Click here to see articles about the holiday published across the Internet.

#1 Myth

Retailers Have Ruined Christmas By Commercializing It

Until retailers began to see in Christmas the opportunity to market their merchandise the holiday attracted little of the attention it does now. It was retailers who made Christmas exciting. It was they who turned Santa Claus into a national icon. Montgomery Ward gave us Rudolf the red-nosed reindeer. Coca-Cola helped popularize the smiling Santa. Retailers discovered the commercial possibilities of Christmas after the Civil War. Only then did newspapers regularly begin to feature advertising sales associated with the holiday.

Retailers helped establish Christmas as an American tradition by persuading Protestants to overcome centuries of hostility to the holiday, which had long been identified as a popish import. The leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony so disdained Christmas that in 1659 they passed a law prohibiting the public celebration of the holiday, punishing"anybody who is found observing [it], by abstinence from labor, feasting, or any other way." The law was repealed 25 years later, but the prejudice against Christmas remained strong. Judge Samuel Sewall was delighted to be able to report in his diary in 1685 that he did not see a single person celebrating the holiday.

#2 Myth

Christmas Cards Are a Venerable Tradition

Yes, Virginia, Christmas cards are venerable. But it was the Victorian businessman who made the Christmas card an American tradition. Before the middle of the 19th century Americans simply did not send holiday greeting cards at Christmas.

#3 Myth

Clement Moore Wrote the Poem,"The Night Before Christmas"

Several years ago Vassar professor and professional debunker Don Foster concluded that Moore did not write the famous 1822 poem with which he is so identified. Foster claimed, according to an account in the New York Times in 2000, that the poem's"spirit and style are starkly at odds with the body of Moore's other writings." Foster speculated that the poem was actually written by Henry Livingston, Jr., an author from Poughkeepsie (where Vassar happens to be located).

The story made a big splash in the newspapers. It was then promptly forgotten. The same cannot be said of the poem.

#4 Myth

Christmas Trees Are Traditional

The Christmas tree first made its appearance in America in the middle of the 18th century, thanks to German immigrants. But a hundred years later it was still rare. In 1851 a Cleveland, Ohio reverend who had recently emigrated from Germany put up a Christmas tree in his local church. He was roundly condemned. Nobody before had ever put up a Christmas tree in an American church. Victorians in the latter half of the 19th century slowly began adopting the German tradition, but the Christmas tree remained controversial. In the 1880s the New York Times editorialized against the Christmas tree. When Teddy Roosevelt became president he denounced the practice of cutting down trees for Christmas. Good conservationist that he was, he declared the practice a waste of timber.

#5 Myth

Santa Was Always Fat and Jolly

Whether he was a Dutch creation, as so many believe, is, according to scholar Eric C. Wolf, doubtful."There is no evidence," says Wolf,"that the Santa Claus myth existed in New Amsterdam, or for a century after English occupation." To be sure, Santa is loosely based on the European figure, St. Nick, the fourth century Bishop of Demre, Turkey, who was said to have carried a sack full of toys for children. But it was only after the Revolution, when writers began inventing American traditions, that Santa suddenly achieved broad popularity. The myth was slow to build. Not until 1821 was Santa seen flying in the sky behind a pack of reindeer. Only in 1837 do we find evidence that he arrived in American homes via the chimney. And not until the Civil War did Santa look the way we imagine him. In colonial days he was often described as thin and beardless. In 1809 Washington Irving imagined Santa as a bulky man who smoked a pipe and wore a Dutch broad-brimmed hat and baggy breeches. Later, Santa was depicted as a fat man with brown hair and a big smile. Then in 1863 Thomas Nast gave us our modern idea of Santa Claus, as a jolly fat man with a flowing white beard dressed in a red suit. Here it is:

Usually in off-year elections the party holding the presidency loses seats in Congress. Why? This is mainly because in the midterm elections the weak candidates who rode in to victory on the coattails of their party's presidential candidate two years earlier find it difficult to win when running for election on their own.

In the 2002 off-year elections in George W. Bush's first term Republicans confounded many pundits by succeeding in adding to their majorities in both the House and the Senate.

Just how impressive was this victory? At the time there was considerable confusion about the historical dimensions of the Republican victory. Dick Morris said on TV that it was the greatest off-year election victory any president ever had. Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, told the press, "Not only have we kept the House, but we've gained seats. This is the first time since the Civil War." CNN, citing Fleischer's quote, reported "that for the first time in U.S. history the president's party gained seats in the House during the administration's first midterm elections." Newsweek's Howard Fineman on NBC gushed that Bush's victory "is just amazing." Fineman added: "The fact is it's not been since John F. Kennedy in 1962 and really going all the way back to Teddy Roosevelt where a sitting president's party has done as well as the Republicans did with George Bush. It really is historic."

Who was right? Were any of these people right? Almost any channel you turned on pundits were drawing different historical parallels. And almost always they made mistakes, though few noticed. Here are the facts: Since the Civil War and Reconstruction, three presidents have scored off-year victories in Congress: FDR, Bill Clinton and now George W. Bush. FDR's victory was the greatest. It was particularly impressive because it followed on the heels of his landslide victory in 1932, which was accompanied by the gain of 90 seats in the House and 13 in the Senate. One would have expected many of these members, swept in on Roosevelt's coattails, to be vulnerable the next election, as usually occurs. Yet this did not happen. The freshmen elected in 1932 kept their jobs and a new class of Democratic freshmen joined them.

	1934 House: Democrats Gain 9 Seats Senate: Democrats Gain 9 Seats
	1998 House: Democrats Gain 5 Seats Senate: Democrats Gain 0 Seats
	2002 House: Republicans Gain 4 Seats Senate: Republicans Gain 2 Seats

Howard Fineman raised a parallel with Kennedy. Kennedy's record was mixed. While his party gained 2 seats in the Senate, it lost 5 seats in the House. Hence, Kennedy was not in the league of FDR, Clinton or Bush. Bush far outdid Kennedy.

Fineman also mentioned Teddy Roosevelt. So did a lot of others, claiming that Bush's victory in 2002 was comparable to TR's in 1902, exactly 100 years earlier. In Media Land, this is a killer fact. (A) It rhymes (2002 and 1902). (B) It is based on the Rule of Hundreds (any anniversary of 100 years is significant). And (C) it reinforces the association of Bush and other popular Republican presidents. Thus, Brian Wilson on Fox News reported: "You have to go back to Teddy Roosevelt, 100 years ago, to find another case where a sitting Republican president did well in the House during a midterm election." Even the Associated Press highlighted the comparison of 2002 and 1902: "Since Abraham Lincoln was president, the party holding the White House has lost House seats in every midterm election except three - 1902, 1934 and 1998."

The comparison of 2002 with 1902 was based on a misreading of the tables you find in the backs of books about presidents. At first glance it appears from the charts that during his first term TR's party gained 11 seats in the off-year election of 1902. In 1900 the party won 197 seats in the House; two years later, in 1902, 208. (208-197=11). The comparison overlooks the fact that while there were more Republicans there were also more Democrats, owing to an expansion in the size of Congress. (Every decade from 1850 to 1900 the House grew in size to keep up with population growth and the admission of new states.) Keeping that in mind, the 1902 election actually marked a slight decline in the fortunes of the Republican Party. In 1900 the Republicans had a 46 seat House majority (or about 57 percent). Two years later that majority shrank to 30 (54 percent). The Senate remained the same. Not bad, as off-year contests usually go, but nothing to brag about. And by no means was that election comparable with the one we just witnessed.

Related Links

• HNN Poll: Midterm Postmortem 2010—Have Your Say!
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• Political Highlights Midterm Elections Coverage - Bonnie K. Goodman

Will’s article tells the story of Mecklenburg and sets it up against Jefferson’s Declaration and explores the historic struggle to get both recognized as the first true declaration of independence from Great Britain.

Wills writes:

The impatient patriots here had splendidly short fuses in 1775. Those who tilled the startlingly red clay or who lived in the town named for George III's wife Charlotte might have been bemused had they foreseen the annual hoopla that commemorates July 4, 1776.

What occurred that day in Philadelphia might have been a Declaration of Independence, but the first such was enacted here on May 20, 1775.

Will does not tell the whole story surrounding the Mecklenburg Declaration though. He treats the story as if it is fact, ignoring the likely possibility that it is false.

The hoary story, based on the memories of eyewitnesses and oral histories, is that on May 20, 1775 a group of Protestant men gathered in Charlotte, in the county of Mecklenburg, to declare independence from Great Britain; a declaration of independence of some sort was supposedly signed. Believers later suggested that they knew where the declaration was precisely made. Former North Carolina Governor William Alexander Graham said in in a speech delivered in 1875 that “The event occurred (as I believe it did occur) in the immediate vicinity of the residence of the families from which I am descended.” Yet there is no documentary evidence from 1775 in support of the claim.

Historian William Henry Hoyt, writing in The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence (1907), summed up the known facts: “evidences dating from 1775 and onward of a document of this nature, copies of doubtful origin of the document in question, a copy written from memory in 1800, testimony of reliable persons who stated between 1819 and 1830 that they had been spectators and participants at a meeting which adopted it, and traditions are cited to prove the genuineness and authenticity.”

For generations people have fought over the legitimacy of Mecklenburg’s Declaration. The most widely known participants in the debate were John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Adams charged that Jefferson had plagiarized the Mecklenburg Declaration when writing his own draft in 1776.

The first time a text of the document appeared was in 1800, fifteen years after the alleged 1775 creation, when it was written down by someone who claimed to remember it from memory. The absence of a contemporary record is suspicious. The citizens of the county of Mecklenburg did indeed express patriotic fervor early on. In May 31, 1775 they barred loyal British workers from employment. But the passage of a formal declaration of independence would have been a far more serious matter.

The state of North Carolina has put the date May 20, 1775 on its state seal and flag. The state rests its case on an investigation of the declaration undertaken in 1820 by the North Carolina Legislature. On the basis of interviews with several witnesses researchers concluded the story was accurate. But it strains credulity to believe that the act of declaring independence would not have been published or at least written down at the time the action was reputedly taken. For George Will to report the story as if it were true is misleading.

]]> Mon, 09 Nov 2026 21:49:23 +0000 https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/52245 https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/52245 0 Recently, HNN ran a breaking news story published by the Washington Post entitled “The ‘Obama before Obama’ ” by Kevin Merida.  The article begins with the story of the purportedly first African American elected to public office, John Mercer Langston, who was from Virginia and was elected township clerk in Brownhelm, Ohio in 1855.  Merida also discusses Langston’s other achievements, including being founder of the future Howard University Law School.

After a brief look at Langston’s life, Merida then weaves it with stories of black leaders in Louisa County, Virginia, where Langston was born in 1829.  He also discusses some locals’ views about Barack Obama’s rise to become the Democratic nominee for President.  The article focuses on the progress from Langston to Obama and is a good piece overall.

Unfortunately, there is a major error regarding the historical record with this article.  Based upon two encyclopedias dealing with African American history, HNN has learned that John Langston was not the first African American elected to public office.  Indeed, there were two men before him.

The first African American to be elected to a public office was Wentworth Cheswill (1746-1817) of New Hampshire.  Cheswill was a prominent citizen of Newmarket, NH, and was appointed justice of the peace in 1768.  He briefly served with American forces at Saratoga.  After the war, he was again active in local affairs.  He was elected to the position of selectman (a town administrator) for Newmarket in 1780.  He served in this capacity, as well as an assessor from 1783-1787 and served in several local offices in the subsequent years.  In 1806, he ran unsuccessfully for state senator.

The other African American elected to public office before Langston was Alexander Twilight (1795-1857) of Vermont.  He was the first African American to earn a degree at an American university when he graduated from Middlebury College.  He began a successful teaching career, which included founding a school.  In 1836, the village of Brownington, Vermont elected Twilight to a one-year term in the state legislature, thus making him the first black state representative in American history.  After his term, Twilight continued teaching until retiring in 1855.

Unfortunately, most comments on the article do not mention the error, and focus instead on the current political situation. A few applaud the article for the history lesson, but miss the error. Only three comments mention Twilight, and none mention Cheswill. As of Friday, June 27, 2008, the Washington Post had not responded to our queries. An automated reply stated that the paper would be investigating the article.

Overall, Merida’s article was interesting, but unfortunately, if the paper corrects the record and gives proper credit to Cheswill and Twilight, it will not have the intended effect.  All three men deserve remembrance for their contributions to American history as pioneers in the participation by African Americans in our nation’s political process.

Hat Tip to HNN reader Paul Finkelman for drawing our attention to the Post's error.

Sources

Finkelman, Paul, Ed.  "Cheswill, Wentworth."  Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass.  Vol. 2 (NY:  Oxford University Press, 2006), 437.

Finkelman, Paul, Ed.  "Twilight, Alexander."  Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass.  Vol. 3 (NY:  Oxford University Press, 2006), 2764.

Robinson, Greg.  "Cheswill, Wentworth."  Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History.  Jack Salzman, David Lionel Smith, and Cornel West, Eds.  Vol. I (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 529.

Robinson, Greg.  "Twilight, Alexander Lucius."  Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History.  Jack Salzman, David Lionel Smith, and Cornel West, Eds.  Vol. V (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 2691.

The irony is too delicious to pass without comment: the screenwriter whose "based on a true story" horse race that never took place rises in florid indignation and calls my column, "slanted and poorly researched." Please. Mr. Fusco should get off his high horse.

But let me address the complaint. At issue is the following sentence: "Nowhere in the site is Fusco or Disney mentioned, and in fact Fusco has attempted to hide his connection with the site. The sleaze is piled higher than horse manure."

First, some background. When frankhopkins.com went live, before the release of Hidalgo, the site was relatively small, with just a few pages. It included (and still includes) the following:

According to the U.S. Remount Service Journal of 1936, [Frank Hopkins] competed in and won over 400 long-distance races, including a legendary 3,000-mile endurance ride across the Arabian Desert in 1890 on his mustang stallion, Hidalgo.

An upcoming Walt Disney movie is to be based on his legendary adventures in the saddle.

Please note: on the web site, it is a "Walt Disney movie," but in Mr. Fusco's response, it magically transforms into "my film." In addition, although Mr. Fusco says he never denied owning the web site, he never explained why, if that was the case, he didn't just come out and say so on the web site. Instead, it says: "this site is sponsored by The Horse of the Americas Registry & IRAM - the Institute of Range and the American Mustang." This reticence seems puzzling, considering Mr. Fusco's willingness to do many press interviews to promote the film.

Also puzzling is the whole question of whose name pops up after doing a "whois" search for the owner of frankhopkins.com. According to the Long Riders' Guild, John Fusco of Morrisville, VT was listed as the owner of frankhopkins.com starting March 14, 2003. Then on May 10 that year the owner became David Zahn. The Long Riders' Guild web sit stated that "embarrassing historical discoveries prompted Mr. Fusco to attempt to disguise his direct involvement in the Hopkins website." Mr. Fusco (somewhat hysterically) said I "borrowed" the guild's accusations. I did nothing of the sort. I looked at the evidence and expressed my disdain at a whole range of dishonest and questionable actions surrounding the Hidalgo imbroglio. I stand by my article, and only concede that instead of saying that Fusco and Disney were not mentioned in the site, I should have said that there was no evidence on the site they were connected with it, despite the fact that clearly Mr. Fusco was connected, and he had been paid by Disney. I accept Mr. Fusco's assertion that Disney directly "never had anything to do with this site," but defend my suspicions at the time I wrote my piece. It seemed unusual that if Mr. Fusco indeed owned the site, he would have the names of the two horse groups listed rather than his own. In addition, I found it entirely plausible that Disney would fund a site (perhaps it did, indirectly) to promote in a slick and glowing manner the central character in one of its soon-to-be-released movies, especially since the Frank Hopkins "stories" so central to Mr. Fusco's script were coming under such withering attack by the experts.

But that is not all. Mr. Fusco says his name was removed as owner because he "values his privacy." I did a "whois" search for frankhopkins.com just now (March 28, 2004, 12:43 p.m.). Here is the result:

Registrant: John Fusco (johnf@FrankHopkins.com) 655 W.Vistoso Highlands Tucson, AZ 85737 US 310-490-4836

Um, "privacy"? It only took a few minutes of googling to learn that Mr. Fusco does not live full time in Tucson, but resides also at Red Road Farm in Morrisville, VT (pop. 2009), not far from Stowe. I also learned the name of his wife, son, and adopted brother in the Lakota tribe. Oh, and there was the sad tale of the intestinal problems of his horse, Little Fox -- all disclosed to the world by the "private" Mr. Fusco.

But let us all calm down and be reasonable. A big reason for all the Hidalgo hue-and-cry was Mr. Fusco's and Disney's insistence on using those five little words: "based on a true story." Historians take their subject very, very seriously and take an almost proprietary pride in promoting and defending their areas of study. Or, to paraphrase Mr. Fusco: "You can say anything you want about me, but I'll have to ask you not to treat my profession that way." I would ask Mr. Fusco to imagine if a fellow screenwriter wrote a script "based on a true story" about a Lakota warrior who raced a Mustang from Moscow to Murmansk, and based his account on one very flimsy source, one that all of his Lakota brothers and sisters said was a fraud. Would he stay silent and say, "It's only a movie." Or would he promote the truth?

Finally, I have noticed that frankhopkins.com has become a horse of a different color. In the past weeks there have been added many new pages dealing with the Spanish Mustang, material that was not on the site before Hidalgo opened in theaters. I leave it to readers to draw their own conclusions about why the site is becoming less about Frank Hopkins, the galloping liar, and more about the horses he loved and fought to preserve. (Note also the emphasis in Mr. Fusco's response: In two instances he mentions Spanish Mustang before Frank Hopkins.) In any case, the shift in focus is a welcome transformation, and I wish Mr. Fusco success with his horses and with his future engagements with history.

The myth of "McCarthyism" is the greatest Orwellian fraud of our times. Liberals are fanatical liars, then as now. The portrayal of Sen. Joe McCarthy as a wild-eyed demagogue destroying innocent lives is sheer liberal hobgoblinism. Liberals weren't hiding under the bed during the McCarthy era. They were systematically undermining the nation's ability to defend itself, while waging a bellicose campaign of lies to blacken McCarthy's name. Liberals denounced McCarthy because they were afraid of getting caught, so they fought back like animals to hide their own collaboration with a regime as evil as the Nazis. As Whittaker Chambers said: "Innocence seldom utters outraged shrieks. Guilt does."

At the time, half the country realized liberals were lying. But after a half century of liberal myth-making, even the disgorging of Soviet and American archives half a century later could not overcome their lies. In 1995, the U.S. government released its cache of Soviet cables that had been decoded during the Cold War in a top-secret undertaking known as the Venona Project. The cables proved the overwhelming truth of McCarthy's charges. Naturally, therefore, the release of decrypted Soviet cables was barely mentioned by the New York Times. It might have detracted from stories of proud and unbowed victims of "McCarthyism." They were not so innocent after all, it turns out.

Soviet spies in the government were not a figment of right-wing imaginations. McCarthy was not tilting at windmills. He was tilting at an authentic communist conspiracy that had been laughed off by the Democratic Party. The Democrats had unpardonably connived with the greatest evil of the 20th century. This could not be nullified. But liberals could at least hope to redeem the Democratic Party by dedicating themselves to rewriting history and blackening reputations. This is what liberals had done repeatedly throughout the Cold War. At every strategic moment this century, liberals would wage a campaign of horrendous lies and disinformation simply to dull the discovery the American people had made. They had gotten good at it.

There were, admittedly, a few rare and striking exceptions to the left's overall obtuseness to communist totalitarianism. John F. Kennedy's pronouncements on communism could have been spoken by Joe McCarthy. For all his flaws, Truman unquestionably loved his country. He was a completely different breed from today's Democrats. Through the years, there were various epiphanic moments creating yet more anti-communist Democrats. The Stalin-Hitler pact, Alger Hiss' prothonotary warbler, information about the purges and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago" – all these had their effect.

But after World War II, the Democratic Party suffered a form of what France had succumbed to after World War I. The entire party had lost its nerve for sacrifice, heroism and bravery. Beginning in the '50s, there was a real battle for the soul of the Democratic Party. By the late '60s, the battle was over. The anti-communist Democrats had lost.

Source:"I Dare Call it Treason," Frontpagemag.com (June 26, 2003).

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Thomas Reeves (Author of a biography of McCarthy)

In case you missed it, Ann Coulter, in her new book Treason, is calling McCarthyism a liberal myth and labelling Joe McCarthy a hero. The Far Right has gone off the cliff, folks. Arthur Herman's book on the Wisconsin Senator started this nonsense. My own biography, I contend modestly, needs to be studied by conservative journalists, along with the huge bibliography that documents McCarthyism fully.

Yes, the Venona Papers are important, but they, like the HUAC hearings on Hollywood, have nothing directly to do with McCarthy. Would that history were required in today's colleges and universities.

Source: Comment posted on the list run by Richard Jensen, conservativenet (July 1, 2003)

Andrew Sullivan

In [Ann] Coulter's world, there are two types of people: conservatives and liberals. These aren't groups of people with competing ideas. They are the repositories of good and evil. There are no distinctions among conservatives or among liberals. To admit the complexity of political discourse would immediately require Coulter to think, explain, argue. But why bother when you can earn millions insulting?

Here are a few comments about "liberals" that Coulter has deployed over the years: "Liberals are fanatical liars." Liberals are "devoted to class warfare, ethnic hatred and intolerance." Liberals "hate democracy because democracy requires persuasion and compromise rather than brute political force." Some of this is obvious hyperbole, designed for a partisan audience. Some of it could be explained as good, dirty fun. It was this formula that gained her enormous sales for her last book, "Slander," which detailed in sometimes hilarious prose, the liberal bias in much of American media. But her latest tome ups the ante even further. If biased liberal editors are busy slandering conservatives, liberals more generally are dedicated to the subversion of their own country. They are guilty of - yes - treason.

A few nuggets: "As a rule of thumb, Democrats opposed anything opposed by their cherished Soviet Union. The Soviet Union did not like the idea of a militarily strong America. Neither did the Democrats!" Earlier in the same vein: "Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America. They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America's self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant." And then: "The myth of 'McCarthyism' is the greatest Orwellian fraud of our times. Liberals are fanatical liars, then as now. The portrayal of Sen. Joe McCarthy as a wild-eyed demagogue destroying innocent lives is sheer liberal hobgoblinism. Liberals weren't hiding under the bed during the McCarthy era. They were systematically undermining the nation's ability to defend itself, while waging a bellicose campaign of lies to blacken McCarthy's name."

Coulter does not seek to complicate her view of liberals with any serious or lengthy treatment of the many Democrats and liberals who were ferociously anti-Communist. Scoop Jackson? Harry Truman? John F Kennedy? Lyndon Vietnam Johnson? She doesn't substantively deal with those Democrats today - from Senator Joe Lieberman to the New Republic magazine - who were anti-Saddam before many Republicans were. She is absolutely right to insist that many on the Left are in denial about some Americans' complicity in Soviet evil, the guilt of true traitors like Alger Hiss or the Rosenbergs, who helped Stalin and his heirs in their murderous pursuits. And part of the frustration of reading Coulter is that her basic causes are the right ones: the American media truly is biased to the left; some liberals and Democrats were bona fide traitors during the Cold War; many on the far left today are essentially anti-American and hope for the defeat of their country in foreign wars....

One of the most reputable scholars who has studied the McCarthy era in great detail, Ron Radosh, is appalled at the damage Coulter has done to the work he and many others have painstakingly done over the years. "I am furious and upset about her book," he told me last week. "I am reading it - she uses my stuff, Harvey Klehr and John Haynes, Allen Weinstein etc. to distort what we actually say and to make ludicrous and historically incorrect arguments. You might recall my lengthy and negative review in The New Republic a few years ago of Herman's book on McCarthy; well, she is ten times worse than Herman. At least he tried to use bona fide historical methods of research and argument." Now Radosh has endured ostracism and abuse for insisting that many of McCarthy's victims were indeed Communist spies or agents. But he draws the line at Coulter's crude and inflammatory defense of McCarthy. "I think it is important that those who are considered critics of left/liberalism don't stop using our critical faculties when self-proclaimed conservatives start producing crap."

Source: The London Sunday Times (July 5, 2003)

Joe Conason

"Slander" is defined in Bouvier's Law Dictionary as "a false defamation (expressed in spoken words, signs, or gestures) which injures the character or reputation of the person defamed." The venerable American legal lexicon goes on to note that such defamatory words are sometimes "actionable in themselves, without proof of special damages," particularly when they impute "guilt of some offence for which the party, if guilty, might be indicted and punished by the criminal courts; as to call a person a 'traitor.'"

So how appropriate it is that in the rapidly growing Ann Coulter bibliography, last year's bestselling "Slander" is now followed by "Treason," her new catalog of defamation against every liberal and every Democrat -- indeed, every American who has dared to disagree with her or her spirit guide, Joe McCarthy -- as "traitors." And like a criminal who subconsciously wants to be caught, Coulter seems compelled to reveal at last her true role model. (Some of us had figured this out already.)

She not only lionizes the late senator, whose name is synonymous with demagogue, but with a vengeance also adopts his methods and pursues his partisan purposes. She sneers, she smears, she indicts by falsehood and distortion -- and she frankly expresses her desire to destroy any political party or person that resists Republican conservatism (as defined by her).

"Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America," according to her demonology. "They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America's self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant. Fifty years of treason hasn't slowed them down." And: "Liberals relentlessly attack their country, but we can't call them traitors, which they manifestly are, because that would be 'McCarthyism,' which never existed." (Never existed? Her idol gave his 1952 book that very word as its title.) ...

The likelihood is that Coulter's many avid fans are as conveniently ignorant of the past as she seems to be. So the rubes who buy "Treason" will believe her when she accuses George Catlett Marshall, the great general who oversaw the reconstruction of Europe, of nurturing a "strange attraction" to "sedition" and of scheming to assist rather than hinder Soviet expansion.

Her duped readers will believe that Marshall and President Harry S. Truman opposed Stalin only because Republicans won the midterm elections in 1946. They probably won't know that Truman confronted the Soviets in the Mediterranean with a naval task force several months before Election Day; or that the new Republican majority cut Truman's requested military budget by $500 million as soon as they took over Congress in January 1947, nearly crippling the American occupation of Germany and Japan; or that Truman, Marshall and Dean Acheson had to plead with the isolationist Republican leadership to oppose Russian designs on Greece and Turkey.

Her deceptive style is exemplified in an anecdote she lifts from an actual historian and twists to smear Truman. She writes: "Most breathtakingly, in March 1946, Truman ostentatiously rebuffed Churchill after his famous Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri. Immediately after Churchill's speech, Truman instructed his Secretary of State Dean Acheson not to attend a reception for Churchill a week later in New York."

In that passage -- footnoted to James Chace's magisterial 1998 biography of Acheson -- Coulter demonstrates that she is both an intentional liar and an incompetent writer. The pages she cites from Chace explain quite clearly that Acheson (who was not then Secretary of State and would not be promoted to that office until 1949) was urged to avoid the New York reception by Secretary of State James Byrnes, not Truman. The British apparently didn't notice that "ostentatious rebuff," since they immediately invited Acheson and his wife to a cordial lunch with Churchill in Washington. And as for Truman, Chace notes that it was he who had invited Churchill to Missouri, his home state, to deliver the speech -- which the American president read in advance, assuring the former prime minister that his strong warning about communist intentions would "do nothing but good."

So replete is "Treason" with falsehoods and distortions, as well as so much plain bullshit, that it may well create a cottage industry of corrective fact-checking, just as "Slander" did last year. (The fun has already begun with Brendan Nyhan's devastating review on the Spinsanity Web site. So far the Spinsanity sages have found "at least five factual claims that are indisputably false" in "Treason," along with the usual Coulter techniques of phony quotation, misleading sourcing, and sentences ripped from context or falsely attributed.)

Such heavy-handed deception was precisely the sort of tactic employed by McCarthy himself against Acheson and all his other targets. In his book "McCarthyism: The Fight for America," for instance, he charged that the Truman aide had "hailed the Communist victory in China as 'a new day which has dawned in Asia.'" Of course, Acheson had neither said nor written anything of the kind.

To Coulter, McCarthy is simply a great man worthy of her emulation. In her alternate universe, he isn't the slimy traducer Americans have come to know and despise. He's bright, witty, warm-hearted and macho, a sincere farm boy who exposes the treasonous cowardice of the urbane Acheson, Marshall and other "sniffing pantywaists." She seems to regard him as kind of a Jimmy Stewart type, albeit with jowls and five o'clock shadow and a serious drinking problem.

And he never, ever attacked anyone who didn't deserve it.

"His targets were Soviet sympathizers and Soviet spies," Coulter proclaims without qualification. But elsewhere she says that he wasn't even really trying to find either communists or spies, but only seeking to expose "security risks" in government jobs. Whatever his mission, it was noble and succeeding admirably until 1954, when "liberals immobilized him with their Army-McCarthy hearings and censure investigation."

Actually, McCarthy was brought down by his own televised misconduct during those hearings -- and by the outrage not of Democrats but of Republicans, including President Eisenhower and a caucus of courageous GOP senators. (Among the latter was the current president's grandfather, Prescott Bush of Connecticut, whose vote to censure McCarthy is another little fact that Coulter forgets to mention.)

The truth is that some of McCarthy's targets were or had been communists -- and therefore by definition "sympathizers" of the Soviet Union -- but he never uncovered a single indictable spy. There had been dozens of Soviet agents in government before and during World War II. But those espionage rings had been broken up by the FBI well before McCarthy showed up brandishing a bogus "list" of 57 or 205 or 81 Communists in the State Department.

Yet the Wisconsin windbag amassed sufficient power for a time to destroy innocent individuals, most notably Owen Lattimore, described smirkingly by Coulter as McCarthy's "biggest star" and the man he once named as Stalin's "top espionage agent" in the United States. "Somewhat surprisingly," as Coulter is obliged to note, Lattimore's name has yet to be found in Moscow's excavated KGB archives or in the Venona cables decrypted by U.S. Army counterespionage agents. The dearth of evidence against Lattimore matters not at all to Coulter, however. Though the eminent China expert was neither a spy nor a communist, he certainly knew and worked with some communists -- and worst of all, he disagreed with the far right about U.S. policy toward China.

Source: Salon (July 4, 2003)

Related Links

• Rick Shenkman, "Remember Watergate?" (How some conservatives, including Ann Coulter, have rewritten the history of Watergate.)

• Dorothy Rabinowitz, "A Conspiracy So Vast" (Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2003).

• David Horowitz, "The Trouble with Treason” (frontpagemag.com, July 8, 2003).

• Brendan Nyhan, "Screed: With Treason, Ann Coulter once again defines a new low in America's political debate," (Spinsanity, June 30, 2003)

• Bryan Keefer, "Throwing the book at her: The bias Ann Coulter documents best may be her own (Salon, July 13, 2003).

"As he said, any person that would gas his own people is a threat to the world."--Scott McClellan, White House spokesman, May 31, 2002

Over the past six months President Bush has repeatedly reminded the public that Saddam Hussein gassed his own people. What he has neglected to mention is that at the time Saddam did so the United States did nothing to stop him. Indeed, as Samantha Power makes clear in an account in her new book, A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, the United States refused even to condemn the killing of civilians.

The infamous gas attack took place in mid-March 1988 in the Kurdish town of Halabja, the crossroads of an ongoing battle waged between a joint Kurdish-Iranian force and the Iraqi army. Caught in the middle were innocent civilians, including women and children.

From Power's account:

"It was different from the other bombs," one witness remembered. "There was a huge sound, a huge flame and it had very destructive ability. If you touched one part of your body that had been burned, your hand burned also. It caused things to catch fire." The planes flew low enough for the petrified Kurds to take note of the markings, which were those of the Iraqi air force. Many families tumbled into primitive air-raid shelters they had built outside their homes. When the gasses seeped through the cracks, they poured out into the streets in a panic. There they found friends and family frozen in time like a modern version of Pompeii: slumped a few yards behind a baby carriage, caught permanently holding the hand of a loved one or shielding a child from the poisoned air, or calmly collapsed behind a car steering wheel.

Halabja was the "most notorious and the deadliest single gas attack against the Kurds," killing 5,000 civilians. But as Power notes, it was just one of some forty chemical assaults staged by Iraq against the Kurdish people.

The official U.S. government reaction to Halabja? At first the government downplayed the reports, which were coming from Iranian sources. Once the media had confirmed the story and pictures of the dead villagers had been shown on television, the U.S. denounced the use of gas. Marlin Fitzwater told reporters, "Everyone in the administration saw the same reports you saw last night. They were horrible, outrageous, disgusting and should serve as a reminder to all countries of why chemical warfare should be banned." But as Power observes, "The United States issued no threats or demands." The government's objection was that Saddam had used gas to kill his own citizens, not that he had killed them. Indeed, subsequently State Department officials indicated that both sides--Iraq and Iran--were responsible perhaps for the gassing of civilian Kurds.

On August 20, 1988 Iran and Iraq ended their war. Within days Iraq again gassed the Kurds. A front-page story in the New York Times summed up the purpose of the latest assault: "Iraq has begun a major offensive [meant to] crush the 40-year-long insurgency once and for all." After a delay of weeks Secretary of State George Shultz condemned the assaults. But the United States again failed to act, even as hundreds of thousands of Kurds were being uprooted from their homes and forced into the mountains, tens of thousands killed. By 1989, says Powers, 4,049 Kurdish villages had been destroyed.

Why had the United States not acted? That was what William Safire and a few other columnists in the media wanted to know. Years later James Baker explained:

Diplomacy--as well as the American psyche--is fundamentally biased toward "improving relations." Shifting a policy away from cooperation toward confrontation is always a more difficult proposition--particularly when support for existing policy is as firmly embedded among various constituencies and bureaucratic interests as was the policy toward Iraq."

Domestic special interests had a stake in the survival of Saddam. Exports to Iraq of American agricultural products were large: 23 percent of U.S. rice exports went to Iraq; a million tons of wheat. When members of Congress threatened to pass a sanctions bill against Iraq, the White House opposed the measure.

In 1989 President George Herbert Walker Bush took power and ordered a review of United States policy toward Iraq. According to Power:

The study ... deemed Iraq a potentially helpful ally in containing Iran and nudging the Middle East peace process ahead. The "Guidelines for U.S.-Iraq Policy" swiped at proponents of sanctions on Capital Hill and a few human rights advocates who had begun lobbying within the State Department. The guidelines noted that despite support from the Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, and State Departments for a profitable, stable U.S.-Iraq relationship, "parts of Congress and the Department would scuttle even the most benign and beneficial areas of the relationship, such as agricultural exports." The Bush administration would not shift to a policy of dual containment of both Iraq and Iran. Vocal American businesses were adamant that Iraq was a source of opportunity, not enmity. The White House did all it could to create an opening for these companies"Had we attempted to isolate Iraq," Secretary of State James Baker wrote later, "we would have also isolated American businesses, particularly agricultural interests, from significant commercial opportunities."

Powers mordantly comments: "Hussein locked up another $1 billion in agricultural credits. Iraq became the ninth largest purchaser of U.S. farm products.... As Baker put it gently in his memoirs, 'Our administration's review of the previous Iraq policy was not immune from domestic economic considerations.'"

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To the Editor:

The old saying tells us that “you’re never too old to learn” --- and it’s true! Reading David T. Fuhrmann’s review of Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (JMH 69, October 2005), I realized that my first impressions of the book were all wrong. Although the reviewer found Racing the Enemy “balanced and thoroughly documented,” I’d originally been appalled at the unnerving regularity with which Hasegawa’s copious footnotes implied that something exists in a document when it simply did not --- but that has all changed.

What I now realize is that I was expecting too much when I assumed that Hasegawa would actually produce real evidence that President Truman had embarked on a desperate race to defeat Japan with nuclear weapons before the Soviet Union could enter the Pacific War. Being overly picky, I was put off by what appeared to be gross misrepresentations of Truman’s words through use of ellipsis in accounts like the following of Truman’s first meeting with Stalin at Potsdam:

Truman noted in his diary: ‘I asked [Stalin] if he had the agenda for the meeting. He said that he had and that he had more questions to present. I told him to fire away. He did and it is dynamite --- but I have some dynamite too which I am not exploding now. . . . He’ll be in the Jap War on August 15th. Fini Japs when that comes about.

Hasegawa goes on to explain that “Truman took Stalin’s announcement as ‘dynamite.’ It is clear that he saw Stalin not as an ally committed to the common cause of defeating Japan, but as a competitor in the race to see who could force Japan to surrender.” How could I have been so obtuse? I’d thought that the 50 or so words replaced by the ellipsis implied that the president was talking about something completely different. The excised portion of the diary entry read:

He wants to fire Franco. To which I wouldn’t object, and divide up the Italian colonies and other mandates, some no doubt that the British have. Then he got on the Chinese situation, told us what agreements had been reached and what was in abeyance. Most of the big points are settled. [Emphasis added.]

It is here that Hasegawa picks up the comments on Stalin entering the war. Now, while it is true that ellipsis are often a revisionist’s best friend, perhaps Hasegawa just didn’t notice that he had utterly changed the meaning of Truman’s diary entry. In another passage, Hasegawa’s gives this account of Truman’s “laconic” response on 8 August to the news that the Soviets had entered the war:

A few minutes after 3:00, Truman held an impromptu press conference. Although he entered the Press Room with a smile on his face, he quickly assumed a solemn expression and read a statement to reporters: “I have only a simple announcement to make. I can’t hold a regular press conference today, but this announcement is so important I thought I would call you in. Russia has declared war on Japan.” Then he added laconically: “That’s all.” This was the shortest White House press conference on record.

This terse statement reveals the profound disappointment Truman must have felt over the news.

Foolishly, I had thought that the very sources Hasegawa’s cites, widely known eyewitness accounts by the New York Times’s Felix Belair, Jr, and Washington Post’s Edward T. Folliard that appeared on 9 August, directly refuted his depiction of Truman’s mood. The president did not walk into a room full of waiting reporters, he was seated at his desk flanked by Admiral Leahy and Jimmy Byrnes when the White House press corps was ushered in. Both reporters stated that Truman was smiling and both commented on his uncharacteristically casual behavior.

The president sat “with one leg thrown carelessly over the arm of his chair and his right arm stretched across the back,” according to the Times’s Belair, and “hid completely the importance of the information he was about to impart.” His “dramatic statement,” moreover, was “issued with all the casualness of a routine proclamation.” Folliard of the Post did say that Truman “assumed a solemn expression,” but only when “he rose to make his announcement.” The president then “rocked with laughter,” according to the Belair, when his concluding words sent reporters crowding the doors to file their reports.

While it may at first appear that even the most casual reading of these articles reveals that Hasegawa’s account might be construed as pure fiction, it seems more fair for me to admit that Hasegawa clearly displays a much better ability to read Truman’s mind than I. In fact, now that I have recognized my error, it is obvious that the president was determined to personally share his mortification --- what Hasegawa describes as his “profound disappointment” --- instead of taking the easy out by having press secretary Charley Ross routinely read a statement to the reporters.

In any event, I now have not the slightest idea what I was thinking when, before reading Fuhrmann’s review, I concluded that a close examination of Hasegawa’s own sources throughout the book either don’t support --- or in some cases, utterly demolish --- his contention that Truman had been “racing the enemy” and was crushed when he found out he had “lost” to Joe Stalin. But most fundamentally, I was wrong about how and why the war began. Thanks to Hasegawa, I have been forced to concede that the war did not begin until April 1945.

Hasegawa’s closing paragraph sets me straight that we are looking at simply “a story with no heroes but no real villains either --- just men. The ending of the Pacific war was in the last analysis a human drama whose dynamics were determined by the very human characteristics of those involved: fear, vanity, anger, and prejudice.” It is now perfectly clear that any examination of these acts committed in the name of the Greater East Asian Coprosperity Sphere --- Pearl Harbor and the Bataan Death March; the 10 to 25 million Chinese who died between the Marco Polo Bridge incident and 1946; the death (according to the UN) of hundreds of thousands of Asian slave laborers and Allied POWs along the Burma Railway and in mines and factories scattered from Java to Hokkaido; the grisly biological warfare experiments of “Unit 731” in Manchuria --- any examination of these acts is nothing more than a cynical attempt to deflect guilt from the Allies in general, and America in particular.

No, Fuhrmann is quite right that Hasegawa deserves praise for “providing an international perspective lacking in previous studies,” and far be it from me to suggest that Racing the Enemy offers an extraordinarily biased and rather dishonest perspective that may appeal to neonationalists in Japan, but will not be useful to many others.

Regards, D.M. Giangreco

Fort Leavenworth, Kansas

The See Sharp edition, however, is extraordinary for its fanfare. Its subtitle proclaims it The Uncensored Original Edition. A slogan on the front cover, complete with exclamation point, denounces all competing editions as “censored commercial versions!” The back jacket touts it as “the version of The Jungle that Upton Sinclair very badly wanted to be the standard edition—not the gutted, much shorter commercial version with which we’re all familiar.”

Inside is a foreword by Earl Lee, a librarian at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, who writes of “efforts of censors to subvert” The Jungle’s “political message” and states that Sinclair “changed The Jungle in order to get it published by a large commercial publisher.” An introduction by Kathleen De Grave, professor of American literature at Pittsburg State, suggests that Sinclair’s alterations were “not driven by a desire for artistic economy” but “produced under coercion, directly or indirectly.” The text restored by the See Sharp edition, she holds, is “closer to Sinclair’s true vision.”

Is it any wonder that reviewers have found it impossible to resist the romance of a forgotten, authentic, suppressed version of The Jungle? Library Journal, in classifying the See Sharp edition as “essential,” deplores the novel’s “butchering” and claims “Sinclair later wanted to reinsert the expurgated material for a full-length version but that never came to fruition” (April 15, 2003). The People’s Weekly World, newspaper of the Communist Party USA, states, “If you have never read The Jungle, don’t waste your time on the 1906 censored version. Go right to the original, now available, at a reasonable price, and feel and experience the real message that Upton Sinclair so deeply desired to convey to his readers” (May 29, 2004).

Just one problem: none of the sensational claims made on behalf of the See Sharp edition is true. The Jungle was not censored. Sinclair did not revise the text to meet the coercive demands of a commercial publisher. He never wanted the 1905 serial version to become the standard edition. And the novel, as eventually published in book form, has a political message that is perfectly clear.

First issued as a book by Doubleday, Page in 1906, The Jungle was a straightaway international bestseller. The See Sharp edition recuperates a lesser-known, earlier version of the novel. The Jungle was first published in serial form between February 25, 1905, and November 4, 1905, in The Appeal to Reason, a socialist newspaper with a nationwide readership edited by Fred Warren and published by J. A. Wayland out of Girard, Kansas. An almost identical text was published in three installments between April and October 1905 in One-Hoss Philosophy, a small-circulation quarterly also published by Wayland. The See Sharp edition reproduces the One-Hoss text.

The initial 1905 version of the novel had a different ending and was longer than the 1906 book known the world over as The Jungle. The former had 36 chapters, the latter 31. This redaction is the basis for See Sharp’s charge that the novel was “gutted” or, as Lee puts it, “expurgated.” According to De Grave, “since the socialists could not raise the revenue to adequately publish, promote, and distribute his book, the only alternative was to revise the novel in such a way that a capitalist publisher would accept it. ...Sinclair must have agonized over the revisions he made. They went against what he believed in, and what he’d seen for himself.”

If this is so—if The Jungle was censored, if corporate perfidy forced Sinclair to make changes he did not wish to make—then a question arises. Why did he permit a bowdlerized version to be reissued, decade after decade?

Across Sinclair’s ninety years, numerous editions of The Jungle were issued . Sinclair held the copyright. Yet every time the novel appeared, it followed the 1906 text. Sinclair self-published the novel four times (1920, 1935, 1942, 1945). He wrote introductory material for the Viking (1946) and Heritage (1965) editions. Further editions of The Jungle include Haldeman-Julius (1924), Vanguard (1926), Albert & Charles Boni (1928), Penguin (1936), Amsco School (1946), R. Bentley (1946), Harper (1951), World (1959), New American Library (1960), Dial (1965), Airmont (1965), and the Limited Editions Club (1965). If Sinclair yearned for the 1905 version and wanted to see it restored, why did he not insist upon its use in these many editions?

To settle this matter definitively requires passing beyond rhetorical questions, however, to a recapitulation of The Jungle’s circuitous publishing history.

After turning out hundreds of pages of fiction week after week in 1904 and 1905, Sinclair was exhausted. He disliked the end result, a work he considered long-winded and rambling. “I went crazy at the end,” he wrote in a personal letter in 1930 to a reader curious as to why many passages had been excised, “... and tried to put in everything I knew about the Socialist movement. I remember that Warren came to see me at my farm near Princeton, and I read him the concluding chapters, and he went to sleep. So I guess that is why I left them out of the book!"

Sinclair began to abbreviate the text. He corrected the Lithuanian references, changing, for example, the name of the main character from Rudkos to the more typical Rudkus. He sought to streamline the novel, making it less repetitious and didactic. At the same time, he ran into problems with Macmillan, a major publisher that had advanced him a contract for book rights following serialization. Macmillan, Sinclair later recalled, demanded that he eliminate the “blood and guts.” Although he strove to pare down the text, Sinclair was unwilling, on principle, to compromise the novel’s brutal realism. The Macmillan arrangement disintegrated by autumn 1905.

Next Sinclair tried to persuade the Appeal to issue the novel as a book, but Warren and Wayland, although phenomenally successful at publishing socialist periodicals, felt ill-equipped to enter into book promotion and distribution. Sinclair then submitted the book to “five leading publishing houses” and watched as every one rejected it, a story he first recounted in a 1920 brochure announcing a new self-published edition of The Jungle.

Frustrated, Sinclair resolved to publish the book on his own. In a letter published in the Appeal to Reason (November 18, 1905), Sinclair criticized capitalist publishing and requested that readers help subsidize the printing costs by ordering copies in advance. He began to trim the work according to his taste and to have the book set into type. Then a surprise turn of events transpired: Doubleday, Page offered him a contract.

Sinclair was satisfied that Doubleday would not pressure him to make changes he could not accept. In a follow-up letter published in the Appeal (December 16, 1905), Sinclair alluded to “an offer from a publishing house of the highest standing, which is willing to bring out the book on my own terms.” Because he had already accepted individual orders, however, Sinclair continued to invite donations and superintend the book’s typesetting. He asked Doubleday to permit him to publish his own small concurrent edition. Their memorandum of agreement was signed on January 8, 1906.

Just one month later, in February 1906, Doubleday, Page put out The Jungle, and the book took the world by storm. Simultaneously, an edition of five thousand copies appeared under the imprint of “The Jungle Publishing Company.” Its cover was nearly identical, except for an embossed addition: the Socialist Party’s symbol of hands clasped across the globe. Pasted inside was a label identifying it as the “Sustainer’s Edition.” The Doubleday edition and this special edition were both issued in New York and printed from the same plates, as prepared by Sinclair.

Sinclair’s memoir American Outpost (1932) corroborates this chronology: "I forget who were the other publishers that turned down The Jungle. There were five in all; and by that time I was raging, and determined to publish it myself. ...I offered a 'Sustainer's Edition,' price $1.20, postpaid, and in a month or two I took in four thousand dollars—more money than I had been able to earn in all the past five years. ...I had a printing firm in New York at work putting The Jungle into type. Then, just as the work was completed, some one suggested that I offer the book to Doubleday, Page and Company. So I found myself in New York again, for a series of conferences with Walter H. Page and his young assistants. ...Doubleday, Page agreed to bring out the book, allowing me to have a simultaneous edition of my own to supply my 'sustainers.' The publication was in February, 1906, and the controversy started at once."

The version that See Sharp Press disparages as “censored” and “commercial,” in other words, is the very version that Sinclair approved, the one that his socialist readers subsidized, and the one that he fought to bring before a wide public without sacrifice of “blood and guts.”

In her introduction, De Grave holds that the 1906 edition was politically vitiated, that it “skirted the realities of disease and death among the poor” and “apologized to the rich and powerful by its silences.” This misimpression arises from a grave analytical error. De Grave presumes that because, say, a given passage condemning capitalism was excised, the resultant novel somehow excuses capitalism. For the most part, however, Sinclair was pruning away duplicative material. It is an absurdity to allege that The Jungle, recognized by millions as one of the leading social novels of the twentieth century, apologized for the rich or overlooked disease and death among the poor.

Equally fanciful is De Grave’s contention that Sinclair watered down the novel’s “ethnic flavor” by modifying its Lithuanian spellings and terms. She makes a great deal, for example, of Sinclair’s adjustment of a minor female character’s name from Aniele Juknos to Aniele Jukniene. This “telling alteration,” declares De Grave, made “the name less Slavic by adding the Romance-language ending.” In actuality, Sinclair was rectifying a blunder. Jukniene is the married feminine form of Jukna; “Juknos” was erroneous. In his meticulous new linguistic analysis Upton Sinclair: The Lithuanian Jungle (2006), Giedrius Subačius, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, writes, “The Lithuanian language of the 1906 edition would have looked quite correct, accurate, and standardized to contemporary Lithuanians, unlike the first newspaper edition of 1905, which contained many more dialectal features, inconsistencies, and mistakes.”

The Jungle was revised, not suppressed. It was published precisely as Sinclair wished. Its refashioning was not ruinous, and Sinclair emended it voluntarily, not under duress. The 1905 text of The Jungle is best understood not as pristine and superior, but as an unevenly executed rough draft produced in great haste. Sinclair truncated it for aesthetic reasons. The result was a more concise text that retains the novel’s political, ethnic, and naturalistic sensibilities while eliminating some of the tedious didacticism of the first draft. (Most literary critics still believe there's too much of that in the novel, as it is.)

Rewriting abounds in literary history. Charles Dickens, for example, altered the ending of Great Expectations, serialized in 1860-1861, when it appeared as a book, yielding to the entreaties of his friend, the playwright Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth all published different versions of identical works.

There is value, to be sure, in having the 1905 version of The Jungle available in print. It contains, for example, explicit elaborations upon the “jungle” as a metaphor for capitalist civilization, as well as a direct mention of Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a model for The Jungle. We need an authoritative scholarly edition of The Jungle that would demarcate precisely which passages were cut or altered between its 1905 and 1906 versions, with an introduction explaining, in a measured way, the significance of the changes. In the meantime, we have the See Sharp edition, hyperbolic to the point of irresponsibility.

Ironies abound in this situation. A radical publisher betrays suspicion of change. A supposedly truer text is promoted with claims contradicted by the evidence. An edition of a novel that indicts capitalism repeatedly for fleecing gullible consumers is advertised misleadingly. A publishing house that accuses all others of crass commercial motives happens upon a cash cow it is unlikely to relinquish.

The failure of the American left is less a result of censorship than of a paucity of ideas capable of winning over new audiences not yet committed to the cause. The left will never transcend the culture of capitalism unless it forgoes stratagems that advance neither social justice nor historical truth. The fault, dear Brutus, lies in ourselves.

Author's addendum (July 19, 2006) This morning I was going over some old research files and came across a personal letter written by Upton Sinclair in 1958. Here Sinclair states in clear, unequivocal language precisely what I argued in my article"The Fictitious Suppression of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle." This letter provides strong--one might say conclusive--confirmation of the historical narrative I offered above.

"The book was finished at the end of 1905," writes Sinclair,"and was not published until June of 1906. It started as a serial in the weekly Socialist paper, ‘The Appeal to Reason,’ which at that time had a circulation of something like three-fourths of a million copies. It published large installments, I would say at a guess about a newspaper page; so all my revelations concerning conditions in the packing houses had been put before a huge public early in the year. I had been offering the manuscript of the book to publishers in New York—I think to five—without result. They were afraid of it, and finally growing desperate I decided to publish the book myself. I got Jack London to write his tremendous endorsement of the book. I announced the publication in ‘The Appeal to Reason,’ and I was taking in several hundred orders a week. I had the plates made and paid for. Then—I have forgotten how—it occurred to me to offer the book to Doubleday-Page; and they immediately accepted it and agreed to take over my plates and to let me have and sell my own edition." (December 1, 1958)

To recapitulate: After the serial version of The Jungle appeared in The Appeal to Reason in 1905, Sinclair, unable to find a mainstream publisher, decided to publish the book himself. He pared down the text and had"the plates made and paid for" himself. Then he received a contract from Doubleday, Page. That publisher, in turn, used Sinclair's self-prepared plates when issuing the book in 1906, while allowing Sinclair to issue his sustainer's edition simultaneously. In short, The Jungle was printed by Doubleday in 1906 not in a censored form but just as Sinclair wished--indeed, from plates he himself had prepared.

Bibliography

DeGruson, Gene. The Lost First Edition of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Memphis: Peachtree, 1988.

Harris , Leon . Upton Sinclair: American Rebel. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975.

Shore , Elliott . Talkin’ Socialism: J. A. Wayland and the Role of the Press in American Radicalism, 1890-1912. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988.

Sinclair, Upton. A New Edition of The Jungle. Pasadena, California: Upton Sinclair, n.d. [1920].

—. American Outpost: A Book of Reminiscences. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1932.

—. The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1962.

—. The Jungle. New York: Doubleday, Page, and Company, 1906.

—. The Jungle. New York: The Jungle Publishing Company, 1906.

—. The Jungle: The Uncensored Original Edition. Tucson, Arizona: See Sharp Press, 2003.

Subačius, Giedrius. Upton Sinclair: The Lithuanian Jungle. Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi, 2006.

Upton Sinclair Manuscripts, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. [The specific letter cited in the main article is to William McDevitt, 3 September 1930, and is found in Correspondence, Box 13. The letter cited in the addendum is to G. L. Lewin, 1 December 1958, and is found in Correspondence, Box 59. Both letters are quoted courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University.]

Marshall started out in life as a newspaperman, eventually working for the Detroit News. Upon America's entry into World War II, he was given a commission as a major and was assigned to the Army Historical Section. His studies of World War II combat began in the Pacific, where he covered the landings on Makin Island and Kwajalein. After a battle on Makin, he asked the survivors questions about their experience in combat, which he referred to as the "after-action interview." "By the end of those four days," he observed, "working several hours every day, we had discovered to our amazement that every fact of the fight was procurable--that the facts lay dormant in the minds of men and officers, waiting to be developed. It was like fitting together a jigsaw puzzle, a puzzle with no missing pieces but with so many curious and difficult twists and turns that only with care and patience could we make it into a single picture of combat."

After his work in the Pacific, Marshall interviewed those who fought in Europe, becoming chief historian of the European Theater of Operations. His experience and the evidence he amassed provided the basis for his pioneering book, Men Against Fire, which was published in 1947. The sixth chapter of that book spelled out Marshall's concept of what he termed the ratio of fire: "a commander of infantry will be well advised to believe that when he engages the enemy not more than one quarter of his men will ever strike a real blow. " "The 25 per cent estimate," he added, "stands even for well-trained and campaign-seasoned troops. I mean that 75 per cent will not fire or will not persist in firing against the enemy and his works. These men may face danger but they will not fight."

Later Marshall raised the number from 75 percent to 85 percent. "We found on average not more than 15 per cent of the men had actually fired at enemy positions or at personnel with rifles, carbines, grenades, bazookas, BARs, or machine guns during the course of an entire engagement. . . . The best showing that could be made by the most spirited and aggressive companies was that one man in four had made at least some use of his fire power."

In Marshall's view there were reasons why the men didn't fire their weapons: in both the civilian world and on the battlefield, the majority let the minority shoulder the burden. Moreover, civilization imparts a "fear of aggression" into "the normal man's emotional makeup." The obvious solution was to train soldiers to fire their weapons in combat, overcoming their instincts. Marshall claimed that as a result of his studies the army altered its training and the "ratio of fire" improved. By the time of the Korean War (which Marshall also studied), he reported that the ratio of fire had increased to 55 percent.

One who didn't buy Marshall's argument was Harold R. Leinbaugh, who served as a rifle company commander during World War II, and co-authored The Men of Company K. Leinbaugh characterized Marshall's assertions as "absurd, ridiculous and totally nonsensical." Leinbaugh wasn't alone in his skepticism. Roger Spiller, an historian at the Army's Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, challenged Marshall's claim that he questioned 400 companies of approximately 125 soldiers each immediately after they had fought in combat: "The systematic collection of data that made Marshall's ratio of fire so authoritative appears to have been an invention." Spiller studied Marshall's records and other documents. He discovered there was no evidence to support support Marshall's grand claims. Spiller said that Marshall's aide, John Westover, who accompanied Marshall in Europe, didn't remember hearing Marshall ask soldiers if they had fired their weapons. Additionally, Westover didn't "recall Marshall ever talking about ratios of weapons usage in their many private conversations," said Spiller. Westover subsequently wrote: "In conversation and published articles, I have repeatedly said that Marshall wasn't a social scientist who ran surveys but was, instead, an intuitive thinker. His statement of having conducted four hundred or six hundred after-action interviews in Europe was an obvious exaggeration. But he did conduct many, perhaps a hundred in World War II, and he read scores of interviews developed by his field historians. Where most of us stopped with the recording of an after-action account, Marshall generalized from the interviews--and his generalizations contained the essence of truth."

Leinbaugh was reportedly personally offended by Marshall's charges for two reasons. First, Leinbaugh felt that Marshall criticized "not only our efforts at Geilenkirchen (a German town) but the performance of every American rifle company that did battle in World War II." Secondly, Leinbaugh observed the use of Marshall's judgments by historians John Keegan and Max Hastings in their work.

Spiller believed that Men Against Fire was born of the simplistic "harum-scarum" journalistic style of the 1920s when Marshall learned his trade. "He liked making heroes," said Leinbaugh. The military accepted his theory because he was sympathetic to professional soldiers, and they reciprocated that feeling. But why did professional historians accept Marshall's prognostications? "Intellectual sloth," said Spiller."The ratio of fire was an easy answer, one that seemed to promise entree into the hidden world of combat." Leinbaugh was even more blunt: "Most people who are writing the histories now have never been on a battlefield." Scant good material existed below the level of regimental records concerning World War II, "so historians had to rely on Marshall." According to Spiller: "Marshall, for all his faults, made real and lasting contributions to an understanding of the military art."

By the time Frederick Smoler's article on Marshall appeared in American Heritage in March, 1989, Marshall wasn't around to defend himself, having died in 1977, but his grandson came to the general's defense. A columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, John Marshall contended that there was ample research and experience to support his grandfather's contention. He said there were reports in the S.L.A. Marshall Military History Collection, housed at the University of Texas, El Paso, authored by his grandfather and other combat historians confirming the ratio of fire theory. In the dustup that followed American Heritage provided lukewarm support for Frederick Smoler. While declaring that the magazine stood by Smoler's article, editor Bryon Dobell conceded: "We don't know what the truth is. Marshall may or may not have been right."

A more recent assessment of Marshall's legacy is provided by Randolph Hils, an amateur historian who served as an airlift planner with the Marine Corps during Vietnam. He says that Marshall "is credited with the development of the ‘after action interview' which, in my mind, is just taking the debriefing process already common to the command level down to the squad level. Troop Carrier crews were routinely debriefed after each mission in detail, not because of any influence by Marshall. Rather, it was the logical process of recording for the record mission events as well as gathering intelligence and information that might influence successive missions."

Hils's area of expertise is the history of World War II Airborne Troop Carrier Groups and in particular Operation Neptune, the name given to the airlift of 13,000 paratroopers into Normandy on June 6, 1944. "In nearly every history written since then," Hils says, "the pilots have been accused of wholesale cowardice and blamed for the deaths and injury of many paratroopers. Researching backwards and investigating the sources of many historians including Ambrose, Keegan, Hastings, Huston and Clay Blair led me to Marshall."

Marshall and his staff wrote the regimental field or unit studies of the parachute infantry regiments of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions that jumped into Normandy and wrote essentially the root history on the operation though the historians named and many more would embellish Marshall's work. What struck me most about the Marshall studies was not what they contained but rather was excluded. As an airlift planner I was looking for the critical analysis of the primary events of any airborne/airlift mission and they just weren't there.

Hils has requested that the Army open an investigation into OPERATION NEPTUNE but has yet to receive a response.

"Besides the Troop Carrier controversy," Hils further explains, Marshall, writing in an article that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1960, "accused British sailors of cowardice at Omaha beach." He said that one Captain Zapacosta had to hold his weapon to the head of the coxswain to get him to get the Landing Craft Assault boats closer to the beach. The only survivor of that landing craft was Zapacosta's bodyguard, Bob Sales, who has given sworn testimony that Marshall fabricated the incident as well as repeating his story in the Lynchburg News Advance newspaper."

Despite the many questions that have been raised about Marshall's research and conclusions, he continues to be cited by the media--including the New York Times!--as one of the great authorities on military history. Why? The army has refused to repudiate Marshall and the media are reluctant, as Hils puts it, to challenge a historian who, like Ambrose, has a flair for words and style.

David Allender, Editor-in-Chief of Warchronicle.com, say that "the Marshall myth lives on because military writers tend to copy previous books without doing original research.

Regarding the New York Times and other sources, Marshall provides a catchy little statistic for editors and writers in a hurry. If they weren't in a hurry, they would realize that Marshall's stats could never have been measured in the first place. But I suppose the main reason S.L.A. Marshall's ‘research' is still relied upon comes down to simple ignorance. Roger Spiller blew Marshall's research out of the water years ago, but Spiller was published in a British academic journal. On the other hand, Marshall is such a good writer that his books are still in stores; they are reprinted, read, and enjoyed by many people.

Allender adds: Marshall "was not a serious historian. He was simply a brilliant combat journalist.... His books should be enjoyed for the considerable insight they contain. But as a source, they must be used with caution. . . . Respect but suspect."

Note: The New York Times did not respond to requests for a comment. ]]> Mon, 09 Nov 2026 21:49:23 +0000 https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1356 https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1356 0

One of the few positive effects of 9/11 has been renewed American interest in Islam and the Middle East. Unfortunately, much of the information disseminated in the media about those topics is ignorant and misleading. This is unfortunate because any hope that the predominantly-Christian West and the Muslim world might transcend conflict requires that the former be accurately informed about the latter (and vice-versa, but that’s an issue for another column). There are in particular seven myths about Islam and Islamic history that have been repeated so often in the media that they’ve achieved conventional wisdom status.

First, it is untrue that Islam is the world’s fastest-growing religion. (Mormonism and Scientology also claim this, but few outside of Salt Lake City and Hollywood believe it.) As Philip Jenkins of Penn State University demonstrates in his work Christianity—in particular Pentecostalism—is the world’s most-rapidly growing faith. Currently there are 2 billion Christians and 1.3 billion Muslims (out of a world population of 6 billion), and in the 21st century Christianity will maintain its lead, thanks to explosive growth in sub-Saharan Africa and China.

Second, despite the claims of even President Bush in a number of public statements, Islam is not solely a “religion of peace.” Yes, there are verses of toleration in the Qur’an: Sura(chapter) al-Baqarah:256 says “there shall be no compulsion in religion;” Sura al-Furqan:65ff says that Allah will be merciful to those who repent and do good works; and Sura al-Nisa’:19ff enjoins Muslim men to provide financially for wives and ex-wives. But verses such as these are arguably outweighed by others: Sura Anfal:12ff and Sura Muhammad:3ff command the beheading of unbelievers; Sura al-Nisa’:34ff allows for beating of one’s wives and in verses 74ff and 94ff, promises great reward for those who die fighting for Allah; Sura al-Ma’idah:51 says “Believers, take neither Jews nor Christians for your friends.” Of course there are violent sections in the Bible—or at least in the Hebrew Scriptures/Old Testament (Joshua and David were military leaders as much as religious ones). But no one denies that, as many—both Muslim and non-Muslim—deny these violent and misogynistic passages in the Qur’an. Many arguments can be made against such verses (they must be contextualized, they are applicable only to that time, they are metaphorical, etc.) but one cannot say they do not exist. Someone who simply rehashs that “the Qur’an teaches peace” obviously hasn’t read it. No doubt most Muslims do not read the passages about decapitation as a blueprint for today. But just as some Christians take literally, for example, the command of to Christ handle poisonous snakes (Luke 10:19), some Muslims take literally the injunction to behead unbelievers. And the latter practice is a bit more injurious to other folks than the former.

Third on the misinformation parade is the allegation that jihad does not mean holy war. This falsehood crops up often in text books and in the media, where the politically-correct tirelessly repeat that jihad actually means only “striving to be a good Muslim.” This is half-right. But early on in Islamic history, jihad came to mean fighting against unbelievers in order to expand the territory under Muslim rule. al-Bukhari lived in the 9th century CE and was the most authoritative compiler of sayings attributed to the prophet Muhammad; he mentions jihad many times as meaning “holy war.” Jihad as “Muslim piety” is mainly the province of the Sufis, the mystics of Islam, and has become a minority view today. Furthermore, Islamic history is chock-full of leaders declaring jihads against their enemies—even the moderately Muslim Ottoman Empire declared a holy war against the French, British and Russians in World War I!

Fourth is the whopper that Islam spread peacefully from Arabia, as if the followers of Muhammad went door-to-door ringing doorbells and handing out brochures. From the mid-7th century CE Muslims militarily overran regions and then pressured the conquered to convert. (Yes, Christian kingdoms did the same—but, again, no one denies that!) Muslim Arab armies destroyed the entire Persian Empire (modern Iran), replacing its official Zoroastrian religion; about the same time they invaded the surviving Christian Roman (Byzantine) Empire and within a few decades had taken half its territory. In 732 CE a Muslim army from Morocco was in France! By 750 CE Muslims ruled from the Iberian Peninula to India. And Muslim armies would stay on the offensive for the next millennium, with only two exceptions: the “Reconquista” in Iberia and the Crusades.

The fifth tiresome myth is that the European Catholic Crusaders started the war with Islam and that for eight centuries Muslims have been brooding over the horrible injustices thereof. Actually, the Crusades, 1095-1291, were simply the first time that European Christians managed to take the fight to their enemy’s territory. And besides: why are the Crusades being constantly used as a club with which to beat the West—remember the scathing attacks on President Bush when, not long after 9/11, he referred to a “crusade” against terrorism?—when the Muslims won? Usama bin Ladin’s constant references to Americans as “Crusaders” is thus a perfect marriage of historical illiteracy with keen psychological insight into his enemy’s self-hate.

Another fairy tale about Islam is that poverty produces terrorists. This hoary myth tells us more about the worldview of its American adherents than it does about the ranks of the Islamists. Most of the 9/11 and London bombers were university-educated and at least middle-class. The same is true for Palestinian suicide bombers and most likely those in Iraq. Naive Americans take their domestic paradigm about poverty and crime—that the former causes the latter—and apply it to a context where it doesn’t fit Regarding the recent London bombings, a British terrorism expert said that “socioeconomic background does not appear to [have] play[ed] a role.” Poverty may be necessary, but it is hardly sufficient, to explain Islamic terrorism.

And finally, we have politically-correct mendacity number seven, which even British Prime Minister Tony Blair recently repeated: that Islam has been “hijacked” by terrorists. In this view Bin Ladin, the ayatollahs in Iran, the former Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, the Saudis with their Wahhabism (a particularly puritanical brand of Sunni Islam)—all are twisting a “moderate” religion to suit their purpose. The “Islam = peace” brigade essentializes Islam as peaceful. UBL essentializes it as jihad. Although there are Qur’an verses, and sayings of Muhammad, on both sides, many do support Bin Ladin and his ilk. Also, Islamic history is replete with Muslim scholars whom the modern Islamic fundamentalists draw upon. The most famous is Ibn Taymiyah who, 700 years before George Bush said “you’re either for us or against us,” divided the world into the domain of Islam and that of war. The only good ruler is a Muslim ruler, asserted Ibn Taymiyah. And by that he meant one that enforces shari`ah, or Islamic law. Most Muslims do not agree, but some do. (And only 10 percent of 1.3 billion is 130 million.) But it is no use pretending that the UBLs of the world have falsely “hijacked” Islam. Indeed, their view of the faith—however intolerant and violent it may seem—has a basis in Islamic theology and history.

Islam is where Christianity was before the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) and then the Enlightenment led the West to divorce religion and state, thereby removing (mostly) the threat of religious-based warfare. As a fellow monotheist with Muslims, I pray that the moderate strands within Islam win out over the more fundamentalist ones, allowing that civilization to follow suit. And for we in the West to help with that, we need to open our eyes to the reality of the harsher aspects of Islam and Islamic history. Anything else is simple—and dangerous—self-deception. ]]> Mon, 09 Nov 2026 21:49:23 +0000 https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/16536 https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/16536 0

This piece was distributed for non-exclusive use by the History News Service, an informal syndicate of professional historians who seek to improve the public's understanding of current events by setting these events in their historical contexts. The article may be republished as long as both the author and the History News Service are clearly credited. ]]> Mon, 09 Nov 2026 21:49:23 +0000 https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/15447 https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/15447 0 Setting people straight about Thanksgiving myths has become as much a part of the annual holiday as turkey, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie. But should historians bother? Jane Kamensky, a professor of history at Brandeis, asks on the website Common-Place (in 2001) whether it’s worth while “to plumb the bottom of it all – to determine, for example, ... whether Plymouth’s ‘Pilgrims’ were indeed the grave-robbing hypocrites that UAINE [United American Indians of New England] describes. ... Was the ‘first Thanksgiving’ merely a pretext for bloodshed, enslavement, and displacement that would follow in later decades?’ ,,, “To ask whether this is true is to ask the wrong question. It’s true to its purposes. … And that’s all it needs to be. For these holidays say much less about who we really were in some specific Then, than about who we want to be in an ever changing Now.”

“And that’s all it needs to be”? I disagree. I think that a historian approaching the question of Thanksgiving Day in the “ever changing Now” will need to ask “the wrong question” – what of all this is true?

Surveying more than two hundred websites that “correct” our assumptions about Thanksgiving, it’s possible to sort them into groups and themes, especially since Internet sites often parrot each other. Very few present anything like the myths that most claim to combat. Almost all the corrections are themselves incorrect or banal. With heavy self-importance and pathetic political posturing, they demonstrate quite unsurprisingly that what was once taught in grade school lacked scope, subtlety, and minority insight.

Commonly the first point scored is that lots of people gave thanks before the Pilgrims did it in 1621. Local boosters in Virginia, Florida, and Texas promote their own colonists, who (like many people getting off a boat) gave thanks for setting foot again on dry land. Several sites claim that Indians had six thanksgivings every year; at least one says that every day, every act, every thought was carried out with thanksgiving by pre-contact Indians. (My thanksgiving is bigger than your thanksgiving?)

Many sites point out that only Edward Winslow’s brief account records Plymouth Colony’s 1621 harvest festivities, beyond which we have just William Bradford’s seasonal comment that the Pilgrims ate turkey among other things. See, for example, Pilgrim Hall Museum’s website.

Archaeologist James Deetz made much of the fact that Winslow did not name the turkeys Bradford mentioned. This startling revelation (that in this case one should ignore Bradford’s general comments and suppose that Winslow was providing a complete menu listing) recurs in various websites, such as the 2002 article posted by the Christian Science Monitor.

More frequently repeated is Deetz’s emphatic reminder that Winslow did not use the word “thanksgiving” -- drawing the conclusion that therefore the 1621 event was not a thanksgiving but some sort of traditional English harvest festival he characterized as “secular.”

I’ve discussed this oversimplification previously in an article. Deetz’s assertion that there was no thanksgiving in 1621 is repeated at numerous websites. Often authors explain that what took place was so unlike later Puritan thanksgivings that it couldn’t have been a true thanksgiving, usually citing, for the definition of what that would have been, William DeLoss Love, The Fast and Thanksgiving Days of New England (Boston, New York: Houghton and Mifflin, 1895), a book whose title alone seems to have inspired the common web article notion that in New England people fasted as an expression of thanksgiving.

In “Top 10 Myths About Thanksgiving,” Rick Shenkman, editor of HNN, announces that Thanksgiving was not about religion. Had it been, he says, “the Pilgrims never would have invited the Indians to join them. Besides, the Pilgrims would never have tolerated festivities at a true religious event. Indeed, what we think of as Thanksgiving was really a harvest festival. Actual ‘Thanksgivings’ were religious affairs; everybody spent the day praying. Incidentally, these Pilgrim Thanksgivings occurred at different times of the year, not just in November.”

Responding to this in reverse order:

(1) that Thanksgivings were not limited to November does not mean that the first one held by the colonists in Plymouth (presumably in September or early October) was not a thanksgiving.

(2) The modern idea that in a religious thanksgiving “everyone spent the day praying” is inconsistent with the only description of the specific activities of a definitely identified thanksgiving day in early Plymouth Colony -- the thanksgiving held in Scituate in 1636 when a religious service was followed by feasting. (See my book The Seventeenth-Century Town Records of Scituate, Massachusetts (Boston: NEHGS, 2001), vol. 3, p. 513.)

(3) That “what we think of as Thanksgiving was really a harvest festival” (as if that meant it could not have been a thanksgiving) repeats Deetz’s incorrect opinion that an English harvest festival was non-religious or even irreligious.

(4) That the Pilgrims “would never have tolerated festivities at a true religious event” presumes a narrow definition of what a true religious event was before arriving through circular argument at a denial that what the Pilgrims did was such an event, because it differed from the axiomatic definition. (Ever been to a midwestern church picnic? Did tossing horseshoes and playing softball make it non-religious?)

(5) The Pilgrims attempted to pattern their religious activities according to biblical precedent. The precedent for a harvest festival was the Feast of Tabernacles, Sukkoth (Deut. 16: 13-14), lasting seven days. The biblical injunction to include the "stranger" probably accounts for the Pilgrims' inviting their Native neighbors to rejoice with them. Besides Sukkoth, the Pilgrims’ experience of a Reformed Protestant thanksgiving every year in Leiden probably contributed to what they considered appropriate. The October 3 festivities commemorated the lifting of the Siege of Leiden in 1574, when half the town had died (an obvious parallel with the experience of the Pilgrims in the winter of 1620-21). Leiden’s ten-day festivity began with a religious service of thanksgiving and prayer, followed by meals, military exercises, games, and a free fair. The common assumption that the Pilgrims’ 1621 event should be judged against the forms taken by later Puritan thanksgivings - whether or not those are even correctly understood - overlooks the circumstance that the Pilgrims did not have those precedents when they attempted something new, intentionally based not on old English tradition but on biblical and Reformed example.

The History Channel website states that, “the colonists didn’t even call the day Thanksgiving. To them, a thanksgiving was a religious holiday in which they would go to church and thank God for a specific event, such as the winning of a battle. On such a religious day, the types of recreational activities that the pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians participated in during the 1621 harvest feast – dancing, singing secular songs, playing games – wouldn’t have been allowed. The feast was a secular celebration, so it never would have been considered a thanksgiving in the pilgrims minds.”

Winslow, our sole source, says nothing about “dancing, singing secular songs, [or] playing games.” Those might be intended among Winslow’s general term “recreations,” but one cannot imagine, specify, and cite them as proof that the Pilgrims’ day was “a secular celebration.”

Thanksgiving seems to commemorate a heritage of false memory. The Internet myths of Thanksgiving range from Fundamentalists’ invention of a fake 1623 Thanksgiving Proclamation -- to prove that God was being thanked (not the Indians) -- through Libertarians’ use of the same fake to claim that “the real reason for Thanksgiving, deleted from the official story, is: Socialism does not work; the one and only source of abundance is free markets, and we thank God we live in a country where we can have them.”

If Thanksgiving was not about the discovery of private property’s profitability, not about help offered to the colonists by the Wampanoag Indians, not about God’s providence -- what was it?

William Loren Katz, author of Black Indians, A Hidden Heritage, writes that, “In 1637 Governor Bradford, who saw his colonists locked in mortal combat with dangerous Native Americans, ordered his militia to conduct a night attack on the sleeping men women and children of a Pequot Indian village. To Bradford, a devout Christian, the massacre was imbued with religious meaning.”

Clearly we should realize that these people were not nice, but just exactly how bad? “Not even Charles Manson and Jim Jones combined could compare with that murderous Doomsday cult – the Pilgrims,” says a website article called “The Pilgrims, Children of the Devil: Puritan Doomsday Cult Plunders Paradise." The site calls itself the Common Sense Almanac, Progressive Pages (and claims to be a project of the Center for Media and Democracy) and says: “According to William B. Newell, a Penobscot Indian and former chairman of the anthropology department at the University of Connecticut, the first official Thanksgiving Day commemorated the massacre of 700 Indian men, women and children during one of their religious ceremonies.”

Newell, who is described in one site as having degrees from two universities (wow! Fancy that!), was convinced about the solidity of his research: “"My research is authentic because it is documentary," Newell said. "You can't get anything more accurate than that because it is first hand. It is not hearsay."

What’s not authentic is the claim that William Newell was head of the anthropology department at the University of Connecticut, whose faculty cannot recall him at all. When the department was founded in 1971, Newell was 79 years old. See the letter by department chair Jocelyn Linnekin here.

And what is completely untrue is the idea that the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony participated in the 1637 Pequot massacre. Although asked to send military assistance, the Plymouth court did not respond until two weeks after the slaughter had been carried out. See my book, Pilgrim Edward Winslow: New England’s First International Diplomat (Boston: NEHGS, 2004), pp. 164-168.

Is this important? Or is the lie “true to its purposes”?

The purposes can best be understood as fitting in with the description of the Pilgrims that animates the so-called National Day of Mourning sponsored by the United American Indians of New England. “The pilgrims ... introduced sexism, racism, anti-lesbian and gay bigotry, jails, and the class system to these shores. One of the very first things they did when they arrived on Cape Cod … was to rob Wampanoag graves.”

Or as one of the founders of the National Day of Mourning, AIM’s Russell Means, claims, “After a colonial militia had returned from murdering the men, women, and children of an Indian village, the governor proclaimed a holiday and feast to give thanks for the massacre. He also encouraged other colonies to do likewise -- in other words, every autumn after the crops are in, go kill Indians and celebrate your murders with a feast.”

Did the Pilgrims rob Indian graves? Not really. As Winslow said, “ because we deemed them graves, we put in the bow again and made it up as it was, and left the rest untouched, because we thought it would be odious unto them to ransack their sepulchres.” There’s more to the story.

One could go on. Someone should go on. To respond to all the assorted internet nonsense about Thanksgiving it is necessary to go on and on. I have, here.

Throughout Hitler's political career, he made several exemptions from his ideology. Whatever Hitler had written into decrees was always subject to alteration at his discretion. Hitler granted thousands of Mischlinge (partial Jews) exemptions from the provisions of his racial laws.

Some have claimed that Hitler made exemptions for Mischlinge because of his own "Jewish" past. Since this issue was raised frequently during discussions of this study, it is explored in some detail. The facts seem to indicate that Hitler feared his paternal grandfather was Jewish. As Dr. Fritz Redlich, psychiatrist and author of Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet, said, "Hitler was mixed up about his descent. He was definitely scared about the possibility that he had a Jewish grandfather." However, no documents have survived to confirm or deny this allegation.

Hitler may have given exemptions to Mischlinge because of his own experiences with them and Jews. Hitler spent time and possibly was romantically involved with quarter-Jew Gretl Slezak. He had met the Austrian Jew Dr. Eduard Bloch, who took care of his mother during her battle with cancer. Hitler respected Bloch. After the Anschluss in 1938, Hitler made sure that Bloch was protected until the proper documents had been procured for his emigration. Hitler saw to it that Bloch, whom he called a "noble Jew," could leave Germany unharmed. Hitler may also have given exemptions to Mischling soldiers because of his contact with Jews during World War I, through which he learned how brave many of them had been. Hitler received his EKI on the nomination of Hugo Gutmann, his regiment's adjutant, a Jew. Such firsthand experiences may have motivated Hitler to give exemptions to some Mischlinge.

Hitler had shown from the beginning of his political career a tendency to make exemptions. Between 1920 and 1933, he usually granted them because of political necessity. He allowed Ernst Rohm to command the SA even though Rohm was a homosexual. Although those who were homosexual were later marked for persecution, at this stage Hitler believed matters "purely in the private sphere" should be left alone. Perhaps the most famous exemption was given to Heydrich, the "Blond Beast," head of the SD Reich Security Main Office and one of the architects of the Endlosung.

When Heydrich was a child in Halle, neighborhood children made fun of him, calling him "Isi" (Izzy), short for Isidor, a name with a Jewish connotation. This nickname upset Heydrich. When he served in the navy, many of his comrades believed he was Jewish. Some called him the "blond Moses." Others who lived in Halle have claimed that everybody believed that his father, the musician Bruno Heydrich, was a Jew. Half-Jew Alice Schaper nee Rohr, who took piano lessons from Bruno, claimed, "We all knew he was Jewish. ...He looked just like a typical Jew." In town, Bruno was called Isidor Suess behind his back. With such rumors going around, it was not surprising that Heydrich felt continually burdened by these allegations, especially when he served as an SS general.

One will never know whether Heydrich was truly of Jewish descent unless more documents are found, but it is possible that Himmler and Hitler may have believed he was. In the early 1930s, according to Himmler's masseur Felix Kersten (if he can be believed), Hitler had told Himmler, "Heydrich was a highly gifted but also dangerous man, whose gifts the movement had to retain. Such people could still be used so long as they were kept well in hand and for that purpose his non-Aryan origins were extremely useful; for he would be eternally grateful to us that we had kept him and not expelled him and would obey blindly."

According to Speer, Hitler often used flaws of men in positions of authority to control them. In this case, Heydrich's possible flaw was "Jewish ancestors." Heydrich often took those who claimed he was Jewish to court for slander. He did so as late as 1940 and sent another man to a concentration camp. Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr, presumably had a large dossier on Heydrich's Jewish past and threatened to reveal what he had if the SS tried to infringe on Abwehr activities. Heydrich was definitely haunted by stories of his Jewish past.

Hitler's actions with Rohm and Heydrich show that he had the ability to ignore "defects" in men who, he felt, could serve his political cause. In this respect, Hitler bent his ideological principles to meet political needs.

This article is excerpted from Mr. Rigg's book with permission of the publisher.

Is there any comparison from the national past that fits 9/11 -- and perhaps illuminates our current dilemmas? Only one comes to this historian's mind: Colonel George Armstrong Custer's annihilation at Little Big Horn in 1876 by an army of angry Indians. This disaster stunned an America that was at peace and in the midst of celebrating the centennial of the Declaration of Independence.

The Americans responded with massive retaliation. Soon an army twenty times the size of Custer's puny force was marching into Indian territory to punish the marauders. They had melted away into scattered bands that were hard to bring to battle. But eventually the leading perpetrators, Chiefs Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, met their fatal comeuppances. Meanwhile, immigrants poured in and the United States continued on its course to becoming the industrial powerhouse of the 20th Century.

Americans of 1876 knew that Little Big Horn was only a chapter in a long war caused by the clash of two very different civilizations. The Dakota battle proved to be one of the final collisions.The American Indians had long used terror and surprise attacks as their chief weapons in their losing war with the white men and women who had come to America in the 17th and 18th Centuries in ever increasing and finally overwhelming numbers. The white men were farmers. That put them in mortal conflict with the Indians' hunter-gatherer way of life, which required vast areas of wilderness to sustain them.

The Indians attacked without warning and slaughtered men, women and children on isolated farms and in undefended settlements with the hope that terror would induce mass flight. Instead, the Americans responded with punitive invasions of Indian territory, bringing the war home to them in ruthless fashion.

A classic example of this warfare was the American response to the Iroquois attack on the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania in 1778. The Indians, allied with the British, swept through the valley, burning over 1000 homes and killing every man woman and child in their path. A smaller raid wreaked similar havoc in Cherry Valley later the same year. In 1779, General George Washington sent a 4,000 man army into Iroquois country in upstate New York with the following orders:"I don't want this territory merely overrun. I want it destroyed."

Destroyed it was. The Iroquois lacked the numbers to fight the army and their British allies deserted them. Forty villages went up in flames; tons of corn and other foodstuffs were destroyed. It was the end of Iroquois power in North America. They became pathetic starving refugees in Canada.

Similarly, in the Civil War, an outbreak of Indian violence in Minnesota killed an estimated 10,000 white settlers. A large Union Army marched into the state, hunted down the killers and eventually hanged 39 of them in the largest mass execution in American history.

This is grim stuff. But it provides a far better comparison to how we can and must deal with the hostiles of Islam, who have chosen to attack us. We will not and must not fight a war of invasion and conquest. Instead, it should be a war of ferocious retaliation, of continuing surveillance and guarded vigilance, while we go about our way of life.

The fanatic mullahs of Islam are not so different from the Indian shamans who told their warriors divine magic made them immune to the white man's bullets. The warriors learned the hard way that their wise men were wrong. Eventually, the warriors of Islam will learn the mullahs are equally wrong. In the meantime, they may inflict considerable pain on us. But as long as we make it clear that every attack will draw massive retaliation, they will eventually grow weary of their pretensions to fighting a war. ]]> Mon, 09 Nov 2026 21:49:23 +0000 https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/427 https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/427 0 This is the second of two articles by Mr. Marina concerning the question of legitimacy in the American Revolution. Click here to read his first article.

Today traditional military power is measured in terms of the vast technology of weaponry. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has functioned as a hegemonic power urged on by neoconservatives and some others to act formally as an empire.

Iraq, like Vietnam earlier, has reminded us that a people, numerous, and widely armed even with small weapons, can pose problems. Even for well equipped armies, confrontation inevitably means killing many among the civilian population that sustains these unconventional forces.

As we recognize the falsehood of the Minority Myth of the American Revolution based upon a misreading of a letter of John Adams, we can begin to appreciate that it was one of history’s great examples of a people’s war.

The first rule of counterinsurgency is to separate the guerrilla or irregular forces from the general population. This implies the occupiers have control, in some sense, of the entire country.

The British were unable to achieve this in the American Revolution. They left New England early in the War, and controlled really only New York City for the duration. They evacuated Philadelphia due to American pressure. They lost an army at Saratoga in 1777, and another at Yorktown in 1781, ending the fighting.

While General George Washington maintained an army that increased each spring as the farmers returned to rejoin it, as John Shy noted in A People Numerous and Armed, the American militia, not much admired by the general, were the “sand in the gears of the British war machine.” (Incredibly, Shy repeats the Minority Myth misreading of Adams’s letter.)

Consider the following: The British did not go out at night in less than battalion strength. Apart from running the farms for much of the year, American women helped enormously to win the War. Urged on by German-speaking Americans, 5,000 Hessians, one third of that force, went over the hill to marry Pennsylvania-Dutch girls, and the general heading the Hessians was always writing back to his prince about the tenacious Americans fighting for their liberty -- probably another closet republican like the brothers, General/Admiral Howe.

In Bergen County, New Jersey the militia became formidable enough to curtail British foraging there, and it was paid, not in increasingly worthless paper script like the regular army, but in gold obtained from selling to the British in New York City.

The real problem in the American Revolution grew out of divisions within the Revolutionary coalition itself, just as it does today in Iraq among Sunni, Shia and Kurd.

Even in England before the War representing several colonies, Ben Franklin had begun to refer to the colonies as “this rising Empire.” He, and other land speculators like Washington dreamed of an American mercantile nation embracing Canada and Florida. Thus, after the victory at Saratoga and the French Alliance, this wing of the coalition was confident enough to reject the overtures of the Peace Commission headed by Lord Carlisle.

The British responded with a “pacification” program much as the U.S. sponsored later in Vietnam. The bloodiest three years of the War were to follow. Earlier the English had also attempted to spread out into the countryside with something on the order of “strategic hamlets,” but Washington had smashed the first one at Trenton.

The final crisis occurred in 1780-81, with the British invasion into the south, and the loss of a 5,000 man American army in Charleston, SC. Washington finally released his best general, Nathaniel Greene, to lead the forces as the British swung into the Carolinas.

After a series of pitched battles beyond Charlotte, NC, which the soldiers called, “the hornets’ nest,” the British began a retreat that ended at Yorktown, in some cases barely getting across rivers in the face of the often young American teenagers on horseback who harassed them. I disagree with those historians who believe the French Alliance was essential to victory, although it might have meant a longer War.

What is significant is that Washington was determined even in this crisis to send LaFayette to speak to the Green Mountain Boys about launching another effort to take Canada. By this time the militia at the other end of the continuum of the coalition, wanted only to be left alone in a free republic. They understood what would later be termed, “the Great Game,” and demanded “double pay, double rations, and plunder.” When the Frenchman said he was unauthorized to accept such terms, Ethan Allen’s militiamen returned home.

What we can conclude is that the American Revolution was a great republican inspired people’s war for Independence, but that the revolutionary coalition was divided across a spectrum from those pressing a rising mercantile empire on the one hand, to those desiring a republic of small government states on the other.

That struggle over America’s destiny is with us still, and the Empire Question will probably remain the great issue facing this nation in the 21st century.

Yet, many Americans, even many scholars and intellectuals, believe that the the American Revolution was itself not a democratic movement. If that is true, then it is legitimate to ask, "what exactly is it that we are celebrating on July 4th?"

The most common piece of evidence cited in numerous books about the Revolution is a letter of John Adams indicating that one third of the Americans were for the Revolution, another third were against it, and a final third were neutral or indifferent to the whole affair.

Oddly, this is the view of the Revolution essentially held by the British at the time. English leaders appeared to believe that only a minority of rebellious Americans, although well organized, desired independence from the Mother Country. Both times British armies ventured into the interior, it was on the assumption there were large numbers of Loyalists there who would support the King's cause.

Significantly, for over a century, a number of American intellectuals, ranging recently from Daniel Elsberg of Vietnam War Pentagon Papers fame, to Irving Kristol, the "Godfather" of today's Neoconservative Iraq Hawks, have cited the Adams' letter as gospel.

A close reading, however, of Adams' letter indicates just the opposite. The "well-known" letter of Adams was to James Lloyd, dated January, 1813. Written so many years after the American Revolution, it becomes clear that Adams was actually discussing American opinion about England and the French Revolution during his presidency, 1797-1801:

"The middle third, composed principally of the yeomanry, the soundest part of the nation, and always averse to war, were [sic] rather lukewarm both to England and France...."

It really boggles the imagination to suggest that Adams would have regarded a neutral third so highly with respect to the American Revolution. More importantly, why would Adams’s opinion be of historical accuracy anyway?

To paraphrase the historian Carl Becker, the American Revolution was both a war ultimately for Independence, but also about the nature of the American nation which would emerge after the war.

There were in fact at least three distinct phases relating to what we can in general call the American Revolution. The first of these was in the debate over American liberties prior to the war itself. The second involved the issue of Independence and the the war to win it. Finally, there was the question of establishing an American nation afterwards, which really was not decided ultimately until the later Civil War.

No one disputes that in the Stamp Act crisis of 1765, Americans were overwhelmingly against that legislation. In the debates which followed, the great contemporary American historian Mercy Otis Warren focused on one event as a day that would "live in infamy," although Franklin D. Roosevelt and his speechwriters gave her no credit when they expropriated that phrase on December 8, 1941.

That event was the British decision to send an army from Halifax to occupy Boston in October, 1768. This was an affront to the Standing Army Act, and the Americans thought, of the Constitution itself. The violence of such an occupation led to the Boston Massacre in 1770, the Tea Party in 1773, and the Intolerable Acts a year later.

In such struggles, a "loss of legitimacy" is a key event as has happened to American forces recently in Iraq. Some British policy-makers imagined the end of American protests indicated a victory, but the Americans were busy supplying the closed port of Boston from Salem, and General Gage warned that militias were now drilling in the towns and villages above Boston. Lexington and Concord were less than a year away.

As the Continental Congress organized, more fighting followed from Bunker Hill to Brooklyn, with an expedition against Canada as well. A large British army of over 30,000 troops convinced even George Washington of the virtues of a “protracted conflict.”

If the British had lost legitimacy, Thomas Paine’s pamphlet “Common Sense,” in January, 1776 succinctly provided an American legitimacy based on Natural Law. Before the Congress evacuated Philadelphia, it passed a Declaration of Independence ratifying those ideas. Abigail Adams was quite right to question her husband’s statement about just all “men” being created equal.

But talk and paper are cheap, and a long and bloody struggle lay ahead. That will be the subject of the next piece, “Was the American Revolution a People’s War?” intended to end the Minority Myth view.

The idea originated with Lyndon LaRouche, one of the most prolific, original, and bizarre of U.S. conspiracy theorists. Just after the 1980 election, one LaRouche magazine ( Executive Intelligence Review , 2 December 1980) first laid out the conspiracy theory, then another one repeated it three years later ( New Solidarity , 2 September 1983). The idea attracted minimal attention, however, until the Iran-Contra scandal of late 1986 seemed to fulfill the terms of the alleged deal. The former president of Iran, Abol Hassan Bani Sadr, tentatively tried out this theory in an article on 12 April 1987 in the Miami Herald . When commentators in the United States (Christopher Hitchens in particular, writing in The Nation , 4-11 July 1987) endorsed the idea, Bani Sadr felt emboldened to make ever-larger and more elaborate claims (the New York Times , 3 August 1987; the Miami Herald , 9 August 1987; and an August 1987 interview [Cockburn, 192-3; 281]).

A handful of conspiracy theorists in the United States (Barbara Honegger, Martin Kilian, David Marks, Robert Parry, Jurgen Roth, and Craig Unger) began researching Bani Sadr's allegations and stumbled upon an array of self-promoters, con men, and criminals from several countries. The cast included Israelis (Ari Ben-Menashe, Ahran Moshell, and Will Northrop), Frenchmen (Robert Benes and Nicholas Ignatiew), Iranians (Jamshid Hashemi, Ahmed Heidari, Houshang Lavi, Hamid Naqashan), Americans (Richard Babayan, Richard Brenneke, William Herrmann, Oswald LeWinter, Heinrich Rupp and Gunther Russbacher), and even a South African (Dirk Stoffberg). Not only did they confirm the story and add their own elaborations, but the researchers carelessly contaminated their sources by informing them of others' statements, further stimulating them to grandiose claims.

After a year, Bani Sadr returned to the topic and found his conspiracy outline fully fleshed out; he was especially impressed by Brenneke's allegations at a 1988 trial in Denver, which in his eyes offered official documentation of the plot. Encouraged by this new information, the former Iranian president now hypothesized a much larger and longer-lasting conspiracy between Reagan and Khomeini ( Playboy , September 1988; and the interviews he granted to Jean-Charles Deniau in September and October 1988, forming the basis of their joint book [Deniau and Sadr, 48; 57]).

Although the October Surprise theory had now ripened, it remained the guilty pleasure of die-hard conspiracy theorists. Only when the New York Times on 15 April 1991 devoted an exceptional two-thirds of its opinion page to this thesis did it become a public issue. The author of this article, Gary Sick, brought to the issue an establishment pedigree (navy captain, Columbia University Ph.D., Ford Foundation program officer, Human Rights Watch board member) as well as the credibility of having served as principal White House aide for Iran during the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis. Sick alleged that"individuals associated with the Reagan-Bush campaign of 1980 met secretly with Iranian officials to delay the release of the American hostages until after the U.S. election. For this favor, Iran was rewarded with a substantial supply of arms from Israel." Sick also raised the possibility that George Bush was one of those Americans, thereby impugning the legitimacy of at least one subsequent Republican president.

The October Surprise instantly vaulted to national importance. Leading television shows devoted hours to the subject, weeklies made it the subject of cover stories, and Jimmy Carter called for an investigation. A January 1992 poll showed 55 percent of Americans believing these allegations to be true and just 34 percent finding them false (Goertzel, 733). As part of his preparations to run for the presidency, H. Ross Perot sent his associates to talk with Gunther Russbacher in his Missouri jail cell. WSJ 14 Apr 92 In February 1992, the House of Representatives voted in favor of an investigation of the chargesNYT 6 Feb 92 and the Senate followed suit soon after.

Sick himself expanded his op-ed into a 278-page book, October Surprise: America's Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan . Here, Sick characterized the 1980 election as a" covert political coup." To give his story the feel of authenticity so important to a conspiracy theory, he chronicled in loving detail events that (it turned out) never took place. Thus, discussing a phantom meeting in Madrid on 27 July 1980, for example, he provided this little touch:"The conversation was interrupted twice, when hotel waiters arrived to serve coffee" (Sick, 83).

So much attention to the October Surprise theory meant it had to be checked in sober and exhaustive detail, and under such scrutiny it promptly collapsed. Several journalistic investigations started the process, especially Frank Snepp,"Brenneke Exposed," Village Voice, 10 September 1991; John Barry,"Making of a Myth," Newsweek , 11 November 1991; Steve Emerson and Jesse Furman,"The Conspiracy That Wasn't," New Republic , 18 November 1991; and Frank Snepp,"October Surmise," Village Voice , 25 February 1992.

Two congressional inquiries then confirmed these conclusions. The Senate stated that"by any standard, the credible evidence now known falls far short of supporting the allegation of an agreement between the Reagan campaign and Iran to delay the release of the hostages" (Committee on Foreign Relations 1992, 115). The House report went further, declaring that"There was no October Surprise agreement ever reached." It found"wholly insufficient credible evidence" that communication took place between the Reagan campaign and the Iranian government and"no credible evidence" of an attempt by the campaign to delay the hostages' release. The report also expressed concern that" certain witnesses may have committed perjury during sworn testimony" (Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union 53; 7-8; 239).

Surprisingly, given that once started, conspiracy theories tend to live on indefinitely, this one did not. For once, research successfully discredited a conspiracy theory. Symbolic of this was that Oliver Stone decided not to make a movie on this topic. But a devout conspiracy theorist sticks to his guns and Sick continued to forward the October Surprise thesis, writing ( the New York Times, 24 January 1993) that the House report"does not lay . . . to rest" his claims of campaign contacts with Iranians; and that it"leaves open the possibility" of Republican interference with the Carter administration's foreign policy negotiations.

The October Surprise episode holds much interest as a conspiracy theory case study. In particular, two features stand out: Gary Sick's having single-handedly transformed it from a story only taken seriously on the left-wing fringe into a credible mainstream claim; and the clarity with which it confirmed the conspiracy theorists' tendency to accuse others of what they themselves are doing. On this latter point: again and again, one finds that whereas the conspiracy theorists' accusations of collusion and illegal behavior were unsubstantiated, they themselves engaged in precisely such behavior . Examples include:

• They claimed Casey and Bush pretended to be in the United States when they were in Paris and Madrid. Richard Brenneke, perhaps the single most important informant for the October Surprise thesis, claimed to be in Paris and Madrid when credit card receipts proved he was in Portland, Oregon.

• They accused Reagan campaign officials of plotting to save their necks, when this is what the conspiracy theorists were doing; at least seven of them (Robert Benes, Richard Brenneke, Ahmed Heidari, Nicholas Ignatiew, Oswald LeWinter, Hamid Naqashan and Will Northrop) were implicated in a 1986 sting operation and the October Surprise offered a way to rehabilitate their reputations.

• Sick, a former Carter Administration official, accused the Reagan campaign of secretly working out an arms deal with the Iranians. In fact, as Sick himself already disclosed in 1985, Jimmy Carter initiated such a deal.

• Sick accused others of withholding information, yet this is precisely what he did, keeping quiet about the hundreds of thousands of dollars he received from Oliver Stone for the movie rights to the October Surprise story.

• Sick accused U.S. government officials of lying, yet he was less than honest himself. He wrote in his New York Times article that he had heard rumors of a Reagan-Khomeini deal during the 1988 election campaign but he"refused to believe them." Not so: on 30, Oct. 1988, at the very peak of the 1988 election campaign, he told The Rocky Mountain News ,"At first I dismissed this, but not any more. I'm convinced on the basis of what I heard that there were some meetings in Paris."

References

Cockburn, Leslie. 1987, Out of Control . New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press. Deniau, Jean-Charles, and Bani Sadr. 1987. Le Complot des ayatollahs . Paris: Editions la Découverte. Goertzel, Ted. 1994."Belief in Conspiracy Theories." Political Psychology 15. Sick, Gary. 1991. October Surprise: America's Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan . New York: Times Books. U.S. House. 1993. Committee of the Whole House on the Steven Emerson,"No October Surprise" American Journalism Review (March 1993) http://eightiesclub.tripod.com/id394.htm State of the Union. Joint Report of the Task Force to Investigate Certain Allegations Concerning the Holding of American Hostages by Iran in 1980 . Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. U.S. Senate. 1992. Committee on Foreign Relations. The"October Surprise" Allegations and the Circumstances Surrounding the Release of the American Hostages Held in Iran. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Like Bush, Kennedy faced valid questions in 1961 about whether it was prudent to invest so much money in space when there were still so many pressing problems on earth. But Kennedy had an additional selling point. According to a 1962 Aviation Week poll, 56 percent of Americans thought that the lunar mission was "questionable but perhaps necessary because of the Cold War."

Congress obviously shared the belief that beating the Soviet Union to the moon was an important goal because it backed the Apollo program despite its $23 billion price tag.

The Bush administration is unlikely to find the kind of congressional backing that Kennedy received. Although many Americans find space exploration more appealing than some of Bush's other programs, policymakers -- other than those in the Bush administration -- could find better uses for that money on earth.

Even with overwhelming congressional backing, Kennedy had second thoughts about the expense of the lunar project. He twice attempted to escape the tremendous financial commitment by promoting a joint lunar trip by the United States and the Soviet Union. That idea was never realized, in part because most Americans opposed sharing technology or glory with the Communist giant.

Without the threat of a hulking enemy outpacing the United States in space, Bush faces a tough battle. When his father similarly recommended a return to the moon and a voyage to Mars in 1989, the proposal was basically dead on arrival in Congress. A recent Associated Press poll showed that 48 percent of Americans back the new proposal for Mars exploration, while an equal number oppose it.

Given the public's sharp division and the costs of the ongoing war on terrorism, Congress is squeamish about NASA's failure to attach an overall price to Bush's proposal, especially when outside estimates run as high as $600 billion.

Projections long have been problematic for the space agency. In selling the idea of a reusable space shuttle during the 1970s, NASA predicted that the shuttle could pay for itself by achieving 25 to 30 missions a year, and could fly as many as 48 times a year.

In reality, the shuttle never became cost-efficient. It has never flown more than nine times in a single year. Two of the five shuttles have been destroyed, with their crews, in apparently preventable accidents.

With the possibility of spiraling costs and unforeseeable technological problems, especially given the 14-month round trip that would be required to get human beings to and from Mars, Bush's proposal will be difficult to sell.

Some political leaders would prefer to see those funds used to balance the budget. Others favor addressing urgent social needs: poverty, health-care costs, environmental protection and the research wars against AIDS, Alzheimer's disease and cancer. Even those of us who are space enthusiasts must admit that the United States faces real problems that demand prompt action.

Based on this administration's record, it's unlikely that money saved by delaying further space initiatives would be invested in such causes. Kennedy robbed a strong domestic agenda to fuel the space race. If Bush's space proposals are not approved, his administration is more likely to promote additional tax cuts for the wealthy or expensive investments in defense programs.

Given that likelihood, it's not unreasonable to argue that research on the moon would be the most meaningful extension of Kennedy's vision and far more worthwhile than lining the pockets of the wealthy. A return to the moon could offer valuable opportunities for astronomical research, practical experience that would prepare us for later planetary expeditions and the prospect of mining rich lunar resources.

Since there's a chance that a different president will control the White House a year from today and since a new president definitely will be in power long before Bush's Mars time line would place astronauts on the red planet, it seems unwise to dive into a major space project while so many other needs are pressing. A new leader might urge Congress to invest in solving more down-to-earth problems now so that a better United States will have the opportunity for exploration later.

Kennedy's moon pledge was fulfilled after his death primarily because Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Congresses of that era shared his belief that going to the moon achieved an important Cold War objective. Bush's proposals may fire the imaginations of some, but without a better rationale for such huge investments, his space program is unlikely to generate a supportive consensus.

This piece was distributed for non-exclusive use by the History News Service, an informal syndicate of professional historians who seek to improve the public's understanding of current events by setting these events in their historical contexts. The article may be republished as long as both the author and the History News Service are clearly credited. ]]> Mon, 09 Nov 2026 21:49:23 +0000 https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/3285 https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/3285 0