These Truths

“The past is inheritance, a gift and a burden.  It can’t be shirked.  You carry it everywhere.  There’s nothing for it but to get to know it.”  Julie Lapore

With Terry Brendel due to speak on “Democracy” at our upcoming Saturday Evening Club zoom meeting, I have been reading Harvard historian Julie Lapore’s new book “The Truths,” suggested to me by Gaard Logan, who is perusing it for her book club.  The title harkens back to “self-evident” truths emanating from the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution: natural rights, political equality, and the sovereignty of the people. Taking a cue from Gaard, after looking over the introduction, I skipped to the recent chapters, entitled “The Brutality of Modernity” and “The Machine, 1946-2016.”  More than most such works, Lapore emphasizes the revolutionary importance of the internet, especially in a political context. Great strides in the development of supercomputers were made during World War II in hopes of breaking the Japanese code and estimating the altitude of missiles.  During the 1940s computer scientist Grace Murray Hopper, a Yale graduate, invented a linker that converted English terms into an A-O machine code system understood by computers.  Hopper was part of the team that developed the UNIVAC 1 giant computer. I recall NBC bringing Univac into its TV studio supposedly to predict 1952 election results as votes were being tabulated (I was a political junkie even then). In 1977 the microcomputer was first marketed, and within a decade home and office computers were increasingly common.

 

Lapore traced how Franklin D. Roosevelt’s welfare state goals eventually gave way to “the national security state,” as Cold War defense spending took priority over social programs.  While the GI Bill of Rights ushered in postwar affluence, African Americans and women were denied equal access housing and educational benefits.  Conservatives used propaganda provided by consulting firms, such as Campaigns Inc, founded by Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter, to defeat liberal proposals for national health insurance, first in California and then at the national level.  The scourge of McCarthyism, Lapore concludes, was not an aberration but a harbinger of guilt-by-association tactics used by Republican politicians to this day. Reviewing “These Truths” for The Guardian, John S Gardner wrote:

    Lapore offers an unabashedly liberal perspective but seeks to be scrupulously fair to the modern conservative movement, devoting numerous pages to its intellectual origins as well as to its nativist and conspiratorial elements. Ideas do have consequences, as wrote [University of Chicago intellectual historian] Richard Weaver, a conservative intellectual for whom Lepore has sympathy.

 

I recall being cool toward computers initially until fully understanding their merits and limitations.  I loved it when a computer competing on Jeopardy against two champions inexplicably missed what seemed like a very easy Final Jeopardy – what city has two airports with names that refer to World War II (answer: Chicago, with O’Hare and Midway). Ironically, given my rudimentary knowledge of computers, after writing an article for the Journal of American History on industrial heritage museums, I was asked to be a paid consultant for a proposed museum in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, that came to house some of the country’s fastest supercomputers developed by Cray Research, a company founded by Seymour R. Cray, called “the Thomas Edison of the supercomputer industry.”  During the 1950s Cray had worked on the UNIVAC division of Remington Rand (later Sperry Rand) before forming his own company.  My main suggestion was that the Chippewa Falls museum include an oral history component.

 

Julie Lapore’s previous best-seller, “The Secret History of Wonder Woman,” revealed that the cartoon’s creator, William Moulton Marston, was an avid feminist who was married to suffragette Sadie Holloway, engaged in sex parties during the mid-10920, and included among his lovers Olive Byrne, the niece of birth control advocate Margaret Sanger.  He had four children, two with Sadie and two with Olive, who were good friends. Lapore notes that after Marston’s death in 1947 at age 54, All Star Comics hired new writers who had the Amazon princess conform more closely to women’s traditional roles, a development that infuriated the women the creator left behind.

 

In the Post-Tribune a “Quickly” commenter wrote that it was incorrect to say that Trump was one of the few presidents not to have a pet in the White House because he had lap dog Mike Pence, only it was the Vice President whose job it was to clean up his master’s messes, not vice versa. Columnist Leonard Pitts reported that after Mrs. Iddy Kennedy in North Little Rock, Arkansas, put up a Black Santa in her yard, a racist told her to get rid of the “Negro elf.” It made the woman initially question whether she wanted to raise her daughter in that neighborhood; but when neighbors heard what happened suddenly Black Santa appeared on lawns up and down the block.  Pitts concluded: “ People also sent money, over $1,000, which the family has redirected to the Arkansas branch of Ronald McDonald House Charities. Speaking to The Washington Post, the charity's executive director, Janell Mason called it ‘humanity doing good things.’ And so it is.”