimizing it. It pricks the psyche on isolated occasions in the same way the name of a long-forgotten acquaintance -- whom one briefly knew or encountered in a life span of sixty years -- makes one sit up and take notice when it appears on the obituary page. Remembering that person with poignant fondness, one is overcome momentarily with the same emotions evoked by the Holocaust: sorrow, emptiness, resignation, profound loss. And then he turns the page -- and moves on with the business of the day.
Most Jews, I think, other than survivors or their children, view the Holocaust with no less detachment than Gentiles. Of course we are shocked, saddened, sickened by the words and pictures that expose so nakedly man's cruelty and depravity -- and yet, other than a fleeting guilty acknowledgement that these poor creatures are co-religionists (with whom I, an unobservant Jew, really have little in common) and that we share some ancient ethnic bloodlines, I regard them as no more than the victims of some otherworldly historical tragedy.
One thought only transforms me from a sympathetic bystander into an empathetic participant. Alan Dershowitz wrote it in his memoir of Jewish self-analysis, Chutzpah, upon visiting the site of a concentration camp: There, but for the grace of God, go I. If our forebears had not had the courage, foresight, and energy to flee Russian persecution one-hundred-twenty years ago, some strange generational iteration of ourselves or our parents would most certainly have died at the hands of the Nazis. Or even more mind-bending, we might never have been born.
It is difficult enough to contemplate the number of Jews who perished during the course of World War II, 5,978,000, 38 per cent of the worldwide Jewish population of 15,748,000, 60 per cent of the European Jewish population. (Hamerow, p. 453) But also lost were millions of future lives -- a teeming multitude of scholars, teachers, writers, artists, musicians, inventors, entrepreneurs, engineers, scientists, parents, children, friends, lovers, leaders, ad infinitum. And with those lives, born and unborn, disappeared a one-thousand-year-old civilization, which, until 1939, had survived isolation, oppression, dispersion, discrimination, denigration, and marginalization, while gifting to the world its unique language, music, art, literature, food, theater, dance, religion, and philosophy -- all reduced to bones and ashes in the blink of an eye, in five years of unrelenting horror.
This unthinkable course of events assumes an aura of dispassionate inevitability in Theodore Hamerow's 2008 sobering study: Why We Watched: Europe, America, and the Holocaust. Hamerow makes a persuasive case that varying degrees of anti-Semitism in Europe and America effectively foreclosed the prewar rescue of European Jewry and sealed its fate once the war started.
While the emancipation of European Jewry in the middle years of the nineteenth century released tens of thousands from the ghetto and offered them the promise of equal rights and equal opportunities, it signaled the evolution of a religious-based anti-Judaism -- in which Jews had been scorned and denounced for their refusal to accept Christianity -- into a more insidious, secularized anti-Semitism. Now Jews were condemned not only for their adherence to a false doctrine but also for their greed, materialism, and clannishness; their heresy was identified as moral and cultural, not merely theological. (Hamerow, pp. 16-25 )
All of a sudden, as Jews were gaining acceptance in traditional social circles, acquiring influence in national and international affairs, and displaying a talent for enhancing their wealth and power -- often at the expense of non-Jews -- they were also arousing uneasiness, resentment, and hostility. The secret designs of World Jewry for complete control over state and society -- whether by means of capitalism or socialism -- became a theme of the new anti-Semitism. (Hamerow, pp. 23,25)
The German philosopher Eugen Duhring prophetically elucidated "The Jewish Question." He wrote: "The most pernicious qualities in the Jewish character were not the result of religious or historical experiences or cultural tradition; they were hereditary, rooted in the genetic composition of the Jews, reflecting an unchangeable racial character. They could not be overcome or modified by adaptation or acculturation or assimilation." Because "in their inner being Jews would always remain inalterably and incorrigibly alien . . . sooner or later Germans were bound to realize how irreconciliable with their best interest is the infusion of the Jewish race into their national environment." (Hamerow, p. 29)
That sentiment was not limited to Germans. Anti-Semitism was persistent and pervasive throughout Europe and America in the prewar years.
In the succession states of Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, hunger and suffering brought on by the Great Depression and the rise of right-wing authoritarian governments resulted in the Jews being singled out as targets for blame and reprisal. Jews were accused of being too clannish, ambitious, covetous, and radical; of becoming too influential in political and economic life; of seeking to rule the native populations through the power of money and the promotion of Communism; and of trying to dominate the professions of business, law, and medicine. Laws were promulgated restricting membership in these occupations. Outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence were frequent and intense. (Hamerow, pp.47-63)
Even a moderate statesman like Jozef Retinger, personal secretary to the Polish government in exile in London, believed that "there were too many Jews in his country and that most of them were and would always be unassimilable, and that their role in economic life was excessive and detrimental." In the minds of other succession state officials, Jews were an alien and disruptive element in their national communities. According to Retinger, "The only solution to this burning question is emigration."(Hamerow, p. 59)
Each of these countries instituted measures to limit the immigration of Jews and began to explore ways to expel or resettle their indigenous populations. But when their policies of civic exclusion and deprivation proved to have a minimal effect and the international powers, especially Britain, showed little interest in providing areas for resettlement and colonization, the Jewish question loomed larger than ever.
In France, a debate raged between those who, motivated by compassion and benevolence, felt a moral duty to help Jewish victims of cruelty and injustice and those who argued that these immigrants would compete with Frenchmen facing the hardships of the Great Depression.
The well-known playwright, novelist, and essayist, Jean Giraudoux, complained that "the hundreds of thousands of Ashkenazis" who had escaped from "the Polish and Romanian ghettos" were now forcing "our compatriots" out of various artisan occupations and undermining the time-honored customs and traditions of those occupations. (Hamerow, p. 75) "Many tradesmen and shopkeepers felt threatened by foreigners who were competing, often successfully, with native-born workers . . . In the last years preceding the second World War . . . there were growing protests, demonstrations, marches, and sometimes riots directed against Jews, especially Eastern Europeans." (Hamerow, p. 77)
These were refugees who would not and could not be assimilated. They would always be alien, different in culture, language, spirit, and collective character. Even the assimilated Jew, wrote one patrician Frenchman, despite his "impeccable appearance, his elegant manner, and his refined tone, would remain unalterably foreign, because of his genetic make-up, his essential nature." (Hamerow, pp 64-89)
The spokesmen for this highbrow variety of anti-Semitism targeted Jewish academics, journalists, musicians, writers, and film producers, whom they saw as competitors in fields traditionally dominated by non-Jews. (Hamerow pp. 78-79) They claimed that the French national character was being corrupted by Jewish greed and aggressiveness. (Hamerow, p. 81)
Furthermore, the qualities that made the Jew a threat to the country "were inherent and therefore ineradicable. They could not be overcome by gradual assimilation and acculturation. They were incorrigible because they were biological in nature; they were racial." (Hamerow, p. 82)
At a meeting at the Quai d'Orsay on November 24, 1938, Georges Bonnet, the French minister for foreign affairs, explained his government's position on the matter of Jewish refugees. With 40,000 already in the country, "France could not stand a Jewish immigration on a large scale." The country was "saturated" with foreigners within its borders. The limit to what it could do -- and would do, in the next two years -- had now been reached. (Hamerow, pp. 87-89)
Because of Great Britain's long-standing commitment to the ideals of religious tolerance and ethnic inclusivity, its Jewish population enjoyed a generally unqualified acceptance into the country's economic, political, and social life. There seemed to be little overt hostility toward Jews -- no reports of mass demonstrations or street riots, no vandalized stores, no broken windows, no assaults against shopkeepers or tradesmen.
Yet an undercurrent of anti-Semitism flowed beneath "the placid surface of public conduct." Its blunt spokesperson was the celebrated author, H. G. Wells. He wrote that the Jews' tradition -- Biblical, Talmudic, economic -- held them together. "It is a tradition that stresses acquisitiveness." (Hamerow, p. 98)
"The Jew's rapacity, according to Wells, reflected his profound estrangement from the society that had provided him with asylum and opportunity: 'He is not a good citizen . . . He does not give his allegiance to the institutions, conventions, and collective interests and movements of the community in which he finds himself . . . He is an alien with an alien mentality.' " (Hamerow, p. 98)
"What Wells found objectionable in Jews was not their race or religion or conduct or appearance. It was their Jewishness . . . The ultimate source of his criticism was that they refused to identify with non-Jews; they insisted on following a path different from that of the rest of mankind." (Hamerow, p. 100)
To the French economic, xenophobic, and cultural arguments against Jewish immigration, the British attached three more. First, it would intensify anti-Semitism in the United Kingdom. "It would stir up the elements that batten on anti-Semitic propaganda," wrote the Daily Express. Sir Samuel Hoare, secretary of state for the Home Office, noting the difficulty "for many of our fellow countrymen to make a livelihood at all and keep their industries and businesses going," warned that "an unchecked flow of impoverished immigrants into Great Britain" -- who would compete with the native population for jobs and opportunities -- "would inevitably lead to the growth of an anti-Jewish movement which we all wish to see suppressed." (Hamerow, p. 108)
In 1938 Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain told his French counterpart, Edouard Deladier, that the current admission of five hundred Jewish refugees a week into Great Britain was fraught with "the serious danger of arousing anti-Semitic prejudice." (Hamerow, p.112)
Secondly, postulated the Daily Express, these asylum-seekers were very likely the authors of their own misfortune, having aroused ethnic hostility by their anti-social mentality and conduct, by becoming too prosperous. (Hamerow, p. 104) A third concern was the fear that an open door policy would only encourage the states of Central and Eastern Europe -- Poland, Romania, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania -- to pressure more Jews to leave, dumping millions of refugees in England's lap, a frightening possibility. (Hamerow, p. 114)
One possible solution to such a mass exodus was overseas settlement. A substantial influx of Jewish refugees might prove of benefit to the underpopulated (at least by whites), underdeveloped, and entrepreneurially deficient British colonies and dependencies. But most Jewish emigrants were reluctant to leave Europe -- even Germany or Poland -- for Kenya, Guiana, Australia, or New Zealand. Nor were the members of the British Commonwealth eager to receive them. (Hamerow, pp. 116-117)
Lord Bledisloe, the governor-general of New Zealand, feared their detrimental impact during a "period of acute economic depression," and their Communist and revolutionary sympathies. The Kenya Settlement Committee stated that "it would be impossible for any considerable number of artisans, clerks,and professional people to be absorbed into the economic life of the country without seriously jeopardizing the interests of existing residents." The Australians violently objected. Palestine was "out of the question," in view of "the failure of the British Mandate to attain some modus operandi between Jews and Arabs." (Hamerow, pp 117-118)
During the course of the war Britain accepted many refugees from allied countries occupied by the Third Reich -- Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Greeks -- but was reluctant to admit large numbers of Jews. The reason was that while the former could be expected to return home once victory was achieved, the Jews had no wish to go back to the communities where they had been regarded as aliens, parasites, and subversives. The likelihood that they would stay in Great Britain, in a more tolerant social environment, was alarming to the British authorities. (Hamerow, p. 193)
Across the Atlantic, prejudice against Jews was dying a slow death. On the one hand, "Jews were playing an increasingly important role in American society; on the other, they were still excluded from prestigious social clubs, banned from many hotels, and subject to unwritten quotas at private and public universities." (Hamerow, pp. 135-136)
Those wishing to restrict Jewish immigration added four new rationalizations to an already intimidating list. Skeptical of accounts of persecution, they raised the red flag of Jewish alarmism. They asked, "Weren't Jews always complaining about discrimination, oppression, bigotry, and injustice? Accusations against the Third Reich had to be carefully studied and evaluated. They might prove to be exaggerated, greatly exaggerated" -- like the reports about the atrocities committed by Kaiser Germany during World War I which had turned out to be mostly propaganda. (Hamerow, p. 140)
Reluctant to challenge or provoke Nazi Germany, they accused American Jews of intriguing to drag their country into a "ruinous military conflict" in which it had no serious stake, subordinating national interests to ethnic solidarity, and willing to risk war to help their co-religionists. (Hamerow, p. 140)
Third, they feared "that any substantial influx of Jews from abroad would strengthen their role in government, business, and the professions, and increase their influence in national life" -- an undesirable outcome and a tangible threat to other Americans. (Hamerow, p. 144)
And finally, in a curious contradiction that had plagued Jews since the turn of the century, they asserted that these foreigners would become either traitorous communists preaching a subversive ideology or successful capitalists accumulating disproportionate riches.
Not all opponents of liberalizing immigration policies were conservatives or nativists. Henry Pratt Fairchild had been described as "socialistic"or "Marxist" in his political leanings, and was a proponent of closer relations between the United states and the Soviet Union. To the common refrain that admitting too many persecuted Jews would ignite "the powerful undercurrent of anti-Semitism that smoldered beneath the surface of openly expressed public opinion," he added this bizarre postscript: by its readiness to accept the victims of European prejudice, the United States might unintentionally increase the extent and intensity of that prejudice, since countries as a result would accelerate their efforts to force them out. (Hamerow, pp. 227-228)
"Some exclusionists were motivated by anti-Semitism pure and simple. To them the inherent character or collective mentality of the Jews made them a threat to any non-Jewish community willing to accept them. The difference between Jew and Gentile was so deep-rooted, so fundamental, that no amount of tolerance on one side or assimilation on the other would overcome them. They were ineradicable." (Hamerow, p. 232)
In Canada, xenophobia, ethnic prejudice, and anti-Semitism were more widespread and intense than in the United States -- and all were compounded by the Great Depression. Jews were regarded as fundamentally different from non-Jews in character, outlook, and conduct. (Hamerow, p. 160)
"Jewish quotas were the rule in universities, the professions, and many industries. Jews were barred from acquiring property in certain neighborhoods, from vacationing in certain resorts, and from joining certain private clubs. They were excluded from the governing boards of many charitable, financial, and commercial organizations. There were even occasional street fights in large cities like Toronto and Winnipeg between Jews and militant anti-Semites." (Hamerow, p. 159)
In 1939, in a petition submitted to the House of Commons, 127,000 Canadians protested vigorously "against all immigration whatsoever, and especially against Jewish immigration," and insisted that the nation maintain its rigorous policy against the admission of foreigners. (Hamerow, pp. 157-158)
Nor would Latin American countries offer much of a haven, where barriers were imposing, and made more insuperable by a world conflict that disrupted their economies, shrinking both their traditional export markets and their importation of essential goods from abroad. Restrictionists preached a familiar sermon, warning that a sudden flood of immigrants might aggravate class tensions and even produce mass riots, that newcomers, once established in the host country, would become successful businessmen, financiers, professionals, or publicists -- at the expense of the native population -- and lead to the spread of anti-Semitism. (Hamerow, p. 378)
As Hitler's insatiable appetite for lebensraum pushed Europe to the brink of war, Americans began to view Nazi totalitarianism as a threat to their national security. "Yet growing U.S. opposition to Nazi Germany did not translate into growing sympathy for those whom its policies endangered the most." (Hamerow, p. 201) Eighty-three per cent of those surveyed in an April 1939 Fortune magazine poll said they would be opposed to a bill increasing current immigration quotas. (Hamerow, p. 208)
While a modicum of central European Jews found asylum in Western Europe and North America in the prewar years, the outbreak of World War II and the rapid territorial expansion of the Third Reich turned the slow-burning refugee problem into a raging firestorm.
On January 20, 1942, at the Wannsee Conference, the Third Reich gave official approval to the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. "Since the danger to Aryan society that the Jews represented was essentially racial -- that is, inherent in their collective genetic character -- it could not be overcome by education or assimilation or acculturation. The only answer was extermination." (Hamerow, p. 294)
Hamerow contends that the Third Reich's prosecution of total war and the resultant gradual shift in its military fortunes were what transformed its violent anti-Semitic prejudice into institutional genocide. Its single-minded adherents blamed world Jewry -- especially influential Jews in the United States and the Soviet Union -- for ceaselessly plotting against them and for continued foreign resistance to their government's policies and goals. (Hamerow, p. 293)
Despite learning about German atrocities early on, authorities in London and Washington were slow to publicize them. They feared that the Jewish community and like-minded humanitarian organizations would pressure them to do something to stop the slaughter -- like destroy railroad tracks leading to the death camps, or bomb German cities, or warn those responsible that they would be tried as criminals. But, they argued, no country engaged in a struggle for survival could afford to divert scarce resources from military to humanitarian efforts. (Hamerow, p. 305)
Furthermore, wouldn't acceding to those demands spark a complaint from the exiled leaders of other endangered ethnic communities -- Poles, Czechs, Serbs, and Greeks -- that the Jews were receiving preferential treatment? And wouldn't the knowledge that Christian lives were being jeopardized to save a small but influential minority of non-Christians reinforce the notion that this war was being fought at the instigation of the Jews? (Hamerow, p.307) Perversely, they shuddered at the thought that rescue efforts might prove so successful that the Nazis would lift their floodgates and expel a deluge of refugees. (Hamerow, p. 309)
Sadly, revelations about the Holocaust had little effect on prevailing attitudes about the refugee problem and the "Jewish question." While persecution and potential genocide on a large scale aroused a great deal of sympathy, as would-be immigrants, the victims were still seen as outsiders, competing with the native populations for food and shelter, aggravating the hardships caused by war. (Hamerow, p. 310)
During the early war years, American officials, including the President, were reluctant to display too much sympathy for Holocaust victims. They wished to avoid doing "anything that might divert public attention from the war effort and impair the nation's collective resolve to keep fighting until victory had been achieved." (Hamerow, p. 355) Roosevelt, ever the astute, experienced politician, recognized that paying special attention to persecuted Jews might reinforce long-standing complaints that he was too much under the influence of his Jewish aides and advisers. (Hamerow, p. 363)
"As it became increasingly clear that the Allies were likely to win, statements of support became more frequent and explicit." (Hamerow, p. 358) Unfortunately, they were too little and came too late.
Military action to save Jewish lives faced such formidable obstacles that it was rarely proposed. The realization that even the most heroic efforts could save only a small fraction of the victims -- one to two per cent -- discouraged all but a few minor initiatives. A general skepticism about reports of mass murder persisted; many people found a planned, systematic genocide hard to believe. Military operations to rescue Jews risked undermining the official position that the war was being waged in defense of all persecuted national and ethnic communities. They might prove detrimental to the total war effort -- by diverting resources, endangering American lives, and fostering domestic dissension. The best way to save the remnants of European Jewry, it was argued, was to defeat Nazi Germany as quickly as possible. (Hamerow, pp. 391-406)
Hamerow doubts that armed force would have been effective. He writes: "The available evidence strongly suggests that the obsessive anti-Semitism of the Third Reich . . . was too strong to be overcome by aerial bombardments or paratrooper raids. Even after the concentration camps were liberated by the Soviet Union, the Nazi genocide continued in the form of starvation, disease, exhausting labor, death marches, brutal beatings, and mass executions. Paradoxically, those who maintained that only victory on the battlefield could save the Jews were in essence right. The tragedy was that by the time victory came, so few were left to be saved." (Hamerow, p. 418)
Anti-Semitism did not disappear with the unprecedented massacre of 62 per cent of prewar European Jewry. Gentiles were as hostile as ever to returning Jews, fearful they would demand the restoration of their homes and businesses, their savings accounts and investments, the positions they had held in journalism, education, and the arts. To the East, where the Soviet Union was imposing satellite regimes, Jews were suspected of being Communist agents and of supporting and engineering the shift to the far left. (Hamerow p. 425)
Nor did the decimation of the Jewish community in Europe end with Germany's defeat. It continued for at least another decade, as 500,000 survivors -- one-quarter of the remaining population -- reluctant to return to the sites of past hardships and suffering, fled West and South. Between 1938 and 1955, a flood of immigrants swelled the population of Israel from 400,000 to 1,600,000. During the same period, about 600,000 Jewish refugees entered the United States (80 per cent after the war), increasing its Jewish population from 4.7 million to 5.2 million. Despite this growth, the Jewish percentage of the overall American population fell from a high of 3.6 in 1927 to 3.1 in 1955 and to 2.5 in 1986. (Hamerow, p. 449)
Accompanying this decline in proportionality was a diminishing of the notion that the national character of the United States would be stained or corrupted by an unending flow of Jews from Eastern Europe. Jews found it easier to assimilate, to achieve "Americanization." The social and cultural barriers that had confronted them before the war began to shrink and disappear.
"There were no longer serious restrictions on the admission of Jews to higher education, either as students or teachers. They became eligible for membership in almost all social clubs and organizations, even the most exclusive ones . . . In growing numbers they were becoming congressmen, senators, and cabinet members." (Hamerow, pp. 449-450) Overt -- and even latent -- anti-Semitism seemed an anachronism.
This development was confirmed by any number of polls. Whereas in 1940, 21% of respondents thought Jews had too much control of "business, property, and finance," by 1959 that number had dropped to 6%. Those who thought Jews had too much power in the U. S. dropped from 56% in 1945 to 17% in 1962. Before the war, 63% of respondents thought Jews had "objectionable qualities"; two decades later the per cent was 22. In 1940, 43% of respondents indicated they would prefer not to have a Jewish employee or coworker; in 1962 only 6% objected to sharing the workplace with Jews. (Hamerow, pp. 456-459)
This is the environment I grew up in.
This process would not mature until 1960, the same time that the Nazi Genocide emerged from the shadows of memory, planted solid roots in the public consciousness, and was transformed into the Holocaust. This was not a coincidence, says Hamerow. It took that long for the Gentile world to realize that the Jewish question -- a source of concern and controversy in Western society for one thousand years -- had finally been answered and that it was now safe, proper, and even necessary to mourn and memorialize the dead.
The problem of "what to do about an ethnic minority which had remained stubbornly different, unwilling to accept the faith and tradition of the national community it was part of, and yet able to play an important role in the economy, culture, and politics of that community . . . had ceased to be an issue. It had at last been resolved -- or rather eliminated." (Hamerow, p. 469)
What the old monarchial order had tried -- and failed -- to attain by isolation, segregation, and discrimination, and the democratic system by toleration, emancipation, and assimilation, Nazi totalitarianism had accomplished by mass murder. (Hamerow, p. 469)
Large numbers of European Jews had been killed, and for those who remained or who found themselves anywhere in harm's way, the state of Israel beckoned. The pitiful remnant of world Jewry no longer represented a threat. "The rabid horde of hungry, impoverished, desperate victims of persecution . . . pounding on the gates of the prosperous democratic countries on both sides of the Atlantic" had either expired in the fires of the crematories, sought refuge in the newly-established national homeland, or been gracefully assimilated into the majority culture. (Hamerow, p. 473)
In its singular, horrific denoument, the Final Solution had forever silenced the Jewish Question and indeed all those carefully calibrated rationalizations as to why more had not been done to prevent its execution.
REFERENCES
Hamerow, Theodore S. Why We Watched: Europe, America, and the Holocaust. New York: W. W. and Norton & Company, 2008.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
The American Way
Ten days ago, bowing to the demands of a frantic Administration, the pleadings of desperate Wall Street moguls, and the weight of a plunging stock market, Congress passed a bill (which the President signed into law almost before the final "aye" vote was cast) authorizing the Secretary of the Treasury to purchase $700 billion worth of toxic (translation: almost worthless) securities from undercapitalized commercial and investment banks -- but only after larding it up with $150 billion in pork-barrel spending and corporate tax breaks -- all this on top of the $1 trillion obligation already assumed by the federal government in nationalizing Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and in throwing lifelines to Bear Stearns and AIG.
But, not to worry. Our schizophrenic Secretary, after selling his bailout plan to a wary Congress and a skeptical public as a matter of utmost urgency, has abruptly changed course. He now proposes to buy commercial paper from credit-starved corporations and invest taxpayer money in struggling banks. No wonder the financial markets are spooked.
Meanwhile, like crazed fiddlers in a burning city, our esteemed Presidential aspirants, Messers. McCain and Obama, dance along the campaign trial, blithely promising their weary audiences a panacea of tax cuts, universal health insurance, regulatory reform, and comprehensive energy strategies -- all of which are estimated to cost anywhere from three to five trillion dollars over the next five years. Do I detect a disconnect here?
Maybe not.
Because, while much has been made of the crushing tax burden being imposed on the irate taxpayer because of the Treasury's extraordinary measures, nowhere have I read or heard of any one actually being required to pay more. In fact, after the anticipatory discomfort dissipates and a proper anesthetic is applied, these copious dollar hemorrhages feel as harmless as a root canal.
Perhaps a little suffering would be instructive. I have a suggestion which, I believe, would either end bailouts forever or launch a second American Revolution. With total federal tax revenues -- from personal and corporate income taxes, social security taxes, and excise taxes -- in the $2 trillion range (a number I derive from subtracting a $4oo billion deficit from a $2.4 trillion budget), a new $1 trillion federal obligation represents a fifty per cent increase in required income; to pay for that, the IRS should simply apply a surcharge to each taxpayer equal to fifty per cent of his current tax bill. Or, since annual U.S. gasoline consumption is about 150 billion gallons, how about a $6.50 per gallon assessment? Yes, my friends, as John McCain would say, the masses would storm the barricades. And they would hardly be pacified by spreading the payments over five years; a twenty per cent surcharge, or $1.30 bump at the pump, would be no more palatable.
But, instead of entertaining such a foolish (but, in my view, quite reasonable) proposal, because it would shake the very foundations of American civilization, low taxes and cheap gasoline, our gritless politicians will no doubt turn a blind eye to any semblance of fiscal responsibility and resort to their perennial method of financing deficits -- the sum total of which is now $10 trillion. They will borrow the money, and keep borrowing until either our credit runs out or the escalating digits overwhelm even them, at which point they will inflate the currency by printing more, and usher in an insidious hidden tax by the back door.
It's the American Way. The taxpayer complains without feeling any pain. The government gets the money at minimal interest rates. And the banks get to dump their worthless paper in return for an infusion of capital, costing them nothing more than a little "lipstick": a handful of warrants and some cosmetic restrictions on CEO compensation. It's like getting something for nothing, which seems appropriate, since that's how all the players earned their roles in this tragicomedy to start with.
It was a combustible combination: government pressure to make home ownership more accessible and more affordable to low-income (minority) citizens mixed with the profits inherent in financing such ownership, profits produced by loan origination, by higher interest rates, by the packaging of these loans with others of better quality into less risky marketable securities, and by the buying and selling of these securities in huge quantities at tiny spreads. The match to ignite the firestorm was readily at hand: lowered underwriting standards for home mortgages to subprime (less credit worthy) and prime (more credit worthy) borrowers.
As a result, former renters got a home, and current homeowners got roomfuls of cash via refinancing or home equity lines of credit, for almost nothing: no down payment and low introductory teaser rates scheduled to reset in the distant future, when their homes would have increased in value (and were thus solid bank collateral) and their rising incomes would easily enable them to make their higher monthly payments. After all, this was America, where prosperity knew no boundaries.
It amuses me how eager so many sanctimonious sophisticates are to cast aspersion upon these folks for merely accepting what some ambitious loan officer handed to them on a silver platter, even if it turned out to be a turkey they couldn't afford. There are many people in this world (or should I say America) who know how to live within their means, but there are just as many who don't, and quite a few who do know how but prefer not to. In our stores, we sell home furnishings, appliances, and electronics on credit. Can we blame the customer if we compromise our criteria and allow him to take home a brand new fifty-inch plasma television with no down payment and a credit history that indicates that he is unlikely to pay for it? Of course, a lender who is looking at collateral he knows will depreciate rather than at collateral he expects will appreciate tends to be more rational.
No less magical than the crystallization of homes out of thin air were the bountiful profits generated by the trade in mortgage-backed securities. Borrowing at interest rates kept artificially low by our own monetary policy makers, Fed Chairmen Greenspan and Bernanke, operating under a dangerously unbalanced ratio of one dollar of capital for every thirty dollars of debt, the institutions engaged in this financial sleight of hand were making money in the literal sense of the word, manufacturing it out of the most ethereal of raw materials.
And when they had extracted every last dollar of profit from the mortgage game, they invented a new one, based on derivatives. These credit default swaps had no intrinsic value in and of themselves, but, when layered on top of the mortgages and other debt instruments they were written to insure, possessed the power to multiply profits exponentially. By calling them swaps instead of insurance, their purveyors cleverly avoided any reserve requirements or regulatory oversight, grounding them in a nothingness even a layman can appreciate. While the actual number remains as elusive as it is incomprehensible, a reported $30 trillion worth of these "nuclear weapons of financial mass destruction," to quote Warren Buffett, is floating around in cyberspace.
Eventually, as Reverend Jeremiah Wright would say, "The chickens came home to roost." Homeowners -- occupants would be a more accurate term -- and securities traders were rudely awakened to what they surely knew but had just forgotten. Their pyramid of wealth did indeed have a foundation. Its name was leverage, and suddenly it turned on them, from an indispensable ally into an implacable foe.
According to Niall Ferguson, writing in Time Online, October 2, 2008, over the past thirty years households and financial institutions have accumulated tremendous levels of debt, now unsustainable due to a frightening reversal of fortune: the assets they bought with the money they borrowed have declined in value.
In the case of households, debt rose from about 50 per cent of GDP in 1980 to a peak of 100 per cent in 2006. Much of the increase was used to invest in residential real estate, the price of which has been falling since the housing bubble burst in 2007. In June home prices in twenty cities were down 16 per cent compared to last year.
"Banks and other financial institutions are in an even worse position . . . By 2007 the financial sector's debt was equivalent to 116 per cent of GDP, compared with a mere 21 per cent in 1980. And the assets the banks loaded up on have fallen even further in value than the average home -- by as much as 55 per cent in the case of BBB-rated mortgage-backed securities."
For a person whose business loans and borrows money, I've never understood leverage.
My customers probably don't understand it either. After they purchase their home furnishings, appliances, or electronics at one of Schewel Furniture Company's fifty stores and finance it by making monthly payments for up to twenty-four months at an APR of 24.9 per cent, I suspect that nine out of ten have no idea that they are borrowing money. Because SFC carries the account itself rather than a bank or finance company, they believe that they are simply paying for their sofa, bedroom suite, or refrigerator over a period of time -- and are happy to enjoy the use of it along the way. Applying a type of leverage they do understand, when service is necessary, they find it quite useful to be making those payments to the same entity that sold them the product.
Accounts receivable, the money owed to the company by its customers, is a two-edged sword. Increased non-cash sales and extended contract terms will drive up accounts receivable -- and yield higher interest income. On the other hand, these same factors will reduce cash flow and require the company to borrow money to finance its operations. Wall Streeters would find this a laughable non-choice, since the cost of the money will be considerably less than the 24.9 per cent interest rate charged to customers.
Which is one reason why a venture capitalist firm was willing to fork over an ungodly amount of borrowed money twenty-two years ago to purchase 51 per cent of Schewel Furniture Company -- an amount equal to twice its book value and almost seven times its earnings before interest (of which there was none), depreciation, and taxes. While its owners -- my father, brother, sister, and I, who owned fifty per cent, and our cousins, who owned the other fifty per cent -- would experience instant wealth creation, become cash-rich overnight, and retain the opportunity to participate in its future growth, the company would be saddled with an unwieldy burden of debt that could endanger its survival if economic conditions should deteriorate.
The company's owners had always been debt-averse. In fact, during their eighty-year history of financing customer purchases, they had borrowed money only once: to buy out a third partner in the late 1950's. Now a lucrative offer was on the table, and a decision had to be made. Debt financing was the American Way, but was it our way?
Actually, the issue was not whether to borrow; it was how much to borrow. No member of our cousin's family was interested in the business, and the only one who had ever worked there had semi-retired from it eight years earlier when he had been elected to the Virginia State Senate. With dollar signs dancing in their heads, they were ready to cash out.
For my father, my brother, and myself, the story was different. Schewel Furniture Company was our identity, our lifelong career, and a labor of love. We were as invested in its continued viability as we were enamored of all that liquidity, and we were reluctant to surrender control of the company to an outsider, no matter how deep his pockets. (Or maybe we were just too noble for our own good.) What began as an auction to the highest bidder degenerated into a bitter negotiation process, fraught with emotional turmoil; my father had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and I was in the throes of a divorce.
Our former partners became our adversaries, and filled the air with vague threats if this deal were not consummated by the end of the year, three weeks away, when capital gains rates were set to increase. Finally, the active owners, my father, my brother, and I, agreed to puchase our cousins' stock for an amount equal to fifty per cent of the outsider's offer, plus a twenty per cent premium for some future earnings, a concession they flushed out of us in the heat of the moment, attributable, I believe, to my clumsy naivete, my lack of financial expertise, and my stubborn fixation on forcing them out. As a result, they received almost two-and-a-half times the book value of their stock and eight times pre-tax earnings, exorbitant multiples even in that high-flying era.
Nevertheless, my father proudly maintained that the day he owned all of Schewel Furniture Company was the happiest of his life. Of course, since he knew he had only two years to live, he had no qualms about bequeathing his children a mountain of debt.
A local banker made the loan, declaring ominously: "Now, Marc, you do know that one day you will have to pay this back."
Since I was as debt-averse as my forbears and had never been initiated in the wily machinations of Wall Street, I had every good intention of doing so.
I guess one's tolerance for debt is a function of his temperament. For the optimist, the glass is always half-full, and the asset which he has purchased with borrowed money -- a house, a business, a mortgage-backed security -- is an opportunity to enjoy the fruits of its appreciation. For the pessimist, the glass is always half-empty, and that asset is an encumbrance bearing a huge cost.
To counteract my own innate pessimism, I recalled the sage advice of an old friend: "The man who has no faith in the future of America -- or in the future of his investments -- will never be successful." Fine words, to be sure, and undeniable, yet hard to stomach during a twenty-five per cent bear market.
Those outside investors with the big check were willing to leverage Schewel Furniture Company up to its eyeballs not only because they had confidence in its continued growth and profitability, but also because their goal in five to ten years was to resell the company for considerably more than they had borrowed. But if it's the American Way to use other people's money as much and as often as possible, it's also the American Way to live the dream of owning your own business and to preserve it for the next generation. Which is why my father, my siblings, and I shunned our ardent suitors and put our names -- and our futures -- on the dotted line.
While the company's newly-acquired debt was a necessary means to an end, your pessimistic chronicler struggled daily to look beyond the added interest cost, the uncomfortable bank covenants, and the prickly notion that the owners did not have complete control of their destiny. I learned a hard lesson about the installment credit business.
The investment banker who had brought us that outlandish offer, and then skillfully run interference between the two warring families, had painted for me a rosy picture. While profits would no doubt be reduced by interest costs, the company would still be generating enough cash every year to pay down some of its bank debt. What he conveniently failed to explain was that if the business experienced any growth, which it did, those profits would be reinvested internally to fund increased accounts receivable and inventory. The company ended up borrowing even more, much to my chagrin.
My steady comptroller reassured me that debt service was just another cost of doing business. My high-rolling director of credit operations reminded me that we were arbitraging our interest rates. A keen observer of the human condition philosophized: "A man's wealth is measured by how much he owes." But I never fully accepted the transformative power of leverage until I realized that the bankers standing at my door one sunny day were there not to padlock it but to loan me more money.
Emulating millions of fellow citizens, thousands of other businessmen, and an engorged federal government, I enlisted as a willing foot soldier in this army of borrowers, or at least adopted their devil-may-care attitude. Like the freckle-faced juvenile adorning the front page of my generation's favorite magazine, my internal refrain became, "What, me worry?" It's only money -- and not even that. It's merely a long-term liability entry on a financial statement.
Ironically enough, about the time I reconciled myself to the American Way of finance, about ten years ago, Schewel Furniture Company began to pay off its debt -- thanks to good collection practices, a slight uptick in the number of customers paying by cash or credit card, and a generous fire insurance settlement. Today it owes only about twenty per cent of the amount it borrowed in its 1986 recapitalization and is weathering the current economic malaise with a strong balance sheet.
Other businesses, financial institutions, and households have not been so fortunate. Under pressure from a decline in the value of their assets, principally residential real estate and mortgage-backed securities, they have been forced into a massive deleveraging.
It's a vicious downward spiral that feeds on itself, writes Mr. Ferguson. "When families and banks tip into bankruptcy, more assets get dumped on the market, driving prices down further and necessitating more deleveraging." A pessimist might say that, "This process has so much momentum that even $700 billion in taxpayers' money may not suffice to stop it."
Then again, a pessimist -- who knows he can't get something for nothing -- would never have allowed himself to get into such a predicament in the first place.
But, not to worry. Our schizophrenic Secretary, after selling his bailout plan to a wary Congress and a skeptical public as a matter of utmost urgency, has abruptly changed course. He now proposes to buy commercial paper from credit-starved corporations and invest taxpayer money in struggling banks. No wonder the financial markets are spooked.
Meanwhile, like crazed fiddlers in a burning city, our esteemed Presidential aspirants, Messers. McCain and Obama, dance along the campaign trial, blithely promising their weary audiences a panacea of tax cuts, universal health insurance, regulatory reform, and comprehensive energy strategies -- all of which are estimated to cost anywhere from three to five trillion dollars over the next five years. Do I detect a disconnect here?
Maybe not.
Because, while much has been made of the crushing tax burden being imposed on the irate taxpayer because of the Treasury's extraordinary measures, nowhere have I read or heard of any one actually being required to pay more. In fact, after the anticipatory discomfort dissipates and a proper anesthetic is applied, these copious dollar hemorrhages feel as harmless as a root canal.
Perhaps a little suffering would be instructive. I have a suggestion which, I believe, would either end bailouts forever or launch a second American Revolution. With total federal tax revenues -- from personal and corporate income taxes, social security taxes, and excise taxes -- in the $2 trillion range (a number I derive from subtracting a $4oo billion deficit from a $2.4 trillion budget), a new $1 trillion federal obligation represents a fifty per cent increase in required income; to pay for that, the IRS should simply apply a surcharge to each taxpayer equal to fifty per cent of his current tax bill. Or, since annual U.S. gasoline consumption is about 150 billion gallons, how about a $6.50 per gallon assessment? Yes, my friends, as John McCain would say, the masses would storm the barricades. And they would hardly be pacified by spreading the payments over five years; a twenty per cent surcharge, or $1.30 bump at the pump, would be no more palatable.
But, instead of entertaining such a foolish (but, in my view, quite reasonable) proposal, because it would shake the very foundations of American civilization, low taxes and cheap gasoline, our gritless politicians will no doubt turn a blind eye to any semblance of fiscal responsibility and resort to their perennial method of financing deficits -- the sum total of which is now $10 trillion. They will borrow the money, and keep borrowing until either our credit runs out or the escalating digits overwhelm even them, at which point they will inflate the currency by printing more, and usher in an insidious hidden tax by the back door.
It's the American Way. The taxpayer complains without feeling any pain. The government gets the money at minimal interest rates. And the banks get to dump their worthless paper in return for an infusion of capital, costing them nothing more than a little "lipstick": a handful of warrants and some cosmetic restrictions on CEO compensation. It's like getting something for nothing, which seems appropriate, since that's how all the players earned their roles in this tragicomedy to start with.
It was a combustible combination: government pressure to make home ownership more accessible and more affordable to low-income (minority) citizens mixed with the profits inherent in financing such ownership, profits produced by loan origination, by higher interest rates, by the packaging of these loans with others of better quality into less risky marketable securities, and by the buying and selling of these securities in huge quantities at tiny spreads. The match to ignite the firestorm was readily at hand: lowered underwriting standards for home mortgages to subprime (less credit worthy) and prime (more credit worthy) borrowers.
As a result, former renters got a home, and current homeowners got roomfuls of cash via refinancing or home equity lines of credit, for almost nothing: no down payment and low introductory teaser rates scheduled to reset in the distant future, when their homes would have increased in value (and were thus solid bank collateral) and their rising incomes would easily enable them to make their higher monthly payments. After all, this was America, where prosperity knew no boundaries.
It amuses me how eager so many sanctimonious sophisticates are to cast aspersion upon these folks for merely accepting what some ambitious loan officer handed to them on a silver platter, even if it turned out to be a turkey they couldn't afford. There are many people in this world (or should I say America) who know how to live within their means, but there are just as many who don't, and quite a few who do know how but prefer not to. In our stores, we sell home furnishings, appliances, and electronics on credit. Can we blame the customer if we compromise our criteria and allow him to take home a brand new fifty-inch plasma television with no down payment and a credit history that indicates that he is unlikely to pay for it? Of course, a lender who is looking at collateral he knows will depreciate rather than at collateral he expects will appreciate tends to be more rational.
No less magical than the crystallization of homes out of thin air were the bountiful profits generated by the trade in mortgage-backed securities. Borrowing at interest rates kept artificially low by our own monetary policy makers, Fed Chairmen Greenspan and Bernanke, operating under a dangerously unbalanced ratio of one dollar of capital for every thirty dollars of debt, the institutions engaged in this financial sleight of hand were making money in the literal sense of the word, manufacturing it out of the most ethereal of raw materials.
And when they had extracted every last dollar of profit from the mortgage game, they invented a new one, based on derivatives. These credit default swaps had no intrinsic value in and of themselves, but, when layered on top of the mortgages and other debt instruments they were written to insure, possessed the power to multiply profits exponentially. By calling them swaps instead of insurance, their purveyors cleverly avoided any reserve requirements or regulatory oversight, grounding them in a nothingness even a layman can appreciate. While the actual number remains as elusive as it is incomprehensible, a reported $30 trillion worth of these "nuclear weapons of financial mass destruction," to quote Warren Buffett, is floating around in cyberspace.
Eventually, as Reverend Jeremiah Wright would say, "The chickens came home to roost." Homeowners -- occupants would be a more accurate term -- and securities traders were rudely awakened to what they surely knew but had just forgotten. Their pyramid of wealth did indeed have a foundation. Its name was leverage, and suddenly it turned on them, from an indispensable ally into an implacable foe.
According to Niall Ferguson, writing in Time Online, October 2, 2008, over the past thirty years households and financial institutions have accumulated tremendous levels of debt, now unsustainable due to a frightening reversal of fortune: the assets they bought with the money they borrowed have declined in value.
In the case of households, debt rose from about 50 per cent of GDP in 1980 to a peak of 100 per cent in 2006. Much of the increase was used to invest in residential real estate, the price of which has been falling since the housing bubble burst in 2007. In June home prices in twenty cities were down 16 per cent compared to last year.
"Banks and other financial institutions are in an even worse position . . . By 2007 the financial sector's debt was equivalent to 116 per cent of GDP, compared with a mere 21 per cent in 1980. And the assets the banks loaded up on have fallen even further in value than the average home -- by as much as 55 per cent in the case of BBB-rated mortgage-backed securities."
For a person whose business loans and borrows money, I've never understood leverage.
My customers probably don't understand it either. After they purchase their home furnishings, appliances, or electronics at one of Schewel Furniture Company's fifty stores and finance it by making monthly payments for up to twenty-four months at an APR of 24.9 per cent, I suspect that nine out of ten have no idea that they are borrowing money. Because SFC carries the account itself rather than a bank or finance company, they believe that they are simply paying for their sofa, bedroom suite, or refrigerator over a period of time -- and are happy to enjoy the use of it along the way. Applying a type of leverage they do understand, when service is necessary, they find it quite useful to be making those payments to the same entity that sold them the product.
Accounts receivable, the money owed to the company by its customers, is a two-edged sword. Increased non-cash sales and extended contract terms will drive up accounts receivable -- and yield higher interest income. On the other hand, these same factors will reduce cash flow and require the company to borrow money to finance its operations. Wall Streeters would find this a laughable non-choice, since the cost of the money will be considerably less than the 24.9 per cent interest rate charged to customers.
Which is one reason why a venture capitalist firm was willing to fork over an ungodly amount of borrowed money twenty-two years ago to purchase 51 per cent of Schewel Furniture Company -- an amount equal to twice its book value and almost seven times its earnings before interest (of which there was none), depreciation, and taxes. While its owners -- my father, brother, sister, and I, who owned fifty per cent, and our cousins, who owned the other fifty per cent -- would experience instant wealth creation, become cash-rich overnight, and retain the opportunity to participate in its future growth, the company would be saddled with an unwieldy burden of debt that could endanger its survival if economic conditions should deteriorate.
The company's owners had always been debt-averse. In fact, during their eighty-year history of financing customer purchases, they had borrowed money only once: to buy out a third partner in the late 1950's. Now a lucrative offer was on the table, and a decision had to be made. Debt financing was the American Way, but was it our way?
Actually, the issue was not whether to borrow; it was how much to borrow. No member of our cousin's family was interested in the business, and the only one who had ever worked there had semi-retired from it eight years earlier when he had been elected to the Virginia State Senate. With dollar signs dancing in their heads, they were ready to cash out.
For my father, my brother, and myself, the story was different. Schewel Furniture Company was our identity, our lifelong career, and a labor of love. We were as invested in its continued viability as we were enamored of all that liquidity, and we were reluctant to surrender control of the company to an outsider, no matter how deep his pockets. (Or maybe we were just too noble for our own good.) What began as an auction to the highest bidder degenerated into a bitter negotiation process, fraught with emotional turmoil; my father had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and I was in the throes of a divorce.
Our former partners became our adversaries, and filled the air with vague threats if this deal were not consummated by the end of the year, three weeks away, when capital gains rates were set to increase. Finally, the active owners, my father, my brother, and I, agreed to puchase our cousins' stock for an amount equal to fifty per cent of the outsider's offer, plus a twenty per cent premium for some future earnings, a concession they flushed out of us in the heat of the moment, attributable, I believe, to my clumsy naivete, my lack of financial expertise, and my stubborn fixation on forcing them out. As a result, they received almost two-and-a-half times the book value of their stock and eight times pre-tax earnings, exorbitant multiples even in that high-flying era.
Nevertheless, my father proudly maintained that the day he owned all of Schewel Furniture Company was the happiest of his life. Of course, since he knew he had only two years to live, he had no qualms about bequeathing his children a mountain of debt.
A local banker made the loan, declaring ominously: "Now, Marc, you do know that one day you will have to pay this back."
Since I was as debt-averse as my forbears and had never been initiated in the wily machinations of Wall Street, I had every good intention of doing so.
I guess one's tolerance for debt is a function of his temperament. For the optimist, the glass is always half-full, and the asset which he has purchased with borrowed money -- a house, a business, a mortgage-backed security -- is an opportunity to enjoy the fruits of its appreciation. For the pessimist, the glass is always half-empty, and that asset is an encumbrance bearing a huge cost.
To counteract my own innate pessimism, I recalled the sage advice of an old friend: "The man who has no faith in the future of America -- or in the future of his investments -- will never be successful." Fine words, to be sure, and undeniable, yet hard to stomach during a twenty-five per cent bear market.
Those outside investors with the big check were willing to leverage Schewel Furniture Company up to its eyeballs not only because they had confidence in its continued growth and profitability, but also because their goal in five to ten years was to resell the company for considerably more than they had borrowed. But if it's the American Way to use other people's money as much and as often as possible, it's also the American Way to live the dream of owning your own business and to preserve it for the next generation. Which is why my father, my siblings, and I shunned our ardent suitors and put our names -- and our futures -- on the dotted line.
While the company's newly-acquired debt was a necessary means to an end, your pessimistic chronicler struggled daily to look beyond the added interest cost, the uncomfortable bank covenants, and the prickly notion that the owners did not have complete control of their destiny. I learned a hard lesson about the installment credit business.
The investment banker who had brought us that outlandish offer, and then skillfully run interference between the two warring families, had painted for me a rosy picture. While profits would no doubt be reduced by interest costs, the company would still be generating enough cash every year to pay down some of its bank debt. What he conveniently failed to explain was that if the business experienced any growth, which it did, those profits would be reinvested internally to fund increased accounts receivable and inventory. The company ended up borrowing even more, much to my chagrin.
My steady comptroller reassured me that debt service was just another cost of doing business. My high-rolling director of credit operations reminded me that we were arbitraging our interest rates. A keen observer of the human condition philosophized: "A man's wealth is measured by how much he owes." But I never fully accepted the transformative power of leverage until I realized that the bankers standing at my door one sunny day were there not to padlock it but to loan me more money.
Emulating millions of fellow citizens, thousands of other businessmen, and an engorged federal government, I enlisted as a willing foot soldier in this army of borrowers, or at least adopted their devil-may-care attitude. Like the freckle-faced juvenile adorning the front page of my generation's favorite magazine, my internal refrain became, "What, me worry?" It's only money -- and not even that. It's merely a long-term liability entry on a financial statement.
Ironically enough, about the time I reconciled myself to the American Way of finance, about ten years ago, Schewel Furniture Company began to pay off its debt -- thanks to good collection practices, a slight uptick in the number of customers paying by cash or credit card, and a generous fire insurance settlement. Today it owes only about twenty per cent of the amount it borrowed in its 1986 recapitalization and is weathering the current economic malaise with a strong balance sheet.
Other businesses, financial institutions, and households have not been so fortunate. Under pressure from a decline in the value of their assets, principally residential real estate and mortgage-backed securities, they have been forced into a massive deleveraging.
It's a vicious downward spiral that feeds on itself, writes Mr. Ferguson. "When families and banks tip into bankruptcy, more assets get dumped on the market, driving prices down further and necessitating more deleveraging." A pessimist might say that, "This process has so much momentum that even $700 billion in taxpayers' money may not suffice to stop it."
Then again, a pessimist -- who knows he can't get something for nothing -- would never have allowed himself to get into such a predicament in the first place.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Undecided
Like a state senator voting "Present" rather than "Aye" or "Nay," I am in the "undecided" category.
In defense of Mr. Obama, because it takes affirmative votes to pass legislation in the Illinois Senate, a "present" vote is tantamount to a "no" vote and is an easy way for lawmakers to express disapproval of a measure they oppose without going on record as against it. (Gonzalez, WSJ Online, Feb. 14, 2007)
Mr. Obama says he cast votes 4000 times in the Illinois Senate, and used "present" votes 130 times to protest bills he believed had been drafted unconstitutionally or as part of a broader legislative strategy. (The Left Coaster, Dec. 20, 2007)
"Present" is not an option on the public ballot; I can register my indecision on November 4th only by my absence, and thus join ranks with 78 million lethargic fellow citizens who, though eligible, will fail to vote for President in 2008.
Labeling myself "undecided," today, forty-five days before the election, will undoubtedly surprise, shock, and sadden many of my friends, family members, and faithful readers, who would be justified in assuming my staunch support of the Democratic ticket -- although it will certainly delight my wayward brother, now a fanatic McCain acolyte. After all, I have one cousin who was a Democratic state senator for sixteen years and another who served as Governor Mark Warner's Secretary of Commerce. I have regularly contributed to Democratic candidates at all levels of government. Except for a couple of protest votes for third-party candidates (Ross Perot is a household name, but does anyone remember John Anderson?) and in cases where a Republican was running unopposed, I have always voted blue. And although I am not a card-carrying (nor dues-paying) member of the Democratic Party, most of my acquaintances would surmise that relationship, based on my liberal views on constitutional, economic, and social issues.
But this has been an unprecedented and historic election year, now featuring a bizarre collection of finalists: the first African-American Presidential nominee, whose explosive rise from relative obscurity to "pseudo-messianism," which enabled him to snatch the prize from its heavily-favored heiress, the first presumptive female nominee, still strains credibility; a scarred seventy-two-year-old political and POW survivor, who, in a few short months, was miraculously transformed from his party's rebellious outcast into the object of its affection when the dubious "surge" strategy he staked his Presidential aspirations on proved to be a surprising success; the first female Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, the eye-pleasing, gun-slinging, moose-hunting, hockey mom turned Governor of Alaska, who, when lightning struck, ignited the Party's social conservative base, captured the attention of millions of celebrity watchers hungry for a new star, and became almost too hot for her opponents to handle; and a loquacious, tiresome, Senatorial journeyman, whose own Oval Office ambitions were suddenly resurrected when his youthful compatriot shunned his former rival and her eighteen million disciples and rescued him from the dustbin of primary also-rans.
And, even more strange, this year my lonesome vote might mean something. The see-sawing Virginia polls now show McCain holding a slim two-point lead (with six percent, including me, undecided), this in a state Democratic Presidential candidates have all but conceded -- and lost -- since LBJ carried it in 1964. But with Democrats now controlling the State Senate, the Governor's Mansion, and one U.S. Senate seat, and with Mark Warner poised to seize the second, the Old Dominion, proud possessor of thirteen crucial electoral votes, has a new moniker: swing state.
While it's nice to be courted and to bask in the glow of an Obamian visitation to one's fair city, there is a drawback to finding oneself in the electoral crosshairs. Television viewers will be inundated by a cacophonous barrage of political commercials, replete with savage accusations, gross misrepresentations, and shameless self-righteousness -- all of which usurp valuable air time from regular advertisers like me, fuel a growing disenchantment with a perverse system, and lead one to the depressing conclusion that "undecided" is most rational choice of all.
Hurdling these obstacles and dragging myself to the voting booth demand a daunting leap of faith. On both sides of the aisle, in the corridors of Congress and state legislatures, I see officeholders (and seekers) corrupted by a lust for power and the bucketfuls of cash tossed their way by influence peddlers. I see them appealing to the basest instincts of their constituencies by simplifying complex issues into flatulent sound bites, demonizing their opponents, and distorting facts to conform to their version of the truth. I see them pandering to voters of every ilk by making vacuous promises they have little intention -- and less chance -- of fulfilling. In the face of such sound and fury signifying nothing, who would not retire to the sidelines?
Yet vote we must, lest we forfeit our right to complain.
The rising tide of dissatisfaction with the Bush Administration -- whose approval rating has fallen to the lowest level in the history of this statistic -- has burst through the Democratic retaining wall and swamped many Independents and some Republicans. The laundry list of indictments is by now familiar: a seven-year war, the longest in U.S. history, the unintended consequence of a personal vendetta, misguided ideology, or oil imperialism (or some combination of the three), sold to the American public on bogus intelligence and mismanaged to the tune of one trillion dollars and four thousand lives; myopic tax cuts, which, while they may have generated economic growth and created new jobs (mostly in the health care sector), have deepened the divide between rich and poor, lined the pockets of Bush's crony capitalists, stagnated the real income of the middle class, doubled the national debt, and crushed the value of the dollar; a ruthless implementation of reactionary internal security measures, often by government fiat, resulting in an infringement of civil liberties and an invasion of privacy rights; and a collapsing housing market and soaring gas prices, which, while they are free market phenomena, occurred on Bush's watch and reflect a failure to regulate aggressive mortgage lending and securitization practices and to initiate a strategic energy policy.
Like a determined parent dressing up a recalcitrant child, Obama persists in draping this weighty cloak of incumbency over McCain's cockeyed shoulders, only to have the latter protest the fit, shrug it off, and introduce his own more fashionable -- and original -- trousseau, sporting high heels, rimless glasses, makeup, and lipstick. In fact, the odd couple's convention lovefest bounced them into a slight (and short-lived) lead over their opponents, who, by all rights should be winning this race going away.
Instead, it's a dead heat. Because, while I reject the ripples of anti-Obama rhetoric coursing through the airwaves and blogosphere as patently false (his Muslim religion), irrelevant (his shadowy Chicago connections), or racially tinged ("community organizer" slurs), like others hungry for change, I harbor doubts about an Obama Presidency.
Despite his two-year quest for the White House and intense (and adoring) media attention, Obama darts along the campaign trail from stump to stage like an elusive butterfly, hard to pin down, an unknown quantity. Boasting a resume as insubstantial and evanescent as a vapor stream, he rocketed into prominence on the wings of oratory, prayers for change, and the audacity of hope, garnering eighteen million votes and vanquishing not only Hillary Clinton, but also the burden of inexperience; he staked his claim to legitimacy on superior judgment and a fresh approach to governing.
After securing the nomination, however, Obama has struggled to project himself as a strong leader. Surprised and distracted by the Palin nomination, nonplused by the success of the McCain "surge" and the decline of violence in Iraq, flummoxed by his opponents' crafty appropriation of his reformist message, backtracking on issues like campaign financing, wiretapping, immigration, and taxation, and missing his teleprompter, he has sounded more tongue-tied than confident. His natural demeanor -- composed, deliberate, refined, professional, the antithesis of the stereotypical black politician -- has exposed him to charges of intellectualism and elitism -- in spite of his self-documented humble beginnings -- which he is at pains to refute as he courts the white, middle class votes he needs for victory.
The body politic yearns for a President with the superhuman powers each contender purports to possess -- the wisdom and strength to keep it safe from internal danger and external attack, to monitor and resolve volatile international situations, to manage a 2.4 trillion dollar budget and an economy five times greater, to balance competing political, economic, and social interests for the general good, and to keep the American dream of prosperity, success, and upward mobility alive for every citizen -- yet with feet of clay, grounded in the soil of the common man. The enduring genius of Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and, yes, Bill Clinton was their unique ability to project themselves as captains firmly in control in every perfect storm, while exuding the warmth and charm of a friend we would like to invite over for a fireside chat.
If Obama's meteoric ascent was, in the words of Charles Krauthammer, based not on issues but on "narrative, eloquence, and charisma," he and his handlers realized, during the summer doldrums, that his celebrity-ness -- deprived of oxygen, lampooned by some clever McCain commercials, superseded by the new girl on the block --was not sustainable. Their charge became to bring him down to earth, to tear away his masque of otherworldliness, to reach out to all the brown-baggers whose taxes he is proposing to cut. Krauthammer describes his acceptance speech as "deliberately pedestrian, state-of-the-unionish, programmatic," and a stark contrast to the lavish Invesco Field setting where he delivered it -- and probably wishes he hadn't. Obama's feisty makeover was in full bloom in his "lipstick on a pig" remark and in his lively interview with Bill O'Reilly.
Although McCain has lamely followed in his footsteps, Obama rode his own surge to the nomination by branding himself as a new breed of politician, who could implement meaningful reform, change the culture of Washington, take on special interest groups, and prevail over destructive partisanship -- to employ the platitudes now spewing from the mouths of both candidates. In truth, Obama resonated as a mythical symbol of the promise of America: a black man legitimately contending for the nation's highest office, proof that it had finally come to terms with its racial identity.
But even if one could reject the premise that any Chief Executive -- no matter how transcendent, now matter how committed to the task, no matter how great his mandate from the people -- is powerless to crack the impenetrable, monolithic, self-serving, self-perpetuating apparatus that dominates and permeates the Washington, D.C., landscape, Obama is a problematic agent. I hate to be bearer of bad tidings, but here is a man who vaulted into the U.S. Senate on the springboard of, by many accounts, a corrupt Chicago machine, a man who has "never challenged his party's base on any matter of substance," a man whose lone act of bipartisanship was backed by every legislator on both sides of the aisle. (Butler, Financial Times Online)
An Obama victory will establish a Democratic hegemony on Capitol Hill and in the White House -- a harrowing prospect for that segment of the electorate who, like me, prefer -- either consciously or instinctively -- a divided government as least harmful to the citizenry. Our Founding Fathers' Grand Design was a system of checks and balances in which the excesses of each branch of government would be restrained by the other two; what they failed to forsee was how the rise of political parties would foil their brilliant conception. The ill-advised, poorly-crafted, politically motivated Prescription Drug Law passed by Congress in 2003, which created a new, massive, unfunded entitlement and granted lucrative favors to drug companies, is the most recent egregious example of unleashed partisanship.
John McCain's emergence as the darling of the Republican Party is no less mystifying than Obama's coup against Hillary Clinton. Eight years ago, the Bush-Rovian smear machine, jarred into action by McCain's stunning victory in the New Hampshire Primary, let loose its social conservative dogs of war, dragged him through the South Carolina mud, and effectively ended his Presidential hopes -- for a time. The red meat was the accusation that McCain had fathered an illegitimate black baby and the insinuation that his pow experience had rendered him too mentally unstable to serve as President. Now, his heroic service, his unwavering support of the surge strategy, and his rugged individualism are stoking the fires of his campaign redux.
The McCain phenomenon is curious to behold. Although one could argue that a crowded primary field splintered the vote, the fact is that when the GOP voters spoke, they were repudiating the tough anti-terrorist (Guliani), the Christian evangelist (Huckabee), the traditional Republican (Thompson), and the capitalist wizard (Romney) -- and the elements of Party dogma each one represented: secure borders, the right to life without exception, offshore drilling, and tax cuts for the wealthy -- in favor of the candidate who was "none of the above." And now, McCain, the embodiment of all those principles he was once so proud to declare his independence from, can best be characterized as "all of the above."
Whereas most Presidential candidates move to the vital center after securing their party's nomination, McCain has moved to the right -- and into territory that makes me uncomfortable.
I have no desire to see the deleterious policies of the Bush Administration perpetuated. I loathe the thought of neocons and supply-side economists repopulating the Cabinet and sub-Cabinet. I am suspicious of the judges and administrators McCain and his advisors will appoint upon his assuming office. For thirty-five years McCain in Congress has been his own man; the question now is whether he has abdicated the rights to that title.
His detractors are convinced he has. They point first to the mean-spirited tone of his campaign, his embrace of the same vicious, inflammatory tactics which victimized him and which he so sanctimoniously denounced and forswore.
I am not one to bemoan negative political television and radio commercials. Both sides use them. They must work, although I like to believe that there are intelligent, informed voters in the audience who, like me, are dismayed and disgusted by these mind-numbing attacks and who question the credibility of presumptive leaders who stoop to conquer, who wade through the swamp and throw mud in order to earn our trust and respect. My view is that the Republicans were first out of the gate in this race to the gutter -- although the Democrats were close upon their heels -- and that McCain, champion of decency, honor, and reform, is being disingenuous, if not hypocritical, when he approves their messages.
While McCain's selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate was smart politics (at least for the past month), it also signals McCain's final capitulation: to the hard-right ideologues who want to retain control of the Republican party and his Presidential agenda. Apparently, they convinced him that, without her, his bridge to the White House would end up nowhere, and, indeed, the plucky ingenue may the first Vice-Presidential candidate to swing an election since LBJ in 1960. The pertinent question is, when this shotgun wedding is consummated, how much will McCain owe the the bridal party if he rides her skirt-tails to victory?
Eight years ago, when John McCain was sixty-four -- and before he walked in the shadow of George W. Bush -- I would have voted for him. I hate to be guilty of age discrimination, but is it not just a little unsettling that a man well past the accepted retirement age in this country, a man who has had four bouts with skin cancer, should take on the most demanding job in the world--although, admittedly, some recent deciders have slumbered through their terms in suspended animation, delegating most of the heavy lifting to surrogates and never allowing the exigencies of government to interfere with their vacation schedules.
Am I the only pundit brazen enough to mention the unmentionable: the nightmarish scenarios of illness, incapacitation, death? I realize that many people enjoy vigorous and productive activity well into their eighties, that hereditary monarchs and dictators have no term limits, that ageless leadership cliques have governed Israel and ruled China for years. I advocate raising the retirement age to seventy, not only because it would restore solvency to Social Security and Medicare, but also because the workplace needs our senior citizens' skills and experience. With that said, no public corporation in this country would think of hiring a seventy-two-year-old CEO -- and giving him a four-year contract. It's just too risky.
Like siblings arguing over a new toy, our two contenders are locked in conflict over who shall claim rightful ownership of the ineluctable force bearing down on Washington (or so they say): change. Although a twenty-year veteran of the Senate, McCain makes a plausible case. On occasion, he bolted his Party caucus, staked out a path of independence, and reached across the aisle to work with Democrats. His vote against the Bush tax cuts and his co-sponsorship of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform Act of 2002 are prime examples.
On the other hand, his ties to lobbyists -- including dozens working on his campaign staff -- and their bottomless pocketbooks have not escaped the attention of Obama or the media. As for those devilish earmarks, for which he has never sold his soul, mastering the federal budget by vetoing them is like calling the fire department to extinguish a match; while $18 billion in earmarks is no small number, it makes up a mere three-quarters of one percent of the $2.4 trillion in total expenditures and less than twenty-five percent of the amount ponied up by the Treasury to bail out one faltering insurance company, AIG. Granted, any fiscal responsibility demonstrated by President McCain will be an improvement over the profligacy of George Bush, who learned to spell "veto" only after the Democrats took control of Congress -- further evidence that "gridlock" has its benefits.
While studies show that voters are most influenced by their perceptions of a candidate's values, authenticity, and trustworthiness, chipping away each one's shiny veneer and exposing his raw imperfections have only reinforced my indecision; I am now compelled to resort to what all the players in this ongoing drama so assiduously avoid: a serious examination of the issues.
Fear is a great motivator of human behavior, and the Republican/Conservative propaganda generator has seized upon the public's overwrought fear of high -- and higher -- gas prices to manufacture its newest incendiary wedge issue, brilliantly dumbed-down to the oily epigram: "Drill here, drill now, pay less." Anyone opposed to this slick formula for rescuing our American way of life from our OPEC tormentors is immediately stigmatized as an animal-loving, tree-hugging, obstructionist radical wacko. In the face of this onslaught, McCain has changed his position on off-shore drilling, and even Obama, in lockstep with his own Party's tentative concessions, has thrown out the white flag.
I am not convinced that this country will ever be able economically to extract enough oil from its supposed reserves to impact the world market price. I believe that domestic drilling will further strengthen the hand of the avaricious oil companies and inflate their already obscene profits, and that the only way to break their -- and OPEC's -- stranglehold on our thirst for fossil fuel is for us to pursue alternative sources of energy. Although Obama continues to spurn the nuclear option, I believe he would be more aggressive in promoting a progressive, strategic, multi-faceted energy policy.
Both candidates' web sites address the twin issues of rising health care costs and the forty-seven million persons who lack health insurance -- with page after page of promises which, in my humble opinion, they have no reasonable chance of fulfilling, or only at an astronomical unfunded cost. Reducing health care costs is a noble objective, and very appealing to employers like me who spend almost twelve percent of our payrolls on our employees' health insurance. While both pieces of boilerplate identify opportunities for improving efficiency and eliminating waste, I doubt that meaningful savings can be wrung out of a system bloated by Medicare and Medicaid cost-shifting and by the public's insatiable appetite for medical services and sophisticated technology, which hospitals and physicians are only too happy to indulge.
I see no way of funding many aspects of Obama's plan -- including the subsidies he will remit to low-income families and individuals to enroll in his national health program. For those not eligible for a subsidy, I see no incentive for them to enroll. McCain offers a refundable tax credit of up to $5000 to enable uninsured families to purchase insurance, which makes sense to me, as long as it is available to low and middle income families who pay no income taxes, who are most likely to be uninsured, and who otherwise would lack the incentive and wherewithal to enroll in a plan.
Neither agenda demonstrates the bold, innovative, collaborative thinking that will be required to solve our country's health care crisis. I give McCain's the edge as being more fiscally responsible.
The whole discussion may be moot, however, shoved off the table by the government's one trillion dollar bailout of sinking financial institutions.
I have always been skeptical of supply-siders' contention that changes in marginal tax rates materially affect people's behavior. What ambitious (greedy) entrepreneur is going to work less because he has to pay three percent more in taxes? Whether or not the boom was attributable to the dot-com proliferation, the economy thrived when Bill Clinton raised taxes and reduced the deficit. Whether or not the current bust should be blamed on the excesses of unrestrained capitalism, the Bush tax cuts have not inoculated the economy against cyclical downturns.
In a former life, McCain objected to those tax cuts as favoring the wealthy; he now sees them through a different lens, and proposes to make them permanent, increase the personal exemption for individual filers, and unfetter the job (and) profit producing power of corporate America by reducing its tax rate by ten percentage points. Obama wants to raise the tax rates on dividends, capital gains, and individuals earning $250,000, and the threshold on payroll taxes, none of which I am opposed to, if these increases were to be used to reduce the federal deficit, last clocked at $400 billion, and rising rapidly. By most calculations, however, Obama's ambitious new spending programs, which include refunds or credits for millions of low and middle income earners, will consume far more than his additional tax revenue.
In just one week, the economic and financial situation in this country has altered dramatically. The federal government (or the taxpayer) has assumed tremendous obligations. Tax cuts and refunds may earn applause on the campaign trail, but sooner or later, when the cheering stops, Presidents and Congressmen will have to face the reality that they don't have enough money to buy all the votes they want, and that someone is going to have to make some hard decisions. From what I have heard so far, and, as Peggy Noonan wrote yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, I have deep reservations if either McCain or Obama is up to the task.
Which leaves me still undecided.
In defense of Mr. Obama, because it takes affirmative votes to pass legislation in the Illinois Senate, a "present" vote is tantamount to a "no" vote and is an easy way for lawmakers to express disapproval of a measure they oppose without going on record as against it. (Gonzalez, WSJ Online, Feb. 14, 2007)
Mr. Obama says he cast votes 4000 times in the Illinois Senate, and used "present" votes 130 times to protest bills he believed had been drafted unconstitutionally or as part of a broader legislative strategy. (The Left Coaster, Dec. 20, 2007)
"Present" is not an option on the public ballot; I can register my indecision on November 4th only by my absence, and thus join ranks with 78 million lethargic fellow citizens who, though eligible, will fail to vote for President in 2008.
Labeling myself "undecided," today, forty-five days before the election, will undoubtedly surprise, shock, and sadden many of my friends, family members, and faithful readers, who would be justified in assuming my staunch support of the Democratic ticket -- although it will certainly delight my wayward brother, now a fanatic McCain acolyte. After all, I have one cousin who was a Democratic state senator for sixteen years and another who served as Governor Mark Warner's Secretary of Commerce. I have regularly contributed to Democratic candidates at all levels of government. Except for a couple of protest votes for third-party candidates (Ross Perot is a household name, but does anyone remember John Anderson?) and in cases where a Republican was running unopposed, I have always voted blue. And although I am not a card-carrying (nor dues-paying) member of the Democratic Party, most of my acquaintances would surmise that relationship, based on my liberal views on constitutional, economic, and social issues.
But this has been an unprecedented and historic election year, now featuring a bizarre collection of finalists: the first African-American Presidential nominee, whose explosive rise from relative obscurity to "pseudo-messianism," which enabled him to snatch the prize from its heavily-favored heiress, the first presumptive female nominee, still strains credibility; a scarred seventy-two-year-old political and POW survivor, who, in a few short months, was miraculously transformed from his party's rebellious outcast into the object of its affection when the dubious "surge" strategy he staked his Presidential aspirations on proved to be a surprising success; the first female Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, the eye-pleasing, gun-slinging, moose-hunting, hockey mom turned Governor of Alaska, who, when lightning struck, ignited the Party's social conservative base, captured the attention of millions of celebrity watchers hungry for a new star, and became almost too hot for her opponents to handle; and a loquacious, tiresome, Senatorial journeyman, whose own Oval Office ambitions were suddenly resurrected when his youthful compatriot shunned his former rival and her eighteen million disciples and rescued him from the dustbin of primary also-rans.
And, even more strange, this year my lonesome vote might mean something. The see-sawing Virginia polls now show McCain holding a slim two-point lead (with six percent, including me, undecided), this in a state Democratic Presidential candidates have all but conceded -- and lost -- since LBJ carried it in 1964. But with Democrats now controlling the State Senate, the Governor's Mansion, and one U.S. Senate seat, and with Mark Warner poised to seize the second, the Old Dominion, proud possessor of thirteen crucial electoral votes, has a new moniker: swing state.
While it's nice to be courted and to bask in the glow of an Obamian visitation to one's fair city, there is a drawback to finding oneself in the electoral crosshairs. Television viewers will be inundated by a cacophonous barrage of political commercials, replete with savage accusations, gross misrepresentations, and shameless self-righteousness -- all of which usurp valuable air time from regular advertisers like me, fuel a growing disenchantment with a perverse system, and lead one to the depressing conclusion that "undecided" is most rational choice of all.
Hurdling these obstacles and dragging myself to the voting booth demand a daunting leap of faith. On both sides of the aisle, in the corridors of Congress and state legislatures, I see officeholders (and seekers) corrupted by a lust for power and the bucketfuls of cash tossed their way by influence peddlers. I see them appealing to the basest instincts of their constituencies by simplifying complex issues into flatulent sound bites, demonizing their opponents, and distorting facts to conform to their version of the truth. I see them pandering to voters of every ilk by making vacuous promises they have little intention -- and less chance -- of fulfilling. In the face of such sound and fury signifying nothing, who would not retire to the sidelines?
Yet vote we must, lest we forfeit our right to complain.
The rising tide of dissatisfaction with the Bush Administration -- whose approval rating has fallen to the lowest level in the history of this statistic -- has burst through the Democratic retaining wall and swamped many Independents and some Republicans. The laundry list of indictments is by now familiar: a seven-year war, the longest in U.S. history, the unintended consequence of a personal vendetta, misguided ideology, or oil imperialism (or some combination of the three), sold to the American public on bogus intelligence and mismanaged to the tune of one trillion dollars and four thousand lives; myopic tax cuts, which, while they may have generated economic growth and created new jobs (mostly in the health care sector), have deepened the divide between rich and poor, lined the pockets of Bush's crony capitalists, stagnated the real income of the middle class, doubled the national debt, and crushed the value of the dollar; a ruthless implementation of reactionary internal security measures, often by government fiat, resulting in an infringement of civil liberties and an invasion of privacy rights; and a collapsing housing market and soaring gas prices, which, while they are free market phenomena, occurred on Bush's watch and reflect a failure to regulate aggressive mortgage lending and securitization practices and to initiate a strategic energy policy.
Like a determined parent dressing up a recalcitrant child, Obama persists in draping this weighty cloak of incumbency over McCain's cockeyed shoulders, only to have the latter protest the fit, shrug it off, and introduce his own more fashionable -- and original -- trousseau, sporting high heels, rimless glasses, makeup, and lipstick. In fact, the odd couple's convention lovefest bounced them into a slight (and short-lived) lead over their opponents, who, by all rights should be winning this race going away.
Instead, it's a dead heat. Because, while I reject the ripples of anti-Obama rhetoric coursing through the airwaves and blogosphere as patently false (his Muslim religion), irrelevant (his shadowy Chicago connections), or racially tinged ("community organizer" slurs), like others hungry for change, I harbor doubts about an Obama Presidency.
Despite his two-year quest for the White House and intense (and adoring) media attention, Obama darts along the campaign trail from stump to stage like an elusive butterfly, hard to pin down, an unknown quantity. Boasting a resume as insubstantial and evanescent as a vapor stream, he rocketed into prominence on the wings of oratory, prayers for change, and the audacity of hope, garnering eighteen million votes and vanquishing not only Hillary Clinton, but also the burden of inexperience; he staked his claim to legitimacy on superior judgment and a fresh approach to governing.
After securing the nomination, however, Obama has struggled to project himself as a strong leader. Surprised and distracted by the Palin nomination, nonplused by the success of the McCain "surge" and the decline of violence in Iraq, flummoxed by his opponents' crafty appropriation of his reformist message, backtracking on issues like campaign financing, wiretapping, immigration, and taxation, and missing his teleprompter, he has sounded more tongue-tied than confident. His natural demeanor -- composed, deliberate, refined, professional, the antithesis of the stereotypical black politician -- has exposed him to charges of intellectualism and elitism -- in spite of his self-documented humble beginnings -- which he is at pains to refute as he courts the white, middle class votes he needs for victory.
The body politic yearns for a President with the superhuman powers each contender purports to possess -- the wisdom and strength to keep it safe from internal danger and external attack, to monitor and resolve volatile international situations, to manage a 2.4 trillion dollar budget and an economy five times greater, to balance competing political, economic, and social interests for the general good, and to keep the American dream of prosperity, success, and upward mobility alive for every citizen -- yet with feet of clay, grounded in the soil of the common man. The enduring genius of Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and, yes, Bill Clinton was their unique ability to project themselves as captains firmly in control in every perfect storm, while exuding the warmth and charm of a friend we would like to invite over for a fireside chat.
If Obama's meteoric ascent was, in the words of Charles Krauthammer, based not on issues but on "narrative, eloquence, and charisma," he and his handlers realized, during the summer doldrums, that his celebrity-ness -- deprived of oxygen, lampooned by some clever McCain commercials, superseded by the new girl on the block --was not sustainable. Their charge became to bring him down to earth, to tear away his masque of otherworldliness, to reach out to all the brown-baggers whose taxes he is proposing to cut. Krauthammer describes his acceptance speech as "deliberately pedestrian, state-of-the-unionish, programmatic," and a stark contrast to the lavish Invesco Field setting where he delivered it -- and probably wishes he hadn't. Obama's feisty makeover was in full bloom in his "lipstick on a pig" remark and in his lively interview with Bill O'Reilly.
Although McCain has lamely followed in his footsteps, Obama rode his own surge to the nomination by branding himself as a new breed of politician, who could implement meaningful reform, change the culture of Washington, take on special interest groups, and prevail over destructive partisanship -- to employ the platitudes now spewing from the mouths of both candidates. In truth, Obama resonated as a mythical symbol of the promise of America: a black man legitimately contending for the nation's highest office, proof that it had finally come to terms with its racial identity.
But even if one could reject the premise that any Chief Executive -- no matter how transcendent, now matter how committed to the task, no matter how great his mandate from the people -- is powerless to crack the impenetrable, monolithic, self-serving, self-perpetuating apparatus that dominates and permeates the Washington, D.C., landscape, Obama is a problematic agent. I hate to be bearer of bad tidings, but here is a man who vaulted into the U.S. Senate on the springboard of, by many accounts, a corrupt Chicago machine, a man who has "never challenged his party's base on any matter of substance," a man whose lone act of bipartisanship was backed by every legislator on both sides of the aisle. (Butler, Financial Times Online)
An Obama victory will establish a Democratic hegemony on Capitol Hill and in the White House -- a harrowing prospect for that segment of the electorate who, like me, prefer -- either consciously or instinctively -- a divided government as least harmful to the citizenry. Our Founding Fathers' Grand Design was a system of checks and balances in which the excesses of each branch of government would be restrained by the other two; what they failed to forsee was how the rise of political parties would foil their brilliant conception. The ill-advised, poorly-crafted, politically motivated Prescription Drug Law passed by Congress in 2003, which created a new, massive, unfunded entitlement and granted lucrative favors to drug companies, is the most recent egregious example of unleashed partisanship.
John McCain's emergence as the darling of the Republican Party is no less mystifying than Obama's coup against Hillary Clinton. Eight years ago, the Bush-Rovian smear machine, jarred into action by McCain's stunning victory in the New Hampshire Primary, let loose its social conservative dogs of war, dragged him through the South Carolina mud, and effectively ended his Presidential hopes -- for a time. The red meat was the accusation that McCain had fathered an illegitimate black baby and the insinuation that his pow experience had rendered him too mentally unstable to serve as President. Now, his heroic service, his unwavering support of the surge strategy, and his rugged individualism are stoking the fires of his campaign redux.
The McCain phenomenon is curious to behold. Although one could argue that a crowded primary field splintered the vote, the fact is that when the GOP voters spoke, they were repudiating the tough anti-terrorist (Guliani), the Christian evangelist (Huckabee), the traditional Republican (Thompson), and the capitalist wizard (Romney) -- and the elements of Party dogma each one represented: secure borders, the right to life without exception, offshore drilling, and tax cuts for the wealthy -- in favor of the candidate who was "none of the above." And now, McCain, the embodiment of all those principles he was once so proud to declare his independence from, can best be characterized as "all of the above."
Whereas most Presidential candidates move to the vital center after securing their party's nomination, McCain has moved to the right -- and into territory that makes me uncomfortable.
I have no desire to see the deleterious policies of the Bush Administration perpetuated. I loathe the thought of neocons and supply-side economists repopulating the Cabinet and sub-Cabinet. I am suspicious of the judges and administrators McCain and his advisors will appoint upon his assuming office. For thirty-five years McCain in Congress has been his own man; the question now is whether he has abdicated the rights to that title.
His detractors are convinced he has. They point first to the mean-spirited tone of his campaign, his embrace of the same vicious, inflammatory tactics which victimized him and which he so sanctimoniously denounced and forswore.
I am not one to bemoan negative political television and radio commercials. Both sides use them. They must work, although I like to believe that there are intelligent, informed voters in the audience who, like me, are dismayed and disgusted by these mind-numbing attacks and who question the credibility of presumptive leaders who stoop to conquer, who wade through the swamp and throw mud in order to earn our trust and respect. My view is that the Republicans were first out of the gate in this race to the gutter -- although the Democrats were close upon their heels -- and that McCain, champion of decency, honor, and reform, is being disingenuous, if not hypocritical, when he approves their messages.
While McCain's selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate was smart politics (at least for the past month), it also signals McCain's final capitulation: to the hard-right ideologues who want to retain control of the Republican party and his Presidential agenda. Apparently, they convinced him that, without her, his bridge to the White House would end up nowhere, and, indeed, the plucky ingenue may the first Vice-Presidential candidate to swing an election since LBJ in 1960. The pertinent question is, when this shotgun wedding is consummated, how much will McCain owe the the bridal party if he rides her skirt-tails to victory?
Eight years ago, when John McCain was sixty-four -- and before he walked in the shadow of George W. Bush -- I would have voted for him. I hate to be guilty of age discrimination, but is it not just a little unsettling that a man well past the accepted retirement age in this country, a man who has had four bouts with skin cancer, should take on the most demanding job in the world--although, admittedly, some recent deciders have slumbered through their terms in suspended animation, delegating most of the heavy lifting to surrogates and never allowing the exigencies of government to interfere with their vacation schedules.
Am I the only pundit brazen enough to mention the unmentionable: the nightmarish scenarios of illness, incapacitation, death? I realize that many people enjoy vigorous and productive activity well into their eighties, that hereditary monarchs and dictators have no term limits, that ageless leadership cliques have governed Israel and ruled China for years. I advocate raising the retirement age to seventy, not only because it would restore solvency to Social Security and Medicare, but also because the workplace needs our senior citizens' skills and experience. With that said, no public corporation in this country would think of hiring a seventy-two-year-old CEO -- and giving him a four-year contract. It's just too risky.
Like siblings arguing over a new toy, our two contenders are locked in conflict over who shall claim rightful ownership of the ineluctable force bearing down on Washington (or so they say): change. Although a twenty-year veteran of the Senate, McCain makes a plausible case. On occasion, he bolted his Party caucus, staked out a path of independence, and reached across the aisle to work with Democrats. His vote against the Bush tax cuts and his co-sponsorship of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform Act of 2002 are prime examples.
On the other hand, his ties to lobbyists -- including dozens working on his campaign staff -- and their bottomless pocketbooks have not escaped the attention of Obama or the media. As for those devilish earmarks, for which he has never sold his soul, mastering the federal budget by vetoing them is like calling the fire department to extinguish a match; while $18 billion in earmarks is no small number, it makes up a mere three-quarters of one percent of the $2.4 trillion in total expenditures and less than twenty-five percent of the amount ponied up by the Treasury to bail out one faltering insurance company, AIG. Granted, any fiscal responsibility demonstrated by President McCain will be an improvement over the profligacy of George Bush, who learned to spell "veto" only after the Democrats took control of Congress -- further evidence that "gridlock" has its benefits.
While studies show that voters are most influenced by their perceptions of a candidate's values, authenticity, and trustworthiness, chipping away each one's shiny veneer and exposing his raw imperfections have only reinforced my indecision; I am now compelled to resort to what all the players in this ongoing drama so assiduously avoid: a serious examination of the issues.
Fear is a great motivator of human behavior, and the Republican/Conservative propaganda generator has seized upon the public's overwrought fear of high -- and higher -- gas prices to manufacture its newest incendiary wedge issue, brilliantly dumbed-down to the oily epigram: "Drill here, drill now, pay less." Anyone opposed to this slick formula for rescuing our American way of life from our OPEC tormentors is immediately stigmatized as an animal-loving, tree-hugging, obstructionist radical wacko. In the face of this onslaught, McCain has changed his position on off-shore drilling, and even Obama, in lockstep with his own Party's tentative concessions, has thrown out the white flag.
I am not convinced that this country will ever be able economically to extract enough oil from its supposed reserves to impact the world market price. I believe that domestic drilling will further strengthen the hand of the avaricious oil companies and inflate their already obscene profits, and that the only way to break their -- and OPEC's -- stranglehold on our thirst for fossil fuel is for us to pursue alternative sources of energy. Although Obama continues to spurn the nuclear option, I believe he would be more aggressive in promoting a progressive, strategic, multi-faceted energy policy.
Both candidates' web sites address the twin issues of rising health care costs and the forty-seven million persons who lack health insurance -- with page after page of promises which, in my humble opinion, they have no reasonable chance of fulfilling, or only at an astronomical unfunded cost. Reducing health care costs is a noble objective, and very appealing to employers like me who spend almost twelve percent of our payrolls on our employees' health insurance. While both pieces of boilerplate identify opportunities for improving efficiency and eliminating waste, I doubt that meaningful savings can be wrung out of a system bloated by Medicare and Medicaid cost-shifting and by the public's insatiable appetite for medical services and sophisticated technology, which hospitals and physicians are only too happy to indulge.
I see no way of funding many aspects of Obama's plan -- including the subsidies he will remit to low-income families and individuals to enroll in his national health program. For those not eligible for a subsidy, I see no incentive for them to enroll. McCain offers a refundable tax credit of up to $5000 to enable uninsured families to purchase insurance, which makes sense to me, as long as it is available to low and middle income families who pay no income taxes, who are most likely to be uninsured, and who otherwise would lack the incentive and wherewithal to enroll in a plan.
Neither agenda demonstrates the bold, innovative, collaborative thinking that will be required to solve our country's health care crisis. I give McCain's the edge as being more fiscally responsible.
The whole discussion may be moot, however, shoved off the table by the government's one trillion dollar bailout of sinking financial institutions.
I have always been skeptical of supply-siders' contention that changes in marginal tax rates materially affect people's behavior. What ambitious (greedy) entrepreneur is going to work less because he has to pay three percent more in taxes? Whether or not the boom was attributable to the dot-com proliferation, the economy thrived when Bill Clinton raised taxes and reduced the deficit. Whether or not the current bust should be blamed on the excesses of unrestrained capitalism, the Bush tax cuts have not inoculated the economy against cyclical downturns.
In a former life, McCain objected to those tax cuts as favoring the wealthy; he now sees them through a different lens, and proposes to make them permanent, increase the personal exemption for individual filers, and unfetter the job (and) profit producing power of corporate America by reducing its tax rate by ten percentage points. Obama wants to raise the tax rates on dividends, capital gains, and individuals earning $250,000, and the threshold on payroll taxes, none of which I am opposed to, if these increases were to be used to reduce the federal deficit, last clocked at $400 billion, and rising rapidly. By most calculations, however, Obama's ambitious new spending programs, which include refunds or credits for millions of low and middle income earners, will consume far more than his additional tax revenue.
In just one week, the economic and financial situation in this country has altered dramatically. The federal government (or the taxpayer) has assumed tremendous obligations. Tax cuts and refunds may earn applause on the campaign trail, but sooner or later, when the cheering stops, Presidents and Congressmen will have to face the reality that they don't have enough money to buy all the votes they want, and that someone is going to have to make some hard decisions. From what I have heard so far, and, as Peggy Noonan wrote yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, I have deep reservations if either McCain or Obama is up to the task.
Which leaves me still undecided.
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