Postquester.

News flash, Postal Service patrons in the District: the mandatory furlough of several federal offices today also means that one of the central branches of the United States Postal Service in our nation’s capitol is completely inaccessible today, as it is located in the same building complex as the EPA.  Not knowing of the furlough, I was completely befuddled this morning when I attempted to access my usual on-the-way-to-work Post Office and found the building locked and bolted at every entrance.  It took me ages to figure out what was going on.  Call me crazy, but it just seems nuts to shutter any branch of a federal agency that needs money as much as the dear old U.S. Mail—one of many government services upon which I daily rely.

What I had to do instead was call up the Post Office in the USDA building, verify they were indeed open, make my way across the Mall, go through security, sign in, get approval to access the P.O., get directions from several employees along the way (who were all very helpful and kind), and eventually make my way through the rabbit warren that is the Agriculture building to the little one-woman Post Office in the sub-basement, where I was finally able to post two important packages before the holiday weekend.

Of course, this speaks to a larger D.C. problem: the dearth of actual Post Offices conveniently located in the downtown. Millions of CVSes and Wells Fargos where you can buy stamps (which, irritatingly, the USPS web site brings up in its search for you), and like five actual full-service counters where you can do complicated things like purchase unusual stamp denominations and combinations, and speak with a human postal employee who is willing to help you. Between my apartment and the Metro, there is both a UPS Store and a FedEx outlet, but no Post Office (it’s in the opposite direction—though it is close, it is not on the way to anywhere). What is wrong with this picture?

Election day.

I. Polling Place

I vote in an elementary school that was built in the 1930s. I vote in the auditorium, the walls of which are decorated with modernist murals depicting scenes from Wisconsin history. They are beautiful. I like to think of pioneers and lumbermen and wildlife looking down on me as I exercise my civic responsibilities. They are, I imagine, always a little shocked to see us, the voters, with our blue folders and our funny clothes, standing in line, marking pieces of paper and feeding them into a machine, talking with one another, running into friends, being neighborly. The men and women look down knowingly, proudly, like they know what they are building. The animals are silent and serene. What they see, perhaps, is older, and longer, and outlasting.

II. Capitol

This is a piece I wrote in March of 2011, when the Wisconsin Capitol was closed to the public.

When I came to Wisconsin in 2005, I didn’t expect to fall in love with a building.

I was making a tour of graduate schools, and Madison was first on my list. To get a feel for the city, I decided to walk from one side of town to the other. It was a chance to find out if this was a place I could not only study, but live and be happy.

There were many things to like about Madison, but what I really fell in love with that morning was the capitol building downtown. It wasn’t just that it was impressive or beautiful—all state capitols are. Rather, it was this capitol’s sheer openness that struck me, its permeability to the rest of the city, the way in which it clearly served as not just an enclosed place of business, but a thoroughfare for citizens: from legislators, to tourists, to those just passing through. This, I learned, is partly by virtue of geography: the capitol sits smack-dab in the center of Madison, a city squeezed onto a narrow isthmus between two lakes, and, chances are, if you’re on your way somewhere downtown, you’ll want to walk through it to get there.

But the capitol’s accessibility is also a result of policy. Its doors are open all day long, there are no metal detectors or bag-checkers, and it is a pleasant place to escape the heat of a Madison summer, the cold of a Wisconsin winter, or the bustle of a Saturday farmer’s market—and maybe run into someone you voted for. My first semester in graduate school, a group of friends and I ran into the governor as we passed through on our way to a bar. He said hi to us, we said hi back, and we went our separate ways, as if this were a completely ordinary occurrence. The great thing about Madison is that it was.

Full disclosure here: I love capitols. I grew up in Albany, where my father had a job in the capitol, and as a kid, I explored the building from top to bottom. The elevator operators knew me, the Sergeant-at-Arms made me hot chocolate, and I would happily have given tours without script or pay. But by the time I left for college, it was a different world. The elevator operators were gone, replaced by buttons. Metal detectors, pat-downs, and searches greeted visitors, even those just looking for the tour. The capitol had transformed from a place of wonder to a place of fear.

I had assumed that it had gotten to be this way everywhere; that every statehouse tour involved a bag search and a frisking, that feeling at ease in public buildings was a thing of the past. When I discovered that the past was alive and well in Wisconsin, I knew I had come home.

When I moved to Madison that fall, I embraced the capitol as the encapsulation of a civic engagement and democratic participation I thought I had lost. Without ever needing to go to the capitol, I was there routinely, and this profoundly transformed my relationship to state and local government. I felt empowered and listened to before I even approached my assemblyperson’s door.

The images of protesters being turned out of the capitol, of citizens barred from entering, of members of the legislature accosted by police, are therefore heartbreaking to me both personally and politically. The capitol lockdown that unfolded in Madison last week has brought me to angry fist-shaking over the morning paper, loud shouting at the radio, and, last night, tears as I watched footage of police tackling a Wisconsin assemblyman on the way to his office. Every photograph, every video of the protests depicts a place I know and recognize, a place I have walked and biked and driven, a place I have sat and listened to music, or enjoyed laughter and a meal with friends. And yet the thought of a locked-up capitol in broad daylight on a Madison weekday is so unfamiliar, so deeply foreign and wrong, that it breaks my heart. And it makes me angry, angry at those who would move to shut down an orderly, respectful, and peaceful protest in a place Wisconsinites rightly thought of as theirs, a place that was woven deeply into their everyday lives: their capitol.

What we need in this country is more proximity to one another and to our elected representatives, not less; more responsible citizenship, less disconnection. Capitol buildings can and should fill this role by becoming or continuing to be a constant and vital part of the everyday activity of a state’s entire citizenry, not just its politicians and activists. I urge officials in Madison to lift the restrictions on the capitol, to restore the building to the people, who have shown the utmost respect for the edifice and all that it represents. Because I believe—and the events in Wisconsin attest—that routine free and open access to our halls of government, and the comfort and familiarity this fosters, makes each citizen a willing and able recipient of the responsibilities of self-government and democracy. If the events in the Midwest are any indication, we will surely need them all.

III. University

Walk down State Street from the Capitol one mile, and you hit the foot of Bascom Hill. On your right are two important libraries: the University of Wisconsin’s Memorial Library, and the Library and Archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society. The latter houses the largest collection in the entire world on the history of North America.

Walk the campus and your are surrounded by the pantheon of Progressivism. Bascom. Ely. Commons. Henry. Van Hise. Chamberlin. Go to the top of the hill and run your fingers over the plaque that upholds academic freedom. Believe that there are still principles and possibilities, no matter how dark things look. Believe in the ability of citizens to stand up, to discuss, to share, to be heard; to listen.

IV. Idea

If there are any books that deserve a second look today, of all days, they are Charles McCarthy’s The Wisconsin Idea and Frederic C. Howe’s Wisconsin: Experiment in Democracy. I read them recently for my research, and was struck by their deep resonance with current events, their continued relevance today. For anyone who believes that the divisive partisanship we see today is unprecedented, that the corrupting influence of huge sums of money in politics is merely a modern phenomenon, I urge you to read these books. Our state capitol is beautiful and lovely and open for another reason, a political one, an economic one: the will to say that a corporation has power that must, in a democratic society, be met with equal power, collective power, organized power. McCarthy calls it “Force,” and “unequal conditions of contract” (pp. 1–2), but it is the same thing.

The books read as both timely and out-of-date. They are infused with evolutionary theories about the progress of races, nations, and civilizations, and eugenicist ideas that will strike the modern reader as quite repellent. They evince a faith in government and the state that seems perhaps naive and horribly old-fashioned today. They are, in other words, documents from another era, another time, when people looked at the world differently. What is worthwhile about them today is the sense of possibility they contain, and the belief in the ability of citizens, policymakers, and experts to come together in a reasonable fashion and, using the best available information from all parties, create reform: not partisan reform, but reform that makes life better for the people of the state.

V. Forward

This image, from page 8 of McCarthy’s book, is one of the resonances that make you stop and say, woah. The Wisconsin Idea (written by a librarian, by the way) is a jeremiad, an appeal to the rest of the country to recognize the forces that are preventing America from achieving its promise. Growing inequality, as depicted in this diagram, is at the root of it for McCarthy, and legislative interventions are needed to help prevent Stage 2 from becoming Stage 3.

Forward, then, is not forward to Stage 3 (where he fears we are heading), but forward to a future where Stage 3 is foreclosed, where the commonwealth (a word that shows up often in McCarthy and Howe) is safeguarded willingly by all. In a state with so rich a tradition, today I have great hope.

Présidentielle.

From our recent trip, a shot in front of a 7e arrondissement polling place on election day.

Sarkozy, Hollande, Erickson.

More to come on our travels.

Interesting articles from the past few days.

Things are busy here, so I thought I’d just post a few links for now. These are articles and pieces I’ve found interesting over the past few days.

a photo essay on pronatalist policies in the Caucasus

a lovely piece about stories and the art of listening

And some interesting parallels between these two online-versus-brick-and-mortar stories:

on Amazon

on online public schools

Good resonances in that last one with a central a lesson of the listening story: information ≠ knowledge.

Gingrich, history, and professional identity.

Yesterday, while catching up on several days’ accumulation of newspapers, I ran across Adam Hochschild’s recent op/ed on Newt Gingrich’s dissertation. I was relieved to read it, as I had been thinking for weeks that a professional historian really should weigh in on Gingrich’s whole “I’m a historian” business. While Hochschild is technically a journalist, he does a good job putting on his historian’s hat and evaluating Gingrich’s questions, and the kinds of sources he uses to answer them.

Since I have not read Belgian education policy in the Congo, 1945–1960 (though the UW Libraries does appear to have a copy), I was glad to have a bit of a summary and a review of the work (I’ve been curious, especially since learning of the subject). And, as a historian, I have to be grateful the subject has come up at all: it is definitely not everyday that you have a discussion of historical questions, sources, documents, and arguments in the pages of the newspaper!

I’ve been thinking about Gingrich’s self-proclaimed historian persona, and wondering if he would be able to make the same claim in another field (e.g., “I’m a physicist”) if he had gotten a Ph.D. in 1971, but hadn’t been a practicing member of that discipline for several decades. I have a suspicion that people are more inclined to buy the historian claim than a claim to being a natural (or perhaps even social) scientist, and that they are willing to do this because of a pervasive popular misunderstanding of the study of history, and what it is that historians actually do. More to the point, I suspect that most people think that history is not really a living discipline in the way that biology or physics or mathematics is: once it has happened, that’s it, it’s over, and something someone wrote in 1971 is just as true today as it was then. No one would make such a claim about the state of our scientific knowledge, but I think this is what people tend to believe about history.

But, of course, history is not dead, and the practice of history as a profession and discipline is a lot more akin to that of the sciences (and, indeed, any other academic field that grows and changes over time) than people usually imagine. Historiography is ever changing, and the stories we tell about the past are always informed by the historical moment in which the historian is researching and writing and thinking, and the professional and public spheres with which he or she is interacting — in other words, the state of knowledge (in all its senses) at that particular point in time.

Gingrich was writing his dissertation at a time when social history was really just emerging as a potent force in the historical discipline, so perhaps one might excuse him a bit for not thinking it essential to include Congolese voices in his story about the Congo. It is possible that no one on his committee was really pushing him to do so — and, it seems, his questions were much more administratively focused. However, I have to admit some surprise that, despite, according to Hochschild, being “clear-eyed about colonialism,” the questions he asks and the sources he depends upon — mostly from the colonial archives, which are of course located not at the Congolese periphery but at the Belgian center — reify colonial patterns and ways of thinking. Had I been present at his defense, this is the point I would have pressed him on.

Of course, my questions are informed by the intervening decades of historical scholarship in ways I cannot separate out. Perhaps it is too easy to poke holes in an old dissertation, especially one so clearly rooted in a pre-social-history way of asking and answering questions. I would say, however, that there are plenty of “old” works of history I have read that still stand up to rigorous questioning today — some of them even dry, wonky works of policy-fascinated scholars. (I’d include Paul Wallage Gates’s History of Public Land Law Development, and many of the volumes in the Economic History of the United States series put out by the Carnegie Institute of Washington in the 1920s and 1930s.) Some profs still include these classics on prelim lists, despite their age, because they still have something to teach — many of them are what we might today consider “ahead of their time.”

But here’s my broader question: once a historian, always a historian? Once a biologist, always a biologist? Is the answer the same? If you get a Ph.D. in a field (the terminal degree being one of the primary ways in which disciplines police and maintain themselves), do you keep that identity always, even if you go on to do something completely different that does not require you to keep abreast of developments in your field? And, regardless of how you might self-identify, would others — both within and without of the field — be willing to grant you that identity as well? I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on this.

The language of community.

I was pleased to see this op/ed in the New York Times on how our national discourse around economic security has shifted since the Depression. As someone who finds the 1930s endlessly fascinating, I enjoyed what seemed to be an accurate reading of the differences between the communitarian language of New Deal-era economic policy (which was social policy as well, of course), and the more utilitarian language of today. This is consistent with my experience as a historian reading documents from the New Deal era. (Indeed, I make something of a parallel argument about the language of rural reform in my dissertation.)

The piece also makes a good point about the ways in which the language we use to frame issues also determines in part the ways we go about addressing them. Not a new point by any means, but one that is always worth driving home again. An excerpt:

In 1934, the focus was on people, family security and the risks to family economic well-being that we all share. Today, the people have disappeared. The conversation is now about the federal budget, not about the real economy in which real people live….

From the 1930s to the 1960s, as the Princeton historian Daniel T. Rodgers demonstrates in his recent book, “The Age of Fracture,” American public discourse was filled with references to the social circumstances of average citizens, our common institutions and our common history. Over the last five decades, that discourse has changed in ways that emphasize individual choice, agency and preferences. The language of sociology and common culture has been replaced by the language of economics and individualism.

In 1934, the government was us. We had shared circumstances, shared risks and shared obligations. Today the government is the other — not an institution for the achievement of our common goals, but an alien presence that stands between us and the realization of individual ambitions. Programs of social insurance have become “entitlements,” a word apparently meant to signify not a collectively provided and cherished basis for family-income security, but a sinister threat to our national well-being.

Over the last 50 years we seem to have lost the words — and with them the ideas — to frame our situation appropriately.

This point about the othering of government is something I’ve been thinking about for years, as it’s become completely rampant in our political discourse. This way of talking about the U.S. government as something (however impossibly) completely apart from citizens was perhaps perfected by Barry Goldwater back in the ’60s: if you read The Conscience of a Conservative it’s everywhere. I’m no political historian, but I’m sure he had a huge impact on this.

The linguistic shift, from sociological to what the authors call economic but which I might argue is simply a different kind of economics, namely neoclassical, as opposed to the institutional (and, I might add, agricultural) economics that reigned in FDR’s day, which was very focused on local conditions, and closely allied in many places with sociology. Some of the greatest New Deal reformers were economists, alongside sociologists. There was a different tenor in the social sciences then, reflected in articles like Carl C. Taylor’s excellent “Sociology on the Spot”, which advocates for the importance of academic sociology to national and local problems, and beseeches sociologists to continue to make their work broadly useful to policymakers. It’s worth reading, and you can do so for free thanks to Cornell University’s Core Historical Library of Agriculture.

What the authors are spot-on about is the trend away from the community (however construed) and toward the individual in so many aspects of our public discourse, not to mention policy. Revisiting the 1930s reminds us that there are other ways to think about, speak about, and address issues of local and national import than the set of ideas that is currently dominant.

Maybe he meant wheat gluten.

Listening to Morning Edition here, chuckling to myself about the fact that, after years in Madison, the phrase “sugar-coated Satan sandwich” doesn’t sound so weird to me. Perhaps he isn’t a fan of seitan?

Also, please enjoy CNN’s inability to spell. (In case that link breaks when they realize their mistake, enjoy a screenshot here.)

SandWHAT?!

First the seed!

And it’s Kloppenburg, by 204 votes!
Get ready for a recount, folks.
(Incidentally, JoAnne Kloppenburg is the wife of Jack Kloppenburg, UW Rural Soc professor and author of this awesome book. Now that’s a rockin’ family.)

What Wisconsin means for women.

Throughout all the coverage of the budget battle in Wisconsin these past few weeks, including a great deal of comparisons of public- and private-sector workers’ pay and benefits, I have been surprised that no major news story I have seen has brought up the issue of the differential effect Wisconsin’s legislation will have on women versus men.
You’d think this would have been one of the first things people noticed about the bill, given the fact that police and fire—two public-sector job fields where it’s safe to say men greatly outnumber women—have been notably exempt from Scott Walker’s assaults on state and local employees, and the fact that some of the most active opposition to the bill has been from education and health care workers—areas that it is also safe to say are more female than male—but I’ve seen next to nothing about it. You’d think someone would have noticed the police-and-firemen-versus-nurses-and-teachers angle, even if just on that (admittedly overly) simplistic plane, but if it’s been out there much, I haven’t heard it.
I’ve had another post in process, related more specifically to education, on this issue—how the attack on teachers is also an attack on women—but I finally found someone writing about the important gender aspects of the current debate over public workers’ pay and benefits. Jennifer Clark’s excellent piece breaks down women’s and men’s public sector jobs on the local, state, and national levels, and clearly shows that the legislation in play in Wisconsin and elsewhere affects working women far more than working men.
Even if we set aside the historical dimensions of this gender breakdown—the cultural pressures that push women into fields like health care and education (which are surely very, very important here, and which I do not by any means want to minimize)—we can see why it might be the case that women would have gone into public sector jobs. Benefits surely have a great deal to do with it. If you are a woman, looking to start a family, are you going to go for a job that is steady, secure, and has good benefits (like health care and maternity leave), or one that might ask you to travel a lot, move somewhere else, that doesn’t carry much job security, and might not have a very good health plan, or might not be interested in giving you parental leave? Of course men would find these perks attractive too, but my point is that women in particular have specific reasons to go into the public sector, even if we don’t take into account the fact that teaching and nursing and social work and library work are traditionally “women’s” fields (and largely in the pay of the state).
I recently made the point that the state should be setting the bar for decent pay and benefits. The situation in the midwest should therefore give us all reason for concern about the future of women in the workplace, and the future of the families that depend upon female public employees’ pay and benefits for their food, shelter, and health care.

Shut out/shout out.

Protesters in Wisconsin are being shut out of the capitol, and even downtown Madison is in something of a police lockdown.
To aid the cause of Wisconsin workers, you can give to the TAA.