https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/02/the-last-time-democracy-almost-died-the-new-yorker-1.html
OK. I have got to stop playing my position, because this is more important for America today: Jill Lepore: The Last Time Democracy Almost Died https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/03/the-last-time-democracy-almost-died?: 'The endless train of academics were also called upon to contribute to the nation's growing number of periodicals. In 1937, The New Republic, arguing that "at no time since the rise of political democracy have its tenets been so seriously challenged as they are today," ran a series on "The Future of Democracy," featuring pieces by the likes of Bertrand Russell and John Dewey. "Do you think that political democracy is now on the wane?" the editors asked each writer. The series' lead contributor, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, took issue with the question, as philosophers, thankfully, do. "I call this kind of question 'meteorological,' " he grumbled. "It is like asking, 'Do you think that it is going to rain today? Had I better take my umbrella?' " The trouble, Croce explained, is that political problems are not external forces beyond our control; they are forces within our control. "We need solely to make up our own minds and to act"...
-- via my feedly newsfeed...Don't ask whether you need an umbrella. Go outside and stop the rain. Here are some of the sorts of people who went out and stopped the rain in the nineteen-thirties: schoolteachers, city councillors, librarians, poets, union organizers, artists, precinct workers, soldiers, civil-rights activists, and investigative reporters. They knew what they were prepared to defend and they defended it, even though they also knew that they risked attack from both the left and the right. Charles Beard (Mary Ritter's husband) spoke out against the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, the Rupert Murdoch of his day, when he smeared scholars and teachers as Communists. "The people who are doing the most damage to American democracy are men like Charles A. Beard," said a historian at Trinity College in Hartford, speaking at a high school on the subject of "Democracy and the Future," and warning against reading Beard's books—at a time when Nazis in Germany and Austria were burning "un-German" books in public squares. That did not exactly happen here, but in the nineteen-thirties four of five American superintendents of schools recommended assigning only those U.S. history textbooks which "omit any facts likely to arouse in the minds of the students question or doubt concerning the justice of our social order and government." Beard's books, God bless them, raised doubts.
Beard didn't back down. Nor did W.P.A. muralists and artists, who were subject to the same attack...
No comments:
Post a Comment