Always interesting

Ms. Goldsmith comes in nearly every Friday, and always has interesting questions. She wants information about organizations connected with Arab-Israeli, Arab-Jewish dialogue. Today she told me that earlier this year the Kennedy Center had had a show on arts of the Arab World. Indeed, Arabesque.

She wanted to know about its sponsors.

Presenting Underwriter: HRH Foundation (it's the charitable foundation of a firm named HRH)

Major Contributors:
A. Huda and Samia Farouki (They're part of the DC social circle, "movers and shakers," she said; I agreed)
The State of Kuwait
The State of Qatar
The United Arab Emirates Embassy in Washington, D.C.

Scandal & Civility

Scandal & Civility
by Marcus Daniel
(Oxford, 386 pages, $28)

Politics and the press have not always been as tame as they are today.

To get some perspective on such views [that the Founding Era was one when Olympian political figures and impartial, public-spirited newspapers guided the nation in its times of crisis], one need go no further than "Scandal & Civility," Marcus Daniel's detailed study of the American press in the 1790s. The idea that this critical period was marked by a calm spirit of reasoned debate is a myth, as Mr. Daniel shows, and a deeply misleading one at that. The postrevolutionary age witnessed the unexpected rise of fiercely contending political parties; an increasingly bloody French Revolution that divided Americans into warring camps; a string of crises, such as the Genet affair, the Whiskey Rebellion, the XYZ affair; and the passage of the Alien and Sedition acts punishing dissent. It would not be too strong to assert that every step along the way the very survival of the nation was at risk.

Jefferson opposed the Alien and Sedition Acts as unconstitutional, stating that they stepped on states rights.

And what role did newspapers play? A profound one. As Mr. Daniel amply shows, they stoked debate with abandon as well as with a mean- spiritedness and partisan passion that make today's scuffles seem tame by comparison.

Ah, the good old days.

One of the most famous editors of the age was Philip Freneau, an ardent Republican and once "penniless young poet," and the publisher of the National Gazette, a semiweekly newspaper. What makes Freneau so interesting is that George Washington's secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, hired Freneau to work as a minor clerk at the State Department; however, his real responsibility was to galvanize, through his newspaper, Republican opposition to the administration he served. Rival journalist Richard Fenno, who was himself aligned with Washington rather than Jefferson, accused Freneau of being a "demon of slander," and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, who often felt the sting of Freneau's articles, condemned Jefferson for paying Freneau with public funds, though to no avail.

The more one knows about Jefferson the more his halo crumbles.

Sick of the constant tirades against the government, an outraged President Washington called on Jefferson to put a stop to Freneau. Remarkably, Jefferson refused, insisting the National Gazette had "saved our Constitution." But if Washington felt the pain of Freneau's attacks, it was nothing compared with what he suffered at the hands of another Republican, Benjamin Franklin Bache, who published the Aurora, a newspaper whose inimitable motto was Surgo ut Prosim ("I rise that I might serve"). A grandson of Benjamin Franklin, the worldly Bache was no run-of-the-mill journalist, which only gave more force to his criticisms. He labeled "unconstitutional" Washington's actions on behalf of the Jay Treaty – a 1794 agreement with Britain, reviled by pro-French Republicans, concerning trade, sovereignty and the looming specter of war – and called for the president's impeachment. Remember, until then Washington was seen as virtually untouchable.

Imagine calling for Washington's impeachment.

Nor did Bache stop there. At the same time that his paper praised revolutionary France's bloodthirsty dictator, Maximilian Robespierre, as the "embodiment of virtue," he derided Washington as a "Demi-God of a Turkish seraglio." Others joined the fray: One writer spoke of Washington's "childish ambition"; another said that Washington was "cowardly"; a third that he was "insipid." Bache himself blasted Washington as "guilty of the foulest designs against the liberty of the people."

Robespierre virtuous, Washington demigod of a harem.

In an age when our newspaper industry is increasingly embattled, "Scandal & Civility" serves as a timely reminder of just how vital a thriving news culture is to the well-being of our democracy. The book, it should be said, is the outgrowth of a doctoral dissertation and is at times marred by the jargon one finds in graduate seminars. But it neatly presents an animated portrait of the postrevolutionary era, when opinionated, brash, irreverent newspapers were indispensable. They are no less indispensable to us today.

The Wizard of Tuskegee

Up From History (excerpt)
By Robert J. Norrell
(Harvard University Press, 508 pages, $35)

After decades of neglect, Booker T. Washington is the subject of a timely reappraisal

A century ago, the most consequential black person in America was a biracial man who had been abandoned by his father and raised by his mother, and who favored a nonconfrontational style of politics. Sound familiar?

Eerily so. Booker T. Washington was seen as a sort of Uncle Tom in times when radicalism and defiance were the orthodoxies. But ...

Washington went on to advise four U.S. presidents and he dined at the White House with fellow Republican Theodore Roosevelt, a black first. His 1901 autobiography, "Up From Slavery," was translated into seven languages and became the best-selling book ever written by a black. Andrew Carnegie called him the second father of the country. Many of America's other moneyed men, including John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, were admirers and major benefactors. Harvard and Dartmouth gave him honorary degrees. Mark Twain and William Dean Howells sang his praises, the latter calling him "a public man second to no other American in importance."

Must recall that TR was an heir to Lincoln; Republicans both. Progressives. Democrats had bee Copperheads, Dixiecrats. As for B.T. Washington, there was more, much more.

For two generations after his death, Booker T. Washington remained widely appreciated. Numerous schools, parks, streets and black-owned businesses were named in Washington's honor. He was the first black to have his likeness appear on a U.S. postage stamp and commemorative coin. In 1942, a Liberty ship was christened the Booker T. Washington. And in 1956, marking the 100th anniversary of Washington's birth, President Dwight Eisenhower created a national monument to the former slave.

Think: in 1942 the Army was segregated, and a ship was named for Washington. But then came the protests.

But Washington's star began to dim in the 1960s, when the style of civil-rights advocacy was given over to protest, condemning authority and challenging the status quo at every turn. The thrust of Washington's message was self-improvement. His focus was the development of the black population of the rural South. His unwillingness to practice protest politics, however, has earned him the scorn of many modern-day critics, who dismiss him as too meek in his dealings with whites.

Why couldn't he be respected, and built on? Ideologic orthodoxies require conformity to the party line.

In "Up From History," a compelling biography, Robert J. Norrell restores the Wizard of Tuskegee to his rightful place in the black pantheon. Just as important, Mr. Norrell explains how ideological imperatives can cloud clear thinking, even among historians who should know better.

Mr. Norrell, a history professor at the University of Tennessee, says that this "present-mindedness of historians writing about race" is a function of the fact that many had themselves been activists and admired the accomplishments of civil-rights protest. "A presumption entered the thinking and writing that protest was correct," he writes, "and for most the only legitimate, means of improving minority conditions. By the mid-1960s Washington was understood to have been the enemy of activism, the Uncle Tom who delayed the day of freedom."